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
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
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1 Der Engel In der Kindheit frühen Tagen |
1 Angel In my tender days of childhood |
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2 Stehe still Sausendes, brausendes Rad der Zeit, Daß in selig süßem Vergessen |
2 Stand still You rushing, flying wheel of time, So that in charming sweet oblivion |
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3 Im Treibhaus Hochgewölbte Blätterkronen, Weit in sehnendem Verlangen Und wie froh die Sonne scheidet Stille wird’s, ein säuselnd Weben |
3 In the Glassouse You arching leaf-clad treetops, In ardent desire And as the sun joyfully parts Quiet prevails, the lightest murmur |
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4 Schmerzen Sonne, weinest jeden Abend Ach, wie sollte ich klagen, |
4 Pain Sun, every evening Oh, why should I complain, |
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5 Träume Sag’, welch wunderbare Träume Träume, die in jeder Stunde, Träume, die wie hehre Strahlen |
5 Dreams Tell me, what strange dreams Dreams which with every hour, Dreams which, like brilliant rays, |
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 grazioso
Schumann 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
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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