Performing songs is like “three-dimensional chess”, the sublime artist that is the world-renowned soprano Barbara Bonney had put it this way recently .
And one of the things Bonney talks about – and something that makes her art so exquisite – is keeping everything simple and singing naturally – getting both the words across while also keeping the musical sung line in legato. Relatedly, one can get inspired by the words, or the music, and then, when you are working with a wonderful pianist, you are not only inspired by the composer’s music or the poet’s words, but you are also inspired by other artist.
As singers, we notice that the difference between you and the cellist or the violinist in your collaboration and attempt at “tuning in” with the pianist in that Debussy sonata is that you are the line that, incontroveribly, has the words in that Debussy song (I know, I know, there are songs like Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise and so on …)!
Not-all-good-things-go-together, however: Beethoven, for one, has been known to have felt at times ambivalent about songs as a genre and how constrained by the meanings of their texts, they hindered his creative imagination. This is intriguing – as there were times when he was moved to set words to music.
Not having been a serious string instrument player, I do think about how a great pianist always thinks about “breathing”, whether they play with another artist or not, though the singer literally has to breathe while the cellist or the violinist only “breathes” with the bow!
As a singer of mostly German Lieder and French mélodies, or at least works written in that tradition, one gets inspirations from the words of the likes of Goethe, Heine, Hugo, Verlaine. You can also almost feel how well the composer like the poet’s words … well, Debussy liked Verlaine’s Clair de lune (“Votre âme est un paysage choisi” or “Your soul is a chosen landscape”) so much he did two song versions of it – both very beautiful – as well as a piano (and non-vocal!) version.
While I love Fauré songs, I would suggest that Verlaine is closer in spirit and probably to the heart of Debussy than Fauré (whose Clair de lune is wonderful but less amazingly wonderful – and Elly Ameling here in discussing the two composer’s setting of a different Verlaine poem is essentially agreeing, even quoting the authority of Pierre Bernac on this)!
Then you have Schubert … who did several settings of favourite texts, like Goethe’s Mignon songs, for example. In the case of Mignon’s “So lasst mich scheinen bis ich werde” poem (the “Mignon II” song), there exists 3 attempts (D.469, D.727 and D.877/3), the 1st being incomplete, with the 2nd and 3rd being very different, written 5 years apart, though both in the key of B major, with the popularity of the 3rd version far outshining the rest (here’s Barbara Bonney herself in this)!
There’s more. If you compare Schubert’s “So lasst mich Scheinen bis ich werde”, Schubert’s response is quite different from Wolf’s, though both are sublime and represent two of the most accomplished songs ever composed (and here’s Elisabeth Schwarzkorf in the Wolf version) and then there is also Duparc’s setting (here’s Elly Ameling in this song named “Romance de Mignon”, from the French translation of Goethe’s text)!
It is also quite difficult to choose between the many composers’ settings of another of Goethe’s Mignon’s songs, ”Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (“Only he who knows longing”) text – there’s Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, and Tchaikovsky, amongst others to “choose between”, as is the case for another of Goethe’s most famous words, Wandrers Nachtlied (wanderer’s night song) II with Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Zelter (the song is named “Ruhe” here with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), but there are also Fanny Mendelssohn’s also very beautiful setting.
Same words, different inspirations, equally beautiful.
