The haunting began before Christmas. Brahms songs. Lottle Lehmann singing “Lerchengesang.” Marjana Lipovsek singing “Von ewiger Liebe.” Thomas Allen singing “Botschaft.” It had been years since I’d heard any of these songs, as a look at my iTunes cupboard, bare of Brahms lieder, instantly proved. An ordinary person would have rustled up the CDs and listened to them. I managed to rustle them up, all right — amazing, really — but instead of listening to them, I went straight to Arkivmusic and ordered recitals by other singers. Then I listened. My reward was an ache for Brahms that persisted through the Christmas season. Only now that we are safely into the new year can I soothe it.

I’ve quickly fallen in love with Bernarda Fink’s all-Brahms disc, but here’s something odd that happened when I opened up a “Liederabend” recording made by Irmgard Seefried back in the mid-Fifties. Seefried was “my first soprano,” because she appeared on my first classical record, Bruno Walter’s recording of Mozart’s Requiem. I never collected her very much, so to speak, because little of what she recorded was in stereo, but now I’m old enough to overlook that in certain contexts, lieder recitals being one. Seefried sings only a handful of Brahms songs, along with Schumann, Schubert, Mussorgsky, Wolf, and, at the end, one little song by Strauss. “Ständchen,” it’s called — like so many German songs; the word means “serenade.” That being the case, it’s customary to give the first line after the title, just to clear things up. This is the amazing thing. As I was reading this line, the song came to my lips. I have not heard it in thirty years; I forgot that it existed a long time ago. But the words, “Mach auf! mach auf! doch leise, mein Kind,” prompted the tune. How I used to love it! How did I know it? I suspect that it appeared — sung by whom, man or woman, I still can’t recall — on a collection of then-old recordings called “The Seraphim Guide to the Lied,” or something like that. There were three LPs in the box, and songs by Schubert, Schumann, Loewe, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss. I think. But nothing is very clear.

This Strauss “Ständchen” is a young man’s ecstatically hushed call to his beloved, imploring her to join him in the moonlit garden — without waking anybody up. The accompaniment is a transfiguration of what you hear in Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” — recursive drudgery made spinning flame. At the end, the lover forgets himself, and fairly bellows the first words of the last line — “hoch glühn” — twice, and louder the second time, in what I believe in pop music is called a “big finish.” It must be acknowledged that Richard Strauss had a unique gift for making adolescence attractive. How did I let this song slip away?

It ought not to be inferred from my longing for Brahms that I got nothing out of the annual diet of Christmas carols. Possibly because I’ve been reading Frances Haskell on baroque painters and their patrons, and Paul Hazard on the Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715, I heard something new in something very familiar. Ever since Kathleen and I set up house together, we’ve had a copy of The Many Moods of Christmas, a Robert Shaw LP that Kathleen knew from childhood. (It made a very early reappearance on CD.) Shaw did a lot of very fine Christmas music over the years, but Many Moods is over-the-top baroque. I don’t mean that it sounds like Bach or Handel so much as that, like those celestial vistas in baroque churches, the arrangements transform what was originally rather humble and simple material into grandiose spectacle. The album opens with three mighty blasts of orchestral firepower, then some vaulting curlicues, then the thundering threesome repeated, followed by more curlicues, and finally five close chords, each of them as massive as the pillars in St Peter’s, which fade away as the choir comes in with “Good Christian Men Rejoice.” This doesn’t sound very clever, but it is, even if it did take me years to recognize “Jingle Bells.” (Kathleen never did hear it until I pointed it out to her the other day.) Somehow the phrase “hiding in plain sight” seems inapt. I’ve always thought that The Many Moods of Christmas was great seasonal fun, but lately I’ve been given to imagine the horror that it very likely aroused in serious music listeners back when it was new. This is seasonal fun, too.

I also learned that we can no longer be content with randomly shuffling through a playlist into which all the better Christmas CDs have been dumped. I’m going to have to “put something together.”

***

The snow and the cold contrived to keep us in bed until it was nearly afternoon. We never thought of going out, although I’d hoped to get to the Museum. Instead, we watched movies. Ages ago, Kathleen went through couple of the bins in which DVDs are filed, and wrote down the names of movies that we own/she likes. For some reason, her list begins with “H” and doesn’t quite reach the end of the alphabet. We watched Hanna, the very first title on the list, after we watched Mortal Thoughts, an unjustly neglected movie from 1991 with Demi Moore, the great Glenne Headley, and Bruce Willis. (Also a fine John Pankow.) As if inspired by playing a supporting role instead of the lead, Bruce Willis gives an astounding performance as a hateful, self-involved prick who, happily, dies early. Just desserts with a cherry on top! The ladies are shrouded in big hair, as befits the Bayonne setting. Mortal Thoughts is the pepper to Working Girl‘s salt.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, January 3rd, 2014 at 9:13 pm.