PERSPECTIVE — At 79, Frederica von Stade has reached the point in her career when if someone asks her to sing, she just says yes. Her attitude is, “If they think that I can do it, why not?” — adding that she is just honored to still be thought of as a singer, as well as part of the world of music.
It is a world that von Stade has enjoyed over a 50-year career as one of its most cherished artists. She ceased performing full time in 2010 but has never retired. As recently as 2018, she garnered rave reviews as Danny in the world premiere of Lembit Beecher’s Sky on Swings at Opera Philadelphia.
The majority of von Stade’s time these days is devoted to the Young Musicians Choral Orchestra, which provides intensive musical training, academic support, and guidance to talented, low-income students aged 9-18 from the San Francisco Bay area, where she makes her home. She speaks passionately about YMCO’s mission, as well as its success rate. Greater loves are her two granddaughters, who live in the Washington, D.C. area, where she visits as often as possible.
Von Stade, however, is closing a chapter in her career. She has announced that her solo in a recording of Joseph Turrin’s And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair, with Musica Viva NY led by music director Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, will be her last. Her first was in 1975, when she recorded Haydn’s Harmoniemesse with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.
Turrin’s piece is one of three works on Crimson Roses: Contemporary American Choral Music, which will be released by Naxos on Nov. 22. The others are Richard Einhorn’s The Luminous Ground and Gilda Lyons’ a cappella Momotombo. All were commissioned by Musica Viva NY in furtherance of the group and its leader’s commitment to new music — one shared by von Stade throughout her career.
And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair was commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, in 2018. Turrin scored the cantata for soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, chorus, and chamber orchestra to texts by Britain’s War Poets. It includes settings of poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most famous of these poets, as well as John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field.”
The first of the poets Turrin discovered, however, was Vera Brittain, whose poem “Perhaps” contains the phrase that provided both the title for the cantata and the text for the solo von Stade sings on the recording. Brittain spent the war as a nurse, caring for wounded soldiers. At the war’s end, and only in her mid-twenties, Brittain had lost her fiancé, brother, and two close male friends in the conflict.
Brittain penned “Perhaps” in 1916, after the death of her fiancé. She is best known, however, for her memoir, Testament of Youth, published in 1933, which memorialized the stories of the four who were dear to her and mourned the loss of a generation of men whose lives were cut short by what she labeled misplaced notions of valor and loyalty.
Hernandez-Valdez recalls that it was Turrin who suggested von Stade as the ideal soloist for the recording. Although composer and singer had never met, they had communicated over the years. She had also sung his songs in recital, including “Night Song,” which he wrote for her. It is a song, she says, that she “just fell in love with.”
Von Stade was interested in the project but insisted that Turrin hear her sing before committing to her participating. She auditioned for him by recording “Perhaps” in her living room with a pianist, sending it off to him with the plea that he be honest with her. Turrin described the entire process as “incredible,” adding that the recording confirmed his belief that von Stade was the singer to give voice to Brittain’s words and his music on the recording.
There was another, more deeply personal reason for von Stade’s interest in Turrin’s piece, as her own father, U.S. Army Lt. Charles von Stade, was killed near the end of World War II on April 10, 1945. She was born six weeks later. Von Stade says that Brittain’s poem could have been written about her mother, Sara Clucas von Stade, who never fully recovered from the loss of her husband.
Von Stade remembers that as a child she knew and lived with the pain of such a loss as Brittain described so poignantly and beautifully in “Perhaps.” Along with her mother and brother, von Stade visited her father’s grave in the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in Eijsden-Margraten and has returned there with her own family. Von Stade’s colleague and great friend, the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, and her husband have also gone there to pay their respects to her father.
With the passage of time, von Stade said she realized just how much her mother gave to her children in spite of her loss. This final recording is her celebration of her mother and the heroism it took to make her daughter’s childhood, as well as that of her brother, so magical and special.
