Old Fogey’s Favourites

George Dyson was a soldier in the First World War - and a mystic. He lived the best of his life after the War in Winchester, England, as a schoolmaster. He was quintessentially English - as English as Elgar, cricket, and Inspector Morse.

In his spare time he composed. And in his 70s he composed this - his vision of the Heavenly City, Jerusalem. It’s hard to know what to say about it - because it goes beyond saying, into the area of experience where only music works - beyond explanation and description. In the rising and falling of its moods you feel the movements of your own soul in its search of tranquillity, and a yearning for reconciliation with the world of fear and anxiety that surrounds us.

Dyson endured the horrors of the First World War - lived in a world of fear far greater than we could ever know - and yet could still compose this affirmation of life, love and reconciliation.

Inspector Morse would have loved him.

The soprano is Valerie Hill. with the St Michaels’ Singers and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Rennert.

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Leos Janacek was one of the most original of late nineteenth and early twentieth century composers. His music lies somewhat outside the conventional path of modern European music. It’s modernity, if that is the right word, comes not from his adherence to some overarching musical ideology, like that of Schoenberg, Webern or Boulez, but more out of his interest in the detailed and specific - the sounds of water, of birds, of speech - in accents and sounds rather than semantics - all of which are reflected in his work. Nor does he seem to have been interested in musical virtuosity, or instrumentalism for its own sake. All his music seems to draw on, and refers back to, a wider understanding of life than just music. I can’t think of anyone who has been quite like him - Oliver Messiaen is the closest and even he isn’t very close.

His collection of short piano pieces, ‘Along an Overgrown Path’, each with touching little titles (’Our Evenings’, ‘A blown away leaf’, ‘They chattered like swallows’) is full of an intense nostalgic longing for his childhood home in Moravia. It was also written in the shadow of the death, aged 20, of his daughter Olga, to whom he was deeply attached, and a deep vein of melancholy permeates them all.

The piece called ‘Goodnight’ is one of the most haunting. It starts with a little four note figure - crochet, two quavers, crochet - high up on the piano, sounding on two notes only. It’s like a distant bell sounding, or a call across a river. The figure is repeated throughout the four minutes or so of the piece, gradually and slowly moving downwards until, at the end it sounds in the bass. It’s as if it was subsiding through consciousness into sleep - and as the final four notes sound, perhaps into that final sleep into which Olga, at long last, subsided - leaving Janacek alone.

The pianist is Thomas Hlawatsch.

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This is a piece that Leopold Godowski wrote for Paul Wittgenstein, the one armed pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Godowski was a master pianist, and a wild virtuoso, who rewrote and ‘improved’ many of Chopin’s works, and in the process made them impossible to play for everyone but those who had his own level of virtuosity. Even Artur Rubinstein thought Godowski an impossible act to follow.

This Elegy is a short piece. But it’s lovely, and melancholy. It was an encore played by the great South American pianist, Jorge Bolet, at a concert I was privileged to be at almost a quarter of a century ago, on 21 December 1983, at St John’s Smith Square, London. The applause is cut off at the end, which is a pity, for it was rapturous.

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I posted earlier Schumann’s lovely setting of this shortest of Goethe’s poems. Here, written a quarter of a century earlier, is Schubert’s. Schumann finds a poignant, personal sense of loss, as if in death, in this yearning for rest at the day’s end. Schubert’s understanding is universal, less personal. He invokes the peace we all can find, as the day, and life, closes, in nature and in God.

‘Peace lies over all the hills; in the treetops there is barely a stir. Birds are hushed in the wood; wait just a little while, soon you too will be at rest.’

The singer is Karl Erb, the greatest of all interpreters of Schubert’s songs.

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For her disobedience Brunnhilde has been banished by her father, Wotan, and put to sleep on a rocky outcrop and surrounded by fire. Only the greatest hero can waken her. This, of course, is Siegfried. In his short orchestral work, Siegfried’s Idyll, Wagner uses a melody from his opera. It is the theme sung by Brunnhilde to Siegfried, after he has awakened her, known as “Siegfried, Treasure of the World”.

Far away from the world of Gods and Heros, there is a more human connection between this gentle, lovely work and an awakening. It is recorded by Wagner’s wife, Cosima in her diary.

“Sunday, December 25 [1870] About this day, my children, I can tell you nothing - nothing about my feelings, nothing about my mood, nothing, nothing. I shall just tell you, drily and plainly, what happened. When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew ever louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music! After it had died away, R. came in to me with the five children and put into my hands the score of his “Symphonic Birthday Greeting.” I was in tears, but so, too, was the whole household; R.had set up his orchestra on the stairs and thus consecrated our Tribschen forever! The Tribschen Idyll - thus the work is called. - At midday Dr. Sulzer arrived, surely the most important of R.’s friends! After breakfast the orchestra again assembled, and now once again the Idyll was heard in the lower apartment, moving us all profoundly (Countess B. was also there, on my invitation); after it the Lohengrin wedding procession, Beethoven’s Septet, and, to end with, once more the work of which I shall never hear enough! - Now at last I understood all R.’s working in secret, also dear Richter’s trumpet (he blazed out the Siegfried theme splendidly and had learned the trumpet especially to do it), which had won him many admonishments from me. “Now let me die,” I exclaimed to R. “It would be easier to die for me than to live for me,” he replied. “

Here it is played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

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This lovely song by Clara Schumann was offered as a gift to her husband, Robert. As a song it is worthy to stand alongside the best that he wrote. Morning has broken as a clear, sunlit day. The sun, her lover, awakens her, just as it might open the petals on the blossom.

‘I desire only to rest upon your breast, and there transfigure you with the sunlight’s shining joy.’

It is touchingly sung by Geraldine McGreevy.

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One of the most famous, and loveliest, of Richard Strauss’s songs. Here is the last verse.

‘Dream, dream, flower of my love, of the quiet, blessed night, when the flower of his love changed forever this world into a heaven for me.’

It is beautifully sung by Gundula Janovitz.

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Here is setting of Goethe’s short poem - the second with this title and one which Schubert also set early in his career - as an addition to my Going to Sleep anthology. It is the version by Hugo Wolf. Here are the words.

“You who are from heaven, who assuage all grief and suffering, and fill him who is doubly wretched, doubly with delight, ah! I am weary of striving! To what end is this pain and joy? Sweet peace, enter my heart.”

In the dissonant chords behind the vocal there is mental pain and anguish, from which the singer yearns for rest.

The singer is Mitsuko Shirai, accompanied by Hartmut Holl.

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The third of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is ‘Going to Sleep’. The allusion to death, strong in the fourth and final song, is absent here. It is the freedom of sleep that is yearned for, untrammeled by the cares of the day, where the spirit can enter the magic world of dreams.

‘The day has wearied me, and now I long to be enfolded in the starry night like a tired child. Hands, leave off your work; brow, forget your thoughts. All my senses long to lose themselves in slumber. And my soul, on freed wings, yearns to soar at its will so to live a thousandfold more intensely under the magic arc of the night.’

It is sung here by Jessye Norman. In an earlier post I wrote about her interpretation of these last songs of Richard Strauss. This is what I said about her singing of this third song. ‘In…..“Beim Schlafengehen” there is a quite magical passage where, after the lovely violin interlude, she follows the line of the melody in almost imperceptible gradations, starting pianissimo then drawing her voice out into a crescendo, then retreating into head voice before building up the crescendo.’ It is unsurpassed.

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This marvelous aria is from some incidental music Handel composed for a play, Alceste, that never saw the light of day. There’s nothing sinister in this song. A lover celebrates the end of a joyful day, and looks forward to the morrow when her lover, after the ‘balmy dew of sleep’, then ‘may retaste the healthful day.’

‘Gentle Morpheus, son of night, hither speed thy airy flight! and his weary senses steep in the balmy dew of sleep. That when bright Aurora’s beams glad the world with golden streams, he, like Phoebus, blithe and gay, may retaste the healthful day.’

It is perfectly sung by Emma Kirkby.

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