The four songs Ema Nikolovska has chosen come from later in Schubert’s career, both from around the time he composed his “Unfinished” Symphony and in the last two miraculous years of his short life. Written in 1826, “Im Frühling” is one of his finest songs; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau called it “a perfect blending of word and music.” Much of its power comes from its beguiling piano accompaniment, a marvelous walking theme that develops a sparkling variation as the song progresses. The singer only occasionally adopts this melody. The poet was Schubert’s contemporary Ernst Schulze, an unstable, sensitive man who died at age 28.
Contrasting with the lovely springtime embrace of “Im Frühling” is one of Schubert’s most rarely heard songs: “Herbst” is a bleak portrait of autumn, when the wind blows cold and the trees are bare. Written in April 1828, the last year of the composer’s life, it sets a poem by Ludwig Rellstab, who penned verses for several of the Schwanengesang songs. Strangely, Schubert didn’t choose to include it with those songs, and it remained unpublished until 1895. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable song that includes harmonic experimentation that would not reappear until much later in the 19th century. In the minor mode, its accompaniment opens with a constant tremolo and a portentous rising line in the bass that establish a feeling of dread. With the textural references to the dying of roses and the loss of hope, one senses here how Schubert must have felt as his own life withered away.
Setting a poem by Friedrich Rückert, “Dass sie hier gewesen” (“That She Has Been Here”) of 1822 or 1823 is also very advanced in its harmonic language. Beginning with sighing dissonant chords distant from the song’s home key of C major, Schubert delays confirmation of that key until the singer finally affirms that the fragrance in the air proves his lover has recently been here. Those sighing, ambiguous chords continue throughout and are echoed in the singer’s lines. Everything is terse and fragmentary in this music about intangible impressions.
Ripping from one over-the-top emotion to another, “Der Unglückliche” (“The Unhappy One”) is a brilliant—if rather melodramatic—display piece Schubert wrote for his friend and patron, the tenor Johann Vogl, to sing at a party thrown by the wealthy Caroline Pichler. Pichler herself wrote the verse.
Having already written more than 40 songs as a child and adolescent, Strauss waited until 1885 when he was 21 to create his first for publication: the nine songs of his Op. 10. The poet was Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg (1812–1864), an Austrian civil servant who wrote verse of a sensitively lyrical and often melancholy nature. Though many of his later songs were designed for the soprano voice of his wife Pauline de Ahna, Strauss had not met her yet, and Op. 10 was intended for the tenor voice. They were immediately appropriated by the principal tenor of the Munich Court Opera, Heinrich Vogel.
Strauss cannily chose the beautiful “Zueignung” (“Dedication”) to lead off his official lieder debut. Contrasting with that song’s grand sincerity, the spirited, slightly sarcastic “Nichts” (“Nothing”) is built over a rhythmically springy figure in the piano part; it flexibly mixes in crisp, unadorned recitative phrases to express the singer’s unwillingness to select either his favorite song or his favorite lieder singer—the words here suggest both.
From 1903, the tender little song “Gefunden” (“Found”) sets a poem Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote to his wife on their silver anniversary; Strauss in turn dedicated his setting to his wife. The composer intended it to be the first of a series of Goethe songs but never continued that ambitious task. Biographer Norman Del Mar explains that Strauss felt inhibited when he tried to set great poetry and thus chose lesser verse to glorify in his music. But this modest verse about a flower transplanted to the Goethe household inspires a gentle folk-like setting. The flower is a metaphor for Goethe and Strauss’s successful marriages.
Written in 1897 shortly after the premiere of his tone poem Don Quixote, “Das Rosenband” (“The Rose Garland”) uses 18th-century verse by Friedrich Klopstock, one of the fathers of early Romanticism. Strauss’s lush treatment with its extensive harmonic wanderings and ecstatic climaxes was originally amplified by an orchestral accompaniment; the piano version came later. The song closes magically with a gorgeous melisma on the word “Elysium.”
Like her teacher Florence Price, Margaret Bonds was one of the African American pioneers in classical music, pursuing a career as a pianist, composer, and teacher. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Chicago’s Northwestern University, despite its hostile, racist environment during the 1930s. She later wrote how her first contact with Langston Hughes’s poetry there gave her hope:
“I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place … I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’ and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he tells how great the Black man is. I know that poem helped save me.”
While studying at Northwestern, Bonds emerged as a sought-after pianist and in 1933 became the first African American to solo with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the next year, she was invited back to perform Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in D Minor. Moving to New York City, she became a close friend and collaborator with Langston Hughes (1901–1967) and set much of his poetry to music, including “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Her first published song was for Hughes’s “Poème d’Automne,” which two decades later would become the first of the four Songs of the Seasons, all setting verse by Hughes.
Commissioned by tenor Lawrence Watson in 1955, this cycle was premiered the following year at New York’s Town Hall. To “Poème d’Automne,” Bonds added another early song “Winter Moon” (1936) and two newly composed songs, “Young Love in Spring” and “Summer Storm.” All four songs demonstrate Bonds’s distinctive gift for merging classical European forms with elements drawn from African American folksongs, ragtime, and blues. Sultry syncopations animate “Poème d’Automne,” with its portrait of “autumn leaves … too heavy with color,” resembling “young courtesans waiting for their lovers.” The traditional blues scale finds its place in the vocal lines.
Hughes’s taut, epigrammatic poem “Winter Moon” inspires Bonds’s briefest song. “In setting the poem in a similarly economical minute-plus of music,” writes an annotator for the Hollywood Bowl, “Bonds’s use of a minor key, sparse accompaniment, and limited melodic movement captures the stillness of Hughes’s words, concluding with the singer’s final words suspended and hanging alone like the moon itself.”
Bonds chooses brighter major keys for Hughes’s poems about the warmer months of spring and summer. In “Young Love in Spring,” she captures the lightness and joy of the arrival of spring with a sparkling accompaniment of limpid triplets and the optimism of a young lover in the soaring, carefree melodic lines. Saluting love in the midst of a July thunderstorm, “Summer Storm” is Bonds’s most expansive and uninhibited song and the one that brings African American elements most vividly into its expressive text setting. The piano imitates the rumbling thunder while the voice cuts loose with a wide-ranging treatment of the words that culminates in a big, sustained high note.
With the six songs written between 1885 and 1887 to the verse of the great Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)—initially published separately in 1888 and then revised and republished as the set Ariettes oubliées in 1903—Debussy finally revealed his unique voice, characterized by sensuous, text-sensitive melodies, supple rhythms, and his own color-driven approach to harmony. Perhaps the composer gave the songs this title because they had initially made little impression on the French musical world. But by 1903 with the recent success of his Pelléas et Mélisande, he had won everyone’s attention, and he gracefully dedicated his “Forgotten Songs” to the Scottish soprano Mary Garden, his “unforgettable Mélisande.”
The first three songs come from Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles. “C’est l’extase langoureuse” describes the exhausted joy of two sated lovers enveloped in the murmurs of a forest at nightfall. Debussy embodies this languorous ecstasy with chromatically down-slipping phrases and harmonies that slide effortlessly from key to key. In “Il pleure dans mon coeur,” the pianist’s right hand conjures the raindrops falling on the town, while the left hand introduces an urgent, troubled melody that will pervade this song of inexplicable depression. “L’ombre des arbres” of 1885 showcases Debussy’s experimental approach to harmony as he blurs conventional tonality to etch a scene in which reality and its reflection are confusingly merged. He prefaced this song with a quotation from Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac, in which a nightingale in a tree seeing its reflection in the water below believes it is drowning.
From the poet’s Paysages belges (Belgian Landscapes), “Chevaux de bois” also comes from 1885. Tied together by a breathless refrain, this song captures images of the fair and its merry-go-round–like series of vivid snapshots. At the end, the tempo slows bit by bit in a haunting evocation of twilight descending and the weary revelers trudging home.
The last two songs come from Verlaine’s Aquarelles (Water Colors) and have English titles; Verlaine taught for a time in both England and Boston. The fragile love song “Green” has the freshness of that color as the vulnerable young lover presents his offerings of hand and heart, hoping they will not be refused. “Spleen” is not about ill-humor as its name suggests, but rather a very subtle song about the fear of loss that is the shadow side of love.
Born in Moscow, Nicolas Medtner is ranked with Rachmaninoff and Scriabin among the leading composers of the “Silver Age” of Russian culture: a fertile period that spanned the turn of the 20th century to the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Awarded the Anton Rubinstein Prize at his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory, Medtner was a superb pianist who chose to be a composer rather than a touring virtuoso. Rachmaninoff became a deep admirer and close friend and dedicated his Fourth Piano Concerto to him. Another colleague described Medtner as “delicate, shy … a sensitive and lofty soul … in no way adapted to a practical life.”
In 1921, Medtner fled the newly formed USSR and spent the rest of his life living in France, Germany, and London. During this period, the popularity his music had enjoyed in Russia eroded, and only in recent decades has his music been rediscovered and embraced by pianists and music lovers. Medtner’s music is difficult to categorize. Born into a cultured German-Russian family, he adored Beethoven above all composers and adhered to the formal practices of the Classical era. But he also was a modernist in his advanced harmonies and provocative rhythms. His devotion to the piano was so intense that the instrument dominated everything he composed, including his 108 songs.
Such is the case of his beautiful “Twilight” of 1911, setting a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev. The piano leads off to establish the descending, rocking theme the voice will follow, then embroiders it with fragile, rhapsodic excursions that carry most of the emotional impact of this ode to a moment in the day that brings solace and rest. Subtle rhythmic irregularities contribute to the song’s effectiveness.
No rest comes for the suffering insomniac in “Sleeplessness” (1918), for whom the hours ticking by are depicted by tolling-bell chords in the piano. This is a challenging song for the singer, who must sustain a building dramatic intensity over a two-octave range, as well as for the pianist. The stygian key is the rarely used E-flat minor. This song uses a Medtner signature: a lengthy, wordless vocalize after the text (again by Tyutchev) is finished, floating over a powerful keyboard postlude.
In his 101 years, Nicolas Slonimsky wore many hats. Born in St. Petersburg, he escaped the Russian Revolution to live first in Paris and then in the United States. A musicologist, conductor, pianist, and composer, he is perhaps best known for his razor-sharp wit, which made him a popular guest on radio and television programs, including Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, during his later years. During his conducting career, Slonimsky espoused contemporary composers and led the world premieres of Ives’s Three Places in New England and Varèse’s Ionisation. Much later, he would collaborate with avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa. When Serge Koussevitzky became conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Slonimsky served as his pianist. Among musicians today, however, he is most famous for his hilarious 1953 book the Lexicon of Musical Invective, in which he collected the wildly wrong-headed criticisms of the greatest composers and their works by writers in their day.
In this spirit, Slonimsky created the Five Advertising Songs, which send up commercial earworms along with the styles of certain composers of classical renown. Here’s how he introduced them:
“When I came to America from darkest Russia in 1923, I instantly succumbed to the unique poetry of commercial advertisements in the gaudy pages of American magazines. Cynicism came much later. I set to music some of the most uninhibited outpourings of the advertising muse. I can even claim priority as composer of the first advertising songs designed for concert performance. They are: ‘Make This a Day of Pepsodent!,’ ‘Utica Sheets and Pillowcases,’ ‘Pillsbury Bran Muffins,’ ‘Vauv Nose Powder,’ and ‘Children Cry for Castoria.’
“The Pepsodent song was on a par with the best fourth-rate Italian operas, full of emotional bel canto. The sheets of Utica were spread with the artiness of a slightly adulterated Schumann. The bran muffin ad bore a banner headline, ‘And Then Her Doctor Told Her …,’ showing a bearded Germanic physician pointing an ominous index finger at a dejected but beautiful female sufferer slumped in an armchair. One could expect the worst, but the doctor in the ad was concerned only with correcting the lady’s ‘faulty elimination.’ I borrowed the theme from Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp–Minor Prelude to depict her condition in suitably dramatic terms. There followed ‘No more shiny nose!,’ attesting to the durable effect of the powder. In the Castoria song, the climax came with the cry, ‘Mother, relieve your constipated child!’ A parlando recitative against a dissonant tremolo reassured the parents that Castoria did not include harmful drugs or narcotics.
“My advertising songs enjoyed a gratifying success at friendly gatherings. Eventually I decided to publish them. To my surprise, the Pepsodent Company refused to let me use their brand name, so I changed it to Plurodent, and revised the text accordingly. [The original version is performed tonight.] The nose powder went out of existence, so I did not have to bother about the copyright. Amazingly, the Castoria people gave me unqualified permission to use their name.”
—Janet E. Bedell