Changing reception history has unintentionally highlighted the historical character of Mahler's purely orchestral, ‘middle-period’ symphonies. The rehabilitation of his reputation after Wold War II, particularly in German-speaking countries was marked by a tendency to consider the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies his most successful and musically rewarding: as more traditional kinds of symphonic discourse, demonstrating the relevant signifiers of mastery. It would be equally appropriate to regard these two works as experiments in the new style to which Mahler himself referred in the case of the Fifth. The cumulative, heterodox structures of the earlier symphonies are replaced, in the Fifth, by a somewhat more uniform model. Its orchestral polyphony is also denser, more frequently mixed in timbre, in the manner of Richard Strauss, and less marked by simultaneously juxtaposed individual sonorities (Mahler experienced difficulty with the Fifth's orchestration and laboured on it in revisions). There is also a reduced reliance on explicitly characterized musical manners of intentionally ironic or naive effect. Instead, Mahler opted for a rhetoric that brings to the foreground a constructed musical subjectivity whose task is to control and unify the protean character changes that define its discourse. Symbolically projected voices and quasi-naturalistic scenarios are still present, but where formerly they were external to the alienated subject, such manners now tend to be presented more frequently as subjective modes, embraced and exploited with Nietzschean élan.[...]

The fragility of that self-confidence was starkly emphasized by the Sixth Symphony (1903–4). This was composed during the period of Mahler's closest contact with the younger Viennese modernists, to whose circle his uneasily progressing marriage to Alma Schindler gave him access. Conducted by Mahler with the subtitle ‘Tragic’ on at least one occasion, the Sixth displays an inverse relationship between symbolic subjective security and structural conciseness (it has four movements, the first with repeated exposition in the Classical manner). Specific biographical reasons for its cumulatively depressive and even suicidal manner are often sought, although Mahler explored as a logical proposal the insight that subjective authenticity and a positively constructed teleology (permitting a happy ending) might have no causal link.

The Sixth Symphony's first movement reverts to sharply characterized and opposed elements, like those of the first movement of the Second and Third Symphonies. A coercive A minor march is replaced by music of energetic lyricism which Mahler described as a representation of his young wife, although it, too, functions rhetorically as a subjective mode, urgently insistent upon its superior claim to authenticity. Other elements are added to the relentless succession of these two (in A minor and F major), most notably music that evokes an experience of high-mountain solitude: unrelated triads and 7th chords drift like mist (celesta and high tremolando strings) while offstage cowbells are heard. Mahler's last printed revision of 1906 somewhat contradictorily directs that these be played ‘so as to produce a realistic impression of a grazing herd of cattle … . Special emphasis is laid on the fact that this technical remark admits of no programmatic interpretation’. The fact that this unusually evoked site of experience is linked to an emergent lyrical idea recalling one of the resurrection motifs of the Second Symphony is significant, although the provisional nature of the first movement's resonantly positive conclusion is emphasized not only by the elegiac qualities of the Andante – originally presented as the third movement but subsequently relocated as the second – but also by the grotesque and almost surreal qualities of the Scherzo, whose insistent opening idea maintains both the key (A minor) and manner of the first movement's march (the changing time signatures of the ‘Altväterisch’ Trio may refer to an authentic Bohemian folkdance). Mahler's apparent intention to return to the original order of the two middle movements was not registered in a further printing.

The work's cumulative negativity focusses the philosophical and psychological implications of the new style, whose more intimate lyrical counterpart may be found in Mahler's settings of the early 19th-century poet Friedrich Rückert, dating from this period (1901–4). They fall into two groups: one an intended cycle, the Kindertotenlieder, the other a less formally related collection of five songs. Given Mahler's modernist connections at this time, Rückert represented a conservative choice of poet. While his settings flirt with consumable sentimentality, the Kindertotenlieder (begun in 1901) and independent songs like Ich atmet' einen linden Duft and Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen model a lyrical discourse of great subtlety, accompanied by modest, chamber-like forces (the addition of a piano to the harps in Um Mitternacht is not of proven authenticity).

Extracted from
The New Grove

Wagner's first encounter with Franz Liszt ocurred inParis in 1840. His impression of the flamboyant virtuoso was tinged with some envy, for Wagner was barely eking out a living by making piano arrangements of contemporary operas such Halévy's La reine de Chypre and Meyerbeer's Robert le diable. He registered "stupefaction" as Liszt's keyboard artistry, but wrote wrote that he was "the last person in the world able to appreciate adequately the achievements of such a person who at the time was sunning himself in the brightest light of day, whereas I had turned my back and faced the night." Although Wagner could easily have capitalized on the insatiable Parisian market for piano music, he wrote very little for the keyboard. Some would argue that his piano works are unidiomatic, sounding like preliminary drafts for budding orchestral texture; their well-spaced contrapuntal activity suggests the sound images that would become familiar in his opera. ...

In the 1840s, Wagner tried to ease his financial burden by turning his hand to song composition - a genre he had never before attempted - and composed several songs in the unfamiliar language of French. The songs were published in 1841, as supplements to Lewald's journal Europa. ...

The symbiotic creative relationship between Liszt and Wagner became even more intense in the years 1882-83. At this time, Liszt wrote no fewer than four original works, all either premonitions of Wagner's death (La lugrube gondole I and II) or inspired by his memory (R. W. - Venezia; Am Grabe Richard Wagners). In some cases Liszt, ever the musical visionary, drew on motives from Wagner's Parsifal and transformed them into musical manifestos that foreshadowed the most forward-looking music of the next century.

Liszt's last visiti with Wagner (Venice, 26 November 1882 - 13 January 1883) proved particularly unhappy. He found Wagner in diminished health and spirits, and exhausted from the strain of mounting the previous summer's Bayreuth Festival, which was devoted to the premiere of Pasifal. Liszt's daughter, Cosima, recorded in her diary how Wagner denigrated Liszt's "new works, declaring them to be completely meaningless... accusing them of being the products of 'incipient madness.'" ...

Despite the gloomy memory of this last visit with Wagner, as always Liszt's magnanimity won out. He inscribed the manuscript of Am Grabe Richard Wagners: "Wagner once reminded me of the similarity between his Parsifal motives and my earlier composition Excelsior (Introduction to the Bells of Strasbourg). May these rememberances live on here. He achieved the great and the sublime in the art of the present." Liszt signed and dated the autograph 22 May 1883. This would have been Wagner's 70th birthday had he not died three months earlier. ...

Rena Charnin Mueller

"In the name of Mozart, Haydn and old Bach, I name thee journeyman." These are the words with Carl Friedrich Zelter admitted his pupil Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy on 3rd February 1824, his 15th birthday, to the "guild" of composers. This was more than a playful ritual: with this formula the "divine, precious boy" (the words are Goethe's) was to be bound to the tradition in which he had, in any case, been reared. Mozart, Haydn and old Bach had constituted the foundations of Zelter's teaching. Their works had provided Felix and his sister Fanny, four years his senior, who was also a very talented musician and one of Zelter's pupils, with a model to emulate, a goal which they had enthusiastically pursued in Zelter's Singakademie since 1819. ...

Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and their contemporaries expressed their attitude to life in song, that most intimate of genres, better than in almost any other form. Being pupils of Zelter, they had been raised in the spirit of 18th century aesthetics of song, the idea of "noble simplicity". This explains the fact that Felix was strangely unmoved by Schubert's vocal output. He considered himself an heir to the classical tradition in music; accordingly he wrote "Songs in the popular vein" with a simple structure that was strophic or strophic with variations, to simple tunes with texts which were declaimed without any emphasis whatsoever.

Ingeborg Allihn

Translation: Gery Bramall

Felix & Fanny Mendelssohn

Lieder

1. Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (Heine)
2. Die Liebende schreibt (Goethe)
3. Ferne (Droysen)
4. Es weiss und rät es doch leiner (Eichendorff)
5. Pagenlied (Eichendorf)
6. Suleika Op. 34,4 (Goethe/Willemer)
7. Suleika Op. 57,3 (Goethe/Willemer)
8. Frage (Voss)
9. Der Mond (Geibel)
10. Frühlingslied Op. 71,2 (Klingemann)
11. Frühlingslied, Op. 34,3 (Klingemann)
12. Verlust (Heine) - Fanny Mendelssohn
13. Die Nonne (Uhland) - Fanny Mendelssohn
14. Sehnsucht (Droysen) - Fanny Mendelssohn
15. Der Blumenstrauss (Klingemann)
16. Frühlingslied (Lenau)
17. Im Herbst (Klingemann)
18. Neue Liebe (Heine)
19. Sonntagslied (Klingemann)
20. Wenn sich zwei Herzen scheiden (Geibel)
21. Romanze (Aus dem Spanischen)
22. Frühlingsglaube (Uhland)
23. Winterlied (Aus dem Schwedischen)
24. Erster Verlust (Goethe)
25. Bei der Wiege (Klingemann)
26. Nachtlied (Eichendorff)
27. Andres Maienlied (Hölty)


Barbara Bonney, soprano
Geoffrey Parsons, piano


Recorded: TELDEC Studio Berlin, April 1991



Quality: mp3, varied kbps
Size: 125 MB

Wilhelm Müller was a sort of A. E. Housman of his day: philologist, historian, librarian. He came from Dessau and fought in the war of independence of 1813. He left five volumes of poetry when he died at an age hardly older than Schubert was to attain.

Schubert drew two song-cycles (the other is Winterreise) and two-thirds of a solo song Der Hirt auf dem Felsen ('The Sheperd on the Rock') from these volumes: in quality at least substantial component of his voluminous output of songs. The Schöne Müllerin poems had appeared in 1821 among a collection entitled 'Poems from the posthumous papers of a travelling hornplayer'. Müller himself had complained: 'Indeed, my songs lead only half a life, a paper life of black and white... till music breathes life into them, or at least calls it forth and awakens such as is already dormant in them.' And: 'If i could produce the tunes, my songs would please better than they do now. But courage! A kindred soul may be found who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me.'

Schubert was a soul more kindred than any poet could have dreamed of (though it may be recalled that the first poem in this cycle was given another tune is even more popular in Germany - an nowhere near as attractive).

Müller's poems touched off in Schubert's mind the wretchedness that the stock-in-trade of an artist in his day, and also the frank mirror of his own harassed soul. It is not significant that he composed some of these songs while he was a patient in a hospital undergoing treatment for venereal disease - the treatment was successful but he could not be expected to prophesy that. He chose twenty of Müller's twenty-five poems, and set them partly in May, partly in November of 1823 (shortly before writing the opera Rosamunde). They were 'universally favoured' in his lifetime, and are often referred to by his contemporaries. Although written for a tenor voice, their range was not regarded as rigid, at least by Schubert who himself transposed three of them into baritone keys. ...

William Mann, 1960

Alan Blyth, 1994

Celebrating the 100th POST of An die Musik, I'm happy to offer you this wonderful collection of recordings, an EMI special edition of early recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the greatest Lieder singer of 20th century, and a specially great interpreter of Schubert. I prepared this post very carefully, and I hope you enjoy it. Tank you very much for all visits, comments, sugestions, downloads and orderings! Stay in touch! Hugs! [Erlen]

In the history of music there has never been anything quite comparable to the interweaving of song, song cycle and symphony that is a unique feature of Mahler's ouvre. The crossovers were there pretty much from the start and continued to fertilise his music until his last years. What remains as a source of fascination is the changing relationships between all the components that make up to what today we hear as Mahler's own "voice". ...

Schubert's relationship with the poetry of Goethe first flared up in October 1814 with Gretchen am Spinnrade. By the summer of 1816 the nineteen-year-old composer had produced forty-five Goethe settings, many among the world's greatest and best-loved songs. What excited Schubert about this poetry was its spontaneity of feeling, its richly sensuous imagery and its ecstatic eagerness to seize and glorify the moment. Goethe's sheer range, too, was dazzling, embracing folk idiom and ballad, love lyrics, nature poetry and verses like Ganymed, An Schwager Kronos and Prometheus that exult in the poet's quasi-divine powers. Then there was the uniquely musical quality of Goethe's verses: poems like Der Fischer and Schäfers Klagelied demand to be sung; and indeed, several songs in this recital, including Nähe des Geliebten, An den Mond and the exquisitely chaste, tender Nachtgesang are settings of verses that were directly inspired by pre-existing tunes.

Goethe's conception of the Lied was very much that of the late eighteenth century, as exemplified in the settings of his friend, Carl Zelter: a straighforward, often folk-like melody, simply accompanied, with the same music used for each verse. What the poet called "a false interest in detail" was to be deplored. When, in April 1816, Schubert sent fair copies of his Goethe songs to the great poet-sage in Weimar, the package was returned unacknowledged. But if Goethe had bothered to look at them he would have found that two, Heidenröslein and Der Fischer, accorded closely with his views on verse setting - indeed, a more elaborate treatment would have been inappropriate for these piquant folk ballads, wich make much of their effect through the cumulative power of repetition. ...

Thomas Hampson and 

Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold

Quality: mp3, varied kbps

Size: 113 MB

Brahms

Lieder

Complete Edition

7 Discs Box

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Jessye Norman

Daniel Barenboim, piano
Wolfram Christ, viola

Quality: mp3, 192 kbps

Brahms

Deutsche Volkslieder

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, sopran
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, bariton
Gerald Moore, piano




Quality: mp3, 192 kbps
Size: 66 MB + 60 MB

Debussy & Mozart

Songs (Mélodies & Lieder)

Juliane Banse, sopran
András Schiff, piano


DL Debussy & Mozart songs

Quality: mp3, 192 kbps
Size: 87 MB

Schubert

Winterreise, D. 911

Liedercyclus nach Gedichten von
Wilhelm Müller (24 Lieder)

Nathalie Stutzmann, alt
Inger Södergren, piano

DL Schubert Winterreise
Part 1
Part 2

Quality: mp3, 192 kbps
Size: 62 MB + 49 MB

Brahms & Mahler

Lieder

Lucia Popp, sopran
Geoffrey Parsons, piano


DL Brahms & Mahler Lieder


Quality: mp3, 96 kbps
Size: 26 MB

Schubert

Winterreise, D. 911

Liederzyclus nach Gedichten von
Wilhelm Müller (24 Lieder)

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, bariton
Jörg Demus, piano

(The Originals - Legendary Recordings from the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue)

DL Schubert Winterreise

Quality: mp3, 128 kbps
Size: 68 MB

Winterreise, D. 911

Liederzyclus nach Gedichten von
Wilhelm Müller (24 Lieder)

Matthias Goerne, bariton
Graham Johnson, piano

(The Hyperion Schubert Edition nr. 30)

DL Schubert Winterreise

Quality: mp3, 96 kbps