Concert programme — Schubert, Schumann & Grieg — Concert Programmes

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Five Lieder

Der Einsame D800 (1825)

Der Musensohn D764 (1822)

Im Frühling D882 (1826)

Der Geistertanz D116 (1814)

Der Zwerg D771 (1822)

Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

Dichterliebe Op.48 (1840)

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai

Aus meinen Tränen

Die Rose, die Lilie

Wenn ich in deine Augen sah

Ich will meine Seele tauchen

Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome

Ich grolle nicht

Und wüssten’s die Blumen

Das ist en Flöten und Geigen

Hör ich das Liedchen klingen

Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen

Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen

Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet

Allmächtlich im Traume

Aus alten Märchen

Die alten bösen Lieder

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Six Songs

Fra Monte Pincio Op.39 No.1 (1870)

Dereinst, Gedanke mein Op.48 No.2 (1848)

Zwei braune Augen Op.5 No.1 (1864)

Til En Op.59 No.4 (1894)

Guten Morgen Op.21 No.2 (1872)

En Drom Op.48 No.6 (1848)

Gerald Finzi (1901–56)

Earth and Air and Rain Op.16 (1928–1935)

Summer Schemes (1932–5)

When I set out for Lyonnesse (1935)

Waiting both (1929)

The Phantom (1932)

So I have fared (1928)

Rollicum-Rorum (1932)

To Lizbie Browne (1932)

The Clock of the Years (1932)

In a Churchyard (1932)

Proud Songsters (?1932)

It takes a very special kind of genius to make smugness attractive. Smug, in his solitary fireside contment, the protagonist of Schubert’s Der Einsame certainly is. And yet, as he sings his modestly tuneful vocal line over a rhythmically unambitious succession of quavers in the pianist’s right hand, his complacency seems positively enviable. Perhaps it is the voice of the cricket, whose charming little motif rises from low in the left hand in the introduction to a higher profile in the last stanza, that does the trick. Goethe’s travelling musician in Der Musensohn, on the other hand, is animated by ceaseless, dancing activity, physical exhilaration over-riding his inner longing. One of the most beautiful of all spring songs, Im Frühling is so relaxed that it is almost indolent – or it is until memories of lost love intrude so painfully that the harmonies are, temporarily, chilled into the minor and the blissful piano melody is displaced by stabbing syncopations.

The 17-year-old composer’s spectral setting of the Matthisson’s macabre Geistertanz effects a timely change of atmosphere before Der Zwerg, one of Schubert’s greatest and at the same time most disturbing songs. A dramatically articulated ballad of erotic dominance and submission, Der Zwerg is driven throughout by a turbulent ostinato in the right hand of the piano part, leaving the left hand to assume the dramatic function of articulating the dread three-note rhythm that introduces the unforgiving Dwarf and doubles in heavy octaves his sentence of death on the Queen.

A reading of the 16 short poems Schumann selected from Heine’s Buch der Lieder for his Dichterliebe cycle presents a progression from dawning love through love requited to love lost and the anguish that goes with it. Schumann’s setting tells a somewhat different story. Blissfully happy and prolifically inspired though he was in the first months of his marrige to Clara Wieck in September 1840 – he wrote nearly 140 songs before the end of the year – he was clearly still profoudly affected by the experience of being rejected by her, on the insistence of her obdurate father, four years earlier. Ich grolle nicht, the turning point in the Dichterliebe cycle, is a direct reflection of that situation.

Far from being full of the joys of spring, as one might expect, Im wunderschonen Monat Mai is set in wistful, almost elegiac minor harmones by a composer who knew only too well what falling in love could mean. The short piano prelude says it all. Expressive though the vocal line unfailingly is in Dichterliebe, it is the piano that consistently tells the truth – as in the implacable cathedral-organ ending of Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome or the tumultuous postlude to Und wüssten’s die Blumen. It is the piano that remembers the beloved’s song, her melody so elusively placed off the beat, in Hör ich das Liedchen klingen. The most poignant piano postlude of all, that of Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen, is recalled after a magical modulation from the funereal harmonies of Die alten bösen Lieder to end the cycle in tender reconciliation.

Grieg found his true voice as a song composer only when he discovered the lyrical potential of Norwegian, rather than German, poetry. He had a particularly fruitful relationship with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, whose Fra Monte Pincio inspired what proved to be one of his most successful songs in Norwegian, in spite of its Roman settings and its skittish little episdoes in the popular Italian style. Althugh he rarely set German verse after his student years, he did assemble a set of Sechs Lieder, including the harmonically sophisticated Dereinst, Gedanke mein, for the Swedish soprano Ellen Gulbranson, who had a taste for the German repertoire. The contrastingly simple Zwei braune Augen is a German translation of To brune øje from Grieg’s first set of songs in a Scandinavian language, Hjertets melodier, to words by Hans Christan Andersen.

Grieg wrote two sets of songs to words by his friend John Paulsen with whom, though a poet of nothing like the stature of Bjørnson or Ibsen, he felt such an affinity that could invest a slender little poem like Til En with surprising passion. Guten Morgen is another German translation of a song originally written in Norwegian, God morgen, which is a particularly attractive setting of words from Bjørnson’s Fiskerjenten (The Fisher Maiden). In compensation, En Drom is a Norwegian version of one of the German songs, Ein Traum to words by Bodenstedt, from the same collection as Dereinst, Gedanke mein. In Norwegian or German, it is an irresistibly spontaneous musical inspiration.

Finzi’s collection of Hardy songs, Earth and Air and Rain, is not a cycle in the same sense as Schumann’s Dichterliebe is a cycle. There is no narrative thread of any kind between them and there is no common theme, either musical or poetic. Even so, they belong together for a better reason than that they are all to words by the composer’s favourite poet. The ten songs cohere by virtue of their carefully chosen proportions and, although there is a link between the first and last, by the contrasts rather than the similarities of their subject matter. It is not at all unlikely that one of the latest songs in the cycle, the joyful When I set out for Lyonnesse, was written specially to offset the metaphysical thinking of one of the earliest, Waiting both. The pianist’s marching rhythms in the first of them are directly opposed to the starlit sonorities of the other, suspended near the top of the keyboard before descending heavily to earth. In much the same way the drinking-song jollity of Rollicum-Rorum precedes the lyrical regrets of To Lizbie Browne – two contrasting but characteristic examples, incidentally, of Finzi’s uncannily accurate musical reflection of the rhythms and pitch inflections of Hardy’s verse. The title of the collection comes from the last line of the last song, Proud Songsters – which not only echoes the bird-song theme of the opening Summer Schemes but also, given its comparatively extended piano prelude and postlude, is endowed with the proportions to make a conclusion to the cycle.