On Song
May 2013
‘Lieder’ reveal a deeper language
Before records and radio, CDs and Spotify we had to make our own music at home. In the nineteenth century, middle class parlours would have boasted a piano, and at least a few family members to play it, or accompany the singer or instrumentalist. If you were rich and connected, you might have been able to convince a virtuoso like Frederic Chopin to appear in your salon.
A music publishing industry was established to cater to this domestic market, and one of the beneficiaries of this was the young Viennese, Franz Schubert. He composed songs of miraculous psychological acuity and (more commercially) tunefulness in great quantity and sold them for a pittance. The piano parts are not ‘technically’ difficult to play, and there are no pyrotechnics in the singer’s line, which often have the simplicity and artlessness of folksong. Compared with later Romantic music, the music looks skeletally bare, pared back to the absolute minimum number of notes. Interpreting these songs is another thing entirely.
What makes these songs so great is what is not written on the page, but what happens in the spaces between and behind the notes. Yet, surely part of what made these songs hits is that their emotional essence is within the grasp of even a parlour musician. It’s as if just by reading Hamlet’s soliloquy aloud we could become Laurence Olivier for a moment. Schubert is a master of characterisation, sketching a situation or personality with utmost economy: the piano in his famous ‘The Trout’ is somehow simultaneously a burbling brook and a portrait of the cocky angler and doomed fish.
Schubert’s later songs are more virtuosic, pointing to their future as the purview of professional musicians or very talented amateurs. The essential intimacy of this form was retained by later composers, even if they were writing with concert performance in mind. The art song may have been perfected in Vienna (which is why we named the genre after the German word for ‘songs’ – lieder), but it’s a genre that transcends national boundaries, as at home in France as it is in England and Scandinavia.
Lieder remains at the heart of the singer’s art. In August the British Wagnerian soprano Susan Bullock (and star of the 2013 Melbourne Ring Cycle) will demonstrate its breadth when she sings Robert Schumann, the ultimate Romantic composer, the perfumed Mélodies of Claude Debussy and the songs of Benjamin Britten, among others. Britten, like many prolific composers of vocal music, was in a relationship with a singer, the tenor Peter Pears, who received songs in French, English, Italian and German. While Britten’s unmistakable compositional voice is always present, he perfectly assumes the accent of any language he composed in. Without being parodies or pastiche, the German songs have more than a hint of Schubert and Schumann in them, suggesting that language has a deeper music which can be liberated by a few well-placed chords.
Susan Bullock performs at Melbourne Recital Centre on August 29.
melbournerecital.com.au
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