UMS Concert Program, May 3, 4, 5, 6, 1951: The Fifty-eighth Annual May Festival -- Glenn D. Mcgeoch

Concert: FIRST
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan

THE FIFTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL
MAY FESTIVAL
NINETEEN HUNDRED FIFTY-ONE
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Official Program of the Fifty-Eighth Annual
MAY FESTIVAL
May 3y 4, 5, 6, 1951 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan
The University Musical Society,
Published by The University Musical Society, Ann Arbor
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Charles A. Sink, A.B., M.Ed., LL.D.......President
Alexander G. Ruthven, Ph.D., LL.D., Sc.D. . Vice-President
Shirley W. Smith, A.M., LL.D.........Secretary
Oscar A. Eberbach, A.B...........Treasurer
Roscoe O. Bonisteel, LL.B. . . Assistant Secretary-Treasurer
James R. Breakey, Jr., A.B., A.M., LL.B.
Harley A. Haynes, M.D.
Thor Johnson, M.Mus., Mus.D.
E. Blythe Stason, A.B., B.S., J.D.
Henry F. Vaughan, M.S., Dr.P.H.
Merlin Wiley, A.B., LL.B.
ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF
Charles A. Sink, President Mary K. Farkas, Secretary to the President Deanne Smith, Bookkeeper and Cashier Gail W. Rector, Assistant to the President Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor
2 ]
THE FIFTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL MAY FESTIVAL
CONDUCTORS
Eugene Ormandy, Orchestral Conductor Alexander Hilsberg, Associate Orchestral Conductor Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor Marguerite Hood, Youth Chorus Conductor
SOLOISTS
Patrice Munsel.............Soprano
Eileen Farrell.............Soprano
Rise Stevens . . . '.........Mezzo-Soprano
Blanche Thebom............Contralto
Coloman de Pataky............Tenor
Oscar Natzka...............Bass
Tossy Spivakovsky..........¦. . Violinist
William Kapell.............Pianist
Artur Rubinstein........... . . Pianist
ORGANIZATIONS
The Philadelphia Orchestra
The University Choral Union
The Festival Youth Chorus
[3]
Notices and Acknowledgments
The University Musical Society desires to express appreciation to Thor Johnson and Lester McCoy, to the members of the Choral Union and the University Musical Society Orchestra for their effective services; to Miss Marguerite Hood and her able associates for their valuable services in preparation of the Festival Youth Chorus; to the several members of the staff for their efficient assistance; and to the teachers, in the various schools from which the young people have been drawn, for their co-operation. Appreciation is also expressed to the Philadelphia Orchestra, to Eugene Ormandy, its able conductor, and to Alexander Hilsberg, Associate Conductor; as well as to Manager Harl McDonald and his administrative staff.
The Author of the annotations hereby expresses his deep obligation to Louise Goss for her aid in collecting materials; and to Donald Engle, annotator for the Philadelphia Orchestra, for his co-operation.
The Steinway is the official concert piano of the University Musical Society and the Lester Grand piano of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Concerts will begin on time and doors will be closed during numbers.
CONCERT ENDOWMENT FUND
The University Musical Society is a nonprofit corporation devoted to educational purposes. During its existence its concerts have been maintained through the sale of tickets of admission. The prices have been kept as low as possible to cover the expense of production. Obviously, the problem is becoming increasingly difficult. The Society has confidence that there are those who would like to contribute to a Concert Endowment Fund, to ensure continuance of the high quality of the concerts. All contributions will be utilized in maintaining the ideals of the Society by providing the best possible programs.
The United States Department of Internal Revenue has ruled that gifts or bequests made to the Society are deductible for income and estate tax purposes.
[4]
FIRST MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Thursday Evening, May 3, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
ARTUR RUBINSTEIN, Pianist
PROGRAM Toccata and Fugue in D minor..........Bach--Ormandy
Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, for Piano and Orchestra ... . Chopin Maestoso Larghetto Allegro vivace
Artur Rubinstein
intermission
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14a.............Berlioz
Largo; allegro agitato e appassionato assai Waltz: allegro non troppo Adagio
Allegretto non troppo Larghetto; allegro assai; allegro
Columbia Records.
The piano used is a Steinway.
[5]
SECOND MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Friday Evening, May 4, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
EILEEN FARRELL, Soprano COLOMAN DE PATAKY, Tenor
BLANCHE THEBOM, Contralto OSCAR NATZKA, Bass
PROGRAM
Requiem Mass...................Verdi
Composed in memory of Alessandro Manzoni For Soli, Chorus, and Orchestra
Requiem et kyrie..........Chorus and Quartet
Dies irae
Dies irae, dies ilia.............. Chorus
Tuba mirum.............. Bass and Chorus
Liber scriptus proferetur.........Contralto and Chorus
Quid sum, miser!........... . Trio and Chorus
Rex tremendae majestatis........, Quartet and Chorus
Recordare, Jesu pie..........Soprano and Contralto
Ingemisco, tamquam reus ...........Tenor Solo
Confutatis maledictis............. Bass Solo
Lacrymosa dies ilia...........Quartet and Chorus
INTERMISSION
Domine Jesu................Quartet
Sanctus...............Double Chorus
Agnus Dei.........Soprano, Contralto, and Chorus
Lux aeterna..........Contralto, Tenor, and Bass
Libera me.............Soprano and Chorus
The Manzoni Requiem was performed at the closing concert of the First May Festival, May 19, 1894
[6]
THIRD MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Afternoon, May 5, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
ALEXANDER HILSBERG, Conductor
THE FESTIVAL YOUTH CHORUS
MARGUERITE HOOD, Conductor
SOLOIST
TOSSY SPIVAKOVSKY, Violinist
PROGRAM
Overture to Manfred, Op. US............Schumann
American Folk Songs
Edited by Marguerite Hood and orchestrated by Dorothy James
Blow the Man Down Ef I Had a Ribbon Bow
De Boatman Somebody's Knocking at Your Door
Lonesome Valley Adelita
Down the Stream Pat on the Railway
Green Grow the Lilacs When Your Potato's Done
The Bold Soldier Rosa-Becka-Lina The Festival Youth Chorus
?Rapsodie espagnole.................Ravel
Prelude a la nuit Malaguena Habanera Feria
INTERMISSION
Concerto in D minor, Op. 47, for Violin and Orchestra . . . . . Sibelius
Allegro moderato Adagio di molto Allegro, ma non tanto
Tossy Spivakovsky
Columbia Records.
[7]
FOURTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Evening, May 5, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
RISE STEVENS, Mezzo-Soprano
PRO GRAM
?Suite for Strings, from Op. 5.............Corelli
Sarabande
Gigue
Badinerie
"Che faro senza Euridice" from Orfeo ed Euridke.......Gluck
"Voi che sapete" from Le Nozze di Figaro.........Mozart
"II est doux, il est bon" from Herodiade.........Massenet
Rise Stevens
fSymphony No. 1, Op. 10.............Shostakovich
Allegretto; allegro non troppo Allegro
Lento; largo Allegro molto
INTERMISSION
Symphonic Poem, "Vltava" ("The Moldau").......Smetana
Air de Lia from L'Enfant prodigue...........Debussy
Habanera from Carmen................Bizet
Seguidilla from Carmen................Bizet
Miss Stevens Polka and Fugue from Schwanda......... . Weinberger
Columbia Records t Victor Records
[8]
FIFTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Afternoon, May 6, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
WILLIAM KAPELL, Pianist OSCAR NATZKA, Bass
PROGRAM
Overture, "The Hebrides" ("Fingal's Cave"), Op. 26 ... Mendelssohn
?"Summer's Last Will and Testament," A Masque . . . Constant Lambert University Choral Union and Oscar Natzka
INTERMISSION
Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26, for Piano and Orchestra . . Prokofieff Andante, allegro Theme and variations Allegro ma non troppo
William Kapell
American premiere
The piano used is a Steinway
[9]
SIXTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Evening, May 6, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
PATRICE MUNSEL, Soprano
PROGRAM Overture to Euryanthe...........'.....Weber
"Chacun le sait" from La fille du regiment........Donizetti
"0 mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchj......... Puccini
"Mi chiamano Mimi" from La Boheme..........Puccini
Patrice Munsel
Symphony No. 3, Op. 48 ("Three Mysteries").....Paul Creston
The Nativity The Crucifixion The Resurrection
INTERMISSION
Lucy's Arietta from The Telephone.......Gian-Carlo Menotti
Willow Song...............Coleridge-Taylor
Norwegian Echo Song, "Kom Kjyra".......Waldemar Thrane
(as arranged for Jenny Lind)
"The Laughing Song" from Die Fledermaus......Johann Strauss
Miss Munsel
Suite from Der Rosenkavalier..........Richard Strauss
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ANNOTATIONS
by
GLENN D. McGEOCH
FIRST CONCERT
Thursday Evening, May 3
Toccata and Fugue in D minor........J. S. Bach
Transcribed for Orchestra by Eugene Ormandy
Johann Sebastian Bach was born at Eisenach, March 21, 1685; died at Leipzig, July 28, 17S0.
In Johann Sebastian Bach, the musical development of two centuries reached its climax. Coming from a family of distinguished musicians famous in Germany for one hundred and fifty years, he entered into the full heritage of his predecessors and used, with incomparable effect, all of the musical learning of his day.
Born in the very heart of medieval Germany, in the remote little town of Eisenach under the tree-clad summits of the Thuringian Wald, Bach lived in an atmosphere that was charged with poetry, romance, and music. Towering precipitously over the little village stood the stately Wartburg, which once sheltered Luther and where, in one of the chambers, the German Bible came into being. Here also in 1207, the famous Tourney of Song was held, and German minstrelsy flowered. In these surroundings Bach's early youth was spent, and his musical foundation formed under the careful guidance of his father. The subsequent events of his life were less propitious. Orphaned at the age of ten, he pursued his studies by himself, turning to the works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and other predecessors and contemporaries as models. Singing in a church choir to gain free tuition at school, traveling by foot to neighboring towns to hear visiting organists who brought him occasional touches with the outside world, securing menial positions as organist in Arnstadt and Muhlhausen, filled the monotonous years of this great master's youth.
Although he gained some fame as the foremost organist of his day, he was ignored and neglected as a composer. Of all his church music, parts of only one cantata were printed during his life, not because it was esteemed, but because it was written for an annual burgomeister election! References by contemporaries are scanty; they had no insight into the value of his art. Fifty years after his death, his music was practically unknown, most of the manuscripts having been lost or mislaid.
The neglect, discovery, and final triumph of Bach's music are without parallel in the history of music. His triumphant progress from utter obscurity to a place of unrivaled and unprecedented brilliance is a phenomenon, the equal of which has not been recorded. Today his position is extraordinary. Never was there a period when diverse ideals, new methods, confusion of aimsi and styles were so prevalent, yet never has Bach been so universally acknowledged as the supreme master of music.
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Certainly masterpieces were never so naively conceived. Treated with contempt by his associates in Leipzig, where he spent the last years of his life, and restrained by the narrow ideals and numbing pedantry of his superiors, he went on creating a world of beauty, without the slightest thought of posterity. The quiet old cantor, patiently teaching his pupils Latin and music, supervising all the choral and occasional music in the two principal churches of Leipzig, gradually losing his sight until in his last years he was hopelessly blind, never for a moment dreamed of immortality. He continued, year after year, to fulfill his laborious duties, and, in so doing, created the great works that have brought him eternal fame. His ambitions never passed beyond his city, his church, and his family.
Born into a day of small things, he helped the day to expand by giving it creations beyond the scope of its available means of expression. His art is elastic; it grows, deepens, and flows on into the advancing years. The changed media of expression, the increased expressive qualities of the modern pianoforte, organ, and complex orchestra have brought to the world a realization of the great dormant and potential beauties that lay in his work.
Bach lived in Weimar from 1708 to 1717 where he held the position of court organist. Here he wrote his finest organ works, using the current French and Italian styles with great independence. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor dates from the early part of Bach's residence there.
The Toccata (from the Italian word "toccare," to touch), a conventional and familiar form in Bach's day, was a kind of prelude which offered an opportunity to display the "touch" or execution of the performer. As a form it lacked definition, but like a fantasia, it was improvisatory in its style and often very showy in character.
There is something Gothic about Bach's great Toccata and Fugue in D minor. It is a tonal cathedral towering from tremendous masses into tenuous spires; it lifts from the reality of earth to the ephemeralness of clouds. While it is beyond the power of music to represent the world of reality, it can present the fundamental qualities which lie behind reality; and Bach's music conveys, through the subtle medium of ordered sound, the abstract qualities which the Gothic cathedral possesses--solidity, endurance, strength---and above all, aspiration.
Mr. Ormandy's transcription, done with great respect and feeling for the old master, reveals these marvels of hidden beauty. What a magnificent world did the mighty Sebastian evolve from the dry, stiff, pedantic forms of his time! As Wagner put it, "No words can give a conception of its richness, its sublimity, its all-comprehensiveness."
[14]
FIRST CONCERT
Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21
for Piano and Orchestra .........Chopin
Frederic Frangois Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, Poland, February 22, 1810; died in Paris, October 17, 1849.
What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn that mocked the smart, Through Europe to the Aetolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart That thousands counted every groan And Europe made his woes her own
--Arnold
"No, that is nothing like me, I am far unhappier than that," cried Byron when he beheld in Rome the bust made of him by the sculptor, Thorwaldsen. Goethe described Byron in the fine phrase, "His being consists in rich despair," and in fact, fame, love, wealth, and beauty left him sick with satiety--a despiser of the world. The soul-life of the age bore the stamp of this man for whom "sorrow was knowledge"; morbidity was at the core of his being, he was in truth the eponymous hero of an epoch.
The age was literally infected by Byronism. Under one form or another, the wave of influence emanating from Byron was mingled with the current of French and German Romanticism. Chateaubriand in France, who gave such fluent and beautiful expression to the emotional ideas originated by Rousseau, created the type of the esprit romanesque in his Rene. At odds with himself and the world, sensitive and disillusioned, full of yearning for love and faith but without the strength for either, he felt nothing but bitter emptiness. "All," says Rene, "preaches to one of dissolution--everything wearies me, painfully I drag my boredom about with me and so my whole life is a yawn." Lamartine, in his Meditations poetiquc,] carried emotionalism to the extremes of poetic sensibility; De Musset sang in his self-conscious poetry the pain of a wounded heart; lyricism had embraced egoism and eccentricity.
In the writing of such artists, literature tended to become decadent, a "splendid greeny-gold growth, glittering and seductive, but filled with intoxicating saps that corrode." Byron's soul was incarnate in his Manfred, who reflected an increasing egoism in the expression of melancholy.t Goethe's Werther, too, had the romantic desire to feel and suffer uniquely from an unhappiness caused by hidden, indefinable longing. This mixture of egoism and sensibility is found as basic stuff in the heroes of the literature of the time. Their philosophy was that of another spokesman of their age, Leopardi, who reflected that "sorrow and ennui is our being and dung the earth--nothing more; where-ever one looks, no meaning, no fruit." Slavonic literature too, stated the "superfluous" theme. Pushkin, the "Russian Byron," in his Eugen Oniegin and Lermantov in The Hero of Our Time
Chopin wrote his two concertos when he was twenty years of age. The F minor, although composed first, was published after the Concerto in E minor, Op. 11.
f The Meditations poctiquc became the inspiration for Liszt's Les Preludes in 1848. t See notes on Schumann's Overture to Manfred, pp. 30-31.
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM
created dramatic young men, who wrapped themselves in Byron's dark mantle, and stalked from one anguish to another. This universal and self-cultivated melancholy had the whole world in its grip. "It was," said Immerman, "as though humanity, tossed about in its little bark on an overwhelming ocean, is suffering from a moral sea-sickness of which the outcome is hardly to be seen." From an over-fertilized emotional soil grew a decadent school of art. Chopin's supersensitive soul cried out its longing in his languorous nocturnes, Berlioz in his "Symphonie fantastique" pictured the narcotic dreams of a young artist who, because of an unrequited love, had attempted suicide by taking opium. Wagner, expressing in his music an imperious force and merciless drive, nevertheless allowed his desire-sick soul to long for death as the only release from the world. Heine characterized this feeling in Germany. "People," he said, "practiced renunciation and modesty, bowed before the invisible, snatched at shadow kisses and blue-flowered scents." This unnatural and unhealthy mental attitude led to a great deal of self-contemplation and introspection which tended to substitute futile or morbid imaginings for solid realities of life. The over-introspective and supersensitive artist cuts himself off from a larger arc of experience and is prone to exaggerate the importance of the more intimate sentiments, and when, as in the nineteenth century, such a tendency is wide-spread, a whole school may become febrile and erotic.
The remainder of tonight's program is devoted to two composers who have become, like Byron in literature, eponymous artists, representing opposite phases of Romanticism in music. In Hector Berlioz, the objective, the dramatic, the excessive aspects of early Romanticism were perfectly reflected; in Frederic Chopin, all that was subjective and sensitive found a lyrical voice. Both artists, however, grew from the same artistic soil; both were products of what the French called le disenchantement de la vie; both suffered from the malady of their century-indeterminate longing and unquenchable desire--le vague des passions which became such a strong element in the formation of French Romantic thought.
Chopin shared little in the actual activities of the Romantic movement, however. Being a creature of superfine sensibilities, he never identified himself with the radical element or took an active part in the progressive life of his time. His art therefore is not marked by the usual romantic excesses; he never submitted, as did Berlioz, to exaggerated enthusiasms or emotional outbursts. In his personal reserve and artistic restraint, he remained a classicist, at least in spirit. Throughout his career he stayed aloof from the whole trend toward programmatic and descriptive music, adamantly resisting the infiltration of drama and "story painting" into music. He ever retained his dignity as an absolute and true musician.
He did share, however, in that paradox of personality that gives such color and interest to the typical Romantic figure. Artistically and emotionally he was of course a true Romanticist, creating music with the soul of a sentitive poet; yet his music, for all its twilight glamor, reveals within the small framework he chose, an instinctive sense of form, a coherence of structure which, although fluent,
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FIRST CONCERT
suggests a conscious discipline of mind. He remained an intense patriot and nationalist who infused into his music, with great independence, the melodic and rhythmic idioms of his native land, singing into the ears and heart of Europe the lament of his ravished Poland. Yet he spent most of his creative life in Paris, a pampered celebrity. He became the voice of a nation, but remained always an individualist. Sensitive and introspective by nature, with a decided aversion for the public, he became ultimately a composer for the multitudes, through a music that transcended all national boundaries in the universality of its appeal. An extremely limited composer, not only in the quantity of his output, but in the variety of his media--having written exclusively for the piano--he created with inexhaustible variety and unlimited imagination and resourcefulness, the most individual style ever evolved for this instrument. Paradoxically again, in creating with rigorous self-discipline, perhaps the most self-conscious and artful music ever conceived, he appears before the world, through the directness and spontaneity of his expression, the most artless of artisans, making an analysis of his music the most futile of intellectual exercises.
Chopin chose not to cast his art in the epic or sublime mold; he sought his inspiration not in a Byron or in the rugged individualistic style of the revolutionary Beethoven, as did Berlioz, but in the lyricism of De Musset and Lamar-tine and the cantabile style of the Italian composers, particularly Bellini, whose admirer and intimate friend he was. He possessed a profound respect for, and an intimate knowledge of, the art of the singer and the great vocal tradition of his day. Avoiding all of the Italian operatic vulgarities, he distilled from the style its singing essence, and this became the very core of his art. He created, with Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, an era of lyricism in music that became the highest accomplishment of the musical Romantic movement, and an exact parallel of what was achieved in literature by such poets as Lamartine, Heine, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley.
In writing of the sonatas and concertos, Liszt regretted that Chopin felt compelled to adhere to preconceived classical forms:
His beauties were only manifested fully in entire freedom. We believe he offered violence to the character of his genius whenever he sought to subject it to rules, to classifications, to regulations not his own, and which he could not force into harmony with the exactions of his own mind. He was one of those original beings, whose graces are only fully displayed when they have cut themselves adrift from all bondage, and float on at their own wild will, swayed only by the ever undulating impulses of their own mobile natures. He could not retain, within the square of an angular and rigid mould, that floating and indeterminate contour which so fascinates us, in his graceful conceptions. He could not introduce in! its unyielding lines that shadowy and sketchy indecision, which, disguising the skeleton, the whole frame-work of form, drapes it in the mist of floating vapors, such as surround the white-bosomed maids of Ossian, when they permit mortals to catch some vague, yet lovely outline, from their home in the changing, drifting, blinding clouds.
In the first movement (maestoso, F minor 44), the Exposition, according to "classic" procedure, is presented first in the orchestra, and then in the solo in Franz Liszt, Life of Chopin. Trans, by Martha W. Cook (2d. rev. ed.; New York: F. W. Christern, 1863).
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM
strument. The principal subject heard in the strings is followed by the second theme (A-flat major) first in the oboe, and repeated in the strings. After a few introductory measures, the piano enters abruptly with the first subject and extends it considerably. A brilliant transitional passage leads to the reappearance of the second subject (again in A-flat major) after which the piano presents new material (C minor). A short orchestral tutti section ushers in the Development section which deals mainly with the first four notes of the first theme and after another orchestral tutti the Recapitulation brings back the first theme in the piano, considerably condensed. The second subject, beginning in A-flat major modulates soon to F minor and, after considerable passage work, the movement closes on an orchestral tutti.
In the second movement (larghetto, A-flat major, 44) the delicately beautiful theme is announced, and then embellished in the piano. A middle section in declamatory style, played by the piano with string support, is followed by a return of the first theme in a more florid form. A short coda ends the movement. Chopin's inspiration for this movement was his love for a beautiful young singer, Constantia Gladkowska. In a letter to a friend in 1829, he wrote "while my thoughts were with her, I composed the adagio [actually a larghetto] of my concerto." No doubt it was her voice he loved, for he dedicated the concerto to another singer, Countess Patocka. Of this movement Liszt wrote: "Passages of surprising grandeur may be found in the adagio of the Second Concerto .... the accessory designs are in his best manner, while the principal phrase is of an admirable breadth. It alternates with a Recitative, which assumes a minor key, and which seems to be its antistrophe. The whole of the piece is of a perfection almost ideal; its expression, now radiant with light, now full of tender pathos."
In the third movement (allegro vivace, F minor, 34) the piano announces the first theme and returns to it after an orchestral section, in a more imposing style. After a descending sequence, it enters a brilliant triplet figure passage. The strings sound briefly the original theme, abruptly interrupted by the return of the piano, supported quietly by strings, with the second theme (A-flat major). Both piano and orchestra treat this subject. A horn solo introduces the final section which employs triplet figures in the piano.
Niecks describes "its graceful, gyrating, dance-like motions, its sprightliness and frolicsomeness .... the exquisite ease and grace, the subtle spirit that breathes through this movement defy description, and, more, defy the attempts of most performers to reproduce the original." t
Ibid., p. 17.
t Frederick Niecks, Fridirick Chopin as a Man and Musician (London: Novello, 1902), 2 vols.
[18]
FIRST CONCERT Symphonie fantastique...........Berlioz
Hector Berlioz was born in Cote-Saint-Andre, France, December 11, 1803; died in Paris, March 8, 1869.
And if bereft of speech, man bears his pain, A god gave me the gift to tell my sorrow.
--Tasso
Among the Romanticists in art, music, literature, and politics, Hector Berlioz was the most dramatic manifestation of the spirit of the times--the one who most theatrically symbolized the new movement of revolt, not only in his native France, but in all of Europe.
Berlioz went to Paris in 1821, a youth of eighteen, and came under the hypnotic spell of Chateaubriand's Rene, and the morbid self-revealing poetry of De Musset. He responded with shocked awareness to the turbulent painting of Gericault and Delacroix, and heard with excitement the clarion call of Victor Hugo for artistic liberation. Stimulated by the excesses of these artists, his mind became volcanic. So intimately identified was his personality and art with the radically progressive spirit of the new literary and social upheaval, that like Byron, he personified the whole movement. Of each it can be said that he had but one subject--himself. Possessing a personality as expansive and powerful as that of Byron, Berlioz' aesthetic impulses were exposed with the same force and bombast; the result was a similar spectacular and exhibitionistic art. Like Tchaikovsky and other "heroes of the age" he proudly displayed, for all to share, his unassuageable grief and the tragedies and frustrations of his own life. His melancholy moods, his sudden revulsions of feeling, his morbid depressions, his neurotic fears and his ferocity of imagination all picture him in the framework of his period. In this "Byron of music," all the complexities of the Romantic movement are mirrored. Although he, too, like De Musset and Chopin, occasionally revealed the sensitive, introspective, poetic side of a suffering soul, his real creative nature manifested itself, with a burst of daemonic originality, in expressions of turbulent passion. He was to the music of his time what his contemporaries Gericault and Delacroix were to painting. In terms of this art, he filled his scores with riotous color, imposing masses, and rich chiaroscuro. As has been said of Delacroix' brush, Berlioz composed with a "drunken" pen. Like the writings of Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas, his music became a "glowing tapestry of bewitching color schemes." In his scores, bold and triumphant in their will to revolt, he displayed an immense creative power beside which the extravagances of many of the other artists of his period seemed reticent and inarticulate. His penchant for the abnormal, illogical, grim, and grotesque forced music with such suddenness into new channels of expression that he alone became the founder of modern program music and the source of an entirely new art of orchestration. Here his genius found the greatest scope. Relying upon his own empirical method of composition, he constantly revealed such an unerring sense of color values, that he became, and remains today, a model for other composers to seriously contemplate.
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM
The "Symphonie fantastique" was written in 1830 when Berlioz was twenty-six years of age. By this year, Romantic extravagance was at its peak. The influence of Byron and E. T. A. Hoffman had stimulated an insatiable appetite for the fantastic, weird, sensational, and supernatural. The Romantic impetus in music had already broken forth with dramatic suddenness in 1828 with the production of xuber's revolutionary opera La Musette de Portici from which social defiance and political insurrection flared. In 1829, the year of Chopin's F-minor Concerto, Rossini's Gitillaiime Tell reinforced the theme of rebellion against tyranny and Victor Hugo's announced revolt in the theater. His drama Hernani had its famous premiere at which Theophile Gautier appeared in a red silk waistcoat as a symbol of his hatred and defiance of artistic conventions and an affirmation of his political radicalism. In the preface of his published play, Hugo had written: "Romanticism is in poetry what Liberalism is in the State." The "Symphonie fantastique," coming in this fateful year of the July Revolution, announced to the world that "Liberalism" had entered the concert hall as well as the opera house and the theater. French music from 1828 to 1830 had taken its place in the front ranks of the battle for Hugo's liberation of the arts.
The "Symphonie fantastique" came also from the period of Berlioz's frenzied enthusiasm for the work of von Weber, Beethoven, Goethe (Faust), and Shakespeare. But more significantly, it was the direct product of a desperate love affair for an Irish actress, Henriette Smithson, the hectic details of which we shall be spared. During a period of passion and frustration, in which he "was seared by the flame of unrequited love" and depressed by Miss Smithson's "genius for lacerating the human soul," Berlioz composed his autobiographic symphony.
The following is his program for the five movements of the work:
A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself in a fit of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments, and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images. The beloved woman herself has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea, which he finds and hears everywhere.!
I. Reveries, Passions. First he recalls that weariness of the soul, those indefinable passions, the causeless joys which he experiences before meeting her whom he adores; then the volcanic love with which she at once inspired him, his delirious suffering, his furious jealousy, his return to loving tenderness, and his religious consolation.
II. A Ball. He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant festival.
III. Scene in the Fields. One summer evening in the country he hears two shepherds playing a Tanz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue.J This pastoral duet, the scene around him, the light rustling of the trees gently swayed by the breeze, some hopes he has recently con The "Symphonie fantastique" is part of a more extended work called Episode in the Life of an Artist. The second part, a lyrical drama, entitled "Lelio, or the Return to Life" is no longer performed.
t The "fixed idea" melody representing the Beloved One occurs in various forms in each movement.
X The Tanz-des-vaches is a type of melody played by Swiss herdsmen on long Alpine homs to call their cattle together.
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ceived, all combine to restore an unwonted calm to his heart and to impart a more cheerful coloring to his thoughts. But she appears once more, his heart stops beating, he is agitated with painful presentiments. What if she were to betray him! One of the shepherds resumes his artless melody, the other no longer answers him. The sun sets. . . . the sound of distant thunder .... solitude .... silence.
IV. March to the Scaffold. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned to death and led to execution. The procession advances to the sound of a march, now brilliant and solemn, in which the dull thud of heavy footsteps gives place to noisy outbursts. At the end the fixed idea, like a last thought of love, appears for a moment, to be silenced by the fatal axe.
V. Dream of a Witches' Sabbath. He sees himself at the witches' Sabbath, in the midst of a frightful crowd of ghosts, magicians and monsters of all sorts, who have assembled for his burial. He hears strange noises, groans, shrieks of laughter, distant cries to which others seem to reply. The melody of the Beloved One again reappears, but it has lost its noble and timid character; it has become an ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance tune; it is she who comes to the witches' Sabbath . . . Howlings of joy at her arrival . . . She takes part in the diabolical orgy . . . The funeral knell, burlesque of the Dies irae. Dance of the witches. The dance and the Dies irae combined.
Summarizing the Symphony as a milestone in the history of orchestration, the eminent critic and program annotator, Alfred Frankenstein writes:
It is the first symphony in the literature, or at least the first that has survived, to use the cornet, the harp, the English horn, the E-flat clarinet, the tuba, and bells; it is the first to employ kettledrums in harmony, necessitating three and four players, the first to subdivide the strings into more than five parts, the first to demand that the violinists use the wooden backs of their bows instead of the hair, the first to call for hard and soft kettledrum sticks, for a roll on a bass drum, and for the striking of a suspended cymbal with a stick. These special instruments and effects are used mainly for particular descriptive purposes--the harps for the brilliance of the ball scene, the English horn for the pastoral duet, the E-flat clarinet, tuba, and bells for the grotesquerie of the witches' sabbath, the drums in harmony for the distant thunder, and so on. Most, if not all, of these instruments and devices had previously been used in the opera orchestra, but Berlioz was the first to call for them in the symphony. Here, in other words, Berlioz begins the process of turning the orchestra into a colossal sound-effects machine which culminated in the works of Richard Strauss and early Stravinsky, and has since subsided. But the things pointed out in this paragraph are the mere obvious externals of the Berlioz orchestration, the revolutionary character of which goes far deeper than simply employing al few instruments Beethoven did not use.
?Philadelphia Program Book, October 20, 1950-51, p. 68.
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Friday Evening, May 4 Requiem Mass...............Verdi
Composed in memory of Alessandro Manzoni
(Fortunio) Giuseppe (Francesco) Verdi was born in Lc Roncole, October 10, 1813; died in Milan, January 27, 1901.
The year 1813 was of tremendous importance in the political world, but no less so in the domain of music, for it brought to earth two epoch-making geniuses, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. In these two masters, the greatest artistic forces of the entire nineteenth century climaxed. In them, the German and Italian opera set up models that seemed to exhaust all the conceivable possibilities of the two cultures. Representing two great musical nations, influenced alike by strong national tendencies, they both assumed the same novel and significant artistic attitude. Wagner, the German, full of the Teutonic spirit, revolutionized the musico-dramatic art; Verdi, the Italian, no less national in spirit, developed, without losing either his individuality or nationality, a style in which the spirit that animated his German contemporary came to be a guiding principle.
Verdi was not a man of culture like Wagner. Born a peasant, he remained rooted to the soil and his art reflects a primitive quality. He created music astonishingly frank and fierce for his time, turning the oversophisticated style of Donizetti and Bellini into passionate utterance. His genius carried him from majestic dignity and impressive elegance to the depths of triviality and vulgarity; but it always reflected great resources of imagination and amazing vitality. His vitality in fact is exceptional among composers. So enduring and resourceful was it that his greatest and most elaborate works were produced after he was fifty-seven years of age, and his last opera Falstaff (by many considered his masterpiece) was written when he was eighty. He was sixty-one when he wrote the Requiem, and in it there is no hint of any diminution of his creative powers. The consistent and continuous growth of his style over sixty years of his life displays an incomparable capacity for artistic development and proves a triumphant vitality and thrilling fortitude of spirit. These he had in abundance, and they sustained him through a life of sadness and misfortune. As the child of a poor innkeeper, he had limited opportunities for a musical education. He spent his early youth in deep suffering occasioned by an unusually sensitive nature. Misfortune marked him at the very threshold of his career, and he was constantly thwarted and wounded in his deepest affections. He was refused admittance to the conservatory at Milan because he showed no special aptitude for music! Married at twenty-three years of age, he lost his wife and two children within three months of one another, only four years after his marriage. In the last years,
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he experienced the bitter loneliness of age. But misfortunes mellowed rather than hardened him. His magnanimity, his many charitable acts, the broad humanity of his art endeared him to his people, who idolized him both as a man and as an artist. Throughout his life and his works, there ran a virility and verve, a nobility and valor that challenges the greatest admiration. At his death D'Annunzio wrote an ecstatic ode which expressed what Verdi meant to the people of Italy and of the world:
He nurtured us, as Nature's hand,
The free, circumambient universe
Of air, sustains mankind.
His life of beauty and manly strength alone
Swept high above us like the singing seas of heaven.
He found the song In the very breath of the suffering throng.
Let mourning and hope echo forth:
He loved and wept for all men,
The Requiem reveals Verdi at the height of his genius for it evidences the maturity of artistic judgment that comes only with years. The whole work is impressively majestic in its broad melodic sweep. To his mastery of vocal resources, so characteristic of Italian composers, must be added a control of the orchestra which sets him apart from his countrymen. His style here approaches more closely that of the masters of German music. The vivid and fresh devices of rhythm and harmony, energized by an outstanding control of polyphony, and an attention directed to the orchestra, as something more than a mere support for the voice (unusual in an Italian), gives his music a Wagnerian richness and opulence. There is, however, not the slightest indication of any Wagnerian technique or influence.
A careful study of his treatment of the fugue will clearly reveal that Verdi possessed distinguished power as a contrapuntist. The fact that his themes are so very melodious has a tendency to draw one's attention away from the constructive skill revealed in this fugue. The Requiem approaches the dignity of Bach and the impressive majesty of Wagner, but it is still genuinely Italian in spirit. Every page reveals the imprint of genius, and genius knows no national boundaries.
The production of the work at Milan, May 22, 1874, was the signal for a controversy which has persisted to this day. The Germans, with Bach and Handel in mind, hear in this work an unfortunate theatricalism and an overwrought sentimentality. They object to an operatic style being carried over into a religious work. And in England also, the memories of Handel and Mendelssohn and the awareness of Elgar are still conditioning factors in a judgment of what a religious work should be. The French and Italians, especially the latter, find in its idioms a perfect expression of religious emotion. Justice requires that the Requiem be criticized with a realization of the radical differences in religious feeling and expression between peoples of the Latin and Teutonic stocks.
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Verdi, like Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and Elgar, used the idioms of his day and generation; consequently his appeal is natural and justified. No one who knows the personality of Verdi could accuse him of a lack of sincerity or of genuine religious conviction.
It was Hanslick who answered certain German criticism of the Verdi Requiem as being too passionate, too sensuous, too violent for religious feeling, by declaring that Verdi's music simply was based on the emotional characteristics of his countrymen. "Certainly the Italian has a right," wrote Hanslick, "to ask if he may not address his God in the Italian language."
The following contemporary estimation of the Requiem is taken from an article written by Lawrence Gilman for the New York Herald-Tribune:
Fifty-seven years ago the Manzoni Requiem with its melodic luxuriance, its dramatic intensity, its vehement utterances of terror, grief, supplication, was a bitter pill for many academic musicians to swallow. They found it lacking in dignity, in austerity; music fit "for the stage and not for the sanctuary."
But why should not a musical setting of the Requiem Mass be dramatic, lurid--even theatrical, if you will Are not the words themselves dramatic, lurid, theatrical enough Are the basic conceptions that underlie the text: the thoughts, visions, prayers of the believer--are these reserved and sober and austere The thought of the Judgment Day when the graves shall give up their dead, when the heavens shall be rolled together like a scroll and the world become ashes; the thought of the trumpets of the Resurrection; the thought of the horror of the everlasting darkness, of the fiery lake, of the agonies of damnation; the thought of universal lamentation, supplication, dread. . . . What music could be too dramatic, lurid, vehement, theatrical, to come within speaking distance of such appalling conceptions
And what of death and lamentation and dread and anguished supplication as they persist in the experience of men--are these things undramatic, calling for reticent dignity of speech
Verdi, the Latin, the Southerner, with his bare nerves and quick responsiveness, has naturally reacted to the implications of his subject with the sensibility, the uninhibited emotions, of his race and his type. And thus his setting of the Requiem has validity and distinction. Who would have wished from him an imitation of Northern reticence and gravity
The music has extraordinary and multiple virtues--a mysticism essentially Latin; compassionate tenderness; purity of feeling; and, above all, an overwhelming dramatic power. . . . Who can forget the; hushed and overwhelming close which sets the crown of beauty and affectingness upon the work: that wonderful decresendo, with its prayer for security and holy rest and peace at last--as if the music, breathless with awe, remembered that ancient promise of living fountains of waters, and the end of tears, and the city that needed not the sun.
The importance of Verdi's Requiem cannot be minimized; it ranks among the great scores extant of its kind.
Shortly after Rossini's death (November 13, 1868), Verdi suggested that Italian composers should unite in writing a worthy requiem as a tribute to the memory of the "Swan of Pesaro." It was to be performed only at the cathedral of Bologne every hundredth year, on the centenary of Rossini's death--a curious proposition to submit to Italian composers who lived for the applause of their countrymen. The only bond of unity was a fixed succession of tonalities determined in advance--possibly by Verdi who took the final number "Libera me."
The attempt was an absolute failure. The power and beauty of Verdi's con[24]
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tribution, however, so impressed his friends that, at the death of the great writer Alessandro Manzoni, he composed an entire requiem in his memory. The inception and fulfillment of his idea can be traced in the following excepts taken from his letters: 1873. To Clarina Maffei:
I am deeply moved by what you say of Manzoni--the description you gave me moved me to tears. Yes, to tears--for hardened as I am to the ugliness of this world, I have a little heart left, and I still weep. Don't tell anyone . . . but I sometimes weep. . . . 1873. To Giulio Rjccordi--May 23:
I am profoundly grieved at the death of our Great One. But I shall not come to Milan tomorrow. I could not bear to attend his funeral. However, I shall come soon, to visit the grave, alone, unseen and perhaps (after more reflection, and after I have taken stock of my strength) to propose a way to honor his memory. 1873. To Clarina Maffei--May 29:
I was not at the funeral, but there were probably few people more saddened this morning, more deeply moved than I, though I was far away. Now it is all over. And with him ends the purest, holiest, highest of our glories. 1873. To the Mayor of Milan--June 9:
I deserve absolutely no thanks (neither from you nor from the city authorities) for my offer to write a Requiem Mass for the anniversary of our Manzoni. It was simpry an impulse, or better, a heart-felt need that impelled me to honor, to the best of my powers, a man whom I value so much as a writer and honored as a man and as a model of virtue and patriotism. When the work on the music is far enough along, I shall not fail to inform you what elements are necessary to make the performance worthy of our fatherland and of a man whose loss we all lament.!
An analysis of the seven movements of The Requiem follows, with the translation of the text version used by Verdi:
I. REQUIEM ET KYRIE
The Introduction (A minor) to the Requiem et kyrie ("Grant them rest") gives us a quiet and mournful theme, developed entirely by the strings. In this part of the work the chorus is purely an accompaniment to the melody played by the violins, but at the words Tedecet hymnus (There shall be singing), it is supreme. After this division (F major, sung a cappella), the introductory theme reappears. At its conclusion the solo parts come into prominence (A major), and the rest of the number is a finely conceived and elaborately executed eight-voiced setting :
of the words, Kyrie eleison.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis;
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam, ad te oranis caro veniet.
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison.
Eternal rest give to them, 0 Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.
A hymn, O God, becometh Thee in Sion; and a vow shall be paid to Thee in Jerusalem:
O Lord, hear my prayer; all flesh shall come to Thee; Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them. Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us.
It is difficult to overestimate the position of Alessandro Manzoni in the European literature of the period. His novel Promcssi sposi ("The Promised Bride") made him Italy's outstanding literary figure and secured for him an international reputation.
t Verdi--The Man in His Letters, ed. Franz Werfel and Paul Stefan, trans. Edward Downes (New York: L. B. Fischer Publishing Co., 1941).
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM
II. DIES IRAE
The Dies irae ("Day of Anger") is divided into nine parts, for solo, chorus, and orchestra. The first of these divisions is a very dramatic setting of the text. It is in the key of G minor and introduces vocal and orchestral effects which are startling in their intensity. The second division, Tuba mirutn ("Hark! the trumpet") (A-flat minor) is preceded by a dramatic treatment of the orchestra, in which the trumpet calls in the orchestra are answered in the distance--until a magnificent climax is reached by the ff chords for the full brass, leading into a fine unison passage for male voice, accompanied by the full orchestra. In quick succession follows No. 3, solos for bass and mezzo soprano. The words Mors stupebit ("Death with wonder is enchained") and Liber scriptus projeretur ("Now the record shall be cited") involve a change of treatment. An abridged version of the first division follows, to be succeeded in turn by a beautiful trio for tenor, mezzo, and bass. The next division, Rex tremendae majestatis ("King of Glory"), is written for solo and chorus. The solo parts to the text, Salve me, fons pietatis ("Save me with mercy flowing"), introduce a melody entirely distinct from that of the chorus, while the ingenious contrasts of the two leading up to the final blending of both in the Salve me are intensely interesting and effective.
The sixth number, a duet for soprano and mezzo, is thoroughly Italian in spirit, is beautifully written for the voices, and carries out most perfectly the spirit of the word, Recordare ("Ah! remember"). The tenor and bass solos which now follow, the Ingemisco ("Sadly groaning") and Conjutatis in the opinion of many critics, contain the finest music in the whole work. Be this as it may, this part is very arresting, and to the musician presents technical points of importance. The Dies irae, as a whole, ends with the Lacrymosa ("AhI what weeping") a tender setting of these words. A wonderful cresendo on the word Amen is to be noted.
Dies irae, dies ilia, Solvet saeclum in favilla, Teste David cum Sibylla. Quantus tremor est futurus, Quando Judex est venturus. Cuncta stricte discussurus! Tuba mirum spargens sonum, Per sepulchra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum. Mors stupebit et natura, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti responsura. Liber scriptus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, Unde mundus judicetur. Judex ergo cum sedebit, Quidquid latet, apparebit, Nil inultum remanebit. Quid sum, miser; tune dicturus, Quem patronum rogaturus,
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Dreaded day, that day of ire, when the world shall melt in fire, told by Sibyl and David's lyre. Fright men's hearts shall rudely shift, as the Judge through gleaming rift comes each soul to closely sift.
Then the trumpet's shrill refrain, piercing tombs by hill and plain, Souls to judgment shall arraign.
Death and nature stand aghast, as the bodies rising fast, hie to hear the sentence passed.
Then before Him shall be placed that whereupon the verdict's based, book wherein each deed is traced. When the Judge His seat shall gain, all that's hidden shall be plain, nothing shall unjudged remain.
Dreaded day, that day of ire, when the world shall melt in fire, told by Sibyl and David's lyre.
Wretched man, what can I plead, whom
SECOND CONCERT
Cum vix Justus sit securus Rex tremendae majestatis! Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salve me, fons pietatis! Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sum causa tuae viae; Ne me perdas ilia die. Quarens me, sedisti lassus; Redemisti crucem passus; Tantus labor non sit cassus. Juste Judex ultionis, Donum fac remissionis Ante Diem rationis. Ingemisco tanquam reus, Culpa rubet vultus meus: Supplicanti parce Deus. Qui Mariam absolvisti, Et latronem exaudisti, Mihi quoque spem dedisti. Preces meae non sunt dignae, Sed tu bonus fac benigne, Ne perenni cremer igne. Inter oves locum praesta, Et ab hoedis me sequestra, Statuens in parte dextra. Confutatis maledictis, Flammis acribus abdictis, Voca me cum benedictis. Oro supplex et acclinis. Cor contritum quasi cinis, Gere curam mei finis. Lacrymosa dies ilia! Qua resurget ex favilla Judicantus homo reus. Huic ergo parce Deus. Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis requiem. Amen.
to ask to intercede, when the just much mercy need
Thou, O awe-inspiring Lord, saving e'en when unimplored, save me, mercy's fount adored.
Ah! Sweet Jesus, mindful be, that Thou cam'st on earth for me, cast me not this day from Thee.
Seeking me Thy strength was spent, ransoming Thy limbs were rent, is this toil to no intent
Thou, awarding pains, condign, Mercy's ear to be incline, ere the reckoning Thou assign.
I, felon-like, my lot bewail, suffused cheeks my shame unveil: God! 0 let my prayers prevail.
Mary's soul Thou madest white, didst to heaven the thief invite; hope in me these now excite.
Prayers o' mine in vain ascend: Thou art good and wilt forefend in quenchless fire my life to end.
When the cursed by shame opprest enter flames at Thy behest, call me then to join the blest.
Place amid Thy sheep accord, keep me from the tainted horde, set me in Thy sight, 0 Lord.
Prostrate, suppliant, now no more, unre-penting, as of yore, save me, dying, I implore.
Dreaded day, that day of ire, when the world shall melt in fire, told by Sibyl and David's lyre.
Mournful day! that day of sighs, when from dust shall man arise, stained with guilt his doom to know.
Mercy, Lord, on him bestow. Jesus kind! Thy souls release, lead them thence to realms of peace. Amen.
III. DOMINE JESU CHRISTE
As a contrast in form and style to the varied and extended Dies irae, the composer treats the next division of the mass, Domine Jesu Christe, in the manner of a quartet, each of the four solo voices by its unique timbre contributing to the simple beauty of the melodic and harmonic conception.
Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poems inferni et de profundo lacu: libera eas de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas tartarus,
O Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell and from the deep pit;
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM
necadant in obscurum. Sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam. Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus.
Hostias et preces, Domine, laudis offeri-mus, tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie naemoriam facimus; faceas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam; faceas, Domine, faceas de morte.
Deliver them from the lion's mouth, that hell engulf them not, nor they fall into darkness;
But that Michael, the holy standard-bearer, bring them into the holy light.
Which Thou once didst promise to Abraham and his seed.
We offer Thee, O Lord, sacrifices and prayers of praise; do Thou accept them for those souls whom we this day commemorate; grant them, O Lord, to pass from death to the life which Thou once didst promise to Abraham and his seed.
Absolve, O Lord, the souls of all the faithful departed from every bond of sin. And by the help of Thy grace let them be found worthy to escape the sentence of vengeance. And to enjoy the full beatitude of the light eternal.
IV. SANCTUS ET BENEDICTUS
The Sanctus is an exalted inspiration of genius. With its glorious double fugue, its triumphal antiphonal effects at the close leading into a soul-uplifting climax, it would, of itself, make the reputation of a lesser composer.
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Domine Deus Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts.
Sabaoth. Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloriae The heavens and the earth are full of Thy
tuae. Osanna in excelsis. glory. Hosanna in the highest.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Blessed is He Who cometh in the name of
Osanna in excelsis. the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
V. AGNUS DEI
If the Sanctus is sublime in its grandeur, no less so in its pathos is the Agnus Dei ("Lamb of God") written for solo voices (soprano and contralto) and chorus. A simple melody with three different settings is the basis of this important number, and in originality and effectiveness it is not at all inferior to the inspired Sanctus which precedes it.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem sempi-ternam.
Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world: give unto them rest. Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world: give unto them eternal rest.
VI. LUX AETERNA
The Lux aeterna ("Light eternal") calls for no extended notice. It is written for three solo voices in the style which we find in Verdi's later works.
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum Sanctis tuis in aeternam, quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
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May light eternal shine upon them O Lord, with Thy saints forever, for Thou art kind.
Grant them everlasting rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them, with Thy saints.
SECONDCONCERT
VII. LIBERA ME DOMINE
The closing number, Liber a me, begins with a recitative (soprano), Liber a me, Domine, de morte aeterna ("Lord, deliver my soul from eternal death"), in-terupted by the chorus, which chants these words, and, introducing a fugue of stupendous difficulty, gives us a repetition of the beautiful introduction to the whole work. There follows a repetition of the recitative, while the chorus holds out a sustained chord ppp. In the repetition of the introduction to the chorus just alluded to, the solo voice (soprano) takes the melody originally played by the violins, with a cappella chorus accompaniment. The ending of the work is very dramatic. Everything seems to be hushed while the awful significance of the words is impressed upon the mind with irresistible force.
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna, in die ilia tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra. Dum veneris judicare saecu-lum per ignem.
Tremens factus sum ego et timeo, dum discussio venerit atque ventura ira, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra.
Dies irae, dies ilia, calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death on that dreadful day when the heavens and the earth shall be moved, and Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire. I am seized with fear and trembling when I reflect upon the judgment and the wrath to come. When the heavens and the earth shall be moved. That day, a day of wrath, of wasting and of misery, a dreadful and exceeding bitter day. When Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.
Deliver me, O Lord, from everlasting death, on that dreadful day.
Deliver me, when the heavens and the earth shall be moved, and Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
Deliver me, O Lord, from everlasting death, on that dreadful day.
Deliver me!
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THIRD CONCERT
Saturday Afternoon, May 5 Overture to Manfred, Op. 115........Schumann
Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony, June 29, 1810; died in Endenich, July 29, 1856.
German music, during the period of Chopin and Berlioz, with all its high quality and distinction, was rearward; it was neither a part of the Romantic music of France, nor of the contemporary literature of its own country. The productiveness of the eighteenth century had decreased, and composers in Germany were still too much in awe of Beethoven to venture much beyond him. "We have lately had few orchestral works of consequence .... many have been absolute reflections of Beethoven," wrote Schumann on one occasion. The two chief representatives of German music of this period were Schumann himself and Mendelssohn.
Robert Schumann was not an epic romanticist. He lacked Beethoven's architectonic imagination and skill; he was not driven by the same forces that drove Berlioz from excessive enthusiasm into wild hysteria.
In Manjred, Byron had displayed the full dramatic force of his genius.f Its plangent poetry has lost much of its power today, but to its generation and that of Berlioz, Chopin, and Schumann, its ill-fated hero (who to Hazlitt was Byron himself "in fancy clothes"), stricken with remorse and doubt and all the other impassioned negations of the period, made an overpowering appeal.
The essence of the poem as it appeared on the flyleaf of Tchaikovsky's score ("Manfred Symphony," 1885) on the same subject follows:
Manfred wanders the Alps. Tormented by the fatal anguish of doubt, torn by remorse and despair, his soul is the prey of suffering without name. Neither the occult sciences, whose mysteries he has fathomed, and by means of which the powers of darkness are subject to his will, nor anything in the world can bring to him the forgetfulness which alone he covets. The memory of the beautiful Astarte, whom he has loved and lost, gnaws at his heart. Nothing can lift the curse which lies heavily on Manfred's soul and which increasingly without truce delivers him to the tortures of the most grievous despair.
Schumann's overture, in its form, follows closely the progress of Byron's poem as outlined above. The following analysis was made by Paul Graf Walder-see in his Musikalische Vortrdge:
The Overture is a deeply earnest picture of the soul, which describes in the most affecting manner the torture and conflict of the human heart, gradually dying out, in allusion to the liberation wrought through death. It is always a dangerous thing to approach such a creation with the intellectual dissecting knife and seek to read from it the definite ideas of the
See notes on Mendelssohn, pp. 49-50. t See notes on Chopin, pp. 15-16.
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composer. In this special case one can hardly err, if he assumes that the master wished to indicate two fundamental moods of feeling: on the one hand that of anguish, which is the consequence of sin--the unrest that is coupled with resistance to divine and human laws; on the other, that of patience, or forgiveness--in a word, of love--so that to the soul's life of Manfred he might offset that of Astarte. The rhythmic precipitancy in the first measure of the Overture transports us at once into a state of excited expectation. After a short slow movement, the development begins in passionate tempo, the portrayal of the restless and tormented mood. It is the syncope, employed continually in the motive, that indicates the conflict of the soul. This storms itself out, and then appears the expression of a melancholy, milder mood. Mysteriously, in the pianissimo, three trumpets are introduced in isolated chords: a warning from another world. But the evil spirits cannot be reduced to silence; with increased intensity of passion the struggle begins anew. The battle rages hotly, but in the pauses of the fight resound voices of reconciliation. At last the strength is exhausted, the pulse beats slower, the unrest is assuaged, the music gradually dies away. A slow movement, nearly related to the introduction, leads to the conclusion. With this Overture Schumann has created one of his most important instrumental works.
AMERICAN FOLK SONGS
1. Blow the Man Down.............Sailor Chantey
Come, all ye young fellows that follow the sea, With a yeo ho! we'll blow the man down! And please pay attention and listen to me, Give us some time to blow the man down!
As I was a-walking down Paradise Street, With a yeo ho! we'll blow the man down! A pretty young damsel I chanced for to meet, Give us some time to blow the man down!
Says she to me, "Will you stand a treat," With a yeo ho! we'll blow the man down! "Delighted," says I, "for a charmer so sweet," Give us some time to blow the man down!
2. De Boatman.............Old River Boat Song
O de boatman dance, de boatman sing,
De boatman up to ebry ting.
When de boatman come on shore,
He spend his money and he wuk fo' mo'.
Hi O, de boatman row,
Up an' down de ribber in his ol' bateau.
Did you ebber see where de boatman live
His house in de holler wid a roof like a sieve!
Boatman say he got one wish,
Ef it gets much wetter he's a gonter be a fish.
Hi 0, de boatman row,
Up an' down de ribber of de Ohio.
?Philadelphia Orchestra Program Notes, January 5, 1950-51, p. 299.
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3. Lonesome Valley.....White Spiritual from the South Highlands
Jesus walked this lonesome valley, We must walk this lonesome valley,
He had to walk it by Himself, We have to walk it by ourselves,
Oh nobody else could walk it for Him, Oh, nobody else can walk it for us,
He had to walk it by Himself. We have to walk it by ourselves.
4. Down the Stream............Miwok Indian Song
This is a song of healing and is sung over and over by the medicine man.
Down the stream. Down the stream.
All the leaves go; All my days go;
Who can say, who can know, Who can say, who can know,
Where the leaves go Where my days go
5. Green Grow the Lilacs
The story is familiar of the early cowboys in Texas singing "Green Grow the Lilacs" so constantly that the Spanish-speaking Texans called them "gringoes" (green grows). Whether this be true or not, there is little doubt that the song was carried into the frontiers by early settlers and cattlemen.
Then green grow the lilacs, and so does the rue, How sad's been the day since I parted from you, But at our next meeting, our love we'll renew. We'll change the green lilac for the Oregon blue.
On top of yon mountain where green lilacs grow And over the valley where the still waters flow I met my true love and he prov'd to be true; We chang'd the green lilac for the Oregon blue.
6. The Bold Soldier...........Early Vermont Folksong
Soldier, O soldier that comes from the plain, Courted a lady to honor and to fame. Her beauty shone so bright that it never could be told. " She always loved a soldier because he was so bold. Fa la la la, la la la la la.
Soldier, 0 soldier I would be your bride.
But for fear of my father some danger might betide,
Then he pulled out sword and pistol and hung them by his side,
He swore he would be married no matter what betide.
Fa la la la, la la la la la.
7. Ef I Had a Ribbon Bow
Ef I had a ribbon bow to bind my hair,
Ef I had a fancy sash my own true love would think me fair,
And when he goes to Frankfort, loggin on the rise,
He'd bring me back with his own hands
"Seven Kentucky Mountain Songs," collected and arranged by John J. Niles (New York: G. Schinner, Inc., 1929).
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A very pretty prize.
Ef I had a ribbon bow to bind my hair,
Ef I had a fancy sash my own true love would think me fair.
Ef I was like the city brung and fair with smart,
Ne'er a lad in all them parts would know my heart.
Then I'd live in Frankfort, where all the lawin' goes,
I'd lark about the settlements
And wear the furrin cloths.
Ef I was like the city brung and fair with smart,
Ne'er a lad in all them parts would know my heart.
Somebody's Knocking at Your Door.......Negro Spiritual
Somebody's knocking at your door, Somebody's knocking at your door. 0 sinner, why don't you answer Somebody's knocking at your door.
Sounds like Jesus. Can't you hear Him Somebody's knocking at your door. Sounds like Jesus. Can't you hear Him Somebody's knocking at your door.
9. Adelita ..............Early Spanish-California
Adelita's the name of my lady. She's my darling, my lovely, my dear. Never think I shall ever forget her, Or desert her for anyone here. Ay, ay, ay. Ay, ay, Ay, ay, ay, Adelita.
If perhaps I should die in the battle And be left on the field so drear, Adelita, I pray you'll remember And shed for your lover a tear. Ay, ay, ay. Ay, ay, Ay, ay, ay, Adelita.
10. Pat on the Railway...........American Traditional
In the early days of railroad building crews of Irish pick and shovel men had an important share. The great Irish emigration to America took place in the 1840's. To judge from the words, these men began to work almost as soon as they arrived on these shores. This song is one of the best of Irish railroad-building songs and has been very popular ever since it was published about 18S0.
In eighteen hundred and forty-wan
I put me cord-roy breeches on,
I put me cord-roy breeches on
To work upon the railway.
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay,
To work upon the railway.
It's "Pat, do this," and it's "Pat do that"
Without a stocking or cravat,
And nothing but an old straw hat
To work upon the railway.
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay,
To work upon the railway.
In eighteen hundred and forty-three,
'Twas then I met sweet Biddy Magee,
An ilegant wife she's been to me
While workin' on the railway.
Fil-i-me-oo-re-i-re-ay,
To work upon the railway
11. When Your Potato's Done.............Creole
When your potato's done, you should eat it, Cooked to a turn, not a burn, When your potato's done, you should eat it. You should eat it hot.
When my potato's done, I shall eat it, Frizzled or charred, soft or hard. When my potato's done, I shall eat it If it's good or not!
From Americans and Their Songs by Frank Luther; reprinted by permission of Frank Luther and Harper & Bros., publishers.
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12. Rosa-beck-lina..............Play Party Game
Lead her up and down Rosa-becka-lina. Hit that back step, Rosa-becka-lina.
I want you to be my darling. I want you to be my darling.
Swing that girl, Rosa-becka-lina. Swing that girl, Rosa-becka-lina.
I want you to be my darling. I want you to be my darling.
Rapsodie espagnole . ............Ravel
Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrenees, March 7, 1875; he died in Paris, December 28, 1937.
Although he was at home among the colored vapors of the Debussyan harmonic system, Ravel expressed himself in a more tangible form and fashioned the same materials into set designs. His art, in this connection, stands in much the same relationship to musical impressionism as the art of Renoir does to the same style in painting; it restores formal values. Like Debussy, he reveals the typical French genius, an exquisite refinement, unerring sense of form, purest craftsmanship, attention to minute details, impeccable taste, and a finesse and lucidity in execution.
Born practically on the Spanish border, and "lulled to sleep by the ancient songs of Spain," Ravel throughout his life had a penchant for Spanish themes, as is evidenced by his "Habanera" (1895); the opera L'Heure espagnole and the "Rapsodie espagnole," both from the year 1907; the popular "Alborado del grazioso" (1912); the famous "Bolero" (1928) and several smaller works.
Felix Borowski wrote the following analysis of the "Rapsodie espagnole" in the Program Book of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:
Prelude a la nuit. Almost the entire movement is based on the figure set forth at the beginning by the muted violins and violas. Fourteen measures later the clarinet brings forward a short subject, which is also, repeated at the end by solo strings. The movement is twice interrupted by cadenzas for two clarinets and for two bassoons respectively, the latter being curiously accompanied by arpeggios in harmonics fof solo violin, and trills for three other violins. The movement ends with a chord in harmonics for the divided cellos and double-basses, leading into the next division.
Malacuena. This form belongs to the dance songs of southern Spain, which include also fandangos and rondinos. These are written usually in 3-8 time; Ravel's Malaguefia is, however, in 3-4.
The movement opens with ai figure in the double-basses which plays an important part in the construction of the piece, being repeated for twenty-nine measures, somewhat in the style of a basso ostinato. Shortly after the cessation of this figure the key changes from A minor to D major, and a new idea is brought forward by a muted trumpet, accompanied by the tambourine and pizzicato choirs in the strings. This having been worked over and brought to a climax, there is a sudden pause, and a declamatory solo is set forth in slow tempo by the English horn. There is a suggestion of the rhythmic figure of the opening movement given to the celesta and to solos in the strings. The figure in the basses, with which the movement had begun, now returns with chromatic descending figures in the flutes and clarinets above it.
Habanera. This movement was originally conceived in 1895. The habanera, sometimes called contradanza criolla (Creole country dance) is Cuban, but it is said to have been introduced into Cuba by negroes who came to that island from Africa. The actual subject of
?Roland Manuel, Maurice Ravel ct son ocuvre (Paris: A. Durand et fils, 1914).
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the movement is heard in the woodwind after an introduction of eight measures, in which a syncopated figure for the clarinet plays an important part. The theme is continued by a solo viola, and its opening part repeated by the strings. A new idea is then brought forward by the woodwind and first harp, its rhythm punctuated by the strokes of a tambourine, the syncopated figure being constantly in evidence in the strings. This theme is worked over almost to the end of the movement, which comes with softly played harmonics in the harp with the syncopated rhythm at first in the violins, and lastly in the celesta.
Feria (The Fair). The movement is divided into three parts. The opening division is based on two ideas, the first of which, two bars long, is given out after four introductory measures by the flute. There is a curious passage for divided cellos and double-basses. Some twenty-seven measures after the beginning of the piece the second idea is heard in three muted trumpets, its rhythm being reinforced by a tambourine. The figure is repeated by the oboes and English horn, the xylophone now accentuating the rhythm. This thematic idea is eventually brought forward, ff, by the full orchestra, and with this and the foregoing material the remainder of the division of the movement is occupied.
The second part of the piece opens with a solo for the English horn in slower tempo. This is continued by the clarinet. The third division consists of a redevelopment--it is not altogether a repetition--of the material of the opening portion of the movement.
Concerto in D minor, Op. 47, for Violin and Orchestra . Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was born in Tavaste-hus, Finland, December 8, 1865.
Sibelius is, without doubt, the outstanding symphonist of the present day. The symphonic scepter has been handed from Beethoven, through Brahms, to him. Although a contemporary figure, he seems to belong to a different race and a different age; Sibelius is really an almost isolated phenomenon.
But this much must be said of his music. It bears the imprint of a powerful and independent personality, evincing a comprehensive mentality unrestrained by historical precedent and uncomplicated by aesthetic preconceptions. His style is proudly restrained for the most part, and, in general, compact and pithy; and in this he is akin to the moderns. But by no means is he a true modernist. After all, he is a member of an older generation, and one whose style was already formed before much we find in recent experiment was even thought of. Rather than projecting a new idiom, his music reveals a fresh and unexpected beauty, a wholly new mode of thought and expression embodied in the idioms of the past. Among contemporary composers, Sibelius has conclusively shown what most people had legitimately begun to doubt, that it is still possible as it ever was to say something new, vital, and original, without having to invent a new syntax, a new vocabulary in order to do so. In this instance he upholds the traditions of the past against the advanced composers of our day. In terms of such composers as Schonberg, Sibelius is in no sense a modernist. He, like the late Richard Strauss, has been creating the last great expression of the romantic ideal.
Much has been said of the nationalistic nature of Sibelius' music. It is true that he is the first composer to attract the attention of the world to his native Finland as a musical nation. His relation to his native land expresses itself in
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the "intangible something" which is evident in every phrase he writes. Mr. Watson Lyle in an article in the Musical Quarterly for October, 1927, describes this ephemeral quality which many sense in his music:
.... A composer of nationalistic expression, an ideal that concurs with its abiding love for lakes, canals, islands and mists, and miles upon miles of forests alternating with stretches of marsh, and flat wastes of the country that is homeland to him. He has an unusual ability for translating into terms of music these natural features of the countryside--the shimmering waters, the strange echoes in the forests, the bird calls, and the depressions emotionally conjured by the desolation of areas of wasteland, and the ghostly veiling of objects by mist and fog. In fact it is by emotional suggestion quite as much as by musical realism, that his art becomes an expression of his country, and the psychology, the prevailing sadness that is a legacy of hundreds of years of oppression of his country by more powerful nations.
But his art transcends the limitations of nationality. He is national, racial, and universal at the same time; and his universality is being sensed slowly. His way to popularity is steadily but surely clearing, but likeBrahms he will find general acceptance only with time. The seriousness and sobriety of his art, the solidity of its content, and the absence of externals make no bid for immediate popularity. His music stands or falls entirely on the enduring qualities of its expression. Only future years will determine how enduring that expression is.
Fate has been persistent in involving Jean Sibelius in great soul-stirring catas-trophies. As a young musician, he was an artistic rebel determined upon Finnish freedom, politically as well as artistically, and was involved in Finland's emancipation in the 1890's. The World War of 1914-18 found him as staunch and bravely patriotic as ever in the face of impending doom. And during the last war, at the close of a long life full of great artistic achievements and deep concern for his native land, the old patriarch refused to leave his unfortunate country in her need and wrote on in the midst of her greatest disaster. Sibelius' faith in humanity has been subjected to the severest test, but he has never lost that faith. In these disjointed times, full of disillusion and cynicism, Sibelius offers us the rare but thrilling spectacle of a man who has created a noble structure in his art-a structure that has come from the grand line of his long life. His music is triumphant; and the harmony he has won in the hard battle of life he transmits to his art, where he has given to the world a much-needed state of spiritual serenity, optimism, and repose.
Sibelius' violin concerto, seldom heard on current programs, is one of extreme difficulty, both technically and interpretively. Its lofty and profound beauty, tinged with melancholy brooding and relieved by wild flights into a world of strange meanings, often evades both the interpreter and the hearer.
The solo part is conceived in so organic a manner as to be related to the whole orchestral texture; it weaves itself so closely and intimately into the symphonic tissue that only occasionally is it given any opportunity for a purely technical display.
Tovey maintained that he had not met with "a more original, a more masterly, and more exhilarating work." As in all the larger works of Sibelius, the form here is vast and sweeping in outline. He does not err in forcing his improvisitory
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expression into preconceived, traditional designs but instinctively uses or invents a form to accommodate the pace of his music. As Tovey so colorfully expressed it, "He does not design motor cars with a box seat for the driver, nor does he build reinforced concrete skyscrapers in the style of the Parthenon."
The first movement (in D minor, allegro moderato and mixed rhythms) is an elaborate composition in Sibelius' unique manner--a peculiar and eccentric sort of effusion having the character of an "improvisation" rather than any close resemblance to accepted forms. The traditional two themes are in evidence clearly enough, but the manner of their treatment is so free and rhapsodical that they elude technical analysis. The first theme, given to the solo violin at the beginning, accompanied by divided and muted violins is plaintive and somber-hued. It spins out rhapsodically to an unaccompanied solo passage which leads to a climax. A short orchestral tutti leads to the statement and unfolding of the tranquil second theme by the solo violin. Following the development of this motive, there is a long tutti passage after which the solo instrument engages in an elaborate unaccompanied cadenza, then passes directly to a restatement of the mournful first theme. Suspended developments lead presently to a reappearance of the tranquil second theme, now in altered rhythm, and still in the solo violin. The movement ends in a brilliant climax. The emphasis upon the solo violin, developing themes without the orchestra, is unusual.
The second movement (B-flat major, adagio di molto) is of a more tangible nature. It is a contemplative romanza, embracing a short prelude followed by a first section based upon a very melodic theme sung in the solo instrument. There is then a short orchestral interlude. A contrasting middle section, announced by an orchestral passage, is heard in the solo instrument spinning out into florid passage-work which continues as figuration against the return of the tuneful first theme in the orchestra. The solo instrument then sings gently the closing strains of this melody, and the end of the movement dies away into a hushed silence.
The third movement (D major, allegro, ma non tanto) is brilliant and aggressive music in the general style of a rondo, opening after a four-measure introduction in the lower strings and kettledrum on a persistent reiteration of the tone D. The second theme, resolute in its nature, is sounded in the orchestra; the melody proper beginning in the violins and violoncelli, and later heard in the solo instrument. The remainder of the movement consists of alternations of these two themes, the violin having a brilliant and difficult part in the climax of the movement.
?Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), III, 103.
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Saturday Evening, May 5 Suite for Strings, Op. 5...........Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli was born near Milan, February 17, 1653; died in Rome, January 8, 1713.
Arcangelo Corelli can claim a double distinction in the history of musical art. As a great violinist in his day, he laid a firm foundation for the future development of the technique of violin playing; and, as a composer, he materially advanced the progress of composition. Being a thorough master of the art of playing the violin, everything he wrote for the instrument grew quite naturally out of its inherent nature. He recognized all the expressive possibilities of the violin as a solo instrument, but more important than this, he revealed to the next generation of composers the use that could be made of it in the orchestra. In his chamber sonatas and concerti grossi, he was the founder of the style on which the future development of orchestral writing for this instrument was to be based.
His great reputation as a composer and performer made him especially desirable to princes and cardinals, and he soon became a favorite in the highest Roman society. As the chief musician of Cardinal Ottoboni, he conducted the famous weekly concerts in the Cardinal's palace, where the musical elect not only of Rome, but of all Europe congregated. Amsterdam, Antwerp, Paris, and London, as well as Rome, published his works, and his fame as a teacher drew talent from all countries to benefit from his instruction. At his death, he left to Cardinal Ottoboni, under whose patronage he had remained for the greater part of his life, a large fortune and a valuable collection of paintings. The possession of the paintings one can understand, for Corelli was on intimate terms of friendship with such eminent painters as Cignani and Maratti, but for a composer to end a Croesus is another claim to historical significance.
Corelli wrote five collections of a dozen "Suonati" (in reality short suites), for two violins and continuo, and it is from one of these collections published in folio at Rome in 170O (Op. 5), that the movements opening tonight's program were taken.
"Che faro senza Euridice" from Orjeo ed Euridice . . . Gluck
Christoph Willibald Gluck was born July 2, 1714, in Erasbach; died November 15, 1787, in Vienna.
Gluck's reputation as the great reformer of opera rests upon the beauty and strength of six of his one hundred and seven operas: Orjeo ed Euridice (1762), Alceste (1767), and Paride ed Elena (1770) to Italian texts; Iphigenie en Aulide (1774), Amide (1777), and Iphigenie en Tauride (1779) to French texts.
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These works embody many of the characteristic features of French opera from the time of Rameau (1683-1764), i.e., comparative subordination of music to drama, avoidance of vocal display, a similarity of style in recitative and aria, general simplicity of subject matter and treatment, and a generous use of chorus and ballet, both associated closely with the dramatic action. These ideas were not original with Gluck; they were in the main those of the Italian originators of the opera in the early seventeenth century. But during the swift development and popularization of the form throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, abuses had crept in which finally drew the attention of serious minds to the necessity for reform. The reclamation of the opera came from a period alive with ideas of social correction. With the slow disintegration of absolute monarchy and the loss of faith in divine institution, there grew, increasingly, a critical attitude toward the arts. Ultimately the "return to nature" movement also gave rise to an impulse for reform, and in music that impulse was aimed at the most popular of all musical forms, and the one closest associated with the dying social order, opera. These social movements gradually exposed the artificialities of the form and revealed the abuses from which it had suffered at the hands of singers, overly ambitious to display their vocal prowess, and of composers who had become overindulgent to their demands and to those of a public grown avid for excitement. The writings of the Encyclopedists, Grimm, D'Alembert, Rousseau, and especially Diderot, were concerned chiefly with problems of reform. Their suggestions became the basis of a work by Francesco Algarotti, who pointed out in his essay on opera every reform suggestion made by Gluck. No doubt these French-inspired ideas came to Gluck directly through his librettist Raniero di Calzabigi, who had received them in turn from Algarotti. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Encyclopedists to music, aside from popularizing the new theoretical ideas of Rameau, was to prepare the way for Gluck. In him they recognized a composer who was in sympathy with their ideas and could carry them to complete and practical fulfillment. "A wise man was formerly a philosopher, a poet, and a musician," wrote Diderot, "these talents degenerated when they were separated from one another. The field of philosophy has shrunk, poetry lacks ideas, and song needs energy and force. . . . A great composer and a great opera poet would soon repair all this damage. . . . Let him appear then, this man of genius who will place the true tragedy and the true comedy on the operatic stage. Let him cry out. . . . Adducite mihi psaltem (Bring me a composer), and he will create the true opera." f That composer was to be Gluck and that "great opera poet," Calzabigi. Grimm, after the advent of Gluck, quoted in his Correspondance Utter air e. for May, 1777, a passage by Marmontel which summarizes Gluck's position:
Gluck made musical declamation move more swiftly, forcefully, and energetically. . . . By exaggerating its expression he at least avoided the pitfall of boredom. He used harmony with excellent effect, forced our singers to observe the same measure as the orchestra, fused the chorus into the dramatic action, and linked the dances to a suitable scene. His art is a
Conte Francesco Algarotti, Saggio sopra I' opera in musica (2d ed.; Leghorn. 1763). + Denis Diderot, Dorval ct mot (Paris, 1875-79), VII, 156-57.
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composite work, in which German taste prevails, but in which is implied the manner of conciliating the outstanding characteristics of the French and Italian opera.
Gluck's first "reform" opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, with text by Calzabigi, had its premiere in Vienna, October 5, 1762.
In the famous and familiar aria to be heard on tonight's program, Orfeo, having lost his beloved, sings of his grief, and calls upon Euridice to return to him.
"Voi che sapete" from Le Nozze di Figaro.....Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was bom in Salzburg, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December S, 1791.
Over one hundred and sixty years ago (1785-86) Mozart composed an exquisite and charming opera, The Marriage oj Figaro, to a text by Lorenzo da Ponte, based upon Beaumarchais' comedy by the same name. Since its first performance in Vienna, May 1, 1786, its music has constantly enlivened and refreshed men's spirits with its sparkling, insouciant humor and spicy plot. At the period of its creation, Mozart was at the height of his powers, having already composed Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail, the "Haffner" symphony, the six "Haydn" quartets, and many of his great piano concerti. With this work he brought to a climax the opera buffa (comic opera) which had replaced the opera seria at the end of the eighteenth century.
Mozart's manifold genius is more fully exploited in opera than in any other form and in The Marriage of Figaro, he reveals a vividness of characterization unequaled by any other opera composer. His amazing sense of dramatic veracity, his uncanny insight into the psychological aspects of character, and the unbelievable aptness with which he established these in his music not only proved his unerring instinct for the theater, but established him as one of the foremost composers of opera in the world.
The aria on tonight's program is from Act II and is sung by the adolescent, lovesick Cherubino, page of the Countess Almaviva. Excessively susceptible to feminine charms, he is at the moment languishing for the love of the Countess herself. Accompanied on the guitar by her maid Susanna, he sings a song he has written for his mistress. Stammering and blushing at first, he confesses his emotional confusion.
The song is in ballad form, to suit the situation, the voice executing the clear, lovely melody, while the string instruments carry on a simple pizzicato accompaniment to imitate the guitar. This delicate outline is, however, shaded and animated with the utmost subtlety by solo wind instruments. Without being absolutely necessary for the progress of the melodies and the completeness of the harmonies, they supply those delicate touches of detail that distinguish the music of Mozart; no composer of opera ever achieved such a perfect balance between the human voice and the orchestra.
Alfred Richard Oliver, The Encyclopedists as Critics oj Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947).
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Fair ladies who know what love is
See in my heart if it abides,
The feeling I have to me is unknown
At times it is joy--at times it is woe
I shiver and yet feel all in a glow
Who holds such magic and what may it be ...
"II est doux, il est bon" from Herodiade.....Massenet
Jules fimile Fre'de'ric Massenet was born at Montaud, near St. fitienne, France, May 12, 1842; died at Paris, August 13, 1912.
Massenet's facile and melodious style was evident in his earlier works, and remained, without much development through his long career, the chief source of his popularity. This gift he applied with consummate tact so as to win and retain popular interest.
His art is marked by a typically French quality, characteristic of his fellow countryman Gounod--a sweetly sensuous melodic feeling that rises from an innate respect for the text and the subtle nuances of the French language. This attribute he seemed impelled to reveal in the depiction of operatic heroines of strong passion and weak virtue--colorful ladies like Salome, Herodiade, Thai's, Manon, and Sapho.
Although his genius did not rise to exalted heights or exhibit any marked vitality or profound inspiration, in points of technical presentation, instrumentation, fine workmanship, and versatility of subject he won a secure place in the world of music.
The opera Herodiade was founded upon Gustave Flaubert's novelette by the same name, and contains much of the best of Massenet's music. The plot, while based upon the well-known scriptural story of Salome, does not follow the Bible or tradition very closely. Here, Salome, having unsuccessfully begged Herod to let her die with the prophet, curses her mother Herodiade and stabs herself at the news of his death.
The aria on tonight's program is from the opening of Act I. In it Salome confesses to Phannel, chief adviser to Herod, how she was saved in the desert by the prophet John, and how she longs to tell him of her love:
I was suffering, sad and lonely, and my heart found peace in his soft and tender voice . . . 0 prophet, loved above all, I cannot live without thee.
Symphony No. 1, Op. 10.........Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostokovich was born September 25, 1906, at St. Petersburg (now Leningrad).
A fair and sane estimate of an artist, who is creating under violent conditions of social upheaval and war, is difficult in the extreme. In times of stress like ours, criticism, attempting to evaluate an artist such as Shostakovich, must guard against the intrusion of temporary and false standards of judgment. More than ever, it must seek to penetrate beyond the artist's reactions to the events of
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his period, to the artistic significance of the work itself--to those eternal verities which neither time, nor place, nor condition can alter. It must carefully distinguish between historical interest and aesthetic value. The former is conditioned by all manner of extraneous and fortuitous circumstance which cannot possibly be foretold; the latter exists outside of time and is subject only to laws which are external and to conditions which are changeless.
It is a question among critics today whether the unprecedented success of Dmitri Shostakovich is due to historical circumstance or to the intrinsic beauty of his music. Certainly no composer in the history of art enjoyed such sudden, such universal acceptance and acclaim, or suffered from such quick reversals of critical opinion. Often the changing events of history can temporarily give or take away from an artist qualities which he may or may not have ever possessed, and may bestow or deprive him of a prestige which he may or may not have ever deserved. Thus it is in the case of Shostakovich exceedingly difficult, but all the more necessary, for criticism to make an objective analysis of the genuine and permanent values which alone can bring to him either distinction or oblivion.
Nicolas Nabokov attempted such an analysis. He contended that the young' Russian composer, although talented in the extreme, had become a symptom of a new era in art, an era of utility, in which the purely artistic worth of a work of art is far less important than its immediate appeal to the masses, or its purpose in serving a political, social, and educational ideal. He referred to the rise of an impersonal and practical art for the common man, an "eclectic collectivistic art" which was placing the individual artist in a completely subservient position to the state and society. Shostakovich was, to Nabokov, a victim of this ideal, and the eclectic and impersonal character of his music signified, to him, the arrival of a new and dangerous era for art. Nabokov's first impressions of Shostakovich's early works were that they were skillful but not particularly novel or creative. He referred to the First Symphony as "this synthetic and retrospective score" which he felt signalized the approach of a period when "perhaps our demand that music be primarily good in quality, new in spirit and technique, original in outlook would be subordinated to such principles as absolute and immediate compre-hensibility to large masses of people and fulfillment of an educational mission, political and social."
It is perfectly true that Shostakovich, from the first, has conscientiously, and with unquestioned sincerity, stated his artistic aims and purposes which are derived from the dialectical teachings of Tolstoy, Engels, Marx, and Stalin. Concerning the function and meaning of music in relation to the Soviet State he writes: "Music is not merely a combination of sounds arranged in a certain order, but an art capable of expressing, by its own means, the most diverse ideas or sentiments. This conviction I did not acquire without travail . . ." The confession in this last sentence is revealing for it shows that the artist Shostakovich, on his way to an artistic fulfillment consistent with his remarkable talents, was
?Nicolas Nabokov, "The Case of Dmitri Shostakovich," Harper's Magazine, 1114 (March, 1943), 422-31.
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unwittingly caught in a conflict of aesthetic and ideological convictions. Continuing in this vein, he writes:
Working ceaselessly to master my art, I am endeavoring to create my own musical style, which I am seeking to make simple and expressive. I cannot think of my further progress apart from our socialistic structure, and the end which I set to my work is to contribute at every point to the growth of our remarkable country. There can be no greater joy for a composer than the inner assurance of having assisted by his works in the elevation of Soviet musical culture, of having been called upon to play a leading role in the recasting of human perception.
Another time, he reiterates:
I am a Soviet composer, and I see our epoch as something heroic, spirited, and joyous . . . music cannot help having a political basis, an idea that the bourgeois are slow to comprehend. There can be no music without ideology. The old composers whether they knew it or not were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolstering the rule of the upper classes. We as revolutionists have a different conception of music. Lenin himself said that music is a means of uplifting broad masses of people, not a leader of masses perhaps, but certainly an organizing force. For music has the power of stirring specific emotions in those who listen to it. Good music lifts and heartens and lightens people for work and effort. It may be tragic, but it must be strong. It is no longer an end in itself, but a vital weapon in the struggle."t
On the eve of the first anniversary of the Russo-German war, Shostakovich wrote, "My energies are wholly engaged in the service of my country. Like everything and everyone today, my ideas are closely bound up with the emotions born of this war. They must serve with all the power at my command in the cause of art for victory over savage Hitlerism, that fiercest and bitterest enemy of human civilization. This is the aim to which I have dedicated my creative work since the morning of June 22, 1941." Shostakovich has, on another occasion, briefly but definitely restated his creed: "I consider that every artist who isolates himself from the world is doomed. I find it incredible that an artist should want to shut himself away from the people, who in the end, form his audience. I think an artist should serve the greatest possible number of people. I always try to make myself as widely understood as possible. And if I don't succeed, I consider it is my fault."
There seems to be common agreement among the critics of Shostakovich that he is an extremely well-schooled and gifted composer, and a craftsman of the first order. Their concern for his future is based on the fear that the dictates of propaganda are reshaping his natural expression, that a rigid submission to political doctrine is reducing an exciting talent to the commonplace. They point out that in his deliberate attempt to make music comprehensible to the masses and to serve the Soviet State, he has restrained his individuality and forsaken the principles of absolute beauty. They speak of the clarity and logic of his themes but also of their tendency to be ordinary and trivial; they acknowledge his rhythmic vitality, but regret his predilection for banal marches; they maintain that the acknowledged brilliance of his stunning orchestration does not al Dmitri Shostakovich, "Autobiographie," La Revue musicale, 17 (December, 1936), 432-33. tThe A'eie York Times, December 3, 1931.
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ways conceal the paucity of his ideas, and they all refer to his eclecticism, which is, in truth, his most apparent weakness. The synthetic and retrospective moments in his works are disconcertingly frequent, but the borrowings are done with an almost naive unawareness. Tchaikovsky haunts his pages, instrumentations unique to Sibelius occur intermittently; formulas familiar in Berlioz appear bereft of their novelty, and Beethoven's culminations to climax are sounded without motivation or impulsion, often resulting in noise without meaning and conflict without tension. There is an irritating awareness that the musical memory rather than the human soul is being probed.
The virtues of his last symphonies, the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth, so highly publicized and so frequently performed, are not such as to necessitate any modification in this critical opinion. Perhaps Shostakovich must wait until his beloved Russia and the world are at peace, until society has been reshuffled into a greater equity, before his indubitable genius can restore just values of beauty and universality to his music. Sincere as his intentions are, it takes more than these to assure the creation of great art. Beethoven and Wagner also were profoundly moved by the conditions of their times and were stimulated by powerful social ideologies, but these forces moved them to the creation of significant, powerful, and original music, which has survived long after the conditions which inspired its inception have been swept away. Their music has lived not merely because Beethoven was profoundly moved by the idea of Democracy and the French Revolution, or because Wagner believed passionately in the doctrine of Renunciation, but because the music they created possessed intrinsic value as music, and became thereby infinite, not finite, in its expression; and universal, not local, in its appeal. Great music, after all, is not merely a medium to arouse emotions; if it were, it would assume a position inferior to some of the daily events in ordinary life. It represents, rather, a sublimation of emotion; a sublimation which is achieved through the very process of artistic creation, when, without intrusion of outside forces, there is a molding, a fusing, and distillation of the emotions, aroused by an outside stimulus, into an artistic expression which bears no particular relation to the realistic aspects of life. This is a process which casts inspiration into permanent soundforms and shapes which are beautiful by virtue of the imaginative and original manipulation of the medium of music, and not because that medium had been forced into the confining service of expressing the finite and concrete. Shostakovich, it seems, has not learned to "contemplate emotion in tranquility"; he shapes his expression too directly out of experience as lived, and in his eagerness to make his music symbolize political ideas, he does not permit the stuff of life to undergo the necessary transformation into significant forms of beauty.
Ernest Newman has touched the fallacy in the art theories of Shostakovich and all those who maintain with him that the function of music is to lift and hearten and lighten people for work and effort, or that its purpose is simply to re-present feelings and emotions aroused by the events of life. He writes in the London Times concerning the Seventh Symphony:
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To the man Shostakovich, writing with the boom of German guns in his ears, or any other artist in any other country working under conditions of similar dire distress, our hearts go out in sympathy and brotherhood; but let us, for heaven's sake, keep clear of the crude fallacy that a work written, conceived, and carried out in such conditions thereby acquires an aesthetic virtue of its own. The contrary is the case.
.... That the world could have dreamed, believed, that it could ever have been supposed that great music is simply profoundly felt emotion poured out under the immediate impact of the events that generated the emotion, is merely due to the fact that most people have only the crudest notion of what a great piece of music really is in its roots and all its fibers. People can be genuinely fond of music without any understanding of the psychical processes by which great music comes into being.
Shostakovich wrote his first symphony (Op. 10) in 1925, when he was nineteen years of age. This work revealed a creative genius of such outstanding talent, and a craftsman of such extraordinary ability, that it won immediate world-wide recognition. None of the symphonies which have followed has equalled it for integration of style, ideas, and expression. Today it must be considered as having already entered the ranks of the much berated "Standard Repertory of Fifty Pieces."
Symphonic Poem, "Vltava" ("The Moldau") . . . . Smetana
Friedrich Smetana was born in Leitomischl, Bohemia, March 2, 1824; died in Prague, May 12, 1884.
Smetana's position in his own country is unique among musicians. Neither Chopin nor Grieg has quite the same powerful national significance. His works are permeated with the spirit of national life in its widest sense. By his determined optimism and farsightedness, he made his art a wonderful stimulus to a rebirth of national feeling. Through his music, Smetana made himself a national hero. He revealed through it a stimulating optimism and made his people aware of their great spirit. Art can never live merely by pessimism. skepticism, and sadness. For that reason mankind has always considered as its special benefactors artists who have been able to infuse into the human soul gladness, and the joy of life. In this respect the nineteenth century never saw a greater genius than Smetana. Since Mozart's time there has not been a composer who, with refinement and alluring freshness, could delight the world with such warm, frank, and genial art as Smetana. His life, unfortunately, gave to him few of the gifts he bestowed upon his countrymen and upon all humanity. Rivaling Mozart as a child prodigy, his early youth gave promise of a brilliant and happy future. But in later years his life was full of tragic experiences. At the age of fifty he, like Beethoven, became totally deaf. He bore this blow with patient courage, but his health began to fail. Depression settled deeply in his soul, and soon he disclosed symptoms of mental collapse. Attacked by hideous delusions, his memory gave way, and he died in an asylum for the insane at Prague, in utter eclipse of! mind. And on the shores of the mighty Moldau, which he immortalized in his music, he lies buried.
"The Moldau," a symphonic poem (written between 1874 and 1879), belongs
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to a cycle of symphonic works, under the general title of Ma Vlast ("My Country"), which, founded on national subjects, have served to carry his fame farther afield than any other examples of his art. The following program is printed as a preface to the score:
Two springs pour forth their streams in the shade of the Bohemian forest, the one warm and gushing, the other cold and tranquil. Their waves, joyfully flowing over their rocky beds, unite and sparkle in the morning sun. The forest brook, rushing on, becomes the River Moldau, which, with its waters speeding through Bohemia's valleys, grows into a mighty stream. It flows through dense woods from which come the joyous sounds of the chase, and the notes of the hunter's horn are heard ever nearer and nearer.
It flows through emerald meadows and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dancing.. At night, in its shining waves, wood and water nymphs hold their revels, and in these waves are reflected many a fortress and castle--witnesses of bygone splendor and chivalry, and the vanished martial fame of days that are no more. At the rapids of St. John the stream speeds on, winding its way through cataracts and hewing the path for its foaming waters through the rocky chasm into the broad river bed, in which it flows on in majestic calm toward Prague, welcomed by time-honored Vysehrad, to disappear in the far distance from the poet's gaze.
Air de Lia from L'Enfant prodigue.......Debussy
Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain, August 22, 1862; died at Paris, March 25, 1918.
With his scene lyrique, L'Enfant prodigue, Debussy won the Grand prix de Rome in 1884. The story is simple. Lia, the mother of Azael bemoans the loss of her wayward son. Ag she expresses her grief, Simeon, her husband, gently upbraids her. He exhorts Lia to hearken to the music of the merrymakers and to partake of their joy. A procession of the revelers enters, and Simeon and Lia join the throng. Azael, who has returned home, exhausted and repentent, has, unobserved by the people who pass by, seen his brother and sister amid the joyous crowd. He falls unconscious outside the home which had once sheltered him, and is discovered by Lia and his father. Forgiveness is extended to the erring wanderer, and all thank Heaven for his restoration.
The following is a free translation and condensation of the French text. Lia calls in anguish for the return of her son:
Year follows year and each succeeding season brings only grief and sorrow, which I must hide within my heart. I walk alone along this wild shore to seek surcease from this heavy woe. But my heart still mourns the child I have no more. Azael, Azael, my beloved one, why have you forsaken me
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FOURTH CONCERT "Habanera" and "Seguidilla" from Carmen.....Bizet
Georges Bizet was born in Paris, October 25, 1838; died at Bougival, near Paris, June 3, 187S.
Very few biographers of Bizet represent him, as he really was, a gifted man with many shortcomings, a composer of undeniable talent, whose Carmen stands in strong and strange contrast to all his other works and also to his personality, as revealed by his letters and the judgments expressed by those who knew him well. That the composer of such a trifle as La Jolie fille de Perth within a few years could create a Carmen is as strange and inexplicable as that Emily Bronte could have written Wuthering Heights after a few insignificant poems. Of Bizet's artistic personality, which began to assert itself in Carmen, we know absolutely nothing. He was always essentially a "bourgeois"--practical, humdrum, and colorless. He did not live long enough for us to have any clue as to the change that took place within him. During the early part of his career, he had no sense of, and no liking for, dramatic music, to which he preferred music of a light facile order. His teacher, Carafa, once wrote to Merchandante, "Monsieur Bizet will never be a dramatic composer, he is utterly lacking in the needful enthusiasm." Was it Wagner who aroused this in him Or perhaps the rays of truth emanating from Merimee's story and reflected in Bizet's mirrorlike soul were so intensified that they kindled the flame of inspiration. It was indeed Bizet's misfortune never to happen upon an author who fully appreciated his ideas and had the talent for writing a libretto in accordance with them. When at last Meilhac and Halevy provided him with a libretto, of which Nietzsche said, "It is a dramatic masterpiece to study for climax, contrast and logic," Bizet responded by revealing a hitherto entirely unknown artistic personality, and real inspiration burst into an incandescent flame.
The arias on tonight's program are too familiar to audiences to warrant any critical comment. In the "Habanera," Carmen, attempting to attract the handsome Corporal of the Dragoon, Don Jose, sings:
Love is like a wild bird--hard to lure and hard to tame. If you love me not--I love you, and if I love you, beware!
In the "Seguidilla," she faces Don Jose after her arrest for stabbing one of the cigarette girls. With her hands bound behind her, she sings as she dances before him:
Near by the walls of Seville at the Inn of Lillas, Pastia, we'll dance the gay Seguidilla. And who loves me, him will I love.
At the end of her seductive song, she offers Don Jose her bound hands, which he quickly frees.
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Polka and Fugue from Schwanda,
der Dudelsackpjeijer........Weinberger
Jaromir Weinberger was born in Prague, January 8, 1896; now living in Fleischmanns, New York.
The first America heard of Weinberger's now famous opera Schwanda, der Dudelsackpjeijer ("Schwanda, the Bagpipe-player") which he composed in Prague in 1927, was at a Lewisohn Stadium Concert in New York on August 4, 1930. On that occasion, Albert Coates conducted the selections from it heard on tonight's program. The opera had its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House, November 7,1931. Mr. Ormandy introduced the Polka and Fugue in his first concerts in Philadelphia in 1931. Since then every major orchestra seems to have considered it an indispensable part of its repertory, for it reappears with what is becoming a persistent regularity. Its effectiveness, especially as a closing number, is of course beyond question.
The story of the opera, which is based upon a Bohemian legend, is as follows:
Schwanda, the bagpiper of Strakonitz, has a young wife, Dorota, who has attracted the amorous eye of the genial robber chief, Babinsky. The latter, wishing to get Schwanda out of the way, persuades him to go with him into the world in search of adventure. Dorota, discovering her spouse's defection, goes in pursuit.
Queen Ice-Heart, rescued from a sorcerer's spell by his merry piping, in gratitude offers to wed the musician when Dorota appears. The Queen in anger sentences him to trial for his life. Outside the city, Schwanda, about to be beheaded, is saved by Babinsky, who substitutes a broom for the axe and restores his bagpipes. Schwanda plays so enticingly that the court dances away into the city and the gate is locked. When Dorota reproaches her husband, he swears that if he has kissed the Queen, may the Devil take him--which he immediately does!
In Hell Schwanda is again rescued by Babinsky, who offers to play a game of cards with the Devil for the piper's release against half of the infernal kingdom. He wins, and the hero is restored to the upper world and his waiting wife, while the robber chieftain obligingly disappears, after returning the winnings to his Satanic Majesty.
The Polka appears in Act I, Scene 2, as Schwanda plays upon his pipes and charms all the court. The Fugue occurs at the end of Act II where Schwanda performs for the demons in Hell.
The popularity of this opera in Europe has been phenomenal. Between its first performance in 1927 and its American premi&re in 1931 it was given over two thousand performances and has been translated into at least fourteen languages.
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Sunday Afternoon, May 6 Overture, "The Hebrides" ("FingaFs Cave") . Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in Hamburg, February 3, 1809; died in Leipzig, November 4, 1847.
It is well in these chaotic days to turn to a perfectly balanced nature such as Mendelssohn, in whose life and art all was order and refinement. There are few instances in the history of art of a man so abundantly gifted with the good qualities of mind and spirit. He had the love as well as the respect of his contemporaries, for aside from his outstanding musical and intellectual gifts, he possessed a genial--even gay--yet pious nature. Moses Mendelssohn, the famous philosopher, was his grandfather and, in an atmosphere of culture and learning, every educational advantage was his. In fact, one might almost say that he was too highly educated for a musician. Throughout his life he was spared the economic insecurity felt so keenly by many composers; he never knew poverty or privation, never experienced any great soul-stirring disappointments, never suffered neglect nor any of the other ill fortunes that seemed to beset Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Verdi. His essentially happy spirit and healthy mind were never clouded by melancholy; no morbidity ever colored his thinking. His genius was of the highest order, but it was never tried and tempered in fire, nor strengthened by forces of opposition. It produced, therefore, an art that was, like his life, delightful, well ordered, and serene.
Mendelssohn's music, like that of its period in Germany, for all its finesse and high perfection, has something decidedly "dated" about it. Full of priggish formulas, it was the delight of Queen Victoria and her England--thoroughly conventional, polite, spick-and-span, "stylish" music--as rear guard as Frederick IV, who admired and promoted it. Influenced by the oratorios of Handel and Haydn, the Waldlieder of Weber, and the piano music of Schubert, his art was eclectic in details, but in general it bore no relation whatever to the contemporary music in France, nor to the overpowering romanticism of his own country. His habitual forms were those of the classical school, yet his idiom was often fresh and ingenious. In the minds of some, grief might have lent a deeper undertone to his art, or daring innovation have given it a vitality and virility. But innovation was foreign to Mendelssohn's habit of mind and he rarely attempted it. He must be thought of as a preserver of continuity with the past, rather than as a breaker of new paths. His instinctively clear and normal mind, however, produced a music that should refresh us today with its inner logic, its order, and its tranquility.
In 1829 when Mendelssohn was twenty years of age, he visited Scotland, with his friend Klingeman, and made a journey to Fingal's Cave, situated on the Island of Staffe, which forms one of the Hebrides group. The cave itself is formed of
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basalt--a dark marble-like rock--and measures some two-hundred feet in length and thirty-three in width. Its floor at ebb tide is a twenty-three foot depth of clear green sea water.
In a letter dated August 10, 1829, Klingeman described their visit:
We were put out in boats and lifted' by the hissing sea, up the pillar stump to the celebrated Fingal's Cave. A greener roar of waves surely never rushed into a stranger cavern-its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, and absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide gray side within and without.
In a letter to his sister on the day of his return from this journey (August 7), Mendelssohn did not rely upon words to express the profound impression the sight of the cave had made upon him. "That you may understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me," he wrote, "the following came into my mind." He then produced twenty-one measures of what was later to become the overture.
It was not until he was in Italy, that he brought the work to completion (December 16, 1830, at Rome). He was not entirely satisfied, however, for, in a letter from Paris, January 12, 1832, he wrote: "The middle portion is too stupid, and the whole working out smacks more of counterpoint than of train oil, sea gulls and salt fish, and must be altered."
In this colorful overture, Mendelssohn, under the impact of the emotions aroused in him by the awesome sight of this famous cave, seems to have shaken off temporarily many of the restrictions of pedagogic tradition that were apparently curbing his natural expression; here he allowed his poetic imagination freer sway, and, without any attempt at being realistic, translated into his music a mood, as Mr. Asthorp described it (influenced, no doubt, by the above quotation from Mendelssohn), "of screaming seabirds, whistling winds, and the salty smell of seaweed on the rocks."
Summer's Last .Will and Testament, a Masque . . . Lambert
Constant 'Lambert was born in London, England, August 23, 1905.
In the second and third decades of this century, two young English composers stimulated a great deal of active interest in the musical world. William Walton's Viola Concerto (1929); Belshazzar's Feast for Baritone, Chorus, and Orchestra (1931); First Symphony (1935); Violin Concerto (1939) and Constant Lambert's Ballet Romeo and Juliet (1926); Rio Grande for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra (1929); Music for Orchestra (1931); Summer's Last Will and Testament, a Masque, for Chorus and Orchestra (1936) and other major works of each raised high expectation among musicians and critics. Lambert's name became linked with Walton's for no other reason than that they alone seemed to stand out hopefully in a dearth of creative talent; actually they represent highly individual and completely independent styles.
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Frank Alan, in an article on "The Music of Constant Lambert" in The Musical Times for November, 1937, divides his creative output into three distinct periods. The first includes his early ballets {Romeo and Juliet, the first work commissioned by Diaghilev from an English composer, and Romona) and Music jor Orchestra. These youthful works have little intrinsic value; they are unnecessarily complex in their details, stilted in style, ingenious at times, but full of artificial mannerisms. In his second period, he wrote works (a piano sonata and concerto) that show the influence of American jazz--erratic, but monotonous in their over-use of syncopated rhythms. Climaxing this period he produced a brilliant and superior work for which he is most famous in America--The Rio Grande. The third period was marked by the production of his most extensive and distinguished work to date, Summer's Last Will and Testament, a Masque to words by Thomas Nash.
This major work is in seven consecutive sections, two of them purely instrumental. There is a feeling of a division into two large parts, however, at the close of the fourth section. There is not a great deal of thematic reference between movements, and what there is is purely fragmentary.
Mr. Alan writes:
The work exhibits a queer blend of grimly exuberant gaiety and utmost gloom, which1 fits with compelling logic into its framework. The work gathers impetus, emotionally, as it goes along: consequently the opening orchestral introduction and the following madrigal, ("Fair Summer Droops"), which at the time may not seem especially striking, attain their true effect in retrospect, when their calmness balances, by contrast, the dramatic force of the second part of the work. This part opens with another madrigal, and, as in the final movement, the fatalistic spirit of the poem enables Lambert to operate very much on his "home ground." "London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn"!
The next movement is a sinister Rondo Burlesca for orchestra only. It is a most exciting piece of virtuosity, mildly programmatic in nature. The composer had in mind as background an incident from Poe's story "King Pest" in which a party of sailors indulge in a wild drunken dance--a final effort to stave off the disasters of the plague. Playable on its own, there is no reason why it should not become an English "L'Apprenti Sorcier," to which it bears a very superficial resemblance of type. It suffers through being too tightly packed with thematic material and would be even more effective if thinned out slightly and shortened. Nevertheless it occurs at the right psychological point in the dramatic scheme of the work, keying the listener up to a feverish pitch of intensity which heightens the inevitable renouncement of the final movement . . . [the last] is an extraordinarily impressive movement. The effect of the chorus's recurring motive, "Lord have mercy on us," interspersed with the soloist's "I am sick, I must die" and the distant tolling of the death-bell, is among the most moving things I know in contemporary music.
Lambert's steady development as a composer and his personal integrity in outlook leave one with considerable hope for the future. He will not, I imagine, practice along normal symphonic lines, for which he lacks sufficient repose or detachment. But whatever he may or may not do, it is certain that he is not prepared to stand still and become, as certain other living composers, merely repetitive. Equally he is in no danger of withdrawing to an ivory tower and cultivating the esoteric: he has far too vigorous a mind for that. His contribution to English music strikes a new and enlivening note. And if, as is likely, his next works are
It is uncertain whether this play, written in 1593. was ever publically performed. No trace exists of the music used to accompany the songs. A pun is intended in the title, as the play was written in memory of Henry VIII's Jester, Will Summers.
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smaller in stature than "Summer's Last Will and Testament" (which took three years to write) that is no matter. He has shown incontrovertibly that he can handle a big theme with complete assurance.
I. Intrata. Pastorale and Siciliana (orchestra only)
II. "Fair Summer Droops "
Fair Summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore;
So fair a Summer look for never more. All good things vanish less than in a day.
Peace, plenty, pleasure suddenly decay. Go not yet away bright soul of the sad year,
The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear. What, shall those flowers that decked thy garland erst,
Upon thy grave be wastefully dispersed 0 trees, consume your sap in sorrow's source.
Streams, turn to tears your tributary course. Go not yet hence, bright soul of the sad year,
The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.
III. "Spring, the Sweet Spring"
Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring, Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing-Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! The palm and May make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherd's pipe all day, And we hear, aye, birds tune this merry lay-Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit; In every street these tunes our ears do greet-Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo! Spring, the sweet spring!
IV. "Trip and Go, Heave and Ho!"
Trip and go, heave and ho!
Up and down, to and fro;
From the town to the grove,
Two and two, let us rove,
A-maying, a-playing:
Love hath no gainsaying,
So merrily trip and go!
Monsieur Mingo for quaffing doth surpass,
In cup, in can, or glass.
God Bacchus do me right
And dub me knight Domingo.
Saint [Do]mingo was, it is said, the patron saint of topers.
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V. "Autumn "
Autumn hath all the Summer's fruitful treasure,
Gone is our sport, fled is poor Croydon's pleasure; Short days, sharp days, long nights, come on apace,
Ah! who shall hide us from the Winter's face. Cold doth increase, the sickness will not cease,
And here we lie, God knows with little ease. From Winter, Plague, and Pestilence good Lord deliver us. London doth mourn, Lambeth is quite forlorn,
Trades cry, Woe worth, that ever they were born; The want of term is town and city's harm,
Close chambers do we want to keep us warm. Long banished must we live from our friends:
This low-built house will bring us to our ends. From Winter, Plague, and Pestilence good Lord deliver us.
VI. Rondo Burlesca (orchestra only)
VII. "Adieu! Farewell Earth's Bliss!"
Adieu, farewell earth's bliss! This world uncertain is: Fond are life's lustful joys, Death proves them all but toys. None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die-Lord, have mercy on us!
Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade; All things to end are made; The plague full swift goes by; I am sick, I must die-Lord, have mercy on us!
Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour. Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye; I am sick, I must die-Lord, have mercy on us!
Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector brave; Swords cannot fight with fate; Earth still holds ope her gate; Come, come! the bells do cry; I am sick, I must die-Lord, have mercy on us!
Wit with his wantonness Tasteth death's bitterness; Hell's executioner Hath no ears for to hear What vain art can reply; I am sick, I must die-Lord, have mercy on us!
Haste therefore each degree, To welcome destiny; Heaven is our heritage, Earth but a player's stage. Mount we unto the sky; I am sick, I must die-Lord, have mercy on us!
[S3]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra .... Prokofieff
Sergei Sergievich Prokofieff was born in Sontsovka, Russia, April 23, 1891.
Sergei Prokofieff, a senior member of a very significant group of young Soviet Republic composers, of whom Dmitri Shostakovich is perhaps the most sensational member, has, after a few early startling excursions into the grotesque, and only an occasional sojourn into the cacophonous realm of musical modernism, produced music that is not merely interesting and clever, but brilliantly effective.
At a period when European audiences either were being doped into a state of insensibility by the vacuity of the Post-Impressionists, incensed to riots by the shocking barbarism of Stravinsky, or baffled into boredom by the mathematical cerebrations of Schbnberg, whose music seemed, as far as emotional expression was concerned, to be hermetically sealed, the spectacle of a composer who was still able to create music that had a natural ease and fluidity, a freshness and spontaneity that was essentially "classical," was as surprising as it was eventful. In this idiom he attained, around 1918, an enviable reputation as a composer, with the orchestral work Scythian Suite, the ballet Cliout, and the ever-popular Classical Symphony. These works, with their driving energy, clear designs, bright colors, and ironic overtones, won him a position of first importance among Russian composers.
During 1918-32 Prokofieff traveled in Japan and the United States and lived for some time in Paris. In America he composed the opera Love for Three Oranges (1921), for the Chicago Opera Company.
Since returning to Russia in 1933, Prokofieff has taken an active part in shaping Soviet musical culture. The first works to identify him with Soviet music were: Symphonic Song jor Orchestra, Op. 57 (1933); Partisan Zhelezmak; Antiutak; the music he composed for children, Peter and the Wolf (1936); Romeo and Juliet (1935); the incidental music to the Russian film, Alexander Nevsky (1939); in the same year, a cantata which he dedicated to Stalin, Zdravitsa; the Sixth Piano Sonata in 1940; and his opera based upon Tolstoy's War and Peace (1940). Prokofieff has never lost entirely the clear terse style he revealed in his earlier work, and although in his recent composition there is a new emotional value, an almost romantic richness of melody, and the fulfillment of a latent lyricism to be noted, the style is still definite and clearly defined. This continues to give to his music the same sureness and spontaneity that has always been its chief distinction. Today, in every respect Prokofieff is at the very height of his creative powers. He is now more than a clever composer who delights in the grotesque; his recent music is, according to Leonid Sabaneyev and many other critics, the most original and valuable that the Russian art of this century has produced.
The first sketches for the third piano concerto were made at St. Petersburg (Leningrad) in 1917; the work was interrupted by his visit to America, and was not completed until October, 1921. Like all the other compositions of this period,
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it electrifies with its audacious and almost insolent effects; the piano part is an out and out brilliant tour de force.
Prokofieff has provided the following analysis:
I. The first movement opens quietly with a short introduction, andante, 4-4. The theme is announced by an unaccompanied clarinet, and is continued by the violins for a few bars. Soon the tempo changes to allegro, the strings having a passage in semiquavers which leads to the statement of the principal subject by the piano. Discussion of this theme is carried on in a lively manner, both the piano and the orchestra having a good deal to say on the matter. A passage in chords for the piano alone leads to the more expressive second subject, heard in the oboe with a pizzicato accompaniment. This is taken up by the piano and developed at some length, eventually giving way to a bravura passage in triplets. At the climax of this section, the tempo reverts to andante, and the orchestra gives out the first theme, ff. The piano joins in, and the theme is subjected to impressively broad treatment. On resuming the allegro, the chief theme and the second subject are developed with increased brilliance, and the movement ends with an exciting crescendo.
II. The second movement consists of a theme with five variations. The theme is announced by the orchestra alone, andantino.
In the first variation, the piano treats the opening of the theme in quasi-sentimental fashion, and resolves into a chain of trills as the orchestra repeats the closing phrase. The tempo changes to allegro for the second and third variations, and the piano has brilliant figures, while snatches of the theme are introduced here and there in the orchestra. In Variation Four, the tempo is once again andante, and the piano and orchestra discourse on the theme in a quiet and meditative fashion. Variation Five is energetic (allegro giusto). It leads without pause into a restatement of the theme by the orchestra, with delicate chordal embroidery in the piano.
III. The Finale begins (allegro ma non troppo, 3-4) with a staccato theme for bassoons and pizzicato strings, which is interrupted by the blustering entry of the piano. The orchestra holds its own with the opening theme, however, and there is a good deal of argument, with frequent differences of opinion as regards key. Eventually the piano takes up the first theme and develops it to a climax.
With a reduction of tone and slackening of tempo, an alternative theme is introduced in the woodwind. The piano replies with a theme that is more in keeping with the caustic humor of the work. This material is developed and there is a brilliant coda.
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Sunday Evening, May 6 Overture to Euryanthe............Weber
Carl Maria von Weber was born at Eutin, Oldenburg, December IS, 1786; died in London, June 5, 1826.
Von Weber left three important operas: Der Freischutz (Berlin, 1821), Euryanthe (Vienna, 1823), and Oberon (London, 1826). Euryanthe has become, in the words of Edward Dent, "a museum opera like Mozart's Idomeneo, put on the stage by devoted enthusiasts at extremely rare intervals and then regretfully consigned again to the shelves of the library." The appearance of this obviously "dated" overture on a Festival program may seem a regrettable incident to those who are aware in our day of the vigorous musical creative activity among our own composers. To them this music is old-fashioned, pompous, full of cumbersome decoration and vacuous melody. To those of a more conventional turn of mind, the Overture to Euryanthe still delights with its jubilant spirit and impetuous sweep.
At its first performance Euryanthe was a resounding success. "My reception when I appeared in the Orchestra," wrote Weber to his wife, "was the most enthusiastic and brilliant that one could imagine. There was no end to it. At last I gave the signal for the beginning. Stillness of death! The Overture was applauded madly. Thank God, as I do, beloved wife, for the glorious success of 'Euryanthe.' Weary as I am, I must still say a sweet 'Good-night' to my beloved Lina, and cry 'Victoria!' "
But the enthusiasm of Viennese audiences for the next twenty some performances constantly waned, and the opera was withdrawn for good. Perhaps its ultimate failure was due in part to the popularity at the time of Rossini's light, amusing operas, then in vogue in Vienna; perhaps it was due, as some maintained, to its undo length and confusing story, and to its lack of dramatic subject. For a century, German critics have almost sadistically blamed its failure upon the authoress of its libretto, poetess Frau Helmina von Chezy, whose eccentricities, it is true, made her more famous in her day than did her poetry.f She had previously written a dramatic effusion called "Rosamund" for which Schubert wrote immortal incidental music. These attempts did not add a millimeter to her literary stature, but they did link her name to that of Schubert and Weber for posterity.
?Edward J. Dent, Opera (Harmondsworth: Middlesex, England, 1940).
t The story proposed to von Weber by Frau von Chezy was the "Romance de Violette" by Gilbert de Montreuil (13th century). It was used by Boccaccio in the ninth tale of the Decameron, and thence found its way into Shakespeare's Cymbalinc. In 1804 it was published at Leipzig in a collection of medieval tales ("Sammlung romantischer Dictunger des Mittelalters") edited by F. Schlegel.
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There is no doubt that Weber's aim in Euryanthe was to elevate German opera to a place of dignity and respect. Unlike Der Freischutz, it was written with continuous music and contained no spoken dialogue; its melodies were full of genuine feeling, its orchestral coloring was bold and novel, its texture rich and more varied than in former works. It aimed in truth at being a grand heroic romantic opera. "It is his heart's blood," wrote Robert Schumann, "what a sound comes from the instruments! They speak to us from the very depths of all being." But for Franz Schubert, who had been deeply impressed by Der Frei-schiitz, Euryanthe was a keen disappointment. "There is no music," he wrote, "there is no finale, no concerted piece according to the rules of art. It is all striving after effect, and he [Weber] finds fault with Rossini! It is utterly dry and dismal."
The central theme of Euryanthe is that of a husband (Adolor) betting on his wife's fidelity and then subjecting her to every severe test of virtue.
The Overture {allegro marcato, con molto juoco, in E-flat) begins with light, energetic measures of introduction, after which the woodwinds in harmony present the first theme, derived from an aria sung by the hero Adolor, in which he affirms his faith in his bride, Euryanthe (Act I). This theme is brilliantly developed to a climax in the full orchestra. After a transition in the cellos, a second theme in the violins, over sustained harmonies in the strings, is stated. This theme, drawn from another aria for Adolor (Act II) further symbolizes his love. After a restatement of the Introduction material, there is a climax followed by a short pause. The largo that follows is associated in the opera with a scene which takes place in a tomb. Eight muted violins play eerie harmonies over a subdued tremolo in the violas. The first theme, originally heard in the woodwinds, returns in the cellos and basses, in inverted form. The Introduction material returns with several key modulations. After a restatement of the second theme fortissimo, a coda brings the Overture to a triumphant end, symbolizing the victory of love over all obstacles.
"Chacun le sait" from La Fille du regiment .... Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti was born November 29, 1797, in Bergamo; died there April 8, 1848.
The number of operas accredited to Donizetti is sixty-seven, including four posthumously performed, but of the total number only four or five are now recognized as of enduring quality. Among this group must be included The Daughter of the Regiment, which, after disappearing from the repertory of the Metropolitan for twenty-two years, was revived in 1940 with sensational success. This success does not rest entirely on its real musical or dramatic merit, but more particularly upon its rollicking songs, its beating drums, and its ear-tickling arias for the coloratura soprano. Unlike the many Italian operas whose heroines go mad, are stabbed, poisoned, or die of unrequited love or consumption before the final curtain, this frolicksome little opera provides a vivacious
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heroine and a slight but entertaining plot which tells of a Tyrolese peasant, Tony, who joins a regiment to win the heart of its adopted daughter, Marie. A marquise, however, claims Marie as her daughter and separates her from the regiment and her lover, providing a noble suitor for her hand. When the wedding ceremony is about to take place, Tony, now a captain, arrives on the scene with a band of soldiers, ready to rescue her. The marquise, deeply touched at Marie's willingness to carry out her wishes, relents and gives her blessing to the persistent lover.
The aria on tonight's program is from Act I and is sung by Marie as she eulogizes her beloved regiment:
It is acknowledged wherever one goes that our regiment is unexcelled. We are welcomed in all the cabarets of France and even the landlords trust us. While husbands and lovers dread us, the ladies love us. For valor and boldness we are supreme. We are so brave that the Emperor is seriously contemplating making marshalls of us all. We must confess it--no regiment is more victorious than the fearless Twenty-first.
"O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi .... Puccini
Giacomo Puccini was born at Luca, Italy, December 22, 1858; died at Brussels, November 29, 1924.
Giacomo Puccini, referred to by Verdi as the most promising of his successors, may be said to dominate modern operatic composers even today, a quarter of a century after his death. He justified his master's prophecy by a career of uninterrupted success from the date of his first dramatic venture, Le Ville, Milan, 1884, to the last, unfinished work, Turandot, 1924. While there are numerous men such as Mascagni and Leoncavallo who have won fame through a single work, Puccini achieved high esteem both by the quantity and quality of his operatic creations.
Gianni Schicchi is one of Puccini's three one-act operas and the action fits admirably the requirements of a one-act play. It is swift, varied, interesting, and the music aids it at every point. When the action of Gianni Schicchi opens, one Donati has been dead for two hours. His relatives are thinking of the will. When it is finally read, it is found that Donati has left all his money to charity. Schicchi, father of Lauretta who is in love with one of Donati's kin, is called in and consulted. He plans a ruse. So far only those in the room know of Donati's demise. The corpse is hidden. Schicchi gets into bed and, when the doctor calls, imitates the dead man's voice and pretends he wants to go to sleep. The lawyer is sent for. Schicchi dictates a new will in favor of himself and becomes the heir to Donati's fortune.
The aria on tonight's program is sung by Lauretta to her father, Gianni Schicchi. In it she begs his consent to her marriage. Pleading coyly at first, she ends by threatening to throw herself under the Ponte Vecchio if he does not allow her to go to Porte Rossa to buy a wedding ring.
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"Mi chiamano Mimi" from La Boheme......Puccini
If the Frenchman, Bizet, was able to express most adequately the life and spirit of Spain in his Carmen, it remained for the Italian, Puccini, to interpret and fix in an opera the student and artist life of Paris. There is a vigor, a lifelike realism, and a delicately drawn pathos in this' work that raise it to a high position in the field of lyric drama. It is without a doubt the most beloved of all operas today. Audiences seem never to weary of the simple love story of the consumptive little seamstress, Mimi, and her artist lover, Rudolph, nor fail to respond to the combination of gaiety and sadness, comedy and tragedy, opulent vocal melody and orchestral richness that comes to them from the pages of this most expressive score.
In this aria from Act I, which is almost too familiar to warrant comment, Mimi is speaking to Rudolph at their first meeting. She tells him of her pitifully simple life--of how she works all day making artificial flowers for a living, of her longing for the real blossoms of spring time and the green meadows of the countryside, and of how lonely she has become in her tiny attic room high above the housetops.
Symphony No. 3, Op. 48--"Three Mysteries" . . . Creston
Paul Creston was born in New York City, October 10,1906; now living in Tuckahoe, New York.
Paul Creston is of Italian parentage and showed interest in music at an early age, receiving his first piano lessons when eight years old. Although he began composing when quite young, he did not seriously consider a composer's career until 1932. Since then he has proved to be one of the most versatile and prolific of our American composers. His interest in music has gone far beyond composition, however, and his researches in acoustics, music therapy, Gregorian chant, evolution of harmony, and psychology of music show the scope of his activity in other aspects of the musical art.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1938-39. On April 13, 1943 he received a $1,000 award, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The same year he received a merit award from the National Association for American Composers and Conductors and the New York Music Critics' Award for his first symphony.
Among his more recent works are: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 43 (July 1949); "Missa Solemnis" for Male Voices and Organ, Op. 44 (October 1949); two motets for male voices, Op. 45 (January 1950); and the Third Symphony (July 1950) on tonight's program.
Since 1934 Mr. Creston has been organist and choirmaster at St. Malachy's Church in New York. He also teaches piano and composition.
This symphony, his latest, was commissioned by the Worcester County Musical Association. It had its first performance at a Worcester Festival concert, October 27, 1950, by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
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Concerning the Third Symphony, he has written: "The subject matter was decided upon about five years ago and, as with all my major works, my attention was directed from time to time through these years toward the general outline and form of the work: the rhythmic structure, the type of movements, the moods."
The source of his subject matter is indicated in the subtitle, "Three Mysteries," referring to The Nativity, The Crucifixion, and The Resurrection. Of these he writes: "Though it derives its inspiration from these events, historic and mystic, the work is a musical parallel of the inherent emotional reactions rather than a narrative or painting. The programmatic content, such as there may be, is for the justification of drawing from the immense melodic wealth in Gregorian Chant."
Mr. Creston has provided the following additional comment on his Symphony No. 3:
L The Nativity (lento; allegro moderato) is based principally on two Gregorian themes; Puer natus est nobis, which is the Introit of the third Mass on Christmas Day, and the Gloria in excelsis Deo of the Kyrie Deus Sempiterne Mass. The Puer natus theme is announced by the horn toward the middle of the introduction, and the Gloria theme is presented by the flute in the quiet section (poco meno mosso) immediately following the climax of the Allegro moderato. A fugato based on the third theme closes this movement.
II. The Crucifixion (adagio) opens with the theme Pater, si non potest hie calix played by solo cello and sustained brass. This melody is soon transformed into a passacaglia-like theme in cello and basses, above which appear fragments of the second theme "Stabat Mater (No. 1)." The ever-increasing intensity of the mood leads to a violently climactic outburst, but of short duration, and subsides into a rather complete presentation of the Stabat Mater theme (bassoon), and then a fragment of this theme against the "Pater" melody.
III. The Resurrection (lento moderato; allegro ma calmo) presents almost the entire Gregorian melody Angelus Domini descendit de each (cellos and basses), leads to the second theme Christus resurgens ex mortuis (horns) and closes the introduction with a later portion of the first theme. The allegro section is based primarily on the Sequence for Easter Victimae pasehali laudes, perhaps the best known of all the themes utilized in this work. The original rhythmic structure of the Gregorian melodies is more closely retained in the second and third movements than in the first, although the actual melodic contour is evident in all of them. The symphony ends with a triumphant chorale based on the Christus resurgens theme.
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SIXTH CONCERT Lucy's Arietta from The Telephone.......Menotti
Gian-Carlo Menotti was born in Cadogliano, Italy, July 7, 1911.
Gian-Carlo Menotti is perhaps the most promising and exciting operatic creative talent of our time. In his operas to date he has demonstrated a natural talent for the lyric stage, unknown to any other composer of our period in America. He has an innate sense of the theater, an acute insight into what, in the aggregate, an opera really should be--i.e., he possesses an exceptional ability to protract in music the emotional atmosphere created by the events on the stage, and to penetrate, through an essentially vocal style, depths of character and personality. His remarkable talent is the result of a unique combination of two or so centuries of operatic tradition and inheritance, a feeling for contemporary musical and theatrical values, and that illusive thing known as an indigenous American expression. If Menotti continues to mature as a composer and musician and begins to control his somewhat youthful desire to contrive theatrical tricks and effects for their own sake--which is his besetting sin--he may easily one day create a music drama that will place him among the masters of this medium.
As a curtain raiser to The Medium, Menotti wrote The Telephone, an unpretentious but delightful little work in the pre-Mozartian frivolous style of Italian opera buffa. Its slender story is of a young man who tries to propose to a young lady, already so wedded to her telephone that his constantly interrupted proposal goes unheeded. In final desperation, he leaves her to call from a near-by telephone, by means of which he successfully pleads his cause and finally wins her. Lucy's Arietta appears at the opening and is sung while the thwarted young man waits for an end of the conversation to pursue his proposal. Inconsequential as this music may sound, it is written with a natural fluency and keen feeling for vocal expressiveness. Its sparkling style is amusingly gay, pleasantly tuneful, yet quick-witted and satirical.
His important works have been: Amelia Goes to the Ball (1937), performed at the Metropolitan in 1938; The Old Maid and the Thief (1939), written for the National Broadcasting Company and since then performed with regularity throughout the country; The Island Cod, a tragic one-act opera performed at the Metropolitan in 1942; The Medium (1946), commissioned by Columbia University (Alice M. Ditson Fund) and produced first at Brander Matthews Hall by the Columbia Theatre Association in conjunction with the music department, and later on Broadway with resounding success. Since its sensational reception it has been made into a moving picture, about to be released. His last work, The Consul, produced with similar success on Broadway in 1950, again furthered his reputation as an operatic composer.
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OFFICIAL PROGRAM Willow Song...........Coleridge-Taylor
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London, England, August IS, 1875; died at Croydon, September 1, 1912.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a British composer of African-Negro descent, had a short, brilliant career. He left to the world, when he died at the age of thirty-seven, an art ranging from opera through symphony, chamber, and choral music, the individuality of which made an immediate and lasting impression and won him a rapid recognition throughout the English-speaking world.
He made three concert tours of the United States, in 1904, 1906, and 1910, conducting his own works, and won from American audiences a lasting respect and affection.
An important part of his work which has lasted through the years is the incidental music written for various plays produced at His Majesty's Theatre, London. The well-known "Willow Song" from Shakespeare's Othello, sung by Desdemona in her chamber just before her death, has been set by this gifted composer with sensitivity and taste.
Norwegian Echo Song, "Kom Kjyra".......Thrane
Waldemar Thrane was born in Christiania, October 8, 1790; died there December 30, 1828.
Waldemar Thrane's claim, if not to immortality, at least to a mention in biographical dictionaries, lies in the fact that he composed, in 1824, the first Norwegian opera, Fjeldeventyret ("A Mountain Adventure").
This fact in itself is not epoch making in importance, but in the creation of the work Thrane tapped a spring of Norwegian folk song and dance which broadened later into a stream of national art music with the advent of Edvard Grieg.
The "Norwegian Echo Song" is Thrane's most popular composition, and concert audiences have had it warbled at them (with gestures) by all the famous divas from the time of the fabulous Jenny Lind, who made her own elaborate version (reaching in one place a G above high C), adding a sensational unaccompanied vocal cadenza on the last word "Ah!" (to the everlasting glory of that otherwise meaningless ejaculation).
During a period when singers attempted rather consciously to improve the quality of their offerings, "The Norwegian Echo Song," along with such vehicles for vocal pyrotechnics as Proch's "Air and Variations" and Bishop's "Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark" (also with variations) disappeared from printed programs, although for a short period it made furtive reappearances as an encore.
Its performance tonight will awaken in the aural memory of many, the voices of Tetrazzini, Sembrich, Melba, Frieda Hempel, Galli-Curci, and Rosa Ponselle, all of whom negotiated interpolated runs and scales with breathtaking (in more than one sense) facility.
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SIXTH CONCERT The following English translation was made by Paul Bliss:
Come Bossy! Come Bossies All! Come Bossy ! Hoah ! Hoah ! Hoah ! Hoah! Ah ! Come cow, come calf, come Bossy! Your coats in the sun are all glossy But you must be branded, whether or no; Each must the mark of the owner show. Hoah ! Hoah! Hoah!
Come on, come Bossy dear! Come Bossy! When the sun is sinking fast, Deeper grow the shadows,
Over ev'ry hill and vale,
All along the meadows.
Then the cattle gladly come;
Soon will I be safely home.
Then the cattle come;
Soon will I be safe at home.
Come Bossy! Come Bossy, come! Come
Bossy! Hoah! Hoah! Hoah! Hoah!
Trrah ho, ho ah! Ah! Ah!
"The Laughing Song" from Die Fledermaus .... Strauss
Johann Strauss, the younger, was born at Vienna, October 25, 1825; died there, June 3, 1899.
About 1805, Dr. Charles Burney spoke of the waltz as "a riotous German dance of modern invention. . . . The verb waltzen, whence this word is derived, implies to roll, wallow, welter, tumble down, or roll in the dirt and mire. What analogy there may be between these acceptations and the dance, we pretend not to say; but having seen it performed by a select party of foreigners, we could not help reflecting how uneasy an English mother would be to see her daughter so familiarly treated and still more to witness the obliging manner in which the freedom is returned by the females."
The waltz flourished, however, in spite of nice old Dr. Burney, and during the middle of the nineteenth century, under the refining influence of the Strausses, father and son, it reached its graceful and melodious perfection.
Johann Strauss began his public career at a concert, October 15, 1844, at Donmayer's Casino. The tremendous success on that occasion began a series of uninterrupted triumphs which finally brought him to the peak of popularity as a conductor. As a composer, Johann Strauss's output was prodigious. He composed almost five hundred dances and sixteen operettas. Although he chose to write in a limited idiom, within it he surpassed all others in effectiveness and expressiveness. His genius as a composer should not be minimized because he avoided working in the larger forms. He remains one of the musical masters of his age. Richard Wagner referred to him as "the most musical brain of the century" and declared that "one of Strauss' waltzes surpassed, as far as charm, finish and musical worth, hundreds of artificial compositions of his contemporaries, as the tower of St. Stephen's surpasses the kiosks on the boulevards of Paris. Long live our classicists from Mozart to Strauss!"
In the spring of 1872, Meilhac and Halevy, librettists for Offenbach, concocted, from a German comedy by Roderick Bendix, a run-of-the-mill farce entitled Le Revillon ("The Awakening"). This unpretentious, rather crude comedy of errors and mistaken identities became the source of one of the most delightfully unique scores in the history of opera.
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The French version of the story was converted by Haffner and Genee into a German libretto, and presented to Strauss, who, intrigued by the fact that the piece centered about a grand ball, emerged after forty-three days of seclusion with the score of a waltz-opera, Die Fledermaus.
The effervescent beauty and exhilaration of this music has served and survived three quarters of a century of modern-minded directors, producers, and versifiers who have periodically attempted to adapt it to the tastes and desires of their various generations. It has been produced as "La Chauve Souris," "La Tzigane," "II Pipistrello," "The Bat," "The Merry Countess," "The Night Birds," "The Masked Ball," "Fly by Night," "Champagne Sec," "A Wonderful Night," "Rosalinda," and under dozens of other titles. No amount of theatrical or dramatic restoration, renovation, rejuvenation, or reconversion of this work could in the slightest degree either increase or diminish the brilliance that is for all time caught within its miraculous musical pages.
The "Laughing Song" is sung by the servant maid, Adele, who is attending a ball in a dress of her mistress, Rosalinda. She is recognized by her master Eisenstein, but laughs off her embarrassment in a series of staccato scales, several high B's, a D, and a brilliant cadenza that ends on a trilled high C
Suite from Der Rosenkavalter.........Strauss
Richard Strauss was born June 11, 1864, in Munich; died in Garmish-Parten-Kirchen, Germany, September 8, 1949.
"If it's Richard, we'll take Wagner; if it's Strauss, we'll take Johann," wrote a Berlin critic after hearing the first performance of Der Rosenkav alter in 1911. But this is not the critical opinion today.
Certainly no other of Strauss's scores has endeared him to so large a public, for no other abounds in such geniality, tenderness, and charm. Nor are there many of his pages that reveal such a wealth of mellifluous and engaging melody or such opulent, and at the same time, transparent orchestration.
To a public shocked and antagonized by the consuming lust and appalling frankness of Salome or by the repellent decadence and crushing dissonance of Electra, the warm humanity and gentility of this comedy of manners with its engaging intrigue and its appealing blend of wit and pathos, buffoonery and nostalgic charm came as a great relief and restored to the late Victorians their faith in decency and good taste.
Der Rosenkavalier is a comedy of eighteenth-century Vienna, written by von Hofmannsthal. It tells the story of a charming woman's reconciliation to her advancing years, and her noble renunciation of a love that has turned from her to a younger woman. The story, relieved by scenes of humor that verge on the bawdy, is so permeated with the spirit of human understanding, humility,
The libretto, used at the recent Metropolitan revival, is by Garson Kanin with lyrics by Howard Dietz.
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SIXTH C ONCERT
and wisdom that it never fails to leave the spectator with a renewed faith in the goodness in living.
The present Suite was compiled for Fiirstner, Strauss's publisher. It begins with the orchestral introduction to the opera, and includes the outstanding ensemble music as well as that associated with the entrance of the Rosebearer. It ends with the waltzes that occur throughout the opera, particularly at the end of Act II, which are mostly associated with the capers of the fat and lecherous, but impoverished, Baron von Lerchenau as he dances around the room delighted with the outcome of his immediate amorous plans.
[65]
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
Organized in 1879. Incorporated in 1881.
PRESIDENTS
Henry Simmons Frieze, 1879-1881 and 1883-1889 Alexander Winchell, 1881-1883 and 1889-1891 Francis W. Kelsey, 1891-1927 Charles A. Sink (Executive Secretary, 1904-1927) 1927MUSICAL DIRECTORS
Calvin B. Cady, 1879-1888 Albert A. Stanley, 1888-1921 Earl V. Moore, 1922-1939
CONDUCTORS
Thor Johnson, 1939-1942
Hardin Van Deursen, 1942-1947
Thor Johnson (Guest), 1947Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor, 1947THE ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Maintained by the University Musical Society
Founded by Albert A. Stanley and his associates in the Board of Directors in 1894
MUSICAL DIRECTORS
Albert A. Stanley, 1894-1921 Earl V. Moore, 1922-1939
CONDUCTORS
Thor Johnson, 1940-1942 Hardin Van Deursen, 1943-1946 Thor Johnson (Guest), 1947[66]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
ORGANIZATIONS
The Boston Festival Orchestra, Emil Mollenhauer, Conductor, 1894-1904
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, Conductor, 1905-1935; Eric DeLamarter, Associate Conductor, 1918-1935
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Conductor, Saul Caston and Charles O'Con-nell, Associate Conductors, 1936; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, 1937, 1938; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Saul Caston, Associate Conductor, 1939-1945; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Alexander Hilsberg, Associate Conductor, 1946The University Choral Union, Albert A. Stanley, Conductor, 1894-1921; Earl V. Moore, Conductor, 1922-1939; Thor Johnson, Conductor, 1940-1942; Hardin Van Deursen, 1943-1947; Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor, 1947-; Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor, 1947The Festival Youth Chorus, trained by Florence B. Potter, and conducted by Albert A. Stanley, 1913-1918. Conductors: Russell Carter, 1920; George Oscar Bowen, 1921-1924; Joseph E. Maddy, 1925-1927; Juva N. Higbee, 1928-1936; Roxy Cowin, 1937; Juva N. Higbee, 1938; Roxy Cowin, 1939; Juva N. Higbee, 1940-1942; Marguerite Hood, 1943The Stanley Chorus (now the Women's Glee Club), trained by Marguerite Martindale, 1934; trained by Wilson Sawyer, 1944
The University Glee Club, trained by David Mattern, 1937 The Lyra Chorus, trained by Reuben H. Kempf, 1937
GUEST CONDUCTORS
Gustav Hoist (London, England), 1923, 1932
Howard Hanson (Rochester), 1926, 1927, 1933, 1935
Felix Borowski (Chicago), 1927
Percy Grainger (New York), 1928
Jose Iturbi (Philadelphia), 1937
Georges Enesco (Paris), 1939
Harl McDonald (Philadelphia), 1939, 1940, 1944
FESTIVAL CHORAL REPERTOIRE University Choral Union
Bach: Mass in B minor (excerpts)--1923, 1924, 1925
Magnificat in D major--1930, 1950 Beethoven : Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123--1927, 1947
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125--1934, 1942, 1945 Berlioz : The Damnation of Faust--1895, 1909, 1920 Bizet: Carmen--1904, 1918, 1927, 1938 Bloch : "America," An Epic Rhapsody--1929 Bossi: Paradise Lost--1916
[67]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Brahms: Requiem, Op. 45--1899 (excerpts), 1920, 1941, 1949
Alto Rhapsodie, Op. 53--1939
Song of Destiny, Op. 54--1950 Bruch: Arminius--1897, 1905
Fair Ellen, Op. 24--1904, 1910
Odysseus--1910
Bruckner : Te Deum laudamus--1945 Carey: "America"--1915 Chadwick: The Lily Nymph--1900 Delxus: Sea Drift--1924 Dvorak: Stabat Mater, Op. 58--1906 Elgar: Caractacus--1903, 1914, 1936
The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38--1904, 1912, 1917 Fogg: The Seasons--1937 Franck: The Beatitudes--1918 Gluck: Orpheus--1902
Goldmark: The Queen of Sheba (March)--1923 Gomer, Llywelyn : Gloria in Excelsis--1949 Gounod: Faust--1902, 1908, 1919
Gallia--1899
Gratnger: Marching Song of Democracy--1928 Hadley: "Music," An Ode, Op. 75--1919 Handel: Judas Maccabeus--1911
Messiah--1907, 1914 Hanson, Howard: Songs from "Drum Taps"---1935
Heroic Elegy--1927
The Lament for Beowulf--1926
Merry Mount--1933 Haydn: The Creation--1908, 1932
The Seasons--1909, 1934 Heger : Ein Friedenslied, Op. 19--1934f Holst: A Choral Fantasia--1932f
A Dirge for Two Veterans--1923
The Hymn of Jesus--19231
First Choral Symphony (excerpts)--1927f Honegger: King David--1930, 1935, 1942 Kodaly: Psalmus Hungaricus, Op. 13--1939
Lambert, Constant : Summer's Last Will and Testament--19511 McDonald, Harl: Symphony No. 3 ("Lamentations of Fu Hsuan")--1939 Mendelssohn: Elijah--1901, 1921, 1926, 1944
St. Paul--1905
Mennin, Peter : Symphony No. 4, "The Cycle,"--1950 Moussorgsky: Boris Godounov--1931, 1935 Mozart: Great Mass in C minor, K. 427--1948
Requiem Mass in D minor--1946 Parker : Hora Novissima, Op. 30--1900 Pierne: The Children's Crusade--1915
Saint Francis of Assisi--1928, 1931 Ponchtelli: La Gioconda--1925 Prokofieff: Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78--1946
World premiere t American premiere
[68]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Rachmaninoff : The Bells--1925, 1938, 1948
Respighi: La Primavera--1924t
Rimsky-Korsakoff : The Legend of Kitesh--1932f
Rossini: Stabat Mater--1897
Saint-Saens: Samson and Delilah--1896, 1899, 1907, 1912, 1916, 1923, 1929, 1940
Schuman, William: A Free Song (Cantata No. 2)--1945
Sibelius: Onward Ye Peoples--1939, 1945
Smith, J. S.: Star Spangled Banner--1919, 1920
Stanley: Chorus Triumphalis, Op. 14--1897, 1912, 1921
Fair Land of Freedom--1919
Hymn of Consecration--1918
"Laus Deo," Choral Ode--1913, 1943
A Psalm of Victory, Op. 8--1906 Stock : A Psalmodic Rhapsody--1922,1943 Stravinsky: Symphonie de Psaumes--1932 Sullivan: The Golden Legend--1901 Tchaikovsky: Episodes from Eugeiie Onegin--1911, 1941 Thompson, Randall: Alleluia--1941 Vardell: Cantata, "The Inimitable Lovers"--1940 Verdi: Aida--1903, 1906, 1917, 1921, 1924 (excerpts), 1928, 1937
La Forza del Destino (Finale, Act II)--1924
OteUo--1939
Requiem Mass--1894, 1898, 1913, 1920, 1930, 1936, 1943, 1951
Stabat Mater--1899
Te Deum--1947
Villa-Lobos, Heitor: Choros No. 10, "Rasga o corac.ao"--1949 Wagner : The Flying Dutchman--1898
Lohengrin---1926; Act 1--1896, 1913
Die Meistersinger, Finale to Act III--1903, 1913; Chorale, "Awake," and Chorale Finale to Act III--1923
Scenes from Parsifal--1937
Tannhduser--1902, 1922; March and Chorus--1896; "Venusberg" Music--1946 Walton: Belshazzar's Feast--1933 Wolf-Ferrari: The New Life, Op. 9--1910, 1915, 1922, 1929
Festival Youth Chorus
Abt: Evening Bells--1922 Anonymous: Birds in the Grove--1921 Arne : Ariel's Song--1920
The Lass With the Delicate Air--1937 Barratt: Philomel with Melody--1924 Beethoven : A Prayer--1923
Benedict, Jules: Sweet Repose is Reigning Now--1921 Benoit: Into The World--1914, 1918 Boyd : The Hunting of the Snark--1929 Brahms: The Little Dust Man--1933
Lullaby--1931 Bruch : April Folk--1922 Busch: The Song of Spring--1922
t American premiere
[69]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Caracciolo: Nearest and Dearest--1923
A Streamlet Full of Flowers--1923 Carey: "America"--1913, 1917, 1918, 1920 Chopin : The Maiden's Wish--1931 Coleridge-Taylor: Viking Song--1924
DeLamarter, Eric (orchestrator): Songs of the Americas--1944, 1948 English: Cantata, "The Ugly Duckling"--1934 Farwell: Morning--1924
Fletcher: The Walrus and the Carpenter--1913, 1917, 1926, 1942, 1950 Folk Songs--Italian: The Blackbirds, Sleep Little Child--1921
Scotch: "Caller Herrin"--1920
Welsh: Dear Harp of My Country--1920
Zuni Indian: The Sun Worshippers--1924 Gaul: Cantata, "Old Johnny Appleseed"--1931
Cantata, "Spring Rapture"--1933, 1937 Gillett: Songs--1941 Gounod : "Waltz Song" from Faust--1924 Grainger: Country Gardens--1933 Gretchaninoff : The Snow Drop--1938 Handel: "He Shall Feed His Flock," from Messiah--1929 Howland, Russell (orchestrator): Song Cycle from the Masters--1947 Humperdinck : Selections from Hansel and Cretel--1923 Hyde: Cantata, "The Quest of the Queer Prince"--1928 d'Indy : Saint Mary Magdalene--1941 James, Dorothy: Cantata, "Jumblies"--1935
Cantata, "Paul Bunyan"--1938
American Folk Songs (orchestration)--1946, 1951
Lieder Cycle (orchestration)--1949 Kelly: Suite, "Alice in Wonderland"--1925 Kjerulf : Barcarolle--1920 Madsen: Shepherd on the Hills--1920, 1922 McArtor, Marion (orchestrator): Songs--1940
Folk Song Fantasy--1943 Mendelssohn: On Wings of Song--1934
Spring Song--1924
Mohr-Gruber: Christmas Hymn, "Silent Night"--1916 Moore, E. V.: "The Voyage of Arion"--1921, 1927 Morley : It Was a Lover and His Lass--1921, 1938
Now is the Month of Maying--1935 Mozart: Cradle Song--1930
The Minuet--1922 Myrberg: Fisherman's Prayer--1922 Pierne: The Children at Bethlehem--1916, 1936
The Children's Crusade--1915
Saint Francis of Assisi--1928, 1931
Planquette: Invitation of the Bells from "Chimes of Normandy"--1924 Protheroe : Cantata, "The Spider and the Fly"--1932 Purcell: In the Delightful Pleasant Grove--1938 Reger: The Virgin's Slumber Song--1938 Reinecke, Carl: "In Life If Love We Know Not"--1921
O Beautiful Violet--1924
World premiere
[70]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Rowley-James : Cantata, "Fun of the Fair"--1945 Rubenstein : Thou'rt Like Unto a Flower--1931
Wanderer's Night Song--1923 Sadero: Fa la nana bambin--1935 Schubert: Cradle Song--1924, 1939
Hark, Hark the Lark--1930
Hedge Roses--1934, 1939
Linden Tree--1923, 1935
Serenade in D minor--1939
The Trout--1937
Whither--1939
Who Is Sylvia--1920
Schumann, Georg : Good Night, Pretty Stars--1924 Schumann, Robert : Lotus Flower--1930
Spring's Messenger--1929
The Nut Tree--1939 Scott: The Lullaby--1937 Strauss, Johann : Blue Danube Waltz--1934 Strong : Cantata, "A Symphony of Song"--1930 Sullivan : Selections from Operas--1932 Thomas, Goring : Night Hymn at Sea--1924 Tosti: Serenade--1933 Van der Stucken : At the Window--1920 Wagner : "Whirl and Twirl" from The Flying Dutchman---1924 Wahxstedt: Gay Liesel--1922 Weber : "Prayer" from Der Freischiitz--1920
The Voice of Evening--1924
? World premiere
[71]
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor
Frederick Don Truesdell, Pianist
Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
Virginia Aprill and Charlotte S. Farris, Librarians
First Sopranos Aprill, Virginia Bell, Elsie L. Boice, Helen E. Boyd, Elinor J. Bradstreet, Lola Branson, Allegra Britton, Veronica Campbell, Ruth Carstens, Dorothy Clark, Janice Clark, Maury Crawford, Mary Davis, Barbara Elliott, Joanne Gilligan, Louise Hanson, Gladys Hendrian, Suzanne Herman, Patricia Heyde, Norma Lee Houston, Alberta Ivanoff, Jacqueline Jewett, Patty Jun, Rose Marie Krimm, Marilyn Lamberton, Pauline Lock, Inez J. Logan, Bernadyne MacLaren, Helen Long, Ardis C. Malan, Fannie Belle Newell, Dorothy Ongpin, Norma Parsons, Mary Patton, Beatrice Prince, Ethel Ranger, Mary I. Ravesloot, Grace St. Denis, Joan Schulz, Eleanor Smith, Dorothy H. Smith, Dorothy J. Taylor, Merle G. Teraes, Patricia Tung, Juliana Van Manen, Lucille
[72]
Wells, Eugenia Wilder, Carol N. Zickerman, Edith
Second Sopranos
Allen, Jean C. Andersen, Barbara Bradley, Barbara Brooks, Faith S. Carillo, Edith Coy, Audrey L. Detzer, Mary Ann Fisher, Winifred Gault, Madelaine Gunn, Florence Hall, L. Jean Hedrick, Norma Higgins, Carol Howe, Helene A. Jensen, Marielouise Jewell, Arlene Jewell, Esther Johnson, Virginia Jones, Lee E. Kuhl, Elise A. Maxwell, Shirley McDowell, Wanda McKinley, Ann W. McLester, Celess Merrill, Barbara Mikulich, Alice Northrup, Martha Patrick, Joan Patsloff, Patricia Peterson, Ingrid Puglisi, Elizabeth Sanderson, Doris Schuster, Ethel Sturgeon, Geraldine Thomas, Grace J. Traxler, Ellen Turner, Mary E. Van Kirk, Nancy Vassoff, Marilyn Vlisides, Elena Zapf, Joan Carol
First Altos
Baker, Lucille Bean, Elizabeth Blair, Virginia Bliese, Marjorie Brask, Sannah Brehm, Beverly Brown, Marian Coutts, M. Joan Crawford, Alice Doerner, Joyce Duncan, Camilla Estep, Jeannette Falcone, Mary L. Festinger, Mary Frederick, Merian Gonan, Gloria J. Griffith, Erma Griggs, Jessiemay Herrick, Hildegarde Hourigan, Virginia Jacobi, Mary Jane James, I. Lucille Kahn, Janice S. Kime, Frances A. LaMed, Renah Little, Ann C. Mastin, Neva M. McCall, Margaret Morse, Frances Niemann, Lane R. Niemann, Mary Jane Palmer, Anna W. Parker, Joyce C. Pierce, Janet C. Rouse, Elaine Rucker, Helen Shook, Thelma Sill, Martha M. Skramovsky, Merrill Stimson, Sally Stoltz, Barbara Tennant, Elaine VandeKieft, Ruth Wappler, Margaret
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Wiedmann, Louise Zeeb, Helen R.
Second Altos
Alchin, Carol Allen, Elizabeth Backels, Ruth Ball, Genevieve Bell, Letitia Biddle, Jane Birk, Allene A. Bogart, Gertrude Branson, Anita Brown, Frances Brown, Mary K. Case, Marietta Clark, Helen Crossley, Sarah-Lou Crossley, Winnifred Enkemann, Gladys Farris, Charlotte Foster, Dorothy Granger, Beverly Holtman, Estella Huey, Geraldine Hummer, Patricia Kornischky, Nancy Katzenmeyer, Ann Kay, Constance Keith, Virginia Kish, Rhea K. Larsen, Joan E. Lauer, Joan Lenz, Elsa F. McMurray, Nancy Mundorff, Patricia Newell, Jean W. Newman, Priscilla Roush, Mary H. Stevens, Evelyn Tulecke, Hazel Utley, Ursula Winson, Ernestine Wisse, Esther Woodworth, Alta Wright, Erma Zumstein, Marguerite
First Tenors
Alperin, Harvey Comfort, Gordon Dykstal, Henry Gorree, Frederick Graham, Ralph Heinze, Richard Horwitz, Fred James, Richard James, Dr. William Johnson, Clare
Liefer, Gerald Lowry, Paul T. Muto, Shuichi Niemann, Frederick Roush, Richard Sanderson, Jesse Savage, Lloyd Stettenheim, Peter Thompson, Peter Visosky, John Wagner, Herbert Waldron, Wilfred Wear, Robert E. Weatherill, Robert Wiseman, Donald
Second Tenors
Applegate, Albert Arnesen, Richard Arnold, Calvin Bronson, David Brown, Robert Damron, Bert L. Fisher, Charles Hall, William J. Hardy, Gerald Haswell, Max V. Hennes, Dr. Allen Kirsten, Walter Lenz, Wallace Maehado, Emiliano McCracken, William Newman, Alan N. Norris, Allen M. Perez, Pablo Robinson, Don Robinson, John Roderick, Thomas Shatz, Malcolm Snyder, Wesley Swanson, Nils Troske, Robert Vandenberg, E. L., Jr. VanEenam, Donald Vedder, Morris Vis, Vincent A. Whitehouse, Frank, Jr. Widerquist, Allan Wortley, Charles Youngberg, Rev. Harold
First Basses
Aaronson, Dr. Lewis Beach, Neil W. Cathey, Arthur Curry, Jon E. Daley, John G. Dejager, Donald Doolittle, Robert
Foster, Emerson Gielow, James Grinius, Algis Grover, Albert Hagen, Ivan J. Hamilton, Ralph Hines, Paul R. Jackson, Philip Kays, J. Warren Keith, Robert Lewis, James L., Jr. Maxwell, Donald McGaw, Richard Meader, Robert Murray, David Neuhardt, John Price, Russell Putnam, Leon J. Roberts, William Shinn, Hal D. Smith, Allan F. Tompkins, Stanton Umphrey, James Van Laar, Jack Wechsler, Martin Wilder, David
Second Basses
Allen, Gordon Bath, Charles Berberian, Ara Berg, Arthur D. Bostrom, Marvin Brown, Robert Clugston, George Curtice, Russell Davidter, Royal Epstein, Robert Gehring, John Gozesky, Max A. Halstead, Boyd Heyde, John B. Holtgrieve, Martin Jahsman, David Jampel, Dr. Robert Krueger, Irwin Larounis, George Leacock, James Liang, Charles Mastin, Glenn Morris, John A. Northrup, Peter Otto, David J. Reinhart, Melvin Rose Arthur Stetter, Charles . Swisher, John E., Jr. Williams, Lewis R., Jr.
[73]
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY ORCHESTRA
Violins Merte, Herman Morris, Donald VV. Shanklin, Genevieve Evich, Walter Wear, Louise Ambrazebich, William Shanker, Morris G. Shaler, Dorothy J. Hewitt, Gail Rupert, Jeanne L. Hohmann, Dorothy Stuart, Alexander V. Redner, Arthur L. Kemp, Clarence S. Weiss, Barbara Strain, Luzella Brown, Archie Schilla, Yvonne Rutter, Phyllis Eddleblute, Clarence Streicher, Janet Westcott, Anne Jones, Roland Leo Stevenson, Diana
Violas
Simonel, Emile J., Jr. Schuster, Kurt S. Wagner, Lilias C. Mauerhoff, Gert Bjorke, Wallace Kovats, Daniel Woldt, Elizabeth Hoermann, Roland W. Norman, Robert Z. Maddy, Joseph E. Schaeberle, E. A.
Cellos
Clark, Bruce J. Klingbeil, Bruce N. Sano, Alice
Jansman, Phyllis Austin, Grace Loeber Streicher, Velma Martin, Ann Stevenson, Anne Stevenson, Charles L. Shetler, Donald J.
Basses
Hammel, Virginia Bryan, Virginia Nusca, Raymond L. Courtright, Ann Skidmore, Edward Spera, Beverley Thompson, Clyde
Flutes
Hauenstein, Nelson M. Hauenstein, Louise Steele
Piccolo Weitknecht, Nancy Lou
Oboes
Heger, Theodore E. Heger, Charles T.
English Horn Schiltz, Grover E.
Clarinets Van Dyke, Harvey Crawford, John W. Symmonds, Nancy Austin, George A.
Bass Clarinet Rolston, Ernest K.
Bassoons
Weichlein, William J. Pfeuffer, Robert
Beck, John C. Szor, Samuel
CONTRABASSOON
Beck, John C.
Horns
Henry, Sheldon Kaatz, Carla H. Laing, Millard M. Chastaine, Leah Bartholomew, Leland Bartholomew, Mary Dalley, Nielsen
Trumpets
Gallagher, Charles Schubert, Beverly Haas, Donald Ray Patrick, Joan Young, Graham Kirsch, Charles Moreland, John
Trombones Bryan, Paul Skrzynski, Joseph Chase, Allen H. Janton, William Waldecker, Doris
Tuba Otto, David
Harp Perlis, Vivian
Percussion
Salmon, James D. Maddy, Richard A. Miller, Paul G., Jr. McGoey, Barbara
Combined personnel of players who participated with the Choral Union in the two Messiah performances, and those who assisted in the preparation of May Festival choral works this season.
[74]
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Eugene Oemandy, Conductor Alexander Hjlsberg, Associate Conductor
Harl McDonald, Manager Thomas A. Greene, Assistant Manager
First Violins Hilsberg, Alexander,
Concertmaster Madison, David,
Assistant Concertmaster Rosen, Irvin Reynolds, Veda Henry, Dayton M. Simkins, Jasha Zenker, Alexander Aleinikoff, Harry Costanzo, Frank Lusak, Owen Gesensway, Louis Sharlip, Benjamin Simkin, Meyer Goldstein, Ernest L. Coleman, David Putlitz, Lois Schmidt, Henry
Second Violins Ruden, Sol Pepper, Joseph Shulik, Morris Brodo, Joseph Bove, D. DiCamillo, A. Gorodetzky, A . Eisenberg, Irwin Schwartz, Isadore Miller, Charles S. Dabrowski, S. Kaufman, Schima Roth, Manuel Stahl, Jacob Mueller, Matthew J. Black, Norman
Violas
Lifschey, Samuel Mogill, Leonard Braverman, Gabriel
Ferguson, Paul Frantz, Leonard Kahn, Gordon Roens, Samuel Bauer, J. K. Epstein, Leonard Greenberg, Wm. S. Loeben, Gustave A. Gray, Alexander
Violoncellos Olefsky, Paul Hilger, Elsa Gusikoff, B. Belenko, Samuel Gorodetzer, Harry Siegel, Adrian de Pasquale, Francis Lewin, Morris Druian, Joseph Gray, John Sterin, J. Gorodetzky, Hershel
Basses
Scott, Roger M. Torello, Carl Lazzaro, Vincent Strassenberger, Max Eney, F. Gilbert Wiemann, Heinrich Arian, Edward Maresh, Ferdinand Schaeffer, John A.
Harps
Costello, Marilyn Bailiff, Jill
Flutes
Kincaid, W. M. Terry, Kenton F. Atkinson, Burnett F. Cole, Robert
Piccolo Atkinson, Burnett F.
Oboes
Tabuteau, Marcel de Lancie, John Di Fulvio, Louis Minsker, John Siegel, Adrian
English Horn Minsker, John
Clarinets
Gigliotti, Anthony M. Serpentini, Jules J. Rowe, George D. Lester, Leon
Bass Clarinet Lester, Leon
Saxophones Lester, Leon Guerra, Selma
Bassoons Schoenbach, Sol Angelucci, A. L. Gruner, William Del Negro F.
CONTRABASSOON
Del Negro, F.
Horns
Jones, Mason Tomei, A. A. Fearn, Ward O. Mayer, Clarence Lannuti, Charles Pierson, Herbert Hale, Leonard
Serving in the United States Navy Band.
[75]
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
Trumpets
Krauss, Samuel Hering, Sigmund Rehrig, Harold W. Rosenfeld, Seymour
Bass Trumpet Gusikoff, Charles
Trombones
Gusikoff, Charles Lambert, Robert W. Cole, Howard Harper, Robert S.
Euphonium Gusikoff, Charles
Tuba
Torchinsky, Abe
Timpani
Grupp, David Schulman, Leonard
Battery
Hinger, Fred D. Schulman, Leonard Valerio, James Roth, Manuel Hoffman, Jacob
Celesta and Piano Putlitz, Lois Sokoloff, Vladimir
Organ
Elmore, Robert Librarian
Taynton, Jesse C.
Photographic Publicity
Siegel, Adrian
Personnel Manager Schmidt, Henry
[76]
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY PROGRAMS 1950-1951
The University Musical Society, in addition to the annual May Festival, provided the following concerts during the season of 1950-51
72ND ANNUAL CHORAL UNION SERIES
HELEN TRAUBEL, Soprano
Coenraad V. Bos, Pianist
October 5, 19S0
Gottes Macht und Vorsehung
"Divinites du Styx" (Alceste) Der Atlas 1
Nacht und Traume Jager ruhe von der
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Beethoven
. Gluck Schubert
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Coenraad V. Bos Isolde's Narrative (Tristan und Isolde) Wagner Go Down, Moses T ;;Â