Lammermuir Festival: Les nuits d’été and Myrthen

Dirleton Kirk - 16/09/23

Another day, another venture into East Lothian! The Lammermuir Festival has a knack of finding excellent venues for concerts, and I found myself yesterday in the pretty village of Dirleton, near North Berwick, for an interesting recital of songs by Berlioz and Schumann. It is an extraordinary place, with a ruined castle, an enormous village green, two superb pubs (we dined at the Castle Inn - highly recommended) and a lovely little church, dating from 1612, which is ideal for a song recital.

A decent, but hardly packed, audience turned up for a concert of vocal music by Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann, given by Harriet Burns (soprano), Nick Pritchard (tenor) and Christopher Glynn (piano). The performers were new to me, and perhaps to the majority of the audience, which may explain the rather disappointing audience, but they were excellent nonetheless.

I am a Berlioz fan, although his songs generally fail to move me, and I was slightly underwhelmed by the version of ‘Les Nuits d’Éte’ we heard at Dirleton. Théophile Gautier was a friend of Berlioz and in 1840, the composer began to set some of the poems from ‘La Comédie de la Mort’, published in 1838, for voice and piano. We are used to hearing the six songs in the version for one voice and orchestra which was finished in 1856, but here we heard them with piano and two voices. My first impression was that they were somewhat under-rehearsed. The singers were very copy-bound and their French, although passable, was less than idiomatic, although the songs were well sung. Mr Pritchard has a well-modulated tenor voice, light but flexible, and easy at the top, while Ms Burns possesses a more vibrant instrument, with quite dramatic possibilities, and a fluency of articulation which matched the music well. Christopher Glynn provided a sympathetic accompaniment, but for me, the cycle failed to spark into life. I think the fault, if there is one, lies with Berlioz. I was reminded, as I listened to ‘Au Cimetière’, of the same poem set by Henri Duparc as ‘Lamento’ in 1883, and the far finer word painting and harmonisation of the later composer. I love Berlioz’s operas, and have sung in several over the years, most notably ‘Les Troyens’ in La Scala, Milan, but I can find little to love in ‘Les Nuits d’Éte’.

After a short interval, we heard Robert Schumann’s Opus 25, ‘Myrthen’, a collection of songs composed as a wedding gift for his fiancée Clara Wieck, and given to her the night before their wedding, in September 1840. The concert neatly presented two cycles written in the same year but composed by men feeling very different emotions. Berlioz’s marriage to Harriet Smithson was falling apart, while the Schumanns were in the throes of a great passion. Robert set 26 poems by wildly differing authors, including Goethe, Rückert and Heine, along with German versions of poems by Burns, Byron and Moore. ‘Myrthen’ is rarely performed in its entirety, and so it was interesting to hear it at Dirleton, especially with two alternate voices and one or two duets.

The other striking feature was that the cycle was performed in a new English translation by Jeremy Sams. Here I must declare two things:

I am not a fan of songs in translation. Several times over my career, I have been presented with English versions of songs by various composers, with a view to my performing them in translation. Only a handful of ballads by Carl Loewe, which, by and large, are narrative in nature and hardly lyrical, have made it into concerts I have sung, and even then only grudgingly. I much prefer singing in the original, providing the audience has text and translation in front of them in a programme, and enough light to read!

Secondly, I have been a friend and colleague of Jeremy Sams for over forty years, ever since we were both students at the Guildhall School of Music in London in the late 70s/early 80s. We performed Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ together in 1980/81 in Helensburgh, Edinburgh (Queen’s Hall), London, and elsewhere, and enjoyed some success in competitions and on Radio 3 in the early 80s. Jeremy went on to become one of Britain’s finest translators of plays and opera libretti, as well as directing and conducting all manner of stage works.

This preamble is designed to show that I have no problem with the excellence of Jeremy’s translations of the songs in ‘Myrthen’, rendered in English as ‘Myrtles’.  In addition, I have to say that the diction of our two young singers at Dirleton was outstanding, and almost every word was clearly enunciated.

But - it doesn’t work for me. Some of Germany’s finest poets, translated into English, sound like novice songwriters, and since many of the poets chosen by Schumann were English or Scottish, we had the somewhat bizarre situation of great original poetry needing to be fitted around word settings meant for singing in German. In addition, since there are eight Burns poems in ‘Myrtles’, we heard them rendered in Received Pronunciation English, with no hint of their Scottish origins, other than random references to Donald, the Forth and the Highlands.

However – the performances were excellent, with both singers much more involved than in the Berlioz, and splendid playing from Christopher Glynn. Schumann’s songs need fine piano playing and we got that throughout. In addition, Mr Glynn provided some duet harmonisation which allowed the two singers to perform some of the songs together, giving us a little more variety. Both singers were able to express themselves warmly, especially in the song, ‘Riddle’, once ascribed to Byron but actually translated from the poem by Caroline Fanshawe, amusingly sung by Harriet Burns, and the Songs of the Inn, given a tipsy swagger by Nick Pritchard. The deepest song, Byron’s ‘From the Hebrew Songs’ was movingly performed by Mr Pritchard, taking us to an altogether more emotional level than many of the others. The famous Heine poem, ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ remained one of the great songs of the cycle, although the first song, ‘Widmung’ (Dedication), lost much of its poetic power in translation.

In mitigation, and serving as a warning to critics making generalisations, I heard many people saying how much they had enjoyed hearing the songs and understanding the words, so I must emphasise that my comments reflect a personal taste and are in no way meant to criticise the performers. The high standard of performance which we have come to expect at the Lammermuir Festival was upheld throughout, and long may it thrive.  

Cover. photo: Ben Ealovega, Nick James