SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mozart and Strauss: Dame Felicity Lott (soprano),  London Symphony Orchestra,  Bernard Haitink (conductor) Barbican Hall, London 15.6.2008 (JPr)


Sometimes known as the ‘Little G minor’, Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 is one of only two mature symphonies he composed in this key (the other is No. 40). It is one of his earliest works to be regularly performed and indeed the movie Amadeus used its dramatic first movement. Most symphonies composed in Mozart’s time are in major keys yet there were some in the minor, several written by Haydn.  Mozart’s No. 25 might have been inspired Haydn's No. 39, also in G minor, with which it shares a number of common features, including its unusual scoring for four horns. Mozart was not yet 18 when he began this work in Salzburg in 1773 after he and his father returned from Vienna where they had heard a lot of Haydn’s music.

Music associated with Sturm und Drang is often written predominantly in the minor though there is little ‘storm and stress’ here in this Mozart. Three of the four movements begin with jagged octaves (only the Andante does not) and the opening is restless and rhythmically repetitive with a B-flat major second theme providing contrast. The four horns add a darker texture to the music throughout. The Andante reveals much melodic charm in a dialogue between bassoons and muted violins. A minuet follows with a mid-section Trio for winds alone which is reminiscent of the salon music that Mozart would write as a court composer. With the Allegro, the gentle turbulence returns and everything stays in the minor key until the work’s end. Bernard Haitink is never one for ‘authentic’ Mozart - or ‘authentic’ anything much - but he produced a crisp and immaculate performance from the London Symphony Orchestra, who clearly love playing for him.  I thought that the bassoons in particular, strove for a more ‘olde-worldly’ fagott–like sound than I expected from them and their conductor.

Although Richard Strauss is usually associated with music on a grand scale especially in his operas and tone poems, and while this programme would end with his over-blown tribute to himself Ein Heldenleben, his output of Lieder reveals a more intimate lyricism which complements the more extrovert aspects of his musical style. His interest in song continued throughout his life - although there was a gap of some twelve years between his 1906 Op 56 and his next set of songs - and included settings of texts from an eclectic mix of poets. Strauss declared himself never to be particularly selective about his choice of words, and wrote ‘If l find no poem corresponding to the subject which exists in my subconscious mind, then the creative urge has to be rechannelled to the setting of some other poem which I think lends itself to music … I resort to artifice.’

Strauss performed most of his earlier songs in recitals with first his wife Pauline de Ahna, who had sung in Tristan und Isolde at Weimar under his baton in 1892 and in the première of his own first opera Guntram in May 1894, four months before they married. Later, the songs were mostly performed with Strauss accompanying the sopranos Elisabeth Schumann and Elena Gerhardt. The vast majority of his Lieder are settings for soprano voice and were originally written with piano accompaniments, but many do have such a strong sense of orchestral colour that they were fully orchestrated later. The songs Felicity Lott sang (including the encore Morgen) covered 12 years of composition from the very Wagnerian Rühe, meine Seele! Written in 1894 and one of the last to be orchestrated in 1948, through to Die heiligen drei Könige which orchestrated from the outset in 1906. 

Interpretation of Strauss songs seems to me to have become a channel for slower - and self-indulgent - tempi and inflated emotion over time. People seem to enjoy them the music this way and perhaps this is what Strauss actually intended. Apart from some overblown religiosity in Die heiligen drei Könige the content of many songs is often quite simple however and many sopranos approach the songs almost in slow motion seeking beautiful sound at the expense of involving the listener in their emotional content.

Dame Felicity Lott had something of a problem living up to David Nice’s programme note which stated  that for Der Rosenband ‘the biggest challenge is the singer’s, in sustaining the wonderful melisma on the word “Elysium” in the last verse – something with which Dame Felicity Lott has no more problems than the redoubtable Frau Strauss’. Unfortunately while Dame Felicity’s voice still had some of its original radiance there seemed little support left for the chest voice. Strauss’s achingly long soprano lines - requiring one limitless breath -   mostly eluded her, though with the Cradle song (Wiegenlied) and in  her encore Morgen, she  was at her best :  both  were simple, moving and rapturous. Haitink was ever attentive to her needs with his orchestral accompaniment.

Strauss's Ein Heldenleben was composed in 1898, when he was only 34. Despite his youth it was an autobiographical summation of his achievements up to that time and its title translates as (‘A Hero's Life’). While the earlier tone poems involved literary works or,  in the case of Death and Transfiguration,  had a programme added to it after the music was written,  Strauss commented about Ein Heldenleben that ‘There is no need for a programme; it is enough to know there is a hero fighting his enemies.’ In a letter to his father a few weeks after the 1899 première which Strauss conducted, he insisted that the statement that the hero was himself was ‘only partly true’. Yet the music does point insistently to its author as its subject and Strauss also confessed to the writer Romain Rolland, that he found himself ‘no less interesting than Napoleon’ the initial dedicatee of Beethoven’s Eroica which had inspired Ein Heldenleben’s composition. His gesture of conducting the première himself instead of giving the honour to its respected dedicatee, Willem Mengelberg, may also confirm the work’s self-congratulatory nature.

Ein Heldenleben has its heroic main theme after which we hear his adversaries all characterised by the instrumentation. There are the ‘carpers’ (‘very shrill and biting’ flute), the vituperators (‘snarling’ oboe), the ‘whiners’ (cor anglais), and the ‘hair-splitters’ (tuba). Strauss also acknowledged the ‘helpmate’ as a portrait of his wife Pauline, who is represented by the solo violin, lustrously played here by the LSO’s guest leader Sebastian Breuninger and sounding like a cadenza for a second violin concerto which Strauss never finished. Writing again to Romain Rolland, Strauss said that ‘the helpmate’ was ‘… very complex, a trifle perverse, a trifle coquettish, never the same, changing from minute to minute.’ The love scene prepares the hero spiritually and emotionally for the challenges to be met in combat. There is vulgar band music and off stage horns in this section in which Haitink - surprisingly as a traditionalist - appeared to revel in the discordance and veritable cacophony that can be seen to give a foretaste of much musical innovation in the twentieth century. The noise abates with ascending notes on the harps.

The next section is perhaps the most intriguing and revelatory as there are quotations from several of Strauss’s own earlier works. Following a transitory theme from Don Juan there are other musical quotations from Guntram, from Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Death and Transfiguration and Also sprach Zarathustra. Introduced by the cor anglais there are recollections / reprises of the adversaries and the battlefield. The love music led by Sebastian Breuninger’s solo violin again prevails, although the work’s conclusion is ushered in by the three-note trumpet motif from Zarathustra.

All sections of the LSO made typical virtuosic contributions in their individual episodes and there was a late-Romantic beauty and rumbustiousness to the performance that  could be expected from Bernard Haitink. But for such a modest man as he is - unlike Strauss -   , under his baton the ending seemed  so surprisingly full of bombast - which he seemed to do nothing to temper - that only vestiges of the hero figure’s dignity remained as the final pedal note died away. I do not think that was what Strauss really intended.

Jim Pritchard


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