You can travel the world over In search of what you need and return home again to find it. • Welcome home to... WMHT 89.1 fin Stereo Classical Music 24 Hours A Day 9 8 4 Tanplpwrmd Thursday, 19 July at 8:30 ELLYAMELING, soprano RUDOLF JANSEN, piano ALL-SCHUBERT PROGRAM I An die Musik Nachtviolen Die Blumensprache Im Abendrot Das Lied im Griinen II Wiegenlied Ave Maria Des Madchens Klage Amalia Das Madchen Standchen INTERMISSION III Songs on texts by Goethe: Auf dem See Erster Verlust Wanderers Nachtlied II Nahe des Geliebten Der Musensohn Gretchens Bitte Gretchen am Spinnrade Week IV IV Songs on texts by Ruckert: Du bist die Ruh Lachen und Weinen Dass sie hier gewesen Sei mir gegriisst The audience is politely requested to withhold applause until after each group of songs. Please do not applaud after the individual songs within each group. Rudolf Jansen plays the Steinway piano. Week IV Notes Franz Schubert was not the first great German composer to write songs (the lyric urge being apparently inborn in the human breast), but he created a new genre of song that far surpassed his splendid forerunners Mozart and Haydn, both of whom wrote a few songs that seem to prefigure Schubert's approach. Melody, of course, is central to song. Schubert's melodies boast a rare and wonderful simplic- ity and directness—to such a degree that many have become virtual folk songs in German-speaking countries. And what was quite new in his songs, rarely at- tempted by earlier composers, was the significance of the accompaniment, now called upon to build a world of expression around the voice, to suggest depths only hinted at in the words or the melody, to allow for a richness of irony or to create instantaneous changes of mood with a sudden chord or a striking new texture. Schubert's songs number in the hundreds. Sometimes the texts come from the pen of one of the great lyric poets of the German language, replete with rich suggestion. Just as often they are little more than hackwork by one of the com- poser's roommates or casual friends. In either case, Schubert chose to set the text because of expressive possibilities that he could perceive in it, regardless of its merit from a purely literary point of view. Once turned into song, the poem ceases to be simply a text and becomes an entirely new entity in which words and music have been married by the genius of the composer. The expressive result is more specific (because the music creates a very particular mood for the words) and often richer (because the music and the text can create an ironic coun- terpoint for one another). A number of great composers followed in Schubert's path as songwriters, whether in German, French, English, or some other language. But few have written so many superb songs, and none has ever recaptured that extraordinary directness that comes from the ability to express so much in the tiniest gestures of a melodic phrase, a change of harmony, or a variation in the accompaniment. Looking backwards through a century of great German song composers, we can find examples of, for example, far greater virtuosity in the creation of elaborate Week IV Live in a Place as Special As Harvard Square Itself. University Green, a new residential decorating interiors await the early community, beckons you to share the purchaser, who may choose a vitality of Harvard Square. Echoing fireplace from among the special the classic design of Harvard College, options. Prices range from $150,000 University Green is a handsome to $575,000. blend of traditional materials and contemporary finishes. 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In the summer of 1825, when he traveled with some friends to Upper Austria, Schubert visited one Anton Ottenwald, who wrote to the com- poser's friend Joseph von Spaun on 27 July, wishing that Spaun could hear Schubert's latest songs: If we could only bring the melodies into your dreams, as they surround us into the sinking hours of the night! —Schubert was so friendly and communicative . When he spoke of art, poetry, of his youth, of his friends and other important people, of the relationship of ideals to life, etc. — I could not help but marvel again and again at this genius of whom it is said that his artistic achievements are so unconscious that he himself is barely aware of them and barely understands them and so on. And how simple everything is— I cannot speak of the extent and the whole- ness of his convictions—but these were glimpses of a very personal philosophy of life . "And how simple everything is ... " indeed! Ottenwald was quite right. But Schubert's simplicity was of that very rare kind that is not simple-minded but rather profound. The songs included in the present program range from some of his earliest, n composed when he was about eighteen, to the end of his short life, little more than a decade later. Some of the most famous are here, as well as some that are unjustly neglected. The songs are roughly grouped by poets, beginning with a set of texts written mostly by members of Schubert's own circle of friends, then a mixed group of songs to texts by several distinguished German poets. Each of MORE MUSIC FORYOUR MONEY. Whether you're looking for an opera or an oratorio, a ballet or a baroque trumpet fanfare, you're sure to find what you want at the Classical Record Center at Barnes & Noble. When it comes to classical music, you always get more for your money at Barnes & Noble. Classical Record Center at Barnes &NoMe 395 Washington Street (at Downtown Crossing) BARNES Mon.-Fri., 9:30-6:30 Sat., 9:30-6:00 &NOBLE Sun., 12:00-6:00 the last two groups consists of songs to the poems of a single author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest lyric poet in the language, and Friedrich Riickert. Franz Schober and Johann Mayrhofer both roomed with the composer at vari- ous times. The former was a volatile character whom his friends regarded as a bad influence on Schubert, while the latter was gloomy and introspective (he eventually committed suicide). An die Musik, an apostrophe to Schubert's own art, is expressed in music of noble simplicity, designed with a bit of imitation between the voice and the piano to symbolize the act of making music in ensem- ble. The poet of the charming and whimsical Die Blumensprache is uncertain. Carl Lappe, author of the text to Im Abendrot, was the most distinguished poet of Pommerania. Im Abendrot uses silence and long-sustained vocal phrases to turn the poet's text into a solemn hymn on the transitoriness of human happiness. Das Lied im Grunen sets a text of Friedrich Reil, an ex-actor at the Court Theater in Vienna. Schubert's accompaniment ripples with one of his favorite devices, bro- ken triads, under a vocal line with a breathless, improvisatory quality suggesting youth and excitement. Mathias Claudius (1740-1815) was a popular poet of natural simplicity whose work Schubert first read in 1816 and immediately began to set. Wiegenlied was borrowed by one of the later masters of the German Lied, Richard Strauss, in his opera Ariadne aufNaxos, in graceful tribute to Schubert. Walter Scott was the great literary discovery of European readers in the 1820s. Schubert had been reading The Lady of the Lake in April 1825; in the following months he set seven selections from Scott's poem as a kind of cycle. Of these, the one officially titled "Ellen's to order cu.ll «"* 6371785 Pick up at rear of 104 Main Sl, Lenox (between Keepsake Quilta & O'Brien's Florist) Fabulous ^Movable ^east of Ixnox. Mass. 1 ,-»-» , , Cheese Delight Appetizer Picnics rYelUde: "new this year" Qold Qoufmet^Soup (iazpacho Vlchyssoise (T^r) •* At [Kiiai'i tomato base A leek bane °Salade de cpbulet a la "Debussyr chunks of chicken, whole grapes, walnut halvesewith tarragon accent Moment's cBeetfioven cJBoeqf Orientate silvered beeC Chinese noodles, vegetables, ginger, sesame, sealllons n Notice (•fieesecake Elegante HOURS: J" Includes: freshly baked marble rye Thurs/Fri/Sat Sunday bread, thick napkin and cutlery 10 AM -8 PM 10 AM -2 PM Third Song"—usually called Ave Maria—is by far the best-known, though often in transcriptions or with a quasi-liturgical Latin text that is far removed from the spirit of the song. Schubert was traveling with his friends in Styria that summer, and he wrote to his father on 25 July, first expressing the hope that the text by Scott might make possible publication in England, too, and spread his name there. Then he added: People wonder greatly at my piety which I have expressed in a hymn to the Holy Virgin and [which] it seems, grips every spirit and turns it to devotion.