Love Gone Wrong

The couple sitting next to me this evening told me they had a folk-singer friend who's noticed the unvarying theme of the songs people like to hear her sing. With tongue-in-cheek, she calls them her "LGW songs", songs about Love Gone Wrong.

German Lieder, of course, are exactly the same. I could have entitled this blog post Lieb und Leid, as it's such a recurrent phrase in the German Romantic poetry set to music by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Lachner, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, Berg, Schönberg, Strauss ...

We have just come home from a live performance of Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and of Schumann's Dichterliebe (another chamber concert at John's house). The performers, both young, were a baritone from Montreal, Marc-Antoine d'Aragon, and the pianist Christine Desjardins (another graduate of McGill).

They wrung out the anguish for all it was worth in both song cycles as well as in the operatic encore (Tchaikovsky's Ya vas lyublyu)—Chris counting "twenty-one songs of unrequited love!", this evening—the singer looked the part too with his thin bearded face, shirt with the top three buttons undone, and wild eyes. I didn't know the Mahler very well but Chris and I have been studying the Schumann for some time now, so after their very dramatic performance, Chris got talking to the pianist and I got talking to the singer to find out if our impressions of their interpretation had been correct.

For instance I was surprised by the bitter intensity in his version of song number 6 (Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome) which I'd always assumed was a song of reverence; this performance made me wonder though, and on second thoughts it could be seen the other way. And in song number 7, the best known one, he seemed to be conveying pity and bitterness simultaneously. I've never heard it done like that before. Apparently he works with a mentor who encourages him to try out the songs in more than one way; he says he's still experimenting and when he came to

Ich grolle nicht...
Ich sah, mein lieb, wie sehr du elend bist

tonight, decided to go for a combination of interpretations. On the whole though, he inclines towards the bitterness. So do you think the poet forgives the girl in the last song? I wanted to know, as Monsieur d'Aragon had performed it with such vehement anger. Oh, not till after the very last bar of the piano postlude, he said. However, I think the piano part is there to convey the tenderness behind the pain and besides, I still think that Fritz Wunderlich gave the definitive interpretation of these songs, so in my opinion, the Poet forgives his love long before the very end.