Standing room only for the event of the month at the Wigmore Hall: a rare performance of Brahms’s romantic medieval songcycle Die schöne Magelone, complete with narration.
Brahms thought his songs — settings of the poems from Ludwig Tieck’s novella — could and should stand alone. But even at the premiere, the cycle’s first baritone thought otherwise. Nobody reads Tieck these days, he said, so it simply won’t make sense.
And, with a few exceptions, that’s how things stuck. Matthias Goerne had scooped Sir Ian Holm to declaim the storyline in English. But when illness forced Sir Ian to withdraw, Goerne opted for a German narration.
Peter Mussbach, the director of the Deutsche Staatsoper, sat at an antique table to tell the tale. The translation was printed in the programme — so the audience was free to experience the performance as a homogenous whole: declaimed and sung German, ancient chivalric tale and lyrical reflection side by side. And all superbly held together and energised by the magnificent piano playing of Elisabeth Leonskaja. It was very nearly a five-star event. But, alas, Mussbach’s narration was delivered with all the poetry and drama of a morose newsreader.
Goerne’s singing, thank goodness, more than made good the shortfall. He thrillingly internalised the bareback galloping of the lovelorn knight. And when he left trusty steed for sweet lute, then Goerne expoited the long, long breaths and minute control of colour of which he is master to confide intimate thought and feeling.
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When the action really got going, energy resonated between all three performers, as narration overlapped with piano prelude, or shot into the singer’s melodic line like an arrow flying from a bow. At times like this, the performance really did reach its mark, and prove just what a neglected masterwork this is.