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NYC Informer, January 23, 2018 |
By Christopher Johnson |
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Liederabend: New York, Carnegie Hall, 20. Januar 2018 |
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Tenor Jonas Kaufmann Brings Sincerity and Earnestness To Schubert’s Quintessential Song Cycle at Carnegie
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Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin is a peculiar thing, part Romantic tragedy,
part fairy-tale, part parade of gentle ironies, and part teenage melodrama,
at once heart-on-sleeve and eloquent in what it doesn’t say. It’s also one
of the finest song-cycles ever written, one of the great high-points in
Schubert’s enormous output, and a defining moment in Nineteenth-Century
Western music.
Jonas Kaufmann and Helmut Deutsch gave a near-ideal
account of it this past Saturday evening at Carnegie Hall, largely by
remembering how it would have played in its own time, as a fable or
exemplary tale pointing a gentle moral in terms that were intended to charm
and amuse, all drawn from the popular poet Wilhelm Müller’s cycle, then
still hot off the presses, which started out as part of a parlor-game.
Schubert chose not to set Müller’s prologue and epilogue, but everyone who
heard it when it was new would have understood that it was meant to be an
entertainment—as Müller put it, einem funkelnagelneuen Spiel/In einem
funkelnagelneusten Styl (“a shiny new show in the very latest style”)—ending
with a tragic dénouement that may not be what it seems, and a sort of
curtain-speech in which the poet throws up his hands, says “Make of it what
you will!,” and turns out the lights. The plot is simple and familiar: boy
goes out in search of love and adventure, thinks he’s found the girl of his
dreams, gets his heart broken, wants to die, and (maybe) does. Still, it’s
more As You Like It than Die Winterreise, and even the supposed suicide has
a pathetic-absurd quality to it, as if Petrouchka were trying out the
Liebestod.
Kaufmann played all this perfectly, which is to say that
he played it straight: the young protagonist had all the sweet, dopey,
cheerful naïveté you could ask for, so his complete misreading of his
beloved’s behavior towards him (she toys with him and treats him like dirt,
while he sees only the smile on her face) was absolutely credible, and all
his adolescent moonings, jealous bluster, and wild self-dramatization rang
perfectly true. As he contemplated dying for love, his sincerity was as
dreadful as his expression was gorgeous—the surest sign that his principal
audience was himself. (Face it, folks: we’ve all been here and done this.)
It’s a long piece, with beauties galore, and once Kaufmann and Deutsch
got warmed up, it was one lovely, glove-fitting thing after another, far too
many to enumerate. A few warm the memory still: the exquisite tonal
discrimination between “hands” and “heart,” with only a single syllable
intervening, in “Dankgesang an den Bach;” the urgent wonder and doubt
contained in a microtonally flattened “Was bist du wunderlich!” (in effect,
“Why won’t you speak?”), in “Der Neugierige;” and each and every one of
Müller’s many repeated words and parallel images individually characterized
and shaded—the four “bleiben” in “Ungeduld,” and the various herbs and
flowers in “Die liebe Farbe” were especially telling. Every word was clear,
and nearly every note was perfectly projected, even at the threshhold of
inaudibility. This was wonderful acting and singing, and while Deutsch and
Kaufmann may not have “seemed to be one” quite as much as Schubert said he
and his friend Vogel were, they must have come close.
If there was a
flaw in the performance, it was that Kaufmann often stepped back and dropped
out of character between numbers, but that was understandable, given that
Kaufmann’s fans were out in force, and many of them had plainly come for the
encores—there was more than the usual amount of rustling and throat-clearing
during the main event, and a lot of that started a note or two before the
music stopped. (Even my companion, who loves Die schöne Müllerin above all
things, whispered “Nessun dorma!” during the first of many ovations.) The
encores were perfection, but the cycle was near-bliss; if the audience’s
concentration had come near the performers’, it would have been bliss pure
and simple.
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