Beethoven: In questa tomba oscura, Adelaide, An die ferne Geliebte, Scottish & Irisch Songs

Album review

Beethoven originally called his 1816 setting of To the Distant Beloved a “cantata”, and introduced a theme that would play a major role in the composer’s subsequent Lieder output: his yearning for the unattainable. This is the first truly through-composed song cycle in music history: the songs in this cycle cannot be singled out for individual performance, since they are connected by transitions in the piano accompaniment. Beethoven would later apply the same cyclic concept in several of his late chamber music works. In 1806/07, apparently inspired by a flowering of religious sentiment that helped him come to terms with an emotional, musical and intellectual crisis, Beethoven wrote a unique vocal work: In questa tomba oscura. This miniature, impressive opera scene in a compact reprise form that is nevertheless full of contrasts – with a fearful piano tremolo in the middle section and subdued chord accompaniment in the outer sections, is often viewed as marking a “turn to the heroic” in Beethoven’s œuvre even though, however, it is more closely associated with the realm of the pathetic and the passionate.

Although solo vocal art song with piano accompaniment eventually became the most common and widespread type of scoring within the Lied genre, a wide range of further variants continued to appear throughout the 1800’s – from Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words to vocal numbers with orchestral accompaniment in Late Romanticism. Beethoven likewise paved the way for such developments with his song arrangements featuring piano accompaniment with optional violin and cello of the Scottish Songs and the Irish Songs. Beethoven thus assembled a total of almost 200 pieces (if one also includes the Welsh Songs), a group of works for which he received a stately sum from George Thomson, a music publisher in Edinburgh. Thomson had asked several composers – including Pleyel, Haydn, Hummel and Weber – to write arrangements of folk songs for a publication in several volumes. For Beethoven, a particular difficulty in composing these vocal works lay in the fact that he had no information whatsoever about their texts or their content. Thomson followed a time-honoured British custom and commissioned entirely new texts for the songs: thus, in these cases, Beethoven was by no means composing “settings of poems”. His contribution can be described as new arrangements and harmonizations of pre-existing melodies. These were true “songs without words”, since considerations of language could not be taken into account. From a formal point of view, these are piano pieces with string accompaniment – a preliminary form of the piano trio genre – and the texts were added after the music was finished. These songs nevertheless manage to transcend the traditional genre within which they emerged. The strings avoid mere parallel duplication of the piano parts (as was elsewhere the case). The violin and the cello each have their own independently composed part, the role of which varies from one song to another. In songs that are lyrical in nature, the string instruments underscore the vocal line. The cello, with its passionate sonority, often takes up the role of a second singer. Pizzicato effects provide additional pungency in the more sprightly songs, and brief interspersed phrases sound like quasi-rhetorical remarks. The strings are likewise called upon to emphasize particular moods.

The Italian-born Andrè Schuen studied voice at Salzburg Mozarteum and further with Thomas Allen, Brigitte Fassbaender and Marjana Lipovsek. He has made guest appearances with renowned orchestras including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Orchestre de Paris. From 2010 to 2014, he was a member of the ensemble of Graz Opera. Last but not least: the German newspaper Die Welt described a performance of the Boulanger Trio as irresistible, while Wolfgang Rihm wrote in a letter: To be interpreted in this way is surely the great dream of every composer. Founded in Hamburg in 2006 by Karla Haltenwanger (piano), Birgit Erz (violin) and Ilona Kindt (cello), the ensemble is now one of the few full-time piano trios currently based in Berlin. It has received crucial musical guidance from Menahem Pressler and Alfred Brendel.