Schubert Edition 5: Nacht und Traume | Harmonia Mundi HMC902063

Schubert Edition 5: Nacht und Traume

Label: Harmonia Mundi

Cat No: HMC902063

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 10th January 2011

Contents

About

In the fascinating Nacht und Träume, long before the great nocturne of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Schubert allows us a glimpse, through a single night, of the great eternal night of which it is the foretaste and the messenger: voice and piano immobile and immutable, hovering since time immemorial and for evermore.

Still more incredible, tracking death at the very moment when it takes hold of us, Totengräbers Heimweh is probably the most violent of all Schubert’s songs: it opens with relentless chords, as furious as the blows of the gravedigger’s shovel as it ploughs into the earth to thrust the dead deep within.

Constantly kept busy digging for others, he angrily rails against his hated fate and envies these pitiful corpses the death which has put an end to their sufferings. But then a terrible anguish grips him: who will dig his grave for him? None of the most direct heirs of Schubert followed him on this perilous path.

No, this furious, desperate hammering will not be heard again before the scherzos of Bruckner’s symphonies...And in the realm of the lied, it was Gustav Mahler, with some of the Wunderhorn songs (Revelge, Der Tambour), who most closely approached such limitless violence. Death will not come, and the gravedigger begs for it. But finally the starless night approaches him, beckons to him, calls him, opens its arms to him. The gravedigger recognises and sinks into it; quitting its cumbersome body, the voice, free at last, hovers an instant above the piano, just long enough to declare: ‘I come.’"
(Christophe Gristi [director of dramaturgy at the Opéra National de Paris] from the booklet note)

This promises to be a landmark series, up there with Hans Hotter and Fischer-Dieskau.” - Anthony Holden, The Observer, 12 October 2008

This product has now been deleted. Information is for reference only.

Error on this page? Let us know here

Need more information on this product? Click here