Song Cycles Beethoven: An die ferne Geliebte (Op.98); Schubert: Schwanengesang (D957)

Performers Matthias Goerne (baritone) and Alfred Brendel (piano)
Venue Usher Hall
Address Lothian Road Edinburgh
Reviewer Pat Napier

Following their successful 1999/2000 tour, Matthias Goerne and Alfred Brendel brought Schubert's Schwanengesang to this year's Festival. They teamed it with Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, the first genuine song cycle ever to be composed, written in 1816 at a time of great personal turmoil for Beethoven due to the disputed guardianship of his nephew.

Alfred Brendel © Regina Schmenken

At a time when Beethoven had become more resigned to his deafness, this group of six songs, set to poems by a Moravian medical student Alois Isidor Jeitteles, betrayed no hint of any personal turmoil. Instead, from the piano's very first chord in E flat, they had a flavour of the calm, spare beauty of early Renaissance paintings. Here was no turbulent passion, so often associated with Beethoven. Instead, the songs revealed a man, still in love and somewhat lonely but remembering the past and imagining a future in which his lost love might sing these same songs. With exquisite feeling, Brendel's piano floated underneath Goerne's emotive voice in the first song. Then, using a clever device of related key patterns, Beethoven wove a tapestry of emotions where both voice and piano were given Romantic expression. The final song, with voice and piano equal partners, closed the loop using the opening music and finishing on the same chord leaving us feeling the heartache of lost love.

Mathias Goerne

Schwanengesang, composed in 1828, is not a true song cycle, being settings of two poets: Rellstab and Heine and telling no real story but sharing great emotional intensity with the Beethoven. Where Beethoven struggled to release his music, for Schubert it flowed out in wonderful, rippling streams of melody. Both poets' work were clearly separated by an interval. Goerne's expressive eyes, constantly moving body and, above all, his musicality, allowed us a glimpse into his feelings about the music and emotions he expressed so well. This was never so well expressed as in the Heine poems, which were set to the most glorious music: Ihr Bild (Her picture) was a musical Vermeer, Die Stadt (The town) was rippling Impressionism and Am Meer (By the sea) full of misty ghostliness, to name but a few.

After our shared journey through Beethoven's sad, deeply-felt elegy to lost love and Schubert's more optimistic celebration of its joy as well as pain, Goerne and Brendel treated us to a second Schubert gem from Die Winterreise as their Abschied.

© Pat Napier. 14 August 2001