UMS Concert Program, May 5, 6, 7, 8, 1966: The Seventy-third Annual Ann Arbor May Festival -- The Philadelphia Orchestra

Season: Eighty-Seventh
Concert: SIXTH
Hill Auditorium

ANN ARBOR
1966
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
of The University of Michigan
The Seventy-third Annual
MAY FESTIVAL
Six Concerts
May 5, 6, 7, 8, 1966
Hill Auditorium
Published by the University Musical Society, Ann Arbor, Michigan
CONTENTS
Page
University Musical Society, Board of Directors......... 5
Eugene Ormandy (photograph) ........................ 6
Performing Artists................................... 7
Concert Programs.................................... 8
Annotations
First Concert....................................... 17
Second Concert...................................... 28
Third Concert ...................................... 35
Fourth Concert...................................... 42
Fifth Concert....................................... 51
Sixth Concert ...................................... 65
Notes on the Philadelphia Orchestra and May Festival
Artists............................................ 71
Organizations -Personnel
The University Choral Union.......................... 78
The Philadelphia Orchestra............................ 80
History, Repertoire, and Resume
The University Musical Society........................ 81
The Ann Arbor May Festival.......................... 83
Choral Union Repertoire ............................. 84
Resume of 1965--66 Season .......................... 86
International Presentations for the 1966-67 Season .... 93
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. Thor Johnson, M.Mus., Mus.D. Wilbur K. Pierpont, M.B.A., Ph.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.
Gail W. Rector, B. Mus., Executive Director
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY is a nonprofit organiza?tion devoted to educational purposes. For eighty-seven 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.
EUGENE ORMANDY
Thirtieth anniversary season as Musical Director oj The Philadelphia Orchestra, and as Conductor at the Ann Arbor May Festival
THE SEVENTY-THIRD 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
Soloists
Montserrat Caballe..............................Soprano
Janice Harsanyi.................................Soprano
Jennifer Vyvyan ................................ Soprano
Lili Chookasian ............................... Contralto
Waldie Anderson ................................. Tenor
Stanley Kolk.....................................Tenor
Sherrill Milnes................................Baritone
Yi-Kwei Sze................................Bass-Baritone
John Bogart...................................Boy Alto
Gyorgy Sandor...................................Pianist
Claudio Arrau ................................... Pianist
Joseph de Pasquale................................Violist
(For biographical sketches of all performers, see pages 71 to 77)
The Steinway is the official piano oj the University Musical Society. The Baldwin Piano is the official piano of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
FIRST MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Thursday Evening, May 5, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
MONTSERRAT CABALLE
PROGRAM
Toccata for Orchestra .................................. Piston
"Tranquillo ei posa"; "Com' e bello quale
incanto" from Lucrezia Borgia .....................Donizetti
"E Sara in quest orribili momenti"; "Vivi
ingrato" from Roberto Devereux .................. Donizetti
MONTSERRAT CABALLE INTERMISSION
Grand Scene (Finale) from II Pirata......................Bellini
Mme Caballe
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 ....................Sibelius
Allegretto
Tempo andante ma rubato Vivacissimo; lento e suave Allegro moderato
Columbia Records
8
SECOND MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Friday Evening, May 6, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
JENNIFER VYVYAN, Soprano
LILI CHOOKASIAN, Contralto
WALDIE ANDERSON, Tenor
SHERRILL MILNES, Baritone
GYORGY SANDOR, Pianist
PROGRAM
Concerto for Orchestra..................................Kodaly
Allegro risoluto Largo
Allegro risoluto Largo
Allegro risoluto
Thor Johnson, Conductor
"Te Deum" ...........................................Kodaly
University Choral Union, Jennifer Vyvyan,
Lili Chookasian, Waldie Anderson and Sherrill Milnes
Thor Johnson, Conductor
INTERMISSION
Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra....................Bartok
Allegro moderato Andante
Allegro molto
Gyorgy San dor Eugene Ormandy, Conductor
o
THIRD MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Afternoon, May 7, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA WILLIAM SMITH, Conductor
SOLOIST
JOSEPH DE PASQUALE, Violist
PROGRAM
Suite, "Lieutenant Kije," Op. 60......................Prokofiev
The Birth of Kije
Romance
Kije's Wedding
Troika
The Burial of Kije
Concerto in B minor, for Viola and Orchestra .... Handel
(Arranged by Henri Casadesus) Allegro moderato
Andante ma non troppo Allegro molto
Joseph de Pasquale intermission
?Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64.................Tchaikowsky
Andante; allegro con anima
Andante cantabile, con alcuna licenza Valse: allegro moderato
Finale: andante maestoso
Columbia Records
10
FOURTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Evening, May 7, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
PROGRAM
Toccata and Fugue in D minor............................Bach
(Transcribed for orchestra by Eugene Ormandy)
"Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67...................Beethoven
Allegro con brio
Andante con moto Allegro
Allegro; presto
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 2 in U major. Op. 73......................Brahms
Allegro non troppo Adagio non troppo
Allegretto grazioso, quasi andantino Allegro con spirito
Colutnbia Records
11
FIFTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Afternoon, May 8, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THOR JOHNSON, Guest Conductor
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
SOLOISTS
JENNIFER VYVYAN, Soprano
SHERRILL MILNES, Baritone
JOHN BOGART, Boy Alto
CLAUDIO ARRAU, Pianist
PROGRAM
"Chichester Psalms," for Boy Solo and Chorus............Bernstein
University Choral Union and John Bogart
"Requiem," for Soprano and Baritone solo,
Double Chorus and Orchestra ........................Delius
University Choral Union, Jennifer Vyvyan and Sherrill Milnes
INTERMISSION
Concerto No. 2 in A major for Piano
and Orchestra (in one movement) .......................Liszt
"Totentanz" for Piano and Orchestra........................Liszt
Claudio Arrau
12
SIXTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Evening, May 8, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOISTS
JANICE HARSANYI, Soprano
LILI CHOOKASIAN, Contralto
STANLEY KOLK, Tenor
YI-KWEI SZE, Bass
PROGRAM
"Music for a Great City"...............................Copland
Skyline
Night Thoughts Subway Jam Toward The Bridge
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Op. 125 ("Choral") ........Beethoven
Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso Molto vivace; presto
Adagio molto e cantabile; andante moderato Allegro assai
University Choral Union and Soloists
ANNOTATIONS
by GLENN D. McGEOCH
The Author of the annotations expresses his appreciation to Ferol Brinkman for her editorial services.
FIRST CONCERT
Thursday Evening, May 5 Toccata for Orchestra............Piston
Walter Piston was born at Rock-land, Maine, January 20, 1894.
Unquestionably the music of Walter Piston reflects our time, yet it is neither shockingly aggressive nor distressingly acrid. In fact among contemporary com?posers he is often, always respectfully, referred to as a "conservative" and a "classicist." If, by classicist, is meant an artist of impeccable taste and meticu?lous workmanship, one who has scrupulously adhered to a logical method of producing well-ordered music in which content, expression, and form are sensi?tively balanced, and if, by conservative, is meant a composer who has con?sistently produced fine and distinguished music that has steadily held the respect of musicians and the general public alike, then Walter Piston is indeed the most eminent classicist and honored conservative in American music today.
His fastidious voice was at first faintly heard amid the anarchy of conflicting theories, bewildering experiments in extreme individualism, and the plethora of new systems that marked the decade of the twenties. Only when the neoclassi-cism had established its tenets and had finally emerged as a body of syntax did Piston's music begin to command attention. He has consciously applied to a modern idiom the governing principles of all classic art, identification of expression and design, and reconciliation of emotional impulse and intellectual organization. The result has been, in spite of the complexity of his musical texture, a clear and forthright music, communicating forcefully and directly.
Mr. Piston enrolled in the Massachusetts School of Art in 1914 with the intention of becoming an artist. He also studied piano and violin and, during World War I, he served in the Navy as Musician Second Class. At the end of the war he entered Harvard University intent upon becoming a composer. After graduation in 1924, he traveled to France to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. Among other honors, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Coolidge Medal, the New York Music Critics Award (twice) and the Pulitzer Prize for Music (twice). In 1961 Mr. Piston received his second Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 7, a Eugene Ormandy commission. From 1926 until his retirement in 1960 he was Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University.
Walter Piston composed his "Toccata for Orchestra" in the spring of 1948, at the request of Charles Munch, for a tour of the United States by the Orches-tre National de France. Mr. Piston writes:
When I saw Charles Munch in Boston in the spring of 1948, he asked me for a short piece for the projected American tour of the Orchestre National de France. I told him I would write a work especially for the tour, and when the college term ended I began the Toccata, finishing the score in time to send it to France around the first of July. Many
Heard at the May Festival, May 6, 1961.
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
memories of student days in Paris returned during the composition of this piece, and I continually sought to bring out in the music those qualities of clarity and brilliance which are sooutstanding in the playing of French musicians.
The Orchestre National performed the Toccata over the French radio before sailing for America, and the first performance in the United States took place in Bridgeport, Con?necticut. The Toccata appeared on every one of the forty-one programs given on the coast-to-coast-tour. [In Ann Arbor on October 25, 1948.]
There is little to be said in description of the work. It is in simple three-part form and, as its name implies, in brilliant and rhythmic style, except for the middle part, which is slower and more lyric in character.
The "Toccata for Orchestra" was first performed by Mr. Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra at subscription concerts on December 2 and 3, 195S.
Recitative: "Tranquillo ei posa"; and aria: "Com' e bello
quale incanto" from Lucrezia Borgia.....Donizetti
Gaetano Donizetti was born March 29, 1797, in Bergamo; died there April 8, 1848.
Facility always! fortunate melodies, passages well composed for the voice, a certain eclat. --Th?ophile Gautier
In the foreword to his book on Donizetti, Herbert Weinstock writes that his special interest in this composer dates from a performance of his tragic opera Anna Bolena which he heard at La Scala in Milan, Italy, in 1958. Referring to it as one of the most profoundly moving operatic experiences of his life, he states that "Donizetti was a musico-dramatic creator of far greater importance than any of my earlier contacts with other of his operas had led me to believe."T In spite of what textbooks have stated for years, and academicians firmly be?lieved--namely that few of his operas were of enduring quality, and that those that have survived are merely technical vocal exercises to delight the "canarie fanciers"--his position today as one of the great masters of the lyric theater is slowly but surely being established. The fact is that for over one hundred and fifteen years, several of his operas have firmly kept their places in the operatic repertory of the world, among them Lucia di Lammermoor, Don Pas-quale, and L'Elisir d'amorc. But these are only three of the seventy-one operas he produced over a period of twenty-six years! What is not commonly known about Donizetti today is that he was a prodigious composer in practically every field, producing, in addition to his fabulous output of operas, thirty-one can?tatas, 116 religious works, twenty-one concert overtures, 183 songs and arias, fifty-six vocal duets, forty-four piano solos and duets, and nineteen string quar?tets. "His talent is great," wrote Heinrich Heine, "but even greater was his fecundity, in which he was excelled only by rabbits." There is little doubt that this frenetic overproduction doomed much of his work, and that, in most fields of composition, he remained merely a talented artisan. He was, however, in the realm of opera, both comic and tragic, a master craftsman.
Philadelphia Orchestra Program Notes, January 28, 1966.
tHerbert Weinstock, Donizetti and the World oj Opera in Italy, Paris, and Vienna in the First Hall o) the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963).
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FIRST CONCERT
The neglect of Donizetti and his two contemporaries, Rossini and Bellini, can be explained on two counts. They have been, for over half a century, com?pletely overshadowed by Wagner and the public misled by the false contention that Wagnerian music-drama was in every way superior to Italian opera. But it must be remembered also that these composers wrote for an era of great singers whose training made them capable of the most incredible vocal attainments. Once that generation of singers had passed, Italian opera of the early nineteenth century lost its appeal and soon fell into disrepute. Donizetti's serious operas, in particular, were not only neglected but considered mere period pieces un?worthy of the attention of real musicians. It became a tradition, and an intellec?tual "status symbol" among critics and dilettantes alike, to dismiss Donizetti and his colleagues as beneath contempt. Recently this attitude has been dra?matically reversed, largely due to the fact that once again, for some mysterious reason, we have singers capable of meeting the vocal demands of these scores. As a result of possessing such superlative artists as Maria Callas, Joan Suther?land, Teresa Berganza, Marilyn Home, and Montserrat Caballe, to mention only five of the most sensational, a great revival is taking place all over the world, and the beauty and dramatic power of many of these operas are once more revealed to us. Donizetti's Maria Stuarda, La Favorite, Anna Bolena, and Lucrezia Borgia; Bellini's Norma, II Pirata, La Sonnambula, I Puritani, and others are firmly back in the center of the repertory of every self-respecting opera house in the world. Still, to many, these operas can be summed up as being merely a series of cadenzas for soprano and flute in which each vies with the other for speed and altitude. Singers in Donizetti's day were free to em?bellish his melodies at will; in fact, their reputations often depended upon their creative ability to do so. But florid execution is only a minor part of the operatic duties of the heroines of these operas. Lyric expression and dramatic recitative have a far greater part to play than runs, trills, and other vocal fireworks. The real core of this kind of opera is the cantilena (a vocal melody of a lyrical rather than a dramatic or virtuoso character), and the chief requirement is basically a firm lyric voice, full-bodied and perfectly controlled, such as we are hearing tonight. The opera composers of Donizetti's time had the greatest know?ledge of and respect for the unique expressive potentialities of the human voice. "Their wonderful sense for the beauty of the voice," wrote Paul Henry Lang, "gave their melodies that broad elastic, flexible, freely arching line which is the birthright of the lyric stage. The soul of this melody is in love with the reality of the human voice, and while it shares of this love, it also fires it with passion and exuberance."
The text for Lucrezia Borgia was written by Felice Romani and was based upon a novel by Victor Hugo. It had its premiere at La Scala, Milan, Italy, December 26, 1833.
In the novel, Hugo displayed one side of his genius which manifested itself in the pleasure he took in dealing with the abnormal, the illogical, the grim, and the grotesque. The opera plot, however, compounds all of the historical errors
Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1941) p. 837.
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
of the novel, and reasserts the popular but erroneous conception of Lucrezia Borgia as a diabolical fiend and murderess. Like most of the popular librettos of the time, based upon history and literature, any liberty was taken as long as it assured a sure-fire theatrical effect. When this opera was presented in Paris in 1840, Victor Hugo objected strenuously to the publication of the French translation, and the work was withdrawn. The libretto was rewritten, the title changed to La Rinnigata and the action transferred to Turkey! Throughout the nineteenth century Lucrezia Borgia remained one of Donizetti's most pop?ular works and played a determining role in the establishment of his position in foreign countries. Since its premiere in 1833, it has never left the active repertoire entirely.
Don Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, suspects a love affair between his wife, the beautiful but notorious Lucrezia Borgia, and a youth named Gennaro; he is actually her son by a former marriage, although she alone realizes it. Seeking revenge upon some young gallants -among them Gennaro -who have pub?licly defaced the Borgia family crest, Don Alfonso invites them to a banquet, where, aided by Lucrezia, he puts poison in their wine. Realizing too late that Gennaro is present and has partaken of the poison, she offers him an antidote which he refuses. Aware of the horrible result of her crime, she suffers the keen?est remorse, drinks some of the wine and expires, surrounded by her dead and dying victims.
In Act I, Lucrezia, in spite of her criminal practices, still has a mother's yearning toward her son. Disguised, she comes into his presence at a gay fes?tival. Wearied by the festivities, Gennaro draws apart from his companions and falls asleep. Lucrezia gazes upon him with maternal longing and sings:
Recitative: He is resting peacefully.
Oh! may his nights be forever so peaceful! May he never know the nature and the force of my nights' torment-ah, may he never know!
Aria: How handsome he is! What enchantment
in that honest, noble face! No, never so charming could I paint him in my thought. My heart is filled with joy, now that at last I can behold him. Spare me, O heaven, the anguish of seeing him, one day, despise me .... If I wakened him No--I dare not-nor can I let him see my face; and even my weeping eyes I must dry--a single moment. While my humble heart is sobbing, while I am weeping at your side, sleep and dream, my sweet, only of joy and of delight.
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FIRST CONCERT
And may your guardian angel awaken you only to pleasure! Sad nights and bitter wakefulness only I must suffer. Dream of joy, and may your angel awaken you only to pleasure. . . .
Recitative: "E Sara in questi orribili momenti"; aria: "Vivi
ingrato a lei d'accanto" from Roberto Devereux . Donizetti
Roberto Devereux was the last of seven operas in which Donizetti drew upon English history and literature. It is a highly romanticized and historically in?correct version of the story of Queen Elizabeth and Essex, written for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, where it had its premiere October 2, 1837. The libretto was prepared by Salvatore Cammarano (librettist for Lucia di Lammermoor). The plot was derived from Elizabeth d' Angleterre, a tragedy by Franqois Aucelot, with additions gleaned from Jacques Descene Desmaison's Histoire secrete des amours d' Elizabeth d' Angleterre et du comte d' Essex. The work had continued success until the operas of Verdi crowded it from the stage. On May 2, 1964, it was revived at San Carlo and the critical opinion was that history had erred in neglecting it so long. The opera was performed in New York for the first time on January 25, 1849, at the Italian Opera House. After 1851, it was not heard again in America until December, 1965, when the American Opera Society, responsible for so many successful revivals of works of this period, presented it in a concert version with Montserrat Caballe, who created a sensation in the role of Queen Elizabeth.
The original manuscript and the plates for the score were destroyed during World War II. A piano score, preserved in the library of the Conservatory of St. Peter in Maiella, provided the source for a new orchestration by Rubino Profeta.
Roberto Devereux, which followed Anna Bolena, L'Elisir d'amore, Lucrezia Borgia, Maria Stuarda, and Lucia di Lammermoor, was composed by Donizetti at the height of his powers. In it, as in other of his later operas, he shows a close kinship to the early Verdi. This is particularly apparent in the manner in which recitatives, arias, and ensembles flow one into the other, creating a continuous musical structure, and in the character delineations which gradually became more human and lifelike.
Robert Devereux, Count of Essex, banished to Ireland for disloyalty to the throne, returns to England and is accused by the Royal Council of high treason. Queen Elizabeth, suspecting him of infidelity as well, and failing to learn from him the name of her rival, signs his death warrant. By returning a ring which she had given him as a token of their love, his life could be spared. Sara, wife of Duke of Nottingham, has kept her love affair with Essex a secret, but at the moment he is to be executed, in a futile attempt to save his life, she brings the ring to Elizabeth and confesses that she is her rival in love. Nottingham an-
The others were: Alfredo il Grande (1823); Emilia di Liverpool (1824); Elizabeita, al Caslello Kenil-worth (1829); Anna Bolena (1830); Maria Stuarda (1834); Lucia di Lammermoor (1835).
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
nounces the death of Essex, and the Queen, in a rage, accuses him and Sara of withholding the ring from her and condemns them both to prison. Left alone, she is haunted by visions of Essex's ghost, and of her own approaching death. She presses the ring to her lips, as she tenderly remembers her love for the dead Essex.
In Act III, Scene 3, Elizabeth, surrounded by her ladies, awaits the arrival of her friend Sara from whom she desires consolation. In grief and agitation she imagines the ring coming to her just as Essex is about to die, but she is tormented by the thought that he will chose death rather than betray her rival. Just before Sara returns with the ring and confesses her guilt, the Queen decides to forgive Essex and set him free:
Recitative:
Can Sara leave me at this horrid time
To her ducal palace, whence Gualtiero hastened to bring her --
And yet -May friendship remind me of her consolations,
for I need them.
I am a woman -the fire of my anger is quenched.
Oh, Sara! Let not my hope be in vain.
Near to death, the august gem he will send me.
I see him repentant in my presence --
Yet, time flies by.
If I could stop the flying moments!
And if, being faithful to my rival, he chose death
Oh, ghastly thought!
And if he were now on the scaffold Ah, no, stop! Aria:
Live, ungrateful one, at her side;
My heart forgives you.
Live, cruel man, abandon me,
Let my tears be hidden --
(She glances at the ladies, remembering that they are watching her.)
Ah! let no one ever say, on earth:
"I have seen the Queen of England weeping."
Live, ungrateful one, abandon me to eternal sorrow. . . .
Grand Scene from II Pirata ("Mad Scene") .... Bellini Recitative: "Oh s'io potessi"; aria: "Col sorriso d'innocenza"
Vincenzo Bellini was born in Catania, Sicily, November 3, 1801; died at Puteaux, near Paris, September 23, 183S.
The capacity for melody is a gift -it is not within our power to develop it by study -of all the elements of music melody is the most accessable to the ear, and the least capable of acquisition.
--Igor Stravinsky
The fame of Vincenzo Bellini was carried throughout Europe in 1831, when he was but twenty-nine years of age, with the performance of his opera Capu-
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FIRST CONCERT
letti ed i Montacchi {Romeo and Juliet). During a period when excessively ornamented music was prevalent, the quiet charm of Bellini's art, with its simple and idyllic melody, provided a welcome novelty.
Like his fellow countrymen, Rossini and Donizetti, Bellini considered the human voice the chief medium through which emotion and sentiment could be expressed best in opera. His orchestration, therefore, remained weak and color?less for the most part. But for the complete realization of all the subtle nuance that lies within the power of the human voice, for an infinitely expressive vocal style, Bellini has had few peers in the realm of opera. For him, the "divine melos" was all-important, the lifegiving force, for which he was willing to sacrifice every other musical element. Through it alone, he created a new kind of melodrama which blazed the path toward the nineteenth-century romantic opera. Through it he brought a new sincerity and aristocratic elegance to the operatic style of his day. His haunting melodies ushered in a new era in Italian opera. At a time when the laughter, the gaiety, and the nimble rhythms of Rossini's florid music (Barber 0} Seville) was the fashion, the melancholy charm of Bellini's art made a profound impression. He created a rich, passionate lyri?cism that diffused itself throughout nineteenth-century music. His elegiac "moon-drenched" melodies were echoed in Chopin's langorous nocturnes with their cantabile phrases and their free use of tempo rubato. Chopin never lost his enthusiasm for the Italian opera of his day, particularly that of Bellini, his intimate friend and adviser. He visited the opera house regularly and advised his students to play their instruments with the same lyric beauty he heard issuing from the throats of Bellini's singers.
Not only Chopin was impressed by Bellini's art. Admonishing his fellow com?posers in Germany for their pedantry, Richard Wagner wrote:
If all would only consider the boundless disorder, the jungle of forms, periods, and modu?lations of many of our modern German opera composers, distracting our enjoyment of the simple beauties, we often might heartily wish this frayed-out tangle put in order by that stable Italian form. . . . Bellini's song enraptures Italy and France. Let the German music-scholar give himself for once to reckless delight in lovely song ... let us spare ourselves for once the sermon, and ponder what it was that so enchanted us. We then shall find, especially with Bellini, that it was limpid melody, the simple, noble beauteous song. To confess this, and believe it, is no sin ... if we breathed a prayer that Heaven would one day give German composers such melodies and such mode of handling song.
Among his other ardent admirers were Verdi, Berlioz, Liszt, Bizet, and, unex?pectedly today, Igor Stravinsky, who believes that it will be many years before Bellini's genius will be fully valuedHe writes:
The Germans, as we know, honor their three great B's (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms). At the time when Beethoven bequeathed to the world riches, partly attributable to the recalcitrance of the melodic gift, another composer . . . scattered to the winds with inde?fatigable profusion, magnificent melodies of the rarest quality, distributing them as gratui?tously as he had received them without even being aware of the merit of having created them. Beethoven amassed a patrimony for music that seemed to be solely the result of
Richard Wagner, "Bellini," 1835, in Wm. Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner's Prose Worts (London: Kegan, Paul French, Triiben 1859-99, 8 vols.) VIII, 67-69.
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
obstinate labor. . . . Bellini inherited melody without having even so much as asked for it -as if Heaven had said to him, "I shall give to you the one thing Beethoven lacks."
II Pirata, Bellini's second opera, had its premiere at Teatro alia Scala, Milan, October 27, 1827, and with it the Milanese public found itself transported into an unknown operatic world -a world not intended merely for amusement but for intense emotional participationHis characters did not rage or curse or struggle against destinyThey submitted to their fate and indulged in their grief. Pity and compassion were the essence of Bellini's art, and these emotions he elicited by the simplest of means -incredibly beautiful, soul-stirring vocal melody. At the first performance the public literally wept. "You cannot imagine what an effect it produced, in a word, tears came to the eyes of all who listened and saw," wrote Bellini.
The first of Bellini's heroines to escape from the tragedy of reality into de?lirious imaginings on the wings of song is the sorrowful Imogene in Pirata. In the decade between 1820 to 1830, "mad scenes" abounded in the operas of Donizetti and Bellini. Ophelia's mad scene from Hamlet was the prototype of all similar passages in the romantic dramas and operas of the day (Anna Bo-lena; Lucia di Lammermoor; Linda di Chamounix by Donizetti; Bellini's Puritanni, and others.)
Imogene is in love with Gualtiero, the pirate. He is captured and condemned to die after slaying her husband Ernesto. The recitative, "Oh s'io potessi dis-sipar," the aria, "Col sorriso d'innocenza," and the cabaletta, "Oh sole, ti velva," bring the opera to its conclusion. In them, Imogene, her mind deranged, recalls the tragic incidents of her life. At the ominous sound that issues from the council chamber, she realizes that Gualtiero has been condemned to death. Overwhelmed, her mind gives way to terror and despair. She has premonitions of his execution on the scaffold and calls upon the sun to darken that she may not witness the horrible sight.
Recitative:
Oh if only I might dispel the clouds which weigh upon my brow.
Is it day or night
Am I at home or in the grave
(To Adele, her lady-in-waiting)
Listen -the wind is wailing;
Here is the bare and empty shore,
And here, at my side, wounded, a warrior.
It is not he! It is not Gualtiero, it is Ernesto.
He speaks -he is calling for his son.
His son is safe. I saved him from the blows of the evil doers.
Let him go to his father; let his father see him,
Embrace him, and forgive me before he dies.
(To her son)
Ahl You, innocent child. Beseech him for my sake.
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics ol Music, trans, by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), pp. 42, 43.
tSections at the end of arias, in quick uniform rhythms.
24
FIRST CONCERT
Aria:
With an innocent smile and a loving look, a glance
Of mercy and forgiveness, Ah! Speak to your father.
Tell him that you breathe, that you are free because of me;
Tell him to look with pity on the one who did so much for you.
What mournful sound is this, which echoes and resounds
This is the trumpet of judgement day! Hear me -Cabaletta:
Veil thyself in deepest night,
Hide from my eyes the barbarous axe.
But his blood is already shed;
It engulfs me wholly.
From anguish, from suffering
And horror I shall die.
Symphony No. 2 in D major.........Sibelius
Jean Sibelius was bom in Tavastehus, Finland, De?cember 8, 186S; died Jarvenpaa, September 20, 1957.
"Sibelius, poor, poor Sibelius -a tragic case." --Nadia Boulanger
The centenary of the birth of Jean Sibelius last year went by practically unnoticed in the press and in the concert halls of our country. No composer of our time, with the possible exception of Richard Strauss, ever suffered such a sudden reversal of fortune. Hailed in the 1930's as the "Savior of modern music and the greatest symphonist since Beethoven" by the eminent English critic Cecil Gray, he has recently been designated by Rene Leibowitz as "the world's worst composer -the heavy deadweight of twentieth-century music," and Virgil Thomson has described his music as "worthless, vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial." Even in his native land, the heroic figure that had so dominated the musical scene has faded to a gaunt, lonely shadowChampioned in the thirties by such eminent conductors as Koussevitsky, Stokowski, and Sir Thomas Beecham, who programmed his works continuously, he has been almost entirely ignored by the conductors of our day. Only Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, and Ernest Ansermet among them, have, by recent performances and recordings, attempted to stem the tide that was swiftly carrying him to oblivion. Perhaps time will determine that, as a composer, Sibelius is not as great as his proponents believe, but far greater than his detractors so vigor?ously maintain.
As Allan Rich has written in the New York Herald-Tribune, December 5, 1965 ("Sibelius: a Sort of Celebration"): "There is no doubt that his music will survive, continue to turn up fairly regularly on concert programs, and will blend in eventually with the whole Post-Romantic nationalistic style of which he was a part. Audiences will forget that he was an anachronism, that others had done in 1894 what he was doing in 1924; music has always had its fogies, among them Johann Sebastian Bach."
25
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
Fate was persistent in involving Jean Sibelius in great soul-stirring catas-trophies. As a young musician, he was an artistic rebel determined upon Finnish freedom and was involved in Finland's emancipation in the 1890's. World War I found him as staunch and bravely nationalistic as ever in the face of impending doom. And in World War II, at the close of a long life full of great artistic achievements and deep concern for his native land, the old patriarch refused to leave his unfortunate country in need, writing on in the midst of greatest disaster. Sibelius' faith in humanity was subjected to the severest tests, but he never lost that faith. He became an international symbol of his country's courage, and his music sounded the proud defiance of a great people and their sure confidence in their ultimate victory over the ruthless aggressor Russia, who was then invading Finland. It was during this period that Sibelius held a posi?tion of unrivaled eminence as a composer, and worldwide respect as a great patriot. In America his symphonies crowded the air waves, conductors built their programs around them, and record shops dispersed them to an avid public. Our current magazines and papers, year after year noted every anniversary of his birth, and continuously carried human interest stories of his personal forti?tude and spiritual strength in the face of disaster.
Speaking of Sibelius purely as a historical figure, and of his position among the great symphonists of the past, it must be acknowledged that it was really through him that the long line of symphonic writing survived; a line which, except for his efforts, seemed to have come to an end. Contemporary composers of the "new school," having lost the sweep and sustaining power that marked such masters as Beethoven and Brahms, declared the symphony a dead form, and turned to the less architectural and more programmatic symphonic poem and a new conception of the suite in which to frame their more lyrical and less epic conceptions. Sibelius alone, working against the tendency of his age, and continuing in the tradition of the great masters of the past, not only saved the symphonic form from oblivion, but raised it again to a level of dignity and grandeur equaled only by Beethoven. It was Beethoven in fact who guided Sibelius through the labyrinth of his own ideas"The composer for me above all others is Beethoven," he wrote"I am affected as powerfully by the human side of him as by his musicHe is a revelation to meHe was a Titan. Every?thing was against him, and yet he triumphed."
A careful consideration of Sibelius' symphonies reveals this one fact: that he again sensed the "grand manner" in music, sustained his inspiration through?out a long life, and cast this inspiration in a monumental series of seven sym?phonies that remain a unique structure in contemporary music. In the words of his biographer, Karl Ekman: "The noble structure of his works has come forth from the grand line of his life. He has won his inner strength and harmony in a hard battle. In a disjointed time, a period of dissension, Jean Sibelius pro?vides us with the uplifting picture of a man who dared to follow his genius and never was subservient to other claims than those of his own artistic con-
Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius, His Life and Personality (New York: Knopf, 1938).
26
FIRST CONCERT
science, who dared to live his life in the grand style. Such an indomitable spirit, it seems, must ultimately triumph in art, but today our estimation of Sibelius as a composer is no longer determined or colored by his fame as a patriot. His music must now stand or fall entirely on the enduring qualities of its expression, and only time will determine how enduring that expression is.
Cecil Gray, in his book on Sibelius, has written illuminatingly of this work:
With the Symphony No. 2, an immense advance over the First is to be perceived. If the First is the very archetype of the romantic, picturesque symphony of the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Second strikes out a new path altogether. The First is a conclusion, the last of its dynasty and in many ways the best; the Second is the beginning of a new line, and contains the germs of immense and fruitful developments. In addition, apart from an occasional suggestion of the influence of Tschaikowsky, it is entirely personal and original in idiom from beginning to end . . .
First Movement: Nothing in the entire literature of symphonic form is more remarkable than the way in which Sibelius here presents a handful of seemingly disconnected and meaningless scraps of melody, and then breathes life into them, bringing them into organic relation with each other and causing them to grow in stature and significance with each successive appearance, like living things . . .
Second Movement: The slow second movement is also highly individual. The familiar principle of the contrast between a lyrical chief subject and a more virile second subject is here intensified into an almost epic conflict, involving several groups of thematic pro?tagonists. The melancholy and reflective first subject is quite unequal to the task of coping with the violent opposition it arouses, and is compelled to call to its assistance a second lyrical subject which, in its turn, engenders antagonism. The melodic writing in this move?ment, incidentally, is of quite exceptional beauty, particularly the second lyrical subject, which is both exquisitely moulded and deeply expressive.
Third Movement: The bustling Scherzo is comparatively conventional in form and style, apart from the lovely Trio which is built upon a theme beginning with no fewer than nine repetitions of the same note--a thing no one but Sibelius would dare or could afford to do.
Fourth Movement: For the rest, the Symphony is on familiar lines, and the concluding movement, which follows without a break, is in the usual finale tradition--broad, stately, ceremonious, rather pompous perhaps here and there. In these days of cynicism and disillu?sion, it is of course the fashion to sneer at the convention of the "happy ending" of which the orthodox symphonic finale is the musical equivalent; and it is certainly true that most modern attempts to conform to it ring hollow and insincere. We of the present generation simply do not feel like that; we find it difficult to be triumphant, and we have no doubt excellent reasons for it. The fact remains that it is a weakness and a deficiency in us, and there is something of sour grapes in the contemporary attitude towards those artists of an earlier generation who have achieved the state of spiritual serenity, optimism, and repose which makes it possible for them to conclude a work convincingly in this manner. Sibelius is one of them; his triumphant final movements, so far from being due to mere unthinking acceptance of a formal convention, correspond to a definite spiritual reality.t
'Ibid.
tCecil Gray, Sibelius (London: Oxford University Press, 1931).
27
SECOND CONCERT
Friday Evening, May 6
Concerto for Orchestra...........Kodaly
Zoltan Kodaly was born in a sub?urb of Budapest, December 16, 1882.
Zoltan Kodaly shares with Bela Bartok the distinction of being one of Hun?gary's few outstanding composers. He is often spoken of, and unjustly so, as a follower and imitator of his more famous compatriot and contemporary. It is true that there is a superficial resemblance, but this is simply the outcome of wholly impersonal and extraneous influences to which they have both been subjected. Both were students at the Academy of Music in Budapest and com?position students of Hans Koessler, a German musician who had settled there in 1883 and who had become enthusiastic about Hungarian music. About 1905, Kodaly and Bartok became associated through their awakened interest in folk sources. Together they traveled throughout the countryside collecting, notating, and recording literally thousands of folk songs and dances which they labor?iously transcribed and finally analyzed. Their pronounced nationalism led them early to seek means of national expression in their own music, and when they came into contact with folk sources, ignored by their predecessors, they found there elements which, once assimilated, led them to the production of an art music that has become international in its communication. Bartok and Kodaly are not known merely as Hungarian composers. Indeed, they are among the few to whom the term "universal" as opposed to "national" may be applied. Their style of composition owes much of its character to the individual musical idioms they have created out of Hungarian peasant music, and Kodaly's highly individual and personal expression distinctly places him apart. Both speak the same language but each expresses a different order of ideas.
Kodaly is not an innovator, as was Bartok, nor was he as prolific a writer, but the paucity of his output is not due to a lack of inventive powers or ingenu?ity. Like Brahms, he is perhaps one of the most self-critical of composers. His aristocratic reserve, his exercise of restraint and control, the refinement and delicacy of his treatment, and its unique combination with the popular and idiomatic mode of expression found in the folksong, gives to his music a pecu?liar charm and a strong individualism. With all of its directness and simplicity, there is a curious subtlety and exactness of detail, so that it seems at the same time to be ingenious and yet full of candor.
The Concerto for Orchestra was composed during 1939-40 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and was first performed on the occasion of its Golden Jubilee in 1941. In it one discerns nothing typically Hungarian, so completely are the nationalistic and folk elements assimilated. Kodaly has cast the work into the traditional form
28
SECOND CONCERT
of the classical concerto grosso, based upon the principle of antithesis, empha?sizing sharp contrasts and antiphonal effects between the woodwinds, brass, and string choirs which he keeps austerely individualized. In the allegro movements there is rhythmic dynamism and pronounced contrapuntal texture. A contrasting slow section features solo instruments in a delicate polyphonic passage that leads finally to a condensed recapitulation of the opening themes.
In a coda the main theme is powerfully stated, after a short recall of the quiet largo section. Although it is composed in a single movement, the result?ing form is transparent, and the thematic ideas clearly defined. Here balance between tradition and modernity is subtly achieved, for Kodaly moves with harmonic and rhythmic freedom while retaining clear formal construction. In an article on Kodaly's orchestral works, published in the British quarterly Tempo (Autumn 1950), Mr. John S. Weismann concludes with the following statement:
"The nature of his musical idiom is nourished on the tradition of his people; the permanent values surviving from an age of ferment are the sources of his inspiration; and in the realization of his thoughts a classical equilibrium is pre?served. His contribution is measured by the significant validity of their syn?thesis."
Te Deum................Kodaly
Kodaly's fame was, for a period, confined to his native Hungary. Two com?positions written and published during the period of World War I, the stun?ning Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello (Op. 8) and the Duo for Violin and Cello (Op. 7), made his name more generally known. It was not until he produced what is now generally considered his masterpiece, the Psalmus Hun-garicus, however, that he became an international figure. The work was com?missioned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of the cities of Buda and Pest. With it he drew the attention of the world to Hungary as a musical nation. For this achievement he was decorated by his government, and appointed lecturer at the University of Sciences. During this period he wrote the popular concert suite Hdry Jdnos, the Marosszek Dances, and in 1936 the Budavari Te Deum on tonight's program. Like the Psalmus Hungaricus it, too, was a commissioned work written for another festival of great national significance--the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Buda from Turkish rule.
Unlike Bartok, Kodaly has never sought in his contemporaneity a daring display of modern idioms and techniques. There is no violent attempt to break with tradition, no compulsive drive to innovation. In comparison with Bartok, therefore, his art played little part in the evolution of contemporary music. It tended rather to meditative introspection, but, fertilized as it was by strong folk elements, it never became overly subjective or personal. Often referred to as the "last naif" of European music, Kodaly always aimed at and achieved simple direct expression. Again, unlike Bartok, who thought instrumentally.
29
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
Kodaly thinks continuously in terms of long singing lines. He is at his best when he employs the human voice.
The Budavari Te Deum is a typical work, and in many ways a remarkable one. Serenely simple in its total effect, it has great rhythmic flexibility and displays an exquisite interplay of the parts, both vocal and instrumental. The melodies, molded by the Hungarian language, have much of the modal supple?ness of folk song, without any direct quotation; they have a distinctive richness and a plasticity of contour that is unique. Musically the work is united by repeated returns of the opening fanfare that employs both the orchestra and choir, and by a theme first heard at the words Pleni sunt coeli (Heaven and Earth are full of the majesty of Thy glory). What Busoni said of Tirso de Molina's Don Juan Tenorio, could well have been written of Kodaly's Te Deum: "It is powerful, it has great freshness and facility, is big and at the same time naive."
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 re?markable 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:
Te Deum Iaudamus te Deum confitemur.
Te aeternum Patrem, omnis terra veneratur. Tibi omnes angeli, tibi coeli, et universae
potestates; Tibi cherubim et seraphim, incessabili
voce proclamant:
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus
Sabaoth. Pleni sunt coeli, et terra majestatis gloriae
tuae.
Sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Te gloriosus, apostolorum chorus, Te prophetarum, laudabUis numerus, Te martyrum, candidatus laudat exercitus. Te per orbem terrarum, sancta confitetur
Ecclesia,
Patrem immensae majestatis, Venerandum tuum verum, et unicum Filium, Sanctum quoque, Paraclitum Spiritum. Tu Rex gloriae, Christe. Tu Patris, sempiternus es Filius.
We praise Thee, O God, We acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship Thee,
the Father everlasting. To Thee all angels, the heavens and
all the powers therein. To Thee cherubim and seraphim with
voice unceasing cry.
Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of the
majesty of Thy Glory. Holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth. The glorious choir of the Apostles, The admirable company of the Prophets, The white-robed army of the Martyrs
all give praise to Thee. The Holy Church throughout all the
world doth acknowledge Thee, The Father of the infinite majesty, Thy adorable, true and only Son, Also the holy Ghost, the Comforter. Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ. Thou are the everlasting Son of the Father.
Wilfrid Mellere, Studies in Contemporary Music (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd. 1947). 30
SECOND CONCERT
Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominera:
Non horruisti Virginis uterum. Tu devicto mortis aculeo:
Apcruisti credentibus regna coelorum.
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes, in gloria Patris.
Judex crederis, esse venturus.
Te ergo quaesumus, tuis famulis subveni: Quos pretioso sanquine redemisti.
Aeterna fac cum sanctis tub, in gloris
numerari.
Salvum fac populum tuum Domine, Et benedic haereditati tuae. Et rege eos, et extolle illos usque in aetemum. Per singulos dies, benedicimus te. Et laudamus nomen tuum in saeculum, et
in saeculum saeculi. Dignare Domine die isto, sine peccato
nos custodire. Miserere nostri Domine;
miserere nostri. Fiat misericordia tua Domine super nos,
quemadmodum speravimus in te. In te Domine speravi: Non confundar in aetemum.
Thou, when about to take upon Thee to
deliver man,
Didst not abhor the Virgin's womb. When Thou hadst overcome the sting
of death, Thou didst open to all believers the Kingdom
of Heaven. Thou sittest at the right hand of
God in the glory of the Father. We believe that Thou shalt come to
be our Judge.
We pray Thee, therefore, Help Thy servants, Whom Thou hast redeemed with Thy
precious blood. Make them to be numbered with Thy
Saints in glory everlasting. O Lord, save Thy people And bless Thine inheritance. Govern them and lift them up forever. Day by day we glorify Thee. And we praise Thy name forever,
yea, for ever and ever. Vouchsafe, O Lord, this day to keep
us without sin. Have mercy on us, Lord,
have mercy on us. Thy mercy, O Lord, come down upon us.
just as we have hoped it of Thee. In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; Let me not be confounded forever.
Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra......Bartok
Bela Bartok was born in Nagyszentmiklos in Hungary, March 25, 1881; died in New York, September 26, 194S.
Bela Bartok was distinguished in every sphere of the music he served so conscientiously and selflessly; no creative artist in any field was ever so com?pletely dedicated to his art, or lived such a life of self-denial in its interest. The extent of his musical activity as composer and scholar is staggering to contemplate; even to begin to recount his manifold achievements would quickly consume the space allotted to this whole program.
More than two decades after his death, his music retains a powerful indi?viduality and refreshing originality seldom encountered in our day. It offers perhaps the greatest challenge known to contemporary musical thought and will no doubt do so for some time to come. His appearance in the world of music was marked by nothing sensational or spectacular--no fierce debates, no manifestos called public attention to his work. Yet in the 1920's his idiom had become the standard of "modern music" everywhere in the world; he was the inventor of one of the most experimental and widely practiced styles of the period between the two wars. From this era of spiritual atrophy and prevailing
31
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
sterility he emerged not only a continuing experimentalist to the end of his life but an artist of the most exacting standards. From a relentless harshness and baffling complexity, his art matured and mellowed into something warmly human and communicatively direct, without sacrificing any of its originality, certainty, or technical inventiveness. He seems to have realized, as Oscar Wilde once observed, that "nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly."
Bartok was equally distinguished as a musical scholar; with his encyclopedic knowledge of folk music, he became one of the leading authorities of our time. The profundity of his scholarship was unique among creative artists. He not only investigated the music of his native Hungary, of Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugo?slavia, and French North Africa, with the authority and thoroughness of the most meticulous scientist, but as a composer he subjected it to a complete artistic transformation and distillation. It was never used as an exotic element for spicing up his own musical language in the manner of Franz Liszt and Brahms, who, with their so-called "Hungarian" rhapsodies and dances, misled generations of musicians as to the true nature of real Hungarian folk music. A nationalistic or racial artist like Bartok has to do more than merely transcribe literally the music of his people. It is not the task or the aim of a composer merely to make arrangements of a few folk songs. He has to be so permeated with the spirit of his people that its characteristic features are woven into the texture of his score almost unconsciously. Thus, a personal style becomes so blended with the racial or national ideas that to distinguish between the two is impossible. With Bartok, it became the very substance of his musical thought and substratum of every score written by one of the greatest creative musicians of the twentieth century.
Bartok's popularity with the public was slow in coming, for he made no concessions whatever to popular taste and was in fact disdainful of immediate success. He was fearless and obdurate to his own disadvantage while he lived, and the world consequently treated him unjustly. It is a tribute to his sincerity, profundity, and the richness of his art that he is emerging slowly but surely from the oblivion and neglect he experienced during his life, to be received affection?ately by sincere audiences eager for new and exciting musical experiences. All honor to an artist of Bartok's uncompromising integrity and modesty, who could survive the conscientious paranoia of our time and emerge from the unhealthy morass of our day with such dedication and sustaining strength of purpose.
Shortly after Bartok's death a memorial concert of some of his chamber music, given at the New York Public Library, was attended by a company of his friends and colleagues. On that occasion the musicologist Curt Sachs discussed some aspects of his work and his personality:
Bela Bart6k was one of the greatest composers and one of the greatest teachers of our time. But this does not tell all. He was one of our greatest scholars, too. He spent his life collecting, transcribing, and evaluating thousands of melodies of the people of Hungary, of Romania, of Yugoslavia, and of the Arabian countries. We would be wronging him were we to stress only these multifarious activities--composition, teaching, research--and brand
32
SECOND CONCERT
them virtuosity. In a universal genius such as he, these things go to make up the whole. Bela Bartok's creative, intellectual and educational powers were merely the multiple expres?sion of an all-embracing personality.
Again we would be wronging him were we to stress only his superlative musicianship. This he achieved because as a human being he was so honest, so pure and so affectionate. No one who has not looked into his bright and knowing eyes, who has not plumbed the depths of his loving heart, who has not felt the warmth that permeated his whole being can do full justice to the man and the artist.
It is this very universal quality of the man that does not permit us to call Bela Bartok a Hungarian nationalist as critics have been prone to do until now. True, he was profoundly rooted in his native country and he had great affection for its folk melodies. Although his roots were deep sunk in the fertile soil of Hungary and although he drank richly of her sap, he grew to such stature and sent his business so far beyond her horizons that we can right?fully say he belongs to the world. In his struggle to free himself from degenerate romanticism and to attain a new classicism, a struggle in which all the masters of his generation partici?pated, he, like his friend and brother-in-arms, Zoltan Kodaly, found his best inspiration in the vigorous melodic lines and rhythms of folk music. For him this music was not a foreign folk lore and a stimulating exoticism as it was to Liszt and Brahms; it was a language which he spoke without affectation and which he was able to oppose to the accepted idiom of his time. Therefore, we say once again, Bartok is not to us an honored guest from Puszta, but a beloved citizen of the world and of our own country as a part of that world. It is in the spirit of such kinship that we are gathered here ... in celebrating Bela Bartok this evening we do not mourn the dead, but we honor, lovingly and gratefully, the ever-living.
The concerto on tonight's program came from a critical time in Bartok's career. After an unproductive period between 1920 and 1925, he suddenly came forth with four works for the piano in one year--1926, a sonata, a suite ("Out of Doors"), Nine Little Pieces, and the First Piano Concerto--works that indi?cated daring experimentation and newly directed purpose. His activity as a virtuoso concert pianist accounted to a degree for the paucity of his output during the previous years. More important, however, was the fact that he was going through a period of artistic gestation. Abjuring his previous style, typified by the Rhapsody No. 1 (original version, 1904) in which he was strongly influenced by Liszt and Strauss, yef uncertain about the validity of the new idiom he was envisioning, his creative energies temporarily declined. With the above works, however, he wrote with a spontaneity and power hitherto unre-vealed. The Piano Concerto bristled with freshness and originality but, because of its relentless drive and fury, caused considerable alarm at its premiere performance July 1, 1927, at Frankfort, Germany, during the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Bartok performed the work under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwangler. One enraged critic referred to it as "a summary of the spirit of this godless age with its ruthless mechanism, over?riding human sentiment and feeling." Others spoke of the "broken bits of themes hammered out on the piano and answered by equally angry blasts of woodwind instruments" and stated that "the only sustained motive was that of bitterness, the sum total unmitigated ugliness." Lawrence Gilman described it in the New York Tribune, December 25, 1927, after its American premiere, as "acrid, pow-
H. W. Heinsheimer, Boston Symphony Program!, Season 1949-50, pp. 1954-61.
33
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
erful, and intransigent," and Bartok as "a musician of darkly passionate imagi?nation, austerity and sensuousness, ruthlessly logical--a cerebral rhapsodist. a tone poet who is both an uncompromising modernist and the resurrection of an ancient past."
The three works of 1926 were written in basically the same idiom. They are percussive, sharp, brittle works with restricted melodic interest, and lacking completely in any relieving lyricism. The climax of his career came in the 1930's and 1940's when in such works as the Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celesta (1936); the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937); the Violin Concerto (1938) and particularly in the generally admired Concerto for Orchestra (1943), he showed a modification of his recalcitrant style that resulted in works unburdened by any of the pedantic intellectuality that marred his earlier ones, and that had tended to isolate him from his audience.
In the First Piano Concerto the thematic material is deliberately harsh and dissonant, emphasizing the chordal and percussive potentialities of the piano. Rhythmically activated groups of repeated notes (a characteristic device) ex?plosively punctuated "tone clusters," proliferations of accidentals and their cancellations, use of old Ecclesiastical modes unearthed by Bartok from ancient Hungarian folk music, constantly fluctuating meters, and polytonal complexes create an inordinately difficult work to perform. In spite of its internal involve?ments, its external form is traditional. All of its movements are cast into classical ternary designs, and, if very broadly interpreted, are governed by principles of tonality. However simple and conventional the basic form of this Concerto is, its inner complexities are so great that any attempt to reveal the nature of its component parts is impracticable. The only justification for any such analysis is to make the listener aware of the thematic materials chosen by the composer and their distribution throughout the work. In this case, it would serve no purpose and would only mystify and confuse. No one will fail to be affected by this firmly articulated music, so logical in plan and procedure, or to react to its propulsive rhythms and machine-like energy that dominate until the very last chord.
34
THIRD CONCERT
Saturday Afternoon, May 7 Suite from Lieutenant Kije, Op. 66......Prokofiev
Sergey Sergeyevitch Prokofiev was born in Sontsovska. Russia, April 23, 1891; died in Moscow, March 5, 19S3.
If we wished to establish Prokofiev's genealogy as a composer, we would probably have to betake ourselves to the 18th century ... to composers . . . who have inner sympathy and naivete of creative art in common with him. Prokofiev is a classicist, not a romantic, and his appearance must be considered as a belated relapse of classicism in Russia.
--Leonid Sabaneyev
Sergey Prokofiev, a senior member of a very significant group of Soviet Republic composers, of whom Dmitri Shostakovich is perhaps the most sensa?tional member, after a few startling excursions into the grotesque and only an occasional sojourn into the cacophonous realm of the musical modernism of his day, produced music that was not merely interesting and clever but also bril?liantly effective.
At a period when European audiences either were being doped into a state of insensibility by the vacuity of Post-Impressionists, incensed to riots by the shocking barbarisms of Stravinsky, or baffled into boredom by the mathematical cerebration of Schonberg (whose music then seemed, as far as emotional ex?pression was concerned, to be hermetically sealed), the spectacle of a composer who was still able to create music that had natural ease and fluidity, and a freshness and spontaneity that was essentially "classical," was as surprising as it was eventful.
During a protracted absence from his native land between 1918 and 1932, at which time he traveled in Japan and the United States and lived in Paris, Prokofiev won a tremendous reputation as an international composer. Such works as the Classical Symphony (1916-17), the Scythian Suite (1916), the opera Love of Three Oranges (1921), which he composed for the Chicago Opera Asso?ciation, and the ballet Chout (1921) had, with their driving energy, clear de?signs, bright colors, and ironic overtones, carried his name throughout the musi?cal world. Upon his return to Russia in 1934 and his identification with Soviet cultural life and its rigid proscription on free expression, he steered a cautious course between his own artistic instincts and the demands of the State. Gradually, a shift from his former rather abstract and sometimes abstruse manner to one more immediate and acceptable to Russian audiences was noted. In a tempered frame of mind he wrote, among other works, Lieutenant Kijc in 1934, the Second Violin Concerto in 1935, a Russian Overture and Peter and the Wolf, both in 1936, incidental music for the film Alexander Nevsky and a cantata dedicated to Stalin, Zdravitsa, in 1939, an opera based upon Tolstoy's War and Peace in 1940, his Fifth Symphony in 1945 (his Fourth Symphony had been written seventeen years before), and the Sixth Symphony in 1947.
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Aside from Russian folk-song sources to which he turned for these works, a new romantic idiom began to shape itself. In spite of his conscious attempts to abide by the dictates of the State, he, along with Shostakovich and Khatcha-turian, was attacked by the Communist Party's famous decree of February 11, 1948, for writing music that "smelled strongly of the spirit of modern bourgeois music of Europe and America," and again later in the year by Tikhon Khren-nikov, secretary-general of the Soviet Composers' Union, for his "bourgeois formalism." In spite of these reprimands. Prokofiev, to the end of his life five years later, continued to produce works of high individuality and artistic value. He never lost entirely the clear, terse style and motoric drive he revealed in his earlier works, and although in his compositions after 1935 there was a new emotional quality, an almost romantic richness of melody and the fulfillment of a latent lyricism, the old style was still definite and clearly defined. This con?tinued to give to his music the same sureness and spontaneity that has always been its chief distinction. At the time of his death he was at the very height of his creative powers. He had become infinitely more than a clever composer who delighted in the grotesque; his music, according to Leonid Sabaneyev and many other critics, is the most original and valuable that Russian art of this century has produced.
"Lieutenant Kije" was derived from the incidental music which Prokofiev composed for a Soviet film produced by the studio Belgosking in Leningrad in 1933. The suite, completed and published in 1934, was first performed in Moscow. It had its first performance in the United States in Boston, October IS, 1937, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The film was based on an anecdote about Tzar Nicholas I (1796-1855). He misread the report of his military aide, so that the last syllable of the name of a Russian officer formed a nonexistent name, Kije. The obsequious courtiers, afraid to point out the Tzar's mistake, decided to invent an officer by that name rather than embarass him. Hence all kinds of comical adventures ensued.
I. The Birth of Kije {allegro). As befits one who is born in full regimentals in the brain of a Tzar, Lieutenant Kije is introduced by a cornet fanfare off stage, followed by the tatoo of a military drum and the shrill of the fife. As the other instruments fall in line, the music keeps its parade-like strut. There is a short andante (still in character)--a return of the fife, drum, and cornet.
II. Romance {andante). This movement and the fourth are written with a part for baritone solo, alternative versions following in which this part is given to the tenor saxophone, double-bass solo, and other of the deeper instruments.
The song concerned with Kije's wooing is translated in the score:
Heart, be calm, do not flutter; Don't keep flying, like a butterfly. Well, what has my heart decided Where will we in summer rest But my heart could answer nothing, Beating fast in my poor breast. My grey dove is full of sorrow--
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Moaning is she, day and night, For her dear companion left her, Having vanished from her sight, Sad and dull is now my grey dove.
III. Kije's Wedding {allegro fastoso). The melodic character of this move?ment suggests that Kije's nuptials, like his melancholy wooing were not free from associations of the tavern.
IV. Troika {moderato). Again a tavern song is introduced to an accompani?ment suggestive of the motion of the Russian three-horse sleigh:
A woman's heart is like an inn; All those who wish go in, And they who roam about Day and night go in and out. Come here I say; come here, I say And have no fear with me.
Be you bachelor or not, Be you shy or be you bold, I call you all to come here. So all those who are about Keep going in and coming out, Night and day they roam about.
V. Burial of Kije (andante assai). To complicate matters the Tzar took a special interest in Lieutenant Kije. Regiments in which he was to serve had to be created; excuses for his not appearing in court had to be invented. The only solution was to have him die in combat and be buried with full military honors. The description of the film explains the entire cheerfulness which at?tended the laying away of the imaginary lieutenant. His brief career is summed up in this movement. A cornet fanfare off stage introduces him again, and the themes of his romance and wedding are invoked. The vanishing voice of the muted cornet returns Kije to the insubstantial medium from whence he was created.
Concerto in B minor for Viola and Orchestra .... Handel (Arranged by Henri Casadesus)
Georg Friedrich Handel was born in Halle, Feb?ruary 23, 1685; died in London, April 14, 1759.
The score of this concerto was published by Max Eschig in 1924, as Concerto in B minor for Alto, with Orchestral Accompaniment; Realization de la basse ct orchestre par Henri Casadesus. Henri Casadesus, a violist and the uncle of Robert Casadesus, the well-known pianist, founded the Society dcs Instru?ments Anciens in 1901. In 1926 he presented to the Boston Symphony Orches?tra a collection of old instruments. On April 20, 1927, the Society members ap?peared as artists with the Orchestra, on which occasion Henri Casadesus played the viola d'amore.
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There is a mystery surrounding the work played on this afternoon's program. The manuscript was said by Mr. Casadesus to be in the British museum, but upon further investigation made by Mr. Barclay Squire, who was the Museum's custodian of the King's Music which contained Handel's manuscripts, it was found that no such work existed. It is possible that Mr. Casadesus, like Fritz Kreisler, who for years gave credit to seventeenth and eighteenth century string composers for several of his original string compositions, has perpetrated a harmless hoax in providing himself with a charming work for his favorite instrument. Handel's name, however, is still associated with the work. If not actually by him, it is definitely written in his idiom and style.
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64.....Tchaikovsky
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky was born in Wotkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840; died in Petrograd, November 6, 1893.
What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn that mocked the smart, Through Europe to the Aetolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart That thousands counted every groan And Europe made his woes her own
--Arnold
"No, that is nothing like me, I am far unhappier than that," cried Byron when he beheld in Rome the bust made of him by the sculptor Thorwaldsen. Goethe described Byron in the fine phrase, "His being consists in rich despair," and, in fact, fame, love, wealth, and beauty left him sick with satiety--a despiser of the world. The soul-life of the age bore the stamp of this man for whom "sorrow was knowledge"; he was, in truth, the eponymous hero of an epoch.
The age was literally infected by Byronism. Under one form or another the wave of influence emanating from him was mingled with the current of French, German, and Slavonic Romanticism: his own soul was incarnate in his Manfred, who reflected an increasing egoism in the expression of melancholy. Chateau?briand, in France, who gave such fluent and beautiful expression to the emo?tional ideas originated by Rousseau, created the type of the esprit romanesque in his Rene. At odds with himself and the world, sensitive and disillusioned, full of yearning for love and faith without the strength for either, he felt nothing but bitter emptiness. "All," says Rene, "preaches to one of dissolution--every?thing wearies me, painfully I drag my boredom about with me, and so my whole life is a yawn." Lamartine, in his Meditations poetique carried emotion?alism to the extreme of poetic sensibility. De Musset sang in his self-conscious poetry the pain of a wounded heart; in the art of these poets lyricism embraced eccentricity. Although Goethe's Sorrows of Werther was written as early as 1774, it had a hero with the same romantic desire to feel and to suffer uniquely from an unhappiness caused by hidden, indefinable longing. Slavonic literature,
The Meditations potliquc became the inspiration for Liszt's Les Prlludes in 1848.
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too, stated the "superfluous" theme. Pushkin, the "Russian Byron," in his Eugen Onegin, and Lermantov in The Hero of Our Time created dramatic young men who wrapped themselves in Byron's dark mantle and stalked from one anguish to another.
This mixture of egoism and sensibility is found as basic stuff in the heroes of the literature of the time. Their philosophy was that of another spokesman of their age, Leopardi, who reflected that "sorrow and ennui is our being and dung the earth--nothing more; wherever one looks, no meaning, no fruit." Literature had become a "splendid greeny-gold growth, glittering and seductive, but filled with intoxicating saps that corrode." The contagion of frustration and disbelief was widespread.
From the same over-fertilized emotional soil grew a prolific school of com?position. The supersensitive Chopin cried out his longing in the languorous noc?turnes, Berlioz in his Symphonie jantastique pictured the narcotic dreams of a young artist who, because of unrequited love, had attempted suicide by taking opium. Wagner, expressing one side of the Industrial Revolution in the imperious force and merciless drive of his music, nevertheless allowed his desire-sick soul to long for death as the only release from the world. The "renunciation" motif is the basis of his great dramas. Senta renounces life for the salvation of the Dutchman, Elizabeth dies for Tannhauser, Briinnhilde throws herself upon the funeral pyre of Siegfried to redeem the race, and Tristan and Isolde live only for the night and long for death to unite them forever. Heine had earlier char?acterized this feeling in Germany. "People," he said, "practiced renunciation and modesty, bowed before the invisible, snatched at shadow kisses and blue-flowered scents." This unnatural and unhealthy mental attitude led to a great deal of self-contemplation and introspection which tended to substitute futile or morbid imaginings for solid realities of life. The over-introspective and super-sensitive artist cuts himself off from the larger arc of experience and is prone to exaggerate sentiment, and when, as in the nineteenth century, such a ten?dency is widespread, a whole school may become febrile and erotic.
Tchaikovsky, like Byron, was a child of his age, another victim of "the grief that saps the mind." It is truly said of Byron that he had but one subject-himself--and that saying is equally true of Tchaikovsky. If his personality was less puissant and terrible than that of Byron, his artistic instincts were reflected none the less forcibly in his self-cultivated and exhibitionistic art. His personal unassuageable grief, the tragedies and frustration of his own life, all he knew of anguished apprehension and despair he poured out in his music. His persistent penchant for melancholy expression, his feverish sensibility, his revulsions of artistic feeling, and his fitful emotions which sank him into morbid pessimism, deadening depression, and neurotic fears on the one hand, or raised him to wild hysteria on the other, picture him in the framework of his age. "And if bereft of speech, man bears his pain, a god gave me the gift to tell my sorrow," wrote Tasso. With this gift, Tchaikovsky was magnificently endowed.
The constant oscillation between sudden exultation, violent passion, and un-resisted submission in Tchaikowsky's temperament excluded the sustaining and
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impersonal elements necessary to the true epic. He gave himself up, as Sibelius noted when speaking of his music, to even' situation without looking beyond the moment. So intent was he on the fascination and charm of the single episode, and so aware of the spell of the immediate melodic beauty and the particular suggestive power of the orchestral coloring, that he never gained the superb structural heights or the completely epic conception found in Beethoven. But such is the beauty and power of his themes and so masterful and effective is the use he makes of the orchestral palette that we cannot consider it a dis?crepancy to find so lyric an expression in so epic a form or a weakness that his compositions, in his own words, often "show at the seams and reveal no organic union between the separate episodes." In fact. Tchaikovsky's faults embrace his virtues, and this is the enigma of his genius.
The dates, frequently given for the composition of the Fifth Symphony (1886-87) are incorrect, according to Tchaikovsky's letters; for in one to his brother Modeste (May IS, 1888) he writes: "I am hoping to collect the ma?terials for a symphony." On June 10, 1888, he says in a letter to Mme von Meek: "Have I told you that I intend to write a symphony The beginning was difficult; now, however, inspiration seems to come. We shall see!" Again he writes (August 26, 1888), "I am so glad that I have finished my symphony (No. 5) that I can forget all physical ailments." This would seem to establish the date of its composition.
Tchaikovsky was not pleased with the effect of his new score. After two per?formances in St. Petersburg, and one in Prague, he felt the work to be a com?plete failure. In December, 1888. he wrote to Mme von Meek:
.... After two performances of my new symphony in St. Petersburg and one in Prague I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure. There is something repellent, something superfluous, patchy, and insincere, which the public instinctively recognizes. It was obvious to me that the ovations I received were prompted more by my earlier work, and that the symphony itself did not really please the audience. The conscious?ness of this brings me a sharp twinge of self-dissatisfaction. Am I really played out, as they say Can I merely repeat and ring the changes on my earlier idiom Last night I looked through our symphony (No. 4). What a difference! How immeasureably superior it is! It is very, very sad!
But, in the following spring, the work had great success in Moscow and in Hamburg, where Tchaikovsky himself conducted it. The orchestra men liked it, and Tchaikovsky, with renewed spirits, wrote to his friend Davidov, "I can again boast of a great success. The Fifth Symphony was excellently played, and I have come to love it again."
That Tchaikovsky had a program in his mind when he composed his later symphonies is reasonably certain. In the case of the Fourth (F minor) we know that he wrote a long explanation of its meaning to Mme von Meek--that he endeavored to represent in tones the inexorableness of fate--"a power which consistently hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles and ceaselessly poisons the soul; a power overwhelming and invincible." We know also that the Sixth
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Symphony ("Pathetic") was originally to have been entitled "Program Sym?phony" and that, although its import was never vouchsafed to the world by the composer, its significance was so fraught with meaning to himself that Tchai?kovsky could write. "Often during my wanderings, composing in my mind, I have wept bitterly." But he never even suggested that the Fifth Symphony bore a program.
Ernest Newman has persuasive reasons for thinking that the Fifth Symphony "bears the strongest internal evidence of having been written to a programme." He explains:
The feeling that this is so is mainly due to the recurrence, in each movement, of the theme with which the symphony begins (the opening theme, for clarinets, Andante, E minor, 4-4). This produces a feeling of unity that irresistibly suggests one central con?trolling purpose. The theme in question is peculiarly sombre and fateful. It recurs twice in the following Andante, and again at the end of the waltz that constitutes the third move?ment. In the finale, the treatment of it is especially remarkable. It serves, transposed in the major, to commence this movement; it makes more than one reappearance after?wards. But this is not all the thematic filiation this symphony reveals. One of the themes of the second movement--the Andante--also recurs in the Finale, while the opening subject proper of the Finale (following the Introduction) is plainly based on the opening of the whole symphony. Lastly, the first subject of the allegro of the first movement reappears in the major, on the last page but two of the score, to the same accompaniment as in the allegro. So that--to sum the matter up concisely--the fourth movement contains two themes from the first and one from the second; the third and second movements each contain one theme from the first. No one, I think, will venture to assert that so elaborate a system of thematic repetition as this is due to mere caprice; nor is it easy to see why Tchaikovsky should have indulged in it at all if his object had been merely to write a symphony in four movements. Nothing can be clearer than that the work embodies an emotional sequence of some kind. It is a great pity that we have no definite clue to this; but even on the face of the matter as it now stands the general purport of the symphony is quite plain.
The gloomy, mysterious opening theme (the "motto-theme" in the clarinets) suggests the leaden, deliberate tread of fate. The allegro, after experimenting in many moods, ends mournfully and almost wearily. The beauty of the andante is twice broken in upon by the first sombre theme. The third movement--the waltz--is never really gay; there is always the suggestion of impending fate in it; while at times the scale passages for the strings give it an eerie, ghostly character. At the end of this also there comes the heavy, muffled tread of the veiled figure that is suggested by the opening theme. Finally, the last movement shows us, as it were, the emotional transformation of this theme, evidently in harmony with a change in the part it now plays in the curious drama. It is in the major instead of in the minor; it is no longer a symbol of weariness and forboding, but bold, vigorous, emphatic, self-confident. What may be the precise significance of the beautiful theme from the second movement that reappears in the finale it is impossible to say; but it is quite clear that the transmutation which the first subject of the allegro undergoes, just before the close of the symphony, is of the same psychological order as that of "fate" motive--a change from clouds to sunshine, from defeat to triumph.
'May Festival Program Hook, 1940.
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Saturday Evening, May 7 Toccata and Fugue in D minor.........Bach
Transcribed for Orchestra by Eugene Ormandy
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach. March 21, 168S; died in Leipzig, July 28, 17S0.
In Johann Sebastian Bach, the musical development of two centuries reached its climax. From a family of distinguished musicians famous in Germany for one hundred and fifty years, he gathered the full heritage of his predecessors and used, with incomparable effect, all the musical learning of his day.
Born in the heart of medieval Germany, in the remote town of Eisenach, under the tree-clad summits of the Thuringian Wald, Bach lived in an atmos?phere charged with poetry, romance, and music. The stately Wartburg, where the German Bible came into being, and which once sheltered Luther, towered precipitously over the village. Here, in 1207, the famous Tourney of Song was held, and German minstrelsy flowered.
In these surroundings Bach spent his youth, and his musical foundation was formed under the careful guidance of his father. Subsequent events in his life were less propitious. Orphaned at ten, he pursued his studies alone, turning to the work of Buxtehude. Pachelbel, and other predecessors and contemporaries as models-Singing in a church choir to gain free tuition at school, traveling on foot to neighboring towns where he heard the visiting organists who brought him occa?sional touches with the outside world, securing menial positions as organist in Arnstadt and Miihlhausen filled the monotonous years of this great master's youth-
Although he gained some fame as the foremost organist of his day, he was ignored and neglected as a composer. References by contemporaries are scanty; they had no insight into the value of his artFifty years after his death his music was practically unknown, most of the manuscripts having been lost or mislaid-
The neglect, discovery, and final triumph of Bach's music are without parallel in history. His triumphant progress from utter obscurity to a place of unrivaled and unprecedented brilliance is a unique phenomenon. Today his position is extraordinary. Never was there a period when there were more diverse ideals, new methods, confusion of aims and styles, yet never has Bach been so uni?versally acknowledged as the supreme master of music.
Certainly masterpieces were never so naively conceived. Treated with con?tempt by his associates in Leipzig, where he spent the last years of his life, and restrained by the narrow ideals and numbing pedantry of his superiors, he went on creating a world of beauty, without the slightest thought of posterity. The
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quiet old cantor, patiently teaching his pupils Latin and music, supervising all the choral and occasional music in the two principal churches of Leipzig, gradu?ally losing his sight, never for a moment dreamed of immortality. He continued, year after year, to fulfill his laborious duties, and in doing so created the great works that have brought him eternal fame. Although his ambitions never passed beyond his city, church, and family, his art grew, deepened, and flowed on into the advancing years. The changed media of expression, the increased expressive qualities of the modern pianoforte, organ, and complex orchestra have brought to the world a realization of the great dormant and potential beauties that lay in his work.
Mr. Ormandy's transcription, done with great respect and feeling for the old master, reveals this hidden beauty. What a magnificent world Sebastian evolved from the dry, stiff, pedantic forms of his time! As Wagner put it, "No words can give a conception of its richness, its sublimity, its all-comprehensiveness." Bach lived in Weimar from 1708 to 1717 where he held the position of court organist. There he wrote his finest organ works, using the current French and Italian styles with great independence. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor dates from the early part of that residence-
The toccata (from the Italian word toccare, to touch), a conventional and familiar form in Bach's day, was a kind of prelude which offered an opportunity to display the "touch" or execution of the performer. As a form it lacked defini?tion, but like a fantasia, it was improvisatory in its style and often very showy in character-There is something Gothic about Bach's great Toccata and Fugue in D minor. It is like a cathedral towering from tremendous masses into tenuous spires. While it is beyond the power of music to represent the world of reality, it can present the fundamental qualities which lie behind reality; and Bach's music conveys, through the subtle medium of ordered sound, the abstract qualities which the Gothic cathedral possesses--solidity, endurance, strength--and above all, aspiration.
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67......Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Decem?ber 16, 1770; died in Vienna, March 26, 1827.
In music, Beethoven created the age of Romanticism to such a degree that the new movement which began in the early nineteenth century might be called "Beethovenism." On the other hand there is no more decided proof in music history that the age produces the artist, for in his life and in his art Beethoven was the very embodiment of the conflicting forces of his times. Born at the end of the eighteenth century, he witnessed, in the formative period of his life, the drastic changes that were affecting the political, intellectual, and artistic life of central Europe. The French Revolution had violently announced the death of an old civilization and the dawn of a new social regime. During this period of chaos, Beethoven stood a colossus, bridging with a mighty grasp the
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two centuries in which he lived -one which saw devastation, the other, hope based upon that destruction. He embodied the ideas of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; he became the sage of the one and the prophet of the other. These two elements were mutually helpful in making him the out?standing representative of each. His romantic tendencies helped him to infuse Promethean fire into the old, now lusterless forms he had inherited, and to endow them with a new and powerful utterance. His respect for the best of classic tradition made him the greatest of the early romanticists, for it aided him in tempering any desire for fantastic extremes. Thus this harmonious em?bodiment of opposing forces, controlled by an architectonic intelligence that molded and fused them together into one passionate, creative impulse, resulted in the production of epoch-making masterpieces, built upon firm foundations, but emancipated from all confining elements of tradition, and set free to dis?cover new regions of unimagined beauty.
He boldly entered this new uncharted realm with the Third Symphony ("Eroica") in 1803. Never before had music been so avid in its attempt to express the profound or to explore the heights and depths of thought and emo?tion; its sudden ingenuity, audacity, and resourcefulness freed it forever after from the fetters of convention that were restricting it. Beethoven had taxed his creative powers to the utmost in this stupendous work, and even his genius could not readily regain the heights he there attainedIn the Fourth Symphony (1806) less problematical material was treated with far less intensity of effortBut in the Fifth, Beethoven again sought the unexplored, guided by the artistic insight he had gained in composing the "Eroica."
The date of the completion of the Fifth Symphony is not definitely known-According to Thayer "this wondrous work was no sudden inspirationThemes for the Allegro, Andante, and Scherzo are found in sketchbooks belonging, at the very latest, to the years of 1800 and 1801 (between the composition of the First and Second Symphonies). There are studies also preserved which show that Beethoven wrought upon it while engaged on Fidclio and the Pianoforte Concerto in G (1804-6), when he laid the C-minor Symphony aside for the composition of the Fourth. That is all that is known of the rise and progress of this famous symphony."
Those who believe that a great piece of music is simply profoundly felt emo?tion poured out under the immediate impact of events or experience that gener?ate that emotion have been persistent in their attempts to read specific meaning into this work. Beethoven's noble music has been constantly dragged from its Empyrean heights to dwell in the world of the commonplace, by imposing upon it an extramusical content. The romantic vaporings of incurable sentimentalists have read into the Fifth Symphony everything from the summons of Fate to the Song of the Yellowhammer, and have never ceased to mention the inevitable overtones of unrequited and tragic love. Sir George Grove, for instance, writes:
"Alexander Wheclock Thayer, The Life oj Ludwig van Beethoven, trans, and ed. by H. E. Krehbiel. English ed. publ. by the Beethoven Association of New York (London: Novello & Co., 1921), 3 vols.
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The composition of the C minor covered the time before the engagement of Beethoven with the Countess Therese von Brunswick, the engagement itself, and a part of the period of agitation when the lovers were separated. . . . Now, considering the extraordinary imag?inative and disturbed character of the symphony, it is impossible not to believe that the work ?--the first movement, at any rate--is based on his relations to the Countess, and is more or less a picture of their personality and association. ... In fact, the first movement seems to contain actual portraits of the two chief actors in the drama. ... At any rate, in this move?ment he unbosoms himself as he has never done before . . . we hear the palpitating accents and almost the incoherence of the famous love-letters, but mixed with an amount of fury which is not in them.
Vincent d'Indy, an equal offender, remarks in his book on Beethoven: "All of those compositions of Beethoven's Second Period, 1801-1815, which tell of or reveal amorous anguish, can apparently be traced, chronologically speaking, only to his passion for Giulietta Guicciardi. Neither Theresa Malfatti, nor Amalie Sebald, nor Bettina Brentano, nor the other women whom Beethoven might have noticed, have left any impression on his musical production.'"
The utter futility of ever attempting to interpret truthfully the meaning of this music is further shown in the rapturous depiction of Hector Berlioz, who. writing of the first movement, says:
It is devoted to the painting of disordered sentiments which overthrow a great soul, a prey to despair; not the concentrated, calm despair that borrows the shape of resignation; not the dark and voiceless sorrow of Romeo, who learns of the death of Juliet; but the terrible rage of Othello, when he receives from Iago's mouth the poisonous slanders which persuade him of Desdemona's guilt. Now it is a frenetic delirium which explodes in frishtful cries; and now it is the prostration that has only accents of regret and profound self-pity. Hear these hiccups of the orchestra, these dialogues in chords between winds and strings which come and go, always weaker and fainter, like unto the painful breathing of a dying man, and then give way to a phrase full of violence in which the orchestra seems to rise to its feet, revived in a flash of fury; see this shuddering mass hesitate a moment, and then rush headlong, divided in two burning unisons as two streams of lava; and then say if this passionate style is not beyond and above everything that had been produced hitherto in instrumental music
How far music's meaning can vary when its effects are confused with its essence is charmingly stated by E. M. Forster in his novel, Howards End, at the beginning of Chapter V:
It is generally admitted that Beethoven's Yth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts of conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are like Mrs. Munt and tap surreptitiously when the tunes come--or like Helen, who can see heros and shipwrecks in the musical flood; ... or like their cousin, Fraulein Mose-bach, who remembers all the time that Beethoven is, "echt Deutsch," or like Mosebach's young man, who can remember nothing but Fraulein Mosebach. In any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at 2 shillings.!
George Grove, Beethoven and His .Vine Symphonies (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1888). fVincent d'Indy, "Beethoven," Musiciens celcbres, 1913, English trans. (New York: G. Schirmer). tHector Berlioz, "Etude analytique des symphonies de Beethoven," Voyage Musieale, I (Pari. 1844). 5E. M. Forster, Howards End (N'cw York: Putnam 5i Sons, 1911).
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All of this is, of course, an insult to the very spirit of music. Such imaginings tie it down to finite things, and music should not be thus bound. What poverty of mind and little understanding of the psychical processes by which a signifi?cant piece of music comes into being is revealed by such attempts to make the most evasive and ephemeral of all the arts finite and specific. "Music," writes Ernest Newman, "is simply air in motion, and though the sound symbols written down by the composer at a particular time may have taken the form and color they did because of some volcanic experience of his in the outer world, or some psychological change within himself at that or some earlier time, it is always dangerous to try to read into the notes an expression of that experience."
Whatever Beethoven was trying to express outside of the music itself, one thing is certain: he created a symphony of tremendous concentration, concision, and heroic powerIn the words of Lawrence Gilman:
Whatever Beethoven did or did not intend to say to us in this tonal revelation, there is one trait that the C-minor Symphony has beyond every other, and that is the quality of epic valor.
There is nothing in music quite like the heroic beauty of those first measures of the finale that burst forth at the end of the indescribable transition from the Scherzo with its swiftly cumulative crescendo, and the overwhelming emergence of the trombones--so cannily held in reserve throughout the foregoing movements.
This is music pregnant with the greatness of the indomitable human soul. Listening to it, one knows that the inward ear of Beethoven had almost caught that lost word which, could a man but find it, would make him master of the hosts of Fate and of the circling worlds.t
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73.......Brahms
Johannes Brahms was born May 7, 1833, at Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, at Vienna.
The differences that actually exist between the art of the two great contem?poraries Brahms and Tchaikovsky are slight indeed. Criticism in the past has been too insistent on symbolizing each of these masters as the epitome of contrasting ideals in the music of their age. It has identified their aesthetic theories and the conflict that raged around them with their art and has come to the false conclusion that no two artists reveal a greater disparity of style, expression, and technique-
In truth, Tchaikovsky and Brahms were products of the same artistic soil, nurtured by the same forces that conditioned the standards and norms of art in their time. They both lived in a spiritually poverty stricken and soul sick period, when anarchy seemed to have destroyed culture; an age which was distinctly unfavorable to genuinely great art, unfavorable because of its pre?tentiousness and exclusiveness and its hidebound worship of the conventional. Its love of luxury and its crass materialism brought in its wake disillusionment,
Ernest Newman, "Beethoven: the Last Phase," Atlantic Monthly, March, 1953. tPhiladelphia Orchestra Program Book. 1937-38 Season, p. 232. tSee notes on Tchaikowsky, pages 38 to 41.
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FOURTH CONCERT
weariness, and indifference to beauty; its showy exterior did not hide the inner barrenness of its culture. Brahms and Richard Wagner, another of his contem?poraries, though opposed in verbal theory, stand together strong in the face of opposing forces, disillusioned beyond doubt with the state of their world, but not defeated by it. Both shared in a serious purpose and noble intention and sought the expression of the sublime in their art, and each in his own way tried to strengthen the flaccid spirit of the time by sounding a note of courage and hope?fulness. Brahms's first piano concerto, the German Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody, the Song of Destiny, and particularly the great tragic songs all speak in the som?ber, earnest, but lofty accents of Wagner. It is no accident that the real Brahms seems to be the serious, contemplative Brahms of these works, for here is to be found the true expression of an artist at grips with the artistic and spiritual problems of his time. Even as Beethoven before him, he was essentially of a hearty and vigorous mind. Standing abreast of such vital spirits as Carlyle and Browning, he met the challenge of his age and triumphed in his art. By the exercise of a clear intelligence and a strong critical faculty he was able to temper the tendency toward emotional excess and to avoid the pitfalls of utter despair into which Tchaikovsky was invariably led. Although Brahms experienced disillu?sionment no less than Wagner and Tchaikovsky, his was another kind of tragedy --the tragedy of a man born out of his time. He suffered from the changes in taste and perception that inevitably come with the passing of time. His particu?lar disillusionment, however, did not affect the power and sureness of his artistic impulse. With grief he saw the ideals of Beethoven dissolve in a welter of cheap emotionalism. He saw the classic dignity of that art degraded by an infiltration of tawdry programmatic effects and innocuous imitation and witnessed finally its subjugation to poetry and the dramatic playAll of this he opposed with his own grand style--profoundly moving, noble, and dignifiedWith a sweep and thrust he forced music out upon her mighty pinions to soar once more. What Matthew Arnold wrote of Milton's verse might well have been written of the music of Brahms: "The fullness of thought, imagination, and knowledge make it what it is" and its mighty power lies "in the refining and elevation wrought in us by the high and rare excellence of the grand style"
Brahms lived his creative life upon the "cold white peaks" and in his epic conception of form often verged upon the expression of the sublimeNo master ever displayed a more inexorable self-discipline or held his art in higher respect. He was a master of masters, always painstaking in the devotion he put into his work and undaunted in his search for perfection. The Brahms of music is the man, in Milton's magnificent phrase, "of devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out His seraphim with the hallowed fire from His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases."
The criticism of the Brahms Second Symphony, written by Edward Hanslick, critic for the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, noted in "its uniform coloring and its sunny clearness" an advance upon the first, and one that is not to be under-
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estimated. There was no possible doubt of the success of the symphony in Vienna. Many of the other important members of the critical brotherhood in Vienna, who had found the first symphony "abstruse" and "difficult of compre?hension" waxed enthusiastic in their admiration of the second, and hailed it as a grateful relief. The abstruseness and austerity of the forbidding C-minor Symphony, however, have worn off, and today the observation may be made that time has set these two symphonies in rather a different light for the present generation. The C minor seems to have borrowed something of the rich tender?ness, something of the warmly human quality, that has been regarded as the special property of the D major, and to have conferred upon the latter in return something of its own sobriety and depth of feeling. The C minor appears far less austere and much more compassionate than it evidently did in 1876, and the D major seems less unqualifiedly a thing of "pure happiness and gently tender grace."
This critical opinion of the D-major Symphony is stated more completely by Walter Niemann:
The Second Symphony, Op. 73, in D major, which followed the First three years later, may be called Brahms's Pastoral Symphony. Just as the First Symphony, with its sombre pathos, struggled upwards in thirds from movement to movement out of darkness into the sun, to a godlike serenity and freedom, so the Second, with its loftily Anacreontic mood, descends in a peaceful cycle of descending thirds in its three movements, the first being in D, the second in B. the third in G major. Even today the Brahms Second Symphony is still undeservedly a little overshadowed by the First and Third. Like Beet?hoven's Pastoral Symphony, on its appearance it was dismissed, far too curtly and pre?maturely, as marking a "little rest" on the part of the composer--perhaps due to fatigue after the deeply impassioned heroics of the First Symphony--and as being throughout a harmless, pleasing, agreeable, cheerfully "sunlit" idyll. Nothing could be further from the truth! The period between the sixties and eighties of the last century, which, in spite of all Germany's victorious wars, was so peculiarly languid, inert, and full of bourgeois sensibility in art. as well as in politics and human relations, had, none the less, as its artistic ideal a heart-rending pathos and monumental grandeur. Nowadays, regard?ing things from a freer and less prejudiced point of view, we are fortunately able to detect far more clearly the often oppressive spiritual limitations, moodiness, and atmos?phere of resignation in such pleasant, apparently cheerful and Anacreontic works as Brahms's Second Symphony. Like its sister-symphony in the major--namely, the Third --the Second, though nominally in the major, has the veiled, indeterminate Brahmsian "Moll-Dur" character, hovering between the two modes.
Indeed, this undercurrent of tragedy in the second Brahms symphony, quiet and slight though it may be, is perceptible to a fine ear in every movement. It is audible in the first movement, with its almost excessive wealth of themes and the unusually broad plan of its exposition section, which amalgamates so many diverse elements into a united whole--in the two A major themes of the concluding section, one with its aggressive upward leaps in a dotted rhythm, the other unified by strongly imitative devices and full of passionate insistence; but it can also be perceived in the fragments of the theme worked into an ominous strelto on the wind in the development section. The second movement, the adagio non troppo, also reveals the tragic undercurrent of this symphony in its suffering, melancholy, and deeply serious spirit. How dejected and tremulous in mood is the noble principal theme on the 'cellos, to what pitch of deep, passionate agi?tation does the development section work up, how musing and sorrowful is the close! It is only the F-sharp major second subject, floating softly by in Schumannesa.ue syncopa-
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tions, that brings a touch of brightness into the melancholy scene of this adagio by the brief glance which it casts back into the lost paradise of childhood and youth. The serious undercurrent also makes itself felt within quite small limits in what is perhaps the most typical and individual movement, the Brahmsian "intermezzo pastorale" of its allegretto grazioso. Less, perhaps, in a trio which forms the middle section (presto in 24 time)--with the slight Hungarian tinge in both its rhythm and its theme, formed by diminution from the principal subject of the first section--than in the enchanting, half-elegiac, half-mischievous principal section of the G minor, allegretto. The way in which the naively pastoral oboe sings forth the perfectly simple, simply harmonized theme in accents of sweet, suave melancholy once again recalls the young composer of the D major Serenade. But it is perhaps in the finale that the quiet tragic undercurrent of this ostensibly cheerful symphony is most plainly apparent; in the frequent energetic attempts to shake off the all too peaceful and idyllic reverie, in the fantastic, romantic, and ghostly elements which can be seen glimmering beneath the ashes in a supernatural, uncanny way throughout the whole development section. For all its apparent vivacity of movement and the apparently unclouded brightness of the D major key, the finale hides within it many sombre features, and even spectral and supernatural visions.
Thus Brahms's Second Symphony, as a great idyll with a slightly tragic tinge, which we may compare with that great, ruthlessly tragic poet Hebbel's fine epic Mutter und Kind, was at the same time, as a "tragic idyll," a piece of the most genuine and typical local Holstein and Low German art. Its quiet, unconscious tragedy hidden beneath the blossoms of a soft idyll of man and nature, with a subdued evening tinge and a prevailing pastoral spirit, carries direct conviction to a discriminating and unprejudiced listener-far more so, in any case, than the conscious and almost forced and deliberate tragedy of the First Symphony or the Tragic Overture. Here again, perhaps, there has been no conductor of our day, who has simply ignored the traditional legend as to the innocent, idyllic charac?ter of the second Brahms symphony and interpreted it as what it really is: a great, wonder?ful, tragic idyll, as rich in sombre and subdued colour as it is in brightness. If one knew nothing but the finale, one might rather call it an "Anacreontic" symphony. For the subdued shimmer of festal joyousness in its principal subject (allegro con spirito) reminds us of Cherubini's Anacreon Overture, and the broad, jovial singing quality of its second theme, in A major, breathes pure joie dc vivre. What is more, the transition passages and development sparkle with a Haydnesque spirit. Yet, in spite of its predominant character, now pungent and sparkling, now dreamy and romantic, even this movement, though ap?parently so full of unclouded cheerfulness, is rich in mysterious Wagnerian visions, suggestive of the Wanderer, in a mystic, woodland, faery, nature atmosphere recalling the Rheingold in many sombre and even ghostly passages.
The first movement {Allegro non troppo, D major, 34 time) brings for?ward the principal subject at once without any introduction. The transitional passage leading to the second subject commences with a new and undulating melody in the first violins, the second subject entering, some forty measures later, with a broad and singing theme played by the violoncellos. After the repetition of this in the woodwinds a second section of the subject is introduced, a vigorous marcato passage in A major, followed by a further presentation of the former theme given out by the violoncellos, this time accompanied by a triple figure in the flute. This closes the exposition. The development works out with considerable elaborateness the principal theme and the undulating passage which led in the exposition from the first to the second subject. The latter theme is not worked out at all The recapitulation brings forward the same material
Walter Niemann, Brahms (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1937).
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as that which has been heard in the exposition, but its presentation is modified as to the instrumentation, and the subjects are stated with contrapuntal em?bellishments in the accompanying partsAt the conclusion of the second subject a coda is introduced, its material being largely concerned with the opening theme of the movement, and ending tranquilly with a sustained chord, piano, in the wind instruments.
The second movement (Adagio non troppo, B major, 44 time) begins with an expressive melody in the violoncellos, the first six measures being later repeated by the first and second violins in unisonAn imitative passage, heard successively in the first horn, the oboes, and the flutes, leads eventually to the second theme (L'istesso tempo, ma grazioso, 128 time)This, in its turn, is succeeded by another idea, heard in the strings, and developed in the wood?winds with a counterpoint in the violas and violoncellos. After an elaborate development of this material a recapitulation of the former subjects is intro?duced, these being, however, considerably modified in length and in the manner of their presentation, the movement ending quietly with a final suggestion of its opening theme.
The third movement {Allegretto grazioso [quasi andantino] in G major, 34 time) is written in the form of an intermezzo with two episodes or trios. Its principal theme is heard in the oboe, the two clarinets, and bassoons, with a pizzicato accompaniment in the violoncellos. This is succeeded by the first episode in 24 time {Presto ma non assai) which is really a variant of the open?ing subject which, first presented in the strings, is re-echoed by the woodwinds. After a modified restatement of the opening theme the second episode in 38 time (Presto ma non assai) is introduced. Following this the first theme is heard for the last time, beginning in F-sharp major, and modulating later to the original tonality of G major, in which key the movement closes.
The finale (Allegro con spirito, in D major, 22 time) is written in the sonata form. Its principal subject opens in the strings. A long transitional passage leading to the second theme is based on this material. The second sub?ject, in A major, is first allotted to the strings, afterward being taken up by the woodwinds with an accompanying figure in the strings, drawn from the first measure of the principal subject.
Another division of this theme--in the full orchestra, ben marcato--is heard later, eventually leading into the development. This part of the movement is occupied solely with a working out of the opening and closing measures of the principal theme. The recapitulation presents the two principal subjects in much the same fashion as that in which they have been in the exposition, and it comes to a close with an elaborate and lengthy coda, the material of which is partly taken from the first measure of the second subject and partly from the opening measure of the first.
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Sunday Afternoon, May 8 Chichester Psalms............Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein was born in Law?rence, Massachusetts, August 25, 1918.
The knowledge of Mr. Bernstein's prodigious gifts as conductor, composer for the concert hall and lyric theatre, pianist, author, and television personality is by now so proverbial that it needs no further elaboration. He spent his youth in Boston, was graduated from Harvard in 1939, and after two years at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he was a pupil of Fritz Reiner in con?ducting and Randall Thompson in orchestration, he came under the guidance of Serge Koussevitsky at Tanglewood (1940-41). There he met Artur Rod-zinsky. then musical director of the New York Philharmonic, who engaged him as assistant conductor for the 1943-44 season. His public debut with the orches?tra came when, on November 7, 1944, he substituted for the ailing Bruno Walter. From then on his rise to fame was meteoric. After many guest appear?ances with the New York Philharmonic, he was appointed one of two principal conductors in 1957-58 and assumed the directorship the following season.
Along with his phenomenal progress as a conductor, he was also winning wide recognition as a composer of both popular and serious music. For the "Jeremiah" Symphony he was awarded the New York Critics' Circle Citation for "the most outstanding orchestral work by an American composer." It was performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in its 1943-44 season and won critical acclaim. The same year he produced the enormously popular ballet Fancy Free for the Ballet Theatre. (In 1947 he rearranged the music for orchestra alone, retitling it "Choreographic Essay"). Several years later a second ballet Fac?simile (1949) reached the stage with equal success. But it was the vivacious musical On the Town (1944) that established him as a Broadway personality. After two more musical shows--Wonderful Town (1953) and Candide (1956) --he wrote West Side Story (1957), a work which has proved to be a milestone in the history of the American musical theater, combining stunning ballets, a rare amalgam of serious and popular musical idioms, and spectacular theatri-calism. Among other works there were a musical score for the prize-winning film On the Waterfront (1954) and a one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti (1952). A choral symphony, the "Kaddish," was written in 1963 to a Hebrew text. The "Chichester Psalms" which followed it in 1965 is his last work, and like its immediate predecessor, uses a text in Hebrew. But here all resemblance ends, for this paean of faith and hope is in sharp contrast to the despair and anguish sounded in the "Kaddish" Symphony.
The title is drawn from Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England. Every summer in England the cathedrals of Winchester, Salisbury, and Chichester join forces for a Festival of Choral Music. In 1965 the Very Reverend Walter
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Hussy, Dean of Chichester, commissioned Mr. Bernstein to compose a new work for the event, and for it he produced the "Chichester Psalms," perhaps the most spontaneous and sincerely effective work he has written. Its strange mixture of religious, contemporary, and popular idioms may deprive it of a desired unity of effect, but it provides an enchanting experience. The work is scored for strings, three trumpets, three trombones, two harps, and a large percussion section.
The text is derived from brief extracts from Psalms 2, 108, 133, and Psalms 23, 100, and 131 in their entirety.
First movement: Maestoso ma energico; allegro molto; dolce tranquillo (Text:
Psalm 108, vs. 2; Psalm 100 in its entirety).
For the text that exhorts man ';to make a joyful noise unto the Lord," Mr. Bernstein has written spirited, pulsating music that is wonderfully appropriate, in which chorus and instrumental parts are combined with great ingenuity and colorful effect:
Awake, psaltery and harp! I will rouse the dawn!
Make a joyful noise unto the
Lord all ye lands.
Serve the Lord with gladness.
Come before His presence with singing.
Know ye that the Lord, He is God.
It is He that hath made us, and
not we ourselves.
We are His people and the sheep
of His pasture.
Enter into His gates with
thanksgiving,
And into His courts with praise.
Be thankful unto Him, and bless
His name.
For the Lord is good, His mercy
is everlasting,
And His truth endureth to all
generations.
Second movement: Andante con moto, via tranquillo; allegro feroce; I'istesso
tempo (Text: Psalm 23 in its entirety; Psalm 2, vs. 1-4). Perhaps the greatest challenge for any composer is to create a musical setting for a widely-known and respected text. Mr. Bernstein has faced it here by employing a simple folklike melody that is entirely apposite to the sentiment of the words. The use of a boy alto voice is most ingenious and touching. This sweet pastoral melody, sung by the young David to a harp accompaniment, augmented by the chorus, is interrupted by sharp, shouting sounds in men's voices which turn momentarily to Psalm 2 and narrate how the kings of the earth conspire in vain against the Lord. The solo alto voice re-enters and slowly and mournfully continues its peaceful melody against the ominous whispers of the men's voices. It finally restores the mood of serenity:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall
not want
He maketh me to lie down in
green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still
waters,
He restoreth my soul,
52
He leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness,
For His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk
Through the valley of the shadow
of death,
I will fear no evil,
FIFTH CONCERT
For Thou art with me.
Thy rod and Thy staff
They comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me
In the presence of mine enemies,
Thou annointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy
Shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.
Why do the nations rage,
and the people imagine a vain thing
The kings of the earth set themselves,
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the Lord and against His annointed.
Saying, let us break their bands asunder,
And cast away their cords from us.
He that sitteth in the heavens
Shall laugh, and the Lord
Shall have them in derision!
Third movement: Sostenuto molto; adagio (Text: Psalm 131 in its entirety;
Psalm 133, vs. 1).
In Psalm 131 a sustained instrumental prelude for string orchestra evokes a mood of quiet meditation that restores our trust in God and our hope for peace and brotherhood:
Lord, Lord,
My heart is not haughty, Nor mine eyes lofty, Neither do I exercise myself In great matters or in things Too wonderful for me. Surely I have calmed And quieted myself,
As a child that is weaned of his mother, My soul is even as a weaned child. Let Israel hope in the Lord From henceforth and forever. Behold how good, And how pleasant it is, For brethren to dwell Together in unity.
Requiem................Delius
Frederick Delius was born in Bradford, England, Janu?ary 29, 1862; died at Grez-sur-Loing on June 10, 1934.
As Beethoven is the morning, and Wagner the high noon, so Delius is the sunset of that great period of music which is called Romantic.
--Haseltdje
With the advent of Frederick Delius, Romanticism, which had given the art of music such tremendous vitality, began to fade. He reached his full maturity while it still survived as a potent force of musical fecundity but was already passing out of fashion. Instinctively, he sensed the approaching end of a glorious era of creativity. His voice, like that of his German contemporary Gustav Mahler, echoed from a vanishing world that was becoming increasingly remote, still beheld in the distance but irrecoverably lost. Delius, unable to sustain the magnificence and splendor of the past, sought solace in recollection and refuge in quiet resignation. "The music of Delius," wrote Cecil Gray, "be-
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MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
longs essentially to the same phase of Romanticism as the art of Flaubert, Gaugin, Verlaine, and Baudelaire--all possessed by the nostalgia of the infinite and the unappeasable longing for an impossible bliss." The essence of his art lies in its "fragrance and affectionate intimacy," in those works or passages when quiet reflection creates, through a wealth of nuance, a feeling of elusive-ness and reticence, or where on the other hand it surges with rhapsodic freedom. In any case his best music resists catagories and defies analysis.
Delius stood quite apart from the main currents of influence that were reshap?ing the music of his time, and he did nothing to support the tenets of contempo?rary art or to advance the cause of modern music. He engaged in no propaganda and created no scandals. He never ventured beyond the borderline of tonality, although within it he moved with ease and freedom. His conscious neglect of forms preordained by tradition, his avoidance of sharply contrasted themes and their calculated development, his use of musical motives that never repeat their original shape, his proclivity for cadences that have a "dying fall," and his indulgence in constantly shifting chromatic harmonies all conspire to give the impression that his music is without form. It seems to evolve from hetero-logous shapes in continuous improvisation. Moving within a limited orbit, how?ever, it creates its own quiet energy and purposefulness.
There seems to be no middle ground in the evaluation of Delius. For those who have a genuine affection for him and a special kind of sensibility, as did Sir Thomas Beecham, his music holds an irresistible magic and subtle beauty. For those who don't, it yields severe monotony of mood and texture and con?sequently creates relentless tedium.
No work of his has induced more differences of opinion as to its merit than the Requiem. To his detractors it is a "lapse into sheer banality" . . . "an inex?plicable and embarassing indiscretion" containing "the most characteristic faults without their compensative virtues"; to his defenders, although they concede it to be far from a masterwork, it is "tragic and moving," as well as "joyous and inspiring." All agree that it does not represent his most distinguished or typical work. According to Anthony Gishford, Delius, who always found it difficult to "externalize his own feelings and convert them into a symbol of universal grief," was defeated by a text that had no continuity of thought and no positive point of view.t The truth is that the Requiem, of all his choral works (Sea Drift, 1903; A Mass for Life, 1905; Songs of Sunset, 1907; The High Hills, 1912), has in the past excited the least interest with the public. Perhaps the reason that the music of Delius seems remote to our impetuous age is due to the fact that it was evolved from "emotion contemplated in tranquility"-a quality that has all but disappeared from modern life and art. Robert Hull, in his essay on Delius, quotes Dr. Dyson who wrote:
Cecil Gray, Survey of Contemporary Music (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1927.) tAnthony Gishford, "Delius: The Choral Music," Tempo, a Quarterly Review oj Modern Musk (Winter, 195253) No. 26.
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FIFTH CONCERT
He has at least one quality which is above all others scarce in our time. He has a deep, a quiet and an intrinsic sense of beauty. Is it this that our generation has lost, or is losing His movements of tranquil yet enchanting fantasy were not born of the tumult of today. . . . They must be tasted without passion, without impatience. Delius is not of the market place. . . . His is often a rhapsodic art, but still more is it at times an art of pure contempla?tion, and an art of pure contemplation is not easy to produce in this twentieth century of ours.
The Requiem was conceived during the years of World War I, and was dedi?cated to the memory of "all young artists fallen in the war." After it, Delius wrote no other big choral work until, blind and paralyzed at the age of sixty-eight, he "dictated "The Songs of Farewell" to Eric Fenby in 1930. "Despite the tranquility and serenity which pervade his music," wrote Cecil Gray, "one hears always, as its burden and undercurrent, the still sad music of humanity, sorrow that lies at the heart of all mortal joys--a sense of happiness irrevocably past.'
Philip Heseltine has given the following analysis of the Requiem:
The work opens with an impressive and majestic movement for double chorus and orchestra. "One day is like another, and all our days are rounded with a sleep. They pass and never return again." The mood recalls the first of the Ernste Gesange of Brahms: "All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." After considerable develop?ment of this theme, the solo voice enters with a denunciation of the "weaklings filled with woe and fear" who "drugged themselves with dreams and golden visions, and built them?selves a house of lies to live in." But "then rose a storm with mighty winds and laid it low. And out of the storm the voice of Truth resounded in trumpet tones: Man thou art mortal and needs must die." The opening chorus is repeated and gradually swells into a funeral march of great breadth and nobility. But this is interrupted by "the crowd," repre?sented by a divided chorus of which the Christian section reiterates Hallelujah "with vigour and fervour" for twenty-one bars in frenzied competition with the La il Allah of the Mohammedan section.
Gradually the shouting dies away and the philosopher is left musing upon the vanity of the world and its ways. The chorus takes up the burden: "All who are living know that death is coming, but at the touch of death lose knowledge of all things, nor have they remembrance more of the ways and doings of men on the earth where they were." "There?fore," saith the Preacher (Eccles. IX, 7), "eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart . . . Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy vanity . . . Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest." And the chorus murmurs over again: "The living know that they shall die, but the dead know not anything."
The second part of the Requiem begins with a song, for baritone solo, in praise of his beloved who was, "like a flower among whose fragrant petals love made his dwelling." "I praise her," he continues, "above all other women who are poor in their being and so are poor in giving too. Were not the world the abode of dissemblers and were not men's hearts so impure, then all mankind would join me in praising my beloved. She gave herself to many and yet remained chaste and pure as a flower ..." A soprano solo follows: "I honour the man who can love life and yet without base fear can die. He has attained the heights and won the crown of life . . . The sun goes down and evening spreads her hands in blessing o'er the world, bestowing peace. Night comes and binds our eyes with cloths of darkness in a long dreamless sleep. The soul of man sings but this only: Farewell,
Leonard and Virginia Wolff, The Hogarth Essays, second series (London: The Hogarth Press, 1928), p. 44. tGray, op. cit.
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I love yc all and the voices of Nature sing in answer: Thou art our brother! And so the star of his life sinks back into the darkness whence it arose."
The concluding section is a rhapsody of spring, in which is portrayed the awakening of Nature from its winter sleep. Finally, the chorus breaks into a chant of the eternal recurrence of all things in Nature and, after a very strange passage of wistful looking back in an overwhelming moment of regret and doubt, the work ends peacefully to the sound of distant bells and cuckoo calls.
Our days here are as one day,
For all our days are rounded in a sleep,
They die and ne'er come back again.
Why then dissemble we with a tale of falsehoods We are e'en as a day, that's young at morning And old at eventide, departs and nevermore returns.
At this regard the weaklings waxed sore afraid,
And drugged themselves with dreams and golden visions.
And built themselves a house of lies to live in.
Then rose a storm with mighty winds and laid it low.
And out of the storm the voice of truth resounded
In trumpet tones: "Man. thou art mortal and needs must thou die."
Our days here are as one day,
For all our days are rounded in a sleep,
They die and ne'er come back again.
Hallelujah.
And the highways of earth are full of cries,
The ways of the earth bring forth Gods and idols.
Who so awhile regards them, turns from them,
And keeps apart from all men,
For fame and its glories seem but idle nothings.
For all who are living know that Death is coming,
But at the touch of Death lose knowledge of all things,
Nor can they have any part in the ways and doings of men on earth where they were.
Therefore eat thy bread in gladness and lift up thy heart, and rejoice in thy wine, And take to thyself some woman whom thou lovest. and enjoy life. What task so e'er be thine, work with a will, For none of these things shalt thou know, When thou comest to thy journeys end.
My beloved whom I cherished was like a flower,
Like a flower whose fair buds were folded lightly.
And she open'd her heart at the call of Love.
Among her fragrant blossoms Love had his dwelling
And to all who longed her love she gave.
I praise her above all other women who are poor in their being,
And so are poor in giving, too.
Were not the world the abode of dissemblers,
And were not men's hearts so impure,
Then all the world would join me in praising my beloved.
She gave to many and yet was chaste and pure as a flower. My beloved whom I cherished was like a flower.
Phillip Heseltine: Frederick Delius (London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. 1923) pp. 117-20.
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I honour the man who can love life,
Yet without base fear can die.
He has attained the heights and won the crown of life.
I honour the man who dies alone
And makes no lamentation.
His soul has ascended to the mountain top.
That is like a throne which towers above the great plains,
That roll far away into the distance.
The sun goes down and the evening spreads its hands
In blessing o'er the world, bestowing peace.
And so creeps on the night that whelms and quenches all,
The night that binds our eyes with cloths of darkness,
Binds them in long and dreamless sleep,
Dreamless sleep, thou that art death's twin brother.
And the passing spirit sings but this only:
"Farewell, I loved ye all!"
And the voices of nature answer him:
"Thou art our brother!"
And so the star of his life sinks down in darkness
Whence it had risen.
The snow lingers yet on the mountains.
But yonder in the valleys the buds are breaking,
On the trees and hedges.
Golden the willow branches and red the almond blossoms.
The little full-throated birds have already begun their singing.
But hearken, they cannot cease, for very joy,
From singing a song whose name is Springtime.
The woods and forests are full of coolness and silence.
And silv'ry brooklets prattle round their borders.
The golden corn awaits the hand of the reaper,
For ripeness bids death come.
Eternal renewing, everything on earth will return again.
Springtime, Summer, Fall and Winter.
And then comes Springtime.
Concerto No. 2 in A major for Piano and Orchestra . . . Liszt
Born October 22. 1811, at Raiding, Hun?gary; died July 31, 1886, at Bayreuth.
The Master can the moment choose With skillful hand to break the mold. --Schiller
As a composer, pianist, teacher, and critic, Franz Liszt completely domi?nated his age. As a composer he brought to fruition the romantic tendencies of the period, with his vividly expressive and highly descriptive music. He created new art forms (the symphonic poem) and increased the expressive qualities of the orchestra, the piano, and every medium in which he chose to work. As perhaps the most sensational pianist who ever lived, he con?tributed incalculably to general musical interest. As a teacher he established
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a school of piano technique that has produced some of the most notable pianists of our day. As a pioneer in musical criticism and as a propagandist, he drew the attention of the world to young unknown composers, among them Brahms and Wagner, and clarified the various movements that were becoming apparent in the musical evolution of the early nineteenth century.
Liszt displays a broad sweep and a grand style, and he moves with ease in vast musical forms. His tendency to casual improvisation destroys at times the homogeneity of his work, but when the foundations of this improvisation are well constructed, he often reaches the apogee of brilliance and power.
By 1850, when Liszt was thirty-nine years of age and at the beginning of his most productive creative period, the nineteenth century had codified most of its ideas. The victory of the middle class was undisputed, the bourgeoise were fully aware of their 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 re?tired 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 tumultuous 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 Beethoven) 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 revolu?tionary 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 Sardanapalus (inspiration for 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, and into their midst came the young im?pressionable Liszt, then twenty years of age. Only one French musician can be counted among them--Hector Berlioz, the Victor Hugo and Delacroix of music.
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Among the Romanticists in art, music, literature, and politics, Hector Ber?lioz was the most dramatic--the one who most theatrically symbolized the new movement of revolt, not only in his native France, but throughout Europe. All its complexities are mirrored in his music. He exposed his aesthetic impulses with bombast and forced music with such suddenness into new channels of expression that he became the source of an entirely new art of orchestration. Here his genius found the greatest scope. Liszt met Berlioz in 1830, and with the composer's permission set about immediately to transcribe his Symphonic fantastique which had just been completed. Already a sensational performer, Liszt sought not only to create a literature that would test to the utmost the tonal and dynamic potentialities of the newly improved piano, but to provide himself with a repertoire, then nonexistent, through which he could display his pianistic powers. In his attempt to make the piano a substitute for the orches?tra, dynamism became synonymous with inspiration--perhaps the most impor?tant factor in the creation of musical romanticism. Pianists of the nineteenth century soon became sovereign; for they discovered that through their instru?ment they could express, within the confines of seven octaves, what was no longer possible with the orchestra of the past. The restraining classical forms of the post-Beethoven symphony were unable to reflect the turbulence of the new era. Musical form was no longer the primary cause but only the incidental result of uninhibited expression. It was Liszt who, with his epic transcriptions drew attention to the piano as an instrument capable of orchestral effects, and with them he opened up a totally new world of sonority for the piano. Without obedience to the demands of traditional structure, the performer could create his own kind of musical unity through improvisation. He was transformed in his moments of spontaneous creation into a composer. Improvisation, and exploration of new sonorous values, dealt a death blow to conventional com?positional forms.
But meeting Berlioz in 1830 was only one of the events that was to condi?tion Liszt as a composer and performer. To Paris that year came Frederic Chopin, one year his senior, whose works were revealing to an enchanted public all the tonal subtleties and nuances of which the piano was capable. He trans?formed with his intimate style, a percussive instrument into a lyrical and singing one. From Chopin, Liszt learned to temper his excesses and to balance the tremendous orchestral sonorities of which he alone was capable.
But perhaps the most decisive and far-reaching influence exerted on his life and art came in 1831 when he heard for the first time the fabulous Paganini, then fifty years of age and at the height of his meteoric career. The bizarre virtuosity of this "Mephistopheles of the violin" swept like a tornado over Europe. Audiences heard with bewildered astonishment this prodigious per?former, and reacted with inextinguishable passion and uncontrolled hysteria. Berlioz referred to him as an "apparition who like a comet burst abruptly on
In addition to the Symphonic jantastiquc of Berlioz, he also transcribed his Harold in Italy and King Lear Overture; various instrumental works of J. S. Bach; the nine symphonies of Beethoven; and Von Weber's overtures to Der Freischiitz and Obcron.
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the firmament of art ... to excite, in the course of its immense ellipse, astonish?ment mixed with a sort of terror before vanishing forever." The majority of responsible musicians of his time agreed that "he lifted the spirit to unknown heights."
It was a brilliant company that welcomed Paganini at his Paris debut on March 9, 1831. Among the celebrated romanticists were George Sand, de Musset, de Vigny, Countess d' Agoult, Victor Hugo, Gautiere, Cherubini, Meyer?beer, and Liszt, who became half hysterical when he wrote to a friend, "What a man, what a fiddle, what an artist! Heaven, what suffering, what misery, what torture dwells in those strings!" Robert Schumann found his playing "ecstatic," and Rossini wrote that he had wept only three times in his life, "the third time was when I heard Paganini." Not only did all respond with unalloyed excitement to his playing, but the greatest composers of the day paid tribute to his creative talents as well. To the young Liszt his playing opened up new technical horizons, which, as in the case of his earlier orchestral transcriptions, he immediately explored for his own purposes. He retired from the concert stage to pursue an arduous program of disciplined practice. After several years he returned to be acclaimed the "Paganini of the piano"--the world's greatest pianist, a reputation he has retained to this day. He had ob?served in Paganini's performances to what extent showmanship could sway an audience, and in this capacity he has had no peer. Thundering chords, flashing embellishments, cascading scales in third, sixth, octave, and tenth intervals, elaborate tracery in glistening arpeggi, incredible quality and variety of tone color, intoxicating velocity, shattering climaxes and fiendish trills, drove audi?ences into paroxysms of uncontrolled enthusiasm. In the same manner in which the romantic writers destroyed with their verbosity the unities of the drama and evoked a new and independent rhetoric in their writing, so Liszt in a whirlwind of virtuosity swept away the last vestiges of the classical forms and performance practices.
A few reactions, recorded by his contemporaries, will attest to the power he exerted over his audiences. Sir Charles Halle gives this laudatory account:
Such marvels of executive skill and power I could never have imagined. He was a giant, and Rubinstein spoke the truth when, at the time when his own triumphs were greatest, he said that, in comparison with Liszt, all other pianists were children. Chopin carried you with him into a dreamland, in which you would have liked to dwell forever; Lisrt was all sunshine and dazzling splendour, subjugating his hearers with a power that none could withstand. For him there were no difficulties of execution, the most incredible seeming child's play under his fingers. One of the transcendent merits of his playing was the crystal-like clearness which never failed for a moment even in the most complicated and, to anybody else, impossible passages; it was as if he had photographed them in their minutest detail upon the ear of the listener. The power he drew from his instrument was
Chopin: Souvenir de Paganini; Berlioz: Harold in Italy; Schumann: Section 15 "Intermezzo Paganini" in Carnival; Sechs Concert-etuden componirt nach capricen von Paganini fur das Pianoforte, Op. 3 and Op. 10; Brahms: Two sets of variations, Op. 35 in A minor on a Theme from Paganini's 24lh Caprice in A minor; and Liszt: Six grandes etudes de Paganini (No. 3--the popular La Campanula from Concerto No. 7 in B minor;) No. 6, a set of variations on Caprice 24 in A minor.
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such as I have never heard since, but never harsh, never suggesting "thumping". His daring was as extraordinary as his talent.
An Englishman, Henry Reeves, who heard Liszt play in Paris wrote:
I saw Liszt's countenance assume that agony of expression, mingled with radiant smiles of joy, which I never saw on any other human face except in the paintings of Our Saviour by some of the early masters; his hands rushed over the keys, the floor on which I sat shook like a wire, and the whole audience was wrapped in sound, when the hand and frame of the artist gave way. He fainted in the arms of the friend who was turning pages for him, and we bore him out in a fit of hysterics. The effect of this scene was really dreadful. The whole room sat breathless with fear, till Hiller came for?ward and announced that Liszt was already restored to consciousness and was com?paratively well again. As I handed Madame de Circourt to her carriage, we both trembled like poplar leaves, and I tremble scarcely less as I write this.t
Another Englishman's judgment is to be found in J.E. Cox:
His mechanism was the most extraordinary that ever human hand was capable of accomplishing. He would pile up difficulties upon difficulties to such a height that it seemed to be next to impossible that anything more intricate could be devised, and yet to these something so startling would be added that it was wholly out of the question to conceive to what extent he would carry them.t
The poet Saphir recorded:
Liszt knows no rules, no forms, no style. He creates his own. With him the bizarre be?comes inspired, the strange comes to seem necessary, the sublime and the uncouth rub elbows, the loftiest is mingled with the most childlike, the most formidable power and the sweetest intimacy. An inexplicable apparition . . . After the concert the victorious chief remains master of the field of battle. The conquered pianos lie scattered around him, broken strings float like trophies, wounded instruments flee in all directions, the audience look at one another, dumb with surprise, as after a sudden storm in a serene sky. And he, the Prometheus, who with each note has forged a being, his head bent, smiles strangely before this crowd that applauds him madly.?
Robert Schumann wrote of a Liszt recital in 1840:
. . . Now the daemon began to stir him; first he played with the public as if to try it, then gave it something more profound, until he had enmeshed every member of the audience with his art and did with them as he willed . . . Within a few seconds tenderness, boldness, exquisiteness, wildness succeed one another; the instrument glows and flashes under the master's hands . . . But I would sacrifice all the astonishing, audacious bravura that he displayed here for the sake of the magical tenderness that he expressed in the following etude. With the sole exception of Chopin, as I have already said, I know of no one who could equal it.1T
In a letter from Chopin, we read:
I write to you without knowing what my pen is scribbling, because at this moment Liszt is playing my etudes and transporting me out of my respectable thoughts. I should like to steal from him the way to play my own etudes.f
Sacheverell Sitwell, Liszt (London: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1951), p. 41.
tAirf.
JJohn Edmund Cox, Musical Recollections of the Last Half Century (London; Prinsley Brothers, 1872), 2 vols.
5Guy de Pourtales, franc Liszt, translated from the French by Eleanor S. Brooks (New York; Henrv Holt & Company, 1926), p. 73.
HXew York Philharmonic Program Book, 123rd season, March 13, 1965.
iSitwell, op cit.
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When the great pianist Clara Wieck (later Schumann's wife) first heard Liszt in 1838 she was overwhelmed. "I sobbed aloud," she wrote, "it overcame me so. Beside Liszt, other virtuosos appear so small. We have heard Liszt," she noted in her journal. "He can be compared to no other virtuoso. He is the only one of his kind. He arouses fright and astonishment, though he is a very lovable artist. His attitude at the piano cannot be described--he is original--he has a grand spirit. It can be truly said of him that his art is his life."
The one inflexible fact that must be considered in any judgment of Liszt as a composer is that he was first and foremost a virtuoso performer--beyond a doubt the greatest the world has ever heard. It colored every aspect of his style and accounts in turn for the grandiose and the majestic, the voluptuous and the passionate, the pretentious and the inspired, the vulgar and the elo?quent that exist side by side in his pages. Despite his fustian and the ineradi?cable traces of the parvenu, he was one of the last great Europeans with the gift of universality and the grand epic style, and he still remains the Romanti?cist of all Romanticists.
The exact date of the composition of the Second Piano Concerto is uncertain. Sketches for it were begun as early as 1839. It was revised in 1856 before its premiere on January 7, 1857, at the Grand Ducal Palace in Weimar. Another revision was made in 1861, and it finally reached publication in 1863. Liszt conducted the first performance at a concert given for the benefit of the Weimar Orchestra pension fund, with his pupil Hans von Bronsart as soloist.
The autographed manuscript of the Concerto in A major bears the title Concerto Symphoniquc. While it lacks a descriptive title or program necessary to the symphonic tone poem, it also departs from the conventional three-move?ment classical concerto. It is written in a continuing series of various tempos and moods, unified by a constantly recurring theme that undergoes a number of transformations and binds the various episodes into a unified whole. Experi?mentation along these lines of modifying the concerto form was not the work of Liszt alone, but other composers of his time thus involved, produced nothing of significance and have passed, and rightly so, into the limbo of forgotten things. As Bartok strove for new expression in his First Piano Concerto in 1926, so Liszt attempted to break the confining form of the concerto in his time. With the re-evaluation of Liszt today, he emerges as perhaps the greatest inno?vator of forms in the nineteenth century.
A strangely haunting theme {adagio, sostenuto assai; A major, time) is announced immediately in the woodwinds (solo clarinet) accompanied by tonally shifting harmonies. This is the theme that undergoes constant meta?morphosis, first in quiet piano arpeggios, then in massive chords, again in a broad romantically expressive cello solo above an undulating piano accompani?ment, and in a tremendous martial statement by the whole orchestra (marziale un poco meno allegro). Separating these recurrences are three piano cadenzas and contrasting themes in piano and orchestra, with a myriad of shifts and
Pourtales, op. cit., pp. 73-74.
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changes that defy analysis. William Foster Apthorp, music critic and annotator of the Boston Symphony programs wrote:
From this point onward, the concerto is one unbroken series of kaleidoscopic effects of the most brilliant and ever-changing description; of musical form, of musical coherence even, there is less and less. It is as if some magician in some huge cave, the walls of which were covered with glistening stalactites and flashing jewels, were revealing his fill of all the wonders of colour, brilliancy, and dazzling light his wand could command. Never has even Liszt rioted more unreservedly in fitful orgies of flashing colour. It is monstrous, formless, whimsical, and fantastic, if you will; but it is also magical and gorgeous as any?thing in the Arabian Nights. It is its very daring and audacity that save it. And ever and anon the first wailing melody, with its unearthly chromatic harmony, returns in one shape or another, as if it were the dazzled neophyte to whom the magician Liszt were showing all these splendours, while initiating it into the mysteries of the world of magic, until it, too, becomes magical, and possessed of the power of working wonders by black art.
Totentanz................Liszt
One of the most original and impressive works by Liszt, the "Totentanz," waited more than thirty years before it was formally presented to the public. Sketches were made as early as 1838 when Liszt was visiting in Pisa. Ten years later, when living in Weimar he worked further on them, but did not complete the work until 1853. Further revisions were made in 1859. The "Toten?tanz" was dedicated to and performed by Hans von Btilow at a concert of the Diligentia Musical Society in the Hague, Holland, March 15, 1865. Published the next year, it lay neglected until Siloti+ played it in Antwerp in 1881. He was still performing it with great effect forty years later, just after the First World War.
"Totentanz" belongs to that unique category of Liszt's works that include the "Faust" Symphony, the "Fantasie, quasi sonate: d'apres une lecture de Dante'" (suggested by the poem of Victor Hugo), the opening movement of the "Dante" Symphony, and the "Mephisto Waltzes"--all sublimations of vivid impressions made upon him by his ardent reading of Dante, and the sensationalism of Paga-nini's satanic appearance and tempestuous performances. They were all products of a Mephistophelian impulse, conceived in a creative inferno, and enveloped by an aura of death and damnation.
None of Liszt's biographers agrees as to the actual source of inspiration which compelled him to write this diabolic work. Richard Pohl states that its origin is to be found in Hans Holbeins' set of fifty etchings known as the "Dance of Death," published in Lyons in 1580. A later biographer, Lina Ramann maintains that according to information imparted to her by Liszt himself, the idea for a composition occurred to him when he saw the fresco of the Triumph of Death attributed to Orcagna in the Compo Santa at Pisa. The inspiration on the other hand could have come from any of the countless
James Huneker, Franz Liszt (New York: Scribner's & Sons, 1911), pp. 173-74.
tAlexander Siloti (1863-1919) was a remarkable Russian pianist and one of the most eminent of Liszt's pupils. He also achieved distinction as a conductor.
tRichard Pohl, Franz Liszt, Studien und Erinncrungen (Leipzig, 1883) .--
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"Dances of Death" produced by medieval sculptors, engravers, or poets. A more likely source, according to Alfred Frankenstein, was a musical one--the Symphonie jantastique of Hector Berlioz, written twenty years before, and transcribed by Liszt for the piano, as we have noted. In the last movement, Berlioz made use of the Dies Irae chant which is the basic theme of the '"Toten-tanz." Sir Charles Halle heard Liszt perform his transcription of the last move?ment, "The March to the Gallows," at a concert given by Berlioz in Paris in 1836. He writes, "At an orchestral concert conducted by Berlioz, the "March au Supplice," that most gorgeously instrumented piece, was performed, at the con?clusion of which Liszt sat down and played his own arrangement for the piano alone, of the same movement, with an effect even surpassing that of the full orchestra, and creating an indescribable furore. The feat had been duly an?nounced by the programme beforehand, a proof of his indomitable courage." It is reasonable to suppose that only two years later the idea for an original com?position on the Day of Judgment, employing the Dies Irae theme, should occur to him as a vehicle for virtuoso display both for the orchestra and the piano.
Whatever the source, "Totentanz" was not intended to be a translation of any particular art work; it is "a musical dramatization, not an attempt at musical illustration." It is freely composed, with variations on the Dies Irae theme which thunders out in all its awesome power in the piano and lower voices of the orchestra. The statement of the theme is interrupted several times by piano cadenzas. The marvelously inventive variations which follow present a grotesque march (Variations 1 and 2), an ironic scherzo (Variation 3), a canon that starts in the solo instrument and ends in a passage with high arpeggiated chords in the piano and a short clarinet solo (Variation 4), and a presto (Variation 5) in the form of a fugato, the subject of which is begun by the piano striking repeated notes. From here on the variations become less distinct and flow one into the other, separated frequently by more cadenzas for the piano. Shuddering clanking rhythms, leaping sardonic figures, tumultuous glissandi, thunderous outbursts of volcanic sound, sustain the mood of terror to the end. Liszt himself referred to the "Totentanz" as a "monstrosity," and indeed to the Philistines and conservatives, its bold orchestration and shatter?ing pianistic virtuosity were as appallingly bizarre and shocking as they were stimulating and novel to the avant-garde of his day.
Sltwell, op. cit.
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Sunday Evening, May 8 "Music for a Great City"..........Copland
Aaron Copland was born in Brook?lyn, New York, November 14, 1900.
A little over three decades ago a virile and tremendously active group of composers appeared in AmericaAmong the outstanding names were those of Marc Blitzstein, George Antheil, Roy Harris, Henry Cowell, Randall Thompson, Virgil Thomson, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Aaron CoplandThese composers energetically espoused the cause of American music, although as individuals they represented every variety of background, attitude, and musical style. Some were mildly conservative, others daringly experimental, but in their enthusiasm and newly awakened nationalistic feeling, they possessed a common goal--to uphold the autonomy of their art, to free it from all the extramusical trappings inherited from nineteenth-century Europe, and to make the world aware that America had come of age musically through the discovery of an idiom that was indigenous to her-According to Roger Sessions, writing in Modern Music in November, 1927, . . . "young men are dreaming of an entirely different kind of music--a music which derives its power from forms beautiful and significant by virtue of inherent musical weight, rather than intensity of utterance; a music whose impersonality and self-sufficiency preclude the exotic, which takes its impulse from the realities of a passionate logic, which in the authentic freshness of its moods is the reverse of the ironic, and in its very aloofness from the con?crete preoccupations of life, strives rather to contribute form, design, a vision of order and harmony."
The most authoritative voice among this group was that of Aaron Copland. The volume and importance of his output and his diversified activity in the world of American music reached into the realms of radio, theater, films, and pedagogy. He drew the attention of the world to the music of his own country by defining, in a more specific way than ever before, the meaning of an indig?enous American idiom. His initial attempts were in the field of jazz, the tech?niques of which he mastered and applied with telling effect in two works, Musk for the Theater (1925) and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1927). Aware of the expressive limitations in this direction, he began to write in a simple but extremely austere manner, producing in the Piano Variations (1930), Short Symphony (1934), and the Piano Concerto (begun in 1935, finished in 1941), vital works of ingenious craftsmanship and originality, but of limited appeal. Realizing the danger of working in a vacuum if he pursued further in this manner, and sensing the growth of a new public for music through radio, films, and the phonograph, he began what he described as his "tendency toward an 'implied simplicity' " which produced some very colorful and directly appealing
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works: El Saldn Mexico (1936); music for radio, "Saga of the Prairie," (1936); music for films including Of Mice and Men (1939), The City (1939), Our Town (1940), and North Star (1943); and music for the ballet in such engag?ing scores as Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944), all of which employed American folk tunes. His Third Symphony (1946), Clarinet Concerto (1950), and Piano Quartet (1950) turned again toward abstract expression without traces of jazz or folk cliches, but revealing a new inventiveness and maturity that result in an economy of means and an avoidance of elaboration without ending in aridity. More recent works include "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson" (1950); an opera The Tender Land (1954), and a 1956 revision of his earlier work "Symphonic Ode" (1932). A Nonet (a composition for nine instruments) dedicated to Nadia Boulanger, had its premiere in Washington, D.C., March 2, 1961.
Winthrop Sargeant wrote in the introduction to the Boosey and Hawkes cata?logue of Copland's works (June 1957), "Any glance at the state of contem?porary music in America must take Aaron Copland as a leaderCopland heads what is probably the strongest 'movement' in American composition at the present timeCritical analysis of his works and aesthetics is therefore very im?portant to anyone concerned with the future of music in America."
"Music for a Great City" was a commissioned work, written in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the London Symphony Orchestra. It had its premiere in London's Festival Hall, May 26, 1964, with the composer conducting. Mr. Copland has provided the following information regarding the nature and in?ception of the work:
I began to work on the score during the latter part of 1963, completing it in April of 1964. The musical materials are derived in part from a film score I composed in 1961. Starring Miss Carroll Baker and directed by Jack Garfine, the script was based on a novel by Alex Karmel called Mary-Ann. The picture was released for distribution in December, 1961, under the title Something Wild. The action of the story takes place in New York, where all of the film was shot. Indoor scenes of tense personal drama are interspersed with the realistic sights and sounds of a great metropolis.
The nature of the music in the film seemed to me to justify extended concert treatment. No attempt was made to follow the cinematic action. The four movements of the work alternate between evocations of big city life with its external stimuli, and the more per?sonal reaction of any sensitive nature to the varied experiences associated with urban living. Music for a Great City reflects both these aspects of the contemporary scene.
The first section is titled "Skyline" and attempts to create the lively activity and noisy confusion of city life. The second, "Night Thoughts," is an eloquent expression of the calm and silence that descends upon a great city in the early hours of dawn. "Subway Jam," corresponding to the third or scherzo movement of a Beethoven symphony, appropriately evokes feelings of urgent haste, and the closing section "Toward the Bridge," sustains this characteristic mood.
Copland's ideas on music, perhaps the most articulate written today, may be found in his What to Listen for in Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939); Music and Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Uni?versity Press, 19S2); and Copland on Music (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960).
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Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125.....Beethoven
Beethoven embodied in his art the spirit of the French RevolutionIn the true meaning of the words "liberty," "equality," and "fraternity," he found the motivating force that gave sustained vitality to everything he wrote, from the somber fury of the Appassionata Sonata, the symbol of early revolt, with its unyielding tension and its sovereign inhumanity, to the Choral Ninth Sym?phony with its all-embracing affection for mankind so sorely wounded by the violence of revolution, and its final outburst of joy at the thought of a better world to come.
This force, this spirit, that infused itself into the music of Beethoven had already driven deep into the minds of men, and had with a shocking sudden?ness unleashed its fury, leaving in its wake a devastated society and a wreckage of traditionWhen finally its violence was spent and the tension had relaxed, when fears and hatreds were dispelled, a new world seemed to emerge like a phoenix from its ashes, a world bright with hope and full with a promise of benevolence. The ecstacy of relief, the joy of being alive, created a new subject matter for artistic expression. It was this spirit that drove Beethoven to the creation of a music which his world had not yet even dared to imagine, a music torrential in its passion for freedom, deep and moving in its heartfelt compassion, and exuberant at its release from confining tradition.
The outburst of exuberance in Beethoven's music is one of its most striking traits. The same impulse to freedom that animated the poetic thought of Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, and Byron, surged through his music. His opera Fidelio, based upon a drama of rescue from oppression and tyranny, with its overtures of abounding joy, the gargantuan scherzi of his symphonies, the overture to Goethe's Egmont with its "Symphony of Victory," the overpowering vitality of the finales of his Fifth and Seventh symphonies, and finally, the "Ode to Joy" in the Ninth Symphony, are only a few of the many instances that attest the manifestation of this spirit. Beethoven had been guided by humanitarian ideals for many years through the lofty impulses of Goethe, the austere ethics of Kant, the magnanimity of Shakespeare, and the passionate optimism of Schiller, whose poem, "Lied an die Freude" ("Ode to Joy") had, from the early years of his creative life, inspired him with the hope that one day he would find a musical expression worthy of the text. Through the written words of these great minds Beethoven had caught a glimpse of a better, freer world, where men would ultimately live together in freedom, equality, and mutual understanding; a world, which, after over a century of subsequent torment, we have not been able to realize.
Oscar Wilde once said that a map of the world on which Utopia is not shown is not worth looking at, for it omits a shore on which mankind will always land. Both Schiller and Beethoven saw that shore and marked their courses with
The intention of utilizing Schiller's "Ode" dates from the year 1793. The text occurs again in a sketchbook of 1798; some of it is intermingled with sketches for the Seventh and Eighth symphonies made in 1811, and from this time on references to it occur with ever-increasing frequency.
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abiding confidence that humanity would some day reach it. Schiller's denial of the realities of the past and his vision of the unrealities of the future, his un?compromising idealism, his unlimited and elemental shout to a glorious future in which all mankind would be held in the bond of brotherhood, spoke directly to Beethoven and strengthened his conviction that man's destiny was to be glorious and fine.
Of all Beethoven's concrete contributions to the art of music, the most powerful and original were: the treatment he gave the first movement form, so full of titanic and elemental struggle; the tumultuous humor and elfin wit, the bacchanalian exultation of the great scherzi; the mystic and ethereal lyricism of the incomparable adagio movements, and the amazing musical architecture found in the variation form-
The Choral Ninth Symphony in all its movements reveals mature and culminative treatment of all these innovations. The originality in Beethoven's music is due in the last analysis to the fact that he thought more deeply, that he was moved more profoundly by life and by an ideal for life than his prede?cessors; and that his music represented that deeper and more profound thought sublimated into broader conceptions of musical form and technique. The Her?culean reach of his conceptions, the sovereignty of their expression, and the constant search for new methods, new techniques, the stretching of existing forms to an unheard-of-degree, his dramatic success in seeking a harmonious embodiment of opposing forces by fusing them into a great architectural one?ness, gives the impression that a daemonic force was working through his brain and directing the bold strokes of his pen.
Beethoven completed his Eighth Symphony in 1812, and for eleven years no other symphony came from his pen. In a sketchbook of the year 1816, how?ever, are to be found passages which later became subjects for the first move?ment and the scherzo of the Choral SymphonyThe actual composition was begun in 1817, the sketches for that year being again confined to the first move?ment and the scherzo. In 1818, Beethoven conceived the idea of writing twin symphonies, and in a sketchbook of that year he made the following memor?andum:
"Adagio Cantique": Sacred song in a symphony in an old mode (We praise Thee, O God --Alleluia), either to stand alone, or as introduction to a fugue. The whole Second Symphony to be based perhaps on its melody. The singing voices enter in the last piece, or as early as the adagio, repeated in a certain manner in the last piece, the singing voices being first introduced little by little. In the adagio the text of a Greek myth "Cantique Ecclesiastique" in the allegro, festival of Bacchus.
The Ninth Symphony was the result of the merging of these two ideas, when at last, in the vortex of Beethoven's mind, eruptions and mystic amal?gamation took place, and fragmentary ideas submitted to his imperial reason and were fashioned by his powerful hand into a single monumental form.
The question of Beethoven's success in writing the Choral Finale to this great symphony has been in the minds of music critics for a long period. It is no longer arrogance or sacrilege to question his judgment in writing it. Critical
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opinion today considers that it was ill-advised, and that it plays the iconoclast in a temple. The fatal mistake of the Choral Finale was the attempt to mix poetry--the concrete and finite, with music--the abstract and infinite, in equal proportions. Music might be inspired by, but should not be dependent upon, the subject of a poem. This being a symphony, the chief source of expression is musical and not poetic, and the most unique and complete expression is found when the composer, freed from the finite meaning of words, gives fervent and eloquent expression through the art of music alone. Schiller's "Ode" served Beethoven well by inspiring him to some of the most glorious music he ever wrote, but when he actually harnessed his tones to Schiller's words, he stopped their flight and dragged them down from the "cloud-capped peaks" of the first three movements, to a "humiliating and belittling concreteness."
Beethoven himself became conscious of the temporary rejection of his art. Czerny told Jahn that after the first performance Beethoven emphatically de?clared he was dissatisfied with the "Hymn to Joy" and wished to write another movement without vocal parts to take the place of this failure. Unfortunately for posterity Beethoven failed to carry out his intention-
In addition, Beethoven could not write for the voice, and failed completely to realize the potential expressive beauty that lies in the proper treatment of it as a unique instrumentThinking almost entirely in terms of the orchestra, he grew impatient with its limitations. His ruthless treatment of the voices in the "Hymn to Joy" invariably turns legitimate singing into unholy screeching. Hav?ing forced the human instrument entirely out of its sphere, the music given to it loses all real expressive quality; and, as a result, much of it in the finale is oppressively trivial and even unforgivably dull.
Wagner was not unmindful of the fact that, without words, Beethoven might have soared to the heights he sought in the first three movements, and he reminds us that the great theme of this movement first presented itself to us unburdened by words:
Thus we find the master still abiding in the realm of the world's idea, for it is not the meaning of the word that really takes us with his entry of the human voice--neither is it the thought expressed in Schiller's verses that occupies our minds thereafter, but the familiar sound of the choral chant. It is obvious especially with the chief melody proper, that Schiller's words have been built in perforce and with no great skill, for this melody had first unrolled its breadth before us as an entity per se, entrusted to the instruments alone, and there had thrilled us with the nameless joy of paradise regained.
Wagner's astute critical mind has sensed the real reason for Beethoven's failure at the end of the Finale--his attempt to achieve a fuller meaning by joining poetry with music in equal proportions; and he has revealed the only, and everlasting, source of Beethoven's powerful expression--an unadulterated, self-sufficient, and transcendent music-
Band."
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Whatever this music means to each individual who hears it is beyond know?ing, but to a world on the verge of war, to a world seething with national and racial hatreds, to a joyless world, this great culmination to Beethoven's creative life speaks perhaps with greater significance than ever before. It offers a renewed faith in the essential goodness of man and a new realization of his inherent nobility of mind. But it does more than this, it re-echoes the cry that has been heard down through the ages, and that has always arisen from the deepest impulses of mankind whenever those impulses have been thwarted or sup?pressed by tyranny, the cry for a world in which liberty, equality, and fra?ternity, the complex of the true democratic ideal, shall reign supreme, and all repression, hatred, and lust for power shall have disappeared from the face of the earth. This is the ideal for which men have fought and died in centuries past and are fighting and dying for today. But Beethoven lived for this ideal, and by this ideal he wrote a music that has, and will, survive all wars and revo?lutions. Beethoven's map of the world shows a Utopian shore, and furthermore, it charts the course by which mankind may some day reach it.
Baritone Recitative:
0 Brothers, no more such music! Rather let us now our voices raise in sweeter, more joyful choruses.
Baritone and Chorus: Hear us! Hear us!
Joy, thou spark from flame immortal, Daughter of Elysium! Drunk with fire, O heav'n born Goddess, We invade thy Halidom! Let thy magic bring together all whom earth-born laws divide; All mankind shall be as brothers 'neath thy tender wings and wide.
Solo Quartet and Chorus:
He that's had that best good fortune, to his friend a friend to be, He that's won a noble woman let him join our Jubilee! Ay, and who a single other soul on earth can call his own; But let him who ne'er achiev'd it steal away in tears alone. Joy doth every living creature draw from Nature's ample breast, All the good and all the evil follow on her roseate quest. Kisses doth she give, and vintage, friends who firm in death have stood, Joy of life the worm receiveth and the Angels dwell with God!
Tenor and Chorus:
Glad as burning suns that glorious thro' the heav'nly spaces sway, Joyous as a knight victorious, haste, ye brothers, on your way.
Chorus and Soloists:
Joy, thou spark from flame immortal, Daughter of Elysium!, etc. Love toward countless millions swelling, wafts one kiss to all the world! Some kind Father has His dwelling surely, o'er yon stars unfurl'd! Fall ye prostrate, O ye millions Dost thy Maker fell, O world He o'erthrones yon starry trillions, o'er the stars rise His pavilions!
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NOTES ON THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA AND MAY FESTIVAL ARTISTS
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA, with the six concerts of the 1966 May Festival, performs here for the thirty-first consecutive yearOrganized in 1900 under Fritz Scheel, it followed for a dozen years under the leadership of Carl Pohlig, who was succeeded by Leopold StokowskiIn 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 touringIn 1936 it made its first of six transcontinental tours; in 1949 the orchestra toured the British Isles in its first foreign pilgrimage; and in 19SS it made its first continental European tour. Immediately following these May Festival concerts, the Orchestra embarks upon a Latin-American tour of 15.000 miles in a five-week period (May 10-June 12)From August 1 to 24 the Orchestra will be in residence at the first Festival of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, opening their series on August 4 with the Beethoven Ninth Symphony.
EUGENE ORMANDY, Musical Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra has appeared annually at these May Festival concerts since 1937. This season, we in Michigan celebrate with him his thirtieth anniversary season. He began his prominent conducting career with sudden impetus in 1931 when he substituted for Toscanini, conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. On that occasion a rep?resentative of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra who was in the audience immediately signed Ormandy as guest conductor, which won for him the permanent 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 Hubay, after whom he was named. He received his pro?fessor's diploma at seventeen and was given degrees in violin playing, compos?ing, and counterpoint. He concertized, then taught at the State Conservatory in Budapest before coming to the United States to seek his fame and fortune. Mr. Ormandy became an American citizen in 1927. He is a Commander of the Order of Dannebrog, First Class, a Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland, and (as of February 18, 1966) Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland for his "meritorious services in promoting Finnish-American Friendship." He is also holder of the Sibelius Medal and the medals of the Mahler and Bruckner societies. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from twelve leading universities, including the University of Michigan (at the May Festival of 1952).
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WILLIAM SMITH has been the Assistant Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1961He 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. 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 tenth 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 and Vice-President of the Interlochen Arts Academy. John?son 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 Founda?tion Scholarship, he studied in Europe with conductors Weingartner, Abendroth, Malko, and Bruno Walter. Upon his return he became conductor of the Univer?sity Symphony 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 Symphony Band and taught for the Armed Services at Schrivenham, 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 UniversityAs 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 surveysHe 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 Detroit 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 1938Before coming to Ann Arbor he trained and taught at Morningside College in Sioux City, IowaHe 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
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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. Beginning in the autumn of 1964, Mr. McCoy became Musical Director of "Musical Youth International," which toured Mexico last summer and is currently preparing for a European concert tour in July.
MONTSERRAT CABALLfi, soprano, was born in Barcelona, Spain. She took her early musical and voice training at the Conservatorio del Liceo. She later studied diction and operatic staging in Italy and was then taken under contract at the State Opera of Basil in Switzerland. She has performed in nearly all of the important opera houses of Europe and at the Glyndebourne Festival, and the operas of Wiesbaden, Marseilles, and Toulouse. Mme Caballe has more than forty operatic roles in her repertoire, and she has appeared in the stage versions of more than thirty of these operas. Still a young woman, Montserrat Caballe made her New York debut on April 20, 1965, with the American Opera Society in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, and returned in December, and again last month, for performances in Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House. She makes her Ann Arbor debut at this May Festival.
JENNIFER VYVYAN, soprano, was bom at Broadstairs, England, but comes from a Cornish family. Educated at St. Paul's School, she entered the Royal Academy of Music in London as a piano student and gained her performer's L.R.A-M, She then won a scholarship for singing and studied with Roy Hen?derson. Later a traveling scholarship--the Boise Foundation Award--enabled her to study in Switzerland and in Milan. In 1951 she entered the International Concours at Geneva and won the first prize. She has sung in several of Benjamin Britten's operas, creating the role of the Governess in Turn of the Screw at the Venice Festival in 1954, a part she has since played in London, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Florence, Amsterdam, Belgium, and Canada. In 1953 she cre?ated the role of "Lady Rich" in Gloriana by Britten at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; and in 1960, the role of "Titania" in the same composer's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Aldeburgh FestivalShe has sung at Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells and with the Glyndebourne Opera Company at the Edinburgh Festival. Miss Vyvyan has come direct from London for her first Ann Arbor appearance.
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
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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 at the 1961 May Festival, and again at the 1965 May Festival.
LILI CHOOKASIAN, contralto, has appeared previously on the Hill Audi?torium stage, singing in the 1962 May Festival, and earlier in Handel's Messiah. She is well known for her oratorio performances as well as for many important operatic roles as a prominent member of the Metropolitan Opera. She has sung with the New York Philharmonic, at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, and with most of the leading orchestras throughout this country. Last summer she made her debut at the Wagner Bayreuth Festival in three differ?ent roles, immediately followed by engagements at the Hollywood Bowl. This season she has appeared with the Montreal Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. With her husband and three chil?dren--Valerie, John, and Paul--she resides as Mrs. George Gavejian in New Jersey.
WALDIE ANDERSON, tenor, is a faculty member at the Interlochen Arts Academy and Co-Ordinator of the Interlochen Honors Musicianship Project. He is at present working with Professor John McCollum toward a doctorate in music education at The University of Michigan. Previous education includes a Bachelor of Arts from Central Washington State College and a Master of Music degree from The University of Michigan. His singing experience in?cludes several summers as tenor soloist at the National Music Camp, leading roles in the operas Magic Flute, Queen of Spades, and Wozzeck at The Univer?sity of Michigan, and soloist in oratorios and recitals in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. He has sung with the Chicago and Detroit Symphony Orchestras. He was regional winner in both the Metropolitan Opera Auditions and the Young Artist Auditions, and first place winner in the Illinois Opera Guild Auditions.
STANLEY KOLK, tenor, who is Michigan-born, is probably one of the busiest of America's younger generation of singers, being constantly re-engaged with many of this country's finest opera companies, including the Santa Fe Opera, the Washington Opera, the Houston Grand Opera Association, and the Miami OperaAs a member of the Metropolitan Opera Studio, Mr. Kolk has been heard throughout the country in a variety of roles, including a historic per?formance of Cost fan tutte at the White HouseHis most recent orchestral ap?pearances include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Utah Symphony, and the Buffalo Philharmonic. In November, 1964, Mr. Kolk sang in two special "Kennedy Memorial" performances of the Mozart Requiem in Philharmonic Hall under the direction of Hermann Scherchen. Mr. Kolk is represented on Columbia Records, singing the title role in Mavra, conducted by the composer Igor Stravinsky.
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SHERRILL MILNES, baritone, won the American Opera auditions, and a trio of top roles for his debut at New York's City Center, to start a career strictly American-made; although singing was not always in his plans for his futureRaised on an Illinois farm, Milnes was exposed to good music in his family, taking violin and piano lessons from early childhood. He entered college as a premedical student, however, and later, at Drake University, he began his music studies in earnest and was encouraged toward a professional career by his voice teacher, Andrew White (formerly a faculty member at The University of Michigan). Music studies continued at Northwestern University. Then, with a summer at Tanglewood under Boris Goldovsky and a Ford Foundation Grant, his opera and concert career began to flourish. He is now a regular member of the New York City Opera Company and has appeared previously in Ann Arbor in several roles. He has recently made his debut with The Metropolitan Opera Company. This is Mr. Milnes first May Festival appearance.
YI-KWEI SZE, bass, is the youngest child of a Shanghai business man. He attended an elementary school conducted by Presbyterian missionaries and there had his first contact with western music. At seventeen, he began to study music, first as a violinist. He was graduated with highest honors in voice from the National Conservatory of Music in Shanghai where he studied with Ben?jamin Ing, a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music; and while there, sang with the Shanghai Municipal Opera. Later, he launched a recital career that rapidly made him popular in China's metropolitan centers-After 1939, he gave hundreds of concerts in Hong Kong for Chinese and British relief; had a contract with the British Radio Broadcasting Company; and gave voice lessons at StPaul's. On the night of December 7, 1941, he had just given one of his radio programs a few hours before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. With the arrival of the enemy in Hong Kong, Sze escaped to Canton. Later he was returned to Shanghai for refusing to sing for the Japanese. He was able to break through the lines to reach China's wartime capitol, Chungking, where he gave concerts and taught until 1947. He then came to America, making his debut in New York's Town Hall that same yearHe continued his studies in this country with Edith Walker, and later with the famous Metropolitan Opera basso, Alexander Kipnis. In recital the singer is often accompanied by his wife, Nancy Lee Sze. They are both American citizens now. They have one child, a son who was named Alexander after Sze's teacher, Alexander Kipnis; and they make their home in Connecticut.
JOHN BOGART, boy alto, was born in New York City in September of 1950-He began musical studies at the age of six. At the age of eleven, he joined the choir of The Little Church Around the Corner. In addition to his frequent appearances as soloist with the choir, he became a cast member of the New York Pro Musica's production of The Play of Daniel, The Play of Herod, and
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a treble in The Motet Choir which toured New York, Chicago, and Washing?ton. On July 16, 196S, he sang the alto solo in the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms under the direction of the composer, which was also recorded by Columbia Records.
CLAUDIO ARRAU, pianist, was born in Chilian, Chile, on February 6, 1903. He gave his first recital in Santiago at the age of five, and his first Buenos Aires recital at seven, when he was on his way to Berlin to continue his studies with Martin Krause, who was a pupil of Liszt. Arrau thus carries on a piano tradition that goes back to Beethoven, who taught Czerny, who taught Liszt, who taught Krause, who taught ArrauArrau came to the United States for the first time at the age of twenty to make his debut with the Boston Symphony. Returning to Europe, he entered the International Geneva Concourse for Pian?ists of 1927, and won first prizeHis international career then began in earnest, including two tours of the Soviet Union before he was thirty years of age. Outside of China there is not an important city in the world where Arrau has not played (excluding the new African nations). He has performed previously in Ann Arbor in recital in 1943 and 1952. He has made his home in New York since 1941, occupying a house in Douglaston, Long Island, and a summer home in Chester, Vermont, with his wife Ruth and a young son Christopher, age 6. His daughter Carmen and son Mario, both born in Berlin, are now United States citizens (as is MrsArrau), and are both married to Americans. Arrau has never given up his Chilean diplomatic passport.
GYORGY SANDOR is Hungarian by birth, an American by choice, a citizen of the world by his piano playing; and since 1962 when he joined the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Music, a resident of Ann Arbor. His wife and two children came to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1961 while Mr. Sandor fulfilled concert engagements in Budapest at the Liszt-Bartok Memorial Festival, performing with the Moscow Radio Orchestra under RozdestvenskiThis was followed by concerts in Paris with the Orchestre Nationale, and in Frankfort with the Radio Orchestra. He also completed a recording series of all of Bar-tok's piano works. Sandor previously appeared at the Ann Arbor May Festival in 1958, performing the Bartok Second Concerto; and at the 1962 May Festival, performing Richard Strauss's "Burleske." He was the soloist in Philadelphia at the opening concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra this season, and in December played a recital in New York's Philharmonic Hall.
JOSEPH DE PASQUALE, formerly first-desk viola with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the Philadelphia Orchestra as principal viola last season. Born in Philadelphia, he began his musical studies with his father, an amateur vio?linist, and then worked with Lucius Cole. Entering the Curtis Institute at the age of seventeen, Mrde Pasquale studied first with Louis Bailly and Max Aaronoff and later with William Primrose. After joining the United States
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Marine Corps in 1941 he was assigned to the Marine Band Orchestra and stationed in Washington until his discharge in 1945Mr. de Pasquale was a member of the American Broadcasting Company orchestra until 1947, when Serge Koussevitzky appointed him principal violist of the Bostony 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
Arentz, Joan C. Austin, Patricia K. Bernstein, Judith S, Bird, Linda Sue Bradstreet, Lola Mae Braun. Maureen Burr, Virginia A. Carlson, Pamela B. Ciarlo, Dorothy A. Coffman, Judith Ann Hanson, Gladys M. Hawk, Gloria Lee Henes, Karen Kay Huff, Nancy K. Jerome, Ruth Jones, Jacqueline A. Jones, Patricia Jean Julien, Charlotte J. Kirkpatrick, Mary E. Lazier, Anita Joy Losh, Susan Carol Luecke, Doris L. Malila, Elida M. McDonald, Ruth M. Montgomery, Patricia Newcomb, Alice R. Newman, Judy Pearson, Agnes I. Plekker, Judith E. Politis, Clara Porter, Mary B. Ramee, Dorothy W. Reddick, Bella G. Richek, Margaret A. Samborski, Alma G. Sevilla, Josefina Sommerfeld, Martha Steere, Judith E. Stevens, Ethel C. Swenson, Melinda M. Thomas, Helen Marie White, Myra Whiteford Yoon, Soon Young Song
SECOND SOPRANOS
Anderson, Wendelyn S. Berg, Stephanie M.
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Berg, Sylvia Joyce Berlin. Joan C. Beverly, Delores E. Blanchard, Jane McA. Boase, Barbara Ann Bradley, Carol Joan Brehm, Vicky Louise Brown, Susannah E. Buchanan, Gale F. Caster, Carol Ann Clague, Rosemary T. Cok, Audrey Joy Cornell, Gail Ann Curll, Joyce P. Cushing, Gloria L. Dallavo, Virginia M. Datsko, Doris Mae Diskin, Karen Eva Goldman, Edith A. Gulevich, Catherine Kellogg. Merlyn L. Klock, Rebecca Anne Leftridge, Sharon L. Leslie, Judith Ann MacDonald, Kathy D. McAdoo, Mary C. McArtor, Nancy Ann McMaster, Carolyn Murray, Carol Ann Needham, Martha L. Nissley. Alice Jean Nobilette, Dorothy M. O'Connor, Barbara A. Osborn. Carolyn Jane Oyer, Thelma M. Richards, Jean Diane Rosenbaum, Stephanie Schoenhals, Helen E. Spencer, Bette Ann Surbrook, Barbara L. Swartzendruber, Kay Sweet, Deborah Page Valencich, Maryjo A. Vlisides, Elena C. Widiger, Susan Joyce Wilson, Miriam L. Wylie, Winifred J.
FIRST ALTOS
Abrams, Gloria S. Adams, Carol Bingham Baker, Mary Matee Block, Judith C. Brown, Marion W. Crawford, Margaret Eastman, Berenice M. Eiteman, Sylvia C. Estep, Jan Fowler, Lucille Hinterman, Ellen K. Hirshfeld, Lucy W. Hodgman, Dorothy B. Kimmel, Helen G. Kister, Susan S. Klein, Linda Sue Langer, Margaret B. Leckrone, Janet G. Lee, Ducky Hee Manson, Hinda Marsh, Martha M. Mayer, Carol Ann McAdoo, Harriette A. McCoy, Bernice Mehler, Hallie Jane O'Neal, Carol Karen Reidy, Dorothy E. Reynolds. Susan L. Robison, Virginia A. Rosevear, Freda A. Rubinstein, Sallie Schmidt, Nancy E. Segal, Deborah Aviva Smith, Marguerite M. Stid, Deborah Diehl Thomas, Anne E. Thomoson. Linda F. Vierling, Judith A. Wargelin, Carol G. Wellman, Karen Weymouth Mary L. White, Nancy Kay Wiedmann, Louise P. Wilke, Mary Lou Wolfe, Charlotte A. Wood, Delores Jean Wyngarden, Dora Mae
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
SECOND ALTOS
Arnold, Helen M. Barber, Deborah Jane Blake, Susan Jane Blossom, Elaine A. Bogart, Gertrude J. Bolhouse, Betty Jean Brink, Virginia Ruth Clayton, Caroline S. Crossley, Winnifred Davis, Judy A. Drew, Wendy Jean Eisenhardt, Elizabeth Enkemann, Gladys C. Foster, Shirley Frizzell. Ann W. George, Betty Rose Haab, Mary E. Howell, Ruth S. Hoyt, Janet Eighmey Jenkins, Bernice Johnson, Grayce Johnson, Lisbcth H. Kendall, Gail Marie Knight, Mona J. Lane, Rosemarie Lidgard, Ruth M. Liebscher, Erika M. Lovelace, Elsie W . Luton, Jane E. Mastin, Neva M. Miller, Carol L. Miller, Rene S. Oehler, Eileen L. Olson, Constance K. Richardson, Gloria J. Roeger, Beverly B. Schmidt, Susan Slater, Beverly N. Stebbins, Kathryn Sweet, Elizabeth O. Wanless, Barbara B. Weber, Lois Williams, Nancy P. Williams, Winefred L. Wolf, Mona Genevieve Woods, Naomi G.
FIRST TENORS
Baker, Hugh E. Bernstein, Paul Chasteen, William C. Cushing, Richard T. Dallavo, William G.
DeVries, Robert Lee Federhen, Herbert M. Ibach, David Norman Kunsman, Peter M. Leckrone. Gerald R. Lowry, Paul T. Miller, Dennis A. Pixley, Allen C. Pratt, Michael W. Ramee, Allan L. Reidy, James Joseph Schel'l, Alden Neil Thompson, Frazier Tillson, Edward E. Washburne, Bruce D.
SECOND TENORS
Atkins, Anthony G. Austin, Robert A. Barber, Harold E. Beyer, Hilbert Carlson, John Swine Clark, Harold R. Cornell, Douglas W. Cross, Harrv Lee Curll, Daniel B. Gaskell, Jerry Johnson, Paul Alan Jones, Charles Edwin Lindemann, Michael May, Wolfuane W. Powell, Fredric A. Reed, Robin Fulton Richardson, Robert Schultz, Stanley T. Settler, Leo Henry Smallwood, Stephen Tarzia, Frank L. White, Douglas Keith
FIRST BASSES
Abrahamse, Bruce Brownson. Robert C. Brueger, John Martin Buresh, David R. Burr, Charles F. Clayton, Joseph F. Clow, Allen Scott Damborg, Mark Johannes Eisenhardt, George H. Frizzell, Guy Edwin Garrels, Michael Jay Hall, Lawrence E. Henry, George R.
Herren, Donald C. Huff, Charles R. Jones, John David Kaiser, Thomas E. Kays, J. Warren Kissel, Klair H. Lanini, Kent Paul Luria, Eric Walter MacQueen, Donald S. McDonald, James Lee McMaster, Ronald A. McWilliams, Leslie G. Meader, Robert E. Palicz, Robert J. Pickut, Guenther Roach, James Warren Robison, James W. Schumacher, Herrmann Slovic, Harold G. Stine, Philip Bruce Way, Thomas J. Wilkins, David G.
SECOND BASSES
Barranger, John J. Carlson, David L. Dunning, James E. Fisher, Wayne Alan Gill, Douglas Edward Goodwin, Carl Harold Gross, Carey Clayton Hunsche, David F. Huntley, James E. Keller, Jacob B. Lee, George W. Lloyd, Steve Edward Lohr, Lawrence L. Loukotka. Joseph Mastin, Glenn May, Michael Dennis McAdoo, William Pass Miller, Glenn E. Morris, John Anthony Peterson, Robert Ross Piehl, Rodger P. Robbins, James Frank Siglin, David G. Stegler, Richard E. Steinmetz, George P. Thomas, Merrill Dean Toy, James W. Wall, Ralph J. Wash, Willard Dexter Wright, Stephen Bruce Wyche, Donald W.
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Eugene Ormandy, Music Director and Conductor William Smith, Assistant Conductor
Boris Sokoloff, Manager Joseph H. Santarlasci, Assistant Manager
VIOLINS Anshel Brusilow
Concertmaster David Madison
Associate Concertmaster Morris Shulik Veda Reynolds William de Pasquale Owen Lusak David Grunschlag Frank E. Saam Frank Costanzo David Arben Barbara de Pasquale Max Miller Jacob Stahl Ernest L. Goldstein Sol Ruden Meyer Simkin Louis Gesensway Irvin Rosen Irwin I. Eisenberg Jerome Wigler Armand Di Camillo Irving Ludwig Isadore Schwartz Norman Black Joseph Lanza Herbert Light George Dreyfus Robert de Pasquale Manuel Roth Benjamin Sharlip Julia Janson Larry Grika Louis Lanza
VIOLAS
Joseph de Pasquale Alan Iglitzin Leonard Mogill Gabriel Braverman Joseph Primavera Sidney Curtiss James W. Fawcett Paul Ferguson Leonard Bogdanoff Wolfgang Granat Irving Segall Darrel Barnes
80
VIOLONCELLOS
Samuel Mayes Elsa Hilger Harry Gorodetzer Francis de Pasquale Joseph Druian Charles Brennand Wilh'am Stokking William Saputelli Winifred Mayes Bert Phillips Marcel Farago Santo Caserta
BASSES Roger M. Scott Edward Arian Ferdinand Maresh F. Gilbert Eney Carl Torello Wilfred Batchelder Samuel Gorodetzer Neil Courtney Michael Shahan
FLUTES
Murray W. Panitz Kenneth E. Scutt Kenton F. Terry John C. Krell, Piccolo
OBOES
John de Lande Stevens Hewitt Charles M. Morris Louis Rosenblatt, English Horn
CLARINETS
Anthony M. Gigliotti Donald Montanaro Raoul Querze Leon Lester, Bass Clarinet
BASSOONS
Bernard H. Garfield John Shamlian Adelchi Louis Angelucd Robert J. Pfeuffer Contra Bassoon
HORNS
Mason Jones
Nolan Miller
Leonard Hale
John Simonelli
Herbert Pierson
Glenn Janson TRUMPETS
Gilbert Johnson
Samuel Krauss
Seymour Rosenfeld
Donald E. McComas TROMBONES
Henry Charles Smith
M. Dee Stewart
Howard Cole
Robert S. Harper Bass Trombone TUBA
Abe Torchinsky TIMPANI
Fred D. Hinger
Michael Bookspan BATTERY
Charles E. Owen
Michael Bookspan
Alan Abel
Manuel Roth CELESTA, PIANO, AND ORGAN
William Smith
Marcel Farago HARPS
Marilyn Costello
Margarita Csonka LIBARIAN
Jesse C. Taynton PERSONNEL MANAGER
Mason Jones STAGE PERSONNEL
Edward Barnes, Manager
Theodore Hauptle
James Sweeney PHOTO PUBLICITY
Adrian Siegel
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
Ross Spence (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-seventh 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 bfevis 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 concertsIn 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 given in two performances each season. This season a third performance was added. 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 eventsDuring the season the Chamber Arts Series of seven attractions takes place and the Summer Concert Series of four recitals is sched-
The "Ann Arbor School School of Music." In 1929 ., University status. In 1940 the wawwoi School to The University o[ Michigan.
of Music" was organized in 1879 and in 1892 was reorganized as the "University the University provided partial support, and students and faculty were given the University Musical Society relinquished full control and responsibility for thy
SI
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
uled for July. Thus, at the close of its eighty-seventh year, the Musical Society will have presented throughout the season, forty-three major events by distin?guished 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 participated 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 84 and 85). The chorus member?ship numbers about three hundred singers, including townspeople and students.
THE ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Maintained by the University Musical Society and founded by Albert AStanley 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 Hardin 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 Had 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. 1S94-1921; 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, 195 7-.
The Festival Youth Chorus, trained by Florence B. Potter, and conducted by Albert A. Stanley. 1913-1918Conductors: 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.
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION REPERTOIRE
Bach: Mass in B minor (excerpts)--1923, 1924, 1925 (complete), 1953
Magnificat in D major--1930, 1950
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, 1966 Berlioz: The Damnation of Faust--1895, 1909, 1920, 1952
Te Deum--1965
Bernstein: Chichester Psalms--1966 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 Brvcii: Arminius--1897, 1905
Fair Ellen, Op. 24--1904. 1910
Odysseus--1910
Bruckner: Te Deum Iaudamus--1945 Carey: "America"--1915
Chabrier: Fete Polonaise from Le Roi malgre lui--1959 Chadwick: The Lily Nymph--1900 Chavez, Carlos: Corrido de "El Sol"-1954J, 1960 Delivs: Sea Drift--1924
Requiem--1966 Dvorak: Stabat Mater, Op. 58--1906
Requiem Mass, Op. 89--1962 Elcar: Caractacus--1903, 1914, 1936
The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38--1904, 1912, 1917 Fin.ney, 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, Percy: Marching Song of Democracy--1928 Hadley:"Music." An Ode, Op. 75--1919 Handel: Judas Maccabeus--1911
Messiah--1S07, 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-1932f
A Dirge for Two Veterans--1923
The Hymn of Jesus--1923t
First Choral Symphony (excerpts)--1927t Honec.ger, Arthur: King David--1930, 1935, 1942
"Jeanne d'Arc au bucher"--1961
World premiere
tAmerican premiere tL'nited States premiere
84
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION REPERTOIRE
Kodaly: Psalmus Hungaricus, Op. 13--1939
Te Deum--1966
Lambert, Constant: Summer's Last Will and Testament--1951t Lockwood, Normand: Prairie--1953
McDonald, Harl: Symphony No. 3 ("Lamentations of Fu Hsuan")--1939 Mendelssohn: Elijah--1901, 1921, 1926, 1944, 1954, 1961
St. Paul--1905
Mennin, Peter: Symphony No. 4, "The Cycle"--1950 Moussorgsky: Boris Godnnov--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 Assissi--1928, 1931 Ponchielli: La Gioconda--1925 Poulenc: Secheresses--1959
"Gloria"--1964
Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78--1946 Rachmaninoff: The Bells--1925, 1938, 1948 Respichi: La Primavera--1924t Rimski-Korsakov: The Legend oj Kitesh--1932t Rossini: Stabat Mater--1897
Saint-Saens: Samson and Delilah--1896, 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 Vaughan 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 coracao"--1949, 1960 Vivaldi-Casella: Gloria--1954 Wagner: Die fliegende Hollander--1918
Lohengrin--1926; Act 1--1896, 1913
Die Meistersinger, Finale to Act III--1903, 1913; Choral, "Awake," and Chorale Finale to Act 111--1923
Scenes from Parsijal--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
"World premiere tAmcrican premiere
85
1965-UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY-1966 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-SEVENTH ANNUAL CHORAL UNION SERIES
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (187); John Browning. Pianist (1);
Jean Martinon, Conductor (1) ........................................October 9
Yehudi Menuhin. Violinist (7) ........... .................................October 15
Czech Philharmonic; Vaclav Neumann, Conductor ...........................October 29
Poznan Choir, from Poland............................................November 2
Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra; Mstislav Rostropovich, Cellist;
Kiril Kondrashin, Conductor .......................................November IS
Barber of Seville (Rossini) New York City Opera (10) ....................November 21
Grand Ballet Classique de France ........................................November 23
Phyllis Curtin, Soprano (3) .............................................January 20
Monte Carlo National Orchestra; Michel Block, Pianist;
Paul Paray, Conductor (3) ..... .....................................February 26
National Ballet, from Washington, D.C.......................................March 27
TWENTIETH ANNUAL EXTRA SERIES
Cleveland Orchestra (21); George Szell, Conductor (14) ..................October 20
Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra (1); Igor Oistrakh. Violinist;
Evgeni Svetlanov, Conductor ........................................November 16
Pagliacci (Leoncavallo) and Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni)
New York City Opera (9) .........................................November 21
Rumanian Folk Ballet ......... ........................................February 16
Rudolf Serkin, Pianist (10) ................................................March 7
THIRD CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
Netherland Chamber Orchestra; Szymon Goldberg, Conductor
and Violinist (1) ............'..........................................October 18
Rafael Puyana, Harpsichordist .............................................October 31
New York Pro Musica (5) ; Noah Greenberg, Conductor (5) ...............November 12
Hermann Prey, Baritone .................................................February' 2
Vienna Octet (1) .........................................................March 1
I Solisti Veneti .... .....................................................March 16
Chicago Little Symphony (2) ; Thor Johnson, Conductor (54) .................March 31
SPECIAL CONCERTS
Carmen (Bizet) New York City Opera (8) ...............................November 20
Van Cliburn, Pianist (3) .................................................February 23
CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
Handel's Messiah ....................................................December 3, 4, 5
Benita Valente, Soprano Malcolm Smith, Bass
Doris Mayes. Mezzo-soprano Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist (38)
Stanley Kolk, Tenor Lester McCoy, Conductor (39)
University Choral Union (253) Members of Detroit Symphony
86
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY REPERTOIRE
CHAMBER FESTIVALS
Chamber Dance Festival--
AlbaReyes Spanish Dance Company ....... ...........................October 22
Paul Taylor Dance Company (1) ......................................October 23
Korean Dancers--"The Little Angels" ...................................October 24
Chamber Music Festival--
New York Chamber Soloists (1) .............................February 18, 19, 20
SEVENTY-THIRD ANNUAL MAY FESTIVAL--MAY 5, 6, 7, 8
The Philadelphia Orchestra (182) ; Conductors: Eugene Ormandy (100) ; Thor Johnson (55) -William Smith (9). Choral Union (256); and soloists: Montserrat Caballe, Soprano Joseph de Pasquale, Violist (2)
Jennifer Vyvyan, Soprano Claudio Arrau, Pianist (2)
Lili Chookasian, Contralto (5) Janice Harsanyi, Soprano (3)
Waldie Anderson. Tenor Stanley Kolk, Tenor (3)
Sherrill Milnes, Baritone (3) Yi-Kwei Sze, Bass (3)
Gyorgy Sandor, Pianist (4) John Bogart. Boy Alto
SUMMER CONCERT SERIES (1V6S)
Gary Graffman, Pianist ............. ........................................July 2
Sidney Harth, Violinist (1) ...................................................July 13
Philippe Entremont, Pianist (1) ...............................................July 20
William Doppmann, Pianist ..................................................July 26
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
Arnfxl Sonata for Chamber Orchestra,
Op. 18 ............ Chicago (Little)
Bach Toccata and Fugue in
D minor (Ormandy) ..... Philadelphia
Baird
Four Essays................. Cleveland
Bartok ?Divertimento (Adagio only,
encore) ................. Netherlands
Beethoven Symphony No. 5 in C minor.
Op. 67 .................. Philadelphia
Symphony No. 9 in D minor,
Op. 125 ................. Philadelphia
Bellini Concerto in E-flat major for
Oboe and Strings .... Chicago (Little) Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D major,
Op. 73 .................. Philadelphia
Symphony No. 3 in F major,
Op. 90 .................... Moscow
Britten Simple Symphony for Strings
(Pizzicato only, encore) .. Netherlands
ClMAROSA
Overture to II Matrimonio
segreto ...................... Chicago
Copland Music for a Great City..... Philadelphia
Debussy La Mer.......................Moscow
Dvorak
Overture. "Carnaval," Op. 92 ......Czech
Serenade in E major, Op. 22,
for String Orchestra ......Netherlands
Slavonic Dances No. 1 and 15
(encore) .......................Czech
FlOTHUIS
?Espressioni cordiali (Six Bagatelles
for String Orchestra) ......Netherlands
Griffes Poem for Flute and
Orchestra ...........Chicago (Little)
87
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
Janacek Taras Bulba: Rhapsody for
Orchestra ......................Czech
KODALY
?Concerto for Orchestra .....Philadelphia
Martinu
?Symphony No. 4.................Czech
Mendelssohn
Symphony No. 4 in A major. Op. 90 ("Italian") Chicago, Monte Carlo
MOUSSORGSKY
Prelude to "Khovanstchina" .... Moscow Mozart
Symphony No. 28 in C major,
K. 200.....................Cleveland
Pergolesi
Concertino No 1 in G
major ...............I Solisti Veneti
Piston
Toccata for Orchestra .......Philadelphia
Prokofieff
"Lieutenant Kije" Suite,
Op. 60 ..................Philadelphia
?March from Love of Three
Oranges (encore) .............Moscow
Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 ......Moscow
Ravel
Suite No. 2 from the ballet, "Daphnis et Chloe" ......Monte Carlo
Rossini Sonata No. 3 in C major
for Strings ............I Solisti Vcneti
Roussel
Ballet Suite, "Le Festin de
1'araiRnee," Op. 17 ........Monte Carlo
Concertino for Cello and
Orchestra. Op. 57.....Chicago (Little)
Ryba ?Serenade in C major ...Chicago (Little)
SCHOENBERG
Verklaerte Xacht ...........Netherlands
Sibelius
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 43 ..................Philadelphia
Smetana
Symphonic Poem, "The Moldau".. Czech Starer
"Triple Concerto for Clarinet, Trombone, Trumpet, and
Orchestra (1965) .....Chicago (Little)
Stravinsky
Suite from The Fire Bird........Chicago
Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 4 in F minor,
Op. 36 .....................Cleveland
Symphony No. 5 in E minor,
Op. 64 ...................Philadelphia
Vivaldi The Concerti of the Seasons,
Op. 8 .................1 Solisti Veneti
INSTRUMENTAL
AlTKEN
?Cantata No. 1 on
Elizabethan Texts .......NY Chamber
Anonymous
?Carnival Songs .........NY Pro Musica
?Che pena e quest' al cor . .NY Pro Musica
?Istampita Ghaetta.......NY Pro Musica
?My Lady Carey's Dompe
(encore) .....................Puyana
?Scottish Gigue.................Puyana
Bach, C.P.E.
?Les Folies d'Espagne ........ . .Puyana
Bach, J.S.
Chorale: Jesu, Joy of Man's
Desiring (encore) .........Doppmann
Concerto in A minor...........Goldberg
?Concerto in D major,
after Vivaldi .................Puyana
Goldberg Variations .........Doppmann
88
Sclections from the Notebook of
Anna Magdalena Bach ...NY Chamber Barber ?Concerto for Piano and
Orchestra, Op. 38 ...........Browning
Bartok ?Concerto No. 1 for Piano and
Orchestra ....................Sandor
Beethoven ?Bagatelle, Op. 119, No. 3
(encore) ......................Serkin
Septet in E-flat major, Op. 20 ... .Vienna Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 Cliburn Sonata for Violin and Piano
in G major, Op. 96, No. 10 ...Menuhin Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major,
Op. 110 ...................Graffman
Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. Ill.......................Serkin
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY REPERTOIRE
Hi in ii ?Sonata for Violin and Piano.......Harth
Brahms
Intermezzi, Op. 118,
Nos. 1 and 2 .................Cliburn
Intermezzo in E-flat minor,
Op. 118, No. 6 (encore) .......Cliburn
Ballade in G minor, Op. 118 .....Cliburn
Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, for
clarinet and strings ............Vienna
Rhapsody in E-flat major, Op. 119,
No. 4 (encore) ................Serkin
Variations and Fugue on a Theme
by Handel, Op. 24...........Graffman
Britten
?Fantasy Quartet .......... NY Chamber
BVSONI
Berceuse ..... ..................Serkin
?Toccata .........................Serkin
ClIAMBON'NIERES
?Le Moutier (Var. by L.
Couperin) ...................Puyana
Chopin
Etude in C minor, Op. 10,
No. 12 (encore) ..............Cliburn
?Mazurka in A minor (Arr.
Kreisler) ......................Harth
Scherzo in D-flat major, Op. 31,
No. 2 (encore) .............Graffman
Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58 . .Cliburn
Corteccia ?Letare et exulta .........NY Pro Musica
Couperin
?Concert Royale No. 3 ......NY Chamber
Concert Royale No. 4
(Forlane only, encore) ...NY Chamber
?Pavanne .......................Puyana
?Soeur Monique (encore) ........Cliburn
Debussy
Pour le piano ...............Entremont
Sonata in G minor ............Menuhin
I'M Kl:
?Sonata, Op. 13 ...................Harth
Festa ?Deus venerunt gentes .. . .NY Pro Musica
FlNNEY
?Sonata quasi una fantasia
(1961) ....................Doppmann
Fisches ?Passacaglia in D minor ..........Puyana
De Florentia ?I' fu' gia usignol ........NY Pro Musica
?Non piu doglic cbbe
Dido .................NY Pro Musica
Per non far lieto ........NY Pro Musica
Tosto che l'alba (caccia) .NY Pro Musica Francisque
?Branle de Montirande (encore) ..Puyana Franck
Sonata in A major for
Piano and Violin ............Menuhin
Frescobaldi
Five Galliards ..................Puyana
Handel Concerto in D minor for Viola
and Orchestra............De Pasquale
Concerto in D major ......NY Chamber
Haydn
?Divertimento in C major ...NY Chamber Isaac ?Missa: In Festo Nativitatis
S. Joannis Baptistae ...NY Pro Musica Kreisler
Caprice Yiennois (encore) .........Harth
Landini
D'amor me biasmo ......NY Pro Musica
Liszt 'Concerto No. 2 for Piano
and Orchestra ..................Arrau
Totentanz .......................Arrau
Valse oubliee (encore) .......Entremont
Lutoslawski
?Recitative e arioso ...............Harth
Luzzaschi
Quivi sospiri ............NY Pro Musica
Marenzio
Cosi nel mio parlar..... NY Pro Musica
Mendelssohn
Concerto in E minor, Op. 64----Oistrakh
Song Without Words, A minor,
Op. 19, No. 2 ...............Graffman
Sonp; Without Words. C major.
Op. 67, No. 4...............Graffman
Mozart ?Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
in B-flat major, K. 595........Block
?Divertimento in F major, K. 138 . .Vienna Duet in B-flat major for Violin and
Viola, K. 424 ...........NY Chamber
Sonata in G major, K. 283 ...Entremont 'Sonata for Violin and Piano in
G major, K. 379.............Menuhin
?Sonata, K. 481 (Adagio only,
encore) .....................Menuhin
?Trio in E-flat major.......NY Chamber
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
Nardixi
Sonata in D major...............Harth
Prokofieff
March from Love of Three
Oranges (encore) ..........Entremont
?Quintet, Op. 39 ...........NY Chamber
Sonata No. 2 in D minor.
Op. 14 ....................Entremont
Sonata No. 6 in A major,
Op. 82 .......................Cliburn
Rameau ?Cantata, "Diane et Acteon" NY Chamber
Sarasate Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs),
Op. 20 ........................Harth
Scarlatti
?Sonatas in C major and D major. .Puyana Sonatas in D minor, D, E, G, and C ....................Entremont
Schubert Octet in F major, Op. 166
(Scherzo only, encore) ........Vienna
?Quintet, "Die Forelle," A major,
Op. 114 ................NY Chamber
Sonata in A major, Op.
posthumous ...................Serkin
?Trio in B-flat major for strings,
Op. 9, No. 2 ...........N. Y Chamber
Schumann
Carnaval, Op. 9 ..............Graff man
Etudes symphoniques. Op. 13 . .Entremont Kreisleriana, Op. 16 ..........Doppmann
SCRIABIX
Etude in D-sharp minor, Op. 8,
No. 12 (encore) ..............Cliburn
Etude in C-sharp minor, Op. 42,
No. 5 (encore) ..............Graff man
Nocturne, Op. 9 (for the left hand
alone, encore) ................Cliburn
Soler
?Sonata in C-sharp minor ........Puyana
Sonata in D-flat major ..........Puyana
Sonata in F-sharp major.........Puyana
Strauss "Don Quixote." Fantastic Variations
for Cello and Orchestra . . . Rostropovich SWZEUNCK
?More Palatino ..................Puyana
Tchaikovsky Russian Dance from Swan Lake,
for solo violin (encore) .........Harth
Variations on a Rococo Theme,
Op. 33 ..................Rostropovich
Verdelot
?Italia mia...............NY Pro Musica
Ysaye ?Sonata No. 3, Op. 27 (Ballade) . . . .Harth
VOCAL
Bellini ?Grand Scene (Finale) from
11 Pirata .....................Caballe
Berlioz
La Mort d'Ophelie (Ballade) .....Curtin
Zaide ...........................Curtin
Debussy
Chevaux de bois.................Curtin
Mandoline ......................Curtin
Donizetti Com' e bello, from Lucrezia
Borgia .......................Caballe
E Sara in quest orribili momenti, vivi ingrato,
from Roberto Devereux........Caballe
Hadyn Six Scottish and Welsh Airs for
Soprano and Tenor .. .Addison-Bressler Massenet Adieu, notre petite table,
from Manon (encore) .........Curtin
Rossini Adieux a la vie (Elegy
on one note) ..................Curtin
90
Schubert
Der Hirt auf dem Felsen........Addison
Klarchens Lied, from
Goethe's Egmont ..............Curtin
Die Liebe hat pelogen .. .........Curtin
Nacht und Traume ..............Curtin
La Regata Veneziana ............Curtin
Stiindchen ......................Curtin
Suleika I ........................Curtin
Suleika II .......................Curtin
Schumann Five Duets for soprano and
tenor ................Addison-Bressler
Alte Laute (Dieselbe Weise) .......Prey
Auf das Trinkfilas eines
vcrstorbenen Freundes ........ . .Prey
?Erstes Griin ......................Prey
?Frage ...........................Prey
Lust der Sturmnacht............ .. Prey
Meine Rose (encore) ..............Prey
Provencalisches Lied (encore) ......Prey
Sehnsucht nach der WaldRegend.....Prey
Stille Liebe .......................Prey
Stille Trancn ......................Prey
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY REPERTOIRE
Stirb, Lieb' und Freud! ............Prey
?Wanderlust .......................Prey
HVanderung .......................Prey
Wer machte dich so krank ........Prey
Strauss Drei Lieder der Ophelia ..........Curtin
Surixach
Flamenco Meditations (on five Sonnets jrom the Portuguese by E. B. Browning) ...........Curtin
Tavares Dansa de Caboclo (encore) .......Curtin
Vaughan-Wuxiams
Six Blake Songs for tenor and
oboe .................Bressler-Kaplan
VlLLA-LoBOS
Estrella e Lua Nova (encore) ....Curtin
Wolf
Abschied .........................Prey
Auf einer Wanderung ..............Prey
?Auftrag ..........................Prey
?Begegnung .......................Prey
Fussreise (encore) .................Prey
Der Gartner ......................Prey
Heimweh .........................Prey
Der Jager ........................Prey
Jagerlied .........................Prey
Lied vom VVinde...................Prey
Nimmersatte Liebe ................Prey
Selbstgestandnis ...................Prey
Der Tambour .....................Prey
CHORAL
Bach
Psalm 117 ......................Poznan
Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D minor.
Op. 125 ..................Choral Union,
Soloists, Philadelphia Orchestra Bernstein
Chichester Psalms.........Choral Union,
Bogart, Philadelphia Orchestra Chopin
?Desire .........................Poznan
Polonaise in A major ...........Poznan
Dei.ivs
"Requiem .................Choral Union.
Soloists, Philadelphia Orchestra Foster Massa's in the Cold, Cold
Ground (encore) .............Poznan
Handel
Messiah ..................Choral Union,
Soloists, Detroit Symphony Orchestra Kodaly
Te Deum ................Choral Union,
Soloists, Philadelphia Orchestra Lotti
Crucifixus ......................Poznan
MONTUSZKO
Spinster; Knight's Song........Poznan
Mozart Aria and Chorus from
"Kronungsmessc" .............Poznan
Palestrina Kyrie from Missa "Assumpta es
Maria" ......................Poznan
Pekiex
Magnum Nomcn Dimini ........Poznan
Prosnak
Sieradz Wedding ................Poznan
Scarlatti
Exultatc Deo ...................Poznan
Stuugrosz Oh, My Little ..................Poznan
SZAMOTULY
Ego sum pastor bonus...........Poznan
Szeucowski
The Angels Sang Sweetly.........Poznan
SZYMANOWSKI
Get Ready, My Lass; Play on.
Musician .....................Poznan
Thompson
Alleluia (encore) ...............Poznan
Wiechowicz
My Mother; The Little Pot .....Poznan
Zielenski
In Monte Olivcti................Poznan
OPERA
Bizet
Carmen ........New York City Opera
Leoncavallo
Pagliacci ......New York City Opera
Mascagni
CavalIeria
Rusticana ......New York City Opera
Rossini Barber of
Seville ..........New York City Opera
0 1
MAY FESTIVAL PROGRAM
BALLET AND MODERN DANCE
Aureole (Handel)..........Paul Taylor
?Con Amore (Rossini) .....National Ballet
DlVERTISSEMENT DE
Gounod (Faust) ___Ballet de France
Esmeralda (Pugni) .....Ballet de France
fOUR TEMPERAMENTS
(Hindemith) .........National Ballet
From Sea to Shining Sea ... .Paul Taylor
Giselle (Adam) ........Ballet de France
Post Meridian ..............Paul Taylor
Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky) National Ballet
FOLK DANCE AND MUSIC KOREAN ............................................................. Little Angels
?America the Beautiful ?The Dance of the Sorceress Fan Dance ?The Farm Dance ?Festival of the Weavers ?Hourglass Drum Dance ?Pagoda
The Penitent Monk
?The Sword Dance
?To the United States Marines
?Travel By Night
?Warrior's Game
?Wedding Day
RUMANIAN ................................................. Rumanian Folk Ballet
Bruil
Calushari Dance Dance from the Almajului Valley Dance from the Oltenia Region Dialogue on Two Cymbaloms Dianca GeamparaleIe The Girls of Capilna Hora from Gorj Hora Staccato ?Melodies on Pan-Pipes Doina
The River OH
Sirba
My Lad from Grui ?Moldavian Dance Sirba in the Cart The Somesh Wedding Suite of Dances from the Cordu
Mountains
Suite of Walachian Dances This is My Love; Ciocirlia (Skylark) ?Dear to Me Is the Somesh Dance
SPANISH .............................................................. AlbaRcvcs
Danza del Molinero
De Canela y Clavo
Dc La Infancia al Invicrno
E1 Caberillo
E1 Gitano
?El Tacon y La Bata
Fiesta Flamcnca Pinturas Andaluzas Sonatos del Siglo 17 Suite de Danzas Colombianas Un Recucrdo dc Zaragoza
SUMMARY
CLASSIFICATION Number of Compositions First Performances at these Concerts Composers Represented Foreign Artists
Symphony and Chamber Orchestra ........ Instrumental ................ Vocal 43 108 51 23 4 9 45 18 59 40 18 4 6 45 35 49 17 22 4 9 5 9 2 1
Choral . .............
Opera
Ballet and Modern Dance .... Folk Dance and Music ....... 1 3
Totals ........ 283 190 Less duplicatio 136 is --33 21
103
?Undetermined
92
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
International Presentations for the 1966-67 Season
SUMMER CONCERT SERIES--1966
Alfred Brendel, Pianist..........Wednesday, July 6
Peter Serkin, Pianist............Thursday, July 14
Evelyne Crochet, Pianist.........Wednesday, July 20
Grant Johannesen, Pianist..........Monday, July 25
CHORAL UNION SERIES
Chicago Symphony Orchestra.......Saturday, October 8
Jean Martinon, Conductor
Guiomar Novaes, Pianist.........Wednesday, October 12
Toronto Symphony Orchestra......Thursday, November 3
Seiji Ozawa, Conductor
American Ballet Theatre........Thursday, November 17
"The Consul" (Menotti) New York City . (8:00) Sunday, November 20
Opera Company Detroit Symphony Orchestra.....(2:30) Sunday, January 8
Sixten Ehrling, Conductor
Winnipeg Ballet Company........Saturday, February 4
Shirley Verrett, Mezzo-soprano.......Monday, March 13
Stockholm University Chorus ........Thursday, April 6
Boston Symphony Orchestra........Saturday. April 8
Erick Leinsdorf, Conductor
EXTRA SERIES
Chicago Symphony Orchestra......(2:30) Sunday. October 9
Jean Martinon, Conductor
Emil Gilels, Pianist..........Tuesday, November 8
"Tosca" (Puccini).........(2:30) Sunday, November 20
New York City Opera Company Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra . . . (2:30) Sunday, February 26
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Conductor Jose Greco and Spanish Dance Company .... Wednesday. March 8
93
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia .... Saturday, September 24 Anshel Brusilow, Conductor
Moscow Chamber Orchestra........Saturday, October 22
Rudolf Barshai, Conductor
Christian Ferras, Violinist........Monday, November 14
Andres Segovia, Guitarist..........Monday, January 9
Music From Marlboro..........Monday. January 30
Jacqueline Du Pre, Cellist, and........Monday, March 20
Stephen Bishop, Pianist
Boston Symphony Chamber Players . . . (2:30) Sunday, April 9
ANNUAL CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
?Messiah" (Handel)--Three Performances . . . Friday, December 2
Saturday, December 3 (2:30) Sunday, December 4
Soloists to be announced
The University Choral Union
Members of The Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
Lester McCoy, Conductor
FESTIVALS
Chamber Dance Festival.........Three events in October
Chamber Music Festival
Borodin Quartet (from Moscow).....Friday, February 17
Stockholm Kyndel String Quartet . . . Saturday, February 18
with Pf.r-Olof Johnson, Guitarist Trio Italiano D'Archi......(2:30) Sunday, February 19
Ann Arbor May Festival (5 concerts)......April 22, 2. 24. 25
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Conductor; guest conductors and soloists.
94
74th Annual
Ann Arbor May Festival
1967
Next year the May Festival is scheduled as a prelude to The University of Michigan's Sesquicentennial Commencement ceremonies. The opening concert will be Saturday evening April 22; two concerts on Sunday, April 23; a concert on Monday evening, April 24; and the closing concert on Tuesday evening, April 25.