Though Franz Schubert’s taste for poetry was broad in its inclusiveness—ranging from the greatest of the German-language poets to the more modest verse of his circle of artistic friends—his favorite was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s poetry inspired more than 70 of Schubert’s songs, encompassing a wide range of expressive moods and topics. Hoping to win the poet’s favor, early in 1816 Schubert and his friends assembled a collection of his early masterpieces and sent them to Goethe. Nine years later in 1825, he made another attempt, sending a more mature selection. It must have been a crushing blow to Schubert that Goethe responded to neither overture.
Poems from Goethe’s classic bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre—the chronicle of a young German’s educational wanderings in which, among other episodes, he meets a mysterious and winsome young girl, Mignon, who has been abducted from her Italian homeland and impressed into a band of traveling circus performers—inspired many Schubert lieder. Composed in 1826, the most famous of these “Lied der Mignon” is “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (“Only one who knows longing”), the last of six versions Schubert created for this haunting poem. The same sublime piano solo forms the prelude and the postlude, revealing the pathos of Mignon’s life in a setting Schubert could finally no longer improve in any way.
There is a connection between Goethe’s poem “Rastlose Liebe” (“Restless Love”) and his revolutionary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, for both are highly dramatized expressions of the young writer’s love for the married Charlotte Buff during the early 1770s. Schubert’s frenzied song about young love that brings more pain than pleasure is driven by a relentless accompaniment. Tonight we hear a revision of this famous song that Schubert made in 1821.
The poem for “Suleika I” was long attributed to Goethe, since it is to be found in his compilation West-östlicher Divan, inspired by his fascination with the work of 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz (Suleika is one of Hafiz’s characters). We now know it was written by Marianne von Willemer, an Austrian actress who had a brief but intense relationship with Goethe. Written while she was traveling in 1815 from Frankfurt to Heidelberg to meet him, it is a song to the East Wind that blows on her outbound journey; that wind is heard in the piano’s opening measures. A whirling ostinato then takes over, conjuring both the carriage’s motion and her agitated heartbeat.
Written in 1820 to verse by Friedrich von Schlegel, “Die Vögel” (“Birds”)is a captivating little song that represents a bird’s view of the earth and humankind. Schubert sets it in a high tessitura that mimics the birds’ twittering and accompanies it with the flutter of their wings.
The Franz Liszt section of this program begins with two keyboard pieces, one early and one late. Published in 1858, “Sposalizio” (“Marriage”) comes from Années de pèlerinage, deuxième année: Italie and was inspired by Raphael’s painting “The Marriage of the Virgin.” Despite his worldly life, Liszt was deeply attracted to his Catholic faith and later in life became an abbé. This piece has an entranced quality as if one were witnessing a miracle. It is built around a three-note motif and in its middle section adopts an exalted ascending melody rising in a sequence. The music sparkles with delicate arpeggios, like the ringing of bells.
In his old age, Liszt devoted himself to two kinds of piano pieces, both visionary in their harmonic and rhythmic procedures. The first group was dark and death-haunted, but the second comprised fantastic dances that lightened the mood. The Valse oubliée No. 1 (Forgotten Waltz) is the most famous of four with that title composed in 1881 when Liszt was convalescing from a bad fall that for a time compromised his ability to walk. But his imagination could still dance, and in this playful, sardonic work, he fragments rhythmic and melodic elements used in traditional waltzes and sends them spiraling away on a wild, almost nontonal journey from the exotic six-sharps keys of D-sharp minor and F-sharp major. The waltz ultimately dies away in exhaustion without coming to a harmonic resolution.
Liszt’s beautifully conceived yet unjustly neglected songs (he ruefully called them “my orphan songs”) have long been overshadowed by the multitudes of showier works he wrote for piano and for orchestra. He seemed to regard them as his personal responses to the poetry he loved and never promoted them heavily. Nevertheless, he composed more than 80 songs in five different languages between 1839 and his death in 1886. Though most are in German, this most cosmopolitan of artists also set poetry in French, Italian, English, and Hungarian.
Songwriting came naturally to Liszt, who counted many of Europe’s leading poets and novelists among his friends. His particular musical inspirations were Schubert (Liszt made many transcriptions of Schubert lieder) and Robert Schumann, whom he knew personally.
Liszt was a painstaking and highly innovative craftsman, who sometimes produced as many as three different versions of a song before he was satisfied. When he settled in Weimar in the 1850s, he found fault with many of his songs of the 1840s, saying: “My earlier songs are mostly inflatedly sentimental and frequently crammed too full in the accompaniment.” He revised most of them extensively, ruthlessly stripping them of excess, and even pruning his own piano parts so they were less virtuosic and more supportive handmaidens of the verse.
The three Liszt lieder performed before intermission set verse by two giants of German early Romanticism: Goethe and Heinrich Heine. In “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (“Joyful and Sorrowful”) of 1844, we have one of the most concise of Goethe’s poems, in which he sums up the wrenching emotions of the state of being in love with the fewest possible words. Liszt originally gave the song a rather sumptuous, rhapsodic piano part (which will be heard on today’s program), but then around 1848 pared that back along with the vocal line to match the poet’s terseness.
Also concise is Goethe’s beautiful “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’” (“Over every mountaintop is peace”), which had been set memorably by Schubert. In a very slow tempo, Liszt’s superb song of 1860 establishes a quasi-religious atmosphere in which time and the bustle of the world vanish altogether. At the end, he expands the words “Wait, you too / Will be at peace” into a coda that is part admonition, part benediction.
Heine was famed for his biting verse, but Liszt chooses one of his most lyrical poems “Im Rhein, im schönen Ströme” (“In the Rhine, in the fair stream”), which portrays Cologne Cathedral and a beautiful sacred painting it contains. Here he creates a continuous shimmering figuration in the piano that imitates the flowing waters of the Rhine. For the final stanza comparing the face of the Virgin to that of the beloved, he modestly allows the singer to carry the entranced mood alone, with the most minimal accompaniment.
At home in many countries, Liszt was as fluent in French as he was in German. On the second half of this evening’s program, we hear two songs setting verse by Victor Hugo. Liszt created two versions of “S’il est un charmant gazon” (“If there is a charming lawn”), one around 1844 and the other in 1859; it is the first version performed on this program, which—typical for earlier Liszt songs—is longer and more elaborate in its vocal and piano parts, and adds an expansive coda. “Oh! Quand je dors” (“Oh! When I sleep”) is perhaps the greatest of Liszt’s French songs. Its arcing legato lines are clearly inspired by bel canto, and its lovely, tactful accompaniment throws the attention on the soprano’s soaring voice.
Though his chosen instrument, the piano, is categorized as a percussion instrument, Sergei Rachmaninoff became one of music’s most inspired melodists, as lovers of his piano concertos can readily attest. Alongside his instrumental works, he poured his lyrical gift into some 80 songs, whose popularity is only limited by their being in the Russian language and thus off-limits to many prominent international singers. The two songs and two piano miniatures on this evening’s program span all periods of Rachmaninoff’s career, from his student days to his final Russian period just before he fled the country and on to the ripe maturity of his late American period.
In 1902, Rachmaninoff hastily wrote the 12 songs of his Op. 21 in order to raise cash for his upcoming wedding. The beauty of “Lilacs” from this set issues from its exquisite simplicity and unity: Nearly all its melodic material is derived from the rocking three-note motif with which it opens. This evening we hear two versions of this song: the first a transcription for piano, followed by the original song.
Like many Russian artists, Rachmaninoff was given to dark moods when his faith in his talent collapsed and he was unable to compose. One such period struck early in 1916, causing him to check into a sanatorium in a spa town in the Caucasus. His friend and poet Marietta Shaginyan visited him there in May and, trying to help, gave the composer a notebook in which she had copied poems by contemporary Russian symbolist poets she thought might be suitable for songs. Whether this poetry produced the cure or not, within weeks Rachmaninoff had shaken off his depression and was sifting through the verse, ultimately selecting six poems that became his last set of songs, Op. 38.
The Op. 38 songs were written at about the same time as the composer’s Op. 39 Études-tableaux for piano, and there is some relationship between them and the songs’ gorgeous piano parts. Setting symbolist verse transformed his musical style: These songs do not sound very Russian, but instead sound much closer to French impressionism. Writes Rachmaninoff biographer Max Harrison: “The keyboard parts are his most difficult, musically speaking, because of their reflections of recondite psychological states. They form poetic commentaries almost in their own right …”
Setting a poem by Fyodor Sologub, the fifth song, “A Dream,” explores the mysterious nature of dreams, carrying us irresistibly wherever they will. In this entranced song, the piano part continually sparkles with magical bell figures in all registers; throughout his career, the composer expressed his fascination with the sounds of bells large and small.
Written in 1892 when the composer was only 19 and just finishing his studies at the Moscow Conservatory, the five Morceaux de fantaisie were Rachmaninoff’s first published pieces for solo piano. He began the set with the dramatic Prélude in C-sharp minor, which was to become one of his most popular pieces, constantly demanded as an encore at his piano concerts. Needing more works for an upcoming concert, he rapidly added four companions. The last, the Sérénade in B-flat minor, was created as an expression of joy upon reading an article by Tchaikovsky in which the older composer praised him as one of Russia’s most outstanding young composers.
For the rest of his life, Rachmaninoff prized these little masterpieces, which he performed regularly and eventually recorded. In 1940, three years before his death, he chose to revise both the Mélodie in E Major and the Sérénade into the definitive versions performed today.
In the Mélodie, Rachmaninoff uses a technique that became one of his signatures—making the left hand the melodic leader of the lovely, slowly ascending theme that dominates the piece. The right hand caresses this theme with sparkling triplet chords that become progressively richer and more chromatic. Toward the close, there is considerable hand crossing as theme and accompaniment merge together.
The Sérénade is a slyly witty waltz decorated with Spanish flourishes. Rachmaninoff playfully uses rubato and cross-rhythms to create a delicious quality of unpredictability throughout this piece, whose lightness defies its B-flat minor tonality.
French composer Henri Duparc suffered the unkind fate of progressively losing control over his body while living on to the age of 85, blind and paralyzed for decades. Yet he bore it all with a sweetness and patience that endeared him to his circle of devoted friends, including many of France’s leading musicians and artists. His career lasted only 16 years from 1868 to 1884, when his undiagnosed nervous condition began to cripple his creative abilities; today, he is known only for his 16 extraordinary songs.
Duparc studied both piano and composition with César Franck, and became the leader of the group of worshipful disciples who surrounded the Belgian composer. Artistically engaged in multiple disciplines—he was an amateur painter as well as musician—he mostly chose verse for his songs by contemporary poets in the Parnassian and symbolist movements, many of whom were his personal friends.
No Duparc song is lovelier than “Extase” (“Ecstasy”), with its languid vocal line floating on a gorgeously colored piano part. The piano’s coda beautifully echoes the high-flying phrase “Mort exquise, mort parfumée” (“Exquisite death, death perfumed”).
In contrast, this program’s final song, “Le manoir de Rosemonde” (“The Manor of Rosemonde”), tells of the utter destruction of a hapless lover, set to words by Duparc’s friend Robert de Bonnières. Here Duparc makes brilliant use of unsettled and dissonant harmonies, truncated phrases, and a syncopated galloping accompaniment that tracks the love-wounded poet’s desperate flight.
—Janet E. Bedell