Fans of art song recitals know that the lieder landscape is littered with emotional wrecks, with tortured night journeys and the occasional bout of suicidal despair. And what of the composers of these beautiful songs? Many of them were struggling with their own psychological issues, as well.
New York Festival of Song will explore these psychological issues during "Art Song on the Couch: Lieder in Freud's Vienna," a program of songs by composers who were Sigmund Freud's contemporaries: Mahler, Wolf, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and Alexander von Zemlinsky. This song recital will present the psychological and musical complexity of fin de siècle art song, in the context of the novel ideas about the human psyche that were circulating in Vienna at that time.
Soprano Janai Brugger and baritone John Brancy will interpret these complex, opulent songs, along with Steven Blier and Michael Barrett on piano, at the Kaufman Music Center in New York on November 11. A special preview performance will be held in Boston at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on November 9.
I recently spoke with Steven Blier, artistic director of NYFOS, about his inspiration for this program.
Classicalite: Presenting German art song in the context of Freud's ideas about the human psyche seems like such a natural thing to do, yet I don't recall ever hearing of a song recital on this theme. Was this why you decided to put German art song on the couch?
Steven Blier: Well, I did feel it was time to do a German program. And then I was thinking about Strauss' Ophelia-Lieder. And I've always said that they are very 'psychiatric' readings of Ophelia. Because you can hear manic, you can hear obsessive-compulsive, you can hear repression, ... It's all in the music. It really felt like a mental ward. It's the most obviously psychiatric, to me, of anything on the program.
But then I started thinking about Vienna and that era, and where the song was going.... Did these composers know about psychoanalysis? Maybe, in a cursory sort of way.
Classicalite: Didn't Mahler know about psychoanalysis?
Blier: Mahler had that one session with Freud. I think [Mahler wanted to talk] about his marriage... and we really don't know exactly what happened. I think Freud saw Oedipal issues with Mahler.
[Mahler's] song "Erinnerung" is so poignant, and it's again to me very Freudian, in that if you look at the poem, it seems to be saying something joyous, and you listen to the music and you hear nothing but pain. And that's all I'm trying to get at in this program, is that the countercurrents against the poem, or the sense that you're hearing the conscious thought and the unconscious thought (or the hidden thought,) so much more than you do in other art songs.
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