CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Dorothea Röschmann
Ian Bostridge
Thomas Quasthoff
Julius Drake

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Dorothea Röschmann, Soprano
Ian Bostridge, Tenor
Thomas Quasthoff, Bass-Baritone
Julius Drake, Piano

SCHUBERT "Harfenspieler I" ("Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt"), D. 478
SCHUBERT "Harfenspieler III" ("Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass"), D. 480
SCHUBERT "Harfenspieler II" ("An die Türen will ich schleichen"), D. 479
SCHUBERT "An Mignon," D. 161
SCHUBERT Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister, D. 877
·· "Mignon und der Harfner"
·· "Heiss mich nicht reden"
·· "So lasst mich scheinen"
·· "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt"
SCHUBERT "Kennst du das Land," D.321
SCHUBERT "Wie im Morgenglanze," D. 544
SCHUBERT "Grenzen der Menschheit," D. 716
SCHUBERT "Erlkönig," D.328
SCHUBERT "Die Nacht bricht bald herein," D. 846
SCHUBERT "Kantate zum Geburtstag des Sangers Johann Michael Vogl," D. 666
SCHUBERT "Der König in Thule," D. 367
SCHUBERT "Gretchen am Spinnrade," D.118
SCHUBERT "Gretchens Bitte," D. 564
SCHUBERT "Szene aus Goethes Faust" ("Dom"), D. 126
SCHUBERT "Licht und Liebe" ("Nachtgesang"), D. 352
SCHUBERT "Der Hochzeitsbraten," D. 930

Encore:
SCHUBERT Andantino from "Der Hochzeitsbraten," D. 930

Program Notes:

By Susan Youens

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)
Born January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died there November 19, 1828.

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship”) is a Bildungsroman, a genre of German novel in which a young man grows to maturity, or, in this instance, outgrows his flattering illusions at considerable cost to those around him. He is molded, as we all are, by those he encounters on his journey through life, including the mysterious Harper, whose tragic history we only learn after his suicide near the end of the novel. He was once Augustin, the son of the eccentric Marquis Cipriani in Italy; raised apart from his younger sister Sperata (her name derived from the Italian feminine noun “Speranza,” or hope) and ignorant of her existence, he meets her as a young man, they fall in love, and she bears him a child: Mignon. Upon discovering that they are brother and sister, Sperata dies, and the Harper wanders hither and yon, singing of his sorrow and guilt. His songs make manifest both art’s power over death and its futility in the face of death, its conversion of the world into ordered language and its creator’s inability to cope with tragic reality. No hell is more terrifying than one’s own inner darkness, as all who suffer pathological depression know: that is the Harper’s fate, and yet he also represents art’s all-encompassing engagement with passion and beauty.

Schubert’s involvement with these poems began on November 13, 1815 with his first setting of “Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt.” Multiple versions of all three Harper poems would follow in September 1816, including two very different conceptions of “Wer nie sein Brod mit Tränen ass” (one simpler and folksong-like, the other more elaborate); that same month saw the creation of the complete Gesänge des Harfners published as Op. 12. All three songs are in A Minor, one of Schubert’s “tragic” keys, and all three are linked musically in various ways, appropriate for a character whose life is one long song of grief. Both in “Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt” and “Wer nie sein Brod mit Tränen ass,” Schubert tells us that the Harper must sing for his supper, must make his sorrows melodious to earn the scant pence of survival. And yet, Italianate lyricism twice gives way in the second song to a mighty indictment of the gods who lead us into transgression and then abandon us to our guilt. The third and final song, “An die Türen will ich schleichen,” is the Harper’s prophecy of a future in which he will beg for his bread; alienated from the rest of humanity, he will wonder why people weep at the sight of him. Over a “walking bass” (an inheritance from the Baroque age in which the bottommost part proceeds in equal note values at a walking pace), a vision of dry bones speaking unfolds in austere immensity.

Mignon is a mysterious, quasi-androgynous creature (Goethe calls her a “Knabenmädchen,” or “boy-girl”) in early adolescence; kidnapped when very young, she is rescued from her harsh life in an acrobatic troupe by Wilhelm Meister and falls in love with him. She does not know her age (“Nobody has counted,” she says in her broken German), she dresses in boy’s clothes, and she speaks of herself in the third person, except in her songs. She symbolizes humanity’s two natures, earthly and spiritual, male and female, and she has prophetic powers. Her life is governed by “Sehnsucht” or “longing,” a form of Romantic desire that manifests itself as affliction; in song, she reaches out for the lost and irretrievable ideal. But we do not know whether the Mignon of “An Mignon” has anything to do with this evocative creature. Goethe wrote the poem in 1796, thirteen years after creating Mignon; he was perhaps inspired by Magdalena Riggi, a beautiful Milanese girl he met on his Italian sojourn. The beginning will remind some listeners of a slower “Am Feierabend” from Die schöne Müllerin (composed in 1823); each verse ends with Schubert’s harmonic evocation of a sad weight on the heart.

With “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,” we rejoin Goethe’s great novel for a song presented as Wilhelm’s incomplete transcription of a duet sung by the Harper and Mignon. This is Schubert’s sixth and final version of this poem, and it is a thorough re-working of an earlier song, “Ins stille Land,” to a poem by Johann Gaudenz von Salis-Seewis, whose persona asks when he might be granted surcease from sorrow. “Heiß mich nicht reden” is introduced in offhand manner in Goethe’s Book 5 as “a poem Mignon had recited once or twice with great expressiveness.” The vow of which she sings is one she made to the Virgin Mary, who promised her protection as she was being kidnapped: she would never tell her story and would live and die in expectation of divine intervention. Schubert sets these grave words to the dactylic rhythms (long-short-short / long-short-short) that often indicate cosmic matters in his songs, although this pattern is supplanted on the final page by a blaze of proto-Wagnerian harmonies.

“So laßt mich scheinen” comes from Book 8, when Wilhelm’s eventual bride Natalie tells him about a birthday party at which Mignon played the part of an angel. Refusing to take off her costume, she sings this song foretelling her transcendence after death, her music devoid of anger, self-pity, or even resignation. Throughout much of the song, Schubert maintains a repeated pitch hidden inside the piano’s chords, as if it were the emblem of the land beyond death on which her gaze is fixed. The harmonic swerve at the words “tiefen Schmerz” is a beautifully economical register of the difference between the “deep sorrow” she endures in this life and an afterlife where she will be transfigured. At the beginning of Book 3 of the novel, Mignon sings “Kennst du das Land” with “a certain solemn grandeur, as if . . . she were imparting something of importance.” Schubert imbues her memories of her native Italy with the solemnity and expressivity Goethe wanted and then ends each stanza with the urgent refrain “Dahin, dahin!” and an appeal to her “Beloved, Protector, Father” (Wilhelm) to take her there.

One of the most haunting duets in the entire repertory for vocal duo is “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” in B Minor, the key of deepest grief (Beethoven called it the “schwarze Tonart,” “the black key”). These two mysterious creatures, who do not know of their relationship, sing mostly in overlapping antiphony, joining together only for such crucial lines as “Alas, the one who loves and knows me is far away;” the clarity, purity, and warmth of that passage are distant indeed from the grief in which they otherwise dwell.

“Cronnan” is actually the name of the bard who is called upon to sing this episode in the love-tragedy of Shilric (a warrior) and Vinvela (his beloved) from the poem Carric-thura in James Macpherson’s Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books Together with several Other Poems composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal; a second volume, Temora, was published with the first as The Works of Ossian in 1765. The ardent Scottish nationalist Macpherson collected oral poetry in the Highlands and helped preserve Gaelic sources, but he drew a firestorm of criticism for claiming that these works were ancient when he himself embroidered or invented much of it. No matter: his misty, moody, pre-Romantic tales were wildly popular (Napoleon loved them, while Oscar Wilde’s full name was Oscar Fingal Wilde), spawning numerous operas, paintings, and songs. Schubert set ten Ossian texts, and this is one of the masterpieces of 1815. The soughing wind and sighing sea sound throughout both the piano introduction and Shilric’s evocation of the mise-en-scène, before giving way to swift, staccato figuration to tell of deer scampering down the hill where the warrior stands. The first of the exquisite love-songs housed within this ballad (“Erschienst du aber”) tells of Shilric’s longing for Vinvela, followed—after a snatch of recitative—by another love-song as he sees her coming towards him. In wispy, fragile music, Schubert hints that she is a ghost, dead of grief, even before she reveals the bleak truth. At the end, Shilric is once again alone with the sounds of the wind and sea, a melancholy frame for this dark, tender ballad.

In 1817, Schubert won the allegiance of a major musical figure in Viennese life: the great opera singer Johann Michael Vogl (1768–1840). Two years later, on a holiday with Vogl in his home town of Steyr, Upper Austria, Schubert wrote this cantata in honor of the singer’s 51st birthday; for the first performance, Vogl’s friend Josefine Koller sang the soprano part, a local tenor named Bernard Benedict took the tenor role, and Schubert himself sang the bass. Vogl, a master of Gluckian classicism, is honored with impeccable late 18th-century pomposity at the beginning; the trio then honors his various famous operatic roles—Orestes in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Jakob in Étienne-Nicolas Méhul’s Joseph, the regimental doctor in Adalbert Gyrowetz’s Der Augenarzt, and Micheli in Luigi Cherubini’s Les deux journées, while Emeline or Liene is the beloved of Jakob Friburg in Josef Weigl’s Die Schweizerfamilie—and ends with a canonic encomium: “his soul will still sound forth” even when his voice falls silent. These contrapuntal waves could, Schubert hints, resound into infinity.

In Part I of Goethe’s Faust drama about a character who overreaches in everything he does, whose aspirations partake both of sublimity and depravity, Gretchen is the archetypal good village girl who is seduced by Faust with the help of the devil’s emissary Mephistopheles, abandoned, and then executed after she murders her baby (but her soul is saved). Goethe knew of real-life infanticides and public executions in Leipzig and Frankfurt. In the scene entitled “Evening,” Gretchen sings “Der König in Thule” just before she discovers the casket of jewels Faust and Mephistopheles have left for her. “Ultima Thule” was the legendary name for the ends of the earth, and this tiny ballad tells of a king faithful to his beloved beyond her death and until his own—but Gretchen will not know such love. Schubert invests this deceptively simple strophic song with all the antique aura of a tale of bygone times.

In the scene “Gretchen’s Room,” she sits at her spinning wheel and sings of peace of mind lost to desire in “Gretchen am Spinnrade”; Goethe reshuffled the order of the scenes over the years, and Schubert would have read the version in which Gretchen is newly awakened to passion but not yet seduced. This song burst onto the compositional stage like an epiphany, a moment after which nothing is ever the same again. Here, the primal power of female sexuality is unleashed in a tonal floodtide, in wave upon wave of harmonies to make the head spin. That a 17-year-old young man wrote it is forever astonishing. In the scene, “Gretchen at the city ramparts,” the pregnant Gretchen, aware of disgrace to come, prays to a statue of the Virgin placed in a niche in the town walls. “Gretchens Bitte” (“Gretchen’s Prayer”) is a fragment: the final three stanzas of her desperate prayer are not to be found here. Various later Schubertians, including Benjamin Britten, have sought to complete the work, but tonight, it will be performed as Schubert left it, breaking off at the line “Das Herz zerbricht in mir” (“And my heart breaks within me”). Like those performances of the Kunst der Fuge that stop where Bach’s hand stopped, there is something poignant about the unfinished state, the “ending” that is not really an end.

The “Szene aus Goethes Faust” is a setting of the scene entitled “Cathedral. Service, Organ, and Singing. Gretchen among many people. Evil Spirit behind Gretchen,” and it is extraordinary: a thoroughgoing compound of opera and song, its dramatic dialogue between Gretchen and an evil spirit interspersed with the bone-chilling setting of the “Dies irae, dies illa” (“Day of Wrath, Day of Judgment”) from the Mass for the Dead. By this point, Gretchen is pregnant, she has unwittingly poisoned her mother with a sleeping draught, and Faust has just killed her brother in a duel. The tragedy of Gretchen and Faust is now headed inexorably to its end.

Matthäus von Collin was far from being a great poet, but he was a thoughtful man who helped introduce Romanticism to Austria. Theater-mad like many Viennese, he completed part of a projected cycle of historical dramas intended to instruct the populace about past historical glory so that Austrians might be inspired to recreate that splendor in the present. The text of “Licht und Liebe” comes from his drama Friedrich der Streitbare (“Frederick the Valiant”), the last of the Babenberg dukes who ruled Austria in the 12th and 13th centuries. Desirous of heroic figures for patriotic purposes, Collin changed the character of the real Friedrich, a bellicose testosterone nightmare, into a tragic figure who must renounce his beloved wife Agnes for dynastic reasons. In the last act, Friedrich hears two distant voices—a boatman and Agnes—singing these words about love. It is chance arranged by destiny that the sailor, untouched by the duke and duchess’s tragedy, sings of love as a celestial principle, and therefore his song is consummate lyricism, while her song begins with dignified lamentation (but with angst-ridden rhythms in the right hand), falls briefly into a despairing outburst, and then chants numbly of love’s loss. Only in the final section do the two characters join forces to sing the opening words again, her part mostly lower than his. She was loved and still knows that “love is a sweet light,” but hers is a sadder view than the boatman’s. And finally, we end with the lighthearted trio, “Der Hochzeitsbraten,” a comic jape about a pre-wedding poaching expedition; the lovers are caught, but the property owner cannot resist the pretty bride-to-be. When he lets them off, they invite him to the wedding. From the beginning, we hear the effervescence of Viennese Volkstheater music, complete with sound-effects to lure the hare out of hiding, a paean to the joys of hunting, and celebratory yodeling at the close.

Susan Youens’s writings on lieder include Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles, both published by Cambridge University Press, and the forthcoming Heinrich Heine and the Lied (2008).

Dorothea Röschmann, Soprano
Born in Flensburg, Germany, Dorothea Röschmann made a critically acclaimed debut at the 1995 Salzburg Festival as Susanna under Harnoncourt and has since returned to the Festival many times to sing Countess Almaviva, Ilia, Servilia, Nannetta, Pamina and Vitellia, with Mackerras, Dohnányi, and Abbado.

At the Metropolitan Opera she has sung Susanna, Pamina, and Ilia with Levine. At the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, her roles have included Pamina and Fiordiligi with Sir Colin Davis and Countess Almaviva with Pappano. At the Vienna Staatsoper, she has appeared as Susanna with Ozawa. With the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, she has sung Zerlina, Susanna, Ännchen, Drusilla, Almirena, Marzelline, Anne Trulove, and Rodelinda. She is also closely associated with the Deutsche Staatsoper, Berlin, where her roles include Ännchen with Mehta; Nannetta with Abbado; Pamina, Fiordiligi, Susanna, Zerlina, Micäela, and Donna Elvira with Barenboim and Elmira in Kaiser’s Croesus and the title role in Scarlatti’s Griselda, both with Jacobs. She has also appeared at La Monnaie, Brussels, as Norina, and at the Bastille, Paris, as Pamina.

Her future engagements include Eva (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) at the Deutsche Staatsoper, the Marschallin (Der Rosenkavalier) at the Deutsche Staatsoper, Countess Almaviva in Munich, and Donna Elvira at the Salzburg Festival.

Her recent concert appearances include the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bayerischer Rundfunk and Concentus Musicus with Harnoncourt; the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia with Sawallisch; the London Symphony Orchestra with Pappano; the Berliner Philharmoniker with Rattle, Haitink, Harnoncourt, and Barenboim; the Chicago Symphony also with Barenboim; the Munich Philharmonic with Levine, and the Cleveland Orchestra with Welser-Möst.

Her recital appearances include Antwerp, Lisbon, Madrid, Cologne, Brussels, New York, London, Vienna, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Edinburgh, Munich, and Schwarzenberg festivals.

Her recordings include Countess Almaviva with Harnoncourt; Pamina and Nannetta with Abbado; Puccini’s Suor Angelica with Pappano; Brahms’s Requiem with Rattle (winner of a Gramophone Award); Messiah with Paul McCreesh; Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Daniel Harding; Handel’s Neun deutsche Arien with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin; Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with David Daniels, Europa Galante, and Fabio Biondi; and a disc of Schumann songs with Ian Bostridge and Graham Johnson.

Miss Röschmann studies with Vera Rozsa in London.

Ian Bostridge, Tenor
Ian Bostridge was a post-doctoral fellow in history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, before embarking on a full-time career as a singer. His international recital career includes the world’s major concert halls and the Edinburgh, Munich, Vienna, Aldeburgh, and Schubertiade festivals, including artistic residencies at the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and his own Perspectives concerts at Carnegie Hall.

In opera he has sung Tamino, Jupiter (Semele), and Aschenbach (Death in Venice) at English National Opera; Quint (The Turn of the Screw), Vasek (The Bartered Bride), Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni) and Caliban (The Tempest) for the Royal Opera, Don Ottavio in Vienna, and Nerone (L’Incoronazione di Poppea), Tom Rakewell (The Rake’s Progress), and Male Chorus (The Rape of Lucretia) in Munich.

His recordings include Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin with Graham Johnson (Gramophone Award 1996); Tom Rakewell with John Eliot Gardiner (Grammy Award, 1999); and Belmonte (William Christie). He is an exclusive artist with EMI/Angel, for whom he has recorded Schubert lieder and Schumann lieder (Gramophone Award 1998), English song and Henze lieder with Julius Drake, Idomeneo with Charles Mackerras, Janáček with Thomas Adès, Schubert with Leif Ove Andsnes, Noel Coward with Jeffrey Tate, Britten Orchestral cycles with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Simon Rattle, Wolf with Antonio Pappano, Bach cantatas with Fabio Biondi, Britten’s Canticles and Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (Gramophone Award, 2003).

His concert engagements include the Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, London Symphony, London Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras under Simon Rattle, Colin Davis, Andrew Davis, Seiji Ozawa, Riccardo Muti, Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniel Barenboim, Daniel Harding, Donald Runnicles, and Antonio Pappano.

In 2001 he was elected an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 2003 he was made an Honorary Doctor of Music by the University of St. Andrew’s. He was created a CBE in the 2004 New Year’s Honours. He is married to the author and literary critic Lucasta Miller. They live in London with their two children.

Thomas Quasthoff, Bass-Baritone
German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff is recognized as one of the most remarkable singers performing today. Since making his US debut at the Oregon Bach Festival with Helmuth Rilling, he has sung with the New York Philharmonic and many other major American orchestras. In recital, he has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center and has made appearances at the Ravinia, Tanglewood, and Mostly Mozart festivals.

In Europe, Mr. Quasthoff regularly appears with the most distinguished orchestras under such eminent conductors as Sir Simon Rattle, Claudio Abbado, Bernard Haitink, and Daniel Barenboim. Much in demand as a recitalist, he frequently sings in the major recital halls in Berlin, Vienna, Salzburg, Paris, Amsterdam, and London.

A frequent guest at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Quasthoff opened the 2001–02 concert season with the Berliner Philharmoniker led by Claudio Abbado. During the 2006–07 season, he was one of Carnegie Hall’s Perspectives artists. Mr. Quasthoff also appeared at Carnegie Hall this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

In April 2003 Thomas Quasthoff made his first staged opera appearance as Don Fernando in Fidelio with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in Salzburg. Since then he has sung the role of Amfortas in a highly acclaimed production of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Vienna State Opera with both Donald Runnicles and Sir Simon Rattle conducting. Since 1999, Mr. Quasthoff has been an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist. He has won three Grammys for his DG recordings, including the best vocal performance award for his first album with the label, Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn with Anne Sofie von Otter and the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Claudio Abbado.

The subject of numerous articles in the national press, Mr. Quasthoff has been profiled on the CBS news programs 60 Minutes and 60 Minutes II, as well as on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Mr. Quasthoff’s biography was recently published in Europe, and a translated version will be available in the US in summer 2008.

Julius Drake, Piano
The pianist Julius Drake lives in London and specializes in the field of chamber music, working with many of the world’s leading vocal and instrumental artists, both in recital and on disc.

He appears at all the major music centers: in recent seasons, concerts have regularly taken him to the Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Munich, Salzburg, Schubertiade, and Tanglewood festivals; to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, New York; the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; the Châtelet, Paris; the Musikverein and the Konzerthaus, Vienna; and Wigmore Hall and the BBC Proms, London.

Director of the Perth International Chamber Music Festival in Australia from 2000 to 2003, Julius Drake was also musical director in Deborah Warner’s staging of Janáček’s Diary of One Who Vanished, touring to Munich, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, and New York.

Recordings include award-winning recitals with Ian Bostridge (EMI), Hugues Cuénod (Chandos), Nicholas Daniel (Virgin), Derek Lee Ragin (Etcetera), Sophie Daneman (EMI), Paul Agnew (Hyperion), Katarina Karnéus (Hyperion), Annette Bartholdy (Naxos), Christianne Stotijn (Onyx), Gerald Finley (Hyperion), Joyce DiDonato (Eloquentia), Christian Poltera (Bis) and Alice Coote (EMI).

Recent and future highlights include tonight’s program of Schubert at Carnegie Hall, New York, also presented at the Barbican Centre, London; recitals in Luxemburg and Paris with Simon Keenlyside; performances at the Australian Chamber Music Festival in Townsville; a Wigmore Live recording with Christopher Maltman and a Grieg disc with Katarina Karnéus for Hyperion; a tour of Japan with Ian Bostridge; and recitals in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Chicago, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, and Vienna with Alice Coote, Diana Damrau, Gerald Finley, and Christianne Stotijn.