Interview,
Robyn Allegra Parton on Burnished Gold
I spoke to Robyn shortly before the launch-concert about the salon culture which sprung up in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the rich and varied depictions of women in these songs, the joys of collaborating with pianist Simon Lepper - and the story behind that striking Klimt-inspired cover...
When did you first become fascinated by fin-de-siècle Vienna, and what was the initial impetus for the project?
I think it comes from several different angles. When I was about seventeen I was given my first Strauss song by a singing-teacher, and I loved it: obviously it’s beautiful music, but I also recognised that it’s the kind of vocal writing which really plays to my strengths. Voices have different innate abilities, and floating high, shimmering lines was something which always came naturally to me. It was there in my voice from the very beginning, and Strauss gave me a chance to exploit and enjoy it.
A couple of years later I went to see Korngold’s Die tote Stadt at the Royal Opera House, and thought it was literally the best music I’d ever heard. But it wasn’t until I was reading music at university that I really learned about this extraordinary moment in history: the end of Romanticism/start of Modernism, where everything comes to a head and all formal structure scatters in a hundred different directions. The tension of that is what I love about the art, music and literature of this period - that sense of hovering on the precipice before everything just dissolves and never comes back together again.
The work of Gustav Klimt inspired both the title and cover - what sort of parallels do you see between his paintings and the songs on your programme?
In Vienna in particular, the Art Nouveau movement is so glittery and shiny, and the way that women are portrayed is very interesting: they’ve kind of lost that innocent, ethereal, not-entirely-human quality that we see a lot in the Romantic period, and somehow become much more complex and vital. Klimt dresses up women to empower them – he covers them in gold not just as an ornament, but to say ‘This is a regal woman who has charisma and a personality, who has adult human feelings and energy’. I think I hear that in all of these songs as well: women’s voices (sopranos in particular) were suddenly gifted music of such energy and assertion and virtuosity, making full use of their vocal range and flexibility to express those qualities.
Did any of the six composers featured on the album have personal connections with Klimt?
Klimt was very much a part of the Viennese Secession movement, a group of people who were breaking away from the traditional architectural and visual arts of the time. The most recognisable woman in his paintings is Adele Bloch-Bauer, who used to hold salons attended by people like Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Stefan Zweig. She was the model for the painting known as 'Woman in Gold', one of Klimt’s famous Golden Style masterpieces, commissioned by her husband. (‘Woman in Gold’ was actually the working title for the album at one point, but I went for ‘Burnished Gold’ instead – I think it conveys that antique, nostalgic quality quite well).
One rather exciting connection is that Alma Mahler apparently had her first kiss with Klimt! Alma famously spent quite a lot of time getting to know the guys of high-society Vienna and she’s a notoriously unreliable source, but it’s fairly well-documented that she met Klimt when she was a teenager and her parents got involved and put a stop to the romance.
Which of the songs here strike you as most daring in terms of pushing tonality to (or even beyond) its limits?
I think that perhaps Alma pushes the boundaries more than the other composers that I’ve chosen here at the time of writing. Obviously she’s drawing on a wealth of influences from the Romantic period, but the way she stretches the structures is fascinating. None of the composers on the album have really done away with tonality yet, but she and Berg are the ones who somehow hide their tonality: they cover it up by switching harmony so frequently and so quickly, and by suggesting harmonies instead of really offering them up.
Picking up on that idea of 'stretching the structure' of songs, which other composers push the envelope in that regard?
In terms of the piano-writing, Joseph Marx is the composer who really stands out: he writes so virtuosically for the piano, and I think that’s what makes his songs so fantastic. I chose his Nocturne as the single we released to promote the album, not least because Simon’s playing in it is so amazing: it opens with this cascade of rolling waves from piano, and it simply never stops moving. I absolutely love to be part of a duo where the piano is given that much responsibility and attention, and it doesn’t often happen in Lieder; Marx inserts a lot more interludes (almost like piano miniatures) within his songs than we tend to see in the Romantic period, and that’s his way of stretching the form in new directions.
Marx was a bit of an outsider in that he wasn’t really a part of Viennese high society in the same way as people like Alma Mahler and Richard Strauss at this time; he spent his early career in his hometown of Graz and only moved to Vienna in 1914. He was also more old-school than some of the other figures on the album, famously one of these composers who didn’t want to push the envelope; he spoke out a lot against what he saw as outlandish innovations (he was credited with inventing the term ‘atonality’ in a thesis which he wrote as a student in Graz). This is why I’ve put his songs first on the album, to start the listening journey from late-Romanticism to the more modern in this short time period.
Johanna Müller-Hermann is someone else who sits more on the Romantic side of things than in the Modernist realm, at least in terms of tonality - but even so, she twists around with her harmonies so much that you feel like you’re never settled in one place. She’s writing a little later than the other composers I’ve chosen - these songs were composed around the time of the start of World War One; I don’t know why she chose these particular poems, but I feel it could be relevant to what was happening at the time. There’s a kind of chronic misery to the songs, and I wonder if that’s influenced by the fact that this was a time when the men would be leaving home to go to war and the women were left behind; again, it’s giving women a stronger voice than they generally had in the Romantic period.
It’s so great to see her music getting some more exposure this year! When did she first come onto your radar?
In 2021 SWAP’ra (Supporting Women and Parents in Opera) held a series of recitals in association with We Are HERA and the Royal Welsh College of Music where they programmed music by unknown, unheard women composers. I came across some of Müller-Hermann’s songs when I was watching one of these concerts online, and then I read some articles about her by Dr Carola Darwin (the person who’s done a lot of the research behind the project). I had a look at the music and just thought ‘More people should hear this’. The mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, one of the founders of SWAP’ra, decided to make an album featuring some of her music around the same time, and we got in touch with each other to make sure we weren’t planning to record the same songs: anyone who enjoys Burnished Gold should definitely listen to Kitty and Joseph Middleton’s album Befreit - A Soul Surrendered as well!
These initiatives to discover works that have been lost to history are really effective. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ties in with the #MeToo movement and the current drive that we have to correct discrimination and sexism: not just conscious discrimination, but also the status quo which prescribes what we perform and who gets to write new music and have it performed. I feel like the opera and song worlds are finally taking note of what the acting world has been doing for the past ten years or more in terms of addressing how many women are actually on stage (and in senior creative roles behind the scenes) per production, and how many women composers are being performed on big stages.
What's coming up for you next season in terms of operatic roles, and what's on your long-term bucket-list?
I just sang Fifth Maid in Elektra, so more Strauss is on my mind…Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier is always on my wish-list, and if my voice ever developed towards Salome then I’d love to sing that one day, but for now I’ll stick with the coloratura or lighter lyric roles - Die Fiakermilli in Arabella would be fun! I’m currently on a full-time contract at Theater Münster in Germany, and they are programming some really interesting repertoire: last year we did Ernst Krenek’s Leben des Orest from 1930. My character, Thamar, was added in by Krenek rather than being a figure from the Greek plays; it’s a Zerbinetta-like role with lots of super-high notes, but unlike Zerbinetta she’s mostly angry! She’s a very strong woman who comes from the frozen Northern lands, so she’s quite cold and set apart and always has a sword in her hand – it was a great role to play.
Next season we’re doing Franz Schreker’s Der Schmied von Gent, another work which has barely been performed since it was written in the 1930s. Basically all of these German and Austrian composers of that period share something of that post-Romanticism that you hear on the album. The Krenek has some jazz in the mix as well: it’s really tonal stuff but incredibly difficult, which is also how I would describe late Strauss.
Otherwise, I’m also working on belcanto Italian repertoire. I had a great time singing Gilda in Rigoletto in Münster last season, and this coming Autumn I’ll be understudying the same role at the Royal Opera House in London. This repertoire relies on the same technique as these flexible Straussian songs, so I think it’s a good pairing.
What's the story behind the cover?
The best thing about working with Orchid Classics is that I’ve had total creative control over the project: that’s been very daunting for a first album, but Matthew [Trusler] has been really supportive. My favourite part was probably organising the cover! I obviously wanted to reference Klimt, without being too clichéd about it . I also wanted to move away from the stereotypical ‘opera-singer in a ball-gown’ image, so I went out and bought some gold-leaf and glued it to myself… the only drawback was I couldn’t get it off, so for about three days I had to walk around with a rather fetching, golden rash!
Robyn Allegra Parton (soprano), Simon Lepper (piano)
Available Formats: CD, MP3, FLAC, Hi-Res FLAC
Katherine Cooper - Head of Editorial
