Here's a wonderful recording of Mozart songs, most of which were virtually ignored until the 1990s but now seem to reveal new riches wherever you look. The claim on the back cover that the songs presented here "accompanied the events of his life like illustrations in a picture-book" is really true only for the Lied zur Gesellenreise, K. 468 (Song on the Road to Becoming a Fellow Craft, track 6), which Mozart wrote for his Masonic lodge. The rest of the texts are by poets, great and small, of the late eighteenth century, including
Goethe ("Das Veilchen"). Part of the reason for the neglect of the songs in an oeuvre otherwise exhaustively performed is that a few of the best-known ones, specifically "Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge," K. 596 (Longing for Spring, track 9), are in a hypersimple, folk-like vein; that song lent its tune to the finale of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595. The songs got cursed with one of the worst labels in the male music critic's arsenal of invective: they were "domestic." In the main, however, they're not so innocent. Consider Das Veilchen itself, a song that by rights would have called for simple strophic music from a composer who was out to toss something off. Instead, Mozart goes counter to type with a through-composed setting that not only illustrates everything in the poem, including the violet getting stomped by the girl, but also delves into the psychological issues
Goethe intended. Schubert couldn't have done it better, and indeed one suspects that the tone-deaf
Goethe would have disliked Mozart's songs as much as he did Schubert's. The first song, "Die Verschweigung," K. 518 (Concealment), in the fine reading by German tenor
Werner Güra, is slyly sexual without a hint of cuteness.
Güra deserves credit for emotionally direct performances that are still technically sophisticated enough to bring out the variety of Mozart's songs, and fortepianist
Christoph Berner is an ideal accompanist who does for pieces like the Kleine Gigue in G minor, K. 574, what
Güra does for the songs -- he shows that, though they are small, they are not insubstantial. He gives them a capricious nervousness that makes a perfect foil for the generally more regular songs. Add in the superb sound from Harmonia Mundi (you'll wish you knew the recording locale), and you have an innovative Mozart recording worthy of a strong recommendation.