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CL@SIX - Baroque Masters
- Handel
Programme note
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Concerto Grosso in B-flat Op 3 No 2 (1734)Vivace – Grave
Largo
Allegro
Menuett
GavotteOpus 3 was the first set of concerti to be published by Handel, and he waited until his 49th year to bring them out – a delay unimaginable to a Vivaldi or a Torelli whose published output by that age ran to hundreds of pieces. So why 1734? As with his Opus 6, the reason may have been simply financial. The 1730s were tough for Handel and he needed to find ways to stay afloat. The minute you look in detail at Op.3 you can see how expedient a publication it is. Its publisher, John Walsh, has been accused of dubious practice and cashing in on Handel’s music without worrying too much about the integrity of the composer’s intentions. Some suspect him even of concocting saleable new ’concertos’ by arranging sundry bits and pieces by Handel for the Op.3 Whoever’s work it is, this concerto deserves particularly attention for its sheer quirkiness. It has as an unusual shape: the first three movements run one into another; then they are followed by two dance movements - a minuet and gavotte. Handel’s handling of the instruments is similarly mercurial and inventive. Many players have fleeting solo opportunities; more unusually, there are lovely duets – most notably a wonderful passage for two cellos in the Largo. The winds are pitched against the strings with great gusto
© Svend Brown
- Handel
Programme note
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Concerto Grosso in A minor Op 6 No 4, HWV 322 (1739)Larghetto affetuoso
Allegro
Largo e piano
AllegroArcangelo Corelli published little music, yet attained a Europe-wide celebrity. His Opus 6 Concerti Grossi were regarded as the pinnacle of the genre in which a smaller instrumental group (concertino) is pitched both against and within a larger group (ripieno). When Handel reached his own ‘Opus 6’ in 1739, he honoured the master with 12 new concertos. Why he undertook this project in 1739 is unclear – but he applied himself to it with some urgency, and completed the lot in just 3 months. They were published swiftly in 1740, so perhaps he was hoping to make some quick money: his financial crises were legendary. As usual, he cleverly recycled earlier works and some of the Opus 6 pieces consist pretty well entirely of re-arrangements. The closing Allegro of this piece lifts melodic material from an aria in his opera, Imeneo but no other borrowings have been spotted yet.
© Svend Brown
- Bach JS
Programme note
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1751)
Brandenburg Concerto No 3, BWV 1048 (1721)Allegro
Adagio
AllegroIn 1721, Bach was looking for a new job, and remembered that the Margrave of Brandenburg had once asked him got some compositions. He had six of his finest concertos copied and expensively bound and sent them off, by way of a job application. He may as well have saved his efforts. His gift lay untouched in the Brandenburg library until, some time after the Margrave’s death, it was sold as part of a job lot. Bach probably did not write the six concertos especially for the Margrave. Every piece is strikingly different from its fellows. This concerto, with its groups of three players, is a special tour de force: nine instruments weaving in and out of each other’s paths in close proximity. In less skillful hands it could have turned out muddy, dense and horribly turgid, but Bach’s writing is lucidity itself. Uniquely, in his concertos, he doesn’t write out all three movements. Aside from a few notes, the Adagio is left as a tantalizing question for the players to respond to in their own way — or simply treat as a short pause between movements.
© Svend Brown
- Handel
Programme note
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Organ Concerto No 13 in F 'The Cuckoo and the Nightingale' HWV 295 (1739)Handel was described by one fellow composer as the greatest organist of his age. His contemporary John Hawkins wrote this of his playing:
"A fine and delicate touch, a volant finger, and a ready delivery of passages the most difficult, are the praise of inferior artists: they were not noticed in Handel, whose excellencies were of a far superior kind; and his amazing command of the instrument, the fullness of his harmony, the grandeur and dignity of his style, the copiousness of his imagination, and the fertility of his invention were qualities that absorbed every inferior attainment. When he gave a concerto, his method in general was to introduce it with a voluntary movement on the diapasons, which stole on the ear in a slow and solemn progression; the harmony close wrought, and as full as could possibly be expressed; the passages concatenated with stupendous art, the whole at the same time being perfectly intelligible, and carrying the appearance of great simplicity. This kind of prelude was succeeded by the concerto itself, which he executed with a degree of spirit and firmness that no one ever pretended to equal."
This piece was premiered as part of Israel in Egypt at the Kings Theatre in the Haymarket in London in 1739. As ever, Handel also drew on his own earlier works and other people’s music in writing this concerto. The first and last movements are based on his own Trio Sonata, Op 5 No 6. The famous second movement, whose bird song gives the whole piece its nickname, lifts ideas from an aria from Giovanni Porta’s opera Numitore (which was certainly known in London as it was performed there in 1720) and a Capriccio sopra il CuCu by Johann Kaspar Kerll. Handle also marks several points in the piece where the soloist plays ‘ad libitum’ - at will.
© Svend Brown
- conductor/organ/harpsichord
The flamboyant interior of St Cuthbert’s offers a superb backdrop to an hour of baroque masterworks. The concerto was the quintessential genre of the era, and Egarr has made his selection of four from among the hundreds of great pieces by two of the greatest musicians of their age: Bach and Handel.
Child Prodigy - Mature Genius
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)Allegro molto
Andante
PrestoThe thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Piano Concerto in D, Hob XVIII (1784)Vivace
Un poco Adagio
Rondo all’Ungarese - Allegro assaiHaydn’s long working life corresponded almost exactly to the period which saw the piano supersede the harpsichord as the pre-eminent keyboard instrument. Though many commentators believe that the earliest of Haydn’s surviving keyboard concertos were conceived for the organ, by the time he came to write tonight's D major Concerto (sometime in the early 1780s), pianos were increasingly being viewed as the keyboard instrument of choice. Certainly, writing in 1784, Haydn urged his friend Marianne von Genzinger to sell her harpsichord and buy a piano. Three years later he asked his publishers, Artaria, to advance him some funds so that he could buy a new piano to use while composing a set of three piano trios.
Unlike Mozart, Haydn did not compose his keyboard concertos to showcase his own abilities as a performer. His proficiency at and appreciation for the keyboard are abundantly evident from his output of wonderful keyboard sonatas and piano trios, but he was no virtuoso. Like many composers, he used the keyboard as a tool, as he explained to his friend and biographer Georg Greiseinger: “I sit down at the keyboard, and begin to improvise, sad or happy according to my mood. Once I have seized on an idea, my whole endeavour is to develop and sustain it, always in keeping with the rules of art."
The D major Concerto was almost certainly the last keyboard concerto Haydn wrote. It was first published by Artaira in 1784, and it rapidly became one of his most popular works. When, in 1787, Haydn offered it to an English publisher, he learnt that pirated editions had already appeared in London. Indeed, by the time of Haydn’s death, the Concerto was being sold by no fewer than eight different publishing houses in five different countries.
It is Haydn’s lively and original voice, rather than conspicuous virtuosity, which marks out this concerto; and the piece overflows with thematic material which Haydn manipulates with typical skill and cleverness. It culminates in a tour-de-force Gypsy Rondo Finale, based on an old Croatian dance; an exotic novelty which must have surely delighted the Esterházy court.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43The reputation Beethoven enjoyed by his 30th birthday can be measured by the fact that he was invited to write The Creatures of Prometheus. The ballet was to be performed before Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily, the most powerful woman in Vienna. Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Germany, Archduchess Consort of Austria, Queen Consort of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia… Need I go on? We live in an age when what remains of empires are breaking down so it is harder for us to imagine a Europe so utterly dominated by the Hapsburg family as it was in 1801. To be commissioned to write music for ears as important as Maria Teresa’s was an honour for any young composer, even a hot-head republican like Beethoven.
The plot of the ballet was drafted by Neapolitan choreographer Salvatore Viganò, - a major Viennese celebrity in his own right. It tells the tale of Prometheus bringing civilization to humanity in the shape of two statues that come to life. As well as enlightening them himself, he recruits many of the Olympian gods and the muses of Parnassus to teach them the arts, especially music and dance. The ballet is said to have opened with Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and then fleeing – hence the jarring discord at the start of this overture, and the subsequent energetic scurrying.
© Svend Brown
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 8 in F Op 93 (1812)Allegro vivace e con brio
Allegretto scherzando
Tempo di Menuetto
Allegro vivaceTo call Symphony No 8 “the little one”, as Beethoven himself once did, is to ignore the fact that it is also the most explosive of the nine. In no other Beethoven symphony is a movement so peppered with abrupt chords and rip-roaring outbursts than the first movement of this work. In fact, Beethoven’s Symphony No 8 is “little” only in the sense that it is compact. Completed in 1812, along with the Symphony No 7, it possesses the same furiously creative drive in even more concentrated form. Beethoven himself preferred the Eighth to the Seventh. When told that its brevity had disappointed its first audience, he replied that that was because it was “so much better”.
The first movement’s well-clinched opening theme gives an immediate idea of the tautness of the music. Yet the theme’s sublime jollity seems constantly threatened by the volatile quality of so much of the rest of the movement. When – after a development section which has been essentially one huge crescendo – it returns on the cellos and basses at the start of the recapitulation, it has to struggle to make itself heard through the noise of the rest of the orchestra.
The slow movement is a tease, in that it is not a slow movement at all, any more than it is a scherzo, despite its scherzando marking. The origin of its ticking rhythm lay in a canon Beethoven wrote for Johann Maelzel, inventor of one of the metronomes of the period. Here Beethoven’s touch is at its lightest, even when small explosions interrupt the ticking.
Something similar happens in the minuet – the opening bars are so syncopated that the dance-like nature of the music is intentionally concealed. Beethoven obviously had no cause to write anything as retrogressive as a minuet at this stage in his career, and the music has little to do with minuets of the sort he produced in his youth. In a sense, this is an anti-minuet, written in reaction to the huge, circling scherzo of the Symphony No 7. The trio section, with its genial horns and grunting cellos, is as charming as it is humorously grotesque.
The exhilaratingly swerving finale does not avoid head-on collisions between one key and another. Indeed it positively savours them. The momentum hardly relaxes even for the lyrical second subject on the woodwind, or for the profound impulse of what is one of Beethoven’s biggest and greatest codas. culminating in virtuosically pounding kettledrums.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/harpsichord
The boy Mozart opens this programme with a piece written at the age of eight, while mature Beethoven closes it. Hearing their two symphonies together dramatically highlights how two generations of composers transformed the symphony – and the language of music itself – from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No.8 in F major, op.9 - Tempo di menuetto - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Child Prodigy - Mature Genius
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No 1 in E flat major, K16 (1864)Allegro molto
Andante
PrestoThe thought that Mozart actually composed a Symphony No 1, employing (at the age of eight) a theme which would reappear in the Jupiter symphony, requires what can only be called suspension of disbelief. Did his influential father have a hand in it? Was it written by Mozart at all? Was he, wunderkind though he was, even capable of writing it? His second and third symphonies, as we now know, were the work of other people, but all the evidence points to the authenticity of K16. True, the music itself does not tell us as much. How could it be expected to do so? Even the reiterating and quite recognisable anticipation of the Jupiter symphony, which dominates the slow movement, is just an eighteenth-century tag, consisting of the notes do-re-fa-mi in sol-fa notation. Mozart employed it more than once in the course of his career, before bringing it to its apotheosis in the finale of his last symphony. Yet the way the horns play it, or underline it, in this boyhood work seems nothing if not significant, even though, in suggesting as much, we are merely being wise after the event.
Or are we? Mozart himself was presumably thinking along ambitious lines when, in writing the piece, he asked his sister Nannerl to remind him to give the horns "something special to do." Moreover the circumstances in which he composed it, during the famous family visit to London when he met Johann Christian Bach and performed for King George III, were curiously, indeed mysteriously, Mozartian, with his father lying in bed, seemingly dying of pneumonia but in fact suffering from no more than a cold, and with the children under orders not to make the slightest noise. Instead, said Nannerl of her brother, "he composed his first symphony for all the instruments of the orchestra – but especially for trumpets and kettledrums."
Though the absence of trumpets and drums from the score may suggest that it was a different symphony she was copying for him as she sat beside him in Leopold Mozart's sickroom, the parts for these instruments (not for the only time in a work by Mozart) may simply have been lost. Certainly the fanfares of the first movement sound ceremonial enough to imply their presence, even if it would be going too far to suggest, as one authority has done, that the stuttering rhythm is an anticipation of Papageno in The Magic Flute. The slow movement in C minor, however, is surely an early manifestation of sombre Mozartian poignancy, swept aside by the breezy concluding presto.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Piano Concerto in D, Hob XVIII (1784)Vivace
Un poco Adagio
Rondo all’Ungarese - Allegro assaiHaydn’s long working life corresponded almost exactly to the period which saw the piano supersede the harpsichord as the pre-eminent keyboard instrument. Though many commentators believe that the earliest of Haydn’s surviving keyboard concertos were conceived for the organ, by the time he came to write tonight's D major Concerto (sometime in the early 1780s), pianos were increasingly being viewed as the keyboard instrument of choice. Certainly, writing in 1784, Haydn urged his friend Marianne von Genzinger to sell her harpsichord and buy a piano. Three years later he asked his publishers, Artaria, to advance him some funds so that he could buy a new piano to use while composing a set of three piano trios.
Unlike Mozart, Haydn did not compose his keyboard concertos to showcase his own abilities as a performer. His proficiency at and appreciation for the keyboard are abundantly evident from his output of wonderful keyboard sonatas and piano trios, but he was no virtuoso. Like many composers, he used the keyboard as a tool, as he explained to his friend and biographer Georg Greiseinger: “I sit down at the keyboard, and begin to improvise, sad or happy according to my mood. Once I have seized on an idea, my whole endeavour is to develop and sustain it, always in keeping with the rules of art."
The D major Concerto was almost certainly the last keyboard concerto Haydn wrote. It was first published by Artaira in 1784, and it rapidly became one of his most popular works. When, in 1787, Haydn offered it to an English publisher, he learnt that pirated editions had already appeared in London. Indeed, by the time of Haydn’s death, the Concerto was being sold by no fewer than eight different publishing houses in five different countries.
It is Haydn’s lively and original voice, rather than conspicuous virtuosity, which marks out this concerto; and the piece overflows with thematic material which Haydn manipulates with typical skill and cleverness. It culminates in a tour-de-force Gypsy Rondo Finale, based on an old Croatian dance; an exotic novelty which must have surely delighted the Esterházy court.
© Stephen Strugnell
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Overture, The Creatures of Prometheus, Op 43The reputation Beethoven enjoyed by his 30th birthday can be measured by the fact that he was invited to write The Creatures of Prometheus. The ballet was to be performed before Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily, the most powerful woman in Vienna. Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Germany, Archduchess Consort of Austria, Queen Consort of Hungary, Bohemia, Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia… Need I go on? We live in an age when what remains of empires are breaking down so it is harder for us to imagine a Europe so utterly dominated by the Hapsburg family as it was in 1801. To be commissioned to write music for ears as important as Maria Teresa’s was an honour for any young composer, even a hot-head republican like Beethoven.
The plot of the ballet was drafted by Neapolitan choreographer Salvatore Viganò, - a major Viennese celebrity in his own right. It tells the tale of Prometheus bringing civilization to humanity in the shape of two statues that come to life. As well as enlightening them himself, he recruits many of the Olympian gods and the muses of Parnassus to teach them the arts, especially music and dance. The ballet is said to have opened with Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and then fleeing – hence the jarring discord at the start of this overture, and the subsequent energetic scurrying.
© Svend Brown
- Beethoven
Programme note
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No 8 in F Op 93 (1812)Allegro vivace e con brio
Allegretto scherzando
Tempo di Menuetto
Allegro vivaceTo call Symphony No 8 “the little one”, as Beethoven himself once did, is to ignore the fact that it is also the most explosive of the nine. In no other Beethoven symphony is a movement so peppered with abrupt chords and rip-roaring outbursts than the first movement of this work. In fact, Beethoven’s Symphony No 8 is “little” only in the sense that it is compact. Completed in 1812, along with the Symphony No 7, it possesses the same furiously creative drive in even more concentrated form. Beethoven himself preferred the Eighth to the Seventh. When told that its brevity had disappointed its first audience, he replied that that was because it was “so much better”.
The first movement’s well-clinched opening theme gives an immediate idea of the tautness of the music. Yet the theme’s sublime jollity seems constantly threatened by the volatile quality of so much of the rest of the movement. When – after a development section which has been essentially one huge crescendo – it returns on the cellos and basses at the start of the recapitulation, it has to struggle to make itself heard through the noise of the rest of the orchestra.
The slow movement is a tease, in that it is not a slow movement at all, any more than it is a scherzo, despite its scherzando marking. The origin of its ticking rhythm lay in a canon Beethoven wrote for Johann Maelzel, inventor of one of the metronomes of the period. Here Beethoven’s touch is at its lightest, even when small explosions interrupt the ticking.
Something similar happens in the minuet – the opening bars are so syncopated that the dance-like nature of the music is intentionally concealed. Beethoven obviously had no cause to write anything as retrogressive as a minuet at this stage in his career, and the music has little to do with minuets of the sort he produced in his youth. In a sense, this is an anti-minuet, written in reaction to the huge, circling scherzo of the Symphony No 7. The trio section, with its genial horns and grunting cellos, is as charming as it is humorously grotesque.
The exhilaratingly swerving finale does not avoid head-on collisions between one key and another. Indeed it positively savours them. The momentum hardly relaxes even for the lyrical second subject on the woodwind, or for the profound impulse of what is one of Beethoven’s biggest and greatest codas. culminating in virtuosically pounding kettledrums.
© Conrad Wilson
- conductor/harpsichord
The boy Mozart opens this programme with a piece written at the age of eight, while mature Beethoven closes it. Hearing their two symphonies together dramatically highlights how two generations of composers transformed the symphony – and the language of music itself – from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism.
Related audio clip
Beethoven Symphony No.8 in F major, op.9 - Tempo di menuetto - excerpt
The Orchestra performed Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 1-8 at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival, under Sir Charles Mackerras. The performances were recorded by Hyperion and released as a 5-disc CD box set. The Philarmonia Orchestra perform Symphony No 9. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Samaagam
- Khan (realised by David Murphy)
Programme note
Samaagam comes from a Sanskrit word meaning confluence or flowing together. In realising this work from Amjad Ali Khan’s singing and playing, and in rehearsing it with the SCO, I have aimed to preserve the essence of both Indian and Western traditions so that they can flow into each other without artistic compromise. I have used the orchestration of Indian ensemble music in the pre-Bollywood era as inspiration and have also looked back to the ancient (i.e. pre equal temperament) Western tradition incorporating elements which, because of their antiquity, do not violate the rules of Indian music. The aim is through this process to joyfully explore the common musical “DNA” of both traditions.
This kind of endeavour needs time and commitment as people need to learn new skills. We have been very fortunate to have the commitment of the wonderful musicians of the SCO Lab music project (which form the concertino group in the work) and the presence of Amjad Ali Khan himself, during a series of workshops which began back in 2006.
Amjad Ali Khan has remarked: “every raga has a soul and every musical note is the sound of God”. In tonight’s performance of Samaagam 12 different ragas will be presented. Some will make only a fleeting appearance; others will be explored for longer. (Not as long as in India however, where it is not uncommon for a musician to perform one raga for 8 to 10 hours -the duration of an all night concert- in order to bring out its full character!)
Samaagam is structured in three sections:
I. Ganesh Kalyan - Subhalakshmi - Swar Samir
II. Medley of Ragas (featuring Lab music players):
Maarva – Durga – Malkauns – Kaushik Dhwani – Kalavati – Basant - Megh
III. Khamaj – Bhupali – Bhairavi
The ragas in the first section were all conceived and developed by Amjad Ali Khan, who feels that these ragas have been invoked rather than created.
His sons Amaan and Ayaan have written:
“New faces (ragas) come to his mind and ask him their names; as they have no names Abba names them and they become new ragas. Listening to most of Abba’s ragas, one feels that they are traditional ragas which were born thousands of years ago, but for some reason, not discovered.”
Ganesh Kalyan made its first appearance at the Ganesh Festival in Pune in 1992. In Indian mythology, Ganesh, the elephant god, is the remover of obstacles and bringer of good luck. Also first presented in 1992, Subhalakshmi is a tribute to Mrs Subhalakshmi Khan, Amjad Ali Khan’s wife. Swar Samir, played here with a seven beat time cycle, made its first appearance in 1964, at the Harballabh Music Festival in the Punjab. It is inspired by two traditional ragas: Raga Rageshri and Raga Joge.
The Medley of Ragas features 7 traditional ragas in quick succession, and features the Lab musicians in solo and group improvisation. Indian Ragas are designed to be played at different times of the day, and different seasons of the year. The majority of the Ragas in Samaagam are evening or night-time ragas, however Maarva, which opens the Medley, was originally conceived to be played at sunset, and Megh, which closes the Medley during the rainy season. If performed expertly enough, it is said to induce rain!
The closing section initially explores the popular and sensual Raga Khamaj, which is said to “turn the flower red with passion”. This is followed by a glimpse of Raga Bhupali described as a woman “in expectation of her lover, nervously putting on her bracelets and moving hither and thither like a swing”. Samaagam finishes with an exploration of Raga Bhairavi. Bhairavi is perhaps the most popular raga in Indian music. It is traditionally a morning raga, played at the conclusion of an all night concert. Due to its popularity (and the contemporary lack of nocturnal musical marathons!) it is accepted that Bhairavi can be performed at any time of the day or night.
© David Murphy
- Sarod
- conductor
- -
Legendary Indian sarod player Amjad Ali Khan joins the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor David Murphy for a dynamic fusion of Indian and Western music, traditions and instruments.
The sarod is deeper in tone than the sitar and more akin to the human voice. Amjad Ali Khan is the master at making it sing: weaving complex, beautiful and emotive soundscapes from its 19 strings, creating an "overall effect which was both exciting and serene". (**** The Scotsman)
The first half of the concert is a 30 minute performance from school pupils and community participants from throughout Perth who have been working with musicians from the SCO and Scottish/Indian dance group Dance Ihayami to create music and dance inspired by Samaagam.
For more information about this project, click here
Osborne Plays Mozart
- Prokofiev
Programme note
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No 1 in D major, Op 25 'Classical' (1917)Allegro
Larghetto
Gavotte: Non troppo allegro
Finale: Molto vivace
Prokofiev claimed that his music possessed five principal manners: the classical, the lyric, the modern, the motoric, the grotesque. Though it is quite obvious to which category the first of his seven symphonies belongs, the classicism announced by its title is more a matter of witty pastiche than of anything more creatively ambitious. The work is not, despite Prokofiev’s declared aims for it, a symphony such as Haydn might have written, had he been still alive to do so. Haydn, by then, would have been writing very differently from (and probably more Mahlerishly than) the composer of the twelve superb London symphonies. Prokofiev’s own music in any case was of a sort that seethed with change. Having reached a state of ferocious grotesquerie in his Suggestion Diabolique of 1908, he anticipated the “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 with the airy lyricism of the First Violin Concerto in the summer of that year. In the dissonant context of his Scythian Suite, which in 1914 had been his answer to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his Classical Symphony was just a joke, albeit an extremely good one, which today’s audiences continue to relish.If Prokofiev’s intentions in writing this were really, as he later admitted, to “tease the geese,” then he succeeded admirably. Teasing was always a Prokofiev speciality. So although the music could never be mistaken for Haydn, nor for anything other than what it was, its sense of comedy proved unmistakable and its pellucid use of a classical-sized orchestra marvellously adept. Its popularity was assured from the start, and the work soon established itself as a classic in its own right.
It begins cleverly, as Mozart or Haydn would instantly have recognised, with a fake Mannheim rocket - a call to attention pioneered by Bavaria’s brilliant eighteenth-century orchestra based in that city. The main theme, deftly unfurled, leads to a second theme involving neat grace-notes from the violins in their upper register and soft downward leaps requiring the most precise articulation. Mannheim rockets continue to explode while Prokofiev assembles (with some modern modulations) his equivalent of a classical first movement, making the most of his dapper material until the music has run its traditional course.
The machine-tooled angularity of the slow movement, with its quietly tripping rhythm, sounds very much the cool essence of Prokofiev at a time when Russia was in political tumoil. A Prokofievian gavotte is substituted, with further angularity, for the expected classical minuet, but quickly makes way for a nimble finale which fizzes along with unswerving momentum.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a 'transfigured farewell' - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - 'Allegro', 'Larghetto', 'Allegro' - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it looked like quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled 'Longing for Spring'.
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigned supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809):
Symphony No 92 in G 'Oxford'Adagio – Allegro spiritoso
Adagio
Menuetto: Allegretto
PrestoHaydn’s relations with Oxford got off on the wrong foot. He had come to England at the invitation of the impresario Johann Peter Salomon in 1791, and arrived to find himself an A-list celebrity. Had there been paparazzi in the 1790s, they would have pursued him hotly. So just imagine how exciting it must have been for the good people of the distinguished (but musically quite provincial) city of Oxford to hear that he would appear in concert there on May 18th. A huge crowd duly assembled — only to be disappointed! Haydn was a no-show. Word of their disappointment reached the great composer, who seems to have been a genuinely humble, warm and magnanimous human being, unspoiled by his stellar reputation. One week later he apologized in print, explaining that he had been unavoidably detained by opera rehearsals in London. He ended charmingly by saying, “The University of Oxford, whose great reputation I heard abroad, is too great an object for me not to see before I leave England, and I shall take the earliest opportunity of paying it a visit.” Two months later he fulfilled his pledge, and graciously accepted an honorary degree from the university. He enjoyed that experience very much, with the exception of being expected to traipse around the streets for three days in his ceremonial garb – a scarlet robe with flouncy frills at the collar and cuffs. Clearly it did not undermine his dignity too much – and he even raised a laugh at a concert by lifting the edges of his gown in a kind of curtsey to acknowledge applause. One paper reported that the gesture got a far warmer response than the soprano soloist!
One of his symphonies was performed at the event, and naturally it came to be known as the Oxford Symphony. Strictly speaking, that is a dubious title. The piece was one of three that Haydn wrote in the late 1780s in response to simultaneous requests for new works from aristocrats in Paris and a small principality in what is now Bavaria. Realizing that neither patron would be any the wiser, Haydn sent the same three symphonies to both! For this piece to wind up being called the ‘Oxford’ merely caps the geographical shenanigans. To be fair, Haydn was on the level in Oxford. He had originally planned to play one of his newest London symphonies, but the house orchestra appears not to have been up to the job. This piece was substituted, and the local critic commented that it was “very fine, but well known.”
On of Haydn’s abiding fascinations – which grew with his age – was the challenge of developing the least amount of raw material into the widest variety of melodies and motifs for a single work. Assemble all the melodies of one of the late symphonies on a single sheet, and you can tease out the family resemblance with ease. This gives the end result and underlying unity and coherence (which should work mostly on a sub-conscious level) and great sense of purpose. In this piece, one example to follow through is the shape of the first proper theme once the slow introduction has finished. It is in the violins about one minute in. It starts on a top note, steps down 4 notes, then steps up them again to the first note then down again. Very simple indeed, simple enough to spark resemblance to the second main theme in the first movement (which inverts it), the opening theme of the second movement, and also the galloping opening of the finale which stretches that simple idea out into an eight bar melody.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
The young Prokofiev called his first symphony ‘classical’ partly in the hope that it would become a ‘classic’. The rest is history – not many pieces are as immediately likeable or more regularly performed worldwide. Okko Kamu pairs it here with one of the symphonies that inspired it (Haydn was Prokofiev’s idol), and Mozart’s last, great piano concerto.
Related audio clip
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K595 - Allegro - excerpt
Alfred Brendel joins forces with Sir Charles Mackerras and the SCO for Mozart's Piano Concerto No 27 in B flat major, K595. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Osborne Plays Mozart
- Prokofiev
Programme note
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Symphony No 1 in D major, Op 25 'Classical' (1917)Allegro
Larghetto
Gavotte: Non troppo allegro
Finale: Molto vivace
Prokofiev claimed that his music possessed five principal manners: the classical, the lyric, the modern, the motoric, the grotesque. Though it is quite obvious to which category the first of his seven symphonies belongs, the classicism announced by its title is more a matter of witty pastiche than of anything more creatively ambitious. The work is not, despite Prokofiev’s declared aims for it, a symphony such as Haydn might have written, had he been still alive to do so. Haydn, by then, would have been writing very differently from (and probably more Mahlerishly than) the composer of the twelve superb London symphonies. Prokofiev’s own music in any case was of a sort that seethed with change. Having reached a state of ferocious grotesquerie in his Suggestion Diabolique of 1908, he anticipated the “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 with the airy lyricism of the First Violin Concerto in the summer of that year. In the dissonant context of his Scythian Suite, which in 1914 had been his answer to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, his Classical Symphony was just a joke, albeit an extremely good one, which today’s audiences continue to relish.If Prokofiev’s intentions in writing this were really, as he later admitted, to “tease the geese,” then he succeeded admirably. Teasing was always a Prokofiev speciality. So although the music could never be mistaken for Haydn, nor for anything other than what it was, its sense of comedy proved unmistakable and its pellucid use of a classical-sized orchestra marvellously adept. Its popularity was assured from the start, and the work soon established itself as a classic in its own right.
It begins cleverly, as Mozart or Haydn would instantly have recognised, with a fake Mannheim rocket - a call to attention pioneered by Bavaria’s brilliant eighteenth-century orchestra based in that city. The main theme, deftly unfurled, leads to a second theme involving neat grace-notes from the violins in their upper register and soft downward leaps requiring the most precise articulation. Mannheim rockets continue to explode while Prokofiev assembles (with some modern modulations) his equivalent of a classical first movement, making the most of his dapper material until the music has run its traditional course.
The machine-tooled angularity of the slow movement, with its quietly tripping rhythm, sounds very much the cool essence of Prokofiev at a time when Russia was in political tumoil. A Prokofievian gavotte is substituted, with further angularity, for the expected classical minuet, but quickly makes way for a nimble finale which fizzes along with unswerving momentum.
© Conrad Wilson
- Mozart
Programme note
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Piano Concerto in B flat major, K595 (1791)Allegro
Larghetto
Allegro"Everything is cold for me – ice cold," wrote Mozart at the start of what was to be the last year of his life. He was not referring to the Viennese weather. His fame as Europe’s finest pianist-composer, who had brought the art of the piano concerto to its zenith, was dwindling. He had cash-flow problems, though these were in the process of being resolved. He was suffering from depression. But, as Meynard Solomon declared in his great Mozart biography, he "somehow managed to stem the drift into silence". He did so with a chain of masterpieces whose sheer quantity and variety - from The Magic Flute to the most subtle sequences of ballroom dances - he had not previously surpassed.
At the beginning of January he completed the last of his piano concertos, K595 in B flat major. His Clarinet Concerto, his last great string quintet, his last two operas, and a group of haunting miniatures - the Little German Cantata, the touching Ave Verum Corpus, the music for mechanical organ, the last few songs - still lay ahead, as also did the great unfinished Requiem. Though the last piano concerto has been thought to possess the quality of a 'transfigured farewell' - a very apt phrase with which to describe it - there is not the slightest evidence that Mozart himself thought about it that way, or that when he wrote it he was more than usually aware of his own impending demise. Those who say the music contains intimations of Mozart’s death are merely being wise after the event. His death-consciousness applied to the fate of all humanity.
Yet after the glitter of the ceremonial Coronation concerto, written three years previously, there is undoubtedly something very pared-down about K595, something conspicuously inward-looking about its mood. Its orchestration, with just a single flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns and strings, but no clarinets and certainly no trumpets and drums, is almost minimalist by Mozart’s standards at the time. Even the movement headings - 'Allegro', 'Larghetto', 'Allegro' - are reduced to single words. All this seems significant, but whether it signifies death or what might have been the start of a new phase in Mozart’s output of concertos is another matter.
Whatever else he had in mind - and it looked like quite a lot - further piano concertos at that point looked unlikely. When he played K595 on 4 March 1791, it was destined to be his last public appearance as a solo pianist before his death nine months later. The person who made it possible was an old acquaintance - the successful clarinettist Joseph Baehr - who slotted it into a concert in which Mozart was quite clearly not the star. The programme, given in the hall of a restaurant owner round the corner from Mozart’s apartment, featured Baehr himself as the main attraction. Next in importance was the singer Aloysia Lange, Mozart’s sister-in-law, whom he had loved and once hoped to marry. The information that "Herr Kapellmeister Mozart will play a concerto on the fortepiano" came third in line.
Did the work’s murmuring, unhurried opening make its mark? Were the downward scales and chromaticisms thought to possess a forlorn wraithlike eloquence? Was the flow of the music, in which one theme merges with the next, perceived to be beautifully sustained or did the audience fail to grasp such extraordinary continuity of line? Mozart’s own cadenza, written into the score, adds to the first movement’s special unity, as does the similarly personal cadenza in the finale.
The simplicity of the slow movement, which one distinguished but sometimes imperceptive authority on Mozart’s concertos has deemed to be a sign of waning inspiration, is perfectly in keeping with the veiled beauty of the rest of the work. Even the buoyant main theme of the rondo finale, which in an earlier concerto might have sounded like a vigorous hunting motif, has a delicacy appropriate to the intimacy of the music. It is no surprise that Mozart employed almost the same melody in one of his last songs, entitled 'Longing for Spring'.
Though it might seem sentimental to point out that 1791’s was to be Mozart’s last spring, the poignancy of the music makes the temptation irresistible. Yet there is also a lightweight muscularity about this movement which makes it possible to draw quite different conclusions about its meaning. In Mozart's last piano concerto, as in so many of its great predecessors, ambiguity reigned supreme.
© Conrad Wilson
- Haydn
Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809):
Symphony No 92 in G 'Oxford'Adagio – Allegro spiritoso
Adagio
Menuetto: Allegretto
PrestoHaydn’s relations with Oxford got off on the wrong foot. He had come to England at the invitation of the impresario Johann Peter Salomon in 1791, and arrived to find himself an A-list celebrity. Had there been paparazzi in the 1790s, they would have pursued him hotly. So just imagine how exciting it must have been for the good people of the distinguished (but musically quite provincial) city of Oxford to hear that he would appear in concert there on May 18th. A huge crowd duly assembled — only to be disappointed! Haydn was a no-show. Word of their disappointment reached the great composer, who seems to have been a genuinely humble, warm and magnanimous human being, unspoiled by his stellar reputation. One week later he apologized in print, explaining that he had been unavoidably detained by opera rehearsals in London. He ended charmingly by saying, “The University of Oxford, whose great reputation I heard abroad, is too great an object for me not to see before I leave England, and I shall take the earliest opportunity of paying it a visit.” Two months later he fulfilled his pledge, and graciously accepted an honorary degree from the university. He enjoyed that experience very much, with the exception of being expected to traipse around the streets for three days in his ceremonial garb – a scarlet robe with flouncy frills at the collar and cuffs. Clearly it did not undermine his dignity too much – and he even raised a laugh at a concert by lifting the edges of his gown in a kind of curtsey to acknowledge applause. One paper reported that the gesture got a far warmer response than the soprano soloist!
One of his symphonies was performed at the event, and naturally it came to be known as the Oxford Symphony. Strictly speaking, that is a dubious title. The piece was one of three that Haydn wrote in the late 1780s in response to simultaneous requests for new works from aristocrats in Paris and a small principality in what is now Bavaria. Realizing that neither patron would be any the wiser, Haydn sent the same three symphonies to both! For this piece to wind up being called the ‘Oxford’ merely caps the geographical shenanigans. To be fair, Haydn was on the level in Oxford. He had originally planned to play one of his newest London symphonies, but the house orchestra appears not to have been up to the job. This piece was substituted, and the local critic commented that it was “very fine, but well known.”
On of Haydn’s abiding fascinations – which grew with his age – was the challenge of developing the least amount of raw material into the widest variety of melodies and motifs for a single work. Assemble all the melodies of one of the late symphonies on a single sheet, and you can tease out the family resemblance with ease. This gives the end result and underlying unity and coherence (which should work mostly on a sub-conscious level) and great sense of purpose. In this piece, one example to follow through is the shape of the first proper theme once the slow introduction has finished. It is in the violins about one minute in. It starts on a top note, steps down 4 notes, then steps up them again to the first note then down again. Very simple indeed, simple enough to spark resemblance to the second main theme in the first movement (which inverts it), the opening theme of the second movement, and also the galloping opening of the finale which stretches that simple idea out into an eight bar melody.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- piano
The young Prokofiev called his first symphony ‘classical’ partly in the hope that it would become a ‘classic’. The rest is history – not many pieces are as immediately likeable or more regularly performed worldwide. Okko Kamu pairs it here with one of the symphonies that inspired it (Haydn was Prokofiev’s idol), and Mozart’s last, great piano concerto.
Related audio clip
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K595 - Allegro - excerpt
Alfred Brendel joins forces with Sir Charles Mackerras and the SCO for Mozart's Piano Concerto No 27 in B flat major, K595. Buy from the SCO Online Shop.
Schumann 200 - Romantic Spring
- Weber
Programme note
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Overture, Der Freischütz (1821)Der Freischütz is the one Weber opera that is as good as the promise of its overture - unlike, say, Euryanthe or Oberon which are so disastrously let down by inept libretti. An instant success on its first performance in Berlin in 1821, within a few years Der Freischütz had been performed in every major opera house in Europe. Johann Friedrich Kind's libretto has its weaknesses, too, but it is effectively designed for the stage and it presents a clear conflict between the forces of good and evil against the romantic background of the great German forest. The duality is no less clear in Weber's score, which is based on a corresponding long-term conflict between the keys of C major and C minor.
The Overture condenses the narrative complexities of the three acts of the opera into a masterfully constructed miniature tone poem. The Adagio introduction sets the scene in the forest with mysteriously slow moving lines on strings and woodwind and idealised hunting calls on the four horns. Just before the tempo changes, the sinister sound of the forces of evil are heard in eerie harmonies on strings and clarinets and dull thuds on the timpani - material derived from the famous 'Wolf's Glen' scene in the second act. The Molto vivace begins in C minor with anxious syncopations on the strings and an unhappy theme to be sung by the forester hero Max in the first act. The force of good enters only as a second subject when, after a clarinet solo that spreads light into the prevailing gloom, a brilliantly radiant melody associated with Max's betrothed Agathe is introduced by violins and clarinet and then taken up by other woodwind. Dramatic exchanges between the main themes are interrupted by a change of scene back to the 'Wolf's Glen', at which point the forces of evil seem to be in the ascendant. But, after a long pause and a massive chord of C major, Agathe's redemptive melody makes its exuberant and ultimately triumphant return.
© Gerald Larner
- Wagner
Programme note
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Wesendonck Lieder (1857-8)Der Engel (The Angel)
Stehe still! (Remain still!)
Im Treibhaus (In the Conservatory)
Schmerzen (Agonies)
Traume (Dreams)
While still married to the reproachful Minna, and with his marriage to the sterner, more enduring Cosima still thirteen years in the future, Wagner became temporarily involved with Mathilde Wesendonck, who served as his muse during his spell of impoverished political exile in Switzerland. The young wife of a wealthy German silk merchant who had retired to Zurich, she was a would-be poet five of whose very Wagnerian effusions inspired the composer’s 'Five Songs for a Female Voice.'In this way she achieved an immortality that would otherwise have been denied her.With her husband Otto Wesendonck as one of Wagner’s most generous sponsors of the period - he even provided the composer with free accommodation in premises next door to his villa - it could be said that Wagner was paid well for his efforts. But the songs, in any case, were masterly, not least because two of them supplied vivid foretastes of Tristan and Isolde, which by then was looming on the horizon and would be staged in Munich in 1865. In the Wesendonck Lieder, Wagner’s love for Mathilde was, in the words of one Wagner authority, “celebrated and idealised,” even if, as seems likely, her arrival in his life simply confirmed that Tristan was already present in his mind.
Though originally for solo voice and piano, the songs benefited - as later would so many of Mahler’s - from the colouring of their orchestral adaptations. Yet only one of them, the haunting Traume, was orchestrated by Wagner himself. The distinguished Austrian conductor Felix Mottl supplied, with the composer’s approval, all the others, before eventually collapsing and dying in the middle of a performance of (ironically) Tristan in 1911. Modern performers now have access to a second version, for chamber orchestra, of all five songs, made by Hans Werner Henze in 1976.
Of the two songs described as 'studies' for Tristan and Isolde, employing thematic material that would be fully developed in the opera, Im Treibhaus (In the Conservatory) suggests the infinite desolation of the prelude to Act Three, and Traume (Dreams) clearly anticipates the love music from Act Two. Though these are obviously the most significant of the Wesendonck Lieder, all five of them possess an emotion and a glowing beauty of line which make it seem a pity that Wagner did not venture more often into the realm of song writing.
© Conrad Wilson
1 Der Engel
In der Kindheit frühen Tagen
hört ich oft von Engeln sagen,
die des Himmels hehre Wonne
tauschen mit der Erdensonne,
daß, wo bang ein Herz in Sorgen
schmachtet vor der Welt verborgen,
daß, wo still es will verbluten
und vergehn in Tränenfluten,
daß, wo brünstig sein Gebet
einzig um Erlösung fleht,
da der Engel niederschwebt
und es sanft gen Himmel hebt.
Ja, es stieg auch mir ein Engel nieder,
und auf leuchtendem Gefieder
führt er ferne jedem Schmerz
meinen Geist nun himmelwärts!1 Angel
In my tender days of childhood
I would oft hear that angels
gave up the bliss of heaven
for earthly sun,
so there where some suffering heart
sighed, hidden from the world,
so there where it ran the risk of bleeding
to death in an outpoor of tears,
so there where its ardent prayer
emitted an impassioned plea for redemption,
an angel might descend
and elevate such heart towards heaven.
So I, too, have now been visited by an angel,
who carries upon the sparkling wings,
far from all pain,
my spirit up, to heaven.2 Stehe still
Sausendes, brausendes Rad der Zeit,
Messer du der Ewigkeit;
leuchtende Sphären im weiten All,
die ihr umringt den Weltenball;
urewige Schöpfung, halte doch ein,
genug des Werdens, laß mich sein!
Halte an dich, zeugende Kraft,
Urgedanke, der ewig schafft!
Hemme den Atem, stille den Drang,
schweige nur eine Sekunde lang!
Schwellende Pulse, fesselt den Schlag;
ende, des Wollens ew’ger Tag!Daß in selig süßem Vergessen
ich mög’alle Wonnen ermessen!
Wenn Aug in Auge wonnig trinken,
Seele ganz in Seele versinken,
Wesen in Wesen sich wiederfindet,
und alles Hoffens Ende sich kündet,
die Lippe verstummt in staunendem Schweigen,
keinen Wunsch mehr will das Inn’re zeugen:
erkennt der Mensch des Ew’gen Spur,
und lös’t dein Rätsel, heil’ge Natur!2 Stand still
You rushing, flying wheel of time,
you which are the measure of eternity;
you shining spheres in distant space
which surround the globe;
you primeval creature, stand still,
enough of growth, leave me alone!
Stand back, you fecund force,
you primal idea that constantly creates!
Hold your breath, calm down your agitation,
be silent for a single second!
You rushing pulses, restrain your pace,
come to an end, you endless day of desire!So that in charming sweet oblivion
I may fathom every delight!
Once an eye has been blissfully intoxicated with another eye,
once a soul has become immersed in another soul,
once a being has been reunited with itself in another being,
once the end of all hope has been announced,
once lips have grown dumb in the wonder of silence,
once the sould has ceased to nurture desire,
then man will discover the imprint of eternity,
and he will solve your riddle, holy nature!3 Im Treibhaus
Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen,
Baldachine von Smaragd,
Kinder ihr aus fernen Zonen
saget mir, warum ihr klagt?
Schweigend neiget ihr die Zweige,
malet Zeichen in die Luft,
und der Leiden stummer Zeuge,
steiget aufwärts süßer Duft.Weit in sehnendem Verlangen
breitet ihr die Arme aus,
und umschlinget wahnbefangen
öder Leere nicht’gen Graus.
Wohl, ich weiß es, arme Pflanze:
ein Geschicke teilen wir,
ob umstrahlt von Licht und Glanze,
unsre Heimat ist nicht hier!Und wie froh die Sonne scheidet
von des Tages leerem Schein,
hüllet der, der wahrhaft leidet,
sich in Schweigens Dunkel ein.Stille wird’s, ein säuselnd Weben
füllet bang den dunklen Raum:
schwere Tropfen seh’ ich schweben
an der Blätter grünem Saum.3 In the Glassouse
You arching leaf-clad treetops,
you emerald canopies,
you children from faraway lands,
tell me, why are you lamenting?
You bow your branches down in silence,
drawing signs in the air,
and a sweet scent is rising up,
as sorrow’s speechless witness.In ardent desire
you spread your arms wide open,
and, captives of delusion, embrace
the worthless demon of the baren void.
And yet I know, you miserable plant:
we share one fate,
though we may bask in light and brightness,
this is not our home!And as the sun joyfully parts
with the day’s empty light,
so he who genuinely suffers,
wraps himself in the dark of silence.Quiet prevails, the lightest murmur
wistfully fills the darkened space:
I perceive heavy dewdrops falling down
from leaves’ green borders.4 Schmerzen
Sonne, weinest jeden Abend
dir die schönen Augen rot,
wenn im Meeresspiegel badend
dich erreicht der frühe Tod;
doch erstehst in alter Pracht,
Glorie der düstren Welt,
du am Morgen neu erwacht,
wie ein stolzer Siegesheld!Ach, wie sollte ich klagen,
wie, mein Herz, so schwer dich sehn,
muß die Sonne selbst verzagen,
muß die Sonne untergehn?
Und gebieret Tod nur Leben,
geben Schmerzen Wonnen mir:
O wie dank’ich, daß gegeben
solche Schmerzen mir Natur!4 Pain
Sun, every evening
your eyes turn red from crying,
as, while taking a bath in the ocean’s waters,
you are overwhelmed by untimely death.
But then in your old glory,
you rise anew, you halo of the woeful world,
awakened on this coming dawn,
a proud, triumphant hero!Oh, why should I complain,
why should you be so heavy, heart of mine,
if the sun himself is bound,
if the sun himself is bound to set?
And if life’s sole outcome is death,
if pain brings me delight,
Oh how grateful I am
that nature gave me so much pain!5 Träume
Sag’, welch wunderbare Träume
halten meinen Sinn umfangen,
daß sie nicht wie leere Schäume
sind in ödes Nichts vergangen?Träume, die in jeder Stunde,
jedem Tage schöner blüh’n,
und mit ihrer Himmelskunde
selig durch’s Gemüte ziehn?Träume, die wie hehre Strahlen
in die Seele sich versenken,
dort ein ewig Bild zu malen:
Allvergessen, Eingedenken!
Träume, wie wenn Frühlingssonne
aus dem Schnee die Blüthen küßt,
daß zu nie geahnter Wonne
sie der neue Tag begrüßt,
daß sie wachsen, daß sie blühen,
träumend spenden ihren Duft,
sanft an deiner Brust verglühen
und dann sinken in die Gruft.5 Dreams
Tell me, what strange dreams
are holding my mind captive,
that prevent it from dissolving like formless foam
to barren nothingness?Dreams which with every hour,
every new day yield sweeter blossoms,
and which, laden with their heavenly message,
happily unfurl in the mind?Dreams which, like brilliant rays,
penetrate deep into the soul,
there to imprint the eternal image:
Of all forgetting, and of recollecting!
Dreams such as when the sun in spring
raises by kisses flowers from the snow,
so that the new-born day
may welcome them to peerless delight,
so they may grow, so they may blossom,
so they may dreamily give out their perfume,
so they may fade upon your bosom,
and then fall into the grave. - Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)
Symphony No 1 in B-flat, Op 38 ‘Spring’ (1841)Andante un poco maestoso - Allegro molto vivace
Larghetto
Scherzo - Molto vivace
Allegro animato e graziosoSchumann was an impulsive, obsessive man and as a composer that manifested itself in the way he focused on one genre after another. For many years he wrote little more than piano music; then suddenly he had a great year of song, 1840-41, during which he wrote most of his vocal music and all of his great song-cycles. In 1841 he turned to the symphony and in the space of twelve months produced three works which were to become his first and fourth symphonies and a quasi-symphony called Prelude, Scherzo and Finale – a sort of symphony without a slow movement. The Fourth Symphony and the Prelude, Scherzo and Finale would later be revised - for better or worse is still a matter of debate – but the first symphony, the ‘Spring’ has all the energy of certainty about it. Schumann dashed it down in outline over just four days in January 1841, and completed it not long after. Perhaps he knew so clearly what he wanted to achieve because as a music critic, he had long reflected on other composers’ efforts. Here is a particularly revealing passage - part of an iffy review he gave of a symphony by Gottfried Preyer which had won a competition:
“Sometimes I wish that a young composer might give us, just once, a light merry symphony, in a major key, without trombones and doubled horns. But then, of course, that is even more difficult...”
He did not entirely follow his own advice in the ‘Spring’ Symphony - there are trombones and horns - but it is in a major key, full of energy and merriment, and notably lacking in the kind of worthy ‘great’ musical thought he had found distressing in Preyer’s work.
The title is drawn from a line by the German Romantic poet, Böttger: “Im Tale zieht der frühling auf” (“In the valley, spring approaches”). Schumann wanted the orchestra to play with all the freshness and yearning of new growth: to capture the excitement and relief at the end of winter. Originally, he gave all the movements poetic titles, but withdrew them later, having decided that Berlioz was wrong to tell a story too literally in his Symphonie Fantastique and that a symphony should be able to communicate its ideas without subtitles. Perhaps, at the back of his mind, there was also the risk of provoking too close a comparison to Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. With or without subtitles, it is plain that the opening movement is very much an awakening - the trumpets give a call to which all respond - and that the flow of invention culminates in ‘High Spring’ in the finale.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
If there were a league table of Romantic composers, these three would never be out of the top six. Between them they created and evolved the musical language with which to express the quintessential Romantic bond with nature as a spiritual force, developing one of the most expressive and fertile art forms imaginable. The marvellous Scottish mezzo Karen Cargill performs Wagner’s passionate love songs.
Schumann 200 - Romantic Spring
- Weber
Programme note
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Overture, Der Freischütz (1821)Der Freischütz is the one Weber opera that is as good as the promise of its overture - unlike, say, Euryanthe or Oberon which are so disastrously let down by inept libretti. An instant success on its first performance in Berlin in 1821, within a few years Der Freischütz had been performed in every major opera house in Europe. Johann Friedrich Kind's libretto has its weaknesses, too, but it is effectively designed for the stage and it presents a clear conflict between the forces of good and evil against the romantic background of the great German forest. The duality is no less clear in Weber's score, which is based on a corresponding long-term conflict between the keys of C major and C minor.
The Overture condenses the narrative complexities of the three acts of the opera into a masterfully constructed miniature tone poem. The Adagio introduction sets the scene in the forest with mysteriously slow moving lines on strings and woodwind and idealised hunting calls on the four horns. Just before the tempo changes, the sinister sound of the forces of evil are heard in eerie harmonies on strings and clarinets and dull thuds on the timpani - material derived from the famous 'Wolf's Glen' scene in the second act. The Molto vivace begins in C minor with anxious syncopations on the strings and an unhappy theme to be sung by the forester hero Max in the first act. The force of good enters only as a second subject when, after a clarinet solo that spreads light into the prevailing gloom, a brilliantly radiant melody associated with Max's betrothed Agathe is introduced by violins and clarinet and then taken up by other woodwind. Dramatic exchanges between the main themes are interrupted by a change of scene back to the 'Wolf's Glen', at which point the forces of evil seem to be in the ascendant. But, after a long pause and a massive chord of C major, Agathe's redemptive melody makes its exuberant and ultimately triumphant return.
© Gerald Larner
- Wagner
Programme note
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Wesendonck Lieder (1857-8)Der Engel (The Angel)
Stehe still! (Remain still!)
Im Treibhaus (In the Conservatory)
Schmerzen (Agonies)
Traume (Dreams)
While still married to the reproachful Minna, and with his marriage to the sterner, more enduring Cosima still thirteen years in the future, Wagner became temporarily involved with Mathilde Wesendonck, who served as his muse during his spell of impoverished political exile in Switzerland. The young wife of a wealthy German silk merchant who had retired to Zurich, she was a would-be poet five of whose very Wagnerian effusions inspired the composer’s 'Five Songs for a Female Voice.'In this way she achieved an immortality that would otherwise have been denied her.With her husband Otto Wesendonck as one of Wagner’s most generous sponsors of the period - he even provided the composer with free accommodation in premises next door to his villa - it could be said that Wagner was paid well for his efforts. But the songs, in any case, were masterly, not least because two of them supplied vivid foretastes of Tristan and Isolde, which by then was looming on the horizon and would be staged in Munich in 1865. In the Wesendonck Lieder, Wagner’s love for Mathilde was, in the words of one Wagner authority, “celebrated and idealised,” even if, as seems likely, her arrival in his life simply confirmed that Tristan was already present in his mind.
Though originally for solo voice and piano, the songs benefited - as later would so many of Mahler’s - from the colouring of their orchestral adaptations. Yet only one of them, the haunting Traume, was orchestrated by Wagner himself. The distinguished Austrian conductor Felix Mottl supplied, with the composer’s approval, all the others, before eventually collapsing and dying in the middle of a performance of (ironically) Tristan in 1911. Modern performers now have access to a second version, for chamber orchestra, of all five songs, made by Hans Werner Henze in 1976.
Of the two songs described as 'studies' for Tristan and Isolde, employing thematic material that would be fully developed in the opera, Im Treibhaus (In the Conservatory) suggests the infinite desolation of the prelude to Act Three, and Traume (Dreams) clearly anticipates the love music from Act Two. Though these are obviously the most significant of the Wesendonck Lieder, all five of them possess an emotion and a glowing beauty of line which make it seem a pity that Wagner did not venture more often into the realm of song writing.
© Conrad Wilson
1 Der Engel
In der Kindheit frühen Tagen
hört ich oft von Engeln sagen,
die des Himmels hehre Wonne
tauschen mit der Erdensonne,
daß, wo bang ein Herz in Sorgen
schmachtet vor der Welt verborgen,
daß, wo still es will verbluten
und vergehn in Tränenfluten,
daß, wo brünstig sein Gebet
einzig um Erlösung fleht,
da der Engel niederschwebt
und es sanft gen Himmel hebt.
Ja, es stieg auch mir ein Engel nieder,
und auf leuchtendem Gefieder
führt er ferne jedem Schmerz
meinen Geist nun himmelwärts!1 Angel
In my tender days of childhood
I would oft hear that angels
gave up the bliss of heaven
for earthly sun,
so there where some suffering heart
sighed, hidden from the world,
so there where it ran the risk of bleeding
to death in an outpoor of tears,
so there where its ardent prayer
emitted an impassioned plea for redemption,
an angel might descend
and elevate such heart towards heaven.
So I, too, have now been visited by an angel,
who carries upon the sparkling wings,
far from all pain,
my spirit up, to heaven.2 Stehe still
Sausendes, brausendes Rad der Zeit,
Messer du der Ewigkeit;
leuchtende Sphären im weiten All,
die ihr umringt den Weltenball;
urewige Schöpfung, halte doch ein,
genug des Werdens, laß mich sein!
Halte an dich, zeugende Kraft,
Urgedanke, der ewig schafft!
Hemme den Atem, stille den Drang,
schweige nur eine Sekunde lang!
Schwellende Pulse, fesselt den Schlag;
ende, des Wollens ew’ger Tag!Daß in selig süßem Vergessen
ich mög’alle Wonnen ermessen!
Wenn Aug in Auge wonnig trinken,
Seele ganz in Seele versinken,
Wesen in Wesen sich wiederfindet,
und alles Hoffens Ende sich kündet,
die Lippe verstummt in staunendem Schweigen,
keinen Wunsch mehr will das Inn’re zeugen:
erkennt der Mensch des Ew’gen Spur,
und lös’t dein Rätsel, heil’ge Natur!2 Stand still
You rushing, flying wheel of time,
you which are the measure of eternity;
you shining spheres in distant space
which surround the globe;
you primeval creature, stand still,
enough of growth, leave me alone!
Stand back, you fecund force,
you primal idea that constantly creates!
Hold your breath, calm down your agitation,
be silent for a single second!
You rushing pulses, restrain your pace,
come to an end, you endless day of desire!So that in charming sweet oblivion
I may fathom every delight!
Once an eye has been blissfully intoxicated with another eye,
once a soul has become immersed in another soul,
once a being has been reunited with itself in another being,
once the end of all hope has been announced,
once lips have grown dumb in the wonder of silence,
once the sould has ceased to nurture desire,
then man will discover the imprint of eternity,
and he will solve your riddle, holy nature!3 Im Treibhaus
Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen,
Baldachine von Smaragd,
Kinder ihr aus fernen Zonen
saget mir, warum ihr klagt?
Schweigend neiget ihr die Zweige,
malet Zeichen in die Luft,
und der Leiden stummer Zeuge,
steiget aufwärts süßer Duft.Weit in sehnendem Verlangen
breitet ihr die Arme aus,
und umschlinget wahnbefangen
öder Leere nicht’gen Graus.
Wohl, ich weiß es, arme Pflanze:
ein Geschicke teilen wir,
ob umstrahlt von Licht und Glanze,
unsre Heimat ist nicht hier!Und wie froh die Sonne scheidet
von des Tages leerem Schein,
hüllet der, der wahrhaft leidet,
sich in Schweigens Dunkel ein.Stille wird’s, ein säuselnd Weben
füllet bang den dunklen Raum:
schwere Tropfen seh’ ich schweben
an der Blätter grünem Saum.3 In the Glassouse
You arching leaf-clad treetops,
you emerald canopies,
you children from faraway lands,
tell me, why are you lamenting?
You bow your branches down in silence,
drawing signs in the air,
and a sweet scent is rising up,
as sorrow’s speechless witness.In ardent desire
you spread your arms wide open,
and, captives of delusion, embrace
the worthless demon of the baren void.
And yet I know, you miserable plant:
we share one fate,
though we may bask in light and brightness,
this is not our home!And as the sun joyfully parts
with the day’s empty light,
so he who genuinely suffers,
wraps himself in the dark of silence.Quiet prevails, the lightest murmur
wistfully fills the darkened space:
I perceive heavy dewdrops falling down
from leaves’ green borders.4 Schmerzen
Sonne, weinest jeden Abend
dir die schönen Augen rot,
wenn im Meeresspiegel badend
dich erreicht der frühe Tod;
doch erstehst in alter Pracht,
Glorie der düstren Welt,
du am Morgen neu erwacht,
wie ein stolzer Siegesheld!Ach, wie sollte ich klagen,
wie, mein Herz, so schwer dich sehn,
muß die Sonne selbst verzagen,
muß die Sonne untergehn?
Und gebieret Tod nur Leben,
geben Schmerzen Wonnen mir:
O wie dank’ich, daß gegeben
solche Schmerzen mir Natur!4 Pain
Sun, every evening
your eyes turn red from crying,
as, while taking a bath in the ocean’s waters,
you are overwhelmed by untimely death.
But then in your old glory,
you rise anew, you halo of the woeful world,
awakened on this coming dawn,
a proud, triumphant hero!Oh, why should I complain,
why should you be so heavy, heart of mine,
if the sun himself is bound,
if the sun himself is bound to set?
And if life’s sole outcome is death,
if pain brings me delight,
Oh how grateful I am
that nature gave me so much pain!5 Träume
Sag’, welch wunderbare Träume
halten meinen Sinn umfangen,
daß sie nicht wie leere Schäume
sind in ödes Nichts vergangen?Träume, die in jeder Stunde,
jedem Tage schöner blüh’n,
und mit ihrer Himmelskunde
selig durch’s Gemüte ziehn?Träume, die wie hehre Strahlen
in die Seele sich versenken,
dort ein ewig Bild zu malen:
Allvergessen, Eingedenken!
Träume, wie wenn Frühlingssonne
aus dem Schnee die Blüthen küßt,
daß zu nie geahnter Wonne
sie der neue Tag begrüßt,
daß sie wachsen, daß sie blühen,
träumend spenden ihren Duft,
sanft an deiner Brust verglühen
und dann sinken in die Gruft.5 Dreams
Tell me, what strange dreams
are holding my mind captive,
that prevent it from dissolving like formless foam
to barren nothingness?Dreams which with every hour,
every new day yield sweeter blossoms,
and which, laden with their heavenly message,
happily unfurl in the mind?Dreams which, like brilliant rays,
penetrate deep into the soul,
there to imprint the eternal image:
Of all forgetting, and of recollecting!
Dreams such as when the sun in spring
raises by kisses flowers from the snow,
so that the new-born day
may welcome them to peerless delight,
so they may grow, so they may blossom,
so they may dreamily give out their perfume,
so they may fade upon your bosom,
and then fall into the grave. - Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)
Symphony No 1 in B-flat, Op 38 ‘Spring’ (1841)Andante un poco maestoso - Allegro molto vivace
Larghetto
Scherzo - Molto vivace
Allegro animato e graziosoSchumann was an impulsive, obsessive man and as a composer that manifested itself in the way he focused on one genre after another. For many years he wrote little more than piano music; then suddenly he had a great year of song, 1840-41, during which he wrote most of his vocal music and all of his great song-cycles. In 1841 he turned to the symphony and in the space of twelve months produced three works which were to become his first and fourth symphonies and a quasi-symphony called Prelude, Scherzo and Finale – a sort of symphony without a slow movement. The Fourth Symphony and the Prelude, Scherzo and Finale would later be revised - for better or worse is still a matter of debate – but the first symphony, the ‘Spring’ has all the energy of certainty about it. Schumann dashed it down in outline over just four days in January 1841, and completed it not long after. Perhaps he knew so clearly what he wanted to achieve because as a music critic, he had long reflected on other composers’ efforts. Here is a particularly revealing passage - part of an iffy review he gave of a symphony by Gottfried Preyer which had won a competition:
“Sometimes I wish that a young composer might give us, just once, a light merry symphony, in a major key, without trombones and doubled horns. But then, of course, that is even more difficult...”
He did not entirely follow his own advice in the ‘Spring’ Symphony - there are trombones and horns - but it is in a major key, full of energy and merriment, and notably lacking in the kind of worthy ‘great’ musical thought he had found distressing in Preyer’s work.
The title is drawn from a line by the German Romantic poet, Böttger: “Im Tale zieht der frühling auf” (“In the valley, spring approaches”). Schumann wanted the orchestra to play with all the freshness and yearning of new growth: to capture the excitement and relief at the end of winter. Originally, he gave all the movements poetic titles, but withdrew them later, having decided that Berlioz was wrong to tell a story too literally in his Symphonie Fantastique and that a symphony should be able to communicate its ideas without subtitles. Perhaps, at the back of his mind, there was also the risk of provoking too close a comparison to Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. With or without subtitles, it is plain that the opening movement is very much an awakening - the trumpets give a call to which all respond - and that the flow of invention culminates in ‘High Spring’ in the finale.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
If there were a league table of Romantic composers, these three would never be out of the top six. Between them they created and evolved the musical language with which to express the quintessential Romantic bond with nature as a spiritual force, developing one of the most expressive and fertile art forms imaginable. The marvellous Scottish mezzo Karen Cargill performs Wagner’s passionate love songs.
Schumann 200 - Romantic Spring
- Weber
Programme note
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Overture, Der Freischütz (1821)Der Freischütz is the one Weber opera that is as good as the promise of its overture - unlike, say, Euryanthe or Oberon which are so disastrously let down by inept libretti. An instant success on its first performance in Berlin in 1821, within a few years Der Freischütz had been performed in every major opera house in Europe. Johann Friedrich Kind's libretto has its weaknesses, too, but it is effectively designed for the stage and it presents a clear conflict between the forces of good and evil against the romantic background of the great German forest. The duality is no less clear in Weber's score, which is based on a corresponding long-term conflict between the keys of C major and C minor.
The Overture condenses the narrative complexities of the three acts of the opera into a masterfully constructed miniature tone poem. The Adagio introduction sets the scene in the forest with mysteriously slow moving lines on strings and woodwind and idealised hunting calls on the four horns. Just before the tempo changes, the sinister sound of the forces of evil are heard in eerie harmonies on strings and clarinets and dull thuds on the timpani - material derived from the famous 'Wolf's Glen' scene in the second act. The Molto vivace begins in C minor with anxious syncopations on the strings and an unhappy theme to be sung by the forester hero Max in the first act. The force of good enters only as a second subject when, after a clarinet solo that spreads light into the prevailing gloom, a brilliantly radiant melody associated with Max's betrothed Agathe is introduced by violins and clarinet and then taken up by other woodwind. Dramatic exchanges between the main themes are interrupted by a change of scene back to the 'Wolf's Glen', at which point the forces of evil seem to be in the ascendant. But, after a long pause and a massive chord of C major, Agathe's redemptive melody makes its exuberant and ultimately triumphant return.
© Gerald Larner
- Wagner
Programme note
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Wesendonck Lieder (1857-8)Der Engel (The Angel)
Stehe still! (Remain still!)
Im Treibhaus (In the Conservatory)
Schmerzen (Agonies)
Traume (Dreams)
While still married to the reproachful Minna, and with his marriage to the sterner, more enduring Cosima still thirteen years in the future, Wagner became temporarily involved with Mathilde Wesendonck, who served as his muse during his spell of impoverished political exile in Switzerland. The young wife of a wealthy German silk merchant who had retired to Zurich, she was a would-be poet five of whose very Wagnerian effusions inspired the composer’s 'Five Songs for a Female Voice.'In this way she achieved an immortality that would otherwise have been denied her.With her husband Otto Wesendonck as one of Wagner’s most generous sponsors of the period - he even provided the composer with free accommodation in premises next door to his villa - it could be said that Wagner was paid well for his efforts. But the songs, in any case, were masterly, not least because two of them supplied vivid foretastes of Tristan and Isolde, which by then was looming on the horizon and would be staged in Munich in 1865. In the Wesendonck Lieder, Wagner’s love for Mathilde was, in the words of one Wagner authority, “celebrated and idealised,” even if, as seems likely, her arrival in his life simply confirmed that Tristan was already present in his mind.
Though originally for solo voice and piano, the songs benefited - as later would so many of Mahler’s - from the colouring of their orchestral adaptations. Yet only one of them, the haunting Traume, was orchestrated by Wagner himself. The distinguished Austrian conductor Felix Mottl supplied, with the composer’s approval, all the others, before eventually collapsing and dying in the middle of a performance of (ironically) Tristan in 1911. Modern performers now have access to a second version, for chamber orchestra, of all five songs, made by Hans Werner Henze in 1976.
Of the two songs described as 'studies' for Tristan and Isolde, employing thematic material that would be fully developed in the opera, Im Treibhaus (In the Conservatory) suggests the infinite desolation of the prelude to Act Three, and Traume (Dreams) clearly anticipates the love music from Act Two. Though these are obviously the most significant of the Wesendonck Lieder, all five of them possess an emotion and a glowing beauty of line which make it seem a pity that Wagner did not venture more often into the realm of song writing.
© Conrad Wilson
1 Der Engel
In der Kindheit frühen Tagen
hört ich oft von Engeln sagen,
die des Himmels hehre Wonne
tauschen mit der Erdensonne,
daß, wo bang ein Herz in Sorgen
schmachtet vor der Welt verborgen,
daß, wo still es will verbluten
und vergehn in Tränenfluten,
daß, wo brünstig sein Gebet
einzig um Erlösung fleht,
da der Engel niederschwebt
und es sanft gen Himmel hebt.
Ja, es stieg auch mir ein Engel nieder,
und auf leuchtendem Gefieder
führt er ferne jedem Schmerz
meinen Geist nun himmelwärts!1 Angel
In my tender days of childhood
I would oft hear that angels
gave up the bliss of heaven
for earthly sun,
so there where some suffering heart
sighed, hidden from the world,
so there where it ran the risk of bleeding
to death in an outpoor of tears,
so there where its ardent prayer
emitted an impassioned plea for redemption,
an angel might descend
and elevate such heart towards heaven.
So I, too, have now been visited by an angel,
who carries upon the sparkling wings,
far from all pain,
my spirit up, to heaven.2 Stehe still
Sausendes, brausendes Rad der Zeit,
Messer du der Ewigkeit;
leuchtende Sphären im weiten All,
die ihr umringt den Weltenball;
urewige Schöpfung, halte doch ein,
genug des Werdens, laß mich sein!
Halte an dich, zeugende Kraft,
Urgedanke, der ewig schafft!
Hemme den Atem, stille den Drang,
schweige nur eine Sekunde lang!
Schwellende Pulse, fesselt den Schlag;
ende, des Wollens ew’ger Tag!Daß in selig süßem Vergessen
ich mög’alle Wonnen ermessen!
Wenn Aug in Auge wonnig trinken,
Seele ganz in Seele versinken,
Wesen in Wesen sich wiederfindet,
und alles Hoffens Ende sich kündet,
die Lippe verstummt in staunendem Schweigen,
keinen Wunsch mehr will das Inn’re zeugen:
erkennt der Mensch des Ew’gen Spur,
und lös’t dein Rätsel, heil’ge Natur!2 Stand still
You rushing, flying wheel of time,
you which are the measure of eternity;
you shining spheres in distant space
which surround the globe;
you primeval creature, stand still,
enough of growth, leave me alone!
Stand back, you fecund force,
you primal idea that constantly creates!
Hold your breath, calm down your agitation,
be silent for a single second!
You rushing pulses, restrain your pace,
come to an end, you endless day of desire!So that in charming sweet oblivion
I may fathom every delight!
Once an eye has been blissfully intoxicated with another eye,
once a soul has become immersed in another soul,
once a being has been reunited with itself in another being,
once the end of all hope has been announced,
once lips have grown dumb in the wonder of silence,
once the sould has ceased to nurture desire,
then man will discover the imprint of eternity,
and he will solve your riddle, holy nature!3 Im Treibhaus
Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen,
Baldachine von Smaragd,
Kinder ihr aus fernen Zonen
saget mir, warum ihr klagt?
Schweigend neiget ihr die Zweige,
malet Zeichen in die Luft,
und der Leiden stummer Zeuge,
steiget aufwärts süßer Duft.Weit in sehnendem Verlangen
breitet ihr die Arme aus,
und umschlinget wahnbefangen
öder Leere nicht’gen Graus.
Wohl, ich weiß es, arme Pflanze:
ein Geschicke teilen wir,
ob umstrahlt von Licht und Glanze,
unsre Heimat ist nicht hier!Und wie froh die Sonne scheidet
von des Tages leerem Schein,
hüllet der, der wahrhaft leidet,
sich in Schweigens Dunkel ein.Stille wird’s, ein säuselnd Weben
füllet bang den dunklen Raum:
schwere Tropfen seh’ ich schweben
an der Blätter grünem Saum.3 In the Glassouse
You arching leaf-clad treetops,
you emerald canopies,
you children from faraway lands,
tell me, why are you lamenting?
You bow your branches down in silence,
drawing signs in the air,
and a sweet scent is rising up,
as sorrow’s speechless witness.In ardent desire
you spread your arms wide open,
and, captives of delusion, embrace
the worthless demon of the baren void.
And yet I know, you miserable plant:
we share one fate,
though we may bask in light and brightness,
this is not our home!And as the sun joyfully parts
with the day’s empty light,
so he who genuinely suffers,
wraps himself in the dark of silence.Quiet prevails, the lightest murmur
wistfully fills the darkened space:
I perceive heavy dewdrops falling down
from leaves’ green borders.4 Schmerzen
Sonne, weinest jeden Abend
dir die schönen Augen rot,
wenn im Meeresspiegel badend
dich erreicht der frühe Tod;
doch erstehst in alter Pracht,
Glorie der düstren Welt,
du am Morgen neu erwacht,
wie ein stolzer Siegesheld!Ach, wie sollte ich klagen,
wie, mein Herz, so schwer dich sehn,
muß die Sonne selbst verzagen,
muß die Sonne untergehn?
Und gebieret Tod nur Leben,
geben Schmerzen Wonnen mir:
O wie dank’ich, daß gegeben
solche Schmerzen mir Natur!4 Pain
Sun, every evening
your eyes turn red from crying,
as, while taking a bath in the ocean’s waters,
you are overwhelmed by untimely death.
But then in your old glory,
you rise anew, you halo of the woeful world,
awakened on this coming dawn,
a proud, triumphant hero!Oh, why should I complain,
why should you be so heavy, heart of mine,
if the sun himself is bound,
if the sun himself is bound to set?
And if life’s sole outcome is death,
if pain brings me delight,
Oh how grateful I am
that nature gave me so much pain!5 Träume
Sag’, welch wunderbare Träume
halten meinen Sinn umfangen,
daß sie nicht wie leere Schäume
sind in ödes Nichts vergangen?Träume, die in jeder Stunde,
jedem Tage schöner blüh’n,
und mit ihrer Himmelskunde
selig durch’s Gemüte ziehn?Träume, die wie hehre Strahlen
in die Seele sich versenken,
dort ein ewig Bild zu malen:
Allvergessen, Eingedenken!
Träume, wie wenn Frühlingssonne
aus dem Schnee die Blüthen küßt,
daß zu nie geahnter Wonne
sie der neue Tag begrüßt,
daß sie wachsen, daß sie blühen,
träumend spenden ihren Duft,
sanft an deiner Brust verglühen
und dann sinken in die Gruft.5 Dreams
Tell me, what strange dreams
are holding my mind captive,
that prevent it from dissolving like formless foam
to barren nothingness?Dreams which with every hour,
every new day yield sweeter blossoms,
and which, laden with their heavenly message,
happily unfurl in the mind?Dreams which, like brilliant rays,
penetrate deep into the soul,
there to imprint the eternal image:
Of all forgetting, and of recollecting!
Dreams such as when the sun in spring
raises by kisses flowers from the snow,
so that the new-born day
may welcome them to peerless delight,
so they may grow, so they may blossom,
so they may dreamily give out their perfume,
so they may fade upon your bosom,
and then fall into the grave. - Schumann
Programme note
Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856)
Symphony No 1 in B-flat, Op 38 ‘Spring’ (1841)Andante un poco maestoso - Allegro molto vivace
Larghetto
Scherzo - Molto vivace
Allegro animato e graziosoSchumann was an impulsive, obsessive man and as a composer that manifested itself in the way he focused on one genre after another. For many years he wrote little more than piano music; then suddenly he had a great year of song, 1840-41, during which he wrote most of his vocal music and all of his great song-cycles. In 1841 he turned to the symphony and in the space of twelve months produced three works which were to become his first and fourth symphonies and a quasi-symphony called Prelude, Scherzo and Finale – a sort of symphony without a slow movement. The Fourth Symphony and the Prelude, Scherzo and Finale would later be revised - for better or worse is still a matter of debate – but the first symphony, the ‘Spring’ has all the energy of certainty about it. Schumann dashed it down in outline over just four days in January 1841, and completed it not long after. Perhaps he knew so clearly what he wanted to achieve because as a music critic, he had long reflected on other composers’ efforts. Here is a particularly revealing passage - part of an iffy review he gave of a symphony by Gottfried Preyer which had won a competition:
“Sometimes I wish that a young composer might give us, just once, a light merry symphony, in a major key, without trombones and doubled horns. But then, of course, that is even more difficult...”
He did not entirely follow his own advice in the ‘Spring’ Symphony - there are trombones and horns - but it is in a major key, full of energy and merriment, and notably lacking in the kind of worthy ‘great’ musical thought he had found distressing in Preyer’s work.
The title is drawn from a line by the German Romantic poet, Böttger: “Im Tale zieht der frühling auf” (“In the valley, spring approaches”). Schumann wanted the orchestra to play with all the freshness and yearning of new growth: to capture the excitement and relief at the end of winter. Originally, he gave all the movements poetic titles, but withdrew them later, having decided that Berlioz was wrong to tell a story too literally in his Symphonie Fantastique and that a symphony should be able to communicate its ideas without subtitles. Perhaps, at the back of his mind, there was also the risk of provoking too close a comparison to Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. With or without subtitles, it is plain that the opening movement is very much an awakening - the trumpets give a call to which all respond - and that the flow of invention culminates in ‘High Spring’ in the finale.
© Svend Brown
- conductor
- mezzo-soprano
If there were a league table of Romantic composers, these three would never be out of the top six. Between them they created and evolved the musical language with which to express the quintessential Romantic bond with nature as a spiritual force, developing one of the most expressive and fertile art forms imaginable. The marvellous Scottish mezzo Karen Cargill performs Wagner’s passionate love songs.
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