In its entirety, Robert Schumann’s piano cycle Waldszenen (Forest Scenes) consists of nine short piano solos, or miniatures, each of which bears a descriptive title leading listeners on a journey through the woods. The first movement, “Eintritt” (“Entry”), opens cheerfully in B-flat major, with a playful echo between the left and right hands—perhaps an unnamed hero setting off on an adventure. The melody becomes slightly introspective, culminating in an exploration of the piano’s range with judicious chromaticism. Yet in the final moments, the jaunty rhythmic accompaniment of the opening returns, as the forest offers the hero time to reflect and wonder at its beauty.
—Alison DeSimone
Although he trained as a pianist and a conductor, Robert Schumann’s songs are some of his most intimate and personal compositions. His Op. 35, Zwölf Gedichte (Twelve Poems) are based on the texts of Justinius Kerner and were composed just after his marriage to Clara Wieck. No. 5, “Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend” (“Longing for Woodland”), continues the program’s theme of the forest as a place for people to wonder at the beauty of nature and to reflect on their own place in the world. The melody soars above a peaceful accompaniment. Notice how the music changes tempo and character on “Your surging, your echoing,” becoming more urgent as the narrator becomes overwhelmed by the glories of the natural world. After a brief return to the opening melody, the short song ends ambiguously, as the singer cadences in B-flat major while the accompaniment fades out in G minor.
—Alison DeSimone
Clara Schumann’s strophic setting of “Geheimes Flüstern hier und dort” shows her mastery at combining text setting and accompaniment to paint both an exterior and interior world for the unnamed singer. The poem, written by Hermann Rollett, mirrors the passion and awe that Kerner’s narrator has for the forest in “Sehnsucht.” Here, Schumann sets the text strophically, meaning that the singer repeats the music to different stanzas of text. Although the text changes, the music’s repetition allows the singer to build upon the previous stanza’s emotions, culminating in a final passionate declaration on “I shall, elated by the spirit of love, / Express in song!” The flowing accompaniment, although not fast, is virtuosic; it explores a range of harmonies and preserves the song’s reverence for nature through the long coda.
—Alison DeSimone
For Gustav Mahler, admiration for the natural world was best expressed through folk poetry. The text for “Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald” was drawn from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German myths, fairy tales, and folklore. In this poem, the text’s perspective changes from first-person narrator in the first half to third person in the final two stanzas. Mahler’s song is through composed, and the music changes to illustrate the shift in narration. In the first half, as the narrator describes walking through the woods and meeting the nightingale, the accompaniment completely supports the vocal melody, emerging as a soloist only to mimic the nightingale’s song. In the second half, the rocking motion in the bass line provides a lullaby-like accompaniment until the final stanza: On “the nightingale sang all night long,” Mahler releases the accompaniment from the vocal line as it bursts into bird song before settling down and rejoining the vocal line.
—Alison DeSimone
Very few works by Alma Mahler survive, but among those that do are 14 songs published in three separate publications. “Licht in der Nacht” is the first of four in her Vier Lieder (Four Songs), and both the text and musical settings evoke the new expressionist movement taking hold of early 20th-century Germany. Otto Julius Bierbaum’s text is dark and rich, painting a vivid scene in which a nameless narrator observes a single light in the darkness—sleep is a metaphor for death. Mahler’s setting is harmonically unpredictable; unlike the previous songs, the accompaniment here is completely separate from the vocal line, contributing a dense chromatic palette. The climax of the song occurs as the singer exclaims the name of Jesus Christ before settling back down calmly in the singer’s lower range; she accepts sleep (death) as the song ends peacefully.
—Alison DeSimone
As revolutionary in his day as Beethoven was in his, Schoenberg stood at the vanguard of the early–20th-century movement to loosen and ultimately dissolve the bonds of traditional tonality and musical structure. “I feel the air of another planet,” the soprano sings in the finale of his Second String Quartet of 1907–1908, the work that marked his definitive break with tonal precedent. At the turn of the century, Schoenberg had methodically worked out a system of free atonality in such works as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, the orchestral cantata Gurre-Lieder, and the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande. To many contemporary critics and concertgoers, the atonal music of Schoenberg and his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg was both alien and alienating: Performances of their works routinely provoked vitriolic attacks in the musical press and riotous demonstrations in concert halls. Yet the so-called Second Viennese School (as distinct from the First Viennese School represented by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) endured and became a seminal force in musical modernism, especially after Schoenberg’s “invention” of 12-tone composition in the 1920s.
Schoenberg’s early chamber music reflected the influence of Brahms and Dvořák. But in the late 1890s, he later recalled, “an almost sudden turn toward a more ‘progressive’ manner of composing occurred. Mahler and Strauss had appeared on the musical scene, and so fascinating was their advent, that every musician was immediately forced to take sides, pro or contra.” Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed in 1899, was consciously modeled on those composers’ symphonic, or “tone,” poems. Schoenberg’s other source of inspiration was literary: a poem by Richard Dehmel set in a moonlit forest, where an unnamed woman confesses to her lover that she is carrying another man’s child. Not to worry, he assures her: The “special warmth” that unites them will “transfigure the strange man’s child” and make it his own. Schoenberg had a strong affinity for Dehmel’s erotically charged and psychologically complex poetry, telling him that “from you we learned the ability to listen to our inner selves.” (The collection in which “Verklärte Nacht” appeared in 1896 was ruled obscene by a German court and briefly banned.) The composer characterized his wordless tone poem as “program music” with a difference, in that it did not “illustrate any action or drama, but was restricted to portraying nature and expressing human feelings.”
His disclaimer notwithstanding, Schoenberg’s synopsis makes it clear that drama is intrinsic to Verklärte Nacht. Just as the music’s slippery tonality mirrors the lovers’ flickering emotions, so the D-minor gloom of the opening bars is emblematic of both their “inner selves” and the “bare, cold grove” in which the drama unfolds. A pleading tune in the first viola, characterized by a falling fifth, mutates into a more agitated motif that will figure prominently throughout the work. After a series of increasingly passionate outbursts, we hear the trudging footfalls of the distraught woman walking beside the man and, in Schoenberg’s words, “fearing his sentence will destroy her.” A moment later the E-minor harmonies vaporize, leaving the second cello’s low B-flat to serve as a bridge to the work’s second half, suddenly bathed in major-key brightness. Schoenberg’s scene painting is magical, with its shimmering harmonics, muted runs, and undulating arpeggios. A soaring melody in the first violin is joined by the first cello, their rapturous duet suggesting the lovers’ growing intimacy and trust. “This section,” Schoenberg tells us, “reflects the mood of a man whose love, in harmony with the splendor and radiance of nature, is capable of ignoring the tragic situation.” Verklärte Nacht culminates in a coda of transcendent beauty in which the work’s various themes are recapitulated “so as to glorify the miracles of nature that have changed this night of tragedy into a transfigured night.”
—Harry Haskell
A Forest Unfolding is a collaborative work inspired by recent scientific research into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees. Four writers—the environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof, along with the novelists Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson—selected prose passages and poems on the relations among people and trees. They presented these selections to four composers—Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner, Stephen Jaffe, and David Kirkland Garner—who set these words into a linked sequence of recitatives and arias. The resulting whole traces a narrative arc from human estrangement from nature to a glimpse of the endless cooperation that knits a forest together.
The composers themselves communicated and cooperated with one another throughout the process, sharing thoughts on the relations between the texts, exchanging material and musical ideas, and shaping the structure of the larger piece. Together, they settled on a shared musical intertext, the final section of the last song in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), to lend connective tissue to the whole. In this way, a collective process of many makers yielded a work in the cantata tradition about the need for human reintegration with the rest of the deeply collaborative living world. A Forest Unfolding was conceived by Richard Powers, Laura Gilbert, and Jonathan Bagg. It was commissioned by Electric Earth Concerts for premieres on August 12, 2018, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and August 18 at the Portland Chamber Music Festival in Maine.
—Richard Powers