Berg: Lyric Suite; Wellesz: Sonnets By Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
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Berg: Lyric Suite; Wellesz: Sonnets By Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
This release unites star soprano Renee Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet for the first time on a journey to Vienna in the `20s and `30s, through music imbued with late romanticism and burgeoning modernism
Bergs Lyric Suite is a work of intricate, complexity believed to have a secret dedication and to outline a secret programme relating to Bergs affair with Franz Werfels sister (Werfel was married to Mahler s widow, Alma). Theodor Adorno called the work a latent opera and in its sixth and final movement, the Largo desolato, Berg introduces the soprano voice and quotes Wagners Tristan motif to evoke his doomed, impossible love.
This was still secessionist Vienna: a world of paintings by Klimt, psychoanalysis by Freud and a musical life where you could hear Bruno Walter conduct Mahler and Clemens Krauss lead the operas of Richard Strauss.
Egon Welleszs highly expressive setting of Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning was one of the last works he completed before leaving Austria ahead of the Anschluss in 1938. It is heard here in its original version for soprano and string quartet. Barrett-Browning was one of the most popular English poets of the Victoria era, although Wellesz turned to German translations by Rainer Maria Rilke for his setting.