Скачать или смотреть Felicja Blumental / Annette Celine: Die Nacht, Op. 10 No. 3 (Strauss)

Strauss composed his first set of songs in the autumn of 1885, some while the 16-year-old was still living at home in Munich in his parents' house and the rest after he took up his position in Meiningen as assistant musical director under Hans von Bülow of the Royal Court Orchestra. His friend and fellow composer Ludwig Thuille had introduced Strauss to the sentimental Romantic poetry of civil servant Hermann von Gilm and it was love at first sight. When the songs were published two years later, Strauss arranged the eight songs so that Allerseelen, the most ecstatic song of the set, came at the end, and Die Nacht, the most rapturous song of the set, came third after the achingly beautiful Zueignung and the playfully joyous Nichts. Die Nacht is a soft, sweet, and voluptuously sensuous through-composed song with long, yearning melodies suspended over exquisitely shaped harmonies. With it, the 16-year-old Strauss equaled Schumann's and Brahms' setting of Eichendorff's Mondnacht in the nocturnal realm of the blissfully Romantic lied.