The first group of songs on this program presents night in its most attractive and beneficent aspect. Since the old man in “Nachtstück,” one of Franz Schubert’s greatest nocturnal songs, dies at the end, it may not seem obvious that it belongs in this category. However, death comes as a happy, longed-for release for this character. The song is enriched by a magnificent piano part, which opens with a prelude of haunting bleakness and later mimics the man’s harp in his lyrical hymn to the night. At the close, the harmony sinks through three keys to portray his gentle death. The poet was Schubert’s close friend Johann Mayrhofer, who, like the composer, had too brief a life.
Schubert’s “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” about the beauty of sunset is also one of his loveliest water songs, with its ravishing accompaniment imitating the waves lapping against the boat. Here with harmonic shadows—and especially the movement from the minor mode at the beginning of each strophe to the major at the end—Schubert captures the impermanence of all moments of perfect beauty, and of life itself.
Often nighttime is a period devoted to pleasure and amorous trysts. “In the Midst of the Ball” comes from 1878, the year Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky completed his opera Eugene Onegin. As we hear so often in his ballets, the composer was a master of waltz music, and this haunting waltz triste describes the memory of a beautiful woman glimpsed at a ball, whose image now revolves ceaselessly in the singer’s mind through a sleepless night. The poet is Aleksey Tolstoy, a distant relative of the famed novelist. From the young Richard Strauss, we hear the sensuous “Ständchen” of 1887, summoning a lover to a moonlit meeting. With its shimmering piano accompaniment and ecstatic vocal lines constantly vaulting to high register, this is one of the most popular of his rich trove of lieder.
Born in Caracas to a Venezuelan mother and a German father, Reynaldo Hahn, nonetheless, became one of France’s greatest songwriters, bringing to his work his skills as a tenor and as a connoisseur of literature. In 1894, he met Marcel Proust, who became his most intimate friend and guided his literary tastes. Hahn was captivated by the poetry of the great Paul Verlaine, who in turn reportedly wept upon hearing Hahn’s beautiful settings of his verse. One of Hahn’s most beloved songs, “L’heure exquise” from his Chansons grises of 1892, perfectly matches the delicate beauty of Verlaine’s poem, capturing sublime moments in a nocturnal tryst, especially in the floating high pianissimos at the end of each stanza.
With songs in English and German, the program’s next section takes us onto open roads under the moon and stars. Arthur Somervell’s “White in the Moon the Long Road Lies” comes from his 1904 cycle A Shropshire Lad, setting a famous sequence of poetry by A. E. Housman. This wayfarer is traveling away from his love, but with an optimistic heart expecting to return, captured in the song’s more animated and forthright middle section. A pupil of Stanford and Parry, Somervell was a pioneer in establishing music education widely in British schools and the creator of several attractive song cycles in a conservative, German-influenced style.
Less sanguine is the traveler in Schubert’s 1826 “Der Wanderer an den Mond,” who contrasts the moon overhead, which is at home in every land it shines upon, with his own rootless state. Nevertheless, this lied in winsomely simple folksong style avoids any real sense of tragedy in its energetic, purposeful gait. Its opening evokes the strumming of the wanderer’s guitar.
In 1904, when he published his cycle Songs of Travel on poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Vaughan Williams was just at the beginning of his career. At the time, he was roaming the English countryside collecting folk songs, and as he was spending so much time on the road, he was captivated by Stevenson’s late-career poems of the same name, written when he was on the island of Samoa. From the cycle, we hear the sixth song, “The Infinite Shining Heavens,” which with the piano’s slow, entranced progression of chords, some rolled so they shimmer, describes the grandeur and mystery of those distant celestial bodies.
We leave the open road for the next song; Robert Schumann’s late lied “Mein schöner Stern!” (1849) is a setting of a poem by one of his favorite poets, Friedrich Rückert. A heartfelt prayer to the evening star—or perhaps to his wife, Clara, the composer’s lodestar throughout life—it provides a revealing look into Robert’s psyche and his ceaseless battle against the forces of depression, which would soon drive him to attempt suicide.
Next, we hear three disturbing songs that portray night as a time of extreme risk, both physical and psychological. The first, “Belsatzar,” suggests Schumann might have been an opera composer manqué. Set to words by the great Heinrich Heine, this is a grim retelling of the Old Testament story of King Belshazzar of Babylon and the fiery handwriting on the wall. Schumann approaches it as a lurid melodrama. Having begun his career as a keyboard composer, he concocted an accompaniment of virtuosic frenzy, with the pianist instructed to accelerate as well as crescendo throughout each of the first two verses. In contrast, the vocal part is straightforward and unadorned, placing emphasis on clear delivery of the story. The song’s stark final moments expertly deliver the chill of a horror story’s denouement.
Much of Schumann’s Op. 39 Liederkreis cycle of poems by Joseph von Eichendorff is positive and lyrical, reflecting its origin in the composer’s triumphant Liederjahr of 1840, but the remarkable 10th song, “Zwielicht,” uncannily explores the inchoate dread night can bring to the human heart. The piano’s eloquent counterpoint sweetens the singer’s bleak phrases, but collapses in blunt warnings at the end.
The ultimate song about the terrors of the night is Schubert’s “Erlkönig,” written in 1815 when he was only 18; the words are by his favorite poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Here the piano’s ferociously galloping octaves drive a three-person drama in which a father frantically tries to save his young son from the clutches of the seductive Erlking. The galloping only ceases at the end, where to a wondrously spooky chord Schubert reveals the child’s fate.
American composer William Bolcom’s “Song of Black Max,” deliciously humorous rather than scary, is from his Cabaret Songs, which deftly modernize and Americanize the edgy satirical style of Kurt Weill. Prolific and eclectic to the core, Bolcom is one of America’s foremost ragtime and popular-song pianists and at the same time a remarkably successful opera composer whose works have been premiered at the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago. Dressed all in black, Max is a true creature of the night, hawking all the pleasures and vices that flourish in darkness.
Songs by the Englishman Roger Quilter and the Austrian Arnold Schoenberg both employ nocturnal images of flowers as metaphors for love. Quilter’s songs are wistfully lyrical, grateful to the voice, and very, very British. In “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” he takes an understated approach to Alfred Tennyson’s lushly sensual imagery. Before he became the father of 12-tone music, the young Schoenberg wrote in a conventionally Romantic tonal idiom, as we hear in his “Warum bist du aufgewacht” (1894). Here in two matching strophes, he spins a lovely, artless melody in which the singer questions why a flower should try to bloom in the night when it needs the sun to flourish.
A pupil of Vaughan Williams at London’s Royal College of Music, Ivor Gurney lived a life that was as tragic as Schumann’s. Both poet and composer, Gurney was a casualty of World War I: Wounded, gassed, and shell-shocked, he returned to civilian life broken in mind and body and spent years in mental institutions. But his pre-war Five Elizabethan Songs (1913) was a little masterpiece. From it, we’ll hear “Sleep,” set to verse by the Elizabethan playwright John Fletcher. Over a hypnotically rocking accompaniment, the poet pleads for sleep to come and soothe his sorrows. The song is filled with subtle, unexpected harmonic twists.
Johannes Brahms’s “Wie rafft ich mich auf in der Nacht” (1864) is the most serious song in this section: an expression of the regret and bitterness of unfulfilled love. The poet was August von Platen, who, because he was gay, was cruelly mocked by Heine and other contemporary writers and led a lonely, guilt-ridden life. Eric Sams suggests Brahms, who generally selected verse that held personal relevance for him, might have been thinking here of his frustrated love for Clara Schumann, as well as remembering her husband’s attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge. The rhyming scheme revolves around matches for nacht (“night”). The piano establishes the dragging steps of the insomniac wanderer; the range is oppressively low and dark. Only when the singer gazes up at the stars does the music lift and brighten. The singer’s anguish over his wasted life is expressed with wrenching pain.
In his 20s, Hugo Wolf developed a profound identification with the verse of the German pastor-poet Eduard Mörike, and in 1888, this affinity inspired an astonishing burst of creativity in which he set more than 50 of Mörike’s poems to music. In biographer Eric Sams’s words, “Their creative minds shared a similar polarization of mood-swing from deep trough to bright crest, from apathy and inertia to frenzied and elated composition.” Through Mörike, Wolf forged his unique style with its subtle illumination of words backed by inspired harmonic choices. “An die Geliebte” is far more than a love song to a woman. According to Sams, “The emotion is gradually heightened from contemplation to tenderness within the human world and then from vision to transfiguration within the divine world.” In the sublime conclusion, the stars smile down on the kneeling, rapt worshipper.
Norwegian Edvard Grieg’s song writing was propelled by his love for his wife, the soprano Nina Hagerup. One of his most popular songs, “Ein Traum” from the Six German Songs of 1889 epitomizes the experience of love fulfilled, a dream become reality. Buoyed by the piano’s excited triplets, the singer twice rises to a high climax in a cry of joy and triumph.
Night’s darkest aspect, its relationship to unjust suffering and especially that of children, is explored in this program’s last section. In Schubert’s 1825 song “Der blinde Knabe,” that suffering is born patiently by the blind boy, who lives cheerfully in his eternal darkness. Schubert captures his halting gait and the thumping of his walking stick in the accompaniment. One of Schubert’s acquaintances made this German translation of a poem by the 18th-century English actor and poet Colley Cibber.
Schumann’s setting of “Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß” comes from his Lieder und Gesänge aus Goethes Wilhelm Meister, created in 1849 to mark the centennial of the poet’s birth. It is one of four grimly disillusioned songs sung by the Harper, a mysterious, half-mad old man who later in the novel is revealed to be the father of Mignon, the story’s plaintive female protagonist. In this lied, the Harper’s bitterness is expressed with uncompromising vehemence while the pianist builds the arpeggios of his harp into a virtuoso display.
The Jewish Czech poet Ilse Weber was one of the countless bright talents snuffed out by the Holocaust. A producer for Czech Radio, she specialized in writing books and poetry for children. Though she didn’t consider herself a professional musician, she played many instruments and, when sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, sang her songs, accompanying herself on the guitar, to the children there. Rather than have her family split up, she chose to go to Auschwitz with her husband; he survived, but she did not. Today, many leading singers have begun to perform and record her simple yet infinitely touching songs, like “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt” and the tender lullaby “Wiegala.” It is reported that she sang the latter to comfort children with her in the gas chamber.
The Scotsman James MacMillan’s music frequently expresses his condemnation of the cruelty and injustices of society past and present. His 1995 song “The Children” sets verse by the Scottish poet William Soutar, who MacMillan says “was inspired by [his] anguish at the Spanish Civil War … The vocal line employs only a few basic intervals and is reminiscent of a child’s song. As it progresses repetitively, the sparse piano accompaniment provides a threatening contrast to the song’s basic innocence and tranquility.”
Our journey through night closes with the welcome arrival of day in Richard Strauss’s beautiful “Morgen!” of 1894, a wedding gift to his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna. Since this poem seems to begin in mid-thought, then drift away without a true conclusion, Strauss mirrors these qualities in his music. The piano, not the voice, is given the radiant melody, and the singer, as though too entranced by it to sing, only joins later. Both singer and piano close on unresolved chords.
—Janet E. Bedell