Ex. 10-6: None but the Lonely Heart

No. 6 from Tchaikovsky's first set of romances (Op. 6), composed in late 1869. The text is Lev Mei's Russian translation of "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship — one of the most frequently set poems in the German Lied tradition.

Tchaikovsky wrote the Op. 6 songs quickly, mainly to earn money. In a letter from November 1869, the 29-year-old composer — then teaching at the Moscow Conservatory — told his brother Modest that he was going to write some songs to bring in some money. It had been a hard year: he had hoped to marry the singer Désirée Artôt, but early in 1869 she suddenly married another man. He dedicated the song to the singer Anna Khvostova, who helped bring his early songs to the public.

Premiered by mezzo-soprano Yelizaveta Lavrovskaya in Moscow in 1870. The following year, it was performed at an all-Tchaikovsky concert hosted by Nikolai Rubinstein in St. Petersburg — the first concert ever devoted entirely to Tchaikovsky's works.

The song even crossed into popular music — Frank Sinatra recorded it four times between 1946 and 1959 — and it has also been sung by many great classical singers, among them Mario Lanza, Plácido Domingo, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

From the album None but the Lonely Heart: Tchaikovsky Romances by Olga Borodina and Larissa Gergieva (1994)
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