April is the cruellest month. So says T. S. Eliot, and certainly on these chilly, stone-grey April days, with their unrelenting breezes, the thermometer hovering in the forties and even the occasional earthquake thrown in, the warm glow of springtime we’ve looked forward to all winter long still seems cruelly distant. The bulbs and rhizomes I ordered some time back, to be shipped just at the appropriate planting time, arrived last week, but the weather hasn’t exactly inspired me to pick up a trowel.
So today, to make up for the lack of actual fair skies and sunshine, I went in search of the musical equivalent — something to bring me that springy feeling without my having to set foot outside my cozy house. The theme of spring has inspired countless compositions, some of them as bright and joyful as blossoms and birdsong, some as prone to disillusionment as the average weather forecast. But just as those pesky April showers can be relied on to bring lovely May flowers, even the saddest of these songs lift the spirits and soothe the soul with their transcendent beauty.
In Franz Schubert’s “Frühlingstraum,” from Winterreise, poet Wilhelm Müller’s colorful flowers, songbirds and green meadows, expressed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in gentle, plummy tones and softly lilting rhythms, give way to vehement, turbulent references to sorrow, strife and the screeching of crows as the protagonist mourns the absence of his love. Yet there is still, in the final verse, the bittersweet aura of hope and yearning.
Richard Strauss’s “Frühling,”setting a poem by Hermann Hesse, is the only one of the Four Last Songs that doesn’t overtly treat on death. Yet Strauss’s mysterious, otherworldly music certainly suggests an Easter-like rebirth of the spirit and a shuffling off of this mortal coil. Jessye Norman’s wondrous voice, glowing with warmth and haloed with a dazzling shimmer, at once enveloping and penetrating, seems to capture a sense of humanity at the threshold of the divine.
For pure vernal freshness and effervescence, there’s Johann Strauss’s “Frühlingsstimmenwaltzer” (Voices of Spring), here sung by the supernal Slovak soprano Lucia Popp. (For more on this treasurable artists, see https://louisetguinther.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/lucia-popp-22queen-of-hearts22.pdf.) Not a cloud mars the “blaue Höh” (blue heights) in this paean to the season of renewal and rebirth. Popp laughs, chirps and trills her way through Strauss’s lilting waltz, capturing in sound everything from the soft first notes of the nightingale to the sparkle of the stars and the shimmer of the moonlight. Her bright, radiant tone and luminous smile match the joyous spirit of the piece as perfectly as the feathery flounces on her bustle match the lightness and buoyancy of her coloratura. “All grief has flown far away” indeed!
Louise T. Guinther 
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