Beethoven’s December 1816 song “Ruf vom Berge” (Call from the Mountain, WoO 147) is based on an adaptation by Friedrich Treitschke (the Fidelio libretto reviser) of a German folksong. Of the original three stanzas, Treitschke retained two, dropped one, and added four.
The original folksong that Treitschke adapted for “Ruf vom Berge” appeared first in Johann Gottfried Herder’s 1778 collection “Stimmen der Völker” (Voices of the People) and then the influential “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (Youth’s Magic Horn), published 1805–1808. The poem begins:
If I were a little bird
And had two wings,
I would fly to you.
But since that cannot be,
I’ll remain here.
(trans. by Paul Reid in he Beethoven Song Companion)
Subsequent stanzas (set strophically) speak similarly of stars, the brook, and breezes.
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“Ruf vom Berge” (WoO 147), 1816
The fourth of the six stanzas has been skipped in this recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but the LP surface noise is retained in all its glory.
Paul Reid sees an influence of Beethoven’s folksong settings in “Ruf vom Berge” aside from its simple melody:
A four-bar postlude echoes the final four bars of the vocal melody and lead directly back into each successive stanza, but this is extended after the final stanza into a seven-bar ritornello, a technique perfected in several of the folksong arrangements which Beethoven made for George Thomson. (The Beethoven Song Companion, pp. 243–44)