In the first of six performances which were to be led by our Chief Conductor Gabriel Feltz this concert season, Carlos Miguel Prieto takes over in the Maestro’s stead.
The program features three stylistically interconnected vocal masterworks from the late Romantic period, performed with soprano Sarah Traubel, whose voice spans from delicately sculpted long musical lines to a dazzling high register.
The Seven Early Songs cycle was written by Alban Berg (1885–1935) between 1905 and 1908 during his composition studies with Arnold Schoenberg, which he had begun only a year earlier with very limited piano knowledge. Three songs in this cycle are the first of Berg’s works ever to be publicly performed.
In their original form, the songs were written for voice and piano, but Berg later orchestrated them in 1928, giving the cycle a fuller, richer sound in keeping with his mature style. The orchestrated song cycle was premiered that same year. The songs represent a transition between mature Romanticism and Expressionism, and show Berg’s compositional development. Although he was still strongly influenced by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg’s early works, the songs already reveal the outlines of a personal style that Berg would later fully develop in works such as the opera Wozzeck. Moreover, although they are called early songs, they demonstrate the artist’s maturity and a developed sense of dynamic nuance and depth of expression. In working on the orchestral version, Berg did not significantly change them in terms of structure, which shows how satisfied he was with the original compositions and by doing so he also wanted to pay tribute to his artistic development and early creativity.
Verses of prominent poets Rilke, Storm, Lenau, and others were carefully selected to allow the composer a rich emotional expression. The whole-tone scale and delicate textures of Nacht (verses by Karl Hauptmann) remind us how Schoenberg’s circle admired the aesthetics of the French Impressionists. Written in Mahler’s style, Schilflied uses tonal imagery to convey the disturbing emotions of Lenau’s poem about a woman’s return to the place where she heard that her lover had drowned. Here, as in Die Nachtigall to lyrics by Theodor Storm, the influence of Berg’s Romantic predecessors in the art song genre is most evident. The dramatic climax of the cycle is the poem Traumgekrönt to lyrics by Rilke, and its harmonic instability is a glimpse into the future. Im Zimmer, to lyrics by Johannes Schlaff, is the earliest poem (1905) that conveys a French flavor, along with the intensity of detail that Berg admired in Mahler. The sensuality that is characteristic of Berg’s music is mixed with the techniques he learned from Schoenberg in Liebesode (to lyrics by Otto Erich Hartleben). The short final song, Sommertage, is set to verses by a poet Berg had known since childhood, Paul Hohenberg, and ends the cycle on a passionate note.
The Four Last Songs are the last completed works of Richard Strauss (1864-1949), written when the composer was 84 years old. In addition to instrumental music and operas, which occupied the central part of his creative oeuvre, the composer also wrote about 200 solo songs. The Four Last Songs are among the best of them. Frühling, September, Beim Schlafengehen, and Im Abendrot are set to verses by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff. The title that united them was given posthumously, in 1950, by the composer’s friend Ernst Roth, editor-in-chief of the publishing house Boosey & Hawkes. Strauss died in September 1949, and a year later, the work was premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in London by Kirsten Flagstadt, with the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Strauss got the idea for the poem Im Abendrot after reading a poem by Josef von Eichendorff, which had a special meaning for him. While working on the music, he received a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse, which left a strong impression on him. Thus, he wrote the music for Frühling, September and Beim Schlafengehen to Hesse’s verses, for soprano and orchestra, with the intention of adding two more poems to them later.
All the poems, except for Frühling, which has a love theme, deal with the theme of death, and this is the common denominator that connects them. They are characterized by a calm, serene atmosphere, and at the end of the Im Abendrot, Strauss quotes his own symphonic poem Death and Transfiguration. The significant roles that the composer assigned to the soprano and horn have their roots in the composer’s personal life. His wife, Pauline de Anna, was a famous soprano, and his father, Franz Strauss, a professional horn player.
The order in which Ernst Roth printed the songs does not correspond to the order in which they were written, and the order in the premiere performance was also different. Although it is not chronologically correct, modern performances generally follow the order given in the printed edition.
Gustav Mahler’s (1860-1911) rich conducting career allowed him to devote himself to composing during his summer vacations. During the summers of 1899 and 1900, after a break of several years, Mahler returned to the symphonic genre with his Fourth Symphony.
The composer’s original idea was for the symphony to consist of six movements with the idea of the transition from the earthly to the divine. Instead, the result is a four-movement symphonic form. The opening movement of the traditional sonata structure is composed of several different mosaic sections on a micro level that together form a single structure. The specificity of the second movement, the scherzo, is the different tuning of the solo violin, which achieves a thinner, spectral sound with which Mahler wanted to evoke the devil’s dance. The third movement is a set of variations on two contrasting themes with the character of a festive march, and the cycle is rounded off by the finale in the form of an orchestrated solo song Das himmlische Leben, composed in 1892 as a separate piece. Since the idea of placing it at the end of the Third Symphony as its final movement did not seem good enough, it fit perfectly into the concept of the Fourth Symphony. Mahler believed that only a child could understand and explain this symphony. Therefore, he gives the role of soloist to a soprano, who should sound childish in describing joy as the lyrical climax of the work.
Today it is difficult to imagine how such a lovely work could have been considered insignificant and provoked protests from the audience and critics. The Munich premiere in 1901 was a fiasco and was booed with comments that it was unclear and tasteless. Expectations were probably too high, because the previous, Third Symphony, was greeted with enthusiasm, and an additional reason was the absence of program titles for the movements. In addition to the Viennese, the work was also evaluated in the same way by American critics in New York in 1904.
Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is a symbiosis of the characteristics that adorned his entire style – love of nature, grotesque humor, rich orchestration, combining instrumental and vocal genres, the opus as a result of the search for the meaning of life. Of Mahler’s nine great symphonic works, the Fourth Symphony is the last which which drew inspiration from the cycle of folk poetry songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Overwhelmed by his work at the Vienna Opera, the composer turned to a warm lyrical atmosphere with the simplicity of music in contrast to the massive works with which he would end his creative journey. Rich invention is woven into elements of music from past eras – the polyphony of the Baroque, the formal patterns and clarity of the scores of Classicism, the motivic work of Romanticism, and even a look ahead to the achievements later begun by the Second Viennese School.
Danica Maksimović
