Ex. 14-13: Verschwiegene Liebe

"Verschwiegene Liebe" (Silent Love) is No. 3 of Hugo Wolf's Eichendorff-Lieder, a set of 20 songs on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Wolf composed it on 31 August 1888. He had sketched this poem once before, back in 1879, but that early version was completely different. The poem is about a hidden love: the lover's thoughts fly free through the night, and only the silent night and the stars know them. Other songs from Wolf's Eichendorff-Lieder are also in this app. (Ex. 1-10: Der Scholar by Hugo Wolf) (Ex. 9-8: Der Freund by Hugo Wolf) (Ex. 13-7: Nachtzauber by Hugo Wolf)

Wolf's first biographer, Ernst Decsey, told the story of how the song was written. That day Wolf had just come back from Bayreuth — the German town where Wagner's opera festival is held — and was staying at the Vienna home of his friend Friedrich Eckstein. He went out to read Eichendorff in the garden, but the noise — a nearby factory, someone whistling, and the beating of carpets to shake out the dust — made it impossible. He hurried indoors, sat down at the piano, and wrote the whole song almost without stopping.

To give Wolf some quiet, Eckstein then lent him his family's country house by the Attersee, a lake in Austria. There, in about a week at the end of September 1888, Wolf wrote around ten more Eichendorff songs.

In 1916 the composer Franz Schreker arranged this song for soprano and string orchestra.

From the album Classical Barbra by Barbra Streisand (1976). Streisand is one of the most famous American popular singers, but she had a personal love of classical song. She recorded this album of classical pieces in 1973, though it was not released until 1976 — a risky move for a pop star. The conductor Leonard Bernstein praised her, saying she moved into classical music "with extraordinary ease" and clearly loved the songs. The album was nominated for a Grammy Award in the classical category.
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