The Program
WOLFGANG AMADEUS
MOZART
“Das Veilchen,” K. 476
In flower symbolism, violets were
emblematic of faithfulness and modesty. We might expect the blossom in “Das
Veilchen”—Mozart’s only song to a text by
Goethe—to be symbolic of a maiden; instead, the violet pines for an unheeding
young shepherdess who tramples it underfoot. Mozart tracks every nuance of the
violet’s innocence, yearning, and tragic fate.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANZ
SCHUBERT
“Viola,” D. 786
The handsome, half-Swedish dilettante
Franz von Schober was perhaps Schubert’s closest friend, and his flower ballad
about trampled innocence and wasted potential horrifyingly corresponds to
Schubert’s situation in 1823. Newly ill with syphilis, Schubert understood the
delineation of seduction and shame dressed in horticultural garb in Schober’s
long poem. This rich, lengthy song is among the many big projects that Schubert
composed this year.
—Susan
Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
CLAUDE
DEBUSSY
“Apparition”
Claude Debussy’s “Apparition”
was written for Marie-Blanche Vasnier—the
young wife of a Parisian architect and an amateur coloratura soprano—with whom
he was infatuated in the mid-1880s. The poem by Stéphane Mallarmé had
just been published the previous year in 1883; Debussy, who was among the most
literary of French musicians, produced an embroidered
effusion of melody to match Mallarmé’s bouquets of stars and the “fairy with
her bright cap.”
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
JOSEPH
SCHWANTNER
“Black Anemones”
Much of the work by Pulitzer
Prize–winning composer Joseph Schwantner has drawn influence from the
Latin-American surrealist tradition in poetry, including “Black
Anemones.” This song is set to text by the
Columbian-American poet Agueda Pizarro. Pizarro’s father was a friend of
Federico García Lorca—her way of jumping from image to image is reminiscent of
Lorca’s style. Schwantner’s love of coloristic sonorities, gypsy-like phrases,
ecstatic melismas (many notes sung on one syllable of text) are on display in
this extended song.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
FRANZ
SCHUBERT
“Prometheus,” D. 674; “Der Zwerg,” D. 771
In Greek mythology, the Titan
Prometheus stole fire from Zeus to give to mortals and was punished by being
bound to a rock in the Caucasus, where each day an eagle plucked out his liver.
What drew Goethe to the myth centuries later in 1773 was the hero’s championship
of humanity against the gods. Schubert’s setting of “Prometheus”—whose
formal novelties and harmonic boldness match the great German writer’s
audacity—dates from 1819, when the composer was also challenging patriarchal
authorities.
Dwarves appear in literature as symbols of
alienation, and they have long been associated with perverse passion. In
the horror ballade “Der Zwerg,”
a young, beautiful queen has a dwarf for a lover; the two are obsessed with
each other. However, when she forsakes him for the king, the dwarf punishes her
for her treachery by taking her out to sea and killing her by mysterious means;
her body sinks in the waters. For Schubert, this poem evoked his complicated
love-hate feelings for Beethoven: We hear warped versions of the “fate” motif
from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
CHARLES IVES
“Charlie Rutlage”; “Songs My Mother Taught Me”; “The Circus Band”
Charles Ives
was an American original, the inventor of a unique musical language. His immortal statement that “all the wrong notes are right” sums up the
resistance he encountered during his lifetime.
Premiered
in 1932 by baritone Hubert Linscott with Aaron Copland at the Yaddo artist
colony in Saratoga Springs, “Charlie Rutlage”
concludes the group of seven Ives songs. In the middle of this unique cowboy
song, the narration details the death of Charlie when his horse falls on him:
The rhythmic recitation culminates with fistfuls of cluster chords in the
piano.
For “Songs My Mother Taught Me,”
Ives discovered a text used by Antonín
Dvorák in his Gypsy Melodies, op.
55; this nostalgic poem was translated into English by Natalia Macfarren. Ives
makes a distinction between memories of the past—which frame the sections of
the song—and the present moment in which the singer teaches her own children
those same songs.
Ives vividly evokes the sounds of the circus with thumping drums and quickstep
rhythms in “The Circus Band.”
Amidst the bustle and booming noise is the nostalgia of small boys’ fascination
with the beautiful “lady in pink.”
—Susan Youens
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation