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Elly Ameling, the First Lady of Lieder
| Article
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11481 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
2,517 Words |
| Author
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
Consider the world of the lieder singer, the domain of the art song. It is probably the most demanding and exposed performance imaginable. There is no place to hide, to let up, to relax for a moment. Only a single singer and pianist on a bare stage - no costumes or sets, no lighting or special effects, no "supporting cast."
The dramas that the two performers must re-enact compress the whole range of human experience into fractions of an hour - from the heights we glimpse in love to the depths we contemplate in despair. At the beginning of Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben (Woman's Life and Love), we see the singer as a young girl at play with her sisters. We follow her through maturity, first love, courtship, and the wedding celebration. We hear her sing her first child to sleep. At the end we see her as the widow, her "life and love" ending together: "I have lived and I have loved," she tells us, "and I am living no longer. Silent, I withdraw into myself - the veil falls." An immense emotional journey, which a stage or opera heroine could develop over three or four hours, is here compressed into fifteen minutes - and is all the more powerful and demanding because of its stark presentation.
Obviously, only a very special performer can meet the demands of such an art, where subtlety and inflection are everything. And Elly Ameling, the undisputed "First Lady" of the art song, is such an artist. Her vocal gifts are enormous: a rich and supple voice, able to vary color and inflection while projecting the text clearly and supporting the onward movement of the melodic line. Her personal gifts are equally important: a personality totally at the service of the music, never introducing its own ego but constantly involving itself and the
... (1996 of 14273 Characters)
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