On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music PURE SCHUBERT by m. anatole gurewitsch F JLm ranz Schubert's contributions to symphonic literature, chamber music and the art of the lied have earned him universal reverence and love....
...The previously available traversal of the complete music for piano, violin and cello by the Beaux Arts Trio has recently been re-released (Philips 6770 001...
...Easily the pre-eminent interpreter of the Schubert song literature, he expertly integrates this with the part's conventional operatic material (such as the stretta of his first aria)—most notably in his delivery of the "Song of the Cloud Maiden," which combines a recitalist's finesse with an opera singer's broader gestures...
...Enter the usurper Mauregato and his daughter, Estrella, whom the ambitious general, Adolfo, demands in marriage...
...That he is cast as the villain is no excuse for the unappealing quality of his voice (though conversely the portrait of Troila is amplified and enriched by the suavity of Fischer-Dieskau's sound...
...From the portentous opening chords to the final chorus of celebration, the musical invention of Alfonso und Estrella is testimony to Schubert's inexhaustible eloquence...
...My complaints concern Hermann Prey and Theo Adam, who take the parts of Mauregato and Adolfo, respectively...
...One outstanding example of Schubert's genius for scene painting occurs at the opening of Act 2. Alfonso (introduced in Act I as a prize-winning singer and swordsman) asks his father to sing him the "Song of the Cloud Maiden"—a kind of latter-day siren whose invitation to her castle in the air tempts men to a rocky death at the foot of a cliff...
...His stage works—two grand-scale operas, Alfonso und Estrella (1822) and Fier-rabras (1823), plus a string of smaller pieces and fragments—went largely unperformed in his own lifetime and continued to suffer neglect after his death...
...its brevity notwithstanding, it manages to ramble quite tiresomely...
...The substitution of mood for more manifest action is probably impossible on stage, where the sight of costumed singers standing about endlessly repeating themselves would prove too forceful a reminder of their inactivity...
...The sustained cantilena phrases of the middle movements of the B-flat trio find the cello singing high and with remarkable independence over the lines of the naturally higher-pitched violin...
...Where the music calls for greater heft than he can supply, Schreier pressures his light tenor and produces a harsh, aspirated sound...
...Then Estrella appears, separated from her hunting party...
...and while it can hardly claim a place among the group's most magisterial recordings, its many riches and profound satisfactions are good to have back...
...Once launched, the figures, unpro-pelled by personal motive, drift forward on the tide of the fable to the expected port of union and reconciliation...
...A moldy tale (to borrow a phrase from Ben Jonson, who thus disparaged Shakespeare's Pericles—yet the occasion for a profusion of fresh music...
...His melodic and harmonic originality enlivens simple lines with unexpected accidentals and subtly dovetailed configurations of major and minor, transporting what in the libretto may appear hackneyed and schematic to the plane of genuine poetry...
...and the titular hero and heroine do not so much carry the plot as provide the means for it to close in harmony...
...She wants none of him, so her father stalls by reminding his unruly subject that an ancient prophecy reserves her for the man who returns a lost treasure to the royal House of Leon—the chain of Eurich...
...Prey, a personable performer with great natural talent, built a career before bothering to acquire any reliable voice technique...
...the dialogues between the strings thus become intriguing explorations of timbre...
...100 develops a pensive air of haunting melancholy...
...If the opening movements of the piano trios remind us that Schubert's handling of the rigors of the sonata form is not outstanding, the daring use of cyclicity at the close of the E-flat bears incidental yet brilliant witness to his total supremacy in a looser form—the theme and its variations...
...In the opening movements of both, Schubert tosses out lovely ideas and takes off on delightful flights of fancy...
...Recognizing the problem, the Beaux Arts members omit the first-movement repeats in the two trios...
...Audiences still cherish him because his instincts about how to shape a line are sound, but in this demanding role his inadequate training is mercilessly exposed...
...The romantic ballad weaves together strands of longing, sweetness and impending doom that the vocal line and musical accompaniment pick out and display...
...a later and remarkable piece—a single movement, built from a single rhythmic and melodic cell is elaborated with great ingenuity—it is nonetheless more tantalizing than fulfilled, like a quatrain from an unfinished Petrarchan sonnet...
...The glories of the album are Schubert's two great mature and fully articulated trios, the B-flat op...
...As a composer for the theater, however, he enjoys no reputation at all...
...99 (D...
...posth...
...Alfonso stays behind to enjoy the serenity...
...Everywhere else the music and playing are of a transcendent order, each movement casting its special spell...
...Happily, such passages are few, so that in the main his performance is attractive and wonderfully idiomatic...
...Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau takes first honors with his handsomely sung, superbly imagined Troila...
...In the astonishing finale, which alternates restlessly between 6/8 and 4/4 alia breve, the "Swedish" theme returns—augmented, so that its real tempo does not change no matter how fast the piano and the violin glint and weave around it...
...Over the square, precise pulse of a slow march, the lofty second movement of the op...
...Edith Mathis, whose soprano has assumed new body, color, and fuller amplitude over the past few years, makes an ardent Estrella...
...28), a product of Schubert's 15th year...
...His portrayal of the declining tyrant disappears behind a shredded instrument—the evidence of his own declining powers...
...The theme is said to derive from a Swedish folk song...
...In contrast, Peter Schreier, the Alfonso, is not so finished a vocalist...
...The story, while clearly plotted and by no means uneventful, lacks dramatic urgency and plausibility—the compelling force of "necessary logic" that arises from sharply drawn characters...
...To her, lost and alone, the craggy forest presents a landscape of terror—and she is swept onstage by an orchestral wave of heroic turbulence that soon gives way to lyricism at the young pair's first, life-transforming encounter...
...100 (D...
...He is at his best in the duet he shares with Fischer-Dieskau, "Geschmiickt von Glanz unci Sie-gen"—an occasion for excellent interpretative consonance...
...Adolfo's uprising is a mere diversion...
...The pace being completely unconsidered, the whole may refuse to ignite as drama, but Schubert's command of mood is so absolute and various that his music demands attention moment to moment as if it were dramatic...
...But unlike Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, he does not owe his place ai.-ong the immortals to a notable genius for manipulating the so-called "sonata form," employed almost without exception in the classical period for the first movements of sonatas (and of ensembles for chamber formations such as the piano trio or the string quartet, as well as symphony itself...
...929...
...His reading has fallen several more notches in general unattractiveness since I last heard him...
...Still, they emerge as rather strenuous, building forever to endings that are far too long in coming...
...After singing the song, Troila exits to tend sick countryfolk...
...898) and the E-flat op...
...The orchestra for the performance is the Berlin Staatskapelle under Ot-mar Suitner, who keeps their playing bright and alert, yet evokes with passion the score's many-hued romanticism...
...His son Alfonso, having grown to manhood ignorant of his royal heritage (to which his father intends in time to restore him), begins to weary of the rustic and secluded life...
...If Adam possesses any glimmer of musicality, it must be hidden under the bushel of his brusque, ungrateful bass...
...By this point the chain hangs about Alfonso's neck, as a pledge from his father that he shall not long be sequestered from the great world beyond their pastoral retreat...
...Moviegoers may remember its time-stopping beauty from the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon...
...Although for the lay public Fier-rabras remains a closed book, Alfonso und Estrella, thanks to a most welcome first recording (Angel SCLX-3878) is now open to universal inspection...
...TJ ^^^r nlike his operas, Schubert s familiar chamber music requires no rescue mission...
...148, bearing the title "Nottur-no" (and the Deutsch listing 897...
...Within the action of the opera, Troila's overthrow is consigned to the background...
...The set is well engineered, too, but the festive flourishes of the hunting music would have benefited by more prominently placed trumpets...
...We may quickly pass over the one-movement "Sonata" in B-flat(D...
...Adam's account of the grasping and bellicose Adolfo (whose menace clearly follows the model of Beethoven's Pizarro) is no better...
...Troila, the deposed king of Leon, lives unrecognized among the peaceful inhabitants of a remote mountain valley, where he has won affection and authority for his wisdom and good works...
...I have called the recording most welcome, and it is, despite a cast that is not of a uniformly high caliber...
...It has many virtues, but the taste of the past century and a half has decreed that they do not include those of the theater...
...Nor need we linger over the E-flat Adagio op...
...to my ears it sounds like nothing other than pure Schubert...
Vol. 62 • July 1979 • No. 14
