We have more "An die Musik," "Zueignung," and "Musik ist eine heilige Kunst" -- but remember, this only SOUNDS like a "good news" post

We have our missing recording of "An die Musik"!
So let's hear it along with its intended companion --




Pavel Lisitsian, baritone; Naum Valter, piano. Melodiya, recorded 1961

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

by Ken

Last week, for possibly predictably perverse purposes of your proprietor, we focused on three bits of music that almost inevitably suggest some connection to the proposition that life is good, life is worth living ("Today's sacred word is 'heilig' ('holy' or 'sacred'), chez Schubert and R. Strauss -- make of it what you will"). Our cases in point were the Schubert song "An die Musik," Richard Strauss's song "Zueignung," and the moment in the final minutes of the Prologue to Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos when the super-serious Composer of the super-serious opera seria Ariadne auf Naxos, in the countdown to its first performance (under troubled circumstances, to put it mildly, in the home of "the richest man in Vienna"), declares, "Music is a sacred art."

However, we only heard two of the three song performances we should have, performances I've lived with so long and so closely that they're inextricably woven into my consciousness. The problem was that one of the two intended "An die Musik"s I had only on an old MK LP I've cherished for more than 40 years (since I plucked it out of a 99-cent bin in the old Sam Goody bargain store across 49th Street from the old West Side store), and at the moment I'm unable to make audio files from LP. Anyway, as I hope you've heard above, the Armenian-born Soviet baritone Pavel Lisitsian's "An die Musik" is now united, as intended, with the much-lamented tenor Fritz Wunderlich's, originally recorded as part of a glorious group of Schubert songs to fill Side 4 of his wonderful 1965 DG Schöne Müllerin (the way the Schubert song cycle, which now fits comfortably on a single CD, usually came to us in those days, on three LP sides).

Over this past week I've scouted for a companion to Jussi Bjoerling's March 1958 Carnegie Hall encore performance of "Zueignung," again with the limitation that it would have to come from my CD holdings, or possibly via digital download. We heard some pretty good ones last week, and I heard lots more this week, but just now we're not looking for pretty good, we're looking for magic. As often happens, though, the joke was on me. I found magic, but not with "Zueignung." Oh, I'd just heard a very very good one, but again, we're not looking for very very good. I couldn't be bothered to stop the disc after the very very good "Zueignung," and wound up hearing something like this:

R. STRAUSS: "Zueignung," Op. 10, No. 1,
plus a special bonus performance (at 2:09)

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. BBC Legends, recorded live at Summer Festival, Wigmore Hall, July 15, 1978


OHMYGOODNESS! ARE THERE ANY WORDS? WELL,
FIRST OFF, I HAVE TO EAT SOME UNKIND ONES

Another joke on me. No sooner do I voice my nonfandom of the celebrated, possibly legendary accompanist Geoffrey Parsons, calling him "a competent enough pianist" but "a ferociously limited musician," than I find myself presenting him in performances of two wildly different songs where his playing is in or near the blow-me-away zone.

The least we can do is untwin those Christa L. perfomances to hear Brahms's thrice-familiar "Lullaby" in its own right.

BRAHMS: "Wiegenlied" ("Lullaby"), Op. 49, No. 4

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. BBC Legends, recorded live at Summer Festival, Wigmore Hall, July 15, 1978

Maureen Forrester, contralto; Thomas Muraco, piano. CBC Records, recorded January 1981

NEW TO THESE PARTS? YOU MAY NOT KNOW --

that this isn't the place to come to hear just one performance of most anything. I guess it's just not the way I think about music. For Brahms's "Lullaby," I realized, I think automatically of Erna Berger, but I must have her performance, alas, on LP only -- and I don't wanna think about that anymore right now. Then my brain started whispering "Maureen Forrester," and sure enough I found her "Wiegenlied" nestled at the end of a CBC Records compilation (one CD all Handel arias, with four different conductors; the other CD all songs -- Brahms's Four Serious Songs and Wagner's Wesendonk-Lieder with John Newmark, plus nine other Brahms songs, including the two Op. 91 songs with viola and all of the Op. 103 Zigeunerlieder with Thomas Muraco).

Thank you so much, Maureen! For everything, I mean.

To get back to Geoffrey Parsons, in fairness -- fairness to me, of course (don't you find that in general when people talk about "fairness" what they have in mind is really "fairness to me"?) -- I did note last week, in connection with "An die Musik," that where Geoffrey P. provided no audible help to Olaf Bär in their 1991-ish recording, Christa Ludwig in her 1961 EMI studio was "a canny enough performer that she gets all she needs from him." I still think the principal generator of the magic that happens here in "Zueignung" and even more in the Brahms "Lullaby" is the singer, but there's no getting around the quality of the piano-playing, rich and varied in dynamics, tone, and shading, moving purposely and seemingly effortlessly.

Nevertheless --


GEOFFREY P. MEETS JON V.,
AND THE RESULT ISN'T PRETTY

In my seemingly unending experience of Geoffrey P., he could give perfectly presentable performances that fell within the safe parameters of performing orthodoxy. But step out of safe orthodoxy, which he rarely did, and watch out! The worst case is the Schubert Winterreise he recorded with Jon Vickers for EMI, at the time in Vickers's life when he was thinking about, and performing, Winterreise a lot, bringing to it not just a voice unlike any other that any of us are likely to have heard in this music, but a sensibility I've never encountered otherwise, which took generous advantage of that voice in both its scaled-down and full-out forms. Often this meant really slow tempos, and in the EMI recording you can hear, or at least I can hear, a man hacking at the keyboard with his hands while mentally wringing his hands in contempt and disgust at the uncouthness of this Canadian hick. I have no evidence for this, mind you, save for the ghastly musical, or rather unmusical, result.

In the case of Vickers's Winterreise, it wasn't until VAI released, very eagerly on the singer's part, a live performance with the pianist Peter Schaaf giving him simply magnificent support that I for one got what the guy was up to. Eventually, after writing about that performance, I met the pianist unexpectedly, when I ran into him and my friend the late Harris Goldsmith, who introduced us. At first I didn't realize who he was. Harris had to tell me that I'd written about the fellow, in glowing terms, and tell me what-and-when. Ah, so that's who it was!

The first thing I learned was that Peter hadn't been contacted Peter about release of that performance, but he was happy enough to see it out. Then he filled in some background. Vickers, in anticipation of touring Winterreise all over Canada, had auditioned a bunch of pianists, and it just happened that at that very time Peter had been immersed in that very music, reveling in the richness and imaginative depth of the piano part -- all of which served him very well indeed when he was engaged for the job.

Of course it also served his new partner incredibly well. But don't take my word. Listen to what is still surely the best-known song from the cycle, as our story-teller, still early in his winter journey that followed his being dumped by his dearly beloved, recalls contemplating suicide, for no clearly established reason, except perhaps that he just wasn't up to that either.

SCHUBERT: Winterreise (Winter Journey), D. 911: No. 5, "Der Lindenbaum" ("The Linden Tree")

-- translation by Arthur Rishi

Jon Vickers, tenor; Peter Schaaf, piano. VAI Records, recorded live Oct. 2, 1983

This is by a good margin the longest performance of "Der Lindenbaum" I've ever heard, with the exception of the above-mentioned EMI recording, where our Geoffrey P. seems not only not to have the slightest clue what the singer is up to but seems not to give the slightest damn. By rights I should inflict that unhappy performance on you, but luckily for us all I have the recording only on LP. So let me just say that: (1) The Vickers-Schaaf Winterreise is for me one of the treasures of our recorded heritage, and (2) I have never since been able to shake the image of Geoffrey P. as a pompous, self-important, musically straitjacketed twit adrip with musical superiority of which I hear scant evidence in the playing.

Still, these performances with Christa L. show what he was capable of doing, and actually sometimes did. That counts.


MOVING ON (OR BACK) TO "ZUEIGNUNG" --
AND WE'VE EVEN GOT FRITZ WUNDERLICH!

At this point I was going to drag you into a whole "Zueignung" project, dumping out a whole bunch of performances (ploddingly gathered and converted to blog-ready audio-file form by your faithful plodder), inviting consideration of how the singers maneuver the fairly simple performance parameters of this exceedingly simple song. But I fear that this week's digressions-to-date have drained everyone's patience to the point where we'll never get where we're supposed to be going today, so let's content ourselves with rehearing two performances we heard last week, the sublime Bjoerling one and Heinrich Schlusnus's, along with the Christa Ludwig one we heard earlier (now separated from its Brahmsian appendage) and maybe one or two "new" ones. Okay, two piano-accompanied ones, and one orchestral one, though not the composer's 1940 orchestration but the conductor Robert Heger's made two years earlie. (One online source credits it as "Orchestrated by Hegel." I like that. This isn't a job you'd entrust to Kant or Schopenhauer; Hegel's the guy.)

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

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. BBC Legends, recorded live at Summer Festival, Wigmore Hall, July 15, 1978

Kiri Te Kanawa, soprano; Georg Solti, piano. Decca, recorded June 12-13, 1990

Anton Dermota, tenor; Hilde Dermota, piano. Decca, recorded September 1950
Orchestral version by Robert Heger

Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Jan Koetsier, cond. Philips, recorded live c1962

For now, one performance takeaway: For that famous third-stanza climax on "heilig, heilig," the song clearly is better-suited to "high" voices (sopranos and tenors) than "low" ones. And I have to say that I admire the heck out of Anton Dermota's recording, and love a lot of what happens in Wunderlich's. Still, does either rise to the level of magic?


REALLY, WE HAVE TO KEEP IT MOVING, SO LET'S
JUST TOUCH BASE QUICKLY WITH ARIADNE

Last week I promised a newly edited version of the chunk of the Ariadne auf Naxos Prologue that would put into fuller context than we've heard before how the idealistic young Composer arrives at the sentiment "Music is a sacred art" -- and where, immediately at least, that sentiment goes. Believe it or not, I've got blog-ready audio clips ready to roll. However, that still leaves a fair amount of work that's going to have to wait for a future time. So let's just listen once more to the crucial moment -- in two performances we've already heard and one we haven't. (The "new" one, I should say, isn't quite what I had hoped it would be, but let's leave that for next time.)

R. STRAUSS: Ariadne auf Naxos, Op. 60: Prologue,
Composer, "Musik ist eine heilige Kunst"

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

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

Christa Ludwig (ms), Composer; Orchestra of the Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Lovro von Matačić, cond. Live performance, October 1964

Just to touch quickly again on what I shorthanded as the "Reverse-Strauss" that's driving this series of posts: What's so wonderful about this excerpt, and indeed the entire comically, over-the-toply-serious character of the Composer, is that our real composer, Richard Strauss, mostly meant all of the things that come out of our over-the-top young Composer's mouth, but he would almost surely never have dared utter them "straight." Instead, as he and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal conceived the character, he can make these things not only resonantly beautiful but borderline hilarious.

I mean only to suggest here: What if it's the exact opposite? What if the sentiments truly are preposterous, and we only kid ourselves that they have some real-world applicability? Wouldn't that be a kick in the head?

#