Mozart-Saal, Konzerthaus
Beethoven – An die ferne Geliebte, op.98
Schoenberg – Das Buch der hängende Gärten, op.15Haydn – The Spirit’s Song, Hob. XXVIa/41; Content, Hob. XXVIa/36; The Wanderer, Hob. XXVIa/32; Sailor’s Song, Hob. XXVIa/31; She never told her love, Hob. XXVIa/34
Berg – Altenberg-Lieder, op.4, arr. Hans Erich Apostel and Gerold Hubert
Beethoven – Adelaide, op.46
What a wonderful programme,
given under the heading ‘Wiener Schule’ (‘Viennese Schools’)! Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte and Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängende Gärten must, along
with Hindemith’s Marienleben, stand
as the most disgracefully neglected of song-cycles. (No reasonable person
denies the greatness of Schubert, but do we really need to have Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise programmed quite so often?)
The opening song, ‘Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend’, began beautifully slow,
heartbreakingly so. This, one felt, with reference to Christian Gerhaher’s most
celebrated operatic role, was Wolframs
Lied. For whatever reason, and the reasons are, I think, complex, we hear
what we imagine to be Beethoven’s voice, his character, in his music. Does
anyone really not hear his greatness as a human being as well as a composer?
The composer’s goodness certainly shone through here, through rather than in
addition to vocal beauty; nor was Gerhaher’s performance at the expense of the
words. There was sadness, though, too: how could there not be when measured
against the state in which the world now stands? The acceleration in the final
stanza was spot on: ‘natural’, with nothing remotely abrupt to it. That, of
course, was Gerold Huber’s doing as well, and the subtlety of the brief
transition to the next song – and not just to this next song – was his too. ‘Wo
die Berge so blau’ offered contrasts between such beauty of tone and a dried
out quality in the second stanza, vibrato strategically withdrawn. ‘Schmerzen’
indeed. I liked the playful yet serious character to ‘Diese Wolken in den Höhen’:
akin to a vocal Bagatelle, and yes, the persistence of certain piano figures
reminded me further of those true gems for the instrument. The sadness of an
aspiration to naïveté, no longer possible to fulfil, Beethoven already too
late, marked ‘Es kejret der Maien’. Beautifully sprung piano rhythms heightened
the loss. The turn to the minor for concluding tears (‘Tränen’) sealed a
tragedy in miniature. Gerhaher offered an almost Mahlerian serenity of
exhaustion – closer, perhaps, to some of the symphonies than the songs – in the
final ‘Nimm die hin den, diese Lieder’. The final stanza reinstated, not
without implicit sorrow, Beethovenian good humour.
Schoenberg could, not without
reason, be a pricklier soul. Here, though, we heard a veritable garden of
delights. Placing his cycle after Beethoven’s suggested reinstatement of that
slippery idea, ‘tradition’, and the intrinsic necessity of its Aufhebung. Lines heard in
quasi-isolation might have been of the past, almost but not quite; where they
were sung or played now, they became unheimlich. The eloquence of Huber’s opening
left-hand single-line melody heightened expectations, which were certainly not
to be thwarted. A Schubertian bird (‘Vögel’) sang during ‘Hain in diesen
paradiesen’, the piano recognisably a collaborative partner drawing upon
Schoenberg’s recent op.11 Piano Pieces. Rhythms in the following ‘Als neuling
trat ich ein in dein gehege’ seemed to want to enjoy themselves, almost
succeeding, Stefan George’s verse pulling them back. Gerhaher’s hairpin on ‘strauchelt’
encapsulated his marriage of drama and beauty, the vowel doing his magical
work. Resignation – ‘leaning in’ on harmonic progressions – marked ‘Saget mir,
auf welchem pfade’; and yet, it moved. Sometimes, as in ‘Angst und hoffen
wechselnd mich beklemen’, the piano part seemed to attain relative autonomy,
but it was not contradiction, such as Schoenberg unfarily accused Busoni of
having advocated. Pierrot-ish rage
seemed within range in ‘Wenn ich heut nicht deinen leib berühre’, whilst pale,
wan tone drew us in and repelled us in ‘Als wir hinter dem beblübtem tore’.
Ghostly dignity was Gerhaher’s mode of delivery here, that mode ever shifting,
ever complex: like Schoenberg’s music itself, of course. The final ‘Wir
bevölkerten die abend-düstern’ had, from its outset, a sense of finality, yet
by the same token, the battle was not won before its singing. There was to be
no easy conclusion; how could there be? Perhaps this offered some irresolute
resolution of that which would not resolve.
We hear Haydn’s – and Mozart’s –
songs far too little. This selection would, I suspect, have been quite an
ear-opener to many. The particular gravity of the piano sound, the placing of chords,
and their harmonies marked out the opening of The Sprit’s Song as ‘late’. Gerhaher’s performance of Anne Hunter’s
words and Haydn’s notes seemed to hark back a little to Handel, whose music so
enthused Haydn both in London and before, and, even, via the adoptive
Englishman, to traces of Purcell. This was no merely genial Haydn; it was as
dark as Schoenberg, indeed perhaps more unrelievedly so. The mood lifted for ‘Content’,
as one might expect (!), but ambivalence remained in a fashion that perhaps
hinted at Mozart. Edging toward Romanticism, though remaining in the
eighteenth-century, the performance of ‘The Wanderer’ sounded perfectly placed.
My sole reservation lay with the Hunter ‘Sailor’s Song’. For me, it does not
present Haydn at his best, but more to the point, both performances sounded
over-emphatic: heavy-handed and whatever the vocal equivalent might be. ‘She
never told her love’, however, sounded as well judged as ‘The Wanderer’ and
indeed announced its kinship thereto.
There is loss, of course, in
any piano version of Berg’s Altenberg-Lieder,
but Huber’s own revision of Hans Erich Apostel soon had us forget and perhaps
even to experience certain compensations. The piano’s quicksilver flickering,
relative weighting of instrumental voices constantly shifting, sounded in model
fashion. Mood and style were marked out as differently from Schoenberg as Haydn
from Beethoven. Gerhaher’s attention to detail presented in the first song a
quasi-turn upon ‘schöner’ as careful as if it had been by Haydn. Occasional erring
of pitch, not of great importance or degree, was eradicated by the time of the
second, ‘Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen’. The paradoxical, or better
dialectical, musical plenitude of Berg at (almost) his most aphoristic was
something to savour in ‘Über die Grenzen des All’ and ‘Nichts ist gekommen’.
Huber plucked the piano strings, harp-like, in the former: a lovely touch.
Gerhaher’s final note, in falsetto, rang out in near-perfection. Sands
constantly shifted beneath an almost Brahmsian core in ‘Hier ist Friede’. This truly
chilled, as if Tristan were meeting Wozzeck.
Placed after Berg, Beethoven’s Adelaide sounded as painfully past, as
unattainable, as Mozart might after Beethoven: heart-stopping indeed. The
Mozart of The Magic Flute did not in
fact sound so far removed from Beethoven’s palpable sincerity. Tamino, rather
than Papageno, seemed almost the guiding spirit. I thought that before knowing
what would come next: a delectable, light yet truly felt, encore of Mozart’s Abendempfindung. I cannot conceive of
any of the preceding works without Mozart’s example; there is, happily, no need
to do so.
