Uploaded June 2011 | Updated September 2026, 19 hours ago

---

The human longing for release is a recurring theme in Valen's œuvre. In his songs, Valen conveys the spiritual perspective for which Schoenberg and Webern cleared the path. Valen paved the way for the recognition of music as a cognitive medium, as a spiritual compass. The song cycles op. 31 (1939) and op. 39 (1941), composed during a dark period of European history, utilize corresponding texts from Schiller to Goethe to Mörike. The final portion of an old epitaph that Valen set to music, Trete leise zu meinem Grabe, assumes through its intense outburst of emotion in "Wisst, was ich gelitten habe," the quality of a personal confession from a composer in self-imposed internal exile in the fillage of Valevag.

It is the songs that lead the way in the development of Valen's stylistically distinctive characteristics. The poems in themselves must have inspired Valen to break free of the tonal system. Like Webern, Valen sems to have prepared and launched each new creative period with vocal works. The text uncovers an inner sense of preparedness, a resonance, in the composer. The text and the composer "encounter each other," to use a Webernian expression.

Consider, o Soul!

A little fir-tree flourishes,
Who knows where, in the wood;
A rosebush, who can tell
In what Garden?
They are selected already.
Consider, o soul,
To take root and grow
On your grave.

Two young black horses graze
On the pasture,
They return back to town
With lively leaps,
They will go step by step
With your corpse;
Perhaps, perhaps even before
On their hooves
The shoe gets loose,
And I can see it sparkle.

Go quietly to my grave

Go quietly to my grave,
So not awaken me again.
Know, what I have suffered
In the course of my life.