Schoeck met the charismatic pianist, Mary de Senger, in August 1918, and pursued an on-again, off-again five year affair with her, during which time he composed a large measure of his most intense, ambitious, and deeply realized work; the works, in fact, upon which his fame largely rests—Venus (1919 - 1920), Elegie (1922 - 1923), Penthesilea (1924 - 1925), Lebendig begraben (1926), and Notturno (1931 - 1933). And when she at last, and finally, distanced herself from him, the emotional upheaval lasted at least until his marriage to Hilde Bartscher in 1925, and does not seem to have been fully exorcised until the birth of his daughter, Gisela, in 1932. The stylistic curve of these central works runs from the expressively impacted late Romanticism of the opera, Venus, through the brazen expressionism of Penthesilea, to the distilled expressionistic bitters of Notturno, after which Schoeck lapses into the treacly sentimentality of Das Wandsbecker Liederbuch (1936). From this vantage, it is of some interest to discover, after the very public, preternatural exuberance of Venus—blocked out in great choral, dance, and storm scenes, and rounded with a Liebestod for the tenor lead—in the Elegie an intimate, spare, fastidious utterance, in which the traditional Lied has been corroded, as it were, by a pathological burden of feeling. Through these 23 songs, Schoeck shuffles the incurable despair of Lenau's verse with the gentler melancholy of Eichendorff—a strategy also employed with even greater concentration and refinement in Notturno. Nikolaus Lenau (1802 - 1850) was influential for at least two generations after his death, inspiring, among other works, Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1 ("Der Tanz in der Dorfschenke") and Richard Strauss' tone poem, Don Juan. Schoeck's response to Lenau uncannily reflects Lenau's corrosive response to the traditional nature worship of German verse—"How mournfully the wind rustles through the bushes, as if weeping: Nature's death rattle...." (Herbstklage). In Schoeck's settings, these lyrics become incantations, dark hymns to alienation and the failure of love, moans of wild despair, and hallucinatory presentiments of death, against which the familiar, resigned sadness of Joseph, Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788 - 1857) looms as a benediction. The deftly scored chamber ensemble accompaniment, with a piano lending an occasional touch of silvery brittleness, enmeshes the voice in incisive strokes of clairvoyant irony. Elegie received its premiere on March 19, 1923, at the Zurich Tonhalle, with Felix Loeffel, under the composer's direction.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi