MAX VAN EGMOND (BARITONE) PENELOPE CRAWFORD (FORTEPIANO): Franz Schubert: Winterreise

Max van Egmond (baritone) Penelope Crawford (fortepiano)

Franz Schubert: Winterreise

© 2006 Musica Omnia

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The greatest German song cycle ever composed performed by two master musicians.

notes

The Winter of the Spirit: Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey), D. 911

In his 1858 reminiscences, Schubert’s friend Joseph von Spaun describes the first time that he and others in the Schubert circle first heard Winterreise:
For some time Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would say only, “Soon you will hear and understand.” One day he said to me, “Come over to [Franz von] Schober’s today, and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying [schauerlicher] songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs.” So he sang the entire Winterreise through to us in a voice full of emotion. We were utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs, and Schober said that only one, “Der Lindenbaum,” had appealed to him. To this Schubert replied, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.”
The composer’s prophecy came true: people have long recognized in this cycle of twenty-four songs one of the nineteenth century’s most profound masterpieces. It is a matter for awe when one realizes that Schubert was only thirty years old when he set these words to music and that he was confronting his own possible fate as he did so. We know nothing about the circumstances in which this composer contracted syphilis, probably in late 1822, but he would have known that a syphilitic’s death was often preceded by paralysis and insanity, the winter wanderer’s fate thus a foreshadowing of what might become of him. The scant biographical record hints that Schubert knew in his bones every atom of the poetic persona’s despair in Winterreise; in a letter of 31 March 1824 to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser, he wrote:
Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this makes things worse and worse instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain at best, whom enthusiasm . . . for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?---“My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I shall find it never and nevermore” [lines from Goethe’s Faust, Part I, which Schubert had set to music in 1814 as “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” D. 118], I may well sing every day now, for each night, on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday'’ grief.
That he could clothe despair of such magnitude in music such as this was a Herculean feat.
It would not have been possible without Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), the young Prussian poet who died on the night of 30 September 1827, perhaps just as Schubert was completing his compositional labors on his second song cycle to Müller’s words (Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, was the first). Twentieth-century critics were wont to decry Müller as a deficient poet, but the great Heinrich Heine did not think so: he acknowledged Müller’s deliberately paradoxical fusion of folklike forms and unfolklike content as the model for his own original poetic enterprise. “The German Byron”---Müller became famous for his poems championing the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire---published his winter journey in three stages, and the complicated genesis of the poetry would shape the formation of the music. On 16 January 1822, the twenty-eight year-old poet sent his Wanderlieder von Wilhelm Müller. Die Winterreise. In 12 Liedern (Wandering Songs by Wilhelm Müller. The Winter Journey. In 12 Songs) to the publisher Friedrich Brockhaus in Leipzig for the 1823 issue of the literary periodical Urania. It was this source that Schubert evidently discovered in late 1826 or early 1827, as the twelve poems correspond exactly to Part I of his setting. In March 1823, ten additional poems were published in Karl Schall and Karl von Holtei’s Deutsche Blätter für Poesie, Literatur, Kunst und Theater (German Album-Leaves for Poetry, Literature, Art and Drama), and in 1824, two more poems (“Die Post” and “Täuschung”) were added to the cycle as it appeared in Müller’s second poetic anthology, the Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten II: Lieder des Lebens und der Liebe (Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Horn Player: Songs of Life and of Love). Müller evidently thought of the first stage, the Urania poems, as a complete work, and we do not know when and why he decided to extend the winter journey. The poetic persona is in much the same condition at the end of the Urania cycle (the twelfth song, “Einsamkeit,” or “Loneliness”) as he was at the beginning, if more exhausted and melancholy, and it is my guess that Müller wanted to bring him to some sort of self-understanding---to revelation. For the final and fully expanded version of the cycle in the Waldhornisten-Gedichte, he reshuffled the order of the poems, and again, we can only speculate why. Perhaps because this cycle traces emotional states of being and thought processes rather than a conventional narrative, he may have been searching for the ideal order with each addition. We know that Müller labored mightily over his poems, tinkering with them and revising them at each stage along the way. For a work as weighty as this one, he took special pains.
The genesis of Schubert’s music for Müller’s words is shrouded in mystery, like so much else about this enigmatic man’s life. According to Franz von Schober, with whom Schubert sharing lodgings during the autumn of 1826, Schubert discovered the poetic cycle in his [Schober’s] library---but when and which version, he does not say. The autograph manuscript is dated February 1827, but that date appears on a fair copy of the first song, a copy that surely postdates the beginning of his work on what became Part I of the cycle. Like Müller, Schubert at first thought of the Urania poems as a completed cycle; he set the twelfth and “last” song in the same D minor tonality of the first song---by the time of the first edition, it was transposed to B minor---and wrote “Fine” (The End) with a fine flourish at the “end” of an autograph manuscript. It is no wonder he felt triumphant. These songs had indeed cost him considerable effort, and certain pages in the autograph manuscript of the first twelve songs (now in the collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City) look as if the Napoleonic Wars had been fought on the paper, so numerous are the emendations and revisions. In some cases, Schubert actually cut pages and entire songs out of the manuscript and “tipped in,” or inserted, fair copies (“Gute Nacht,” the last page of “Auf dem Fluße,” “Rückblick,” and, possibly, “Gefror’ne Thränen”); even so, a fresh copy of the twelve songs had to be prepared for the engraver at Tobias Haslinger’s music publishing company in Vienna. It is clear that the unknown copyist and Schubert worked closely and in tandem on this engraver’s copy, as there are passages which differ markedly from the autograph.
We do not know when Schubert discovered the complete poetic cycle in the Waldhornisten anthology, although he was evidently engaged in work on Part II during the summer of 1827, as sketches of “Mut” (Courage) and “Die Nebensonnen” (The Mock Suns) can be tentatively dated from late summer of that year. At whatever time he found the poet’s complete winter journey, he must have realized that he could not duplicate Müller’s final ordering without disrupting the musical structure he had already created in the first twelve songs, and therefore he simply set the remaining poems in order, although he reverses the order of “Mut” and “Die Nebensonnen” near the end of the work. Poetry is always transmuted by music into a hybrid of the two arts, and the unlike ordering of the poetic and musical winter journeys only underscores the fact of difference. The autograph manuscript of Part II is a fair copy, without the multitudinous revisions evident in Part I (most of the prior manuscripts are now lost), and was not delivered to Haslinger until the end of September 1828, almost one year after its completion in October 1827 and over eight months after the publication of Part I in January 1828. Five witnesses attest that Schubert corrected the proofs of Part II after he took to his bed in his brother Ferdinand’s apartment on Kettenbrückengasse---the “Schubert Sterbehaus” (the house where Schubert died), now a museum ---with his last illness. The corrected proofs are not longer extant,
Müller’s text is a monodrama, with only a single character through whose eyes we see everything in the world of this cycle. That one character is a Romantic cliché, a wanderer whose journey through a fictive landscape is symbolic for the “Weg nach Innen,” or the pathway into the soul, but Müller does original and profound things with the motifs he borrowed from Romanticism’s storehouse. The wanderer states in the first song, “Gute Nacht” (Good Night), that he does not know where he must go or how long the journey will take. A philosopher manqué, he subjects his every action and emotion to analysis decades before Freud would devise a scientific framework for such investigations. His solitude is not only the anguished withdrawal of a rejected lover--- the woman he loved has married a rich man---but a necessary laboratory for existential research. Shocked into awareness of alienation, he probes for information of the unmapped regions of his own soul. When he begins the cycle by saying that he came to this place a stranger and departs still a stranger, he implies that he was a wayfarer before he arrived at the sweetheart’s town and has failed yet again to find a place of belonging. “Why am I estranged from life as other people live it?”, he asks himself over and over. We never know his name, or any other name, what he looks like (except that he has black hair), his birthplace, occupation, upbringing, or personal history, nor is there a narrator to divulge background information. Of his inner life, we learn much more.
Those familiar with Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” might find in this cycle a poetic version of the process Freud describes in his brief essay. The mourner is at first exclusively devoted to the labor of grief, immersing himself in memories he is reluctant to relinquish for fear of losing the beloved irrevocably. The wavering motion of a step forward into life, followed by a step backward into memory, is beautifully portrayed when the wanderer tries to bury his love by carving an icy memorial in the frozen river in the seventh song, “Auf dem Fluße” (At the River), but then flees back into reminiscence in the next song, “Rückblick” (Glance Back). Successful mourning should eventually modulate into acceptance of loss so that life may continue, but Müller’s wanderer believes himself severed from humanity by some invisible “mark of Cain” that sets him apart, and hence, his heroic attempts to comply with the demands of reality are dashed on the rocks of a more pathological state. Even when he recognizes in the twenty-third song, “Die Nebensonnen” (The Mock Suns---an atmospheric phenomenon called “parhelia” in which sunlight refracted through ice-crystals produces images of the sun on either side of the real sun) that his sweetheart was never meant for him, that her love was an illusion, he is no better off for the realization.
Throughout the cycle, the wanderer longs repeatedly for death, to no avail. The cycle has as one essential theme the difficulty of dying when one wishes, or the tenacity of life, all the more marked when unwanted. For example, in the fifth song, “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree---the traditional site for lovers’ rendez-vous in German literature), the wayfarer is so immersed in memory that he is in danger of freezing to death in the winter storm. “There you would find rest,” the voices of Nature promise him, but, realizing his peril, he presses on, without knowing why he chooses life over death. Later, in the fifteenth song, “Die Krähe” (The Crow), he looks up at a crow circling overhead and hopes that the carrion bird has come to claim his dead body---but it flies on. In the twenty-first song, “Das Wirtshaus” (The Inn), the wanderer comes to a cemetery and fancies that it is an inn, its evergreen funeral wreaths a sign of welcome for wayfarers (nineteenth-century Austrian innkeepers used to hang wreaths on their doors to indicate that the heurige, or new wine, was available); surely there is a chamber prepared for him. But the “innkeeper” turns him away, and he resumes his journey. His lack of hope and soul sickness should, he feels, entitle him to death, and yet it is always denied him.
Given the wanderer’s repeated wish to die, it is no wonder that there is a long tradition of explaining the twentieth song, “Der Wegweiser” (The Signpost), as a vision of death, but there is another, subtler reading possible. In Müller’s feint, the wanderer speaks to himself throughout the cycle, with no audience, no narrator, no one else present; we are eavesdroppers who hear, at great length, things never intended to be heard. We know, of course, that we are not actually spying unseen on private travail, but the poet succeeds in creating that possibility as a considerable claim on our emotions. By the time of “Der Wegweiser,” the wanderer is desperate for answers and begs his heart to explain why he shuns humanity, why he is driven onward without rest, why his pathway in the rocky heights is so difficult. All of a sudden, he sees a signpost at a crossroads in the mind. What is written on the sign, he does not say ---why should he read aloud what he can see all too clearly? He states to himself only what most horrifies him: that no one can return. It is my supposition that he sees, not the actual physical extinction he has desired so fervently, but something even more horrifying: a living death. What that living death might be is shown to us at the “end” of the cycle---not the end of the grim journey, not the end of life, but the last we see of this tragic figure.
In the final song, “Der Leiermann” (The Hurdy-Gurdy Player), the wanderer sees of a solitary beggar playing the hurdy-gurdy and asks him, “Will you grind your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?” Cut off from everyone, the elderly musician neither speaks nor listens but only grinds out obsessive, elemental music devoid of any possibility of transcendence, the frozen, numbed strains of insanity. It has seemed to many commentators that the wanderer is insane, the eerie figure of the hurdy-gurdy player a product of hallucination, but it is both more logical and more moving to interpret the final song as a vivid imagining of his own probable future by a man still sane. Müller’s pictorial language is no different at the end than it was at the beginning; indeed, the evocation of an unnamed village and a pack of dogs is much the same as in “Gute Nacht.” If the iconographic tradition of the Dance of Death, or Death as a musician, resonates in the figure of the old man, it is also an image drawn from contemporary life: in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, the highways of Europe teemed with beggars, the creations of a toppled empire. Both Müller and Schubert would have seen the many Werkelmänner (organ-grinders) who plied their trade from house to house and at the city gates, droning out music-hall melodies for the scant pence of survival. For a composer with reason to fear that syphilitic insanity might reduce him to just such an emblem of misery as the hurdy-gurdy player, Müller’s powerful final poem must have seemed a portrayal of his own likely fate. One can hardly imagine the courage necessary for this composer to set these words to music in the penultimate year of his life. I like to think that Death, perhaps flattered by Schubert’s many and variegated depictions of him in music, spared Schubert at the end the horror he so dreaded, taking him swiftly and relatively painlessly before the living death of insanity could claim him. For all the tragedy of Schubert’s early death (and we will always wonder what might have been), we can only be grateful that he did not become the wanderer, but instead turned him into “songs I like better than all the rest.”
One would need a large tome to enumerate the many subtleties of this work, which challenges symphony or opera in its dimensions (Schubert’s ambitions were not small). Given limitations of space, a few examples of his consummate mastery as a lieder composer will have to suffice. We know that Schubert composed the piano introductions and postludes at the initial stage of composition, and the lengthy piano introduction of the fifth song, “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree), can be heard as the instrumental script for a sequence of events within the mind, a wordless process that leads to memory given words. The wanderer first hears a rustling sound that arises unbidden to awareness in the first two bars and ends with a hollowed-out chord from which the bass drops away, leaving only enigmatic, unharmonized tones. When the rustling resumes, it is at a higher plane; the wanderer is more fully aware of its presence, and the figuration is filled with rhythmic and harmonic disquietude. The instrumental corridor that leads from the first faint rustling of the linden leaves to the song proper culminates in echoing horn-call figures, evocative of wandering horn-players in the German forests, by extension, of idealized Romantic memories of the past. An entire drama in the mind transpires before a single word is sung. In the eleventh song, “Frühlingstraum” (Dream of Spring), the wanderer dreams of fields, flowers, and love in spring to a distillate of eighteenth-century musical gestures, its perfect symmetry, clarity, and grace devoid of all tensions. But the vision of earthly paradise conjured up by the imagination exists only to be destroyed by a battering ram compounded of dissonance, riccocheting motion, fragmentation, and darkness. The disjunction between the two planes is bone-jarring, impossible to resolve into unity, and therefore the ending of the song has the dreary melancholy that comes from awareness of an ideal but illusory world vanished beyond recall.
The usual tempi of depression are shades of slow, but Schubert charges the cycle with occasional episodes of fierce energy, panic, and angst barely this side of a psychotic break. In the eighth song, “Rückblick” (Glance Back), the wanderer relives his panic-stricken flight from the sweetheart’s town. He had feared being driven away by a society hostile to him in the first song, “Gute Nacht,” and now he remembers pelting out of town as if pursued by foes. In Schubert’s imagination, the pell-mell exit is re-created as canonic imitation---a chase in music. The imitation sounds at the distance of a single beat; inimical forces are hot on one’s heels, the composer suggests. In “Die Post” (The Mail Coach), at the exact center of the winter journey, the wanderer hears a posthorn sounding from the road, and Schubert, after the leaden apathy of “Einsamkeit” just before, energizes the cycle with stylized evocations of horses’ hooves and horn fanfares. It is also in “Die Post” that we twice hear a measure of utter silence; such enigmatic silences at important structural points are a hallmark of Schubert in his last years. Here, the wanderer awaits an answer to his question, “Why, my heart, do you leap at the sound of the posthorn?”, listening with such concentration that all other sounds are blotted out, but there is no answer---not yet. In the eighteenth song, “Der stürmische Morgen” (The Stormy Morning), the wanderer, who repeatedly looks for images of himself in Nature, declares that the cold, wild winter storm is analogous to his own heart and does so to violent strains fraught with displacing tensions. This is denial and bravado, the savagery at the end unequaled anywhere else in the cycle . . . but he is no King Lear, and the defiant mood does not last.
The final song, “Der Leiermann” (The Hurdy-Gurdy Player), is, in its utmost economy of means, as radical a departure from the conventions of early nineteenth-century lieder as Schubert’s foreshadowings of Wagnerian harmony in songs such as “Auf dem Fluße.” Schubert restricts the song essentially to a single harmony, the “cadences” merely inflections that feign endings within a context of endless continuation, an exercise in ceaseless turning. The last chord seems like a bar, shutting us out from implied continuation beyond the fermata. This music is the symbol for what the wanderer (and Schubert) fears his future might be: sounding nothingness, and, horrifyingly, it has the potential to go on and on, beyond bearing. The stylized imitation of the hurdy-gurdy’s mechanism in the piano part is uncanny; even the “starting up” of the drone bass, at first slightly under the pitch, mimicked in the grace-noted initial measures. The beggar-musician is the refracted image of the wanderer himself, his own fears given independent life and form, and Schubert accordingly fashions both the hurdy-gurdy tune in the right hand and the wanderer’s vocal part from the same minimal materials, but distinct from one another rhythmically and melodically. “Je est un autre,” the poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote, and the warping of French syntax bespeaks the divided self (not “Je suis un autre” but “Je est un autre,” a phrase for which there is no adequate English translation---perhaps “I is an Other” comes closest). “Der Leiermann” enacts that haunting statement half a century earlier, and its combination of monumental simplicity and complexity makes of this song something sui generis. Indeed, the entire cycle is such: here, poet and composer confront ultimate things and make of that confrontation a work without which the world would be a much poorer place.

Susan Youens

Max van Egmond (baritone)


Born on February 1, 1936 in Semarang, Java, (Indonesia – then the Dutch East Indies),
the admired Dutch bass-baritone Max (Rudolf) van Egmond studied principally with Tine van Willingen. He completed his schooling and musical education in Holland after the war, becoming a member of the Nederlandse Bach Vereniging (Dutch Bach Society) at the age of eighteen. In 1959 (three years after his friend and compatriot, Elly Ameling) he became a prizewinner at the 's-Hertogenbosch International Vocal Competition. He was also awarded competition prizes in Brussels (1959) and Munich (1964).

These public successes marked the beginning of a distinguished career in the fields of oratorio, Lieder and baroque opera. Max van Egmond has achieved his greatest fame as an interpreter of J. S. Bach's cantatas, masses and passions and, from 1965, participated in complete recordings and performances of these masterpieces with conductors Gustav Leonhardt, Jaap Schröder, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Frans Brüggen. (Teldec, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Seon). One of Holland's most beloved artists, he has received numerous awards and honours including a special decoration from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his decades of service to Dutch musical life. His forty-year career has taken him throughout Europe, North and South America, the Middle and Far East, North Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

For many years a professor at Amsterdam's Sweelinck Conservatory, Max van Egmond continues to give master classes throughout the world, most regularly in Mateus, Portugal, and in Oberlin, Ohio at the Baroque Performance Institute. His performances with the Belgian-based Ricercar Consort have explored the extensive seventeenth-century German cantata repertory, documented in a highly successful series of recordings (Deutsche Barock Kantaten) for the Ricercar label. Over the last 15 years, Max van Egmond has concentrated on performing Lieder and French art songs, and has already produced highly acclaimed recordings (with the Belgian pianist, Jos van Immerseel) of Schubert's Winterreise as well as chansons of Gabriel Fauré (Channel Classics). For Musica Omnia, Max van Egmond has recorded Schubert’s Schwanengesang and Schumann’s Dichterliebe (with pianist Kenneth Slowik) as well as the cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise (with Penelope Crawford). Max van Egmond’s concerts, recordings and master classes all provide eloquent testimony not only to his expertise in all areas of the vocal repertoire, but also to his great kindness and humanity in the service of music.

Peter Watchorn (2005)


PENELOPE CRAWFORD
(fortepianist)


Internationally acclaimed as one of America's master performers on historical keyboard instruments, Penelope Crawford has appeared as soloist with modern and period instrument orchestras, and as recitalist and chamber musician on major North American concert series, including those of the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, and Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, and Merkin Hall in New York, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, and the Ordway Theater in Minneapolis. From 1975 to 1990 she was harpsichordist and fortepianist with the Ars Musica Baroque Orchestra, one of the first period instrument ensembles in North America. As a member of the Atlantis Trio with violinist Jaap Schröder and cellist Enid Sutherland she has performed and recorded the complete chamber works of Schubert for piano and strings, as well as the complete Piano Trios and the Sextet of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and the Schumann Quintet and first Piano Trio. She has also performed Schubert's three major Lieder cycles with baritone Max van Egmond; Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise having been recorded for Musica Omnia. Her solo piano recordings have so far appeared on the Titanic and Loft labels, with later Schubert and Beethoven sonatas due to be recorded for Musica Omnia over the next year. Ms. Crawford has performed and lectured at national keyboard conferences, and has served as a judge for several international competitions.

As a faculty member of the University of Michigan and the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, Ms. Crawford is frequently invited to give lectures and master classes at colleges and universities across the country. In an effort to establish stronger connections between performance and scholarship, she has served as artistic planner and performing participant in several important international festivals and scholarly conferences, two of which received major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities: the Michigan Mozart Fest with Roger Norrington conducting (1989 in Ann Arbor, Michigan), co-sponsored by the University Musical Society and the University of Michigan School of Music; Schubert's Piano Music, (1995 in Washington D. C.), co-sponsored by The Westfield Center and the Smithsonian Institution; Beyond Notation: The Performance and Pedagogy of Improvisation in Mozart’s Music, (2002 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) co-sponsored by The Westfield Center and the University of Michigan.

Penelope Crawford received performance degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan, and also studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Her teachers include well-known pedagogues Cécile Genhart, Rosina Lhevinne, Guido Agosti, Kurt Neumüller and Gyorgy Sandor.

An avid collector of historical keyboards, Ms. Crawford includes among her instruments both originals and reproductions of 18th- and 19th-century pianos and harpsichords.

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