Strauss: The Complete Songs, Vol. 7

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艺人: Richard Strauss
语种: 德语
厂牌: Hyperion Records
发行时间: 2015年03月30日
专辑类别: 录音室专辑

专辑介绍

Recording details: Various dates

All Saints' Church, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom

Produced by Mark Brown

Engineered by Julian Millard

Just before the last Christmas of the nineteenth century, on 8 December 1899, Richard Strauss composed a little song called Weihnachtsgefühl. Unpublished in his lifetime, it is nevertheless a tiny gem, one of those one-page miracles that crop up every so often in the song repertoire—probably the greatest examples being the settings of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied (‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’’) by Schubert and many other composers including Schumann, with whose rapt setting Strauss’s little song has much in common. It was eventually published in the collected edition of 1964, together with the eighteen Jugendlieder also included in this volume of our series; but even without the date inscribed on the manuscript, the mature composer’s hand is discernible in such felicities as the warm shift to G flat major on the word ‘Seligkeit’ and the halo of light created by the piano’s descending treble at ‘Weben um den Weihnachtsbaum’.

Strauss’s very first Lied—in fact his very first attempt at composition—was also a Christmas song, Weihnachtslied, to a poem by Schubart, most famous as the poet of Schubert’s Die Forelle. The six-year-old composer was just able to ‘paint in the notes’ (as he put it), but because he ‘could not write small enough’ the words were inscribed into the manuscript by his mother. Melody and accompaniment are both simple and unadorned, but the harmonization is far from elementary, with an unexpectedly touching modulation to G sharp minor at the end of the first couplet.

Strauss’s next effort was a setting of a poem by Ludwig Uhland, Einkehr, to which he would return many years later in a much more elaborate version (recorded in volume 5 of this series). It has a cheerful melody in the outdoor key of A major, and perhaps a touch of schoolboy pride in having discovered the so-called ‘German sixth’—the little harmonic twist that occurs before the final cadence in each verse. Winterreise, to another poem by Uhland, though brief, is more pianistically ambitious in its use of piano tremolandi to create dramatic atmosphere. No doubt impressed by theatrical scores such as Weber’s Der Freischütz, to which his parents had introduced him at the opera house, Strauss employs the same feature to even greater effect in Der müde Wanderer, composed some two years later in around 1873 to a poem by Hoffmann von Fallersleben. This song also shows the influence of Schumann (in the syncopated left-hand rhythm of the opening) and Schubert (in the delicate, bell-like right-hand figure of the second section).

Another text by von Fallersleben inspired the carefree Husarenlied, a cheerful little genre piece complete with strutting fanfares and a little leap to attention (‘Trara!’) after each couplet. Relatively conventional this may be, but Der Fischer, composed after a four-year gap when Strauss concentrated on instrumental pieces, is something else. An extended and dramatic ballad in several sections on a famous poem by Goethe, it suggests the now twelve-year-old composer has been absorbing the examples of Schubert and Loewe—the most likely models for the flowing, if four-square, triplets that set the watery scene—but has added an operatic element all his own, à la Weber, in the impassioned melody with which the mermaid clinches her seduction of the hapless fisherman: ‘Lockt dich der tiefe Himmel nicht …’.

In other songs of this period Strauss seems to alternate between relatively naïve, folk-song-like settings and attempts at greater depth and atmosphere. Die Drossel is an example of the former (though it begins with a highly original cadenza for the piano to represent the thrush’s song); Lass ruhn die Toten is an example of the latter, successfully invoking time and place, especially in the broken, silence-filled gestures of the piano introduction.

Schubert and Loewe are again evoked in Lust und Qual, to a typically wry little Goethe poem in which a young fisher-lad tangles with a shepherdess, only to find that he is the one who is caught in the net. The strophic setting, with its 6/8 metre and beguiling turns of harmony and melody, has something of the pastoral quality of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, sympathetically backing up the story without overstating its case.

A year later in 1878, Strauss tackled another extended ballad in the manner of Der Fischer. Theodor Körner’s Spielmann und Zither is a histrionic tale about a minstrel who, waking from a daydream of his long-dead beloved, discovers that his zither is being carried away by the waves. Like the Fischer, the Spielmann too ends up in a watery grave, but here Strauss’s rather four-square setting, though highly dramatic and pictorially vivid in the elaborate piano figuration of the opening and the Schumannesque two-handed tremolandi of the stormier sections, never quite manages to transcend the silent-movie quality of Körner’s melodramatic text.

The little Wiegenlied that follows has of course nothing to do with the magisterial Dehmel setting of the same name in Opus 41 (recorded in volume 1)—once more the poem is by Hoffmann von Fallersleben. But one can nevertheless hear the young Strauss beginning to find surer ground. Here are the beginnings of that sweetness of tone and sense of interplay between voice and piano that would become the hallmark of so many of his songs. Abend- und Morgenrot is an exercise in irony in the pietistic tradition of German folk poetry (the kind that Gustav Mahler was to bring off far better in his Knaben Wunderhorn songs). A simple Schubertian switch from major to minor and back again underlines the story, in which a fly sits in the sunset cleaning its wings, only to continue unmoved next morning when the dawn reveals a girl lying dead in the chamber. Im Walde is another genre piece of outdoor jollity complete with hunting horns and 6/8 rhythms, with an accompanying figuration not unlike that of Brahms’s Botschaft.

The next three songs share the designation ‘Opus 10’ in the youthful composer’s cataloguing, indicating a gradual maturing but of course not to be confused with the eight von Gilm songs of Strauss’s brilliant song-publishing debut. Nebel sets a poem by Nikolaus Lenau, whose writings inspired Strauss’s first great success, the tone poem Don Juan. It is a not unsuccessful attempt at echt-German Romanticism, dark in colour and unrelieved in its melancholy, underpinned by a newly independent bass-line in the manner of Schubert. Soldatenlied, in a similar vein to Husarenlied (and with words by the same poet), also shows an advance in expression, its middle section nicely suggesting the young soldier’s ambivalent emotions at going off to war. With its rippling semiquavers, Ein Röslein zog ich mir im Garten is in a mode that Strauss would revisit in Die erwachte Rose, one of the three songs he sent to his friend Lotti Speyer in 1883 (recorded in volume 6). Here the piano-writing has become more sophisticated in the way it weaves itself around the voice part, and the change from major to minor in the last verse is unaffectedly touching.

Hitherto almost all of these songs would have been composed for Strauss’s aunt Johanna to sing. Waldesgesang was the first of his songs to be performed in public, together with five other Geibel settings which are sadly no longer extant. They were all composed in 1879, around the time of Strauss’s fifteenth birthday, and performed two years later by Cornelia Meysenheim, a singer at the Munich Court Opera. Strauss’s sister (another Johanna) recorded with pride young Richard’s success, and the arrival the following morning of a laurel wreath complete with blue bow and golden inscription. For the first time in a song of this kind, Strauss really allows the soprano voice to soar above the stave, especially at the climax of verse three, a passage involving some of his most intricate piano-writing to date. According to a letter from Strauss’s father, the song also originally included a number of extravagant modulations, but these were pruned severely, perhaps under paternal pressure. Given the mature Strauss’s predilection for mesmerizing harmonic shifts, it is a pity that the original version no longer exists.

There is one other song from this period in the Boosey & Hawkes complete edition. It provides a modest though welcome addition to the small repertoire of songs with obbligato instrument: Strauss’s father Franz was a distinguished horn player for whom he would go on to compose two fine concertos, and Alphorn (composed in 1878 to a poem by Justinus Kerner) has a beguiling horn part. While hardly sounding like a real alphorn, it was no doubt performed with great satisfaction by the proud father, to whom it was dedicated. If the idiom is hardly adventurous, even for the young Strauss, that is probably accounted for by a desire not to go beyond the E flat major 6/8 dictated by conventional horn-writing.

At his death, Strauss left behind him not only these eighteen Jugendlieder but also a number of other ‘works without opus’. These include the lovely Weihnachtsgefühl, and four epigrammatic (one extremely so) settings of Goethe, each composed for a special purpose or occasion—on the back of a dinner-menu, so to speak. The first three were all taken from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. Although composed at different times, together with the fourth, Xenion (Epigram), they make a rather attractive little sequence when heard one after the other. Sinnspruch, composed in June 1919 at the request of a publisher friend, Rudolf Mosse, for inclusion in his Almanach of 1920, makes fun of people who self-importantly spin a web around themselves and then cry blue murder at the slightest touch of a new broom—characterized by criss-crossing semiquavers brushed aside by occasional sweeps in treble and bass. Durch allen Schall und Klang is a celebratory fanfare composed in 1925 for the sixtieth birthday of Strauss’s devoted friend, the writer and poet Romain Rolland. In his dedication Strauss referred to Rolland as ‘the heroic fighter against all evil powers working for the downfall of Europe’ and received a warmly gratified letter in return.

Zugemessne Rhythmen was written in 1935, in a rather more inflammatory context. In a eulogy of Hans Pfitzner, the Leipzig conductor (and Nazi sympathizer) Hermann Abendroth had sought to praise the composer of Palestrina by comparing his ‘exalted virility’ with ‘the feminine voluptuousness and torpor of sounds padded with fat’ to be found elsewhere. Another composer and conductor Peter Raabe took Strauss’s part, and in gratitude Strauss composed this fragment in which Goethe declares the need for talent continuously to find new forms. Amusingly, ‘talent’ is represented by the famous theme from the finale of Brahms’s first symphony, while Strauss, quoting first Arabella and then Tod und Verklärung, represents the restless spirit (‘selbst der Geist’). The brief postlude, of course, quotes the prelude of Wagner’s Meistersinger, the supreme portrayal of new art conquering conservatism. Lastly, Xenion, all of six bars long, is a setting of words that became known as Goethe’s credo, composed in September 1942 for the distinguished poet Gerhart Hauptmann.

Perhaps for good reasons, in his mature years Strauss shied away from setting Goethe in any more serious context, with one lovely exception: the touchingly autumnal Gefunden, Op 56 No 1 (recorded on volume 4), whose mood of marital contentment almost certainly echoed his own at the time. He had no such reservations about his childhood favourite poet Ludwig Uhland, to whom he later devoted one of his two songs for bass and orchestra (Das Tal) and a whole set of five songs, published as Opus 47. Two of the latter have already been recorded in previous volumes: Des Dichters Abendgang (volume 4), and the second version of Einkehr, already mentioned.

Of the remaining three songs from Op 47, the first two chart in very different ways a musical and psychological journey from darkness to light. Auf ein Kind begins in emotional turmoil, represented by turbulent chromatics in the piano part. However these give way to increasingly diatonic harmonies, culminating in a divinely inspired C major and an ethereal vocal line that seems literally transported by the child’s God-given innocence of worldly cares. In Rückleben, a far more extended song, the poet grieves at his beloved’s graveside to dark, brooding chords in the piano’s lowest register: but in a reverie he imagines her rising from the grave, and living her life in reverse, her youth and beauty gradually restored and returning to the joy of their first kiss, a vision clothed by Strauss in a soaring triplet-borne melody akin to that of Des Dichters Abendgang. Like many another of Strauss’s visionary songs, it begins in one key but ends in another. Interestingly, the English poet Thomas Hardy explores the same idea in The Clock of the Years, a poem memorably set to music by Gerald Finzi; but in Hardy’s case the life-in-reverse is taken to its logical conclusion, erasing all trace of the beloved’s existence, to the singer’s bitter regret.

Von den sieben Zechbrüdern could not be more different in character: at almost seven minutes it is one of Strauss’s longest songs, but goes by at an extreme pace, telling an amusing, cautionary tale about seven drinking companions who, hearing of a tavern serving exceptionally good wine, set off in search of it, but on the way get lost, first almost dying of thirst and then finding themselves drenched by rain and back where they started. Marked So schnell als möglich (‘as fast as possible’), and alternating a speedy 6/8 with a more ironically laid back 3/4, the hectic narrative makes virtuoso demands of the tenor, while affording the piano (in some of Strauss’s most brilliant and orchestral writing for the instrument) all kinds of illustrative detail, from rippling streams and crashing thunder to the white-hot chromatics of the scorching sun. After so much breathless activity, Strauss’s laconic little coda is a masterstroke.

This volume ends with another celebratory song. Sankt Michael is one of two ‘pretty songs’—as he described them—that Strauss composed in March 1942 for the fiftieth birthday of the Austrian poet Joseph Weinheber. (The other, Blick vom oberen Belvedere, is included in volume 6.) An expansive prayer to the Saint, Sankt Michael begins and ends warmly in Strauss’s heroic key of E flat major and is punctuated with cries of ‘salva nos!’. Two of the threats from which the Saint’s protection is sought are the wind from the West and the plague from the East, both amusingly depicted by a figure remarkably like that for the torrents of rain in Von den sieben Zechbrüdern. Meanwhile dragons are dispatched with martial cut and thrust, the Archangel’s splendour is celebrated in soaring lines, and the song closes to a rousing series of vocal and pianistic fanfares.

Strauss: The Complete Songs, Vol. 7

专辑介绍

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