SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Internet MusicWeb

Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht and Mahler’s Das Lied von Erde: Christianne Stotijn (mezzo soprano), Robert Dean Smith (tenor), Budapest Festival Orchestra; Iván Fischer (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London 1.10.2008 (JPr)

Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’) is a tone poem originally composed for a small chamber ensemble (string sextet of two violins, two violas and two cellos), the first piece ever written for such an ensemble. It is based on the contemporary poem Weib und Welt (‘Woman and World) written by Richard Dehmel in 1896. Dehmel's work was considered controversial because of its veiled – and often unveiled – sexual content. Schoenberg preferred the term 'programme music' to ‘tone poem’ and later commented ‘My composition was, perhaps, somewhat different from other illustrative compositions, firstly, by not being for orchestra but for a chamber group and secondly, because it does not illustrate any action or drama, but was restricted to portray nature and express human feelings ... in other words, it offers the possibility to be appreciated as “pure' music”.’ Originally composed in 1899, Schoenberg composed an arrangement for string orchestra in 1917, further revising it in 1943. This was the version performed by the full string  complement of the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

The structure of the work broadly follows the poem’s five stanzas. Throughout, Schoenberg employs his rather limited palette of strings to create a breadth of vivid textures and orchestral colour. The ominous, dark, beginning is a moonlit scene for a couple’s walk and introduces the prominent motif of the woman's anguished state as she confesses to her lover she is pregnant by another man. The music shifts to the bright D major, which reflects the extremely consoling words of the man and reaches a climax after which there is an exalted coda that combines earlier themes and concludes the work.

One Vienna Music Society refused to perform Verklärte Nacht because the score contained a dissonance which could not be explained by any textbook of the day. (It is in bar 42 and is a chord of the 9th in its 4th inversion with the 9th in the bass.) Schoenberg famously remarked ‘and thus (the work) cannot be performed since one cannot perform that which does not exist’.

A critic also found a place in posterity after saying Verklarte Nacht sounded like 'someone had smeared the ink of Tristan while it was still wet', alluding to Schoenberg’s use of Wagnerian chromaticism. For me there certainly are hints of the Siegfried Idyll, Parsifal in the piece but to my mind it most resembles Strauss’s Metamorphosen when with the late-Romantic languorous lushness that Ivan Fischer and his orchestra gave us. There were fine contributions from leader Violetta Eckhardt’s violin and from Péter Lukács viola. Though not for a moment was I in any way transfigured,  unfortunately.

With his conducting commitments completed in 1908, Mahler went to his summer retreat in the southern Tyrolean village of Toblach for the last three years of his life, where he could start composing again. (Readers may be interested to know that his composing house there still stands within a small childrens’ zoo with pigs, goats and chickens.) A friend had given Mahler a volume by Hans Bethge entitled Die chinesische Flöte (‘The Chinese Flute’), a volume containing German translations of a collection of some 80 Chinese poems. The poems appealed to Mahler and using seven of them,  he turn them into the six songs of Das Lied von der Erde. It is the sixth song (Der Abscheid) that includes two poems and Mahler also makes his own important alterations to the text.

Highly significant is Mahler’s choice of key signature for each of the songs: I Das Trinklied … – A minor; II Der Einsame in Herbst – D minor; III Von der Jugend – B-flat major/G major; IV Von der Schönheit … – G major; V Der Trunkene … – A major/F major; VI Der Abscheid – C minor. If we consider Mahler’s superstition about the finality of ninth symphonies, with one exception (the second song) he avoids the use of D minor – the key of both Beethoven and Bruckner’s Ninth (and last) Symphonies. (Later of course, Mahler's own Ninth Symphony will be in D minor.) The second song is most clearly about the fear of death, and so the use of D minor for it is undoubtedly not coincidental and the fifth song, perhaps the most despairing of the cycle, ends significantly in F major, the relative major of D minor. Der Abscheid’s principal key is C minor moving finally to C major, the relative major of the A minor in which the work starts.

Iván Fischer founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra 25 years ago and they played well – a rather shrill flute notwithstanding – with important contributions from oboe, cor anglais, clarinet, solo cello and the leader’s violin. Throughout Das Lied von der Erde the ensemble had an impeccable balance and timbre. Fischer states in the programme that he is ‘a great Mahler fan’ and this  being the case it is possible that I expect too much of him. His was an eloquently romantic account of the score lacking some intensity and vision and, for me, the necessary real gut-wrenching emotion. In the fifth song for instance, ‘Drunkard in Spring’ there is some despair here as it advocates needing to drink to get through life. Here it was too rumbustuous and Robert Dean Smith was much too convivial. Robert Dean Smith also never produces an ugly sound or shows signs of strain when singing and his is a wonderful heroic tenor voice. I would have preferred a grittier performance of greater emotional depth and a brighter sound.

The young mezzo Christianne Stotijn, is a pupil of Dame Janet Baker, and she did her mentor proud although without suggesting that she has the maturity yet for this music. She tends to swallow beginnings of sentences and her diction was not truly impeccable. Yet there were some wonderful pure tones and elegant phrasing in her performance, though I remained unconvinced that she is yet psychologically ‘at one’ with the meaning of the texts. Also the apparent lack of a developed chest register suggests she is a high mezzo at best, if not a soprano. She never stood still and swayed constantly from side to side, which was a bit distracting and would have undoubtedly have been a lot worse had she been singing Elgar’s Sea Pictures!

2008 is therefore the centenary of the composition of Das Lied von der Erde though Mahler never lived long enough to hear a public performance. I have heard it three times this year and undoubtedly this was the least satisfying of the three. I was in Toblach in August for the centenary performance at the Mahler Festival and there was a spirited account by Germany’s Bundesjugendorchester conducted by Matthias Foremny with an outstanding young German mezzo, Claudia Mahnke, with a remarkable range, and valiant tenor Keith Ikaia-Purdy. Earlier – and still my favourite for concert of the year – was Christoph Eschenbach’s definitely transfiguring account with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the ardent tenor Nikolai Schukoff and the dignified and poignant, Petra Lang, perhaps the great Mahler mezzo of our time. (See Review)

Jim Pritchard

An edited version of this review  will appear in the December issue of The Wayfarer,  the magazine of the UK Gustav Mahler Society.

^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}