In the final moments in the Vorspiel of Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, the Composer – an intense, precious boy, sung by a mezzo in a nod to the antiquity the opera parodies – philosophizes on the nature of his vocation: ‘Musik ist eine heilige Kunst, zu versalmmeln alle Arten von Mut’ [‘Music is a sacred art which brings together all men of courage’]. It is a great Straussian outburst – of course in terms of its exquisite melodic contour, but also because of the philosophy it embraces, one that would be further exercised in Capriccio. Yet even with such arias in his armoury, the role is over in little more than one of Zerbinetta’s Augenblicks; it takes a singer of real artistry to make her impact still felt ninety minutes later, following a long, complicated act in which she takes no part.
I’m sure Strauss, that most perspicacious of composers, wrote the role secure in the knowledge that one day Ann Murray would be along to sing it. With Ann in the part, it is as happy a marriage as the genre can produce; a voice that blossoms at the top of those long phrases; a beauty to the vocal line that, by extension, suggests that the young stage composer who makes it is the Real Thing; and an impact that competes quite happily with everything Ariadne, that wilful, dramatic soprano throws up in the following act. Most mezzo sopranos (and their fans, a different breed from those who lionize sopranos) look to Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier for such harmony – another trouser-role Ann has played with consummate, touching skill throughout her most distinguished career. But Octavian is a slow-burning fuse – a callow, young man redeemed by eventual good manners, love and affection towards the older Marschallin – and a pretty good musical send-off following four hours on stage. Whereas the Composer has only one shot at our affections.
And our affections Ann gets; even men with little courage are brought together through her artistry, her performances of this ‘sacred art’. Ann would dismiss these words with the surface insouciance she has cultivated over the years – a part of her Irishness that demands as relaxed and unpretentious a response as possible to the demands of her craft and the more ludicrous components of our industry. Yet such insouciance disguises (not always very successfully) a most instinctive, passionate, dedicated musician with a quick mind and a faster tongue.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t believe her when she tells the story of Phil the Fluter’s Ball, a narrative of folksy Irish charm that pops up occasionally in her recitals: ‘Then Phil the Fluter tipped a wink to little crooked Pat, / “I think it’s nearly time,” sez he, “for passin’ round the hat.” / So Paddy passed the caubeen round, and looking might cute, / Sez, “You’ve got to pay the piper when he tooters on the flute.”’ Similarly when she sings from her arsenal of traditional Irish songs, full of pretty maidens and leprechauns, of fairies and impossibly beautiful Irish towns; this after all is a genuine part of her heritage. And although she has long beguiled audiences of all nationalities and sympathies with these thumbnail sketches of the country of her birth, I prefer Ann in the more subversive songs – Galway Bay, for example, with its explicit, historical anti-Britishness (‘For the strangers came and tried to teach us their way, / They scorn’d us just for being what we are . . .’), or Danny Boy, a Mahlerian miniature in which death separates the young lovers, although not for all eternity: ‘And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be, / For you will bend and tell me that you love me, And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.’ These songs illustrate a more complex nationalism or sense of identity, a balancing act of tragedy and lyricism, which in itself encapsulates so much of what Ann brings to the opera stage and recital platform.
Mahler is actually the composer through whom I know Ann best. The first time I heard her was in 1991 at London’s Royal Festival Hall – me an exchange student from my native Australia, she singing one of the Mahler orchestral song-cycles. I was transfixed by her unshowy musicality, by her take-no-prisoners pianissimos despite the large hall and orchestra, each one somehow filling the space. My German was bad then, but Mahler – like Strauss – paints his words using harmony not melody, and harmony I did understand. Yet however wonderful the sound of her melody, it was her care of harmony and voice-leading that communicated the essence of these great, tragic songs, effortlessly leapfrogging the barriers erected by my inadequate schoolboy German. This was the dénouement of my musical education. And like a bore at a party, I lost no opportunity to lecture friends and fellow students about what she did in concert, implying a certain amount of credit for discovering her, as though the performance I had witnessed was not by a major artist at the height of her powers, but was instead by an unknown 15-year-old Ann at a small Feis Ceoil in Dublin; such things, of course, were the mosaics of her musical childhood, but long before I knew her.
As a good Irish girl Ann has no doubt read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I make no specific allegation here, but these powers I mention have been at this height for a suspiciously long time. Her Schubert recording of 1988 with Graham Johnson became and remains my Desert Island Disc; having heard her give a transforming performance of Nacht und Träume on my first visit to Wigmore Hall a month or so after her Festival Hall appearance, five years of terrible student performances of Schubert were erased in a flash. But despite this recording being nearly 20 years old now, her recent recitals display the same luxurious sound, an undiminished power of phrasing and understatement. And although this disc is only the third in what is a 40-disc series (aptly concluded by Ann and friends), there is a sense that Graham simply had to give this jewel of a song to Ann and no one else, no matter the distinguished list of artists he was already assembling for this project.
Quite a few years after this London discovery, when working at the Aldeburgh Festival, I invited Ann to take part in a series of Britten songs. For her recital I wanted to match the journey of the protagonist(s) in his Cabaret Songs with that of the narrator of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben. She told me that she hadn’t sung the Schumann cycle for over twenty years, and even then had only ever performed it the once. ‘On that occasion I had a friend who afterwards said to me: “Well, that’s the last time we’ll ever hear you sing that . . .”’. There isn’t really a good reason why the cycle remained out of her repertory – bar the sheer amount of song material with which she has kept herself occupied. But hearing this work in Aldeburgh, and then again at Wigmore Hall once I had commenced there as Artistic Director and was determined to repay some debts, it seemed like twenty wasted years. From the short-breathed phrases of the first song of youthful desire, to the unbelieving joy of engagement, to the ecstasy of motherhood, and to the pain and betrayal in her husband’s death, we in the audience were compelled by this dramatic monologue. When the piano coda in the final song was played – itself a recapitulation of the cycle’s piano introduction – it was only because she had sanctioned it; there was nothing more of this story to be told, and like a travelling troupe at the end of a show, the players were required quickly to take their leave.
After this experience, those cabaret songs were a much-needed tonic. Of course they are not a cycle, sketched quickly by a young, jobbing composer as clever-clogs incidental music to a play – the third song (‘Johnny’) testimony to Britten’s powers as a mimic. Only through thinking of a single schizoid narrator – a cross between that in Poulenc’s La voix humaine and that in Menotti’s The Telephone – does a (mis)constructed sense of cycle come across. But listening to the chilling ‘Funeral Blues’ in that Aldeburgh concert (‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone . . .’) after ‘Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan’ from Frauenliebe, it was clear to see to which Romantic tradition Britten and Auden belonged, no matter how distinct was the musical language. And these songs, too, had about them the sense of journey that Ann brought to the Schumann.
The vignettes in A Charm of Lullabies are not linked with such telling Romantic iconography, yet they offer further evidence of Britten’s preoccupation with the power and potential of night – I suppose an important Romantic construct in itself. And in this same Aldeburgh recital, drawing on a different set of Celtic traditions from her usual patch, Ann deftly muddied the water between the image of a mother singing her child to sleep and far more adult visions of the subconscious. The fourth song, ‘A Charm’ (to a poem by Thomas Randolph), in which a desperate mother threatens her child with a hex if the child will not sleep (‘I will make Erinnys whip thee with a snake . . .’) – with its musical pre-echoes of the great fight scene in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – was chilling to the core.
A reluctant teacher, in Aldeburgh she gave a series of classes which were the antithesis of the ‘celebrity masterclass’ of today, an often odious spectacle. She’d often ignore the audience and instead whisper ideas and images to the students – one of them the first ever Wigmore Young Artist, baritone Ronan Collett, with whom she immediately and generously agreed to include in her next Wigmore recital. And so it happened that the two of them became the young lovers in Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, itself a ragbag of songs, not a cycle. Ann always makes light of her own performances immediately afterwards (has she ever admitted to anyone that she sang well??), but was generous, admiring and lovely to Ronan following this auspicious coupling.
Since I first heard her those years ago we have performed together all of the Mahler song cycles, most recently his Kindertotenlieder, which left us backstage immediately afterwards silent and drained. But Ann managed an encore with the only song that feasibly can follow this cycle, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. She doesn’t so much sing this last song as be it; and with an orchestra that allows a tempo much slower than a piano can sustain, her glorious phrasing and core of sound linked this world with the next, our mortal vision with Rückert’s more elevated perspective. Of course people applauded after such a metaphysical and musical feat, between their tears and their yelps, but a healthy number preferred to slip out silently, alone into the night with their thoughts.
Of her many awards, I suspect she is proudest of being appointed a Kammersängerin of the Bavarian State Opera – a tribute, amongst other things, to all those Ariodantes, Cesares, Xerxes and Rinaldos that have punctuated her career in Munich. For the opening of the 2004/5 Wigmore Hall season we commissioned a new orchestral song cycle from a young French composer, Oscar Strasnoy, for Ann to sing. I sent Oscar some discs of Ann – Schubert of course, but also Handel arias with Charles Mackerras – and was not at all surprised when the cycle came in with a final song full of florid, impossible coloratura, Oscar’s own tribute to all those Handel roles under Ann’s belt. The cycle was long and difficult, learnt of course in too short a time. But I suspect even Ann was pleased when the composer sat in rehearsals, mouth open in disbelief at what she was able to do with his work, but with no words coming out. Of my many memories of Ann at Wigmore Hall, where she belongs, this is my favourite.
Paul Kildea
Paul Kildea is a conductor and formerely Artistic Director of Wigmore Hall, London
