CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Christine Schäfer
Eric Schneider

Zankel Hall
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 7:30 PM

Christine Schäfer, Soprano
Eric Schneider, Piano

PURCELL "Music for a While"
PURCELL "If Music Be the Food of Love"
PURCELL "Ah! How Sweet it is to Love"
PURCELL "An Epithalamium"
PURCELL "Sweeter than Roses"
GEORGE CRUMB "Night"
PURCELL "From Rosy Bow'rs"
PURCELL "Not all my Torments"
GEORGE CRUMB "Let it be Forgotten"
PURCELL "Crown the Altar"
GEORGE CRUMB "Wind Elegy"
PURCELL Dido's Lament from Dido and Aeneas
GEORGE CRUMB Apparition (Elegiac Songs and Vocalises on texts from Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd)

Encores:
BERG "Schliesse mir die Augen beide"
WEBERN "Dies ist ein Lied," Op.3, No. 1
SCHUBERT "Nacht und Träume," D.827

Program is approximately 1 hour, 30 minutes, including one intermission

This concert and the Pure Voice series are sponsored by the Jean & Jula Goldwurm Memorial Foundation in memory of Jula Goldwurm.

Program Notes:

Henry Purcell (1659–1695)

Henry Purcell, among the greatest of all English composers, was trained as a chorister in the Chapel Royal. After studying with composer John Blow, Purcell succeeded him in 1679 as organist of Westminster Abbey, where he would later be buried. The exile of King James II in 1688 largely ended his career at court, although he remained on the royal payroll under the joint rule of King William III and Queen Mary II. After 1690, Purcell focused on works for the theaters in London’s Drury Lane and Dorset Garden before dying unexpectedly on November 21, 1695, at age 36. He is especially famous as a song composer: Two anthologies entitled Orpheus Britannicus were published in 1698 and 1702, respectively.



George Crumb (b. 1929)

Born 270 years after Purcell, Crumb studied music at Mason College, the University of Illinois, the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, and the University of Michigan. He taught composition at the University of Pennsylvania from 1965 until his retirement 30 years later. Like Purcell, he is a deeply theatrical composer, noted for extended performance techniques and exquisite sonorities created by both traditional and non-traditional means. Among his numerous prizes are the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for Echoes of Time and the River, the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition in 2001 (Star-Child), and Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 2004.



About the Songs

In the 1690s, no play in London was considered complete without a complement of songs, dances, and instrumental music. Music for a While comes from Purcell’s incidental music for John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee’s play Oedipus. (Poet Laureate Dryden was one of the foremost poets and literary critics of Restoration England.) Alecto, with snakes for hair, is one of Greek mythology’s Furies, and we hear the serpents dropping from her head in Purcell’s melody. This composer was addicted to ground basses (a type of variation in which a bass-line or a harmonic pattern is repeated over and over while the upper parts shift and change above it).

Purcell composed three versions of Colonel Henry Heveningham’s If Music Be the Food of Love, its first line borrowed from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The first version, published in June 1692 in The Gentleman’s Journal, is the most breathless and ecstatic of the three, with panting and rising figures to tell of love’s transports.

Ah! How Sweet it is to Love is one of two musical numbers Purcell provided for John Dryden’s 1669 heroic melodrama Tyrannic Love, which recounts the martyrdom of the fictional St. Catherine of Alexandria. The role of the saint was played by Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwyn, and many 17th-century listeners would no doubt have had contemporary subtexts in mind when they heard this lively, frothy encomium to the pleasures of eroticism.

Juno, wife of Jupiter and patroness of marriage, sings An Epithalamium (A Wedding Song) in Act V of The Fairy Queen, adapted from Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Each act incorporates a masque (a festive courtly entertainment, often allegorical); this song immediately precedes the exotic Masque of Hymen, god of marriage. In it, we hear Purcell’s distinctive vocal writing, somewhere between florid recitative and arioso, with insets of tuneful melody.

Richard Norton’s tragedy of ancient Sparta, Pausanias, is no masterpiece, but Sweeter than Roses is. In the drama, it is sung to arouse the amorous desires of Pandora, Pausanias’s unfaithful mistress. Anyone not seduced by this aphrodisiac air, with its virtuosic acclamation of victorious love, is not listening.

Of his Three Early Songs, composed for his wife-to-be (pianist Elizabeth Brown), Crumb wrote:

The sins of one’s youth are often recalled with feelings of either embarrassment or nostalgia, or both, and rummaging through one’s juvenilia can be an unsettling experience. Most of the music I wrote before the early ‘60s (when I finally found my own voice) now causes me intense discomfort, although I make an exception for a few songs which I composed when I was 17 or 18. Of course, it is possible that I am simply uncritical or indulgent towards these particular early efforts—the songs certainly lack technical sophistication and originality (although a shrewd analysis might reveal a few undeveloped latent fingerprints).

Robert Southey, the poet of Night, was one of the Lake Poets and Poet Laureate of England for 30 years. Crumb’s homage to nocturnal mystery begins with crystalline sounds in the piano’s treble register and gong-like strokes in the low bass.

Thomas D’Urfey was a Restoration wit, famous for his Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, and for this writer’s three-part theatrical adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Purcell composed some of his finest songs. From Rosy Bow’rs comes from Act V, when Altsidora attempts to seduce Quixote away from his beloved Dulcinea. This ambitious mad song musically depicts the different effects of insanity—flirtatious enticement, despair, thoughts of drowning, and frenzy.

From Purcell’s Gresham manuscript (a songbook he wrote between 1692 and 1695), Not all my Torments is in his more florid, Italianate style. Never published in his lifetime, it begins in an impassioned manner and progresses through the almost manic invocation of the beloved’s scorn to the triumphal proclamation of continued love—and finally, to desolate sorrow.

Let it Be Forgotten is the first of two early Crumb settings of poems by Sara Teasdale, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1918, loved (but did not marry) poet Vachel Lindsay, and killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1933—two years after Lindsay’s own suicide. At the beginning in the piano, we hear the delicate ticking of the clock for kind Time, who will make us old and enable us to forget pain—but evidently not yet.

Of Purcell’s odes and welcome songs (multipart works to celebrate royal birthdays, arrivals, weddings, or special occasions), 24 survive. Celebrate this Festival was the fifth of six odes Purcell wrote to celebrate the birthdays of Queen Mary between 1689 and 1694; the ground-bass song, Crown the Altar, is a quietly ecstatic gem for the merger of heavenly (the bright seraphic throng) and earthly music.

In Crumb’s setting of Teasdale’s Wind Elegy, we hear the voice of the wind grieving along with the speaker. As the unknowing sun shines, the wind-piano descends in a version of the same antique chromatic descent grief-evoking heard
as the foundation of the final work by Purcell on this evening’s program.


Dido’s Great Lament

In Virgil’s epic Aeneid, the Trojan Aeneas is shipwrecked at Carthage, ruled by Queen Dido, after the fall of Troy to the Greeks. The gods call Aeneas away in order to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome, but in Nahum Tate and Purcell’s 1789 opera Dido and Aeneas, witches (probably representing the forces of Catholicism in William and Mary’s Protestant realm) part the two lovers out of sheer spite. Distraught, Dido builds a funeral pyre and commits suicide. Tate has incurred much abuse for his inept poetry, but his irregular line lengths were perfectly suited to Purcell’s flexible text-setting, and his transformation of Dido’s suicide into a Liebestod (love-death) of great nobility was inspired.

This recitative and aria is a Venetian-influenced lament, complete with the conventional ground bass pattern of a chromatic descending tetrachord (a series of notes descending by half-steps and covering the interval of a fourth). The dissonances created against the inexorable motion of the ground bass and the shattering cries of Remember me ensure that we will do just that.


An Acclamation of Death: Crumb’s Apparition

For this group of songs and vocalises (wordless melodies), Crumb extracted portions from Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, an elegy written for President Lincoln in the weeks following his assassination. The first song, The Night in Silence Under Many a Star, sets the seventh stanza of Whitman’s Death Carol—the 16th section of When Lilacs … We hear the special sonorities of Crumb’s beloved prepared piano in the zither-like plucked and strummed nature sounds of the beginning.

The second number is a vocalise evocative of summer bird calls and forest murmurs, with the singer speaking and singing into the piano for added resonance. The brief, delicate third song, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,"
links thoughts of perennial mourning with the lilacs that return each spring, however brief
their blossoming.

The fourth song, Dark Mother Always Gliding Near with Soft Feet, is a setting of two couplets (lines 9–12) from the Death Carol. This reverential invocation of death (the singer whispers with soft feet) suggests ritual and mystery. The huge leaps with which the soprano hails the dark mother seem to span the entire mystery of life and death in a single bound.

The second vocalise is harsh, primal—nature and death represented at their most shockingly violent—and it merges directly into the sixth song, Approach Strong Deliveress! (lines 13–16 of the Death Carol). Whitman’s metaphor of death as a female force who can resurrect life becomes a relentless, driving march in Crumb’s hands.

The final vocalise, Death Carol (Song of the Nightbird), is based on Whitman’s song of a hermit thrush and leads into the eighth song, Come Lovely and Soothing Death. This weightiest song of the cycle begins with a ritualistic-sounding undulation between two pitches; its rising sequence for the words in the day, in the night recalls the Evening Interlude from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. At the end, we return to the words of the first section: Death is circular, both an end and a beginning, a richer return to a universal life.

—Susan Youens

© 2010 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

More Information:

An unusually probing singer—with a pure and sensitive soprano voice—sings an unusual program. She alternates between two inimitable composers, each unique in his time, to English-language texts: Henry Purcell from the Baroque era and George Crumb from contemporary America. Both create special sound worlds, dependent on vivid musical reactions to words.

Christine Schäfer, Soprano
Christine Schäfer, Soprano

With an impressively diverse concert repertoire, Christine Schäfer enjoys a flourishing concert career with regular appearances on the major stages of Europe and America. She has collaborated with many of today’s preeminent conductors, including James Levine, Claudio Abbado, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Pierre Boulez, Christoph Eschenbach, Bernard Haitink, Christian Thielemann, and Sir Simon Rattle.

Ms. Schäfer began the 2009–2010 season with numerous concerts and recitals in Europe, including Strauss’s Four Last Songs with the Pittsburgh Symphony in Essen and Lucerne, a program of Bach cantatas in Dresden, Berg’s Der Wein and Lulu Suite with the Deutsche Sinfonie in Berlin, and Schubert’s Winterreise in Dortmund.

Opera highlights of the present season include Adele in a new production of Die Fledermaus at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, with Zubin Mehta conducting; Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera; Asteria in a new production of Handel’s Tamerlano and Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro—both at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Concert engagements this season include Britten’s Les Illuminations with the Vienna Symphony, Zemlinsky’s Lyrische Sinfonie with the San Francisco Symphony and Christoph Eschenbach, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with Daniele Gatti conducting l’Orchestre National de France. Ms. Schäfer was also recently featured in an all-Handel program with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Nicholas McGegan.

Ms. Schäfer’s recording credits include the award-winning Zemlinsky Lyrische Sinfonie on Capriccio with Eschenbach and l’Orchestre de Paris; and Apparition, her highly original Purcell and Crumb recording on Onyx Classics, which has been met with the highest of critical acclaim.

Ms. Schäfer studied at Berlin Hochschule für Musik with Professor Ingrid Figur, the late Arleen Auger, Aribert Reimann, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Sena Jurinac.

Eric Schneider, Piano
Eric Schneider, Piano

Hailing from Germany’s Bergische Land, Eric Schneider—grandson of author Albrecht Schaeffer, who emigrated to the United States in 1939—begged for piano lessons at the age of five. Music, for the youngest of four boys, provided its own special realm.

During piano studies at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, a strong passion for musical communication with the audience grew within Mr. Schneider. After winning competition prizes as a soloist, he discovered a pervasive enthusiasm for German
lied. Mr. Schneider completed his studies in vocal accompaniment with Hartmut Höll; celebrated singers Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau served as essential and inspiring teachers. He has established intensive and fruitful partnerships with singers such as Christiane Oelze, Stephan Genz, and Matthias Goerne. Numerous recordings—most recently Franz Schubert’s Winterreise with Christine Schäfer—document Mr. Schneider’s career.

Mr. Schneider’s success rests on his particular ability to facilitate the union of piano and voice intended by the great lied composers. Partnerships with outstanding singers afford him the opportunity to perfect the extraordinary range of tonal quality and ardency in his piano playing, and his artistic accomplishments have matured in a long series of lied recitals. He is now again devoting particular attention to his solo repertoire.