Mark Padmore, Tenor Kristian Bezuidenhout, Fortepiano
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10-14 Schubert.qxp_GP 10/2/15 11:58 AM Page 1 Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday Evenings, October 14, 15, and 17, 2015 The Schubert Cycles Mark Padmore , Tenor Kristian Bezuidenhout , Fortepiano Page 43 The Lovely Mill Maiden Wednesday Evening, October 14, at 7:30 Page 47 Swan Song Thursday Evening, October 15, at 7:30 Page 51 Winter Journey Saturday Evening, October 17, at 7:30 These performances are also part of the Great Performers Art of the Song series. These performances are made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. Fortepiano by R.J. Regier, Freeport, Maine Please make certain all your electronic Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater devices are switched off. Adrienne Arsht Stage WhiteLightFestival.org 39 10-14 Schubert.qxp_GP 10/2/15 11:58 AM Page 2 BNY Mellon is Lead Supporter of Great Performers. Upcoming White Light Festival Events: Support for Great Performers is provided by Tuesday and Wednesday Evenings, October 20–21, Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser, The Florence Gould at 7:30 in James Memorial Chapel, Union Foundation, Audrey Love Charitable Foundation, Theological Seminary Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Heretical Angels (U.S. premiere) Friends of Lincoln Center. Dialogos and Kantaduri Post-performance discussion on October 20 with Public support is provided by the New York State Katarina Livljani c and Ara Guzelimian Council on the Arts. ´ Sunday Afternoon, November 1, at 5:00 Endowment support for Symphonic Masters is in Alice Tully Hall provided by the Leon Levy Fund. Prayer Christine Brewer , Soprano Endowment support is also provided by UBS. Paul Jacobs , Organ Works by HANDEL, BACH, PUCCINI, GOUNOD, MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center. and WIDOR; works for solo organ Artist Catering provided by Zabar’s and zabars.com Saturday Evening, November 14, at 7:30 in Alice Tully Hall Last Soliloquy Fortepiano courtesy of The Juilliard School. Paul Lewis , Piano ALL-BEETHOVEN PROGRAM Mr. Padmore and Mr. Bezuidenhout will sign CDs in Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109 the lobby immediately following each performance. Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110 Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit WhiteLightFestival.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 to learn about pro - gram cancellations or to request a White Light Festival brochure. Visit WhiteLightFestival.org for full festival listings. Join the conversation: #LCWhiteLight We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces. The taking of photographs and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. 40 10-14 Schubert.qxp_GP 10/2/15 11:58 AM Page 3 Overview: The Schubert Cycles By Susan Youens The song cycle—a group of songs held together by unifying texts, mood, poetic form, or musical procedures—became one of the foremost genres of the 19th century, with Beethoven the first composer to use the word Liederkreis (song cycle) to designate his only work of this kind: An die ferne Geliebte , Op. 98 (1816). In Beethoven’s unique con - ception, paired with Schubert’s Swan Song in the middle of this series of Schubert’s com - plete song cycles, six not-quite-independent songs are connected by “corridors” in the piano; the work is truly a cycle, a circular design in which we return at the end to a trans - formed version of the first song. It was inevitable that Schubert, who at age 14 announced his intent to “modernize the song composition of our day” and who idolized Beethoven, would be interested in this fledgling genre. In the early 1820s Schubert came across the poetic anthology Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Wandering Horn-Player (a tongue-in-cheek jab at Romanticism’s favorite themes) by his Prussian contemporary Wilhelm Müller. The col - lection begins with Die schöne Müllerin (The Lovely Mill Maiden), which tells the antique story of a miller maid wooed by a sensitive young mill-apprentice in love for the first time. When his rival wins the girl, the despairing lad drowns himself in the brook that has been his confidant from the start. From this archetypal tale of youth undone by its first brush with tragedy in love, Schubert in 1823 created some of his most heart-rending music. After Schubert died in November 1828, the Viennese publisher Tobias Haslinger bought from the composer’s brother seven songs on poems by the Berlin writer Ludwig Rellstab and six songs on poems by Heinrich Heine, one of Germany’s greatest poets. To these two groups, Haslinger added the last song Schubert ever wrote (“Die Taubenpost”), and published all 14 as Schwanen-Gesang (Swan Song). The Rellstab poems, intended for Beethoven, become rich, extended songs in Schubert’s hands; the Heine songs are a glimpse into the future of 19th-century music; and “Die Taubenpost” (Pigeon-post) is the summation of Schubert’s songwriting art. Schwanengesang is not a cycle in the same sense as the Müller-Schubert masterpieces, but it is a swan song: a late and final outpour - ing before death and a guarantee of immortality for its creator. In the wake of Die schöne Müllerin , it is only to be expected that Schubert would respond to new poetic works by Müller, and in 1827, he set another monodrama from Vol. 2 of Müller’s Horn-Player anthologies to music; he would correct the proofs for the second half of Winterreise on his deathbed. In this song cycle, a man has lost his beloved to a wealthier suitor and leaves her town on a journey into the wintry landscape of his soul. The only “plot” consists of his changing states of melancholy, despair, alienation, self- analysis, and longing for death. From the wanderer’s bleak insistence on self-understand - ing comes one of Western music’s most profound works. Although the songs of Schwanengesang were composed after it, Winterreise comes last in this series because, quite simply, nothing can follow it. —Copyright © 2015 by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. WhiteLightFestival.org 41 10-14 Schubert.qxp_GP 10/2/15 11:58 AM Page 4 Schubert and Samuel Beckett By Catherine Laws Next month the White Light Festival presents three performances based on the writings of Samuel Beckett, a lover of music for whom Schubert was, it seems, most significant. The two men shared certain preoccupations: lone figures journeying through barren land - scapes, ambiguous encounters along the way, the persistent desire for the comfort of company in the face of ultimate isolation, and the hovering presence of death. In Beckett’s radio play All That Fall and the television play Nacht und Träume we hear Schubert’s actual music. The only sound in the beautiful, wordless Nacht und Träume is a wavering voice, humming and then singing a few bars of the Schubert lied from which the play takes its name. In All That Fall , a crackly recording of “Death and the Maiden” emanates from the “ruinous old house” of a “very old woman,” the music reinforcing the themes of the play: birth, youth, and fertility versus sterility, physical decline, and death. In Schubert’s music, then, Beckett finds a Romantic counterpart to his own, very different expression of the gap between the self and the world. We might even see this as the core of a broader musicality developed in Beckett’s work. Beckett loved music. He enjoyed playing the piano, was married to a professional pianist, and regularly attended concerts. His listening tastes were broad, but his great love was for music of the late Classical and early Romantic periods. Beckett makes brief references to Schubert’s compositions in his early stories, and throughout his life retained a particular love of lieder, sometimes singing them to his own accompaniment. He listened repeatedly to Winterreise , especially, and references to winter journeys are found in Texts for Nothing 2 and 12, and especially at the end of What Where (1983), commissioned for the Autumn Festival in Graz, where Winterreise was partly composed: “It is Winter./Without journey.” Beckett’s writing, for both the stage and the page, has often been perceived as pushing towards its own obliteration, ever closer to the silencing of the voice. His “characters”— though hardly that—with decaying, almost useless bodies, situated in barren environ - ments, steadily insist that there is nothing to say and no possibility of knowledge or understanding. But they never stop; the voices fizzle on with their increasingly broken, empty, repetitive, hopeless—and often very funny—attempts to tell stories. In the process, the language fragments and fissures even as it pours forth; whether truncated and percussive or accumulative and spieling, the closer we get to exhaustion and silence the more musical the impact of the language. This was important to Beckett: rehearsing Footfalls with Rose Hill, Beckett announced: “We are not doing this play realistically or psychologically, we are doing it musically.” Catherine Laws is a musicologist and pianist based in York, England. Much of her research focuses on the relationship between music, language, and meaning. Her book, Headaches Among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music , appeared in December 2013 (Editions Rodopi). —Copyright © 2015 by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc 42 10-14 Schubert.qxp_GP 10/2/15 11:58 AM Page 5 Wednesday Evening, October 14, 2015, at 7:30 The Lovely Mill Maiden Mark Padmore , Tenor Kristian Bezuidenhout , Fortepiano SCHUBERT Die schöne Müllerin (1823) Das Wandern Wohin? Halt! Danksagung an den Bach Am Feierabend Der Neugierige Ungeduld Morgengruß Des Müllers Blumen Tränenregen Mein! Pause Mit dem grünen Lautenbande Der Jäger Eifersucht und Stolz Die liebe Farbe Die böse Farbe Trockne Blumen Der Müller und der Bach Des Baches Wiegenlied This program is approximately 70 minutes long and will be performed without intermission.