Schubert Birthday Celebration:  Schubert, Berger, Kreutzer, Hüttenbruner, Bürde, Loewe, Randhartiger, Lachner, Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn, Schumann, Rossini Claire Booth (soprano), Ann Murray (mezzo soprano), Mark Padmore (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), Graham Johnson (piano), Wigmore Hall, London, 31.01.2007 (AO)

 

 

 

Every year, The Wigmore Hall commemorates Franz Schubert with a special concert on his birthday.  This year’s programme focussed on the composer’s  contemporaries. It was particularly thought provoking because it showed what “might have been” had Schubert’s genius not transformed the nature of art song.   The genius here was Graham Johnson, because this programme was so brilliantly put together. Johnson highlights the relevance of even the most obscure composers.  It is as if holding a mirror up to them reflects deeper facets of Schubert’s achievement.  It also recreated the essence of the musical milieu in which Schubert lived, with its Italian and folksy Germanic elements. Johnson understands Schubert so intuitively that this programme was full of insight and new ideas, even for the erudite Wigmore Hall audience.

 

This programme demonstrated clearly that “Lieder” is far more than simply “song”.  Schubert transformed the genre.  Beethoven started the process. Wisely, though, Johnson focussed on more run of the mill composers who probably represented the more generalised background from which Schubert stood out so distinctly.

 

Appositely, he chose the Wilhelm Müller settings by Ludwig Berger (1777-1839) which Schubert was later to use in Die Schöne Müllerin.  The contrast between Berger’s strophic, four square approach and Schubert’s is telling.  Müller is a Romantic poet, intuitively attuned to the new ideas of the Romantic age.  Berger isn’t.  Berger’s songs are charming, but plodding, and don’t bring out the more esoteric levels of the text.  Not for him the undercurrent of mystery and rather unhealthy obsession in the text.   His world is the tail end of the Age of reason: he can’t comprehend the wider implications of the Romantic spirit. Thus he sets Rose, die Müllerin, a poem not by Müller at all.  It’s pretty, full of coquettish trills.  But so predictable! In the original poetry, the girl remains a vague, almost symbolic presence.  The real drama takes place within the miller lad’s imagination.  In many ways it’s a supernatural dialogue between him and the brook.  Perhaps Berger needed to add a song to give the girl a more concrete place in the proceedings so the narrative would make more sense to a mindset more attuned to the tail end of the Age of Reason.

 

Johnson then chooses settings by Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849) of Müller poems that Schubert would immortalise in Winterreise. Kreutzer isn’t an obscure composer, and singers as astute as Peter Schreier have championed his work.   He’s interesting musically – his Der Lindenbaum masterfully contrasts the last two stanzas with their alternate themes of cold and warmth.   Indeed, the last line is, if anything even more sensuous than Schubert’s.  But even with three songs from a bigger set, you can hear this is no rival to Schubert’s masterpiece.  Kreutzer’s Die Post is taken at a gallop, but there’s none of the tantalising anxiety that pervades Schubert’s approach.  Again, what this really illustrates is just how imaginative and inventive Schubert was, and how psychologically prescient.

 

Anselm Hüttenbrunner (1794-1869) also serves as an illustration of what Schubert “might” have been.  As a young man, Hüttenbrunner was one of the more glamorous figures in Schubert’s inner circle, but like so many others in that set, didn’t achieve great things.  Again, he’s a composer more attuned to conventional song even though the influence of his younger friend is clear.  He was the first pianist to accompany Schubert’s Erlkönig, so, like dozens of other composers before and since, was tempted to try his hand, too, with less spectacular results.  

 

Johnson springs another intriguing surprise with a song by Jeannette Bürde (b 1799-?), sister of Anna Milder-Hauptmann, the soprano who commissioned Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, one of the most challenging of Schubert songs. Milder-Hauptmann was a megastar in her day, known as “The Yodelling Evelina” for her speciality, mock rustic Alpine genre pieces.  Her sister’s song, Der Birghirt, also to a poem by Müller, thus includes deliberate references to yodels.  Its main interest is the connection to Schubert via the composer’s sister.  Musically, it’s not on the radar.  Benedikt Randhartinger (1802-1893) shows an appreciation of what Schubert was doing, but again, it’s tribute by default rather than art in itself.

 

Carl Loewe, on the other hand, suggests what Lieder might have been had Schubert not existed.  Loewe’s huge output contains many treasures, including a setting Of Erlkönig that holds its own against Schubert’s.  He’s very good indeed, and he does engage with Romanticism, but he doesn’t have whatever magic that makes Schubert’s music leap beyond its time and place.  Again, we are left wondering what the nineteenth century would have been without the phenomenon that was Franz Schubert.  Johnson thoughtfully includes two songs by Franz Paul Lachner (1803-1890) whom he calls “the missing link between Schubert and Schumann.  The two songs here, Fischermädchen and Ständchen are based on the same Rellstab and Heine settings used in Schwanengesang. It’s a good comparison.  Lachner has quite a following, his work being promoted by tenors like Christoph Prégardien. 

 

Included in this programme were pieces by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and by Robert Schumann, the other great giants of song in the first half of that century, as if to strengthen the point that Schubert’s role was pivotal.  It was a relief to hear Mendelssohn’s Minnelied im Mai after an evening of historical interest rather than of musical significance.  Again, it brought home Peter Schreier’s intelligent observation that we must learn the landscape by knowing the “valleys”, the more to cherish the “peaks”.

 

The Schubert pieces chosen for this programme were also carefully selected to enhance the sense of time and place.  They acted like a frame for the other pieces.  Thus the evening started with the lovely four part song An die Sonne where the voices blended like a garland – distinctively Romantic but not of the variant that would produce Winterreise. Similarly Der Hochzeitsbraten links to the tradition of Singspiele, a German genre that inspired composers from Carl von Weber to Schumann.  Johnson compares this comic scene with the Figaro-Susanna-Count triangle in Le Nozze di Figaro.  Similarly, the evening concluded with a well matched pair of Schubert’s Italian songs.  L’’incanto degli occchi gave Roderick Williams a vehicle to show his considerable talents as a comic actor, and La pastorella al prato gave Claire Booth a chance indulge in trills and decoration.  The Rossini finale was another great reminder of how much Schubert loved that style, and how he was inspired to write for opera. 

 

If I haven’t said much about the singing, that’s because the material largely didn’t demand great feats of skill.   Mention though, must be made of Claire Booth’s achievement in stepping in at a few hours with minimal rehearsal.  Since most of the programme featured songs for high voice, most of the singing fell to her and to Mark Padmore.

This isn’t standard repertoire by any means, so all the more credit to her for learning so fast – she sang so well it was hardly noticeable.  

 

The real “star” of this programme was the programme itself.  Johnson’s panoramic knowledge and musical insight made this concert a major contribution to appreciating Schubert on a deeper level.

 

Anne Ozorio