“You compose because you want to somehow summarise in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.” Aaron Copland’s quote describes best what first drew the American baritone Thomas Hampson to the art of song: the unique combination of two independent art forms that expresses human emotion in an unbelievably condensed way. With a beautiful snowy landscape glaring through the windows of his Zurich home and into the camera of his laptop, Hampson reflects on the art of American song and the importance of a liberal arts education.
“In whatever language and whatever epoch, poetry is a metaphor of the experience of being alive, and it is that,” Hampson explains enthusiastically, “that inspires composers to match that experience in a musical language. The magic of song is everything that is not being said or heard. It’s a dialogue, describing and emoting feelings, capturing a particular moment in time. In a way, it’s a self reflection.” Hampson and I agree that too many recitals today are about who is singing and where it is being sung, and too little is about the literature itself. “This is what really motivates me!” he exclaims. “There is never a time that I’m not singing songs, studying songs or teaching songs. Song can be a magical moment where time almost stands still.”
Ideally, poetry and music go hand in hand, and it is this dialogue that makes song such a wonder in itself. “It embraces, in fact, it demands that the listener both engages intellectually and emotionally – sometimes in the same proportion, but certainly at the same time. Every poem comes from a Gedankengut (body of thought); every text has a certain function. If you don’t understand that function, you can’t understand the music. If you don’t understand the agogic of Heine, you can’t completely understand Schumann.” Hampson has been living in Austria for years, he sings German Lieder, reads German poetry, and yet his command of the language is so surprisingly meticulous that it takes me few words to realise that he’d switched from English into German. “Schubert war unendlich fasziniert, auf welche Weisen man die menschliche Erfahrung in Worte bringen kann. (Schubert was endlessly fascinated by the different ways human experience can be put into words). Schubert was the first to take this context of extra-musical elements and tried to make them audible to further explore the actual dilemma of the personal relationship.
“The miracle of Schumann – and we should never forget that he wept for a week after Schubert died – is that he took the musical elements to another level.” It was also Schumann who started giving the piano more attention, Hampson continues. “It’s important to understand that the piano is not an accompaniment. The pianist must know the singer and the singer must know the pianist. The period of 1820 to 1840, the period of Schubert and Schumann was unbelievably rich in those metaphors.”
There are not many singers whose operatic career is so interwoven with their career as a song recitalist. I ask how his life on the opera stage has influenced his approach to songs or have they influenced his dramatic singing? “Vice versa. I think every singer would be better on stage had they learned how to articulate song, the immediate expression of an intent, if you will. But whether it is an immediate and intimate relationship of thought and emotion in song or in a larger almost canvas painting characterisation of a character, you have to find the soul of it. I never found it useful to find a Fach, especially as a young singer.”
For the last ten years, Thomas Hampson has been pouring his heart and soul into the project Song of America, a comprehensive archive of American song that “tells the story of our culture and nation, through the eyes of our poets and the ears of our composers”. He has always been interested in his country’s history, studied political science at school and one day asked himself the question: “Who is our Schubert? Who is our Brahms and who is our Tchaikovsky?” He started looking at songs and realised “with the turbulences and velocity of American culture becoming American culture you can almost define the history of it in 10 to 15 year periods. America is a geographical collection of mini cultures, of nationalities and origins. With songs, composers tell that story of that time of America. That narrative, that dialogue, that storytelling is probably more powerful in an American than in a European context. It is so contemporarily driven, it is so story-oriented by the time of when it was written. It isn’t until deep into the 20th century where we find poets somewhat liberated from that Americanism, who show a transcendental poetic effort regardless of their nationality.
“I found so much information in our history through the poets and composers that has made so much sense of what America is to me. It’s very difficult to adequately empathise with a culture that is not your own if you don’t know your own. My passion for American song is first and foremost to America, and second to the world. We don’t know our own stories, we don’t know our own history. The American educational system has almost completely written off liberal arts education which I think is a big mistake. It is unfair to our young children. I don’t want my grandchildren to not know our glorious and tumultuous past.”