From the same performance as last night's Fischer-Dieskau performances, Brigitte Fassbaender offers a significantly more persuasive account of the haunting song "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen," again with Hans Zender conducting the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra, April 1979
Where other composers such as Bela Bartók became increasingly interested in their native music as they grew older, Mahler seems to have absorbed the music of his homeland into his very cells at an exceedingly early age and seems then to have taken no further conscious interest in it. Instead, he built instinctively on the most powerful and primitive sources of expression throughout some of the most complex and sophisticated structures yet conceived by the Western musical mind. Perhaps that is one reason the strong appeal of Mahler's music continues to grow in our increasingly complex and often baffling age.
-- from Jack Diether's liner note for the Ludwig-Berry-Bernstein recording of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs
by Ken
This is the paragraph from Jack Diether's liner note which I quoted in last night's first part of this glimpse at Mahler's "military"-themed settings from the folk-poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), where we focused on two of the shorter, less grave military songs, "Trost im Unglück" ("Comfort in Misfortune") and the "Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" ("Song of the Prisoner in the Tower"). I said last night that when we put the two paragraphs together, we would have "as good a description and summation of Mahler's art and particular genius as I can imagine in two paragraphs." (For those disinclined to click through to last night's post, we'll put those paragraphs together in tonight's click-through, though of course you'll have to click through to get to that.)
Tonight, as promised, we hear the longer and graver "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" {"Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow"), Mahler's chiefest gift to the female soloist among the dozen "standard" Wunderhorn-group songs that aren't part of a symphony -- thereby excluding the luminous "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"), which found a place before the Finale of the Second (Resurrection) Symphony, of which we've actually heard quite a few performances, including three by Maureen Forrester: a grainy black-and-white videowith Glenn Gould conducting (!) and then performances from 1958 and 1987, from recordings of the Resurrection Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter'and Gilbert Kaplan, respectively. That post, by the way, offered Forrester singing large quantities of Mahler, including two Wunderhorn songs, "Antonius of Padua's Fish Sermon" and -- of all things! -- "Wo die schönene Trompeten blasen.").
Both of the masterly songs we're working toward tomorrow, "Revelge" ("Reveille") and "Der Tambourg'sell ("The Drummer Boy"), are pretty nearly the exclusive province of male singers, normally baritones and bass-baritones. "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen," of very nearly comparable stature, is just as near-exclusively female turf. (In further compensation, "Urlicht" itself is often performed as part of the Wunderhorn "set.")
It doesn't get more eloquent than Maureen Forrester singing Mahler's "Urlicht"
>
The great Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester sings "Urlicht" with Glenn Gould conducting (left-handed!), from a 1957 Gould CBC telecast.
"Urlicht" ("Primal Light")
O rosebud red! Man lies in the greatest need. Man lies in the greatest anguish. Far rather would I be in heaven.
Then I came to a broad path. Then a little angel came and wanted to send me away. But no! I didn't let myself be sent away.
I am from God, I want to return to God. Dear God will give me a little light, will light me all the way to eternal blessed life.
-- text from the collection of German folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn")
by Ken
At some point we'll continue with Tchaikovsky, and come back to the comment left by our friend Balakirev in response to last week's music piece. I don't agree with much in it, except for the rather lengthy list of works by Tchaikovsky he gives a thumbs-up. The one thing that distresses me is that he so readily associates himself with the ranks of what I called "'serious' music critics," which leads me to believe that I wasn't sarcastic enough in dismissing such charlatans, whose "seriousness" resides only in their tiny brains. And yet here's someone proudly claiming membership in their ranks.
What distresses me is this evidence that I wasn't sarcastic enough. One charge I thought I would never have to face is being insufficiently sarcastic.
As I say, we can come back to Tchaikovsky. One point that might have arisen, which I thought might be interesting to talk about, is the way commentators' aesthetic dislikes may be less interesting than their likes, if they can make a useful case. Tchaikovsky himself, for example, wasn't the greatest fan of Beethoven, especially the later Beethoven, and that really doesn't tell us much, except about Tchaikovsky's own musical makeup.
Glenn Gould's eloquent case for early Beethoven
Which sent me back to thinking about the late Glenn Gould (1932-1982), the eccentric (to put it mildly) Canadian pianist, who had something close to unmitigated contempt for later Beethoven. Unlike most of us, who see the composer's artistic development as a process of unparalleled broadening and deepening, Gould thought Beethoven became ponderous, pompous, and tedious -- generally unbearable.
Again, this doesn't tell us nearly as much about Beethoven as it does about Gould, but that's still much less interesting than the case Gould made on behalf of the earlier Beethoven works, both in his writings and, in the case of the piano works, in his performances. To the works he believed in, he brought to bear the full resources of his singular imagination, and as a result, many of the earlier sonatas -- works too often thought of as way stations on the path to the composer's "greater" later sonatas -- achieve an emotional stature we rarely encounter.
(Among the Beethoven string quartets, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that Gould had no sympathy for the late ones, reckoned by most of us the composer's most searching and visionary imaginings, and not much more for the daring middle ones. But the Early Quartets, the six quartets of Op. 18 -- ah, these he loved! What a shame it is that we can't hear performances of them lit up with the kind of passion, not a word we often associate with the severely repressed Gould, and insight that abound in Gould's performances of the early sonatas.)
So who's your favorite composer?
One day we'll get around to that piece too, but so far it won't write itself. (And I need to be able to present appropriate musical selections in audio and/or video form.) That set me to thinking, how about tackling the question I'm asked so often and have never been able to answer in a way that satisfies or even means much to the questioner: Who's your favorite composer?
Because I have at least a dozen "favorite" composers, maybe more, depending on the particular kind of favoring in play. I thought it might be fun to play with that. I still think it may be, but not for now. With the weekend slipping away, I thought, well, what about offering just a glimpse one of my "favorite" composers? Then I thought perhaps I could communicate something about one of the composers whose way of looking at the world resonates most personally with me. That list would be (in provisional form):
Berlioz Mahler maybe Shostakovich
I went shopping on YouTube. If I could find just one decent clip, why, there we would be! Because I'm still fumbling with computer audio and video technology. In order to enable you to hear at least a sampling of the music I'm writing about -- and what's the point of writing about it if I can't? -- I'm still mostly dependent on "found" clips.
We hit paydirt!
Imagine my surprise to stumble across a clip I've looked for a number of times online -- the one at the top of this column, which was included in the first volume of Sony Classical's early-'90s Glenn Gould video series, drawn from the extensive work of various sorts he did for Canadian television throughout his career. This is a rare example of GG conducting -- and yes, conducting left-handed. (Normally left-handed conductors conduct just the way right-handed conductors do, for the simple reason that that's what every orchestra is accustomed to seeing. I guess GG figured that since he had no intention of presenting himself before the world's orchestras, he could conduct however he damned pleased, as long as it was "readable" by the little studio orchestra scraped together out of his modest CBC budget.)
It's a 1957 performance of the little Mahler song "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"), which serves as the fourth movement of the composer's monumental Second Symphony, the Resurrection. The soloist is one of the great Mahler singers, the Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester (born 1930), and the 1957 date would make this her first recording of "Urlicht," since she didn't take part in her first recording of the Resurrection Symphony until the following February, with Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic. (Unless I've missed one, she made her last Resurrection recording in October 1982 -- not a bad time span, 25 years. I'm alarmed to note that Forrester seems barely remembered today. How could that have happened?)
This haunting, childishly innocent little song sets the stage for the monumental half-hour finale of the symphony, where a soprano soloist, the alto, and a chorus join in for a setting of Klopstock's "Resurrection Ode." (The composer took pains to specifiy that these two movements should proceed without pause, but an appalling number of LP versions inserted a side break between them, and even on CD it's far from unheard-of to have a disc change here.)
The text of "Urlicht" comes from a remarkable collection of German folk or folklike poems called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), "edited" by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano and published near the start of the 19th century. The anthology, which covers quite a wide range of subject matter, from idyllic flirtations to military horror stories, was an important source of inspiration for the budding German Romantic movement, and was invaluable to Mahler in the earlier stages of his career.
Not only "Urlicht" but the immediately preceding movement of the Resurrection Symphony, a nonvocal scherzo based on Mahler's wise and witty setting of "Antony of Padua's Fish Sermon," is Wunderhorn-based. (One of these days we will definitely get around to talking about that wonderful song, in which Saint Anthony gathers a large and surprisingly attentive crowd of fish species to listen to his harsh sermon about their behavior, after which the audience members, richly edified, all go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.)
To perform "Urlicht" successfully, you have to strip all artifice and manipulativeness from your performing arsenal. The singer is totally exposed, both vocally and emotionally. Sometimes the result can be surprising. Maybe the most moving performance I ever heard from Marilyn Horne was a live "Urlicht"; I wish I'd heard more performances from her with that degree of lack of artifice.
For a song of such cosmic implications, it plays above all on simplicity and directness. Enjoy!
MAHLER: "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" ("Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow")
"Who then is outside and who is knocking, waking me so gently?"
"It is your heart's beloved, and let me in with you! Why should I stand here longer?
"I see daybreak rising, daybreak, two bright stars. I surely wish I were with my sweetheart! With my sweetheart!"
The girl got up and let him in. She also bids him welcome.
"Welcome, my dear boy! You've been standing so long!" And she gives him her snow-white hand. In the distance the nightingale sang. The girl began to weep.
"O do not weep, my beloved! By year's end you will be my own. My own you will certainly be, as no other is on earth! O love, on the green earth. I go off to war on the green heath; the green heath, it's so far!
"There where the beautiful trumpets blow, there is my house of green turf."
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Feb. 17-19, 1964
This performance is part of a group of five Mahler songs that Christa Ludwig and Otto Klemperer recorded as a fourth-side filler for their recording of Das Lied von der Erde. Their Das Lied, with Fritz Wunderlich as the tenor soloist, turned out spectacularly, one of the glories of the phonograph. But the "filler" songs turned out pretty spectacularly too. In "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" the intensity of atmosphere and emotional concentration are established at the initial downbeat and never let up.
Let's back up and put those two paragraphs of Jack Diether's together, then add his brief note on tonight's song.
Mahler's unique power as a composer lies in his ability to catch the essence of the sounds of man and nature, and to transmute it into purely musical terms. From his early childhood, he was fascinated by the sounds that environed him: bird songs, bugle calls, tattoos, marches and, especially, dances and airs. It is said that when Mahler was only four or five years old he could already play more than a hundred peasant songs and dances on an accordion.
Where other composers such as Bela Bartók became increasingly interested in their native music as they grew older, Mahler seems to have absorbed the music of his homeland into his very cells at an exceedingly early age and seems then to have taken no further conscious interest in it. Instead, he built instinctively on the most powerful and primitive sources of expression throughout some of the most complex and sophisticated structures yet conceived by the Western musical mind. Perhaps that is one reason the strong appeal of Mahler's music continues to grow in our increasingly complex and often baffling age. . . .
[T]he largest and most important category [of Mahler's settings of poems from the folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn)] comprises the so-called "military" songs, where Mahler's penchant for the ironic, the pathetic and the macabre is given full rein. Of the six in this genre, three are duets and three are solos. . . .
"Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" is compounded of eeriness and sad beauty in a manner that is virtually unparalleled in the art of song. This too would be a duet, were it not that the whole thing is cast in narrative form -- therefore one voice.
Now you'll recall that Jack was a proponent of duet performance of the "he said, she said" Wunderhorn songs. It turns out that he's wrong in thinking that nobody would contemplate performing "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" as a duet.
"Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" ("Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow")
Diana Damrau, soprano; Iván Paley, baritone; Stephan Matthias Lademann, piano. Telos, recorded 2003
I think a duettized "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" would be a tough sell even in a better performance than this one (where I have to say I don't think the piano-playing is the problem).
One point to note about the Ludwig-Klemperer performance is that, relatively speaking, it's fast. It doesn't sound fast to me, but the just-over-six-minutes timing is practically lickety-split. I haven't combed my holdings, but I don't think I've got a performance anywhere near that short. Ludwig's next recordings, with Leoanrd Bernstein conducting and at the piano (in the glorious Des Knaben Wunderhorn with her then-husband, baritone Walter Berry; last night I ventured that their "Trost in Unglück" and "Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" pretty much sweep the field) are almost a minute longer. But thanks to the amazing intensity and concentration of the performance, it doesn't sound rushed, or even quickish, to me.
Our next two performances, in addition to showcasing distinctly different voice types (Jessye Norman's full-fledged dramatic soprano with that contralto-like lower range, Lucia Popp's lyric-weight soprano), stretch the song out significantly -- to 7:31 and 8:41, respectively.
"Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" ("Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow")
Jessye Norman, soprano; Concertgebouw Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips, recorded April 1976 Lucia Popp, soprano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Klaus Tennstedt, cond. EMI, recorded 1985-86
And finally, I promised last night that we would hear Anne Sofie von Otter's performance from the Wunderhorn recording conducted by Claudio Abbado. (Last night we heard baritone Thomas Quasthoff, the sturdy male soloist, give fine performances of both our songs.)
Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano; Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded February 1998
By now you should be able to say it before me: It's the last of Mahler's Wunderhorn settings, "Revelge" ("Reveille") and "Der Tamboursg'sell" ("The Drummer Boy").
