UMS Concert Program, May 6, 7, 8, 9, 1965: The Seventy-second Annual Ann Arbor May Festival -- The Philadelphia Orchestra

Season: Eighty-sixth
Concert: SIXTH
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan

ANN ARBOR
1965
ANN ARBOR
Souvenir Book Mark
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
of The University of Michigan
Ciahtu-dixth
eaAon
Program of the Seventy-second Annual
ANN ARBOR
MAY FESTIVAL
Six Concerts
May 6, 7, 8, 9, 1965
Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Published by the University Musical Society, Ann Arbor
CONTENTS
Page
University Musical Society, Board of Directors......... 5
The Philadelphia Orchestra (photograph).............. 6
Performing Artists .................................. 7
Concert Programs ................................... 8
Annotations
First Concert....................................... 17
Second Concert ..................................... 27
Third Concert ...................................... 42
Fourth Concert ..................................... 49
Fifth Concert....................................... 57
Sixth Concert....................................... 66
Notes on the Philadelphia Orchestra and May Festival
Artists............................................ 75
Organizations--Personnel
The University Choral Union and Youth Chorus.......... 80
The Philadelphia Orchestra........................... 82
History, Repertoire, and Resume
The University Musical Society........................ 83
The Ann Arbor May Festival.......................... 85
Choral Union Repertoire.............................. 86
Resume of 1964-65 Season............................ 88
International Presentations for the 1965-66 Season. ... 95
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
Board of Directors
Charles A. Sink, A.B., M.Ed., LL.D., HH.D. . . President Alexander G. Ruthven, Ph.D., LL.D., Sc.D. . Vice-President
Erich A. Walter, A.M..........Secretary
Oscar A. Eberbach, A.B..........Treasurer
Roscoe 0. Bonisteel, LL.B., LL.D., Sc.D.
Assistant Secretary-Treasurer
James R. Breakey, Jr., A.M., LL.B., LL.D. Harlan Hatcher, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D. Harley A. Haynes, M.D. Thor Johnson, M.Mus., Mus.D. E. Blythe Stason, A.B., B.S., J.D. E. Thurston Thieme, M.S., M.D. Henry F. Vaughan, M.S., Dr.P.H.
Died January 20, 1965.
Gail W. Rector, B.Mus., Executive Director
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY is a nonprofit organiza?tion devoted to educational purposes. For eighty-six years its concerts have been maintained through the sale of tickets. Gifts, credited to the Endowment Fund, will commensurately ensure continuance of the quality of concert presentation and make possible advances in scope and activity as new opportunities arise.
30th anniversary oj the appearances oj the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Ann Arbor May Festival.
THE SEVENTY-SECOND ANNUAL
ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Conductors
Eugene Ormandy, Orchestral Conductor
William Smith, Assistant Orchestral Conductor
Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor
Lester McCoy, Chorusmaster
Organizations
The Philadelphia Orchestra
The University Choral Union
Youth Chorus
Soloists
Leontyne Price..................................Soprano
Janice Harsanyi..................................Soprano
Maureen Forrester .............................Contralto
Murray Dickie....................................Tenor
Cesare Siepi ........................................Bass
Sviatoslav Richter................................Pianist
Anshel Brusilow ................................Violinist
Joseph de Pasquale................................Violist
Leonard Rose.................................Violoncellist
(For biographical sketches of all performers, see pages 75 to 79)
The Steinway is the official piano of the University Musical Society. The Baldwin Piano is the official piano of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
FIRST MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Thursday Evening, May 6, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
LEONTYNE PRICE, Soprano
PROGRAM
Overture to Der Freischiitz......................................Weber
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60......................Beethoven
Adagio; allegro vivace Adagio
Allegro vivace
Allegro ma non troppo
Concert aria: "Bella mia fiamma, addio".........................Mozart
Leontyne Price
intermission
Recitative, "Sorta e la notte" and Aria, "Ernani, involami" from Ernani............................Verdi
Miss Price
?Suite from The Firebird...................................Stravinsky
Introduction: The Firebird and Her Dance
Dance of the Princesses
Infernal Dance of Kastchei
Berceuse
Finale
Columbia Records 8
SECOND MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Friday Evening, May 7, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
YOUTH CHORUS THOR JOHNSON, Guest Conductor
SOLOISTS
Janice Harsanyi, Soprano Maureen Forrester, Contralto
Murray Dickie, Tenor Anshel Brusilow, Violinist Joseph de Pasquale, Violist
PROGRAM
Overture to Die Entjiihrung aus dem Serail.......................Mozart
Spring Symphony ............................................Britten
University Choral Union, Youth Chorus, Janice Harsanyi, Maureen Forrester, and Murray Dickie
INTERMISSION
Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major for
Violin, Viola, and Orchestra, K. 364...........................Mozart
Allegro maestoso Andante Presto
Anshel Brusilow and Joseph de Pasquale
9
THIRD MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Afternoon, May 8, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA WILLIAM SMITH, Assistant Conductor
SOLOIST
LEONARD ROSE, Violoncellist
PROGRAM
Suite of Dances from the opera Alcina.....................Handel-Smith
Gavotte (Act I) Sarabande (Act I) Menuet (Act II) Alia breve (Act I) Ballo: a) Pleasant thoughts
b) Unpleasant thoughts; frightened pleasant thoughts;
their fight (Act III) Tamburino (Act III)
"Schelomo," Hebrew Rhapsody for Violoncello
and Orchestra...........................................Bloch
Leonard Rose
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88.............................Dvorak
Allegro con brio Adagio
Allegretto grazioso
Allegro ma non troppo
10
FOURTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Evening, May 8, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
CESARE SIEPI, Bass
PROGRAM
Symphony No. 30 in D major, K. 202............................Mozart
Molto allegro
Andantino con moto Menuetto Presto
Concert aria, "Per questa bella mano"............................Mozart
"Es ist genug" from Elijah...............................Mendelssohn
Cesare Siepi
intermission
La Procession ................................................Franck
Song Cycle, "Don Quichotte a Dulcinee"...........................Ravel
Chanson romanesque Chanson epique Chanson a boire
Mr. Siepi
Pastorale ....................?............................Stravinsky
Anshel Brusilow, Solo Violin
?Pictures at an Exhibition..........................Moussorgsky-Ravel
Promenade
The Gnome
Promenade
The Old Castle
Promenade
Tuileries: Children Quarreling at Play
Bydlo--The Polish Oxcart
Promenade
Ballet of Chicks in Their Shells
Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle
Limoges: The Market Place
The Catacombs
The Hut on Fowls' Legs
The Great Gate at Kiev
Columbia Records
11
FIFTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Afternoon, May 9, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THOR JOHNSON, Guest Conductor
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
YOUTH CHORUS
SOLOISTS
MAUREEN FORRESTER, Contralto MURRAY DICKIE, Tenor
PROGRAM
Les Amants magnifiques .......................................Jolivet
Poeme de l'amour et de la mer................................Chausson
Maureen Forrester
intermission
Te Deum, Op. 22.............................................Berlioz
Hymn: Te Deum
Hymn: Tibi omnes
Prayer: Dignare
Hymn: Christe, rex gloriae
Prayer: Te ergo quaesumus
Hymn and Prayer: Judex crederis
University Choral Union, Youth Chorus,
Murray Dickie Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
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SIXTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Evening, May 9, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
SVIATOSLAV RICHTER, Pianist
PROGRAM
Overture to Egmont, Op. 84.................................Beethoven
Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 16............................................Grieg
Allegro molto moderato Adagio
Allegro moderato molto e marcato
SVIATOSLAV RlCHTER INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 5, Op. 47.................................Shostakovich
Moderato; allegro non troppo Allegretto Largo
Allegro non troppo
13
ANNOTATIONS
by GLENN D. McGEOCH
The Author of the annotations expresses his appreciation to
Ferol Brinkman of the University Publications Office
for her editorial services.
FIRST CONCERT
Thursday Evening, May 6
Overture to Der Freischiitz..........Weber
Carl Maria von Weber was born in Eutin, No?vember 18, 1786; died in London, July 5, 1826.
Seventeen, years after Weber's burial in London, his body was removed and interred in his native German soil. On that occasion, Richard Wagner, giving the valedictory address over Weber's grave, voiced the deepest feelings of his coun?trymen:
Never was there a more German composer than thou; to whatever distant fathomless realms of fancy thy genius bore thee it remained bound by a thousand tender links to the heart of thy German people; with them it wept or smiled like a believing child, listening to the legends and tales of its country. It was thy child-like simplicity which guided thy manly spirit like a guardian angel, keeping it pure and chaste; and that purity was thy chief quality. Behold, the Briton does thee justice. The Frenchman admires thee, but only the German can love thee! Thou art his own, a bright day in his life, a drop of blood, a part of his heart.
Thus was the first of the great romanticists in music venerated by the man who was to fulfill his artistic revelation!
In Weber's day, the protest against the eighteenth century, politically, morally, socially, and artistically, was universal. This protest was two-fold. On the one hand it was negative, against all established authority; on the other, positive, in favor of a return to nature. In Germany, Goethe, Kant, and Herder, the criticism of Lessing, the return to an enthusiasm for Shakespeare, the mania for Ossian and northern mythology, the revival of ballad literature, all expressed one universal cry for a return to the natural.
Music was rather late in responding to the violent note of revolt against a tradition for the sake of emotion, chiefly because music in the eighteenth century was in a transitional state of technical development, attempting to gain articulation and freedom through cultivation of its unique forms and designs. The opposition between classic and romantic principles in the second half of the eighteenth century, for this reason, was not as clearly defined in music as in literature. But with Weber and his Der Freischiitz, this definition of romanti?cism in German opera was clearly stated. Here at last was a music that presented, with astonishing realism for the time, the atmosphere of the German forest and the eeriness of the fantastic powers of nature.
Weber's ideas were in strong sympathy with the romantic revolt in literature. With his music he awoke the dormant soul of Germany to the true German spirit full of heroism and mystery, and a love for nature. Although Weber's romanticism did not spring from the innermost depths of feeling and contempla?tion, as did that of Schubert and Schumann or any of the earlier members of that school, Weber cultivated a romanticism that could be used in and reconciled
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to the theater. Here he was at times dynamic and picturesque, but he lacked the magic of his contemporaries. Reaching his artistic maturity just as the eighteenth century merged into the nineteenth, he did not seem to possess the genius either to bring to a climax the ideals of the one era or to fulfill the hopes of the other. He was no longer of the rank of the truly great Romantic composers, of whom Schubert was the last; he was already of a subsequent line in which Wagner was ultimately to overshadow him. His conscious effort to find a new equilibrium between the various arts antedated Wagner's idea of the music drama by half a century. But the fulfillment of this ideal was not his destiny. "He died," wrote Cornelius, "of the longing to become Wagner."
Weber was one of the first composers after Mozart to establish a definite connection between the overture and the opera, by selecting its themes from the body of the work. The overture then became a kind of brief summary of the drama, rather than a mere and unrelated introduction to it. In truth, three-fourths of this overture was drawn by Weber from material in different parts of the work. To be exact, of the total 342 measures, 219 of them belong to the opera. And yet this is no heterogeneous mass, no patchwork of unrelated themes. The overture is a perfectly unified and strongly knit composition revealing not only a perfect balance of formal elements and a just proportion of parts, but a dramatically moving and a graphically descriptive tabloid of the whole opera.
ANALYSIS
In a mood of mystery, the overture begins (Adagio, C major, 4-4 time) in unharmonized octaves and unison. A quiet melody in the horns, with a tranquil accompaniment in the strings, is interrupted by a sinister tremolo in the violins-the "leading motive" associated with the demon Zamiel and the Wolf's Glen.
The main movement of the overture (Molto vivace, C minor, 2-2 time) opens with a syncopated and agitated theme, which is derived from the end of Maxe's aria "Durch die Walder, durch die Auen" ("Through the forests, through the meadows"). After a crescendo in the strings, an energetic passage in the full orchestra (fortissimo) is brought forth. The climax is from the scene in the Wolf's Glen. The second subject, divided into two parts, is made up of a passion?ate phrase in the clarinet related to Maxe's outburst "Ha! Fearful yawns the dark abyss" in Act II; and the joyous conclusion of Agatha's aria "Leise, leise." A conventional development section follows and there is an abbreviated recapitu?lation. Practically the whole of the coda is derived from the orchestral finale of the opera.
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 .... Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Decem?ber 16, 1770; died in Vienna, March 26, 1827.
It is difficult to decide whether the man creates the age or the age the man, but in the case of Beethoven each is true. Certainly, as far as music is con?cerned, he created the age of Romanticism to such a degree that the new move-
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ment which began in the nineteenth century could be called "Beethovenism" as well. On the other hand, there is no more decided proof in music history that the age produces the man. In his life and in his works, Beethoven is the embodi?ment of his period. Born at the end of the eighteenth century, he witnessed, in the formative period of his life, the drastic changes that were occurring throughout central Europe; changes which affected not only the political but the intellectual and artistic life of the world. The French Revolution, breaking up an old civilization, announced the dawn of a new social regime. The spirit of freedom which animated the poetic thoughts of Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, and Byron poured into the music of Beethoven, from the creation of the Appas-sionata Sonata to the Choral Ninth Symphony.
Throughout this period of chaos and turmoil, Beethoven stood, a colossus, bridging with his mighty grasp the two centuries in which he lived. In his person were embodied the ideas of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; he became the sage and prophet of his period, the center of the classic and romantic spirit.
These two elements were mutually helpful in making him the outstanding representative of each: his romantic tendencies helped him introduce Promethean fire into the old, worn-out forms, endowing them with new vitality: his respect for classic idioms aided him, the greatest of the early Romanticists, in tempering the excesses and extremes of his contemporaries. Thus, harmonious embodiment of opposing forces, controlled by an architectonic wisdom molding and fusing them together into one passionate, creative impulse, resulted in the production of epoch-making masterpieces, built upon firm foundations but emancipated from the confining elements of tradition, and set free to discover new regions of unimagined beauty.
Beethoven had taxed his creative powers to the utmost in creating the stupen?dous Third Symphony in E-flat major ("Eroica"). With no sign-posts to guide him, he had reached panoramic heights which even his genius could not readily regain. Invariably, throughout his career, he sought momentary relaxation after expending his forces on works of such magnitude. Thus the relatively placid and traditional Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth symphonies separated the more imposing Third, Fifth, Seventh, and Ninth, where compulsion to innovation and soaring flights of imagination again drove him to the creation of revo?lutionary works. From the stormy cloud-capped peaks of the "Eroica," he descended momentarily into the sun-drenched valleys of the B-flat major Sym?phony. In the ordinary course of events, what we now know as the Fifth Symphony would have followed the Third, for he had by 1805 almost completed its first and second movements. For reasons unknown he put it aside and turned to the less problematical material of the Fourth, which he treated with far less intensity of effort. It was composed in 1806 at Martonvasar, a Hungarian village where Beethoven was a guest of Count Franz Brunswick and his two beautiful daughters, Therese and Josephine. Sentimental writers have identified Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved" with the elder Therese, with whom he was in
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love, and to whom he was, for a short period, betrothed. To the incurable romantic Romain Rolland, this "Symphony of Love" was "a pure fragrant flower which treasured up the perfume of those days." Nothing in truth is definitely known about the inception of the work beyond the inscription on the manuscript "Sinfonia 4U, 1806, L v Bthvn." We are on safer ground to agree with Hector Berlioz that this symphony "is generally lively, nimble, joyous and of a heavenly sweetness," or with Beethoven's biographer Thayer, who declared it "placid and serene--the most perfect in form of them all," or with Sir George Grove that "a more consistent and attractive whole cannot be. ... the movements fit in their place, like the limbs and features of a lovely statue; and full of fire and invention as they are, all is subordinate to conciseness, grace and beauty." Referring to its position between the Third and Fifth, Robert Schumann called it "a Greek maiden between two Norse giants."
What is beyond question is that the spring and summer of 1806 were one of the happiest and most serene periods of relaxation in Beethoven's stormy career. It followed an experience of bitter disappointment at the miserable failure of his opera Fidelia in Vienna, November 20, 1805, amid the gloom incident to the occupation of the city by the French troops of Napoleon. Beethoven, who, all through his life proved his resilience under the blows of adversity, rallied from this disaster and lost himself in the creation of a series of masterworks which were vehicles of defense against, or perhaps escape from, his personal frustra?tions. In a spirit of revived exhilaration, he produced the buoyant D major Violin Concerto, the cheerful Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 58, the three "Rasoumowsky" quartets, Op. 59, and the gay and spirited symphony on tonight's program. Perhaps some inner artistic necessity, rather than a passing love affair, compelled him to reject the powerful impulses of the Fifth Symphony so soon after the creation of the epic "Eroica," and to seek an emotional balance by finding refuge in the joyful and translucent pages that inspirit these optimistic works.
Concert aria: "Bella mia fiamma, addio" (K. 528) . . Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, January 27, 17S6; died in Vienna, December S, 1791.
I like an aria to fit a singer as perfectly as a well-made suit of clothes.
--Mozart
In its diversity and scope, the music of Mozart is one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of European art. Wherever he directed his pen, to the creation of opera, serious or comic, to cantata, Mass, chamber music, sonata, or symphony, he left imperishable masterpieces. In more than six-hundred works, created at a breathless speed during less than thirty-six years, Mozart revealed a universality unknown to any other composer, for his art was founded upon a thorough assimilation and sublimation of the prevailing Italian, French, and
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German styles of his period; he carried to perfection all instrumental and vocal forms of his day. No composer ever revealed simultaneously such creative affluence and such unerring instinct for beauty. Few artists in any age have been so copious and yet so controlled, or have so consistently sustained throughout their creative lives such a high level of artistic excellence.
"Is not almost all of the instrumental music of the second half of the eighteenth century in general, and that of Mozart in particular, penetrated through and through with spirit of opera," wrote the great Mozart authority Alfred Einstein. "Nowhere does the purely Italian derivation of Mozart's style show more clearly than in the aria and all other forms that have more or less to do with opera." In truth, Mozart's manifold genius is more fully exploited in the opera than in any other form. His amazing sense of dramatic veracity, his uncanny insight into the psychological aspects of character, and the un?believable aptness with which he manifested these in his music, not only proved his natural talent for the theater, but established him as one of the foremost composers of opera in the world.
Nowhere is the indebtedness of instrumental forms to the opera more evi?dent than in the aria. By 1750 it had become a miniature concerto for voice and orchestra. "The strange thing about its development historically speaking," wrote Einstein, "is that the form . . . was perfected in the work of [the Italian composers] Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti earlier than the concerto, so that the concerto was actually fashioned after the aria and not vice versa."f
Mozart's concert arias were occasional works either to be inserted into his own operas, or those of other composers commissioned by famous singers of his time, or simply written by choice for singers who possessed voices he particularly admired. In them he followed models established by his Italian predecessors, and upon them he bestowed his richest melodic gifts and the wealth of his instrumental craftsmanship. In none of the fifty odd concert arias he composed throughout his life (from the age of nine to the year of his death in 1791) is this fact more apparent-than in the dramatic aria Bella mia jiamma. It was the product of the fullest flowering of his genius. He was thirty-one years of age when, in January of 1787, he visited his favorite city Prague, where he performed his D major ("Prague") Symphony, K. 504, and received a commission to write Don Giovanni. Upon returning to Vienna he composed the string quintets K. SIS (C major) and K. 516 (G minor). The death of his father on May 25 found him again in Salzburg where, in August, he produced his Serenade, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and the Violin and Piano Sonata in A major (K. 526). He was back in Prague for the premiere of Don Giovanni on October 29, and on November 3 he composed the aria Bella mia jiamma. At the time Mozart and his wife were staying at the Dusek's country place near Prague. Franz Dusek, noted pianist and composer, commissioned Mozart to write an
Alfred Einstein, Mozart, His Character and His Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 35S. 174M., p. 357.
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aria for his wife Josepha, a famous soprano. According to Mozart's son, Josepha locked his father in a garden house and did not release him until he had finished the promised aria. He, in turn, it is said, surrendered the score on the condition that she sing it at sight, knowing that the frequent tritone progressions would be a challenge to her. Although not a bravura aria in the literal sense, it is of extreme difficulty. Written in the grand manner, in the style of Donna Anna's arias in Don Giovanni, it requires a singer of impeccable musicianship with a large, rich, and expressive voice.
The protagonist of this aria is really a man. A hero, going to his sacrificial death, takes leave of his beloved. To a friend he entrusts her care. The situation is not clear from the text, but in Einstein's words, "Mozart used extreme means to represent an extreme situation."
Heart's beauty flaming, I leave you!
It has not suited high Heav'n to make us happy.
Severed already is the pure tie that bound us,
that united our spirits before the consummation and
fulfillment of their own single will. Lie yet! Yield all to fate! Yield all to duty! Soon will my death absolve you from the vows that we
plighted.
Marry one far more worthy . . . O sorrow! Enjoy a life of enchantment; be happier and gayer. Remember me, dear Heart;
though rare embraces bestowed upon your consort may haunt your hours of sleeping, ignore their mem'ry. Farewell, Love! Obedient, I leave you. Let Death end forever all my woe! Death, end my anguish! Sorrowing, companion, my heart's Beloved, I leave you.
Recitative: "Sorta e la notte" and Aria: "Ernani, involami"
from Ernani...............Verdi
(Fortunino) Giuseppe (Francesco) Verdi was born in Le Roncole, Italy, October 10, 1813; died in Milano, January 27, 1901.
Verdi was not known in Italy as a national figure until 1842 when he produced his third opera, and real first success, Nabucco. Of his twelve early works written in an atmosphere of fertile romanticism, only Nabucco, Ernani (1844), and Macbeth (1847; revised in 1865) still hold the stage today. In these operas Verdi stuck closely to the conventions he inherited from his predecessors of the bel canto era--Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti. He composed them, therefore, in a series of separate "numbers": recitatives, arias, ensembles and cabalettas (sections at the end of arias, etc., in quick uniform rhythms), and recognized the
Josepha Dusek was the first to sintc Beethoven's great aria Ah, Perfido November 21, 1796. We may infer that he wrote it for her. She died in Prague at an advanced age.
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human voice as the most expressive of all instruments, never allowing the orchestra to usurp its position of pre-eminence.
Ernani was Verdi's fifth opera, written when he was thirty years of age and performed for the first time in Venice, March 9, 1844. It contains many of the commonplace features of the Italian opera of the early nineteenth century, which he ultimately enobled in such scores as Rigoletto and La Traviata, and com?pletely transcended in the incomparable Otello and Falstaff of his last years. In spite of the fact that Ernani contains flashes of dramatic urgency and eloquence and what Frances Toye calls Verdi's "savage sincerity," it is in general an ac?quiescence to banal proceedings, full of theatrical absurdities and musical weak?nesses.
It was characteristic of nineteenth-century opera, Italian and otherwise, to base its librettos upon famous novels and dramas. Verdi turned to Victor Hugo for his Ernani (Hernani) as he did again later for Rigoletto (Le Rot s'amuse).
The story takes place in Aragon about 1519. Elvira, a Spanish lady of rank, is about to be married to the elderly Grandee of Spain, Don Gomez de Silva. She, however, is in love with John of Aragon, who, after his estates had been confis?cated, became known as the bandit chief Ernani. The recitative, aria, and cabaletta heard on tonight's program occur at the opening of Scene II in Act I. Elvira, alone in her apartment, awaits Silva. She broods over her enforced marriage, which she seems powerless to prevent, and expresses her happiness at the prospect of being united with Ernani. It is one of the more enduring passages from the opera, rich in vocal display, but full of a genuine expression of despair and joy:
Recitative: Night is departing, and Silva does not return. Ah! that he never would, with his odious protestations of love. I belong only to Ernani!
Aria: Ernani, fly with me, prevent this hateful marriage. With you a barren desert
would become an Eden of enchantment.
Cabaletta: I scorn everything that does not tell my heart of Ernani; nothing can turn hatred to love. Hasten the hour of my flight. To the heart in love, all delay is torture.
Suite from The Firebird..........Stravinsky
Igor Feodorovitch Stravinsky was born in Oranien-baum (now Lomonosov), Russia, June 17, 1882.
. . . here, stop playing this horrible thing. Otherwise I might begin to enjoy it.
--RlMSKY-KoRSAKOFF
Igor Stravinsky's position as the greatest living composer in the world today is universally established and recognized. Since the deaths of Bela Bartok in 1945
Sir Walter Scott: Rossini's La Dame du Lac ("Lady of the Lake"); Donizetti's Lucia de Lammermoot ("The Bride of Lammermoor"); Victor Hugo: Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, etc.
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and Arnold Schonberg in 1951, he is undoubtedly the most illustrious and significant figure in contemporary music, not only for his monumental works, but because of the influence he has exerted upon other composers; there are few in our day who have not felt the impact of his powerful and challenging art.
Unlike Arnold Schonberg, a true revolutionist who caused a decided break with conventional methods of tonal organization, Stravinsky has remained firmly rooted in tradition. In spite of the often sensational innovations he has brought to each successive work, he has always held to certain basic musical values with characteristic conviction, and practiced them with unusual fidelity. Aesthet?ically, technically, and stylistically, his music is a flowering of traditional thought and practice. Beginning as a Romantic, he shared for a time the vaporous impressionism of Debussy and Scriabin; then opposed suddenly this evanescent expression with a violent primitivism, and finally reverted to the absolutism of the music of earlier centuries. The term neoclassic is often applied and perhaps best describes the methods he has employed with such mastery throughout a long career. As Stravinsky himself has often asserted, the classical roots of his music strike deeper than we suspect or are willing to admit. Certainly its constructive coherence and inexorable logic, its economy of means, its avoidance of all unessentials, and the directness and clarity of its communication attest to its rational sources. The manner in which he successfully conceals himself in his art and the complete absence of any personal commentary or preoccupation with lyrical expression without first subjecting it to rules identify him with classical rather than Romantic tradition. In aesthetic theory, he is a strict autonomist, maintaining that music's main function is not merely to evoke sensations but "to bring order into things" and to help us pass "from an anarchic and individual state into a state of order." He has devoted his life to becoming a superb artisan, constantly refining his idiom and developing his technique. In the words of Andre Malroux, he has been concerned almost exclusively with "render?ing forms into style."
From his early youth Stravinsky was surrounded with music and musicians. His father, a bass singer, was an important member of the Marginsky theater in St. Petersburg and created the bass roles in many of the operas of Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and others, that now are the backbone of the Russian repertory. In spite of this rich heritage of musical opportunity within the family circle, he was destined by his parents for the profession of law. His acquaintance with Borodin, Moussorgsky, and a later chance meeting with Rimsky-Korsakov, which resulted in the latter's accepting him as a pupil, were influences strong on the side of music; the aspiration of the family for a distinguished career in law were overcome, and music gained one of the leaders in twentieth-century composition. A symphony performed successfully on February 29, 1908, a set of songs Le Faune et la bergere for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, an orchestral fantasy Feu d'artifice ("Fireworks") written for the marriage of Rimsky-Korsakov's daughter June 17, 1908, and a "Scherzo fantastique" (1909) were
Igor Stravinsky, Autobiography (New York: M & G, Steuer, 1958).
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all he had produced when the famous impressario Diaghilev, impressed with the talented but as yet unknown composer, commissioned him to write music to a ballet suggested by Fokine, on some Russian folk subject. The result was the first of Stravinsky's ballet masterpieces Zhar-Ptitsa, performed in Paris, June 25, 1910, under the French title L'Oiseau de feu. Stravinsky considers it to be his first full-fledged work. The unprecedented brilliance of the score, with its novel glissando of harmonics in the strings, its exhilarating rhythms, metrical irregu?larities, and myriad of scintillating colors, created immediate enthusiasm and established an association with Diaghilev that was to produce in quick succession, Petroushka (Paris, 1911), whose recurrent rhythmic explosions, novel sonorities, and bold innovations in polytonality marked a turning point in twentieth century modernism; and the even more revolutionary Le Sacre du printemps (Paris, 1913), which severed completely all ties with conventional idioms, and whose volcanic eruptions and barbarity of sound ushered in an era of war and devas?tation. In the language of Emmanuel Kant, Stravinsky had become an "historical postulate." His development was rapid, his eclecticism thorough, his emancipation sudden and complete.
The original version of The Firebird used an exceptionally large orchestra. In 1919, he extracted passages to form a suite, but did not change the instrumenta?tion. In 1945 he rescored it, reducing the number of instruments and omitting two movements, the adagio and scherzo.
From Ralston's Russian Folk Tales we learn that the fire bird is known in its native haunts as the Zhar-Ptitsa. The name indicates its close connection with flame or light, Zhar means "glowing-heart"--as of a furnace, so Zhar-Ptitsa means literally "the glow bird":
Its appearance corresponds with its designation. Its feathers blaze with golden or silvery sheen, its eyes shine like crystal, it dwells in a golden cage. In the depth of the night, it flies into a garden and lights it up as brilliantly aa could a thousand burning fires. A single feather from its tail illuminates a dark room. It feeds upon golden apples which have the power of bestowing youth and beauty (on magic grasses in a Croatian version).
In Russian folklore, we encounter the monstrous ogre Kastchei the Immortal, who exists "as one of the many incantations of the dark spirit. . . . Sometimes he is altogether serpentlike in form. . . . Sometimes he seems to be of a mixed nature, partly human, partly ophidian, in some stories framed after the fashion of man. He is called 'immortal' or 'deathless' because of his superiority to the ordinary laws of existence. Sometimes his 'death', that is, the object with which his life is indissolubly connected, does not exist within his body."f
The following descriptive section is taken from the program notes of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Sixty-fifth season, 1964-65:
--Introduction and Dance of the Firebird. While out hunting, Ivan Tsarevitch strays into the wood that surrounds the castle of the wizard, Kastchei. He sees a magic tree gleaming
William R. S. Ralston, Russian Folk Tales (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1873) p. 285. Ubid., p. 84.
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with golden fruit. There is a sound of wings as a bird with fiery-bright plumage alights in the tree. Ivan aims an arrow, but misses. The bird flies away. When it returns, Ivan springs from his hiding place and seizes it. The Firebird pleads to be released. Ivan sets it free, for which he is rewarded with a golden feather.
--Dance of the Princesses. Soft music (woodwinds, harp, and strings) sounds in the distance. Twelve princesses emerge from the woods. Shaking golden apples from the tree, they toss the apples to one another. When they discover Ivan, they urge him to escape before Kastchei can turn him into stone. But Ivan decides to match his wits against those of the magician.
--Infernal Dance of Kastchei. The massive sound of a big orchestra playing fortissimo, with incisive driving rhythm, gives this movement its unmistakably Stravinskyan texture. As a lurid light illuminates the forest, a band of demons, with Kastchei at their head, swoops down on Ivan. He wards off the attack by waving his magic feather. The Firebird leads Kastchei's demons in a frenzied dance until, dazed and exhausted, they fall asleep.
IV--Berceuse. Woodwinds, harp, and strings introduce the Berceuse. While the demons are asleep, the Firebird directs Ivan to a buried casket. In it Ivan finds a large egg. Con?tained in the egg is the soul of Kastchei--the source of his evil power.
V--Finale. A horn-call above strings tremolandi begins the final section. While Kastchei watches frantically, Ivan tosses the egg into the air and catches it. Finally Ivan drops the egg. There is a sudden blackout and a shattering turmoil. When the lights come up, Kastchei and his demons are gone, and the castle has disappeared. Youths and maidens, liberated from the magic spell, rush forward, acclaiming Ivan as their saviour and future ruler. Ivan marries the most beautiful of the maidens.
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Friday Evening, May 7
Overture to Die Entjiihrung aus dem Serail .... Mozart
In 1776, Joseph II of Austria created in Vienna a court and national theater, which reached an unprecedented height of excellence, and became a center of serious literary interests. Joseph considered the theater as an important means of national cultivation, and from the time when it joined in the struggle which ended in the triumph of German literature and art over buffoonery and extempor?ized pieces, the best authors of the day wrote for it with the avowed object of improving taste and aiding the spread of culture.
Literary criticism, too, soon joined the crusade, and, freed by the introduction of the liberty of the press, turned its attention to the drama and aimed to enlighten the general reader on the quality of the entertainment afforded him by the author and the actor. In this way, a public was educated without reference to rank or order, and the poet or musician could make his appeal as an independ?ent artist, instead of ministering, as previously, exclusively to the entertainment of his patron. In the spirit in which he had founded the national theater, Joseph II abolished the spectacular ballet and the Italian opera and instituted a "National Vaudeville" as he called the German opera.
Mozart had just suffered such indignity and insult at the hands of his inconsiderate patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, that he had been forced to withdraw from his services. Without a permanent position and with the intense desire to write opera, he looked to Vienna with hope and enthusiasm. A fitting career stood open for him here, and he wanted nothing more than to prove his power in this branch of his art. The Emperor himself was evidently anxious to give Mozart an opportunity to try his powers as a German operatic composer. Die Entjiihrung was composed then by Mozart in deference to a desire on the part of Emperor Joseph to found a national German opera. The particular situ?ation which gave rise to this work was the proposed visit of the Grand Duke Paul of Russia, who was expected to visit Vienna in September, 1781. Mozart was commissioned to have his opera ready for the festivities that were to take place on that occasion. It was already the last day of July when the composer received his text from the librettist Stephanie, inspector of the Vienna Opera. Mozart wrote to his father on August 18:
Yesterday young Stephanie gave me a book for composition. It is very good, the subject is Turkish, and it is called "Belmont and Constance," or "Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail" . . . The time is short, certainly, for it is to be performed in the middle of September, but the attendant circumstances will be all the more favorable. And indeed, everything combines to raise my spirits, so that I hasten to my writing table with the greatest eagerness, and it is with difficulty that I tear myself away.
Emily Anderson, The Letters of Mozart and Bis Family (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1938).
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The first act was finished August 22, but, at the beginning of the following month, word was received that the Grand Duke would not visit Vienna until November. When he did arrive Mozart's opera was put aside to make room for productions of Gluck's Alceste and Iphigenia. Discouraged, Mozart made no attempt to finish his opera, and when the Duke appeared on the scene, it was still unfinished, and remained so until the spring of the following year.
The Viennese court was dominated by Italian influences, and, in spite of his nationalistic intentions, Joseph really preferred Italian music to that of any other nation, and the principal positions in his court were held by musicians who came to Vienna from the south. Yet Joseph II perceived, even if he did not fully understand, the astonishing genius of Mozart. The Italian musicians perceived that genius, too, and placed every impediment in the path of its exploitation. It required the express command of the Emperor to overcome the cabals of Salieri and his followers, and to bring Die Entjiihrung to its just performance, July 16, 1782.
The results were beyond all expectations. "The house was crammed full, there was no end of applause and cheering, and performances followed one another in quick succession," wrote Mozart in one of his letters. A second performance was given three days later. "Can you believe it," wrote the composer to his father, "that the opposition was even stronger than on the first evening. The whole first act was drowned, but they could not prevent the bravos after every song." In this letter Mozart records the fact that "the theater was almost more crowded than on the first. The day before not a seat was to be had." The general verdict was overwhelmingly in favor of Mozart and was a justification of the Emperor's hope of founding a German opera. Yet the imperial amateur was not quite sure that his hopes had been realized. "Too fine for our ears, and an immense number of notes, my dear Mozart," he said to the composer. Mozart's reply was worthy of an artist--"Just as many notes, Your Majesty, as are necessary." From Vienna the fame of the new work traveled with great speed. It was given at Prague with enormous success in 1783,f in Leipzig the same year, in Mannheim, Cassel, and on numberless other stages.
Die Entfiikrung caught the public fancy, because German sentiment, emotion, and disposition found expression for the first time at the hands of an artist. Mozart had in truth established German opera.
"I think I may venture to lay down," said von Weber, "that in the 'Entfiihrung' Mozart's artist experience came to maturity, and that his experience of the world alone was to lead him to further efforts. The world might look for several operas from him like 'Figaro' and 'Don Juan,' but with the best will possible he could only write one 'Entfiihrung.' I seem to perceive in it what the
The date given by Otto Jahn is July 12. Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) was the favorite composer of Joseph II. Many of his forty some operas were admired by the Viennese public as well as by the Emperor. Salieri, who was the teacher of a number of composers who later became distinguished, taught Beethoven and Schubert.
tNiemetschek, writing of the performance in Prague, later said, "I cannot describe the applause and sensation which it excited at Vienna from my own observation, but I was a witness of the enthusiasm with which it was received at Prague by connoisseurs and nonconnoisseurs. It made what one had hitherto heard and known appear not to be music at all! F.veryone was transported--amazed at the novel harmonies, and at the original passages for the woodwinds."
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happy years of youth are to every man; their bloom never returns, and the extirpation of their defects carries with it some charms which can never be recovered."
Spring Symphony, Op. 44............................Britten
Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, November 22, 1913.
What delights us in the spring is more a sen?sation than an appearance . . .
--Hamerton, 1792
After having made an early reputation as the enfant terrible of the musical world, with a conscious flaunting of his copious resources, Benjamin Britten finally succeeded in establishing himself as one of the leading composers of the twentieth century. Born in a small English village, he embarked upon his composing career at the age of ten. Before his seventeenth birthday he had to his credit several large-scale symphonic, choral, and instrumental works, and by the middle of the 1930's his music had begun to attract much attention throughout Europe. In 1939 he visited the United States, where he produced his first opera Paul Bunyan (Columbia University, 1941), established himself on the American scene with the performance of his works, and received a com?mission from the Koussevitsky Foundation for what was to become his first outstanding success -the opera Peter Grimes (premiere in London, 1945; the Berkshire Festival, 1946). Only after the Sprhig Symphony in 1949, his operas Billy Budd (1951), and The Turn of the Screw (1954), was he generally ac?knowledged to be the master he had indeed become.
In an age of cerebration and constantly fluctuating aesthetic standards, the direct emotional appeal and relative stability of Britten's music set it quite apart from that of most of his contemporaries. For well over a decade his works have been performed more continuously and universally than those of any other living composer, with the possible exception of Igor Stravinsky. He has written in practically every idiom, except that of Arnold Schonberg's "atonal-ism," to which he has remained recalcitrant. Many of his choral works, especial?ly the recent and sensationally successful War Requiem (1962), his songs, song cycles, and operas have been sung in practically every language. His operas Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw are now well established in the repertories of the leading opera houses of the world.
This universal acceptance of his music may be due in part to a kind of eclec?ticism that ranges over so wide a field that the accusing finger cannot be pointed in any particular direction; his uncanny inventiveness only occasionally permits fleeting glimpses of Schubert, Wagner, Purcell, Mahler, et al. Or it may be accounted for by the fact that in no sense of the word has he ever been a real innovator or a disturber of comfortable tradition. The fact remains that his
OUo Jahn, Life oj Mozart, trans, by Tauline D. Townsend (London: Novello, Emer and Co., 1882)
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music, for whatever reason, has caught the imagination of the multitude, and has successfully overcome the barriers of language and culture.
Although it is strongly idiomatic, it is extremely diversified in style and con?tent; while giving the impression of novelty, it is masterly in its vivid adapta?tion of traditional methods to his own purposes. Beyond the fact that he has maintained the most profound respect for the past, he has always opposed any influences that have come into conflict with his own principles. He rejects, for instance, the extremely personal style of high romanticism. "The Romantics," he writes, "became so intensely personal that it looked as if a point might be reached when the composer would be the only man who could really understand his own music. Well, that tendency is not for me ... I try to write as Stravin?sky has written, and Picasso has painted. They were the men who freed music and painting from the purely personal."
In quite a different way, however, his music remains intensely personal, not in the romantic sense that it is self-revealing, but in that it is unique. No artist who declares, as Britten has, that his music serves "the cause of compassion, sympathy and forbearance," can be considered to be entirely impersonal.
The Spring Symphony is a brilliant example of Britten's antiromantic atti?tude and highly independent thinking. It is far removed from the moral and religious apprehension of nature found in the nineteenth century poets and painters, yet it miraculously evokes every variety of feeling associated with the spring. It does this through its own abstract qualities of vitality, gusto, buoy?ancy, and momentum. Britten's fecundity and versatility reach their highest expression in the intelligible and persuasive treatment of the various texts chosen from poems that range from the thirteenth century to our time. Here he is the true musico-dramatist, using his orchestra to create atmosphere, evoke sensations, and constantly illuminate the text. He achieves all of this without recourse to radical means. His tonal centers are clearly defined in spite of an occasional impression of bitonality and polytonality; without rejecting tonality, as did Schonberg, his use of it is far removed from conventional diatonic har?mony. His methods of construction are basically classical, but they are employed with the greatest dexterity and virtuosity. The work is divided into four large sec?tions, comparable in a vague way to the four-movement symphony -allegro, adagio, scherzo, allegro -each section, except the last, is subdivided. It com?prises, in all, twelve separate movements which allow the widest scope for variety and contrast.
The instrumentation is again highly individual. A large orchestra is employed, but in only four of the movements is it used in its entirety. Here artistic economy is constantly applied. Only those instruments that are absolutely needed are used, and then not so much for balancing dynamic levels as for pointing up every sentiment and mood implied in the texts. Thus in one place the solo tenor voice is accompanied by only three trumpets ("The Merry Cuckoo"), in anoth?er by violins alone ("Waters' Above"). In other places the soprano voice and
Charles Reed, "Britten at Fifty," New York Times Supplement, November 17, 1961.
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boys' choir are supported only by woodwinds, tuba, percussion, and violins ("When as the rye reach to the chin"; "The Driving Boy"); the contralto, with woodwinds, harp, and lower strings ("Welcome, Maids of Honor"); a chorus by horns, tympani, and percussion ("Now the Bright Morning Star"), and so on. In general the aim is to avoid the heavy, over-burdened scoring of the late romantic composers and to keep the colors as pure as possible. The vast tonal canvas of the Spring Symphony abounds in sharp delineatory strokes that serve throughout to convey to the listener the varied moods evoked by nature. The function of the orchestra, therefore, is to accompany and not to participate independently. Yet the various vocal sections have been combined in a kind of symphonic cycle without adhering to the usual schemes of symphonic move?ments. This is not as radical a procedure as it appears to be. The term sym?phony, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, originally referred to instrumental movements occurring in vocal works, and has since indicated music of varied character. The symphony as it was codified by Haydn and Mozart served composers admirably through its pliant four movements, mild diversity of tonality, design, texture, and color to express anything they desired in purely abstract terms. Britten's use of voices, and his departure from the popular con?ception of what a symphony is, should disturb no one familiar with Beethoven's "Chorale" Ninth, Mahler's Eighth with its vocal movements, or his Das Lied von dcr Erde, which is vocal from beginning to end and where the voices and instruments share equally in creating the musical texture. Today our sense of tonality has widened and is less strictly defined, and the symphonic form, whose key relationships and modulatory devices were its cornerstone, has gradually become problematical. We should use the term here only in a metaphorical sense.
The Introduction is a prayer for spring to come. Part I deals with the arrival of the cuckoo, the birds, the flowers, the sun, and "May month's beauty." Part II paints the melancholy side of spring -fading violets and soft night rains. Part III pictures youthful love and merry dancing, and Part IV a May?day festival with boys shouting "Soomer is icoomin in."
The Spring Symphony was dedicated to Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony and was performed for the first time at Amsterdam, July 19, 1949. Its first American performance was on August 13 of the same year at the Berk?shire Festival, Koussevitsky conducting.
INTRODUCTION
Introduction. Lento senza rigore. Mixed chorus and full orchestra. Text: "Shine Out, Fair Sun" (Anonymous, sixteenth century)
After a brief opening by percussion and harp, an unaccompanied dissonant chorus, alternating with instrumental interludes, sings a prayer for the arrival of Spring. The movement is loosely constructed, but the words "Shine out, fair sun" are frequently repeated. The vibraphone and the xylophone add their unique colors to suggest the clear, crisp atmosphere of austere winter.
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The sopranos at the end sing an interval of a minor third (A to F-sharp) on the words "Shine out." The trumpets repeat it, imitating the song of the cuckoo, the harbinger of spring:
Shine out, fair sun, with all your heat,
Show all your thousand-coloured light!
Black winter freezed to his seat;
The grey wolf howls he does so bite;
Crookt age on three knees creeps the street;
The boneless fish close quaking lies
And eats for cold his aching feet;
The stars in icicles arise:
Shine out, and make this winter night
Our beauty's spring, Our Prince of Light!
PART I
Part I contains four sections describing the awakening of Spring. There is no apparent connection between them musically, other than a subtle use of similar intervals as transitional links. The sections complement each other, however, in such a way that seemingly heterogeneous elements achieve an ingenious co?ordination.
Section 1. Vivace. Tenor solo and three trumpets Text: "The Merry Cuckoo, Messenger of Spring" (Spencer)
Spencer's sonnet is treated as three stanzas, in which the tenor voice, in reci?tative style, and three trumpets joyously greet the cuckoo's call:
The merry cuckoo, messenger of spring,
His trumpet shrill hath thrice already sounded;
That warns all lovers wait upon their king,
Who now is coming forth with garlands crowned:
With noise whereof the quire of birds resounded
Their anthems sweet devised of love's praise,
That all the woods their echoes back rebounded.
As if they know the meanings of their lays.
But 'mongst them all, which did love's honour raise,
No word was heard of her that most it ought,
But she his precept proudly disobeys,
And doth his idle message set at nought.
Therefore, O love, unless she turn to thee
Ere cuckoo end, let her a rebel be.
Section 2. Allegro con slancio (with impetuosity). Soprano, contralto, and
tenor soli; mixed chorus and orchestra Text: "Spring, the Sweet Spring" (Nashe)
Spring is in its first bloom. A solo string quartet supports the soloists, who individually share a melody of the utmost simplicity and freshness. While a regular rhythm swings backward and forward between two chords, the chorus reiterates the opening phrase "Spring, the sweet spring," and at the end of each stanza the soloists join in a trio of bird calls ("cuckoo," "jug-jug," "pu-we,"
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"to-witta-woo"). The music in each of the following stanzas varies widely in harmony and rhythm to accommodate the free meters of Nashe's poem. The chordal accompaniment, however, remains constant throughout. The sec?tion ends with a short restatement of the opening lines; final notes on the word "Spring" form an interval of a falling fifth (D to G) which continues into the first bar of the next section:
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 shepherds 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!
Section 3. Allegro molto. Boy's choir, woodwinds, tuba, and tambourine; so?prano solo and violin
Texts: "When as the rye reach to the chin" (George Peele) "The Driving Boy" (John Clare)
Two poems combine to form this high-spirited movement. In the first, fresh new effects of boys' voices and whistled fragments create a feeling of youthful vigor and evoke an atmosphere of joyful welcome to the vernal season with its "strawberries swimming in the cream" and "school-boys playing in the stream." In the second poem the soprano voice is accompanied by violins divided into four parts and played in the highest register, while the boys continue to whistle. The choir restates the opening lines while the soprano continues her song. In the last bars, there is a modulation from E-flat to F, the key of the next section:
When as the rye reach to the chin,
And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream,
And school-boys playing in the stream;
Then O, then, O then O, my true love said,
Till that time come again,
She could not live a maid.
The driving boy, beside his team
Of May-month's beauty now will dream,
And cock his hat, and turn his eye
On flower, and tree, and deepening sky;
And oft burst loud in fits of song,
And whistle as he reels along,
Cracking his whip in starts of joy--
A happy, dirty, driving boy.
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Section 4. Molto moderato ma giocoso. Mixed chorus, brass, and percussion Text: "Now the Bright Morning Star" (John Milton)
A choral hymn set to Milton's "Song on May Morning," and cast in an even, strict form, retains the dignity of the poem and brings Part I to its conclusion:
Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her The flowery May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose.
Hail, bounteous May that doth inspire Mirth and youth, and warm desire, Woods and groves, are of thy dressing, Hill and dale, doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long.
PART II
Part II is in three sections, all of a contemplative nature, thus representing vaguely the traditional slow second movement of a symphony. Section 1. Allegro rubato. Contralto solo, five woodwinds, two harps, lower
strings Text: "Welcome Maids of Honour" (Robert Herrick)
The fragile timbre of the woodwinds and harp, alternating with deep strings, and the simple structure of this movement were suggested, perhaps, by the deli?cate shape and heavy scent of violets, "Spring's maids of honour." The four stanzas of the poem are conceived musically as a theme with three subtle varia?tions:
Welcome Maids of Honour,
You doe bring
In the Spring;
And wait upon her.
She has Virgins many,
Fresh and faire;
Yet you are
More sweet than any.
Y'are the Maiden Posies,
And so grac'd,
To be plac'd,
'Fore Damask Roses.
Yet though thus respected,
By and by
Ye doe lie,
Poore Girles, neglected.
Section 2. Molto moderato et tranquillo. Tenor solo and violins Text: "Waters Above" (Henry Vaughan)
The violins, absent in the previous section, return as the only accompanying instruments to the tenor voice, which chants a song to the gentle rain of a spring evening. The violins, divided into two parts, play in turn a delicate trip?let figure sul pontkello (close to the bridge) suggesting the falling of random raindrops:
Waters above! eternal springs!
The dew, that silvers the Dove's wings!
O welcome, welcome to the sad:
Give dry dust drink; drink that makes glad!
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Many fair ev'nings, many flowers
Sweeten'd with rich and gentle showers
Have I enjoy'd, and down have run
Many a fine and shining sun;
But never till this happy hour
Was blest with such an evening-shower!
Section 3. Adagio. Contralto solo, mixed chorus, winds, and percussion Text: "Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed" (W. H. Auden)
This slow-moving and highly-developed movement, the last of Part II, stands as the centrum of the symphony. It is a pivotal point on which the other move?ments are balanced. Each of the four stanzas of Auden's poem is linked to the others by a wordless interlude sung by the seated chorus. The contralto voice is accompanied by woodwinds and muted brass. In the first stanza they are heard in only an occasional pianissimo passage which evokes the feeling of a quiet sultry "windless night in June." As in the other movements, each of the following stanzas of the poem is treated with musical freedom; in this case it is largely one of instrumental color. In the first ("Out on the lawn I lie"), a duet is sung between alto flute and bass clarinet; in the second ("now north and south"), the duet is continued between two oboes and bassoons. In the third verse ("to gravity attentive") a solo flute tremolo, high above the solo voice, alternates with heavy woodwind chords to create an oppressive atmosphere. The fourth stanza ("And, gentle, do not care to know") bursts forth with snare drum and a fanfare of trumpets and trombones on the words "where Poland draws her Eastern bow." There is a reprise of the opening of the movement at the words "nor ask what doubtful act allows." Fragments from earlier phrases and hummed cadences of the chorus bring to a close a section replete with diver?sified instrumental colors and unusual vocal effects, and where meditation prevails:
Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead In the windless night of June; Forests of green have done complete The day's activity; my feet Point to the rising moon.
Now North and South and East and West Those I love lie down to rest; The moon looks on them all: The healers and the brilliant talkers, The eccentrics and the silent walkers, The dumpy and the tall.
To gravity attentive, she Can notice nothing here; though we Whom hunger cannot move, From gardens where we feel secure Look up, and with a sigh endure The tyrannies of love.
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And, gentle, do not care to know, Where Poland draws her Eastern bow, What violence is done; Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house, Our picnics in the sun.
PART III
Part III, which is in three sections, bears a faint resemblance to the scherzo section of a symphony. Spring is at its height, the days are sunlit and shepherds sing their songs of love.
Section 1. Allegro impetuoso. Tenor solo, violin, viola, cellos, and two harps Text: "When will my May come" (Richard Baenefield)
The tenor solo voice, accompanied by arpeggios of strings and harps, sings a passionate but simple strophic song. The melody is ingeniously devised, by ever-new variations of the opening recitative phrase, and closes on the notes C-A ("Embrace thee"), which are immediately taken up by the oboe with pizzicato string accompaniment to form the short introduction to the next section:
When will my May come, that I may embrace thee When will the hour be of my soules joying
If thou wilt come and dwell with me at home;
My sheepcote shall be strowed with new green rushes;
We'll haunt the trembling prickets as they roam
About the fields, along the hawthorn bushes;
I have a piebald cur to hunt the hare:
So we will live with dainty forest fare.
And when it pleaseth thee to walk abroad,
(Abroad into the fields to take fresh aire:)
The meads with Flora's treasures shall be strowed,
(The mantled meadows and the fields so fair.)
And by a silver well (with golden sands)
I'll sit me down, and wash thine iv'ry hands.
But if thou wilt not pitie my complaint,
My tears, nor vowes, nor oathes, made to thy Beautie:
What shall I do But languish, die, or faint,
Since thou doth scorne my tears, and soule's duetie:
And tears contemned, vowes, and oathes must fail:
For when tears cannot, nothing can prevaile.
Section 2. Allegretto grazioso. Soprano and tenor soli, woodwinds, and strings
(pizzicato) Text: "Fair and Fair" (George Peele)
This gay, tender duet between shepherd and shepherdess, presents a lovely melody of unusual freedom and intricate rhythms reminiscent of Elizabethan vocal music. It is first sung by the soprano (accompanied by the oboe) and tenor (accompanied by bassoon) in alternation. Later, in close canon, the rhyth-
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mic accents of the singers conflict at every eighth note, evoking the sound of twittering birds. The accompaniment remains in straightforward 68 time:
Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
The fairest shepherd on our green,
A love for any lady.
Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
Thy love is fair for thee alone,
And for no other lady.
My love is fair, my love is gay,
As fresh as bin the flowers in May;
And of my love my roundelay,
My merry, merry, merry roundelay,
Concludes with Cupid's curse:
They that do change old love for new,
Pray gods they change for worse.
Fair and Fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
The fairest shepherd on our green,
A love for any lady.
Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
Thy love is fair for thee alone,
And for no other lady.
My love can pipe, my love can sing,
My love can many a pretty thing,
And of his lovely praises ring
My merry, merry, merry, roundelays,
Amen to Cupid's curse:
They that do change old love for new,
Pray gods they change for worse.
Section 3. Allegro molto tnosso. Mixed chorus, boys' choir, and full orchestra Text: "Sound the flute" (William Blake)
Tenors and basses, sopranos and altos, and boys' choir sing in turn, short duets to the accompaniment of a light staccato rhythm in brasses, woodwinds, and strings. After the third verse, the three choruses combine and the orchestra closes the section with a postlude:
Sound the flute! Now it's mute. Birds delight, Day and night. Nightingale In the dale, Lark in sky Merrily,
Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.
Little boy Full of joy. Little girl Sweet and small. Cock does crow So do you. Merry voice Infant noise Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.
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Little lamb Here I am. Come and lick My white neck. Let me pull
Your soft wool. Let me kiss Your soft face. Merrily, merrily, to welcome in the year.
PART IV
Finale. Moderato alia valse; allegro pesante; tempo pritno. Whole ensemble;
boys' choir
Texts: "London, to thee I do present the merry month of May" from "The Knight of the Burnay Pestle" (Beaumont and Fletcher) "Soomer is icoomen in" (Anonymous, thirteenth century) The finale of this exhilarating work is one movement in large ternary form. Spring is at the height of its bloom. A jaunty waltz is heard in the distance and the Maylord, accompanied by the rough call of a cow horn, summons all the people ("London, to thee I do present the merry month of May"). They all join in a boisterous allegro which forms the middle section of the movement. It develops into a series of free variations on two themes, one in the voices, the other in the orchestra. As the soloists join in the tune it gains in momentum and at the climax, the boys' choir in 24 time, supported by the horns, shouts out the old canon "Soomer is icoomen in," which stands out in a kind of bas relief, against the triple waltz rhythm of the other singers. The music begins to recede and the Maylord returns to his recitative, accompanied again by the cow horn and a chorus of humming voices, to declaim "Which to prolong, God save our King, and send his country peace, And root out treason from the land! and so, my friends, I cease." The orchestra, with a single fortissimo chord, confirms his last words:
London, to thee I do present the merry month of May; Let each true subject be content to hear me what I say: With gilded staff and crossed scarf, the Maylord here I stand. Rejoice, O English hearts, rejoice! rejoice, O lovers dear!
Rejoice, O City, town and country! rejoice, eke every shire I
For now the fragrant flowers do spring and sprout in seemly sort,
The little birds do sit and sing, the lambs do make fine sport;
And now the birchen-tree doth bud, that makes the schoolboy cry;
The morris rings, while hobby-horse doth foot it feateously;
The lords and ladies now abroad, for their disport and play,
Do kiss sometimes upon the grass, and sometimes in the hay;
Now butter with a leaf of sage is good to purge the blood;
Fly Venus and phlebotomy, for they are neither good;
Now little fish on tender stone begin to cast their bellies,
And sluggish snails, that erst were mewed, do creep out of their shellies;
The cow horn scored here resembles the tone of the Swiss cow horn, but it has three notes instead of one. It was especially constructed for Britten by the publishers Boosey and Hawkes for the premiere of the work. It produces a curiously awkward, rustic, blaring sound that no other instrument can make in that particular register.
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The rumbling rivers now do warm, for little boys to paddle; The sturdy steed now goes to grass, and up they hang his saddle; The heavy hart, the bellowing buck, the rascal, and the pricket, Are now among the yeoman's peas, and leave the fearful thicket; And be like them, 0 you, I say, of this same noble town, And lift aloft your velvet heads, and slipping off your gown, With bells on legs, with napkins clean unto your shoulders tied, With scarfs and garters as you please, and "Hey for our town!" cried, March out, and show your willing minds, by twenty and by twenty, To Hogsdon or to Newington, where ale and cakes are plenty; And let it ne'er be said for shame, that we the youths of London Lay thrumming of our caps at home, and left our custom undone. Up then, I say, both young and old, both man and maid a-maying, With drums, and guns that bounce aloud, and merry tabor playing! Which to prolong, God save our King, and send his country peace, And root out treason from the land! and so, my friends, I cease.
Soomer is icoomen in,
Loode sing cuckoo.
Groweth sayd and bloweth mayd
And springth the woode new;
Sing Cuckoo 1
Awe blayeth after lamb,
Lowth after calve coo;
Bullock stairteth, booke vairteth;
Mirry sing cuckoo,
Cuckoo, Cuckoo,
Well singes thoo, cuckoo,
Nay sweek thoo nayver noo.
Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major, K. 364, for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra...........Mozart
Mozart was born at a time when chamber music and the symphony were not as clearly differentiated as they are today. The term Sinfonia, the Italian name for symphony, in the early Baroque period, had no fixed form or style. Symphonies that stood alone, without being attached to a cantata, suite, or larger work, came to be known later as "Concert Symphonies." Just before the middle of the eighteenth century, the Sinfonia was pretty well denned by its function, and in Johann Adolph Scheibe's Der critische Musicus we read that symphonies were of three types: spiritual, theatrical, and chamber. The cham?ber symphony, Scheibe continues, was governed almost entirely by "the fire of the composer--thus vivacity and genius for inventing, expounding, and ani?mating a melody are the only guides he must follow."
The word concertante was one of several eighteenth-century terms used to designate pieces in which several solo instruments participated after the manner of their forerunner, the earlier concerto grosso of Corelli and his imitators, in which a body of instruments, the concertino, was pitted against the full orches-
Adolph Scheibe, Der critiscke Musicus (Leipzig: 174S).
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tra, concerto, tutti, or ripieno. Alfred Einstein describes the concertante more colorfully than any musical dictionary:
When to the competition of two or more instruments, the orchestra is added as another participant in the dazzling tournament--a participant that usually opens the occasion and retires, leaving the center of attention to the combatants, mostly accompanying or comment?ing upon their activities, and returning to the foreground only when they are tired and must rest a little--we are squarely in the concertante domain.
Mozart departed from the concertante style more and more as he matured, or perhaps it is more to the point to say with Einstein that "he separated its ingredients, developing the symphonic elements in ever purer form in the orches?tral symphony, and the concertante elements in the concerto for solo instru?ments.!
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the concertante had assumed a more or less specific stylistic meaning, due in a great measure to the famous Mann?heim School of composers, of whom Johann Stamits (1717-57) was the most prominent. He joined the Mannheim orchestra, became its conductor, and in?augurated a unique style of composition and performance that spread the fame of this organization throughout Europe. If the Mannheim School cannot be given full credit for having established the foundations for the symphony, as later found in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, it did codify many of the prin?ciples and formulas that were later to characterize the style of these great mas?ters. Through them, Germany finally triumphed over Italy in instrumental com?position.
On September 23, 1777, Mozart departed from Salzburg with his mother on a tour to Mannheim and Paris, hoping to gain fame and permanent employment. From the moment he arrived in Paris on March 27, 1778, to the time of his re?turn in January, 1779, his life was filled with anguish and frustration. He experi?enced a series of degrading failures in his attempt to find an appropriate posi?tion worthy of his talents; he was lost in intrigues and court politics, exploited yet unrewarded; and he was desperately in love with Aloysia Weber (sister of Constanze whom he later married), whose indifference plunged him into deep depression. His mother died suddenly and had to be buried on foreign soil. On his way home from Paris, he met Aloysia Weber in Munich and she made it unmistakably clear that her interest in him was at an end. He returned to Salz?burg in 1779 a broken man. Yet he entered upon a period of great creative activity, producing in that one year many choral works for the church services, two symphonies (K. 318 in G major and K. 319 in B-flat major); the Serenade in D major, K. 320; the Divertimento in D major, K. 334; the Concerto for Two Pianos, K. 365; and the Sinfonia Concertante on tonight's program. What?ever personal emotions of grief and anguish Mozart experienced under these tragic conditions, they never found expression in his music. Here they were transformed into significant forms of beauty that have brought joy and delight to generations.
Einstein, op. cit. Ubid., p. 274.
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In the Sinfonia Concertante we have a perfect example of Mozart in a state of transition to the series of magnificent piano concertos written in Vienna after 1781. "It was in the piano concerto," wrote Einstein, "that Mozart said the last word in respect to the fusion of the concertante and symphonic elements-a fusion resulting in a higher unity beyond which no progress was possible, be?cause perfection is imperfectable."
In this superb work Mozart brought to fruition all the efforts he had previ?ously made in this style. By virtue of its truly symphonic treatment, it is per?haps the most significant instrumental work he had composed up to that time, certainly the greatest concerto, and the summit of his Salzburg period. "In it," wrote Einstein, "Mozart summed up what he had accomplished in the concertante portions of his serenades, adding what he had learned of the monu?mental style in Mannheim and Paris, and most important of all, treating all his materials with the personal and artistic maturity which he had by this time reached--the powerful orchestra crescendo (a rarity in Mozart's works occurring here in the first movement) is in the Mannheim style; but the living unity of each of its three movements--all this is truly Mozartian."f
'Ibid., p. 288. rf.. P. 277.
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Saturday Afternoon, May 8
Suite of Dances from the opera Alcina......Handel
Georg Friedrich Handel was born in Halle, Germany, February 23, 168S; died in London, April 14, 1759.
Georg Friedrich Handel, one of the titans of music, is today one of the most shamefully neglected of composers. Although Messiah is known through?out the civilized world and is perhaps the most beloved of all choral works, we must agree with Bukofzer that "its immense public knows it more for its religious appeal than for its musical excellence." It must be admitted that Messiah has won its place in our affections largely by habit, custom, and association. A large part of its faithful public is unaware of the fact that Handel wrote thirty-one other oratorios, to say nothing of forty-six operas and a stag?gering amount of instrumental music. Furthermore, he composed in every form known to his age. Besides the incredible number of operas and oratorios, he produced Passion music, anthems, Te Deums, cantatas, duets, trios, songs, pasticcios, incidental music for the stage, serenades, and odes. His output of instrumental music was equally fabulous. Numbered among his complete works are sonatas, trios, organ concertos, suites, concerti grossi, overtures, and music for the harpsichord, harp, and ballet. Thus there is available for opera houses, choral societies, individual singers, and instrumentalists throughout the world an almost inexhaustible wealth and variety of practically unknown music by this, the last great master of the Baroque era. Three countries have a national justi?fication for claiming him: Germany, the land of his birth; Italy, where he received his early training and experience; and England, the land of his adop?tion, where he created most of his music over a period of a half century and where he lies buried in the poets corner of Westminster Abbey among the im?mortals of English letters.
The opera Alcina was written in the midst of disaster. A rival opera company and impresario, Nicola Porpora, were offering malicious competition and lur?ing his finest singers away from him by offering more lucrative contracts; he was on the verge of bankruptcy; the King's Theatre where he had been pro?ducing his operas, was handed over to his rival and he was forced to move into the much smaller Lincoln's Inn Fields. But Handel was no stranger to this sort of cut-throat procedure. It had always stimulated him to ingenious devices to regain prestige with his public, and inspired him to greater artistic effort. The new Covent Garden which had just been completed offered him a refuge, and he leased it for the production of a new opera Ariodante early in 1735. To
'Gcorg Friedrich Handel Werke (Leipzig: Breilkopf and Hartel, 94 volumes, 1858; 6 supplemental volumes, 1888-1902).
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insure the success of this venture, he imported a group of French ballet dancers as an added attraction. The same year saw the production of Alcina for which he continued to write more ballet music. But in spite of everything he could do, his operatic star was in the descent. By 1737, both he and his rival Porpora were forced to close their respective doors because of astronomical deficits incurred by their famous Italian singers, but more particularly by a change in public taste. It had begun in 1728 with the phenomenal success of John Gay's Beggars Opera in English. Handel, an astute business man, did not retire com?pletely from the battle field as did his rival, who ultimately ended in a pauper's grave. He quickly forsook the dying opera which had invariably been sung by Italian singers in their own language, and turned to oratorio in English. His success restored him to public favor, filled his empty purse, and led him to his final rest in Westminster Abbey.
The story of Alcina was based upon the celebrated sixteenth century poem "Orlando furioso" by the Italian poet Lodovico Ariosto. Thirty-odd stanzas were expanded into an undistinguished libretto by Antonio Marchi. Handel transformed it into a remarkably effective opera by writing brilliant arias, noble recitatives, and ballet music of ingratiating charm. It was performed twenty-four times between 1735 and 1737, but disappeared with the absence of singers technically equipped to perform it. In 1957 the Handel Opera Society revived it for Joan Sutherland, whose fantastic performance revealed its remarkable pages to an astonished public. It is available in complete form on London records (OSA 1361; A 4361) with Sutherland and Teresa Berganza in the leading roles.
The Gavotte, Sarabande, Minuet and Alia breve bring Act I to its close; the Ballo ends Act II, and the Tamburnio ends the opera amid general rejoicing.
"Schelomo," Hebrew Rhapsody for Violoncello
and Orchestra..............Bloch
Ernest Bloch was born July 24, 1880, in Geneva, Switzerland; died in Portland, Oregon, July IS, 1959.
Ernest Bloch is the most solitary figure in contemporary music; he has stood by himself in splendid isolation above all the conflicts and confusions of modernism. Throughout his career he never forsook his artistic credo--to avoid the eccentric and to express with sincerity, originality, and unerring truthfulness what he as an artist felt compelled to express, irrespective of the popular styles and changing ideologies of modern art. "Art is the outlet of the mystic emotional need of the human spirit; it is created rather by instinct than by intelligence, rather by intuition than by will," he once wrote. He always had a distaste for cerebral creations hatched from algebraic the?orems and remained coldly aloof from all the experimentation and striving for the novel and fashionably smart that has produced so much puerile mu-
Joan Chissell, "Style in Bloch's Chamber Music," Music and Letters, XXIV, No. 1 (January, 1943), 31.
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
sic in our day. "Unlike those who have strained to be up-to-date more than to be artistically communicative, Bloch never succumbed to the aesthetic gangrene of his time," wrote John Hastings. "He had no interest in fashions, cults, isms, formulas, or systems. And he had no use for the sensationalism that was the crutch of many a precarious celebrity. For these reasons his music, while it has steadily consolidated its grip upon a growing audience, has never been in vogue; and therefore it has been snubbed by that sector of the critical fraternity that follows every mode like a housemaid with a dust pan after a shedding dog--his music has shown a spontaneous forthrightness that in most of his contemporaries' arbitrary theorizing has strangled in its bassinet. His. indeed, is the miracle of whole genius which, occurring so seldom in any gener?ation, transcends the cocoon of 'conditioning factors,' of which it is never essentially a part." Bloch believed that music should be an experience and not a formula; an art, not a craft, and that it is a whole spiritual expression in?volving on the part of both composer and listener "not the use of the micro?scope and the seismograph, but the exercise of the mind undivorced from the heart and the activation of the spirit unalienated from the pulse."f
The question of Judaism is always foremost in any discussion of Bloch, for, from the beginning of his career, he expressed himself in a peculiarly Jewish idiom such as no other composer of his religion had done before him, and at a time when such an idiom was practically unknown to modern music. According to Guido Gatti, Bloch should be considered the first, perhaps the sole, Jewish musician the history of music affords us. He fashioned early a modern musical expression that conveyed something akin to the deep sorrow and noble exaltation of Judaism as it is found in the Old Testament. In such early works as the Psalms (1912-14), Trots pohtnes juifs (1913), Schelomo (1915), Israel (1912-15), and Baal Shem (1923) he gave complete and con?scious utterance to his Hebraic spiritual inheritance. Of this period he has writ?ten, "I have but listened to an inner voice, deep, secret, insistent, ardent ... a voice which seemed to come from far beyond myself--a voice which surged upon me on reading certain passages in the Bible--this entire Jewish heritage moved me deeply, it was reborn in my music"! As he matured and developed, his own rugged and impetuous personality exerted its control over his religious feelings with the result that a new music began to emerge that was an amal?gamation of both. The Jewish quality of his earlier idiom was never achieved superficially by the adaptation of Hebrew melodies, the authenticity of which he himself doubted, aware that most of them were borrowed from other nations. He wrote:
It is not my purpose nor my desire to attempt a "reconstitution" of Jewish music, or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archaeologist. I hold it of first importance to write good genuine music. It is the Jewish soul that interests me,
John Hastings, "Ernest Bloch and Modern Music," Music Review, X, No. 2 (May, 1949), 1 IS.
t6iU, p. 117.
tDavid Ewen, Book of Modern Composers (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1942), p. 251.
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the complex, glowing, agitated soul that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible; . . . the freshness and ndiveti of the Patriarchs; the violence of the Prophetic Books; the Hebrew's savage love of justice; the despair of the Ecclesiastes; the sorrow and the immensity of the Book of Job; the sensuality of the Song of Songs. All this is in us, all this is in me, and it is the better part of me. It is all this that I endeavor to hear in myself and to transcribe in my music; the venerable emotion of the race that slumbers way down in our soul.
The qualities of his art do not belong exclusively to any ethnic or religious group. The universality of appeal that it now enjoys repudiates any arbitrary lines of demarcation. He was simply gifted by nature to give expression to racial currents that flow in his veins, but his idiom was his own and reflects himself as well as his race.
In Irwin Edman's Philosopher's Quest, the author, in an imaginary conver?sation with Schopenhauer, has him speak of our contemporary music thus:
Perhaps modern music does peculiarly catch the note of reality. Its discords and dis?sonances, its broken melodies, its shattered harmonies--these are the very essence of the nature of things, the blind frustrations of the reasonless desire, the futile reiterations of the will always doomed to futility. Perhaps the music of your day is something like the music I have been waiting for. But, from the little I have heard of it, there is something missing; the touching quality of song, the poignance of feeling. It is the geometry of tragedy rather than the heartbreak of it that these cerebral young composers have caught. But if ever the great musician comes, he will have caught the very tone of world sorrow itself and of human fatality, and in listening we will become one with it, and our own little tragedies will find their fulfillment in transfigured union with the tragedy of all things.t
No one could have painted a better word portrait of Ernest Bloch and his achievement than that stated in the last sentence of the above paragraph. Ernest Bloch may not have produced the "music of the future," but he demon?strated noble qualities of mind and heart and asserted a spiritual integrity and aspiration both in word and deed desperately needed in the world today.
"Schelomo" was composed at Geneva, Switzerland, in January and Feb?ruary, 1916. The following description was written by Guido M. Gatti in La Critica Musicale, 1920, and translated into English by Theodore Baker. It ap?peared in the Musical Quarterly, January 1921:
The Hebrew Rhapsody for solo violoncello with orchestra bears the name of the great king Schelomo (Solomon). In this, without taking thought for development and formal consistency, without the fetters of a text requiring interpretation, he has given free course to his fancy; the multiplex figure of the founder of the great temple lent itself, after setting it upon a lofty throne, and chiseling its lineaments, to the creation of a phantasmagorical entourage of persons and scenes in rapid and kaleidoscopic succession.
The violoncello, with its ample breadth of phrasing, now melodic and with moments of superb lyricism, now declamatory and with robustly dramatic lights and shades, lends itself to a reincarnation of Solomon in all his glory, surrounded by his thousand wives and concubines, with his multitude of slaves and warriors behind him. His voice resounds in the devotional silence, and the sentences of his wisdom sink into the heart as the seed into a fertile soil: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity. What profit hath a man
Chissell, op. cit., p. 31.
tlrwin Edman, Philosopher's Quest (New York: The Viking Press, 1947) p. 138.
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of all his labor which he taketh under the sun One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. ... He that Increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. . . ." At times the sonorous voice of the violoncello is heard predominant amid a breathless and fateful obscurity throbbing with persistent rhythms; again, it blends in a phantasmagorical paroxysm of polychromatic tones shot through with slivery clangors and frenzies of exultation. And anon one finds oneself in the heart of a dream-world, in an Orient of fancy, where men and women of every race and tongue are holding argument of hurling maledictions; and now and again we hear the mournful accents of the prophetic seer, under the influence of which all bow down and listen reverently. The entire discourse of the soloist, vocal rather than instrumental, seems like musical expression intimately con?joined with the Talmudic prose. The pauses, the repetitions of entire passages, the leaps of a double octave, the chromatic progressions, all find their analogues in the book of Ecclesiastes--in the versicles, in the fairly epigraphic reiteration of the admonitions ("and all is vanity and vexation of spirit"), in the unexpected shifts from one thought to another, in certain crescendi of emotion that end in explosions of anger or grief uncontrolled.
Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88.......Dvorak
Anton Dvorak was born in Nelahozeves on Vltava near Prague, September 8, 1841; died in Prague, May 1, 1904.
Do you guess I have some intricate purpose Well, I have--for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has. Do you take it I would astonish Does the red tail, twittering through the woods
--Walt Whitman
It is as little known among performing musicians as it is among the general listening public that Anton Dvorak was one of the most prolific composers of the late nineteenth century. If we judge him only by the extent of his work, he is incontestably a phenomenon in the world of music. Without a doubt Dvorak was one of the most distinguished musical personalities of his period and should take his rightful place beside Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Franck. He ranks today among the great masters in the copiousness and extraordinary variety of his expression.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, other European countries besides Germany, Austria, Italy, and France became articulate in music. The period saw the emergence of such nationalistic composers as Grieg in Norway, Mous-sorgsky and the "Five" in Russia, Albeniz in Spain, and Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia. The freshness and originality of their musical styles stemmed from their conscious use of folk music sources. The result was an agreeable and popular art, essentially melodic, rhythmic, and colorful. Folk music, consciously cultivated by such artists as Dvorak and Smetana, sheds its provincialisms but retains its essential characteristics--simplicity, directness, and honesty.
As a traditionalist Dvorak accepted the forms of his art without question, but he regenerated them by injecting a strong racial feeling, which gave brilliant vitality, depth, and warmth to everything he wrote. Dvorak possessed genuinely Slavonic qualities that gave an imperishable color and lyrical character to his art. With a preponderance of temperament and emotion over reason and
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intellect, he seemed to be always intuitively guided to effect a proper relation?ship between what he wished to express and the manner in which he did so. In this connection he had more in common with Mozart and Schubert than he had with Beethoven. His expression is fresh and irresistably frank, and, although it is moody at times and strangely sensitive, it is never deeply philosophical or brooding; gloom and depression are never allowed to predominate. He could turn readily from one strong emotion to another without any premeditation; he could pour out his soul without reserve or affectation, and in the next moment reveal an almost complete lack of substance in his predilection for sheer color combinations or rhythmic effects for their own sake. But everything he felt and said in his music was natural and clear. There was no defiance, no mystical ecstacy in his makeup. He had the simple faith, the natural gaiety, the sane and robust qualities of Haydn. His music, therefore, lacks the breadth and the epic quality of Beethoven's; it possesses none of the transcendent emotional sweep of Tchaikovsky's; but for radiantly cheerful and comforting music, for good-hearted, peasant-like humor, for unburdened lyricism, Dvorak has no peer.
The orchestra was the medium best suited to display Dvorak's particular gifts. The most significant section of his orchestral compositions, and the largest in extent, is the series of nine symphonies which have secured for him a place among the most original symphonists in history. They are eloquent and con?vincing testimonies to his creative powers which enabled him to approach each in turn with increasing structural control, novelty, and indigenous expression. They became the foundation stones of a national Czech musical art.
In 1865, at the age of twenty-four, he wrote two symphonies in close succes?sion that failed to reach a performance. Undaunted, he returned a decade later with a third which showed unmistakably the influence of Wagner and Liszt. In the next two years, with Beethoven as his model, he produced his fourth and fifth. It was in the sixth, in 1880, that undeniable Czech overtones were sounded. After a sojourn into the passionate and agitated world of the seventh in 1884, written with Brahms-like terseness and severity, he produced the symphony on this afternoon's program in a spirit of relaxed tension and in full artistic maturity. In it sounds again, as in the sixth, the simple, uncompli?cated, but moody Dvorak. Living at the time a happy and contented life in the Czech countryside, and momentarily unconcerned with intellectual problems of composition, he produced a work of infinite freshness, flexibility, and origi?nality. It is permeated with a spirit of happy tranquility, yet relieved by con?trasting moods of spirited animation (first and fourth movements), and poetic meditation (second and third movements). In its formal aspects it is perhaps the most original and independent of all his symphonies. After three years of residence in America (1892-95) he wrote the last and most famous of all his works, the symphony in E minor From The New World.
The sketches for the eighth symphony were made between September 6 and 23, 1889, at Vysaka in Bohemia; it was completed on November 8 of the same year and had its first performance in Prague, February 2, 1890.
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The order in which he composed the symphonies, and the numbers and opus indications are confusing. The symphony on this afternoon's program, for in?stance, is often listed as No. 4, because it was the fourth to be published; how?ever, in order of composition it was actually No. 8. The following table will in?dicate the correct order of composition, the accepted numbering and opus indi?cations of the nine symphonies:
1. 1865 Symphony in C minor ("The Bells of Zlonice"), Op. 3. Unpublished.
2. 1865 Symphony in B-flat major, Op. 4. Unpublished.
3. 1873 Symphony in E-flat major (orig. Op. 10). Published Posthumous 1912.
4. 1874 Symphony in D minor (orig. Op. 12). Published Posthumous 1912.
5. 1875 Symphony in F major, "No. 3" (originally Op. 24), Op. 76, revised in 1887.
6. 1880 Symphony in D major, "No. 1," Op. 60.
7. 1885 Symphony in D minor, "No. 2," Op. 70.
8. 1889 Symphony in G major, "No. 4," Op. 88.
9. 1893 Symphony in E minor, "No. 5," ("From the New World"). Op. 95.
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Saturday Evening, May 8
Symphony No. 30 in D major, K. 202......Mozart
Many of Mozart's early instrumental works resist classification because the distinctions of form we make today were not known in his time. The symphony was in the process of evolving from the Italian sinfonia or opera buffa overture, which was characterized by two fast movements separated by a contrasting slow one. It presented no other problem of formal construction and had no obligation to the work it preceded. It was purely light, gay, ceremonial music, and thus it remained in the hands of the Italians themselves until German com?posers in Vienna began to expand its form, about 1760, by inserting a minuet between the slow second and final fast movements, and evolving in general a more aggressive style. Mozart's various visits to Vienna, especially during the year 1767 and again briefly in 1773, made him increasingly aware of the changes that were taking place in the Italian sinfonia at the hands of his own country?men. The influence of the Viennese school upon Mozart, especially that of Franz Joseph Haydn, prevailed until 1777 when he visited Mannheim and heard its famous orchestra. In the Symphony in G minor, No. 25, K. 183, of 1773, he broke away noticeably from his earlier Italian models. His themes became more significant and their treatment more logical and dramatic; there was evidence that he was moving to greater freedom and individuality in the use of his instru?ments and that he was becoming more aware of effective balance between move?ments.
The four years between Mozart's seventeenth and twenty-first birthdays (1773-77) were spent in Salzburg. We know less about this period in his life than any other. Since he was at home with his family most of the time, there were few personal letters, which are the chief and most reliable sources of all biographical information concerning him. There is, however, a record of his compositions during these years that gives us some indication of his musical development. In the year 1774 alone, he created, besides the G minor, K. 183, three other symphonies--the C major, K. 200; the A major, K. 201; and the one on tonight's program, the D major, K. 202. Of the three, the D major was the last one composed and the only one actually dated (May 5, 1774). These symphonies are particularly significant for they embody characteristics of his youth and promises of his maturity; they form the beginning of a transition to the monumental symphonies at the end of his life, the E-flat major, K. 543; the G minor, K. 550; and final C major, "Jupiter," K. 551. This transition is not an even one. Occasionally there are reversions to the operatic overture style. Charming as is the symphony on tonight's program, it is the least significant of the four. It shows little of the spirit of the romantic fervor heard in the G minor, K. 183, or the A major, K. 201. According to Einstein "the last move?ment is not much more than a Kchraus (last dance of the evening) whose only
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remarkable characteristic is that it has a thematic relation with the first move?ment; the andantino con vioto for strings alone (second movement) could have appeared in one of the Vienna quartets in the style of Haydn; the minuet is not very characteristic, and the first movement, which is the most important, simply applies the technique gained in the G minor and A major symphonies to material to which it is not wholly appropriate. Just as in the Vienna quar?tets, so in the symphony, Joseph Haydn had upset Mozart's thinking; there are instances in which even Mozart's receptive spirit was not strong enough to assimilate an impression and make it fully his own."
But this is the opinion of a great Mozart scholar who judges this work in relation to the more technically advanced symphonies that accompanied it. To our ears it is simply Mozart, and to Mozart the word "inferior" can never be applied.
Concert Aria: "Per questa bella mano," K. 612 . . . Mozart
Of the five works by Mozart heard on these programs the concert aria, "Per questa bella mano," was the last to be written. It was composed March 8, 1791, the year of his death, for Franz Gerl, the first "Zarastro" in The Magic Flute, which was written at approximately the same time. The author of the undis?tinguished text, which is simply a conventional declaration of love, is unknown. Mozart treated it in a straightforward fashion. But having available in the Freihaustheater Orchestra a remarkable virtuoso performer on the double bass, one Pischlberger, he made use of his unusual talents for performing fioratura passages on the unwieldly instrument, by writing for him an agile obbligato to the chaste vocal line. (In this evening's performance it is played by the cello.) Einstein believes the piece to have an air of parody about it, which is intensi?fied by the nimble efforts of what he calls the "instrumental Behemoth." Amus?ing as it is when performed by the double bass this aria is not one of Mozart's major efforts:
By thy lovely hand I swear to love but thee. The breezes, the forests, the mountains bear witness to my never dying love. Look with kindness, or spurn with anger, love or hate, but say you hear me, say you love me. No power on earth or in heaven can change my love for thee!
"Es ist genug" from Elijah.......Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in Ham?burg, February 3, 1809; died in Leipzig, November 4, 1847.
Few today would place Mendelssohn's Elijah in the same class with Handel's Messiah or Bach's B-minor Mass, yet it remains a classic of its kind. Its fine style and consummate good taste have endeared it to a great public. Mendels?sohn's particular genius was lyrical and not epic, so that some of the more dra?matic moments of the text may seem to be unrealized or under-written. Today we
Einstein, op. cit., pp. 224-85.
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might wish for a more dramatic treatment in the music of Elijah taunting the prophets of Baal, mocking the storm, receiving the vision of Horeb, or being swept up to Heaven in a whirlwind. But in the more quiet moment, when Elijah pathetically declares his failure in "It is enough," Mendelssohn is at his lyrical best and writes music that is moving in its simple beauty, sincerely and deeply, if not too intensely felt.
It is enough, O Lord; now take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers! I desire to live no longer; now let me die, for my days are but vanity! I have been very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts! For the children of Israel have broken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars, and slain Thy prophets with the sword: and I, even I, only am left; and they seek my life to take it away.
--Job 7:16; Kings 19:10
La Procession..............Franck
Cesar Franck was born in Liege, December 10, 1822; died in Paris, November 8, 1890.
Cesar Franck was not a prolific composer. He developed slowly and created his most significant works after the age of sixty. The Chorale, Prelude and Fugue for piano, the Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra, the Violin Sonata, and above all the Symphony in D minor, unsuccessful in their day, ultimately won critical approbation, but more significantly, the lasting affection of a universal public.
Although Franck was little recognized as a composer by his colleagues in the Paris Conservatory where he taught organ, he exerted a tremendous influence over French music during his life time. Together with a group of loyal and devoted students, among whom were Vincent d'Indy, Henri Duparc, and Ernest Chausson, he directed his energies to re-establishing the principles of instru?mental music at a time when opera was dominating the entire musical life of the nation. He and his group played an equally important role in the develop?ment of the French art song or mSlodie. Before the influence of the German lied was felt, France had only a popular kind of chanson that was entirely without distinction. Franck and his followers preferred a type that was more refined in emotional content and more elevated in thought. They produced a genre that constituted in many ways the French counterpart of the German lied. As the melodie was developed through Franck, Duparc, and Chausson, it became not a mere setting of a text but an attempted fusion in which poetry and music both achieved heightened effect. They imbued the song with a typi?cally French, evocative charm and nuance which was carried to a point of ex?quisite perfection in their contemporaries Gabriel Faure, Debussy, and later, in Poulenc. Unlike the German lied, the melodie never exploits music at the expense of poetry. It retains an extraordinary sense of verbal beauty, and uses music as a key to the inner meaning of the poem, never as a vehicle for pure musical expression in which the poem serves but a subsidiary function.
During his long life Cesar Franck came under many musical influences, none of which hindered the formation of a strikingly personal and indigenous idiom.
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His melodic gift, colored by a Wagnerian chromaticism, was abundant, inex?haustible in its flow, and characteristic in its subtle accentuations. This gift he lavished upon his instrumental works and to a more subtle degree upon those for the voice. He wrote only sixteen songs of which La Procession is typical. At the request of the publisher Bruneau for a poem that "was noble in thought, and at the same time very childlike, very simple in its inner meaning," the poet August Brozeux provided Franck with the text of La Procession. Attracted by scenes from the Bible and Gospel, as many of his vocal works attest, he created a song of luminous sincerity and religious tenderness, impregnated with the spirit of Christian mysticism:
The Lord advances across the fields!
By the moors, the meadows, through the green
undergrowth of the beeches. He comes, followed by the people and borne by
the priests, Oh birds in the sky, mingle your songs with the
chant of man! He halts. Around an ancient oak the throng reclines in
adoration,
Beneath the mystic monstrance. Oh sun in the heaven! cast on Him thy
declining rays! Birds in the sky, mingle your songs with the
chant of man! You, flowers, with perfume like incense
exhale your aroma! O festal day! so bright, so holy, so
fragrant! The Lord approaches across the fields.
"Don Quichotte a Dulcinee"..........Ravel
Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, March 7, 187S; died in Paris, December 28, 1937.
In the exacting art of song writing, Maurice Ravel evolved, as he did in every medium he touched, a highly individual style. His vocal line, a qtiasi-parlando quite distinct from the free recitative of Italian opera or the Sprech-stimme of Arnold Schonberg, has often been characteristically referred to as "Ravelian declamation." The melodic content in his songs invariably lies in the accompaniment, where the independent piano or instrumental parts, subtly rhythmic and highly developed harmonically, carry the main musical interest. In contrast to his contemporary countrymen, Claude Debussy, Ernest Chaus-son, and Henri Duparc, Ravel was not a born song writer. He must be classed with those composers whose style was essentially instrumental. His precise, witty, and ironic expression, and particularly his penchant for clarity and com?pactness of form, often counteracted the mutability of conventional vocal melody. It did, however, assure the most intimate relationship between word and tone.
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In all of Ravel's songs, the subtle inflections of the French language are as precisely duplicated as possible vocally. For this reason, translation into another language, always a moot question aesthetically, is in their case unthinkable.
In 1932, Ravel was commissioned, along with Manuel de Falla, Jacques Ibert, and Darius Milhaud to provide music for a film entitled Don Quichotte starring the famous singing actor Fedor Chaliapin. Ravel's contribution con?sisted of a setting of the three Don Quichotte a Dulcinee poems by Paul Morand. His delay in bringing these songs to their final state of polished perfection resulted in the commissions being awarded to Ibert. They were finally intro?duced to the public, however, by Martial Singher at the Concerts Colonne, in Paris on December 1, 1934. "No living musician could enclose so much tact and so much taste within so few notes," wrote the French critic Vuillermoz. "How intelligent is each of them; how well each of these notes knows what it wants, whence it comes, whither it goes." In truth, Ravel's tendency to economic means and deftness of expression noted in his later works such as the Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922), the opera-ballet L'Enfant et les sortileges (1925), and the two piano concertos (D major--1931; G major--1932) is apparent in these, his last songs. They include a chanson romantique in which Don Quichotte, to the rhythm of the guajira naively but nobly offers to die for his lady; a chanson Spique, a confident prayer to the Madonna, full of great tender?ness and haunting beauty, and finally a chanson de boire, a rollicking drinking song, Ravel's last composition and his farewell to music.
Born practically on the Spanish border, Ravel throughout his life had a penchant for Spanish themes, as is evidenced in his Habanera (1895); the opera L'Heure espagnole and the Rhapsody espagnole, both from the year 1907; the popular Alborado del grazioso (1912); the famous Bolero (1928); and several smaller works.
In Don Quichotte a Dulcinee, he called again upon the sustaining inspiration that had produced some of his most famous and colorful compositions:
Chanson Romanesque
If ever for rest you are yearning,
I'll hush the winds and seas, my love,
I will say to the sun above:
"Cease in your flight, stay in your turning!"
If ever for morning you sigh,
The stars mil I hide and their wonder,
The splendor of heaven tear asunder,
And banish the night from the sky . . .
But if ever I hear you cry:
"Give me your life, prove how you love me,"
Darkness will fall, shadows above me,
Blessing you still, then I shall die!
0 Dulcinee!
Chanson Epique
Unto my soul her presence lending,
Saint Michael, come! her champion let me be,
With knightly grace her fame defending,
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Saint Michael, come! to earth descending,
With good Saint George before the shrine
Of the Madonna with face divine.
May the light of heaven be lying,
Give to my spirit purity,
And lend my heart sweet piety
And lift my soul in ecstacy undying!
(O good Saint George and Saint Michael, hear me)
An angel watches ever near me,
My own beloved, like, so like to you,
Madonna, maid divine! Amen.
Chanson a Boire
Lady adored! Wherefore this sorrow
I live in your glance divine,
Say not that love, love and good wine
Bring to us mortals grief tomorrow.
Drink then! Drink to joy!
For good wines make you laugh like a merry boy! . . .
Who wants a maid (not I, I'm thinking)
A maid who mopes all day long,
Silent and pale, never a song,
Frowning to see her lover drinking!
Drink then, drink to joy ....
Pastorale...............Stravinsky
As a young student, Stravinsky wavered between law and music as a career. In 1902, at a critical time of indecision, he met Rimsky-Korsakov, whose en?couragement determined his choice. After two fruitful years of study with this great master of orchestration, during which he wrote a symphony (E-flat major), a piano sonata, some songs, and a wordless "vocalise," he launched upon his brilliant career.
Tonight we hear this charming work as Stravinsky later rescored it for violin solo and woodwind quartet. Beginning quietly in a florid melody for the oboe, accompanied by the clarinet and bassoon, staccato, the violin continues with an elaboration of the oboe theme, embellished by counter melodies in the English horn and oboe.
Pictures at an Exhibition........Moussorgsky
(Orchestrated by Ravel)
Modeste Petrovitch Moussorgsky was born in Karevo, March 21, 1839; died in Saint Petersburg, March 28, 1881.
For Moussorgsky, art was so valuable a means of effecting human understand?ing that to treat it merely as a vehicle for the glorification of the beautiful would be to pervert its purpose and to dissipate its power. For him art was no autonomous segregated phenomenon, but rather the direct expression of humanity, and like it, art is in a constant state of flux and evolution. There should be, therefore, no arbitrary formulistic boundaries imposed upon it. As the
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expression of humanity is an office which ought to be carried out with a full sense of responsibility attached to those entrusted with it, the artist is called upon to be sincere and truthful in any work he undertakes. For Moussorgsky, "art for art's sake" became "art for life's sake."
Hard things have been said of him as an artist. He has been accused of crude realism, of a lack of any sense of real beauty, of creating clumsily, laboriously, and imperfectly. It is true that he was a thoroughgoing realist in music, but for him realism was not only an essential and indispensible quality in art; it also rendered to art an instrument through which the masses could be brought to a realization of their social and moral duties. This attitude, contrary to the conception of art as appealing primarily to the cultivated, is comparable to that of Tolstoy.
The music of Moussorgsky brings varying and confused impressions to the mind. Considering his work as a whole, there is at times imperfection, incom?pleteness, and carelessness. It is marked by a rugged crudeness and by unprece?dented and quite intuitive audacities with their constant adaption to the special needs of his own creative temperament. And yet, we must acknowledge a genius of colossal inspiration and aweful power. To his more conservative contempo-aries, Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein, Moussorgsky was a musical nihilist, and his music filled them with misgivings. In a letter written by Tchaikovsky to Mme von Meek, November 27, 1878, we meet with an interesting characteriza?tion:
As far as talent goes, he is perhaps the most important of all, only his is a nature in which there is no desire for self-improvement--a nature too absorbed with the absurd theories around him. Moreover, his is a rather low nature, that loves the uncouth, coarse and ugly. He prides himself on his ignorance, and writes down what comes to his head, believing blindly in the infallibility of his genius.
The reference to the "absurd theories around him" points to the group of young Russian contemporary composers who had banded themselves together in opposition to Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein, who, they thought, were more Teutonic than Russian. Other members of this chauvinistic coterie were Cesar Cui, Borodin, Balakirev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. This group, known as "The Five," were the young radicals in their day, looking with scorn upon the whole musical world. None looked with more contempt than Moussorgsky, who was "always ready to sacrifice poetry and musical charm to realism, and never recoiled from shocking rudeness."f
His obvious incorrectness at times, his ultracrude realism, and his insistence upon preserving his originality at the cost of discipline do not destroy in any way his position as perhaps the most gifted of the Neo-Russian School, over?flowing with vitality and reckless in his daring. His spontaneous and unfettered music submerges all weaknesses of detail. Claude Debussy has exactly defined his music in these terms: "It resembles the art of the inquiring primitive man,
Modeste Tchaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Peter llick Tchaikovsky, translated and edited by Rosa Newmarch (New York: John Lane Company, 1906), p. 252. Ilbid.
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who discovers music step by step, guided only by his feelings." He is in truth the Dostoevsky of music, and his music is a poetic evocation to nationalism.
In the spring of 1874, a posthumous exhibition of drawings and water colors by the architect Victor Hartmann, an intimate friend of Moussorgsky, was held at the Academy of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg. Moussorgsky's musical fancy had full play only when it had some objective reality upon which to work. He created this composition under the influence of a deep inspiration derived from his late friend's pictures. Wishing to show his affection for Hart?mann, he paid him tribute by "translating into music" the best of his sketches in the form of a piano suite.
At the suggestion of Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, Maurice Ravel in 1922 provided a brilliant orchestration for this suite. The introduction to the work is entitled "Promenade." The following comment on this section is by Calvocoressi:
The introduction "Promenade," which reappears several times as an interlude between the pieces, can be ranked among Moussorgsky's charming inspirations of his instrumental works. Here the rhythmic suggestion is precise and sustained: "The composer," says Stassov, "portrays himself walking now right, now left, now as an idle person, now urged to go near a picture; at times his joyous appearance is dampened, he thinks in sadness of his dead friend !"t
An abbreviated translation of Moussorgsky's description of the pictures, printed in the original piano edition of his Suite, follows:
I. Gnomus. A drawing representing a little gnome, dragging himself along with clumsy steps by his little twisted legs.
II. Vecchio Castello. A castle of the Middle Ages, before which a troubador is singing.
III. Tuileries. Children disputing after their play. An alley in the Tuileries gardens with a swarm of nurses and children.
IV. Bydlo. A Polish wagon with enormous wheels, drawn by oxen.
V. Ballet of Chicks in their Shells. A drawing made by Hartmann for the staging of a scene in the ballet "Trilby."
VI. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. Two Polish Jews, the one rich, the other poor. "Two Jewish melodies, one replying to the other. One of them is grave, imposing, decisively marked; the other is lively, skipping, supplicating . . "t
VII. Limoges. The market place. Market women dispute furiously.
VIII. Catacombs. In this drawing Hartmann portrayed himself, examining the interior of the Catacombs in Paris by the light of a lantern. In the original manuscript, Moussorgsky had written above the Andante in B minor: "The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me toward skulls, apostrophizes them--the skulls are illuminated gently in the interior."
IX. The Hut on Fowls' Legs. The drawing showed a clock in the form of the fantastical witch Baba-Yaga's hut, on the legs of fowls. Moussorgsky added the witch rushing on her way seated on her mortar.
X. The Gate of the Bogatirs at Kiev. Hartmann's drawing represented his plan for con?structing a gate in Kiev, in the old Russian massive style, with a cupola shaped like a Slavonic helmet.
Oscar Thompson; Debussy, Man and Artist (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1940), p. 195. tMichel D. Calvocoressi, Modest Moussorgsky, His Lie and Worts (Fair Lawn, N.J.; Essential Books, Inc., 1956), p. 182.
tPierre d'Alheim, Moussorgsky (Paris: 3rd ed., 1896).
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Sunday Afternoon, May 9
Les Amants magnifiques: Variations on a Theme
ofLully................Jolivet
Andre Jolivet was born August 8, 190S; still living.
Before he entered music as a profession, Andre Jolivet experimented creatively in the fields of literature, the drama, and painting. Shortly after having become a pupil of Edgard Varese, one of the boldest innovators in twentieth century music, he, with Oliver Messiaen, formed a society La Jeune France for the advancement of modern French music.
In 1949 he was appointed musical director of the Comedie francais, thus satis?fying an early desire to be identified with the theater. In a series of animated and inventive works that defy classification, this most protean of composers has made use of practically every device known to contemporary composition.
In the Musical Quarterly for July 1949, the French critic Fred Goldbeck, has amusingly indicated his position:
Picture the musicologists of a distant future puzzling whether the following two fragments of music, discovered in a mid-20th-century collection . . ., both ascribed to one Andre Jolivet, could reasonably be credited to the same composer. I imagine, for their greater bewilderment, the subsequent discovery of the complete and dated scores of the String Quartet (1943) and the Pastorales de Noel (1943): not one single feature in the Pastorales resembling those of the Quartet, and not one single element in the Quartet like anything in the Pastorales . . . After further inquiry and complementary research, the scholars will come to the conclusion that Jolivet is a 20th-century replica of those medieval Doppelmeister that caused so much concern to historians when musicology was in its infancy. The entries in the Historical Dic?tionary of Music and Musicians of the 22nd centurywill very probably read as follows:
"Andrl Jolivet I (flourished in the second quarter of the 20th century)--French school. Spirited and highly imaginative composer. An atonalist (q.v.), but not a dodecaphonist (q.v.). Underwent the influence of the contemporary Franco-American musician Yarese (q.v.) . . . Endeavored to obtain, by means of a sophisticated polyphonic technique, the effects of primeval musical magic . . . Jolivet's works are in general well planned, and constructed with clarity and unwavering impetus. Works: . . .
"Andri Jolivet II (apparently contemporary with Jolivet I): An excellent composer. Style: functional music (q.v.). Pastiche, archaism, and neo-Classicism of the meekest kind. Not difficult to play. Likely to have won prizes at international competitions. Works: numer?ous but mostly forgotten."
The operas of Jean Baptiste Lully (1639-87) are too overburdened with court artificialities to be accepted today. The excerpts that occasionally reach us in the concert hall recall the solemn dignity and vast majesty of the court of Louis XIV, where Lully reigned, with supreme authority, as the sole com?poser of opera; they sound once again, in their severe and measured musical declamation, the rhetorical splendor and magnificence of the pseudo-classical tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Lacking in lyrical effusion and intimacy, this French opera of the seventeenth century, in spite of its severity and arti-
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ficiality, is genuinely artistic. In it the will to style of the period reached its summit; here everything was ordered and clear, sonorous and pure, and pleas?antly contrived. The most successful music of this period was bound to be that which most fully mathematized itself, and absorbed the Cartesian spirit of symmetry. Lully was the master stylist of his age, and although he was a second-rate musician, he was a first-class theatrical composer who knew the commercial value of complying with the taste of his time. His operas were models in France for almost a century; in fact, until the advent of Gluck.
Les Amants magnifiques ("The Magnificent Lovers"), a set of variations on a theme from Lully's opera by the same name produced February 4, 1670, was written by Jolivet in 1961. There is no attempt on his part to modernize the simple harmonies and measured rhythms of this vivacious music. Through the modern orchestra he has merely emphasized the infectious charm and elegance of this French master of the high Baroque period.
Klaus G. Ray, editor of the program notes for the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, at the American premiere of the work on January 18, 1962 wrote:
Study of the score reveals that the contemporary Frenchman has not constructed an unmis?takably "modern" set of variations on material provided by his ancient countryman; nor has he even given Lully's own themes in their original guise. He has, it seems, merely clothed the older master's melodies in shining new raiments, retaining the harmony intact and creating a sonority that might be referred to as "neon-baroque." Lully, of course, wrote of courtly splendor appropriate to the age of the Sun King, Louis XIV, but he did not have at his dis?posal such an array of percussion instruments. Of these, Jolivet makes ample use, also for some of his connective passages.
Formally, the Variations are in the shape of a continuous suite of short movements; the vivacious opening music returns again at the close, and also appears in abridged form some time after the middle of the work. The new orchestral fabric alternates between transparent grace and a weightiness typical of the High Baroque; the old dance rhythms remain straightforward and solidly shaped. Commencing and closing in D major, the music traverses several other related tonalities on its secure and measured orbit. Particularly entertaining may be the frivolous march begun by bassoons (Vivement, in G), and a variation of an earlier tune--commenced by woodwinds (Leger, in D)--that turns into a kind of "Hornpipe Saint-Germain."
Poeme de l'amour et de la mer........Chausson
Ernest Chausson was born in Paris, January 20, 1855; died in Limay, near Mantes, June 10, 1899.
All his works exhale a dreamy sensitiveness. His music is saying constantly the word "cher." --Pierre de Breville
Ernest Chausson was on the threshold of a distinguished career, when a fatal bicycle fall cut short his life at the age of forty-four. His unrecognized gifts had attained their full power, but his output was so meager that it barely saved his name from oblivion. His ill-fated life was spent during one of the most static and unsubstantial periods in French music. He worked in the twi?light of a fading romanticism whose aura of yearning and frustration seemed
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to envelope him. In spite of his conscious attempts to free himself from the powerful influence of German romantic tradition, there is in his music a deep tone of passionate melancholy and ardent sensuousness that is truly Wagnerian. He holds a unique position, however, in the annals of modern French music, as the only composer who definitely marked the transition from his teacher Cesar Franck to Claude Debussy, who was destined to open the way to the idioms of the twentieth century. In this unfortunate position, he was as over?shadowed by their contemporary fame, as he was outshone by the dazzling versatility and fecundity of Camille Saint-Saens. His modesty, lack of con?fidence, and assertiveness could offer no opposition to such inundating forces. His art, rarely dramatic and never flamboyant, was not the kind that would im?press the French public of his day, whose chief occupation was with opera. In company with a small close group which included, besides his mentor and beloved teacher Cesar Franck, such renowned artists as the conductor Arthur Nikisch, the violinist Eugene Ysaye, and the composers Gabriel Faure, Henri Duparc, and Vincent d'Indy, he found a refuge from the crass mediocrity that was all around him. Keen intelligence, exquisite sensibilities and fine tastes, an ingratiating personality, and financial independence did not spare him from fierce and unabatable misgivings that he could never rise above the level of a dilettante. Furthermore, scruples attending his wealth hampered him in ad?vancing his ambitions and in fostering the performance of his own works. All this extreme sensitivity is reflected in his art. Here, spiritual values and the revelation of inner beauty were of more importance to him than preoccupation with popular forms and styles. "His music," wrote Camille Mauclair, "was of smooth sonority, serene, even, a pure tide without seductive sparkling, a quiet wave, cool, clear, from which, occasionally a deeply human cry arose. Like the man himself, it was constantly inspired by the heart rather than the head."
All the sensitivity of this unique personality is reflected in the Poeme de Vamour et de la mer. A subtle aura of melancholy pervades the work. Yearning for the unobtainable, secret sorrow and unending regret sound throughout its pages. Like most of his works, it fell victim to the animosity of the critics. For its first performance in Brussels, February 21, 1893, Chausson suggested that each song be given a subtitle. Considering the poems of Maurice Bouchor to be "hermetic," he provided the following subtitles for each song:
I. La Fleur des eaux ("The Flower on the Water")
Pressentiment, rencontre, adieu
II. La Mort de Vamour ("The Death of Love") En mer, 1'oubli, epilogue
I. "The Flower On the Water."
Pressentiment. The air is full of beautiful perfume from the lilacs which grow from the top to the bottom of the walls, perfuming the women's hair. The sea reflecting fiery sunlight on all around. And the fine sand is caressed by tiny waves.
Oh sky, which carries the color of her eyes, breezes singing among the flowering lilacs.
Camille Mauclair, "Souvenirs sur Ernest Chausson," La Vogue, August 15, 1899.
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only to emerge, all perfumed, rivulets which dampen her robe, you green path which would be pressed with her dear little foot, permit me to see my well beloved.
Rencontre. And my heart is awakened that summer morning, for a beautiful girl is on the shore, leaving me the impression of large clear, eyes, who smiles at me with a manner both tender and untamed. You, who are the incarnation of youth and love, you appeared to me then as the soul of all things. My heart flew toward you, you took it without return, and the open skies rained roses over us both.
Adieu. What lamentable and savage sound tolls the hour of farewell. The mocking sea flowed on the shores and cared little that it is the hour of departure. Birds pass with open wing over the abyss, almost happily. In the bright sunlight the sea is green, and I suffer silently at watching the brilliant skies. I suffer, watching my life which is floating away with the tide. My very soul is torn from me and the sombre sound of the sea covers my sobbing. Who knows if that cruel sea will bring it back to my heart. My eyes are fixed on her. The sea is singing and the mocking winds laugh at my heart's distress. II. "The Death of Love."
En mcr. Soon the gay, blue island amidst the rocks will appear to me. It will float on the still water like a water lily. Across the amethyst sea smoothly glides the boat. And soon I will be both happy and sad at the memory.
L'oubli. The wind blows the dead leaves. My thoughts revolve like dead leaves in the night. Never have there shone before so softly in the black skies, thousands of golden roses. The dead leaves dance a frightening waltz, making a metallic sound, appearing to groan, the while they tell of the heartbreak of a love that is over. The large silver trees in the moonlight are the ghosts (spectres). I, all my soul is frozen while I watch my beloved coldly smile.
As on the brow of the dead, our foreheads paled, and speechless, I leaned toward her. I read the fatal word written in her large eyes. Forgotten!
Epilogue. The time of lilacs and roses will never return to this spring. The time of lilacs and roses is passed, and of the carnation as well. The wind has changed, the skies are darkened and we will not dance and gather the flowering lilacs and beautiful roses. The spring is sad and cannot bloom again. Oh sweet and happy spring which came to shine upon us last year. The bloom of our love is so faded and weary that even your caress is unable to awaken it. And you, what are you doing No more blooming flowers, gay sun, nor soft shadows
The time of lilacs and roses, with our love, is gone forever.
The section which Chausson modestly called Epilogue has become the most frequently performed of all his songs--Les Temps des lilacs. Its theme is first suggested in the instrumental interlude at the end of Rencontre and at the end of Adieu. In the introduction to the La Morte de I'amour, it is given full state?ment.
Te Deum, Op. 22, for Triple Chorus, Solo Tenor, and Orchestra.............Berlioz
Hector Berlioz was born in Cote-Saint-Andre, France, December 11, 1803; died in Paris, March 8, 1869.
"His music came as a fiery meteor above our heads."
--Hanslick
The Te Deum was completed in October of 1849, when Berlioz was thirty-six years of age, and as yet relatively unknown. It came from the beginning of a period in which he was shortly to become one of the most influential composers of the century, unremittingly shaping the characteristic musical idiom of his day.
By 1849 the nineteenth century had codified most of its ideas. The victory of the middle class was undisputed; the bourgeoise were fully aware of their
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power in society; the aristocracy as a class had vanished. In their novels Stendahl and Balzac had dealt with subject matter and moral conflicts utterly unknown to former generations. Chateaubriand had created the type of esprit romanesque in his novel Rene (1802) and had retired into political life. In the decade between 1820 and 1830, the romantic movement in France had been in a state of gestation. Its revolutionary moods had created a veritable vortex of shocking ideas and startling works of art. Gericault exhibited his tumul?tuous Raft of the Medusa (1819); Stendahl in Racine and Shakespeare (1823) thundered out against the time-honored unities in the drama; Victor Hugo, sensing the spirit of the times, published in October of 1827 (death of Bee?thoven) his famous romantic manifesto in the preface to Cromwell that, in the words of Gautier, "shone before our eyes like the tables of the Laws of Sinai"; in impassioned rhetoric he wrote "Art is revolutionary and dynamic, its object is not beauty but life." The way was opened for attacks on the stagnation that had come over French literature, due to its long compliance to classical formulas and rigid rules. The same year Delacroix, who had already released French painting from the bondage of the academy with his fierce energy, riotous color, and tumultuous forms, exhibited his Death of Sardanapa-lus (Berlioz' cantata Mort de La Sardanapale) and inspired by the uprising of 1830, when the Bourbons were uprooted, painted his Liberty Leading the People. In 1828, Auber's opera La Muette de Portici shot forth sparks of revolutionary passion, and opened a new era in French lyric drama. It was in 1828 also that Gerard de Neval produced a translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I (used later by Berlioz in his opera, The Damnation of Faust). On February 25, 1830, five months before the July Revolution, Victor Hugo's Hernani had its first performance, and the Romantic drama obtained its first decisive victory. While Berlioz was composing the Symphonic fantastique (1829-30), Rossini's French opera William Tell was thrilling audiences with its theme of liberation from tyranny. From this melee emerged a mass of literary figures, bold in their will to revolt. Only one French musician can be counted among them--Hector Berlioz, the Victor Hugo and Delacroix of music.
Among the Romanticists in art, music, literature, and politics, Hector Berlioz was the most dramatic--the one who most theatrically symbolized the new movement of revolt, not only in his native France, but in all Europe. So in?timately identified was his personality and art with the radically progressive spirit of the new literary and social movement that, like Byron, he personified it. Of each it can be said he had but one subject--himself. Possessing a per?sonality as expansive and powerful as Byron's, Berlioz' aesthetic impulses were exposed with the same force and bombast; the result was a similar spec?tacular and exhibitionistic art.
All complexities of the Romantic movement are mirrored in this music. Although Berlioz, like De Musset and Chopin, occasionally revealed the sen?sitive, introspective, poetic side of a suffering soul, his real creative nature was manifest in a burst of daemonic originality, in expressions of turbulent passion. He was to the music of his time what his contemporaries Gericault and
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Delacroix were to painting. As has been said of Delacroix' brush, Berlioz seemed to compose with a "drunken" pen. Like the writings of Victor Hugo and Alex?ander Dumas, his music became a "glowing tapestry of bewitching color schemes." In his scores, he displayed an immense organizing and creative power beside which the extravagances of many of the other artists of his period seemed reticent and inarticulate. His penchant for the abnormal, grim, and grotesque forced music with such suddenness into new channels of expression that he alone became the source of an entirely new art of orchestration. Here his genius found the greatest scope. "In the domain of fancy," wrote the Russian composer Glinka, "no one has such colossal inventions, and his combinations have, besides all other merits, that of being absolutely novel. Breadth in the en?semble, abundance in details, close weaving of harmonies, powerful and hitherto unheard of instrumentation are the characteristics of Berlioz' music."
The Grande Messe des Mortes (Requiem) and the Te Deum are occasional works upon which Berlioz' reputation for megalomaniac extravagance rests. Their inception came from a time when he was in a state of hysterical ex?citement and volcanic creativity, so eloquently described by him in his Mi-moires. He had just returned from Italy after receiving the Prix de Rome for his Cantata, La Mart de Sardanapole. Envisioning the French armies of Napoleon leaving defeated Italy, and entering Paris in triumph, he con?ceived the idea of celebrating his nation's dead with a vast seven-movement symphony concluding with a gigantic chorus, in the manner of Beethoven's Choral Ninth. The opportunity came in March of 1837, when he was commis?sioned to write a Requiem Mass to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the death of heroes in the battle of July 28, 1830. The sublimity of the subject intoxicated him, and in sympathy with the revolutionary tendency to employ music for great mass occasions, he created the Requiem. In the midst of frantic rehearsals, the ceremony was officially countermanded, for unknown reasons. Fate immediately intervened, however, with the death of General Damremont at the battle of Constantino in Algeria, October 23, 1837. A second commission ensued for a Requiem Mass to be performed at his funeral in the huge domed chapel of Saint Louis in the Invalides. Berlioz attempted to bring the sound of his music into scale with the vastness of the cathedral space, by calling for one-hundred and ninety instruments, two-hundred and ten voices, added tim?pani, and a brass choir. The results were sensational, causing Heinrich Heine to refer to him as "an antedeluvian bird, a colossal nightingale or a lark the size of an eagle."
In like manner the Te Deum was created twelve years later, as a companion piece to the massive Requiem, a religious and military counterpart, to be per?formed (he hoped) on occasions of national Thanksgiving. We need not relate here the disappointments and frustrations Berlioz endured in his futile at?tempts to get the Te Deum performed. The occasion finally arose in April of 1855, when it was given as a prelude to the opening of the Great Exhibition
Nathan Haskell Dole, Famous Composers (2d. ed.; New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1925). 62
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of that year, in the church of Saint Eustache in Paris. Like the Requiem, it was performed for a state occasion, with specific forces in mind; a conception and utilization of architectural space was again a factor in arranging for the first performance which called for approximately nine-hundred performers. There seems to be little possibility of hearing the Te Deum or the Requiem under the conditions that determined their vast proportions. However performed, the Te Deum remains the most powerful of Berlioz' works. Passages of terrific force and sheer nervous energy contrast with sections of deep tenderness. Per?sistent references to its bombast and grandiloquence, however, are, like Heine's famous hyperbole describing its composer, slightly exaggerated. Acquaintance with the details of its craftsmanship reveal that Berlioz worked out his ideas with a clarity of vision and a determination that far exceeded any desire for mere sensational effects. Although spiritual meanings, personal reflections, and brooding introspection are absent in this startlingly objective treatment of the text, and in spite of the lack of inward religious feeling, the Te Deum remains, nonetheless, a stunning and extremely effective work. It was dedicated to Prince Albert and published by subscription. The list of subscribers included Queen Victoria and most of the crowned heads of Europe.
The noblest and most inspiring of all sacred hymns, the great canticle Te Deum laudamus, was composed about the beginning of the fifth century, A.D., by Bishop Nicetas of Dacia (c. 335-414). Its passages were drawn from the Old and New Testaments, the Psalms, Prophets, Gospels, and Epistles--a remarkable fusion of scattered biblical elements. It is little wonder that the early Christians found in its all-comprehensive verses, appealing to man's will to strive and endure, an expression of their unconquerable faith and resolution, or that composers have, throughout the history of music, met the challenge of its glorious text.f
1. Te Deum (Chorus). Solemn chords in the orchestra allegro moderato answered by the organ, announce the opening chorus which consists of three separate choirs. They engage in a magnificent double fugue announced by the sopranos, and treated in a most spacious way, which concludes effectively with a long diminuendo.
Te Deum laudamus; te Dominum We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge
conjitemur. thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth
Te aelernum Patrem omnis terra, worship thee, the Father everlasting. veneratur.
2. Tibi omnes (Chorus). Two choirs are engaged in this lovely movement, which opens with an organ solo andantino. The first sopranos sing the opening theme; the other voices are sparingly used, but come together at the climax. Its outstanding characteristic is its smooth, flowing polyphony.
"Research of Professor Peter Wagner, Dom Paul Cagin, O.S.B., and Clemens Blume, places the time of its composition at a much earlier date.
tSince the great polyphonic period, the Tc Deum has been the vehicle of elaborate choral settings, usually on occasions of thanksgiving after victory. The outstanding ones are by Handel for the Peace of Utrecht, 1712; and for the victory of Dettingen, 1743: Berlioz' Te Deum oj a Thousand, 1849-54; Bruckner, 1884; Dvorak, 1896; Sullivan for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilre, 1897; and Verdi, 1898.
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Tibi omnes angeli,
Tibi coeli et potestates,
Tibi cherubim et seraphim
Incessabili voce proclamant,
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,
Deus Sabaoth!
Pleni stint coeli et terra vtajestatis
gloriae tuae.
Te gloriosus chorus apostolorutn, Te prophetarum laudabilis numerus, Te martryum laud at candidatus
exercitus. Te per orbetn terrarum sancta
confitetur ecclesia Patrem immensae majestatis, Venerandum tuum verum et unicum
Filium: Sanctum quoque paracletum Spiritum.
To thee all angels cry aloud,
The heavens and all the powers therein,
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim
Continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord God of Sabaoth!
Heaven and earth are full of the majesty
of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles, The goodly fellowship of the Prophets, The noble army of Martyrs praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world
doth acknowledge thee The Father, of an infinite majesty; Thine adorable, true, and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
3. Dignare, Domine (Chorus). The third movement, moderato quasi andan-tino, subtitled by Berlioz "Prayer," is confined again to two of the three choirs. The sopranos sing a flowery melody that is imitated canonically by the tenors. After a climax on the words in gloria numerari (in glory everlasting), the music gradually dies away.
A prelude, intended by Berlioz to be played only when the Te Deum was to be performed for some military occasion, followed at this point. (Omitted.)
Dignare, Domine, dies isto sine peccato Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day
nos custodire. without sin.
Aeterna jac, cum sanctis tuis, Make us to be numbered with thy Saints
nos in gloria numerari. in glory everlasting.
Miserere nostri, Domine. O Lord, have mercy upon us.
4. Christe, Rex Gloria (Chorus). This powerful section, allegro non troppo, praising the King of Glory, reveals Berlioz' lavish use of both vocal and instru?mental forces. An effective contrast is achieved when a small choir of voices sings ad liberandum suscepturus ("when thou tookest upon thee to deliver man"). The full two choirs return at the words tu ad dextram Dei sedes ("Thou sittest on the right hand of God"). It is a movement of epic force and simplicity.
Tu, Chrlste, rex gloriae, Patris semptternus Filius. Tu, devicto mortis aculeo,
Aperuisti credentibus regna coelorum.
Small Chorus Ad liberandum suscepturus,
Non horruisti virginis uterum.
Tutti
Tu ad dextram Dei sedes, In gloria Patris.
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Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. When thou hadst overcome the sharpness
of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven
to all believers.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver
man, Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God, In the glory of the Father.
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5. Te ergo quaesumus (Tenor solo and chorus). Serene and ethereal andan-tino quasi adagio, this section, subtitled "Prayer," is begun by the solo tenor, who is joined by a two-choir chorus at the words Fiat super nos misericordia, Domine ("O Lord, let thy mercy be upon us"), scored otherwise for sopranos and a few strings and woodwinds. This movement is full of rich and subtle beauty.
Tenor Te ergo quaesumus, Domine,
famulis tuts subveni, Quos pretoiso sanguine
redemisti.
Tenor and Chorus Fiat super nos misericordia,
Domine, Quemadmodum speravimus in te.
We therefore pray thee, Lord, help thy servants,
Whom thou hast redeemed with thy pre?cious blood.
O Lord, let thy mercy be upon us, As our trust is in thee.
6. Judex crederis (Tutti). The final movement, allegretto un poco maestoso, is one of Berlioz' most glorious moments. In it he makes magnificent use of the full power of orchestra and chorus (three choirs). A short prayer sung by the sopranos on the words Salvum jac populum ("O Lord, save thy people") breaks for a moment the high dynamic level of the music. At the words Per singulos dies benedicimus ("Day by day we magnify thee") the bass choir returns the movement to its former intensity. After a momentary repeat of the prayer (Salvum jac, Domine), the full forces of orchestra, organ, and the three choirs reach a stunning culmination. Berlioz referred to this as "my most grandiose creation."
Judcx crederis esse venturus.
In te, Domine, speravi; non conjundar in aeternum.
Salvum jac populum, et benedic haereditati tuae, Domine,
Per singulos dies benedicimus, laudamus te,
Et laudamus nomen tuum.
We believe that thou shalt come to be
our judge. 0 Lord, in thee have I trusted;
let me never be confounded. O Lord, save thy people, and
bless thine heritage, Day by day we magnify thee,
And we praise thy name.
A preludium for orchestra and a final march for the "presentation of the colors" was intended by Berlioz for use only at quasi-military services. (Omit?ted)
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Sunday Evening, May 9
Overture to Egmont...........Beethoven
For a performance of Goethe's Egtnont at the Hofburg Theatre, Vienna, May 24, 1810, the manager, one Mr. Hartl, commissioned Beethoven to provide incidental music for the play. So impressed was Beethoven with the nobility of this drama that he refused any remuneration for his efforts. Perhaps hero worship of Goethe led him to this generous step, or perhaps he saw in the mis?understood, self-reliant Egmont, gloriously struggling with a relentlessly per?secuting fate and filled with tragic longing for a pure and ideal love, an image of himself.
At any rate, Goethe's Egmont supplied Beethoven with a basis and incentive for music of such heroic delineation, and of such dramatically moving material, that it can take its place with the "Eroica" Symphony, the Fifth Symphony, and the Lenore No. 3 as an imperishable testimony to the genius which he manifested in his portrayal of the heroic, the noble, and the magnanimous.
Goethe's Egmont differs in many particulars from the Egmont of history. He is a man of most genial temper, sincerely devoted to the cause of freedom, and befriended because of his frankness, courage, and inexhaustible generosity. But he lacks the power to read the signs of hostile intention in others, and this defect, which necessarily springs from some of his best qualities, exposes him to deadly peril and leads ultimately to his ruin. Interwoven with the history of his relation to the public movements of his age is the story of his love for Clarchen, who is in every respect worthy of him, capable of heroic action as well as of the tenderest love.
The scene of the tragedy is laid in the Low Countries at the beginning of the revolt against Spain. In the fifteenth century, Philip of Burgundy had an?nexed several of the Netherland provinces to swell his own rich domains. His successor, Charles V, abolished their constitutional rights and instigated the Inquisition.
Favorite of court and people was the Flemish soldier, Count Egmont, who, by his victories at Saint Quentin and Gravelines, had become one of Europe's most famous military figures. When in 1559 a new Regent of the Netherlands was to be chosen, the people hoped that Egmont would be named. Margaret of Parma, however, Philip's half sister and a powerful and tyrannical woman, was chosen. She, with the ruthless Count Alva, pressed the demands of Spain still further.
This, in brief, is the historical background against which, with many factual changes, Goethe places his tragedy. The central motif is that man imagines he directs his life, when in fact his existence is irresistibly controlled by his destiny.
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Egmont is the typical soldier and man of action, who expresses his philosophy in his own words . . . "Take life too seriously and see what it is worth ... re?flections--we will leave them to scholars and courtiers ..." He is beloved by Clarchen, who in turn is loved by Brackenburg, the very opposite of Egmont. In the midst of court intrigue Egmont dares to defy Alva and is arrested. Clar?chen, knowing that death must await Egmont, drinks the poison that Bracken?burg, ironically, had prepared for himself. Egmont, the idealist to the last, dies in the belief that he gave himself for the freedom of his people and that they, to avenge his death, would rise in revolution against the Spanish yoke.
In referring to the Overture to Egmont, Mr. C. A. Barry wrote:
In view of Beethoven's expressed intentions regarding certain portions of his incidental music to Egmont it may be asked: Are we not justified in extending these to the Overture Is not this to be viewed as a dramatic tone-picture Though entering more into generalities than the Overture of Coriolanus, which (as Wagner has pointed out) is restricted to a single scene, it is assuredly not less profoundly dramatic, or less expressive of the feelings of the principal personages concerned, and of the circumstances surrounding them. Egmont's patriotism and determination seem to be brought before us, in turn with Clarchen's devotion to him. The prevailing key (F minor) serves as an appropriate background to the general gloom of the dramatic picture, but it is occasionally relieved by its relative major (A-flat)--indicative, as it often seems, of Clarchen's loving presence. The Overture concludes with the Sieges-Symphonie (Symphony of Victory), which at the close of the drama immediately follows Egmont's last words: "Fight for your hearts and homes, and die joyfully--after my example--to save that which you hold most dear," addressed to his comrades as he is led away to execution. This music, occurring in the Overture, seems to indicate prophetically the victory of freedom to be gained by Egmont's death for his country.
Concerto in A minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 16 . . Grieg
Edward Grieg was born June 15, 1843, in Ber?gen, Norway; died September 4, 1907, in Bergen.
He had brought it about that Norwegian moods and Norwegian life have entered into every music-room in the whole world.
--Bjornson
Edward Grieg was born into a peaceful world, in a city far off the beaten path and remote from the great cosmopolitan centers of the world. The events of his life provided little excitement and glamour. He received his first musical instruction from his mother and began composing at the age of nine. Upon rec?ommendation of the eminent Norwegian violinist, Ole Bull, he was sent to the Leipzig Conservatory where he remained from 1858 to 1862 studying the tech?niques of his art. After leaving Leipzig he studied further in Copenhagen. It was not until his return to Norway, however, that he identified himself with a dis?tinctly national movement and devoted himself to the creation of a characteris?tically Norwegian music. In 1867 he founded a musical organization in Christi-ania and remained its conductor until 1880. In 1865 and again in 1870 he visited Italy where, in Rome, he met Franz Liszt. He performed his own piano concerto
May Festival Program Book, 1940, p. 27.
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
at a Gewandhaus Concert in Leipzig in 1879 and at the Philharmonic Concert in London in 1888. In 1894 the honorary degree of Music Doctor was conferred upon him at Cambridge. This in brief is the prosaic story of his life. Other than a few brief journeys, he lived, after 1880, a quiet and secluded life in his country home and died suddenly in 1907 in a Bergen hospital.
Although Grieg's name is a household word throughout the world, the works that have made him universally loved as a composer are few. From his hand came immortal melodies that have spoken directly to the heart of everyone, yet more than half of his music is today completely unknown. Aside from his Piano Concerto, which more than any other work established his fame, there are only the first Peer Gynt Suite ("Morning," "Ase's Death," "Anitra's Dance," the "Hall of the Mountain King"); selections from the famed Lyrical Pieces ("To Spring," "Album Leaf"), and the second Peer Gynt Suite ("Solvejg's Song"), and a handful of his one hundred and fifty songs ("A Dream," "To a Water-lily," "I Love You," "A Swan") that have remained before the public and retained their popularity.
Seldom, if ever, does the public today hear his one string quartet, his sonata for violoncello and piano, and only rarely any of his three violin and piano sonatas. His larger works based upon the Norwegian sagas (Four Psalms for a cappella choir, the cantata "Bewitched in the Mountain") are heard only in their native country. He wrote no operas, no symphonies, no chamber music in the grand style.
The part of his work that has remained popular and universal sounds the overtones of his Norwegian heritage, music that combined a strange melancholy, quiet jubilation, and gentleness that remind us of Tennyson's line, "Dark and true, and tender in the North." This music he cast into lyric rather than epic molds--into works of unsurpassed sensitivity and haunting beauty, which he caught directly from the folk music of his beloved Norway. Although he wrote a few works in the formal and expansive forms, it was in the smaller, more inti?mate, and lesser works that he grasped the essence of the idyllic Norwegian life, and made his limited yet potent appeal.
Grieg's best and most characteristic works were written between the ages of twenty and thirty. The mannerisms of his later years supplanted the true and unaffected expression of his youth. From those early years dates the pianoforte concerto. It was written at the age of twenty-five during the summer of 1868 in the Danish village of Sollerod, and though it was frequently revised by the composer the work never lost its pristine beauty. It is now a universally recog?nized classic, replete with haunting melody, engaging rhythms, and unique har?monies--all elements echoing Norwegian folk music and reflecting Grieg's con?stant preoccupation with his homeland.
A verbal analysis of the forms of the movements of this concerto could do little more than reveal the obvious. Grieg was not a "formalist" in the sense of
At his death, he was in the midst of changes in the orchestration for a performance at the Festival at Leeds, England, in October, 1907. Grieg died in September. The concerto was performed by Percy Grainger.
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Beethoven or Brahms, and for this "weakness" he has been severely criticized, especially by German critics in the past. In estimating the rank of a composer, professional critics usually attach altogether too much importance to questions of form and duration. Form can be taught and learned, the creating of fresh and novel ideas cannot--it is that which distinguishes genius from talent. "Genius creates, talent constructs," is the way Robert Schumann stated it, and if Edward Grieg failed to accept the dictates of traditional form, it was be?cause he chose to be free, not because he lacked skill in the art of development. He never consciously attempted to expand or deepen the significance of musical form; he, like Franz Schubert, was intent only on voicing his own poetic feeling which was constantly aroused by the exotic quality of Norwegian music. The charm, the supple, spontaneous, and unaffected expression of this totally unso?phisticated artist, render all detailed analysis not only superfluous, but un?desirable.
Symphony No. 5, Op. 47........Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich was born September 16, 1906, in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad); still living.
A fair and sane estimation of an artist who creates under violent conditions of social upheaval and confusing creative cross-currents is difficult in the ex?treme. In times of stress, criticism, attempting to evaluate an artist such as Shostakovich, must guard against the intrusion of temporary and false standards of judgement. More than ever, it must seek to penetrate beyond the artist's re?actions to the events of his period to the artistic significance of the art work itself--to those eternal verities which neither time, nor place, nor condition can alter.
Nicholas Nabokov attempted an analysis of Shostakovich and his art as early as 1943. He referred to the rise of .an impersonal and practical "eclectic collec-tivistic" art which was placing the individual artist in a completely subservient position to the state and society and contended that the then young Russian composer, although talented in the extreme, was already a symptom of a new and dangerous era, 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 pur?pose in serving a political, social, and educational ideal.
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. Con?cerning 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 cap?able of expressing, by its own means, the most diverse ideas or sentiments. This conviction I did not acquire without travail. . . . Working ceaselessly to master my art, I am endeavoring
Nicolas Nabokov, "The Case of Dmitri Shostakovich," Harper's Magazine, 1114: 422-31, March. 1943.
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
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 reaffirms his credo:
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 of 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 occa?sion, briefly but definitely restated his creed: "I consider that every 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 ... the advanced composer is one who plunges into the social currents swirling around him. and with his creative work serves the progress of mankind."!
There has been 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 has been based on the fear that the dictates of prop?aganda have reshaped his natural expression, that a rigid submission to po?litical doctrine has reduced an exciting talent to the commonplace. They have pointed 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 have spoken of the clarity and logic of his themes but also of their tendency to be ordinary and trivial; they have acknowledged his rhythmic vitality, but have regretted his predilec?tion for banal marches; they have maintained that the acknowledged brilliance of his stunning orchestration has not always concealed the paucity of his ideas.
"Dmitri Shostakovich, "Autobiographic," La Revue Musiealc, 17: 432-33, December, 1936.
tThe New York Times, December 3, 1931.
Xlbid.
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and they all have referred to his eclecticism, which is, in truth, his most ap?parent 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.
The virtues of his last works, so highly publicized, are not such as to neces?sitate any modification in this critical opinion. Music critics writing recently in the New York Times and the New York Herald-Tribune, refer to his last works as music "that bears the stigmata of a composer trying to live up to an heroic reputation"; "that becomes sprawling, noisy, lacking in coherent style"; "that goes through motions of being both grand and grave, but is nothing but a noisy, empty shell"; "that is thin and without charm or character." Alas, poor Dmitri! The persistence and uniformity of this sort of criticism today only verify Nabokov's opinions and prophesies of a quarter of a century ago, and lead us to regretfully conclude that perhaps it is too late for his indubitable genius to 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 con?ditions, 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 relation to the realistic aspects of life. This is a process which casts inspiration into permanent soundforms and shapes which are beau?tiful 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 tranquillity"; he has shaped 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
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re-present feelings and emotions aroused by the events of life. He writes in the London Times concerning the Seventh Symphony:
To the man Shostakovich, writing with the boom of German guns in his cars, 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 in 1925, when he was nineteen years of age. This work revealed a creative genius of such outstanding tal?ent, and a craftsman of such extraordinary ability, that it won immediate world-wide recognition. The "October Symphony," his second, written in com?memoration of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and the "May Day Symphony," his third, composed in honor of the working classes' holiday on May the first, in which he envisaged a world socialism, did not, in spite of their programmatic intentions, repeat the success of the First. A conflict which had begun to appear between the artist's natural expression and Soviet official sanction, came to a climax when he produced his opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (1935). This opera, according to the critics in Pravda, the chief paper of the communistic party, was "founded upon formalistic ideas and bour?geois musical conceptions," and was "a concession to bourgeois taste." The Union of Soviet Composers and other official, but nonmusical organizations, placed Shost;:V.ovich in disfavor, and his career as a composer was definitely jeopardized for a period. After completing the Fourth Symphony, he himself withdrew it from performance believing it would not please the State. The Fifth Symphony played on tonight's program was composed on the basis of the criticism that had been leveled against him and was subtitled "A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism." It was performed in celebration of the twentieth an?niversary of the October revolution (1937). With it Shostakovich was officially restored to grace, for according to the critic, Andrew Budyakovsky, in the Moscow Daily News:
The composer, while retaining the originality of his art in this new composition, has, to a great extent, overcome the ostentatiousness, deliberate musical affectation and misuse of the grotesque which had left a pernicious print on many of his former compositions. His fifth symphony is a work of great depth, with emotional wealth and content, and is of great importance as a milestone in the composer's development. The fetters of musical formalism which held the composer captive so long, and prevented him from creating works profound in conception, have been torn off. He must follow up this new trend in his work. He must turn boldly toward Soviet reality. He must understand it more profoundly and find in it a new stimulus for his work.
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This criticism seems curious in the extreme, for in this symphony, Shosta?kovich, meek and penitent after his official chastisement, had created a com?pletely traditional and abstract work. Heeding the admonitions he had re?ceived for his "October" and "May Day" symphonies, he had returned, in the Fifth, to conventional structural forms and methods, to those "formalistic ideas and bourgeois conceptions," and had now pleased his critics!
Even more curious is the interpretation of the meaning of the symphony, written by Alexis Tolstoy, one of the most esteemed of Russian musicologists:
. . . Here we have the "Symphony of Socialism" [he writes]. It begins with the largo of the masses working underground, an accelerando corresponds to the subway system; the allegro in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science, and art. The scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happiest inhabitants of the Union. As for the finale, it is the image of the gratitude and the enthusiasm of the masses.
This farfetched and ludicrous statement, so typical of the "utility" school, ob?viously contributes nothing whatever to the understanding of the music. It does reflect, however, not only the puerile state of Soviet aesthetics, but the power of the concept that has controlled, directed, and destroyed the creative energies of one of the most promising composers of our time. In the words of Igor Stra?vinsky, "It is in its line a consummate masterpiece of bad taste, mental infirmity, and complete disorientation in the recognition of the fundamental values of life."t
The Fifth Symphony is in its way a master work. It is formed with classic simplicity and orchestrated brilliantly and with the utmost clarity. With only occasional suggestions of the Kremlin Square, it is music of spacious dimensions, with few of the inequalities, superficialities, and weaknesses of his later works. Its themes are, for the most part, broadly melodic, their treatment plastic, and their development logically and in some instances ingeniously carried out. It has achieved a remarkable balance between emotional tension and structural strength. Had Shostakovich continued to scale such heights, he might have ultimately conquered the peaks.
The principal theme of the first movement, sonata allegro, marked by strong, wide intervals, is stated in the lower strings and immediately answered in the upper strings. From this theme as an embryo, there grows, in the violins, an extensive and broadly melodic section formed of fragments that inter?mittently return to unify the movement. The first theme returns in the brass (horns and trumpets), and over a triple rhythmic figure it dies away in the violins. The tempo increases, the rhythms grow more incisive, and one of the main theme fragments heard in the brass becomes an aggressive march. The return of the first slow tempo marks the beginning of a telescopic recapitula?tion of the principal theme, very broadly sung. The strings and brass recede to a gentle mood, and the woodwinds, fully exploited, bring the movement,
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19S6), pp. 114-15. tAM.
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
which, in its slow and deliberate pace, has unfolded like the pages of a Russian novel, to its close.
The second movement, allegretto, is cast in the very conventional Song and Trio design. In style a scherzo with traditional triple rhythm and repeated sections, it is not unlike any of the familiar Beethoven scherzt in spirit, although the themes are unabashedly simple and often trite.
The third or slow movement, largo, like the first, is gradually culminative, growing from an austere theme in the strings to a fruition in the woodwinds, accompanied by tremolo strings. At its climax, the movement gains in tension and sonority, but without the aid of the brass choir. It is the most impressive movement of the Symphony and bows slightly to modern harmonies.
The final movement is again cast in a traditional classical form that ap?proaches the Rondo. The marchlike theme, so characteristic of Shostakovich, is direct, propulsive, and tremendously vital. After a slow digression, in which reminiscences of earlier movements are heard, the energetic first section returns and, the tempo constantly increasing, brings the Symphony to a moving con?clusion.
74
NOTES ON THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA AND MAY FESTIVAL ARTISTS
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA, with the six concerts of the 1965 May Festival, performs here for the thirtieth consecutive year. Organized in 1900 under Fritz Scheel, it followed for a dozen years under the strong leadership of Carl Pohlig, who was succeeded by the strikingly effective Leopold Stokowski. In 1940 Eugene Ormandy became the fourth Musical Director. No other orchestra has traveled so far (12,500 miles in an average season) or so often as the Philadelphia group, which has made history through its touring. In 1936 it made its first of six transcontinental tours; in 1949 the orchestra toured the British Isles in its first foreign pilgrimage; and in 1955 it made its first continental European tour. In addition to the special tours, each season it plays regular schedules in New York, Baltimore, Washington, and other Eastern cities. The fame of the orchestra has further spread through its recordings. Since its first sessions at Camden in 1917, recordings have been an integral part of its activ?ities. The Philadelphia Orchestra has recorded exclusively for Columbia Records since 1943 and now has a larger recorded repertoire than any other orchestra. Through its more than two million miles of travel and its untold number of records sold, it has certainly earned the title of the world's best-known orchestra.
EUGENE ORMANDY. Musical Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, has appeared annually at these May Festival concerts since 1938. He began his prominent conducting career with sudden impetus in 1931 when he substituted for Toscanini, conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. On that occasion a representative of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra who was in the audience immediately signed Ormandy as guest conductor, which won for him the per?manent post and where he continued until 1936. Born November 18, 1899, in Budapest, Ormandy's early musical training began at the age of five at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. At nine he became the pupil of the great violinist Jeno Jubay, after whom he was named. He received his pro?fessor's diploma at seventeen and was given degrees in violin playing, composing, and counterpoint. He concertized, then taught, at the State Conservatory in Budapest before coming to the United States to seek his fame and fortune. He has been praised and honored the world over, receiving several honorary degrees, one of which was presented to him by The University of Michigan at the May Festival of 1952.
WILLIAM SMITH has been the Assistant Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1961. He also serves as conductor of choirs and orchestra at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the Philadelphia Orchestra Chorus a few years ago. Born in New Jersey, Smith came to his present post in 1953.
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
A versatile musician, he understudies Mr. Ormandy in preparation of all con?certs, conducts reading rehearsals of new works, assists in the preparation of all choral groups and vocal soloists, and is the official pianist and organist of the orchestra. His concerts for children use his talents both for conducting and commentary. He conducts a chamber orchestra series at the University of Penn?sylvania Museum and also conducts the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music. This is his ninth conducting appearance at the May Festival.
THOR JOHNSON, Guest Conductor of the May Festival, has conducted the University Choral Union performances with the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1940, except for four years when he was serving with the United States Army. He is now Director of the Interlochen Arts Academy. Johnson lived most of his early life in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was graduated from the University of North Carolina and later received a master's degree in music at The University of Michigan. In 1935, under a Beebe Foundation Scholarship, he studied in Europe with conductors Weingartner, Abendroth, Malko, and Bruno Walter. Upon his return he became conductor of the University Sym?phony Orchestra, organized and conducted the University Little Symphony which toured throughout the country, founded the Mozart Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and also served as conductor of the Grand Rapids Symphony. During World War II, as Warrant Officer in the United States Army, Johnson conducted the first Army Symphony Band and taught for the Armed Services at Shrivenham, England. Upon discharge he conducted the Juilliard Orchestra for one year before accepting the directorship of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for eleven years. During that period he made special guest conductor appearances with the Symphony of the Air, including its Far Eastern tour. From 1959 to 1964 he was head of orchestral activities at Northwestern University. As a member of the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts, he was sent to Iceland, Czechoslovakia, Korea, the Philippines, and Japan for guest conducting and surveys. He is also Director of the Peninsula Music Festival in Wisconsin, the Moravian Music Festivals, and the Chicago Little Symphony.
LESTER McCOY, Conductor of the University Choral Union since 1947, prepares the chorus in the works performed in the May Festival and each Advent season conducts the Choral Union, the University Symphony Orches?tra, and guest solo artists in the traditional Messiah concerts. He received his Master of Music degree from The University of Michigan in 1938. Before com?ing to Ann Arbor he trained and taught at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He serves as Minister of Music of the First Methodist Church in Ann Arbor, and from 1958 to 1964 he conducted the Michigan Chorale, a group of Michigan high school seniors, which toured in Europe and South America during the summer as part of the Youth for Understanding Student Exchange Program, sponsored by the Washtenaw Council of Churches.
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NOTES ON FESTIVAL ARTISTS
LEONTYNE PRICE, born in Laurel, Mississippi, had the inheritance of two Methodist minister grandparents and a background of hard work, discipline, and faith. Now at the height of an international career and one of the most prominent prima donnas of the Metropolitan Opera Company, Miss Price has reached this stature from constant devotion to her art during early schooling at Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio, and the Juilliard School of Music. Her historic success as Bess in Porgy and Bess in the early 19SO's led to many concert engagements. Her debut recital took place in Town Hall in 1954, and TV appearances with the NBC Opera and the American Opera Society followed. In 1957 she made her debut with the San Francisco Opera and her first Ann Arbor May Festival appearance (in A'ida). This led to her debut in 1958 at the Vienna Staatsoper in the same role and since then her fame is legend. In 1962 her debut at the Metropolitan Opera took place. Her last appearance in Ann Arbor was at the May Festival of 1960 singing Verdi's Requiem."
SVIATOSLAV RICHTER, born in the Ukraine, was largely self taught when he became conductor of the Odessa Opera at the age of fifteen. Four years later, again without much formal teaching, he gave an all-Chopin recital in Odessa, and three years later went to the Moscow Conservatory to study with the distinguished teacher Neuhaus. Some six years later he introduced Proko-fieff's Sixth Sonata and was at once hailed as at the forefront of Soviet artists. Although Richter played in the Western world only once before his debut in 1960, he has since appeared with enormous success in London, Paris, Italy, and Germany. On this tour--his second to North America in the past two months --he makes his debut appearance in Ann Arbor. This is his only appearance with orchestra on these tours. Married to a lieder singer, Richter lives in an apartment near the Conservatory in Moscow. He collects modern art and drives a late-model Citroen. He also has a country home in the forests outside Moscow.
CESARE SIEPI, Metropolitan Opera bass, began his singing career in the classic Italian traditions. His training at Milan Conservatory was only brief before he made his debut as Sparafucile at Schio, near Venice. The war forced him to flee to Switzerland, where, after a brief sojourn in an internment camp, he was free to pursue his vocal studies. In 1946 he first appeared at the famed opera house La Scala. He sang under Toscanini there and at Carnegie Hall, and also gained fame in other parts of the world. In 1950 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera House and at Covent Garden. His operatic career flourished. In 1962 he starred in the Broadway musical Bravo, Giovanni (pre?miered in Detroit). He appeared once before in Ann Arbor, at the May Festival of 1953.
MAUREEN FORRESTER was born in Montreal, Canada, and now resides in Toronto with her husband Eugene Kash (also a Canadian) who is a con?ductor and violinist. They have four children, ages eight to three. Miss For?rester's career began a steady climb from her debut at the Salle Garceau in
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Paris in 1955. An intensive year of sixty recitals in Quebec and Ontario and her first operatic roles were followed by a year of concerts in Europe. In 1956 she made her debut in Town Hall and appeared with the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter. Recordings, festival appearances, and extended tours have since kept her occupied from Australia to the Soviet Union. Miss Forrester appears in Ann Arbor for the first time at this May Festival.
JANICE HARSANYI, soprano, lives in Princeton, New Jersey. American-born and trained, she started her musical career in her early years--singing, playing the violin and piano, and composing. She has had a most active career in sing?ing since she was sixteen years of age and has appeared with many of the country's leading orchestras (including over twenty appearances with the Phila?delphia Orchestra since her debut under Mr. Ormandy in 1958). Miss Harsanyi has introduced vocal works of many outstanding composers including Roger Sessions (who has dedicated "Psalm40" to her), Richard Yardumian, George Rochberg, John Eaton, Alan Stout, David Epstein, and Robert Suderberg. Also, Wolfgang Fortner chose her to sing the first United States performance of his "Berceuse Royal" at Town Hall. She first appeared in Ann Arbor with the University Choral Union in the 1961 May Festival.
MURRAY DICKIE, tenor of the Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna State Opera, was born in Scotland. This is his first appearance in Ann Arbor. Mr. Dickie has sung leading roles in practically every major opera house in the world, including the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, La Scala in Milan, Glyne-bourne, Salzburg, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and featured festivals in Edinburgh and Perugia. He is heard on a dozen major recordings and has a wide reper?toire in recital, oratorio, and orchestral works.
ANSHEL BRUSILOW, concertmaster, joined the Philadelphia Orchestra in September, 1959. A native of Philadelphia, thirty-five years old, he began his study of the violin at the age of six. At eleven, he was accepted at the Curtis Institute of Music where he continued his training with the famous concert violinist and director of the school, Efrem Zimbalist. Further work on his in?strument continued under the guidance of Dr. Jani Szanto at the Philadelphia Musical Academy where Brusilow was a scholarship student. A winner of the Philadelphia Orchestra Youth Concert auditions, he made his debut at the Philadelphia Academy of Music at sixteen. Prior to his present position, Brusilow was associate concertmaster with the Cleveland Orchestra, and before that he was concertmaster and assistant conductor of the New Orleans Sym?phony. In the course of his career he has been engaged as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra on many different occasions, including several recent May Festivals.
LEONARD ROSE, cellist, was born in Washington, D. C, raised in Florida, and trained at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. His career began in 1938 when he joined the NBC Symphony under Toscanini's direction and
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NOTES ON FESTIVAL ARTISTS
later he served as first cellist of the New York Philharmonic. Mr. Rose shares with Pablo Casals the honor of a solo cello appearance at the White House. Mr. Rose's recent concert tours have included solo appearances in the United States, Stratford (Ontario), Edinburgh, Israel, and Mexico City, along with several distinguished chamber music engagements with violinist Isaac Stern and pianist Eugene Istomin. Before his European debut in 1958, Mr. Rose appeared once previously in Ann Arbor at the May Festival of 1954, performing the Dvorak concerto.
JOSEPH de PASQUALE, formerly first-desk viola with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the Philadelphia Orchestra as principal viola at the opening of this current season. Born in Philadelphia, he began his musical studies with his father, an amateur violinist, and then worked with Lucius Cole. Entering the Curtis Institute at the age of seventeen, Mr. de Pasquale studied first with Louis Bailly and Max Aaronoff and later with William Primrose. After joining the United States Marine Corps in 1941 he was assigned to the Marine Band Orchestra, and stationed in Washington until his discharge in 1945. Mr. de Pasquale was a member of the American Broadcasting Company orchestra until 1947, when Serge Koussevitzky appointed him principal violist of the Boston Symphony. In Boston he premiered a new viola concerto composed for him by Walter Piston, and gave the first Boston performances of the William Walton Viola Concerto and the Viola Concerto No. 1 by Darius Milhaud. Mr. de Pasquale is one of four brothers in the Philadelphia Orchestra string section.
GLENN D. McGEOCH, program annotator for the annual May Festival Program Book, has been associated with the University School of Music since 1931, and is at present Professor of Music Literature and chairman of the Department of Music Literature and History. He holds two degrees from the University of Michigan and has studied further at Peabody Conservatory, Balti?more; Cornell, New York, and Wayne Universities in this country; and at Cambridge, England, and Munich, Germany. He initiated the first extension courses in music literature in the early 1930's and has since lectured extensively throughout the state under the joint sponsorship of the University of Michigan and the Wayne State University Adult Education division.
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THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor
Lester McCoy, Conductor
Alden Neil Schell, Pianist
FIRST SOPRANOS
Blakeley, Francis Bradstreet, Lola Mae Burr, Virginia A. Dewsbury, Joyce Ruth Fish, S. Leslie Greenslit, Carol Ann Hammann, Roberta Lee Hanson, Gladys M. Hawk, Gloria Lee Henes, Karen Kay Housekeeper, Judith K.. Howe, Joan Frances Jerome, Ruth Owens Julien, Charlotte J. Losh, Susan Carol Luecke, Doris L. Martin, Donna Jean McDonald, Ruth M. Montgomery, Patricia Owens, C. Jane Pearson, Agnes I. Plekker, Judith E. Politis, Clara Porter, Mary Burke Ramee, Joan Carol Ramee, Dorothy W. Reddick, Bella M. Rhodes, Mattie R. Rulfs, Mary Kathleen Sanford, Phyllis E. Sevilla, Josefina Z. Shimmin, Susan A. Sommerfeld, Martha L. Steere, Judith E. Stevens, Ethel C. Weston, Lynda R. Woodward, Carol L. Wright, Frances Yoon, Soon Young S.
SECOND SOPRANOS
Austin, Patricia K. Caster, Carol Ann Clague, Rosemary B. Cushing, Gloria L. Danforth, Ruth E. Datsko, Doris Mae
80
Douglas, Susan J. Edwards, Virginia M. Gill, Karol S. Globe, Carlotta B. Goodman, Charlotte A. Hall, Patricia Sue Hall, Sara Jean Hendrickson, Marianne B. Karapostoles, LaVaughn Kellogg, Merlyn L. Klock, Rebecca Anne Leftridge, Sharon L. McAdoo, Mary C. McLester, Celess B. Mundinger, Cheryl Munson, Elizabeth B. Needham, Martha L. Nemacheck, Nancy S. Papke, Bonnie Jean Reading, Melissa M. Reynolds, Susan L. Richards, Jean D. Ridley, Charlene Ann Rosenbaum, Stephanie Schumm, Barbara L. Sandman, Rita Marie Sweet, Deborah Page Thomas, Anne Edna Vlisides, Elena C. Wilson, Miriam L. Wylie, Winifred J. Yoder, Edith
FIRST ALTOS
Abrams, Gloria S. Bauer, Judy M. Beam, Eleanor P. Beggrovs, Marina Brown, Marion W. Brown, Susan Lee Carr, Nancy Plewes Dawson, Shirley M. deBoor, Matilda F. Eastman, Berenice Evans, Daisy E. Hellstedt, Linda F. Hinterman, Ellen Kay Hodgman, Dorothy B.
Holland, Sharon Huber, June Moore Jennejahn, Carol E. Kimmel, Helen G. Kister, Susan S. Manson, Hinda Markeson, Carole J. Marsh, Martha M. McAdoo, Harriette A. McCoy, Bernice I. Mehler, Hallie J. Neal, Marcella E. Price, Janet M. Rubinstein, Sallie Schaafsma, Diane L. Sweet, Elizabeth O. Swenson, Judith Ann Swope, Faythe C. Toth, Karen Maria Wargelin, Carol G. Wentworth, Elizabeth B. Wiedmann, Louise P. Wolfe, Charlotte A.
SECOND ALTOS
Arnold, Helen M. Blackman, Carol Lee Blake, Susan Jane Bogart, Gertrude J. Brink, Virginia R. Brock, Thelma I. Cole, Mary Kathleen Clayton, Caroline S. Crossley, Winnifred M. De Marco, Anita M. Drew, Wendy Jean Eisenhardt, Elizabeth Enkemann, Gladys C. Gamble, Carol E. Gault, Gertrude W. Haab, Mary E. Hondorp, Joan Arlene Jenkins, Bernice M. Johnson, Grayce E. Johnston, Theolia C. Kero, Ruth Kendall, Gail M. Knight, Mona J.
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Lane, Rosemarie Lidgard, Ruth M. Liebscher, Erika M. Lovelace, Elsie W. Luton, Jane E. Malstrom, Florence L. Miller, Carol L. Miller, Joyce E. Miller, Rene S. Oehler, Eileen L. Olson, Constance K. Price, Mary E. Prout, Eve Anna Richardson, Gloria J. Roeger, Beverly B. Slater, Beverly N. Weber, Lois Jean Wendt, Christine Ann Williams, Nancy P. Wolf, Mona G.
FIRST TENORS
Baker, Hugh E. Bernstein, Paul Bowman, Victor B. Cushing, Richard T. Cross, Harry Lee Estes, Robert A. Freed, Robert L. Greenberger, Allen J. Haynes, Evan A. Kunsmann, Peter W. Lowry, Paul Malstrom, Robert W. Moore, George W. Ramee, Allan L. Reidy, James J. Schell, Alden N. Tillson, Edward E. Wheeler, A. Leon Zeile, John C.
SECOND TENORS
Beyer, Hilbert Buuck, David Paul Clark, Harold R. Gaskell, Jerry T. Gibilisco, Fred T. Gunning, Stephen H. Humphrey, Richard Johnson, Paul A. Lindemann, Michael May, Dr. Wolfgang VV. Oltrogge, R. David Oravec, Ronald D. Preston, Dr. Thomas A. Schultz, Stanley T. Settler, Leo Henry Thome, George R. Way, Thomas J. Winkler, William H.
FIRST BASSES
Beam, Marion L. Berzins, Jams T. Bierlein, Albert R. Bloom, Henry R. Brueger, John M. Burr, Charles F. Carlson, David L. Clayton, Joseph F. Clegem, William H. Damborg, Mark J. Eisenhardt, George Fedchenko, Robert E. Hauser, Larry A. Hebert, Ernest C. Kays, J. Warren Kissel, Klair H. Lanini, Kent Litton, Glenn B.
McWilliams, Leslie G. Miller, Marcus J. Palicz, Robert J. Palmer, David W. Pearson, John R. Pickut, Guenther Raedeke, Henry W. Roach, James W. Schumacher, Hermann
SECOND BASSES
Bcltz, Douglas M. Boos, Werner K. Brandes, Mark E. Brodt, E. William Buehring, Hugh Dalley, Edward O. Ford, Gary K. Goodwin, Carl H. Herrmann, Lothar Keller, Jacob B. Lane, Leroy E. LaZar, Ross Allen Lloyd, Stephen E. Lohrmann, Leon K. Mittelstadt, Paul F. Parkes, Herbert B. Peterson, Robert R. Petty, Mark A. Schroeder, Dale E. Steinmetz, George P. Trapp, Thomas H. Tuhy, Daniel B. Vander Lugt, Bud Vreeland, Robert G. Wall, Ralph J. Wilcox, Allen J. Williams, David G. Wobst, Martin L. Wright, Stephen B. Wyche, Donald W.
YOUTH CHORUS
Arnett, John B. Badley, Doreen Marie Baker, David E. Betzig, Laura L. Brown, Cheryl Lynn Caless, Lynn S. Cambon, Gilda M. Carroll, Betsy M. Cox, Larry E. Curtis, Richard A. Datsko, Robert J. Gee, John Joseph Green, Susan Lee Griffin, Gregory B. Groves, Ann Elizabeth Haynes, Susan M. Hoffrichter, Paula L.
Hooper, Celia Ann Jabs, Cynthia Joan Jacobi, Richard W. Johnson, Claudia J. Kelley, Nancy Kelly, Elizabeth Ann Kelly, Michael L. Kuhn, Jay Meredith Lowery, Jane E. Marsh, Georgina J. Massman, Pam Lin Mellencamp, Peter A. Merte, Kenneth E. Miller, Peter M. Mohler, Linda Gwenn Moncrieff, Carol Jean O'Brien, Kathleen S.
PMsbury, J. Curt Powers, Mark C. Raaf, Leonard C. Radock, Bill Michael Robinson, Cathy Ann Robinson, Chris B. Roberts, Adrian Rosenstock, Ruth M. Rutherford, Paula M. Sexton, Mary H. Shumaker, Jackie L. Smith, Kathleen C. Stojokovich, Kathy Ann Stoll, Fred Watkins, Ricky Lee Webber, Lezlie Carol Wirth, Larry S.
81
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Eugene Ormandy, Music Director and Conductor William Smith, Assistant Conductor
Boris Sokoloff, Manager Joseph H. Santarlasci, Assistant Manager
VIOLINS
Brusilow, Anshel
Concertmaster Madison, David
Associate Concertmaster Shulik, Morris Reynolds, Veda de Pasquale, William Lusak, Owen Ruden, Sol Saam, Frank E. Costanzo, Frank Arben, David Grunschlag, David Miller, Max Stahl, Jacob Goldstein, Ernest L. de Pasquale, Barbara Simkin, Meyer Gesensway, Louis Rosen, Irwin Eisenberg, Irwin I. Wigler, Jerome Di Camillo, Armand Ludwig, Irving Schwartz, Isadore Black, Norman Sharlip, Benjamin Lanza, Joseph Dreyfus, George Light, Herbert Roth, Manuel de Pasquale, Robert Janson, Julia Grika, Larry Lanza, Louis
VIOLAS
de Pasquale, Joseph Iglitzin, Alan Mogill, Leonard Braverman, Gabriel Primavera, Joseph Jr. Curtiss, Sidney Fawcett, James W. Ferguson, Paul BogdanofF, Leonard Granat, Wolfgang ?Segal 1. Irving Greenberg, William S.
82
VIOLONCELLOS
Mayes, Samuel Hilger, Elsa Gorodetzer, Harry de Pasquale, Francis Druian, Joseph Brennand. Charles Stokking, William Jr. Saputelli, William Mayes, Winifred Phillips, Bert Farago, Marcel Caserta, Santo
BASSES
Scott, Roger M. Arian, Edward Maresh, Ferdinand Eney, F. Gilbert Torello, Carl Batchclder, Wilfred Gorodetzer, Samuel Courtney, Neil Shahan, Michael
FLUTES
Panitz, Murray W. Scutt, Kenneth E. Terry, Ken ton F. Krell, John C, Piccolo
OBOES
de Lancie, John Raper, Wayne Morris, Charles M. Rosenblatt, Louis, English Horn
CLARINETS
Gigliotti, Anthony M. Montanaro, Donald Querze, Raoul Lester, Leon, Bass Clarinet
BASSOONS
Garfield, Bernard H. Shamlian, John Angclucci, A. L. Pfeuffer, Robert J., Contra Bassoon
HORNS
Jones, Mason
Fries, Robert M.
Hale, Leonard
Janson, Glenn E.
Pierson, Herbert
Mayer, Clarence
Fearn, Ward O. TRUMPETS
Johnson, Gilbert
Krauss, Samuel
Rosenfeld, Seymour
McComas, Donald E. TROMBONES
Smith, Henry C, III
Stewart, M. Dee
Cole, Howard
Harper, Robert S., Bass Trombone TUBA
Torchinsky, Abe TIMPANI
Hinger, Fred D.
Bookspan, Michael BATTERY
Owen, Charles E.
Bookspan, Michael
Abel, Alan
Roth, Manuel
CELESTA, PIANO AND ORGAN
Smith, William Farago, Marcel HARPS
Costello, Marilyn Csonka, Margarita
LIBRARIAN
Taynton, Jesse C. PERSONNEL MANAGER
Jones, Mason STAGE PERSONNEL
Barnes, Edward, Manager
Hauptle, Theodore E.
Sweeney, James
PHOTO PUBLICITY Siegcl, Adrian
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
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); 1927-
MUSICAL DIRECTORS
Calvin B. Cady, 1879-1888 Albert A. Stanley, 1888-1921 Earl V. Moore, 1922-1939
CONDUCTORS
Thor Johnson, 1939-1942 Hardin Van Deursen, 1943-1947 Thor Johnson (Guest), 1947-Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor, 1947-1956; Conductor, 1956-
ADMINISTRATORS
RossSpence (Secretary), 1893-1896 Thomas C. Colburn (Secretary), 1897-1902 Charles K. Perrine (Secretary), 1903-1904
Charles A. Sink (Executive Secretary, 1904-1927); President, 1927-Gail W. Rector (Assistant to the President, 1945-1954); Executive Director, 1957-
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY, which this year observes its eighty-sixth season, was organized during the winter of 1879-80 and was incorporated in 1881. Its purpose was to maintain a choral society and an orchestra, to provide public concerts, and to organize and maintain a school of music which would offer instruction comparable to that of the University in its schools and colleges. Ars longa vita brevis was adopted as its motto. In 1894, as a climax to its offerings, the "First Annual May Festival" was inaugurated. Gradually the number of concerts in the Choral Union Series was increased to ten, and the May Festival, from three to six concerts. In 1946, with the devel?opment of musical interest, a supplementary series of concerts was added-the Extra Concert Series. Handel's Messiah, which had been performed at in?tervals through the years, became an annual production and since 1946 has been heard in two performances each season. Since 1941 an annual Chamber Music Festival of three concerts has been held in Rackham Auditorium and, since 1962, an annual Chamber Dance Festival of three events. During the season the Chamber Arts Series of seven attractions takes place and the Sum?mer Concert Series of four recitals is scheduled for July. Thus, at the close of
The "Ann Arbor School of Mumc" was orRanized in 1S79 and in 1S92 was reorganized as the "University School of Music." In 1929 the University provided partial support, and students and faculty were given University status. In 1940 the University Musical Society relinquished full control and responsibility for the School to The University of Michigan.
83
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
its eighty-sixth year, the Musical Society will have presented throughout the season, forty-six major events by distinguished artists and organizations from fifteen countries.
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION was an outgrowth of a "Messiah Club," made up of singers from several local churches. For a decade and a half, assisted by distinguished professional artists and organizations, it partici?pated in numerous Choral Union concerts. In addition to its Messiah concerts, since 1894, it has performed at the annual May Festivals, offering a wide range of choral literature over the years (see pages 86 and 87). The chorus member?ship numbers about three hundred singers, including both townspeople and stu?dents.
The YOUTH CHORUS, to perform in Britten's Spring Symphony and Ber?lioz' Te Deum with the Choral Union, under Mr. Johnson, was organized espe?cially for this occasion. The fifty young singers are fifthand sixth-grade pupils from the Ann Arbor public schools.
84
THE ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Maintained by the University Musical Society and founded by Albert A. Stanley and his associates on the Board of Directors in 1894
MUSICAL DIRECTORS
Albert A. Stanley, 1894-1921 Earl V. Moore, 1922-1939
CONDUCTORS
Thor Johnson, 1940-1942 Haxdin Van Deursen, 1943-1946 Thor Johnson (Guest), 1947-
GUEST CONDUCTORS
Gustav Hoist (London, England),
1923, 1932 Howard Hanson (Rochester), 1926,
1927, 1933, 1935 Felix Borowski (Chicago). 1927 Percy Grainger (Australia), 1928 Jose Iturbi (Philadelphia), 1937
Georges Enesco (Paris), 1939 Harl McDonald (Philadelphia),
1939, 1940, 1944
Virgil Thomson (New York), 1959 Aaron Copland (New York), 1961 Igor Stravinsky (Los Angeles), 1964 Robert Craft (Los Angeles), 1964
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'Connell, Associate Conductors, 1936; Eugene Ormandy, Con?ductor, 1937, 1938; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Saul Caston, Associate Conductor, 1939-1945; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Alexander Hilsberg, Associate Conductor, 1946-1953, and Guest Conductor, 1953; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, 1954--; William Smith, Assistant Conductor, 1957-.
The University Choral Union, Albert A. Stanley, Conductor, 1894-1921; Earl V. Moore, Conductor, 1922-1939; Thor Johnson, Conductor, 1940-1942; Hardin Van Deursen, Conductor, 1943-1947; Thor Johnson, Guest Con?ductor, 1947-; Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor, 1947-1956, and Con?ductor, 1957-.
The 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, 1943-1956; Geneva Nel?son, 1957; Marguerite Hood, 1958.
S5
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION REPERTOIRE
Bach: Mass in B minor (excerpts)--1923, 1924, 1925 (complete), 19S3
Magnificat in D major--1930, 19S0
Sleepers, Wake (Cantata 140)--1964 Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major, Op. 123--1927, 1947, 1955
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125--1934, 1942, 1945 Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust--1895, 1909, 1920, 1952
Te Deum--1965
Bizet: Carmen--1904, 1918, 1927, 1938 Bloch: "America," An Epic Rhapsody--1929
Sacred Service (Parts 1, 2, 3)--1958 Bossi: Paradise Lost--1916 Brahms: Requiem, Op. 45--1899 (excerpts), 1929, 1941, 1949
Alto Rhapsodie, Op. 53--1939
Song of Destiny, Op. 54--1950
Song of Triumph, Op. 55--1953 Britten: Spring Symphony--1965 Bruch: Arminius--1897, 1905
Fair Ellen, Op. 24--1904, 1910
Odysseus--1910
Bruckner: Te Deum laudamus--1945 Carey : "America"--1915
Chabrier: Fete Polonaise from Le Roi malgre lui--1959 Chadwick: The Lily Nymph--1900 Chavez, Carlos: Corrido de "El Sol"--1954$, 1960 Delius: Sea Drift--1924 Dvorak: Stabat Mater, Op. 58--1906
Requiem Mass, Op. 89--1962 Elgar: Caractacus--1903, 1914, 1936
The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38--1904, 1912, 1917 Finney, Ross Lee: "Still Are New Worlds"--1963 Fogg: The Seasons--1937 Franck: The Beatitudes--1918 Gabrieli: In Ecclesiis benedicto domino--1958 Giannini: Canticle of the Martyrs--1958 Gluck: Orpheus--1902
Goldmark: The Queen of Sheba (March)--1923 Gomer, Llywelyn: Gloria in Excelsis--1949 Gounod: Faust--1902, 1908, 1919
Gallia--1899
Grainger, Pfrcy: Marching Song of Democracy--1928 Hadley: "Music," An Ode, Op. 75--1919 Handel: Judas Maccabeus--1911
Messiah--1907, 1914
Solomon--1959 Hanson, Howard: Songs from "Drum Taps"--1935
Heroic Elegy--1927
The Lament for Beowulf--1926
Merry Mount--1933 Haydn: The Creation--1908, 1932, 1963
The Seasons--1909, 1934 Heger: Ein Friedenslied, Op. 19--1934t Holst: A Choral Fantasia--19321
A Dirge for Two Veterans--1923
The Hymn of Jesus--1923t
First Choral Symphony (excerpts)--1927t Honeccer, Arthur: King David--1930, 1935, 1942
"Jeanne d'Arc au bucher"--1961 Kodaly: Psalmus Hungaricus, Op. 13--1939
World premiire tAmerican premiere
86
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION REPERTOIRE
Lambert, Constant: Summer's Last Will and Testament--195lt Lockwood, Normand: Prairie--1953
McDonald, Harl: Symphony No. 3 ("Lamentations of Fu Hsuan")--1939 Mendelssohn: Elijah--1901, 1921, 1926, 1944, 19S4, 1961
St. Paul--1905
Mennin, Peter: Symphony No. 4, "The Cycle"--1950 Moussorcsky: Boris Godunov--1931, 1935 Mozart: Great Mass in C minor, K. 427--1948
Requiem Mass in D minor, K. 626--1946
"Davidde penitente"--1956 Orff, Carl: Carmina Burana--1955 Parker :Hora Novissima, Op. 30--1900 Pierne: The Children's Crusade--1915
Saint Francis of Assisi--1928, 1931 Ponchielli: La Gioconda--1925 Poulenc: Secheresses--1959
"Gloria"--1964
Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky, Op78--1946 Rachmaninoff: The Bells--1925, 1938, 1948 Respichi: La Primavera--1924t Rimski-Korsakov: The Legend of Kitesh--1932f Rossini: Stabat Mater--1897
Saint-Saens: Samson and Delilah--1S96, 1899, 1907, 1912, 1916, 1923, 1929, 1940, 1958 Schonberg: Gurre-Lieder--1956
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 des psaumes--1932, 1960
"Persephone"--1964 Sullivan: The Golden Legend--1901 Tchaikovsky: Episodes from Eugen Onegin--1911, 1941 Thompson, Randall: Alleluia--1941
Vardell, Charles: Cantata, "The Inimitable Lovers"--1940 Vauchan Williams, Ralph: Five Tudor Portraits--1957
"Flos Campi"--1959
Dona nobis pacem--1962 Verdi: Aida--1903, 1906, 1917, 1921, 1924 (excerpts), 1928, 1937, 1957
La Forza del Destino (Finale, Act II)--1924
Otello--1939
Requiem Mass--1894, 1898, 1913, 1920, 1930, 1936, 1943, 1951, 1960
Stabat Mater--1899
Te Deum--1947, 1963
Villa-Lobos, Heiter: Choros No. 10, "Rasga o corac.ao"--1949, 1960 Vivaldi-Casella: Gloria--1954 Wagner: Die fiiegende Hollander--1918
Lohengrin--1926; Act 1--1896, 1913
Die Meistersinger, Finale to Act III--1903, 1913; Choral, "Awake," and Chorale Finale to Act III--1923
Scenes from Parsifal--1937
Tannhauser--1902, 1922; March and Chorus--1896; "Venusberg" Music--1946 Walton, William: Belshazzar's Feast--1933, 1952 Wolf-Ferrari: The New Life, Op. 9--1910, 1915, 1922, 1929
tUnited States premiere tAmcrican premiere
S7
1964-UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY-1965 Resume of Concerts and Music Performed
Concerts--Forty-six events were included in the international presentations listed below. The total number of previous appearances of the respective artists and organizations, under the auspices of the University Musical Society, is given in parentheses.
EIGHTY-SIXTH ANNUAL CHORAL UNION SERIES
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (187); Jean Martinon, Conductor ............September 25
Antonio and The Ballets de Madrid.........................................October 8
Warsaw Philharmonic (2); Stanislaw Wislocki, Conductor ....................October 14
Leonid Kogan, Violinist .................................................November 4
Raduga Dancers ........................................................November 14
Faust (Gounod) New York City Opera (8) ...............................November 22
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (7); Henryk Szeryng, Violinist;
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Conductor (2) ...............................February 8
Rosalyn Tureck, Pianist....................................................March 1
Robert Merrill, Baritone (2) ................................................March 12
National Ballet of Canada (2) ................................................April 3
NINETEENTH ANNUAL EXTRA SERIES
London Symphony Orchestra; Georg Solti, Conductor........................October 2
Irina Arkhipova, Mezzo-soprano .........................................November 9
Merry Widow (Lehar) New York City Opera (7) .........................November 22
Berlin Philharmonic (4); Herbert von Karajan, Conductor (5) ................January 30
Detroit Symphony Orchestra (7); Sixten Ehrling, Conductor.................February 28
SECOND CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
Societa Corelli (3) ........................................................October 28
New York Chamber Soloists .............................................November 17
Andres Segovia, Guitarist (3) ..............................................January 20
Paris Chamber Orchestra (with Bach trumpeter
Adolf Scherbaum (2); Paul Kuentz, Conductor.........................February 14
Netherlands Chamber Choir ..............................................February 27
Chicago Little Symphony (2); Thor Johnson, Conductor (52) .................March 7
Solisti di Zagreb (2); Antonio Janigro, Cellist (2) ............................March 30
SPECIAL CONCERTS
Ballets de Paris ........................................................September 29
Die Fledermaus (Strauss) New York Opera (6) ............................November 20
Artur Rubinstein, Pianist (12) .............................................January 26
Marian Anderson, Contralto (10) .............................................April 14
CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
Handel's Messiah..................................................December 5 and 6
Helen Boatwright, Soprano Howard Nelson, Bass
Jean Saunders, Mezzo-soprano Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist (37)
Charles Bressler, Tenor (2) Lester McCoy, Conductor (34)
University Choral Union University Symphony Orchestra
88
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY REPERTOIRE
CHAMBER FESTIVALS
Chamber Dance Festival--
Paul Taylor Dance Company ..........................................October 23
Jean Leon Destine Dance Company .....................................October 24
First Chamber Dance Quartet ..........................................October 25
Chamber Music Festival--
Budapest Quartet ......................................February 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
SEVENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MAY FESTIVAL--MAY 6, 7, 8, 9
The Philadelphia Orchestra (182); Conductors: Eugene Ormandy (100); Thor Johnson (54); William Smith (7). University Choral Union (250); Youth Chorus; and soloists: Leontyne Price, Soprano (3) Sviatoslav Richter, Pianist
Janice Harsanyi, Soprano (3) Anshel Brusilow, Violinist (3)
Maureen Forrester, Mezzo-soprano (2) Joseph de Pasquale, Violist (2)
Murray Dickie, Tenor (2) Leonard Rose, Cellist (2)
Cesare Siepi, Bass (2) Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist (38)
SUMMER CONCERT SERIES (1964)
Gyorgy Sandor, Pianist (4) ...................................................July 2
Daniel Barenboim, Pianist ....................................................July 7
Eugene Istomin, Pianist (4)...................................................July 20
Ralph Votapek, Pianist .......................................................July 29
The complete repertoire of the concerts this season includes music which represents a wide range of musical forms and periods. The compositions, classi?fied into categories of (1) symphony and chamber orchestra, (2) instrumental (by chamber music groups and virtuoso artists), (3) vocal (solo), (4) choral, (5) opera, (6) ballet and modern dance, and (7) dance and folk song groups are listed below. Works presented here for the first time are denoted by asterisks.
SYMPHONY AND CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
Bach
Sinfonia in B-flat major. .Chicago (Little) Suite No. 2 in B minor...........Berlin
Bartok
Concerto for Orchestra ..........London
?Rumanian Folk Dances............Paris
?Suite, "The Miraculous
Mandarin" ...................Chicago
Beethoven Overture to Goethe's
"Egmont" .............. Philadelphia
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major,
Op. SS ("Eroica") ............Warsaw
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat
major, Op. 60............Philadelphia
Berlioz
Overture, "The Roman Carnival," Op. 9 .............Warsaw
Bizet
Suite, "L'Arlisienne," No. 1 (encore) ..............Chicago
Bloch ?Meditation and Processional for
Viola and Orchestra .. Chicago (Little)
Boccherwi Concerto in D major for
Cello and Strings.......Societa Corelli
Brahms Symphony No. 1 in C minor, '
Op. 68 ........................Berlin
Symphony No. 3 in F major,
Op. 90.......................Chicago
Britten Simple Symphony for Strings
(Scherzo-Encore) ........Paris, Zagreb
?Sinfonia da requiem. Op. 20......London
Corelli
Badinerie (Encore) ...I Solisti di Zagreb Concerto Grosso, Op. 6,
No. 1 .................Societa Corelli
Concerto Grosso, Op. 6,
No. 3, in C minor.......Societa Corelli
Debussy
"La Mer" .....................Chicago
DvorAk ?Slavonic Dance, Op. 46,
No. 6 (encore) ...............London
Symphony No. 4 in G major, Op. 88 (New No. 8) ......Philadelphia
80
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
Elgar
March--"Pomp and Circumstance," Op. 39, No. 1 (encore) ........London
FUKUSHIMA
Kadha-Hi-Haku (commissioned
for CLS) ...........Chicago (Little)
Gabrielu ?Sonata a 4 e S instrument with
Trumpet, in D major............Paris
Geminiani Concerto Grosso, Op. 2, No. 4, in
D major ..............Societa Corelli
Handel ?Suite of Dances from the opera,
"Aldna" .................Philadelphia
Haydn ?Symphony No. 104 in D major
("London") ..................London
Hindemith
Concert Music for String Orchestra and
Brass Instruments ........Minneapolis
?Funeral Music for Cello and
Strings ............I Solisti de Zagreb
Honegger ?Concerto da camera for Flute, English
Horn, and Strings___Chicago (Little)
Hovhaness
?Prelude and Quadruple Fugue___Detroit
Inghelbrecht ?Sinfonia breve da camera,
No. 1 ...............Chicago (Little)
JOLIVET
?"Les Amants magnifiques" .. Philadelphia Kelemen Concertante Improvisations
.................. I Solisti di Zagreb
Klebe
?Divertissements, Op. 5 ... Chicago (Little) Locateixi ?Conterto Grosso a Quattro, Op. 1,
No. 9 .................Societa Corelli
Moniuszko ?Mazurka from the Opera "Halka"
(encore) ....................Warsaw
Moussorgsky-Ravel
"Pictures at an Exhibition" ..Philadelphia Mozart
"Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail"
K. 384...................Philadelphia
Divertimento in D major,
K. 136..............1 Solisti di Zagreb
?Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major for Violin, Viola, and
Orchestra ................Philadelphia
Symphony No. 29 in A major,
K. 201 ........................Berlin
?Symphony No. 30 in D major,
K. 202 ..................Philadelphia
Rossini
?Finale (Sonata) (encore) ..........Paris
?Sonata No. 6, D major ("The Tempest")
for Strings .........I Solisti di Zagreb
?Sonata a Quattro, No. 1 in
G major ..............Societa Corelli
Roussel
Sinfonietta, Op. 52 ................Paris
Saint-Georges ?Symphony in G major, Op. 11,
No. 1 ..........................Paris
Shostakovich
Symphony No. 1, Op. 10, in
F minor......................Detroit
Symphony No. 5, Op. 47___Philadelphia
Sibelius Symphony No. 1, in E minor,
Op. 39 .......................Detroit
Valse Triste (encore) ___Chicago (Little)
Stravinsky
Suite from "The Firebird" ...Philadelphia ?Pastorale ..................Philadelphia
SZYMANOWSKI
?Concerto for Violin and
Orchestra ................Minneapolis
Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. S in E minor,
Op. 64...................Minneapolis
Telemann ?Conterto in D major for Trumpet and
Orchestra ......................Paris
Vauchan Williams ?The Lark Ascending--A Romance for
Violin and Orchestra ..Chicago (Little) Vivaldi
Concerto in A major for
Strings.............I Solisti di Zagreb
?Concerto Sacro in C major for Violin
and Orchestra......I Solisti di Zagreb
?Concerto in D major for Cello and
Orchestra ..........I Solisti di Zagreb
?Concerto Grosso, Op. 3, No. 3, in
G major ..............Societa Corelli
?Concerto in G minor for Two Celli
and Orchestra ..................Paris
Weber Overture to "Der Freischiitz".Philadelphia
INSTRUMENTAL
Albeniz
?Zambra Granadina..............Segovia
Bach Capriccio on the Departure of a
Well-Beloved Brother ........Tureck
Chaconne (for Violin alone) ......Kogan
90
Gavotte .......................Segovia
Italian Concerto ................Tureck
Fantasie and Fugue in G minor . .Sandor Goldberg Variations (29th variation only: encore) ................Tureck
?Two-part Invention in C major . .Tureck
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY REPERTOIRE
?Two-part Invention in E minor ..Tureck ?Two-part Invention in F major ..Tureck Partita No. 1 in B-flat major
(Gigue only: encore) .........Tureck
?Prelude and Fugue on the name of
Bach ........................Tureck
?French Overture ................Tureck
?Sinfonia in B minor ............Tureck
?Sinfonia in F minor ............Tureck
Beethoven
Romance in F major ............Kogan
Sonata in C major, Op S3, No. 21
("Waldstein") ................Istomin
Sonata in F minor. Op. 57, No. 23
("Appassionata") ..........Barenboim
Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 81a, No. 26
("Das Lebewohl") .........Barenboim
Sonata in C minor, Op. Ill,
No. 32 ....................Barenboim
String Quartets, Complete Cycle. .Budapest Bloch "Schelomo" for Cello and
Orchestra .......................Rose
Brahms Capriccio in B minor, Op. 76,
No. 2 .......................Votapek
Intermezzo in B-flat minor, Op. 117,
No. 2 .....................Rubinstein
Intermezzi, Op. 118 ............Votapek
Rhapsody in B minor, Op. 79,
No. 1 ....................Rubinstein
Rhapsody in E-flat major, Op. 119,
No. 4 ............Votapek, Rubinstein
Variations on a Theme by Paganini,
Op. 35, Book I ..............Sandor
?Sonata in G major, Op. 78, No. 1 . .Kogan Castelnuovo-Tedesco
?Spring (encore) ................Segovia
Chopin
Concerto in F minor, Op. 21, No. 2 .Kedra Etude in E-flat minor, Op. 10,
No. 6 (encore) ..............Votapek
Etude in E minor, Op. 25, No. 5
(encore) ..................Rubinstein
Fantasia in F minor, Op. 49......Sandor
Nocturne in F minor, Op. IS,
No. 1 ........................Istomin
Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27,
No. 2 .....................Rubinstein
Nocturne in C-sharp minor,
Op. Posth.....................Kedra
Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53
("Heroic") ................Rubinstein
Scherzo in B minor, Op. 20, No. 1. .Istomin Scherzo in D-flat major,
Op. 31, No. 2 ............Rubinstein
Couperin
?Concert Royal No. 4 ........New York
Debussy ?Etudes ........................Votapek
ESPLA
?Two Levantine Impressions ......Segovia
Falla Miller's Dance from "The Three
Cornered Hat" (encore) ......Istomin
Frescobaldi
?Aria: "La Frescobalda" .........Segovia
Griec
Concerto in A minor, Op. 16......Richter
Sonata in C minor, Op. 45, No. 1 . .Kogan Handel
?Cantata, "Crudel tiranno Amor" for Tenor, Strings, and
Harpsichord ...............New York
Haydn
?Sonata in A major..............Istomin
?Sonata in A major for Violin and
Viola .....................New York
Hdtdemith
?Martinslied (encore) ..........New York
?Third Sonata ..................Votapek
KlSIELEWSKI
?Danse Vive (encore) ............Kedra
Liszt ?Fantasia quasi Sonata ("Apres une
lecture de Dante") ............Sandor
Mendelssohn Song Without Words, in G major,
Op. 62, No. 1 ................Istomin
?Song Without Words in G major, Op 62,
No. 1 (Arr.Kreisler) (encore). .Kogan Mozart ?Quartet in F major, K. 370, for Oboe,
Violin, Viola, and Cello ___New York
Poulenc
?Toccata .......................Votapek
Prokofiev
Suggestion diabolique ............Sandor
Sarasate ?Spanish Dance, Op. 23, No. 2
(Zapateado encore) ..........Kogan
Scarlatti Sonatas in D, E, B-flat and
D major ....................Votapek
Schubert
Impromptu in E-fiat major, Op. 90,
No. 2 .......................Istomin
Impromptu in G-flat major, Op. 90,
No. 3 ........................Istomin
Moment Musical in A-flat major,
Op. 94, No. 2 (encore) ......Barenboim
?Sonata in A minor, Op. 164......Votapek
?Grand Sonata in B-flat major, No. 3
(Posthumous) .............Rubinstein
Schumann
Fantasia in C major, Op. 17......Sandor
"Kreisleriana," Op. 16
(eight pieces) ..............Rubinstein
Shostakovich Prelude .........................Kogan
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
SOR
?Study and Allegro ..............Segovia
Stravinsky
?Sonata in Three Movements .... Istomin Tansman
In Modo Polonico (for Segovia) . .Segovia Tel em ann
?Cantata No. 72. "Was gleicht dem
Adel wahrer Christen"......New York
Torroba
Tvo Castilian Pieces (for Segovia)
............................. Segovia
TURINA
Fandanguillo (for Segovia) ......Segovia
Villa-Lobos
Etude (encore) .................Segovia
Polichinelle (encore) ........Rubinstein
Weiss PreIude, Ballet. Sarabande, and
Gigue .......................Segovia
Wieniawski Polonaise in D major ............Kogan
VOCAL
Barber
Nocturne .....................Anderson
Bizet "Toreador, en garde!"
from Carmen .................Merrill
Bridge
?E'en as a Lovely Flower .........Merrill
Britten
The Ploughboy ......___.....Anderson
Chausson Poeme de l'amour et de
la mer......................Forrester
Duparc
Phidyle.........................Merrill
Folk Songs (Negro) Done Foun' My Lost Sheep
(Arr. R. Johnson) .........Anderson
?Hear de Lam's a Cryin'
(Arr. L. Brown) ...... .. .Anderson
He's Got the Whole World in His
Hands (Arr. H. Forrest) ... Anderson Let Us Break Bread Together
(Arr. W. Lawrence) .......Anderson
?Let's Have a Union
(Arr. H. Johnson) ........Anderson
Lord, I Can't Stay Away
(Arr. Hayes) ..............Anderson
Ride on, King Jesus
(Arr. Burleigh) ...........Anderson
Oh, What a Beautiful City
(Arr. Boatner) ............Anderson
Franck
La Procession ....................Siepi
Gershwin ?I Got Plenty of Nuthin'
(Porgy and Bess) (encore) .....Merrill
It Ain't Necessarily So
(Porgy and Bess) (encore) .....Merrill
Giordani
Caro mio ben ...................Merrill
Giordano Aria, "Nemico della patria" from
Andrea Chenier ...............Merrill
Hahn ?D'une prison....................Merrill
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Handel
Chio mai vi possa.............Anderson
"Thanks Be to Thee"
from Israel in Egypt...........Merrill
Tutta raccolta ................Anderson
Hadyn My Mother Bids Me Bind
My Hair ...................Anderson
The Spirit's Song .............Anderson
Johnson
?Courtship .......................Merrill
?Witness ..... ..................Merrill
Leoncavallo Aria. "Zaza, piccola zingara"
from Zaza (encore) ...........Merrill
MacGimsey
Sweet Little Jesus Boy........ . .Merrill
?To My Mother..................Merrill
Malotte
A Little Song of Life ............Merrill
Mendelssohn "Es ist genug" from Elijah ........Siepi
MOUSSORGSKY
?Each to His Own ............Arkhipova
Songs and Dances of Death .... Arkhipova
?Retrospect ... ...............Arkhipova
Mozart
"Deh vieni alia finestra"
from Don Giovanni............Merrill
?Concert Aria, "Bella mia fiamma" ..Price ?Concert Aria, "Per questa bella
mano".........................Siepi
Pergolesi Nina...........................Merrill
POUXENC
?La belle jeunesse ................Merrill
Prokofieff
?The Chatterbox ..............Arkhipova
The Field of Death, from the
cantata Alexander Nevsky .. .Arkhipova
?The Sorcerer................ Arkhipova
Quilter
Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind ......................Anderson
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY REPERTOIRE
Rachmaninoff
?Do Not Mourn Me...........Arkhipova
?Do Not Sing Again ..........Arkhipova
?A Dream ....................Arkhipova
Floods of Spring .............Arkhipova
?How Painful for Me.........Arkhipova
In the Silence of the Night___Arkhipova
I Wait for Thee..............Arkhipova
?Lilacs .......................Arkhipova
?Un Fragment d'Alfred de
Musset ....................Arkhipova
?Was It Long Ago, My
Friend ...................Arkhipova
Ravel
"Don Quichotte & Dulcinee"........Siepi
?Nicolette .......................Merrill
Rodgers You'll Never Walk Alone
(encore) .....................Merrill
Rossini
"Figaro" from The Barber
of Seville (encore).............Merrill
Schubert
Der Doppelganger .............Anderson
Der Erlkonig .................Anderson
Liebesbotschaft ...............Anderson
Suleika .......................Anderson
Stradeixa
Se nel ben ......................Merrill
Swanson
The Negro Speaks of Rivers ... .Anderson Verdi
"Credo" from Otello .............Merrill
"Di Provenza il mar" from
La Traviata ..................Merrill
"O don fatale" from
Don Carlo (encore) ........Arkhipova
"Ernani involami" from Ernani ....Price
CHORAL
Andriessen
?Stomello (for NCC) ........Netherlands
Badincs
?Lied van het hemelse land ...Netherlands Belle
Int groene .................Netherlands
Laet ons nu al verblijden ....Netherlands O Amoureusich mondeken
root .....................Netherlands
Berlioz
Te Deum, Op. 22 .. Choral Union, Dickie, and Philadelphia Britten
?Spring Symphony.........Choral Union,
Harsanyi, Forrester, Dickie, and Philadephia Clemens Non Papa ?Agnus Dei (from the Mass
"A la fontaine du prez") .. .Netherlands ?Sanctus (five-part canon) .... Netherlands Dallapiccola
?Due cori di Michelangelo ... .Netherlands Dresden ?Daar was e wuf ............Netherlands
Folk Songs (Dutch) Felix de Nobel, arr. ?De Driekusman (encore) ... .Netherlands
?Shot'se Vier (encore) ........Netherlands
Skotse Trye (encore) ........Netherlands
Folk Song (Italian) Luigi Colacicchi, arr.
Me Pizzica (encore) ........Netherlands
Handel
Messiah ..................Choral Union,
University Orchestra Josquin Des Pres ?Gloria (from the Mass
"Pange lingua") ..........Netherlands
Retting
Deuntje ....................Netherlands
Obrecht ?Agnus Dei (from the Mass
"Malheur me bat") ......Netherlands
PlZZETTI
De profundis ...............Netherlands
Schutz
?Das deutsche Magnificat.....Netherlands
Waelrant
?Als ic u vinde ..............Netherlands
OPERA
Gounod Fau$t............New York City Opera
Lehar "The Merry Widow New York City Opera
Stkavss Die Fledermaus .. New York City Opera
BALLET AND MODERN DANCE
?Aureole (Handel) ...........Paul Taylor
?Autumn (Kalnin) ...............Raduga
La Chambre (Auric) .....Ballets de Paris
?Corsair--Pas de deux (Adam) ... .Raduga ?Duet (Haydn) ..............Paul Taylor
The Dying Swan (Saint-Saens) .. Raduga Esmeralda--Grand pas de deux from Act II (Pugni) ............Raduga
Espana (Chabrier) ........Ballet de Paris
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
?Five Songs (from Schumann
Dichterliebe) ............Dance Quartet
?Impressiones Intuias
(Mompou) ..............Dance Quartet
?Inner Obstacle
(Shostakovich) ...........Dance Quartet
?Joy Waltz (Igenberg) ...........Raduga
?Junction (Bach) ............Paul Taylor
Nutcracker--Act II (Tchaikowsky)
Canada Nutcracker--Pas de deux
(Tchaikowsky) .................Raduga
Offenbach in the Underworld
(Offenbach) ....................Canada
?Party Mix (Haieff) .........Paul Taylor
?Pi R Square (Varese) ......Dance Quartet
?Recollection of an Age
(Boieldieu) ..............Dance Quartet
Three Epitaphs.............Paul Taylor
?Romance (Shostakovich) ........Raduga
?Russian Duet (Liadov) .........Raduga
Scaramouche (Milhaud). Ballets de Paris
Serenade (Tchaikowsky) .........Canada
?Spring Waters (Rachmaninoff) ...Raduga ?Summer Pergola
(Boccherini) .............Dance Quartet
?Under Green Leaves
(Telemann) ..............Dance Quartet
?Tarantelle (Rossini) ___Ballets de Paris
Walpurcis Nicht--Excerpts
(Gounod) ...................Raduga
FOLK DANCE AND SONG Haitian .....................................................................Destine
?Afro Chant
?Bal champetre
?Baptism of the Drum
?Caribbean Serenade
?Drum Conversation
?Drums
?La Legende de l'assotor
?Mazurka Creole ?Slave Dance ?Spider Dance ?Village Festival ?Witch Doctor ?Yoruba Bakas
Russian".....................................................................Raduga
?Balalaika Solos Dance
Kak na Gorke Luchinushka
?Bayan Solos Volga Tunes On the Wav
?Dance from Kazbek Gopak ?Lyana ?Rivalry ?Folk Songs
The River Volga Flows
Folk Wedding Song Matushka
Spanish
.Antonio
Algrias
E1 Amor brujo
Danza del terror
Circulo magico
Danza del fuego Farruca "The Miller's Dance" from "The
Three-Cornered Hat" (Music by Falla)
EI Martinete ?Suite of Basque Dances ?La Taberna del toro Viva Navarra Zorongo gitano
SUMMARY
CLASSIFICATION Number of Compositions First Performances at these Concerts Composers Represented Foreign Artists
Symphony and Chamber Orchestra ........ Instrumental ................ Vocal . 65 94 68 22 3 29 34 33 36 28 21 3 25 32 41 36 33 15 3 24 6 5 2 1
Choral . . ...........
Opera .
Ballet and Modern Dance .... Folk Dance and Song........ 3 3
Totals............ 315 178 Less duplicatic 152 ns --42 20 --1
110 19
?Undetermined
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UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
International Presentations for the 1965-1966 Season
SUMMER CONCERT SERIES--1965
Gary Graffman, Pianist..........Wednesday, July 7
Sidney Harth, Violinist............Tuesday, July 13
Phillippe Entremont, Pianist.........Tuesday, July 20
William Doppmann, Pianist..........Monday, July 26
CHORAL UNION SERIES
Chicago Symphony Orchestra........Saturday, October 9
Jean Martinon, Conductor; John Browning, Piano soloist
Yehudi Menuhin, Violinist..........Friday, October 15
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.......Friday, October 29
Karel Ancerl, Conductor
Poznan Choir (from Poland)........Tuesday, November 2
Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra......Monday, November IS
Mstislav Rostropovich, Cello soloist "Barber of Seville" (Rossini) .......Sunday, November 21
New York City Opera Company
Grand Ballet Classique de France.....Tuesday, November 23
Phyllis Curtin, Soprano . . . ?.......Thursday, January 20
Monte Carlo National Orchestra.....Saturday, February 26
Louis Fremaux, Conductor; Michel Block, Piano soloist National Ballet (Washington, D.C.) .... (2:30) Sunday, March 27
EXTRA SERIES
The Cleveland Orchestra........Wednesday, October 20
George Szell, Conductor Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.....Tuesday, November 16
Igor Oistrakh, Violin soloist "Pagliacci" and "Cavalleria Rusticana" . (2:30) Sunday, November 21
New York City Opera Company
Rumanian Folk Ballet.........Wednesday, February 16
Rudolf Serkin, Pianist...........Monday, March 7
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UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
Netherlands Chamber Orchestra......Monday, October 18
Szymon Goldberg, Conductor and Violinist
Rafael Puyana, Harpsichordist........Sunday, October 31
New York Pro Musica..........Friday, November 12
Noah Greenberg, Conductor Hermann Prey, Baritone (lieder recital) . . . Wednesday, February 2
Vienna Octet..............Tuesday, March 1
I Solisti Veneti............Wednesday, March 16
Chicago Little Symphony.........Thursday, March 31
Thor Johnson, Conductor
ANNUAL CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
"Messiah" (Handel)--Three Performances .... Friday, December 3
Saturday, December 4 (2:30) Sunday, December 5 Soloists:
Benita Valente, Soprano
Doris Mayes, Mezzo-Soprano
Stanley Kolk, Tenor
Malcolm Smith, Bass
The University Choral Union
Members of The Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Mary Me Call Stubbins, Organist
Lester McCoy, Conductor
FESTIVALS
Chamber Dance Festival
Alba-Reyes Spanish Dance Company .... Friday, October 22
Paul Taylor Dance Company......Saturday, October 23
To be announced.........(2:30) Sunday, October 24
Chamber Music Festival (Three concerts).....February 18, 19, 20
New York Chamber Soloists, Including
Adele Addison, Soprano; Charles Bressler, Tenor
Ann Arbor May Festival (6 concerts)........May 5, 6, 7, 8
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Conductor; guest conductors and soloists.
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UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
1879