T H E P Ro G

Thursday, April 19, 2018, at 7:30 pm

Art of the Song

Mark Padmore, Tenor Paul Lewis, Piano

SCHUMANN

Liederkreis (1840)

Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage Es treibt mich hin Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen Lieb Liebchen Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden Warte, warte, wilder Schiffmann Berg’ und Burgen schaun herunter Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen Mit Myrten und Rosen

BRAHMS

Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze Sommerabend Mondenschein (1878) Es schauen die Blumen Meerfahrt Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht

Intermission

Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off.

This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center.

Steinway Piano

Alice Tully Hall, Starr Theater Adrienne Arsht Stage
Great Performers

Support is provided by Rita E. and

Gustave M. Hauser, Audrey Love C

haritable Foundation,

Great Performers Circle, Chairman

’s Council, and Friends of Lincoln C

enter.

Public support is provided by the N Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and t ew York State Council on the Arts he New York State Legislature. with the support of
Endowment support for Symphoni Endowment support is also provide Nespresso is the Official Coffee of NewYork-Presbyterian is the Offici c Masters is provided by the Leon
Levy Fund. d by UBS. Lincoln Center al Hospital of Lincoln Center

UPCOMING GREAT PERFORMERS EVENTS:

Friday, April 27 at 8:00 pm in David Geffen Hall

Los Angeles Philharmonic Gustavo Dudamel, conductor

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN: Pollux (New York premiere) VARÈSE: Amériques SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5

nstein Atrium

Pre-concert lecture by Harlow Robinson at 6:45 pm in the David Rube

Wednesday, May 2 at 7:30 pm in Alice Tully Hall

Gerald Finley, bass-baritone Julius Drake, piano

inem gemalten Band; Aus be; An Schwager Kronos;
BEETHOVEN: Neue Liebe, neues Leben; Wonne der Wehmut; Mit e Goethes Faust SCHUBERT: Prometheus; Geistes-Gruss; An den Mond; Rastlose Lie Schäfers Klagelied; Wandrers Nachtlied; Erlkönig TCHAIKOVSKY: Don Juan’s Serenade; At the ball; None, but the lonely RACHMANINOFF: O stay, my love; In the Silence of the Secret Nigh Linnet; Christ is Risen; Spring Waters heart; Over burning ashes t; Fate; On the Death of a

Selection of favorite folk songs

Sunday, May 6 at 3:00 pm in David Geffen Hall

London Symphony Orchestra Simon Rattle, conductor Stuart Skelton, tenor Christian Gerhaher, baritone

MAHLER: Das Lied von der Erde

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Great Performers I The Program

SCHUMANN

Dichterliebe (1840)

Im wunderschönen Monat Mai Aus meinen Tränen sprießen Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’ Ich will meine Seele tauchen Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome Ich grolle nicht Und wüßten’s die Blumen Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet Allnächtlich im Traume Aus alten Märchen Die alten, bösen Lieder

Great Performers I Snapshot

By Susan Youens

Timeframe

ARTS

One of the most important poets in the history of song, and of German literature, was Heinrich Heine, born the year of Schubert’s birth (1797) and died the year of Schumann’s death (1756). Somehow the eerie coincidence seems only appropriate, as both composers spun profound music from his words.

1840

Schumann’s Liederkreis &

Dichterliebe

Victor Hugo’s poem collec-

tion Les Rayons et les Ombres

1878

Brahms’s “Mondenschein”

Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore opens in London.

Schumann met Heine in 1828, and the poet, somewhat unusually, exerted himself to be kind to the teenage musician; 12 years later, Schumann could embark on a succession of brilliant settings of this man’s words and did so with his first Heine cycle: Liederkreis, Op. 24. These nine songs are a virtuosic “shot across the bow,” an announcement of something far more than parlor songs for the amateur bourgeoisie.

SCIENCE
1840

Publication of Louis Agassiz’s

landmark Studies on Glaciers

1878

Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

Schumann’s protégé, Brahms, set a great deal of Heine to music when he was young, but destroyed the settings. It wasn’t until later in life that he went back to Heine to create six masterful songs on texts by the poet of his youth. Two of them (“Sommerabend” and “Mondenschein”) are paired, and the second is a variation of the first. In the final song of this evening’s group, Brahms turns the immortal coupling of Eros and Death into consummately beautiful music.

IN NEW YORK
1840

Coal is the city’s primary fuel.

1878

The Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad (“Brighton Line”) opens.

We then return to Schumann for one of the greatest song cycles in the entire repertoire: Dichterliebe, or Poet’s Love. In 1840, the composer selected 20 songs but omitted four for publication. The 16 songs of the final version are masterpieces of musical ingenuity in the service of contradictory inner experience—heartbreak and anger conjoined, irony and emotional truth yoked together. At the end, Schumann provides his own wordless ending in the piano, one different from the poet’s.

Great Performers I Notes on the Program

By Susan Youens When a poetic anthology entitled simply Buch der Lieder (“Book of Songs”) by Heinrich Heine first appeared in 1827, neither he nor his publisher, Julius Campe, could have known what a phenomenon it would become. A bestseller, it was also one of the foremost sources for song composers, and no wonder: In these terse poems, a uniquely mordant voice entered German literature. Here, unrequited love and misogynistic contempt, ironic negation of noble sentiments, and recurring battles between the dream world and reality are at contradictory and simultaneous work. Most of all, Romanticpoetic love is subjected to a drubbing. In the Buch der Lieder, the poet first consecrates his beloved as something sacred, then lashes her with whips made of words when she fails to meet the ideal in his mind.

Liederkreis, Op. 24 (1840)

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Born June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Germany Died July 29, 1856, in Endenich, Germany

Approximate length: 23 minutes

These nine songs, completed by the end of February 1840, trace a vague narrative of love’s ardor, despair, and finally, the metamorphosis of love and grief into art. Schumann unifies his cycles musically; this one begins and ends in the same key (a true “Kreis” or “circle/cycle”). “Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage” is a Lied im Volkston, or folksong-like art song of the sort popular throughout the 19th century. If the back-and-forth alternation of the left- and right-hand parts sounds like a clock ticking or a young man pacing, that is only appropriate to this persona, who anxiously awaits his beloved. In Heine’s world, we expect her to be unfaithful or at least carelessly tardy, but Schumann, whose thoughts of his fiancée Clara Wieck were far from this bitter, ends the postlude with a wistful cadence and tender thoughts.

“Es treibt mich hin” is also a song about Time that separates lovers, but in impatient mode; the feverish young lover condemns the lazy hours, which dawdle rather than bringing him swiftly to his sweetheart. In “Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen,” Heine’s paranoid singer cannot even trust the little birds telling him of the beloved’s “golden word.” The birds speak to pale, unhappy lovers in a magical song-within-a-song. In “Lieb Liebchen,” Heine takes on the Romantic compound of Eros and death, with Schumann’s stark vocal line dogged by the piano softly hammering an unwelcome message: Each heartbeat is a nail in the singer’s coffin. To Heine, the “beautiful cradle of my sorrows” (“Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden”) was Hamburg, a city he hated, given his tense relationship with his rich uncle Salomon and his unsuccessful courtship of Salomon’s two daughters. We can be sure that Heine would have said “schöne” (“lovely”)

with his lip curled. Not so Schumann, who begins with one of his most gorgeous melodies and then rides a roller coaster of misery, near madness, and

exhaustion. “Warte, warte, wilder Schiffsmann” is almost hysterical in its

rage, fueled by misogyny both Biblical (Eve as the origin of sin) and classical (Eris, the goddess of discord). In Schumann’s piano postlude, all this hyperfury evaporates by degrees, with even a hint of a chuckle at the very end. Does the composer perhaps find all this inflated emotion a trifle ridiculous?

By contrast, “Berg’ und Burgen schaun herunter” is one of the loveliest

specimens of water music in German song, with its lapping waves that gently enfold and buoy the vocal line. Another tiny masterpiece, “Anfangs wollt’ ich fast verzagen,” begins by quoting the Lutheran chorale “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten.” The vocal line lies higher than congregational melodies, the piano part lower, and the conjunction tells both of triumph over adversity and continuing tension. “How did I survive it?” he asks (we don’t know what “it” is, and the omission makes the poem more powerful), and then answers the question in the final song, “Mit Myrthen und Rosen,” by turning it into art. The “Book of Songs” is a richly adorned coffin in which love and song are buried. Resurrection by readers and listeners is assured.

Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze, Op. 71, No. 1 Sommerabend, Op. 85, No. 1 Mondenschein, Op. 85, No. 2 (1878) Es schauen die Blumen, Op. 96, No. 3 Meerfahrt, Op. 96, No. 4 Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, Op. 96, No. 1

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany Died April 3, 1897, in Vienna

“Did you know that I too once set almost all of Heine to music?” wrote Brahms to a friend, in teasing reference to the songs he had written as a youth and destroyed in his typical self-critical way. It is fortunate for us that Brahms was lured back to Heine in his maturity.

In “Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze,” Heine (that master of irony) takes on

18th-century anacreontic conventions (poetry in imitation of the ancient Greek poet Anacreon of Teos) about springtime and shepherd-shepherdess love idylls in order to tell of unrequited love. Brahms perfectly captures the mixture of mockery and misery. Heine loved German folklore, and its supernatural creatures come to new life in poems such as “Sommerabend,” where a brook is the enchanted nocturnal setting for beautiful elves bathing in the waters. For such allure, Brahms assembles signature elements of his style: a bass line closely related to the singer’s melody (in contrary motion), richly upholstered harmonies in the middle section, and increasing rhythmic complexity

throughout the song. In a fashion unusual for Brahms, he pairs “Sommerabend” with “Mondenschein” as a variation on the same elements. Beginning with Brahms’s “death motif” of stark descending thirds in the piano and a darkened palette, we return to the idyllic elfin music when moonlight bathes the landscape.

Brahms’s close friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg described “Es schauen die Blumen” as “a gem indeed, a marvel of compactness!” and Clara Schumann wrote in May 1886: “Oh, how the third song moves one with its cry of despair at the end!” Notice in particular one obsession of late Brahms: the mixing of bright and dark, major and minor, in a fashion that evokes life’s ambivalence.

In “Meerfahrt,” lovers in a little boat on the sea—antique symbols for individual existence as a frail skiff in a cosmic ocean of Time—cannot land on the unattainable moonlit isle of spirits, where beautiful music resounds; they can only drift by in inconsolable bleakness. Von Herzogenberg called the anguished dissonances in the piano that mark the statements of the principal melody “those strangely affecting hornblasts,” adding, “The A-minor song, with its final ‘trostlos’ [inconsolable], still haunts me perpetually.”

Despite his habit of mocking Romanticism, Heine admitted that he was “a

Romantic in spite of myself.” “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht” is a varia-

tion on the über-Romantic dichotomy between Day (oppressive life) and Night (cooling, love-drenched death), its advent heralded by a young nightingale who sings only of love. This is Keats’s “easeful death” transposed to Germany. Hear how darkness creeps outward in the piano as the dying persona declares “Es dunkelt schon” (“It already grows dark”), and how the passionate outburst against “der Tag” (“day”) in minor mode cedes immediately to major so that we might hear the nightingale’s song—rapture en route to death.

Dichterliebe, Op. 48 (1840)

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Schumann originally set to music 20 poems from the section of the Buch der Lieder entitled Lyrisches Intermezzo (“Lyrical Intermezzo”) between May 24 and June 1 of 1840, the famous “miracle year” during which he wrote 130 songs. By the time the song cycle finally appeared in print in August 1844, Schumann had deleted four songs, made numerous emendations, and renamed the cycle Dichterliebe.

In the first song, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” the singer says that in

the cliché Maytime season of new life and love, he confessed his longing; Schumann’s music is so infused with ambivalence that we suspect an unhappy ending from the start. The pitch C-sharp grating against D at the outset—almost unbearably poignant—is instantly identifiable as Dichterliebe.

Schumann questioned both beginnings and endings in music, and he famously “ends” the first song hanging in mid-air. Thereafter, the persona sings of his tears and sighs transforming themselves into floral offerings and love’s nightingales in “Aus meinen Tränen sprießen”; sings in alliterative excess of “die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine” (“the dainty one, the refined one, the pure one, the only one”—invented, one notes, by Heine) in “Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube”; and finds that he cannot trust the beloved’s words of love in “Wenn

ich in deine Augen seh’.”

In “Ich will meine Seele tauchen,” he sings of submerging his soul in the lily’s chalice—exquisitely sexualized imagery. We even seem to hear post-coital sobbing in the piano at the end. The persona compares the beloved to the image of the Virgin in the great cathedral at Cologne in the sixth song, “Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome”; excoriates her as someone with night and serpents in her

heart in the seventh song, “Ich grolle nicht”; and declares in No. 8, “Und

wüßten’s die Blumen,” that if only the flowers, nightingales, and stars knew his distress, they would try to comfort him.

In the ninth song, “Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen,” the poet imagines the

beloved’s wedding music through the scrim of his own psychological distress; at the end, he collapses in abject misery. “The little song that the beloved once sang” chimes on the offbeat throughout the melancholy lied, “Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen,” while in its wake, the persona tries to universalize/trivialize

his grief in No. 11, “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,” which Schumann sets

as a village dance gone awry. In the twelfth song, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” the flowers entreat him to forgive “our sister,” and the persona continues to mourn the loss of her love in the funereal “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,” shot through with silences. He sees her in his dreams in “Allnächtlich im Traume” and wishes he could go to some fairy-tale land, to relinquish his sorrow and be happy once again, in “Aus alten Märchen.” In the last song, “Die alten, bösen Lieder,” he resolves to bury “the old, evil songs” of hopeless Romantic love; to do so, he will need an immense coffin, carried by giants and sunk in the ocean. But Schumann does not allow his cycle to end with Heine’s bitterness. Instead, he concludes with a long piano postlude, a varied reminiscence of the twelfth song, “Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen,” where Nature itself pleads for the bereaved lover to forgive. Heine’s singer cannot, but Schumann’s can, and there are few things in the entire song repertory more moving than this affirmation of reconciliation in the heart’s depths.

Susan Youens, newly retired as the J. W. Van Gorkom Professor of Music at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of eight books on German song,

including Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin; Hugo Wolf and his Mörike songs; Schubert’s Late Lieder; and Heinrich Heine and the Lied (all from

Cambridge University Press), as well as over 60 scholarly articles and chapters.

Great Performers I Texts and Translations

Liederkreis

Text: Heinrich Heine

Song Cycle

Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage

Morgens steh’ ich auf und frage: Kommt feins Liebchen heut? Abends sink’ ich hin und klage: Ausblieb sie auch heut.

Every morning I awake and ask

Every morning I awake and ask: Will my sweetheart come today? Every evening I lie down, complaining that she did not appear.

In der Nacht mit meinem Kummer Lieg’ ich schlaflos, lieg’ ich wach; Träumend, wie im halben Schlummer, Wandle ich bei Tag.
All night long with my grief I lie sleepless, lie awake; dreaming, as if half asleep, I wander through the day.

Es treibt mich hin

I’ve driven this way

Es treibt mich hin, es treibt mich her! Noch wenige Stunden, dann soll ich sie schauen,
I’m driven this way, driven that! A few more hours, and I shall see her,
Sie selber, die schönste der schönen Jungfrauen;— Du armes Herz, was pochst du so schwer! she, the fairest of the fair— faithful heart, why pound so hard?

Die Stunden sind aber ein faules Volk! Schleppen sich behaglich träge, Schleichen gähnend ihre Wege;— Tummle dich, du faules Volk!
But the hours are a lazy breed! They dawdle along and take their time, crawl yawningly on their way— get a move on, you lazy breed!

Tobende Eile mich treibend erfaßt! Aber wohl niemals liebten die Horen;—
Raging haste drives me onward! But the Horae can never have loved—
Heimlich im grausamen Bunde verschworen, cruelly and secretly in league,
Spotten sie tückisch der Liebenden Hast. they spitefully mock a lover’s haste.

Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen

Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen Mit meinem Gram allein;

I wandered among the trees

I wandered among the trees, alone with my own grief, but then old dreams returned once more
Da kam das alte Träumen,

Und schlich mir ins Herz hinein.

and stole into my heart.

(Please turn the page quietly.)

Great Performers I Texts and Translations

Wer hat euch dies Wörtlein gelehret, Ihr Vöglein in luftiger Höh’? Schweigt still! wenn mein Herz es höret,
Who taught you this little word, you birds up there in the breeze? Be silent! If my heart hears it,

Dann tut es noch einmal so weh.

my pain will return once more.

“Es kam ein Jungfräulein gegangen, “A young woman once passed by, Die sang es immerfort, Da haben wir Vöglein gefangen Das hübsche, goldne Wort.” who sang it again and again, and so we birds snatched it up, that lovely golden word.”

Das sollt ihr mir nicht erzählen, Ihr Vöglein wunderschlau;
You should not tell me such things, you little cunning birds,
Ihr wollt meinen Kummer mir stehlen, Ich aber niemanden trau’. you thought to steal my grief from me, but I trust no one now.

Lieb Liebchen

My love