Das Rosenband (The Rose-Garland), Op 36 No 1; Mutterandelei (a Mother’s Idle Chatter), Op 43
No 2; Morgen (Tomorrow), Op 27 No 4 Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Strauss wrote songs throughout the whole of his career, from childhood to the last year of his life. In particular, his love for the soprano voice prompted some of the best-loved songs in the repertoire (as well as some outstanding operatic roles), many of them written for his wife, Pauline de Ahna.
‘Das Rosenband’ (The garland of roses), written in 1897, has words by the eighteenth-century German poet Friedrich Klopstock, also set to music by Schubert. Unusually, Strauss originally wrote it for voice and orchestra, transcribing the orchestral part for piano later. His setting responds aptly to the poet’s playfully understated eroticism.
Full of capricious harmonic twists and turns, ‘Muttertändelei’ is a vivid portrayal of a mother asserting that her child is the most beautiful in the world - a natural feeling, but you get the impression that this particular mum will not stand for being contradicted, and you suspect that it is, in part, a portrait of Pauline: her and Strauss’s only child, Franz, was two years old when it was written.
‘Morgen’, one of Strauss’s best-loved songs, is a peaceful, rapt meditation on love with a particularly unforgettable opening, with the voice floating in, mid phrase, before the piano introduction has ended – the effect is simply magical.
Sieben Frühe Lieder (Seven early songs) Alban Berg (1885-1935)
1. Nacht (Night); 2. Schilflied (Song of the Reeds); 3. Die Nachtigall (The Nightingale); 4. Traumgekrönt (Crowned with Dreams); 5. Im Zimmer (In the Room); 6. Liebesode (Ode to Love); 7. Sommertage (Summer Days).
Berg first went to study with Schoenberg in 1904, harmony and counterpoint at first, then composition from 1907 to 1911. Schoenberg later commented that Berg seemed incapable of writing anything but songs, and that he had to devote a lot of effort to developing his pupil’s capacity for thinking instrumentally.
Between 1901 and 1908 Berg composed some eighty or so songs, and in 1928, prompted by his wife, Helene, he chose these seven, and revised and published them in versions with piano and with orchestra. Only one other song from this period was published in his lifetime.
As is only to be expected in songs from the beginning of Berg’s career, a number of influences make themselves felt, most notably Wagner, but also Brahms and Wolf, while Debussy is a presence in ‘Nacht’.
Four Songs, Op 13
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
No 4. Nocturne; No 1. A Nun Takes the Veil; No 2. The Secrets of Old; No 3. Sure on this Shining night.
Barber had a profound understanding of literature and feel for the human voice. He himself was a fine baritone, and at one stage considered taking up a professional singing career. In 1935 he gave a series of radio broadcasts for NBC and made a celebrated recording of his own Dover Beach for voice and string quartet.
Unsurprisingly, then, vocal music makes up a large proportion of his total output. His earliest published song dates from 1927, but even that was preceded by a large quantity of songs he had composed as a child. He was particularly drawn more to European, particularly Irish, poets than texts by Americans writers.
The four songs, Op 13 are sung today, not in their published sequence, but in the order given above.
The words of ‘Nocturne’ are by the novelist, poet and translator Frederick Prokosch (1908-89), already a personal friend of Barber’s when he set this poem in 1940. In spite of this, as he later told a another friend, he was not particularly drawn to the text, but “the music just popped out for it.”
‘A Nun Takes The Veil’, composed in 1937, sets a short poem by the technically innovative and expressively intense Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Barber responds to the words desire for tranquillity and seclusion with rich spread chords on the piano and a declamatory voice part.
‘The Secrets of the Old’, dating from 1938, is the scherzo of the group, a light-hearted setting of a poem by WB Yeats in which three women assert their friendship through their shared memories. The music is full of rhythmic playfulness and constantly changing meters.
One of Barber’s most frequently performed songs, ‘Sure on this Shining Night’ is a rapt and poignant meditation dating from 1938. The text is by the American poet, novelist, journalist and film critic James Agee (1909-55), whose words Barber would turn to again in 1947 for Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra.
Wesendonck-Lieder
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
1. Der Engel (The Angel); 2. Stehe still! (Be Still!); 3. Im Treibhaus (In the Hothouse); 4. Schmerzen (Pain); 5. Träume (Dreams).
In 1849 Wagner fled the city of Dresden (where he had been Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony since 1843) following the unsuccessful revolutionary uprising there. He escaped to Switzerland, settling in Zürich where, three years later, he met a retired silk merchant, Otto Wesendonck. Wesendonck gave Wagner much-needed financial support, and offered him and his wife, Minna, the use of a small house next to a villa being built for the Wesendoncks in the city’s suburbs. Both couples moved into their respective new homes in 1857, and a love affair between Wagner and Otto Wesendonck’s wife, Mathilde, that had begun soon after their first meeting, reached its emotional climax (though probably not consummated physically). In August Wagner put aside the score of his opera Siegfried, on which he was then working, and began Tristan und Isolde (which he had first conceived three years earlier), based on the Arthurian legend of the two lovers whose affair places them outside social conventions.
In September, Wagner read the completed libretto to a gathering that consisted of Minna Wagner, Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck, and the conductor Hans von Bülow and his wife, Cosima, Liszt’s daughter (who would leave her husband for Wagner six years later). As might be expected, it was, by all accounts a highly-charged occasion. Mathilde’s response, once she had recovered from the emotional devastation that the reading had produced in her, took the form of five poems steeped in the opera’s world of passionate longing. Wagner set them to music between November 1857 and May 1858, designating ‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’ as studies for Tristan and Isolde. Originally conceived for voice and piano, the songs are usually performed today in the orchestrations by the conductor and composer Felix Mottl.
‘Der Engel’, with its air of gentle consolation, is followed by the restless longing for peace that begins ‘Stehe still!’. By the end, the singer has found peace in the union of two souls. ‘Im Treibhaus’ opens and closes with music that will eventually find its place in the Prelude to Act 3 of the opera. The song’s air of unfulfilled longing culminates in the bliss-through-pain paradox of ‘Schmerzen’, followed by the softly rapturous ‘Träume’, which begins and ends with music that would eventually become part of the great love duet in Act 2. Wagner arranged ‘Träume’ for solo violin and small orchestra as a birthday present for Mathilde in December 1857.
© Mike Wheeler, 2011