Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 4

16,00

1 CD 

Κλασική Μουσική 

Hyperion

18 Μαρτίου 2016

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Franz Liszt:Blume und DuftDes Tages Laute Stimmen SchweigenDie LoreleyDie tote Nachtigal, S. 291Einst (Bodenstedt)Ich scheide, S. 319Il m'aimait tant, S533Lasst mich ruhenMignons Lied (Kennst du das Land), S275Verlassen, S336Was Liebe Sei? (1)Was Liebe Sei? (2)Was Liebe sei? (Hagn)Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass, S.297Wieder mocht’ ich dir begegnen

Καλλιτέχνες

Sasha Cooke (Mezzo-Soprano)Julius Drake (Piano)

As in the previous volumes in this series of the complete songs of Franz Liszt, this album contains songs that span the composer’s life, from his earlier years as a virtuoso performer-composer all the way to 1880. Song composition was a sporadic affair during Liszt’s years as a virtuoso performer—he was, naturally, more occupied with piano music—but thereafter the pace picks up. In Weimar, where he lived from 1848 to 1860, he had at his disposal four outstanding singers (the tenor Franz Götze, the mezzo-soprano Emilie Genast, and Rosa and Feodor von Milde) to spur on his song-writing. Roughly half of the songs on this programme are post-Weimar (late 1860–1880), a time darkened by the deaths of his son Daniel in 1859 and his daughter Blandine Ollivier in 1862. (Of his three children by Marie d’Agoult in the 1830s, only Cosima, who married first Hans von Bülow and then Richard Wagner, survived him.) ‘I am extremely tired of living, but as I believe that God’s Fifth Commandment “thou shalt not kill” also applies to suicide, I go on existing’, he told his friend Olga von Meyendorff. The later songs tend to austerity, to minimalist dimensions—unlike the virtuosity and richness of his earlier works. But whatever the stylistic changes en route to the end, Liszt always tried to imagine what the future of music might be.

The words of Des Tages laute Stimmen schweigen (which Liszt set in 1880) by Ferdinand von Saar, among Austria’s most eminent Realist writers, evoke sunset and the peaceful approach of night—or, perhaps, death. If so, this vision of a kindly death would be denied both to Saar (who killed himself in 1906) and to Liszt, who died after days of agony in Bayreuth. ‘I have never wished to live long’, Liszt once wrote to Olga von Meyendorff, saying: ‘In my early youth, I often went to sleep hoping not to awake again here below.’ We hear the harmonies darken when darkness is first invoked and then brighten for the glowing crimson radiance in the heights, with beautifully complex chords sounding in quiet pulsations. As night bestows a gentle kiss at the close, an unharmonized vocal line slowly descends, and a few spare, un-final-sounding chords (a hallmark of late Liszt) sound at the end.

August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the poet of Lasst mich ruhen (c1858), was a friend and member of the New Weimar Society, founded in 1854 for the purpose of defending the ‘music of the future’ from the Philistines who decried it. ‘Enough of the old; we hope for something new in Weimar’, the poet wrote. In this exquisite song, memories of days gone by are set to ever-shifting harmonies in Liszt’s ‘progressive’ manner—a beautiful paradox. We almost see the persona slipping into a dream-state when we hear the downward flowing figures at the beginning and beneath the title words ‘Let me rest’. For the second stanza, ‘Wie des Mondes Silberhelle’, Liszt conjures a moonlight-enchanted atmosphere with a shifting succession of pure triads; only when memory and sorrow regain sway do the harmonies turn more complex and lead back to the refrain, ‘Lasst mich ruhen’.

The beautiful actress Charlotte von Hagn was renowned for her wit and comedic gifts; in 1828, the Bavarian king Ludwig I commissioned her portrait for his Gallery of Beauties in Nymphenburg Palace. When Liszt played his first recital at the Berlin Singakademie in December 1841 (a sensation that gave rise to ‘Lisztomania’), Charlotte wrote Was Liebe sei on a fan and presented it to him. In this tiny dialogue between a questioner and a poet, love is defined as the ‘soul’s breath’, while a kiss that is too short is a sin. Charlotte and Liszt became lovers (later, in 1849, the then-married Charlotte wrote him to say: ‘You have spoiled all others for me’), and Liszt set her invitation to love three times. This recording gives us the rare opportunity to hear the evolution of a lighthearted love song through three stages over more than thirty years. The first version, published in 1844, is emblematic of earlier Liszt in its melismatic filigree for the piano, hand-crossings, and wide-spanning chords; one notes as well the delighted repetitions of ‘die Sünde!’, the rhapsodic setting of the answer ‘Love is the breathing of the soul’, and the eroticized panting in the piano to underlie the kissing.

Liszt’s minimalist last songs from the late 1870s and early 1880s are at times attached to traditional tonality by the most tenuous of threads. Little is known about Gustav Michell, but his drama Irrwege includes a heartbroken song by an abandoned woman (among the oldest topics in poetry): Verlassen. This listless lament is haunted by tritones, especially the refrains ‘I weep, ah! have to weep’, and it ends on a clouded, indeterminate chord.

Composed in 1878, Einst is one of Liszt’s smallest, most affecting songs. After his university studies, the writer Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt was engaged as a tutor to the family of Prince Gallitzin in Moscow; three years later, he was teaching in present-day Georgia, where he studied Persian literature and became famous for Die Lieder des Mirza Schaffy (perhaps paraphrases of poems by his Azeri friend Mirza Shafi Vazeh). There is a statue of him in Western garb but with bare feet—a hippy avant la lettre—in his native Hanoverian town of Peine. In Einst, Bodenstedt’s singer contrasts earlier days, when he wished to wind a garland for his sweetheart (a symbol for rich gifts or wealth?) but could find no flowers, with the present day, in which blossoms are plentiful but the beloved is gone. The song trails off unresolved, like thoughts of those loved and lost that never find quiescence.

In Ich scheide, the singer takes leave of something or someone beloved and ponders how all life consists of comings and goings, with more departures than reunions: how appropriate for the peripatetic Liszt. By 1860, the year this song was composed, both its poet and composer had left Weimar, Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1859 and Liszt in 1860. Chromatic sighing fills the introduction and the refrains (‘Leb’ wohl! ich scheide’), while the song begins with a sweet, graceful melody that almost immediately departs from the designated key. Comings and goings are here enacted musically.

Liszt’s second setting of Was Liebe sei is tauter than his first, with the tender answer about love surrounded by irresistibly light and happy staccato figures in the piano. In stark contrast, this tiny musical bauble is followed by one of Liszt’s longer songs. Die Loreley, a descendant of Homer’s sirens and a golden-haired archetype of female eroticism, sits atop a rocky promontory on the Rhine river and lures sailors to shipwreck with her beautiful singing. Heinrich Heine’s poetic masterpiece about the fatal power of myth so entranced Liszt that he returned to his first thoughts many times over the years, with minor adjustments and major reworkings, publishing three further versions for voice and piano, the last of which is also given an orchestral accompaniment. In the second version recorded here the influence on the opening of Wagner’s Tristan is unmistakable. The Loreley is described to melodic lines that yearn upwards, as if gazing at the cliff-top, followed by pianistic waters frothing and foaming as catastrophe ensues. Over and over, the narrator at the close sings ‘Und das hat mit ihrem Singen / Die Loreley getan’ to the music emblematic of her—in the piano. Liszt the great pianist seduces his listeners with instrumental ‘singing’.

Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass is the second of three inset-songs for the tragic character of the Harper in Goethe’s influential novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1796). Born Augustin Cipriani, he was separated from his sister Sperata in infancy and later falls in love with her and fathers a child—Mignon—before learning the truth. Thereafter, half mad, he wanders the highways and byways of Europe, singing of the gods’ cruelty to humanity, whom they lead into inexpiable guilt. Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass is his most shattering indictment of ‘the heavenly powers’, and Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Wolf and many others would test their mettle on these bitter, massive words. In this, his first of two settings, Liszt begins with mournful strains ‘like a harp’, the hollow fifths in the bass and the chromatic slide downwards (a variant of this descending figure will end the song) being traditional musical emblems of despair. Three times, his Harper repeats ‘He knows you not’, the first ‘spoken’ softly (Liszt’s directive), the second in rising intensity, and the third statement immense. (An earlier version of this first setting, from 1843, was published in the Liszt Society Journal in 1995.)

In his final setting of Was Liebe sei, Liszt returns to the notion of curlicued filigree for the pianist at the start, followed by his signature late mixture of unharmonized phrases for the singer and chromatically altered chords for the piano in the interstices. The ending is poised in mid-air, with a final high pitch left to evaporate at the close.

The Harper’s daughter Mignon is kidnapped as a child from her native Italy by a troupe of travelling acrobats and later rescued by the title character Wilhelm, with whom she falls in love. She symbolizes humanity’s two natures, earthly and spiritual, male and female, and her gestures, mannerisms, and language mimic the symptoms of child abuse. In songs such as Mignons Lied (‘Kennst du das Land’), she reaches out for the lost and irretrievable ideal—the Italy of her childhood. Goethe tells us that she sings with ‘a certain solemn grandeur, as if … she were imparting something of importance’. From Beethoven to Berg and beyond, composers have been drawn to this ultimate expression of yearning. Liszt, who seldom considered any work of his finished, was drawn to it four times, and we hear the second version, from c1856 (there is an earlier version from 1842). Angular tritone leaps fill the vocal line for the repeated questions ‘Kennst du—?’ (‘Do you know—?’), while the threefold refrain ‘Dahin! dahin’ rises in palpable desire.

Henriette von Schorn, a lady-in-waiting for the Weimar Archduchess Maria Pawlowna, was one of numerous salonnières in Liszt’s social world and one of Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein’s closest friends in Weimar during the 1850s. (Carolyne had a relationship/friendship with Liszt for almost forty years.) Henriette’s daughter Adelheid was a student of Liszt’s and a chronicler of the Liszt circle; when Liszt returned to Weimar from Rome in 1869 (from this point he triangulated his life between Rome, Budapest and Weimar) and rented the Hofgärtnerei, a small house on the city’s outskirts, Carolyne had Adelheid report every detail of his life. By 1877, when Liszt composed Sei still, his and Carolyne’s relationship had been rendered difficult by her detestation of Cosima and Wagner and her theological obsessions, although Liszt would still call himself ‘Your perpetual Sclavissimo’ in 1880. Liszt’s life in the late 1870s and early 1880s is a whirlwind of relentless work and travel, much of it for charity; Sei still might well have been an injunction to his own exhausted self. This work exemplifies the austerity of his late songs, with its unharmonized phrases, and his characteristic tonal radicalism. ‘Where are we?’, we might well ask: F sharp minor? D major? Nowhere for very long: the harmonies belie quietude right to the ending—on a first inversion chord.

The poet and composer Peter Cornelius was a member of the Altenburg circle, although he would come to see Weimar as a hindrance by 1860, the year Liszt set Wieder möcht’ ich dir begegnen to music. Liszt had just closed his residence in Weimar—the only real home he had ever known—on 17 August; perhaps it is a place as much as a person to which Liszt bids farewell in this song, composed on 9 October. (Cornelius, the nephew of the famous Nazarene artist Peter von Cornelius, is best known for the operas Der Barbier von Bagdad and Der Cid and song cycles such as the Brautlieder and Weihnachtslieder, the latter including Die Könige, known in English as The Three Kings. It was the disastrous premiere of Der Barbier in 1858 that was, in part, the catalyst for Liszt’s decision to resign his post in Weimar.) Here, a lover separated from his beloved sends blessings, greetings, and love to the beloved’s soul. The tender passage that sounds first in the treble register and then wafts downwards in the piano at the beginning and between each stanza conveys the ethereal atmosphere of this love before a single word is sung. Each of the first two verses begins with a wish (‘möcht’ ich’) followed by the sad recognition of its impossibility (‘aber’).

The son of a bricklayer, Christian Friedrich Hebbel—another member of the artistic circle around Liszt at the Altenburg—was famous for his ‘tragedies of common life’, beginning with Judith in 1840. In the tiny poem Blume und Duft, fragrances unseen and evanescent are preferred to the flowers themselves, doomed to wither quickly. Ethereal harmonies only momentarily alight in definable places; Liszt, addicted to enharmony, makes it a symbol of the ephemeral become eternal, D sharp turning to E flat at ‘Der Duft läßt Ew’ges ahnen’ (‘Fragrance is a foretaste of the eternal’).

Philipp Kaufmann was best known for his translations of Robert Burns, but the words of Die tote Nachtigall are his own. Liszt had already set this poem to music in 1843, but he revisited it in 1878 to add a wistful, drooping piano introduction (the nightingale dying?). In addition, he extensively revised the music for the mother’s weeping, and accompanies the ‘awakening of springtime’ section in the major mode not with harp-like arpeggios but with ethereal treble chords, as the singer’s trills evoke the other nightingales that will come next spring. The ending is among Liszt’s sparest, with two harsh cries of lamentation in the piano and a close that fades to silence.

The poet of Il m’aimait tant!, Delphine de Girardin, was the wife of Émile de Girardin, a journalist who furthered Marie d’Agoult’s transformation into the writer Daniel Stern. Delphine, the daughter of the well-known salonnière Sophie Gay, was a popular author under the pseudonym Charles de Launay. Here, a woman denies that she loved a man but recounts all the symptoms of passion. But when he finally asks her for a rendezvous, she does not appear (Liszt indicates a lengthy silence at this point), and he vanishes from her life. Life-into-art speculation is always tenuous, but the relationship between Marie d’Agoult and Liszt wended its way to final dissolution in 1844; on 11 April of that year, he wrote her a brief, agonized note to say: ‘I no longer wish to speak to you, nor see you—much less write to you.’ The piano introduction descends, in chromatic tendrils, to the first tonic harmony—the warm A flat major tonality that Schubert associated with reciprocated love in his songs—and a softly murmured start of the little tale in salon song-mode. The refrain, ‘Il m’aimait tant!’ (‘He loved me so!’), each time is an enharmonic deflection from the main key and is accompanied by tremolando harmonies that tell of inner turmoil. (One recalls Schubert’s Mignon singing ‘Es schwindelt mir’—‘I am fainting’—to tremolo chords.)

On returning to Germany from Georgia, Friedrich Martin von Bodenstedt became a proficient translator of English and Russian literature, and Gebet (‘In Stunden der Entmutigung’) is a paraphrase of a poem by the great Russian Romantic poet Mikhail Yur’yevich Lermontov (1814–1841). This prayer was written in 1837, following the scandal created by his ‘Death of the Poet’ and his exile to a regiment in the Caucasus. The singer confesses that in times of discouragement, a ‘wonderfully sweet prayer’ lifts the weight from his heart and enables him to believe once more. In Liszt’s setting from 1878 we hear the struggle to rise from beneath the weight of darkness in the introduction; the harmonic warmth of ‘comfort’ and ‘encouragement’; and the featherlike lightness of restored faith at the song’s end.

Susan Youens © 2016

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