Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is full of richly drawn and compelling characterizations, but none more so than Mignon. Such is the beauty of the lyric verses that Goethe provides for her to sing in the novel that Franz Schubert was inspired to set them to music time and time again. In 1827, publisher Antonio Diabelli released four of these "Mignon Songs" as Schubert's Opus 62 (now cataloged as D. 877), calling them "Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister von Goethe." Three of Mignon's four songs are represented in Opus 62—the first and fourth songs of D. 877 are settings of the same poem. All four of these lieder were composed during January 1826, and they represent the last settings of Goethe that the composer would craft. They are: "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," "Heiss mich nicht reden," "So lasst mich scheinen," and again, "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt."

The first of the two "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" settings is a duet, with one voice representing Mignon and one representing the Harper (each of Schubert's other settings of this text are for solo voice and piano). The duet is cast in the key of B minor, and a gently sloping melodic cell—proffered by the piano in the song's very first measure—pops up time and time again as the song unfolds. The two voices often seem isolated from one another, as the text would seem to demand, but from time to time they come together to produce gestures of the utmost expression, the most striking of which is a crystalline, pianissimo rendition of the main melodic cell in C major ("He who knows and loves me is far off," words that contrast beautifully with the closeness of the two voices at this point).

In D. 877/2, "Heiss mich nicht reden," Mignon tells of her burdensome secret. During the second, comparatively hopeful stanza, Schubert provides a chorale-like C major, voice and piano working together in total homophony.

"So lasst mich scheinen" is part of Mignon's death sequence, and, as if to mirror the great complexity of Goethe's masterful verse, Schubert crafts the song out of a tender, warm B major which a lesser composer would have wrongly thought to be irreconcilable with such bittersweet words. But how perfect it works when at two key moments Schubert brings in the briefest hint of B minor.

The final song in D. 877, another "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt," rolls forth in a sad 6/8 meter. There is real pang to the B flat octaves that mark both the introduction and the final instrumental postlude. Mignon tells us of her great loneliness, but it is the solo piano that seems to explore most deeply the painful, dissonant reality of solitude.

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3.Lied der Mignon: So lasst mich scheinen

Schubert's first completed setting of "So lasst mich scheinen" (So let me seem) (D. 727) from April 1821 started in B minor and ended in B major. Schubert's second completed setting, from January 1826, harmonically starts in B major, thereby literally beginning where the first left off. Conceived as the last of a self-contained group of Mignon Lieder on poems from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lahrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) and published as Op. 62 in March 1827, the song known as Lied der Mignon describes Mignon's vision of her transformed and heavenly self after her impending death. In context of the Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister (Songs From Wilhelm Meister), the B major of the Lied der Mignon not only balances, but serves as the harmonic transformation of the B minor of the opening Mignon und der Harfner. Schubert sets the four verses of Goethe's poem as pairs of strophes with the opening pair recapitulated in the closing pair. As with the other Op. 62 songs, the piano prelude of the third song contains the musical essentials of the whole song: the graceful triple-time rhythm, the hymn-like chordal melody, and especially the ecstatic tone of incipient transfiguration. The first and third verses are set to the same luminous pianissimo music in the tonic major. The second and fourth verses start pianissimo in the tonic major and then crescendo into the glowing fortissimo mediant major. Next is a climax that darkens a bar later into the gloomy mediant minor and then blackens in the next bar into the harsh dominant minor before finally and miraculously returning to the consoling tonic major. The chiaroscuro of shadow and light, of fear and hope, of mortal death and immortal life in the music of Lied der Mignon makes it one of the greatest of all Schubert's songs.

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2.Lied der Mignon: Heiss' mich nicht reden

Schubert self-consciously composed the four Mignon Lieder as a group in January 1826, and they were published as his Op. 62 in March 1827. The three poems Schubert set are all from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship) and all are sung by the enigmatic and tragic character of Mignon (although the first is a duet with the character of the Harper). All four songs are deeply sorrowful in tone. The similarities of melody, harmony, rhythm, and gesture among the songs are fully intended, and the harmonic relationships between the songs are as meaningful as the harmonic relationships between movements in a sonata. Thus, the first song's B minor tonality, with its emphasis on the subdominant of E minor, is significantly linked with the second song's E minor key. The second song, known as Lied der Mignon I, sets Goethe's three-verse poem in modified binary form; that is, the opening and closing strophes begin with similar formal gestures, but develop in differing ways, while the central strophe serves as a contrast. As in the first of the Mignon Lieder, the piano prelude contains the essentials of the song: the funereal dactylic rhythm, the fateful melody, and the dour cadential harmonic gesture. The opening verse starts in the stoic tonic minor, climbs to the more consoling major mediant and resolves by the cadential gesture back to the tonic minor. The central verse starts and stays, for most of its length, in the confident major submediant, but ends in the dominant of the tonic only via a wrenching modulation upwards through an anguished diminished seventh. The closing verse starts with the same stoic music as the opening verse, now in the radiant tonic major. But after seeming set to climax hearteningly in that key, the music crashes back into the tonic minor and the vocal melody, which had heretofore been doubled by piano, soars in shock and agony above a series of block chords, chromatically modulating through two enormous climaxes to a crucial moment of tension on an agonizing dominant seventh chord. From there the music proceeds once more to the grim cadential gesture alone in the voice. But when the gesture is repeated in the piano as a postlude, it ends in the tonic major, concluding the song with a small ray of hope.

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1.Mignon und der Harfner: Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

It is impossible to overestimate the musical heights and emotional depths of Schubert's greatest duet, Mignon und der Harfner (Mignon and the Harper) (D. 877, No. 1), from January 1826. Based on a poem from Chapter 11, Book 4 of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lahrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), Schubert's setting is an inspired representation of Goethe's text: "He lapsed into a state of dreamy longing; and the passionate expressiveness of the free duet that Mignon and the Harper were singing, was like an echo of what he himself was feeling." Although Schubert had already set the poem five times (and would set it one final time, as the last of his Op. 62 of 1827), surely this was his best setting yet of the quintessential poem of Romantic longing. Schubert takes the 12 lines of Goethe's lyric and divides it into five through-composed sections. As with Mignon I of 1821, the tonality is B minor and like that song, nearly all of it is contained in the piano's four-bar prelude: the fateful dactylic rhythm, darkening harmonic motion from tonic minor through minor sub-mediant to major flattened super-tonic and back through a perfect cadence to tonic minor, and most importantly and poignantly, the fatally descending melodic curve. The first two lines of the poem are alternatively sung by the soprano and tenor at the distance of a bar to a melody derived from the piano's prelude over an accompaniment built on the piano's prelude that stays rooted in the tonic minor. The third through sixth lines are sung by the vocalists first at the distance of half a bar and then simultaneously over an insistently rhythmic chordal tattoo in the piano that modulates from the minor sub-dominant to the sub-mediant. The agonized seventh and eighth lines are sung together by the vocalists, while the piano's chordal tattoo gathers momentum and the music modulates from the flattened super-tonic back to the sub-dominant. The climactic ninth and tenth lines are emphatically declaimed as recitative over a howling crescendo tremolo in the piano's left hand, ecstatically modulating upwards by whole tone to the tonic major. The sorrowful closing pair of lines reverses the order of initial entrances of the vocalists, but they essentially sing the same melody over a similar piano accompaniment. Horribly, the left hand continues its awful tremolo until the last funeral bars of the song.

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4.Lied der Mignon: Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous novel Wilhelm Meister is full of richly drawn and thoroughly compelling characterizations, but it is really the tragic Mignon that best plays the strings of the reader's heart. Mignon is full of song (not happy song), and such is the beauty of the lyric verses that Goethe provides for her to sing that Franz Schubert was inspired to set them to music time and time again. In 1827, publisher Antonio Diabelli released four of these "Mignon Songs" as Schubert's Opus 62 (now cataloged as D. 877), calling them "Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister von Goethe." The last song in the group is a setting of the poem "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" (and the first song of the group also sets the same text). Like the other three songs of the opus, it was probably composed during January 1826—as fate would have it, these four lieder are the last settings of Goethe's words that Schubert would ever make.

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt ("Only he who knows what yearning is"), D. 877/4, rolls forth in a sad 6/8 time. The poem is in one continuous stanza, and Schubert allows his material to appear more or less continuously, only recalling the material of the singer's opening melody when the text itself is repeated at the end. There is a real pang to the B flat octaves that mark both the introduction and the final instrumental postlude—Mignon tells us of her great loneliness, but it is the solo piano that seems to explore most deeply the painful, and in this case dissonant, reality of solitude.

In all, Schubert made five settings of "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt"; this setting and D. 877/1, the other setting of the poem included in Op. 62, are probably the best-known and certainly the finest. Better known than either of these, however, is the setting of the poem that Tchaikovsky made many decades later, known by the English title "None but the Lonely Heart."

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