Grosser
Saal, Mozarteum
Schubert:
Der
Wanderer, D 649; Der Wanderer an den Mond, D 870; An den Mond, SD 259
Mahler:
Lieder
eines fahrenden GesellenKrenek: Reisebuch aus den österrichischen Alpen, op.62
Florian Boesch (baritone)
Malcolm Martineau (piano)
There are many ways to wander,
not least with one foot in the soil of German Romanticism. Many of us will
think of the paintings of Friedrich – now, alas, almost too well known – and of
Wotan in Siegfried. Need there be
such metaphysical implications? Perhaps, perhaps not; it would be difficult to
avoid them completely in a Liederabend.
That is not to say, however, that they might not be played with, questioned,
even satirised. As Florian Boesch admits, in a booklet interview, it is not
easy to know how to programme Ernst Krenek’s Reisebuch aus den österrichischen Alpen. Schubert and Mahler here
offered complementary, even dialectical standpoints from which to approach Krenek’s
song-cycle.
The three opening Schubert
songs were well chosen, even their titles making the connection clear: Der Wanderer, Der Wanderer an den Mond, and An
den Mond. Boesch’s crystal clear diction, never an end in itself but a
crucial guide to meaning, was apparent from the start. The different register
chosen for the moon’s encouragement – ‘Folge true dem alten Gliese, wähler
keine Heimat nicht’, or should that be discouragement? – made its point without
exaggeration. Likewise the quiet ecstasy of ‘schein’, of appearance, of
reflection, on ‘Seh’ ich mild im Widerscheine’ told us all we needed to know.
Both Boesch and Malcolm Martineau, perhaps a little reticent in these songs,
used the form of Schubert’s second and third songs to chart a wandering of
their own: similar yet different throughout their stanzas. Already, it was
clear that this was to be a performance of a very ‘Austrian’ baritone, at times
tenor-like, in the line of Wolfgang Holzmair, although certainly not merely to
be identified with him.
Martineau turned far more
interventionist – as, indeed, did Boesch – in Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer. Fair enough: there is no un-mediated Mahler,
certainly not here. Sometimes, though, less is more, or at least it can be. I
could not help but find the very heavy
piano accents in ‘Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht’ a little much, perhaps also
Boesch’s underlining of words. His heavy sarcasm in the following ‘Ging heut’
morgen über’s Feld’ ensured that what may sometimes be lost was not. At what
price, though? Expressionistic anger, Wozzeck-like,
made a powerful case for such an approach in ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’,
although intonation sometimes went a little awry. Uneasy repose, in a very slow
‘Die zweu blauen Augen von meinem Schatz’ suggested a dark dreamworld indeed,
responding perhaps to the Schubert of Winterreise,
not least in the frozen quality to Martineau’s piano part.
Krenek’s cycle thus emerged,
both as work and performance, as some sort of mediated response to those two
extremes (extremes which, of course, retained something of each other within).
The expectancy of the opening ‘Motiv’, together with its slightly doubting
harmonies, nicely pointed by Martineau, set the scene – without, quite rightly,
our yet knowing how it and its action would develop. As James Parsons put it in
his 2010
Austrian Studies article on the work,
Krenek is, to an extent at least, ‘reversing the associative connotations of
the Lied as a medium suited to withdrawing
from the cares of the world, and, in place of that, taking up the genre as the
means by which to actively work through life’s larger concerns’. Which may, of
course, as we heard here, entail dealing with issues of withdrawal; indeed, it
almost certainly will. To follow such a song with ‘Verkehr’, a song playing
with pictorialism and Neue Sachlichkeit
just as it plays with the mountain railway that is its ostensible subject, takes
us further – and so it did here, Boesch’s irony less exaggerated and in many
ways more telling than in Mahler. Is ‘scenery’ lighter? Perhaps, as in the
following ‘Kloster in den Alpen’, but there are echoes here of Romanticism;
consciously or otherwise, Boesch and Martineau seemed to point – or at least I
heard them doing so – to Schumann’s Im
Rhein. Or is that a pointless diversion? ‘Abends dann beim Wein im
Klosterkeller magst du nachdenken, was für ein sinnlos Leben du fuhrst.’
Schubert is the more obvious model, of course, and, I think, the more obvious
focus of rebellion. In ‘Traurige Stunde’, we were asked to participate in an
act of false or at least fallible remembrance, even before the explicit act
thereof in ‘Unser Wein (Dem Andenken Franz Schuberts)’.
For memory is a strange thing.
Its ambivalence and ambiguity had been prepared in the preceding ‘Regentag’,
not least by further suggestion of musical ‘autonomy’ in the piano part. More
than once such thoughts came to mind, unsettling and yet expanding ideas of
what this music, these words, their alchemy (or not) might be ‘about’. A
journey was underfoot, towards dodecaphony, through quasi-Schoenbergian
procedures in ‘Auf und ab’, itself questioned by the grandeur of external
display in the succeeding ‘Albenbewohner (Folkloristisches Potpourri)’. The
post-expressionism of ‘Gewitter’, again not entirely unlike the Schoenberg of
the 1920s, although certainly never to be confused with him, told us how
gloriously untrue that song’s final major chord must be. If there were a
decision (‘Entscheidung’), it seemed to relate to reinforcement of those
ambiguities, ambivalences, autonomies. We citizens of nowhere, we rootless
cosmopolitans know no home; we no longer want one. Or do we?
