HAMLET ECHOES ...

HAMLET ECHOES ...
An echo travels far afield, recedes into opacity, fades away and is swallowed up by nothingness, pure stillness.
That is how the sound of the orchestra dies out in Christian Jost’s opera Hamlet, premièred in 2009. The
instrumental parts retreat one by one, melt into silence. From such a brooding stillness, almost unreal, emerges
the first song in Brahms’s late Opus 91. With the Fourth Symphony already in his head, still embittered over the
fallout with Joseph Joachim, Brahms composed the two Songs for contralto with viola and pianoforte, op. 91
to be sung by his former friend’s divorced wife Amalie Joachim. The first song is based on a poem by Rückert,
the second on a text from Emanuel von Geibel’s translated anthology of Lope de Vega entitled Spanisches
Liederbuch.
Both of these lieder inscribe themselves in the 19th-century genre of chamber music song, in the lineage of
Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock. To be sure, subsequent composers of the likes of Siegmund von Hausegger
and Gustav Jenner also wrote for the same combination of voice and instruments invented by Brahms – with
viola and piano – but no one manages to merge the two instruments with the voice as elegantly as Brahms,
who was already past fifty.
Richard Strauss chose to use the same sort of vocal/instrumental “trio”, barely modified, with obbligato violin
instead of viola. Benjamin Britten’s teacher Frank Bridge once more chose the viola as second instrument
alongside the piano. Infused with Late Romantic style, Bridge’s Three Songs reflect many of the qualities he
would come to show as a master of instrumental music. Already written in 1906 and 1907, they are not to be
confused with the three somewhat more popular Tagore songs of 1922-24. The second of Bridge’s Three
Songs is based on an English translation of Heine’s poem Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’, the German original
of which was also set to music, among others, by Schumann in his cycle Dichterliebe. Bridge enjoyed high
esteem as a violist, and it is interesting to note that, in the same year when he wrote the first of these songs,
6