Gypsy Songs (II)

Last week we talked about Antonín Dvořák's Cigánské Melodie, focusing on the author of the poems, Adolf Heyduk, and this week we'll listen to another song after talking about the tenor who commissioned them, Gustav Walter.

Walter was born in Bohemia in 1834; he began studying violin as a child at the Vienna Conservatory, but when the time came to study for a living his father told him that was enough music, he had to dedicate himself to something serious. And so the boy studied engineering. Not that I have anything against engineering, but anyway. Gustav worked as an engineer, but not for long; in his free time he sang in an amateur vocal quartet, and it was there that a singing teacher discovered him; the boy went back to the conservatory and in 1855 made his debut at an opera house in Brno. The following year, at twenty-two, he made his debut at the Vienna Opera, where he sang until 1887. During those years he performed ninety-two different roles in around 2,500 performances (which works out to about eighty performances a year).

He seems to have been a great Mozart interpreter; he sang the role of Don Ottavio at the inauguration of the new Vienna Opera House in 1869 and that of Belmonte at the opening of the main hall of the Musikverein; in 1891, when the centenary of Mozart's death was being commemorated, the Salzburg Festival invited him to take part in the tribute. Walter was also recognised as a great Wagnerian, and one of his most celebrated roles was Lohengrin, which he premiered in Vienna in 1861. And I can't help ending this summary of his operatic achievements with the Vienna premiere of Schubert's Alfonso und Estrella, in which he sang the role of Alfonso.

In parallel, he also built a career as a Lieder singer, something quite unusual at the time. He devoted himself to it intensively after leaving the Vienna Opera, touring all over Europe (he was adored in England) but there are notable moments before that too: in 1870, for instance, he sang at the first public performance of Brahms's Liebesliederwalzer, with the composer and Clara Schumann at the piano, and he gave the premiere of other songs by his friend, such as Feldseinsamkeit. I mention this Lied because a recording of it survives; if you want to hear how it sounded performed by someone close to Brahms, follow this link and bear in mind that Walter was seventy years old and was most likely singing with his head stuck into the horn of the phonograph; of the pianist, who can be heard far, very far away, we have no information.

It was while he was still active as an opera singer that he commissioned the Gypsy Songs from Dvořák. And we come back to the language obstacle I mentioned last week: the tenor, Bohemian like the composer, asked him to write the songs in German, even though the original poems were in Czech. Walter wanted to sing them in Vienna, and in that context everyone expected them to be in German; the idea of a different country with a different language didn't enter the Viennese mind, which, at best, regarded the other languages spoken in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as fit only for the lower classes and therefore irrelevant.

But there is more: it is very likely that Walter did not speak Czech, because although he was Bohemian, he was from Bílina, in the Sudetenland, a region where German had been the native language since the Middle Ages. So the tenor sang the songs in German, as he wished. At least the first and the third, which he premiered in February 1884; I have been unable to find any information about the premiere of the complete cycle.

Despite the origins of the songs, it is unusual for a tenor to sing them. I have heard them in recital from sopranos, mezzo-sopranos and baritones, but never from a tenor, and recordings are not plentiful either. Fortunately there are two very recommendable ones: that of Peter Schreier and Marián Lapšanský (in German) and that of Pavol Breslik and Robert Pechanec (in Czech), which is the one we listened to last week and will listen to again today.

Our song will be THE song — the fourth in the cycle, Když mne stará matka [When My Old Mother]. The only one that has taken on a life of its own, a song that a great many people know without knowing exactly where it comes from, and one that would rank very highly on any list of encores (to be precise, it is the German version, Als die alte Mutter, that would top that list).

It is a beautiful song built on a poem that says a great deal in just four lines. Too often, especially when sung as an encore, performers come dangerously close to sentimentality, but listen to the version I am proposing, and tell me if it isn't a beautiful song. And afterwards, if you have a few more minutes, listen to the complete cycle.