Liszt: Im Rhein, im schönen Strome, S272

This second volume of Hyperion’s newest Lieder series features the great dramatic and musical gifts of mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager. Internationally renowned on the opera stage, the concert hall and the recording studio, Kirchschlager is an ideal performer of these most varied, complex and emotionally charged songs. She is accompanied by the multi-Gramophone Award-winning Julius Drake, who curates the series.

The songs recorded here encompass thirty years of Liszt’s life, with texts in German, French and Italian, and contain many examples of the hidden beauties of this undervalued and little-known strand of the composer’s works.

Detailed and informative notes by Susan Youens and a beautifully intimate recorded sound complete a volume which will be indispensable to any lovers of Lieder.

After her sumptuous album of Strauss songs with orchestra, soprano Diana Damrau marks the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth with an album of his most celebrated songs in German, French and Italian, accompanied by pianist Helmut Deutsch.

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.

In this 200th anniversary year of Liszt, Carus has released a recording of seldom performed songs. The 20 songs in this collection reflect Liszt’s interest in German Romanticism and are based on poetry by various German poets of the 17th and 18th centuries. Mammel is in great demand as a lieder singer.

Perhaps stemming from his years touring Europe as a virtuoso pianist or from his later émigré life in Paris, Franz Liszt's choice of song texts reflect his 'polyglot' attraction to the 19th Century literature and culture of many different countries, shown in these settings of French, German, Italian, English, Russian and Hungarian words.