瘋狂的原因 布拉姆斯/德布西/舒伯特藝術歌曲集 卡洛琳．桑普森 女高音 Reason in Madness - Carolyn Sampson

Throughout history men have feared madwomen,
burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and
subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also
been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them.
For their new disc, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph
Middleton have created a programme that explores the
responses of a variety of composers to women whose
stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a
motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche:
'There is always some madness in love, but there is also
always some reason in madness.'

Brahms' Ophelia Songs, composed for a stage
production of Hamlet, appear next to those by Richard
Strauss and Chausson, while Ophelia's death is
described by both Schumann (in Herzeleid) and SaintSaens.
Goethe's mysterious and traumatized Mignon
appears in settings by Hugo Wolf as well as Duparc,
while his ill-used Gretchen grieves by her spinning-wheel
in Schubert's matchless setting. Sadness and madness
tip into witchery and unbridled eroticism with Pierre
Louÿs's poems about Bilitis, set by Kœchlin and Debussy.
Sampson and Middleton end their recital as it began,
with a suicide by drowning: in Poulenc's monologue La
Dame de Monte-Carlo, the elderly female protagonist
has been unlucky at the gambling tables and decides to
throw herself into the sea.