Grosser Saal, Mozarteum
Brahms – Die Schöne Magelone, op.33
Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Yuja Wang (piano)
Ulrich Matthes (narrator)
I had not initially been
intending to attend this concert, but, owing to a mix-up, stupidly returned my
ticket to hear Grigory Sokolov’s recital; by the time, I realised my mistake,
the concert was sold out, as it continued to be until the day itself. I
therefore bought myself a ticket for what seemed to be the next best option
that evening. Why mention that at all? Partly to explain why I think I should
have got more out of the concert, had I been more fully prepared.
For this was a performance of
Brahms’s ‘song-cycle’, Die schöne
Magelone, with narrative coherence provided by readings from Ludwig Tieck’s
romance, the Liebesgeschichte der schönen
Magelone und des Grafen Peter von Provence. Ulrich Matthes’s delivery of
those readings was, to my second- or third-language ears quite outstanding. He
did not try to upstage the musical performances, but nor was he unduly reticent;
he understood – on one case, with wry, infectious amusement – the particular
tone of Tieck’s verse, its direction, and its preparing the way, in this
particular context, for Brahms’s setting of the songs within the romance, one
per chapter. I should have benefited from a translation, whether in titles or
in the programme, but only the songs were translated. It was certainly good practice
for my German-language skills, and the language is not in itself especially
difficult, but I could not help but think that an international festival such as
Salzburg might have made provision for people in my situation and, indeed, for
those with less or no German. There were, sadly, quite a few departures from
the hall – accompanied, needless, to say by still-more disruptive tutting from
some of those remaining.
None of that offers any reflection,
of course, upon the readings themselves, which I should have loved to hear
again, having more firmly an idea in my head of the direction and nature of the
verse. Nor does it offer reflection upon the musical performances from Matthias
Goerne and Yuja Wang. I did not find them especially well matched; nor did I
find Wang’s piano tone especially well suited to this particular repertoire.
That is perhaps more a matter of taste than anything else – however unfashionable
this may be, Brahms will probably always retain at least a veneer of mahogany
for me – but Wang’s bright, unapologetically Steinway-ish tone sounded to me
more appropriate to Rachmaninov, say, than to Brahms. By the same token,
though, there was much to admire in the clarity of her playing; there was no
muddiness here. I liked the post-Schubertian lilt both she and Goerne imparted
to ‘Sind es Schermzen’, for instance. However, for the most part she seemed
somewhat withdrawn as an ‘accompanist’, rather than an active participant.
Goerne, by contrast, offered
keen narration, far more dramatically committed than he had seemed in the Kindertotenlieder
a couple of nights earlier. He placed Brahms not only as a successor to
Schubert but to Beethoven too; indeed, in the aforementioned ‘Sind es Schmerzen’,
the dialectic between, say, the heritage of
a song such as Erlkönig and
that of the Beethoven
Lieder Goerne had recently sung
at the Wigmore Hall was vividly, dramatically apparent. A subtle, never
exaggerated sense of near-Wagnerian – yet only near-Wagnerian – intoxication at times, for instance during ‘Wie soll
ich die Freude’, proved another welcome ingredient to the mix. The conflicts of
‘Muß es eine Trennung geben’, the playfulness of ‘Sulima’ – no Orientalism
here, thank God! – and the genuine optimism, even happiness of ‘Wie froh und
frisch’ marked important stations on our procession to the close. And yet again
it was Beethoven, in ‘Treue Lieder dauert lange’, who came to mind in something
approaching ecstatic conclusion. Even for me, a non-native-speaker, the
additional context had proved invaluable.
