CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Song Continues...Duo Recital

Weill Recital Hall
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 5:30 PM

Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-Soprano
Kelly Markgraf, Baritone
Steven Blier, Piano

MAHLER "Der Schildwache Nachtlied"
MAHLER "Ablösung im Sommer"
ZEMLINSKY "Altdeutsches Minnelied," Op. 2
MAHLER "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen"
R. STRAUSS "Frühlingsfeier," Op. 56, No. 5
IVES "Berceuse"
MAHLER "Scheiden und Meiden"
WEILL "Sailor's Tango"
WEILL "One Life to Live"
WEILL "Complainte de la Seine"
WEILL "Wie lange noch?"
WEILL "How Can You Tell an American?"
KERN "I'm So Busy"
KERN "Make Believe"

A program of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall in partnership with The Marilyn Horne Foundation

Professional Training Workshops are made possible, in part, by Mr. and Mrs. Nicola Bulgari and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

Program Notes:

Des Knaben Wunderhorn in Austria, Germany, and America

One of the most influential works of German Romantic literature is Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) of 1806–1808, an anthology of German folk poems compiled (and occasionally embellished and emended ) by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. The Wunderhorn of the title is actually a magical cornucopia, spilling forth riches; certainly it bore musical riches, as numerous composers were drawn to this collection for song texts, from Felix Mendelssohn to Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, Johannes Brahms, and—most notably—Gustav Mahler.

Among the 20-plus Wunderhorn songs Mahler composed at different times between 1892 and 1901 is “Der Schildwache Nachtlied.” Mahler grew up in a Moravian town whose garrison band concerts he loved as a child, and therefore his songs include what we now call “military nocturnes”—night-pieces filled with bugle calls, fanfares, and marches. Mahler also loved dialogue-songs; here, the contrast between love and war could not be more starkly drawn, as stirring military strains alternate with exquisite invitations to love.

“Ablösung im Sommer” is one of what Mahler called the “Humoresken” in his Wunderhorn songs. In ironic, tongue-in-cheek fashion, it is only when the cuckoo is dead and gone that the nightingale can beguile us.

Zemlinsky, with numerous ties to other “greats” in turn-of-century Vienna (Arnold Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde, and Zemlinsky loved Alma Schindler, who would serially marry Gustav Mahler, Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel), emigrated to the United States after Austria’s annexation to Germany in 1938 and died in exile near New York four years later. The ebullient love song “Altdeutsches Minnelied” is an early work, stylistically indebted to Brahms but already showing signs of a personal musical language.

“Wo die schöne Trompeten blasen” is another of Mahler’s military nocturnes. Ghostly fanfares, spectral drum-rolls, and dissonance-laden bugle calls fill the accompaniment of this dialogue between a maiden and the ghost of her dead soldier-fiancé. The intensity of their love is evident in the beauty of their songs to one another, including a slow waltz of heartbreaking purity and longing.

“I like my songs best,” Richard Strauss once said to the great singer Hans Hotter; given Strauss’s devotion to opera, one takes the statement with a grain of salt, but it is true that his long compositional career is framed by songwriting on either side. “Für fünfzehn Pfennige” is Strauss in comic mode, doing a turn with the Lied im Volkston (“folksong-like art-song”). In this dialogue between a would-be suitor (a mere clerk) and a girl on the prowl for a lover, the refrain changes meaning from verse to verse, depending on the speaker and the context.

Turn-of-century Yale music professor Horatio Parker often assigned the setting of German and French poetry to his students, including the brilliant, idiosyncratic Charles Ives. The date of “Berceuse” is unknown: Whether it was created before Ives’s graduation in 1898 is a mystery, but certainly this brief, pretty song has all the hallmarks of a Parker assignment, adapted some 20 years later.

We close our group of Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs as we began—with Mahler. The irresistibly ebullient music of “Scheiden und Meiden” at its beginning darkens briefly for the invocation of infant mortality in the third stanza and then reverts to exuberant energy at the end.


A Cosmopolitan Genius

Kurt Weill’s compositional career is divided into two phases: his life in Germany until 1933 and his life in America thereafter. The son of a cantor in Dessau, he studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Philipp Jarnach at the Prussian Academy of the Arts and composed such extraordinary works as Mahagonny to texts by Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Three-Penny Opera), and Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) before the Nazi seizure of power made it impossible for him to remain in his native country. Once in America, he transformed himself into a composer for Broadway musicals and movies, including works that required considerable courage to tackle.

When the Kurt Weill—Bertolt Brecht melodrama-with-songs Happy End was first performed in Berlin in 1929, it was a flop; its revival in English in 1977 with Meryl Streep fared only somewhat better. But songs extracted from it have long been popular, including “Surabaya Johnny” and “Sailor’s Tango.” These sailors are hard-driving, godless types, but they are awestruck—both wonder and horror are at work—by the blue sea at song’s end.

The musical Lady in the Dark tells the story of Liza Elliott, the unhappy editor of a fashion magazine who is undergoing psychoanalysis. “One Life to Live” is a duet sung by Liza and the gay fashion photographer Russell Paxton in Act I; Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye were the original performers.

Maurice Magre, who wrote the words for “Complainte de la Seine,” was a colorful character; a Bohemian opium addict in his youth, he later gravitated to esoteric spiritualist groups (Madame Blavatsky and ashrams). In Weill’s setting of Magre’s poem, the River Seine sings a lament for all the corpses of the poor, insane, and desperate in its depths, to the rhythmic backdrop of a bitter, inexorable funeral march in the piano.

Banned during the Third Reich, satirical writer Walter Mehring, like Weill, fled Germany for America. “Wie lange noch?” is a song of utmost torment in love. “When will I tell you goodbye? How much longer? How much longer?”, the unnamed woman sings to rhythmic patterns and harmonies that could only be by Weill.

“How Can You Tell an American?” comes from Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s musical Knickerbocker Holiday, a romantic comedy / thinly veiled allegory equating the New Deal with fascism. In its original context, this duet is sung by the young romantic lead Brom Broek (an American individualist) and the narrator Washington Irving; the kernel of the drama comes from one of this American writer’s tales in Father Knickerbocker’s Stories. To be American, they declare, is to be rebellious, iconoclastic, to resist governments and judges and any “governmental plan.”


More Glories of Broadway

Jerome Kern, the son of two German Jews, wrote some 700 songs and numerous Broadway musicals. “I’m So Busy” comes from his witty 1917 musical Have a Heart, written for the Princess Theatre in New York, which specialized in intimate, small-cast, low-budget shows.

In 1925, Kern met Oscar Hammerstein II, his lifelong friend and collaborator; they wrote Show Boat two years after their initial meeting. Based on a novel by Edna Ferber, it introduced serious themes of racism and miscegenation onto the stage. “Make Believe” is first sung by the characters Gaylord Ravenal, a handsome riverboat gambler, and Magnolia Hawks, the daughter of the show-boat captain, shortly after they meet in Act I; here, Hammerstein and Kern establish the contrast between the rose-colored, make-believe world of young love and the harsh realities of life. In Act II, Ravenal sings it again to his little girl, just before he deserts her and Magnolia because of his compulsive gambling.

—Susan Youens

© 2010 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

More Information:

As part of The Song Continues ..., a festival celebrating the art of vocal performance, singers from the Marilyn Horne Foundation perform in duo recitals in Weill Recital Hall on January 19 and January 20, 2010.

Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-Soprano
Sasha Cooke, Mezzo-Soprano

Among her exciting appearances last season, Sasha Cooke sang at the Metropolitan Opera in the role of Kitty Oppenheimer in the New York premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, and sang the same role with the English National Opera in her European debut. She sings Handel’s Messiah with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and with the Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall, and Bernstein’s Opening Prayer with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. In April 2009, Ms. Cooke was presented by Young Concert Artists in the Irene Diamond gala concert at Lincoln Center, performing Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. In summer 2008, she appeared as Olga in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin with the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv. Ms. Cooke won First Prize in the 2007 Young Concert Artists International Auditions and holds the Lindemann Vocal Chair of YCA. She made her Washington, DC, debut in the Young Concert Artists Series at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in September 2007 and her New York debut at Zankel Hall in October 2007. Ms. Cooke was a member of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program of the Metropolitan Opera. Her recent performances have included Bastianello by John Musto and William Bolcom’s Lucrezia with the New York Festival of Song, the Marilyn Horne Foundation’s 2007 Gala at Zankel Hall, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor with the Mozart Academy of San Luis Obispo, and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky with the Brazos Valley Symphony Orchestra.

Kelly Markgraf, Baritone
Kelly Markgraf, Baritone

In fall 2009, Kelly Markgraf sang Masetto in Christopher Alden’s new production of Don Giovanni at New York City Opera. He recently completed his tenure at the Juilliard Opera Center, where his work last season included the roles of Mamoud in a staged concert of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer conducted by the composer, and Ford in Verdi’s Falstaff in a production directed by Stephen Wadsworth and conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson. In spring 2009, Mr. Markgraf was part of Ken Noda’s Winterreise project at Juilliard. In fall 2008, he performed in the all-Bernstein program conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas that opened Carnegie Hall’s season and was nationally televised. He also debuted with Pittsburgh Opera as Ragged Man in Ricky Ian Gordon’s The Grapes of Wrath, a role he created at Minnesota Opera in 2007. In 2008, as a second-year apprentice at Santa Fe Opera, he sang the role of the Bosun in Paul Curran’s production of Billy Budd under the baton of Edo de Waart. His 2010 season includes the Count in Le nozze di Figaro at the Crested Butte Music Festival and Escamillo in Carmen at Pittsburgh Opera (company debut). He will sing the Brahms Requiem and Paul Moravec’s Songs of Love and War with Princeton Pro Musica, Schumann’s Dichterliebe at the La Jolla Music Festival with Ken Noda, and returns to Opera Omaha in 2011 for the title role in Don Giovanni. Mr. Markgraf’s honors include the Grand Prize in the Opera Index Competition, awards from the Giulio Gari Foundation and the Licia Albanese Puccini Foundation, and a Richard F. Gold Career Grant.

Steven Blier, Piano
Steven Blier, Piano

Steven Blier is Artistic Director of the New York Festival of Song, which he co-founded in 1988 with Michael Barrett. Since the festival’s inception, he has programmed, performed, translated, and annotated over 100 vocal recitals with wide-ranging repertoire. Mr. Blier also enjoys an eminent career as an accompanist and vocal coach. In concert with Renée Fleming, he has performed throughout North America and Europe. His collaboration with Cecilia Bartoli began in 1994, and has included an appearance at Carnegie Hall where Mr. Blier played both piano and harpsichord. He has also worked with Samuel Ramey, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Susan Graham, Frederica von Stade, Jessye Norman, Wolfgang Holzmair, Susanne Mentzer, Sylvia McNair, José van Dam, and Arlene Augér. A champion of American music, Mr. Blier has premiered works by John Corigliano, Paul Moravec, Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, John Musto, Richard Danielpour, Tobias Picker, Robert Beaser, Lowell Liebermann, and Lee Hoiby.

His discography includes the premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles (Koch International), which won a Grammy Award; the NYFOS discs of Blitzstein, Gershwin, and German Lieder (Unquiet Peace); Gershwin’s Lady Be Good! (Nonesuch Records); four albums of songs by Charles Ives in partnership with baritone William Sharp (Albany Records); and first recordings of music by Busoni and Borodin with cellist Dorothy Lawson (Koch International). In October 1999, New World Records issued the Grammy-nominated premiere recording of Ned Rorem’s full-length song cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen, commissioned by NYFOS and the Library of Congress. His latest release is Spanish Love Songs (Bridge Records), recorded live at the Caramoor International Music Festival with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Joseph Kaiser, and Michael Barrett. Later this year, Bridge Records will release the world premiere recording of Bastianello (John Musto) and Lucrezia (William Bolcom)—a double bill of one-act comedies set to librettos by Mark Campbell.

Mr. Blier is on the faculty of The Juilliard School. As a broadcaster and writer, he has appeared both as an essayist and a quizmaster on the Metropolitan Opera broadcast intermissions. His writings on opera have been featured in recent issues of Opera News Magazine and the Yale Review. He has recently joined the artistic team at New York City Opera, where he is a casting consultant.