Topic: Schubert Lieder

[dissily Mordentroge]

I find it somewhat depressing the last post I can find discussing lieder was made in 2012. Am I looking in the wrong place or has Lieder really become that unpopular today? While I’m here can someone reveal if larger scale vocal works, such as Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, are generally regarded here as lieder of subsumed under some other category?

[Cato]

I find it somewhat depressing the last post I can find discussing lieder was made in 2012. Am I looking in the wrong place or has Lieder really become that unpopular today? While I’m here can someone reveal if larger scale vocal works, such as Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, are generally regarded here as lieder of subsumed under some other category?

Check under Composer Discussion/Opera and Vocal/Great Recordings: we have often written about the Lieder of Schubert, Mahler, Richard Strauss, etc..  The search engine here is rather eccentric.   

e.g.

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,683.msg1233389/topicseen.html#msg1233389

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,555.msg1233608/topicseen.html#msg1233608

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,555.msg1237613.html#msg1237613


https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,14181.msg1209504.html#msg1209504


https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,683.msg1238928.html#msg1238928

[dissily Mordentroge]

Check under Composer Discussion/Opera and Vocal/Great Recordings: we have often written about the Lieder of Schubert, Mahler, Richard Strauss, etc..  The search engine here is rather eccentric.   

e.g.

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,683.msg1233389/topicseen.html#msg1233389

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,555.msg1233608/topicseen.html#msg1233608

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,555.msg1237613.html#msg1237613


https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,14181.msg1209504.html#msg1209504


https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,683.msg1238928.html#msg1238928

Thanks for the reading list. I’ll digest it at leisure. When I read the last was titled "Robert Schumann's Secret" by Jan Reichow I thought to myself ‘I knew he was gay’ but then I remembered Clara and realised I was thinking of Schubert.

[Biffo]

I find it somewhat depressing the last post I can find discussing lieder was made in 2012. Am I looking in the wrong place or has Lieder really become that unpopular today? While I’m here can someone reveal if larger scale vocal works, such as Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’, are generally regarded here as lieder of subsumed under some other category?

I can't comment on 'such as' but, specifically, Mahler regarded Das Lied von der Erde  as a symphony (and so do I) and I am sure there is plenty of discussion of it in the Mahler thread.

[dissily Mordentroge]

I can't comment on 'such as' but, specifically, Mahler regarded Das Lied von der Erde  as a symphony (and so do I) and I am sure there is plenty of discussion of it in the Mahler thread.

A rose by any other name?

[Jo498]

By no name will Mahlers "Das Lied von der Erde" ever become a Schubert lied...

[dissily Mordentroge]

By no name will Mahlers "Das Lied von der Erde" ever become a Schubert lied...

What a peculiar idea ! All I can say is I experience ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ as a tone poem with words.
 I have to admit rationing my exposure to the Ferrier, Patzak, Walter recording to once a year. Even decades after being knocked senseless on first hearing I still burst into tears at the final song - er movement - er 'Der Abschied’. I know not everyone suffers the same vulnerability to an initial exposure. I haven’t ever recovered from first hearing the Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, Moore recording of Wolf’s ‘Italian Songbook’ despite having enjoyed many other highly recommended performances. Same with an ancient LP of Paul Paray’s Brahms 4th Symphony which still gets a spin 50 or more years after.
Maybe that makes me a musical luddite of some kind? 

[Gurn Blanston]

What a peculiar idea ! All I can say is I experience ‘Das Lied von der Erde’ as a tone poem with words.
 I have to admit rationing my exposure to the Ferrier, Patzak, Walter recording to once a year. Even decades after being knocked senseless on first hearing I still burst into tears at the final song - er movement - er 'Der Abschied’. I know not everyone suffers the same vulnerability to an initial exposure. I haven’t ever recovered from first hearing the Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, Moore recording of Wolf’s ‘Italian Songbook’ despite having enjoyed many other highly recommended performances. Same with an ancient LP of Paul Paray’s Brahms 4th Symphony which still gets a spin 50 or more years after.
Maybe that makes me a musical luddite of some kind?

I think you misunderstand: he is merely referring to the now ongoing discussion of Mahler in a thread on Schubert. If you thought it was hard to find a discussion of it earlier, wait till someone else goes looking for this one! 

[Mandryka]

Just started to explore this one. I know Alain Buet through some Dowland songs which I like. The booklet explains the project. Is it casuistry? I like the voice, both from the point of view of timbre and interpretation, which is restrained but not too restrained. The transcription seems inoffensive.  It's on streaming platforms so easy to check out.

The twentieth century has transmitted to us a demand for scrupulous respect with regard
to an original musical text, a respect that is extended to the very means employed for its restitution, such as the use of period instruments (or copies of them), the search for authentic
playing techniques, the adoption of a lower diapason, in short everything that will enable the
closest possible reproduction of the contemporary historic circumstances surrounding the
composition of a work. Despite this, though still of historical import, transcription was one of
the means by which Schubert’s music gradually spread throughout the whole of Europe from
the 1830s. Apart from the transcriptions for solo piano (that Liszt was not alone in making),
the lieder in particular were the object of the most diverse adaptations – either replacing
the voice by a cello, a violin, a horn, even a cornet, or indeed by substituting a guitar for the
accompanying piano. There is, however, one kind of transcription that was to play a special
role, one practised by some of the greatest names – from Berlioz to Britten via Brahms and
Reger: orchestration. It was thus an orchestrated version of Die junge Nonne (D 828) that,
overnight, in January 1835, had brought fame in France to the name of Schubert, moving the
lied from the confined space of the salon to that, public, of the concert hall.
Hence, far from constituting a violation of the work’s integrity, transcribing the Winterreise for voice and string quartet lies within this tradition; only an excessive purism, an
exaggerated idolisation of the score would lead one a priori to decry such an attempt. Beneath
its apparent inauthenticity such an approach proves on the contrary to be fully authentic.