Old Fogey’s Favourites

This is one of two great settings (the other is Schubert’s) of this shortest of Goethe’s poems. He wrote it as a young man on a walking tour and inscribed it on the wall of a mountain hut where he slept the night. Then the words carried the sense of soft repose after a day of healthy exercise. Returning many years later as an old man, to look again on the words he had left there, they must have taken on quite another connotation.

Peace lies over all the hills; in the treetops there is barely a stir. Birds are hushed in the wood; wait just a little while, soon you too will be at rest.

I heard this sung by Dame Margaret Price at a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall on 1 February 1995. She sung it as an encore, in memory of Geoffrey Parsons, the great accompanist, who had died the previous week.

Here it is sung, most beautifully, by Christine Schafer, accompanied by Graham Johnson.

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