This week I'm (more or less) on holiday, so I'm posting a very brief Christmas post, the second one this season. Just a few words to talk you about a little, tender, song: one of the Trois chants de Noël by the Swiss composer Frank Martin, his first song here on Liederabend.

 

A few people have recently told to me that despite Christmas is upon us, they weren't fully aware of it: neither home decorating nor gifts, nor meals thought... We're living hard times, to say the least, and the spirit of Christmas is downhearted. That is why I thought of one of those balm-songs for the first of the three posts of this season, a wonderful song by Francis Poulenc, Priez pour paix.

The text was published at Le Figaro on 29 September 1938, when Europe was fearing a new war, only twenty years after the end of that terrible conflict that had bled the continent. Poulenc immediately wrote his mélodie: "I have tried in this mélodie to give an impression of fervour and above all, of humility, which for me its the [...]

 

Two weeks ago, I told you that Die Stadt could give us a clue about the music we missed due to Schubert’s early death. Back then, I told you it was a strange and fascinating song, just that. Not even the poet, Heine, or the performers, Thomas Quasthoff and Justus Zeyen. That article was already long enough to add even one or two more paragraphs and I thought I'd rather tell you more about the song in another post.

When people talk about what Franz Grillparzer called Schubert's "fairer hopes", that music he couldn’t write, we usually refer to the modernity of some of the works he wrote during his last year, such as the three piano sonatas or Heine's songs. We could add some other ones written before which anticipate some decades other [...].

 

"O is for orchestra? But you shared just a few songs with orchestra!" Well, that's the point. I realized when I chose the letter, and thought that our alphabetalphabet would give me a chance for self-examination. To begin with, how many different kinds of songs with orchestra are there? Let's see.

There are orchestral songs, without piano version (as far as I know). So my only options are to share them and not to share them. Of course, I share them, but, in fact, there aren't so many... For example, we listened to one of the Ernest Bloch's Poèmes d'Automne, or Richard Strauss' Hymnus. Then we have the songs with two versions simultaneously published, with piano and with orchestral accompaniment; That meaning mostly Mahler [...]

 

Little is known about the relationship between Schubert and Wagner. Over the years, the apple of my eyes learnt to overcome his shyness to some extent, but Wagner’s overwhelming personality was a tough test for him. They might have met several times; as I said last week, maybe Schubert also attended that 1863 meeting where Brahms and Wagner were first introduced, although they didn’t become friends, they kept in mutual respect and admiration. Schubert gave opera up very early, demotivated by the cold reception his works have. Despite being told that he only needed a good libretto, he suspected that the main problem was another: he used to compose German opera, while the audience wanted Italian opera (and then he smiled, remembering his good master Salieri). No doubt many Italian operas with absurd libretti were really successful in Vienna! So, after his [...]