Ex. 3-2: Das Veilchen

"Das Veilchen" (The Violet) is a song Mozart wrote in Vienna in 1785 (K. 476), to a poem by Goethe. It is his only setting of a Goethe poem.

He wrote it during his most successful years in Vienna. Earlier that same year, his father Leopold had come from Salzburg to visit, and heard Joseph Haydn tell him, "Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer I know." Mozart was writing his great piano concertos in these months, a year before his opera The Marriage of Figaro.

The poem tells a small, sad story. A violet grows in a field. A young shepherdess walks across the field, singing. The violet wishes she would pick it and hold it to her heart. But she does not see it, and steps on it. The violet dies — yet it is happy to die at her feet.

Goethe's poem ends there. Mozart added a line of his own — "The poor violet!" — a word of pity, and then repeated Goethe's earlier line, "it was a dear little violet," to finish the song. Most songs of the time used the same melody for every verse. Mozart did something different: the music keeps changing as the story moves, almost like a small opera scene.

It is not known how Mozart found the poem, or even whether he knew it was by Goethe. The two never met as grown men, but Goethe admired Mozart's music and later wished Mozart could have set his Faust. Today "Das Veilchen" is often called one of the first true German art songs.

You may notice that recordings do not all sing the small ornaments the same way. In Mozart's time these little decorations were partly left to the performer's taste, and singers and editors still read them differently today. There is no single "correct" version, so a recording may not exactly match the melody you know.

From the album Mozart: Lieder by Barbara Bonney and Geoffrey Parsons (1991)
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