Vienna: Fin de siecle

Barbara Hannigan (soprano), Reinbert de Leeuw (piano)

Few performers are better placed to guide the listener through the fractured beauties of early-20th-century Viennese art song than Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw. As founder of the Netherlands-based Schoenberg Ensemble, de Leeuw has been in the vanguard of musical modernist performers since the late 1970s, and he and his ensemble made a sensational impression at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival, when the theme was ‘Vienna 1900’. Soprano (and sometime conductor) Barbara Hannigan is one of the brightest stars of a younger generation of performers specialising in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, who counts Alban Berg’s notorious femme fatale Lulu amongst her signature roles.

Now, following their highly-acclaimed collaboration in the music of Satie (Socrate, on the Winter & Winter label), Hannigan and de Leeuw reunite on disc to explore key works in the early development of ‘Second Viennese School’ song. The repertoire they have chosen focuses on the unravelling of traditional tonality, as expressed through settings of poems loosely centred on the theme of ‘Sehnsucht’ (usually translated as ‘longing’). Here, the longing seems above all to be for a lost age of greater harmonic certainty, while at the same time looking forward with a mixture of angst and hope to the new musical possibilities taking shape on the horizon.

As you’d expect, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern feature prominently, with beautifully committed, engaged and nuanced performances of Schoenberg’s Four Songs, op.2 (1899), Webern’s Five Songs on Poems by Richard Dehmel (1906-08), and Berg’s celebrated Seven Early Songs (1907). De Leeuw’s colourful but supremely sensitive piano playing points up fascinating connections between Schoenberg and Debussy in particular, and both he and the ever-involving Hannigan are thoroughly idiomatic in the expressionistic depths of Webern and the more overtly lyrical outpourings of Berg. This is music in which one feels both performers are completely in their element, with singing and playing of thrilling immediacy.

By including songs by Zemlinsky (from the mid- to late 1890s) and Alma Mahler (1910 and 1915) alongside these three pillars of the Second Viennese School, Hannigan and de Leeuw add not only an expanded context but real substance to their recital. Zemlinsky’s fundamentally tonal musical language seems to be looking back to a Brahmsian tradition, but also tentatively forward as the world stands on the brink of a new century. Certainly you feel the tension in Hannigan’s performance of Entbietung (‘Invitation’), a setting of words by Richard Dehmel – who provided a crucial literary inspiration for all these composers. Alma Mahler (herself a source of inspiration not only for her husband Gustav, but also for Berg and Zemlinsky, among several others) seems to look even further back from her vantage point in the early to mid-1910s, yet even here you feel a sense of foreboding, not least in the eerie harmonies that open her setting of Dehmel’s Die stille Stadt (‘The Silent Town’).

Following the trajectory set by the Zemlinsky and Mahler songs, Hannigan and de Leeuw end their programme at the point where, in their view, it all started: Hugo Wolf’s Mignon settings from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Here, as the 19th century moved toward its close, music and text, melody and accompaniment became inextricably entwined. Texture as much as tonality defined the music of the new century, and song-setting, for all these composers, was an essential part of their musical DNA, as well as laying the formal foundations for the ‘new music’ ahead. By bidding a tender farewell with Wolf’s extraordinarily prescient music, Hannigan and de Leeuw seem to be inviting us to listen again to the whole programme in the light of its discoveries and connections.

And return to it again the listener surely will. There may be more tonally radiant recordings of some of these songs, and others with more clinical, pinpoint accuracy. But there are few that combine such a sense of sheer involvement, at foreground and deep-background levels, with such a complete awareness of, and identification with, the fin-de-siècle mindset. For that reason alone, lovers of 20th-century art song need to hear this disc. They will find it an immensely rewarding and thought-provoking experience: from these musicians, one would expect no less!