Music lounge (7)

In one of the most famous standards of bossa nova repertoire, Tom Jobim’s Wave (the original title in English), one line says “it is impossible to be happy when you’re alone”. Well, German poet Richard Dehmel begs to differ. I used to joke that his Waldseligkeit is the most German of love poems. You only discover that there is a beloved one in the last verse, and what the poet actually tells her is that he is truly hers when he is at his 100% himself, i.e. alone in the woods. That means – she is not even there! But Richard Strauss – who had a strange way with choosing the texts for his songs – makes this happen. And – curious as it may sound – you would believe your beloved one if he/she told that strange amorous feeling about you when away from you if he/she told you just the way Strauss composed it. Especially if you heard it from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in her studio recording with Georg Szell and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. If I had to pick one recording to prove why she was so famous, this would be the one. Here, everything plays to her strengths and her husband Walter Legge should be praised for producing such a special recording – ideal singer, ideal conductor, ideal orchestra, ideal Tonmeister. It is the crème de la crème of recorded music.

It is said that Strauss composed the song having his wife’s Pauline de Ahna’s soprano in his mind. It seems she did not sing anymore when he composed it, but she was the model for the vocalism required here, for one of her special talents was the ability to float sustained notes. I never thought the piano version was what the composer had in mind as a final idea. It feels empty and the accompanying figures in the orchestra – even with the very best pianists – are hard to make out. Norman del Mar in his Critical Commentary of Richard Strauss’s Life and Works even says the piano version had always been a draft for the orchestral version, although he cannot prove that. He is right – you just need to hear the orchestral version and the whole spell is there. The orchestral sound picture for the first stanza is a miracle of musical description. The low tessitura, the warm sounds of strings give an impression at once intimate and wide – a forest. And there is this up-and-down figure that works like a “walking bass” in Klangfarbenmelodie technique shared among wind instruments – the trees stirring, gently touching each other in the night breeze. And the soprano sings very long lines that has an almost hypnotic effect – one feels spirited away to this magic landscape. Actually, this magic moment that makes the forest so special. As much as in the closing scene of Daphne, the tessitura gradually rises – there to depict Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree (Karl Böhm used to say that we could hear the tree rising in the very orchestral sound), here to depict the poet’s bosom swelling with the magical moment, he is one with the forest and as wide as the forest, he is at his fullest – and that is how he can defines how he feels towards his beloved. He has to be alone in this forest because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to grasp the immensity of his feeling. And that is why the last word in the poem is so important – and what is usually called Schwarzkopf’s mannerisms is here something of a hyperconsciousness – she doesn’t let go any expressive device to show this unusual declaration of love – it has to be one long, seamless gesture that ends in “Dein!” (yours). And she does it.

In many interviews, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf explained how she cultivated her trademark felt-like tonal quality. When you see her sing, you can actually understand the whole method employed by her to cover her tone in a way that you would not hear any metallic overtone in it, something she would consider vulgar. But she was also able to shift to a more “open” sound, especially when she thought that the material required something more “natural”, folklike – then her voice had an appealing, almost pop sound. And, not surprisingly, she builds her Waldseligkeit from the “natural” sound towards her “cultivated” sound. You can hear the natural sound in “Der WALD”, it is almost white, childish-like in tone. You can almost hear her wide-eyed facial expression in it – as if she was eager to tell us something. Now she got your attention and keeps it by means of absolutely perfect legato. You hear her breath, but it’s part of the same arch, she starts over with the exact same sound and she “inhabits” every long note. It’s not the fixed, computer-beep sound many singers believe that they have to produce there, they are shimmering as the dusk through the canopies of leaves moving to the breeze. The way she attacks the mezza voce in Nacht (night) is one of the loveliest sounds every produced by a singer. You can feel what she is talking about only by listening to that sound. The way she sings als ob sie selig lauschen” (as if they were blissfully listening) is another example of the tonal contrast – she starts the phrase with the roundest of sounds, relishing the chromatic descent that effectively describes the sensation, the bliss until she goes back to the “natural” sound in lauschen (listening). It sounds almost childlike – but it adds a touch of excitement, she is describing something out of this world (actually – it is just the forest, but under the right light it sounds something out of this world). Then we have the very long high d in the vowel ü in which Schwarzkopf’s again shimmering sound soars over the woodwind buzz of crickets and other night insects that gradually merges with her voice (Szell… and the Tonmeister…. do it exactly as it should be). Again, this long floated note cannot sound like an instrument – it has to be alive, spun by the singer and not just kept there. This is a song of details and a tiny mistake kills the atmosphere. It is the same with the orchestra, which is reminiscent of the scene in Tristan und Isolde when we hear the sounds of the night and Isolde says Nicht Hörnerschall tönt so hold.

The first stanza is about the setting. The second one is about its effect on the poet – and Strauss marks that change by having the soprano sing in a very uncomfortable area pretty close to the end of a soprano’s “natural” register. This is the moment in which, for instance, Felicity Lott (whose recording is otherwise very good) almost speaks and the effect is the opposite of sensuous. Here the text says Und unter ihren Zweigen, da bin ich ganz allein (And beneath their branches, I am completely alone). This line – in the bottom register of the soprano voice – for me has an almost “studied artlessness”, an “innocent sexiness” that makes me think of the suspended, harmonically ambiguous lines sung by Mélisande in the scene in the tower in Debussyé Pelléas et Mélisande, when the soprano says apparently meaningless lines such as Il fait beau cette nuit. Schwarzkopf manages it through her “natural” sound – it is hard to keep a flowing line that way and one can almost hear the technique working there. It is at the same time sincere and insincere – I don’t think that this what Dehmel had in mind but it adds an extra layer here. And the way she handles the pause before allein (alone) as if she was stressing “alone, in the evening, in the forest”. It is at once fairy-tale-like and provocative, as if she were confessing something. The next line is a difficult transition back into the second octave. Sometimes one hears a bump in the line – not here. Schwarzkopf does it very smoothly, slightly covering the tone, everything fleece-like in sound, especially the first long “ganz”. It colors the harmonic shift just happening there in its absolute floating quality. She increases the dynamic very smoothly and breathes very expressively after the word nur (only) as some sort of frisson. It comes just before the word Dein (yours) which Strauss saves for later. She is not ready yet to say it. The last phrase is so multifaceted, I could hear it again and again. We’re in the “cultivated” sound when she sings again ganz (entirely), she moves from note to note with increasing concentration, some very elegant and extremely discrete use of portamento until again she says nur and breathes, but the breathing is entirely different here. Here she gathered the impulse to say dein (which she finally says) in her “natural”, artless, but no longer childlike tone. The way she manages this note is something to be studied – it is again an almost white sound but it keeps changing color, it verges on breathiness at one point and intonation is almost suspect at another moment.

Szell and the Berlin Radio orchestra are always ideal in it – the way the orchestra blends with the soprano voice, especially in long notes is short of miraculous. Some may say Schwarzkopf risked all that because it is a studio recording. Yes, this is true, but it doesn’t mean that she couldn’t make something of that song in concert. If you look on Youtube for her video in Paris with Berislav Klobucar, you’ll find an entirely different interpretation, less multifaceted than in the studio one year before but still vocally effective. Someone comments “she’s struggling there, but it is still interesting”. My answer is “everybody struggles there – and they are rarely interesting”.