Richard Strauss' Op. 27 set of songs is one of his greatest, considered as a set. Strauss was a composer of varying inspiration, and his several dozen songs contain his share of misses among many hits. Some of his greatest songs were published alongside weaker verse settings. Perhaps the surest indication that the composer thought well of this set is that he dedicated it to "my beloved Pauline" and gave it to the singer Pauline de Ahna on their wedding day, September 10, 1894. She often performed these songs.

Strauss had become acquainted with a circle of poets in Berlin that included Kaspar Schmidt (whose real name was Max Stirner), John Henry Mackay, and Karl Henckell. All were socialists. Stirner was felt to be such a radical that he made Karl Marx seem tame, and Mackay was even more of a rabble-rouser than Stirner.

However, Strauss tended to pick the gentlest, most bourgeois, and most Romantic poetry from among the works of this group.

The opening song of the set is called "Ruhe, mein Seele!" (Calm, My Heart!) and is on a text drawn from Henckell's Buch des Kampfes (Book of Struggles). The name of the song comes from a recurring refrain. The song considers the past life of a person with a deeply troubled spirit, and the recurring admonition that one should calm one's heart seems to reflect the singer's passage through a stage of constant struggle.

Fine as the song is (though somewhat elusive in expression in its original form), Strauss improved it when he orchestrated it. It was 54 years after he wrote it that he provided an orchestral accompaniment, which is dated June 9, 1948. Strauss improved the timing of the song by lengthening by a measure or two some pauses between verses, and by orchestrating the block-like chords of the original piano part.

The second song is to words by Heinrich Hart. It is a passionate expression of love. The name of the poem and song is "Cäcilie," who was Hart's wife. Her name is never stated in Hart's verses; the refrain of the song is the expression "Wenn du es wüßtest" (If you only knew), which builds in its ardent expression of love as it is repeated. Strauss orchestrated the song in 1897, partly to provide a song for Pauline to sing at his concerts as she traveled with him on his guest conducting tours. Once again the orchestration improves an already masterly piano song.

"Heimliche Aufforderung" (Secret Invitation) is the first of several songs that Strauss wrote to poems of Mackay, who also provided the text of the final song, "Morgen!" (Morning!). Much as Mackay might have wished Strauss would pick some of his socially conscious poems, these are both love poems. The first maintains the passionate tone of "Cäcilie," while "Morgen!" is serenely rapturous. Strauss made a beautiful orchestration of "Morgen!" However, he must have concluded that the highly pianistic writing of the accompaniment of "Heimliche Aufforderung" would defeat even an orchestrator of his abilities. A later orchestration by Robert Heger is lackluster.

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1.Ruhe, meine Seele

In 1894 Strauss married his former student, the soprano Pauline de Ahna. As a wedding present, he gave her the set of songs Op. 27. This extraordinary group of songs has few rivals. The four songs are completely different to one another but each one is a masterpiece. The first, Rest, my Soul, is utterly dramatic, like an operatic aria. It opens in a tragic atmosphere created by somber orchestral chords. The voice enters pianissimo, creating a haunting, ecstatic mood. The dramatic intensity rises in the second stanza:

your storms have been savage

you have raged and trembled

like the breakers as they surge

but at the third it subsides into the mysterious feeling of the beginning. The orchestra closing mirrors the introduction.

The second, Cäcilie, is a love song overflowing with enthusiasm:

If you knew

what to love is...

to soar, borne on the light,

to blessed heights,

if you knew,

you would live with me!

The third, Secret Invitation, begins in expansive, celebratory mood:

Raise the sparkling cup to your lips

and drink to your heart's content

and then turns intimate:

...leave the festive scene

of loud companions...

there, by our old custom

I will wait for you.

The fourth, Tomorrow, is full of melancholic enchantment:

And tomorrow the sun will shine again

and on the path I shall follow

it will unite us again...

Strauss made a purely orchestral arrangement of this last song in 1897.

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2.Cäcilie

The marriage of Richard Strauss and Pauline de Ahna has gone down in musical history as a model example of the attraction of opposites. Strauss, who described himself as "phlegmatic," was on the surface an unlikely match for the high-strung soprano de Ahna, whose temper was well known in late nineteenth-century German musical circles. Strauss composed Cäcilie in Weimar on September 9, 1894, the day before his wedding, as a wedding present for his bride-to-be; the song thus stands today as something of a monument to their long-lived union. Cäcilie would become a mainstay in the repertoire of the couple's Lieder recitals in Europe and the United States. Strauss' song is also a fitting interpretation of Heinrich Hart's poem, which was the poet's declaration of love to his wife, Cäcilie. Around the same time as the composition of Cäcilie, Strauss, then employed as the Kapellmeister at the court of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was also strengthening his ties with Cosima Wagner and the Wagnerian circle in Bayreuth. The year 1894 also saw the première of Strauss' first opera Guntram and his appointment as Kapellmeister at the Munich court. Cäcilie was orchestrated in 1897.

Strauss' through-composed musical setting of Heinrich Hart's poem at once denies the poem's strophic construction and confirms the passion of its content. The voice-and-piano version is in the key of E major; Strauss transposed the song to E flat major when he orchestrated it in 1897, a decision that permits the heroic associations of this key to enrich the meaning of Hart's bold profession of love. The music of the first text strophe offers an adventuresome major-mode context for the passionate images of the text: ardent kisses, caresses, whispers. Strauss avoids congruity between poetic lines and musical phrases, a free approach to the text that yields an outpouring of emotional expression. The shift to minor mode at the beginning of the second text strophe and the harmonic volatility throughout reflect a change in the poetic imagery to the darker side of love: worry, lonely nights, isolation, despair. Likewise, the sunny return to the major mode at the end of the second text strophe predicts the expansion of the imagery of third strophe into ideal realms, to which one travels in a blaze of light to the heights of the blessed creation. The ascending scalar figures in the piano postlude confirm this upward sweep.

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3.Heimliche Aufforderung

For a socialist, anarchist, and promoter of man-boy love, the Scottish/German writer John Henry Mackay wrote some of the sexiest poems the bourgeois reactionary and resolutely heterosexual composer Richard Strauss ever set. In Strauss' 1894 setting of Heimliche Aufforderung (Secret Invitation), Op. 27/3, is a less-than-discreet invitation to have sex in the bushes outside a castle after a feast. Strauss' melody is ardently passionate and his accompaniment is full of lush harmonies and rushing arpeggios culminating in a glorious climax, followed by a warm-hearted melody for the piano alone in the coda.

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4.Morgen

One of Richard Strauss' best known songs, this work, a celebration of love, is inspired by the composer's feelings toward his wife, Pauline. The text is "Morgen," a poem by the German poet (of Scottish extraction), John Henry Morgan (1864-1933). The poem, which blends tranquil, reassuring images of nature with deep confidence in love, inspired a natural, flowing melody of extraordinary beauty. While the atmosphere of tranquillity remains fundamentally undisturbed, the smoothly ascending movement of the melody suggests feelings of deep, boundless joy, yearning to express its immensity. Providing discreet harmonic accompaniment and gentle melodic support, the piano part beautifully complements the solo. While Strauss is better known for his symphonic and operatic works, this work, composed in 1893-1894, identifies him as one of the great masters of the German Lied.

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