the concert programme

Simon Keenlyside
Malcolm Martineau
Wednesday 18 December 2013 7.30pm, Hall
Uwe Arens
Schoenberg
Erwartung
Eisler
Spruch 1939
Unter den grünen Pfefferbäumen
In den Hügeln wird Gold gefunden
Diese Stadt hat mich belehrt
Zwei Lieder nach Worten von Pascal
Erinnerung an Eichendorff und Schumann
Verfehlte Liebe
Spruch
Britten
Songs and Proverbs of William Blake
interval 20 minutes
Wolf
Denk’ es, o Seele!
Um Mitternacht
Wie sollte ich heiter bleiben
Auf eine Christblume II
Blumengruss
Lied eines Verliebten
Schubert
Alinde, D904
Der Wanderer, D649
Herbstlied, D502
Verklärung, D59
Brahms
Verzagen, Op 72 No 4
Über die Heide, Op 86 No 4
Nachtigallen schwingen, Op 6 No 6
Simon Keenlyside baritone
Martin Martineau piano
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First the poetry, then the song
Prima la musica e poi le parole, ‘First the music
and then the words’, is the title of an 18thcentury libretto by Giambattista Casti, set to
music by Antonio Salieri and, in the 1930s,
the starting-point for Stefan Zweig when
he began work on the libretto for Richard
Strauss’s Capriccio. In Strauss’s case everyone
knows that the phrase is ironic; the words may
be the starting-point but it’s the music that
matters. (Would anyone today willingly endure
one of those long evenings when Richard
Wagner read his latest ‘poem’ to a company
of unswerving enthusiasts or an afternoon
recitation of Piave’s libretto for La traviata?)
However, when a composer turns his talents to
Lieder, mélodies or songs, can we be as certain
that it’s the music first and then the words? For
one thing, with just a handful of exceptions,
the poems that composers have chosen to
set to music were written to stand alone. And
for another it’s the writer who catches the
imagination of the musician and suggests the
music. Prima la poesia. Indeed, one of the
pleasures of a recital such as this evening’s is to
see where a writer/poet leads a musician. The
art of the song would seem to be a genuine
dialogue, rather than a struggle for artistic
supremacy between the musician and the poet.
2
That said, not all poets whose work is set to
music are great, or even good poets. And
while there are composers with tin ears when
it comes to choosing poetry, they somehow
sometimes polish dull metal into musical silver.
That’s the miracle of Schubert’s Winterreise and
of so many of Richard Strauss’s early songs.
Arnold Schoenberg
The text for Schoenberg’s Erwartung was
written by a poet who spoke for and to a
whole generation of German-speaking
composers. Richard Strauss, Reger, Zemlinsky,
Webern and Kurt Weill as well as Schoenberg
all set Richard Dehmel’s words to music.
His appeal was simple: he was radical in his
politics, a champion of workers’ rights, and
he was fiercely critical of the well-mannered
hypocrisy about human sexuality that
characterised late 19th-century German society.
Love that dared to speak its name in all shapes
and sizes was his principal song, the fulfilment
of desires which encouraged men and women
to unloose the artificial constraints of straitlaced bourgeois society. Dehmel was twice
prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy and his
collection Weib und Welt (‘Woman and World’),
published in 1896, was condemned to be burnt.
Three years later Schoenberg set Erwartung
from Weib und Welt to music, together with
two other Dehmel poems; and we shouldn’t
be surprised that the lush late Romantic style
of these songs’ music seems to anticipate
that of the wordless tone-poem Verklärte
Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler studied with Schoenberg for four
years in the early 1920s and was the first of the
composer’s disciples to adopt serialism as a way
of composing. But as a member of the German
Communist Party Eisler was also encouraged to
write music that would be readily understood
by a popular audience. In Berlin by 1925, the
composer embraced jazz and cabaret music
and his music became increasingly political –
to the evident dismay of his former teacher.
Eisler also met Bertolt Brecht in Berlin,
with whom he would collaborate for the
rest of his life, in exile in the USA during
the Second World War and then back in
East Berlin, as it became after 1945.
Unter den grünen Pfefferbäumen, Diese Stadt
hat mich belehrt and In den Hügeln wird Gold
gefunden are three of Brecht’s Hollywood
Elegies, sardonic reflections on the City of the
Angels, where ‘Paradise and hell-fire are the
same city’, written when the poet/playwright and
the composer were living in exile in Los Angeles.
If Brecht’s pungent verse repays a debt
to popular ballads the tone is entirely the
playwright’s. In Spruch – Spruch meaning
proverb – and Spruch 1939, there’s that
knowingness about the ways of the world
that fills the plays, particularly The Good
Setting Brecht’s poetry may not have been that
much of a choice for Hanns Eisler, joined as
they were at the creative hip in Germany and
then Hollywood, where both Eisler and Brecht
worked on Fritz Lang’s movie Hangmen Also
Die, for which Eisler was nominated for an
Oscar in 1944, and then back in Berlin at the
Berliner Ensemble. Yet there’s an unmistakably
Brechtian tone to both of the passages that
Eisler set from Pascal, Despite these miseries
and The only thing. However, no one can fault
this composer’s taste in setting Eichendorff’s
fragment Erinnerung an Eichendorff und
Schumann and Heine’s infinitely sad lyric about
wasted love, Verfehlte Liebe. Here the composer
is nothing if not his own man as he relishes a
sense of mordant regret present in both writers.
Programme notes
Dehmel’s feelings for man and woman in
nature and the excitement that attends erotic
anticipation (Erwartung) are condensed into
just 20 lines, with each of the five verses a
chapter in the story of a lover waiting for a
sign to enter the red villa by the sea-green
pond. There’s something almost painterly,
and Expressionist, in the poem’s eye for
colour, while the varied rhyme-scheme
only racks up the sexual excitement.
Person of Szechwan. In den finsteren Zeiten is
truly a proverb for the year that the Second
World War in Europe began. ‘In the dark
times will there also be singing? Yes, there
will also be singing about the dark times.’
Benjamin Britten
No 20th-century English composer sets
words with more respect for their sounds
and sense than Benjamin Britten. In Britten’s
hands English is no longer die Sprache ohne
Musik! Indeed, almost single-handedly he
banishes that ancient canaille that language
loses its musicality when set to music.
One of the treats to be seen at a centenary
exhibition this summer in the new Britten–Pears
Archive in Aldeburgh was the composer’s copy
of Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s tragedy
Phèdre with the composer’s annotations on the
page as he prepared the text that would become
his late cantata Phaedra. An engagement with
the text was clear, but there was also a sense
of one artist inhabiting the words of another.
So we should not be surprised that the shelves
of the Red House where Britten and Peter Pears
lived in Aldeburgh were packed with poetry
3
Nacht, since that string sextet took its cue from
another of the poems in the same collection.
books, reflecting this composer’s lifelong
love for English poetry in particular. As early
as 1935, when he was just into his twenties,
Britten had made a setting of William Blake’s
chilling account of unacknowledged rage in
A Poison Tree, while his darkly erotic version
of The Sick Rose is one of the most disturbing
movements in that early masterpiece, the
Serenade for tenor, horn and strings of 1943.
Twenty years later Britten returned to William
Blake when he began work on Songs and
Proverbs of William Blake, in which settings of
poems from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of
Experience are punctuated by epigrams from
the undated Proverbs of Hell. Blake’s full title for
the 1794 joint edition of the Songs provides us
with a more than a hint of what these poems
meant to the composer: Songs of Innocence
and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary
States of the Human Soul. We are divided
against ourselves by ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ and
constrained from personal fulfilment by custom
and practice in a society where ‘Prisons are built
with stones of Law [and] brothels with bricks of
Religion’. Blake’s identification of innocence with
childhood surely spoke to a composer whose
abiding theme is the betrayal of innocence.
At the heart – and literally so – of Songs and
Proverbs of William Blake is one of the most
compelling and mysterious of the poet’s lyrics,
The Tyger. ‘What immortal hand or eye, Could
frame thy fearful symmetry?’. How could a
caring creator create the tiger and the lamb?
For Blake, and perhaps Britten too, joy and
terror co-exist in creation. And if the lamb in
the poem conjures up a world of pastoral
innocence, the tiger seems to have been forged
in some divine industrial smithy. Yet next in this
cycle of songs comes the proverb ‘The tygers of
wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’!
Britten’s response to the ambiguities of Blake’s
verse is to alternate a dislocating chromaticism
with music that is tonally straightforward.
Innocence and experience written into the score,
words and music singing the same song.
4
Hugo Wolf
Hugo Wolf’s creative life was fast and furious. In
just three years, from 1888 to1891, he composed
over 200 songs that recreate the relationship
between words and music to take account of
the Wagnerian tonal revolution and thus renew
the German Lieder tradition. These songs,
with their carefully wrought introductions,
extended postludes and shifting tonality are
often music dramas in miniature. And their
‘librettists’ can be numbered among the
greatest German lyric poets of the 19th century:
Eichendorff, Mörike and, above all, Goethe.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, prodigious in his
literary achievements, attracted almost every
serious Lieder composer from Schubert to the
beginning of the last century. Goethe’s lyric
poetry seems to distil the essence of German
Humanism, blending a delight in the natural
world with searching introspection; and always
in an elegant but straightforward language
that seems made for the composer. Indeed,
Goethe himself observed that no lyric poem
was really complete until it was set to music. ‘But
then’, as he said, ‘something unique happens.’
And so it does in Blumengruss, composed
in December 1888, with Wolf building his
song around a short but persistent theme
that mirrors the lover who has stooped
tausendmal – a thousand times – to gather
flowers for a garland for the beloved which
then he has clasped a hundred thousand
times to his breast. And there’s more than a
hint of resignation at the end, suggesting that
this garland is all that he will get to hug.
Wie sollte ich heiter bleiben comes from the last
collection of poetry that Goethe worked on,
the West-östlicher Divan (‘West-Eastern Divan’),
12 books of poetry written between 1814 and
1819 which were inspired by the Persian poet
Hafez, whom Goethe had read in a translation
by Joseph von Hammer. The style of these
poems is quite different from Goethe’s earlier
work, being a mixture of arguments, parables
and religious thoughts that bring together East
and West. Wie sollte ich heiter bleiben is taken
from the ‘Book of Zuleika’ and is of thoughts of
love that the poet is finding it hard to express.
‘When she enticed me to her, There was need
of words. And my tongue faltered, So my quill
did too.’ Wolf matches the this pair of conflicting
desires in his piano part and for once there is a
happy ending to the song, at least musically.
Eduard Mörike belongs to the generation of
German poets after Goethe, although his lyrics
are often compared to the older writers. Born in
1804 he studied theology at Tübingen University
becoming a Lutheran pastor, a career that
held little charm for him. So in 1834 he retired
and devoted the remaining 41 years of his life
Um Mitternacht is one of Eduard Mörike’s
greatest poems, complete with the archRomantic imagery of mountains, rushing streams
and dark blue skies at the end of a day. So Wolf
begins his setting with a rocking lullaby theme
that somehow slides into sleep in the postlude.
In Auf eine Christblume II, Mörike remembers
for a second time a Christmas rose that he had
come upon in a churchyard. He transplanted
it to a window box where a wind uprooted
the plant. These simple things lead the poet
to a poem on a butterfly ‘that one day over
hill and dale will shake its velvet wings in
spring nights’. But is this is a meditation on the
sleeping soul suddenly awakened? Wolf builds
his song from a two-bar cell for the piano
marked ‘very tender and throughout pp’. An
immaculate match between words and music.
Lied eines Verliebten is a lover’s song with a
twist, a tale with a sting. The lover wakes with
an aching heart before first light, envying the
carefree fisherman or the miller’s lad still asleep
before their happy working day begins. The
lover tosses and turns in Wolf’s part for the
pianist’s left hand. But the chromatic tonality
suggests that there’s self-pity in this lover’s
lament. As Goethe said, something unique has
happened when Mörike’s words meet music.
Franz Schubert
Schubert is the stone on which all German
Lieder composers have stubbed their toes
since his death in 1828 at the age of just 31.
And you could argue that the choices of poets
made by Schubert would influence the next two
generations of German composers. If Schubert
selected poetry that he admired, he also set
lyrics that he liked, including the work of his
friends. The poem Alinde was written by Johann
Programme notes
Friedrich Rochlitz, a poet, novelist and journalist
from Leipzig, who met Schubert in Vienna in
1822 and who became an enthusiastic supporter
of the composer’s music. Schubert repaid the
compliment and dedicated the completed
song to Rochlitz. If the poem is conventional,
the musical setting is elegantly well matched.
This is a gift of friendship that might be read
and sung in any salon with artistic ambitions.
Friedrich Schlegel is one of the founding fathers
of German Romanticism, a literary critic,
philosopher, philologist and poet, who had a
profound effect on Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and thus upon English Romanticism. Together
with his wife Dorothea – the daughter of the
philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and aunt of
Felix Mendelssohn – and his younger brother
Wilhelm – he established the cultural precedents
for Romanticism and many of its themes and
topics. It was Friedrich Schlegel who declared
that ‘Romantic poetry is a progressive universal
poetry’.
Der Wanderer, not to be confused with the
song with the same title that provided the
chief theme for Schubert’s Wanderer-Fantasie,
is the introductory poem to the second
part of Schlegel’s collection Abendröte.
And if Schubert’s other poet’s ‘wanderers’
are Romantic outsiders, at odds with their
surroundings – as in Winterreise – Schlegel’s
traveller is at one with the world. Here, travelling
is a kind of freedom and not an escape
from heavy days and endless troubles.
Herbstlied was composed in 1816 but had to
wait until 1872 for publication. It is the bestknown of the settings that the composer made
of poems by Johann Gaudenz Freiherr von
Salis-Seewis, a soldier with literary ambitions.
Salis-Seewis served in the Swiss Guards in Paris
until the Revolution in 1789, and is said to have
been a particular favourite of Marie-Antoinette.
A Wanderjahr through Germany that included
meetings with Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the
poet Wieland in Weimar turned his mind to an
early Romantic style of writing which combined
a deep appreciation of nature with a love of
Heimat. His poetry has an elegiac quality that
surely appealed to Schubert. Autumn is indeed
a time for melancholy, ‘when red leaves fall,
grey mists surge [and] the wind blows colder.’
It was Johann Gottfried Herder himself who
provided the text for Schubert’s Verklärung. But
5
to literature. His language is plain and simple
and his humour down-to-earth. Yet if Mörike’s
poetry seems genial, sometimes bucolic, there
is also a dark edge to many of his poems,
reminding the reader of a deep wound that
seems to have been caused by his falling in love
and being rejected by Maria Mayer, a barmaid
who belonged to an itinerant religious sect
whom he had met at the age of 19. So Denk’
es, o Seele! invites us to think on the rose bush
that will grow on our grave and the two black
horses that will pull our hearse. A poem that
shines in its modesty which Wolf, ever sensitive
to the nuances of a text, matches with silences.
the words are not his. The text is a translation
of Alexander Pope’s poem Transfiguration,
which ends with the celebrated couplet ‘O
grave, where is thy victory? O death, where is
thy sting?’ taken from St Paul’s First Letter to the
Corinthians and which haunted 19th-century
hymn writers. It was from the philosopher
Immanuel Kant, who had taught Herder, that
the younger German writer had acquired his
love of Pope. We can only guess at Schubert’s
reaction to the source of the poem he set as
Verklärung, but its sentiment – exaltation at the
defeat of death – must surely have appealed to
a composer so conscious of his own mortality.
Johannes Brahms
Brahms does not always feel like a natural
songwriter, despite the fact that he composed
over 200 Lieder. There’s little sense of his songs
spilling out from his imagination as they did
for his mentor Schumann. There’s something
hard-earned about this composer’s songs, they
can feel ‘worked’ rather than spontaneous. And
there’s the all-pervading feeling of autumn in
many of them. That may perhaps say something
generally about Brahms as a composer
although Schoenberg would describe him as
the ‘conservative revolutionary’. However, in
no way does it diminish the quality of his best
songs, in which the piano part is invariably at the
service of the poem. And Brahms undoubtedly
had an ear for poetry from his earliest years.
6
Verzagen (‘Despondency’) was published as one
of a group of four songs in 1877. This gloomy
poem was by the art historian Karl Lemcke who,
after studying and teaching at Heidelberg,
moved to Munich in 1871 where he became a
member of the circle of writers known as Die
Krokodile, taking the nickname ‘Hyena’. Unlike
others of their German generation, notably
the Junges Deutschland Group, the Crocodiles
abjured politics in their poetry. For them it was a
holy art that took its cue from classical, medieval
and even Oriental models. And by the time
Lemcke arrived in Munich there was an odour
of late-Romantic angst in the group’s work
that would surely have appealed to the stoic in
Brahms. As Lemcke writes: ‘Du ungestümes Herz
sei still Und gib dich doch zur Ruh’ (You, unruly
heart, be silent, And surrender yourself to rest).
In Über die Heide, published as one of a set of
six songs in 1882, Brahms returned to his roots
in Northern Germany. Theodor Storm was one
of the most prominent 19th-century German
Realist writers. He was also a child of the same
North Sea plain that had nurtured a young
Brahms, and over the course of 50 novellas and
his poetry, Storm celebrates the austere beauty
of this landscape, the mud flats that seem to
stretch for ever, the sea that constantly threatens
and the hard-won pastures. It is the simplicity of
this vision that makes Über die Heide (‘Over the
heath’), such a fine poem and Brahms rises to
the challenge of setting it to music magnificently.
Nachtigallen schwingen is among the earliest
of Brahms’s songs, from a group of six that
were published in 1853 when the composer
was just 20. Steeped in Romantic writers such
as Eichendorff, Heine and E T A Hoffmann, he
would have also have read August Heinrich
Hoffmann, one of the most popular German
poets in the middle years of the 19th century.
Progressive in his politics, Hoffmann wrote poetry
that can be read as a harbinger of the 1848
revolutions, and indeed it was he who wrote
the words for what has become the German
national anthem. But what his contemporaries
admired in his poetry was the plain and
unadorned manner in which he gave expression
to the ‘passions and aspirations of daily life’.
These virtues are present in Nachtigallen
schwingen. These nightingales are no figment
of the Romantic poet’s overheated imagination,
no ‘immortal birds … not born for death’, but
a simple natural miracle. And by the end of
Brahms’s song, words are just about superfluous:
the music has worked its own magic with them.
Programme note © Christopher Cook
Texts
Texts
Arnold Schoenberg
Erwartung, Op. 2 No. 1
Aus dem meergrünen Teiche
Neben der roten Villa
Unter der toten Eiche
Scheint der Mond.
Expectation
From the sea-green pond
near the red villa
beneath the dead oak
shines the moon.
Wo ihr dunkles Abbild
Durch das Wasser greift,
Steht ein Mann und streift
Einen Ring von seiner Hand.
Where her dark reflection
stretches out through the water
stands a man and takes
a ring from his hand.
Drei Opale blinken;
Durch die bleichen Steine
Schwimmen rot und grüne
Funken und versinken.
Three opals glitter;
through the pale stones
swim red and green
sparks and sink.
Und er küsst sie, und
Seine Augen leuchten
Wie der meergrüne Grund:
Ein Fenster tut sich auf.
And he kisses her,
and his eyes shine
like the sea-green ground:
a window is opened.
Aus der roten Villa
Neben der toten Eiche
Winkt ihm eine bleiche
Frauenhand.
From the red villa
near the dead oak
a lady’s hand
waves to him
Richard Dehmel (1863–1920)
Spruch 1939
In den finsteren Zeiten,
wird da noch gesungen werden?
Ja! Da wird gesungen werden
von den finsteren Zeiten.
Proverb 1939
In the dark times
will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
about the dark times.
Unter den grünen Pfefferbäumen
Unter den grünen Pfefferbaümen
Gehen die Musiker auf den Strich, zwei und zwei
Mit den Schreibern. Bach
Hat ein Strichquartett im Täschen. Dante schwenkt
Den dürren Hintern.
Underneath the green pepper trees
Underneath the green pepper trees, daily
the composers are on the beat, two by two
with the writers. Bach
writes concertos for the strumpet. Dante wriggles
his shrivelled arsehole.
In den Hügeln wird Gold gefunden
In den Hügeln wird Gold gefunden.
An der Küste findet man Öl.
In the hills are the gold prospectors
In the hills are the gold prospectors.
By the sea you come upon oil.
7
Hanns Eisler
Grössere Vermögen
Bringen die Träume vom Glück,
Die man hier auf Zelluloid schreibt.
Greater fortunes far
are won from those dreams of happiness
which are kept on celluloid spools.
Diese Stadt hat mich belehrt
Diese Stadt Hollywood hat mich belehrt
Paradies und Hölle können eine Stadt sein.
Für die Mittellosen
Ist das Paradies die Hölle.
This city has made me realise
This city of Hollywood has made me realise:
Paradise and hell-fire are the same city.
For the unsuccessful
Paradise itself serves as hell-fire.
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
Translations by John Willett
Zwei Lieder nach Worten von Pascal
Despite these miseries
Despite these miseries, man wishes to be happy,
and only wishes to be happy, and cannot wish not
to be so. But how will he set about it? To be happy
he would have to make himself immortal. But,
not being able to do so, it has occurred to him to
prevent himself from thinking of death.
The only thing
The only thing which consoles us for our miseries
is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our
miseries. For it is this which principally hinders
us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which
makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this
we should be in a state of weariness, and this
weariness would spur us to seek a more solid
means of escaping from it. But diversions amuse
us and lead us unconsciously to death.
8
Blaise Pascal (1623–62)
Erinnerung an Eichendorff und Schumann
Aus der Heimat hinter den Blitzen rot,
Da kommen die Wolken her.
Aber Vater und Mutter sind lange tot,
Es kennt mich dort niemand mehr.
Souvenir of Eichendorff and Schumann
From my homeland, beyond those streaks of red,
that is where all the clouds appear.
But my mother and father are long since dead
and nobody knows me here.
Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857)
Translation by John Willett
Verfehlte Liebe
Zuweilen dünkt es mich, als trübe
Geheime Sehnsucht deinen Blick.
Ich kenn es wohl, dein Missgeschick.
Verfehltes Leben, verfehlte Liebe.
Wasted love
Sometimes it seems to me that
a secret longing dimmed your glance.
I know your sorrow well.
Wasted life, wasted love.
Du blickst so traurig, wiedergeben
Kann ich dir nicht die Jugendzeit.
Unheilbar ist dein Herzleid:
Verfehlte Liebe, verfehlte Leben.
You look so sad, I cannot
give you back your youth.
Incurable is your pain:
wasted love, wasted life.
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856)
Translation by Lindsay Craig
Proverb
This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know.
At least I’m still alive, as you may see.
I’m like the man who took a brick to show
how beautiful his house used once to be.
Bertolt Brecht
Translation by John Willett
Texts
Spruch
Dies ist nun alles und ist nicht genug.
Doch sagt es euch vielleicht, ich bin noch da.
Dem gleich ich, der den Backstein mit sich trug
Der Welt zu zeigen, wie sein Haus aussah.
Benjamin Britten
Songs and Proverbs of William Blake
Proverb I
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
London
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
Proverb II
Prisons are built with stones of Law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.
9
The Chimney-Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying weep weep in notes of woe!
Where are thy father and mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winter’s snow
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy and dance and sing
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and his Priest
and King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
Proverb III
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole,
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.
Proverb IV
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the
evening. Sleep in the night.
The Tyger
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
10
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Proverb V
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of
instruction.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would
become wise.
If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
The Fly
Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush’d away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink and sing:
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
Proverb VI
The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock; but
of wisdom, no clock can measure.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
Texts
Ah, Sun-flower
Ah, Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime,
Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
Proverb VII
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
Every Night and every Morn
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro’ the Eye,
Which was Born in a Night, to perish in a Night,
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears and God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.
William Blake (1757–1827)
11
interval: 20 minutes
Hugo Wolf
Mörike Lieder: No 39 Denk’ es, o Seele!
Ein Tännlein grünet wo,
Wer weiss, im Walde,
Ein Rosenstrauch, wer sagt,
In welchem Garten?
Sie sind erlesen schon,
Denk’ es, o Seele,
Auf deinem Grab zu wurzeln
Und zu wachsen.
Zwei schwarze Rösslein weiden
Auf der Wiese,
Sie kehren heim zur Stadt
In muntern Sprüngen.
Sie werden schrittweis gehn
Mit deiner Leiche;
Vielleicht, vielleicht noch eh
An ihren Hufen
Das Eisen los wird,
Das ich blitzen sehe!
Consider, O soul
A little fir-tree flourishes,
who knows where, in the wood;
a rosebush, who can tell
in what garden?
They are selected already,
consider, O soul,
to take root and grow
on your grave.
Two young black horses graze
on the pasture,
they return back to town
with lively leaps.
They will go step by step
with your corpse;
perhaps, perhaps even before
on their hooves
the shoe gets loose,
that I can see sparkle.
Translation by Jakob Kellner
12
No 19 Um Mitternacht
Gelassen stieg die Nacht ans Land,
Lehnt träumend an der Berge Wand,
Ihr Auge sieht die goldne Waage nun
Der Zeit in gleichen Schalen stille ruhn;
Und kecker rauschen die Quellen hervor,
Sie singen der Mutter, der Nacht, ins Ohr
Vom Tage, vom heute gewesenen Tage.
At midnight
The night ascends calmly over the land,
leaning dreamily against the
wall of the mountain,
its eyes now resting on the golden scales
of time, in a similar poise of quiet peace;
and boldly murmur the springs,
singing to Mother Night, in her ear,
of the day that was today.
Das uralt alte Schlummerlied,
Sie achtets nicht, sie ist es müd;
Ihr klingt des Himmels Bläue süsser noch,
Der flüchtgen Stunden gleichgeschwungnes Joch.
Doch immer behalten die Quellen das Wort,
Es singen die Wasser im Schlafe noch fort
Vom Tage, vom heute gewesenen Tage.
To the ancient lullaby
she pays no attention; she is weary.
To her, the blue heaven sounds sweeter,
the curved yoke of fleeing hours.
Yet the springs keep murmuring,
and the water keeps singing in slumber
of the day that was today.
Eduard Mörike (1804–75)
Translation by Emily Ezust
Wie sollte ich heiter bleiben
Wie sollte ich heiter bleiben,
Entfernt von Tag und Licht?
Nun aber will ich schreiben,
Und trinken mag ich nicht.
How could I remain cheerful
How could I remain cheerful,
when parted from day and light?
But now I shall write,
and do not wish to drink.
Wenn sie mich an sich lockte,
War Rede nicht im Brauch,
Und wie die Zunge stockte,
So stockt die Feder auch.
When she enticed me to her,
there was no need of words;
and as my tongue faltered,
so my quill did too.
But come, dear Saki,
fill my cup in silence!
I’ve only to say: ‘Remember!’
And my meaning is clear.
Texts
Nur zu! geliebter Schenke,
Den Becher fülle still!
Ich sage nur: Gedenke!
Schon weiss man, was ich will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)
Mörike Lieder: No 21 Auf eine Christblume II
Im Winterboden schläft, ein Blumenkeim,
Der Schmetterling, der einst um Busch und Hügel
In Frühlingsnächten wiegt den samtnen Flügel;
Nie soll er kosten deinen Honigseim.
Wer aber weiss, ob nicht sein zarter Geist,
Wenn jede Zier des Sommers hingesunken,
Dereinst, von deinem leisen Dufte trunken,
Mir unsichtbar, dich blühende umkreist?
On a Christmas rose II
There sleeps within the wintry ground,
flower-seed-like,
The butterfly that one day over hill and dale
will flutter its velvet wings in spring nights.
Never shall it taste your viscous honey.
But who knows if perhaps its gentle ghost,
when summer’s loveliness has faded,
Might some day, dizzy with your faint fragrance,
circle, unseen by me, around you as you flower?
Eduard Mörike
Blumengruss
Der Strauss, den ich gepflücket,
Grüsse dich vieltausendmal!
Ich habe mich oft gebücket,
Ach, wohl eintausendmal,
Und ihn ans Herz gedrücket
Wie hunderttausendmal!
Flower greeting
May this garland I have gathered
greet you many thousand times!
I have often stooped down,
ah, at least a thousand times,
and pressed it to my heart
something like a hundred thousand!
Mörike Lieder: No 43 Lied eines Verliebten
In aller Früh, ach, lang vor Tag,
Weckt mich mein Herz, an dich zu denken,
Da doch gesunde Jugend schlafen mag.
Hell ist mein Aug um Mitternacht,
Heller als frühe Morgenglocken:
Wann hättst du je am Tage mein gedacht?
Lover’s song
At first dawn, ah! long before day,
my heart wakes me to think of you,
when healthy lads still are sleeping.
My eyes are bright at midnight,
brighter than early morning bells:
when did you ever think of me by day?
Wär ich ein Fischer, stünd ich auf,
Trüge mein Netz hinab zum Flusse,
Trüg herzlich froh die Fische zum Verkauf.
If I were a fisherman, I’d get up,
carry my net down to the river,
happily carry the fish to market.
In der Mühle, bei Licht, der Mühlerknecht
Tummelt sich, alle Gänge klappern;
So rüstig Treiben wär mir eben recht!
At first light the miller’s lad
is hard at work, the machinery clatters;
such hearty work would suit me well!
Weh, aber ich! o armer Tropf!
Muss auf dem Lager mich müssig grämen,
Ein ungebärdig Mutterkind im Kopf.
But I poor wretch
must lie idly grieving on my bed,
obsessed with that unruly girl!
Eduard Mörike
Translations by Richard Stokes
13
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Franz Schubert
Alinde, D904
Die Sonne sinkt ins tiefe Meer,
Da wollte sie kommen.
Geruhig trabt der Schnitter einher,
Mir ist’s beklommen.
‘Hast, Schnitter, mein Liebchen nicht gesehn?
Alinde, Alinde!’
‘Zu Weib und Kindern muss ich gehn,
Kann nicht nach andern Dirnen sehn;
Sie warten mein unter der Linde.’
Alinde
The sun sinks into the deep ocean,
she was due to come.
Calmly the reaper walks by.
My heart is heavy.
‘Reaper, have you not seen my love?
Alinda! Alinda!’
‘I must go to my wife and children,
I cannot look for other girls.
They are waiting for me beneath the linden tree.’
Der Mond betritt die Himmelsbahn,
Noch will sie nicht kommen.
Dort legt der Fischer das Fahrzeug an,
Mir ist’s beklommen.
The moon entered its heavenly course,
she still does not come.
There a fisherman lands his boat.
My heart is heavy.
‘Hast, Fischer, mein Liebchen nicht gesehn?
Alinde, Alinde!’
‘Muss suchen, wie mir die Reusen stehn,
Hab nimmer Zeit nach Jungfern zu gehn,
Schau, welch einen Fang ich finde.’
‘Fisherman, have you not seen my love?
Alinda! Alinda!’
‘I must see how my oyster baskets are,
I never have time to chase after girls;
look what a catch I have!’
Die lichten Sterne ziehn herauf,
Noch will sie nicht kommen.
Dort eilt der Jäger in rüstigem Lauf,
Mir ist’s beklommen.
The bright stars appear,
she still does not come.
The huntsman rides swiftly along.
My heart is heavy.
‘Hast, Jäger, mein Liebchen nicht gesehn?
Alinde, Alinde!’
‘Muss nach dem bräunlichen Rehbock gehn,
Hab nimmer Lust nach Mädeln zu sehn;
Dort schleicht er im Abendwinde.’
‘Huntsman, have you not seen my love?
Alinda! Alinda!’
‘I must go after the brown roebuck,
I never care to look for girls;
there he goes in the evening breeze!’
In schwarzer Nacht steht hier der Hain,
Noch will sie nicht kommen.
Von allen Lebendgen irr ich allein,
Bang und beklommen.
The grove lies here in blackest night,
she still does not come.
I wander alone, away from all mankind,
anxious and troubled.
‘Dir, Echo, darf ich mein Leid gestehn:
Alinde, Alinde!’
‘Alinde,’ liess Echo leise herüberwehn;
Da sah ich sie mir zur Seite stehn:
‘Du suchtest so treu, nun finde!’
‘To you, Echo, I confess my sorrow:
Alinda! Alinda!’
‘Alinda’, came the soft echo;
Then I saw her at my side.
‘You searched so faithfully. Now you find me.’
14
Johann Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842)
Der Wanderer, D649
Wie deutlich des Mondes Licht
Zu mir spricht,
Mich beseelend zu der Reise:
‘Folge treu dem alten Gleise,
Wähle keine Heimat nicht.
Ew’ge Plage
Bringen sonst die schweren Tage;
The traveller
How clearly the moon’s light
speaks to me,
inspiring me on my journey:
‘Follow faithfully the old track,
choose nowhere as your home,
lest bad times
bring endless cares.
You will move on, and go forth
to other places,
lightly casting off all grief.’
Sanfte Ebb’ und hohe Flut,
Tief im Mut,
Wandr’ ich so im Dunkeln weiter,
Steige mutig, singe heiter,
Und die Welt erscheint mir gut.
Alles reine
Seh’ ich mild im Widerscheine,
Nichts verworren
In des Tages Glut verdorren:
Froh umgeben, doch alleine.
Thus, with gentle ebb and swelling flow
deep within my soul,
I walk on in the darkness.
I climb boldly, singing merrily,
and the world seems good to me.
I see all things clearly
in their gentle reflection.
Nothing is blurred
or withered in the heat of the day:
there is joy all around, yet I am alone.
Texts
Fort zu andern
Sollst du wechseln, sollst du wandern,
Leicht entfliehend jeder Klage.’
Herbstlied, D502
Bunt sind schon die Wälder,
Gelb die Stoppelfelder,
Und der Herbst beginnt.
Rote Blätter fallen,
Graue Nebel wallen,
Kühler weht der Wind.
Autumn song
The woods are already brightly coloured,
the fields of stubble yellow,
and autumn is here.
Red leaves fall,
grey mists surge,
the wind blows colder.
Wie die volle Traube
Aus dem Rebenlaube
Purpurfarbig strahlt!
Am Geländer reifen
Pfirsiche mit Streifen
Rot und weiss bemalt.
How purple shines
the plump grape
from the vine leaves!
On the espalier
peaches ripen
painted with red and white streaks.
Sieh, wie hier die Dirne
Emsig Pflaum’ und Birne
In ihr Körbchen legt;
Dort, mit leichten Schritten
Jene goldne Quitten
In den Landhof trägt!
Look how busily the maiden here
gathers plums and pears
in her basket;
look how that one there,
with light steps,
carries golden quinces to the house.
Flinke Träger springen,
Und die Mädchen singen,
Alles jubelt froh!
Bunte Bänder schweben
Zwischen hohen Reben
Auf dem Hut von Stroh.
The lads dance nimbly
and the girls sing;
all shout for joy.
Amid the tall vines
coloured ribbons flutter
on hats of straw.
Johann Gaudenz Freiherr von Salis-Seewis
(1762–1834)
Translations by Richard Wigmore
Verklärung, D59
Lebensfunke, vom Himmel entglüht,
Der sich loszuwinden müht!
Zitternd-kühn, vor Sehnen leidend,
Gern und doch mit Schmerzen scheidend –
End’, o end’ den Kampf, Natur!
Sanft ins Leben.
Transfiguration
Vital spark of heav’nly flame!
Quit, O quit this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,
O the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.
15
Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829)
Aufwärts schweben
Sanft hinschwinden lass mich nur.
Horch! mir lispeln Geister zu:
‘Schwester-Seele, komm zur Ruh!’
Ziehet was mich sanft von innen?
Was ist’s, was mir meine Sinnen
Mir den Hauch zu rauben droht?
Seele, sprich, ist das der Tod?
Hark! they whisper; angels say,
Sister Spirit, come away!
What is this absorbs me quite?
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?
Die Welt entweicht! sie ist nicht mehr!
Engel-Einklang um mich her!
Ich schweb’ im Morgenrot! –
Leiht, o leiht mir eure Schwingen:
Ihr Bruder-Geister, helft mir singen:
‘O Grab, wo ist dein Sieg?
Wo ist dein Pfeil, o Tod?
The world recedes; it disappears!
Heav’n opens on my eyes! my ears
with sounds seraphic ring!
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy victory?
O Death! where is thy sting?
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
Johannes Brahms
Fünf Gesänge, Op 72: No 4 Verzagen
Ich sitz’ am Strande der rauschenden See
Und suche dort nach Ruh’,
Ich schaue dem Treiben der Wogen
Mit dumpfer Ergebung zu.
Despondency
I sit by the shore of the raging sea
Searching there for rest,
I gaze at the waves’ motion
in numb resignation.
Die Wogen rauschen zum Strande hin,
Sie schäumen und vergeh’n,
Die Wolken, die Winde darüber,
Die kommen und verweh’n.
The waves crash on the shore,
they foam and vanish,
the clouds, the winds above,
they come and go.
Du ungestümes Herz, sei still
Und gib dich doch zur Ruh’;
Du sollst mit Winden und Wogen
Dich trösten – was weinest du?
You, unruly heart, be silent
and surrender yourself to rest;
you should find comfort
in winds and waves – why are you weeping?
Karl Lemcke (1831–1913)
Sechs Lieder, Op 86: No 4 Über die Heide
Über die Heide hallet mein Schritt;
Dumpf aus der Erde wandert es mit.
Herbst ist gekommen, Frühling ist weit,
Gab es denn einmal selige Zeit?
Over the heath
Over the heath my steps resound;
muffled sounds from the earth wander with me.
Autumn has come, Spring is far distant,
did rapture once really exist?
Brauende Nebel geisten umher,
Schwarz ist das Kraut und der Himmel so leer.
Swirling mists ghost about,
the heather is black and the sky so empty.
Wär ich nur hier nicht gegangen im Mai!
Leben und Liebe – wie flog es vorbei!
Had I never wandered here in May!
Life and love – how they flew by!
16
Theodor Storm (1817–88)
Nightingales joyfully flutter
Nightingales joyfully
flutter their feathers,
nightingales sing
their old songs,
and the flowers
wake again
at the tones and sounds
of all these songs.
Und meine Sehnsucht wird zur Nachtigall
Und fliegt in die blühende Welt hinein,
Und graft bei den Blumen überall,
Wo mag doch mein mein Blümchen sein?
And my longing becomes a nightingale
and flies out into the blossoming world,
and asks everywhere of every flower,
where might my own floweret be?
Und die Nachtigallen
Schwingen ihren Reigen
Unter Laubeshallen
wischen Blütenzweigen,
Vor den Blumen allen
Aber ich muss scheweigen,
Unter ihnen steh ich
Traurig sinnend still;
Eine Blume seh ich,
Die nicht blühen will.
And the nightingales
flutter their dances
beneath leafy arbours
among blossoming boughs,
but I must keep silent
about all the flowers,
I stand among them
sadly lost in silent thought;
I see a flower
that does not wish to bloom.
Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874)
Translations by Richard Stokes
Texts
Sechs Gesänge, Op 6:
No 6 Nachtigallen schwingen
Nachtigallen schwingen
Lustig ihr Gefieder,
Nachtigallen singen
Ihre alten Lieder,
Und die Blumen alle,
Sie erwachen wieder
Bei dem Klang und Schalle
Aller dieser Lieder.
Barbican Classical Music Podcasts
17
Stream or download our Barbican Classical Music
Podcasts for exclusive interviews with the world’s greatest
classical stars. Recent artists include Ian Bostridge, Harry
Christophers, Maxim Vengerov, Joyce DiDonato and
many more.
Available on iTunes, Soundcloud and the Barbican website
About the
performers
Uwe Arens
He will return to the Royal Opera House
(Rigoletto), the Vienna State Opera (Count
Almaviva and Rigoletto), the Bayerische
Staatsoper (Ford, Giorgio Germont, Posa, Don
Giovanni and Macbeth) and will make many
further appearances at the Metropolitan Opera.
Simon Keenlyside
Simon Keenlyside baritone
Simon Keenlyside was born in London. He made
his operatic debut at the Hamburg State Opera
as Count Almaviva (The Marriage of Figaro).
He appears in all the world’s leading opera
houses and has a particularly close association
with the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the
Bavarian and Vienna State Opera houses where
his roles include Prospero (Thomas Adès’s The
Tempest), Posa (Don Carlo), Giorgio Germont
(La traviata), Papageno (The Magic Flute)
and the title-roles in Don Giovanni, Eugene
Onegin, Pelléas et Mélisande, Wozzeck, Billy
Budd, Hamlet, Macbeth and Rigoletto. For his
portrayals of Billy Budd at ENO and Winston
(1984) at the Royal Opera House, he won the
2006 Olivier Award for outstanding achievement
in opera. In 2007 he was given the ECHO Klassik
award for Male Singer of the Year, and in 2011
he was honoured with Musical America’s Vocalist
of the Year Award.
He enjoys extensive concert work and has sung
under the baton of many of the world’s leading
conductors, appearing with the Chamber
Orchestra of Europe, the City of Birmingham and
London Symphony orchestras, Philharmonia and
Cleveland Orchestras and the Vienna and Berlin
Philharmonic orchestras.
A renowned recitalist, Simon Keenlyside appears
regularly at the world’s major recital venues.
He has recorded a disc of Schumann Lieder
with Graham Johnson and four recital discs
with Malcolm Martineau, of Schubert, Strauss,
Brahms, and most recently, an English song disc,
Songs of War, which won a 2012 Gramophone
Award.
He has also recorded Britten’s War Requiem
with the London Symphony Orchestra under
Gianandrea Noseda, Mendelssoh’s Elijah
under Paul McCreesh, Mahler’s Des Knaben
Wunderhorn under Sir Simon Rattle, the titlerole in Don Giovanni under Claudio Abbado,
Carmina burana under Christian Thielemann,
Marcello in La bohème under Riccardo Chailly,
the title-role in Billy Budd under Richard Hickox,
Papageno under Charles Mackerras and Count
Almaviva in the Grammy award-winning The
Marriage of Figaro under René Jacobs.
18
Simon Keenlyside was made a CBE in 2003.
Malcolm Martineau
Malcolm Martineau piano
Malcolm Martineau was born in Edinburgh, read
Music at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and
studied at the Royal College of Music.
Recognised as one of the leading accompanists
of his generation, he has worked with many of
the world’s greatest singers including Sir Thomas
Allen, Dame Janet Baker, Olaf Bär, Barbara
Bonney, Ian Bostridge, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan
Graham, Thomas Hampson, Della Jones, Simon
Keenlyside, Angelika Kirchschlager, Magdalena
KoΩená, Solveig Kringelborn, Jonathan Lemalu,
Dame Felicity Lott, Christopher Maltman, Karita
Mattila, Lisa Milne, Ann Murray, Anna Netrebko,
Anne Sofie von Otter, Joan Rodgers, Amanda
Roocroft, Michael Schade, Frederica von Stade,
Sarah Walker and Bryn Terfel.
He has presented his own series at the Wigmore
Hall (a Britten and a Poulenc series and ‘Decade
by Decade – 100 years of German Song’,
broadcast by the BBC) and at the Edinburgh
Festival (the complete Lieder of Hugo Wolf). He
has appeared throughout Europe (including at
the Barbican, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Royal
About the performers
Recording projects have included Schubert,
Schumann and English song recitals with Bryn
Terfel (for DG); Schubert and Strauss recitals with
Simon Keenlyside (for EMI); recital recordings
with Angela Gheorghiu and Barbara Bonney
(for Decca), Magdalena KoΩená (for DG),
Della Jones (for Chandos), Susan Bullock (for
Crear Classics), Solveig Kringelborn (for NMA);
Amanda Roocroft (for Onyx); the complete Fauré
songs with Sarah Walker and Tom Krause; the
complete Britten folk songs for Hyperion; the
complete Beethoven folk songs for DG; the
complete Poulenc songs for Signum; and Britten
song-cycles as well as Schubert’s Winterreise with
Florian Boesch for Onyx.
This season’s engagements include appearances
with Simon Keenlyside, Sarah Connolly, Dorothea
Röschmann, John Mark Ainsley, Christoph
Prégardien, Michael Schade, Thomas Oliemans,
Kate Royal, Christiane Karg, Florian Boesch,
Iestyn Davies and Anne Schwanewilms
He was a given an honorary doctorate by the
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
in 2004, and appointed International Fellow of
Accompaniment in 2009.
In 2011 Malcolm Martineau was Artistic Director
of the Leeds Lieder+ Festival.
19
Russell Duncan
Opera House; La Scala, Milan; the Châtelet,
Paris; the Liceu, Barcelona; Berlin’s Philharmonie
and Konzerthaus; Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw
and the Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein),
North America (including in New York both Alice
Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall), Australia (including
the Sydney Opera House) and at the Aix-enProvence, Vienna, Edinburgh, Schubertiade,
Munich and Salzburg festivals.
Songs and arias of grace and
power from one of the finest
singers alive. Magdalena Kožená
presents a double portrait of
music from two of the greatest
composers of the 18th century.
barbican.org.uk