Italian Lieder? At This Songfest, Ja

Your Songfest passport this year has Italy stamped as the destination. But you’re going to make a surprise side trip. To Germany.

“If one stuck entirely to Italian, it’s sort of short in the song repertoire department,” Songfest co-founder Martin Katz said in a recent interview from his Michigan home.

“Italy was so busy getting politically organized and getting Verdi’s career launched in the 19th century when Germany was creating [art songs], I don’t know if we could put on an interesting week if we only did Italian songs.”

So Katz and co-founder Rosemary Hyler decided to focus the annual summer vocal-arts workshop, this week at Chapman University in Orange, its new home, on Hugo Wolf’s “Italienisches Liederbuch” or “Book of Italian Songs.”

As the title indicates, the work, which will be sung Saturday, is in German.

It is the fourth and last of Wolf’s four great songbook collections and consists of 46 settings of translations from the Italian by Paul Heyse. (Heyse won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1910. His poetry was also set by Brahms.)

Most of “Italienisches Liederbuch” consists of love songs that reflect a variety of moods and feelings.

“They really actually depict life in an Italian village in terms of the battle of the sexes and the Italian boy’s subservience to his mother and how his girlfriend perceives that subservience,” Katz said.

All the songs are short. Most are two minutes and shorter.

“Forty of them are only two pages long in piano score,” Katz said. “So you can work exhaustively on one of them and it only takes 20 minutes, whereas if we were working on a Brahms song, it could take two hours.”

When performed complete, the songs are usually divided between two singers, a soprano and a baritone. At Chapman, however, there will be more than 20 singers participating in the workshop. So the songs will be divided accordingly.

The work also will be partly staged.

“It lends itself to looser stage deportment than do Brahms’ ‘Four Serious Songs,’ especially using more than two performers,” Katz said. “You can construct little mini-dramas. Four or five songs can be a chapter within this book.

“It will not be an opera, but the singers will not just stand in the curved part of the piano.”

To create the mini-dramas, Katz has rearranged the order of the songs.

“You can do them in the order they were published or the order in which they were composed--which is different,” he said. “Or any order you want to for variety and contrast. She insults the boy, he reacts to her. Doing all 46 is only for special occasions.”

Though Wolf, an Austrian, makes great artistic demands on singers and the pianist, the singers do not need an especially wide range.

“There are only two high notes for the women and two for the men in the whole thing,” Katz said.

“Wolf wanted it done in a restricted range so that the text would be totally understood and not heard with modifications or distortions by high or low notes.”

To make the words totally understood, however, the composer’s rhythmic notations must be followed meticulously.

“Wolf doesn’t leave anything to chance,” Katz said. “He agonized over finding the exact rhythms that captured the sense of those words.”

Paying attention to the rhythmic notation goes for the pianist too.

“The piano shifts moods even faster than the singer does,” Katz said. “Just the moment you’ve gotten the mood established, you have to establish the next mood.

“The piano is to this and to all Wolf songs what the orchestra is to Wagner,” he added. “Wolf didn’t like being called the ‘Wagner of the Lied,’ but he really is. Not in terms of being loud or long, but in terms of the psychology of the poem.

“You can take the singer out and you’re left with completely whole music. You can’t even call it accompaniment.”

The participants at Chapman will consist of singers at various professional levels drawn from across the country and Japan.

“I don’t think anything happens in the 46 songs that anyone there will not have experienced,” Katz said. “Begging the person you most love in the world to love you back or thinking that your beloved is better than God himself--we all have such moments.”

The key is to follow the music exactly.

“Wolf gives lots of instructions,” Katz said. “You’re being led by the hand by each measure. It’s wonderful. I tell students there are cooks who go into the kitchen and improvise and create wonderful dinners. Other have to follow recipes.

“These are the most complicated recipes you’ll ever have. Just follow them and it’s guaranteed to work.”

* Wolf’s “Italienisches Liederbuch,” as staged by Martin Katz, will take place Saturday, 7 p.m. in Salmon Hall, Bertea Music Building, Chapman University, 1 University Drive, Orange. Free.

A Songfest Fifth Anniversary Concert, featuring past Songfest alumni, will take place Sunday, 2 p.m. in Memorial Hall on the Chapman campus. Free. (714) 997-6871.

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Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.