Robert Schumann – Liederkreis, Op. 39 (1840)

I’ve loved Schumann’s Dichterliebe (also 1840) ever since I first heard it during my sophomore year of college.  The easiest way for me to convey why is with an anecdote.  A couple of weeks ago, I read an article by W.H. Auden for a class I’m taking on contemporary opera.  Part of Auden’s argument was that emotional ambiguity is impossible in music because “whatever is sung is the case” — that is, because the emotional impact of music is so direct and immediate that listeners can’t take a distanced or critical approach to it.  I can hardly even express how wrong I think this position is.  Not only is emotional ambiguity possible in music, but it’s one of the things I value most in a piece.  And when I raised that point to one of my classmates, his immediate reaction was:  ”Yeah, hasn’t he heard ‘Ich grolle nicht’?” — “Ich grolle nicht” being, of course, one of the songs from Dichterliebe.  And pretty much every song in the cycle is like that:  perfectly balanced between tranquility and melancholy, or between ecstasy and heartbreak.  ”Smiling through tears,” as the professor who introduced me to it would say.

I got to know the piece through the recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel.  The other piece on that CD is the Op. 39 Liederkreis (I’m specifying the opus number because there’s another song cycle with the same title — which just means “song cycle” — that was published as Op. 24).  I remember starting to listen to it once, finding it much less evocative than Dichterliebe, turning it off, and then forgetting about it.  But last week my composition teacher recommended that I check out the song “Zwielicht” (“Twilight”) as a possible model for a piece I’m working on, so I figured it was time to give the whole cycle another listen.

(Aside:  I’m writing this in my office at school, and someone is playing “Im wonderschönen Monat Mai” (“In the Wonderfully Beautiful Month of May”), the first song from Dichterliebe, in the next room!)

This time, too, my first impression was that Liederkreis is less emotionally sophisticated than its companion.  The first few songs in particular seem very straightforward — beautiful, to be sure, but lacking the sense of mystery that draws me to Romantic lieder.  But things get stranger later in the cycle.  Although the poems, taken from Joseph von Eichendorff’s novel Premonition and Present (1815), don’t add up to a clear narrative, themes begin to emerge.  The narrator repeatedly associates himself with birds, makes references to traveling in a foreign land, and implies that there is something sad or sinister about the natural world.  Most strikingly, Eichendorff repeatedly associates marriage with pain.  At the end of “Auf einer Burg” (“In a Castle”), a wedding procession passes by, the bride inexplicably weeping.  In “Im Walde” (“In the Woods”), the narrator again sees a wedding procession, and when it has passed, it leaves behind an eerie nighttime landscape that makes the narrator shudder “im Herzensgrunde,” literally “in the root of his heart.”  By the end of the piece, the third song, “Waldgespräch” (“Forest Conversation”), seems to have taken on a new meaning.  It initially comes across as a fragment of a  fairy tale, the kind of thing everyone in Germany was obsessed with in the first half of the 19th century:  the narrator encounters the witch Lorelei in the forest and she lays a curse on him:  ”You will never again leave these woods!”  But she also says that her heart has been broken by the treachery and cunning of men.  Is the image of the weeping bride an echo of Lorelei’s pain?  Do the cycle’s numerous references to foreign lands mean that the protagonist is lost in the forest the whole time, that the curse lasts for the entire cycle?  Is that why, in “In der Fremde” (“In a Strange Land”), his beloved is dead?  Is that why, in “Frühlingsnacht” (“Spring Night”), he weeps with joy when the moon, stars, trees and nightingales murmur, “She is yours, she is yours?”  Has Lorelei sentenced him to an incomprehensible dream-world as a punishment for the crimes of his sex?

The music also becomes more ambiguous as the piece goes on.  In the later songs, there’s often a direct contradiction between the emotional content of the text and that of the music.  When the text of “Im Walde” moves from wedding to strange silent landscape, for example, the music registers the change only with brief ritardandi, while its harmonic language remains cheerful;  when the narrator sings about shuddering in the root of his heart, there’s only a single chromatic note, a C natural in E major, to hint at the pain he’s feeling.  ”In der Fremde” is the other way around, or seems to be at first:  a poem about the mysterious beauty of nature is given a rapid minor-mode setting full of nervous grace notes.  It’s only at the end, when it’s revealed that the narrator’s beloved is dead, that the song’s tone makes sense.  And “Wehmut” (“Melancholy”) is actually about this sort of emotional layering:  with utter tranquility, the narrator sings, “Then all hearts listen and everyone is glad / Yet no one feels the sorrows, the deep pain in the song.”

As for “Zwielicht,” the song that got me interested in the cycle in the first place, it’s not exactly emotionally ambiguous, but it certainly is creepy.  The narrator is consumed with dread as twilight falls, and warns the listener that you should never trust your friends or let your deer graze alone at this strange, liminal hour, because danger is waiting, and “much is lost in the night.”  The setting is spare, full of disquieting cross-relations and aching 3-2 suspensions over V chords.  At times it reminds me of the more melancholy Scarlatti sonatas, especially the one in B minor, K. 87.  At the end of the song, the word “night” is accompanied by a iv7 chord with an unusual, almost jazzy voicing:  from low to high, E-E-G-A-C-A.  The top A is doubled by the voice, but it soon moves to a G, creating a mild dissonance with the piano.  Unsettling.

Four more early electronic pieces

Richard Maxfield – Sine Music (A Swarm of Butterflies Encountered Over the Ocean) (1959).  Six minutes of bleeps and bloops.  There doesn’t seem to be any additive synthesis going on;  it’s all pure sine tones, which is to say the most colorless sound material available.  It was his first electronic piece, so I don’t want to be too harsh, but I really get nothing out of it, even with the help of an evocative title.

Luigi Nono – Omaggio a Vedova (1960).  On the other hand, this is Nono’s first electronic piece and it’s a hundred times more sophisticated than Sine Music.  Stylistically it reminds me a bit of the Evangelisti piece I wrote about in my last post, but its focus is overwhelmingly on clangorous sounds rather than floating ones;  the overall impression I get is of enormous steel machines in a giant warehouse. Particularly striking is the passage starting around 3:40, in which the sound field is overtaken by a wild, thrashing ball of filtered noise, which then sputters out into silence.  It’s certainly the most visceral moment I’ve heard in a Nono piece, though to be fair I don’t know very much of his music.  The title is a reference to the painter Emilio Vedova, who often designed sets and costumes for Nono’s operas, and I can certainly hear an affinity between these violent slashes of sound and Vedova’s violent slashes of color.  (Also, I’d really like to see some of those Vedova paintings in person!)

Kenneth Gaburo – The Wasting of Lucrecetzia (1964).  We now return from Milan to the US, specifically the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign.  If Omaggio a Vedova sounded like an otherworldly factory, The Wasting of Lucrecetzia sounds like a dance band from another planet.  As far as I can tell, the piece is be built from layers upon layers of screaming voices, drums and saxophones, sometimes played back at normal speed, but sometimes — more and more often as the piece continues — sped up to a frenetic chipmunk-squeal.  At the end some of the layers drop out, leaving the piece to conclude with a barrage of rhythmic, high-frequency, insectile buzzing.  I had no idea anything like this existed in 1964.  It sounds like an outtake from a Faust album, or a particularly experimental Olivia Tremor Control side project.

Kenneth Gaburo – Lemon Drops (1965).  I always like it when a composer tries something new in each piece.  While Lemon Drops does share The Wasting of Lucrecetzia‘s textural density and use of instrumental samples, its mood and sound world are completely different.  This time Gaburo combines layers of improvisatory atonal lines played on what sounds like a Wurlitzer with electronically generated sounds — mostly bloopy bass notes but once, just over halfway through the piece, a jarring mid-register warble that sounds like it was probably created with a Buchla synthesizer.  Despite its meandering quality and the overwhelming density it builds to by the end, it’s a surprisingly satisfying piece.  Its methods of construction are totally different, but its character reminds me of the similarly overstuffed music of Brooklyn sound-collagist Noah Creshevsky.

Four electronic pieces from the 1950s

Gottfried Michael Koenig, Klangfiguren I (1955).  The electronic music lab at Cologne’s WDR studio was only set up in 1951-2, so 1955 is still early in the history of synthesizer-based electronic music.  Surprisingly, the composers working there produced some very “musical” pieces very early on — for example, Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer’s Klangstudien I and II (1952), with their wild, reverb-drenched space-age arpeggios. Klangfiguren I, though, feels more like an exercise, like the work of someone concerned mainly with the technical possibilities of additive synthesis, tape editing and dynamic envelope shaping.  The sounds that Koenig creates must have been very fresh at the time;  their inharmonic spectra are pretty far away from anything that exists in nature, with the possible exception of churchbells.   But the piece never feels like more than the sum of its parts.  It’s just a collection of sounds, without the dynamism of Stockhausen’s stylistically similar Studie I (1953), or the eerie, greyed-out quality of his even more similar Studie II (1954).

Louis and Bebe Barron, Battle with the Invisible Monster (1956).  A short excerpt from the Forbidden Planet soundtrack.  Apparently this score caused all sorts of legal problems because the Barrons weren’t members of the Musician’s Union, with the result that they were credited with “Electronic Tonalities” rather than “Music” at the beginning of the movie.  It’s been years since I saw the movie, and I’d forgotten just how involved the score was;  in just two minutes, we have sounds that suggest futuristic machinery, alarms, vehicles and violent explosions, as well as passages that are more atmospheric than mimetic, with Theremin-like wails over clunky, plodding bass notes.  Aesthetically it’s the exact opposite of Klangfiguren I:  American-populist rather than European-esoteric, loud and in-your-face rather than restrained and cerebral, preferring chaotic maximalism over economy of means.  If you’ve read this blog at all, you can guess which one I like better.

Franco Evangelisti, Incontri di fasce sonore (1956-7).  Similar in construction to Klangfiguren I — individual sound objects floating in space, with minimal repetition and very few sustained textures — but with a much more varied timbral palette.  Here Koenig’s alien bells come up against sounds that resemble drumrolls, knife scrapes, whip cracks and clanging metal;  in fact, the title, as far as I can tell, means “Encouters of Sonic Strands.”  After a couple of listens I can’t perceive much in the way of structure (which of course doesn’t mean there isn’t any!), but it’s impressive how much he manages to make electronically generated sounds resemble musique concrète.

Vladimir Ussachevsky, Linear Contrasts (1958).  And now a work from the director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.  I was expecting it to share the European pieces’ floaty abstract quality — but despite the dry title, it’s actually closer in construction to what Louis and Bebe Barron were doing in L.A.: spooky ambient synth washes, wailing high notes over percussive, metallic grooves, and conventional dramatic elements like gradual buildups and climaxes.  It also alludes to the pitch language of acoustic instruments;  in fact, there’s a passage about two and a half minutes that sounds more like a processed piano than something generated using sine-wave oscillators.  I don’t know if the recorded sound vs. synthesized sound war ever existed in the States, but considering that Stockhausen put an end to it in Europe in 1956 with Gesang der Jünglinge, it seems safe to speculate that there actually is a piano in there, playing atonal melodies in the middle of a warbling thicket of noise.

Carl Maria von Weber – Clarinet Concerto #1 in F Minor, Op. 73 (1811)

This is the only Weber I’ve heard aside from some excerpts from Der Freischütz (1821) that I listened to for a college music history class.  All in all, I’d say it comes across like a competent work by a minor composer, with occasional moments of excellence and quite a bit of “OK, that’ll do.”   Like many works by minor composers, it often feels like an amalgam of elements taken from more inventive predecessors and contemporaries:  the first movement in particular could be summed up pretty neatly as a combination of Beethoven’s storminess, Mozart’s melodic language, and Schubert’s orchestration.  There are some unusual formal touches, including the fact that the movement’s most dramatic climax occurs after the recapitulation has finished (leading one commentator to conclude that it’s not actually in sonata form — a claim that I think reflects a far too reductive view of what sonata form is, one that’s not borne out by the repertoire) — but the material is generic enough that it doesn’t leave a lasting impression.

The other two movements have more to them.  The slow movement’s main theme has a typically Germanic wistfulness to it, like a Schumann character piece that’s meant to suggest a nostalgic memory of childhood.  That material is set off against two other kinds of music:  a return to the first movement’s F minor, full of Sturm und Drang but signifying nothing, and a striking chorale-like passage played by only the solo clarinet and the horns.  The chorale returns briefly at the end, but oddly, the F-minor passage happens only once.  There’s also a surprising transitional passage that links the horn chorale to the return of the main theme:  three sustained horn notes, each followed by an isolated pizzicato chord.  It sounds more like a scene change in an opera than a transition in a piece of instrumental music;  the F-minor music’s disconnection from the rest of the movement also suggests operatic, or at least narrative, thinking.

The third movement is a clownish rondo, full of Rossini-esque twiddling, sudden interruptions and deliberately clunky dancing-elephant appoggiaturas.  It’s also got a minor-mode section that unexpectedly achieves a real sense of pathos, and some surprisingly triumphant climaxes.  If there’s one thing it’s clear that Weber is good at, it’s building to a fortissimo explosion.

Hey, wait a minute.  Forgettable tragic first movement, affecting second movement, sarcastic finale… did I just listen to Schubert’s Fourth Symphony (1816)?

Ludwig van Beethoven – Cello Sonata #5 in D Major, Op. 102/2 (1815)

Well, it certainly sounds like late Beethoven.  It’s not as meaty as the late piano sonatas (1814-1822), or as profoundly bizarre and radical as the late string quartets (1823-1826), but its approach to form and mood has a lot in common with those pieces.  Some typical late-Beethoven gestures that appear in the piece:

• A moment of strange, mysterious quiet.  Specifically, in the second movement, where a lush, sensuous passage in D major is suddenly interrupted by a return to the movement’s spare opening, stripped down even further by the removal of the cello:  just simple, somber chords in D minor.

• The unexpected emergence of a long, lyrical melody over an off-kilter accompaniment texture.  Specifically, right after the passage I just described:  those simple, somber chords are offset by stately dotted-rhythm arpeggios in the cello, and eight bars later, those arpeggios are transferred to the right hand of the piano, while the left hand plays triplets.  The superimposition of rhythms gives the piano part an unsettled quality, while the cello melody floats above, undisturbed.

• A transitional passage that doesn’t clearly belong to one movement or another.  Specifically, the ascending scales, first in the cello and then in the piano, that anticipate the opening of the third movement.

• A fugue.  Specifically, the finale.  It’s an upbeat movement that reminds me somewhat of Handel (Beethoven’s favorite composer at the end of his life), but the bit where the scalar subject is reduced to isolated three-note interjections is pure Beethoven.

• Perhaps most importantly:  a first movement that just barely manages to fit within the boundaries of sonata form.  It’s not that it lacks a clear exposition, development and recapitulation, or that you can’t find first and second key areas;  it’s that it completely lacks the intense forward drive that had Beethoven had helped establish as the sonata-form norm a decade earlier.  The exposition keeps changing its mind about what it’s doing.  A dramatic opening piano flourish, a cadential formula, a decisive cello arpeggio — then a sudden shift and the music is quiet and lyrical, marked dolce.   Three bars later, the music becomes chromatic and bass-heavy, the texture reduced to almost nothing but parallel octaves;  then there’s an eruption of heroic contrapuntal music, but it’s cut off abruptly after only four bars.  Toward the end of the exposition, single bars of heroic march music are dropped into a passage that’s otherwise simple, lyrical and focused on triplets.  The development section refuses to push toward a retransition, preferring instead to spin its wheels, repeat itself, get stuck on particular harmonies and figures. And at the end of the movement, Beethoven suddenly interrupts himself, modulates from G major to Db major in a tense passage built over unceasing left-hand sixteenth note oscillation, and then gets back back by moving an entire chord up a semitone, without any voice-leading tricks to eliminate parallel fifths and octaves.

There are a few ways to perform a score like this.  You can play it with the character of a middle-period Beethoven piece and dramatize the contrasts, like Pierre Fournier and Wilhelm Kempff do;  the result is jerky and discombobulating, like an early Romantic John Zorn.   Or you can do what Adrian and Alfred Brendel do:   smooth everything into a lazy dream, like an early Romantic Debussy, so that the movement sounds not like a series of abruptly juxtaposed scenes but like someone reminiscing about times past, letting their thoughts wander from memory to memory.  My dad has been talking recently about how he feels like the late Beethoven quartets have the structure of thought, and I think you could say something similar about the first movement of this cello sonata.