Patrick Bade
French and German Romanticism
Patrick Bade - French and German Romanticism
- From the time that Louis XIV moved into his newly-enlarged palace of Versailles in the 1690s up until the French Revolution in 1789, Versailles was the sun that all the other European courts revolved around and it was France, and particularly Versailles, that set the agenda for much of European culture. All over Europe, people followed the manners and the ideas of France and the French court and that’s particularly the case with Germany, which of course, at this time, is fragmented into many little kingdoms, princedoms, archbishoprics and so on. And it’s often said that every German princeling wanted to have his Versailles and a great many palaces were created over the 18th century. It may be that I’m prejudiced, I probably am prejudiced, but in my view, the various German mini-Versailles are all much more beautiful and much more delightful than the rather barrack-like Versailles. This is Potsdam. This is Nymphenburg. There are plenty of others. Bishop’s Palace in Wurzburg. Schleissheim, Wurzburg outside of Munich. And this exquisite room. This is surely the most beautiful interior created in the 18th century. This is not in France. This is in Munich. This is the Amalienburg in the grounds of Nymphenburg. But there’s no doubt that the flow of influence was, throughout the 18th century, almost entirely in one direction, from France to Germany. And it wasn’t just in visual arts. It was also in ideas, the Enlightenment, Voltaire, in particular, had a great influence outside of France and in Russia, but particularly in Prussia and for two years, 1750 to 1752, he was in Potsdam under the protection of Frederick the Great, had a great influence upon him.
It’s a story that, of course, ended in tears. But as I said, France was where the culture and the ideas were coming from. And then, after the Revolution, of course, we’ve got the Napoleonic period where Napoleon conquers a great deal of Europe and much of Germany completely comes under his sway. You’ve got the Confederation of the Rhine, the Kingdom of Westphalia, which is completely under French domination. And other countries that are now part of Germany, like Bavaria, of course, was allied to France. And we see the continuing French influence in this room in Nymphenburg, which dates from the earth 19th century, and it is completely in the Napoleonic Empire style. This comes to a very rapid and brutal end, of course, in 1812 with the disastrous Russian campaign, retreat from that. And then Napoleon’s first major defeat at the Battle of the Nations outside of Leipzig in 1813, when the Grand Army, in combination with some of his German allies, is defeated by the Austrians, the Prussians, and the Swedes. This is Caspar David Friedrich’s comment on the situation, a bleak comment on the political situation. It’s The Chasseur in the Forest. This is the lonely French soldier who is completely overwhelmed by the vastness of the German forest.
And this is the truly terrifying, I think, but kind of awesome monument to the Battle of the Nations. Just look at how, the scale of the thing. Look how big the people are in the foreground. This was created for the centenary of the battle. It was finished in 1913. I’m going to… My first musical example is a setting of a poem written by Heine. He’s a German poet, a German-Jewish poet, in 1822. In German, it’s called “Die beiden Grenadiere,” “The Two Grenadiers,” and it’s two men, like the ones you see on the right-hand side in the drawing by Gericault, who are the remnants of the Grand Army that has been defeated and they hear the news that Napoleon has been captured by the allies, and they’re completely devastated by this. And we’re going to hear this in… The musical setting is by Schumann. It dates from 1840. We’re going to hear it in a French translation that’s sung by this splendid-looking character on the left-hand side. This is Marcel Journet. And so I’m going to actually just play you the last part of the song, which morphs into a passionate rendition of the French national hymn, “The Marseillaise.”
As I said, the flow of influence up until the French Revolution was all from France to Germany, but that changes with the advent of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century with the great cultural renewal, revival in Germany with such important figures, obviously, as Schiller and Goethe and many other intellectuals and philosophers in this period. We have here a portrait of Madame De Stael. She was a salonmoere. She ran an influential salon in Paris until she was banned and exiled. She was a thorn in the flesh of Napoleon. She was anti-Napoleon, and rather like later dictators, of course, he did not take kindly to any kind of opposition or criticism, but in her exile, she discovered this exciting renewal of German culture, and she alerted the French, she was the first to alert the French there was something really interesting going on on the other side of the Rhine in her book “De L'Allemagne,” That’s why I called this lecture “De L'Allemagne,” “Of Germany,” which as you can see, was published in Paris in 1812. I’m concentrating today mainly on the musical influence of German romanticism in France, and the first half of the 19th century is the great age, the golden age of German Lieder, and songs of Schubert and Schumann were taken up in France and very loved and much performed, but always in French translation. They wouldn’t be like today, where you might… In fact, of course, they were usually sung in private performance.
The idea of having a whole evening of a public performance of songs, of classical songs, that’s something that happened much later, really, not until the beginning of the 20th century. But here you can see a list of all of the great German, all the songs by Schumann, translated to French. The first name there, Jules Barbier, he was a well known literary figure. Hand he created the vibrato for the operas of Gounod and in particular, of course, “Faust.F So, I’m going to play you a recording of probably Schubert’s most popular song, "The Trout,” as it sounds in French and I’ve chosen this singer, he’s called Vanni Marcoux, ‘cause he seems to me to demonstrate the very best qualities of French, distinctively French vocalism. The timbre is very French. It’s very bright, very light. If you has the original record, you’d see on the label that he’s called a bass. Well, the voice might surprise you as a bass voice 'cause it really sounds more like a very light baritone than it does a bass. It has a pungent, slightly nasal quality, and there’s a rippling, fast vibrato, not pleasing to everybody, pleasing to me. To me, it’s like the sparkle in a fine, dry, light wine, but his great quality is his fantastic enunciation of French.
A very very difficult language to sing in, but he makes it sound really beautiful. Schumann’s song cycle, , in French of course it’s “L'Amour et La Vie D'Une Femme” had a particular appeal to the French, who have less than three different French translations of this song cycle, which I suppose, it’s the sentimentality of it, in a way, that particularly appeal to the French. It tells a story of a young woman who falls in love and finds the man of her dreams, and they have a very happy marriage, and then eventually, he dies and leaves her a widow. And there were two wonderful historic, complete recordings made in the 1920s, one with Germaine Martinelli, who makes a rather more mature impression, she has a darker, heavier voice, but I’m going to play you the wonderful Ninon Vallin. She was probably the most loved French soprano between the wars, and she makes a very youthful impression. She sounds like a very young woman, and certainly a very, very young widow, and the voice is so lovely. Again, it’s a very French timbre, very bright, clear timbre and I’d like you to notice the exquisite neatness of all the little ornaments in the vocal line. That’s not something you always hear in these songs.
This particular song, she’s expressing her happiness at the wonderfulness of her new husband. The great figure of French Romantic music is obviously Hector Berlioz. Here you see him looking very intense and with his Romantic, big hair. These are two ceramic sculptures in the Musee Carnavalet or from the Romantic period, Berlioz on the left-hand side and Liszt from behind playing the piano on the right-hand side. I think they were in a competition about who could have the most outrageous, bushy hair. So, Berlioz, an incredibly original composer. Sir Thomas Beecham in his autobiography talks about Berlioz as being, as one of the most original… He actually picks out two composers, Berlioz and Delius, as composers who just sort of sprung fully formed, uninfluenced by anybody before them. And I’d agree with him that Berlioz is incredibly original, but I don’t agree that he was uninfluenced. He was certainly very, very engaged with German music. He had a passionate admiration for Weber, in particular, and actually added orchestrated versions of recitatives in Weber’s opera, “Der Freischutz”, to enable it to be performed at the Paris opera without very strict rules. You could perform any opera with spoken dialogue. And he also produced a wonderful orchestration of another very famous song of Schubert, the “Erlkonig.” “Erlkonig,” of course, is a very dramatic song, even in its piano version, but it really turns into full-blooded opera when it’s orchestrated, particularly in the version that I’m going to play you now.
Of course, normally, of course, it’s one singer who, and it’s a showpiece for singers, to show, a singer who wants to show off how they can change the timbre or the quality of their voice 'cause they actually have to play four different roles in the course of the song. There is the narrator and then there is the father, who is galloping through the night with his feverish and dying child in his arms and then their is the sinister fairy king that the child thinks he can hear in his delirium, but in this very spectacular version, we get actually three, it’s a trio, Jos Steel, who you see top right, he’s the narrator and he’s also the king of the fairies, and we have the baritone singing the father, and we have a boy treble singing the terrified child. I’m afraid I’m going to cut that off, terrible as that is, but I think you all know the end of that song. The father arrives and finds that his child has died in his arms. So, Berlioz’s greatest masterpiece, of course, his first really great masterpiece, is the “Symphonie Fantastique,” a truly astonishing work dating from 1830 and I want to play you the opening bars of this symphony, which seems to me so perfectly to express the particular quality of French Romanticism.
I said last week, it’s characterised by this thing called ennui, which is sort of untranslatable into English and it’s the sense of melancholy, a sense of exhaustion, much, much more than the literal translation of boredom. And so, the opening movement is just intensely introspective and it starts in this listless, lethargic, sighing way, perfect expression of ennui, and then suddenly, it flares up in nervous excitement and then, once again, it subsides into, the orchestra sounds like it’s sighing with sadness and exhaustion. The image on the screen is a painting by Gericault and it’s a portrait of his young friend, Delacroix, who is, of course, great arch-Romantic in France in these years and it could be this expression of melancholy and introspection that goes very well, I think, with this musical example. The poem of the “Erlkonig” is, I’m sure you know, by the greatest of all German Romantic poets, Goethe, and he is a towering figure, not just in German culture, but in European culture altogether with a tremendous influence throughout the 19th century and his great masterpiece, “Faust,” it’s said that there are over 50 musical settings of “Faust” and it was translated into every language in Europe, including French, of course, and had a tremendous impact in France, who was an inspiration for Delacroix. This is a little painting of the scene in which Faust agrees to sell his soul to the devil in return for regaining his youth. And Delacroix made a whole series of lithographs illustrating Faust.
This is a rather interesting example, really, of Franco-German mutual influences. You see, he’s using the newly-invented medium of lithography. Gericault and Delacroix are the first two great artists to explore this new medium, which had been invented by a German. It was invented by Aloys Senefelder in Munich right at the beginning of the 19th century. Well, Goethe saw these illustrations and was hugely impressed and praised them extravagantly. He even said he thought that somehow Delacroix had got to the heart of the drama even more than he had. So there are two very important musical settings of Goethe’s “Faust” in France in the 19th century. I’m sure there are many, many more that have dropped by the roadside, but the two that hold their place in repertoire are Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust” and Gounod’s opera. And in fact, altogether of course, there are four of the most popular French operas of the 19th century are based on Goethe’s texts, Ambroise Thomas’s “Mignon,” which is based on the novel, “Wilhelm Meister,” and “Werther” by Massenet, which is the setting of one of Goethe’s early masterpieces, an autobiographical novel, “Sufferings of Young Werther.” But I’m going to play you a short excerpt of the opening of “The Damnation of Faust.” Here’s Faust alone, solitary, brooding, melancholy again in that Romantic way, communing with nature and wondering at the beauty of the transition of winter into spring. And the other setting, of course, was “Faust,” which became the most popular opera in the second half of the 19th century.
It was performed constantly, so often at the Metropolitan New York that it actually got the nickname, the Faustspeil-haus because you could never get away from it. It was even popular in Germany, with the opera going public, although very disapproved of by German intellectuals who saw it as almost a desecration, a trivialization. I think Germans felt that, you know, it was reducing this great complex, profound masterpiece to a simple love story and last time and it was kind of a trivialization of Goethe’s masterpiece. Last time in the questions again, somebody was asking me whether the Gericault portraits could be seen as romantic and I tried to explain the difference between Romantic with a capital R and with a small R. And I think you could accuse Gounod, Massanet, Ambroise Thomas of reducing the capital R Romanticism of Goethe to a kind of trivial, sentimental, small R romanticism, but, hey, I’m not complaining. It’s gorgeous music, “Faust,” particularly the love music is very lovely in the garden scene. And I’m going to play you some of that with the elegant French tenor, Alain Vanzo, and my very, very dear friend, Renee Doria, the soprano, who I used to visit once a month for a wonderful lunch for over many years and she died at age 100, last year.
I miss her very much. Again, two very characteristic French voices, very bright and forward in their production. Next, we’re going to hear an excerpt from Ambroise Thomas’, “Mignon.” Again, an opera that was immensely popular, very, very widely performed, not done so often in these times. His other popular opera was “Hamlet,” a setting of Shakespeare’s play, which improved by giving it a happy ending, and the Brits rather disapproved of that in the way that the Germans disapproved of “Faust.” This is the monument to Ambroise Thomas in the Park Monceau with the waif-like figure of Mignon, his most famous heroine. We’re going to hear an excerpt sung by the great Conchita Supervía, in the mezzo, and it’s the aria, “Connais-tu le pays,” which is, of course, the French translation of one of the most famous poems in the German language, “Kennst Du Das Land? Wo Die Citronen Bluhn,” and she actually recorded it twice, once in Italian and one in French. And I put this CD for this together some months ago and I’m not quite sure why I put the Italian version and not the French version. Actually, what’s interesting, is Supervia I can hardly think of another singer who is as incredibly, sensitively responsive to language. She’s absolutely wonderful.
She makes any language she sings sound wonderful with it. Catalan, Spanish, Calisian, she didn’t record German, but Italian, French, or English, she’s really, really sensitive to the qualities of the language and if you have the CD of Supervia and you can compare her French version and her Italian version, they’re really quite different. Italian version is much more emotionally overt with lots of little sobs in it, which are absent from the French version. Anyway, here we are going to hear the Italian version of this aria sung by Contita Subeviere. “Werther” is by Jules Massenet, came out in the early 1890s. As I’ve said, it’s autobiographical novel, although, about an unhappy love affair that Goethe had in his early adulthood and the hero that shoots himself and apparently, the novel was so popular throughout Europe that it was one of those novels, rather like “The Bell Jar” later on that led to a wave of suicides. But I’m going to play the most famous piece in it where Werther is alone with the heroine, Charlotte, and he’s reading poetry to her. He’s actually reading from “Ossian,” the fake Celtic epic that I was talking about I think a week before, lecture before last, and he sings that the famous song of Ossian and he gets so carried away that he actually leaps on Charlotte and she pushes him off and this is really the emotional climax of the opera. Whoops, where is that? Oh, it doesn’t want to play, so I have to move on. Schumann in particular, Schumann and Schubert were very much cult figures in 19th-century France and they were, really you could say it was a sort of snobbishness about them This is a painting by, about this devotion to German songs, even though they were always sung in French.
This is a painting by Fantin-Latour, which shows homage to Schumann as this began his homage to Schumann. This is a painting by the Belgian artist, Khnopff, where the title is “Listening to Schumann.” The notorious novel, “A Rebours,” “Against Nature,” by Huysmans it is about a rather decadent aesthete and the novel is talking about his various tastes in visual arts, in literature, and in music. And the narrator tells us, “certain settings for the viola and cello by Schumann left him positively panting with emotion, choking with hysteria, but it was chiefly the Leider of Schubert that excited and carried him away and then frustrated him, as if he had been squandering his nervous energy, indulging in a mystical debauch.” This here, illustrations of the novel with this very decadent aristocratic aesthete and the most notorious episode in the book, it’s where he has a live turtle, tortoise inlaid with precious jewels so that it can crawl across his oriental carpets and create wonderful colour harmonies. This is the singer, Georgette Leblanc, who was the mistress of the Belgian poet Maeterlinck and she gave extraordinary concerts of German Leider, of Schubert and Schumann, in Paris in the 1890s that were frequented by all the French snobs and she recruited her brother, Maurice Leblanc, who is the novelist who created the character Arsene Lupin, who is the French equivalent to Sherlock Holmes. So he made literal translations.
And then she managed to get no less than Maeterlinck to turn these translations into poetic text and she performed these translations in public and one critic described how she managed to turn the Schubert songs, , “into an affair of thrashing arms, sculptural attitudes, and a cry of fainting exasperated flesh.” Not at all the sort of things that we would expect today in a Leider concert at the Whitmore Hall. So as of today, a specifically French take, I think, on this German Romantic songs. So there is French and Germans, of course, well, it’s a bit like the French and the English, I suppose. There is a kind of mutual suspicion, a mutual, each one thinks it’s superior to the other. I spent a lot of my time actually with French friends deflecting their criticism of Germany, defending Germany, and of course the other way around, with Germans and the French. But this is a painting by a German artist called Anton von Werner I always find absolutely infuriating. It’s a painting that expresses the late 19th century German sense of cultural superiority over the French and what it depicts is an incident in the Franko-Prussian War of 1870 where you could see these very healthy, rosy-cheeked, blonde German soldiers, that they’re outdoor types, you could see they have very muddy boots and here they are in a French chateau that they’ve captured and they’re surrounded by all this French froo-froo and decadence and all this very fluffy Loius XV furniture and so on and but there, demonstrating German culture with a capital K, which they think is much more profound and healthy.
You can’t see on the screen, but actually, if you stand in front of the painting, you can see that the music on the piano is actually a Leid by Schumann. This mutual, what can you say? Not exactly contempt, but suspicion, I think, is also expressed in the correspondence of the great French critic Romain Rolland and the German composer, Richard Strauss. Romain Rolland was irritated that Strauss was incapable of understanding what he thought was that the finest elements in French culture couldn’t appreciate for instance and he was also really irritated that Strauss liked Charpentier’s opera, “Louise,” which he regarded as completely trashy. And so Romain Rolland wrote to Strauss, “ugh, why do you like "Louise”? It’s inflated and false.“ And Strauss wrote back, "But, my dear fellow, the French are like that. We in Germany know that you are like that. Every nation has its faults; these are yours.” Well, even though Strauss is one of my heroes, I must say, I would feel like punching him if he said something like that to me. I want to finish with another very French take on German musical culture and that is the wonderful second piano concerto of Saint-Saens. Saint-Saens was a great devotee of German music, but in a way, this whole concerto is like a slightly light-hearted homage to German music but it comes out in the end as been completely French.
And it’s, I’ve loved this concerto since my earliest childhood, really delighted in it when I was six or seven years old. Just the sheer good humour of it and cheerfulness of it. I didn’t pick up, of course, at that age the rather sly cultural references, musical references, but it starts off with a piano solo, where Saint-Saens is pretending to be Bach, straight flourish, like an organ conducteur of Bach, and then in comes the orchestra and instantly he shifts from being Bach to being a very frowning version of Beethoven and that continues through the first movement and at the end of the first movement, very much again in a Beethovian manner. So here’s the Bachian opening and the transition to Beeethoven. Ooh, please make this work. Is it going to work? It’s not working. What do I not… See if this works. Oh well, you’ll have to go and- I’m so sorry I can’t play this to you. It’s really maddening when these technical things happen. But the delight for this concerto really… Do look it up and listen to it. As I said, the first movement ends very thunderous and Beethoven frowning and then in a flash, he moves from Beethoven to being Mendelssohn and the music sort of scampers off and it’s very “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and then quite suddenly again it moves on and it becomes positively Offenbach or musicals, so he does the full gamut of the most serious Germanic mood to a very frothy and lighthearted and tuneful French mood. So I’m really sorry that those didn’t work at the end. I’m not quite sure why that is and I’m going to see what questions we have.
Q&A and Comments:
Yes, it’s amazing default. I love “The Trout.” As soon as you translate it into another language, it becomes another piece of music. It really transforms it. And well, well of course, “The Trouts’ Quintet” was written after the song. The song, as putting in the song with a bit of a joke I think putting it into “The Trout Quintet.”
Yes, of course, again, the “Erlkonig” then it becomes really a big dramatic, operatic scene when you orchestrate it and when you parcel out the parts to different singers. I would certainly art, I’m a huge admirer of Kitniss. What a great singer, yeah. Probably would be my favourite version too. But of course, there’s a lot of competition and a lot of wonderful versions, so. General Finley today, another singer, one of the few singers today that I unconditional admire. I think he’s a wonderful singer.
I’m less with you, Hubert, on that, but that’s a personal thing.
Of course, Belioz, yes, as you say, he wrote it, he was a great orchestrator. He’s one of the supreme masters of orchestration. He wrote a text on how to, yes, a much, much more sophisticated orchestrator than Beethoven. Thank you, Catherine.
Yes, I know. For me, it’s such a great sadness because I love France and I love Germany and well, I think actually, of course, the biggest tragedy is I do feel that the most, that somehow that the marriage of German culture and Jews should have been, well, it was for a while, the most wonderful enlightenment for the whole world and then the fact that that ended so badly, for me, is the other great tragedy as well as the other unnecessary wars between France and Germany.
You’re saying “The Trout” Leid was first. Yes, that’s what I said, yes. “The Trout,” the Leid is first and it kind of comes afterwards. Yes, there are a lot of words. That’s my friend Mike in Munich. There are so many interesting words in German and French and I suppose there are English words too that probably can’t be translated back into those. And you said, Well, yes, that means sort of, yes I suppose is still not quite exactly the same, is it? It’s a sort of being tired of life, not quite the same. And is sort of being joyless. I don’t think they’re quite the same.
Gounod’s “Faust” in Germany… Yes, you’re quite, I meant to say that, of course, that Germans in Germany traditionally, “Faust” is performed as “Marguerite,” not as Faust because they actually are offended by the trivialisation of Goethe’s text.
Q: Do I prefer the beginning of Gounod’s “Faust” or Berlioz’s?
A: Ooh, a loaded question. I don’t know. Well, I mean, I think, obviously Berlioz’s is a more profound and greater masterpiece, but I wouldn’t was to be without Gounod’s “Faust” actually. I love it dearly, even though it’s a slightly faded period piece. Actually, you could say the English settled on ennui. For French, yes ennui- You could, people can even use the French term ‘cause there’s no real English equivalent.
Q: Concise English version or the long, drawn out German one?
A: Oh, that is German for supersonic. I didn’t know that, actually. Interesting. Senefelder invented lithography not as an artistic medium but as a cheaper way of printing music than engraving. Yes, and of course, the story of how he invented it is such a wonderful story. His mother was a washer woman who was using waxy crayons on a piece of stone to keep her trackable, the undies she was washing and that’s, it was an accidental discovery.
Thank you, Margaret. I suppose it’s a nice compliment to be considered compared to a warm bath.
Q: Which is the symphony that didn’t work?
A: I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Is that something I said tonight?
Yes, no, there were meant to be two musical, there were meant to be two musical examples. I was going to play you the beginning and the beginning of the second movement. Just try at least, such a delightful piano concerto, the second piano concerto of Saint-Saens. Just go download it or buy yourself the CD. It’s the second piano concerto of Saint-Saens. He wrote five of them. They’re all wonderful. The second one is the famous one.
You had vetta in Vienna last week, lucky you. Well, lucky you. You sound like you had a very good time in Vienna. Looney Tunes gave Saint-Saens a wonderful send off with Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny. I’ll try that.
World-weary. World-weary a bit. Yes, that’s quite, it’s quite good, isn’t it? World-weary. Yes, I think that may be better than anything else we’ve tried out so far. Thank you, Erica.
And next week we move onto the very underrated Giacomo Marber.
Thank you all very much indeed. See you on Wednesday.