6 songs by Alma Mahler
7 songs by Franz Schrecker
Korngold
Unvergänglichkeit Op. 27
Lieder Op. 22
Gluck, das mir verlieb from Die Tote Stadt
Dorothea Herbert Soprano
Peter Nilsson Piano
7 Mountain records 7MNTN-029
Full price
The Review
Dorothea Herbert’s voice is not yet the finished article, I suspect – there is a dull spot in the middle register and a tremble that never quite settles – but it is thoroughly appropriate for most of this overheated music from the first few decades of the last century.
Wherever Alma Schindler went, there was music, obsession, sex and emotional turmoil. Much of Viennese art, visual and musical, would simply not have been the same without her. Klimpt, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Schrecker and Gropius all fell for her – not that it did their emotional lives any good, or hers – and even though her own composing life dried up (whether under misogynist edict, like Mahler’s, or her decision), she inspired her lovers.
This recital is cleverly split between half a dozen of her few extent songs and some of Schrecker’s, then switches to nine of Korngold’s – a generation younger, written before Nazism made him leave Vienna for Hollywood. There is a feeling in the first half of a Vienna festering in heavy velvet. Everything is heavy with introspection, none of it positive.
Given the politics of the time, the composers and poets (the liner essay by Klaus Bertisch is very good on the poets) can hardly be blamed for that. For the city it was an end of empire time with worse to come, especially for artists of Jewish heritage. Much of the angst here, though, stems not from the city’s obsessions but their own. Even if they were not in and out of each other’s bedrooms, the cafés were an intellectual substitute. Bertisch points out that Erich Korngold’s father, Julius, was a critic who delighted in scourging Schrecker and his friends in the newspapers.
If so, he must have found his son’s songs frustrating. Those included here are full of portent but frankly do drag a bit. The last of the Unvergänglichkeit set and Was Du mir bist, the first of the Op.22, are attractive enough to be unworthy of that complaint but the others take too much chewing. They anyway need a fuller and more open, sustained tone than Herbert can offer. Comparisons are rough on singers, especially those with musical intelligence and conviction like hers, but these songs really need a Jessye Norman or Renée Fleming – to name two very different voices – to carry them off and pretend they are in an adjacent league to Richard Strauss.
SM