Adrianne Pieczonka Sings STRAUSS • WAGNER
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Adrianne Pieczonka sings STRAUSS • WAGNER Brian Zeger piano DE 3474 1 0 13491 34742 4 DELOS DE 3474 ADRIANNE PIECZONKA DELOS DE 3474 ADRIANNE PIECZONKA Adrianne Pieczonka sings STRAUSS • WAGNER Brian Zeger, piano RICHARD STRAUSS Meinem Kinde (To My Child) Rote Rosen (Red Roses) • Begegnung (Encounter) Nichts (Nothing) • Morgen! (Tomorrow!) Die Nacht (The Night) • Einerlei (Sameness) Befreit (Released) • Zueignung (Dedication) RICHARD WAGNER: Du meines Herzens Krönelein (You, my Heart’s Wesendonck-Lieder Coronet) Der Engel (The Angel) • Stehe Still! (Stand Still!) Ruhe, meine Seele! (Rest, My Soul!) Im Treibhaus (In the Greenhouse) Traum durch die Dämmerung (Dream into Dusk) Schmerzen (Agonies) • Träume (Dreams) Total time: 51:22 ORIGINAL ORIGINAL DIGITAL DE 3474 © 2015 Delos Productions, Inc., DIGITAL P.O. Box 343, Sonoma, CA 95476-9998 (800) 364-0645 • (707) 996-3844 [email protected] • www.delosmusic.com SIX SONGS by RICHARD STRAUSS 1. Rote Rosen, WoO. 76 • Red Roses (2:08) 2. Begegnung, WoO. 72 • Encounter (1:52) 3. Die Nacht, Op. 10, No. 3 • The Night (2:54) 4. Einerlei, Op. 69, No. 3 • Sameness (2:35) 5. Befreit, Op. 39, No. 4 • Released (4:50) 6. Zueignung, Op. 10, No. 1 • Dedication (1:49) RICHARD WAGNER Wesendonck-Lieder, WWV 91 7. Der Engel • The Angel (3:14) 8. Stehe Still! • Stand Still! (3:34) 9. Im Treibhaus • In the Greenhouse (5:47) 10. Schmerzen • Agonies (2:26) 11. Träume • Dreams (4:27) MORE SONGS by RICHARD STRAUSS 12. Du meines Herzens Krönelein, Op. 21, No. 2 • You, my Heart’s Coronet (1:55) 13. Ruhe, meine Seele! Op. 27, No. 1 • Rest, My Soul! (3:18) 14. Traum durch die Dämmerung, Op. 29, No. 1 • Dream into Dusk (2:46) 15. Meinem Kinde, Op. 37, No. 3 • To My Child (2:19) 16. Nichts, Op. 10, No. 2 • Nothing (1:30) 17. Morgen! Op. 27, No. 4 • Tomorrow! (3:49) Total time: 51:22 Adrianne Pieczonka, soprano Brian Zeger, piano 2 ichard Strauss was one of Richard life and occupied him at crucial points in Wagner’s foremost inheritors; his between. father Franz Strauss disapproved of RWagner, but the young Strauss became an By 1883, Strauss was going beyond the ardent Wagnerian at an early age. These more Schubertian contours of his earliest two men, born over fifty years apart, both songs; increasingly, we hear the elements pushed the language of music to new of his own unique idiom in formation. lengths, saturating their music with com- In the summer of 1883, the 19-year-old plex chromaticism and inventing novel Strauss went to the spa town of Bad Hei- tonal procedures; both men were ob- lbrunn near Munich for ten days and sessed with opera, and both wrote songs. there met Lotti Speyer, granddaughter But Strauss wrote many more Lieder over of the song composer Wilhelm Speyer. his long life than did the operatic genius Strauss clearly liked her: he wrote Rote who died when Strauss was only 18. The Rosen expressly for her, and then fol- Lied was fundamental to him in ways it lowed it with “Die erwachte Rose,” and was not for Wagner, and he began com- “Begegnung,” united by their common posing songs when he was only 6 ½ years references to roses as the archetypal sym- old. His aunt Johanna Pschorr was a gift- bol of passion. These three songs were ed amateur mezzo-soprano, and his wife, only discovered in 1958 and performed Pauline de Ahna, was an accomplished for the first time the next year by Eliza- professional soprano: vocal music ran beth Schwarzkopf and Gerald Moore. in the family. “Actually, I like my songs “Rote Rosen” is a setting of a poem by the best,” Strauss would tell the great bass travel writer Karl Stieler, member of the Hans Hotter, and he created 158 songs famous Munich literary circle called Die between 1885 and his death in 1949. In Krokodile and son of Joseph Karl Stieler, fact, his “last rose” (his tender term for who painted a famous portrait of Beetho- his final composition) was the song “Mal- ven; in this work, we hear a dreamy, ten- ven,” written some nine months before he der love song whose off-tonic beginning died on September 8, 1949: songs were is typical of Strauss’s songs from the time the bookends that frame either side of his of first maturity onward. In the middle 3 section, the gentle, harp-like arpeggiat- was working as assistant conductor of ed harmonies in the piano give way to the ducal court orchestra in Meiningen; throbbing chords indicative of more at the time, he was in love with a married heated passion. woman, Dora Wihan, the wife of a cellist who was a colleague of his father’s. Strauss What a fascinating coincidence that came to know the Letzte Blätter (Last Al- two ardent “Wagnerianer”—Strauss and bum-leaves) of the Austrian civil servant Hugo Wolf—each wrote a song entitled Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg—mar- Begegnung about gleeful confessions ried at 49, a father at 50, dead at 51— of young love. Strauss’s is a setting of a through the auspices of his young friend poem by Otto Friedrich Gruppe, an an- and fellow composer Ludwig Thuille. In ti-Hegelian philosopher, classicist (he Die Nacht, night is represented as a thief discovered the poetry of a rather mys- of all beauty, but Strauss in October and terious Augustan woman named Sulpi- November of 1885 mutes both the men- cia), and poet whose poems were set by ace and the poet’s fear of losing the one Brahms (“Das Mädchen spricht”) and he loves in order to bring to sounding life Carl Loewe, among others. Here too, “a a lover’s nocturnal ecstasy. maiden speaks,” in a song whose refrains convey secrecy by means of Straussian The poet ofEinerlei was one of the in- trademark chromaticism, followed by ventors of German Romanticism, the a fermata that first sustains the crucial writer and folklorist Achim von Arnim verb “kissed” and a tiny postlude or in- (co-editor of the famous anthology Des terlude that descends in three stages from Knaben Wunderhorn); here, he indulg- the high treble down (the first words of es in word-play on the similar sounds the song are “Jumping down the stairs”), of “einerlei” (the same) and “mancher- with a cross-relation between A-flat and lei” (diverse) for a love-poem about the A-natural to color the proceedings. beloved’s simultaneous sameness and diversity. Strauss’s expansive piano in- The songs of Op. 10—the composer’s first troduction culminates with an exquisite song opus—were created when Strauss coda featuring the first wordless appear- 4 ance of the refrain “O du liebes Einerlei, / Zueignung is the first song in his first Wie wird aus dir so mancherlei!” (O you Lied opus (Op. 10): we can hear it in one dear sameness, the diversity that comes sense as the “dedication” at the start of his from you!”) in the left hand. Only Strauss life on the stage of print as a song com- could have composed this song, with its poser. Its poet was the German-Austrian lyrical melisma on “derselbe” (the same) writer Hermann von Gilm zu Rosenegg, and its side-slipping tonal excursions in whose Jesuitenlieder and Zeitsonette Strauss’s signature manner. caused a stir for their political content— but here, the subject is love. The persona Richard Fedor Leopold Dehmel was a of this song invokes, first, the sufferings literary sensation in the last years of the of love, then the freedom of his former 19th century and first two decades of single state, and finally the bliss of recip- the 20th century, with rapturous critics rocated love, each stanza concluding with declaring that he was the greatest Ger- the same fervent thanks to the beloved. man lyric poet since Goethe—but now Paeans of rapture are on display at the his name endures almost solely because end. Strauss, Schoenberg, Berg and others set his poems to music (the eroticism In November 1856, Richard Wagner of certain poems drew fire from the le- wrote Princess Marie von Sayn-Wittgen- gal system as pornography). He was not stein (the daughter of the Polish-born pleased with Strauss’s setting of Befreit; Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgen- it was, he thought, “a little too soft for the stein, Liszt’s partner in life for 40 years) poem.” A lover releases his beloved to that while working on the opera Siegfried, the death they both know is coming; for he had slipped “unaware into Tristan . this somewhat questionable “liberation,” music without words for the present.” Strauss devises a song that begins softly Wagner cared little for song composi- but builds to climaxes sufficient to thrill tion after his student years in Leipzig us, if not the picky poet. and found no occasion to compose songs until 1857, when he was embroiled in an affair with a silk merchant’s wife, Mathil- 5 de Wesendonck who wrote these five a Woman’s Voice by Richard Wagner.” sensual-ecstatic or sorrowful poems, Since the idea was that Mathilde would two of which became studies for Tristan. accompany herself at the piano, Wagner Wagner first met Otto and Mathilde We- orchestrated only one setting, “Träume,” sendonck in February 1852: the 37-year- for her birthday in December 1857. (The old Otto was a rich businessman from orchestral versions of the other four the Rhineland, a partner in a New York songs most often heard are the work of silk firm, while the 23-year-old Mathilde Felix Mottl, rescored by Hans Werner was the daughter of a leading financier.