Lieder, Satires, Scenes

Lieder, Satires, Scenes

Songs by Brahms, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, and Bartók

Paul Thomason

Songs were the musical genre that occupied Johannes Brahms throughout his life. They were among his first works and they were among his last. Yet, as Eric Sams pointed out in his superb study of the composer’s songs, “Brahms is the most misunderstood and neglected of all the great lied-composers. He was a thorough-going Romantic, who expressed his own feelings. Yet he often chose to conceal or dissemble those feelings.” The 14 songs on this evening’s program span more than three decades of the composer’s work and offer a look at two aspects of life that were particularly important to him: nature and love.

Brahms usually spent winter and spring in the city, but summer and autumn found him in the country, where he reveled in the woods, hills, and lakes. In Vienna his Sundays included lengthy walks through the hills and vineyards of the Vienna Woods. Love was more problematic. Before he was even a teenager, Brahms was supplementing the family income by playing the piano in what were essentially brothels in his native Hamburg, where he sometimes seems to have been treated like a toy for both the prostitutes and the customers. This early experience had a profound impact on him and he never married, although he was smitten by several young women and went so far as to become engaged. Without a doubt the great love of his life was Clara Schumann, the famous pianist and wife of Brahms’s mentor, Robert Schumann. She was 14 years older than Brahms and had an important influence on his work, but while part of her affection was undoubtedly maternal there was much more to their relationship. Brahms’s songs reflect his conflicted view of love, sometimes blissfully happy, but often mired in the pain of unrequited or lost love.

This dichotomy is reflected in the two songs from opus 63 heard tonight. Although based on texts by different poets, the nine pieces included in this opus number really form a cycle in which the singer mourns the loss of his youth and first love. The fifth song, Meine Liebe ist grün, conveys the exuberant joy of love. The words are by Brahms’s 18-yearold godson, Felix Schumann, the youngest son of Clara and Robert. Clara did not tell her son that Brahms had set the poem to music and was playing it with the violinist Joseph Joachim when Felix walked into the room and asked what the words were. “When he saw that they were his own he turned quite pale,” Clara wrote to Brahms. “How beautiful the song is.”

O wüsst’ ich doch den Weg zurück is the next to the last song in the cycle. Love has fled and the singer longs to return to his lost youth, to the comfort of his childhood. The piano part conveys a restless, but futile searching for the way back, compounding the sorrow of the vocal line.

One of Brahms’s friends, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, wrote him that Nachtigall “has the bittersweet of the real nightingale’s song; they seem to revel in arguments and diminished intervals, passionate little creatures that they are!” As the singer remembers “the other, heaven beautiful” song, the music briefly expands, becoming almost ecstatic with the pleasant memory, before turning melancholy once again.

The mood darkens considerably in Verzagen. The dejected lover sits forlornly on the empty shore, hoping to find comfort in watching the raging sea and crashing waves, but in the end he continues to weep. The virtuosic piano part clearly depicts the turbulent waves relentlessly breaking onto the shore, over which Brahms has written a haunting lament for poet Carl von Lemcke’s words.

The two songs from opus 95, Bei dir sind meine Gedanken and Mädchenlied depict young women consumed with love. In the first the girl tells her beloved that her thoughts “flutter around you,” an image reflected superbly in the piano part. Brahms did not set the first two verses of the anonymous Italian poem that make up Mädchenlied. They describe a poor, 15-year-old washer-girl who sings the song at dawn while still sleepy. What Brahms did set was the song itself, and he gave it something of a folksong character, in keeping with the innocence of the girl singing about waking up in Paradise but, if she did not find her beloved there, laying down and going to sleep again.

Von ewiger Liebe is deservedly one of Brahms’s best-known songs. Even Hugo Wolf, anti-Brahmsian that he was, said it was among the composer’s most accomplished, “deeply-felt and consistently atmospheric.” Atmosphere it has aplenty. It begins in the key of B minor, with the narrator setting the scene of the forest at night with a couple approaching. The boy is passionate, urgent as he tells the girl that if she is suffering disgrace because of their love, she should leave him. The key switches to B major as the girl, at first calmly and then with growing conviction, replies that their love is firm and will endure forever. From the dark, rather brooding opening to the almost religious fervor of the ending, the song is a moving affirmation of true love.

Brahms wrote Anklänge in March 1853, before he left his hometown of Frankfurt to meet the Schumanns. Despite having texts by different poets, the six songs that make up opus 7 are designed to tell a story of five girls who are left alone or abandoned, while in the sixth song the young man returns home. In Anklänge the girl sits alone in an isolated house, spinning threads for her wedding dress. The open harmony of Brahms’s music leaves no doubt that the wedding will never take place and emphasizes the loneliness of the young woman.

The girl in Das Mädchen spricht is a young bride and in quite a different mood as she rather cheekily asks a swallow building its nest if it is building for last year’s mate or for a new one. The piano part reflects the fluttering of the swallow’s swings, and the bouncing vocal line conveys the bubbling humor of the girl’s questions.

At first glance, Heinrich Heine’s poem Meerfahrt seems to be remembering a pleasant trip a couple had taken in a boat. The piano plays an extended prelude, a gently rocking barcarolle, though the music has a sad hue to it and some of the harmonies are unsettling. The vocal line begins as a gently melancholy gondolier’s song but becomes feverish as the singer recalls music and dancing mists that whirled on an island they passed. But the boat drifts by the island. As the poet ruefully describes floating “desolate on the wide sea,” Brahms’s music is filled with despair, becoming hopeless as the poet repeats “on the wide sea, the wide, wide sea.”

The feeling of Brahms’s brief early song Der Schmied could not be a bigger contrast. A young girl enthusiastically sings the praises of her strong lover who swings his hammer, the

sound filling the town like the sound of bells. The piano part is a wonderful example of onomatopoeia, with the bass chords representing hammer strokes and the quick right hand’s 16th and eight notes painting the flames.

Brahms was drawn to the overt eroticism of Georg Daumer’s poetry and set eight of his poems to music in his opus 57. In the fourth song, Ach, wende diesen Blick, the music makes it clear that although the rejected lover finds the gaze of the beloved almost unbearably painful, he is also helpless to do anything but crave the look. The last song in the cycle, Unbewegte laue Luft, has been described by Eric Sams as “music of explicit sexual fulfillment… This song is another Tristan und Isolde of the lied.” Brahms brilliantly depicts the “motionless, tepid air” of the poem’s beginning and the gentle splashes of the fountain. But then feelings of hot desire begin to swell inside and the music surges with the turbulence of unleashed sexual desire, culminating in a plea to the beloved, “Come, o come” that they can give each other “heavenly satisfaction.” Heather Platt writes that the year after composing this cycle Brahms finally met the poet whom he had always imagined would embody the themes of his erotic poetry. “Brahms found Daumer to be an old man who claimed that he had always loved only one woman—his wife, who, Brahms noted, was a withered as the poet himself.”

Unrequited love takes a comic turn in Vergebliches Ständchen. “Lively and with good humor” are the instructions for this dialogue between a boy and a girl. He pleads for admittance to her home, she refuses on the advice of her mother. He pleads it is cold outside, but she is unmoved, and the piano postlude leaves no doubt that the door (or window) is slammed shut in his face. Brahms once told a friend (perhaps in jest?) that he would trade all his other songs if he could keep this one. Its freshness and simplicity follows his declaration to Clara Schumann that folksongs are his ideal in lieder writing.

Giving characteristic musical expression to the nation’s folk was one of the prime goals of Modest Mussorgsky and the other Russian composers who made up “The Five,” or “Mighty Handful.” His song cycle Detskaya (The Nursery) was written to his own texts between 1868 and 1872. Originally the composer had planned two series of songs, five for Nursery and four under the title At the Dacha, but only two Dacha songs have survived (On the Hobby-Horse and Sailor the Cat) and have been incorporated into Nursery. Mussorgsky had a strong, nostalgic longing for childhood and an uncanny feeling for seeing the world through a child’s eyes. While working on the song cycle, he wrote to his friend, the critic Vladimir Stassov, that he had an “understanding of children and seeing them as people with an original inner world, not as funny dolls.”

In Nursery his writing for both voice and piano is startlingly close to the rhythms and feeling of speech, and the texts capture the impulsiveness and spontaneity of children brilliantly. With Nanny conveys the child’s swiftly changing moods as she identifies with human beings and fairy tale characters. In the Corner is a psychological study of a basically good boy who becomes more and more convinced of his goodness as he tries to convince his nurse he is not, in fact, guilty of the wrong she says he did. In The Beetle the child faces fear and even death, while feeling compassion, and With the Doll is a lullaby filled with care and tenderness. The rather humorous Evening Prayer begins sedately and conscientiously as the girl says her nightly prayers, but then unravels as she frantically tries to remember all the family members she is to name—and gets scolded by the nurse. On the Hobby-Horse is filled with make believe and pulling an adult’s leg. Sailor the Cat ends the cycle on a child’s heroic meeting with a naughty cat and foiling its attempt to grab a pet bird.

A vastly different cycle of Mussorgsky’s, his Songs and Dances of Death, made up the first half of the recital when soprano Galina Vishnevskaya gave the world premiere of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Satires. In a preface to the score, the composer states, “I, too, have my merry spells. I have written five satirical romances to words by Sasha Chorny, a wellknown pre-revolutionary satirist. With devastating sarcasm he ridiculed the philistines who flourished at the period of reaction which set in after the 1905 Revolution. He satirized unsparingly the people who plunged into mysticism, who tried to find refuge in a narrow world of petty personal concerns.”

During the summer of 1960 Shostakovich invited Vishnevskaya and her husband, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, to his home to hear a new work he had written. “Slava and I remained rooted to our chairs, overwhelmed by the unimpeded flow of sarcasm and black humor,” the soprano recalled in her autobiography. “This work came unexpectedly after all of Shostakovich’s tragic symphonies. It was as if he had reached back to the distant past, to the time when he had written Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, feeling himself once again young and full of vital forces. The cycle—in music as well as verse—is savory and succulent, alive with dashing, youthful energy. But one quality sets it apart from the rest of Shostakovich’s work. Here he scoffs—and he does so openly and maliciously. He points up the ignorance of critics, the vulgarity and poverty of life around him, the stupidity of the primitive ideology that is stuff into our heads from childhood.”

Shostakovich had composed the cycle for Vishnevskaya (it was “written for a music-hall singer with an operatic voice,” she declared) and was thrilled when she and her husband performed it for him a few days later. “There’s just one thing: I’m afraid they [the authorities] won’t let it be performed,” the composer said. The sticking point was the third of he songs, the crux of the cycle, Descendants. Set to an insistent waltz-like accompaniment, the text denounces the current regimen and expresses disillusion at the idea of a better future. There was no way the authorities would allow a public performance of such a song, even though the words had been written 50 years earlier.

It was Vishnevskaya who suggested calling the cycle “Pictures of the Past.” “Throw them that bone and they might sanction it,” she said. Shostakovich “snickered at the irony of it” she remembered. “Beautifully thought out,” he said. “Under Satires we’ll put ‘Pictures of the Past’ in parentheses, like a kind of fig leaf. We’ll cover up the embarrassing parts for them.”

At the premiere on February 22, 1961 “the concert hall was jammed with people. All of Moscow waited impatiently for Shostakovich’s new work with the seditious verses. Slava accompanied me…. As I began [the song Descendants] I could see that the audience was taut with tension. Stalin’s and Beria’s crimes were being exposed; the verses were hitting bull’s-eye… When I was finished the audience did not so much shout as roar. They demanded an encore, and we repeated the whole cycle for them, but they still refused to let us go; we performed the entire work yet another time.” Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were then invited to give a performance of the Satires on Moscow television, but when they refused to cut Descendants it was abruptly canceled.

Béla Bartók’s Village Scenes also consists of five songs for female voice and piano. Written in 1924 (the only work the composer completed that year), the cycle represents a new, firmer control of folk material on Bartók’s part. All five pieces, both words and music, come from the Zvolen district of Slovakia. Bartók balances the scenes into a superb whole as he depicts the customs and life of the peasant village. The work is unpretentious, though the piano part also reflects the fact that the composer himself was a virtuoso pianist, and throughout it does much more than merely accompany the singer. At the request of the League of Composers in New York, Bartók later transcribed three of the songs for women’s voices and chamber orchestra.

Halsey Stevens points out that the Slovak tunes are preserved intact and that they fall entirely within the Lydian and Mixolydian modes. “Haymaking, At the Bride’s and Lullaby are parlando and somewhat restrained; Wedding Song and Lads’ Dance are spirited. In two of the scenes two folksongs alternate: this combination of separate tunes had not previously occurred in Bartók’s folksong transcriptions for voice and piano, nor did he resort to it again, except in the choral settings of folk material.”