Probably the most important relationship in Carl Zelter's life was his friendship with Goethe, and it is ironic that this should have brought him more posthumous obloquy than fame. For he was, like others upon whom was bestowed the great man's patronage, jealous of his special position, and this it was in part that led him to influence Goethe against Schubert and Berlioz. To be fair, however, Zelter genuinely went along with Goethe's view that while most if not all lyric poetry carried the implications of music, any musical setting should not usurp the prime expressive function. Many of Zelter's settings are like those of his contemporaries, strophic and in some cases scarcely independent of the piano part. It is remarkable how much he manages to achieve within these limits. Um Mitternacht (one of the few of Zelter's songs that occasionally gets a hearing) is a song of real beauty, with a haunting melody that precisely responds to the mood and detail of them poem.
Other songs are scarcely less attractive: here, one may single out the first of the Harper's songs (''Wer sich der Einseimkeit ergiebt''), the Mailied (''Wo geht's, Leibchen?''), Wand'rers Nachtlied (''Uber allen Gipfeln''), Beruhigung. The manner is not always adequate for some poems' implications, of course, and Zelter hardly makes anything of Schiller Berglied.
But this is not the whole story. Zelter was an intelligent and in some ways enterprising musician (his other chief claims to fame are as Director of the Berlin Liedertafel and as Mendelssohn's teacher). His setting of Goethe's Rastlose Liebe anticipates Schubert's in its passionate energy, and in the manner in which it sets the scene with a tremendous piano description. He is capable of a good deal of harmonic originality. His two settings of the third Harper's Song ( ''Wer nie sein Brot'') reveal how his ideas about poetry must have changed: the first (1795) seizes the poem's implications to provide a harp-imitation introduction and postlude to a well-fashioned melody, but the 1816 setting is terser and grimmer but also musically stronger in its expression of the old man's guilt-haunted memories.
Anyone with an interest in German song should take note of this record, and those who decide to add it to their collections will not regret the choice. Fischer-dieskau puts us yet once more in his debt for lending the weight of his renown to so little known a figure, as well as for presenting the songs to such advantage. It is true that they do n ot all really suit so powerful an interpreter: a song such as Gleich und gleich, about a little bee sipping at a floweret, belongs in the German domestic tradition of family song-books, and it bends low under Fischer-Dieskau's intensity. Some of the little fioriture with which Zelter can decorate a cadence need a lighter voice; and though Fischer-Dieskau is here strong in the lower register, even he can show a hint of difficulty with, for instance, the low D at the end of Selige Sehnsucht. But these are quibbles, and the intelligence and the interpretative mastery with which he presents this selection is all-important. It is right to use a light piano of roughly the period: Aribert Reimann is an expert accompanist upon it. The sleeve should be reprinted, for LS's translation of Karl Schumann's too-brief note has been jumbled up with the French version by the make-up editor. Never mind: this is a record to hear.'