Carnegie Hall

Selections from Erich Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds, Op. 14

Composed in 1920, Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds are the products of a 23-year-old composer who already had reached full maturity after more than a decade of prodigious composing that fascinated the musical giants of his day. When he played his cantata Gold for Gustav Mahler at age 12 in 1909, Mahler proclaimed him “a musical genius.” The next year, his ballet Der Schneemann created a sensation at the Vienna Court Opera and was given a command performance for Emperor Franz Joseph. His career climbed rapidly and had recently been crowned with the premiere of Der tote Stadt in Hamburg and Cologne in December 1920; this opera then swept Europe and remains in the active repertoire today.

With World War I having killed many of his close friends and relatives, Korngold knew well the pain of separations. More intimately, he was experiencing a difficult separation from his fiancée Luzi von Sonnenthal; marriage between the two had been opposed by both sets of parents. (In 1924, they were finally allowed to marry.) Selecting verse by different poets that spoke directly to his feelings, Korngold clothed the words in daringly rich harmonies and big arching melodies that recall Mahler’s and Richard Strauss’s approach to lieder, yet are distinctly his own. The wonderfully conversational style of “Gefaßter Abschied” (“Resigned Farewell”) tenderly captures a moment of farewell between the two lovers.

Three Prayers

Best known for his vocal music, both choral and solo, Leslie Adams died in 2024 at the age of 91. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he spent his long career there, composing for The Cleveland Orchestra, Ohio Chamber Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and various artists and churches; nevertheless, his music was also enjoyed by audiences across the US, as well as in Europe. He earned degrees from Oberlin College and Ohio State University (a doctorate). Like many vocal composers, Adams was drawn to the poems of the great Black American writer Langston Hughes, and his song collection Nightsongs (1961) contains several settings of Hughes’s verse. The beautiful simplicity of “Prayer” matches the spare eloquence of Hughes’s poem.

As a Black woman, Florence Price was a dual pioneer in the world of American classical music. Born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, she began playing the piano at age four and had her first composition published at 11. After earning her bachelor’s degree in music with honors from the New England Conservatory before the age of 20, she eventually moved to Chicago, where she became friends with Langston Hughes and the great contralto Marian Anderson, both of whom had a hand in promoting her composing career. In 1933, her Symphony in E Minor was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the first composition by a Black American woman ever to be played by a major American orchestra.

Over the course of her career, Price wrote some 300 pieces in a variety of genres. Her songs and arrangements of spirituals were in heavy demand in Chicago during her lifetime; both tenor Roland Hayes and soprano Leontyne Price programmed them. But after her death in 1953, Price’s music was largely forgotten for decades. With the coming of the 21st century, its rediscovery began when new owners of her summer home found a plethora of major, previously unpublished works. Their release has sparked a Florence Price revival as artists and ensembles have embraced her music. The sweetly sentimental “Sunset” to words by Odessa P. Elder testifies to her timeless appeal.

The oratorio Saul (1738–1739) was Handel’s first great success in a genre he would come to dominate. A work of tragic grandeur, it tells the story from the Old Testament Book of Samuel of King Saul’s downfall, when his jealousy of David’s triumph over Goliath and his popularity with the Israelite people drives him to murderous insanity. One of the finest—and also the quietest—moments in the score is “O Lord, whose mercies numberless,” David’s gentle song attempting to calm the king after his first violent outbreak. Not an elaborate da capo aria but rather a simpler strophic air, it is made unforgettable by the poignant melismas that cap each stanza.

Clara and Johannes: Romantic Romantics

For more than 60 years, Clara Schumann reigned as the “Queen of the Piano” of 19th-century music. No less an expert than Franz Liszt considered her to have “complete technical mastery, depth, and sincerity of feeling.” And, though she was very ambivalent about her abilities, she was also a composer of considerable talent. Unlike Gustav Mahler, who notoriously suppressed his wife’s talents as a composer, Robert Schumann supported his spouse’s creative work. They began exchanging information about suitable poetry to set, and when Robert embarked on his mania for songwriting in the early 1840s, Clara modestly followed suit. When she gave him four of her song settings of Friedrich Rückert for his birthday in 1841, he was so impressed he included three of them in his Zwölf Gedichte aus Friedrich Rückerts Liebesfrühling clearly indicating they were hers.

Composed around 1842–1843, her Op. 13 songs are among her finest. For its opening piece, “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen,” (“I stood, in dark dreams”), she chose one of her husband’s favorite poets, Heinrich Heine. Clara’s gift for writing beautiful, cantabile melodic lines is on full display in this song about a lover dreaming he has lost his beloved forever as he gazes at her picture.

The two lieder by Brahms come not from the early period of his intense involvement with Clara Schumann, but from his Op. 57 songs of 1871: Eight songs set to verse by Georg Friedrich Daumer, one of his favorite poets. Daumer was known for the frank eroticism of his poetry, considered very daring for the Victorian era. That is certainly the case with “Unbewegte laue Luft” (“Motionless mild air”), a remarkable song that incorporates two distinct tempos and moods. In a very slow tempo, the opening section creates the rapt, uncanny atmosphere of nocturnal peace in a garden. Then the tempo abruptly quickens, and the vocalist sings an ardent call to the lover to join him in the garden that they may consummate their love. With its surging 16th notes and burning chromaticism, the piano seethes with sexual arousal.

Though written some two decades after they met, Clara may be for Brahms the “divine woman” for whom the singer yearns in “In meiner Nächte Sehnen” (“In my nights of yearning”), for the musical motif he created for her keeps peeping into the urgent phrases of both piano and singer. A restless piano part drives the pace of this song, which recaptures the youthful passion Brahms still remembered vividly.

Two Jewish Prayers

Composed in 1951, Max Janowski’s setting of the liturgical prayer “Avinu Malkeinu” is the most widely popular work of this prolific composer, pianist, and choral director; even Barbra Streisand has recorded it. Raised in Berlin, Janowski received his musical training there at the private Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. After winning an important piano competition in 1933, he moved to Japan—the Japanese were always eager to secure European musical talent—and became head of the piano department of the Musashino Conservatory of Music.

Four years later, Janowski immigrated to America. In 1938, he became the musical director of Chicago’s KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, the city’s oldest continuously functioning synagogue. From then until his death in 1991, Janowski pursued his career there as composer, conductor, and pianist, making KAI a legendary center of Reformed liturgical music.

Like many French composers, Maurice Ravel was fascinated by the musical exoticism of other cultures, in which a more passionate style of expression replaced French reticence. In 1914 on a commission from Madame Alvina Alvi, a soprano at the St. Petersburg Opera, he set two traditional Jewish melodies and texts as his Deux mélodies hébraïques. This evening we hear its first song: “Kaddisch.” Over a stark, intermittent piano accompaniment comes the voice of the cantor singing Ravel’s adaptation of the traditional chant, filled with the expressive melismatic flourishes typical of Jewish liturgical music.

Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis

The Eichendorff Liederkreis, writes Schumann scholar John Daverio, “in sheer beauty and lyric intensity is perhaps unsurpassed among Schumann’s cycles.” The composer selected the verse for these 12 songs from three novels by the German Romantic Joseph von Eichendorff.

While the poems do not follow a story line as in Schumann’s Dichterliebe, they do convey several themes beloved to the Romantic soul and especially pertinent to the emotionally volatile Schumann. First among them is the isolation of the individual in society and his emotional separation from the happier activities swirling around him. Three of the songs are ostensibly set in foreign (“fremde”) lands, though here the concept of foreignness or exile may refer as much to a state of the soul as to an actual place. A sub-theme is weddings, seen here as occasions of foreboding and sadness. Clearly, Schumann harbored apprehensive feelings on the eve of his own projected marriage to Clara.

Another unifying theme is night, encompassing both its beauties and terrors. According to British writer Martin Cooper, “Schumann’s music really suggests another world of feeling, solemn and mysterious, peopled with poetic imaginations which would fade in the light of common day.” The six night songs in Liederkreis include a spooky ballad, “Waldesgespräch” (“A Forest Dialogue”), in which a gallant young man riding in the woods (his chivalrous character described in the piano’s dashing theme) meets the legendary Lorelei of the Rhine, the beautiful woman who lures men to their deaths. The inchoate dread that night can bring to the human heart is the subject of the remarkable 10th song, “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”). The piano’s eloquent counterpoint sweetens the singer’s bleak phrases, but collapses in blunt warnings at the end. The fifth song, “Mondnacht,” captures the positive side of night in arguably Schumann’s most ravishingly beautiful song. The rapt piano part, with its repeated syncopated chords, portrays the mood of enchantment, while one simple eight-bar vocal melody carries the poem through all but its final verse, where a slight development is allowed.

Schumann structured the cycle so that it divides into two equal parts, with two joyful songs—“Schöne Fremde” (“In a Beautiful Foreign Land”) and “Frühlingsnacht” (“Spring Night”)—bringing each half to an optimistic conclusion.

The second half of the cycle is significantly more melancholic than the first, and it contains two remarkable songs in which Schumann pares his musical material to the bone to convey the bleakness of sorrow. In “Auf einer Burg” (“In a Castle”), no piano prelude or postlude enriches the stark, archaic-sounding vocal lines; the twist comes at the end, where a joyous wedding party is seen below on the Rhine; yet, the bride is weeping. “Wehmut” (“Sadness”) defies the expected positivity of its major key. Again, the vocal line is spare and narrow in range, and all color is bleached out as the singer reveals the tears lying behind even his happy songs.

Sorrow is blown away in the cycle’s final song, “Frühlingsnacht.” Here Schumann trusts his own instrument to speak for him as he anticipates finally winning Clara. The piano’s ecstatic syncopated figures convey the singer’s exaltation more powerfully than does the somewhat restrained vocal line: “Sie ist Deine, sie ist Dein” (“She is yours, she is yours”).


—Janet E. Bedell