Jointly commissioned by the Konzerthaus Berlin and the Copenhagen Opera
Festival, Christian Jost’s reinterpretation of Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love) was first performed in Berlin in
October 2017 by the artists who appear on this Deutsche Grammophon world
premiere recording: Danish tenor Peter Lodahl and the Konzerthaus Berlin’s
own Horenstein Ensemble.
In Jost’s Dichterliebe, the Romantic art song is fused with
elements of the composer’s own contemporary style. The solo piano
accompaniment is transformed into writing for a nine-piece chamber ensemble
and Schumann’s cycle is doubled in length, thanks to the addition of
newly-composed instrumental passages that link together the sixteen
originally self-contained songs. As Jost explains, these transitions form
“a harmonic sea, in which the songs are individual islands woven
organically into a larger, newly created composition”.
One of those islands, “Hör ich das Liedchen klingen” (“When I hear the
sound of the song”), disrupts the cycle’s initial flow of hope and
optimism, emerging as the recomposition’s central meditation on the nature
of existence. The song is followed here by the postlude from Schumann’s
original score, repositioned and reworked to evoke the “dark longing” of
Heine’s text.
“It is very clear that the loved one is lost, crazy, under a spell, and in
a totally different sphere,” observes Christian Jost. “And from that point
onwards in my piece, the instrumentation is also much more fragmented. The
sounds are more fragile, and are played with more fragility.” In an act of
great courage he also confronts the fragility of life and the sting of
death in “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (“I wept in my dreams”).
Jost originally came up with the idea of reworking Dichterliebe
for his wife to perform. As it turned out, the writing process, charged
with the pain of her death in December 2015, raised essential questions
about the nature of creativity and the role played by suffering in art.
“There were moments when due to my personal crisis, or the tragic events in
my life and the loss of my beloved wife, composing led me to what was
preserved in myself,” he observes. “With ‘Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet’ I
wanted to enter, even drill a way into a particular state in myself.” The
recycling of part of Schumann’s accompaniment as a rhythmic riff enabled
Jost to penetrate the song’s heart. “The violence of this piece is the
pain,” he explains. “Even if it is a very personal concern, in the end, the
personal life and biography of the composer shouldn’t necessarily be
decisive factors when it comes to the quality of a piece. But then again,
none of us lives in a vacuum, uninfluenced by things that, existentially,
are deeply moving, destructive and totally incomprehensible.”
Jost’s late wife Stella Doufexis recorded Schumann’s
Dichterliebe and the Liederkreis op.39, just over a year before her death, and
her moving performances appear on this album alongside his recomposition.
Both works are more commonly associated with the male voice, and it is
fascinating to hear the different expressive nuances brought to the music
and to Eichendorff’s poetry by Doufexis. She and Jost worked intensively on
both cycles before the recording, and had many a discussion about how to
interpret them. “She approached these Lieder as if they were French
chansons,” recalls the composer. “Because of that, and because her readings
avoid pathos, the songs acquire incredible depth.”
