Haus für Mozart
Berg – Four
Songs, op.2
Schumann – Dichterliebe,
op.48
Wolf – Three
Michelangelo Songs
Shostakovich – Suite
on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti, op.145: ‘Dante’; ‘Death’; ‘Night’
Brahms – Four
Serious Songs, op.121
Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Daniil Trifonov (piano)
This proved an outstanding
recital, at least as much for Daniil Trifonov’s searching, protean pianism as
for Matthias Goerne’s singing. Such a partnership, something beyond what one
might ‘ordinarily’ expect during the concert season, is just what a festival
such as Salzburg should be about. Likewise the programming: excellent in
itself, yet also offering connections to broader themes on offer in the
festival.
Goerne is singing Wozzeck here
– on which, more later in the week – so Berg’s op.2 songs could, if one wished,
be understood as anticipatory. More importantly, they made for a fine opening
to this programme, the Hebbel setting ‘Schlafen, Schlafen, nichts als Schlafen’
drowsy, somnolent in the best way, emerging and yet never quite emerging from
that state of half-awakedness. The languor one heard and felt had something of
Debussy and early Schoenberg to it, yet could never quite be reduced to them or
indeed to any other influence; this was Berg. Above all, it was founded in the
piano part, above which words could then do their work. In its Parsfalian
leisure-cum-torpor, one almost felt it to be ‘lit from behind’. ‘Schlafend
trägt man mich’ continued in a recognisable line, yet initially lighter, soon
more involved and questioning. Trifonov showed himself keenly aware of the
importance of specific pitches and their repetition; later Berg beckoned
already. ‘Nun ich der Riesen Stärksten überwand’ and ‘Warm die Lüfte’ continued
the developmental idea, (re)uniting, intensifying earlier tendencies – and again
the importance of specific pitch, here in the bells tolling and nightingale singing
in the piano part.
Dichterliebe benefited from the alchemy of no clear
break: Schumann’s song-cycle emerged from Berg’s songs and retrospectively
announced that that was where they had always been heading. From the very
outset, the opening ‘Im wunderschönen Monat Mai’, the limpidity of Trifonov’s
piano playing was to die for, the delicacy of Goerne’s song also spot on.
Magically slow, this was something to savour, without a hint of narcissism. ‘Aus
meinen Tränen sprießen’ developed not only, it seemed from its predecessor, but
from Berg’s songs too, not least in its nightingale song. Nothing here was
formulaic, nothing taken as read: the voice took on the quality of something
approaching an instrumental chamber music partner to the piano in ‘ich will
meine Seele tauchen’, save of course for the words that both heightened and
questioned that sense. The young Wotan seemed to appear on stage for ‘Im Rhein,
im heiligen Strome’, his piano partner striking in dark, stark simplicity
(however artful). The piano’s taunting cruelty in ‘Das ist ein Flöten und
Geigen’ could match anything in Schubert: implacable, heartless, almost ‘objective’.
It was, moreover, an unquestionably post-Schubertian agony here – distended,
just a little, unerringly judged – that characterised the ensuing ‘Hör’ ich das
Liedchen klingen’. ‘Am leuchten Sommermorgen’ brought that summer morning to
refracted life courtesy of Trifonov, the piano part’s passing notes returning
us to Berg, perhaps even going beyond him, whilst the piano chords in ‘Ich hab’
im Traum gewidmet’ spoke in almost Lisztian fashion, not unlike his Il penseroso. The strange tricks and
consolations of dreams that followed (‘Allnächtlich im Traume’) seemed almost
to prepare the way, following the weakened ebullience of ‘Aus alten Märchen’,
for those two extraordinarily final postludes. They spoke at least as keenly as
any words, even those of Heine.
Liszt, unsurprisingly, came
more strongly and unquestionably to the fore in Wolf’s Drei Gedichte von Michelangelo. His harmonic language and its
bitter self-destruction haunted ‘Wohl denk’ ich oft’. Quite rightly, words took
the lead in ‘Alles endet, was entstehet’ and ‘Fühlt meine Seele’, seemingly
inciting Wagnerian harmonies through what, in context, sounded most
Schopenhauerian language. The two songs’ different character registered as
strongly as what they held in common.
Trifonov’s quasi-verbal directness
of utterance, especially in the bass register, struck me especially powerfully
in the three Shostakovich Michelangelo songs that followed. It was as if the
ability to ‘speak’ were being returned with interest. In ‘Dante’ in particular,
Goerne brought to our attention Shostakovich the seer and the critic. That importance ascribed to particular pitches in
Berg seemed to haunt the world of Shostakovich too, as if to remind us of what
might have been. Once again, however incorrect this priority in the world of
mere empiricism, the words of the following songs seemed to grow out of the
piano’s wordless speech. ‘Night’ (Noč’) evinced an unfamiliar familiarity,
musical and verbal. ‘Hush, my friend, why awaken me?’ Why indeed?
That illusory ‘timeliness’ –
what could be more ‘timely’ – of Brahms in ‘archaic’ mode proved especially
striking in the Vier ernste Gesänge.
Trifonov’s understanding and communication of the piano parts was properly
generative, even occasionally verging on a quasi-objective autonomy, an ontological
frame within which the Biblical words might be intoned and considered. ‘Ich
wandte mich und sahe an alle’ nevertheless spoke of subjectivity, of a late
verbal Intermezzo that more than hinted at Webern. An earlier German
Romanticism hung in the air, and yet clearly had passed: sad, perhaps, but Goerne’s
Ecclesiastes Preacher would surely have understood. An almost Bachian embrace
of death, albeit with a more Romantic sense of tragedy underlying it,
characterised Goerne’s delivery in ‘O Tod, wie bitter bist du,’ flickering
half-lights again very much from the world of the late piano pieces. ‘Wenn ich
mit Menschen- und mit Engelszungen redete’ afforded a climax that was truly
Pauline in its depth, complexity, and sheer difficulty. The best theologians
will sometimes, as Brahms shows us, be agnostic, even atheist, albeit in a
strenuous sense: more Nietzsche than, God help us, Richard Dawkins and his ilk.
This was Brahms’s reckoning with how things were, just as much as that of the
epistle writer. And so it was with the recital as a whole: a reckoning
necessarily both final and not.
