Ian Bostridge, Tenor Wenwen Du, Piano
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Sunday, April 12, 2015, 3pm Hertz Hall Ian Bostridge, tenor Wenwen Du, piano PROGRAM The Music and Poetry of the Great War Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) Three songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn Revelge (1899) Der Tambourg’sell (1901) Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (1898) Rudi Stephan (1887–1915) Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied (1913– 1914) I. Kythere II. Pantherlied III. Abendfrieden IV. In Nachbars Garten V. Glück zu Zweien IV. Das Hohelied der Nacht PLAYBILL PROGRAM George Butterworth ( 1885–1916 ) A Shropshire Lad (1909–1911 ) I. Loveliest of Trees II. When I Was One-and-Twenty III. Look Not in My Eyes IV. Think No More, Lad V. The Lads in Their Hundreds VI. Is My Team Ploughing? INTERMISSION Kurt Weill (1900–1950) Four Walt Whitman Songs (1942, 1947) I. Beat! Beat! Drums! II. Oh Captain! My Captain! III. Come up from the Fields, Father IV. Dirge for Two Veterans Benjamin Britten ( 1913–1976 ) Four songs from Who Are These Children? , Op. 84 (1969–1971 ) III. Nightmare VI. Slaughter IX. Who Are These children? XI. The Children This performance is made possible, in part, by Patron Sponsors Susan Graham Harrison and Michael A. Harrison. Funded, in part, by the Koret Foundation, this performance is part of Cal Performances’ " !#–" !$ Koret Recital Series, which brings world-class artists to our community. Hamburg Steinway piano provided by Steinway & Sons, San Francisco. Cal Performances’ " !#–" !$ season is sponsored by Wells Fargo. CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES Gustav Mahler ( CHFB–CICC ) encounter of a young girl and the ghost of her Three songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn dead sweetheart, killed in battle. About the time that Mahler completed his First Symphony, in 1888, he began setting verses Rudi Stephan ( CHHG–CICE ) from the much-loved collection of German Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied folk poems titled Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”) that Ludwig Composed in GOGI–GOGJ . Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano had published at the beginning of the 19th cen - Rudi Stephan, killed in Se ptember 1915 at the tury. American musicologist Edward Downes age of 28 when he took a Russian sniper’s bul - noted a deep-seated personal need in Mahler’s let to the brain on the eastern front in Galicia interest in these simple peasant verses: “Like (now in Ukraine), was Germany’s greatest most German Romantic artists, Mahler felt a musical loss of World War I. Born into the love for folk art amounting almost to worship. family of a prosperous lawyer in the Rhenish In part, this may have been the nostalgia of city of Worms in 1887, Stephan started com - the com plex intellectual city-dweller for an posing as a teenager and studied composition Eden of lost innocence, of freshness, of with Bernhard Sekles in Frankfurt and Rudolf naïveté.” Mahler set some two dozen of the Louis in Munich. He completed his first large Wunderhorn poems over the following composition in 1908 , Opus G for Orchestra (he decade, as independent songs as well as texts said he preferred “no poetic title, not the des - and music that he incorporated into his ignation ‘tone poem,’ nothing” for his instru - Second, Third and Fourth symphonies. mental works), and then worked on a one-act In Revelge (“Reveille”) and Der opera ( Vater und Sohn [“Father and Son”], Tambourg’sell (“The Drummer Boy”), Mahler never completed), two orchestral works and a created two of his most powerful and ironic violin concerto, and presented them at a con - vocal utterances through the medium of the cert in January 1911 for which his father hired march with voice. He told his friend and in - the Munich Konzertverein Orchestra. formal biographer Natalie Bauer-Lechner in Additional performances of those and other 1901 that “he felt sorry for the world that orchestral works brought Stephan wide recog - would one day have to hear them, so terribly nition and a contract with the venerable music sad was their content.” Mahler authority publisher B. Schott in 1913. His only com - Donald Mitchell wrote of them, “The inten - pleted opera, Die ersten Menschen (“The First sity of this music has few parallels, even else - Men”), was scheduled for its première in where in Mahler. The Wunderhorn settings Frankfurt in 1915 but that performance was remind us of one central truth about his ap - cancelled by the outbreak of World War I; the proach to texts, that for him the poems were work was first staged by the Frankfurt Opera not artificial evocations or revivals of a lost in 1920. Stephan volunteered for military age of chivalry and German Romanticism, but service in March 1915 and in September he were vivid enactments of reality, of sorrow, was sent to the Eastern front, where he died heartbreak, terror and pain. The Wunderhorn two weeks later. Performances of his handful songs often tell a chilling truth about the of works were sporadic following his death human condition.” The original text of Wo die (most of his papers and autographs were de - schönen Trompeten blasen (“Where the stroyed in a 1945 bombing raid on Worms), Splendid Trumpets Are Sounding”) told of a but much of his music, including the complete simple tryst between lovers, but Mahler al - orchestral works and songs and the opera Die tered the poem to make this song into a mas - ersten Menschen , have now been recorded and terful evocation of the eerie midnight are occasionally heard in concert. PLAYBILL PROGRAM NOTES Stephan composed his song cycle Ich will He was elected president of the University dir singen ein Hohelied (“I Will Sing You a Music Club and developed close friendships High Song” ) in 1913–1914 to poems by Gerda with Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris, Cecil von Robertus (1872–1939), the pseudonym of Sharp, Adrian Boult, Hugh Allen, and other Gertrud von Schlieben. Her father was a of the university’s finest musicians, quickly diplomatic officer and her life and schooling coming to share their enthusiasm for the col - were dictated by his postings in Dresden and lection and study of traditional English folk - Berlin, but following his death in 1906 sh e de - songs and dances, which were fast voted herself to literary pursuits. Stephan bor - disappearing under the encroachment of rowed the texts for Ich will dir singen from her modern society. By the time he graduated first published collection of p oems (1906), from Oxford, in 1908, Butterworth had devel - which brought an almost mystical quality to oped into a serious scholar of indigenous the German Romantics’ traditional subject of English music, personally gathering some 150 human love reflected in nature. Stephan’s set - songs and becoming expert at performing tings, realized with an Impressionist sensual - many of the traditional dances. Neither his ity, are lyrical, delicately colored, and scholarly activities nor his fledgling attempts hauntingly suggestive. at composition could provide him with a liv - ing, however, so after leaving Oxford he worked for brief periods as a re viewer for The George Butterworth ( CHHE–CICF ) Times of London and a teacher at Radley A Shropshire Lad College before entering the Royal College of Music in 1910 for formal music study. Though Composed in 1 OFO–GOGG. Premièred on May he cared little for the curriculum, he did find GL, GOGG, in Oxford by baritone Campbell his creative voice during his year at the RCM, McInnes and the composer a s pianist. composing the Two English Idylls for orches - tra, making exquisite settings of six poems “I think I know of no composer whose music from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad , and com - expressed his character more exactly.... He had pleting an orchestral piece based on the first of the determination to be and say exactly what his Housman songs. Still uncertain of the di - he meant and no other.” With those admiring rection of his life, Butterworth restlessly fol - words, the English composer and folklorist lowed his musical interests after quitting the Ralph Vaughan Williams eulogized his friend RCM in 1911—sketching a hand ful of works and colleague George Butterworth, killed at but finishing only The Banks of Green Willow age 31 by a German bullet during the Battle of for orchestra, a second set of Housman songs the Somme. Butterworth was born in London (Bredon Hill ), a collection of songs on poems on July 12, 1885, and moved to York six years by W. E. Henley ( Love Blows as the Wind later when his father, the distinguished solic - Blows ) and a few folk song arrangements; ac - itor Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth, was ap - companying Vaughan Williams on folk song pointed general manager of the North Eastern expeditions; promoting the work of the Railway. George showed exceptional talent in English Folk Dance and Song Society—but music during his years at Eton (1899–1904), the eruption of World War I in August 1914 learning the piano, participating in concerts, filled him with a quickened sense of purpose. and beginning to compose, but Sir Alexander He enlisted in the Twelfth Durham Light insisted that his son study classics at Trinity Infantry in September and was soon pro - College, Oxford in order to take up the pater - moted to second lieutenant and mobilized to nal legal profession. Butterworth’s interest in the French front the following summer. He music soon won out over law, however, and he was assigned to the hellish trenches along the determined to fol low a career as a musician. Somme, where he was killed by enemy fire at CAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAM NOTES Pozières on August 5, 1916. He was posthu - (and much of his soul) as a volunteer nurse at mously awarded the Military Cross for a military hospital in the city.