By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
For more than a century, the ravishingly beautiful, deeply moving songs of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf have held great power over listeners. Rich with the emotional impact of  the romantic period, song settings of the poetry of the great German poets have continued to hold a place in the repertoire worldwide.
Which brings us to Max Reinhart’s gift.
Reinhart, who is head of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages, wanted to leave something with graduating seniors--something they could take with them for decades to come. So he designed a new course, one that teaches students the enduring poetry of Goethe, Eichendorff, Heine and Moerike, along with the beloved musical settings by Schubert, Schumann and Wolf.
The resulting collaboration with the School of Music has students soaring on wings of song.
“I had a student from the class come into my office one day, with a look somewhere between a smile and pained chagrin on his face,” says Reinhart. “He said, ‘I have never heard anything like this. This has changed my life.’ The whole idea of the class was for it to be a final gift, a going-away present. I’m glad to see they’re taking it that way.”
While participants in Reinhart’s senior seminar were intensively studying the German poets and their work, the voice students of Stephanie Tingler, chair of the voice area in the School of Music, were preparing to perform the songs for Reinhart’s students. Reinhart used the WebCT system extensively for the class, posting the songs online so students could be familiar with them before hearing them live. When Tingler’s students performed the songs for Reinhart’s students last month, the poetry moved from the printed page to the world of live sound.
“In the case of German lied [song], ‘in the beginning was the word,’ ” says Tingler. “In German song, the words are incredibly important--sometimes, it seems, almost to the exclusion of the melodic line.”
John Wustman, one of America’s top piano accompanists, visited UGA in March to present master classes in the School of Music. He spoke to Reinhart’s class and accompanied singers in the Schubert, Schumann and Wolf lieder.
Often called the “dean of American accompanists,” Wustman began as accompanist for the Robert Shaw Chorale and has since performed regularly in major international venues with leading vocal soloists of our time, such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Birgit Nilsson, Régine Crespin, Renata Scotto, Christa Ludwig, Roberta Peters and Nicolai Gedda. Luciano Pavarotti chose Wustman as his accompanist for his 1978 debut recital at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Wustman founded the vocal coaching and accompaniment program at the University of Illinois in 1973, and his students have gone on to careers as singers, conductors and repetiteurs at major opera houses and universities both here and abroad.
“It is impossible to be purely academic in the presence of this music and poetry,” Reinhart admits. “But it’s well worth the effort. Surely once you hear Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s ‘Der du von dem Himmel bist’, you can’t ever read Goethe’s poem without that ineffably beautiful melody lilting through your heart.”
Reinhart’s interest in how music and the word intersect is far from theoretical. An accomplished keyboard player, singer and songwriter, he spent a decade working on Nashville’s famed Music Row as a studio musician, demo singer (performing on 3,500 such recordings) and composer. In his academic career, however, Reinhart is a literary historian with numerous articles and books to his credit. (His latest book, in collaboration with Jared Klein of UGA’s classics department, is a translation of Brother Jesus: The Nazarene Through Jewish Eyes by Schalom Ben-Chorin, which the University of Georgia Press will publish this spring.)
Students in the senior seminar also studied the history and context of the work and the lives of the poets and composers. Schubert, Schumann and Wolf all died young, and Schumann and Wolf spent their final years in the dark world of madness. But their gifts have endured.
“Schubert never succeeded at writing opera, but his songs are really almost arias, because they come from a dramatic context,” says Tingler. “It’s amazing that these composers lived right at the edge and lost their sanity to the art they were giving birth to at the same time.”
Reinhart argues that the fragile nature of the composers’ physical and mental health made them especially responsive to the lied, as a brief, intense reaction to the words of Germany’s great romantic poets. The common fate of the composers gave Reinhart a unifying motif for the course. |
|
