Once upon a time (so runs the argument of Loewe's Die Heinzelmannchen) life was so much earsier in Cologne than it is nowadays. Why, there were benevolent goblins around then, goblins who would labour all night long to complete the work that idle or improvident men left unfinished at sunset. For example, if a carpenter, let's say.... And then one apprehensively notices (apprehensively, that is, if one has ever been subjected to a surfeit of Loewe) that the text of the song runs over on the next page, runs for eight longish verses, indeed, as the butcher, the baker, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all are adduced in further evidence of the erstwhile benefits of goblin Gastarbeitershaft before the song eventually gets down to telling us how and why Cologne was de-goblinned. One expects another example of Loewe's garrulous inability to recognize when enough is enough, rendered in this case more tedious still by roguish fairy whimsy, but one is very pleasantly surprised.
What Loewe's large and uneven output needs is selectivity, selectivity even before the sympathetic artistry that is no less necessary, and both have been exercised here in exemplary fashion. Die Heinzelmannchen turns out to be one of his relaxed and genial songs, with a deal of quiet humour (in the piano part as well as the voice), more than adequate contrast between the verses and plenty of knobbly, onomatopoeic words for the singer to enjoy. Moll and his pianist relish the deft characterization of the various trades, but they know better than to overdo this. For the naive moral fable of Die Uhr, simple directness is the manner they adopt, allowing an unemphatic solemnity to point the pious message of the final verse. Odins Meeresritt, one of the best of Loewe's heroic, epic ballads, gives more opportunities for the operatic resources of moll's voice; the eerie moment where the horseshoe magically grows in the unsuspecting smith's hands and he realizes that he is shoeing the horse of no mortal rider is splendidly effective. So is the crucial moment of Die verfallene Muhle: the aged knight, visiting again the now ruined mill where he was once unhappily in love, imagines that the mill-wheels are turning again, and that a beloved figure offers him a glass of wine, but he reaches for it and grasps ''nur Luft'', only air, as the vision fades. It is at moments like this, with the singer responding to the text as generously and expressively as the composer did, that one realizes why Loewe is such a central figure in German Romanticism. His melodies are simple but memorable, his word-setting vivid and his accompaniments, in the songs selected here, at least, strikingly graphic and varied. Even monotony is cunningly used (the bell-ostinato in Der Pilgrim vor St Just, a 14-line narration of Charles V's abdication and entry into a monastery, lifts into an arch of expressive melody just once, when the King says that the shoulders now bowed under a monkish habit were once decked ''with imperial ermine'') and both singer and accompanist respond to it with subtlety and sensitivity.
The collection presents a very strong case for reconsidering Loewe's achievement as a songwriter. A close and rather dry recording makes the piano sound a rather dwarfish instrument but Moll's diction emerges very crisply.'