Liszt: Kling Leise, mein Lied, S301

Sylvia Sass was born near Budapest, Hungary, in 1951 to a very musical family. Her mother was a coloratura soprano and her father a high school music teacher. She made her stage debut at age 14 in Adam’s operetta Die Nürnberger Puppe and then commenced study at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, completing a five-year program in two. Her professional debut was as Frasquita in Carmen in 1971. Several awards followed – 1st prize at the Kodály Voice Competition in Budapest, 1972; winner at the International Opera Competition for Young Singers, of the Grand Prix as Violetta in La traviata, 1973, the Silver Medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, 1974. She was also made an Honoured Artist of Hungary in 1977.

While still in Budapest, she performed such dramatic roles as Freia in Das Rheingold, Violetta in La traviata and Mimi in La bohème. International stardom came with a composer with whom she is most associated and in a role represented on her Decca recitals – Giselda in Verdi’s I Lombardi at Covent Garden in London, 1976. The next year she made both, her Italian debut in Turin as Lady Macbeth, and her Metropolitan Opera debut as Tosca alongside José Carreras. La Scala followed the year after, in 1978, where she sang Puccini’s tragic heroine Manon Lescaut alongside Plácido Domingo.

Soon, Sass was being heralded as ‘the new Callas’, and she did meet Callas in person, thanks to a meeting set up by Leonard Bernstein. True, the voice had a similar dramatic colour, but Sass quickly rebuffed the comparison, saying, ‘Callas was so great and so unique. I just don’t think it’s fair to compare somebody with such a great artist.’

Her three recital records for Decca include two discs of operatic arias, including all her most celebrated roles, both conducted by Lamberto Gardelli, and a disc of songs by Liszt and Bartók with her compatriot, pianist András Schiff. All of these are issued collectively as a 2CD set for the first time. In recent years, Sass has settled in France, where she keeps busy painting and giving masterclasses.

When Dame Margaret Price died in January 2011, the musical world reacted in an understandably emotional fashion. By contrast, the Welsh soprano herself was a woman with an understated approach to her life, eschewing the frenetic international star system in favour of loyalty to a select few major opera houses. She bade farewell to public performance in 1999, retiring to rural Wales where she turned to breeding golden retrievers. Although a local vicar persuaded her to perform in a charity concert, she found the occasion so nerve-wracking that her dogs finally became the only audience for her singing.

The start of another Hyperion Lieder series is always cause for celebration. In advance of his bicentenary in 2011, we turn to a composer whose songs, against the vast bulk of his compositions in larger genres, were considered insignificant for well over a century.

A collaborator with some of Europe’s best singers, such as the great French tenor Adolphe Nourrit and the husband–wife duo of Feodor and Rosa von Milde (the first Elsa and Telramund in Wagner’s Lohengrin), Liszt used song as a compositional laboratory in which to experiment with ‘Zukunftsmusik’, or ‘music of the future’, including some of his most finely wrought works. A cosmopolitan artist who traveled prodigiously during his years as a virtuoso performer from 1838 to 1847, he chose song texts written both by denizens of Mount Olympus (Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hugo, Tennyson, Tolstoy, Petrarch) and amateurs, the latter often aristocrats from Liszt’s glittering social circles. From their words he created songs that changed the very definition of the genre, that are a bridge to such later masters as Hugo Wolf, Sergei Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss.

This first volume in the series features the American tenor Matthew Polenzani who has been astounding Met opera audiences in recent years with his expressive and ardent performances. He is accompanied by the curator of the series and Hyperion regular, Julius Drake.

The intention of the Liszt Lied Edition is to give these songs their due place in the repertoire of Liszt and to make previously unpublished works available, as well as to present recording premiers. Liszt’s Lieder contain the essence of his entire oeuvre. Adrian Eröd made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in 2001 and in 2003 at the Teatro Fenice in Venice. He has performed with Harnoncourt, Rilling and Rattle.

Liszt’s songs are among his least performed works. With the bicentenary of his birth upon us, much of his output will be performed and recorded, and no doubt re-assessed. The composer himself was aware that he was difficult to categorise, and that the public face he had was as a flashy virtuoso pianist composer – a reputation that survives to this day, as the Rick Wakeman’s 1975s rock-opera ‘Lisztomania’ (filmed by Ken Russell, and starring The Who’s Roger Daltry as Liszt) testifies.

‘Everyone is against me: the Catholics because they find my music profane, the protestants because my music is Catholic, the Masons because they find my music too clerical. For the conservatives I am a revolutionary, for the futurists I am a phony Jacobin. For the Italians, in spite of Sgambati (his pupil and fellow composer), if they are Garibaldini they hate me because the think me a bigot, if they are on the Vatican’s side, they accuse me of turning the Tempio di Venere into a church. For Bayreuth I am an advertising agent rather than a composer. The Germans hate my music because they think it French, the French hate it because they think it German. For the Austrians I make Gypsy music, for the Hungarians I make foreign music. And the Jews hate me and my music without any reason.’

Interesting words, from a deeply frustrated Liszt. So how do we or should we find a definition for his music? The songs provide a fascinating clue. The writing for voice is clearly of Latin origin, skillfully woven into German Lied. Liszt manages to adapt the ‘feel’ of the music depending on the language he was setting – so a French text and the music ‘sounds’ of French origin and so on. Such stylistic flexibility can also be found in his orchestral, choral and solo piano works making this great composer a difficult customer in an age where we like to ‘pigeon-hole things. The songs require great skill from both singer and accompanist to reveal their many treasures.