Concert & Tickets

Programme note

Ich stand' in dunklen Träumen, Op 13 No 1
(I stood in darkened daydreams)

Sie liebten sich beide, Op 13 No 2
(They once loved each other)

Liebeszauber, Op 13 No 3
(Love’s magic)

“Not without subtle nuances” is the New Grove’s assessment − delivered not without condescension − of Clara Schumann’s Six Songs, Op 13. Written soon after her husband’s famous Year of Song (1840) Clara’s own year of song yielded rather less in terms of quantity, but then, as she put it, “a woman must not desire to compose − not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?”

Why indeed? These were Clara’s years of childbirth, yielding Marie, Elise, Julie, and Emil in quick succession between 1841 and 1846, with four more children to follow. Moreover, she had been an inspired concert pianist − eventually the greatest in Europe − from the age of nine, with a husband who, in order to compose, had the will-power to shut himself off from family life. Yet she, too, had force of personality, nurturing her career as a pianist with tours of Denmark in 1842 and Russia in 1844 and holding (as did her husband) major academic appointments.

If women composers flourish today, it is because they have gained the scope to do so. Yet Clara herself, despite her flair for self-criticism, was no mean composer. It was something her dour, heavy, professorial father actively encouraged in her. Her A minor Piano Concerto, a work of considerable character begun at the age of thirteen, was completed three years later − almost, it seemed, in anticipation of her husband’s much more famous concerto in the same key. Her song sets, Op 12 as well as Op 13, display impeccable taste in poetry, as well as imaginative responsiveness to words.

Of the three songs from Op 13 to be performed today, the first two are based on the ironic wit and pathos of Heinrich Heine, the third on the lyricism of Emanuel Geibel. By 1853, in more spacious domestic surroundings, she had gained new freedom to compose songs and instrumental pieces. But her husband’s suicide attempt in 1854 and commitment to an asylum for the last two years of his life stopped her in her compositional tracks. What she might have achieved as a composer continues to tantalise. What she did achieve as a pianist speaks for itself.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Die Mainacht, Op 43 No 2
(The May Night)

Von ewiger Liebe, Op 43 No 1
(Of love eternal)

Solo songs, from Schubert onwards, have been called the emblems of nineteenth-century music. Brahms, with folk poetry as a special focus, composed about two hundred, mostly gathered into short groups and identified simply by opus numbers and first lines. Descriptive names, such as Magelone Romances for the substantial

set of fifteen songs, Op 33, were rare − or rarer, at any rate, than in the output of Schubert or Schumann. For the most part Brahms was content to provide a generalised identity tag, with Lieder und Gesange (which he chose for five of his song sets) as his favourite. Since this, in essence, means merely “Songs and Songs,” it does not seem greatly informative, though by implication there is a shade of difference between Lieder (meaning, by common acceptance, “German art songs”) and Gesange (possibly implying something a little grander).

This afternoon’s two songs, from a group of four Gesange composed in 1868, are prime examples of their kind, powerful meditations on love, the first with its vision of moonlight, cooing doves, dark shadows and lonely tears, evoked via the footsteps of a wandering, yearning lover. The words to the first are by Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty, poet also of Brahms’ An die Nachtigall (To the nightingale) of the same period. Josef Wenzig's Von ewiger Liebe, with a Slavonic folk song as its source, grows magnificently and stirringly out of a lovers’ dispute, wherein the girl declares that her love, being stronger than iron and steel, will last for ever.

© Conrad Wilson

Programme note

Programme note to follow.