Getting through, but not quite finishing with, Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer" -- studies in emotional contrasts

Baritone Christian Gerhaher sings the raging, then emotionally wiped-out third of Mahler's Wayfarer Songs, "Ich hab' ein glühend' Messer," at the 2010 Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, with Herbert Blomstedt (age 83) conducting the Mahler Youth Orchestra.

by Ken

Here I was thinking we could cover the four songs of Mahler's Lieder eines farhrenden Gesellen) (Songs of a Wayfarer) in two posts (plus previews). Now it turns out that it's going to stretch to three.

In the first installment we got through the first two songs, "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht" ("When my darling has her wedding day") and "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld" ("Went this morning across the field"), which trace -- in an impressionistic rather than narrative way -- the aftermath of the wayfarer's rejected love. Then in Friday night's preview to today's post, we jumped to the great final song, "Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz" ("The two blue eyes of my darling"), which seems to resolve into some sort of acceptance. Along the way we've listened to the way Mahler recycled the second and fourth songs, or portions thereof, into key portions of the first and third movements of his First Symphony.

Well, we're going to hear the third and fourth songs today, all right. In fact, we've already heard the third, "Ich hab' ein glühend' Messer" ("I have a glowing knife") up top. But we're not going to do much more than that. I'm still struggling with how I want to get just a bit inside "Die zwei blauen Augen." And so I'm going to defer most of that to another time. We will, however, entertain a couple of Schubertian digressions.


SO LET'S HEAR THE FINAL WAYFARER SONG

Preview: "By the street stands a linden tree" -- Mahler's "Wayfarer Songs," part 2

"Frère Jacques"? That beloved old French round song -- huh??? You'll hear why, but here's a hint:

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Oct. 10-11, 1962

by Ken

This week we complete our brief but intense journey through Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer. In Part 1, we began by hearing how the composer transformed the song "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld" into the exposition of his First Symphony. Tonight we're going to hear something still more remakable, I think, and surpassingly beautiful. I think it's fair to describe it as a life-changing moment, at least for the narrator. Let's start by listening to just these two all-too-brief excerpts.

Or three, actually. This time we're not going to cheat as we did with "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld," when we skipped over the intermediate stage: Mahler's orchestration of the song, prior to his incorporation of it into the symphony.ing by going back to the initially piano-accompanied version of the song, ignoring the fact that Mahler had orchestrated it before incorporating it into the symphony. (We've even got recordings that our soloist made in the same year!)

Piano-accompanied version of the song

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Leonard Bernstein, piano. CBS/Sony, recorded in New York, 1968
Orchestral version of the song

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded December 1968
Symphonic rendering

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG, recorded October 1967

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Oct. 10-11, 1962

(I notice that the start points of the clips aren't exactly synched up. I suppose I could redo them, but I don't think that's going to happen.)


NOW TO HEAR THE COMPLETE SONG

With a concerted effort we can get through half of Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer" (okay, there are only four)

This October 1960 Paris performance of the second Wayfarer Song, "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld," with the NHK Symphony under Paul Kletzki is the vocally freest (and, yes, best; it's curious how that works) Fischer-Dieskau performance of the song I've heard. (We've got a bunch of 'em coming up.)

by Ken

Was it clear from Friday night's preview, in which we heard how Mahler transformed the second of his Songs of a Wayfarer, "Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht" ("When my darling has her wedding day"), into the exposition of his First Symphony, whether we were headed toward the song cycle or the symphony today? It wasn't supposed to be.

Once upon a time we might have tackled both in one post. Today I'm not going to try to get all the way through the four Wayfarer Songs. We're going to split them in half and listen just to the first two.

I thought that first we would re-covering the ground we covered Friday night, and for "Wenn mein Schatz" I've plucked out a remarkable performance we're going to hear again in the click-through. I'm not the world's biggest Janet Baker fan, but I really like the performance of the Wayfarer Songs she recorded with Sir John Barbirolli. They take some audaciously broad tempos, which is even riskier given the wispy nature of Dame Janet's mezzo, but I have to say, they really pull it off.

To appreciate the audacity of the Baker-Barbirolli performance, we're going to precede it with a wonderful but more conventional one by Yvonne Minton and Georg Solti. It's worth noting as we hear the song again -- even before we hear it in context, following the opening song of the cycle -- that the one ostensibly "happy" Wayfarer Song ends on a decidedly down note. When we hear the two songs together, you'll understand what the singer is apparently referring to in this unexpectedly down conclusion

MAHLER: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
(Songs of a Wayfarer):
ii. "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld"
("Went this morning across the field")


Yvonne Minton, mezzo-soprano; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded Mar.-Apr. 1970

Janet Baker, mezzo-soprano; Hallé Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded May 4, 1967

Now, to hear how the recycled song fits into the Mahler First Symphony, it seems only logical to hear the recordings made by the same conductors and orchestras, even though the early-stereo Barbirolli-Pye recording represents a decidedly less advanced state in Sir John's (and his provincial orchestra's) Mahler advocacy.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 1 in D:
i. Langsam. Schleppend

Hallé Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. Pye, recorded June 11-12 1957

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded October 1983


LET'S GO BACK TO THE FIRST OF THE WAYFARER SONGS

Preview: From song to symphony -- the journey of Mahler's lonely wayfarer

Thomas Allen sings the second song, "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld," from Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, in a 1991 performance conducted by Václav Neumann. (See below for German and English texts.)

by Ken

As we've already established, Mahler's early symphonies -- through, say, No. 4 -- were intertwined with his song-writing of the period, especially drawing on the folk-poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn). The poems that became his first great song cycle, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), sound like Wunderhorn poems, but they're not -- they're actually the composer's own.

Mahler's First Symphony took shape by an almost indescribably convoluted process -- in other words, pretty much the way all the later symphonies did. And when the dust settled, some of the Wayfarer Songs had found their way into the symphony, most conspicuously the second, "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld" ("Went this morning across the field"). And here is more or less how that transformation sounds, allowing for the fact that we're skipping a step. By the time the song was pressed into service to provide the exposition of the first movement of the First Symphony, Mahler had already produced an orchestral version of the originally piano-accompanied Wayfarer Songs.

We're going to hear the orchestral version of "Ging heut' Morgen" in the click-through, along with the complete first movement of the First Symphony. For now let's just hear the piano-accompanied version of the song and the incorporation of the song as the symphonic movement's exposition.

MAHLER: Songs of a Wayfarer:
No. 2, "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld"
("Went this morning across the field")


Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Leonard Bernstein, piano. CBS/Sony, recorded in New York, Nov. 4, 1968

MAHLER: Symphony No. 1 in D:
1st movement exposition
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. CBS/Sony, recorded Oct. 4 and 22, 1966



Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in this October 1974 performance of the first half of the first movement of Mahler's First Symphony. (The rest of the movement is here. The later movements are also posted.)


FIRST LET'S HEAR THE ORCHESTRAL VERSION OF THE SONG

And then came "Widmung"

In Clarence Brown's Song of Love (1947), Paul Henreid as Robert Schumann introduces the newly composed "Widmung" to Katharine Hepburn as Clara; later Henry Daniell as Liszt plays his version, and finally Clara has her turn with it. (All the piano-playing is by Arthur Rubinstein, whom we'll hear playing the Liszt version straight through in the click-through.)

by Ken

Among the great creative feats on record, I'm not sure that any surpasses what is often referred to as Robert Schumann's Year of Song, 1840, the year in which he married Clara Wieck, which we talked about back in April 2010. As Eric Sams has put it, "In the 12 months beginning 1 February 1 1840 he wrote over 160 vocal works, including at least 135 of the 246 solo songs in the complete Peters Edition."

Near the head of the list is the collection of 26 songs published as Schumann's Op. 25, Myrthen (myrtles -- "European evergreen shrubs with white or rosy flowers that are often used to make bridal wreaths"), which the composer presented to Clara as a wedding gift and of course dedicated to her. And at the head of Myrthen is "Widmung" ("Dedication"), the exhilarating song we previewed Friday night.

SCHUMANN: "Widmung" ("Dedication"), Op. 25, No. 1


Baritone Hermann Prey, with pianist Leonard Hokanson (1975)

German text by Friedrich Rückert

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world in which I live,
my heaven you in which I soar,
o you my grave in which
I have buried my sorrows forever.

You are rest; you are peace;
you were destined for me by heaven.
That you love me makes me feel worthy;
your glance has transfigured me;
you lift me, loving, above myself --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world, in which I live,
my heaven you, in which I soar --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

AS I MENTIONED FRIDAY NIGHT, IT WAS A RECITAL
THIS WEEK BY PIANIST ANNE-MARIE McDERMOTT . . .

Preview: The singular exhilaration of Schumann's "Dedication," and of Liszt's

SCHUMANN: "Widmung" ("Dedication"), Op. 25, No. 1

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world in which I live,
my heaven you in which I soar,
o you my grave in which
I have buried my sorrows forever.

You are rest; you are peace;
you were destined for me by heaven.
That you love me makes me feel worthy;
your glance has transfigured me;
you lift me, loving, above myself --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

You my soul, you my heart,
you my joy, o you my pain,
you my world, in which I live,
my heaven you, in which I soar --
my good spirit, my better "I"!

-- German text by Friedrich Rückert

by Ken

This past week I attended a recital by pianist Anne-Marie McDermott with a reasonably interesting-looking program. As it turned out, the most satisfying music-making, at least for me, was the several minutes devoted to, of all things, Franz Liszt's solo-piano expansion of Robert Schumann's singularly exhilarating little song "Widmung" ("Dedication").

By "little" song I don't mean that it's in any way small-scaled emotionally. Quite the contrary, as I expect you've noticed if you watched the performance above. All I mean is that its running time in performance is normally a mere two minutes, give or take. Naturally Liszt couldn't leave well enough alone, and had to add expansions of his own after each of the song's basic sections. (The song, you'll notice, is basically in good old A-B-A format, with a cunning slip from A-flat major to E major, at the start of the B section, "You are rest; you are peace" -- at 0:29 of the song performance above, 1:41 of the Liszt solo-piano rendering below.)

IN SUNDAY'S MAIN POST, I want to talk a bit about that recital experience, but for tonight I thought we'd just hear "Widmung" both ways, in interesting performances I found online: the breathless one above of Schumann's original (with an odd truncation of the piano's opening-bar introduction) by the American soprano Jessye Norman (born 1945); and below, Liszt's solo-piano rendering-and-amplification in a 1985 recording by that wonderfully poetic Pittsburgh-born piano pyrotechnician par excellence, Earl Wild (1915-2010).

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Sunday Classics: Is Mahler's Sixth Symphony any more "tragic" than life itself?

The conclusion of the 1976 Bernstein-Vienna Phil Andante -- we heard the first half in last night's preview post. The "climactic" section we heard Valery Gergiev whip into a frenzy begins at 3:05 of the clip.

by Ken

Do I have to have an ulterior motive for backing our way into the Mahler Sixth Symphony via the awesomely beautiful Andante we heard in last night's preview? (Just as a reminder, we started -- in Friday night's pre-preview, by listening to the radiant Andante sostenuto of the Brahms First Symphony, played by "Mahler's orchestra," the Vienna Philharmonic, under Sir John Barbirolli in 1967 and Leonard Bernstein in 1981.) Okay, I do have an ulterior motive, but do I have to? Goodness, there's so much I could, and want to, say about this symphony, but instead let me just explain how it came onto this week's Sunday Classics schedule.

It all started with the new 10-CD Sony BMG Classics compendium of 1974-80 Levine-RCA Mahler recordings I mentioned last week I had ordered. The set arrived, and I started listening through it, which was kind of enjoyable, though I can't say I much enjoyed the actual performances. I certainly understood why I'd hardly listened to them again since they were first issued -- and I actually liked some of them better then. It's kind of eerie how little audible concern there is here for how the music gets from one note to the next, which is, oh, about 98 percent of what matters in Mahler's music, and that of most any other composer of consequence, or at least 98 percent of what makes it music instead of just a bunch of notes.

Nevertheless, I was listening through happily enough. The performances contain a fair number of ideas -- no, I'd rather call them "performance choices," since they're really qualities slapped onto musical moments, which don't really rise to the level of "ideas." I got through Nos. 1, 10, 4, 7, and 5 before crashing with No. 6, which seemed to be so far from adding up to any sort of performance of the piece that I had to seek relief in various sorts of actual performances.

My original idea was that a good subject for a post might be the kind of phony-baloney issue that musical dim bulbs like to fixate on instead of trying to deal with the music: the question of the "correct" order of the middle movements of the Mahler Sixth. And that's still what we're going to be looking at. But since we're also going to be hearing the the much larger outer movements as well, as I thought about what to say to you about them, I realized that a different version of this same phony-baloney musical "issue" comes into play: Just how "tragic" is this symphony that Mahler himself dubbed, at least at the time of the premiere, Tragic?


HOW "TRAGIC" IS THE MAHLER SIXTH SYMPHONY?
TO JUDGE FOR YOURSELF, CONTINUE READING

Preview: The Andante of the Sixth Symphony -- the most beautiful movement Mahler ever composed?

If you think the climax of the slow movement of the Mahler Sixth needs to be made "exciting," I guess Valery Gergiev's your man -- here are the final four minutes (beginning at bar 138) of a November 2007 performance with the London Symphony. (Note that he's playing the Andante as the second movement -- i.e., before the Scherzo.)

by Ken

I can't prove to you that Mahler had the gorgeous Andante of the Brahms First Symphony (which we heard in last night's preview) in mind when he composed the Andante of his Sixth, but you'd have to go a long way to convince me that he didn't. Most composers, at least those with a modicum of sense, would shy away from such an exalted precedent; Mahler lived up to it.

The climactic section that we hear in the Gergiev clip above begins at 10:35 in this recording, Leonard Bernstein's first of the Mahler Sixth.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 6 in A minor:
iii. (or maybe ii.) Andante moderato


New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded May 1967


TO HEAR MORE OF THIS AMAZING MOVEMENT, READ ON

Preview: Do we need a reason to listen to the radiant Andante sostenuto of Brahms's First Symphony?

Theo Alcantara conducts the Andante sostenuto of the Brahms First Symphony at Festival Casals, San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 2005. (The whole performance is posted.)

by Ken

We've heard the radiant slow movement of Brahms's First Symphony, back in July 2009, though I see that that Karajan clip has been disappeared. Well, tonight we're hearing it again! I don't think we need a reason, but in fact we have one, which will become clear tomorrow night.


FOR MORE OF THIS GLOWING MOVEMENT, READ ON

Sunday Classics: We're ready now to hear those "fraternal twin" symphonies, Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth

Post rehabilitated and updated, June 2018 (see below)



At top, Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the instantly recognizable first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (in the Vienna Konzerthaus, 1977); above, Arturo Toscanini conducts the NBC Symphony (March 22, 1952).

by Ken

The music is all set to go for this post, and I think this week I'm just not going to say very much. [Well, this was so in 2010, a little less so in 2018. -- Ed.] We've already established the chronological connection between Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies (whose slow movements we heard in, respectively, Friday night's and last night's previews), which were created in almost a single continuous burst of inspiration, and had their first performances at that amazing four-hour-plus concert on December 22, 1808, at which not just the two symphonies but the Fourth Piano Concerto and Choral Fantasy for piano and orchestra (both of which we heard quite a lot of in a post on Beethoven's piano concertos) plus three movements from the C major Mass and the concert aria "Ah, perfido" also had their premieres -- and the composer also offered a solo piano improvisation, presumably worrying that the audience might not feel it was getting its money's worth.

We've also hinted at the thematic connection between these near-twin symphonies (fraternal twins, of course), which is basically that there doesn't seem to be one. Of course Beethoven had a horror of repeating himself, but when it comes to consecutive creations there seems also to have been an utterly understandable impulse to go somewhere wildly different.

* * *

Preview: And now for something pretty different -- Beethoven's NEXT symphonic slow movement

Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the second movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony.

by Ken

I promised a companion piece to the one we heard in last night's preview, the flowing but muscular slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony). And pieces don't come much more companionable than Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, written in such quick succession that there must have been overlap in the composer's imagining of these two works, which nevertheless -- or perhaps for that very reason -- are staggeringly different works. But they came into the world together:

The Fifth Symphony was premiered at a mammoth concert at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna consisting entirely of Beethoven premieres, and directed by Beethoven himself. The concert went for more than four hours. The two symphonies appeared on the program in reverse order: the Sixth was played first, and the Fifth appeared in the second half. The program was as follows:

The Sixth Symphony
Aria: "Ah, perfido," Op. 65
The Gloria movement of the Mass in C major
The Fourth Piano Concerto (played by Beethoven himself)
[Intermission]
The Fifth Symphony
The Sanctus and Benedictus movements of the C major Mass
A solo piano improvisation played by Beethoven
The Choral Fantasy

Yikes!


FOR TONIGHT'S PREVIEW --

Preview: In which we dip into one of the most famous works ever written -- but not THAT movement

Glenn Gould plays Liszt's piano transcription of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. (The movement concludes here.)

by Ken

In Beethoven's time, and Liszt's too, of course, concert opportunities to hear orchestral works were far more limited than they are now, and radio broadcasts and recordings still undreamt of. And so as a way of enabling the music to circulate, and of allowing music lovers to enjoy them in their own homes, and of providing publishers an opportunity to make some money, piano transcriptions were abundant -- sometimes done by the composers themselves, more often done by competent musical journeymen, and in rare cases done by musicians of the order of a Franz Liszt. The thing to remember about Liszt's transcriptions of the nine Beethoven symphonies is that they were undertaken as a labor of love, with no thought of any creative contribution by the distinguished transcriber.


TONIGHT, BY WAY OF A PREVIEW OF OUR PREVIEW --