Program Notes: Liederabend - Songs of Mendelssohn and Schubert

All Saints Parish, Brookline - Saturday, October 23, 2010

The German Romantic Lied flourished during the nineteenth century in solo and choral forms. Composers such as Schubert preferred this form for its ability to provide more emotional expressiveness and intimacy than the bravura style of opera. The brevity of the form provides an intensification of poetic ideas, placing the German art song among the defining manifestations of Romanticism in music.

With the rise of a piano-owning middle class, the performance of Lieder became a favorite pastime in the salons of Europe. The fortepiano of the early 1800s could render new orchestral sound effects such as string tremolandos, sustained tones, quicker repetitions of keys, and dynamic contrasts. Mendelssohn had first dabbled in strophic style in 1824. His father arranged for the publication of some faux-folk poems by Felix’s friend Johann Droysen (1808-1884), under the pseudonym J. N. Voss. One of these early poems became Im Grünen, composed for Felix’s sister Fanny to sing.

THE NATURAL WORLD

Romantic poets cast shadows on the brightness of Enlightenment reason and classical proportion. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers, such as the Transcendentalists, expressed the idea that Progress and Science were taking mankind away from its natural roots. During this period, wild and inaccessible places became major attractions for hikers like Friedrich Nietzsche. Some artists began to view nature as a lost paradise toward which man instinctively is drawn: a mirror for the soul.

One of the best examples of this theme is Mendelssohn’s song Der Mond, to a text by Emanuel von Giebel (1815-1884). The singer compares his heart to “the dark night, when all the treetops rustle.” The forest falls silent under a full moon, whose glance casts “heavenly peace” on his “unquiet heart.” Each verse is framed in the darker bass register, and nature soothes the civilized beast. An earlier example is Schubert’s setting of Der Gondelfahrer (The Gondolier) by Johann Mayrhofer (1787- 1828), exploring how a Venetian gondolier might sense both the death-like pull of the sea and its calming sensibility. The constant rhythmic drive of this quiet piece is interrupted by bells tolling midnight: contrasting a man drawn to nature, but tied to society.

THE EXOTIC

This background of social and philosophical change helped to produce an unprecedented explosion of literary creativity in the years 1815-1835. New works featured highly charged emotional atmospheres, the bizarre, and the supernatural. There was an enormous fascination with faraway, exotic lands, and in the mystery of the Middle Ages. Mendelssohn’s 1835 song Der Waldschloss (The Forest Castle by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857)), explores a mysterious landscape “where no wanderer has ever walked,” inhabited by “beautiful wood nymphs.” After hearing unearthly voices drifting down from rocky crags at sunset, the hunter/singer leaps off his horse and disappears forever. Mendelssohn uses the piano to propel the rider forward, interrupted by the chromatic (wordless) depiction of the wood nymphs’ call.

MENDELSSOHN

One of the most brilliant of the early Romantic composers, Felix Mendelssohn came from a wealthy, distinguished family. His grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, a famed enlightenment philosopher and rabbi hailed in his day as the “German Plato.” Moses, who worked tirelessly to avoid German anti-Semitism, frowned on Jews converting to Christianity in hopes of gaining social acceptance, but when Felix was a child, the young family moved to Berlin and converted to the Lutheran church. Felix nonetheless remained conscious of his Jewish heritage, and he developed an unconflicted enthusiasm for Bach’s Passions, Handel’s oratorios, and sacred Latin motets.

THE SACRED CHORAL COMPOSER

Laudate pueri is the second of three Latin motets for women’s voices and organ Mendelssohn composed in Rome in 1830 during his Prix de Rome fellowship. However, most of the sacred music Mendelssohn composed was intended for the Lutheran liturgy. In the last year of Mendelssohn’s life Friedrich Wilhelm IV commissioned a setting of the ten musical portions of the Prussian Liturgie for the Sunday services at the Berlin Cathedral, including six short responses and Amens. The pieces were published separately after Mendelssohn’s death. The jewel of this final Liturgie is the Heilig, propelled by a cascading series of thirds. Descending from the soprano, they complete a sequence beginning and ending on D, as the texture increases from one to eight voices. Mendelssohn creates a scene of suspended heavenly voices eventually “grounded” in a radiant major sonority.

THE SECULAR COMPOSER

An extraordinarily gifted child, young Felix was matched by his talented older sister, Fanny, also a pianist and composer. The teenagers’ family connections to leading writers of the day inspired them to compose Lieder, duets, and secular choral works. Grandfather Moses had been a close friend of Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), and Felix became fascinated with his work, including a song text from Schiller’s second Wallenstein drama entitled Des Mädchens Klage. Schubert had made several youthful attempts to set the melodramatic text, but Mendelssohn’s rhapsodic approach from the 1840s brings Thekla Wallenstein’s grief for her lost love to life. He uses the piano to set the stormy scene, and allows the singer only two verses of the lament, ending with Thekla’s request to be taken up to heaven.

The Four [Choral] Songs, op. 100, illustrate Mendelssohn’s remarks to his friend Klingemann: “The most natural of all music, [occurs] when four people are rambling together in the woods, or sailing on a boat, and have the music already with them and inside them!” Im Wald, op. 100, no. 4, was composed for just such a gathering: during a relaxing summer spent in Frankfurt, Felix and his wife Cécile attended a fête champêtre held in their honor. A party of forty, including Dorothea Schlegel and the poet Heinrich Weismann, crossed the Main River and “journeyed by omnibuses to the adjacent hills.” Weismann had given his poem Im Wald to Felix a few days before, and was surprised by an ensemble of twenty under lantern-lit beech trees, serenading them with samples of Felix’s latest choral works. The composer recorded the scene in a drawing. The other poets included in this grouping include Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874), author of the German national anthem and many children’s books, and Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), a friend of the Brothers Grimm.

Mendelssohn often decorated his letters and manuscripts with his own watercolors and drawings: Nicholas von Lenau’s Schilflied (Song of the Reeds, op. 71, no. 4) begins, “On the lake’s unruffled surface rest the moon’s fair beams.” This is one of only two surviving copies Mendelssohn made of his artwork and is held by the Bodleian Library. Schilflied is cast in a haunting barcarolle-like F-sharp minor. It concludes with a turn to the major for a “sweet thought of you, like a quiet evening prayer.”

Mendelssohn’s songs include settings of other well-known poets of his day, including those of Josef von Eichendorff (1788-1857). His Der Waldschloss (1835, discussed above) and Es weiss (1843) are fairly conservative in style, although Mendelssohn enhances and mirrors the poetic transformation of Es weiss. He begins with an Andante in which the singer whispers, “The snow outside is not so quiet”… “as my thoughts.” A sudden transition to the parallel major, Allegro vivace, depicts larks darting through the sky with vigorous triplets in the right hand of the piano.

SCHUBERT

With the flowering of German literature in the late eighteenth-century, Franz Schubert (1797-1830) emerged as the first great master of the Romantic Lied, finding a new balance between words and music. Schubert explored and expanded the Lied with haunting melodies, complex modulations, chromaticism, unexpected shifts between major and minor, and pictorial piano accompaniments suggested by the text. Like Beethoven, his earliest efforts mimicked the ballad style, but evolved into extended works with dramatic shifts in texture and tonality, often combining elements of recitative and arioso styles.

Most of Schubert’s Lieder were not intended for public concert performance, but rather for private salon gatherings of his friends. Two notable songs describe the musician as both singer and accompanist: as a harpist in the early ode An die Musik (1817) and as a lutenist serenading his lover in An die Laute (1827).

Some of Schubert’s songs were commissions, such as Des Tages Weihe, D. 763. In November 1822, the Baroness Geymuller requested a part-song to celebrate the recovery of a gentleman named Ritter from a serious illness. At least one scholar has suggested that the syphilis that would kill Schubert in six years had begun to manifest itself at that time, and that the recovery he depicted so movingly was his own hoped-for cure from an incurable disease.

SERENADES

True to their roots in courtly song, some Romantic Lieder are mini-ballads on the theme of unrequited and forbidden love. Schubert’s alto with chorus Ständchen, D. 921, to a text by Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) traces a gradual arch of crescendo and decrescendo to portray the singer sneaking to and from his lover’s chamber. The opening text “Leise” (quiet), is echoed between the soloist and chorus to provide a charged atmosphere.

The solo Ständchen from Schubert’s last song cycle Schwanengesang, D. 957, no. 4 (1828) provides excellent examples of how Schubert handles an oscillation between insecurity (that is, reality, in D minor) and hope (in F major). The work begins in D minor, suggesting longing, and turns to F major at the text “Liebchen, komm zu mir” (Darling, come to me). Later lines describe the rustling of treetops in the moonlight (found also in Mendelssohn’s Der Mond) and the D-minor calls of nightingales, recalling that bird’s ability to know “Liebesschmerz” (the pain of love). Schubert depicts the singer’s insecurity through his use of flatted-sixths and resolves the tension with uplifting passages in D major.

Schubert went into a deep depression in the late Spring of 1826, but in the Fall composed Widerspruch (Contradiction) and Nachthelle (Night’s Brightness), both setting texts by Johann Gabriel Seidl, whom he knew personally. Nachthelle is an ecstatic hymn of praise to the silver radiance of the night. The strange line “die Häuser schaun verwundert drein” (the houses pull wondering faces) prompts one of Schubert’s exciting harmonic excursions. Against shimmering repeated chords high on the piano, the tenor and chorus exchange phrases as they harmonically ascend into the cloudless night sky. Each modulation takes the singers higher until the solo tenor breaks through to the summit, floating above the world in a vision of infinity that Schubert’s music makes audible.

© 2010 Laura Prichard. All rights reserved.