One of the greatest lieder singers of our time, the tenor Christoph Prégardien is giving three recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall this week. The second and third of his appearances are devoted to 19th-century song and to Handel and Telemann respectively, but his opening programme, for which he was partnered by the pianist Stefan Litwin, ranged across almost two centuries, from Schubert to Wilhelm Killmayer.
But this was much more than a random selection of favourites. The sequence carried the title Erinnerung (Recollection), with the 30 songs thematically grouped; there were songs about trees, about the horrors of war, about romance and so on, with settings by Hanns Eisler as the common denominator between them all. More than half of the songs here were by Eisler, from excerpts from his Op 11 Zeitungsausschnitte (Newspaper Clippings), which was composed in the mid-1920s when he was still trying to reconcile the influence of his teacher Schoenberg with his urge to compose music that would connect with the widest possible audience, through his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht in Berlin in the 1930s, in the US during their second world war exile and afterwards back in Europe in the newly created GDR.
Eisler’s songs are some of the most important of the 20th century, encompassing a vast range of style and content. Prégardien and Litwin’s programme was framed by two of the Neue deutsche Volkslieder, songs intended for young people to sing which are as guilelessly straightforward as anything by Schubert, but they also included some of Eisler’s greatest, most intense settings, including the savage Ballade von der Krüppelgarde (Ballad of the Cripple Brigade), the intensely nostalgic Und ich werde nicht mehr sehen (And I shall never see again) from 1941, and the aspirational Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe (Spare no grace, no effort) composed in East Germany in 1950.
All are wonderful songs and, as Prégardien consummately showed, all well worthy of being placed alongside the setting by Schubert and Schumann, Wolf, Mahler and Ives that were interleaved with them. Prégardien’s voice may be rather worn and sometimes lacking in body these days, but his intelligence as an interpreter is as sharply focused as ever, with the ability to make his audience hang on every word, totally immersed in the worlds he evokes.
• Christoph Prégardien gives further recitals at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 5 and 7 July
