5.Schlechtes Wetter

After taking a 12-year vacation from song composition, Richard Strauss returned to the world of Lieder in 1918 and in short order turned out four sets of them—Opp. 66, 67, 68, and 69. The last of these are the Fünf kleine Lieder (Five Little Songs), Op. 69, settings of poems by two important early Romantic poets: Achim von Arnim, one of two men who compiled Des Knaben Wunderhorn in the early nineteenth century, and Heinrich Heine. These "little songs" are really not all that short, but there is a gracefulness to them—a certain lightness of touch that can be one of the most endearing features of Strauss' music—that creates the illusion of a diminutive stature that actual measurement belies. Some of the poems, such as "Einerlei" (Sameness, the third song in the group), are, however, very brief indeed.

Strauss' sometimes irrepressible tendency to write long, voluptuous melodies is kept firmly in check throughout Op. 69: a scherzando character marks songs like Einerlei and Schlechtes Wetter (Bad Weather), the final song of the five, and the smooth legato lines of Der Pokal (The Goblet), Op. 69, No. 2, are more ceremonial than emotive. The final bars of Schlechtes Wetter, and thus of Op. 69, give us Strauss at his quicksilver best: a thin thread of melody in the right hand gives in to the left hand's persistent little cascades (rain, present throughout the whole song) and everything tumbles down rapidly toward a final F major chord that, bad weather notwithstanding, seems as simple and as warm as can be.

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