RELIEVED MONDAY 12:50pm UPDATE: I think we're OK! In the meantime, I've fixed yet another incorrect clip. Sigh! -- Ed.
The world's first superstar flutist, Jean-Pierre Rampal, with his frequent collaborator -- on both harpsichord and piano -- Robert Veyron-Lacroix
I THINK SOMETHING OF A MIRACLE HAPPENS AT
THE VERY START OF THIS ROUSING MUSICAL BIT
For now let's call it "Flute & Piano Bit A," and note that it consists of a mere eight bars of music, repeated. Note too how differently our two elite performing teams imagine it. (If you need a hint, start by noting the timings.)
Emmanuel Pahud, flute; Eric Le Sage, piano. Valois, recorded in the Salle de Châtonneyre (Switzerland), February 1994
BUT TO APPRECIATE WHAT HAPPENS AT THE START OF 'BIT A,'
WE NEED TO HEAR SOMETHING REALLY QUITE DIFFERENT
We can call it "Flute & Piano Bit B" -- and note again how differently our performers hear this music. (A word of caution: Be careful not to crank your volume up. Note that this bit begins pp [very soft] for the piano and p [soft] for the flute, and while it does heat up, it quickly cools back down.)
Emmanuel Pahud, flute; Eric Le Sage, piano
by Ken
Before we go on, there are a few more things you should perhaps know about "Flute & Piano Bit A."
(1) My proffer of "something of a miracle" may be misleading, given that we usually think of "miracles" as happy-making events. I think the composer was well aware of this, and really meant for what's happening here to sound happy-ish, but I don't want you to blame me if the "miracle" turns out to seem fairly catastrophic.
(2) If "Bit A" rings a bell but you can't quite place it, maybe it will help to hear it in its original form. The first performance we're going to hear is the one that, some time back, set me to thinking about this song this first time. (Yes, there's been a second time, which is what prompted me to try to look at the song with you.) I've added the second performance so we can hear "Bit A" in, more or less, both imaginative sets: the Rampal–Veyron-Lacroix (Raskin-Schick) and the Pahud-Le Sage (Bostridge-Johnson).
"Und wenn sie wandelt am Hügel vorbei"
("And when she wanders past that mound")
Ian Bostridge, tenor; Graham Johnson, piano. Hyperion, recorded Oct. 26-28, 1995
[UPDATE: Oops, I had the Raskin-Schick clip in twice, then "fixed" it by un-fixing a different clip, then mis-fixed it again! I think it's all right now. Sorry!]
OH WAIT, THERE'S ONE MORE THING I SHOULD MENTION
(3) Long-time readers may not be entirely surprised to learn that I've scrambled our two "bits." They are, in fact, continuous -- except in the reverse order. If we flip them, so that "B" is followed by "A," they sound like this:
Jean-Pierre Rampal, flute; Robert Veyron-Lacroix, piano
Emmanuel Pahud, flute; Eric Le Sage, piano
Now that the bits have been put together properly, I think we can hear both our teams staking out coherent interpetive paths. I really like both performances. For our purposes, harking back to the song that inspired its composer to the flutification, I would pay particular attention to the path staked out by Emmanuel Pahud (only 24 at the time of this recording but, amazingly, already rounding out his second year as principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic) and Eric Le Sage. Eventually we'll come back to the flute version.
NOW YOU PROBABLY WANT TO HEAR THE WHOLE SONG.
OK, SOON! FIRST, WE SHOULD HEAR A DIFFERENT SONG --
This must surely be the happiest song Schubert wrote.
SCHUBERT: Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Milleress), D. 795: No. 11, "Mein!" ("Mine!")
Little brook, let your gushing be!
Millwheels, cease your pounding!
All you merry woodbirds,
large and small,
end your twittering!
In and out
of the grove
let one song alone echo today!
The beloved milleress is mine!
Mine!
Spring, are those all the flowers you have?
Sun, have you no brighter beams?
Alas, then I must be all alone
with this blessed word of mine,
uncomprehended in the whole wide Creation!
[The whole first part -- through "Mine!" -- is repeated.]-- text by Wilhelm Müller, translation (mostly) by William Mann
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. EMI, recorded in the Gemeindehaus, Berlin-Zehlendorf, Dec. 4, 1961
Ernst Häfliger, tenor; Jacqueline Bonneau, piano. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, August 1959
Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Gielen, piano. DG, recorded in the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich, July 1966
Ian Bostridge, tenor; Graham Johnson, piano. Hyperion, from Vol. 25 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition, recorded Oct. 26-28, 1995
Ah, life is good! I don't think this song requires much explanation: Here in No. 11 of the 20-song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, this is our budding young miller at the high point of the tale he sings, in the first of Schubert's two glorious narrative song cycles, creative milestones I'm not aware of anyone else having come close to approaching. Our boy has a good job, working for a benevolent miller whose training holds out for him the promise of an honest career, and most important, he's madly infatuated with the boss's beautiful daughter (the Müllerin of the title), and wonder of wonders, she is now, you know, his!
(Soon enough we'll have cause to wonder whether the young lady had any idea that she was "his." But for now let's let our boy enjoy the moment.)
I've put the Fischer-Dieskau and Häfliger performances at the top of our list if only for the celebratory ruckus their respective accompanists, Gerald Moore and Jacqueline Bonneau, kick up from the keyboard, but in both cases the singing is mighty spiffy too -- don't you love that breathlessly excited hush with which Ernst H. launches the song?
Then, I doubt that the song can be sung more beautifully -- even thrillingly -- than Wunderlich does, and I'm kind of pleased for him that he doesn't go overboard with the obvious celebration -- he gives us a young man who, as of now, sees a good life opening out ahead of him. (Of course he's got the ever-reliable Hubert G. supporting him on the piano.) And don't Ian Bostridge and Graham Johnson provide our young miller with an oh-so-sweet moment?
NOW, FINALLY, I THINK WE'RE READY TO HEAR "OUR" SONG
Okay, not quite. Before we hear the whole song, since it happens that I've made audio clips (in addition to the Raskin-Schick and Bostridge-Johnson ones we heard) of the original song version of "Flute & Piano Bit A," why don't we hear them? You'll notice that with the notable exception of Fritz Wunderlich's performance they all incline to the more reflectively gradual pace we heard in the Pahud-Le Sage flute version.
Again, pay attention to the very first bar, although my "something of a miracle" may not be conspicuous until we hear it in place, following the portion of the song that precedes it. Now also pay attention to the end of the song, namely the last four bars of the piano postlude.
Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Gielen, piano. DG, recorded in the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich, July 1966
Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; Aribert Reimann, piano. DG, recorded in Studio Lankwitz, Konzertsaal, Berlin, October 1993
Ian Bostridge, tenor; Graham Johnson, piano. Hyperion, from Vol. 25 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition, recorded Oct. 26-28, 1995
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. DG, recorded in UFA-Ton-Studio, Berlin, December 1971
Finally, let's hear the whole song. Right after I take a moment to welcome Brigitte Fassbaender, a singer who gave me lots of pleasure, to our little party. Schöne Müllerin seems to me even less obvious territory than Winterreise for a female protagonist, but it can be done, and she's in great voice here, bringing an aptly dark presence to the proceedings.
So, now on to the complete song, giving us a chance to see how our performers manage the transition from "Bit B" to "Bit A" -- and also to hear the subtle major-back-to-minor shift at the end of the piano postlude. We already heard it at the end of the clips we heard of the end of the vocal version of "Bit A"; now we can properly hear how, in its quiet way, it brings us, if not our young miller, back from heartbreakingly crackpot fantasy to stark, unsentimental reality.
SCHUBERT: Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795:
No. 18, "Trockne Blumen" ("Withered Flowers")
Judith Raskin, soprano; George Schick, piano. Epic, recorded in Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City, Mar. 18, 1966
Brigitte Fassbaender, mezzo-soprano; Aribert Reimann, piano. DG, recorded in Studio Lankwitz, Konzertsaal, Berlin, October 1993
Fritz Wunderlich, tenor; Hubert Gielen, piano. DG, recorded in the Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich, July 1966
Ian Bostridge, tenor; Graham Johnson, piano. Hyperion, from Vol. 25 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition, recorded Oct. 26-28, 1995
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Gerald Moore, piano. DG, recorded in UFA-Ton-Studio, Berlin, December 1971
By this point in his journey -- No. 18 of the 20 songs of Schöne Müllerin -- our young miller-in-training has been dumped by his beloved milleress, if indeed there was any dumping to do. If we've followed his whole journey, it does seem possible, even likely, that the idea of a great romance was mostly if not entirely in his head. And our boy is losing it. For starters, he's singing a song to a bunch of goddamned withered flowers, or rather goddamned bunches -- he saved all the damn flowers his beloved gave him. Worse still, he's imagining himself dead and buried, and the world doing just fine without him. Winter is gone, May has come! Happy days! (That is, for people who aren't dead.)
His one hope is that his gal will at some point wander past the mound where he's buried (another of his delusions? he's not going to be buried in any mound, and the poor girl isn't even going to know that he's died, let alone where he's buried), look up, and think, You know, that fellow was true!
"But," you may object, "it's so beautiful!" And of course it is! This is Schubert, after all, and it's hard to imagine anybody who could have imagined this final section of the song -- so startlingly beautiful even as it's so starkly delusional.
My goodness, there's so much that could be said about Schubert's setting of "Trockne Blumen"! Let me just suggest looking at the song's proportions. Remember when we were listening to the flute-and-piano "bits"? And the first part seemed significantly longer than the second, even though the flute version allows for only one stanza in the first part, rather than the song's two stanzas. Now, listening to the whole song, we can hear that the two parts are almost equal in length, even though the first section sets three-fourths of the text.
Schubert clearly heard that at "Und wenn sie wandelt" something happens, something new and important -- and almost unimaginably terrible. And in launching our "Bit A," he did two things. The obvious one is that for the young miller's gravesite fantasy he switched the key from E minor to E major. The other thing is that he introduced, in the pianist's left hand, that dotted-rhythm, downward-moving melody. The dotted rhythm had already been heard, in less pointed form, in the later stage of the first section of the song, but now -- in the piano's single bar of intro, the point in our "Bit A" where I diagnosed "something of a miracle" -- the dotted rhythm develops a rhythmic and harmonic drive that sets up some of the most beautiful music I know.
What wonderful music it is, to "celebrate" . . . the waste of a life.
I MENTIONED THAT IT WAS JUDITH RASKIN'S RECORDING
OF "TROCKNE BLUMEN" THAT SET ME THINKING ABOUT IT
That was way back when I was preparing a promised but never-published follow-up to the post of Dec. 24, 2024 titled "The start of an all-too-quick remembrance of a special singer we'll be hearing from (too briefly) in an upcoming Mahler 3 post," a remembrance of Judy R. prompted by no particular occasion, just rehearing a recording that made me think (fondly, of course) about a special singer I worried has been forgotten. As best I recall, that Mahler 3 post still hasn't upcome -- we're still one if not two posts short of finishing up with Mahler 3.
When I went looking for the J.R. "Trockne Blumen," I was startled to realize it was ensconced in the J.R. follow-up post, which had never been brought to publication, despite all the work I'd done on it. I even had most if not all of the vocal texts in place, a labor I usually get to just prior to posting. Hey, I clear forgot I'd already made a number of the "Trockne Blumen" partial audio clips we wound up hearing in this post! I kind of think what happened is that the follow-up post just grew too unwieldy, giving attention to J.R.'s work in opera, concert, and recital. It was while working in the "recital" category that I stumbled across "Trockne Blumen," having naturally gone back to the lovely all-Schubert and hybrid Mendelssohn-Mahler LPs she recorded for Epic, both with able, alert piano-playing by George Schick.
In the still-unpublished draft version of that follow-up post, I'd pretty well decided to include "Trockne Blumen," even though the song itself is fairly puzzling out of the context of the Schöne Müllerin cycle (hmm, I don't think I mentioned that all the "Trockne Blumen" performances we heard except J.R.'s are from complete Schöne Müllerin recordings), and it isn't a song ideally suited to her vocal resources. It isn't necessarily even one of her best performances on the Schubert LP. However, she "made" the song's great climax, and if you have the vocal wherewithal to do that, this is a song you want in your recital repertory -- talk about an audience-grabber!
"TROCKNE BLUMEN" BONUS: A REAL HEARTBREAKER
I should stress that a "happy" performance of "Trockne Blumen" is by no means an illegitimate choice. After all, the Schöne Müllerin cycle is basically a direct report of these events by the protagonist, and there can't be any doubt that he's genuinely excited about the idea of May coming and winter being gone. Never mind that his plan is to be dead and buried by then.
Of course, Schubert in his musical setting has given us a great deal more than just the young-miller's-eye view of the story. His setting is filled with all sorts of musicalizations (in the piano part, for example), shadings, and cues that enable us to see and factor in things that the active participant doesn't. Which leads me to a performance I want you to hear. It's from a Schöne Müllerin we've dipped into earlier, Ernst Häfliger's 1959 DG recording with Jacqueine Bonneau, from which we heard that splendid "Mein!"
After relistening to the "Trockne Blumen" we're about to hear, I had the idea of bracketing these two performances, and part of me is sorry I didn't. So feel free to go back and rehear the "Mein!" either before or after the "Trockne Blumen," which on this hearing, my first in a long while, I found really devastating. Strangely, where Häfliger seemed in "Mein!" in such bountiful voice, under impeccable control, here the voice sounds thinner and less flexible. (That couldn't be deliberate, could it?) It's a shame this Schöne Müllerin" is so hard to come by. I find myself looking longingly at DG's 2019 12-CD Ernst Haefliger Edition.
Ernst Häfliger, tenor; Jacqueline Bonneau, piano. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, August 1959
OUR YOUNG MILLER IS TRULY NEAR THE END OF HIS ROAD
In fact, after "Trockne Blumen" he will sing only one more song, or maybe just half a song: No. 19, "Der Müller und der Bach" ("The Miller and the Brook"), is a dialogue between the two. No. 20 is a lullaby sung by the brook, where we learn that our boy is no more, having taken up permanent residence in its waters. "The Brook's Lullaby" is, if you'll pardon the choice of words, a killer of a song. Graham Johnson, in the indispensable study of Schubert's songs he wrote to accompany the complete recording of the songs he made for Hyperion as both artistic director and pianist, calls it "one of Schubert's most telling and mesmeric utterances." Yup!
Since I knew we have a performance of "Des Baches Wiegenlied" in the SC Archive which we've heard more than once (I already dragged it out once, in November 2022, for a post devoted to that lovely pianist Imogen Cooper, using it to document her extensive recorded collaboration with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair), I thought we might hear that. And I was curious myself to rehear the performance from the 1959 Häfliger-Bonneau Schöne Müllerin, so I've made a clip of that to tack on.
"The Brook's Lullaby" is by far the longest song in the cycle, and it's in, of all things, straight strophic form: five stanzas that are musically identical (allowing for minor differences in the scansion of the five texts), marked simply with repeats.
SCHUBERT: Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795:
No. 20, "Des Baches Wiegenlied" ("The Brook's Lullaby")
Rest you well, rest you well, close your eyes!
Wanderer, you tired one, you are home.
Faithfulness is here, you shall lie with me,
till the sea drinks the little streams dry.
I'll give you a cool bed on soft mud
in the blue crystalline bedroom.
Come to me, come to me, whatever can lull,
lap and lull my boy to sleep!
When a hunting horn sounds, from the green wood,
I will gush and rush all around you.
Do not look within, blue flowers!
You will make my sleeper's dreams so troubled.
Away, away from the millpath,
bad girl, lest your shadow wake him!
Throw me here your fine kerchief,
that I may keep his eyes covered over.
Good night! Good night! Till everything awakes,
sleep away your joy, sleep away your sorrow.
The full moon is rising, the mist gives way,
and the sky above, how broad it is!
-- text by Wilhelm Müller, translation by William Mann
Wolfgang Holzmair, baritone; Imogen Cooper, piano. Philips, recorded in the Mozarteum, Salzburg, November 1997
Ernst Häfliger, tenor; Jacqueline Bonneau, piano. DG, recorded in the Herkulessaal of the Residenz, Munich, August 1959
Might I just add -- admittedly as a confirmed admirer of Dame Imogen -- that at Wolfgang H.'s and her near-eight-minute pacing she seems to me to play the heck out of "one of Schubert's most telling and mesmeric utterances" (as Graham J. puts it so aptly)? So beautiful! Almost beyond-imagining horrible, and yet so beautiful. And I should say, same thing with Ernst H. and Jacqueline B., in their inspiringly very different way.
OH YES, FROM THE LOOSE ENDS DEPT.: WHAT'S THE DEAL
WITH THAT FLUTE RENDERING OF "TROCKNE BLUMEN"?
I expected we'd be taking care of this loose end in this very post. But as you've no doubt noticed, the post has already expanded, possibly past any possible point of endurance. So let me just explain that, whatever it was that prompted that second pull of "Trockne Blumen" on me to which I alluded earlier, it included pursuing the song into this curious appendage.
The flute-and-piano performances we heard are the "Theme" portion of an "Introduction, Theme and Variations" (in, roughly, the 17-20-minute range) which Schubert concocted out of "Trockne Blumen," catalogued by Deutsch as D. 802, and a gift for all time to flutists, who don't have that much solo repertory of this quality. If you look on YouTube, it seems like every flutist in creation takes a shot at the "Trockne Blumen" Introduction, Theme and Variations -- and you can hardly blame them! Of course, not every flutist is Jean-Pierre Rampal or Emmanuel Pahud.
As far as I know, no back story to D. 802's composition has ever been discerned. It doesn't seem to have been written for anyone or for any purpose except the composer's own edification, and I don't think there's evidence that it was performed in the composer's lifetime. It was found among the mess of papers left behind at his intolerably young death, in 1832, age 31, and wasn't published till 1850. (This source even questions whether the theme was in fact borrowed from the song!) We can take this up in a short separate post.
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