TODAY WE HAVE MUSIC!!! (It's just not in our usual form)
Internet Archive, where SC's music is lodged, has been dealing with major cyber-attacks (see below). While it's back online (hooray!), it's still in "read-only" form, so I still had to find another way to "re-musicalize" an SC post.
zart adj sensitive, delicate, tender
[from Mahler's directive to the singer of "Urlicht":
"durchaus zart" -- "throughout zart"]
MAHLER: Symphony No. 2 in C-sharp minor (Resurrection):
iv. "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"): Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht (Choralmässig) (Very solemn, but simple/plain/truthful) (Chorale-like)
Then at bar 3: "Nicht schleppen" ("Don't drag")
Per the 2015 YT posting: "the first known footage of Glenn Gould conducting"
O little red rose,Maureen Forrester, contralto; orchestra, Glenn Gould, cond. Live performance filmed in Loew's Uptown Theatre, Toronto, for the CBC's 1956-57 Chrysler Festival series, aired Feb. 20, 1957
Man lies in greatest need,
Man lies in greatest pain,
I would rather be in heaven.
Then I came upon a broad path,
then came a little angel and wanted to turn me away.
Ah no, I didn't let myself be turned away:
I am from God and want to return to God,
the dear God will give me a little light,
will light the way for me to eternal blissful life.
-- original German text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn
by Ken
To quote myself from the Oct. 2 Sunday Classics post:
Mahler had access to sheer beauty in a way that only Schubert could rival (think of "Urlicht," the radiant alto setting drawn from Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's three-volume German folk-poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which sets the stage for the monumental finale of the Resurrection Symphony). In addition, for all Mahler's command of musical tragedy, he was the genuinely wittiest composer the classical world has produced (think of "Father Anthony's Fish Sermon," a very different Wunderhorn settting).Now, the above text chunk contains a basic breach of Sunday Classics protocol -- did you spot it? It's the, er, inspiration for the form this blogpost has finally taken: to rectify that error, which we'll talk about -- after:
(1) We deal with the Internet Archive disaster;
and (2) we hear more Mahler songs based on Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
(1) NOW, ABOUT INTERNET ARCHIVE: FINGERS CROSSED
FOR A RETURN TO NORMAL (BUT MORE SECURE) SERVICE
[Feel free to skip this section -- I really had to include it, though. -- Ed.]
Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-21Forbes's Lars Daniel reported on Oct. 22 on a third in a series of I.A. cyber-attacks this month, on Oct. 20. There's also an interesting Reddit thread headed "Internet Archives Thoughts 2024-10-25" by Internet Archive insider Jason Scott, who makes clear that he's not speaking in an official capacity but is "chatting" based on his knowledge of the attacks and the org's response and recovery.
Posted on October 21, 2024 by Chris Freeland
In recovering from recent cyberattacks on October 8, the Internet Archive has resumed the Wayback Machine (starting October 13) and Archive-It (October 17), and as of today (October 21), has begun offering provisional availability of archive.org in a read-only manner. Features like uploading, borrowing, reviewing items, interlibrary loan, and other services are not yet available.
Please note that these services will have limited availability as we continue maintenance.
Hackers disclosed archive.org email and encrypted passwords to a transparency website, and also sent emails to patrons by exploiting a 3rd party helpdesk system.
The safety and integrity of the Internet Archive’s data and patrons remain our top priorities. As the security incident is analyzed and contained by our team, we are relaunching services as defenses are strengthened. These efforts are focused on reinforcing firewall systems and further protecting the data stores.
We appreciate your patience and support as we work through these challenges. For ongoing updates, please follow our blog and official social media channels on X/Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon.
We stand with all libraries that have faced similar attacks—British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and Calgary Public Library—and with the communities we serve. Thank you for standing with the Internet Archive as we continue to fight back on behalf of all affected readers.
IN THE LONG TERM, I MAY HAVE TO FIGURE OUT A
DIFFERENT WAY OF BRINGING MUSIC INTO THE BLOG
The music is, after all, the one justification I can cling to for these posts. Even when I'm at my most dubious about their value, I can often derive consolation from the music, which I try to prepare with care. So these last several weeks, even as I've been trying to deal with content -- i.e., with a whole range of issues that arise as we continue our slow march through the Mahler Third Symphony -- I've been experimenting with constructing a pair of posts (this one and one more) built around YouTube clips.
I should add that, lacking as we do now ready access to the Internet Archive music holdings, obviously we don't have access to any of the SC Archive.
It's frustrating too that even though we'll be depending on a video format, we're not going to snag that much usable video, and/or the video may not be of exactly prime quality. Plus, even when there's video worth seeing as well as hearing, it may require a link to YouTube rather than embedding of the clip, since YT posters can always decline to allow postings to be viewed via embed. This can be really frustrating since I may not know until a post is posted with embeds, which seem to be perfectly fine in blog "preview" mode, that they nevertheless can't be viewed by embed but can only be viewed on YT. Often I haven't found this out until a post was posted and I tried to view the embed. In fact, as we'll see, this may also be the case with audio-only clips. I'll do my best to make sure that both embeds and YouTube links (we've got one of those in this post) do what they're supposed to.
(2) SO LET'S SEE & HEAR MORE MAHLER WUNDERHORN SONGS
To return to the point I made about my reference, in the text chunk that I quoted from the last post, to two Mahler songs, which I described as "a basic breach of Sunday Classics protocol," the breach was that they were just references -- we didn't hear the songs. I like to think that we don't do that here! I guess I was worrying about a post that was already ballooning dangerously, plus I would have had to either locate (for copying) or re-create the text translations. In all likelihood I was leaning on the fact that we've heard both "Urlicht" and "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt" on a number of occasions, as is reflected in their abundance in the SC Archive. However, I try not to assume that anyone who finds their way here has ever been here before. At the very least I could have provided links to appropriate posts -- but since I don't have any kind of usable index, that can be a real job (sigh!).
It probably won't come as any great surprise now that next on our seeing-and-hearing agenda is one of the Mahler songs most beloved of performers and audiences, "Antonius von Padua." I might note that for the songs we're going to visit in this post I managed to find video clips that not only fit our immediate needs but are, as far as I'm able to determine, embeddable. You should be able to view them by clicking on them.
And in the case of our first two songs, I think they're definitely worth seeing as well as hearing. The "Urlicht" we just saw and heard may not be a visual extravaganza, but we're witnessing in Maureen Forrester one of the great singers of the second half of the 20th century (and one of the most special, given that contraltos of this quality are rare in any era) in music to which her voice is so precisely suited, in collaboration with one of the most distinctive musicians of that time -- and as noted, it's a possibly singular opportunity to see Glenn Gould, one of the most distinctive pianists of his (or any other) time, conducting.
The video we're about to watch of "Antonius von Padua" is distinctly on the crappy side, and the audio isn't much better, which rankles me, because I know this performance exists in excellent broadcast stereo -- not just of this song, but of the fine performance from that day in April 1979 of the canonical 11 Mahler orchestral Songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn", with a formidable mezzo soloist in Brigitte Fassbaender. Nevertheless, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's "Antonius von Padua" is worth seeing because his stage presence emphatically makes a very different experience of his vocal performance.
MAHLER: Songs from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn":
"Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt"
("Anthony of Padua's Fish Sermon")
Not to worry, this clip loads slowly! But hey, it's got subtitles!
My first thought would have been to append an audio clip of Fischer-Dieskau and Hans Zender performing this song. As a matter of fact, we've heard vocally better Fischer-Dieskau performances of "Antonius von Padua," not to mention piano- as well as orchestra-accomopanied performances, and again my first thought would have been to drop those audio clips in as well. And maybe I should anyway, on the theory that one of these weeks the archival clips we hope the archival clips will be playable again. (For the record, we've also heard Maureen Forrester sing "Urlicht" with Bruno Walter, Gilbert Kaplan, and Leonard Slatkin, and in normal times I would have thought about dropping those clips in as well.
NOW WE HAVE A TINY SONG THAT HARDLY SEEMS TO
BELONG IN THE COMPANY OF OUR TWO BLOCKBUSTERS
Make no mistake, this song is a small gem, but it's hardly one you might think of to round out a threesome with "Urlicht" and "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt." Mahler himself didn't go to the trouble of orchestrating "Ablösung im Sommer" ("Summer Replacement" -- in this case a forest nightingale whose vocal prowess is required to provide song for a forest song deprived of its reigning soloist, a suddenly defunct cuckoo.
MAHLER: Lieder aus der Jugendzeit (Songs from Youth):
"Ablösung im Sommer" ("Summer Replacement")
Although the text is from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Mahler extended its eight lines to twenty and changed three words. It is a nature-poem, relief from the summer heat coming at night when "Frau Nachtigall" ("Mrs Nightingale") begins her song after the unmelodious cuckoo has finished his. The song is in four short stanzas, with imitation birdcalls in the accompaniment, and an archaic-sounding sequence of descending perfect chords at the words "soll uns denn den sommerlang."
-- Michael Kennedy, in a note for EMI's 1997 recording by Simon Keenlyside, Simon Rattle & the City of Birmingham Symphony
Cuckoo has fallen to his death[orch. Detlev Glanert (not Mahler!)] Christina Landshamer, soprano (not pictured at the top of the clip -- that's contralto Wiebke Lehmkuhl, who sings the last three of the six songs in the full YT clip); WDR (West German Radio) Symphony Orchestra, Cristian Măcelaru, cond. Live performance (without audience) from the Philharmonie, Cologne, Feb. 6, 2021
on a green willow tree.
Cuckoo is dead!
Fallen to his death.
Who then for us this whole summer
will while away the time?
Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
Hey! Lady Nightingale must do so!
She sits on a green branch:
the small, delicate Nightingale,
the dear, sweet Nightingale!
She sings and hops, is ever happy,
even when other birds are silent.
We'll wait for Lady Nightingale,
who lives in green hedgerows.
And if the cuckoo is at an end,
then she will start to warble.
-- original text "based on" Des Knaben Wunderhorn
but mostly by Mahler, translation (mostly) by William Mann
WE'RE GOING TO HEAR MORE OF "ABLÖSUNG IM SOMMER,"
BUT IF YOU WONDER WHY WE'RE MAKING A FUSS OF IT . . .
Unfortunately, in this case I wasn't able to find an embeddable YouTube performance, so this time you're going to have to click through to see and hear this ravishing, ethereally delicious movement, which should sound familiar. (I'd never heard this performance, by the way, but I love it!)
Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast.
(Comfortable. Scherzando. Without hurry.)
[photo from the Benjamin Zander Center website]
Click here to watch on YouTubePhilharmonia Orchestra, Benjamin Zander, cond. Telarc, recorded in Walthamstow Assembly Hall, London, Feb. 28 & Mar. 2, 2003
NEXT TIME: More of "Ablösung im Sommer," plus why we're focused on this oddball threesome of songs
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