The Program
GUSTAV MAHLER
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
Mahler began the long, drawn-out
process of fashioning and refining the four songs of his first song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen in 1883,
when he was a young conductor in Kassel, Germany. He probably acquired a new
edition of the early 19th-century folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn when he moved to Kassel and fell in love with
the singer Johanna Richter in 1883. She broke off the relationship a year
later, and the songs’ emotion may have been derived from the composer’s
personal experience.
At the start of “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht,” we hear a
wedding dance with mocking overtones in the piano; the
dance music becomes funereal when the sad singer takes it up. The blue flowers—one
of the prime emblems of Romanticism—and the birds sing of Nature’s beauty, but
the persona will have none of it. “Ging
heut’ morgen übers Feld” would later give rise to the first
movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony; here again, Nature offers its beauty to
the fatalistic persona who, in the final passage, rejects all such
blandishments.
The third song, “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,”
is the most vehement of the four. The eerie moment of calm at the words “Wenn
ich im gelben Felde geh’” incites the final passionate outburst before the
music descends by degrees into a pit of despair. In the last song, “Die
zwei blauen Augen,” Mahler recycles the metonymic
image of the sweetheart’s eyes and the lovers’ linden tree from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANZ LISZT
“Die Loreley”; “Oh! quand je dors”; “O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst”;
“Mignon’s Lied”
“My orphaned songs,” Franz Liszt once called
his repertory of art songs while expressing the hope that singers might take
these works under their wings. A collaborator with some of Europe’s best
singers—including French tenor Adolphe Nourrit and husband-wife duo Feodor and
Rosa von Milde—Liszt used song as a laboratory in which to experiment with
“music of the future.”
“Die Loreley”
was a mythical figure invented in the early-19th century by Romantic writer
Clemens Brentano. A descendant of Homer’s sirens, this golden-haired archetype
of female eroticism sits atop a rocky promontory on the Rhine River and lures sailors to shipwreck with her beautiful
singing. The poet Heinrich Heine would subsequently write a poem about
her—Liszt was so entranced by the text that he set it to music five times.
The worshipful lover who speaks in Victor Hugo’s
“Oh!
quand je dors” begs his beloved to appear to him
as Laura once did to Petrarch, the 14th-century creator of some of the world’s
most profound love poetry. Liszt sets these ardent words in one of his most
lyrical songs; the singer’s last phrase draws us upward into paradise.
Some will recognize the similarities between the mellifluous “O
lieb, so lang du lieben kannst” and the popular solo piano work,
“Liebesträume, No. 3,” S. 541. The song is set to a poem by Ferdinand
Freiligrath, who was famous in the 1840s for his rabble-rousing political
verse.
The character Mignon in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was kidnapped
from her native Italy by a troupe of
traveling acrobats and subsequently rescued
by the title character Wilhelm, with whom she falls in love. In “Mignon’s Lied,” Goethe tells us that she sings with “a certain solemn
grandeur, as if ... she were imparting something of importance.” Liszt imbues
his setting with all the passionate intensity of late Romantic music.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANCIS
POULENC
Banalités
Francis Poulenc first met Guillaume
Apollinaire in late 1916; the composer, however, had already been fascinated
with the great avant-garde poet’s verse for several years. In 1950, the
composer told an interviewer, “I find myself able to compose music only to poetry
with which I feel total contact—a contact transcending mere admiration. This
quality is one I felt for the first time when I encountered the poems of
Guillaume Apollinaire. That was in 1912, when I was 13.” The poet died in the
great flu pandemic of 1918 when Poulenc was still a teenager, but his
importance in Poulenc’s life can hardly be overstated: By 1954, the composer
had set 34 songs to Apollinaire’s poetry.
Written in 1940, this wartime set of five songs was composed shortly after
Poulenc was demobilized as the result of the disgraceful treaty between
Philippe Pétain (France’s head of state) and Adolf Hitler. Banalités is one of Poulenc’s most popular works; we encounter him
in five different, but very characteristic moods.
“Chanson d’Orkenise”
is a mock folksong; nevertheless, it is filled with sophisticated nuances. The
song is about a wanderer and a wagon driver—the former leaves his heart behind
in the fictional town of Orkenise and the latter is bringing his heart there.
“Hôtel”
is a musical display of utter languor. The song
evokes the image of lying alone in a hotel room in a state of complete
torpor, smoking a pungent French cigarette.
Apollinaire’s “Fagnes de Wallonie”
features an intrinsic musicality in the poem’s blend of sounds and rhythms: “Nord
/ Nord / La vie s’y tord / En arbres forts / Et tors / La vie y mord / La mort / À belles dents / Quand bruit
le vent.” Poulenc designs music to carry and flow around these verbal
melodies.
The whirlwind of a waltz-song “Voyage à Paris”
captures Poulenc’s undiluted joy upon returning to the city he loved most. “For
me,” he wrote, “Paris often brings tears to my eyes and music to my ears.”
Poulenc and French baritone Pierre Bernac often performed this song as a mildly
malicious encore at the end of recitals.
In contrast to the madcap Parisian gaiety,
“Sanglots” features Poulenc’s philosophical voice, appropriate
for Apollinaire’s brooding reflection on tragic love. The poet reflects on how
people throughout the ages and from all corners of the earth have suffered and
died for love, from Ultima Thule (a mythical island in the North Sea) to Ophir
(a fabled ancient region celebrated for its gold and gems). We, in turn, become
like the dead who endured this pain before us. If these reflections are not
comforting, they are beautiful when dressed in such poignant musical garb.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation