Schumann's Dichterliebe as antidepressant, and antidote to double speak
Christian Jost's re-invention of the classic song cycle is perfect in its imperfection
vol. 2 issue 6
Greetings,
The appeal of unanswered questions inherent to Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe is what German composer Christian Jost claims drew him to re-work the romantic song cycle.
“Schumann repeatedly opens up small, special doors in the piece. Sometimes he doesn’t even enter the rooms behind them…but always leaves behind a question mark,” Jost says in a video interview about his version of the work, which made its US debut on Friday, February 14, 2020, in a performance at Live! at 10th and G Streets in Washington, by the New Orchestra of Washington. Co-commissioned by Konzerthaus Berlin and the Copenhagen Opera Festival, the work made its world debut last October.
Intrigued by this novel claim, I wondered if by entering those chambers, Jost might succeed in answering those questions, so I attended the concert. The work is problematic, but that might be what helps make it extraordinary.
Jost replaces Schumann’s solo piano accompaniment with a nine member chamber ensemble (string quartet, celesta/piano, marimba/vibraphone, harp, flute, and clarinet). He leaves the key the same and uses the same text from Heinrich Heine’s 16 poems of love, longing, and loss. Rather than discrete, episodic verse, Jost sets the songs and their original melodic lines in a continual stream of music. This proves to be both the work’s genius and its flaw.
Genius because with this arrangement, Jost changes the song cycle’s meaning without seeming to change its meaning at all. It’s important to know that Jost’s original intention was to reconstruct the piece, ordinarily a staple of the light tenor repertoire, for his wife, the mezzo-soprano, Stella Doufexis. Before his gift for her was completed, however, Doufexis died of cancer at age 47. Rather than for her, the work then became about her.
For that reason, the verses are not the anguished sounds of the unrequited lover, but the lover who has truly lost love. Same words, utterly different meaning because of an entirely different emotional reality denoted by a whole new tonal perspective.
‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet, Mir träumte, du lägest im Grab” (I wept in my dreams, I dreamed you were in your grave) in Jost’s composition is not, as it is in Schumann’s, the fear of loss, but the actual experience of loss. Jost’s anguished vocal line, along with the trembling clarinet that carries the center and then fades into the storm of shiny sounds from the rest of the ensemble is a catharsis, not a melodramatic show of devotion.
No matter what the words mean, implicit in both versions is that the music representing the emotion can be trusted. Music, in its very direct way, will tell us the truth because it is what carries the real experience, not the words used to describe it.
This is a remarkable achievement in an era rife with doublespeak, where words that once warned, comforted, or otherwise contained emotional relevance are now used to manipulate and harm us. I suspect I will no longer be able to listen to the original without hearing it as only one half of a whole.
The work’s flaw is that the instrumentation is so texturally dense, the singer drowns in its waves and currents. There was not much NOW artistic director and conductor Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez could do to help elevate tenor Vale Rideout above the torrent of instrumental sound required by the score, which despite being faithful to Schumann’s meter and phrasing, is relentlessly dissonant, loud, multi-layered, and constant in its juxtaposition of light and dark, tenderness and violence.
And yet, while I imagine this imbalance is frustrating for any singer of this work, and also for the listener, I detect a purpose for it if we think of the un-integrated vocal and instrumental lines as akin to two parallel streams. One stream, in this case the singer’s, is that of life. The other raging stream is the sound of whatever is beyond life, certainly what is beyond what is known. It is hard to fully integrate what we do not know for sure.
In his grief, I imagine the composer sought to hear the other side where his beloved might still be singing to him, but there was too much other sound drowning her out, turning all sounds into a cacophony. This would make the tempestuous textures of Jost’s score authentic to his psychological experiences, even if it makes the works technically flawed. But it would also mean that as far as answering the questions is concerned, Jost succeeds. Indeed, he has said publicly that this work was his way of tunneling through his grief.
In the performance, Jost’s composition was preceded on the program by the original, sung by the riveting American mezzo-soprano, Devony Smith, accompanied by Hernandez-Valdez. His sensitive playing felt personal. Smith’s interpretation felt authentic. Whether it was Hernandez-Valdez or Smith who succeeded best at shaping the songs with the deliberateness of thoughtful talk was hard to discern. Regardless, the audience appreciated the effect, displaying the emotional intelligence to let the last note recede into the silence before erupting with applause.
It was a complicated outing for Rideout who, understandably, stayed on book. After the performance, director Jay D. Brock told me Rideout was concerned that after years of singing the original, he might sing the “wrong” notes from rote memory rather than sing the “right” notes from recent learning. Rideout can be praised for his effort, which was committed but insufficient, and forgiven for attempting a novelty that neither fits his voice (more than once he had to cover notes beyond his range), nor favors singers to begin with.
The ethereal sounding celesta (played by NOW executive director, Grace Cho) denoted the phenomenon of how we might “see stars” when we are in excruciating pain, as Jost has publicly averred he was with grief when composing this piece. The clarinet (Jeremy Eig) wanders throughout the score, haunting the songs’ melodies, and often entwining with the cello (Valeriya Sholokhova). As the middle-voiced and saddest sounding members of the winds and strings, together their swelling melancholia have the effect of the composer in conversation with the ghost of his late mezzo-soprano wife, even as the rest of the instruments clang and whisper around them.
This interpretation was facilitated by yet another novelty: it was staged. Truly, I can’t recall ever seeing German lieder performed this way before. To and from his seat at a library table stationed next to the musicians, a glass of brown liquor or the like and his score at hand, a casually dressed Rideout roamed the stage, anguished by the words he sang. Smith, dressed in tight jeans and a black leather jacket while singing the original in earnest, returned for the Jost dressed in a simple red shift. By turns she moved slowly, without expression, haunting Rideout with her presence, close enough for Rideout to touch, but try as he might, he could not. It was gut wrenching, effective.
Jost’s success is in finishing the build-out of Schumann’s original blueprint of the heart’s musical chambers; the rooms were always there, but they could never be fully inhabited until the lover had lost. It would be the loss that illuminated the dark, the loss that answered the questions of “What if you loved me?”
I wonder if one day, Jost might return to the work and make it less personal for him, peel away some of the textures, and trust the music to guide him to what is correct for the work to endure.
Until this piece, I had never heard of Jost before. Hernandez-Valdez told me post-performance that he’d only been introduced to Jost’s music himself through a friend in Berlin who attended the work’s world premiere in Berlin and, upon hearing it, texted him to insist he bring it to the States. I commend NOW for bringing it to our attention in this country.
Jost’s Dichterliebe can be re-worked, perhaps, but it should not be ignored. The work demonstrates the powerful antidepressant qualities of music, while also demonstrating how to go beyond cynical doublespeak and find truth. By those standards, I consider this work a success.
To read more about this work:
My preview for DC Metro Theater Arts.
Grief and sadness v. clinical depression: a docu-mental perspective.
The New Orchestra of Washington
Christian Jost
To hear the work, visit your favorite streaming service.