According to Wikipedia, the term "midlife crisis" was coined in 1965 and refers to "a time where adults come to realize their own mortality and how much time is left in their life". Almost fifty years later, I don't think this round figure, 40 years, has the same connotations; if "an 35-year-old” can still benefit from young people’s discounts, it’s hardly plausible that five years later he’ll be facing an existential crisis. Or perhaps he will, who knows.
This is the 4th post of the series about "Wilhelm Meister's songs", that's to say, the songs composed upon Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. If you missed the previous posts please pull the thread here.
Wagner was a Lieder composer in his youth, he wrote, for instance, the Seven Pieces for Goethe's Faust or Der Tannenbaum. A few years later, during his first stay in Paris (1839-1842), Wagner composed a handful of songs in French, among which one excels, perhaps the best Wagner's Lieder, apart from, of course, the Wesendonck-Lieder.
"Britten wrote these songs during his three-year stay in America with Peter Pears, the tenor who was his partner and muse. But they were premiered in London, at the Wigmore Hall, in 1942. A set of complicated poems in Renaissance Italian by Michelangelo, they are intensely erotic and homosexual in their imagery. The idea that these two men, who were already pretty unpopular for being pacifists, came back to Britain and got up on stage and performed these songs is extraordinary. I don't think people quite realised what was happening because the songs were in Italian." (The road to perfection: Ian Bostridge's best of Benjamin Britten)
Next Tuesday, November 19th, is Schubert’s death anniversary; as you all know, the apple of my eye. One year ago I gave you five reasons to love Schubert; today I would like to give you one more reason, a Lied that I've been leaving aside for months waiting for an opportunity like this. I didn't choose it because it was among my favourite, I’ve got dozens of favourite Schubert's songs; I did it because there's a word that comes to my mind every time I listen to it which is elegance. Schubert's music is not characterized by its lack of delicacy, but here I'm talking about… daring elegance.
