Songs are not the first genre of music we usually associate with Beethoven, but he wrote them throughout his career, starting when he was 13 years old. He had over 70 to his credit when he wrote the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) in April 1816.

The first three songs presented tonight show Beethoven’s progression up to that pinnacle. Beethoven toiled on “Adelaide”  from approximately 1794 to 1796, struggling to set texts by early German Romantic Friedrich von Matthisson. Rather than repeating musical themes, Beethoven accompanied each of the stanzas with distinct melodies. “Adelaide” became one of the composer’s most popular songs; Matthisson wrote in a 1825 edition of his collected poems: “Several composers have animated this little lyric fantasy through music; none of them...cast the text into deeper shade with his melody than the genius Ludwig van Beethoven in Vienna.”

“Mailied” (May Song) is a cheery tune extolling the delights of spring, the fourth in a collection of Eight Lieder published in 1805, and is among Beethoven’s earliest settings of Goethe. “Der Liebende” (The Lover) features a poem by Christian Ludwig Reissig, whose work inspired eight of the composer’s lieder. Written in 1809, in the middle of Beethoven’s “Heroic” period, it captures the nervous energy of love’s intoxicating effects.

By the time Beethoven started work on An die ferne Geliebte, in 1816, he was suffering from severe personal crises. He was in despair over the impossibility of attaining the relationship for which he had expressed desire in his “Immortal Beloved” letter from 1812. His hearing had deteriorated to the point that he could not perform, and he was deeply concerned with the care of his nephew Karl.

During this musically fallow period, Beethoven began arranging folk songs for George Thomson, ultimately contributing over 150 of them to the Scottish publisher. The songs of An die ferne Geliebte have a simplicity and directness of expression like many of the songs Beethoven arranged for Thomson. The six poems were written by Alois Jeitteles, a young Czech medical student in Vienna, possibly at Beethoven’s request.

As charming as the tunes may be, they are tautly organized into the first of the great Romantic song cycles. In terms of direct imitation, An die ferne Geliebte may have been the most influential of Beethoven’s works on his contemporaries and those immediately following him, particularly Robert Schumann, who further developed the song cycle and quoted the beginning of “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder” in his Fantasy in C major, an homage to Beethoven.

There are changes in tempo, dynamics, and inflection throughout the cycle, creating a sense of spontaneity, but interludes and transitions connect the six songs, and the effect of the musical links and the narrative line is that of a single mega-song. The melody of the first song is quoted in the last one (and both are in the same key, E-flat major)—as the end of this song circle returns to the beginning, a closing that is also an opening.

—John Henken