Lieder ohne Worte (“Songs without words”)

• Lieder ohne Worte (“Songs without words”) is a collection of 48 songs for solo piano in eight volumes. The first 36 songs were published in six volumes between 1832 and 1845. The final two volumes were published posthumously:¹
  1. Op. 19 (1832); the first song of this volume was originally written as a birthday present for the composer’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, in 1828.²
  2. Op. 30 (1835)
  3. Op. 38 (1837)
  4. Op. 53 (1841)
  5. Op. 62 (1844); dedicated to Clara Schumann
  6. Op. 67 (1845)
  7. Op. 85 (1851)
  8. Op. 102 (1868)

• The idea of composing songlike pieces for piano may have been a childhood activity between Felix and Fanny in which the two would make a game out of applying texts to piano pieces.³
• In 1842, Mendelssohn wrote the following in reference Lieder ohne Worte:

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.⁴

1. Betsy Schwarm, “Songs Without Words,” Encyclopedia Britannica (2018), accessed August 30, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Songs-Without-Words.
2. R. Larry Todd, “Mendelssohn(-Bartholdy), (Jacob Ludwig) Felix,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed August 30, 2022, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000051795.
3. Ibid.
4. Betsy Schwarm, “Songs Without Words,” Encyclopedia Britannica.