CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Dame Felicity Lott 
Graham Johnson

Zankel Hall
Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Dame Felicity Lott, Soprano
Graham Johnson, Piano

MAHLER "Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft"
MAHLER "Liebst du um Schönheit"
MAHLER "Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder"
MAHLER "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"
SCHUMANN "Widmung," Op. 25, No. 1
SCHUMANN "Aus den östlichen Rosen," Op. 25, No. 25
SCHUMANN "Liebeslied," Op. 51, No. 5
SCHUMANN "Singet nicht in Trauertönen," Op. 98a, No. 7
WOLF "Frühling übers Jahr"
WOLF "Anakreons Grab"
WOLF Mignon III: "So lasst mich scheinen"
WOLF "Kennst du das Land"
DUPARC "L'invitation au voyage"
CAPDEVIELLE "Je n’ai pas oublié"
SAUGUET "Le chat"
DEBUSSY "Le jet d’eau" from Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire
DUPARC "La vie antérieure"
COWARD "I'll Follow My Secret Heart " from Conversation Piece
COWARD "English Lesson" from Conversation Piece
COWARD "Nevermore" from Conversation Piece
HAHN "Air de la lettre" from Mozart
O. STRAUS "Valse des adieux"
ANDRÉ MESSAGER "J'ai deux amants" from L'amour masqué

Encores:
COWARD "If Love Were All" from Bitter Sweet
POULENC "Les chemins de l'amour"
OFFENBACH "Invocation à Venus" from La Belle Hélène

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

Program Notes:

By Susan Youens

GUSTAV MAHLER “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft”, “Liebst du um Schönheit,” “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder,” and “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”
Born July 7, 1860, in Kalischt (Kalištĕ), Bohemia; died May 18, 1911, in Vienna.

The fin-de-siècle genius Gustav Mahler gravitated to earlier Romantic poetry for his songs, including verse by Friedrich Rückert, an Orientalist, fond of wordplay and a creator of intricate verse-forms. In “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” (“I Breathed a Gentle Fragrance”), Mahler turns Rückert’s pun on “lind” (gentle) and “Linde” (linden tree, the traditional site for lovers’ rendezvous in German poetry) into one of the most wistful, delicate songs he ever wrote. “Liebst du um Schönheit” (“If You Love for Beauty”) was composed for Mahler’s young wife, Alma Schindler, during an idyllic Carinthian summer retreat. Here, a humble lover renounces any right to be loved for reasons of beauty, youth, or wealth; only for love itself should such ardor be reciprocated. The melodic peak by which the singer in turn hails the sun, springtime, and the mermaid as lovelier, younger, and richer than he (or she) is makes a final appearance for the verb “to love,” which trumps all else. “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder” (“Look Not into My Songs”) puns again, this time on the words “Lieder” (songs) and “Lider” (eyelids, pronounced the same way). Here, an artist muses on his own creative process and the artist’s relationship to the external world; he tells us not to trespass on the act of creation, but to rejoice in the finished artifact when the work is done. And yet, in delightful irony, we hear beelike industry throughout as a lively, graceful song comes into being. The gentle injunctions not to trespass on creation are themselves a creation to which we are given privileged access. “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I Am Lost to the World”) is a song from the other side of abnegation. If ever there was metaphysical music, this is it: an artist “dies” to the world in order to live in heaven, love, and song.


ROBERT SCHUMANN Widmung, Op. 25, No. 1; Aus den östlichen Rosen, Op. 25, No. 25; Liebeslied, Op. 51, No. 5; and Singet nicht in Trauertönen, Op. 98a, No. 7
Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany; died July 29, 1856, in Endenich, near Bonn.

“How blissful it is to write for the voice!” Robert Schumann exclaimed to his fiancée Clara Wieck early in his “song year” of 1840, a year in which he completed some 125 songs, more than half of his complete output in the genre. He had composed songs before—13 of them in 1827 and 1828—but the outburst of creativity in 1840 is extraordinary in the annals of music history. His 25th opus is a singular song cycle entitled Myrthen (the full resounding title is Myrthen. Liederkreis von Göthe, Rückert, Byron, Th. Moore, Heine, Burns, & J. Mosen für Gesang und Pianoforte), from which the first two songs in this group are taken; myrtles are the German symbol of marriage. Schumann would present this volume of 26 songs—an alphabet of love in many moods from many countries—to Clara Wieck on the eve of their marriage in September 1840, when Clara was 21 and they could finally marry, over the objections of her tyrannical father. The first song, “Widmung” (“You My Soul, You My Heart”—Schumann’s title, not Rückert’s), is a dedication to Clara at the beginning of the opus and of their marriage. The gentle but exultant fanfares of the piano introduction and the wonderfully lyrical melody—the leap of a sixth to the word “Wonn’” (“rapture”) is unforgettable—are the essence of Schumannian Innigkeit (“inwardness, intimacy, but with a gentle vivacity at work as well”). For those who love Schubert as well, it is nothing short of wonderful that “Widmung” contains two quotations from well-known Schubert songs: his setting of another Rückert poem,”Du bist die Ruh’”(we hear the same words in the middle section of the Schumann song), and the famous “Ave Maria” from the set of seven songs on poems from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. The “Ave Maria” only appears in Schumann’s piano postlude, Robert’s way of telling us at song’s end and without need of words that Clara is his Madonna. Some 25 songs later, Schumann returns to Rückert’s 1822 anthology, Östliche Rosen (“Eastern Roses”), for the delicate, transparent “Aus den östlichen Rosen” (“From the Eastern Roses”). The manuscript of this song bears the marginal notation “In Erwartung Claras” (“Waiting for Clara”): this is a love letter in music, but one marked by the tentative wistfulness of someone whose path to love has not been easy. “Liebeslied” is Schumann’s somewhat pedestrian title for an unnamed poem included as an example in Goethe’s didactic glosses to the West-östlicher Divan (“The Western/Oriental Anthology”), his appropriation and transformation of Persian poetry for his own Olympian purposes. One section of the gloss is entitled “Chiffer” or “Codes”; here, Goethe discusses how lovers used to exchange coded poems based on the same book. No one has solved the literary riddle that is this poem, its third and fourth verses a reworking of stanzas by Marianne von Willemer. This gifted woman had married her banker-guardian; her correspondence with Goethe was not published in 1873, at which point the world learned of their love for one another—but largely at a distance. In this supremely beautiful song, Schumann seems to signify the lovers’ separation by separated phrases (musical telegraph-ese), with the piano “singing” between the singers’ lines as if to link them by love across the spaces that divide them.


HUGO WOLF “Frühling übers Jahr,” “Anakreons Grab,” “Mignon III: So lasst mich scheinen,” and “Kennst du das Land”
Born March 13, 1860, in Windischgraz, Styria (now Slovenjgradec, Slovenia); died February 22, 1903, in Vienna.

In early December 1888, Wolf moved to new winter quarters at Döbling, a suburb of Vienna, where Heinrich Köchert and his wife Melanie had a residence in the 19th district of the city. (Melanie and Wolf had fallen in love in the summer of 1884; she would stand by him his entire life, and her husband found ways to slip Wolf much-needed money without hurting his pride. These were not ordinary people, any of them, and this was not a tawdry affair.) The year 1888 was Wolf’s “miracle year” of song: after completing the composition of 53 songs on poems by Eduard Mörike and 13 songs on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, Wolf kept right on going—and this time, he turned to Goethe. One of Wolf’s most exquisite love songs is “Frühling übers Jahr” (“Spring All the Year Round”); the beloved vies with spring itself, but she remains in beauty when the dear season is past. Rich yet ethereal bells chime in the treble, while puffs of arpeggiated breeze waft through each bar of an enchanted song. Goethe’s poem, “Anakreons Grab” (“Anacreon’s Grave”), is a combination of neo-classical epigram and epitaph; it was written in 1785 as homage to the ancient Greek poet Anacreon of Teos (570–488 BCE). Anacreon and his imitators had exerted massive influence on mid-18th-century German poetry, including the young Goethe’s, but here, Goethe takes leave of Anacreontic songs of wine and roses, crickets and love, and does so with love and gratitude to the long-dead master. Wolf in turn composed one of the most tender homages to the dead anyone could imagine.

“So lasst mich scheinen” (“So Let Me Seem”) is one of the inset-songs sung by the mysterious adolescent waif Mignon in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Virtually every song composer worth his or her salt since the novel’s first appearance (Brahms is a notable exception) has tried to find the right tones both for her and the equally mysterious Harper, her father by incest; when they are brought together on the highways and by-ways of Germany, neither realizes who the other is, and the mystery is only clarified for the reader at the end. In the eighth book of the novel, the clairvoyant Mignon has been chosen to deliver a birthday present to two girls and is dressed up as an angel for the occasion. Refusing to relinquish her angelic garb, she anticipates her future destiny as a transfigured being beyond this world. In Wolf’s setting, the octave leaps in the vocal line, plunging down and then soaring up again at Mignon’s plea to divine powers that she might be eternally young again, after the cares that have aged her prematurely, are a shattering way to conclude a very great song. “Kennst du das Land” (“Knowest Thou Where?”) is another Mignon-song and was written before November 1783 as a rhythmic imitation of the English ballad, “Summer,” by James Thomson (“Bear me, Pomona! to thy citron groves; / To where the lemon and the piercing lime, / With the deep orange, glowing through green, / Their lighter glories blend”). Here, Mignon longs for the heaven of her Italian childhood, lost when she was kidnapped. This song is a desperate avowal of a child’s dependence on paternal love, and yet it is oedipal as well, her longing confessed to a surrogate father-beloved: Wilhelm Meister. In the novel, she is perhaps 13 or so years old, but her preternatural wisdom, her uncanny intuition, give her depths beyond her years, and Wolf therefore endows her with a wholly adult, post-Wagnerian capacity for passionate emotion in music.

HENRI DUPARC “L’invitation au voyage”
Born January 21, 1848, in Paris; died February 12, 1933, in Mont-de-Marsan.

For the second half, we begin with settings of poems by Charles Baudelaire, one of France’s greatest poets; his first and most famous volume of poems, Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil; 1857), with its themes of sexual desire and death, brought charges of an offense against public morals for poet, publisher, and printer alike. It is only to be expected that the best composers would discover such a rich body of texts, and we hear five this evening. The long-lived Henri Duparc composed only 17 melodies before falling victim to a mysterious neurasthenic disease that prevented him from composing at all in the final 48 years of his life. As if in compensation for such a hideous fate, his songs are among the greatest in the French language, with a subtlety and gravitas beyond the reach of his contemporaries; songs composed under the aegis of the German composers he revered—Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Beethoven, and Bach—are made inimitably French. This composer would be immortal if he had written nothing other than “L’invitation au voyage” (“Invitation to the Voyage”) to one of Baudelaire’s most beautiful poems. Here, the poet seduces the beloved with his vision of a realm of perfect beauty, steeped in calm and bathed in a Watteau-like amber glow of sensuality. The pair will journey to this exotic realm by boat, and therefore Duparc floats this exquisite song both on the surface and in the depths of a harmonic waterway infused with “luxe, calme, et volupté” (“richness, calmness, and sensuality”) from the start.


PIERRE CAPDEVIELLE “Je n’ai pas oublié”
Born February 1, 1906, in Paris; died July 9, 1969, in Bordeaux.
HENRI SAUGUET “Le chat”
Born May 18, 1901, in Bordeaux; died June 21, 1989, in Paris.

Pierre de Capdevielle is a much less familiar name than Duparc, but this Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur created a significant list of works, many inspired by literature. His text for “Je n’ai pas oublié” (“I Have Not Forgotten”) comes from Baudelaire’s “Parisian Scenes”—Baudelaire was one of the first great poets of the modern city—and is a rueful, tender, wistful reminiscence of young love in cheap surroundings. Henri Sauguet, born Henri-Pierre Poupard (Sauguet was his mother’s maiden name), was encouraged by Darius Milhaud to move to Paris from his native Bordeaux and study with Charles Koechlin; there, he became one of four disciples of Erik Satie to form the École d’Arcueil. His second ballet, La Chatte, about a kitten transformed into a beautiful young woman, was choreographed by none other than Sergey Diaghilev; somehow one is not surprised that Sauguet would also be drawn to Baudelaire’s “Le chat” (“The Cat”) (one of three hymns to all things feline in The Flowers of Evil).


CLAUDE DEBUSSY “Le jet d’eau,” from Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire Born August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye; died March 25, 1918, in Paris.
HENRI DUPARC “La vie antérieure”
In his early years, the great Claude Debussy, like Hugo Wolf at the same time, fell under Wagner’s spell, in particular the spell of his last opera, Parsifal; Debussy might well have composed the Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (“Five Poems of Baudelaire”) in order to exorcize his immense German predecessor’s influence. “Le jet d’eau” (“The Fountain”) is an exquisite evocation of love-making and its aftermath in melancholy lassitude as symbolic imagery of a fountain whose watery plume shoots skywards and then sinks down again. The refrains, with their repeated fusion of water and tears, are unforgettable, and so too is the sensuous beauty of what precedes them. Returning to Duparc, we hear his final song, his last testament to a profound understanding of Baudelaire for music: “La vie antérieure” (“The Former Life”). What Graham Johnson rightly calls “epic grandeur” without a trace of bombast or vulgarity is on display here, in the massive columns of harmony in the piano at the beginning (the “vastes portiques” and “grands piliers” of the poem made audible), in the surge of the sea, the proclamation of a “previous life” in poetic fantasy, and the long piano postlude sinking quietly into wordless wonder.


NOËL COWARD “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “English Lesson,” and “Nevermore”
Born December 16, 1899, in Teddington, England; died March 26, 1973, in Blue Harbour, Jamaica.

In 1933, Noël Coward wrote, directed, and co-starred with the great French soprano Yvonne Printemps in his operetta Conversation Piece of 1933. Set in Brighton-by-the sea, it tells the tale of a man and his ward and an amusing plot to ensnare a marquis in marriage. The “big tune” of this work is the waltz-song, “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” whose genesis Noël Coward recounted in his memoirs. After 10 days’ futile effort, “I sat gloomily envisaging everybody’s disappointment and facing the fact that my talent had withered and that I should never write any more music until the day I died … I decided to go to bed. I switched off the lights by the door and noticed that there was one lamp left on by the piano. I walked automatically to turn it off, sat down and played ‘I’ll Follow My Secret Heart’ straight through in G-flat, a key I had never played in before.” In “English Lesson,” the character Melanie practices dislocated English phrases and comments in French on the impossibility of our language, while “Nevermore” is a slow waltz-song whose theme is summed up in the final words: “Others may regain their freedom / But for you and me / Never, Nevermore.”


REYNALDO HAHN “Air de la letter,” from Mozart
Born August 9, 1874, in Caracas, Venezuela; died January 28, 1947, in Paris, France.
OSCAR STRAUS “Valse des adieux”
Born March 6, 1870, in Vienna; died January 11, 1954, in Bad Ischl, Austria.ANDRÉ MESSAGER “J’ai deux amants,” from L’amour masque
Born December 30, 1853, in Montluçon; died February 24, 1929, in Paris.

The final group of songs stems from three different composers’ collaboration with the film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright Sacha Guitry, who was married to Yvonne Printemps. The half-Venezuelan, half-German Jewish composer Reynaldo Hahn was among the most elegant denizens of belle époque Paris, and his mélodies are among the treasures of the repertory. In 1925, he teamed up with Guitry to compose the operetta Mozart; in the “Air de la lettre” (“Air on a Letter”), from this work, the great Viennese composer, played by Printemps en travesti, writes to his wife Constanze to tell her how much he misses her. We know from the real Mozart’s letters that he cherished his wife and had an almost child-like vulnerability where she was concerned—this is part and parcel of the immense humanity on display in his music. Hahn’s wistful, reticent melody allows Guitry’s tender words to come through. Oscar Straus, who studied composition with Max Bruch, was a Viennese operetta composer now best known for Der tapfere Soldat (“The Chocolate Soldier”) and Ein Walzertraum (“A Waltz Dream”); as a young man he reportedly heard Franz Léhar’s The Merry Widow—a gigantic “hit”—and said, “I can do that too.” He was steeped in the “light classical” traditions popularized by the Strauss family and others in the dance-mad city of Vienna, and “Valse des adieux” (“Farewell Waltz”) will surely transport listeners there, at least in thought. And finally, André Messager was a student of Camille Saint-Saëns and succeeded Gabriel Fauré as the organist at St. Sulpice before beginning his career as a stage composer for the Folies-Bergère in the late 1870s. He did not stay there long, however, and in subsequent years, he would direct the Opéra-Comique, work at Covent Garden, head the Paris Opera, and conduct the orchestra for the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. He is principally famous as an operetta composer, although he had ambitions in the realm of serious music. He would only compose two more operettas after L’amour masqué of 1923, from which comes the delicious song, “J’ai deux amants” (“I’ve Two Lovers”).


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Youens is author of several books on song, including Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Dame Felicity Lott, Soprano
Felicity Lott was born and educated in Cheltenham, read French at Royal Holloway College, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow, and sa at the Royal Academy of Music, of which she is a Fellow. Her operatic repertoire ranges from Handel to Stravinsky, but she has above all built up her formidable international reputation as an interpreter of the great roles of Mozart and Strauss. At the Royal Opera House she has sung Anne Trulove, Blanche, Ellen Orford, Eva, Countess Almaviva and under Mackerras, Tate, Davis, and Haitink, she has sung the Marschallin. At the Glyndebourne Festival her roles include Anne Trulove, Pamina, Donna Elvira, Oktavian, Christine (Intermezzo), Countess Madeleine (Capriccio), and the title role in Arabella. Her roles at the Bavarian State Opera (Munich) include Christine, Countess Almaviva, Countess Madeleine, and the Marschallin. For the Vienna State Opera her roles have included the Marschallin under Kleiber, which she has sung both in Vienna and Japan. In Paris at the Opéra Bastille, Opéra Comique, Théâtre du Châtelet, and Palais Garnier she has sung Cleopatra, Donna Elvira, Fiordiligi, Countess Madeleine, the Marschallin, and the title roles in La belle Hélène and La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein. At the Metropolitan Opera (New York) she sang the Marschallin under Carlos Kleiber and Countess Almaviva under James Levine. She recently sang Poulenc’s heroine in staged performances of La voix humaine at the Teatro de la Zarzuela (Madrid), the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble, and the Opéra National de Lyon.

She has sung with the Vienna Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony orchestras under Solti; the Munich Philharmonic under Mehta; the London Philharmonic under Haitink, Welser-Möst, and Masur; the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Masur; the Suisse Romande and Tonhalle orchestras under Armin Jordan; the Boston Symphony under Previn; the New York Philharmonic under Previn and Masur; the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Sir Andrew Davis in London, Sydney, and New York; and The Cleveland Orchestra under Welser-Möst in Cleveland and Carnegie Hall. In Berlin she has sung with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Solti and Rattle, and the Deutsche Staatskapelle under Philippe Jordan.

A founder member of The Songmakers’ Almanac, Ms. Lott has appeared on the major recital platforms of the world, including the Salzburg, Prague, Bergen, Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, and Munich festivals; the Musikverein and Konzerthaus in Vienna; and the Salle Gaveau, Musée d’Orsay, Opéra Comique, Théâtre du Châtelet, and Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. She has a particularly close association with the Wigmore Hall.

Her many awards include honorary doctorates at the universities of Oxford, Loughborough, Leicester, London, and Sussex, and the Royal Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. She was made a CBE in the 1990 New Year Honors and in 1996 was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire. In February 2003 she was awarded the title of Bayerische Kammersängerin. She has also been awarded the titles Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur by the French Government.

Graham Johnson, Piano