Liv Redpath

Das verlassene Mägdlein – Hugo Wolf

Liv Redpath: ‘If pressed to choose a song from our Phänomen that resonates most vividly to me, I would name ‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’. To speak of it in today’s currency, I put its clever relationship to memory and time in an emotional world familiar to Joni Mitchell or Phoebe Bridgers. In the poem, Mörike cruelly lets us experience the reassembling of heartbreak’s memory and feeling in the early hours of morning. The small details in its opening tableau – the little stars, the flame habitually started by the Mägdlein – are delicate, immediate, beautiful, innocent. With these hanging in the balance context-free, we are then hit with the realization that the girl’s subconscious has visited her in sleep with the phantom of her faithless lover - giving us someone to assign as the accused to the “versunken Leid” she feels staring into the hearth.

There is an enduring and familiar nature to the Mägdlein’s experience that allows for the separating out and naming of particular evils of betrayal and heartbreak; the versunken Leid that permeates half-woken consciousness; the acute sensitivity to things both near and far that seem to shimmer more beautifully despite our inner turmoil; the pragmatic world of the living that we must continue to mark through with the same tasks that dominated our quotidien, menial lives - before, during, and now, after the fact. More verbose songs in the repertoire fail to execute the simple knife’s cut of “Das verlassene Mägdlein”. Most crushing of all, Wolf’s setting does so with the requisite beauty of the disparate emotional world painted in Mörike’s words. It always leaves me with the impression of a hard moment of life perfectly lived and expressed.’