Theater is not only plays and
musicals; it is also opera and ballet, and perhaps even sports events. Also
canny storytelling and, if they still exist, poetry readings. And certainly
masterly song recitals.
By this I mean the English art
song, the German lied, and the French
melodie, all of which, expertly
performed, yield their kind of drama. Let the song be about a relationship of
love or hate, a person’s elated response to natural phenomena like flowers and
birdsong, or elegiac contemplation of a parting or death, and drama is born,
presupposing of course the capturing and holding of a theatrical audience.
I am thinking here of a recent Alice
Tully Hall Liederabend, a concert
evening of songs by Hugo Wolf in recital by the English tenor Ian Bostridge and
the Austrian soprano Angelika Kirchschlager, a major artistic occasion. The
songs were culled from the Spanisches
Liederbuch (Spanish Songbook), Wolf’s setting of Spanish folk songs and
lyrics by lesser known rhymesters—although also one each by Lope de Vega,
Cervantes, and the Portuguese master Luis de Camoes—as translated into German
verse by two decent minor poets, Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse.
There was first a group of
spiritual songs concerning God and Christ, then a secular group, mostly love
songs of one kind or another, and rather more satisfying. Bostridge and
Kirchschlager are both consummate artists, but there was a difference. He was
affected and posturing—which, in the past, he wasn’t, or just barely—whereas
she was perfect and adorable.
The white-bread, gangly, Oxford
undergradish (he is indeed an ex-Oxonian) Bostridge has the requisite voice and
technique, but his physical mannerisms now cry out for the discretion of the
CD, sparing us the distracting carryings-on. The tenor swayed to the right and
left, sometimes threatening to fall on the piano—at which Julius Drake superbly
supported the singers, albeit as an accompanist, not as a crutch. Worse yet,
Bostridge kept taking little—or not so little—listing walks toward the footlights
and back again, rather like an as yet novice sleepwalker.
One might also have quarreled
with his dynamics, which seemed excessive at times, as were his exaggerated
facial expressions. It made me nostalgic for the recitals of the greatest
singer among my coevals, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He remained upright, close
to the piano, without making faces like the hapless little girl in the Hilaire
Belloc poem. The voice acted out the meanings of what it sang, a dignified kind
of theater, without unleashed histrionics.
But Kirchschlager made up for
everything—and then some. The singers alternated after every one or two songs.
When not singing, each sat on a chair well to the right of the piano. As one
finished and headed for the chair, the other was crossing him or her on the way
toward the piano. The tenor did this deadpan, whereas the soprano with a
slightly sly, almost mischievous smile.
Once Angelika sang, she was truly
angelic, with understated but charmingly varied facial expressions, whatever
subtly enhanced the text. Drama was exuded by the eyes, and surged from the
versatility of the voice. That she is a lovely woman added to the
expressiveness of the performance. (Personally, I would not allow a pachyderm
like Stephanie Blythe on a concert stage no matter how good her voice.)
The last song she delivered in
her crystalline yet also warm soprano, “Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt!” (Go,
Beloved, Go Now), was one of my supreme concertgoing experiences. In the text, a
girl after a night of lovemaking urges her lover to be off with the dawn, lest
prying neighbors’ eyes and malicious tongues put paid to the lovers’ nocturnal
trysts.
There was more true, deep feeling
in the soprano’s rendition of that one lied
than in an entire recital by so many other singers. Then, delightfully
introduced by Drake—as apt with his words as with his fingers—we got for an
encore a duet by Schumann, which recalled for me an evening at Carnegie Hall: a
joint recital by Kirchschlager and the marvelous British baritone Simon Keenlyside,
featuring several such duets.
But what about the songs
themselves? I prefer Wolf’s similar Italienisches
Liederbuch, a setting of songs from the Italian, and even more so the lieder
from neither of the songbooks, but superb settings of great poems by the likes
of Goethe and Mörike, exalted or shattering as very little in the two song
cycles is.
But Hugo Wolf is always
interesting. I have a little brochure entitled Das Lied, and subtitled (I translate) “A German Contribution to
World Culture,” a collection of essays by various hands (including a lovely
prose poem by the distinguished Ingeborg Bachmann), published as an elaborate
program booklet in conjunction with a series of concerts and master classes in
the fall of 1990, presided over by Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf,
Mitsouko Sirai and Hartmut Höll, and sponsored by the International Hugo Wolf
Society of Stuttgart.
I definitely wasn’t there, alas,
and have no idea how the brochure came into my possession. In any case, it
contains the text of a talk by the eminent French philosophy professor and
music scholar Andre Tubeuf, in which he aptly characterizes Wolf’s work as
“l’apogée désespérée d’un genre,” the desperate high point of an art form,
which Wolf’s lieder assuredly are.
This brings to mind an incident
from the distant past, when Fischer-Dieskau gave a series of lieder recitals in
Carnegie Hall. The last of them was to have been all Hugo Wolf, but the crass
impresario Sol Hurok persuaded the baritone to switch to all Schubert, which,
he claimed, sells better. Emerging disappointed from the concert, I ran into
the legendary music critic B. H. Haggin, who beamed at me and exclaimed, “Wasn’t
it wonderful?” It would have been more so, I replied, had it remained Wolf.
Haggin stared at me in disbelief: How could anyone prefer Wolf to Schubert?
Well, by and large, I did. And still do.
