St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
FRANZ SCHUBERT – Schwanengesang (1828) D957
Roger Wilson (baritone) and Terence Dennis (piano)
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday 21st October, 2026
St Andrew’s on-The-Terrace Wellington’s remarkable Lunchtime Concert Series continued to delight its regular attendees besides scoring notably extra interest in its latest Wednesday concert – this was a complete performance of Franz Schubert’s eponymously-titled song-cycle “Schwanengesang” given by Wellington baritone Roger Wilson and Dunedin pianist Terence Dennis, an occasion marking a fifty year-old musical partnership involving countless song recitals, live and recorded, throughout the country. We relished the fruits of that near-lifetime rapport between singer and pianist in ways both evident and concealed throughout the cycle’s range of situation and feeling, perhaps enjoying first and foremost the naturalness and ease with which the music here was made to give meaning to the words, the musicians’ accord intuitively inhabiting the same outer dwellings and inner mind-spaces.
The idea of “Schwanengesang” as an integral cycle was a publisher’s rather than Schubert’s, whose tragically early death prevented him from completing what might have become a comparable cycle of settings by a single poet similar to the great earlier ones the composer had undertaken, Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. All of this presentation’s songs were composed by Schubert in 1828, with seven settings of texts by Ludwig Rellstab, six by Heinrich Heine and one by Johann Seidl (Taubenpost). The publisher Tobias Haslinger wished to present the songs as Schubert’s “last testament” by giving the collection its “swan-song” title and placing Seidl’s single song as a final, positive-sounding utterance, one described by another commentator as “a fitting, happy epigraph to his (Schubert’s) life as a song-writer”.
Though this collection lacks the constant mood or intensities of the composer’s two previous song-cycles, the feelings relating to love or longing permeate the Rellstab settings, maintaining a lyrical, sometimes regretful manner, whereas Heine’s lyrics move the songs to a darker, more despairing aspect in places, such as with Die Stadt and Der Atlas, and perhaps reaching its tragic apogee in Der Doppelganger. All the more alleviated, then, are the listener’s feelings upon encountering the hopeful whimsicality of the final Taubenpost, probably the composer’s actual final song, and here distilling a life-enhancing, if whimsical optimism.
From the beginning singer and pianist struck a balance between robust youthfulness and questioning concern, each phrase and echoed reply expressing a thoughtful expectation sharpened by a strand or two of anxiety, voice and piano mirroring a shared naturalness which oversaw the whole presentation’s interactive process – Liebesbotschaft, the first song, was such a joy in that respect, setting the parameters for the rest to follow.
The sterner, angst-ridden Kriegers Ahnung here suitably caught the warrior’s forebodings and longings with ringing top notes and gentler remembrances, while the following Frühlingssehnsucht tracked a different circumstance’s conflict between longing and uncertainty, though here, my listener’s own self-indulgent instincts wanted a touch more “caressing” of the concluding repeated words at each stanza’s end. With the deservedly famous Ständchen that followed, I loved the interactive “shaping” of the melody between singer and pianist, the two strands so affectingly merging as one, though again, the sentimentalist within me wanted each final phrase-note here to be savoured a mere tad more…
I so enjoyed the forthright tones of Aufenthalt, a real, primal nature-song, expressing throughout “des Felsen uraltes Erz” (the rock’s age-old core), the self-identification so resolutely made. With the following In der Ferne I wasn’t so sure – I imagined it would be the very devil of a song for a singer to perform as one would need huge reserves of breath to hold those phrases’ lines to their ends! Their repetition in places sounded like “appendages” rather than integral to the phrases, almost a kind of “list of instances” that distracted from the message. The song’s deeply pessimistic overall atmosphere was certainly realised, but for what proved to be the only time in the presentation, I felt somewhat relieved when we were taken to the next song!
This was the enchanting Abschied, which I’ve always loved, and which feeling was buoyantly and exuberantly conveyed by the singer and pianist – what a pleasure, and what resonances for anybody recalling pleasant or otherwise times spent in a since “let go of” place! The performers certainly deserved their “midway round of enthusiastic applause” from us at this point in the music’s journey!
Having farewelled the Rellstab verses Roger Wilson and Terence Dennis then addressed the Heine settings, rather more symbolically abstracted and darker in general effect, though the first one here, Das Fischermädchen, was as charming and unclouded as anything else in the composer’s oeuvre, almost artlessly teasing and hopeful. Not so the succeeding Am Meer, another difficult song to bring off, but here adroitly handled, with the lyrical verses calmly and gently realised, and their companion “responses” painting a suitably despondent scenario of love’s rejection. Even more overtly bleak was the spooky Die Stadt with its obsessive piano octaves and repeated spectrally minimalist flourish – a masterpiece in its own right! The appearance of the Sun in the song was an amazing moment, not a relief but an intensification of the dark mood’s despair! We got a splendid high note from the singer at the climax of this angst-ridden point, before the opening piano flourish mercilessly returned, indicating the absence of any hope or joy. A great performance!
We continued our Winterreise-like journey with Der Doppelgänger, another great song, and here even more powerfully and relentlessly presented by the performers– perhaps the emotional highlight (if one is into despair and phantasmal confrontation) of the collection (one, of course, could choose differently, depending upon one’s inclination!). The trajectories were weightily-paced, the atmosphere suitably spectral, and the inexorable confrontation with the “self” something out of a nightmare! The song which then followed, Ihr Bild, seemed, in fact, an almost macabrely-resigned “reality version” of Der Doppelgänger, featuring an image of the “beloved” whose rejection of the unfortunate would-be lover had brought about all of this suffering and nightmarish despair!
The same lover’s inner torment in response to the beloved’s outward beauty then exploded via the angriest and most nihilistic utterances of these songs with Der Atlas, in a performance here which took no prisoners, expressing “Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen” in the most vehement vocal and pianistic terms, the singer regarding himself as bearer of an unspeakable emotional burden of sorrows – an amazing archetypal characterisation of human suffering! How quixotic, therefore, that fate decreed the following and final song of this collection as Schubert’s own unintended swan-song – Taubenpost, written just weeks before Schubert died, and here given a truly life-enhancing lilt and sparkle by these two heroes, at the conclusion of a momentous journey of song from voice and piano! We showed our heartfelt appreciation at being invited to share Roger Wilson’s and Terence Dennis’s deservedly-enduring realisation of a composer’s treasured vision.