If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that world in Blake’s grain of sand. Their span may be short, but their emotional horizon is infinite — a lyric window on to an epic landscape. And yet there’s something about a song recital that sets up quite a different expectation.
Maybe it’s the venues. Entering the Wigmore Hall or Oxford’s Holywell Music Room still feels like stepping into another, older world. Politeness, not passion, is the overriding sensation of well-heeled audiences with their well-thumbed programmes, prepared for 90 minutes of just-enough-but-not-too-much musical excitement. Maybe it’s the genre itself; you won’t hear much lieder on Classic FM because apparently it ‘doesn’t test well’ with focus groups.
But perhaps that’s all part of the process — an expectation set up, as by the closed curtains of a theatre, which then rise to reveal something quite unexpected.
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