Wolf Mörike-Lieder – Werner Güra

Mörike found his composer, and it happened almost overnight — the mad, miraculous outpouring of 1888, when Wolf wrote something like forty songs in a matter of weeks, as if the poems had been waiting decades for the right musical hand to unlock them. Nobody before or since has understood the particular tang of Mörike’s imagination quite so well: the way his poems slide from the domestic into the uncanny without so much as a comma to warn you. Wolf caught that. He caught it in harmonic language that keeps shifting the floor under your feet.

This reissue is budget-priced and stripped of texts or notes, a real annoyance since Mörike’s German is not always transparent even to native speakers. It gives us twenty-three of these songs from Werner Güra and his longtime partner Jan Schultsz, recorded in the Reitstadel at Neumarkt in the winter of 2004. Güra was forty then, in vocal prime, a tenor whose instrument never quite forgets its Mozartean upbringing even when the repertoire wanders far from Idomeneo or Belmonte.

That lineage matters here. You hear it instantly in the diction — clean, forward, unfussy — and in the sheen he brings to the top of the voice, which never turns effortful even under pressure. Some listeners want more heft in Wolf, more baritonal darkness, the sort of thing Fischer-Dieskau supplied across his several recorded traversals. Güra offers something different: a lighter, more silvery approach that trades weight for agility. Mostly it pays off.

“Fußreise” is a good early test. He passes it with real charm, the walking rhythm never stiff, the sudden swell at “Vater du” opening out naturally, unforced. There is elastic phrasing in “Er ist’s” too, though the famous eruption on “Frühling, ja du bist’s” shows the limits of a lighter instrument pushed toward vehemence. He gets there. It just costs him something in vocal ease that a bigger voice wouldn’t notice.

And then “Der Feuerreiter” — a song that terrifies half the tenors who attempt it, and rightly so. Wolf’s fire-rider gallops through diminished harmonies toward his own destruction, and the piano part alone is a small nightmare of cross-rhythms. Güra sings it with intelligence and evident nerve, the narrative snapping into focus. Still, my ear keeps drifting back to Helge Rosvaenge’s 1930s account, a rendition of such reckless, bronze-throated abandon that it still sounds slightly dangerous eighty-odd years on. Güra is not dangerous. He is thoughtful. Different animal entirely.

Where he really excels is in the smaller, stranger poems. “Im Frühling” unfolds with an unhurried tenderness, the vocal line floating over Schultsz’s rippling arpeggios like something half-remembered. “Zitronenfalter im April,” a miniature many singers rush past, gets the patience it deserves; Güra lets the fragile, hovering quality of the butterfly-image register without underlining it. Nothing is spelled out. Everything is implied.

“Der Gärtner” has a lovely, courtly lightness of touch, the grace of it never curdling into preciousness. In “Nimmersatte Liebe” he manages the tricky business of tracking Mörike’s shifting emotional temperature, from playful to nearly desperate, within a handful of bars. The half-voice he produces for “Peregrina II” deserves particular praise: a thinned, almost disembodied tone that suits the poem’s ghostliness, its sense of love recollected through some kind of veil.

Schultsz, for his part, is an alert, transparent partner who never covers the voice, though I sometimes wanted more character from him in the purely pianistic flourishes, the postludes especially. Wolf gives his pianists enormous responsibility; this is symphonic writing squeezed onto two staves, and Schultsz plays it well without quite making you forget it’s Wolf’s true orchestra.

Does this displace the classic sets — Fischer-Dieskau and Moore, or Schwarzkopf’s survey with Gerald Moore at the keyboard, both wiser in their psychological shading? No. But it was never trying to. What Güra offers, at a bargain price, is a sympathetic introduction to Wolf’s most sustained achievement, sung with taste, intelligence, and, in the best moments, real illumination. The absence of texts is a genuine failing for a company like Harmonia Mundi, which should know better. Buy it anyway, and track down a translation online. The singing more than earns the trouble.