Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
Auf dem Strom, song for voice, piano and horn, D943 (1828)
In the last year of his life, Schubert composed two great extended songs in which singer and pianist are joined by an obbligato wind player. Perhaps they were meant to form the start of a series which he died too soon to complete. The second of them, The Shepherd on the Rock, famously calls for the services of a clarinettist, who helps to transform the music into a sort of scena (dramatic scene) or cantata. The first, On the River (Auf dem Strom), remains a rarity in which a solo horn, or alternatively a cello, adds a sombre, desolate voice to the traditional coupling of voice and piano. The second song is its bright-toned obverse, its interplay of soprano and clarinet timbres highlighting its ravishing purity of sound - which, according to one Schubert authority, “breathes the air of an Alpine meadow.” But a month after composing it, young Schubert was dead.
In the earlier song, composed during Schubert’s last springtime for a unique public concert in Vienna entirely devoted to his music, a conspicuous sense of mortality seems to darken every strain, as the horn obbligato casts its melancholy over the voice of the singer - usually, as on this occasion, a tenor. It is a wonderful piece, excluded from most Schubert recitals by its sheer size and prevailing sadness, but hugely compelling on the infrequent occasions it turns up.
The fact that its first performance took place on 26 March 1828 - the centenary of Beethoven’s death - and that the music was clearly an intended tribute to Schubert’s great forebear explains its recurring references to the funeral march from the Eroica Symphony. But Beethoven’s song cycle, An die Ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Loved One), which Schubert reputedly adored, is also audible in the background.
Schubert had been a torch-bearer at Beethoven’s funeral, and an evocation of the solitary, recently-dead composer haunts this setting of Rellstab’s poem, which had surely been written for Beethoven himself to set to music. But Schubert by then had become aware of his growing stature as Beethoven’s successor, and his awareness is something else that pervades the song as we listen to it today.
It starts with a spacious introduction, where the piano plays subdued triplets in Schubert’s familiar watery mode while the horn plays the melody. Interludes for horn and piano separate each verse of the poem, with Beethoven’s funeral march prominently featured in the second verse and looming grimly out of the fourth. The song has been called a metaphor of life and death - Beethoven’s death, obviously, but also, unmistakably, Schubert’s own. It dates, after all, from the same period as Winterreise and Schwanengesang.
© Conrad Wilson
Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
From Four Impromptus, D899 (1827)
No 3 in G flat major
No 4 in A flat major
If Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy is a sonata in disguise, the same could be said - has indeed been said many times - of his two sets of impromptus, D899 and D935, written in the penultimate year of his life, shortly before he embarked on his last three great piano sonatas. Schumann, that passionate musical cryptographer, was one of the first to propose that Schubert was here concealing something, basing his evidence on the second set, D935, with its abundance of sonata-like features and its return in the end to the key in which it began. But the earlier D899, half of which we shall hear this afternoon, begins in one key and ends in another, and seems unified only by the fact that the four pieces are all by Schubert.
Whatever Schubert himself felt about them, he was pragmatic enough to tell his publisher that the pieces could be played separately or together.
The term 'impromptu' was in any case a bit vague in 1827, its implications more casual than 'sonata', and more concerned with improvisation than with ideas rigorously worked out. Schubert’s Viennese contemporary Tamas Vorisek, conductor of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and a composer known to Schubert, had been its pioneer five years earlier. Of the four pieces that form D899 (at one time known as Op 90) the third is a serenely flowing yet infinitely touching idyll based on one of the most adorable of all Schubert melodies, seemingly simple yet more intricate than it sounds. In the fourth there are flashing arpeggios surrounding a rugged, somewhat Beethovenian, middle section.
© Conrad Wilson
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Adagio and Allegro, Op 70 (1849)
As music critic of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Schumann deplored the prevailing German taste for what he regarded as superficial salon pieces. His own domestic music, of which - particularly in 1849 - he composed an abundance, was an object lesson in poetic feeling, expressed with a finesse that showed him to be far more responsive to instrumental colouring than history has given him credit for.
Though the piano was his primary instrumental voice, it shared the limelight in the first movement of his piano concerto with one of the most exquisite clarinet solos ever penned; and his enthusiasm for the still fairly new-fangled valve horn resulted in his fine Adagio and Allegro, Op 70, a pioneering and challenging work which loses none of its magic when played, as it sometimes is, by a viola, or cello, or oboe, or violin.
Indeed the music adapts itself chameleon-like to whatever instrument is playing it, its lyricism - with the piano as binding factor - emerging unimpaired. On the horn, it’s true, it sounds like concert music, on the clarinet or cello like something more private. But the contrast between dreamy adagio and vigorous allegro, and how the different instruments deal with it, is what matters. Such contrasts are fundamental to Schumann, displaying a cleavage in his personality that was as psychological as it was musical. Composed in the year of Chopin’s death, the music evokes a world of lights and half-lights which Schumann’s Franco-Polish contemporary would undoubtedly have understood.
© Conrad Wilson
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain (1955)
While Britten maintained good friendships with a number of his composer contemporaries, some relationships were more strained than others. Although Britten admired William Walton, who was ten years his senior, after their first meeting Britten wrote in his diary: ‘To lunch with William Walton at Sloane Square. He is charming, but I feel always the school relationship with him – he is so obviously the head prefect of English music, whereas I'm the promising new boy.’ But he and Britten shared many musical passions, among them a love for the poetry of Edith Sitwell, and in 1932, Walton composed the entertainment piece Façade, on poems by Sitwell. Considered by many to be abstract nonsense poetry, in the same manner as Lear’s Jaberwocky, the text was unlike anything audiences had heard before, and the work was catapulted to fame as one of the turning points in twentieth-century composition.
Not all of Sitwell’s poetry is quite so obscure, and much of it focuses on the war which surrounded her during the early 1940s. Despite admiring her work, it was some time before Britten felt able to set Sitwell’s poetry to music, so raw was the immediate aftermath of the war in Britain. But in 1954, three months after the premiere of his opera The Turn of the Screw, Britten wrote to his publishers that he had been ‘deeply moved’ by Sitwell’s poem, Still falls the rain and ‘felt at last that one could get away from the immediate impacts of the war and write about it.’ The setting became his Canticle III for tenor, horn and piano, one of five unconnected canticles which Britten wrote at different times during his career. The poem itself was written in 1940, shortly after the air raids on London, and as a result it is saturated with a dark and sombre melancholy, the text probing a sense of disillusionment with man and his predilection for war, despite Christ’s own sacrifice on the cross.
Sitwell attended the first performance at the Aldeburgh Festival, for which Dennis Brain and Peter Pears were the soloists, and was so overwhelmed by the result that she and Britten agreed to collaborate on a series of further settings of her poetry for performance the following year. The event was titled The Heart of the Matter (1956) and featured additional settings of Sitwell’s poetry, with Canticle III as the centrepiece of something that could be considered a chamber cantata. United by the theme of war, the other ‘movements’ of the work comprise a Prologue, ‘Where are the seeds of the Universal Fire’, a song entitled ‘We are the darkness in the heat of the day’ and an Epilogue, ‘So, out of the dark’, along with a fanfare for solo horn which, harking back to Britten’s Serenade, frames the entire sequence. Despite its musical beauty and tight integration of music and text, there were no further performances of the work in Britten’s lifetime and Britten appears to have suppressed its publication until well after his death. This, despite the fact that Britten gleefully told Sitwell that the composition of Canticle III had made him feel ‘on the threshold of a new musical world’. Perhaps its touching exploration of the delicate concept of death proved too difficult to deal with in the years of ill health that plagued Britten’s final decade.
© Jo Kirkbride
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Selected Folksongs (various dates)
Down by the Salley Gardens
Little Sir William
O Waly, Waly
At the age of fourteen, Britten fell in love with the music of Frank Bridge, and after arranging a meeting with the composer, he was lucky enough to begin composition lessons with him. This was an important milestone for both composers – Bridge, as a rule, did not take on pupils, while for Britten the lessons signalled a new stage in his compositional development and the beginning of a prodigious outpouring of compositions for new ensembles. It was Bridge that put Britten in touch with his more modernist side, introducing him to the likes of Berg and Schoenberg and encouraging him to be more experimental in his output. Unlike most English composers around him, the young Britten was active in his desire to forge a new path for English music. He made no secret of the fact that he found much recent English music rather boring, and focussed much of his attention instead on the eclectic works of composers such as Stravinsky, whose ballet, The Rite of Spring, he called ‘the World’s Wonder’.
Britten found the nationalist music of other English composers such as Vaughan Williams, whose works drew heavily upon the rich heritage of Engligh folksong, uninspiring and redundant. Writing to Grace Williams in 1935 Britten wrote disparagingly about Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs: ‘That “pi” and artificial mysticism combined with, what seems to me, technical incompetence, sends me crazy.’ Despite these disapproving marks, and although he never considered himself part of the same English folksong tradition, Britten had his own success with many folk song arrangements over the course of his career. In 1936, he wrote in his diary about his music for a documentary entitled The Village Harvest: ‘All arrangements of folk & traditional tunes (some from Moeran)—all lovely stuff and I must admit my scoring comes off like hell.’ One of his earliest folk song arrangements, The Plough Boy (1936), was part of the score for this film, the high whistle of the boy going about his duties captured by the piano in the opening. Down by the Salley Gardens (1943) is among his best-loved songs, and is a setting of W.B. Yeats’ poem of the same name, which tells a story of love gone wrong: ‘She said to take love easy as the leaves grew on the tree, but I was young and foolish and with my darling could not agree.’ O Waly Waly (1948) has a similarly message, melancholically lamenting the demise of love over time, a sad predicament that Britten evokes through the unceasing ebb and flow of wave-like movement in the piano accompaniment. Along with the Salley Gardens, both Little Sir William (1941) and Oliver Cromwell (1941) were among four folksong arrangements which Britten said produced a ‘wow’ every time they were performed. Often used as encore pieces while Britten and Pears gave concerts in America, they both contrast their lively, youthful melodies with an underlying sense of sadness.
© Jo Kirkbride
Britten was someone whose important musical passions were lifelong affairs. Schubert was one of his essential composers: he performed many of his songs with Peter Pears. John Mark Ainsley is a wonderful interpreter of both Britten and Schubert; he has one of the finest tenor voices, and also a true storyteller's grasp of narrative and drama. In trio with Tom Poster and SCO Principal Horn, Alec Frank-Gemmill, he includes two real treats for tenor and horn - Auf dem Strom and Britten's third canticle.