In 1824 George Gordon Byron died in Missolonghi, where he had gone to fight for the freedom of the Greeks, thus ending his life at the age of thirty-six, which had been as hyper-romantic as his poetry. The Italian musical institutions have let this bicentenary pass almost unnoticed, despite the fact that many musicians were inspired by Byron, even Italians such as Donizetti and Verdi, albeit in rather free librettist reworkings, which led Byron back into the tradition of melodramatic librettists. Equally free but closer to the Byronic spirit they are Harold in Italy in Berlioz e Manfred by Schumann. There are also many (not very many, at least among those worthy of note) faithful musical versions of his poems and one must look for them above all in German lieder, a treasure chest that reflects in the purest way the romantic ideal of symbiosis between poetry and music . Ian Bostridge offered an anthology of it in his precious concert for the Ravenna Festival, one of the few exceptions to that widespread Italian forgetfulness mentioned above, all the more serious because Italy had an important role in Byron’s short life. Ravenna was, after Venice, the Italian city to which Byron was most attached, also due to his love affair with a local noblewoman.
In the Loggetta Lombardesca, the magnificent Renaissance cloister of the Museum of Art of the City of Ravenna, with its unexpectedly excellent acoustics despite being a vast open-air space, the English tenor and his pianistic alter ego Julius Drake offered a musical evening to be framed. They began with Isaac Nathan, the only British composer on the programme. This rather singular character – the fact that he is known as the “father of Australian music” suggests that he did not follow the usual tracks – asked Byron to write him some poems inspired by the Bible. Bostridge played two of these Hebrew Melodies: the first one tells The Destruction of Sennacheribterrible example of the merciless divine anger against the enemies of Israel, while the second, She walks in beauty like the nightsings the grace, elegance and sensuality of the protagonist of the Song of Songs. With a lot of demeanor british or perhaps prompted by biblical argument – he claimed that his melodies came from the ancient service of the second Temple in Jerusalem! -Nathan doesn’t go too far into the dramatic tones of one nor does he languish in the other, but his sobriety is very effective.
We spent time in Germany with Carl Loewe, one of the first romantic lieder players, who set several poems by Byron to music in German translation. Loewe is certainly not a banal composer, but he pales in comparison with Schumann, of whom Bostridge sang three pieces from the collection Myrthen: first a Jewish song on a text by Byron, then two Lieder on poems by Thomas Moore set in Venice, the Italian city where Byron lived the longest. In this way Bostridge passed to the Romantic poets who admired Byron and were influenced by him. After Moore, here is Walter Scott, with two Lieder by Schubert and one by Beethoven, who included it in his collections of Irish songs, undervalued and neglected in an absolutely unjustifiable way, judging from this beautiful example. He continued with the German Whilelm Müller, strongly influenced by Byron, so much so that in 1825 he wrote the first complete biography: on his verses Schubert composed the Winter journeyan absolute masterpiece of liederism. For obvious reasons of duration, Bostridge could not perform this cycle in its entirety and chose the first five Lieder. After Schubert, the Lied composed on a text by Müller himself by the Swiss Friedrich Theodor Frölich, known more for his tragic end – he committed suicide in 1836 – than for his music, seemed even more innocuous. We returned to Byron with two Lieder by Felix Mendelssohn, confined to a Biedermeier world, and three Lieder by his sister Fanny (the only one of these German-speaking composers to have set Byron to music in the original English and not in translation) who in this area proves superior to her brother. A greater consonance with Byron could be found in the three Lieder by Hugo Wolf that concluded this memorable concert.
And at this point it is necessary to focus on Ian Bostridge who, due to the choice of the program and the wonderful interpretations, was the great protagonist of the evening together with Byron. His vocality, very far from Italian bel canto, is designed to give prominence to every phrase, every word and every syllable, with an almost infinite range of different – large and minimal – shades of color, intensity, accent: but this wouldn’t be of much use if his interpretation wasn’t guided by culture, intelligence and above all very acute sensitivity. His approach is not a banally romantic one, i.e. subjective and sentimental, but goes much further. He himself writes in the program that “music is, and has always been, supreme in the expression of the mysteries of life: love, death”. And again: “the best composers do not limit themselves to ‘music’, rather they use the general spirit of the text to create a completely new world”. Schubert’s Lieder in Bostridge’s interpretation truly opened up an unprecedented “new world”: the last lines of the fourth and fifth Lieder of the Winter journeythey were a disturbing and shocking example of this. This exaggerated attention to detail could lead to a risk of fragmentation, but here Julius Drake intervenes, who does not limit himself to accompanying, supporting and doubling the voice but is an indispensable complement to Bostridge’s interpretation, supporting the melodic arc and the continuity of the song.
The seats were limited and totally sold out – someone sat on the lawn – and the general admiration was expressed in warm applause for the two interpreters, who given the late hour gave only one encore, the Schubertian In the mouth on verses by Goethe.
