Volume 1 (6/99) was promising, Vol. 2 (10/99) revealed a major song-writer, but Vol. 3 is quite extraordinary. Pfitzner was a ‘literary composer’ in the best sense – the libretto of his opera Palestrina is masterly – and in these songs his sensitivity to words often leads his music in strange yet impressive directions. Op. 19 No. 1, for example, sets a poem about obsessive longing, in a troubled state between waking and dreaming, day and night. Pfitzner’s music is as strong and compelling as the longing it evokes, but also as unstable. In several of these songs a firm sense of key is denied (but the music never becomes ‘atonal’, never directionless), either by intense chromaticism or by a strikingly original use of the whole-tone scale, as in the big, vehement, almost cantata-like setting of Goethe’s An den Mond. At the other end of the expressive scale is Op. 11 No. 1, Hebbel’s Ich und Du, where extreme simplicity – lyrical phrases over bare diatonic chords – expresses two lovers’ union with solemn grandeur. But why imply that Pfitzner’s expressive range has only two ends? Setting a naive anonymous poem for a competition to find ‘new German folk-songs’, he combines artless and artful to unexpectedly touching ends, while in Op. 15 No. 4, to a whimsical mock-rococo text by Eichendorff, he deftly provides not-quite-serious fake Haydn and a charming evocation (wittily underlined by the pianist Donald Sulzen) of a mechanical clock.
The text of ‘Michaelskirchplatz’ (Op. 19 No. 2) is filled with images of young love (blushing cheeks, offered flowers) but ‘we smiled and were silent as St Michael’s bells rang’, and the whole song is memorably contained within bell sounds. No less impressively, in Op. 15 No. 1 Pfitzner approaches Schubert on his own ground (the song is called ‘The hurdy-gurdy man’) as he in effect sketches the earlier career of the strange old man that the wanderer approaches at the end of Winterreise. Hinting at the hurdy-gurdy’s music also brings Pfitzner close to the world of Nielsen’s ‘Jens Vejmand’, to moving and gripping effect.
The performances are quite admirable throughout, as are the recordings (but the translations are going from bad to worse). My conclusion after hearing Vol. 2 (‘anyone interested in Lieder who has so far not investigated Pfitzner will find this collection a revelation’) applies still more strongly to this one. My feelings then (‘I can hardly wait for the remaining volumes’) are still more urgent.'