Mathilde de Rothschild: The Songs – Charlotte de Rothschild

Baronesses did not, as a rule, publish. They embroidered, they hosted, they occasionally painted watercolors of the Rhine — but getting one’s music engraved and sold by a house like Durand was another matter entirely, one that required either colossal self-confidence or a family willing to absorb the cost of any embarrassment. Mathilde de Rothschild apparently had both, plus something rarer: real talent, modest but genuine, the kind that doesn’t announce itself so much as quietly persist.

Her great-great-granddaughter Charlotte de Rothschild has spent what must have been years chasing this music down. Some of it was printed in Mathilde’s lifetime; some was retrieved from a family attic, the sort of discovery that sounds too good to be true until you hear the results and realize the songs justify the fairy tale. Two discs’ worth. German lieder on the first, French mélodie on the second, and scattered through both a handful of salon piano pieces that Adrian Farmer plays with more affection, I suspect, than the printed page strictly demands.

Start with the German set, since that’s where the strongest material lives. Six songs published in 1876 open the program, and they wear their Schumann on their sleeve without apology — the kind of unabashed influence that would get a professional composer accused of derivativeness but here just sounds like homage, or perhaps simple honesty about where her ear had been trained. Later groups, from 1885 and 1897, tread the same ground: warm diatonic harmony, vocal lines that favor the singer’s comfort over any expressive risk, piano writing that never strays far from arpeggiated accompaniment. Wolf is nowhere in evidence. Neither, really, is Brahms at his most searching. This is music that stopped its clock sometime around 1850 and seemed perfectly content there.

Which is not a complaint, exactly. More an observation about what kind of listening this requires. Three Heine settings anchor the early group, and “Weine nicht,” built on a folk text, is the disc’s quiet triumph: a melody that circles back on itself, the phrase “do not weep” recurring like someone gently repeating themselves at a bedside. Rothschild the singer — herself, remarkably, a descendant of the composer — leans into the repetitions without milking them, and Farmer’s accompaniment thins out at just the right moments to let the tune breathe. “Du bist wie eine Blume,” which follows, is nearly as fine, though Heine’s poem has attracted so many settings (Schumann’s own, inevitably, looms) that Mathilde’s version can’t help sounding like one voice in a crowded room. She holds her own there better than you’d expect.

“O sage nicht” is the real surprise of the set, harmonically more adventurous than anything around it, as though for four minutes she forgot to be careful. The chromatic inflections in the piano writing actually earn the poem’s ache. I wish there were more like it. Elsewhere she can misjudge things badly: “Lamento,” with its dead beloved and its opportunities for real desolation, comes off oddly brisk, almost cheerful, as though she hadn’t quite trusted the poem’s darkness enough to follow it down.

Some biographical context the liner notes rightly make much of: Chopin taught her, briefly, when she was a girl, and visited the Rothschild household often enough that his fingerprints are all over the piano miniatures scattered through both discs. A mazurka here, a nocturne there, wisps of salon music that Farmer dispatches with real charm and not a trace of condescension. They’re slight. They know they’re slight. One imagines them as the background music of a Frankfurt drawing room in the 1860s, which is exactly what they were designed to be, and there’s an honesty in that which I find more endearing than embarrassing.

The French disc is a different animal — mélodies, but not of the Chausson-Chabrier-early-Debussy variety the ear half expects given the chronology. Mathilde was fluent in German, French, and English, cosmopolitan in the specific nineteenth-century-banking-dynasty way that meant homes in three countries and songs to match, but her French settings stay closer to Gounod’s world than to anything that would eventually curdle into impressionism. It’s a reminder that “French song” in this period was not a monolith, whatever the standard narratives imply. There was Fauré moving one direction and any number of amateur and semi-professional composers, mostly forgotten, mostly women, moving another entirely.

Rothschild’s soprano is not a large instrument, and there are moments — a few exposed high entrances, some slightly effortful legato in the more sustained French lines — where you’re aware of a singer working rather than simply singing. But the diction is impeccable in both languages, the phrasing unfailingly musical, and there’s an evident personal stake in this project that no hired specialist, however starrier, could quite replicate. Farmer, for his part, is the ideal collaborator: attentive, unshowy, never once trying to make Mathilde sound like someone she wasn’t.

Nobody is going to mistake this for a lost masterpiece waiting to overturn the canon. But it’s a genuinely worthwhile hour and a half, generously annotated, lovingly assembled, and it does something specific that most reissues and premieres don’t manage: it makes you like the composer as a person, curious about her circumstances, grateful someone bothered to look in the attic. Recommended, with real if measured enthusiasm.