Interview, Malcolm Martineau on Decades in Song

This Friday sees the launch of a fascinating new series on Vivat, which will explore the development of art-song in nineteenth-century Europe decade by decade. The series is the brainchild of the pianist Malcolm Martineau, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of this literature and has worked with some of the finest singers of his generation (many of whom will make appearances on one or more of the projected ten volumes, alongside some of the most exciting emerging voices he's encountered over the past couple of years).

Ahead of the launch of Volume One this Friday, I caught up with Malcolm over the phone to find out more about how Decades came into being, and what hidden gems we can expect to discover over the next couple of years…

Tell me a little about how the project came into being…

It all started off as a series at Wigmore Hall that I did about four or five years ago which was only German songs, and it was so successful that I decided to try and expand it to include other countries as well. It was so interesting to see what was going on, even just in the German-speaking countries at the same time, to include some really popular stuff, but also material by unknown composers as well as repertoire by major composers that isn’t often given an airing. Beethoven people always forget about, because they’ve heard An die ferne Geliebte but don’t know anything else! And the reason that the others aren’t done very often is that they’re really difficult to sing: Michael Schade’s voice lends itself to Beethoven, because he doesn’t mind sitting around E-F-G of the tenor voice, and just really suits this repertoire.

You’ve got a real mixture of very established singers and emerging artists…

Yes, quite deliberately so. I’ve got very well-known people like Michael, and Chris Maltman and Angelika Kirchschlager, but also some youngsters as well, including Anush [Hovhannisyan] who does the Russian songs on the second disc and is one of the Young Artists from the Jette Parker scheme at the Royal Opera House, and the marvellous young German soprano Christina Gansch, who won the Kathleen Ferrier Award in 2014. So quite a few young artists as well as wonderful people like Ann Murray, who is still singing amazingly and still sounding as if she’s 35!

Was it a deliberate idea to include composers who were reasonably well known but not necessarily as song-writers?

Definitely. And it’s something that features more and more as the series goes on…The German-speaking countries were miles ahead at the beginning, so the Viotti and the French songs are very – ‘basic’ is the wrong word, but they are very simple little songs: the accompaniments certainly are basic, Alberti bass stuff, or in the case of the Spanish songs they imitate the guitar, so it’s much more a case of composers drawing on the folk tradition in Italy, France and Spain, at least at the beginning. But as the series goes on it’ll be much less orientated towards the German-speaking countries: over the course of the next three or four volumes we’ll get some Swedish songs, some Portuguese, some Czech. In the first volume there’s Tomášek, but he was writing in German (as a Czech living in Austria and writing German-style music). It’s been fascinating for me to find all these people, and the third decade comes when you’re in between Schubert and Schumann: this period when Schubert’s just died and Schumann hadn’t really started and we think ‘Oh, well there isn’t really any song’… but of course there are lots of fantastic songs by other people. You have Loewe, for instance, who stuck around for four decades because he lived till he was over 80!

That Weber song on the first volume – is it very similar to his operatic writing?

It is a little, but funnily enough it’s also very similar to Beethoven – the Fidelio-like Beethoven, which fed into Freischütz and Euryanthe and Oberon. It’s quite simple, but like a lot of the Germanic songs of that time it’s also very philosophical, with this sense of fixing the mind on higher things. And despite the simplicity, it’s also quite experimental harmonically in a way that songs from the other countries during this period aren’t. As with the operas, there’s a sense that Weber’s looking forward to Wagner… It’s fascinating to see which composers are looking back and which are looking forward.

With hugely prolific figures like Schubert, where do you start narrowing down the selection?

Essentially, we just chose the ones we really love! 1815 was his golden year, when he wrote SO many songs, but it’s a side of Schubert that people may not know. When there are five verses of the same music, you might think ‘well, how did that work?! - but if you’re a genius like Schubert then you can make the same music work equally well for the different words…you can play around with colours and with phrasing, or taking a breath in a slightly different place.

Are the majority of the texts also from the nineteenth century, or do any of the composers set eighteenth-century or even Renaissance poetry?

There’s nothing Renaissance (though certainly Schumann was obsessed with Renaissance polyphony, and trying to recreate the musical sounds of that era). Of course you have Goethe, and a lot of that comes from the end of the eighteenth century, and many of Schubert’s 1815 songs set these texts. But funnily enough, it’s generally later in the century that you get people looking backwards…

Are there any specific texts which will recur throughout the series?

The famous Goethe settings will certainly come back – 'Suleika', 'Mignon' etc – and ‘Du bist wie eine Blume, which is the most set German poem ever, with something like 20 000 settings!

Female composers feature quite heavily on the first volume – is this going to be true of the series as a whole?

The female composers are the ones that have cropped up as wonderful discoveries – there’s Josephine Lang, who was around in the 30s and 40s, and who Clara Schumann called the most talented composer around at the time. And then there’s the wonderfully-named Agathe Backer-Grøndahl, a Norwegian composer who was a pupil of Liszt’s, both compositionally and pianistically; I am also a great fan of Fanny Mendelssohn’s songs( she has a completely different voice from her brother), and they’ll appear on Vols. 2 & 3 ; and Clara Schumann will feature, of course.