Category Archives: Program Notes

Sonata in A major D959

Schubert’s penultimate piano sonata was one of three written in the summer of 1828, just months before his death. This is a pianistically challenging work of unusually wide emotional range. Its moods run the gamut from the heroic to the playful, featuring outbursts of musical vehemence that alternate with moments of poetic reflection. This span of emotional states is at its widest in the slow movement which constitutes the dramatic centrepiece of the sonata.

The Allegro opens with an assertive theme featuring a climbing bass pattern beneath an immovable treble, musically emblematic of firm resolve and inner strength of character. No sooner has this theme been stated than Schubert begins to vary it, giving in to a penchant for immediate development that will dominate the exposition of this movement. His second theme is a simple, soothing melody that also finds itself wandering into developmental territory, thanks to a chromatically rising bass line figure with fugal aspirations that keeps interrupting the proceedings. The real development section, by contrast, is a chiming music box of steadily pulsing harmony chords shadowing the lyrical second theme as it wanders through an enchanted forest of harmonic modulations. The recapitulation is unremarkable except for its thoughtful coda and the poetic washes of harmonic colour with which it ends.

The Andantino second movement begins as a sad little barcarolle rocking mournfully on the waters of its own interior reflections. Its shockingly spare texture and fretful obsession with the same few notes gives a hypnotic quality to its melodic self-absorption. After some 70 bars of harmonic stasis in the key of F-sharp minor it drifts into a fantasy world, as rhythmically free and melodically wide-ranging as the opening section was monotonously repetitive and claustrophobically contained in scope. Musical violence, of a sort unprecedented in Schubert’s previous piano works, then rages forth to create the image of a terrifying hallucination, or a bad drug trip. Calm returns when the sad opening tune reappears, shadowed now with a pathetic echo in the treble above.

The following scherzo, Allegro vivace, is an acrobatic tour de force of register hops that mixes the dancelike character and graceful charm of a Chopin waltz with a mischievous sense of fun most evident in the cascading runs that unexpectedly interrupt the proceedings at regular intervals. The trio, however, is, on its best behaviour, the soul of harmonic stability. But perhaps this civility is only tongue-in-cheek, its gentle hand-crossings a witty parody of the register hops of the main section of the scherzo.

The opening theme of the fourth movement sonata rondo sounds like a solemn processional hymn from a previous age, and indeed in harmonic layout and dignity of tone it echoes the well-known St. Anthony Chorale attributed to Haydn. In this context, its subsequent elaboration in florid counterpoint, with the melody in the tenor, comes as no surprise. The second theme, however, is a songful pianistic creation that delights in the rhythmic bounce of its repeated notes. Schubert’s inventiveness in creating ear-tickling piano textures is extraordinary in this movement. Extraordinary as well is the dramatic series of chords that echo the harmonies of the first movement’s opening bars.

Schwanengesang D957

Schwanengesang (Swan Song) is not a song cycle, as it lacks a narrative thread, but rather a song collection, composed by Schubert just before his death in 1828 and put on sale under this name the following year by his publisher, Thomas Haslinger, who thought it would sell well if marketed as Schubert’s “last farewell to song.”

The collection comprises 14 songs by three contemporary German poets. The first seven songs are to poems by Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), the multitalented littérateur and arch-conservative music critic famous for giving Beethoven’s Op. 27 No. 2 sonata its title “Moonlight”. The following six are settings of poems by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), a cosmopolitan poet of humour and irony who combined a light touch with an aphoristic density of thought. The final, encore song sets the words of the Austrian imperial bureaucrat Johann Gabriel Seidl (1804-1875).

Themes of lost love and communion with nature dominate the Rellstab songs. Liebesbotschaft (Message of love) is typical, with the piano playing the role of rippling brook to the singer’s bright-eyed swain-in-love. Kriegers Ahnung (Warrior’s foreboding) is much less upbeat. Its piano accompaniment follows the beating of the soldier-lover’s racing heartbeat, but the opening and closing passages that frame the story, so evocative of the halting steps of a funeral march, give an undertone of worrying fatefulness to the singer’s words.

Frühlingssehnsucht (Spring longing) paints the breathless enthusiasm of the love-besotted singer who pauses, almost comically, at the end of each verse to ask himself a question. Ständchen (Serenade) is one of Schubert’s best-known melodies, evocative of the stillness of the night and the lover’s heightened awareness of the sounds of nature that surround him. The throbbing piano pulses of Aufenthalt (Resting place) paint the natural world as less distant, more a participant in the lover’s sufferings.

Even more desolate is the mood of In der Ferne (In the distance), with its theme of exile conveyed through a sparseness of texture and the obsessive repetition of melodic phrases. The Rellstab set concludes with Abschied (Farewell), an upbeat evocation of trotting away from town on horseback, the prancing hoof-steps of the lover’s mount picturesquely painted in the staccato articulations of the piano accompaniment.

The poems of Heinrich Heine, many of them concerned with the theme of alienation, are much more compact, and pack a bigger poetic punch. Der Atlas (Atlas) receives the heavy treatment its theme deserves. The lament of the god-man who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders is admirably conveyed by the pervasive use of dotted rhythms and by setting the piano accompaniment in the low range of the keyboard. Much more spare in texture is Ihr Bild (Her picture), in which the concentrated gaze of the lover upon his beloved’s portrait is evoked in unison passages between voice and piano.

Schubert`s little sea-shanty setting of Das Fischermädchen captures well the irony of the role-reversal inherent in the scene, in which it is the “sensitive New Age guy” who sits dreamily on the shore, trying to entice the strong, capable girl out earning a living on the waves to come be with him. A much more seriously poetic watery scene is summoned up in Die Stadt (The town), with its shimmering depiction of the morning sun glinting off the waves, a counterpoint to the dark distant outlines of the town where the singer’s pain originated.

The mood turns spooky in Am Meer (By the sea), a description of the debilitating effects of love, with tears as the deadly poison that rots away the lover from the inside. Despite the hymn-like reverence of the peaceful seaside scene where the tale begins, much deeper currents of emotion emerge, urged into the open by melodramatic tremolos in the piano that tell a different story. Scariest of all is Der Doppelganger (The ghostly double), a night scene in which a man stands before the house where his love once lived and recognizes a spectral shape equally absorbed in sad remembrance: an image of himself. The impassive, slow-moving chords in the piano give no comfort at all to the lonely voice of the singer as he realizes he is descending into madness. This is a song without a melody, symbolic of a situation without hope.

This song collection ends on a note of optimism, however, with Die Taubenpost (The carrier pigeon), a song with a gentle Viennese lilt that merrily praises the contributions of aviary postal delivery to the cause of true love.

Donald G. Gíslason

Fantasie in F minor for piano four hands D940

Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor for piano duet, composed in 1828, is similar in structure to the composer’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy of 1822. Both are laid out in one continuous movement of four sonata-like sections played without interruption, comprising an opening Allegro, a slow movement, a scherzo and a finale containing a fugue. And both embrace the cyclical principle of reprising the first movement’s themes in their final movement.

But while the Wanderer stands out for its emphatic musical rhetoric and unabashedly muscular keyboard writing, the F Minor Fantasie entices its listeners with an inverse appeal in long passages at dynamic levels of pp, or even ppp, and a more reflective tone overall.

Nowhere is this reflective tone more strikingly evident than in the first movement Allegro molto moderato, in which a timidly pleading, almost whimpering first theme, obsessing over a number of small melodic intervals, emerges out of a hushed murmur of harmonic support. Juxtaposed with this delicate flower of a melody is a stern, implacable second theme that soon arrives to challenge it, advancing gravely and ponderously in great granitic blocks of sound. As is so typical of Schubert, the two themes in this section are presented in ‘stereo’, modally speaking – in both their major- and minor-mode variants.

The Largo second movement presents a similar juxtaposition of opposing musical personalities. Beginning with a jarring series of trills, this movement alternates between the defiant gestures of a double-dotted, French-overturelike first theme and a ‘tra-la-la’ second theme of a distinctly Italianate melodic stamp that roams blissfully carefree over an oom-pah-pah accompaniment.

The scherzo Allegro vivace provides much needed relief from all this drama with its dancelike verve and general spirit of bonhomie as the two players coyly echo each other’s phrases. Schubert’s quicksilver changes of mode, often alternating between major and minor in successive phrases, give this movement an intriguing tonal sparkle that is maddeningly hard to define.

The Allegro molto moderato finale brings us full circle to the poetic opening bars of the work. But at the entrance of the imposing second theme, a browknitting fugal argument breaks out leading to a sustained bout of contrapuntal navel-gazing which only the opening theme, returning yet again, can quell. The uncompromisingly bleak tone of the closing bars is exceptional in the works of Schubert.

Sonata in B flat major D960

Schubert’s last piano sonata, written in 1828 a scant few months before his death, exemplifies in one single work the full range of his gifts as lyric melodist, serious musical dramatist, and refined exponent of the light, dance-besotted musical style of Vienna.

The first movement, Allegro moderato, is typically generous in its bounty of themes. It opens with a softly whispered melody, humbly small in range and accompanied by a repeated pedal tone in the left hand, like a pulsing human heartbeat. This opening theme has a sweet yearning quality that gives it an ineffable, almost nostalgic charm, urging it to burst more fully into song, which it soon does. A second theme introduces a tentative note of worry, but Schubert’s constant harmonic wavering between the major and minor modes prevents the emotional tone from becoming downcast. A third theme of a triadic stamp scampers over the full range of the keyboard, in both hands, to re-establish a more directly buoyant emotional tone, disturbed only by a recurring low trill in the left hand that acts as a sectional marker within the movement. The development is where all the drama lies, as Schubert passes his melodic material through a harmonic colour wheel, building to an intense climax that acts as a rare moment of sonic emphasis in the centre of what is, essentially, a movement of delicate shades of nuance.

Much more starkly dramatic is the Andante sostenuto slow movement which features an introspective melody in the mid-range of the keyboard, surrounded by sonic echoes, both above and below, implying that this lonely plaintive voice is pleading its mournful case in a vast, but empty enclosure. It is hard not to think of the more militant middle section as an attempt to take heart, an attempt that inevitably fails as the opening mood returns to conclude the movement.

The third movement scherzo, Allegro vivace con delicatezza, is indeed ‘delicate’ if judged by the standards of Beethoven’s rough-house humour. More typically Viennese in its subtlety, it generates good-natured humour from its frequent changes of register and twinkling grace notes. A steady interchange of material between the hands creates the impression of a dialogue between two real musical ‘characters’. The contrasting trio in the minor mode is much more sedate, sitting put in the middle of the keyboard and shifting its weight around in gentle syncopations.

Still in a humorous frame of mind, Schubert begins his rondo finale, Allegro ma non troppo, with a mock ‘mistake’. Starting off in the minor mode, he then ‘remembers’ that he wants to be in a major key and makes a mid-course correction at the end of the first phrase. This joke of changing dramatic masks from the serious to the comedic is played out frequently during the movement, with intervening episodes of songful respite in between. This is a finale filled with congenial joking of the most sophisticated kind, created by a true Viennese pianistic ‘sit-down comic’.

Trio in B flat major for piano, violin and cello D898

The popular image of Schubert as the composer of cheerful lyrical melodies, spontaneously extending out to heavenly length, is given ample confirmation in his B flat Trio D898. Despite being completed in the last year of Schubert’s life, this large-scale work displays none of the dark, foreboding tone of other works of this period in which the approach of death can be intuited on the horizon. Rather, it radiates a healthy emotional flow of musical sentiments, passing from an alert and fully engaged first movement through a serenely voluptuous second movement, and ending in a pair of movements smitten with the spirit of the dance.

The opening Allegro moderato presents us with a triadic fanfare theme in the strings over a pulsing cushion of harmonic support in the piano, ushering in the mood of spirited resolve and bright-eyed optimism that will dominate the movement as a whole. Pert punctuations of dotted rhythm and jolly figurations of triplets add a bouncing quality to this theme, summoning up the image of a bracing walk in the park on a pleasant spring morning. The generous, widearching intervals of the songful second theme, introduced by the cello, only add to the feeling that all’s right with the world and a hot cup of tea awaits at home. The development section takes its job seriously, chewing over important phrases from both themes with a sense of dramatic import but always arriving at a happy resolution of its thematic concerns.

The heavy lifting of the work thus completed, Schubert gives us a bit of naptime in a Brahmsian lullaby of a slow movement, Andante un poco mosso. The cello takes on major melodic duties in this movement, cooing with its fellow turtle-dove, the violin, in a cheek-to-cheek duet of mutual admiration that a more florid central episode only serves to intensify.

Schubert’s third movement scherzo lies halfway between the sedateness of the minuet from which this genre developed and the mischievous joke that it became. Its quick, but still danceable, repeated notes harken back more to the folk dancing idiom of the Austrian Ländler than to the stiff reserve of the courtly minuet. There is no doubt about the trio, however. It is a straight-up waltz (and seemingly a forerunner to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Waltz) with the piano’s echoing “pah-pah” in support of a reliable one-to-a-bar “oom” in the strings.

The last movement rondo, Allegro vivace, is even more dancelike, glinting with numerous stylistic influences from Viennese popular music. It features a delicately skipping principal theme opposed by a mock-serious thematic challenger in strong unisons, with lots of frolicsome scampering in dotted rhythms and joyous triplets filling in the landscape in between. Adding to the light tone of this movement is Schubert’s practice of treating the piano largely as a single-line instrument, chuckling merrily away in unisons or octaves up in the high register alongside the violin.

Donald G. Gíslason

Sonata in C minor D958

Of the three last sonatas Schubert wrote just before his death in 1828, it is the Sonata in C minor that most reveals him as Beethovenian, not just in his choice of key, synonymous with Beethoven’s most turbulent musical thoughts, but more tellingly in the restless energy and propulsive forward drive that characterizes its four contrasting movements.

The Allegro first movement begins boldly with a series of punchy gestures clearly patterned after the theme from Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor. When the turmoil of this serious opening material subsides, a more familiar personality emerges, that of Schubert the keyboard colourist, painting magical moments of calm and stability, anchored in pedal points that drum reassuringly from the bass or ring bell-like in the treble. These, in turn, give way to more active sections alternating between a spirit of the dance and worrying signals of alarm, a typically Schubertian dichotomy of moods.

Where the spirit of Beethoven moves most freely is in the development section, in which he gnaws away at small motives, like a dog worrying a bone. Eventually, he abandons all pretense of melody in a free chromatic fantasy that leads with conviction to the return of the movement’s opening chords in the recapitulation. Beethovenian, as well, is the ruminative coda that recalls material from the development at the movement’s close.

The second movement is a rarity in Schubert: a real Adagio. But the mood of repose and elegiac tone offered by the opening melody is twice interrupted by thoughts of a more anxious nature, the first interruption fretting its concern in a pattern of pulsing triplets, the second breaking into full-on contrapuntal discord. Much about this movement, especially the triplet figurations, is reminiscent of the slow movement from Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata.

The sonata’s third movement is a Menuetto, but it appears strangely conflicted as to whether it actually wants to be a dance at all. The extreme irregularity of its phrase lengths makes toe-tapping of any extended length impossible, and its thoughtful pauses point more to the Romantic-era rhetoric of inner doubt than to the assured pose of Classical-era court ritual.

Where Schubert unleashes his inner playful demon with wicked glee is in the last movement Allegro, a moto perpetuo of considerable length in tarantella rhythm. When hearing this movement it is hard not to summon up the picture of a thrilling ride on horseback over hill and dale. Something of the exhilaration of the ride is available to the pianist, as well, in the extraordinarily effective hand-crossing textures that Schubert creates, with melodic fragments tossed wildly between the treble and bass registers over the pounding patter of horse’s hooves in the mid-range.

Fantasie in C major for Violin & Piano D934

Who knew that Schubert could write a virtuoso showpiece for violin? It was in early 1828 that the young Czech virtuoso Josef Slavík (1806-1833) was to appear at a concert in Vienna along with Schubert’s friend, the pianist Carl Maria von Bocklet (1801-1881). Slavík’s dazzling virtuosity was rumoured to be on a par with that of Paganini while Von Bocklet was creating quite a stir in the capital with his keyboard fantasias. Schubert’s decision to write a display vehicle for both of them in the form of a free fantasy must have been an easy one.

The Fantasie is laid out in seven continuous sections, built around variations on Schubert’s own well-known setting of the love poem Sei mir gegrüsst! by German poet Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866). The poem expresses the yearning of a young lover separated from the kisses of his beloved and the work evokes these tender emotions in its introduction, opening in a sonic haze of piano tremolos in imitation of orchestral strings, or perhaps even the thrum of the Hungarian cimbalom, a kind of dulcimer. Against this timbral backdrop an endearing melody of long-held violin notes emerges as trills burble up from the lower regions of the piano and then sparkle from the high register.

A second introductory section is more animated and dancelike; its crush notes give it a tangy Hungarian gypsy flavour, although the constant imitative interchange between the instruments gives it something of a sly, knowing quality, as well.

The centrepiece of the work is the third section, which arrives with a simple statement in the piano of the gently lilting lied melody with its languorous chromatic turns of phrase, emblematic of the lover’s sighs. Three bravura variations in the style of Paganini ensue and, after a brief reminiscence of the theme, the work closes with a vigorous Presto exclamation point.

The composer makes shockingly effective use of the high register in both instruments to create a dazzling array of ear-tickling textures. So dazzling, in fact, that admirers of his more sedate ‘Viennese’ style might well ask, “Who are you, and what have you done with Franz Peter Schubert?”

String Quintet in C D934

Schubert’s decision to write a string quintet in the last year of his life with two cellos, instead of the more normal two violas used by Mozart and Beethoven in their quintets, was not entirely unprecedented. Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) himself a cellist, had done so before, but had written the extra cello part relatively high in the range, i.e., as a viola in all but name. Schubert, by contrast, makes full use of the extra cello’s baritone timbre to add a dark but richly burnished lustre to the lower regions of the ensemble, and in so doing strides boldly towards a symphonic ideal of sound in this chamber genre.

This symphonic ideal is evident in the many passages of throbbing repeated notes that keep the string sonority ringing in your ears while important melodic events are presented in other instruments. This ideal plays out as well in his varied treatment of instrumental sub-groups as orchestral ‘choirs’ that parallel the established division of orchestral forces into strings, winds, brass and percussion.

That the qualities of pure sound are uppermost in his mind is evident from the way in which the work begins. Schubert offers us a static representation, without a regular rhythmic pulse, of the structuring harmonies that will undergird his roughly textured first theme, the eventual arrival of which is made to seem all the more disruptive by contrast with the placid opening bars. Where the listener is especially grateful for the expansion of musical forces in this quintet is in the glorious second theme, presented in a cello duet with an almost Brahmsian luxuriance of phrasing, its gently swaying melodic line in 6ths exquisitely perfumed with a sentimentality and sophistication uniquely Viennese. The long development section is kept coherent by Schubert’s skillful alternation of instrumental groupings amid which the return of the opening material in the recapitulation materializes as if by magic.

The slow second movement, like that of the C minor Sonata, is a real Adagio. It presents a triptych of contrasting moods with two otherworldly outer sections bookending a middle section of dramatic (almost melodramatic) intensity of feeling, with gasping, off-beat accompaniment figures fretting anxiously between a nervously active bass line and a urgently pleading melody in the first violin. The emotional range of this movement is astonishing.

An unheard-of volume of sound explodes from the 3rd movement scherzo, that begins with 9-voice chords made all the more resonant by the use of open strings (C – G – D). The sounds of hunting horns and galloping hooves abound in this movement, contrasting starkly with the subdued, elegiac tone of the middle section trio.

The work is rounded out with a sonata-rondo dance finale of distinctly Hungarian flavour with a heavy peasant stamp, expressed in thumping offbeat accents, major-minor tonal ambivalence, a race-to-the-finish accelerando, and a final ‘smudgy’ D-flat-to-C crush-note ending that Brahms would later appropriate for the final bar of his F minor Quintet scherzo.

Donald G. Gíslason

The age of the German lied, an art-song for solo voice with piano accompaniment, extends from the first songs of Schubert (1814) to the last songs of Hugo Wolf (1897). Its emergence in the early part of the 19th century was strongly influenced by literary Romanticism, and it is not a coincidence that lyric poems by Romantic literary giants such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) figure largely in the repertoire.

The emphasis in the Romantic movement on the psychology of the solitary individual, along with its admiration of folklore and its worshipful yearning for communion with Nature, seemed tailor-made for musical setting, with the solo singer as the archetypal Romantic hero. At the same time, the piano was undergoing major improvements which increased its range, its strength of tone, and its expressive potential, making it a miniature orchestra capable of providing a theatrical ‘backdrop’ behind the singer’s voice, or even of engaging with the singer in dramatic dialogue. It could thunder, it could whisper, it could echo the singer’s sentiments, making every song, in effect, a dramatic duet between singer and piano.

The elevation of song to the realm of high art paralleled the rise of bourgeois patronage in the arts, and so one further element in the lied’s success was the setting of its performance. In keeping with the celebration of home entertaining and cozy family life that characterized the Biedermeyer period in central Europe (1815-1848), the new temple of Art where this new art-form flourished was not the aristocratic palace, nor the public concert hall, but the domestic drawing room. And because the lied addressed its audience on terms of social intimacy, it often contains subtleties of expression that amply repay close listening.

Robert Schumann
Liederkreis Op. 24

After spending the 1830s concentrating exclusively on composing for the piano, Schumann finally burst into song in the year 1840, producing in this year alone more than 125 songs—over half his lifetime output. His penchant for composing epic cycles of piano music comprising a succession of evocative scenes rather than in a continuous narrative (Papillons, Carnaval, Kreisleriana) is evident in the way he structures his Liederkreis Op. 24 as a series of mood portraits, intended to be played as a unit. The songs are connected by a number of recurring musical motifs, but lack a central plot, per se. More song collection than song cycle, the Liederkreis presents us with a kind of musical ‘drone footage’ circling round a distraught young lover, depicting the suffering and anxieties that an amorous affliction is causing him.

Schumann had ample reason to sympathize with the protagonist of these songs as his own love life was beset with the same frustrations and uncertainties.

Having given up hope of obtaining parental permission to marry the 20-year old Clara Wieck, he had taken her father to court to settle the matter and the legal proceedings were ongoing as he wrote the Liederkreis. The lyric poems he was setting from Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder (1827) must have had an extraordinary resonance with him, speaking as they do of the anxieties and doubts that young love brings.

The composer’s self-confessed alter egos, the dreamer Eusebius and the passionate Florestan, are much in evidence in this collection, their contrasting psychological states being introduced in the first two songs, Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage and Es treibt mich hin, es triebt mich her. The piano is a major supporting actor in this work, adding muscular resolve in the grimly determined Warte, warte wilder Schiffmann and a picturesque depiction of the Rhein river’s undulating waves in the placid Berg’ und Burgen schau’n herunter. Long postludes allow the piano to have the last word in many scenes, painting it as the more knowing and more emotionally balanced of the performing pair.

The penultimate song, Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen, is the most unusual of the collection. It is based on the Lutheran chorale melody Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten that expresses quiet faith in Providence.

Johannes Brahms
Lieder to texts by Heinrich Heine

Brahms’ song writing has been criticized by some as too instrumental in conception to be effective as vocal music. He is more concerned, it is said, with the shape of his melodies and the complexities of his textures than with the need for speech-like rhythm and musical illustration of the text. And yet his melodic ideal was the simple folksong, and his textures respond vividly to the poetic images they support in music, no matter how motivically dense their musical structure may be.

An example of this ‘abstract but illustrative’ craft is given in Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze (How lovely to love in spring), which begins in the piano with a rippling image of waves, in imitation of the river beside which the song’s shepherdess is sitting. But this piano figuration is also a mirror image, in smaller note values, of the simple folklike melody that soon enters. At the mention of the wreaths (Kränze) that the shepherdess is weaving, the vocal melody gets interwoven with not one, but two countermelodies in the piano part. The arrival of the cantering horseman provokes a change to a triplet rhythmic pulse, but the shepherdess’ reaction to him blends both duple (her) rhythm with triple (his) in an ingenious use of texture to engage with the poetic text.

Details such as these abound in these songs. It would be correct to say, however, that Brahms gives the piano an important role in varying the texture of the vocal-instrumental duet. Indeed, in his moody and intense rendering of Heine’s Meerfahrt (Sea voyage) the piano holds forth for a full page of score before the voice first enters, and in many passages pulls the song along with its own momentum.

Instrumentally conceived as well are the two-against-three accompaniment patterns, common in Brahms’ piano music, that make these songs so richly textured. Most Brahmsian of all is the gentle lullaby mood that pervades the first two songs of Op. 85, Sommerabend (Summer evening) and Mondenschein (Moonlight), which share not only a common central melody, but a similarly delicate, intriguingly complex piano accompaniment.

Franz Schubert
Lieder to texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It was Franz Schubert’s imaginative settings of Romantic poetry, with its everpresent nature imagery and fixation on the psychology of the lonely outsider, that elevated the German lied to the status of high art. With melodies that ranged in style from the tunefulness of folksong to the operatic intensity of whispered recitative, he combined a gift for vocal writing with the pianistic imagination of a theatrical scene painter to reveal a new expressive potential in the simple pairing of solo voice and piano. The poems of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe provided him with texts that stimulated his imagination to a fever pitch, as demonstrated in the selections on this afternoon’s program.

An den Mond (To the moon) is a song of adoration tinged with more than a hint of sadness, as intimated by the sigh motives in the piano introduction and in the vocal line throughout. The moon is a blessed giver of light in the darkness but a somewhat distant source of consolation for one afflicted with earthly troubles, as represented by the raging river in the song’s more turbulent middle section. By doubling the singer’s voice in the piano, Schubert adds a metallic timbre to the melody line, emblematic of the moon’s cool radiance and its impassive noninterference in human affairs.

Meeres Stille (Calm sea) is starkly minimalist, with every expressive dimension muted in sympathy with the idea of oceanic stillness that is the poem’s central image. The song unfolds in a hushed pianissimo, within a limited vocal range, at a slow, but steady and unvarying pace, the entire accompaniment a single rolling arpeggio at the beginning of each bar suggestive of a light ripple on the surface of the water. The eerie mood of this song is double-sided, its peaceful surface implying fearful depths below.

The theme of loneliness is explicitly explored in Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt (Who gives himself to loneliness). Advancing the curious conceit that you are never alone as long as you have your own loneliness to keep you company, it travels meditatively through this thought to its logical consequence: an acceptance of the relief that death will provide. This grim reality is reinforced by a passacaglia-type descending bass line with a distinctly Baroque feel.

Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen aß (Who never ate his bread with tears) continues the depiction of earthly existence as a vale of tears but its mood, while initially reserved, is hardly one of resignation. With a nobility of utterance reminiscent of Gluck, the singer challenges the justness of the ‘heavenly powers’ who leave men to suffer so much. Their shockingly stern reply is given by the piano in the final bars.

The wandering mendicant is the subject of An die Türen will ich schleichen (I’ll steal from door to door). The piano accompaniment of steady quarter notes is brilliantly multidimensional: both a pictorial representation of the beggar’s continual travels on foot, and an anthem-like hymn, troubled by constant chromatic alterations.

An Schwager Kronos (To coachman Chronos) is a bumpy but exhilarating coachride headlong into life, complete with all the stages of youthful exuberance, bracing maturity, and the thought of impending death defiantly faced, and even mocked. A constant pulse of triplet 8th notes keeps the coach-ride rhythmically vivid throughout while the declamatory style of the vocal line rises triumphantly above it.

Hugo Wolf
Lieder to texts by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The closing scene of the age of German lieder was played out by Hugo Wolf, a fervent Wagnerian and arch-enemy of Brahmsian conservatism. While he packaged his terse, intensely expressive poetic settings within the framework of the traditional lied, his boldly chromatic treatment of poetic texts provided a glimpse into developments to come in the 12-tone techniques of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg and company. Wandering with unprecedented freedom from key to key, he followed the poetic text with feverish concentration, tracing its psychological tension with finely etched musical details. Music, he said, was like a vampire sucking the life’s blood out of poetry and in his own performances, he insisted on reciting the original poem to his audience before singing it. Although theoretically music takes a backseat to the poetic text in his works, there is undoubtedly a lot of back-seat driving going on in the way they develop. These songs all derive from his collection of Goethe-Lieder published in 1890, when he was at the height of his creative powers.

Der Rattenfänger (The rat-catcher) takes up the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but this rat-chaser is an equal-opportunity abuser of rats, young children and young women. The piano scampers mischievously, evoking both his magical powers and the line of bewitched subjects trailing behind him. The rapid patter of this shamelessly jolly braggart is riveting: Rossini’s Figaro meets Bad Cop.

A lover’s repeated act of bending down to pluck a flower ‘a thousand times’ is painted by the repeated bowing gestures of the piano in Blumengruß, a song less fraught with angst than most.

Gleich und Gleich (Like to like) is an ode to the symbiotic relationship between flower and bee. The piano’s cutesy introduction, with its high, tinkling imitation of the flower ‘bell’ and its sudden melodic drop (representing the bee’s plunging in to drink its fill) occurs throughout. A sexual subtext is not hard to find here. This is the birds and the bees talk for the horticulturally inclined.

The Phänomen (Phenomenon) offers hope to those well on in years that love still awaits, just on the other side of a rainbow colourfully painted in boldly chromatic tones.

Anakreon’s Grab (Anacreon’s grave) is an elegy to the memory of the ancient Greek poet of love and revelry. The garlands bedecking his grave are lovingly painted by gentle cascades of harmonic colour in the piano.

Ob der Koran von Ewigkeit sie? (Has the Koran existed for all time?) marks a rare incursion on the part of German art music into the field of Islamic theology, if only in jest. The rhetorical question stridently posed in unison by voice and piano as the work opens finds a blasphemous answer more congenial to both as it ends: it is better to face God tipsy than sober.

The final trio of lieder expands, in ever more exuberant fashion, on the pleasures of drink. Trinken müssen wir alle sein! (We must all be drunk!) is a rousing drinking song with the swinging arms of flagon-holding pub patrons vividly imitated by the rocking rhythms of the piano accompaniment. The march-like fervour of So lang man nüchtern ist (As long as we are sober) has an ironic cabaret-like feel, while Sie haben wegen der Trunkenkeit (They accuse me of drunkenness) mournfully expands the definition of inebriation to include the effects of love and poetry, with the implicit moral at the end: it’s all good. All hell breaks loose in the final song, Was in der Schenke waren heute (What a commotion at the inn), a raucous evocation of an alcohol-fuelled pub fight with a manically pulsating piano ostinato to rival Schubert’s Erlkönig.

Donald G. Gíslason