Before we take our closer look at Gurre-Lieder, I want to think about two performers who make one performance a special case

The ruins of Gurre Castle (as of 2007), in the far northeast of Denmark (on the map Gurre looks like a stone's throw across the water from Sweden) where King Valdemar I is supposed to have tucked away his beautiful, dearly beloved mistress Tove -- until, well, thereupon hangs a tale.

Which we'll get to. Just maybe not right away.

So it begins --


Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded live in the Kongress-Saal of the Deutsches Museum, Munich, March 9-12, 1965

Staatskapelle Dresden, Giuseppe Sinopoli, cond. Teldec, recorded live in the Semper Oper, August 1995

Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton, cond. Live performance from Grieg Hall, in the Bergen International Festival, June 4, 2008

Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, in the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 10, 1969

In time, these Gurre-Lieder, or Songs of Gurre, come to Tove's declaration, "Nun sag' ich dir zum ersten Mal, 'König Volmer, ich liebe dich'" (replaying the performances we've already heard) --

Now I say to you for the first time, "King Volmer, I love you."
Now I kiss you for the first time, and fling my arms around you.
And if you were to say I had earlier said it
and ever given you my kiss,
then I say, "The king is a fool,
who recalls vague rubbish."
And if you say, "Indeed I am such a fool,"
then I'll say, "The king is right."
But if you say, "No, I'm not that,"
Then I'll say, "The king is bad."
For I have kissed all my roses to death,
all the while I was thinking of you.

Gundula Janowitz (s), Tove; Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Live performance from the Vienna Festival, in the Vienna Konzerthaus, June 10, 1969

Jessye Norman (s), Tove; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. Philips, recorded live in Symphony Hall, April 1979

by Ken

Believe it or not, we're making progress, even if it's of a kind of sidewise sort. I remember there was a plan to illustrate the special qualities I hear in the conducting of Josef Krips (1902-1974), which at the time seemed to require nothing more than plucking an abundance of for-instances out of the Sunday Classics Archive. I'm not so good at just-plucking-out, however, and as soon as I started, the project began to grow and shift, especially when I found myself taking a better listen than I have before to a performance I've owned for ages: Krips's 1969 Vienna Festival rendering of Arnold Schoenberg's monumental cantata-oratorio-or-whatever (I'm not aware of a term that begins to cover it), Gurre-Lieder.

At that point it seemed necessary to pause the Krips quick-tour and spend a jot of time with Gurre-Lieder, one of the most arresting and astonishing musical creations I know. No sooner had I set out on that tack (well, maybe many, many hours of toil after I set out on that tack), I realized that before we got to that, it might be useful for me to explain why that particular performance exerted such a fascination for me. Which meant a closer look at conductor Krips and the singer who incarnated King Waldemar's inamorata Tove, which is to say the soprano Gundula Janowitz (born 1937).

Again, I first thought this could be accomplished easily and painlessly by a simple raid of the archives. And probably it could have. But again, my mind doesn't work that way. Soon enough I was back at work crafting whole new sets of audio clips and puzzling out a navigable path through them. And in just a moment we're going to partake of a teasing taste of G.J.


BUT FIRST, BACK TO THE BEGINNING -- OF GURRE-LIEDER

Let's have a first look at a project we're going to be undertaking

THERE'VE BEEN NOTABLE UPDATES (SORTA MARKED) SINCE
FIRST POSTING -- NOT PLANNED, THEY JUST KINDA HAPPENED

We note the obvious trend going from performance A to F, right? (With just an interesting variant in the B-C sequence)

[UPDATE NOTE: If you just want to get your toes wet to start, focus just on the Andante con moto section, which ranges -- rather amazingly! -- from roughly 1:25 to 2:40 in our specimens. (This was my original plan anyway for first presentation of these clips, rather than going to the huge hassle, not to mention blog-loading drain, of adding shorter new clips.) Btw, since that first score page took us so close to the end of the Andante non troppo, I've added another chunk to get us there and into the Allegro non troppo.]

[A]

[Allegro moderato at 1:25] Full symphony orchestra, March 1957
[B]

[Allegro moderato at 1:56] Reduced-size orchestra, December 1986
[C]

[Allegro moderato at 1:53] Chamber orchestra, February 1986
[D]

[Allegro moderato at 2:09] Full symphony orchestra, 1988-89
[E]

[Allegro moderato at 2:26] Reduced-size orchestra, June 1958
[F]

[Allegro moderato at 2:42] Full symphony orchestra, October 1970

by Ken

Okay, so maybe a minor derailment here. I was aiming for a post that would in some way tie up our loose ends and dangling threads regarding musical larks, serenades, and the tragic case of Schubert, and also a separate post (or maybe two) to wrap up our Ives explorations (it's looking likelier that we're going to culminate with Ives's most ambitious creations: the Concord Sonata and the Fourth Symphony, which -- even just whizzing through -- are both sizable work units). And this is still the hope. It's just that each of these topics, which we'd all dearly love to be done with, kept throwing up obstacles that sent me in as much of a sideways as a forward direction.

Meanwhile, I've got a good start on another project, which without any such specific intention will actually continue one of the above-enumerated threads, and while the bulk of that project is still in the drawing-board stage, there's enough ready -- or at least there was enough ready once I added some music -- to allow what might have been a mere teaser to stand pretty well on its own.


YOU LIKELY RECOGNIZED THE MUSIC WE JUST HEARD

Afterpost: Gregg Smith & Co.show us that Ives's "bells-and-whistles" version really adds a dimension to "General William Booth Enters into Heaven"

Choral masterworker Gregg Smith (1931-2016)

Archie Drake, bass; Gregg Smith Singers, Columbia Chamber Orchestra, Gregg Smith, cond. Columbia-CBS, recorded in Legion Hall, Hollywood, May 4, 1966
[NOTE: We're going to hear the performance again, with printed vocal text.]

by Ken

My original plan was just to add what follows as an "afterthought" ("Some Afterthoughts on the Performances") to the post "'Jesus came from the courthouse door': 'General William Booth Enters into Heaven' and other, variously irresistible Ives songs," with a note like this:

I'm sure you're tired of hearing about how I don't have a chance to hear audio clips in their post places until a post is posted, and even then not till I can get past the exhaustion of birthing the post. That said, a couple of thoughts.

So I thought it would be better to spin those performances out into an "afterpost."

Preview: Another set of three exotic Mahler "middle movements"

Gianandrea Noseda conducts the BBC Philharmonic in the Deryck Cooke performing version of the first of the two scherzos of Mahler's uncompleted Tenth Symphony, 2007.

by Ken

We're in the middle of two projects. Last week we continued our Sexual Obsession in Opera series with the initial intersection of the protagonists of Bizet's Carmen, the free-spirited gypsy Carmen and the Basque army sergeant Don José, both displaced to Seville. And two weeks ago we attacked Mahler's uniquely wonderful Seventh Symphony from the middle: listening to the three middle movements -- the two Nachtmusik (Night Music) movements that frame a scherzo. Those two movements are in turn framed by the symphony's "big" movements.

We're going to come back to Carmen, probably next week, to hear Carmen and José through to their climactic confrontation. Meanwhile this week we return to the Mahler Seventh, to hear those grand outer movements, which we'll do on Sunday. For tonight I thought we'd take a peek into the future.