Schumann: Dichterliebe, Gedichte und Requiem & Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder

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This is a performance that offers something earthier, more tangible than mere Romantic navelgazing. There’s reflection, tenderness and Innigkeit aplenty, but also a hint of bitterness, a determination... — Gramophone Magazine, February 2020 More…

Release Date: 11th Oct 2019
Catalogue No: CC72788
Label: Challenge Classics
Length: 63 minutes

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Schumann: Dichterliebe, Op. 48

Work length27:42

$16.00

$22.40

Michael Gees, Christoph Prégardien

I. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai

Track length1:29

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II. Aus meinen Tränen sprießen

Track length0:56

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III. Die Rose, die Lilie

Track length0:35

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IV. Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'

Track length1:37

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V. Ich will meine Seele tauchen

Track length0:55

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VI. Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome

Track length1:56

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VII. Ich grolle nicht

Track length1:31

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VIII. Und wüssten's die Blumen

Track length1:13

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IX. Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen

Track length1:25

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X. Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen

Track length1:59

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XI. Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen

Track length0:59

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XII. Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen

Track length2:22

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XIII. Ich hab' im Traum geweinet

Track length2:34

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XIV. Allnächtlich im Traume

Track length1:27

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XV. Aus alten Märchen winkt es

Track length2:43

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XVI. Die alten, bösen Lieder

Track length4:01

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Wagner: Wesendonck-Lieder (5)

Work length18:29

$5.00

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Michael Gees, Christoph Prégardien

I. Der Engel

Track length3:07

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II. Stehe still!

Track length3:15

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III. Im Treibhaus

Track length5:03

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IV. Schmerzen

Track length2:28

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V. Träume

Track length4:36

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Schumann: Gedichte (6) und Requiem, Op. 90

Work length17:10

$7.00

$9.80

Michael Gees, Christoph Prégardien

I. Lied eines Schmiedes

Track length1:30

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II. Meine Rose

Track length3:28

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III. Kommen und Scheiden

Track length1:27

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IV. Die Sennin

Track length1:56

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V. Einsamkeit

Track length3:06

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VI. Der schwere Abend

Track length1:59

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VII. Requiem

Track length3:44

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$1.40

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Tenor Christoph Pregardien and pianist Michael Gees perform two of the greatest masterpieces in the solo song repertory: Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. Schumann’s powerful, but lesser knownLenau Lieder with Requiem, Op.90 completes the album.

Robert Schumann was the most confessional of composers and many of the songs from his great Liederjahr of 1840 were in essence love songs to Clara Wieck. In Dichterliebe (‘Poet’s Love’) Op.48, he turns again to the pithy verses of Heinrich Heine’s Buch der Lieder. On one level, Dichterliebe can be heard as his most piercing recreation of the fluctuating emotions he had experienced during his long courtship of Clara.

Characteristically of Schumann, it is the piano that controls the musical narrative in Dichterliebe. Characteristic, too, of Schumann’s 1840 songs is the piano postlude that encapsulates and deepens a song’s meaning. Dichterliebe takes this to the furthest extreme.

In August 1850, Schumann set six poems by the unstable and ultimately insane Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), whom he had briefly met in Vienna in 1839. Like Schumann and Wolf, Lenau spent his last years in an asylum, his mind destroyed by syphilis. Schumann was ill and dejected at the time, and his mood is reflected in these poems of satiety, oppressiveness and transience. As a tribute to the dying poet (who he initially believed had already died), Schumann appended to the Lenau group one of his rare religious songs: Requiem, a setting of Héloïse’s lament for Peter Abelard. For this quasi-operatic music of solemn grandeur and mounting exaltation, Schumann devised a swirling keyboard accompaniment that takes its cue from the poem’s image of angelic harps.

During the autumn of 1857 Wagner began a set of five songs to poems by Mathilde Wesendonck, written in evident imitation of Wagner’s hothouse Tristan manner - one of the very rare occasions when he set words other than his own. The Wesendonck Lieder, as they are now known, were revised and completed in 1858, and first performed as a cycle in July 1862 at a country house belonging to the publisher Franz Schott. Each of the songs shares with Tristan the concept of ‘endless melody’, a saturated, dissolving chromaticism - the musical emblem of unstilled desire - and a feverish, oppressive atmosphere.

Reviews

February 2020

This is a performance that offers something earthier, more tangible than mere Romantic navelgazing. There’s reflection, tenderness and Innigkeit aplenty, but also a hint of bitterness, a determination and a strength of character...Prégardien’s voice is inevitably less fresh and juicy than before...but there’s still plenty of sweetness, not to mention impressive power in the lower range. Michael Gees’s piano-playing,
too, is superb, finding character and nuance at every turn.

Schumann: Dichterliebe, Gedichte und Requiem & Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder

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