Over the course of listening to the New Esterházy Quartet (NEQ) of violinists Lisa Weiss and Kati Kyme, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist William Skeen, I have encountered a variety of stimulating experiences involving music arranged for string quartet. Almost a year ago, however, the ensemble bumped the stakes of arrangement up to a new level. The group devoted its entire program to Franz Schubert’s D. 911 song cycle Winterreise (winter’s journey). The vocalist was bass-baritone Paul Max Tipton, and bassist Kristin Zoernig joined the quartet. The arrangement was prepared by Harold Birston.
The results were often as informative as they were delightful. The attentive listener had a better sense of the polyphony in Schubert’s accompaniment, particularly in the arpeggiated passages. Tipton’s balance with the ensemble was always impeccably managed. The only thing missing was a sense of dialog between vocalist and pianist that often informs the rhetoric behind the song texts.
First page of the first edition publication of D. 795 (published by Sauer & Leidesdorf in 1824, from IMSLP, public domain)
Yesterday afternoon NEQ presented the other (earlier) song cycle in Schubert’s catalog, the D. 795 Die schöne Müllerin (the loverly maid of the mill). Like D. 911, D. 795 is based on a cycle of poems that Wilhelm Müller included in his collection Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (poems from the papers left by a traveling horn player). The poems of the cycle are set in the voice of a miller’s apprentice, initially following his labors and his satisfaction with his work. The protagonist then becomes smitten with the miller’s daughter, which motivates his work for the sake of impressing both father and daughter. He then discovers that the daughter is smitten with a huntsman, and the remaining poems follow him in a downward spiral.
I reproduced the title of Müller’s collection to make the case that the poet did not intend the reader to take this narrative too seriously. Indeed, Müller included a prologue and an epilogue, both of which amount to sly winks. Schubert did not set these to music. However, when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded his performance of D. 795 with Gerald Moore, he included recitations of both prologue and epilogue; and even one not well-versed in German could detect those sly winks in the tone of his voice.
Yesterday afternoon Tipton seemed more included to take the poems Schubert had set at face value. (Schubert omitted five of the poems in Müller’s published version.) Nevertheless, he was sensible enough to avoid over-emoting, particularly during the final downward spiral. Rather, his priority was to let the words speak for themselves, providing rhetorical turns that those in the audience could then translate over to the English version of the text in the program book prepared by Celia Sgroi.
On the instrumental side the arrangement by Skeen displayed a keen ear for that aforementioned polyphony in the piano part. As a result, most, if not all, of Schubert’s highly refined textures were more than adequately transformed into string ensemble music. The one shortcoming is that D. 795 has more strictly strophic songs than D. 911 does. Thus, much of the accompaniment is repeated from one verse to the next. When a vocalist performs those strophic texts with a pianist, the two musicians can often engage in a sense of dialog that reflects the unfolding of the overall narrative or the way in which a strophe introduces an unexpected twist. That engagement has more to do with the spontaneity of performance than with the marks on paper; and, when five instrumentalists are involved, individual spontaneity tends to get short-changed.
Nevertheless, the overall chemistry between Tipton and the instrumentalists captured much (even if not all) of the rhetorical spirit of Müller’s texts; and simply having the opportunity to listen to a different instrumental approach to Schubert’s music allowed the listener to explore new ways of thinking about the poems themselves.
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