Written on 19 August 1815—one of seven songs the eighteen-year-old Schubert composed in a single day before publishing it in 1821 as Op. 3 No. 3—Heidenröslein was among the sixteen Goethe settings Josef von Spaun posted to Weimar in April 1816. As Herbert F. Peyser noted in Schubert and His Work (1950), “His Excellency in Weimar did not even deign to acknowledge it,” and biographer Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn observed, “Neither in Goethe’s works, nor in his correspondence with Zelter, nor in his conversations with Eckermann, do we find a syllable in connection with Schubert’s name.” By recording Alfred Cortot’s solo transcription on his Weimar-themed debut, Weimar-born pianist Justus Eichhorn makes belated amends.
Where Daniel Gregory Mason (The Romantic Composers, 1906) remarked that “Schubert is often sublimely simple, as in ‘Du bist die Ruh,’ ‘Heidenröslein,’ ‘Der Leiermann,'” Cortot expands the short strophic song into a four-strophe miniature. At a C. Bechstein grand, stroking the keys with flat finger-pads, Eichhorn draws a velvet tone across a gentle pulse. He floats the first strophe over a warm pedal halo, brings out Cortot’s rippling inner counter-voice as the second strophe begins, and darkens the colour for the E-flat major third strophe, swelling (1:17) before dropping to a whisper in the chromatic bridge (1:44).
Though his generous pedalling and broad slowing into the final G major reprise slightly blur the folk-like innocence that Radu Lupu or Angela Hewitt preserve, DG’s intimate recording captures a glowing homage.