Some notes on the program:

The figure of Shakespeare towers over the English language and its literature as does none other. In learning art songs we study the poetry of other languages, meeting figures who likewise dominate their own literatures. For years I have imagined bringing these poets together in a single recital, rather like inviting them to a salon where they may share their poems in musical settings. In this recital you are at just such a party, listening in on the conversation.

My guest list is controversial. Most Germans would acknowledge Goethe’s claim to be invited, and no Russian would deny the right of Pushkin. But Italians almost certainly would invite Dante before Petrarch, and, while Spaniards acknowledge Lope de Vega’s superiority as a poet, we Anglophones tend to think first of Cervantes among Spanish writers. But I am presenting poetry through song, and both Petrarch and Lope enjoy a wider range of musical settings of their poetry than do their more illustrious countrymen. (Also, Petrarch’s sonnets had a huge influence on the poetry of the rest of Europe, which is why I have included two Shakespeare sonnets in the program.) Having decided on these five, it remained to invite a French poet, and I chose Victor Hugo for a number of reasons, partly because some of my favorite French art songs are settings of his poetry, and partly because that would make a neat set of three Renaissance poets and three Romantics. I was encouraged to see that my dictionary of French poetry labels him the most towering figure in French letters, but I also know that students of modern poetry may grumble that he got the place that should have gone to Charles Baudelaire.

But the poets are here now, and we begin. Petrarch, the oldest, speaks first, through Haydn’s setting of a sonnet from Il Canzoniere (a.k.a. Rime Sparse), a sequence of Italian poems, largely sonnets, exploring his love for Laura, a younger, married woman who died of the plague during Petrarch’s lifetime. (He idealizes her so much that some curmudgeonly scholars doubt that she existed at all, but that need not concern us here, as poets’ muses have not been invited to appear in person.) While this single selection hardly does justice to the range of Petrarch’s achievement, it is the most-anthologized of Petrarch’s poems and the later poets will respond to its theme of love that separates the poet from other people, causing him to confuse his love for the woman with the love he owes to God (although the woman personifies the Divine as well), and ultimately to seek refuge in nature. Alert readers are no doubt wondering why the aria is entitled “Sonnet XXIX” when it is in fact poem #38 in Petrarch’s series. I think it’s because not all the Canzoniere poems are in sonnet form (14 lines with a particular rhyming scheme), and this is the 29^th sonnet. The musical piece is not, strictly speaking, an art song, but rather a piano reduction of Haydn’s last concert aria, which would be performed with an orchestra.

Petrarch’s junior by two and a half centuries, Shakespeare responds to Petrach’s sonnet with two from his own celebrated sequence. Much ink has been spilled over the human story that the sequence appears to be telling (were the young male poet and the Dark Lady to whom various sonnets are addressed real people?), and just how much irony Shakespeare has injected into his take on the Elizabethan sonnet sequence (he was the greatest, but certainly not the first, English poet to emulate Petrarch’s Canzoniere). For our purposes, we note that Sonnet 29 (“When in Disgrace”) echoes Petrarch’s sense of separation from society and finding the natural world more congenial setting to his love. John Duke’s setting of this sonnet is straightforward, using Duke’s trademark restless modulation in the accompaniment to underscore the dissatisfaction of the first half, then joyous arpeggios to track the upward soaring of the soul with the lark. A touch of uncertainty inhabits the final phrase however, as the majestic surge under “scorn to change my state with kings” is interrupted by a minor chord. This is born out in the melancholy of Parry’s setting of the 87^th sonnet: “Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,” whose musical phrases carry the emotion of the loss of a love, while the poet’s mind concocts legalistic phrases about the right of a sovereign to both bestow and revoke benefits upon favored subjects. Even more familiar to English readers than the Sonnets are Shakespeare’s plays, which contain song texts that have inspired many musical settings. We present two that allude to Petrarch’s flight into nature from society, in contrasting twentieth-century musical settings. Roger Quilter’s “Come away, death”, sets the Clown’s song from Twelfth Night, where the despondent lover seeks not only death, but isolation of his grave so that other lovers will not be further saddened. “Under the Greenwood Tree” celebrates the life in the Forest of Arden, where political intrigue is left behind and life is simple. This song from As You Like It has had many settings; we present a good-humored one by Mervyn Hoerder, who freely admits being influenced by dance rhythms in the musical theater of his youth.

Contemporary with Shakespeare was Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (a.k.a. Lope de Vega), who reformed Spanish drama in more than 800 plays he wrote during his lifetime and whose poetry brought the phrase “es de Lope” into the Spanish language to express excellence. His compulsive womanizing led him to take Holy Orders at one point in his life, although this didn’t end his relationships with women. In Lope’s writing we see the dichotomy between sacred and erotic love that Petrarch struggled with. “Madre, unos ojuelos vi” and “No lloréis ojuelos” are excerpts from songs in La Dorotea, Lope’s novel in dialogue that recounts an unhappy youthful love affair. “Cantarcillo” comes from one of Lope’s books of sacred poetry, expressing love of God through the Virgin Mary’s concern for the comfort of her newborn child (this poem was translated into German, where Lied lovers know it as “Die ihr Schwebet”.) The two loves meet in Joaquin Rodrigo’s song “Coplas del Pastor Enamorado”, whose title implies that the speaker is a shepherd whose solitary journey through a beautiful but somewhat hostile landscape is a quest for an erotic love. In fact, Lope’s poem is taken from a play entitled La Buena Guarda, in which a woman flees society after committing adultery and, at a fateful moment, encounters the singer of these words, who is Jesus disguised as a shepherd, coming to lead “the jewel I have lost” back into life.

Given German Romantic poetry’s centrality to the art song tradition, and Goethe’s stature among German Romantic poets, it was a challenge to choose ten minutes of music from among the many masterpieces that have been written to his texts. Any selection I could make would leave out important composers, so I gave up and honored his significance by letting him invite a couple of his friends: Johann Reichardt and Freidrich Zelter. Largely forgotten today, they were significant German composers of their time, both of whom knew Goethe and wrote many settings of his poems that he admired and enjoyed. We present one song by each, to texts written by the young Goethe when he was coming to terms with his love for Charlotte von Stein, a married lady-in-waiting at the Weimar court. Unbeknownst to these three fine German artists, we have also invited a young Austrian composer whose art songs were to revolutionize the genre: Franz Schubert. The young composer did in fact send some settings of Goethe’s poetry to the distinguished poet, but Goethe never acknowledged them. (Scholars debate whether this incident shows Goethe’s lack of musical sophistication or simply that the songs arrived during a period of illness and life difficulty for Goethe.) So now we give the poet who revolutionized German letters another chance to experience his poems as set by the composer who revolutionized German Lieder. We present Schubert’s settings of the two texts already heard, followed by his unforgettable setting of Gretchen’s soliloquy from Goethe’s Faust, a song that is considered by many to be the the watershed in the development of the Lied and hence of art song in general. All three of these texts feature the restlessness inherent in erotic love. While love may be the “crown of life”, it is physically and emotionally exhausting, and, not only does it draw one away from the peace that comes from Heaven, in the case of poor Gretchen, it truly is drawing her dangerously toward Hell, since the man she loves is seducing her with the aid of the Devil.

One might argue that Pushkin was capable of making his own hell in life, but he also influenced the development of the Russian language and created some of its most enduring masterpieces of poetry, prose, and drama. He is not as well known in the west as he might be, partly because much of the genius of his poetry is in its brilliant use of the sounds of the Russian language, which don’t translate into English. We hope that the poetic sounds, aided by the music of four great Russian composers, will help bring his poetry to life here today. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s setting of “On Georgian Hills” evokes the natural and musical sounds of Pushkin’s exile in Georgia. The composer took some liberties with the text for musical expression, but we have restored Pushkin’s words, most notably the final statement “And my heart burns and loves again because it is incapable of not loving,” which, I am told, has become a much-quoted phrase in the language. The second song is one of the best-known Russian songs outside of Russia, a little gem describing a statue at the palace of Tsarskoye Tselo. The subject of the statue is LaFontaine’s fable of the dairymaid who spilled her pail of milk on the way to market, but Pushkin sees in it the wonder of art, which is able to preserve a moment’s sorrow for all time. Rachmaninov’s song “Do not sing” is a counterpart to “On Georgian Hills”. Just as the poet in exile could not stop thinking of a woman back home, now that he is at home, hearing a woman sing a Georgian song sadly reminds him of a woman back in Georgia. Pushkin had many love affairs in the course of his short life, but the most enduring was with his poetic muse, whom many of the real women in his life personified for him. We see this in one of the most celebrated of Russian lyric poems, written to an actual woman, describing her as “the genius of pure beauty”. The song is an especially happy pairing of Russia’s seminal poet with its seminal classical composer, Mikhail Glinka, a contemporary of Pushkin who was influenced by Bellini and Donizetti as well as by the Russian peasant choruses he heard as a child.

Like Goethe, Hugo wrote novels, dramas, and criticism as well as beautiful lyric poetry, and, like Pushkin, he endured a period of political exile. Hugo evokes Petrarch and his muse Laura in “Oh, quand je dors”, but it is significant that, while a woman as muse inspires him, it is her physical reality that truly awakens his soul. (This poem has a more famous, and more lengthy, setting by Franz Liszt.) Having brought the woman to earth, Hugo reconnects her with the divine in the transcendent “Quand la nuit n’est pas étoilée”, which is an excerpt from a longer poem “Puisque nos heures sont remplis”. Both this poem and the text of Fauré’s sparkling early duet “Puisqu’ici-bas toute âme”, have a rhetorical structure that begins many lines with “Puisque” (“since” or “because”), then advises actions in response to the multiple premises. (Hahn’s setting skips the premises and begins with the advised actions.) But while the first poem celebrates how the divine resides in nature, where everything gives itself to something else, the final poem mourns a present moment full of sadness and regret. In the moment of celebration, the poet proposes to emulate nature by giving his love to another. But in the soul’s night, the imperative is to look deeply into the darkness in appreciation of its mystery, letting one’s eyes move freely between heaven and the underworld, in the realm of earthly life itself.