Long before he dreamed of being a composer, Alban Berg’s first love was literature, especially poetry. Not surprisingly, his first compositions were songs: He wrote more than 30 between the ages of 16 and 19. When his brother saw an advertisement in a Viennese newspaper from Arnold Schoenberg announcing he was taking pupils, he took the liberty of showing some of Alban’s songs to him; so impressed was Schoenberg that he agreed to take on Berg as a pupil gratis.
The Sieben frühe Lieder (Seven Early Songs) were composed between 1905 and 1908, when Berg was still studying with Schoenberg, but because Berg was quite dismissive of his juvenile song output, they were not published until 1928. Most of them were closely tied to his growing passion for Helene Nahowski, whom he met in 1907 and would eventually marry. At this time, Berg was still writing in a late-Romantic style sometimes reminiscent of his adored Gustav Mahler. The sensuality of his response to the poems is extraordinary, and the writing for voice and piano shows a sophistication remarkable in a composer still only in his early 20s.
Written in 1908, “Nacht” shows night in its most beneficent and magical aspect; the mists and shadows do not hide, but instead reveal the beauty of the world spread out before the poet’s (Carl Hauptmann) eyes. The eeriness of the song’s opening gives way to joy as the veil of clouds and mist is lifted. Berg’s use of the whole-tone scale Debussy was promoting mingles here with traces of Mahler.
Written at about the same time, “Schilflied” (“Reed Song”) is more an indulgence of nostalgic reverie than an expression of grief, and we suspect that the singer is enjoying her weeping beside the sympathetic rushes. The verse is by the arch-Romantic poet Nikolaus Lenau. The most famous of these songs is “Die Nachtigall” (“The Nightingale”) set to verse by Theodor Storm in 1907. With its beautiful arching lines, it is essentially a throwback to the world of Schumann. The middle section has a wonderful quality of shy reticence, describing the young woman wandering with a sunhat dragging from her hand.
Set to a superb little poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, the exquisite outpouring of love in “Traumgekrönt” (“Dream-Crowned”) of 1907 was specifically connected to Helene, whom Berg had met a few months earlier. Marvelous chords capture a sense of awe and wonder at love’s power in this radiant song. Dating from 1905, “Im Zimmer” (“In the Room”) is the earliest of the songs. Both poem, by Johannes Schlaf, and music are simple and straightforward: a portrait of perfect contentment.
Berg gives “Liebesode” (“Ode to Love”) of 1906 a lushly sensuous setting clearly influenced by Wagner’s Tristan. The summer breeze ripples in the pianist’s left hand throughout. Last of the songs to be composed, in the summer of 1908, “Sommertage” (“Summer Days”) is the daylight equivalent of “Nacht”: a wide-angle vision of a wondrous landscape beckoning the happy wanderer on. Tonality is now beginning to lose its grip on Berg’s harmonic movement, but the spirit of Mahler still hovers over this ecstatic song.
Developed from 17th-century Dutch mixed with indigenous dialects, Afrikaans is the language of not only European settlers in South Africa, but also people of all races throughout that country and in neighboring Namibia. Using this language, South African Boers created their own distinctive culture and literature. In the early 20th century, Boer poets such as Boerneef, the pen name of I. W. van der Merwe (1897–1967), devoted themselves to creating Afrikaans volksverse: naive verse that expressed the earthiness and eroticism of life on rural Boer farms.
South African pianist and composer Pieter de Villiers was a graduate of the University of Pretoria who later taught harpsichord, piano, and organ there, and was also a sought-after accompanist for South African classical musicians. Around 1960, he became fascinated with volksverse and set several of Boerneef’s poems to music. Quoting from French composer Arthur Honegger, de Villiers described his approach: “My inclination and my effort have always been to write music which would be comprehensible to the great mass of listeners and at the same time sufficiently free of banality to interest genuine music lovers.” He also stated that “one can only compose what one is, otherwise it will be fictitious.” Before composing, he recited each poem’s words aloud to discover their rhythm and stresses.
De Villiers’s witty, vivacious accompaniments also bring these verses to life as in the opening song, “Blow on the pumpkin stem” (“Blaas op die pampoenstingel”), in which the rustic sounds of that improvised instrument are imitated by dissonant scales. Pounding percussive chords describe the frantic battle of “Little Pete du Plooy” (“Klein Piedeplooi”) with the flea that’s invaded his cot. In the third song, a wistful waltz depicts the singer’s yearning for a faraway lover; she sends a fallen eagle feather as a token of her enduring love. For “Why does the devil fear a whetstone” (“Waarom is die duiwel vir ’n slypsteen bang”), the piano’s ominous drone figures conjure fear while the singer imitates rough conversational speech that does little to soothe it. In the tender “Aandblom is a white night flower” (“Aandblom is ’n wit blom”), two lovers express their devotion by the courting candle as they gaze at the evening primrose in bloom. The impatient lover awaiting a rendezvous is not comforted by her speckled hen, lurching and cackling in the piano. Loveliest of the songs is the nostalgic “Up on the ridge” (“Doer bo teen die rant”), which describes the homemade remedies of traditional rural life, where healing plants are gathered to treat the aches and pains of old age.
In 1849, Wagner was forced to flee Germany after he became involved in the rebellion against the king of Saxony in Dresden. Banned from the German states for more than a decade, he took refuge in Zurich, Switzerland, where the friendship of the wealthy Swiss businessman Otto Wesendonck gave him both financial assistance and a home on the lavish Wesendonck estate.
Wagner developed a relationship with Otto’s beautiful young wife, Mathilde, and the two became lovers emotionally, if not physically. The relationship inspired Wagner’s revolutionary opera Tristan und Isolde, a story of clandestine love that cannot be fulfilled in this world. As he completed a new section of the opera’s libretto each day, Wagner would visit Wesendonck to share it with her. She was inspired to create a series of five poems that Wagner gave, in her own words, “a supreme transfiguration and consecration” with his musical settings. The songs were composed at the height of their love affair.
Wesendonck’s poetic abilities were modest, but her fervid Romantic verse perfectly suited Wagner’s needs as he began to conceive of the music for Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, three of the songs contain musical ideas later developed in the opera, and two of them—“Im Treibhaus” and “Träume”—Wagner labeled as “a study for Tristan und Isolde.” The songs’ often densely chromatic harmonies are similar to Tristan und Isolde’s experimental harmonic world.
Wafting over an accompaniment that undulates like the beating of an angel’s wings, “Der Engel” (“The Angel”) sets the most conventionally sentimental of Wesendonck’s poems, in which she imagines angels forsaking heaven to aid human suffering on earth. “Stehe still!” (“Be Quiet!”) portrays the frenzy and anguish of earthly life in the endless wheel of time. Only in the lovers’ perfect unity can a glimpse of the eternal—captured by Wagner in music of radiant calm and stasis—be won. “Im Treibhaus” (“In the Hothouse”) is the most complex of the songs and was the last to be composed. The aching longing of its ascending piano prelude became the bleak theme of Tristan und Isolde as the wounded Tristan waits for Isolde to arrive in Act III.
Though the title “Schmerzen” (“Anguish”) suggests a song of suffering, Wagner transforms this imagery of the sun sinking to its death each evening only to rise triumphantly to new life in the morning into a cry of heroic exultation in the appropriately heroic key of E-flat major. The last song, “Träume” (“Dreams”), foreshadows Tristan and Isolde’s extended duet in Act II. Wagner creates a breathless forward surge for each repetition of the word Träume, linking the individual stanzas together. For Wesendonck’s birthday, Wagner orchestrated this song for chamber orchestra and had it played outside her window, as he would do years later with the Siegfried Idyll for his wife, Cosima.
Composed in 1796 during Beethoven’s early years in Vienna, “Ah! perfido” is both a tribute to the great concert arias of Mozart—and especially to one of his favorite singers, the Czech dramatic soprano Josepha Duschek—and a preview of the impressive vocal music that would fill Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, nearly a decade later. On a trip to Prague that year, Beethoven had met Duschek and her husband, and decided to honor her with a concert aria of his own. In fact, this showcase of technique and temperament is a full-blown operatic scena with an extended opening recitative followed by a two-part aria in adagio and allegro assai tempos. Duschek premiered it in November 1796 in Leipzig, and then, as far as we know, the aria was put away.
For his legendary Akademie Konzert in Vienna on December 22, 1808—in which he premiered both the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, among many other major works—Beethoven decided to revive “Ah! perfido” to display the gifts of another soprano, Anna Milder, a wonderful artist who had sung Leonore in his first version of Fidelio. However, Beethoven was not always the most congenial of musical colleagues, and he provoked an argument with Milder that resulted in her cancelling her appearance. Rushed in to replace her was the inexperienced 17-year-old soprano Josephine Schultz-Killitschky. And Beethoven’s imperious manner sent her into such an attack of nerves that she barely got through the performance, let alone did justice to this demanding piece.
Though designed to be sung on the concert stage, “Ah! perfido” follows the conventions of Italian operatic arias of this period. For the recitative, Beethoven borrowed a well-worn text from Achille in Sciro by Pietro Metastasio, the most famous librettist of the 18th century. The theme is the stock “hell hath no fury” situation with the abandoned woman alternately raging and pleading with her faithless lover. The alternation between anger and sorrow continues into the contrasting slow and fast arias, set to texts by an unknown author. Beethoven knew how to mine artistic gold from such mood swings, and his mixture of tenderness and fury, particularly within the final fast aria, shows off the full powers of a skilled singing actress blessed with a large but agile soprano voice. In the adagio aria “Per pietà,” the touchingly beautiful principal theme is an exemplar of lyrical legato singing.
—Janet E. Bedell
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