Music, Germanics team up for concerts

The School of Music and the Department of Germanics are collaborating on two upcoming concerts that feature German texts set to music.

On Oct. 30, tenor Thomas Harper, artist in residence at the School of Music, will perform a romantic song cycle composed by Johannes Brahms and based on a book by German author Ludwig Tieck. Professor Emeritus of Germanics Gunter Hertling will narrate for the concert, titled Die Schone Magelone. And on Nov. 16, School of Music voice students will perform songs set to Goethe’s texts and Germanics graduate students will recite his poems.

Thomas Harper

The collaboration was set into motion when Germanics Professor Jane Brown went to hear Harper perform after he first arrived on campus in 1998. “I was blown away,” Brown recalls. “I called him afterward to tell him how wonderful I thought he was.”

Harper, though he’s a native of Oklahoma, had spent a number of years performing in Germany. So he and Brown were soon talking about ways they and their students could work together. The Goethe idea surfaced first, because Brown planned to teach a graduate course on 19th century German poets, including Goethe. Then Harper suggested that they add the song cycle.

“The song cycle comes from a romantic fantasy novel written in 1796, although the story is much older,” Harper explains. “The novel contains 15 poems, 12 of which Brahms set to music.”

The way the performance is set up, Hertling will read excerpts from the novel in German and Harper will sing the songs as they come up in the narrative.

The story is an Odyssey-like tale in which Peter, the son of a count, goes off to seek his fortune in the world and meets the woman of his dreams, Magelone. However, circumstances separate them and Peter goes through many adventures before he is able to get back home to his true love. In the story, the poems serve almost like film cuts: the hero is one place when the poem begins and has arrived someplace else by the time it ends. But Harper doesn’t think the novel would make a film, or even good musical theater.

“The plot is not the artistic center of this novel,” he says. “It’s really the text, the language. The language is beautiful.”

According to Harper, the novel is not well known in this country; in fact, as far as he knows, it has never been translated into English. The songs haven’t fared much better. Though Harper says they’re often performed in Germany, they haven’t received much of a hearing here. Brown says copies of some of them have been distributed to second year German students and she hopes they’ll go to the concert.

Brown, who says she has a longstanding interest in music, is excited about the collaboration. “There really is a lot of interest in music in Germanics,” she says. “I’ve written about Mozart, as has Gunter Hertling, who will narrate the Tieck novel. I’ve also written about Schubert, and another colleague has written about Wagner.”

Both concerts are at 7:30 p.m. in Brechemin Auditorium. Tickets for Die Schone Magelone are $10, $8 for students and seniors. The Goethe concert is free.