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Vienna: the window to modernity Frequently, recitals cover whole centuries of musical history, the scale ranging from Mozart to late Romanticism. The singer not only wants to offer variety to his or her audience, but also wants to meet the challenge of coping with different musical ages, styles, authors and languages. In my current programme I concentrate on a comparatively short period: There are only 45 years between the Goethe Songs by Hugo Wolf and Erich Korngold’s ‘Das Eilende Bächlein’. But how very much happened in those few years between 1888 and 1933, between the golden age of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies and the beginning of the Third Reich – not only in world history but also in the field of culture: Fin de siècle, Art nouveau and Expressionism, psychoanalysis and the women’s movement; the invention of the gramophone record, film, broadcasting; the boom of operetta and the cabaret; the Bauhaus and New Music movements. From a musical point of view, it was one of the richest and most exciting epochs in history, and one of the most important creative centres of those years was Vienna. It was in Vienna that many key developments and encounters took place – not to mention all the musical circles and salons, very often led by emancipated women, where artists met and inspired one another. As a representation of the enormous artistic variety that originates from those years, today I would like to present to you works of five composers of that epoch whose tracks were closely linked. Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler, both born in 1860, joined the class of Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Academy of Music, but developed in highly different ways. Mahler supported the Wunderkind Erich Korngold and advised him to study with Alexander von Zemlinsky. Zemlinsky and Mahler, in turn, were connected through Alma Schindler. She had a roaring affair with Zemlinsky before marrying Mahler. Zemlinsky not only supported Korngold, but in a unique way also fostered Arnold Schoenberg. Later Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde became Schoenberg’s wife. The influence of Mahler’s symphonic works on Schoenberg’s oeuvre and his 12-tone technique should not be underestimated. The deeper one immerses oneself in that musical epoch, the more fascinating it becomes. For me, working on these musical works was a wonderful personal journey, not least because I was shown what Vienna had been in those years: the window to modernity. Renée Fleming Barbican Classical Music Podcasts Prior to her recital at the Barbican, Renée Fleming talks exclusively to us, revealing the fascinating personal and musical links between the composers she will be performing. Subscribe to our podcast now for more exclusive interviews with some of the world’s greatest classical artists. Available on iTunes, Soundcloud and the Barbican website. 2
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) Goethe Lieder – Frühling übers Jahr Gleich und gleich Die Spröde Die Bekehrte Anakreons Grab After his youthful outpouring of songs between 1878 and 1883, Hugo Wolf experienced long bouts of creative torpor. These were the years when he earned his living primarily as Vienna’s most barbed music critic, indulging, inter alia, in his fanatical hatred of Brahms’s music. It was only in February 1888 that the floodgates opened. As Wolf wryly put it: ‘Eventually, after much groping around, the button came undone.’ The upshot was the 53 songs of the Mörike Songbook, composed in two torrential bursts that year. A letter to his friend Edmund Lang gives an idea of the manicdepressive Wolf’s state of mind. I have just written down a new song, a divine song, I tell you … I feel my cheeks glow like molten iron with excitement, and this state of pure inspiration is to me exquisite torment, not pure happiness. Even before he had penned his final Mörike song Wolf was pitting himself against the greatest and most universal of the German poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In another surge of euphoric creativity, he composed the 51 songs that make up his Goethe Songbook between October 1888 and February 1889. As with the Mörike Songbook, Wolf arranged the Goethe songs in thematic groups, beginning with the Harper and Mignon songs from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (and thus challenging the settings of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann et al) and ending with the great philosophical trinity, ‘Prometheus’, ‘Ganymed’ and ‘Grenzen der Menschheit’, likewise set by Schubert. The Goethe Songbook also includes a group of lyrics that the poet deemed especially suitable for singing, four of which Renée Fleming includes in her recital. Two are flower-songs of exquisite delicacy: ‘Frühling übers Jahr’, whose chiming, shimmering moto perpetuo accompaniment was surely inspired by Goethe’s image of the swaying snowdrop bells; and the tiny, diaphanous ‘Gleich und gleich’. ‘Die Spröde’ and ‘Die Bekehrte’ are piquant settings of a pair of Goethe poems in the rococo pastoral convention, the first blithely coquettish, the second rueful, with the piano evoking both the faithless Damon’s flute and rustic musette drones. The finest of these Goethe songs, both as poetry and as music, is ‘Anakreons Grab’, a tender, tranquil meditation on the Greek poet traditionally associated with the beauties of nature, the delights of the grape, love and song. As so often, Wolf’s keyboard writing here suggests the textures of a string quartet. Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) Rückert-Lieder – Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft! Liebst du um Schönheit Um Mitternacht Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen As Mörike was to Wolf, and Heine to Schumann, so Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) – poet, philologist, orientalist – was to Mahler. The composer identified profoundly with the mingled directness and refined sensibility of his verses, declaring that ‘after Des Knaben Wunderhorn I could not compose anything but Rückert – this is lyric poetry from the source, all else is lyric poetry of a derivative kind’. Apart from the earliest, ‘Um Mitternacht’, all of the so-called Rückert-Lieder were written in the idyllic lakeside setting of Maiernigg in Carinthia, where Mahler had built a summer villa as a refuge from the habitual turbulence of the Viennese opera season. Four of the songs were completed, in both piano and orchestral versions, by August 1901. A fifth, the radiant ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’, followed a year later, as a gift to his new bride, Alma Schindler. It is Mahler’s only overt love song, and the only one of the Rückert-Lieder he never orchestrated, doubtless because of its intensely personal significance. When a plausibly Mahlerian orchestral version by the Leipzig musician-cum-critic Max Puttmann appeared in 1916, Alma, predictably, protested. In response to Rückert’s delicate, intimate verses, the five so-called Rückert-Lieder are, with one exception, Mahler’s most tender and lyrical songs. ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft!’ is an enchanting evocation of drowsy summer murmurings. Mahler himself spoke of the song as expressing ‘the feeling one experiences in the presence of someone one loves and of whom one is quite sure, two minds communicating without any need for words’. He regarded ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder’ (‘Look not into my songs’: he hated anyone prying into his unfinished works!) as the least 3 Programme note
Page 1: 1 Renée Fleming Sunday 9 December
Page 5 and 6: his credo thus: ‘A great artist,
Page 7 and 8: Und ein Andrer bot ihr Bänder, Und
Page 9 and 10: Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder Blic
Page 11 and 12: Alexander von Zemlinsky Fünf Liede
Page 13 and 14: Das Heldengrab am Pruth, Op. 9 No.
Page 15 and 16: Andrew Eccles/Decca About today’s

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