Up late again, listening to Hugo Wolf

 The post the other day about "Anakreons Grab," the exquisite little song by Hugo Wolf, had unexpected consequences.

One, I have walked around for three days with "Anakreons Grab" on my brain!

Try that on for size. It is not fun! Going around the house singing Goethe poetry, your husband looking at you funny hearing German coming out of your mouth. Well, actually my husband is used to that, because I listen to a lot of German lieder. But the sweet chromatics of Wolf's work, that is something else.

Anyway, that was the first thing that happened. The second thing was, I heard from a person named Anonymous who is looking for a good recording of "Anakreons Grab" to introduce people to the strange and beautiful art of Hugo Wolf. If you read the comment on the previous post you will see that he is involved with a project to read Goethe's autobiography, in translation, in total, or something like that. You must excuse me. It is hard to absorb things when you have "Anakreons Grab" repeatedly playing in your head.

Apparently people of this person's acquaintance have trouble swallowing the Elisabeth Schwarzkopf interpretation of "Anakreons Grab." There is something off-putting about Schwarzkopf singing Wolf, he or she believes, something that is an acquired taste. Being that I acquired that taste instantly when I was about 12, I have trouble understanding it. But I believe it.

I have to say this though: I have been enjoying this conversation with Goethe fan Anonymous, and I went on YouTube looking for an "Anakreons Grab" that would not put off his or her listeners.

There are not that many performances on YouTube but the number grows daily. Anonymous set out some ground rules. Orchestral accompaniment was out, for one thing. Also you do not want anything that will alienate people. To me that disqualifies the video at the top of this post, by baritone Thomas Allen and pianist Malcolm Martineau. The performance is all right but who wants to sit there looking at that skull.

Hans Hotter is a singer I have loved since childhood ....



 ... but I am afraid his sound is rather vinyl and antiquated. Plus he might be forbiddingly German to people not into this stuff. The handsome Hans Hotter died only a few years ago, in his 90s. That was too bad because it was fun to see people interviewing him. They always called him "Herr Hotter."

I am enjoying that recording. What a deep, graceful voice. But onward.

Birgit Nilsson's recording on YouTube has the visuals going for it. It is kind of pleasantly ghostly with those twinkling stars.



But the sound is not great. And it is a live performance with too much coughing. Obviously this recording was made in Buffalo. There is that Buffalo cough.

I love that haunting little piano introduction, you know? That is genius, just those few notes. They draw you in, and it goes with the poem, that begins with a question. You have stumbled on this beautiful grave with the flowers blooming and the turtledoves singing and you wonder who is buried here.

We are still seeking the "Anakreons Grab" that will do for Anonymous. Let me see, let me see.

La la la la la la la.

Ah!

What about this one?



 I have never heard of this singer, Lidia Vinyes Curtis, but I like how she sings "Anakreons Grab." She is natural with it and she seems to like the song.

Look at her when she recognizes whose grave it is and sings "Es ist Anakreons Ruh." You see it in her eyes! She is living the song. I like that. I looked her up. Her website says she is from Barcelona.

Perhaps Anonymous did not check out her video because of that microphone in front of her. I am not sure what that is doing there.

But anyway, Anonymous, might that work?

Out of the mouths of frumps

Last night I caught the clip of Susan Boyle, above, winning millions of people over by singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Mis" on the show "Britain's Got Talent."

Howard and I laughed happily at it. You had to. This dowdy woman, showing off such a voice. The crowd loved it.

It was fun to see the pop music crowd, accustomed to everyone looking plastic and perfect, suddenly discovering what the classical music crowd has long known: Sometimes the greatest voices come out of the biggest frumps.

A few years ago I read "The Toughest Show on Earth," Joseph Volpe's entertaining account of running the Metropolitan Opera. I believe that was the book where I picked up that Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, one of the greatest and most beautiful sopranos of the 20th century, was really a frump.

Here is Schwarzkopf done up. Incredible.


And in "Der Rosenkavalier," no one made a more beautiful Marschallin.


But as the great musicologist Pee Wee Herman said, everybody's got a big but. And in Schwarzkopf's case that big but was that offstage, she was a frump. Apparently after every concert she would immediately change into frumpy clothes which, German frumpy clothes are even frumpier than normal people's frumpy clothes. Her frump get-up included a dirndl skirt. That is what I read!

Schwarzkopf even showed up once at a post-concert party in her frump clothes. She had gone home and changed. Ha, ha! The hostess looked at her and said: "Elisabeth. How ... how charming." I remember reading that!

I tend to believe it because I do have a picture of Schwarzkopf being a frump. It is a shot of her rehearsing and somehow it ended up on the back of a record album. She probably did not object. Well, she obviously didn't, or else it would not have been there.

I remember looking at it as a teenager going, "What in the world?"

Unfortunately I don't have time now to go running around looking for this picture and scanning it in. Perhaps I can do that over the weekend. For now you will just have to take my word for it: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was a not-so-secret frump!

It is a little early in the day to be hitting the Dowland but here is a cute YouTube clip of Schwarzkopf singing Dowland and then a Mozart song. There are neat pictures of her with it including a couple of semi-frump shots. One shows Schwarzkopf clowning with an ass. No jokes about her husband, the opportunistic and much-disliked Walter Legge! I mean an actual donkey.

There is another good shot of her pouring a big glass of red wine for a sexy-looking young man who I think could be Herbert von Karajan.

Imagine if Elisabeth Schwarzkopf had put on her frump face and gone on "Britain's Got Talent."

That would have been something to see!