After several false starts in 1816, Schubert composed his first completed setting of Mignon's song Heiss mich nicht Reden (Do not bid me speak) in April 1821. Taken from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lahrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), Schubert's Heiss mich nicht Reden (also known as Mignon I) is a magnificent and poignant poem for the enigmatic and tragic waif Mignon, a song to her silence, her suffering, and her faith in transfiguration. Schubert takes Goethe's three-verse poem and sets it in modified binary form. The opening and closing verses are set to similar vocal melodies over similar harmonic progressions, while the central verse is set to wholly different music that later is in part recapitulated at the end of the closing verse. The four-bar piano introduction contains all of the musical elements of song: the dactylic rhythm of the first bar that re-appears in every phrase of the song; the larger harmonic motion from the tonic of B minor through dominant of F sharp major to the major sub-mediant of G major; and, above all, the tone of hymn-like sublimity suffusing every subsequent melody of the song. The four phrases of the opening verse of Heiss mich nicht Reden harmonically alternates between the tonic minor and the tonic major, the first and third phrases in minor and the second and fourth in major. Interestingly, the melody for the first and third phrases is stoic in tone, while the second and fourth's are more comforting. The central verse moves from the tonic minor through a diminished seventh chord to the major sub-mediant and the melody itself grows from the stoicism of the first phrase through the anguish of the second phrase to the elated rapture of the final pair of phrases. After a return to the tonic major at the end of the central verse, the closing verse recapitulates the harmonic and melodic content of the first phrase of the opening verse, but the music transforms through an extraordinary chromatic modulation to an exultant apotheosis for the final pair of verses that harmonically moves through the major mediant to the tonic major. The tiny two-bar postlude for the piano pianissimo cadence in the tonic major is more consoling than ecstatic, a tender close to a sublime song.

© All Music Guide