Sleep and dream thou, dear my boy!”
These lines seem to indicate a transition from wifely love to maternal love in the affection of Solveig, with the advent of age.
The moral of the drama, not a very ethical one, but one which has possessed the minds of many devoted women since the world began, appears to be that in love alone is salvation. Whatever the errors and sins and follies of the man, he is won at last and saved, even at the eleventh hour, by the faith, the hope, and the love of one devoted woman.
Grieg: An den Frühling (Spring Song), Op. 43, No. 6
Among the very few strictly lyric compositions for the piano by Grieg,—a vein in which he was singularly unproductive for so eminent a genius,—this spring song must unquestionably take rank as the best, the most evenly sustained throughout, the most perfect in form and finish, and decidedly the finest as well as most emotional in quality.
The opening notes of the right hand accompaniment fall light and silvery as the soft drops of the April shower upon the waiting woods, when the first faint shimmer of tender green begins to tint the tips of the waving boughs. Then the melody enters in the left hand with subdued, repressed intensity, warmly, sweetly vibrant, like the upper register of that most passionate of instruments, the ’cello, a melody telling of mild, languorous days and soft, dream-haunted nights, thrilled through by the mysterious throbbing of a new life in the earth’s long-frozen veins; telling of Nature, surprised but radiantly happy, awakening at the touch of her ardent lover, the sudden spring, from her ice-locked sleep, like the slumbering, frost-fettered bride in the old legend of Siegfried and Brünnhilde; telling of summer joys and brightness begotten of their union, of bird songs, sweeter for the long silence, of many-tinted flowers springing in fragrant profusion where the cold white drifts of winter lay but yesterday, as if the snowflakes had all been transformed to blossoms by the magic kiss of the sun; of love as sudden as the spring, as tenderly sweet as its violets, strong as its rushing torrents, but alas! too often as transient as its fleeting glories. This sudden, startling thought of pain and disillusion strikes sharply across the mellow, golden current of the stream with a somber threatening note of danger and distress rising to a swift, strong climax of indignant protest or fierce defiance, a contrasting reactionary mood common to certain minds, like those, for instance, of Byron and Heine, aptly illustrated by the following lines, translated from the German of Amentor:
“Sing not to me of spring, its flowers and azure skies,
Fleeting delusions all to cheat unwary eyes.
Talk not to me of love, its dreams of Paradise.