Elena Obraztsova is known to millions of music lovers primarily as an outstanding opera singer of the 20th century who shone in the parts of Russian, Italian and French repertoire on the world’s best stages. In addition to that, she dedicated as much time to concert performances and chamber music through the years. Vocal cycles by de Falla, Granados, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Sviridov, Schumann, Mahler and Ravel took an important place in the singer’s chamber programmes.
In 1980, Elena Obraztsova turned to Wagner’s and Brahms’s vocal orchestral pieces for the first time. That was also when she began to work on Berlioz’s vocal cycle that she performed for the first time in December 1983.
The vocal cycle Les nuits d’été (Summer Nights) was extremely close to Elena Obraztsova’s singing style. As the сomposer’s friend and romantic poet Théophile Gautier wrote, “Berlioz represents the romantic musical idea … unexpected effects in sound, tumultuous and Shakespearean depth of passion.” No one wrote vocal cycle with orchestral accompaniment before Berlioz. The composer turned to Gautier’s collection of poetry La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) to create the Summer Nights and set six poems from the book to music – Villanelle, Le spectre de la rose (The Ghost of the Rose), Sur les lagunes: Lamento (On the Lagoons: Lament), Absence, Au cimetière: Clair de lune (At the Cemetery: Moonlight) and L’île inconnue (The Unknown Island).
The first edition of the Summer Nights was finished in 1834. In 1841, Berlioz reworked the piece, and fifteen years later, in 1856, he wrote the final orchestral edition. This version became widely known as one of the favourite works of West European chamber vocal art.
The music of the Summer Nights captures the creative spirit of the “frenetic romanticist” who Berlioz was in his most active period of the 1830’s and 1840’s, a period when he created his Symphonie fantastique, Harold and Roméo et Juliette, and when he was afire with desperate and hopeless passion for actress Harriet Smithson. The six songs are perceived as a single poem, a sort of a “novel in verse” about all-absorbing power of love of a woman, her happiness and deep suffering. The concluding song (The Unknown Island) is a romantic burst towards an ideal world where true love can only come true.
The album includes Elena Obraztsova’s first performance of the Summer Nights at the concert that took place at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 21 December 1983 with the Symphony Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre conducted by Algis Žiūraitis.
In December 1982, Elena Obraztsova together with the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society conducted by Algis Žiūraitis recorded two masterpieces of German chamber music on Firma Melodiya – Richard Wagner’s vocal cycle Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme (Five Songs for Female Voice), commonly known as Wesendonck Lieder, and Johannes Brahms’s Rhapsody for alto, male chorus and orchestra.
“To me, what the vocal cycles of Wagner and Brahms have in common is, first of all, elevated romantic emotion, bright expression and inspired poetics,” Elena Obraztsova described her artistic vision of the works in an interview after the recording sessions were over. “To my mind, both works are extremely typical of Wagner and Brahms. They are the quintessence of their vocal styles, so to say. The songs set to Wesendonck’s words are sometimes referred to as etudes to Tristan because they and some bits from Tristan and Isolde have common themes like the heroes’ love duet, the intro to the third act… I love Tristan very much, and the atmosphere of these songs is truly Tristanian, full of ecstatic passion, elegiac sorrow and lofty enlightenment.”
The Wesendonck Songs, Richard Wagner’s only vocal cycle, became one of the most intimate, diary-like creations of the author of monumental musical dramas. Wagner met the married couple of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck in the early 1850’s during his Swiss exile after the composer was involved in the Dresden uprising of 1849. They rendered him moral and financial support actually sheltering the disgraced musician in their home.
Mathilde Wesendonck was a generously gifted person. Endowed with rare beauty, charm and a poetic cast of mind (she wrote poems, prose, dramas and music), Mathilde became an ardent admirer of Wagner’s musical and dramatic ideas. Their cordial friendship grew into passionate mutual love. However, she firmly decided that she would not leave her husband and children. Wagner left Zurich in 1858 not to see Mathilde for many long years. That emotional experience inspired him to write Tristan and Isolde, a powerful hymn to a love doomed “at the light of day.” Tristanian intonations and harmonies run through the entire cycle of five songs written by Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck’s poems. According to one of Wagner’s German biographers, the sequence they were composed in is an accurate picture of how their feeling progressed: 30 November 1857 – Der Engel (The Angel), four days later – Träume (Dreams), 17 December – Schmerzen (Sorrows), 22 February 1858 – Stehe still! (Be Still!), 1 May – Im Treibhaus (In the Greenhouse).
“I had never created anything better than these songs. Only a few of my works can stand the comparison with them,” the composer stated.
The Rhapsody for alto, male chorus and orchestra, Op. 53, by Johannes Brahms is the last song cycle on the album. Elena Obraztsova performed it for the first time on 2 August 1980 at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the male group of the Yurlov State Republican Academic Russian Choral Capella and the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society conducted by Algis Žiūraitis.
The researchers connect the emergence of the Rhapsody with one of Brahms’s deepest amorous experience associated with his feeling for Clara Schumann’s daughter Julie. A fragment from one of the most Wertherian poems by Brahms’s favourite poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Harzreise im Winter (1777) – was a poetic source for the Rhapsody. The poem was based on a real event. One day, when Goethe found himself dropping behind the hunting company of Karl August, duke of Saxe-Weimar, he set out for the Harz Mountains expecting to see there the young man who had shunned society and was giving way to despair after reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. When Brahms was young, he compared himself with the hero of Goethe’s novel because of his own conflicting feelings for Clara Schumann that were reflected in a number of his works of the 1850’s. Many years later he visited the family again, and fell in love with Clara’s daughter Julie, then a 24-year old dazzling beauty. Her sudden engagement to count Marmorito caused the tumult of Brahms’s mind. Painful abandonment of the dream of love and family, self-denial and loneliness were realized in the Rhapsody.
“Johannes brought me a wonderful thing a few days ago,” wrote Clara Schumann in her diary. “He called it his wedding song. I was so much shaken by the deep sorrow of the words and music that I cannot recollect a recent impression as strong as that.”
The Rhapsody was premiered in 1870 at Jena with the participation of Pauline Viardot.
The Rhapsody amazes with the concentration of feeling, power of expression and sincerity that are typical qualities of the composer’s best songs. Elena Obraztsova performs the Rhapsody with noble restraint of a deeply concealed feeling. “The singer remains all the time in the state of solemn calm that the poet asks for so much in his verses” (Anatoly Orfenov). The Rhapsody closes with a moving prayer “Father of love.”
Compilers: Boris Mukosey, Ludmila Leontyeva
