Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881)
The Field Marshal (Golenishchev-Kutuzov)
from Songs and Dances of Death (1877)

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen
Nicht wiedersehen
Das irdische Leben
Urlicht
from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)
Priez pour paix (d’Orléans)
Bleuet (Apollinaire)

Henri Duparc (1848–1933)
Au pays où se fait la guerre (Gautier)

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis (Ravel)
from Trois Chansons (1914–15)

Intermission

Charles Ives (1874–1954)
Tom Sails Away (Ives)
In Flanders Fields (McCrae)

Samuel Barber (1910–1981)
I Hear an Army (Joyce)

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
The Clown (Baring)

Lori Laitman (*1955)
She Died (Dickinson)

Hanns Eisler (1898–1962)
Kriegslied eines Kindes
Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es (Brecht)
Der Graben (Tucholsky)

Kurt Weill (1900–1950)
Barbara-Song (Brecht)
from Dreigroschenoper (1928)

Surabaya-Johnny (Brecht)
from Happy End (1929)

Barbara (Monique Andrée Serf) (1930–1997)
Göttingen

Songs of War and Peace
On Marie Seidler and Wolfram Rieger’s Recital Program

Anne do Paço


A battle becomes a battlefield for Death, galloping on a ghostly steed. It is not just one life it takes, but a whole army that it forces to stand to attention. In The Field Marshall from his Songs and Dances of Death, Modest Mussorgsky portrays sheer horror with merciless realism, creating a gaze into the abyss of nothingness in which even music becomes a servant to Death.

It is one of the darkest war songs in all of music history that Marie Seidler and Wolfram Rieger have chosen to open their program—a subject the mezzo-soprano has been considering for several years. Given the current wars and crises, she has now decided to share her journey of the mind to the battlefields of this world with the audience, entering the heads and feelings of soldiers, of those who remain behind, the widowed, the orphaned, the sacrificed and betrayed.

“When I design a program, the intellectual framework always comes first,” Seidler says. “Maybe this is because I studied German literature and philosophy before I became a singer. A song recital allows me to combine all my interests. Only when the dramaturgy makes sense to me do I start thinking about the vocal side and whether a program is doable—and I often take risks with that.” Today’s recital is a premiere, for the program will be heard for the first time at the Pierre Boulez Saal. “With these songs of war and peace, I want to show the madness war causes in humans,” Seidler adds, “and that’s why we have chosen to open the program with Mussorgsky’s The Field Marshall. It is a very dark piece about fighting that immediately shows what humans are capable of. But I also sing songs that talk about hope or individual fates—in the musical and poetic colors of various nations.”


“A House of Green Turf…”

For Gustav Mahler, who grew up in the Moravian garrison town then known as Iglau, everyday military sounds such as wakeup calls and fanfares, roll calls and marches held a great fascination even when he was still a child. Over and over, they found their way into his compositions, including those songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn that deal with the soldier’s life. Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen describes a nocturnal visit a soldier pays to his sweetheart, with dark forebodings. Dawn becomes a metaphor for the bloody ending, already announced in the piano introduction with unsettling allusions to marching and skeletal wakeup calls. Ultimately, his only possible home is a “house of green turf”—the grave. In Nicht wiedersehen, a young man learns that his beloved has died during his absence. Mahler characterizes the situation with changes between major and minor keys and calls of “Ade” (Adieu) that are steeped in pain. Perhaps the composer’s most wrenching song of all is Das irdische Leben, starting with its laconic title, which translated as “Life on Earth.” Ever more insistently, a child begs: “Give me bread, or I’ll die!” The mother’s attempts at calming the child, however, cannot quench its hunger—“And when the bread was baked, / The child lay on the funeral bier”. In Urlicht, on the other hand, Mahler focuses on the hope for redemption and the belief in life after death. “This Urlicht is the soul’s questioning and struggling for God and its own divine existence beyond this life,” Mahler is reported to have said according to a diary entry by his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner.


On the Battlefields of France

In the tense months before the outbreak of World War II, Francis Poulenc discovered in the newspaper Le Figaro on September 29, 1938, the first lines of a ballad written by Charles de Valois, Duke of Orléans, in the early 15th century during his imprisonment in England. The text inspired him to compose Priez pour paix, a prayer for peace of unadorned fervor. One year later, he wrote Bleuet, setting a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire from the time of World War I. The poet was among the many artists who initially celebrated the war with great enthusiasm in 1914. Weakened by a serious headwound he had incurred at the front in 1915, he died of the Spanish flu in 1918, just 38 years of age. The title Bleuet alludes to the grey-blue uniforms of the French soldiers, but also to the cornflowers that became a symbol of those fallen. The graphic notation of the text shows the sentence “You have looked death in the eye more than a hundred times / You do not know what life is” running across the page like a deep wound. In the face of a new world war, Poulenc composed a “miniature” requiem, a work imbued with a sense of tenderness and humility that seems otherworldly.

Maurice Ravel was also eager to be called up in 1914. When he was confronted with death at close quarters as a truck driver in the rear of Verdun, however, his enthusiasm quickly turned to pacifism. In the winter of 1914–5, he sublimated his experiences in his Trois Chansons, rendering them timeless in the tone of unadorned neoromanticism. In the second of these songs, a girl sees three birds of paradise whose blue, white, and red plumage not only symbolizes the colors of the tricolor, but also contain a prophecy: the blue bird reminds her of the beloved’s eyes, the white of his forehead, but the red bird carries the heart of the man who has fallen in the war. A similar situation is described in Henri Duparc’s Au pays où se fait la guerre, written around 1870, in which he set a ballad by Théophile Gautier: a woman longs for the return of her beloved—but his whereabouts are uncertain.

Despite its darkness, tonight’s program is also about consolation. “I’m not trying to portray only death and blackness,” Marie Seidler notes, “but also great human strength: the ability to love, to commiserate, to empathize, the strength that grows from intimacy. One thing that made a huge impression on me are the stories about Christmas in World War I, when there was a ceasefire in the trenches and the enemy soldiers came together, played cards, shared their food, and exchanged family photographs—only to start shooting at each other again the next day.” With the following songs, the singer takes us to the U.S., to England, and to Germany. “These are songs from very different nations, each with their own musical language. It’s as if we were wandering through these countries, learning from their songs how people there perceive war.”


Anglo-American Voices

Charles Ives was among the most radical composers of his time. He maintained his artistic independence by making a living as an insurance salesman. Written in 1917, his songs Tom Sails Away and In Flanders Fields are a reaction to the entry of the U.S. into World War I and open up intimate perspectives: a child seeks refuge in memories when confronted with her or his brother’s conscription. Tom will probably not return—or so the piece’s elegiac ending, with a quote of the popular song Over There by George M. Cohan, suggests. In Flanders Fields is based on words by the Canadian lieutenant John McCrae, who saw a close friend die in battle in 1915. Assuming the perspective of the dead, Ives shows the ambivalence between the horrors of war, patriotism, and soldierly honor, with deconstructed allusions to the Marseillaise and the Star-Spangled Banner.

Poems written by James Joyce in 1907 inspired Samuel Barber to compose his Op. 10 Songs in 1937. I Hear an Army describes a nightmare in which an abandoned person is haunted by images of war. Galloping horses, fanfares, and the tempestuous sea are strikingly brought to life in the piano part, while the protagonists’ agony keeps growing to the desperate cry: “My love, my love, why have you left me alone?”

London-born Ethel Smyth was not only one of England’s outstanding composers but also fought for women’s rights. She went to Leipzig to study composition against the fierce resistance of her family and was also an active member of the suffragette movement, composing its Women’s March and being arrested in 1912 after hurling stones through the office windows of a misogynist politician. “Ethel Smyth’s works were almost completely forgotten after her death in 1944; only in recent years have they been performed more often,” says Marie Seidler. “To me, her music is a really fascinating discovery as well. That’s the main reason I included The Clown in this program, not so much because I absolutely wanted to have a female voice in it. The same is true for Lori Laitman, with whom I’ve had a regular exchange.” Since the 1990s, the New York–born composer has been exploring the interaction between poetry and song, becoming one of the most frequently performed female American composers today. She Died, one of her settings of texts by Emily Dickinson written in 1996, is a loving farewell to a woman who has died, full of nuanced lyricism and a peaceful belief in life after death.


For a Better World

Hanns Eisler became aware of Kriegslied eines Kindes—which describes a mother’s departure for World War I from a child’s perspective—through Walter Benjamin’s newspaper review of an anthology of nursery rhymes. A grotesque refrain undermines the glamourous impression of the uniform, and at the end, the female soldier does not emerge victorious from the trenches, but is eaten by black ravens and ends up in a “Himmelbett” (literally, a “heaven-bed”, the German term for a canopy bed). Written in 1925, the song is one of the first works in which Eisler turned against those composers whose art he felt existed in “terrible isolation,” catering to “a small number of gourmets to sample ever-more refined delights.” As a participant in the communist class struggle, he began to write political music of great impact. In 1930, he met Bertolt Brecht, and that same year, the two of them published the didactic play Die Maßnahme (The Measure), from which the song Ändere die Welt, sie braucht es is taken. Another haunting song is Der Graben, composed around 1960 and setting a text by Kurt Tucholsky that calls upon its readers not to consider the soldiers in the opposite trenches their enemies, but rather the “landed gentry and factory owners” who are waging war to advance their own interests.

By this time, Brecht had already introduced a new kind of musical theater together with Kurt Weill. Their greatest success was Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928, based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera about Peachum, the king of beggars, his daughter Polly, and the criminal Macheath, known as Mack the Knife, or Mackie Messer in German. Weill’s music was a major factor in this success, his songs cleverly alluding to entertainment and dance music, street ballads, chansons, but also ancient chorales. They include the Barbara-Song, in which Polly justifies her wedding to Mackie Messer to her parents. Surabaya-Johnny, on the other hand, tells the story of a man who steals women’s hearts on land before returning to the sea. The song was written in 1929 for the satirical comedy Happy End, in which members of the Salvation Army try to missionize a group of gangsters. (Conceived as a follow-up to Dreigroschenoper, the piece was not a success but produced two classics, Surabaya-Johnny and the Bilbao-Song.)

With Weill and Eisler, Marie Seidler adds another aspect to her program—works that are “explicitly political, pleading for a better world,” as she explains. “If I didn’t believe that music can change the world, I wouldn’t be singing. The arts of course take a back seat when we’re faced with war, a deadly virus, or other disasters. But we also know that people who have experienced the worst often begin to sing before they do anything else. Music brings us together, it offers us a feeling of security, a sense of grounding and strength. And it can also be a symbol of reconciliation—as in Barbara’s Göttingen.” The song was written in 1964 while the French chansonnière was touring Germany, an engagement she had initially refused because of her family’s escape from the Nazis, but which she eventually accepted. In Göttingen, Barbara described how she discovered “the house of the Brothers Grimm, where the fairy tales we knew so well as children were written. At noon on the last day of my stay, I jotted down Göttingen… I owe this chanson to a profound longing for reconciliation, but not for forgetting.”

This brings us full circle, and our wanderings through more than two centuries and two continents come to an end in our own time, when we are confronted daily by the fact that certain things and events never fade. Accordingly, Marie Seidler and Wolfram Rieger have chosen a motto for their recital that goes back to a statement by Hegel and has been attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “History teaches people that history teaches people nothing.”

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag


Anne do Paço studied musicology, art history, and German literature in Berlin. After holding positions at the Mainz State Theatre and Deutsche Oper am Rhein, she has been chief dramaturg with the Vienna State Ballet since September 2020. She has published essays on the history of music and dance of the 19th to 21st centuries and has written for Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and Opéra National de Paris, among others.