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Elly Ameling, the First Lady of Lieder
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11481 |
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THE ARTS
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10 / 1986 |
2,517 Words |
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Tom Pniewski
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Consider the world of the lieder singer, the domain of the art song. It is probably the most demanding and exposed performance imaginable. There is no place to hide, to let up, to relax for a moment. Only a single singer and pianist on a bare stage - no costumes or sets, no lighting or special effects, no "supporting cast."
The dramas that the two performers must re-enact compress the whole range of human experience into fractions of an hour - from the heights we glimpse in love to the depths we contemplate in despair. At the beginning of Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben (Woman's Life and Love), we see the singer as a young girl at play with her sisters. We follow her through maturity, first love, courtship, and the wedding celebration. We hear her sing her first child to sleep. At the end we see her as the widow, her "life and love" ending together: "I have lived and I have loved," she tells us, "and I am living no longer. Silent, I withdraw into myself - the veil falls." An immense emotional journey, which a stage or opera heroine could develop over three or four hours, is here compressed into fifteen minutes - and is all the more powerful and demanding because of its stark presentation.
Obviously, only a very special performer can meet the demands of such an art, where subtlety and inflection are everything. And Elly Ameling, the undisputed "First Lady" of the art song, is such an artist. Her vocal gifts are enormous: a rich and supple voice, able to vary color and inflection while projecting the text clearly and supporting the onward movement of the melodic line. Her personal gifts are equally important: a personality totally at the service of the music, never introducing its own ego but constantly involving itself and the audience with the musical and dramatic content of the work at hand.
'Natural' is a word that critics have often used to describe Elly Ameling's voice - a word that fits her entire personality. It's not surprising that she began to sing almost before she could walk or talk. "Many children sing themselves to sleep," she once said, "but I sang the whole day long. I think I had been inspired by my mother, who sang a lot to me when I was a baby. At school, I was always being picked out to go to the front of the class to sing something before the other children. I sang duets with my mother - and I'm thankful to her, too, because she also made me learn piano, and kept me at it even when I wanted to go out and play with the other children."
Through her secondary school years, Elly Ameling knew that she enjoyed music and had a gift for it, but didn't consider a career as a singer until later on. Competitions brought her to national, then international, attention. She studied with the great French baritone Pierre Bernac, who was for many years closely associated with composer-pianist Francis Poulenc. Her debut in Holland came in 1961, with English and American debuts in the next few years. From the start, critics and audiences recognized her linguistic accomplishment, interpretive freshness, and effortless technique.
Offstage, Madame Ameling is no less involving a personality. If it were possible to gather into a single container the bright sunlight of Dutch landscape painting, the freshness of tulip fields in spring, and the liveliness of the reflecting canals of Amsterdam, that container would have to look a great deal like Elly
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