His range was extraordinarily wide, encompassing ideal, unhappy and erotic love, joy in the natural world, religious mysticism, the supernatural, whimsy and broad or ironic humour-all themes richly represented in Wolf’s Mörike collection.
With its riot of delicately buzzing trills, its diaphanous piano countermelodies and its mingled shy hesitancy and elation, “Der Knabe und das Immlein,” the first song in tonight’s Mörike group is a perfect vignette of tremulous young love. The verses of “An eine Aeolsharfe” were inspired by the poet’s grief for a dead brother.