We began in the world that was—in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the “Fugitives” concept was inspired by Zemlinsky’s “Meeraugen,” or “Sea Eyes,” which tells of a “person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean.” You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history—war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism—made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths. But NYFOS imposes no stylistic ideologies, and if, in 1939, Ullmann felt compelled to dive back into Straussian late Romanticism, Blier sees nothing contradictory in the gesture.
When a recital ranges from “Meeraugen” to Kurt Weill’s “Buddy on the Nightshift,” by way of Krása’s atonal Five Lieder and Hanns Eisler’s Brecht setting “The Landscape of Exile,” singers of extreme versatility are required. The duo on hand for “Fugitives”—the mezzo Kate Lindsey, a veteran of the series, and the baritone Gregory Feldmann, a new addition—met the challenge. The pianist and vocal coach Bénédicte Jourdois, NYFOS’s associate artistic director, assisted with the accompaniments and with the stage patter, of which there is always a fair amount. Blier is a strong personality, as his entertainingly candid book reveals, but he is a genial host, and also a knowledgeable one. If he dominates the party, you don’t want to leave.
Feldmann, a relatively recent Juilliard graduate, showed his Lieder-singing chops in the Viennese fare, his tone robust, his diction crisp. He could have brought a sharper edge to political songs by Eisler and Weill—the latter’s “Caesar’s Death” needs more of a snarl to make its anti-Fascist allegory clear—but he shifted effortlessly into Broadway belting in “Love Song,” from Weill’s “Love Life.” Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” a radiant song by a composer who did so well in Hollywood that classical snobs wrote him off, benefitted from a plush timbre. Feldmann learned all this esoteric repertory in just a week (after Justin Austin dropped out on account of illness), making his achievement somewhat heroic.
Lindsey came on the musical scene as a sweet-voiced Mozart mezzo and has grown into a fearless singing actor. Although her German diction lacked bite, especially in the cabaret-style material, she has an inherent ability to inhabit and project a song. Daringly, she took on Hollaender’s “Black Market,” which was written for the mighty Dietrich: it comes from Billy Wilder’s 1948 film “A Foreign Affair,” an acidulous political comedy set in occupied Germany. Lindsey didn’t impersonate the original—as Blier pointed out, she actually sang the notes, rather than a Dietrich-like approximation of them—but she did throw in a few smokily accented phrasings. More important, she and Blier together caught the unscrupulous sophistication of the scenario, for which Hollaender supplied both words and music:
During his American period, Hollaender worked with such lyricists as Leo Robin and Frank Loesser, but as a wordsmith he equalled any of them, and over time he mastered English well enough that he could replicate the mordant virtuosity of his German numbers. (“Get the Men out of the Reichstag” and “The Jews Are to Blame for Everything” are two classics.) NYFOS did a service by celebrating this often overlooked songwriting genius, whose wit was as lethal as his melodies were lithe.
Fiercest of all was Lindsey’s rendition of Weill’s “Wie lange noch?” (“How much longer?”), which was written in 1944 and broadcast into Germany for psychological-warfare purposes. The tune comes from Weill’s French-language torch song “Je ne t’aime pas.” The émigré satirist Walter Mehring inserted a new text that retains a torchy vibe—this is ostensibly a complaint against a lying lover—but implicitly urges resistance against Hitler: “I believed you, I had gone mad / From all your talk, your vows.” The title phrase alludes to Cicero’s denunciation of a would-be dictator: “How much longer, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” The airing of the song had no apparent effect: the madness went on until Hitler was dead. ♦