Mein Brot

Diana Damrau and Jonas Kaufmann, reigning stars of opera, are also consummate interpreters of song. In early 2018, with master pianist Helmut Deutsch, they performed Hugo Wolf’s multi-faceted Italienisches Liederbuch in 12 cities around Europe. “One couldn’t ask for more,” wrote the Telegraph after their London concert, which took place two days before this live recording was made in the German city of Essen.

Diana Damrau and Jonas Kaufmann, reigning stars of opera, are also consummate interpreters of song. In early 2018, with master pianist Helmut Deutsch, they performed Hugo Wolf’s multi-faceted Italienisches Liederbuch in 12 cities around Europe. “One couldn’t ask for more,” wrote the Telegraph after their London concert, which took place two days before this live recording was made in the German city of Essen.

Although Bach had dreamt of establishing a ‘well-regulated church music’ since his early days, it was only between 1723 and 1750 that he finally had the chance to do so, as Kantor and Director Musices in Leipzig. Here he invented the ‘modern’ cantata, combining chorales and traditional biblical texts with arias and recitatives on freely composed texts. The four cantatas recorded by Philippe Herreweghe offer a magisterial demonstration of the transition from cantatas initially judged ‘too theatrical’ to a perfectly achieved form – as in the cantata BWV 84, among the very last to be written.

In 1947 a brilliant generation of Austro-German singers represented the Vienna State Opera for a short season at Covent Garden. Among those known to London audiences from before the war were Maria Cebotari and Hans Hotter; new were Anton Dermota, Erich Kunz and an array of sopranos headed by Hilde Gueden, Sena Jurinac, Emmy Loose, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried and Ljuba Welitsch. For one famous evening Richard Tauber joined the cast of Don Giovanni before entering the hospital in which he died four months later. It was a season which, more than any other event at the time, reassured opera-goers that traditions survived and that singing of real distinction, even greatness, might yet be heard in the postwar world.

Italian songbook is a collection of 46 Lieder (songs for voice and piano) by Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). The first 22 songs (Book 1) were composed between September 1890 and December 1891, and published in 1892. The other 24 songs (Book 2) were composed between March and August 1896, and published the same year. The time lag between the two volumes was caused by Wolf's long-proposed opera, Der Corregidor (1895), which might have been inspired by his personal love triangle with his friend’s wife Melanie Köchert.

In 1947 a brilliant generation of Austro-German singers represented the Vienna State Opera for a short season at Covent Garden. Among those known to London audiences from before the war were Maria Cebotari and Hans Hotter; new were Anton Dermota, Erich Kunz and an array of sopranos headed by Hilde Gueden, Sena Jurinac, Emmy Loose, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried and Ljuba Welitsch. For one famous evening Richard Tauber joined the cast of Don Giovanni before entering the hospital in which he died four months later. It was a season which, more than any other event at the time, reassured opera-goers that traditions survived and that singing of real distinction, even greatness, might yet be heard in the postwar world.

Italian songbook is a collection of 46 Lieder (songs for voice and piano) by Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). The first 22 songs (Book 1) were composed between September 1890 and December 1891, and published in 1892. The other 24 songs (Book 2) were composed between March and August 1896, and published the same year. The time lag between the two volumes was caused by Wolf's long-proposed opera, Der Corregidor (1895), which might have been inspired by his personal love triangle with his friend’s wife Melanie Köchert. The 46 lyrics of the songs were taken from an anthology of Italian poems by Paul Heyse (1830–1914), translated into German and published with the title of Italienisches Liederbuch in 1860.] Despite Heyse’s diverse poetic selections, Wolf preferred the rispetto, a short Italian verse usually consisting of eight lines of ten or eleven syllables each, as a result of which the songs are short.

Composed in feverish bouts interrupted by long periods of inaction, Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch was brought to completion in 1896. The 46 songs are settings of poems in German by Paul Heyse, after Italian folk songs – miniatures with a duration of less than 2 minutes in most cases. Heyse’s collection numbered more than 350 poems, but Wolf ignored the ballads and laments, and concentrated almost exclusively on the rispetti.