I really like the Heinrich Heine poem that begins with the line “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam”: it's just two four-line stanzas, but they suggest many interpretations. We talked about it in some detail here, when we listened to Edvard Grieg's setting, and last summer we listened to Rimsky-Korsakov. This summer we come back to it with Liszt, who wrote a song based on this poem around 1845; as he did with many songs from that period, he rewrote it about ten years later.
He often revised his songs to "lighten" them, to simplify them, because, in his view, the early versions were too much ("too many notes," as Joseph II says in Amadeus). In the case of Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam, the first version was already sober –surprisingly sober, for Liszt at that time– so perhaps the need to rewrite it didn't necessarily come from there. Sometimes the composer would revise a song and, once finished, the score would have nothing to do with the original, but that isn't the case with the second version of this Fichtenbaum either, since here Liszt reworks the material to make a song we immediately connect with the first one. It's a special, precious case, because both songs are.
Since I like both so much, and they're short, and this article is too, I decided to share both. The first, S. 309a, we'll hear performed by Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch, while the second, S. 309b, will be the recording by Hermann Prey and Alexis Weissenberg.
I hope you enjoy them!
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh’.
Ihn schläfert; mit weißer Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er träumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.
A spruce-tree stands alone
in the north, on the bare heights;
it slumbers; in a white blanket
it is surrounded by ice and snow.
It dreams of a palm tree
which, far-off in the land of the morning,
grieves, alone and mute,
on a burning, rocky wall.
(translation by Emily Ezust)
