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Track(s) taken from CDA67124

Tragödie, Op 14 No 5

First line:
Entflieh mit und sei mein Weib
composer
1881
author of text

Stephen Varcoe (baritone), Clifford Benson (piano)
Recording details: October 1999
Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell
Release date: June 2000
Total duration: 5 minutes 9 seconds
 

Reviews

‘Beautifully performed with excellent notes, this recording will convince even the sceptical of the true worth of these songs … a most sensitive performance’ (Gramophone)

‘Maintains in each and every bar the high standards of the previous release’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘This collection, along with its predecessor has changed my life. Without any question, it contains some magnificent songs, settings that would grace any company under the sun … voice and piano are in true partnership. I can only salute with deepest admiration Stephen Varcoe's sterling baritone, so utterly sympathetic to Stanford's every note, so undemonstratively secure, so responsive to word and musical line’ (International Record Review)

‘Immediately appealing. Stephen Varcoe is the perfect singer for this repertoire. A treasure of a disc’ (Fanfare, USA)
Completed in April 1880, Tragödie (or its translation, ‘The Tragedy of Life’) was included in Six Songs, Opus 14, published by Boosey in 1882. Stanford had already exercised his interpretative powers on twelve of Heine’s poems in his Opp. 4 and 7 sets but in these instances the settings were of shorter, more concise lyrics. In Tragödie the structure is a broader triptych, employing elements of narrative more in the manner of a ballad. The first section begins with the words of the lover as he beckons his beloved to flee with him so that they can marry (‘Entflieh mit mir und sei mein Weib’), a passionate utterance which culminates at its conclusion in a bold, four-bar statement from the piano. The expected cadence is, however, deliberately avoided, yielding to a second section using words, as Heine admitted, from a Rhineland folksong. Stanford’s response was, appropriately, to invent his own ‘folk’ material emulating, in a stark F minor, the fantastical Romanticism of Schumann’s Legenden Ton. Commenting on the action of the first section, the text recounts the tale of a youth and a maiden who recklessly stole away in the dead of night – unbeknown to their parents – and were bedevilled by ill fortune, dying in penury. This moral in turn becomes the subject of reflection in the final, more tonally discursive section. Here the two lovers (of the first section), having fled their homes, sit beneath a lime tree over a grave (the grave of the hapless couple of the folksong narrative). Amid the faltering breeze and the sweet yet sorrowful song of the birds, they are overwhelmed by an incomprehensible sadness. Once again Heine’s sense of fate is tinged with a bitter cynicism and irony, and this is highlighted by Stanford’s profoundly poetic reiteration of the piano’s heroic melody, first in the flat submediant (A flat) as an elegiac reference to the doomed lovers (‘Die Winde sie wehen so lind und so schaurig’), and latterly in the postlude where the restatement of C major is muted in tragic solemnity.

from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2000

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