Maddalena Sings Schumann at Monadnock
By: Michael MIller - Aug 11, 2006
Monadnock Music Festival, Saturday, August 5, 8 pm, Peterborough Town HouseJames Maddalena, baritone, and Judith Gordon, piano, Robert Schumann, "Liederkreis" (text by Eichendorff), Op. 39, 12 Lieder (text by Kerner), Op. 35
For some years now the American baritone James Maddalena has enjoyed considerable respect for his performances of contemporary and classical opera and song. A regular visitor at the Monadnock Music Festival, he devoted an evening to two song collections by Robert Schumann, "Liederkreis," Op. 39, and "Twelve Songs" by Kerner, Op. 35, which are less often performed but equally beautiful.
"Liederkreis" consists of twelve songs by Eichendorff, a series of intimate meditations on foreign and familiar landscapes, the seasons, moments in the day, and love. In Schumann's settings the intense, even painful mood pervading the songs is relieved by occasional responses to cheering phenomena in nature, bird-song for example. Justinus Kerner was one of Schumann's favorite poets, from his first attempts at song-writing to his maturity. Kerner, a versatile man like many poets of the age, was also a physician, who worked with the insane and with spiritual phenomena. He also remembered as the discoverer of botulism and as one of the first people to use ink-blots as a form of expression.
Schumann's selection of his poems follows some of the same themes as Eichendorff's, while extending further into the realms of German folklore and death. Like Schubert, Schumann took his first inspiration from the poems themselves, but he made no attempt to compromise his own interpretation as a creative act, either through selection or arrangement. He would even change words, if it suited him. In any case we should view Schumann's engagement with his poetic material as deeply personal. For this reason there is something chilling in the words of the final Kerner song, "Wer machte Dich so krank?" [Who made you so sick?] As Schumann struggled from day to day in his battle with mental illness, he often described himself as "krank," a word prominent in the libretto of his only opera, Genoveva, which will be the subject of my next review.
Mr Maddalena addressed both cycles as lyrical expression of the great themes of Romanticism. His voice moves seamlessly from one register to another, his middle and upper registers as rich as his lower. With this extraordinary instrument he was able to build long, arching melodic lines, which often encompassed the entire song, as in "Schöne Fremde" in the Liederkreis. His established working relationship with his accompanist, the excellent Judith Gordon, was apparent throughout the evening. Their common sense of the mood and expression appropriate for each song was unerring.