Incisioni Programma

Incisioni di La Bella Mugnaia
La discografia della Bella Mugnaia comprende un elevato numero di incisioni. La prima in ordine di tempo è quella del tenore Franz Naval del 1909, ristampata di recente in CD dalla Symposium; anche se il fruscio è notevole, questo CD è un documento di grande interesse per gli appassionati. Di notevole valore è anche l’incisione del 1943 del tenore Julius Patzak e quella del coevo tenore danese Aksel Schiotz; ambedue però attualmente non sono più in commercio. Nell’epoca del 33 giri sono numerose le incisioni di straordinaria bellezza. Il baritono Fischer-Dieskau ha inciso la Bella Mugnaia tre volte: di particolare interesse la prima e l’ultima, riportate ambedue nell’elenco. Altri grandi interpreti di quel periodo sono il tenore inglese Peter Pears (accompagnato da Britten) e il baritono francese Gerhard Souzay; di minore interesse quella del tenore tedesco Wunderlich. Incisioni più recenti (tutte in CD), anch’esse molto ammirate, sono quelle dei tenori Pregardien, Bostridge, Gura e Haefliger, e dei baritoni Bar, Goerne, Holzmair, Gerhaher. Molti di questi ultimi interpreti li abbiamo ascoltati ed applauditi ad Imola; Pregardien addirittura nella Bella Mugnaia. La rivista Diapason considera di riferimento, tra queste ultime, le incisioni di Gura e Pregardien. Le incisioni con la voce femminile sono due, una del soprano Lotte Lehmann (che si spera la Naxos ristampi presto in CD) e l’altra del mezzo soprano Fassbaender.
Franz Naval (ten), August Pilz (piano), Symposium 1367 (incisione del 1906)
Jiulius Patzak (ten), Michael Raucheisen (piano), Preiser 3128 (incisione del 1943)
Aksel Schiotz (ten), Gerald Moore (piano),

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritono), Gerald Moore (piano), EMI Classics 566 907 (incisione del 1951)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritono), Gerald Moore (piano), DG 437 235 (incisione del 1971)
Peter Pears (ten), Benjamin Britten (piano), DECCA 436 201 (incisione del 1960)
Gerard Souzay (bar), Dalton Baldwin (piano), Philips 438 511 (incisione del 1964)
Fritz Wunderlich (ten), Hubert Giesen (piano), DG 447 452 (incisione del 1966)

Christof Pregardien (ten), Andreas Staier (fortepiano), Harmonia Mundi
Christian Gerhaher (bar), Arte Nova 53172
Ian Bostridge (ten), Graham Johnson (piano), Hyperion 33025
Werner Gura (ten), Schultz (piano), Harmonia Mundi 901 708
Olaf Bar (baritono), Geoffry Parsons (piano), EMI 74855
Ernst Haefliger (ten), Jorg Ewald Dahler (piano), Claves 508 301
Wolfang Holzmair (bar), Imogen Cooper (piano), Philips 456 581
Matthias Gorne (bar), Eric Schneider (piano), Decca 470 797
Lotte Lehmann (sop), Ulanowsky (piano),
Brigitte Fassbaender (mezzo sop), Aribert Reimann (piano), DG

Un interessante saggio sulle diverse interpretazioni della Bella Mugnaia di Schubert si trova nel libro “Song on Record” a cura di Alan Blyth della Cambridge University Press. Di seguito riporto la parte iniziale di questo saggio.

Schubert's first song-cycle, a young apprentice miller falls in love with his master's daughter. Through the first eleven of the twenty-song work, he believes his love is returned, but he soon realizes that he has lost her to the green-jacketed forester, and in despair throws himself into the brook to which he has constantly confided his hopes and fears. In the final song, he is `lapped into eternal sleep to music as timeless and spacious as eternity itself' (William Mann).
When the first LP version of the cycle appeared - by Dietrich FischerDieskau - the anonymous sleeve-writer (Walger Legge?) economically adumbrated its genius: 'Wilhelm Múller's poems of the miller's unlucky passion for the lovely miller-maid do not in themselves strike the heart, but with Schubert's light upon them it is quite another matter. They take on a glow which, like Claude's sunrises and sunsets, will remain strong in great beauty until beauty itself is banished and disregarded by man. In Die schóne Múllerin, Franz Schubert is the brook, the mill-house gleaming through the trees, the miller striding along the brookside on a mountain morning, the shy admirer in the firelight, and the stricken shadow of 'Trock'ne Blumen" . . . It matters little that Muller's verses are not of the best: once the songs have been heard, a subsequent reading of the poems even without the music warms the spirit, so powerful is the Schubertian transfiguration.'
But, of course, that transfiguration has to be brought to life by a singer and a pianist who understand to the full the songs' requirements. For a generation, those interpreters were the young Fischer-Dieskau and the experienced Gerald Moore of that 1951 recording, a very different one from those which followed it in 1961 and 1971. For an earlier generation Gerhard Hiisch's 1935 recording was the accepted tradition. In between these two baritones came the Danish tenor, Aksel Schietz in 1946, and in recent years another tenor, Peter Schreier, in a number of performances, has created another yardstick.
In a sense, these five singers box the compass of possible approaches to the cycle, though there are one or two others that demand special attention for their individuality. The five represent the sharp contrast between what Eric Sams has termed `contemplation or participation', between a simplistic or a sophisticated reading, between description and intervention. A middle way may be possible and valid, as will become clear, but present-day singers and audiences have been brought up to favour the overtly interventionist approach as displayed by Fischer-Dieskau, where songs tend to be over-phrased and tonal contrasts pushed to excess thus vitiating the obvious beauty of the singer's tone and the power of his intellect. Schiotz tends towards the other extreme: never quite dull, but relying on tonal beauty and the overriding importance of line. Schreier is of the Fischer-Dieskau school, but less emphatically so, as is Pears. Húsch is an advocate of the via media already mentioned, emotionally strong but always within acceptable bounds.
Both baritones have to transpose down. In Winterreise, such transposition is more tolerable than in the earlier cycle, where the tenor voice predicated by the original keys is surely preferable in songs relating to the feelings of a shy and impressionable youth. The heavier voice inevitably suggests a stronger, less suitable personality. Fischer-Dieskau has, according to his biographer Kenneth Whitton, understood that, and for this reason has not sung the cycle in public since 1973. Yet when a baritone successfully lightens his tone, as Gérard Souzay does in his 1964 disc, reissued in 1985, the inappropriateness of the lower voice becomes less marked. And our one female interpreter (of the whole cycle), Lotte Lehmann, shows that, given the total conviction of the singer, type of voice may matter less than one imagined. But voice quality, and a listener's response to it, inevitably colours opinion of an interpretation. Through twenty songs, one must enjoy the singer's timbre to enjoy the reading.
The importance of the pianist in Schubert's cycles is obvious, and most of the more convincing performances of Die schóne Misllerin are those where a true partnership is in evidence: Pears and Britten, FischerDieskau and Moore, Souzay and Baldwin, the Partridges, Schreier and the guitarist Konrad Ragossnig. Schreier has also recorded the cycle eloquently with fortepiano accompaniment, as has Ernst Haefliger. Both performances, as that of Schreier with guitar, suggest an intimacy of making music in the home which, whatever the merits or otherwise of authenticity, cannot be wrong.