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Posted by Martin Walker on July 3, 2007, 12:56 pm
213.36.2.240
I would like to follow up John Quinn's reflections & qualms concerning "Ruhe, meine Seele!". This is a very stimulating review that confirms my feeling about Anne Schwanewilms's quality from the little I have heard from her so far. You say "It’s one of the composer’s greatest songs, pregnant with meaning – but with what meaning? I find it an ambiguous song for the soul is being enjoined to take rest yet the music is full of foreboding and there’s real dramatic emotion at the words “Diese Zeiten Sind gewaltig”. Yet this unquiet song was a wedding day gift from Strauss to Pauline, his wife. What one would give to have heard her sing the song!" I very readily agree with the characterisation of the song - "foreboding", "unquiet" - but I don't really understand the repetition of "yet" here. To deal with the second "yet": well, yes, it is one of his finest songs, so I can't myself see there is a real paradox in his giving it to his wife, a singer, on their wedding day, despite its foreboding character. The first "yet" is more of a problem here for me, John: the poem sets the scene of a grove slumbering after a storm; the dark canopy of the leaves is shot through by sunlight. It is therefore not at all an ambiguity - on my interpretation - when the singer admonishes his soul also to quieten down after the wild storms it has encountered during life, comparing it to the ocean breakers, then suggesting that the soul's disquiet is to be understood in the context of the prevalent social unquiet and enjoining it once more to calm down and forget the minatory forces opposing it. One might even consider this an implicit self-revelation by Strauss to his bride. There is also an element here of Heldenleben's darker passages, which also seems not unapt considering the context. - Hitherto my favourite interpretation of this on record has been that by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, accompanied by Jacqueline Robin at a concert in Strasbourg in 1960, a performance marked by power, anxiety & a ruefully compassionate tenderness towards him/herself that seems quite appropriate to a wo/man entering into a lifelong marriage bond after a topsy-turvy life. I am very curious now to hear the Schwanewilms recording.
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