This song, another Eduard Mörike Lied that tumbled from Hugo Wolf's pen on March 1, 1888, is a vivid example of the composer's ability to exactly match the tone of the text, to probe between the poet's lines and capture every implication. The atmosphere in Bei einer Trauung (At a Wedding) is oppressive as a ponderous march (a funeral march, really) prepares the way for the singer to tell his tale of a wedding between two cripplingly mismatched people. Wolf captured the poet's dry, matter-of-fact reportage interspersed with wry commentary on the disaster unfolding before the "select and privileged" gathering. The narrator notes that while the organ loft may be stuffed with violins, he swears that heaven won't be. Look, the singer interjects, she is weeping frightfully while he makes an atrocious face. Truly, truly, no love exists between them! Some Wolf scholars have considered this humorous vignette heavy handed, yet in the hands of a subtle singer and a pianist who can mine the intricacies of the accompaniment without unduly underlining what Wolf had so scrupulously fashioned, the song is a gift. The narration in the poem itself insists on a simple, uninflected delivery, while the commentaries should have the effect of asides. The voice maintains its volume so that words do not fall into inaudibility, but the inflections inform the listener that there is a wrenchingly hilarious aspect to this tale -- and that the singer is only too delighted to share it. This song was completed four days after Zur Warnung (To Offer a Warning) and a week before Abschied (Farewell), two other Mörike songs of grotesque humor that some believe flirt with musical burlesque. In Mörike, Wolf discovered a poet of rare lyric refinement and range, one also imbued with a passionate involvement with his works. Mörike was no dilettante. A Protestant minister who became increasingly torn between church doctrine and his own humanistic leanings, he was a man of febrile sensitivity and a writer serious about what he put on paper. His gifts eventually would have established him as one of Germany's finest poets, but Wolf's setting of his texts hastened recognition beyond his native Swabia. When placed together with Zur Warnung and Abschied, Bei einer Trauung seems approachable enough. Whereas Zur Warnung recounts a wildly distressful episode of delirium tremens and Abschied a hallucinatory encounter with a "critic" (both placing the narrator as principal in the scenario), Bei einer Trauung is an observation, a commentary. No vocal contortions are needed, only a variation in tone color as the observer becomes interpreter. Amidst the persistent 4/4 pulse of the piano part (accompaniment is too casual a term), myriad subtleties may be identified, notably Wolf's use of the augmented fifth (übermässig in German) to suggest bathos, the same device Wolf used elsewhere to indicate pathos. ~ Erik Eriksson, All Music Guide
