Peter Lieberson's Rilke Songs (2001) and Neruda Songs (2005) stand apart from the rest of his oeuvre and have much in common. Lieberson has referred to both sets as being about love, although only the Neruda songs are explicitly so. Both cycles offer settings of five sonnets selected by Lieberson from prominent collections by their titular poets, and both works were set in their original languages, German and Spanish, respectively. Given Lieberson's evident poetic sensitivity and the extraordinary success of these two cycles, it is surprising that he has not produced more vocal works in the course of his career. These songs were preceded by the 1981 Three Songs, brief settings that have less in common with the song cycles considered here than they do with the mature vocal works of Elliott Carter (another composer with a strong literary background but with only a few major vocal works). Lieberson has also composed an opera, Ashoka's Dream (1997), and the recent cantata for mezzo-soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra entitled The World in Flower (2007, premiered 2009), a setting of eleven widely disparate texts, including one poem each by Rilke and Neruda.

Lieberson's settings draw directly on the traditional techniques and styles of European and American art song, and yet they do not sound outmoded. Structure is clear in these pieces, both in cases in which the poem's sonnet form is maintained and when a new musical form supersedes the poetic form. Poetic rhymes are frequently underscored by musical rhymes, and word painting is often employed. Melodic contour and range shape our understanding of poetic meaning with a particular emphasis by Lieberson on the lower register and downward trajectories. These mostly syllabic settings allow for melismatic moments of heightened expressivity, and harmonic and melodic dissonances (particularly tritones) frequently function as meaningful markers as they would in tonal song. In general, aspects of both tonal and post-tonal harmony appear in these pieces, which evoke both the precision of midcentury serialism and the more Romantic and Expressionist gestures of the early twentieth century.

The Rilke Songs repeatedly recall the modern Germanic tradition of Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, and early Schoenberg whereas the Neruda Songs also allude to the music of Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc. In fact, Lieberson successfully blends Germanic and French vocal styles of the early twentieth century in these works. Occasionally, specific works and styles from the past seem to be referenced, as I will note below. However, for the most part these echoes do not sound as quotations and certainly are devoid of any ironic engagement with the musical past. Given the centrality of Tibetan Buddhism to both the composer's life and his major orchestral works, the lack of overt textual and musical reference to Tibetan and Buddhist traditions in these song cycles is also noteworthy. However, the mystical tendencies of both Rilke and Neruda and their emphasis on transformation, infinity, and oneness with the universe might have made their work particularly attractive to Lieberson. In his liner notes to the Rilke Songs recording, Lieberson refers to Rilke as displaying a “deliberate elusiveness in order to provoke our intuition.” These songs prove both moving and profound but also unassuming and reserved, an impression for which any detailed explication remains elusive.

The texts for the Rilke Songs were selected from the poet's Sonnets to Orpheus. Befitting an Ovidian subject, the selected poems all emphasize transformative states. The poems repeatedly celebrate breath/wind, space, and sea/water, which are common themes in the Rilke set but which are emphasized by Lieberson's particular choice of poems. Rilke's poems exhibit a clear rhyme scheme and poetic meter that resound in Lieberson's settings. The first song, “O ihr Zärtlichen” (O You Tender Ones), begins with utter tuneful simplicity—octave B-flats in the piano and pure B-flat major triads followed by a lilting vocal melody. The poem is addressed to youth, calling upon the blessed ones to embrace suffering and to return the heaviness of life to earth. However, the wistful speaker ends the poem with fragments of hope and desire: “Aber die Lüfte . . . aber die Räume . . .” (But the winds . . . but the spaces . . .). In the second stanza the speaker alludes to the bows and arrows of love, thereby suggesting his or her own longing. Lieberson's setting of this stanza is suddenly Mahlerian in its emotional intensity with a forte “ed appassionato” marking, large melodic leaps, a disjunct piano line, a melodic tritone on “Herzen scheint,” and a suitably chromatic twisting and ascending vocal line for the play of bows and arrows. Rather than imagining a smiling Cupid sporting with youth, our attention is directed by Lieberson's setting to the speaker's presumed amorous woes.

The second song, “Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!” (Breath, You Invisible Poem!), celebrates with mystical intensity the element that makes vocal performance possible. The voice begins alone for the title line and then seems to circle back upon itself as the poem speaks of the cosmic exchange between the universe and our inner beings through the act of breathing. This poem echoes Stefan George's “Entrückung” (Enrapture)—the text Schoenberg set in the fourth movement of his second string quartet. Lieberson twice appears to allude to Schoenberg's vocal setting of George's line “I feel air from other planets.” Unlike Schoenberg, who ended his quartet with a major triad, Lieberson's piano accompaniment releases a question into the ether with a sonority of a seventh and ninth. This soft and inconclusive ending stands in stark contrast to the emphatic and impassioned start of the next song “Wolle die Wandlung” (Will the Transformation), a nearly Wagnerian declaration with its assertive use of Stabreim. This command gives rise to some musical transformations as the vocal C and G immediately become C-sharp and G-sharp and the following phrases appear as variants of each other. Lieberson's responses to this text are particularly madrigalistic. The voice and piano seem to pivot on a C-natural as we hear of the point at which transformation occurs, and Lieberson offers a clever allusion to the very opening phrase of the cycle as the third stanza ends with “and with ending begins.”

“Blummenmuskel, der der Anemone” (Flower-Muscle of the Anemone) serves something of a scherzo or character piece function in relation to both the third and fifth songs in the cycle. The engaging, motoric sixteenth-note piano line playfully depicts the “polyphonic light” of the sun as it pours down into the womb of this rather erotic flower. The song ends, however, on a more serious note, asking when we will learn to be as all embracing as this flower, with a tritone in the vocal line and a single subterranean note in the piano. This ending prepares us for the profundity of the final song—also the final poem in Rilke's cycle—in which the speaker addresses a distant “silent friend.” We again hear a possible reference to Schoenberg's second quartet as the speaker refers to the friend's breath and to space. The speaker calls for the friend to sound out like a bell, and the piano appears to oblige. Most striking is this song's relationship to the cycle's first. There is a similarity in the piano's measured introductions to both songs, and both poems end with fragmentary utterances. Rilke's speaker implores the distant and silent friend to speak to the earth and to the water and thereby affirm his or her existence. However, the final “I am” is set with a half diminished seventh chord in the piano and is to be “cut off abruptly” by the vocalist. Only the smallest affirmative gesture may be heard here as the entire cycle began with B-flats and ends higher with a B-natural.

Lieberson chose five of Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets for his second major song cycle and states in the liner notes that “each of the five poems . . . seemed to me to reflect a different face in love's mirror.” The first two of these celebrate love as all-encompassing, and both, like the Rilke texts, turn to the natural elements in doing so. From a literary perspective, songs 3 and 4 might well have been reversed because the third is something of an aubade in which the speaker begs the lover not to leave, and in the fourth the speaker tenderly addresses the sleeping lover. However, Lieberson's ordering works well in musical terms, given the dramatic arc of the entire cycle. The final song envisions a future in which one of the lovers will no longer be living but in which their love, “like a long river,” will continue. Water imagery flows throughout the cycle. Lieberson repeats and manipulates Neruda's texts more freely than he did Rilke's, but this work similarly engages in considerable word painting and features descending lines. All five songs begin with a strikingly low pitch, imparting a particular weight to the cycle. In his introductory notes to the recording, Alex Ross points to stylistic traces of baroque opera arias, flamenco, and the blues and rightly refers to the songs' “uncommon refinement” and “motivic concentration.” Lieberson's harmonic language in this cycle, with its emphasis on five- and six-pitch clusters, points back to his own earlier style more clearly than do the Rilke Songs. In addition, his stylistic allusions and juxtapositions are somewhat more bold.

The first two songs together serve as an introduction of sorts with their playful and celebratory amorous mode. In the first, the lover flirtatiously lists all of the qualities that, should the lover fail to exhibit them, would disqualify their love. Because the lover possesses each quality in so exemplary a fashion, however, they inspire an overwhelming love. Lieberson's setting proves to be both “sultry” and “languid” as marked in the score and, at certain moments, recalls the early works of Schoenberg. Lieberson employs motivic repetition to achieve unabashed climaxes, as in the lead up to the speaker's exclamation: “Oh, my dearest.” The second song leans toward the exotic Espagne à la certain French composers and features a sparkling orchestral introduction, a more melismatic vocal line, and snappy rhythms. The mood shifts, however, as the text speaks of the secrets of the sea, and the orchestra gently rocks in Debussian fashion. The song ends with a dissonant stinger chord, pointing to the more somber tone to come in the third song, which begins with the same cluster. “No estés lejos de mí un solo día” (Don't go far off, not even for a day) opens as a lamenting accompanied recitative. The tightly knit melodic line and textual repetition seem an attempt to enfold the lover musically, to hold him or her in place, as does the static accompaniment. Whereas one might hear echoes of Schoenberg in the earlier songs, the mournful motivic repetition here calls to mind the slow movement of Poulenc's Sonata for Clarinet.

Stylistic allusion (and intrusion) is more evident in the cycle's fourth song, which moves from the style of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras nos. 1 and 5, to the bossa nova, to the anguished strings of some classic 1940s Hollywood film score as the leading lady turns away in tears when her lover departs forever in a taxi, train, or airplane. Although the opening lines of the poem seem celebratory and comforting (“And now you're mine. / Rest with your dream in my dream”) the musical setting is foreboding and somewhat tragic. (This sense of unease recurs when the word “amor” is heard with a tritone sonority and when it is accompanied by a bitonal hexachord. “Dream” is set similarly and the song ends with a dissonant cluster.) The entrance of the bossa nova rhythm brings a smile of recognition, a release of tension in the listener, and a sudden flirtatious turn in the vocal part. The stylistic change does not appear clearly motivated by the poetic text. Why does Lieberson turn so directly to this popular Latin American style and to Villa-Lobos in this song? In his review of Lieberson's recent cantata The World in Flower, Anthony Tommasini cites its Neruda movement for skirting “uncomfortably close to Manuel de Falla” (8 May 2009, The New York Times). Is there something specifically German, beyond the language, about Rilke's poetry that called for allusions to certain Germanic composers and something Hispanic—or I should say Latin American—about Neruda's poetry that brought the bossa nova to Lieberson's mind? Without chastising Lieberson for drawing on the styles of earlier music, we may still wonder whether the universality of Rilke's and Neruda's poetry is somewhat circumscribed by these particular references.

The final song alternates between a transcendent, rocking gesture in the violins suggestive of a lullaby and of an infinite love, and a darker tone, complete with a funereal tattoo in the low strings. Both the styles of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea and of Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder come to mind. An unexpected intrusion of a dance rhythm briefly ties this song back to the previous number. The rocking gesture begins and ends this movement, and the cycle comes to rest on a pure G-major triad, having opened with G-naturals in the low strings. The first song in this cycle began with a low B-flat in the bass and harp, and this final song ends with the voice on B-natural, perhaps offering another attempt at a small affirmative gesture as in the Rilke Songs.

These two cycles and the recent cantata share another crucial aspect—they were intended to be performed by the composer's late wife, the celebrated mezzo-soprano Loraine Hunt Lieberson. Both her recording of the Rilke Songs with Peter Serkin and of the Neruda Songs with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra received Grammy awards for Best Vocal Recording. (Lieberson himself also received the 2008 Grawemeyer award for the Neruda Songs.) Hunt Lieberson's performances are controlled, refined, and subtle while they also display a passionate and warm engagement with the text and a depth of feeling. Her purity of tone, intuitive sense of timing, and general projection of vocal ease suggest a covered strength or harnessed intensity in these performances. Her final “Ich bin” in the Rilke cycle and “amor” in the Neruda Songs are devastating. Her operatic experience is particularly in evidence in the recording of the Neruda cycle in that we sense a strong dramatic and psychological presence. In the first Neruda song, for example, she displays a timbral range from earthy to ethereal and moves from intensity to tenderness with great fluidity. In this song's first line, her singing of “luna” involves an expressive swell on each syllable, something not indicated in the score. What is remarkable is that taken together, these nuances result in a natural, rather than mannered, sounding rendition of the songs. Both Serkin and Levine seem ideal collaborators fully in synch with her timing and expression. These are live recordings that, although slightly marred by a few unfortunate coughs from the audience and recording hiss, make Hunt Lieberson's performances all the more remarkable. As others have attested, our knowledge of this performer's early death in July 2006 make her recordings of the final songs of each cycle almost too poignant to bear. Fortunately, other mezzos have begun to perform these cycles—works so closely associated with Hunt Lieberson. It can only be hoped that the composer's vocal inspiration will continue even though she is gone.