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Opera Today, 18 Feb 2018 |
Mark Berry |
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Wolf: Italienisches Liederbuch, London, 16. Februar 2018 |
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Hugo Wolf, Italienisches Liederbuch
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Nationality is a complicated thing at the best of times. (At the worst of times: well, none of us needs reminding about that.) What, if anything, might it mean for Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook? Almost whatever you want it to mean, or not to mean. |
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Wolf, one might say, was an Austrian composer, which is or at least was
certainly to say also a German composer; yet he was born in Windischgrätz,
now Slovenj Gradec. Both names for what was long a Styrian town refer to the
Slovene or Wendish Graz, to distinguish it from the larger Graz. And so on,
and so forth. Mitteleuropaïsch is more than a collection of disparate
identities; it is an identity in itself. It certainly was in the Austrian
Empire in which Wolf was born, and it certainly was in the Dual Monarchy in
which he grew up. Moreover, northern Italy had long been part, to varying
extents, and depending on who was, of that identity too. So too, however,
had a romanticised German idea of ‘Italy’, of the Mediterranean, of the
South. Look to Goethe and Liszt, for instance - or to Paul Heyse’s selection
and translations of songs, as set by Wolf (not greatly, or indeed at all, to
Heyse’s pleasure).
What one can say is that this idealised ‘Italy’,
Tuscan rispetti and Venetian vilote could only have come from without the
Italian lands. If ‘German’ constitutes at least as multifarious a multitude
of sins as ‘Italian’, these songs remain very much a German evocation of
lightness, of sunlight, of serenades, of a ‘love’ that is rarely, if ever
that of German Romanticism, although it may well be viewed through that
prism. All three performers at this Barbican recital understood that, I
think: both intuitively and intellectually. At any rate, the tricky balance
between Italian ‘light’, in more than one sense, and German ‘prism’ seemed
almost effortlessly communicated - however much art had been required to
convey such an impression.
The songbook is not a song-cycle, so to
speak of ‘reordering’ is perhaps slightly misleading. At any rate, the
ordering selected made good sense, grouping the book’s forty-six little
songs into four groups, which, if not exactly narratives of their own, made
sense as scenes or, if you will, scenas. One made connections as and when
one wished; nothing was forced, much as in the music and the performances
themselves. Diana Damrau and Jonas Kaufmann opted, boldly yet not too
boldly, for a staginess alive to the humour, or at least to the potential
for humour without sending anything up or otherwise trying to turn the songs
into something they are not. Helmut Deutsch, in general the straight man,
perhaps had the ultimate moment of humour, in his piano evocation of a
hapless violinist (‘Wie lange schon war immer mien Verlangen), Damrau having
ambiguously prepared the way, at least in retrospect, with a lightly
wienerisch account. Deutsch provided an excellent sense of structure
throughout: non-interventionist perhaps, but none the worse for that. Damrau
and Kaufmann, after all, were intended to be the ‘stars’ here.
In
general, but only in general, Damrau’s performances - roughly alternating,
yet with a few exceptions - were knowing, whilst Kaufmann’s were lovelorn.
Such is the order of things in this ‘German Italy’. Metaphysics, when they
reared their head - more in Wolf than in Heyse - tended to be the tenor’s.
Was he right to make relatively little of them? I am not sure that right or
wrong makes much sense here. Perhaps it is all, or mostly, in inverted
commas anyway. There were a few occasions when I found Kaufmann, especially
during the first half, somewhat generalised, but such generality remains a
very superior form: more baritonal still than I can recall having heard him,
yet with an ardent, show-stopping tenor, even upper-case Tenor, that puts
one in mind, just in time, of his Walther (‘Ihr seid die Allerschönste’) or
his Bacchus (‘Nicht länger kann ich singen’). And Damrau was perfectly
capable of responding, of singing about his singing, as for instance, in
‘Mein Liebster singt am Haus’, to which Kaufmann’s ‘Ein Ständchen Euch zu
bringen’ came as the perfect response, and so on. Piano and voice together
in the latter song conveyed to near perfection the shallow yet genuine
sexual impetuosity of youth. (Or is that just what older people think?) The
lightness of a wastrel’s self-pity in ‘O wüsstest du, wie viel ich
deinetwegen,’ was likewise finely judged. So too was the cruelty of his
beloved in ‘Du denkst mit einem Fädchen’.
Yet, as the two archetypes,
stereotypes, call them what you will, drew closer towards the end of the
first half, there was genuine affection too, or so one thought. The rocking
piano in ‘Nun lass uns Frieden schliessen’ suggested, without unnecessary
underlining, a peace perhaps all the more interesting, or at least
characteristic, for its lack of interest in passing all understanding. For,
as that half had climaxed with an acknowledged role for Wolf’s Lisztian
Romantic inheritance, so the piano harmonies of the second half took up from
that half-destination, taking us somewhere new, briefly darker (the austere
Doppelgänger flirtation of ‘Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschweiegen’) and
ultimately, once again, ‘lighter’, yet perhaps never truly ‘light’.
Sweetness of death (‘Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder’)
intervened, yet was it but an act, the commedia dell’arte perhaps, or, as
the Marschallin would soon have it, ‘eine wienerische Maskerad[e]’.
Increasingly, neither party wished truly to resist, whilst making great play
of doing so: on stage as well as in music. An air of Straussian
sophistication became more marked, without ever shading into mere cynicism.
If the ‘girl’ were always going to win, that was as it ‘should’ be. There
were enough qualifications, or potential alternative paths and readings,
though, to make one wonder. And then to wonder - ‘lightly’ or no - why one
was wondering at all.
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