Ex. 6-5: Die Mainacht
Fanny Mendelssohn wrote this song on 24 June 1838, when she was 32. It was not published in her lifetime; it appeared in 1850, three years after her death, as the last of her 6 Lieder (Op. 9). The poem, by Ludwig Hölty, was written in 1774: on a moonlit May night a nightingale sings to its mate and doves coo in pairs, while the speaker wanders alone and sheds a lonely tear. Brahms later set the same poem (Ex. 14-9: Die Mainacht by Johannes Brahms); Fanny used only the first three stanzas, so her song ends with the tear, while Brahms chose stanzas 1, 3 and 4.
Hölty's poems had attracted her before: in early 1827, at 21, she set seven of them in about two months, and one of those songs opens the same Op. 9 collection. That week her husband, the painter Wilhelm Hensel, was away, and she was writing letters to him from Berlin; he spent part of that year working in London. Earlier that year, in February, she had played her brother Felix's Piano Concerto No. 1 at a charity concert in Berlin — one of her very few appearances on a public stage. At home she ran the family's "Sunday concerts," held in a garden hall that could seat up to 300 guests; she planned the programmes, played the piano and conducted the choir and orchestra.
Musically, the voice enters half a bar later than the natural stress of the words would suggest, so at first the melody seems to lag a little behind the piano before settling into step with it.
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