(Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke)
23rd October 2024
Austrian conductor Friedrich Haider is a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Music. At the age of 29, he became one of the youngest chief conductors in the history of the Opera National in Strasbourg before gradually advancing to the forefront of opera houses such as Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Venice. In 2006, he celebrated a successful debut at the Metropolitan Opera New York with Verdi’s Rigoletto. Orchestras Friedrich has conducted include the London Symphony, Czech Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, Camerata Salzburg, Tokyo Philharmonic and Milan Chamber Orchestra, among others.
In 2018 he was appointed Chief Conductor of Musicae Antiquae Collegium Varsoviense, the renowned Polish ensemble playing on period instruments. With this orchestra he has performed Mozart’s Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and La Clemenza di Tito as well as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. As both a pianist and conductor Friedrich Haider has participated in several audio and video recordings released by major labels such as Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, Sony Classical, DECCA, and Orfeo International.
When reading through a score by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari for the first time in an antique bookshop in London in 2001, Haider was immediately overwhelmed by the charming, ardent, rollicking and melancholic language of his music. Since that moment he has not stopped studying, performing and recording the works of this composer.
The Spanish orchestra Oviedo Filarmonia developed into a captivating orchestra under Haider’s artistic direction between 2004 and 2011 – highlighted by their concerts on the international stage: Madrid, Tokyo (Bunka Kaikan Hall), Paris (Theatre des Champs-Élysées). They also enjoyed outstanding editorial achievements for the work of Wolf-Ferrari: the recording of the opera Il segreto di Susanna, the world premiere recording of all his orchestral works as well as the oratorio Talitha Kumi. The recording of Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto (with the soloist Benjamin Schmid) was awarded the prestigious Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics’ Award) in 2013.
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Thanks so much for agreeing to speak with me about your new arrangements of Wolf-Ferrari’s songs! You mentioned to me that he wrote 52 songs altogether.
Yes, 52 songs were published during his lifetime. 8 songs in 1902 (when Wolf-Ferrari was 26) called Rispetti, Opus 11 & 12 and 44 songs in 1935 (when he was 69) called the Canzoniere (meaning Songbook), Opus 17. The majority of them were written for soprano. The original manuscripts of the Rispetti are held at Beinecke/Yale, the Canzoniere can be found at Casa Ricordi in Milan and Staatsbibliothek Munich.
You have chosen 29 of these songs and orchestrated the piano parts. What was your motivation to do so, and how long is this particular song cycle?
These songs are not only among the best from his pen, but also an enrichment of the Lied-literature. Even if Wolf-Ferrari’s music is performed more often again, it is still far from experiencing a renaissance. At the same time the classical solo recital, the ‘Liederabend’ leads an orphan existence. Jewels such as those songs therefore lie in the darkness of archives and libraries unheard! I wanted to get them out of there. I was sure that orchestrating these songs would increase the chance of getting them back on stage. Another reason was that when I was playing these songs on the piano, just for myself, I very often heard single instruments playing or chords in peculiar instrumental mixtures – a feeling that doesn’t always materialise when I accompany songs. Finally I selected and orchestrated 29 of them, and the cycle lasts around 40 minutes.
You named the cycle after a song title…
Love always begins with a glance. ‘Quando ti vidi’ – ‘When I laid eyes on you’ – is a song about the magical and mysterious moment of love at first sight. Nothing is as it was before. I chose it as the title because it holds an enchanting hand over the entire work.
Are the poems all by the same author?
It’s folk poetry. As with folk music we don’t know who the authors are. If you pick out one single poem, it may have been just one person who created it, but it could also have been two or more; and then it was passed on by word of mouth to a neighbour, someone else in the village, to the younger generation. Sometimes people also invented melodies for these lyrics and started to sing them. In the Nineteenth Century scientists, artists or adventurers began to write down these poems. When finding them in different collections today, we can often notice slight variations because people have varied them. It’s a very beautiful process. In Wolf-Ferrari’s library there must have been at least two of these collections of Tuscan poetry. He really loved it, and it exclusively dominates the songs that he wrote.
You told me in our previous interview on I gioielli della Madonna[1] that you discovered Wolf-Ferrari in a shop in London. What year was that?
It was in 2001, in an antique bookshop. I just fell into this shop and there was one little box containing music.
So it wasn’t even a specialist music shop or library?
No, not at all! I just looked at this piece of music and saw that it was a piano score of Il segreto di Susanna. I’d never heard the title, I wasn’t sure if I had heard of the composer – maybe I’d read his name somewhere but I didn’t know his music. So I opened it and looked at the overture. I thought, ‘wow, what an energy! This music is full of joie de vivre!’ Then I started to read through the opera, saw the little duet between Susanna and Gil right at the beginning, and was overwhelmed: the fusion of sound and word were done in a way which was unknown to me up to this moment. It was music with extraordinary refinement, highly individual and incomparable to any other composer. I sat down on these little steps in the shop and was just turning the pages, reading and reading. The guy working at the shop said that he had to close up, so I quickly paid for the score and took it with me!
After that I immediately started to learn more about the composer and search for more of his work, as I was aware that he was an outstanding master. It wasn’t long before I had bought everything I could order: scores, piano reductions, libretti, programme booklets, musicology essays… I wrote to many archives and libraries and asked them if they could provide me with whatever materials they had: photos, documents, newspaper articles and so on. I also tried Harvard and other universities in the USA.
Then, of course, it finally came out that the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) had the biggest collection of Wolf-Ferrari material – I think they bought it in two auctions around a decade before I discovered it. So I went to Munich to dig into this treasure right away. I saw that they had many manuscripts and sketches that had not been identified. As I knew a lot of Wolf-Ferrari’s music by this point I said I would help whenever I could – I think they were quite happy about that. I could identify many sketches and first drafts of some pieces where he had not written a title, although I did not recognise everything because, of course, I don’t know all his operas down to the last bar. There were also many drafts that were never developed into a work or published, and just remained a thought or a sketch. You can see all the Wolf-Ferrari material on the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website.[2] It’s possible to enlarge and even download it. It’s incredible.
Fantastic. Could you tell me more about how you developed the story within this song cycle? I know that you divided the 29 songs into three sections, titled ‘L’addio’, ‘La lontananza’ and ‘Il ritorno’ – ‘The farewell’, ’The absence’ and ’The return’.
…which are subtitles by Wolf-Ferrari himself in one of the Canzoniere volumes. Six songs only, telling a ‘micro-plot’. I realised that if I were to orchestrate and publish these songs then I should, of course, propose an order. When I started to do this, I thought it could be an idea to use these three subtitles as the focus and then enlarge the story. It worked perfectly.
It was not too difficult to make the selection. The Rispetti Op.11 & 12 are simply heartbreaking. He wrote them for his wife, the singer Clara Kilian. He exclusively chose such verses in which the girl sings devotedly and adoringly to the beloved. There was no doubt I would take them all into the cycle. The Canzoniere contains a much wider spectrum – songs with whimsical or droll moments, songs like flashes of exuberance, some with popular tunes or a defiant character, but also some very dark ones. All of them are quite short. There were some songs that I thought wouldn’t fit into the story but finally, yes they did. For example, in one of the songs it’s not the girl who is singing but an old woman. She’s telling the young people to sing their love songs now, not when it’s too late. So I decided to install this as the opening, as a sort of prologue. It has a funny touch: an old woman raising her forefinger in warning, so to speak!
To build upon Wolf-Ferrari’s existing story is a very clever idea. With the Philharmonie in Essen you did a first ‘test run’ of your score and also recorded some of the songs. I’ve listened to the recording several times now, and I really love your instrumentation.
Thank you. It’s light but hopefully rich in colour too. However above all I have endeavoured to be poetically characteristic.
And you use an accordion!
Yes, that’s right.
I loved that. What gave you the idea to use one?
Well, as mentioned before – very often when I played the music at the piano I started to hear different instruments in my mind. There were passages that felt like they should be played by a horn, some which felt like a guitar (which I don’t use but I imitated with rough violin-pizzicati over 2 or 3 strings in song No. 4 ‘Dio ti facesse star tanto digiuno’). There were lines which seemed to ask for the connection of flügelhorn and celli, and so on.
But some decisions were the result of personal reflection. For example, at one moment the girl is seeking her beloved. She is walking along the beach and there is a little bird singing. She believes to hear from his words that she has been betrayed. The bird’s singing is imitated by a short motif that we hear three times. For days I wasn’t sure which instrument should play it, but I finally put it into the piccolo, playing in a very low register. I felt, that the pale, wan colour could bring the expression closer to death.
From the very beginning I had the idea to use the accordion – it serves as a sort of amalgam that connects the groups together. Having a number of different registers, it fits in with the brass or woodwind instruments to the same extent as the strings, it’s lovely. Above all, the accordion has a very broad range of expression. As for the sound symbolism in the cycle is concerned it represents the Tuscan countryside and it’s flavour. For me it wasn’t too important for the jolly or folkloristic passages rather than for parts of heavier sentiment or outstanding moments. In song No. 24 (‘Vado di note, come fa la luna’) for example, the girl meets Death, who tells her he has buried the young boy. In this last ‘death chord’ I used the accordion in a very low register – it’s very special at this point to hear this instrument in that chord.
In No. 13 ‘Vai in buon’ora, o viso delicato!’ it sounded to me as if the strings were mimicking the accordion in the opening bars. Then the accordion came in later.
Yes, the accordion only comes in at the very end of this song when she says ‘addio’ – the farewell. The accordion accompanying the goodbye shows that the youngster is leaving their common soil, the Tuscan landscape.
Interestingly, Wolf-Ferrari used the accordion (as far as I know) just once, in his opera I gioielli della Madonna. He uses it for the people from the Camorra [Sicilian Mafia], who appear with folk instruments like the guitar and accordion. They seem to be the nice guys but they’re not. You would think that the music portraying the Camorra would start sounding very dark or dangerous, but on the contrary. They are depicted as really funny guys, which was a genius idea from Wolf-Ferrari.
How many musicians did you use altogether for this project? It sounds like a rather small orchestra.
Yes – you could see it as a small orchestra or a big chamber orchestra. There are 28 musicians in all. I used 6 first and 4 second violins, but then went a little beyond the standard: 4 violas, 4 cellos and 2 double basses. It could have been more logical to go with less of the deeper strings, but I was slightly more heavy in the lower register because of the rich, melancholic sound that I wanted in many of the songs. There are 4 woodwind instruments: 1 flute (switching to piccolo), 1 oboe (switching to cor anglais), 1 clarinet and 1 bassoon.
Nice. So there’s no percussion?
No.
And brass?
Well, one trumpet, one French horn and one trombone. As for the trumpet, I had always imagined a rather soft instrument. I did quite a lot of research, and finally it was Renè Eljabi who recommended to use a Flügelhorn, which I was was not very familiar with. Renè was playing oboe and cor anglais at the recording and suggested the Flügelhorn because it’s sound is very round and soft. It can tell stories and has many nuances and shades of colour. When the Flügelhorn is playing the epilogue-line of ‘È tanto c’è pericol’, expressing a love who’s fading is unthinkable, I feel a tear to be in the sound, as if the imminent farewell is already palpable.
Some instruments are assigned a symbolic role…
Yes, in particular passages oboe and cor anglais stand for the young girl, the Flügelhorn for the boy. The clarinet represents love itself, while the trombone is its antithesis: Death.
Bianca Tognocchi, the soprano with whom you recorded 12 of the songs for your video documentation, is fantastic!
Yes. I think she’s now one of the best coloratura sopranos. Although there are no coloraturas in the cycle, she is a fantastic cast. This cycle needs a rather light and clear soprano, with the ability for warm espressivo and elegant phrasing. It needs a singer with the ability to realise the ‘messa di voce’, the slow swelling and subsiding of a tone. Passages of multi-faceted and fast Italian speaking must be managed as well. So there is a whole range of challenges which I had to take into consideration when selecting the singer. Bianca manages all of that amazingly.
I have worked with what must be around 5,000 singers, if I count the many performances I’ve conducted. One wouldn’t believe it, it’s an enormous amount! But you cannot imagine how poor the expression in singing is, generally. There are a lot of extremely good voices to be found today and of course, it always feels wonderful to hear them. But the essence of interpretation is whether a singer is really providing an individual idiomatic expression in the sense of sonic gestures. There is a lot of ‘beautiful singing’ but very little characteristic singing. Bianca can really shape her sound.
Have you worked with her before?
Yes. She has been in the ensemble at the Frankfurt Opera for a few years now, and I worked with her at the Festspielhaus in Erl, Austria. We did Bellini’s Sonnambula, which was a lovely experience. I kept her in mind, especially because of this openness to seek for expression. I approached her to sing these songs in Frankfurt and she immediately accepted to be part of the project.
How wonderful, to work on a whole new song cycle and be the first to perform and record it.
What was it like working with the language in these poems?
With the heavy southern dialect in I gioielli della Madonna, there are Italians who might not understand every word. But in these songs, although going back to old Tuscan folk poetry, it’s not the case – an Italian of today can understand these poems, because in the Nineteenth Century, when the important collections were created, they were also adapted to the current linguistic style. Sometimes the meaning of certain words isn’t clear, and you end up playing a guessing game as to whether a word means this or that. There are also figures of speech which only belong to a very specific location, maybe only a little village somewhere in Tuscany. But there is one collection – Canti Popolari Toscani by Giuseppe Tigri – where the author adds little footnotes, explaining the context of the words. Some of them even go back to Dante Alighieri.
You’ve included an intermezzo…
I call it a ‘riflessione strumentale‘. When Death has told the maiden that her love is buried, her ‘song’ is over. All she says is ‘where is my voice, that rang out so beautifully? Where is it?’ I then had to think about how to make the switch to ‘L’è rivenuto il fior di primavera’, the unexpected return of the boy. There needed to be some music in between these sections, otherwise the change would have been much too sudden. That was a tricky point. So I took the title song: No. 8 ‘Quando ti vidi’ (‘When I laid eyes on you’) and wrote a significantly varied instrumental version of it. I inserted some motifs from former songs, as if she was thinking of a time that will never return.
That’s a creative solution.
It was as if she was now remembering the beautiful words and feelings she had sung about him. This was more difficult than I might have thought. If you decide that one certain motif should appear, you have to find where it harmonically fits in. Even when you find a place for it, it might still not work or make musical sense. It took me quite some time to achieve natural flowing music with that idea.
The cycle ends with a quiet and somewhat extraordinary song…
The girl is overjoyed and ebullient when her love has returned, but I didn’t want to close the cycle with the exalted marriage music of ‘Quando sará quel benedetto giorno’. Instead I used a little lied that Wolf-Ferrari wrote when he was 16 years old and which he, the 69-year-old, fascinatingly added to the new composed songs of the Canzoniere: ‘I was given three violets; I placed them under my pillow; I could smell them all night’. It felt right to put this as an epilogue. It’s only 40 seconds long, and brings a little misty-eyed mystery to the ending, stimulating the listener’s imagination.
Yes, I thought that was a very tasteful way to end the cycle.
Was it hard to conduct something that you had orchestrated yourself?
Yes, very hard! It demands a different kind of hearing and listening, and even with all of the experience I have as a conductor I was a bit overwhelmed. You try to analyse what have you done – what crimes did you commit? (laughs) It’s not like when you study a score of a composer for a year and your inner imagination creates a sound of the music you read. Here it’s the other way round. You create a sound in your imagination and have to write it down in the best possible way.
Another reason this song cycle has so much potential is that there aren’t very many for the soprano voice and orchestra.
That’s right. So I am happy to offer a new one. By the way, I made a German opera intendant listen to our recording and his spontaneous reaction was: ‘An Italian counterpart to the Chants d’Auvergne – but with so much more substance!’ I made the director of the Munich based publisher Musica Mundana listen to the recorded songs. He immediately offered to print and publish the score as well as the orchestral parts.
That’s fantastic. What would you pair this piece with in a concert? What other works do you think it would compliment well? I suppose a great feature about a lot of Wolf-Ferrari’s music which would make it versatile when programming is the strong influence you can hear of both German and Italian music.
The more I think about that I am not sure if this is really the case. We read that he’s a German-Italian and then decide that we hear the German and the Italian in the music. But what is German and what is Italian? In fact you can’t really divide it! It’s stated that in the time he studied counterpoint with Josef Rheinberger in Munich his music developed a Germanic influence. But if you take the counterpoint itself that does not mean it is the German aspect of his work. Counterpoint has its roots in Palestrina and Monteverdi as well. And if one says heaviness is a Brahmsian or Wagnerian characteristic, go to Puccini, Giordano, Mascagni, Respighi – that’s Italian, but is it ‘light’ music? It’s not so easy to distinguish these influences within one work.
In fact what I’d like to emphasise most is, that Wolf-Ferrari’s music largely rejects the ‘zeitgeist’. That’s why I’m cautious about mentioning other composers. His oeuvre is multifaceted and all of his important works demonstrate a highly individual language. In the song cycle as I have compiled it, one encounters almost all aspects of his artistic expression. On the one hand there is a pureness of spirit, a classical clearness in the formal structure, and a heartbreakingly naïve but also intelligent humour. Grief and despair can appear in strongest intensity but are never excessive, and contrapuntal passages, seeming to be thrown onto paper with ease, are without the slightest academicism and rather feel like a joyful play of forces. On the other hand, when touching on romance he creates a new guise, a special shape of Italian romanticism, full of sereneness. And finally, Wolf-Ferrari has this tremendous ability of melodic invention – the strongest side of his genius. His melodic lines are of purest beauty, of noblesse, and at times they may also touch a stylised folksy tone.
By the way: Le donne curiose, his first big operatic success, was composed in 1902, creating a musical language which today is considered to be ‘neoclassical’. But other composers usually associated with this stylistic phenomenon – including Stravinsky – followed much later! Wolf-Ferrari was first, and I actually think that he has to be regarded as the inventor of neoclassicism![3] The music historians might need to be corrected…
There is one very important sentence that I like very much in Wolf-Ferrari’s written work Considerazioni attuali sulla musica (‘Current Considerations on Music’). He wrote that as soon as one has reached a ‘term’ in music, one already has left the standpoint of art. I suppose that is a sentence that many musicologists would not be very happy with, but it means: the very point of art is that it can’t be defined. There are words to analyse harmony, to define rhythm, to speak about formal or stylistic aspects. But what makes the music move us cannot be defined. I think that is a great sentence.
I only know of one radio interview with Wolf-Ferrari, held in Switzerland after the war. When asked to talk a little about his music, he simply replied: ‘There’s nothing to talk about. You have to listen to the music and keep quiet.’
[1] Click here to read Friedrich’s interview on Wolf-Ferrari’s I gioielli della Madonna.
[2] www.digitale-sammlungen.de, others can be found at https://www.digitalarchivioricordi.com/en
[3] See also Friedrich’s interview on Wolf-Ferrari where we both discuss a bitonal chord that appears when Maliella stabs Rafael with her hairpin (p.107 of the vocal score). Wolf-Ferrari superimposes a B7 chord above a C minor chord, which was most likely written before Stravinsky’s Petrushka.