Ex. 1-11: Schließe mir die Augen beide

Berg wrote this song in 1907, when he was 22. He had been a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg since 1904. In the same year he met Helene Nahowski, and the song is dedicated to her. They married in 1911. In 1917, ten years after they met, he made a clean copy of ten of his early songs, and this song was one of them.

The poem is by Theodor Storm, from his collection Sommergeschichten und Lieder (Summer Stories and Songs, 1851). It has only eight lines. The singer asks his loved one to close his eyes with her hands. Under her hands his pain goes to sleep, and she fills his whole heart.

In 1925 Berg set the same poem a second time, for the 25th anniversary of his publisher, Universal Edition. The two settings are very different. This one, from 1907, is in C major. The 1925 setting was his first piece in the twelve-tone method (a way of composing that uses all twelve notes in a fixed order). The two were published together in 1930.

From the album Berg: Seven Early Songs (Piano and Orchestral Versions) by Margaret Marshall and Geoffrey Parsons (1993)
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