Unser neuer Gesamtkatalog

Today, we encounter Ludwig Thuille primarily as a correspondent and friend of Richard Strauss, as well as co-author (with Rudolf Louis) of “Harmonielehre”. February 5, 2007 marked the 100th anniversary of Ludwig Thuille’s death. Born in Bozen, Thuille first studied in Innsbruck and then at the Royal School of Music in Munich, where he was appointed teacher of composition after completing his studies. As successor to Joseph Gabriel Rheinberger, he influenced an entire generation of Munich-trained composers.
His oeuvre includes five works for stage, one symphony, one piano concerto, choruses, songs and chamber music. The belle époque aesthetic can be clearly heard in his song settings, which accent natural and traditional values but are harmonically quite complex. In their sensitive and complex sound, Thuille’s songs have a fascinating, unmistakable color.

Fünf Lieder für eine hohe Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte, op. 4 (1886)
Fünf Lieder für eine hohe Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte, op. 19 (1901)
Drei Lieder nach Gedichten von Clemens Brentano op. 24 (1902)
Drei Lieder für drei Frauenstimmen solo nach Gedichten von Joseph von Eichendorff (1904)
Drei Mädchenlieder nach Gedichten von Wilhelm Hertz, op. 36
Rebecca Broberg, soprano · Frank Strobel, piano
Ksenija Lukic, soprano · Heike Kohler, alto

Thuille’s songs: my experience


Ludwig Thuille is considered to be a quintessentially Jugendstil composer. In art song at the turn of the previous century, one often finds nostalgic tendencies towards the popular folk style, perhaps as a protest against growing materialism and the wonders of technology, and perhaps as well a proud sign of German nationality. This nostalgia is evidenced in the choice of poem (describing or taking place in nature, like a fairy-tale, the sentiments of simple country people), the melody (song-like and declamatory) and the form (strophic). In the simplification, however, as well as in the abstraction, many composers, greedy to be deemed genius or because they were incapable, have not treated song as the exalted expression of the psyche. Ludwig Thuille, on the other hand, seems to have been compelled to create from the depths of his soul. He infused the poem with soul and spirit, bringing it to life with various emotions, making it rich with stories to tell. Every song by Thuille that I have sung is like a dramma in musica, much more than a song with piano accompaniment. New worlds are created; the poem becomes a unity of the two autonomous dimensions of voice and piano melting into each other. Awe inspiring is the Anima of the song – the transfigured, exceedingly dramatic poem – as well as the composer’s command of compositional techniques, which has created this. Equally wonderful and seldom: the composer does not compel the listener to acknowledge his superhuman significance with exotic compositional procedures, but brings into play a broad palette of compositional techniques to represent the validity of the content and passion inherent to the text. Each of the Opus numbers on this recording – Opus 4, 19, 24, 31 and 36 – has its own special character.

Opus 4 is like a song cycle, with film-like flowing images and colors. This group of songs tell the story of a love that is over. Its apotheosis takes place with the death of the love-sick speaker.

Otto Gensichen’s Greeting is made supernatural with long phrases. Because the first phrase is only four measures, the ecstatic exhilaration of the following three phrases, while thinking of the beloved, is overwhelming. They melt into a period encompassing the twelve measures. With “And a heavenly singing…” the arpeggios of the heavenly harps are heard in the piano; they suggest a ladder to heaven from which the angels descend. Love is young and fresh, blissfully alone and full of hope.

Herman Lingg’s The abandoned girl confronts the listener abruptly with hard reality. The beloved hasn’t come back. The piano writing at the beginning has the effect of pricking needles of anxiety and impatience, of trembling misery. “Nobody wakes up and lets you in” is a cry into the silent solitude: after sixteen measures the piano has a complete rest and the voice stands alone. Then the music becomes frenetic, slightly hysterical: repeated sixteenths in the piano and even a nervous metrical change at “you will kiss another”, and then a key change in resignation at “when I am pale and cold”. The May winds blow with the premonition of hopelessness and a last plea, “Come soon!” – soon there will be no more May winds.

A banal fanfare of happiness rings in Wilhelm Osterwald’s In May. The phrasing is short of breath and almost manic: a mixture of physical and psychological illness. The consumptive abandoned girl reacts to the sign of life from her beloved given her by Spring as if it were a dose of morphium. She exhausts herself in the refrain, in its long-windedness and range.

Herman von Gilm’s Allerseelen brings us back to earth again in the four-four measure of mournful loneliness. The leaves and moist earth of an autumn day make themselves tangible. Suspensions (Measures 2, 3, 6, 7, 21, 23, etc.) are like sighs. After Measure 26, “Come to my heart”, the great climax, the suspension is particularly potent in Measure 28 with “(you again) I’ll have”. There is also a prolonged suspension to the dominant of d-minor. Measure 27 moves with tearful melancholy in two-four measure. The suspension on “have” is tighter and very intense due to the preceding interval. Richard Strauss’ setting of this phrase is similar, but lacks the extreme desolation of loneliness.

Robert Hameling’s Ganymed makes me see the colors of Maxfield Parish and N.C. Wyeth in pastel-illuminated mountains and sky landscapes. Ganymed’s longing to fly like a god is a metaphor for the poet’s longing for love, for salvation through orgasm and/or death. The circling eagle is liberating Death, who redeems Ganymed from an unhappy life, lifting him on high to the Hall of the gods of eternal lovers.

The five songs of Opus 19 reflect various emotional facets. Numbers 1 and 5, expressing a young girls’s desire for physical love, frame Summer noon, The fool’s rain song, and Mrs. Nightingale. The atmosphere and emotional life of these three songs are enchanting. Summer noon emotes a humid sunny day in August and lasciviousness. The fool’s rain song (interestingly the beginning of Bierbaum’s play Die vernarrte Prinzeß which in its entirety was set to music by Richard von Chelius and Oskar Fried, as well as fragments thereof by Rudi Stephan) evokes the inconsolable wetness of grey fog and tormented Weltschmerz. Mrs. Nightingale, on the other hand, calls forth the refreshing coolness of a spring forest and blissful ardor.

Thuille reveals in von Eichendorff’s Die Kleine the physical desires of a young girl. The wide vocal range of the first phrase reflects the breadth of her desire and frustration. With the playfulness of the melody “on three bright horses” the composer shows that she is indeed still a child. The young girl cries, “You can be happy”, and wallows in jealous day-dreaming: “When it gets quiet outside…” She then throws herself in her little bed and is again a child: “I don’t have anything anywhere!” This leads again into the expansive first phrase with the longing to finally be a woman at last, who may kiss as much as she wants.

In Theodor Storm’s Summer noon the piano’s tone-painting brings forth sleepy bees and even a snoring miller. The longing young girl has become a stealthy seductress. The scene’s setting is described by the singer, slowly building upt to the climax with the daughter’s exclamation: “Now kiss me, amorous youth, but neatly, not so loud!” The length of the held high-note and the octave interval reveal how fantastic this kiss is. The music continues to describe the poet’s picture: the lovers sink to the floor in the last two measures.

The desolation of Otto Julius Bierbaum’s The fool’s rain song captures the winter weather of northern Germany: chromatic and unsettling, without rest, stuck in grey nowhere. The princess identifies herself with the woeful melody of the mourning heart. The dissonance and chromaticism induce feelings of discomfort and pain.

The singing of Mrs. Nightingale (from “The youth’s magic horn”) encourages the emotions to swing upward again. Nature and the nightingale are constantly heard in the piano part. A striking number of intervallic jumps in the vocal line reveal the excitement of the speaker. It is wonderful how the nightingale is heard to answer the question, “Where is it good to live?” . The bird’s fantastic singing induces the vocal line to float in ecstasy.

The spinner’s song, also from “The youth’s magic horn”, returns us to the simple world of the quizzical little creature we’ve previously met in the first song, whom we now encounter in conversation with her mother. The mother attempts in vain to lure with promises of shoes and stockings the capricious daughter to work. The young girl refuses to work until her mother promises her a husband. The composition enjoys the simplicity and humor of this situation.

The songs of Opus 24 (Clemens Brentano) – and also of Opus 36 (Wilhelm Hertz) – are much darker than the previous songs. The texts are gloomy; they depict abandonment and longing for death. In When the sun goes away the voice sinks into the depths of the chest voice at “darkness”, “dark child”, and “are dark and lost”. At the beginning the chords sound empty until the pianist’s left hand intensifies the mood with its entry at “sunset”. The form reminds us of a strophic setting, but is more complicated. We are told why the darkness is there at the third strophe. What is hid by darkness is revealed by the moon and stars: “my heart’s quiet fire”. We are face to face with the great passion of the German Puccini (Gatti-Casazza). An iron lung could be of use here. The text is set so brilliantly with rhetorical sensitivity, that the key and meter changes do not strike us as the avantgarde compositional techniques that they are. The song of the spinner depicts the spinning wheel in the piano, perhaps more realistically even than in Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, and again the sweet calling of the nightingale. The spinner stops spinning suddenly with “If only God would unite us!”, but she subsequently carries on spinning the thread of her fate, perpetually resigned in the surrogate for crying: singing.

Thuille’s setting of I was going to make you a little bouquet conjures up the Affect of the poem more accurately than Strauss’ setting. It isn’t about a sugary-sweet rococo wreath; it’s about the realization: “Grief lives in loving” and fatal resignation. The composition of this song also implements a free strophic form, faithful to the text at all times. The voice delves into the depths of the chest voice at the passages: “dark night came”, “in the dark clover”, and “in the garden completely alone.” The melody trickles step-wise in the flow of tears: “tears flowed from my cheeks into the clover” and with “My beloved has stayed away, I am so alone”. The a-minor of the last measures spreads emptiness, and lonely and fatalistic desolation.

The luscious harmonies and airy melodies of Thuille’s three vocal trios, Opus 31 (The Rogue, Forest solitude, and The elves), seem to anticipate the style of early Hollywood films, with lots of glamor and showgirls in silver and white, but also with a vocal style that we encounter in the arrangements of the Andrews Sisters, with intimate voice-leading demanding tight ensemble. Thuille’s tonal language is seasoned consummately with dissonance and sets extremely high standards for the perform ers. Thuille certainly envisioned the performance of these trios chorally as well as soloistically. Each setting of Joseph von Eichendorff’s poetry begins with dynamically driving ostinato figures, with emphasis on the interval of the second. The piano is an immanent rhythmic presence. The voices in The Rogue move repeatedly homorhythmically above the accompaniment’s dynamic carpet of sound. While the text is portrayed in the vocal lines with particular harmonies of intervals, the piano’s figuration creates character and action. This is heard in the first measure when the left hand springs mischievously over the keys against the right hand’s ostinato. At “A happily astonished boy” a rising figure stretches in the left hand. With“now the songs of the lark are floating…” at the marking of poco più mosso the piano communicates the feeling of floating. With electric dissonance “sings the nightingale”, so that the listener practically feels the vibrations. The rushing cool water of the waterfall sparkles downwards in the piano part. “Spring, it is spring again…” brings the first climax. The strophe ends with a cadence in the dominant seventh. The piano then begins alone, with four sixteenth-notes against eighth-note triplets. At “The boy is heard flying” the alto begins the narration, followed by the other two in an almost whirring echo until they each go their individual searching ways at “searching, fleeing, longingly erring”. Word-painting is also heard in the harmony and choice of intervals. The tension is gradually intensified until the ultimate fortissimo climax, again with ecstatic dissonance and great tension in the secondary dominant: the soprano and middle voice form a tritone ( a and d-sharp, with b in the alto). A diminuendo immediately brings us to piano and we are gently led back to the tonic.

Forest solitude begins with a hypnotic minor second as part of the right hand’s ostinato. This compositional technique depicts the uncanny enchantment of the surroundings. First the quiet woods are described with tight triplets. The sixteenths flow at “the streams run throught the quiet woods”. At “the mother of God watches” the harmony spreads gentle amazement. The hypnotic triplets are heard throughout the entire song, excepting the last two measures, leading us to “good night”.

The composer implements rhythm with hypnotic effects also for the setting of The elves. The repetition of the request “Stay with us!” in the individual voices intensifies the urgency and the magic, transforming the poem theatrically. Wallowing in the magnificence of their plans, the elves describe how they have covered the dance floor in the valley with a harmonically-heavenly moonglow. Once again is heard the individually intoned, urgent plea: “Stay with us!” They return to raving about the moonglow-covered valley and its magic in two-four measure, suggesting to the spellbound listener that “the most beautiful” is to be found there. At the end of the song, as if awaking from a dream, the listener hears from far away the elves urgently pleading: “Stay with us!”

Its tonal language refined and mature, as well as permeated by deep seriousness, Opus 36 seems to reflect the composer’s premonition of his ensuing death. Perhaps his wife’s mental problems also influenced the choice of text, the morbidity of which is hardly to be surpassed. The central Brentano Lied Last wish is framed by Brentano’s My angel will watch over you and Come, sweet sleep. Unreciprocated love inspires interest in suicide. The desire to bring everything along into the grave is the connecting theme of these three songs. In My angel will watch over you the lyrical ego tries to manipulate the beloved youth with gentle and superficially-selfless love into staying with her. The command, “Go away in peace!” is a hopeless outburst. It should actually be: Please don’t go! He may go, but as he is her happiness his departure will cause her death. The idea that her image will follow him is an intrinsically desperate threat that her ghost will pursue him if he abandons her.

And he abandons her:”My treasure is going to get married. I’m lying at the verge of Death!” This is how the story continues in Last wish. The composer creates an extreme contrast here between the dramatic outburst at the realization of the truth and the hopeless resignation, in the act of her tying her wishes in a little bouquet. One of the bouquets is to be given to her beloved, the other she will take with her to the grave. These will be her last gifts ever. After this proclamation the song becomes ghostly parlando alla recitativo; she threatens her idée fixe that she will return as a ghost and follow him. This is pronounced flatly, almost without voice. The melody of the first measure is implemented several times now, and thus acquires an evil, phantom-like aspect.

With Come, sweet sleep we know that this woman did indeed not die and continues to suffer. She has apparently cultivated her obsession. She dreams how it might once have been – “You once, after kissing and joking…” – and the music is a voluptuous rhapsody. She wakes up sober: “He was long ago taken to the grave, and love and happiness with him.” Again she repeats, like an incantation, “Come, sweet sleep!”.

Ludwig Thuille’s great empathy and penetrating knowledge of personal and psychological details, as well as his manifest technical mastery, allow the singer and her accompanist to relate graphic stories and the listener to vicariously experience them. His music consistently serves the text, transfiguring it into a multi-dimensional dramatic cosmos. He combines poetry and voice with heart and soul into masterpieces of unfailing relevance to the present. The occupation with Thuille’s vocal compositions offers the performers – and also the understanding listener – rewarding challenges technically, musically and interpretatively.

Ludwig Thuille (1861–1907)

Today the name of the composer Ludwig Thuille is known primarily due to his written correspondence with Richard Strauss, published in two volumes. He is also known as the co-author, along with Rudolf Louis, of a respected harmony treatise.

He received his first music lessons as a boy in Kremsmünster. An orphan at the age of six, it wasn’t until he was fifteen that Pauline Nagiller, a composer’s widow, brought him to Innsbruck. He studied there with Joseph Pembauer (senior) from 1877 until 1879. In Innsbruck Thuille also met his friend Richard Strauss for the first time. Thuille continued his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in Munich with Joseph Rheinberger (well known as Fugenseppl, or the fugue fool), and the pianist Karl Bärmann. Immediately after finishing his studies he was invited to teach there, becoming a professor of piano and theory in 1888. In 1903, Thuille took over Rheinberger’s position in composition, and thus became the father of the “Munich School”.

Thuille’s students included Walter Courvoisier, Richard Wetz, Julius Weismann, Ernest Bloch, Walter Braunfels, August Reuß, Franz Mikorey, Joseph Pembaur (the son of Thuille’s former teacher), Clemens von Franckenstein, Fritz Cortolezis, Edgar Istel, Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen, Hermann Abendroth, Paul von Klenau, Rudolf Ficker, Rudi Stephan and Joseph Suder. In addition to his Symphony in F Major, a piano concerto, choral works, songs and chamber music, Ludwig Thuille composed five works for the stage: Theuerdank (1897), Lobetanz (1898), Gugeline (1901), Der Heiligenschein (unfinished, posthumous concert premiere of Act One in 1910), and the melodrama Die Tanzhexe (1901). The librettos of his second and third operas, as well as of his dance-melodrama, were written by Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865–1910), who also collaborated with Elsa Laura von Wolzogen on the Heiligenschein libretto. After World War I, the works of the German Puccini (so deemed by the impresario Gatti-Casazza) disappeared slowly from the stage, despite Lobetanz’s great success in Zurich, Vienna, Straßburg, Riga, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and in Philadelphia.

Ludwig Thuille died on February 5th, 1907 in Munich.



The Performers

Rebecca Broberg was born in Philadelphia. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where she received the Annie Wentz Prize in Voice. Having specialized earlier in baroque music, with a minor in viola da gamba, her repertoire includes all eras. She has portrayed on stage Telemann’s Vespetta in Pimpinone and Xantippe in Der geduldige Sokrates, Megildis in Humperdink’s Das Mirakel, and Siegfried Wagner in the one woman show Father, have you cursed me? WDR (West German Radio) and DeutschlandRadio Kultur (Berlin) have broadcast the live performances of Siegfried Wagner’s operas Der Heidenkönig, in which she portrays Gelwa, and Der Kobold, in which she enacts the leading role of Verena. She has been praised internationally by the media for her physical and vocal stamina, as well as for the intensity and depth of her character realization.

Ksenija Lukic was born in Kragujevac, Yugoslavia. She received degrees at the conservatory for singing and for Italian Literature at the university in Belgrad. She has performed more than fifty roles (Susanna, Musette, Saffi, Adina, Rosalinde, Anna-Elisa among others) in various theaters in Germany and abroad. In addition to frequently appearing as a soloist in concert and at various festivals, Ksenija Lukic may be heard in many CD recordings.

Heike Kohler began her vocal studies in Munich with Maria Francesca-Cavazza, continuing in Nuremberg with Arno Leicht. She has portrayed the Countess Eberbach in Der Wildschütz and Käthe in Der Kobold. Her repertoire includes the dramatic soprano roles of Ariadne, Santuzza, Eboli, Kundry, Sieglinde and Fricka.

Frank Strobel is an artist firmly committed to overlapping genres and styles of music. The pianistic child prodigy was born in Munich in 1966. He cultivates not only the classical and romantic repertoire, but also twentieth century music, and with great enthusiasm the broad field of »music and film.« Strobel has conducted premiere performances of the works of Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Siegfried Wagner as well as of more recent works. Strobel enjoys international renown as a film conductor and has arranged original pieces as well as new compositions for over forty silent-film classics performed under his baton in opera houses, concert halls, and film theaters, and recorded by the ZDF, arte, SDR, SR, and 3sat television networks in co-operation with the German Radio of Berlin. He has recorded with a number of leading European orchestras music for film and television productions in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States as well as, of course, works from other genres (releases on labels such as BMG, Polydor, wea, CPO, and Capriccio). Until 1988 he was the principal conductor of the German Film Orchestra of Babelsberg. Since 2000 he has been the artistic director of the European Film Philharmonie, an orchestra which he cofounded.

Concert tours have taken Strobel to almost all the European countries as well as to the United States, Canada, Central and South America, and Asia. A frequent guest artist at various festivals, including the Berlin and Vienna Festival Weeks, Frank Strobel currently resides in Berlin.

The artists of this CD are members of the piano-pianissimo-musiktheater (www.pppmt.de), founded in 1980 by Peter P. Pachl due to the inspiration of August Everding, General-Intendant in Munich. Biennial celebrations in Pegnitz, Franconia, brought to life previously unperformed works by Richard Wagner. This opera ensemble has performed world premieres of works by Franz Schreker, Siegfried Wagner and Alexander Zemlinsky and contemporary writers such as Herbert Rosendorfer and Bernd Schünemann. The pianopianiossimo-musiktheater has been invited by the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Hamburg State Opera, the Nuremberg Opera, the Vienna Festival Weeks, the Carinthic Summer Ossiach, the Vienna Concert Hall, the Basel Festival, the Oberhausen Theater, the Philadelphia Arts and Fringe Festival, the Solingen Theater and Concert Hall, the Fürth Theater and the Bayreuth Civic Hall. Many productions on TV and CD have been broadcast in cooperation with SFB Berlin, RIAS, Bavaria Broadcast, Austrian Broadcast, SWR Mainz, WDR Köln, DeutschlandRadio Kultur, BR –Franconia and Naxos CDs (Marco Polo).