Ex. 8-19: Es duften süß die Linden

Luise Greger published this song in 1926 as the second of her two songs to poems by Gottfried Hertel, Op. 125. She was then 64 and had lived in Kassel, in central Germany, since 1894, when she and her husband, a doctor, opened a sanatorium there that she ran as a business. After her divorce in 1911 she moved to a large flat on the Wilhelmshöher Allee, where she held musical evenings, singing her own songs and playing the piano herself, sometimes with her eldest son Helmuth, a trained baritone. In the years before this song appeared she also gave concerts of her songs in Berlin, Frankfurt and other German towns; a newspaper in Husum wrote in 1924 that she played the accompaniments from memory without a single mistake.

In the poem, the linden trees are in flower on a close summer night; the singer cannot rest and thinks only of a loved one, and wishes the wind would carry the leaves to that person, each one with the words "come soon, come soon to me." She dedicated the song "in friendship" to a woman friend, and the other song of the pair to the poet himself, about whom nothing more is known today.

Luise Greger was born in 1861 in Greifswald, on Germany's Baltic coast; she had piano lessons from the age of five, her earliest surviving songs date from when she was eleven, and according to a family story she was invited as a girl to play at the Russian court in St Petersburg. In the 1880s she studied for a year at the music academy in Berlin, and in 1888 she married Ludwig Greger, a doctor, with whom she had three sons. She was still active in her seventies. In 1932 a Kassel newspaper called her "Germany's most important lyric composer of the day," and in 1933 her fairy-tale play Gänseliesel (Goose Girl) was staged in Baden-Baden, with the composer in the audience, and was given twelve more times. She died in 1944. In the 1990s her great-grandchildren found about 170 of her works and letters in an old iron trunk, and since then her songs have been published and sung again.

IMSLP