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Natalie Dessay and Philippe Cassard

Natalie Dessay posing on a black velvet chair

In Women’s Words, beloved French duo soprano Natalie Dessay and pianist Philippe Cassard give women the spotlight, whether as composers or as heroines of their own stories.

Tonight Natalie Dessay and Philippe Cassard celebrate the female perspective in art song and opera. The first half is devoted to three composers who were overshadowed by their eminent menfolk for far too long.

Despite her father’s (and, regrettably, her brother Felix’s) attempts to discourage her, as a woman, from pursuing music as a profession, Fanny Mendelssohn wrote more than 400 works. Her husband, the artist Wilhelm Hensel, was supportive, however, and Fanny continued composing, organising concerts and conducting her own choir until the day she died of a stroke, aged 42.

As precociously gifted children, she and Felix had known Johann Wolfgang von Goethe well; when she was about 14, her songs impressed him so much that he wrote a poem for her to set. She seems not to have obliged; but in Dämmrung senkte sich von oben (‘Dusk has fallen from above’) she treats his words with sensitivity, passion and harmonic daring.

After her death, the devastated Felix had several volumes of her songs published. For Op 10, he chose some of her most sophisticated creations, including Vorwurf (‘Reproach’), which offers almost Bachian resonances. ‘Suleika’, with its unpredictable phrase-lengths and subtle twists of harmony, was included in a Christmas album that Fanny created in 1836. The poem is by Marianne von Willemer – long misattributed to Goethe, who based the character Mignon in his West- Eastern Divan on her.

A child prodigy pianist, Clara Wieck was celebrated throughout Europe by her mid-teens. In 1840 she married Robert Schumann; following his tragic death in a mental hospital in 1856, she raised their seven surviving children alone. In her later years she was a revered piano professor and remained a close friend of Johannes Brahms.

Soon after their marriage, the Schumanns jointly created in 1841 a collection of their settings of Friedrich Rückert’s poems, including Clara’s Liebst du um Schönheit (‘If you love for beauty’), Warum willst du and’re fragen (‘Why enquire of others’) and Er ist gekommen in Sturm und Regen (‘He came in storm and rain’), which reveal her melodic gifts in full bloom. Sie liebten sich beide (‘They loved one another’) sets Heinrich Heine’s bittersweet story of undeclared love. But her Romance in A minor, Op 21, for solo piano, from a group of three composed in 1853, occupies a world of anxiety and anguish that belies the modest title.

Alma Mahler-Werfel, too, was torn between her own creative gifts and a man – her first husband, Gustav Mahler – who preferred her to support his. Just 17 of her songs survive, capturing the fervid, hot-house atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna and also hinting at influences from Wagner and Schumann.

Tonight’s songs appear in a 1910 collection edited, at last, by Gustav, who had realised he was losing her affections.

Bei dir ist es traut (‘I feel warm and close to you’) matches Rainer Maria Rilke’s sentiments with suitably intimate music. In Laue Sommernacht (‘Mild summer night’), hope illuminates the darkness, though the final cadence is left unresolved. In meines Vaters Garten (‘In my father’s garden’), a poem by Otto Erich Hartleben, depicts three sisters dreaming that their beloveds must leave for war; Alma’s atmosphere progresses from innocence to dread.

We turn now to music by French male composers in which female characters take power into their own hands – whether over their lives or that of others.

Ernest Chausson, a friend of Gabriel Fauré and Henri Duparc, inherited serious money and was fearful of being thought a compositional dilettante. He was just beginning to gain confidence and repute when he was killed in a bicycling accident in 1899, aged 44. In Chanson perpétuelle (1898), evoking an abandoned, Ophelia-like woman contemplating suicide by water, the Symbolist poetry of Charles Cros merges ideally with Chausson’s melancholy music.

There’s no romanticisation about the gambling-addict protagonist of Francis Poulenc’s La dame de Monte Carlo. The composer set this Jean Cocteau monologue for his duo partner, the soprano Denise Duval, to sing in 1961. It reminded him, he wrote, of a time in the mid-1920s when he lived in Monte Carlo, observing ‘those old wrecks of women, light-fingered ladies of the gaming tables …’

For most of Claude Debussy’s enigmatic opera, based on Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas et Mélisande, the eponymous pair cannot declare their love: she is married to his elder brother. In ‘Mes longs cheveux’, Mélisande leans from a castle window, letting down her hair to envelop Pelléas, standing below, in what is by far the opera’s most sensual scene.

Chimène, heroine of Jules Massenet’s opera Le Cid (1885), has a good reason to weep in ‘Pleurez, mes yeux’: her beloved, Rodrigue, has killed her father in a duel. Later, however, Rodrigue will ask her to decide his fate; she forgives and marries him.

Finally the ‘Jewel Song’ brings us full circle to Goethe, on whose Faust Charles Gounod’s 1859 opera is based, if loosely. Faust has sold his soul to Mephistopheles in return for restored youth. Courting Marguerite, he sends her a casket of jewellery. Here she gazes, astonished, at her newfound glamour, culminating in a surge of joy.

© Jessica Duchen

Details

Event date 6 Dec 2023
Start time 7.30pm
Running time
120 minutes
There will be an interval
All timings are approximate and subject to change

Programme and performers

Fanny Mendelssohn Dämmrung senkte sich von oben
Vorwurf
Suleika
Clara Schumann Liebst du um Schönheit
Sie liebten sich beide
Warum willst du and’re fragen
Er ist gekommen
Romance for piano in A minor, Op 21
Alma Mahler Bei dir ist es traut
Laue Sommernacht
In meines Vaters Garten

Ernest Chausson Chanson perpétuelle
Francis Poulenc La dame de Monte-Carlo
Claude Debussy ‘Mes longs cheveux’ from Pelléas et Mélisande
Jules Massenet Mélodie, Op 10 No 5
‘Pleurez mes yeux’ from Le Cid
Charles Gounod ‘Ah, je ris de me voir si belle’ from Faust

Natalie Dessay soprano
Philippe Cassard piano

Translations

Dämmrung senkte sich von oben
Dämmrung senkte sich von oben,
Schon ist alle Nähe fern,
Doch zuerst emporgehoben
Holden Lichts der Abendstern.
Alles schwankt ins Ungewisse,
Nebel schleichen in die Höh’,
Schwarzvertiefte Finsternisse
Widerspiegelnd ruht der See.

Nun am östlichen Bereiche
Ahn’ ich Mondenglanz und Glut,
Schlanker Weiden Haargezweige
Scherzen auf der nächsten Flut.
Durch bewegter Schatten Spiele
Zittert Lunas Zauberschein,
Und durchs Auge schleicht die Kühle
Sänftigend ins Herz hinein.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)

Vorwurf
Du klagst, dass bange Wehmut dich
beschleicht,
Weil sich der Wald entlaubt,
Und über deinem Haupt
Dahin der Wanderzug der Vögel streicht.
O klage nicht, bist selber wandelhaft,
Denkst du der Liebesglut?
Wie nun so traurig ruht in deiner Brust
Die müde Leidenschaft!

Nikolaus Lenau (1802–50)

Suleika
Ach, um deine feuchten Schwingen,
West, wie sehr ich dich beneide:
Denn du kannst ihm Kunde bringen
Was ich in der Trennung leide!

Die Bewegung deiner Flügel
Weckt im Busen stilles Sehnen;
Blumen, Augen, Wald und Hügel
Stehn bei deinem Hauch in Tränen.

Doch dein mildes sanftes Wehen
Kühlt die wunden Augenlider;
Ach, für Leid müsst’ ich vergehen,
Hofft’ ich nicht zu sehn ihn wieder.

Eile denn zu meinem Lieben,
Spreche sanft zu seinem Herzen;
Doch vermeid’ ihn zu betrüben
Und verbirg ihm meine Schmerzen.

Sag ihm, aber sag’s bescheiden:
Seine Liebe sei mein Leben,
Freudiges Gefühl von beiden
Wird mir seine Nähe geben.

Marianne von Willemer (1784–1860)

Dusk has descended from on high
Dusk has descended from on high,
All closeness has become distance now,
But risen first has
The Evening Star in beautiful radiance.
Everything reels into uncertainty,
Mists creep upwards;
Reflecting deep black darkness
The lake is at its rest.

Only in the eastern region
Do I sense the moon’s radiance and glow.
Hair-like branches of slender willows
Jest on the nearby water.
Amidst the play of moving shadows
Trembles Luna’s magic light,
And through the eye creeps coolness
Soothingly into the heart.

.

Reproach
You lament that fretful melancholy creeps
upon you,
As the woods lose their leaves,
And as above your head
Passes the train of migrating birds.
Do not lament! you too are fickle;
Do you recall love’s ardour?
How sadly now dwells
In your bosom passion exhausted!

.

Suleika
Ah, your moist wings,
I envy you, O west wind;
For you can bear him the message
Of how I suffer, parted from him!

The movement of your wings
Awakens in my bosom a quiet longing;
Flowers, eyes, woods and hills
Are damp with tears at your breath.

But your mild, gentle gusts
Cool the sore eyelids;
Ah, I should surely perish from grief,
Did I not hope to see him again.

Hurry then to my love,
Speak gently to his heart;
But do not sadden him
And hide my pain from him.

Tell him, but tell him modestly,
That his love is my life,
Joyful feeling of both
His closeness will give me.

Translations by Bettina Reinke-Welsh © Hyperion Records

Mélisande
Mes longs cheveux descendent
jusqu’au seuil de la tour;
Mes cheveux vous attendent
tout le long de la tour,
Et tout le long du jour,
Et tout le long du jour.
Saint Daniel et Saint Michel,
Saint Michel et Saint Raphaël,
Je suis née un dimanche,
Un dimanche à midi …

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949)

Mélisande
My long hair falls
to the foot of the tower;
my hair awaits you
the length of the tower
and all through the day,
and all day long.
Saint Daniel and Saint Michael,
Saint Michael and Saint Raphael,
I was born on a Sunday,
A Sunday at noon …

Translation © Erato/Warner Classics

Artist biographies

Since the beginning of her career, Natalie Dessay has appeared on leading international stages, performing roles by Mozart (Blondchen, Queen of the Night and Pamina) and Richard Strauss (Fiakermilli, Zerbinetta and Sophie). During her career she has been a regular visitor to the Vienna State Opera, Metropolitan Opera, New York, La Scala, Milan, Barcelona’s Liceu, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Paris National Opera.

She is also fêted for her interpretation of French operatic repertoire,including such roles as Ophélie, Minka, Lakmé, Olympia, Juliette and Manon. She has also enjoyed great success in the bel canto repertoire, in La sonnambula and particularly in the titlerole of Lucia di Lammermoor, which she has sung at the Chicago Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Paris National Opera, and has recorded under Valery Gergiev’s baton.

Other highlights include Marie (La fille du régiment), directed by Laurent Pelly, at Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, Metropolitan Opera and Paris National Opera; Violetta (La traviata) in Tokyo, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Vienna State Opera and Metropolitan Opera; the title-role in Manon at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse; and Handel roles with conductor Emmanuelle Haïm.

She also collaborates with Michel Legrand, with whom she has toured in Europe and South America and recorded two CDs. Philippe Cassard is her pianist for recitals: together they have given around 60 concerts on the most prestigious stages, including Carnegie Hall in New York, Jordan Hall in Boston, here at the Barbican, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Vienna Musikverein, Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow and Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris; next year they give a recital at the Wiener Staatsoper. They have released three albums together.

Natalie Dessay has been appointed a Kammersängerin by the Wiener Staatsoper.

She made an acclaimed theatrical debut in Howard Baker’s monologue Und at the Théâtre Olympia in Tours, subsequently performing it in many French cities as well as Théâtre des Abbesses and Dejazet in Paris. She has also performed Stefan Zweig’s La Légende d’une vie at the Théâtre Montparnasse.

Audience in the hall

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