1.Waldseligkeit

After divorcing his wife and renouncing his job as an insurance salesman in 1899, Richard Dehmal began his real life as a writer. In his poetry, he united a deep love of the natural world with an equally deep love of human sexuality and his best poems fuse these two elements into an indissoluble whole. Like most literary Germans, Strauss only became familiar with Dehmal's poetry in the late 1890s, but he quickly became quite enamored of it, setting three of his poems in his Op. 39 group in 1898 and another in his Op. 41 group of 1899. Two years later, Strauss set Dehmal's "Waldseligkeit" (Woodland Happiness), published as the first of his Acht Lieder, Op. 49. It is a quietly rapturous setting with a high-lying vocal melody over a warmly murmuring accompaniment in the piano. There are few of Strauss' trademark chromatic harmonies; rather, the song is wholly inward and without outward display. And when Strauss subtly shifts from one key to another at the moments of greatest intensity, the effect is of transcendent serenity.

© All Music Guide