Richard Wagner: Fünf Lieder nach Gedichten von Mathilde Wesendonck
Franz Liszt: Ausgewählte Lieder · Tre Sonetti di Petrarca
Konrad Jarnot, baritone · Alexander Schmalcz, piano
Franz Liszt viewed his songs with a great deal of objectivity and a critical-constructive position. One sees in Liszt’s lieder how his compositional style developed – from a self-recognized overuse of motivic allusions and tone painting to a much reduced simplicity and economy that displays an extraordinarily
great command of the métier. This contrast is particularly impressive in the two settings of Goethe’s text “Der du von dem Himmel bist”, written in 1843 and 1860 respectively.
Immediately after completing “Tristan and Isolde”, Richard Wagner composed
five songs using texts of his Zurich muse Mathilde Wesendonck. The songs reflect the unfulfilled attraction the two had for each other, and are simultaneously
a chamber-musical commentary on “Tristan”. Wagner even called two of these songs “studies” for the opera. Konrad Jarnot has established himself as one of the younger generation’s foremost Lied recitalists. He has released a number of CDs on OehmsClassics with songs by Strauss, Ravel, Duparc, Mahler, Zilcher and the Mozart family.
Liszt / Wagner: Songs
As early as the first measures of the Heine setting Im Rhein, im schönen Strome, Franz Liszt reveals his compositional dependence
on the piano, both programmatically and for tone painting. Similar to his famous Liebestraum, the arpeggios move in virtuosic, shimmering waves over the keyboard, until Heine’s poem causes the stream of tones to pause for a moment until they can escort the “floating blossoms and angels” into the ether on light-footed chords.
Liszt paints the questioning temptation of the Loreley just as picturesquely. Unexpected intervals and gentle rhythmic hesitations sketch the bewilderment that intensifies into dark waves in the deadly storm that follows. But having gone through this transformation, the opening lack of understanding returns shortly before the end again, brought about by an abrupt modulation and pointed use of rests between faltering motivic fragments.
“My early songs are often too overblown and sentimental, and the accompaniments are frequently filled to the brim.” This was Liszt’s own self-critical judgment at the beginning of
the 1850s in regard to songs he had composed several years earlier, including the eight-verse Ich möchte hingehn and Vergiftet sind meine Lieder. Excessive imagery almost entirely prevents the Herwegh and Heine texts from getting a word in edgewise; every nuance, every hidden emotion is represented in the accompaniment. This shows that Liszt’s first and foremost intention was insistent musical representation of the content. He selected texts more incidentally than carefully, setting to music whatever crossed his path. A deeper interest in literature didn’t develop until his Weimar years, when he virtually controlled the city’s entire musical life from his position as court Kapellmeister, developing from a piano
virtuoso into one of the age’s most important
composers.
Liszt’s compositional maturing process can be seen most clearly in his three settings of Goethe’s Der du von dem Himmel bist.
The first version, written in 1843, carries not without reason the subtitle Invocation, and is still characterized by effusive hymn-like excesses
whose conflagration hardly seems to perceive the simplicity of this nocturne. The last version from 1860, however, is of great tonal
and dynamic effortlessness, particularly because
of the meter change from 3/4 to 4/4. The third part of this “nocturne” is introduced by a rest; the two last lines of the poem are sung practically on one tone, and after a closing octave
leap, fade away at a triple pianissimo.
A comparison of the two settings well demonstrates
Liszt’s compositional development, which increasingly tended towards more concise, simple
forms and musical language. His works gain in brevity; the – in the end – painful experiences of his Weimar years seem to have sharpened Liszt’s understanding for the essential.
It was also in 1869 that Liszt revised his composition Es rauschen die Winde, which he had written 15 years earlier. The insistent, at first almost sluggishly arpeggiated chord progression constantly yields to cleanly set chords. Celestial objects shimmer palely, but provide little comfort in light of a love which has ended. Just as in Oh! Quand je dors, the resignation to inalterable fate is still heard in the occasional moments of passion.
The Tre Sonetti di Petrarca, with which Liszt paid tribute to Italy’s intellectual greatness
during his first visit to Rome, are completely
representative for the Romantic period.
All of the songs’ musical material develops from one single flickering chromatic motive, which the poet and composer use to reproduce
all emotions along the way from the inferno
into paradise. At the same time he was composing the vocal setting of the trilogy, Liszt wrote his major poetic piano works, which he then assigned to volume two of the Années de pèlerinage.
“I am happy to see you somewhat more worldly,” said Richard Wagner to his friend Liszt, after he presented Wagner with his Petrarca settings.
Wagner was a great admirer of the composing
and conducting piano virtuoso Franz Liszt; at first, the two maintained an intimate relationship, which later, however, became somewhat conflict-ridden.
Wagner once confessed to conductor Hans von Bülow that “without the relationship to Liszt, his harmony would have been much different.” This, as well as the friendship to Mathilde von Wesendonck led to Wagner’s famous and sudden stylistic break, which then manifested itself in Tristan.
The five settings of poems by Mathilde von Wesendonck, written in 1857 and 1858, are an expression of Wagner’s unquenched yearning
due to the impossibility of lasting happiness
with the poetic muse of his Zurich years, because both Wagner as well as his beloved were already in permanent relationships.
Wagner considered Im Treibhaus and Träume to be studies for Tristan und Isolde; the chronology of the five loosely related pieces forms an arch from Der Engel (Wagner’s designation
for Mathilde) through Träume, which promises redemption in “another” world, one that is meant to heal the wounds of alienation represented in the humid atmosphere of Im Treibhaus as well as the restlessness of this world (Stehe still!).
Kathrin Feldmann
Translation: Elizabeth Gahbler
Alexander Schmalcz
Alexander Schmalcz took his first piano lessons as a member of the Dresden Kreuzchor. He was a student of Iain Burnside and Graham Johnson at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
The young pianist has won the Gerald Moore Award (1996) and the Megan Foster Accompanist Prize.
Alexander Schmalcz has appeared as a guest performer in the great music centres of Europe, America and Japan. Thereto he has played at renowned music festivals and at Wigmore Hall in London, the Schubertiade
in Schwarzenberg, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Wiener Musikverein, the Hamburger Staatsoper, the Chatelet Paris, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Leipziger Gewandhaus,
the Kölner Philharmonie, the Théâtre de
la Monnaie Bruxelles, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Salzburger Theater Festival,
the Schleswig Holstein Musikfestival, the Schwetzinger Festspiele, the Tanglewood Festival and the Prague Spring Festival.
As an accompanist he has worked with such international singers as Grace Bumbry, Peter Schreier, Matthias Goerne, Konrad Jarnot,
Stephan Genz, Christiane Oelze, Eva Mei and Doris Soffel.
In 2005, he accompanied Peter Schreier on his farewell tour throughout Japan and Korea.
His partners for chamber music are the Petersen
Quartet and the actors Julia Stemberger and Hans-Jürgen Schatz. He has made numerous
CD recordings for various music labels and radio companies. Together with Konrad Jarnot, he has already released songs of Mozart and Zilcheron the OehmsClassics label.
Alexander Schmalcz has instructed at the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule in Düsseldorf since 1999, and has also instructed Master Classes, among others at Wigmore Hall.
The Munich Concert Society invited him to be a juror at the Munich “German Romantic Song” competition in 2004.