Download your concert programme here - Barbican

More documents

Recommendations

Info

important of the Rückert-Lieder – and the one that would find most favour with the public! But it is a beguiling miniature scherzo, set in motion by a buzzing sotto voce accompaniment prompted by the apian imagery in the second verse. ‘Um Mitternacht’ is the odd one out in this group, a song of stark, hieratic grandeur. After the anxious spiritual questioning of the opening verses, the final one moves from minor to major for a triumphant apotheosis as the poet surrenders his strength to God’s hands. Contrary to Mahler’s prediction, the most celebrated of the Rückert songs is ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, a vocal counterpart to the famous Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony. Its text, on the familiar Romantic theme of withdrawal into a secluded world of art and nature, had a deep personal appeal to Mahler, who said of it: ‘It is my very self’. For all its rapt, timeless lyricism (the dynamics never rise above piano), the song is almost symphonically conceived, with an intricate contrapuntal interplay between voice and accompaniment. INTERVAL Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Erwartung, Op. 2 No. 1 Jane Grey, Op. 12 No. 1 Arnold Schoenberg, the archsubverter of musical tradition, always vehemently denied that he was a revolutionary. He was, he protested, merely perpetuating the great Austro-German tradition from Bach through the Viennese Classics to Brahms, Wagner and Mahler. When his early works – above all the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, a declaration of love to his future wife, Mathilde Zemlinsky – were praised at the expense of his 12-tone music, he retorted by saying that the only differences were that his later works possessed greater clarity and economy. Schoenberg knew this was at best a half-truth. But it was always important for him to emphasise continuity rather than disruption. And in no genre is this sense of tradition more apparent than the Lied: indeed, there is a gradual, logical progression from his early, unpublished songs to the Expressionist Stefan George cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1908–09), in which virtually all traces of conventional, structural harmony disappear. Schoenberg’s encounter with the work of the Prussian poet Richard Dehmel (1863–1920) in the mid- 1890s had important creative repercussions, most obviously in Verklärte Nacht. Dehmel’s thought was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche, and his view of regeneration and redemption through the power of the ‘inner spirit’. But there are other strands in his poetry, including a devotion to socialist ideals, a fin de siècle eroticism and, most importantly for Schoenberg, the relationship between man and woman, which Dehmel expressed with both tenderness and with a frankness that shocked the prudish contemporary bourgeoisie. Dating from 1899 (and not to be confused with the later monodrama of the same name), ‘Erwartung’ sets a Dehmel poem of sexual anticipation that foreshadows the nocturnal encounter between two lovers in Verklärte Nacht, composed shortly afterwards. Schoenberg’s musical language is still within hailing distance of Wolf’s, though the luminous, deliquescent keyboard writing sometimes threatens to dissolve tonal outlines. The impassioned, elegiac ‘Jane Grey’, to verses by Heinrich Ammann on the young noblewoman who became Queen of England for just nine days in 1553, is one of two ballads Schoenberg composed in 1907 in response to a Berlin competition for new ballad settings. Neither it nor its companion, ‘Der verlorene Haufen’, won: hardly surprising given their dense, complex textures and, especially, their ‘vagrant’ (Schoenberg’s term) harmonic language that often teeters on the edge of atonality. From here it is only a short step to Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, begun the same year. Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942) Fünf Lieder auf Texte von Richard Dehmel – Vorspiel Ansturm Letzte Bitte Stromüber Auf See Although Alexander von Zemlinsky’s earlier works enjoyed a vogue in pre-First World War Vienna, by the 1920s he was already in eclipse. By then his style was considered too progressive for the traditionalists (whose idol was Korngold) and too conservative for the adherents of Schoenberg, his former pupil and brotherin-law. Zemlinsky came close to the line, but never followed Schoenberg into the brave new world of atonality, summing up 4
his credo thus: ‘A great artist, who possesses everything necessary to express essentials, must respect the boundaries of beauty, even if he extends them much further than hitherto’. In later years he would remark wryly, ‘My time will come after my death.’ This proved all too true: it is only in the last two decades, with first performances of his operas and recordings of most of his major works, that Zemlinsky has at last begun to emerge from the giant shadows of Mahler on the one hand and the Schoenberg-led Second Viennese School on the other. Zemlinsky had an intuitive empathy for poetry and wrote Lieder, often of strikingly concentrated intensity, throughout his career. Like Schoenberg, he entered a setting of ‘Jane Grey’ for the 1907 Berlin ballad competition, and was likewise unsuccessful (the prizes went to men we would now describe as composing nonentities). Zemlinsky also shared Schoenberg’s attraction to the then daringly erotic poetry of Richard Dehmel, and in December of the same year he composed a cycle of five songs about a doomed adulterous affair. Influenced by Schoenberg’s extreme chromaticism, these disquieting, epigrammatic songs, each unified by a single keyboard motif or pattern, may have been prompted by Zemlinsky’s concern at the affair between his sister Mathilde, married to Schoenberg, and the painter Richard Gerstl. Gerstl would commit suicide after Mathilde returned to her husband in the autumn of the following year, 1908. The affair permanently damaged Zemlinsky’s relationship with Schoenberg, and, as his biographer Antony Beaumont has suggested, may have been the prime reason why he never published the Dehmel songs. Erich Korngold (1897–1957) Sterbelied, Op. 14 No. 1 Das Heldengrab am Pruth, Op. 9 No. 5 Was du mir bist, Op. 22 No. 1 Das eilende Bächlein, Op. 27 No. 2 Erich Korngold, after Johann Strauss II (1825–99) Walzer aus Wien – Frag mich oft ‘I never wanted to compose. I only did it to please my father’, remarked Erich Wolfgang Korngold, perhaps a touch disingenuously. Reluctant or otherwise, the young Erich, carefully nurtured by his ambitious, domineering father Julius Korngold – Eduard Hanslick’s successor as Vienna’s most powerful music critic – was one of the most dazzling musical prodigies in history. At 5 he was dubbed ‘the little Mozart’ and he amazed Richard Strauss with the sophistication and finish of his compositions (‘this assurance of style, this mastery of form, this bold harmony …’). Just after Korngold’s 10th birthday an equally astonished Mahler pronounced him ‘A genius! A genius!’ In adulthood the former Wunderkind would rival Richard Strauss as a composer of successful operas (Die tote Stadt, Das Wunder der Heliane) and instrumental music. After his music was condemned as ‘entartet’ – ‘degenerate’ – by the Nazis, he escaped to the United States to reinvent himself, like his contemporary Kurt Weill, as a composer for Broadway and Hollywood. Korngold wrote his first songs at 7. As a seasoned pro of 14 he assembled a collection of 12 Eichendorff songs as a birthday gift to his father. Five years later, in 1916, he selected three of these, added three more and published them as Sechs einfache Lieder (‘Six simple songs’), Op. 9. One of these, the not-so-simple threnody ‘Das Heldengrab am Pruth’, with its bitonality (the piano right and left hands playing in keys a semitone apart) and distorted fragments of birdsong, commemorates the terrible Austrian losses on the River Prut, now in Romania. That same year, 1916, Korngold was working on the sombre, warinspired collection of Lieder des Abschieds (‘Songs of Farewell’), of which ‘Sterbelied’ sets a German translation of Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me’. That Richard Strauss’s admiration for Korngold was reciprocated is evident in the song’s broad, elegiac melody, luxuriant keyboard textures and side-slipping chromatic harmonies. A gorgeously decadent (very) late- Romantic chromaticism also suffuses the fervent love song ‘Was du mir bist’, from the Op. 22 collection published in 1929, when Korngold was at the zenith of his fame. ‘Das eilende Bächlein’, composed in the summer of 1933, was one of Korngold’s last songs. The imagery in Eleonore van der Straten’s carpe diem poem inevitably calls to mind Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, though in Korngold’s hands the ‘Bächlein’ is more surging torrent than babbling brooklet. Like his father before him, Korngold was a passionate admirer of Strauss’s operettas, making a lucrative second career in the 1920s and early 1930s adapting them for the Vienna stage. With fellow-composer Julius Bittner he also concocted a pasticcio, Walzer aus Wien (adapted for Broadway as ‘The Great Waltz’), that draws on hit numbers from assorted Strauss operettas, among them the sumptuous love song ‘Frag mich oft’. Programme note © Richard Wigmore 5 Programme note
Page 1 and 2: 1 Renée Fleming Sunday 9 December
Page 3: Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) Goethe Lieder
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

Download your concert programme here - Barbican

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?