Wigmore Hall
Hollywood
Songbook
Christopher Maltman (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
‘Fascinating’ hardly begins
to describe Hanns Eisler. A pupil of both Schoenberg and Webern, who to a
certain extent rejected Schoenberg and the mainstream of ‘New Music’ on account
of his political convictions, Eisler proved a surer collaborator with Brecht
than Weill had ever done. (Weill’s selling out in his American exile is one of
the saddest stories of twentieth-century music, the composer of the Violin
Concerto. the Second Symphony, and Mahagonny
reduced to non-ironic churning out of popular song.) Exiled from the Third
Reich, Eisler would eventually be expelled from the McCarthyite USA too,
despite support from luminaries as diverse as Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas
Mann, Albert Einstein, Henri Matisse, and a good few others. The final phase of
his career would be spent in the GDR, where the collaboration with Brecht would
continue. Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik continues to bear Eisler’s name.
The Hollywood Songbook, as one would expect, comes from Eisler’s years
in Los Angeles, being made up of songs written in 1942 and 1943. As Christopher
Maltman pointed out in his engaging spoken introduction to the recital, one
thing about LA – at least from a European standpoint – is simply how far away
it is from home; Eisler’s émigré status, not without bitterness, shines
through, and clearly offered a starting point to Maltman and pianist Julius
Drake, whose idea it had been to perform the Songbook. It was a splendid opportunity, though there were times
when I wondered whether performing Eisler alongside music from the traditions,
past and more present, from which he had been uprooted and indeed from which he
had uprooted himself, from Schubert to Schoenberg, might have been a better
idea. One can argue fruitlessly, though, about immersion versus
contextualisation; both have their advantages. I cannot imagine that anyone in
a clearly appreciative Wigmore Hall audience would have been disappointed,
either with the songs performed or the excellent performances.
The first half was devoted to
Brecht’s ‘Flight’ songs. Having Brecht’s original texts printed in the
programme enabled one to hear the good number of changes Eisler made to then,
often minor but not always so. Poised somewhere between Schoenberg and
Hindemith – a rough and ready description, but one that might help to place him
for those unacquainted with his music – Eisler’s voice sounded strongly from
the outset, a language not so distant from Schoenberg’s period of ‘free
atonality’ evident in the piano introduction to ‘Der Sohn’. (I thought more
than once of the op.11 Piano Pieces.) And when ‘her heart kept beating so loud’
(‘Ihr Herz, das pchte so laut’), it certainly did, Drake having mastered
rhetoric as well as musical language; the anger in the first song’s conclusion
was palpable. Maltman’s excellent German diction and fine communicative skills
proved just what was required, very different from Matthias Goerne (whose
recording offers an inevitable frame of reference): less dark, in a sense, but
finely attuned to the shifting moods of both Brecht and Eisler. The second ‘Sohn’
song thus offered a well-judged balance between the helpless and the defiant,
the latter characteristic undeniably present but never exaggerated; words and
music did the job largely for themselves, or so it seemed. A sardonic approach,
for instance in ‘In den Weiden’, works so much better than caricature. ‘Little’
touches, such as the eloquently spoken
‘das Hoffen’ (hope) with which ‘Frühling 1942’ concluded, proved splendidly
telling, followed as it was a postlude somehow both nonchalant and felt. The
richness of Maltman’s description of beer, goat’s cheese, fresh bread and
berries in ‘Speisekammer 1942’ was such that one could almost taste the goods
so cruelly denied the emigrant across the seas. Deep sadness characterised ‘Über
den Selbstmord’, again all the more so for the lack of self-imposition from the
artists; one felt duly numb at the end. In the barrage of ‘Gedenktafel für 4000
Soldaten, die im Krieg gegen Norwegen versenkt wurden,’ Drake’s piano part
proved fiercely relentless, likewise Maltman’s vocal delivery, just the right
side of hectoring. Succinct, even spare, the ensuing ‘Epitaph auf einen in der
Flandernschlacht Gefallenen’ made its point all the more clearly after that.
Attention to detail made all the difference, for instance the second recounting
of the words ‘ich bin noch da’ (I’m still here) in ‘Spruch’, not only louder,
but richer in tone. ‘Der Kirschdieb’ was skittish but not carefree; unease
manifested itself in the piano’s disintegrating dance rhythms, whilst its
chromaticism, in ‘Winterspruch’ drew one in emotionally, both in terms of work
and performance. A darkly sardonic – perhaps more Goerne-like – rendition of ‘Panzerschlacht’
offered a Lehrstück of sorts, yet
remained above all a song, a Lied,
perhaps the ultimate defiance, Eisler’s echoes of Schubert’s Erlkönig reminding us of great distance,
both geographical and chronological.
The second half opened with
the ‘Anakreontische Fragmente’, by way of Hölderlin. High spirits, not notably
evident before, offered contrast in the opening ‘Geselligkeit betreffend’,
rendering Maltman’s imploring performance of the ensuing ‘Dir auch wurde
Sehnsucht’ all the more touching in its sadness. In many of the songs, the
semi-autonomous nature of the piano part – again, Hindemith came to mind, if
only as a starting reference – came equally to the fore, the strength of
musical structure in, for example, ‘In der Frühe’ readily apparent. The
balance, or dialectic, between what we might call ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’
was finely projected in the ‘Zwei Lieder nach Worten von Pascal’, Pascal’s Pensées (in English) offering an ideal
condensation of form and expression. ‘Erinnerung an Eichendorff und Schumann’
provided, as its title suggests, a moving remembrance of both Eichendorff and
Schumann. (It would be renewed in the encore: Schumann’s original setting of ‘Aus
der Heimat’.) Head voice offered a degree of characterisation in the Goethe
setting, ‘Der Schatzgräber’, unearthly, with a proper sense of the sinister,
whilst a more involved, ‘German Romantic’ quality reasserted itself upon a
return to Hölderlin, in ‘Andenken’. There was, similarly, an aching sense of ‘lateness’,
of the ‘hopelessness’ of the ‘too late’, in ‘An eine Stadt’, dedicated to
Schubert, with its gnawingly memorable, seemingly ‘remembered’, harmonies. Much
the same could be said of ‘Erinnerung’. A post-expressionist nightmare briefly
summoned itself in ‘Nightmare’: angry, chilling, surreal, or all three? If that
aggression were echoed in the first of the five Brecht ‘Elegien’, the second
offered an almost Strauss-like, yet far from incongruous, Romanticism, albeit
heavily ironised in its postlude. ‘Vom Sprengen des Gartens’ summoned up a
longing for the gardens of home, but the final ‘Die Heimkehr’ remained
clear-eyed about what return might bring. What would the native town (‘Vaterstadt’)
look like after the bombers had done their work? Such was the tragedy, or part
of the tragedy, of post-war Germany; the song’s bitter truthfulness once again
proved all the more telling for the lack of histrionics.
