BaL 2.02.19 - Schubert: Schwanengesang D.957

[gurnemanz]

... the CD is still available at reasonable prices secondhand :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00005AAFB/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

.

Saw that but went for download anyway.

[richardfinegold]

I said somewhere above that the slow tempo of Doppelgänger probably excludes Goerne's marvellous rendition of the cycle (with Christoph Eschenbach on the piano) from being a library recommendation. I don't find the tempo "impossible" but a perfectly valid proposition by one of our best and most experienced and thoughtful Lied interpreters. Reactions obviously vary but I find it very moving.

I defer to you in lieder, gurne, and I know that many critics describe Goerne’s voice as “honeyed” but it sounds dry and desiccated to me. I suppose it must just be a personal perception on my part

[Bryn]

I said somewhere above that the slow tempo of Doppelgänger probably excludes Goerne's marvellous rendition of the cycle (with Christoph Eschenbach on the piano) from being a library recommendation. I don't find the tempo "impossible" but a perfectly valid proposition by one of our best and most experienced and thoughtful Lied interpreters. Reactions obviously vary but I find it very moving.

I am not intending to simply be pedantic when I say that Schwanengesang is not, and never was intended as a "cycle". It's a collection of late songs by Schubert, published posthumously as a set. So no wonder it does not come across as a 'cycle'.

[gurnemanz]

I am not intending to simply be pedantic when I say that Schwanengesang is not, and never was intended as a "cycle". It's a collection of late songs by Schubert, published posthumously as a set. So no wonder it does not come across as a 'cycle'.

I call it a cycle only because it is frequently performed and recorded as if it were one and because people habitually refer to it as such even if it isn't. I mentioned this point in my first post on this thread above. Its status as a cycle may have come about as a historical anomaly but given that it seems perversely to have persisted as such, there must be some way in which it does actually work like that.

Other permutations are possible: eg the Complete Hyperion sort of makes it into two cycles - Rellstab and Heine with separate singers. The one Seidl song Taubenpost gets tagged onto Heine. Prégardien and Steier solve the solitary Seidl anomaly by adding further complementary Seidl settings, making it into a more balanced three-poet collection, now with 21 songs, lasting 71 minutes.

Schubert, being dead, was unable to influence matters. Interesting to wonder what he might have thought about it.