Sandrine Piau

By Elisabetta Fava

Lied, mélodie, pesnja, song—the invention of a form of singing for voice and piano that charts a path beyond operatic vocality and binds itself intimately to poetry—originated in the German language but radiated outward, taking root in other tongues and repertoires. The constant aim was to perfect the interplay between melodic line and poetic text, in all its phonetic and prosodic particularity. This evening’s Liederabend offers an opportunity to explore and compare two such traditions: the Austro-German and the French. The program spans from Schubert to Wolf, focuses on the experimental works of Debussy, Ravel, and Duparc, and includes less familiar gems by Clara Wieck and Lili Boulanger. Legendary figures—Lorelei, the Erlking, Sleeping Beauty—appear alongside moments of dream or reflection, evoking painted scenes (Auf ein altes Bild) or unforgettable, beloved faces (Ihr Bild and Ich stand in dunklen Träumen, both settings of the same Heine poem). The sharp, forward-looking writing that anticipates the twentieth century (Verborgenheit) encounters archaisms that sound, paradoxically, both modern and subtly estranging.

The opening piece, Wiegenlied by Richard Strauss, is among the most beloved in the Lied repertoire: over the delicate arpeggios of the piano, the voice lays out a melody so caressing, so suspended in time, it seems unwilling to come to rest, drifting on a thread of dreamy arabesques. The three songs by Hugo Wolf featured here are drawn from a collection of 53 Lieder, all set to poems by Eduard Mörike and composed in a single outpouring in 1888. This followed months of silence after the death of Wolf’s father—a time when he had written not a single note. In this artistic reawakening and final embrace of his destiny as a composer of song, Wolf produced both searingly passionate pages like Begegnung, in which two lovers run joyfully into one another’s arms, and fragments of inconsolable despair such as Verborgenheit (“seclusion”), as well as miniatures like Auf ein altes Bild, where the piano mimics choral textures and veiled dissonances subtly disturb the idyllic surface.

Franz Schubert and Clara Wieck Schumann each set the same Heine poem, in which a sleepless lover sees once more the face of the beloved. Schubert treats the vision as sacred, using a quasi-liturgical chordal style (not unlike the one Wolf would use decades later for Auf ein altes Bild, though in reference to an image of the Madonna and Child). Clara Schumann, by contrast, gives the same lines a more romantic tremor, reflected in the pulsing piano accompaniment and tender curves of the vocal line. Also set to Heine, Die Lorelei immortalizes the siren combing her long golden hair on the cliffs above the Rhine, bewitching sailors with her otherworldly song; the driving chords in the piano recall the anxious pulse of Schubert’s Erlkönig, carrying the doomed vessel toward the rocks. Even the central section of Loreleiseems to echo Schubert’s method of embedding song-within-song, as in Erlkönig, where the desperate father's ride through a stormy night is interrupted by the seductively sweet voice of the elf-king calling to his child: here, death is the fruit of a boundless longing, an insatiable desire that ultimately breaks the heart.

At the recital’s center is a piano solo: Clara Wieck’s Second Scherzo, a product of her deep pianistic skill and the rich, continuous exchange of ideas with her husband Robert Schumann. Their stylistic affinity is especially evident in the impassioned melodic sweep, while the lighter arpeggiated passages and middle section suggest an intimacy with the Scherzi of Chopin.

The second half of the program turns to France, beginning with La belle au bois dormant by Claude Debussy, written in 1890 to a poem by Vincent Hyspa—an artist of many talents: singer, composer, writer, actor, and one-time muse of Erik Satie. The song flows on a stream of arpeggios, into which modal harmonies weave a timeless, almost incantatory atmosphere; each stanza ends with a refrain (Dormez au bois) that changes only in the final lines. Lili Boulanger—sister of the renowned pedagogue Nadia—was a gifted composer, a child prodigy, and a virtuoso on multiple instruments, though plagued by fragile health. Born in 1893, she died in 1918 at only twenty-four. In 1913, she became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome. Critics immediately recognized in her an exceptional melodic gift: simple, intense, and particularly radiant in her chamber works. The cycle Clairières dans le ciel (1913–14) sets thirteen poems by Francis Jammes. In Vous m’avez regardé de toute votre âme, the piano’s wavering line seems to mirror the flutter of eyelashes under which a gaze flickers, full of emotion; Si tout ceci n’est qu’un pauvre rêve, dedicated “to my great friend Tito Ricordi,” opens with an echo of Tristan und Isolde’s third act, filtered through Debussy’s pianism. Heard here in its original piano solo version, Cortège dates from the same period: over a steady bass rhythm, the right hand dances freely, ornamenting the texture with modal inflections that feel at once ancient and fresh.

Henri Duparc also suffered from precarious health, compounded by an incurable dissatisfaction with his own work. Of the many compositions he destroyed, a few sublime mélodies survive, including L’invitation au voyage, set in 1870 at the height of the Franco-Prussian War—a search in art for sanctuary, or a promise of escape to distant lands where “all is order and beauty, / luxury, peace, and pleasure.” Also drawn from Baudelaire, La vie antérieure demands a majestic yet subtle, ever-shifting writing style, capable of evoking in sound a world of colors, basalt, and perfumes that floods the soul with yearning.

Maurice Ravel’s taste for folk repertoire is once again on display in the Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, sketched in a matter of hours in 1906 for a lecture by his friend, the musicologist Michel Calvocoressi (of Greek descent). La chanson de la mariée, all radiant with high, bell-like textures (eerily foreshadowing a famous Rachmaninoff prelude), conjures the excited bustle of a bride dressing on her wedding morning. Là-bas, vers l’église mourns the fallen in battle, cloaked in archaic-sounding harmonies; a trace of hysteria shades the foppish speaker of Quel galant m’est comparable, with its staccato piano skips. La chanson des cueilleuses de lentisques mirrors the repetitive rhythm of labor in a vacant fifth, almost like a wandering thought; and the brief Tout gai (“All Cheerful”) pulses with an irrepressible urge to dance, its sparkling tra-la-la affirming once more that, for Ravel, simplicity never equates to predictability.