Recital Notes for November 13, 2007
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Wolf: Songs from Mörike and Goethe

Im Frühling (Eduard Mörike) Hier lieg' ich auf dem Frühlingshügel; die Wolke wird mein Flügel, ein Vogel fliegt mir voraus. Ach, sag' mir, all-einzige Liebe, wo du bleibst, daß ich bei dir bliebe! Doch du und die Lüfte, ihr habt kein Haus. Der Sonnenblume gleich steht mein Gemüte offen, sehnend, sich dehnend in Lieben und Hoffen. Frühling, was bist du gewillt? Wann werd' ich gestillt? Die Wolke seh' ich wandeln, und den Fluß Es dringt der Sonne goldner Kuß mir tief bis ins Geblüt hinein; die Augen, wunderbar berauschet, tun, als schliefen sie ein, nur noch das Ohr dem Ton der Biene lauschet. Ich denke dies und denke das, ich sehne mich, und weiß nicht recht nach was: Halb ist es Lust, halb ist es Klage: Mein Herz, o sage, was webst du für Erinnerung in golden grüner Zweige Dämmerung? Alte unnenbare Tage!	In Springtime Here I lie on the springtime hill; the clouds become my wings, a bird flies out ahead of me. Ah, tell me, one and only love, where you live, so that I may be with you! But you and the breezes have no home. Like a sunflower my mind stands open, yearning, expanding in love and hope. Spring, what do you want of me? When shall I be stilled? I see the cloud and the river pass by; the sun's golden kiss penetrates deep within my veins; my eyes, wondrously enchanted, close as if in sleep. Only my ears catch the hum of the bee. I think of this and that, I yearn without quite knowing why: It is half pleasure and half lament. My heart, tell me, what memories are you weaving here in the shade of golden-green branches? Old, unnamable days!
Auf ein altes Bild (Mörike) In grüner Landschaft Sommerflor, bei kühlem Wasser, Schilf und Rohr, schau', wie das Knäblein, Sündelos, frei spielet auf der Jungfrau Schoß! Und dort im Walde wonnesam, ach, grünet schon des Kreuzes Stamm!	On an Old Painting In the green landscape of a blooming summer, beside cool water, sedges and reeds, behold how the sinless child plays freely on the virgin's knee! And there in the woods, blissfully, alas, the tree of the Cross is already growing!
An den Schlaf (Mörike) Somne levis! Quanquam certissima mortis imago; Consortem cupio te tamen esse tori. Alma quies, optata, veni! Nam sic sine vita Vivere, quam suave est, sic sine morte mori! (Meibom) Schlaf, süßer Schlaf! obwohl dem Tod wie du nichts gleicht, auf diesem Lager doch willkommen heiß' ich dich! Denn ohne Leben so, wie lieblich lebt es sich! so weit vom Sterben, ach, wie stirbt es sich so leicht!	To Sleep Light sleep, though you are the very image of death, I nevertheless desire you to share my bed. Healthful repose, so ardently wished for, come! How sweet it is to live without life, to die without death! Sleep, sweet sleep! although nothing resembles death like you do, nevertheless to this bed I welcomingly call you! For devoid of life, like this, how lovely it is to live! so far from dying, ah, how easy it is to die!
Gleich und Gleich (J.W. von Goethe) Ein Blumenglöckchen vom Boden hervor war früh gesprosset in lieblichem Flor; da kam ein Bienchen und naschte fein: Die müssen wohl beide für einander sein.	One and the Same A little flower-bell had sprouted earlyfrom the ground with a lovely little flourish; there came a little bee and sipped it delicately: they must have been made for each other.
Ganymed (Goethe) Wie im Morgenglanze du rings mich anglühst, Frühling, Geliebter! Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne sich an mein Herz drängt deiner ewigen Wärme heilig Gefühl unendliche Schöne! Daß ich dich fassen möcht' in diesen Arm! Ach, an deinem Busen lieg ich, schmachte, und deine Blumen, dein Gras drängen sich an mein Herz. Du kühlst den brennenden durst meines Busens, lieblicher Morgenwind! ruft drein die Nachtigall liebend nach mir aus dem Nebeltal. Ich komm', ich komme! Wohin? Ach, wohin? Hinauf! hinauf strebt's. Es schweben die Wolken abwärts. Die Wolken neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe. Mir! Mir! In eurem Schoße aufwärts! umfangend umfangen! Aufwärts an deinen Busen, alliebender Vater!	Ganymede How in the morning light you glow red-hot around me, Spring, beloved! With love's thousand-fold ecstasy my heart is thronged by your eternal warmth of sacred feeling and endless beauty! Would that I might hold you in my arms! Ah, on your breast I lie and languish, and your flowers, your grass press themselves to my heart. You cool the burning thirst of my bosom, lovely morning wind! the nightingale calls to me lovingly from the misty valley. I come, I come! But whither? To where? Upward I strive, upward! The clouds float downward. The clouds bow down to yearning love. To me! To me! In your lap upward! embracing, embraced! Upward to your bosom, all-loving Father!

A concert is a labyrinth, a sinuous path on which to journey, not to arrive elsewhere but to heighten the enjoyment of exploring where we are now. Cul-de-sacs become opportunities for exploration, highlighting the paradox of the maze: we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves anew. Tonight's concert leads to the center of a musical labyrinth, but we take these experiences and find our way back to a world inexplicably transformed by our departure and return.

We begin this maze-journey through the poetic portal of Torquato Tasso's sixteenth-century epic, The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme Liberata). The pivotal Canto Sixteen of the poem begins, in fact, with the poetical description of a maze; portions of this canto will read tonight by Tasso's most recent poet-translator, Buffalo's own Max Wickert. When Tasso's poem first appeared in 1579, it was widely praised, although printed without the author's permission. He allowed an authorized version to appear two years later, although he already was racked with doubts about its moral and literary correctness. He rewrote the poem from scratch and in 1591 published a completely different version, entitled Gerusalemme Conquistata, with the romantic and magical aspects of the narrative mercilessly expurgated. The critical and public response to it was not enthusiastic. Despite its tumultuous creative origins, the original version Tasso's epic had widespread influence in literature and art and was the basis for myriad musical adaptations throughout the following centuries.

Continuing through this concert maze, we come upon the inscription on David Felder's 1984 work for solo piano, which states, "Two distinct stimuli are responsible for the creation of Rocket Summer : the unmatched ferocity of a midwestern blizzard, and the first chapter of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles." In Bradbury's story, an Ohio landscape in winter experiences a temporary revival of summer caused by the fiery blasts of exhaust from a nearby rocket lift-off. The shivers of winter are intoned by the piano's opening flurries of blustering clusters, which are then interrupted by sustained harmonic resonances. Recollections of summery major-key nocturnes and minor-key mazurkas resound dimly through gelid winter gusts, building to a harmonically static, bi-tonal climax. The warmth of temporary summer fades as dream-like tonal memories reappear and finally disappear, and the last indication in the score is the single word, "FROZEN!" The composer dedicated the piece to his mother, whom he describes as "a very fine amateur pianist", and was commissioned by Steve Zegree.

In February 2006, composer and pianist Paolo Cavallone wrote, "Confini is structured in three parts (actually, two parts with a Coda). The first and the last frame a central section, which is a metaphorical tango. The pianist, with his movements involving playing the piano, playing inside the piano, hitting is own body and stomping his feet, eventually standing up and sitting down again, suggests a sort of a ghost/metaphor of a tango dancer. Moreover, this second section represents in itself two movements: the classical adagio, the essence of the typical slow movement in its meditative becoming, and the minuet/scherzo of the global sonata structure. While working on the tango as a dance and as a piece of music, other influences affected the work: similarities among tango, some of Domenico Scarlatti's "Spanish music" and flamenco, for example. Sometimes, only a breath, a rest, can change the meaning and perspective to music; this breath can be the result of a century of evolutions. Therefore, the choice of the tango is also intended as a symbol of a great tradition that includes not only popular and classic approaches but also cultures and dimensions that go far beyond every boundary."

Writing of his Sonata for Violin and Piano, Claude Debussy invoked the image of Ouroboros, a symbol of cyclic recursion apropos not only the Sonata for Violin but also to Debussy's intention of writing six sonatas with diverse instrumentation. This work was to be the third of the set, but the cycle would remain incomplete with the composer's death in 1917. A letter to his friend Robert Godet, contained the advice, "Don't trust any piece that appears to hover in flight from heaven - it could have been brooded in the dark depths of a sick man's brain! For instance, the finale of my sonata: the simple play on a thought that twists itself like a snake biting its own tail..." The "sick man" is Debussy himself, who had been long ill with cancer. The music bears an economy and austerity usually associated with his earlier compositions, especially another g-minor work, the String Quartet of 1893. Perhaps this is a wistful reflection of times before the French involvement in the first World War, but Debussy may have intuited that this would be his last work when he wrote, "Music has completely abandoned me."

The last of a completed set of six sonatas for solo violin, the single movement of Eugene Ysa¥e's Sonata no. 6 is divided into three parts. The first section, Allegro giusto non troppo vivo introduces a habanera dance as part of a tribute to its dedicatee, violin virtuoso and composer, Manuel Quiroga (known as the "Spanish Kreisler"), who never publicly performed the work himself. Quiroga's career as a performer was cut short after being struck by a vehicle in New York's Times Square. (Another Ysa¥e dedicatee, Fritz Kreisler himself, would later die blind and deaf as a result of injuries suffered in a separate New York car accident.) The second part of Ysa¥e's final solo sonata, Allegretto poco scherzando, sets the habanera in a minor key, and the final Allegro Tempo I returns to the capricious major-key opening music in a valedictory gesture of Iberian bravado. For Ysa¥e, a creative warren interconnecting six solo violin compositions was completed with this work, published along with the rest of the set in 1924.

Weaving our way through tonight's musical maze to Hugo Wolf's setting of Mörike's To Sleep (itself a translation of Latin verse by Meibom), the polarity of life and death is welcomed as a bedside companion. Mörike's On an Old Painting again invokes the Virgin Mary, this time in her role as mother of the young Jesus, whose vibrant youth stands in the shadow of the tree which will eventually be cut into the cross of his own execution. In One and the Same, opposites are reconciled through Goethe's whimsically simple sketch of a bee attracted to a flower. While the plant's life is gradually drained by the feeding insect, the generational survival of both is assured through the exchange itself. His setting of Mörike's In Springtime even portrays the floral nature of our own existence: "Like a sunflower my mind stands open, yearning, expanding in love and hope." As with the symbiotic pairing of flower and bee, we play a seminal role in the continuity of life, growing beyond individual limitation into the infinity of nature's labyrinthine creative bounty.

The center of tonight's concert-maze points to 1835, when a self-consciously reactionary Mendelssohn wrote to fellow composer Ferdinand Hiller, "I have some new pianoforte things and shall shortly publish some of them. I always think of you and your warning whenever an old-fashioned passage comes into my head, and hope to get rid of such ideas." About the Piano Trio in d-minor, Hiller recounts:

Certain pianoforte passages in it, constructed on broken chords, seemed to me—to speak candidly—somewhat old-fashioned. I had lived many years in Paris, seeing Liszt frequently, and Chopin every day, so that I was thoroughly accustomed to the richness of passages which marked the new pianoforte school. I made some observations to Mendelssohn, suggesting certain alterations, but at first he would not listen to me. "Do you think that that would make the thing any better?" He said, "The piece would be the same, and so it may remain as it is." I answered, "You have often told me . . . that the smallest touch of the brush, which might conduce to the perfection of the whole, must not be despised." We discussed it and tried it on the piano over and over again, and I enjoyed the small triumph of at last getting Mendelssohn over to my view.

Mendelssohn would rewrite the piano part at his friend's behest without altering the trio's themes or its formal design. The four-movement work features a characteristically impish scherzo , whose catch-me-if-you-can quality is established by a seven-measure piano theme, dividing unevenly as three-plus-four. The work concludes with a joyous rondo, which expands on the classical form through its major-key recalling of the preceding scherzo before the movement's conclusion at the end of our travels through this musical labyrinth. The secret of any maze lies at its center, which is not merely a physical location but the center of our own experience. Having completed the journey, the trail leads us back to where we started, back out of the concert hall, back to where we are ready to begin the journey anew.

Marc Aneny