AT-HOME: Christoph Prégardien & Gloria Chien: Poetry in Performance

Christoph Prégardien, one of the world’s greatest lyric tenors, treats Portland to a rare United States performance! Prégardien’s “plaintive beauty and piercing insight” (The New York Times) make him a preeminent interpreter of German Lieder, art songs for voice and piano inspired by poetry. Internationally renowned as a superb musical storyteller, Prégardien will evoke the love and loss that is at the heart of some of the greatest romantic songs by Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. Joined by Artistic Director Gloria Chien on piano, Prégardien will unfurl a magnificent aural poetry experience.

Premieres on CMNW.org beginning Thursday, March 10 @ 7:30 PM (PT) and can be accessed through Thursday, March 17 at midnight. Concert is available to view for one week.

“Prégardien…has the precious ability to make even the most commonplace phrase matter and linger in the memory.”

— The Guardian

Learn more about Christoph Prégardien
Learn more about Gloria Chien

Online Virtual Concert
Premieres Thursday, 3/10 • 7:30 pm PT

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Program

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PROGRAM NOTES: Learn about Poetry in Performance

Christoph Prégardien & Gloria Chien: Poetry in Performance

“I don’t like writing songs,” Ludwig van Beethoven once declared. “With vocal compositions I must always be asking myself: can this be sung?” A poor singer himself — unsurprising for someone with a hearing impairment — Beethoven did not have an intimate understanding of sung music, unlike the insider knowledge he brought to the instrumental works for which he is best known. Artistically, Beethoven was also drawn to the open-ended emotional possibilities of instrumental music. As a genre, songs, constrained by the meanings of their texts, hindered his creative imagination. Nonetheless, there were times when Beethoven was moved to set words to music. Beethoven fans might be surprised to learn that over the course of his life, he composed approximately 80 lieder (“songs” in German).

Adelaide, composed between 1794-96 on the text of Friedrich von Matthison’s eponymous poem, was most likely written for and inspired by an accomplished young singer, Magdalena Willmann. The two first met in Bonn as teens; when Beethoven discovered Magdalena had relocated to Vienna, he was delighted. Biographical information on Beethoven is scanty, and some of it is of dubious accuracy (19th century biographers tended to invent or “interpret” facts about their subjects), but sources suggest Beethoven was deeply enamored of Magdalena and at one point proposed marriage.

Matthison’s poem recounts a youthful longing for an idealized concept of womanhood, expressed in rhapsodic descriptions of nature. More aria than song, Beethoven’s melody meanders through Matthison’s nature imagery without repeated phrases, other than the rapturous sighing refrain, Adelaide. 

Wonne der Wehmut and Neue Liebe, neues Leben, both set to poems by Goethe, reflect Beethoven mature compositional style. The music more closely echoes the meaning of the words, such as the unusual harmony underneath the word “tot” (death). Other examples to listen for: the piano’s tear-drop-like accompaniment in Wonne der Wehmut (Joy in Sadness), or the lighthearted joy of Neue Liebe, neues Leben (New Love, New Life).

In 1828, Franz Schubert’s six-year battle with syphilis began its final lethal phase; the 31-year-old composer, whose health had been precarious for years, knew his time was running out. Nonetheless, Schubert worked tirelessly, producing some of his finest music, including the final three piano sonatas, and the collection of songs known as Schwanengesang (Swan Song).

Schubert never thought of Schwanengesang’s 14 songs as a cycle, nor did he intend to publish them together. Unlike Schubert’s previous song cycles, Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin, whose poems by a single author tell one gradually unfolding story, the songs in Schwanengesang do not share a common narrative, nor are the texts by a single poet. Nonetheless, after Schubert’s death, his publisher Tobias Haslinger issued the songs in one grouping with an absurdly Romantic title, hoping to capitalize on the success of Schubert’s earlier works.

In 1825, poet Ludwig Rellstab sent seven poems to Beethoven, who died before he could begin working on them. Rellstab may have then forwarded them to Schubert, or Schubert may have found them amongst Beethoven’s papers following the older composer’s death; historical accounts vary. However Schubert gained possession of Rellstab’s poems, his melodies and piano accompaniments deftly evoke a wide range of emotions and images.

Love/loss and ecstatic paeans to nature (not coincidentally two of Schubert’s favorite subjects), feature prominently. Schubert provides the joyous optimistic songs Liebesbotschaft, Frühlingssehnsucht, and Abschied with limpid piano figurations flowing underneath lyrical melodies. In the bleaker songs: Kriegers Ahnung, Aufenthalt, and In der Ferne, the piano’s weighty chords evoke, in turn, anguish, despair, and resignation. Ständchen, one of Schubert’s most popular songs, uses shifting minor-to-major harmonies to express the lover’s half-painful, half-pleasurable longing for his beloved.

In 1840, Robert Schumann experienced an extraordinary outpouring of creative energy, which he channeled into the composition of lieder. Between February and December 1840, Schumann wrote more than 100 lieder based on the work of several poets, particularly Heinrich Heine.

Schumann’s best-known song cycle, Dichterliebe, features 16 of the 65 poems in Heine’s 1823 Lyrisches Intermezzo. This collection of poems is voiced by a despondent knight who spends his days alone in a castle. As he sleeps, the knight dreams of a fairy/lover who dances with him until dawn, whereupon she disappears, leaving him disconsolate and alone. Heine, well known for his biting irony, employed and derided the tropes of German Romanticism simultaneously. Whether Schumann fully appreciated Heine’s mordant sensibility has been the subject of heated debate; some of Dichterliebe’s songs appear to express a naïve, straightforward interpretation of Heine’s words, while others reflect the poet’s sardonic, nuanced perspective.

Textually and musically, each song leads into the next; the first three are presented without pause. The piano’s opening and closing measures in No. 1 are musically unresolved, which suggests Schumann definitely grasped Heine’s layered meanings. Schumann uses the opening notes of No. 2 several times in subsequent songs, particularly No. 13, although now the music is cast in the darkest of minor keys, reflecting the poet’s emotional journey from hopeful expectancy to a dream of his beloved lying dead. No. 7 mocks its title in its pedantic recitative style and ponderous chordal accompaniment. In the final song, Heine’s knight declares his desire to toss all his poems, and the heartache that inspired them, into a massive coffin. Schumann’s setting of this text clearly articulates Heine’s anger, and with the final reference of No. 2’s melody in the singer’s closing measures, his ultimate despair.

© Elizabeth Schwartz

BEETHOVEN Adelaide, Op. 46

BEETHOVEN Wonne der Wehmut, Op. 83, No. 1

BEETHOVEN Neue Liebe, neues Leben from 6 Gesänge, Op. 75, No. 2

SCHUBERT selections from Schwanengesang, D. 957

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Selections from Schwanengesang (Swan Song), D. 957 (22”)

II. Kriegers Ahnung (Warrior’s Foreboding)
IV. Ständchen (Serenade)
V.  Aufenthalt (Resting Place)
X.  Das Fischermädchen (The Fisher-Maiden)
XIII. Der Doppelgänger (The Double)
XIV. Die Taubenpost (The Pigeon Post)

R. SCHUMANN Dichterliebe, Op. 48

Concert Program

Song Texts and Translations

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