Today's sacred word is "heilig" ("holy" or "sacred"), chez Schubert and R. Strauss -- make of it what you will

UPDATE: A second Fischer-Dieskau/Moore "Zueignung" added!

"An die Musik": Maybe we don't need words?
(But not to worry -- we'll have 'em eventually)


The man himself, seen here at home, is heard playing his own solo-piano rendering -- one stanza only -- of Schubert's one-of-a-kind song "An die Musik" ("To Music"), to conclude the Homage to Gerald Moore in London's Royal Festival Hall, Feb. 20, 1967 (as audio-recorded by EMI).

by Ken

I hadn't known when I started out that Gerald Moore, the one and only, was going to be leading the whole thing off, but when the above solo performance of "An die Musik" slipped provisionally into this lead-off position, it just seemed right. I hadn't expected either to be so affected rehearing this performance of an indulgent kind G.M. never would have given when he was partnering another performer, as he did so luminously with so many performers in his long and storied career. Nor, finally, was I prepared for the double take I did the third or fourth time I typed the date of the Homage to Gerald Moore concert. My goodness, that was more than 50 years ago! How did that happen?

For years now I've wanted to "do" G.M. in a post or posts, and have always shied away from it. Do I have to add that in all this time I still haven't heard another accompanist in his league? Oh, every now and then I hear a pianist who seems in that moment almost worthy of comparison. I settle almost-happily for that.


IF YOU DON'T KNOW "AN DIE MUSIK," BY ALL MEANS
SKIP AHEAD TO THE PERFORMANCES WITH WORDS

Oh yes, back to the post, such as it is. Because as of this moment I don't have so much "a post" as the bones of one, consisting basically of music. And since the music is so much worth hearing, for this moment I hope that's going to be enough. Well, it'll have to be enough. Maybe I'll come back and fill in some verbiage, or then again maybe I'll just leave that for another week, and let the music speak for itself.

The one note of caution I would add right now is there's more than one way to "read" this assemblage of music. And it's the less obvious one, one I might call a Reverse-Strauss, that we're going to have to come back to eventually, because it was the reason for assembling this particular assemblage in the first place.

Hofmannsthal and Strauss

And to explain the Strauss reference, we're going to start by revisiting an old friend, the Composer created for the revised, stand-alone version of their opera Ariadne auf Naxos by those great collaborators Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. As you probably know, the Prologue was created for the revised version of Ariadne to enable it to be performed as a stand-alone piece. (The original version had been created to be performed as a between-acts "entertainment" in an adapted version of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme.) In the process they created something miraculous: a backstage look at the process of creation which is at once borderline-hilarious funny and, at strategic points, deeply moving. For Strauss it was a dream combination: He could put into the mouth of the deliciously over-earnest young Composer all the deep artistic seriousness that he no doubt felt but would never have allowed himself to utter in his own voice. A case in point, obviously, is the Composer's stirring declaration: "Musik ist eine heilige Kunst" ("Music is a holy art").

By a Reverse-Strauss what I have in mind is sort of the opposite process: What if, instead of deeply serious considerations disguised as comic inventions, we have stuff that has all the trappings of serious intent but may after all have no real-world import.

When we get to that discussion, I expect we'll be ready to hear a somewhat more inclusively edited version of this transcendent excerpt, which specifically targets the "Musik ist eine heilige Kunst" moement, from almost-the-end of the Ariadne Prologue. The more inclusive version will allow us to hear better the process whereby the Composer reaches a totally unexpected moment of peace after the series of batterings he has endured in this roughly three-quarters of an hour in the home of "the richest man in Vienna," leading up to the premiere of his opera Ariadne auf Naxos, paid for, as the poor Composer is never allowed to forget, by the self-same richest man in Vienna.

Strauss himself was most unlikely to have declared of his own work and its potential power for an audience, as the Composer does in a earlier exchange with his teacher, the Music Master: "The secret of life is revealed to them in it, takes them by the hand." You can hear this whole exchange in the last of an extended series of posts from October 2015 through February 2016 which I'm tempted to call Ariadne-focused, except that "focus" may not be exactly the right word given the frequent digressions that occurred along the way; a listing of those posts appears at the end of the February 7 post.]


SAYING THE "SACRED" WORD:
STARTING WITH "MUSIC IS A HOLY ART"

For now, though, we're going to hear just the "transcendent" portion of the Ariadne Prologue's climactic scene, in just the way we heard it in on Feb. 7, 2016. I think we can say good-bye, by the way, to the last two of these performances, which seem ripe for retiring. In other Ariadne Prologue excerpts we've already heard considerably better Composers, like Tatiana Troyanos and Julia Varady, and there are a number of other Composers we should hear more of.)

"Music is a holy art"

THE COMPOSER: Music is a holy art, which brings together all men of courage, like cherubim around a shining throne, and for this reason it is the holiest of the arts. Holy music!

-- from the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos

Sena Jurinac (s), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA-Decca, recorded 1958

Teresa Zylis-Gara (s), Composer; Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded June-July 1968

Agnes Giebel (ms), Composer; Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine, cond. DG, recorded January 1986

Anne Sofie von Otter (ms), Composer; Staatskapelle Dresden, Giuseppe Sinopoli, cond. DG, recorded Sept. and Dec. 2000


"SACRED" SONG EXHIBIT NO. 1:
SCHUBERT'S "AN DIE MUSIK"

It would surprise me to learn that there are music-lovers who don't thrill to Schubert's "An die Musik." Is the Gilm poem great poetry? Of course not. Is the whole thing utterly obvious? Of course, but does it matter?

Fritz Wunderlich

Over the years I've thought often of building some sort of post around "An die Musik," and I did find one that included it, but the telltale indicator was that no audio files were to be found for either of the recordings that would have to have been included in any of the posts I'd contemplated: Fritz Wunderlich's (see below) and Pavel Lisitsian's (from a mid-1950s Melodiya song recital, and alas, for frustrating technical reasons, still not offerable; it's coming, though).

Me, I could easily enough listen to the Wunderlich "An die Musik" five or six times in succession. To fill it out a bit, I turned to Christa Ludwig (I love the beauty of her straightforward simplicity) and George London (in refurbishing that old post I mentioned, I regretfully had to replace a now-disappeared video clip of a quite beautiful London concert performance). I made a clip of Heinrich Schlsnus's 1928 recording but decided I don't like it nearly as much as the 1938 "Zueignung" we'll hear in a moment.

The Olaf Bär recording is likable enough, from a singer who's given me a lot of pleasure, but it shows all too clearly just how hard this little song is to sustain. I can't help thinking that a really good accompanist -- a Gerald Moore, say -- would have not only helped sustain the piece in the piano part but found ways to help the singer do so. (It still confounds me that many listeners considered Geoffrey Parsons, a competent enough pianist -- as we hear in the recording with Christa Ludwig, a canny enough performer that she gets all she needs from him -- but a ferociously limited musician, in a class with Moore.)

SCHUBERT: "An die Musik," D. 547


Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Giesen, piano. DG, recorded November 1965

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. EMI, recorded Nov. 28-30, 1961

George London, bass-baritone; John Newmark, piano. VAI, recorded live, Feb. 15, 1957

Olaf Bär, baritone; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. EMI, recorded 1991-92


"SACRED" SONG EXHIBIT NO. 2:
BACK TO STRAUSS, FOR "ZUEIGNUNG"

As you're mentally making your own post of these little musical selections, one possibility to consider is the Strauss-Schubert-Strauss progression. That might have some significance. Or it might just be that "Zueignung" is another (I'm tempted to say "the other") song in the category of "An die Musik" whose obviousness is surpassed many times over by its undimmable potency.

When it came to "Zueignung" there was one recording that immediately demanded inclusion: Jussi Bjoerling's stunning Carnegie Hall encore performance, as much for the liquid beauty and easy intensity of the calm first two stanzas (but has anyone sung the line "Und du segnetest den Trank"more, well, blessedly?) as for the thrill when he opens up on "heilig, heilig." I think the Schlusnus recording is self-recommending, and I like the Winbergh too, where it's interesting to note that at the point in the song that many singers think is all that matters, the upper-range attack of "heilig, heilig," he's not in especially confident vocal territory.

The Nilsson recording here, as I expect I've explained before, is a souvenir of a Carnegie Hall recital at which La Nilsson offered "Zueignung," on essentially the very stage where Bjoerling sang his encore performance, and started one stanza with her back to the main audience, singing directly to the cadre of enthusiasts filling the stage seats formerly behind her. I imagine the back wall provided some bounced sound projection; still, it was pretty stunning to hear the volume of sound she produced with her back to us!

I don't expect that any of this will come through this little clip. I think maybe you have to have experienced the voice at both its full immensity and in the scaled-down form we hear most of the way until the climax at "heilig, heilig," which is something else again. For me, though, this is a precious souvenir of a much-cherished artist. If it's thrills you want, though, we can turn to the composer's orchestral version. You'll notice that it tends to encourage the singer to amp up the "excitement" level in the first two stanzas -- forget the poise of Bjoerling.

R. STRAUSS: "Zueignung," Op. 10, No. 1

Jussi Bjoerling, tenor; Frederick Schauwecker, piano. RCA, encore recorded live in Carnegie Hall, Mar. 2, 1958

Heinrich Schlusnus, baritone; Sebastian Peschko, piano. Polydor, recorded 1938

Gösta Winbergh, tenor; Friedrich Haider, piano. Nightingale, recorded c1992

Birgit Nilsson, soprano; János Sólyom, piano. Bis, recorded Jan. 5-8, 1975
Orchestral version by the composer

Jessye Norman, soprano; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Philips, recorded August 1982

Renée Fleming, soprano; Munich Philharmonic, Christian Thielemann, cond. Decca, recorded live, April 2008


FINALLY, LET'S HEAR GERALD MOORE AT WORK ON MORE
TYPICAL WORKING DAYS THAN THE ONE ATOP THIS POST

Longtime collaborators Gerald Moore and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

As it happens, we can hear both of our songs, recorded with baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at about the same time (1966-67) as part of massive projects for different record labels: all the songs DFD deemed suitable for male performance by Schubert (DG, eventually rereleased as a 21-CD set) and by Richard Strauss (EMI, a mere six discs when this made it to CD).

SCHUBERT: "An die Musik," D. 547


Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. DG, recorded 1966-67

R. STRAUSS: "Zueignung," Op. 10, No. 1

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. EMI, recorded Sept. 4-7, 1967

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. EMI, recorded in recital at the Salzburg Festival, July 1962

This was a period in Fischer-Dieskau's career when much of the voice was reliably there but the upper range seems to have been less reliably available and often more gingerly handled, and in these massive record-'em-all projects I think even the singer would have acknowledged that not every song was prepared with all the consideration he might ideally have accorded it. However, "An die Musik" and "Zueignung" must always have been part of his active repertory, and the latter gets an especially interesting performance (how often do we hear perfomances that crack the two-minute barrier?), with a good deal of the filling-out sculpted by the pianist.

UPDATE: In the course of reshelving the CDs I used for this post, I realized I'd ignored and EMI set of Fischer-Dieskau recitals at the Salzburg from 1962, 1963, and 1964. (They're all with Gerald Moore, in case you were wondering, as are the five recitals once issued on LP by Orfeo, each -- like 1963's Schubert and 1964's Brahms -- devoted to a single composer: 1957, Schubert; 1958, Brahms; 1959, Schumann; 1961, Wolf; and 1965, Beethoven.) Sure enough the 1962 recital included "Zueignung," and I thought it would be interesting to have the two performances here side-by-side. Note that the 1962 "Zueignung" not only broke the two-minute barrier but left it far behind. The voice seems clearly under better control -- though not the upward reach for "heilig, heilig" -- and there's a lot I like in the performance (there's some really beautiful singing here), but there's also a fair measure of the cheesy vocal effects Fischer-Dieskau could be prone to. At the same time, at this still more gradual pace, the piano-playing seems to me especially remarkable -- how many accompanists could have held the song together and kept it moving while also basking in its constant beauties?

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