Sunday CD: Seelentrost

Among my recent enthusiasms has been the music of Heinrich Schütz, a prolific composer of primarily church music who flourished in German lands in the 17th century, during and just after the Thirty Years’ War. (As his career progressed, he was forced to compose for smaller and smaller ensembles — the result of the war’s decimation of the local population.)

There’s no shortage of recordings of his work, despite his relative marginalization anywhere but in early music circles. But in its February issue Gramophone bestows a laurel or two on Seelentrost (Perfect Noise), the debut album by soprano Isabel Schicketanz. Subtitled “The sound of inner life in Heinrich Schütz’ time,” her program features work not only by Schütz but also by many of his students, including the recovery of some fine work by Sophie Elisabeth (1613-1676).

Schicketanz plumbs the spiritual depths exemplified by these composers’ immersion in the Christian religion and in early Baroque practice with intent and unerring focus and power (as products of a Protestant theology, the language here is a Lutheran German rather than a Catholic Latin — without this, no German Enlightenment as I described the other day); her coda in the final minute of Adam Krueger’s “Der Liebe Macht herrscht Tag und Nacht” sends shivers down my spine.  Her accompanists are themselves subtle and precise, and Dr. Oliver Geisler’s liner notes provide an incisive and informative introduction to this obscure work:

Speaking of programme conception: with the works on this recording, Isabel Schicketanz takes a path that first leads us listeners into darkness, letting us explore the shadow regions of the soul. A second group of works, from Heinrich Schütz’s “Ich harrete des Herren” (“I waited patiently for the Lord”), portrays a person who lives and loves, who has tasted all aspects of life and can pass on these experiences (of life and faith). The third and final part begins with Heinrich Alberts “Dass alle Menschen sterben” (“That all people die”). The certainty of death is expressed, however, with the promise of coming salvation. A certain serenity can be heard, an inner smile and light that is built on deeper insights into life and the soul.

You can listen to the album through many streaming services, including Apple Classical; you can also hear it on YouTube, but for cryin’ out loud, the delicate work of Schicketanz and her colleagues demands better reproduction than your MacBook will provide. The CD is available from Challenge Records or perhaps an e-tailer near you.

For a deeper dive, the New York Times‘ Anthony Tommasini has more on Schütz here.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Harry Kupfer’s 1979 production of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer at Bayreuth.

Last night I tried to get my blood pressure down (doctor’s orders) with a recording of Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, produced at Bayreuth in 1978 and taped in 1985. As it happened, it was one of those productions that, like Patrice Chereau’s Bayreuth Ring cycle conducted by Pierre Boulez at around the same time, attracted both praise and condemnation from the Festspielhaus’s devotees. John Gilks laid out the reason for this in 2011:

The concept is that the Dutchman exists only in Senta’s imagination. She is fixated on the Dutchman as her route out of the repressed bourgeois environment [in which] she is trapped. It’s a tormented, even hysterical, version of Senta. …

Onstage throughout the opera, Lisbeth Balslev is excellent and haunting as Senta; Simon Estes as the Dutchman is revelatory. Last night I caught the first half; tonight I conclude.

I’ve been more attracted than usual to vocal music and opera over the past few years, especially that of Austria and Germany; it follows a lifelong interest in what I suppose we can call the German Enlightenment, a 150-year period that stretches from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Freud and Wittgenstein in the years before the First World War — over just slightly more than a century and slightly less than a single lifetime, German-speaking lands produced Goethe and Beethoven, Schopenhauer and Wagner, Thomas Mann and Mozart. In these dark times (as Karl Kraus called them), I could use a little more light, so I’m again reaching up to those higher shelves where I’ve been keeping The World as Will and Representation and Buddenbrooks.

And of course my vinyl collection awaits me — the Solti Ring and the Furtwängler Ninth. But first, down to my German homework — I’ve got a lesson on Monday.

If you’re playing along at home, I recommend Bryan Magee’s Aspects of Wagner, the best short introduction to the composer, and Barry Millington’s lengthier but more comprehensive look at the Sorcerer of Bayreuth. (Magee also is quite good on the relationship between Schopenhauer and Wagner in another book.) Kupfer’s Fliegende Holländer production and several other Bayreuth productions are streamable through Deutsche Grammophon’s Stage+ — a streamer I highly recommend as well.

Is it 1933 yet?

Rudolf Schlichter (1890–1955), Woman with Tie, ca. 1923. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

As we await history’s verdict on the events of the past week or so, we look forward to the next exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie, Neue Sachlichkeit/New Objectivity, which opens at the Fifth Avenue museum on February 20. Running through May, the show, curated by Dr. Olaf Peters, who also curated the Neue Galerie’s fine Otto Dix and Degenerate Art exhibitions, throws a spotlight on one of my favorite artistic periods and celebrates the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking 1925 exhibition curated by Gustav F. Hartlaub at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. (I note also that many of these artists were cited as “favorites” by R. Crumb, who shares not a few affinities with them.)

“Characterized by its critical realism, social commentary, and detailed depiction of contemporary life, and marking a significant departure from Expressionism’s emotional intensity … [the] Neue Sachlichkeit movement was divided by two philosophies — the unflinching and socially critical Verists, and the Classicists, who focused on harmony and beauty,” says the Neue Galerie:

The show will offer a wide-ranging perspective, exploring the tension between the Verists and the Classicists, which will be illustrated through a multidisciplinary installation, featuring paintings, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, works on paper, and film. … The presentation interprets these two camps as a coherent chapter in art history, focusing on the ways that the New Objectivity proponents mirrored the Weimar Republic’s cultural, political, and social complexities.

There may be no better time to reacquaint yourselves with this remarkable body of work; central to the art was the idea of the integrity of the individual, especially in an era of fluid gender presentation and representation (as evidenced by Schlichter’s Woman with Tie at the top of this item). Needless to add, the movement was crushed by Hitler’s seizure of authoritarian power in 1933; I tend to side with Peter Gay who saw this as a “Revenge of the Father,” as he put it in his 1968 book Weimar Culture, also worth a rereading. Indeed, why not read that, then enjoy the exhibition? It opens on February 20; tickets (which will be hard to come by, no doubt) are now available here.