His purpose was, he explained, to put to bed the old notion that men sing
‘men’s songs’ and women sing ‘women’s song’, whatever those categories may
mean. The time is ripe for change, and he wanted to encourage all singers
of whatever gender to believe that the entire art song repertory was theirs
to explore, perform and enjoy.
In the 19th century, repertoire gender-polarity was not a
significant issue, but it’s true that, as Lawrence Kramer has suggested (in
a 2011 article, ‘Sexing Song: Brigitte Fassbaender’s Winterreise
’), ‘the more professionalized the performance of art song became, the more
the rule of gender asymmetry prevailed. By the turn of the twentieth
century it had become rigid.’ It’s generally been more common for women to
adopt male personae in art song than vice versa. In 2017, Janet Wasserman
(founder and executive director of the Schubert Society of the USA)
published a list of 59 female singers who had recorded Winterreise from soprano Maria Ekeblad in 1910 to mezzo-soprano
Ingeborg Hischer in 2014, which includes Kirsten Flagstad, Lotte Lehmann,
Barbara Hendricks, Christa Ludwig, Margaret Price, Christine Sch‰fer and
others. And, there are many more who have sung individual songs from
Schubert’s song-cycle in concert and on disc.
But, if there has been no shortage of ‘courageous’ women – Alice Coote, who
sang the cycle at Carnegie Hall in 2017, was thus ‘praised’ – eager to sing
Schubert’s songs, and while some have been well-received, the views
expressed by Matthew Gurewitsch – who asked in the New York Times
in 1990 ‘Can a Woman Do a Man’s Job In Schubert’s Winterreise?’,
and judged Fassbaender to have evoked ‘the adolescent hysterics of Octavian
toward the end of Der Rosenkavalier’s first act’, were not
atypical.
Williams would profoundly disagree with Gurewitsch’s conclusions: ‘At any
rate, however astutely or partially Mozart, Goethe, Mendelssohn, Chamisso,
Schumann and Loewe have penetrated the feminine psyche, no man would dream
of presenting their insights in public, any more than they would
impersonate the coy nymph of Debussy’s Arcadian Chansons de Bilitis.’ You just have to empathise with the
protagonist’s feelings and experiences, and be able to communicate them in
song, argued Williams – words not so dissimilar from Elena Gerhardt’s
comment about Winterreise, ‘You have to be haunted by
this cycle to be able to sing it.’
I’m absolutely on Williams’ side on this one, but there is one obvious
counterargument that might be raised with respect to his Wigmore Hall
programme. That is, barring one short song by Clara Schumann, the female
experiences embodied in the songs he sang are not ‘female experiences’ at
all, but rather male speculations and representations of imagined – perhaps
desired? – female experiences. Whether poet or composer, these men cannot
escape the prevailing ideology of Romantic subjectivity. The eight songs of
Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben are narrated by a woman but some
might argue that is the man she loves and loses who is the actual
‘protagonist’ of the cycle.
One could argue this way and that for eternity, so it’s probably best just
to focus on the singing itself, and this recital offered us all the
pleasures and comforts that we associate with Williams’ singing: a general
impression of sincerity, thoughtfulness and care; well-considered, natural
diction; a lovely fresh vocal tone, by turns light and dark, but never
insubstantial or overly weighty; a true and innate sense of poetic phrasing
and meaning. The BBC cameraman perched in the balcony enabled us to marvel
at the relaxed sensitive of Joseph Middleton’s fingers as they delicately
articulated accompanying textures, sought out harmonic nuances in support
of semantic inflections, and inhabited an understated but telling
narratorial role throughout, but especially in the summative piano
postludes, by turns restful and agitated, tragic and consoling. What I
found most striking about this performance was the flexibility of
the phrasing. The expressive freedom was sometimes quite marked but it
never felt anything other than entirely ‘right’, indicative of a mutual
appreciation of the union of poetic and musical meaning, and how to
communicate this to an audience – even one far away, peering into laptop
screens or reclining in an armchair beside a radio.
Williams began with three songs by Schubert and, in some ways, it seemed to
me that he was most ‘himself’ here. Perhaps it was the dark tone which
‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Der Tod und das M‰dchen’ and the less well-known
‘Die junge Nonne’ share, but the rich colours of Williams’ mid to low range
were complemented by Middleton’s plunging resonance in all three songs.
‘Gretchen’ was perhaps the most overtly ‘dramatic’ song of the recital and
Williams swept us immediately and magnetically into its agonies. The
varying tempi, rubatos and fermata of ‘Der Tod’ were consummately handled,
and here Williams was a chilling figure of Death, enticing and commanding
the maiden to take the hand of her ‘Friend’ and sleep in his arms.
Middleton’s energising staccato bass injected ‘Die junge Nonne’ with
compelling urgency while Williams’ taut but quiet baritone captured the
protagonist’s fear of the night, as dark as the grave. The harmonic shifts
were brilliantly shaped by Middleton, and Williams’ major-key, even,
self-composed closing “Allelulia”s suggested spiritual transfiguration
rather than earthly fulfilment.
In the six songs by Brahms, Williams was appropriately lighter of voice,
capturing something of the protagonist’s naivety and vulnerability. At
times I wondered if the inevitable octave transposition of the vocal
disturbed the registral relationship of voice and piano: in ‘An die
Nachtigall’, for example, a woman’s voice would be cushioned within the
generally high-lying, gentle piano rocking, whereas Williams’ baritone
formed a ‘bass line melody’ in a way. I’m not sure if this matters, but it
came to mind especially in the closing episodes as Middleton’s falling
cascades rippled with graceful tenderness. I loved the way Williams
expanded the breadth of his tone and emotive suggestiveness in the final
stanza of ‘M‰dchenlied’ – “Die Tr‰nen rinnen/ Mir ¸bers Gesicht -/ Wof¸r
soll ich spinnen?/ Ich weiss es nicht!” (The tears go coursing/ Down my
cheeks—/ What am I spinning for? I don’t know!), powerfully conveying the
agony of burgeoning, not yet understood, passion and desire.
In contrast, ‘Das M‰dchen spricht’ pushed forwards with impetuousness and
curiosity – and with subtle temporal nuances, a certain wryness – as the
young girl questions the swallow about its marriage plans! Middleton’s
dancing dotted rhythms were light as air and one could imagine the girl
tossing of her tresses with the staccato snap of the final terse cadence. I
don’t think I’ve heard ‘Salamander’ before, and though it was brief it made
a mark, in no small part due to the perspicacity of Williams’ exploitation
of the text but also the piano’s concluding tumult. The contrast between
the chirpy song of the insouciant nightingale at the start of ‘Nachtigall’
and the slightly ‘spiky’ melodic and rhythmic disintegration of the bird’s
song at the minor-key close, as the protagonist urges the nightingale to
cease tormenting them with ‘love-kindled songs’ – “Fleuch, Nachtigall, in
gr¸ne Finsternisse,/ Ins Haingestr‰uch,/ Und spend’ im Nest der treuen
Gattin K¸sse;/ Entfleuch, entfleuch!” (Fly, nightingale, to the green
darkness,/ To the bushes of the grove,/ And there in the nest kiss your
faithful mate;/ Fly away, fly away!) – was wonderful. One could surely hear
in Middleton’s playing in this song the Brahms of the late piano
intermezzos.
Clara Schumann’s ‘Liebst du um Schˆnheit’, though flowing and sweet was
slightly lost, embedded as it was within these Brahms songs. Perhaps if
Williams had really wanted to take some risks, he would have included all
of Clara’s contributions to this Op.12 set? But, Clara’s was the prevailing
spirit in the recital’s main work, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. This really was stunning singing and
playing. If the martial spirit of ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’ always
leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable at Schumann’s self-representation,
as he manipulates the beloved’s thoughts and feelings to accord with his
Romantic sense of ‘self’, then Middleton’s brilliantly shaped and defined
bass line, never heavy, always singing, balanced the books in that song!
True partnership characterised ‘Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben,
which needs to be simultaneously fast and precise, without heaviness, and
was – with the added expressivity of some well-considered ebbs and flows of
the tempo.
‘Du Ring an meinem Finger’ is one of my all-time favourite songs – nothing
to do with the sentiments and everything to do with memories of playing
through Schumann’s songs as a student in order to understand harmonic
structure, nuance and meaning – and the duo did not disappoint, conjuring a
mood of peace and solemnity. The bright energy of ‘Helft mir, ihr
Schwestern’ conveyed the bride-to-be’s impatience and joy; in the closing
stanza she takes leave of her ‘sisters’ with both sadness and joy, and
Middleton’s beautifully placed cadence, closing on a first-inversion chord,
wonderfully both confirmed her happiness and suggested her movement
forwards into a new life. After the almost delirious rapture of ‘An meinem
Herzen, an meiner Brust’, Wiliams’ baritone was firm but intense in the
final song of the cycle, ‘Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan’.
Middleton wrought every drop of harmonic inference from Schumann’s
twisting, shifting colours, before the final piano postlude reminded us,
with bittersweet beauty, of that innocent love, now lost, forever, along
with life itself: “Ich zieh mich in mein Innres still zur¸ck,/ Der Schleier
f‰llt,/ Da hab ich dich und mein verlornes Gl¸ck,/ Du meine Welt!”
(Silently I withdraw into myself,/ The veil falls,/ There I have you and my
lost happiness,/ You, my world!)
The first performance of Frauenliebe und -leben was given by
baritone Julius Stockhausen, and, further suggesting that he, and perhaps
his contemporaries, had no notion of a gender-dichotomy in art song, in
1873 one of his pupils, Johanna Schwartz, sang songs from Winterreise in a recital that Stockhausen had organised for his
students. Recalling his own student days, Williams described having learned
Brahms’ ‘Sapphische Ode’, which was loved and recommended by one of his
first teachers. It was the song that ‘kicked the whole thing off’,
he explained: having submitted Brahms’ song as part of a competition
programme, he was told that he could not perform it. Why? It was a ‘woman’s
song’. He dedicated his encore to his first two teachers, Valerie Heath
Davis and Janet Edmunds.
Claire Seymour
This recital is available to view at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtU4lsVcHas
The series continues for two more weeks, until 26th June.
For further information and to view previous concerts in the series
click
here
.
Roderick Williams (baritone), Joseph Middleton (piano)
Franz Schubert – ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ D118, ‘Der Tod und das M‰dchen’
D531, Die junge Nonne’ D828; Johannes Brahms – Vier Lieder Op.46
No.4 ‘An die Nachtigall’, F¸nf Lieder Op.107 No.5 ‘M‰dchenlied’,Sieben Lieder Op.95 No.1 ‘Das M‰dchen’; Clara Schumann –3 Songs Op.12 No.2 ‘Liebst du um Schˆnheit’; Johannes Brahms –F¸nf Lieder Op.107 No.3 ‘Das M‰dchen spricht’, No.2 ‘Salamander’,Sechs Lieder Op.97 No.1 ‘Nachtigall’; Robert Schumann – Frauenliebe und -leben Op.42.
Wigmore Hall, London; Friday 12th June 2020.
image=http://www.operatoday.com/Middleton%20Williams%20WH.jpg
image_description=
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product_title=Woman’s Hour: Roderick Williams (baritone) and Joseph Middleton (piano) at Wigmore Hall
product_by=A review by Claire Seymour
product_id=Above: Joseph Middleton and Roderick Williams