This song was recorded live at the Oxford Lieder Festival as part of Hugo Wolf: The Complete Songs on Stone Records.
Click here to listen to this song with Sophie Daneman and Sholto Kynoch, or click here to buy the CD from Stone Records.
An den Schlaf
German source:
Eduard Mörike
Auf diesem Lager doch willkommen heiss ich dich!
Denn ohne Leben so, wie lieblich lebt es sich!
So weit vom Sterben, ach, wie stirbt es sich so leicht!
To sleep
English translation ©
Richard Stokes
I bid you welcome to this couch!
For thus without life, how sweet it is to live!
So far from dying, ah, how easy it is to die!
Translation © Richard Stokes, author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005)
An den Schlaf
German source:
Eduard Mörike
To sleep
English source:
Richard Stokes
Schlaf! süsser Schlaf! obwohl dem Tod wie du nichts gleicht,
Sleep! sweet sleep! though nothing so resembles death as you,
Auf diesem Lager doch willkommen heiss ich dich!
Denn ohne Leben so, wie lieblich lebt es sich!
So weit vom Sterben, ach, wie stirbt es sich so leicht!
Composer
Hugo Wolf
Hugo Filipp Jakob Wolf was born on 13 March 1860, the fourth of six surviving children, in Windischgraz, Styria, then part of the Austrian Empire. He was taught the piano and violin by his father at an early age and continued to study piano at the…
Poet
Eduard Mörike
Eduard Friedrich Mörike was a German Romantic poet. Mörike was born in Ludwigsburg. His father was Karl Friedrich Mörike (d. 1817), a district medical councilor; his mother was Charlotte Bayer. He attended the Latin school at Ludwigsburg, and the…