April 22, 2009: A vocal recital of maturing texts

Given the focus of my preview piece, I cannot conceal my disappointment that physical indisposition prevented mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, accompanied by Karel Košárek, from concluding her San Francisco Performances recital at Herbst Theatre with the seven "early songs" of Alban Berg.  However, the rest of the program remained intact;  and the chronological ordering of the composers turned out to offer a fascinating perspective on a growth of "maturity" in the texts those composers selected.  Kožená also has a diverse operatic repertoire, through which she brought a keen sense of dramatic interpretation of those texts to her performance;  but, since this was a recital, she realized that interpretation through facial and bodily gestures that were minimal but effective.  Through her understanding of those texts, I found myself thinking about them from new points of view, making this recital more than just an experience of the music itself.

For example, whatever musical challenges face the soloist who wishes to perform Henry Purcell, inevitably that soloist must contend with the "eccentricities" of John Dryden's way with words.  Consider the text of the innocuously titled (and frequently performed) song "Music for a while:"

Music for a while
Shall all your cares beguile:
Wond'ring how your pains were eas'd
And disdaining to be pleas'd
Till Alecto free the dead
From their eternal bands,
Till the snakes drop from her head,
And the whip from out her hands.

Since the program listed this as "A Selection of Love Songs," those last four lines seem a bit kinky, if not downright loopy.  At the very least we should wonder just where this text appeared in the 1692 production of Dryden's Oedipus, for which the song was composed.  However, the incongruity between the beginning and ending of the text is then accompanied by Purcell's decision to set the word "drop" several (some would say too many) times, as if to portray those snakes dropping off one-by-one.  If a composition of music is a "temporal journey," then this risks coming off as a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Kožená recognized the challenge of this text and treated it with poise.  As the snakes began to drop, she offered just a hint of a wistful smile, as if to say, "Yes, these words are a bit much;  but isn't the music heavenly?"  Of course she was right.  The music was heavenly;  and the "love" of these "love songs" was clearly in the music, rather than the words.

We then progressed from the 1692 of Purcell and Dryden to Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle from 1840 (Opus 42), set to texts by Adelbert von Chamisso.  Were it not for Schumann, Chamisso would probably be remembered more as a botanist than as a poet;  but, to the extent that these poems offer a relatively straightforward account of a young woman's experience of love and marriage (Schumann's accompaniment even includes a brief wedding march), they indicate an emergence of a vérité grounded in the psychology of the human heart, in sharp contrast to Dryden's classical allusions.  Chamisso was thus as much a "naturalist of the soul" as he was of the plant world, which made him a perfect source for Schumann's efforts towards the connotation of human emotions in his music.  Here Kožená could be dramatic without being apologetic, but again her minimalist approach was sufficient to invoke Schumann's emotionality without overplaying it.

With the Berg cut from the program, the evening concluded with a set of five songs by Henri Duparc.  As the notes in the program book indicated, Duparc preferred the texts of the French Parnassians, a brief school of thought that intervened between Romanticism (as represented by the German Chamisso) and modernist Symbolism.  These are, again, psychological texts;  but the psychology is always connoted through the skilled use of tropes, rather than denoted through the sort of direct descriptions Chamisso would invoke.  Duparc's musical language thus matches the "rhetoric of connotation" of these poems;  and the resulting emotions are all the more intense for being more subdued than they had been in Schumann's treatments.  Once again, however, Kožená kept her minimalist poise, letting Duparc's music "do all the talking," so to speak.

Was she as "physically indisposed" as we had been told at the beginning of the evening?  Yes, there were some rough spots in her sound;  and the Berg songs make heavy demands on the lower register, where she tended to be weakest.  However, as the old cliché goes, we each have to play with the cards that have been dealt to us.  Kožená played her hand with the skill of a performer determined that none of the music on the program be short-changed.