THE LIBRARY | SONGS

This song was written much earlier than its mid-period opus number suggests. It was Beethoven’s first serious attempt at song during his early Vienna years. It’s actually modeled after Haydn’s O Tuneful Voice, a song Beethoven admired for its relative ambition in the genre. In Adelaide, we find the most extended art song yet to be written, three full years before Schubert was even born.

One of the most notable elements of the song is the setting of the name Adelaide, which punctuates every stanza of the poem. No two of the fourteen times Beethoven sets the word are exactly the same. Beethoven makes the word a kind of proxy for whatever the mood of the piece is—varying from sweetly parlando in spoken rhythm to dramatically melismatic at the top of the singer’s range.

Also notable in this song is Beethoven’s willingness to travel to foreign keys when it suits the text, a technique that was novel at the time but would become a signature of Lieder from Schubert on. The most stunning example is the shift from G Major to E-flat Major (known as the “flat-six”) on the line “Nachtigallen flöten” (“nightingales sing”), which captures the sweetness of the bird’s song.

One final formal innovation is the exuberant finale, with a sudden shift to Allegro for the final stanza. It anticipates not only the final song of An die Ferne Geliebte, but the Dionysian finales to works like the 9th Symphony much later in Beethoven’s career.