Mignon, song for voice & piano (of "Jugendlieder")

• Date: ca. 1904
• Composer: Alban Berg
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

A clear majority of Alban Berg's early Jugendlieder are settings of texts not easily found outside the Jugendlieder -- the poets are obscure ones, even virtually unknown ones. There are, however, exceptions. A few Heinrich Heine poems, for example, found their way onto Berg's songwriting desk; and with the songs Grenzen der Menschheit of 1902 and Erster Verlust of late 1904, young Alban Berg tackled that Granddaddy of German poetry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A few years later, near the end of the Jugendlieder collection (chronologically speaking), Berg tried his hand at another Goethe poem, this time one of the most oft-set poems in the German language (and, via translation, one also set in French, Polish, and Russian many times): "Mignon." Beethoven set these words, as did Schubert, Liszt, Schumann, Ludwig Spohr, Fanny Mendelssohn, Anton Rubinstein, Hugo Wolf, Carl Zelter, Charles Gounod, and Tchaikovsky. Some of these many settings are known by the title Mignon, as Berg's is; others go by the name Kennst du das Land, after the first words sung.

Berg, like Beethoven before him, set only the beginning of the poem -- Goethe wrote three stanzas, Berg set just one, and given the drawn-out finality of the music's ending, it isn't likely that he meant the next to stanzas to be sung to the same music. "Do you know the land in which the lemons flourish amidst dark leaves that glow golden-orange? In which a gentle wind blows from the blue sky, the myrtle stands still and the laurel stands high? Do you know it well? Over to it, over to it I would so gladly go, my beloved!"

Berg's music is lush and romantic -- the song employs an F major that is balanced, idiomatic, and traditional in scope (whereas the harmonies in many of the Jugendlieder are idiosyncratic or downright quirky, as Berg first struggled to gain the skill to command his harmonies, rather than have them command him, and then struggled to find a comfortable position between modernism and melodic "old-fashionedism" -- something that, despite his reputation as a progressive, in fact occupied him for the rest of his life). If, in the fourth bar of Mignon, you get the feeling that you've heard this music before, you might be correct. Berg lifted a couple of measures from the late-1906 song So regnet es sich langsam ein, and, subjecting them to minor modifications, plugged them into Mignon -- listen for the rich, Richard Strauss-like descending parallel sixths. The song ends with the kind of glowing, chromatically modified cadence (flat sixth scale degree) that would become the stuff of Hollywood cliché as the twentieth century moved along. ~ Blair Johnston, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Alban Berg: Jugendlieder	2003
Alban Berg: Lieder, 1900-1925
Jessye Norman
Jessye Norman Sings Alban Berg	1995
Schoenberg/Webern/Berg/Duchow/Burns	1996
Tief in der Nacht	2011

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