Songs Without Words

Songs Without Words, collection of 48 songs written for solo piano rather than voice by German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Part of the collection—consisting of 36 songs—was published in six volumes during the composer’s lifetime. Two further volumes—with 12 more songs—were published after Mendelssohn’s death in 1847. Most famed of the four dozen Songs Without Words is the lighthearted and aptly named “Spring Song,” Op. 62, No. 6, in A major, from the fifth volume.

In 1842 Mendelssohn wrote to a correspondent about the composition of the Songs Without Words:

If you ask me what I had in mind when I wrote it, I would say: just the song as it is. And if I happen to have certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to others. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling that is not expressed, however, by the same words.

In that same letter, he had earlier remarked:

People often complain that music is too uncertain in its meaning, that what they should be thinking as they hear it is unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only in the context of an entire speech, but also with individual words. These, too, seem to me so uncertain, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music that fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts expressed to me by the music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.

The first set of six songs, Op. 19, appeared in print in England in 1832 under the title Original Melodies for the Pianoforte. The following year it was published in Germany as Lieder ohne Worte. Five more collections appeared in the course of Mendelssohn’s abbreviated life (he died at age 38). These include Op. 30 (1835; first published in France as Six Romances and later that year in Germany as Lieder ohne Worte; all later volumes were published in Germany under the familiar title), Op. 38 (1837), Op. 53 (1841), Op. 62 (1844), and Op. 67 (1845). The posthumously published collections are Op. 85 (1851) and Op. 102 (1868). Five of the six volumes were dedicated to women, the fifth set to his friend and colleague Clara Schumann.