UMS Concert Program, April 23, 24, 25, 26, 1970: The Seventy-seventh Ann Arbor May Festival -- The Philadelphia Orchestra

Season: Ninety-first
Concert: FIFTH
Hill Auditorium

ANN ARBOR
1970
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
1879
Ninety-first Season UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
of The University of Michigan
The Seventy-Seventh
ANN ARBOR
MAY FESTIVAL
Five Concerts April 23, 24,25, 26, 1970
Hill Auditorium
Published by the University Musical Society, Ann Arbor, Michigan
CONTENTS
President Nixon and Dr. Ormandy
with the Philadelphia Orchestra.................................. 4
University Musical Society, Board of Directors................... 5
Performing artists........................................................ 7
Festival Programs......................................................... 9
Annotations
First Concert..............................................................17
Second Concert.......................................................... 31
Third Concert............................................................39
Fourth Concert.......................................................... 50
Fifth Concert............................................................ 64
The Philadelphia Orchestra and May Festival Artists...........70
Personnel
The University Choral Union.......................................... 78
The Philadelphia Orchestra............................................81
History
The University Musical Society.........................................83
The Ann Arbor May Festival...........................................85
Choral Union Repertoire................................................86
Gift Program.............................................................. 89
Contributors............................................................. 89
International Presentations for the i970 -71 Season............94
President Nixon honors Eugene Ormandy with the Medal of Freedom on the occasion of the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Phila?delphia Orchestra.
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
Board of Directors
Gail W. Rector...........................................President
Roscoe O. Bonisteel...............................Vice-President
Erich A. Walter.........................................Secretary
E. Thurston Thieme....................................Treasurer
William L. Brittain Douglas D. Crary
Robben W. Fleming
Harlan Hatcher
Paul G. Kauper
Wilbur K. Pierpont Daniel H. Schurz Stephen H.Spurr
Directors Emeritus
Oscar A. Eberbach ThorJohnson Alexander G. Ruthven
Charles A. Sink E. Blythe Stason Henry F. Vaughan
THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL
ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Conductors
Eugene Ormandy, Orchestral Conductor Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor Donald Bryant, Choral Director
Organizations
The Philadephia Orchestra The University Choral Union
Soloists
Evelyn Mandac............................................Soprano
Benita Valente...........................................Soprano
Mary Burgess......................................Mezzo-Soprano
Birgit Finnila............................................Contralto
Jon Humphrey...............................................Tenor
Leslie Guinn...............................................Baritone
Alicia De Larrocha.......................................Pianist
Rudolf Serkin.................,............................Pianist
Van Cliburn................................................Pianist
Itzhak Perlman...........................................Violinist
(For biographical sketches of all performers, see pages 70 to 77)
The Steinway is the official piano of the University Musical Society.
The Baldwin Piano is the official piano of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The Philadelphia Orchestra records exclusively for RCA Red Seal.
FIRST MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Thursday Evening, April 23 at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Donald Bryant, Choral Director EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOISTS
EVELYN MANDAC, Soprano BIRGIT FINNILA, Contralto
PROGRAM
Chorale Preludes...........................................................Bach
"O Mensch, bewein' dein' Siinde gross" "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme"
(Transcribed for orchestra by Eugene Ormandy)
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 2 in C minor"Resurrection".......................Mahler
Allegro maestoso
Andante moderate
In ruhig Hiessender Bewegung "Urlicht" (Sehr feierlich)
Wild herausfahrend; langsam
University Choral Union and Soloists Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
'Available on Columbia Records
SECOND MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Friday Evening, April 24, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Donald Bryant, Choral Director
THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
EVELYN MANDAC, Soprano JON HUMPHREY, Tenor
ALICIA DE LARROCHA, Pianist
PROGRAM
"Stabat Mater" for Soprano, Chorus
and Orchestra.....................................................Poulenc
Evelyn Mandac and The University Choral Union
"Prologue", Op. 75, No. 1, for Soprano,
Tenor, Chorus, and Orchestra..............................Alan Stout
Evelyn Mandac, Jon Humphrey, and The University Choral Union
INTERMISSION
Concerto No. 19 in F major, for Piano
and Orchestra, K. 459.............................................Mozart
Allegro Allegretto Allegro assai
Alicia De Larrocha
10
THIRD MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Evening, April 25, at 8;3o
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
VAN CLIBURN, Pianist
PROGRAM "Don Juan," Op. 20.........................................Richard Strauss
?Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, for
Piano and Orchestra, Op. 23...............................Tchaikovsky
Allegro nun troppo e molto maestoso Andantino semplice; allegro vivace assai Allegro con fuoco
Van Cliburn
INTERMISSION
"To the Victims of Hiroshima" --Threnody......................Penderecki
Suite No. 2 from the Ballet "Daphnis and Chloe".....................Ravel
Daybreak Pantomime General Dance
Available on Columbia Records
11
FOURTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Afternoon, April 26, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
SMALL CHORUS OF THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
WOMEN'S CHORUS OF THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Donald Bryant, Choral Director
THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
BENITA VALENTE, Soprano
MARY BURGESS, Mezzo-Soprano
BIRGIT FINNILA, Contralto
JON HUMPHREY, Tenor
LESLIE GUINN, Baritone
ITZHAK PERLMAN, Violinist
PROGRAM "Magnificat" in D major for Orchestra,
Chorus and Soloists.............................................J. S. Bach
Magnificat Fecit potentiam
Et exultavit Deposuit
Qiiia respexit Esurientes
Omnes generationes Suscepit Israel
Quia fecit mihi magna Sicut iocutus est
Et misericordia Gloria
Small Chorus of The University Choral Union and Soloists
Donald Bryant, Harpsichordist Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
INTERMISSION
"La Damoiselle elue" ("Blessed Damozel") for
Women's Voices, Soprano, and Contralto......................Debussy
Benita Valente, Birgit Finnila, and The Women's Chorus of The University Choral Union
(Performed in recognition of the Centennial Anniversary of the Admission of Women to The University of Michigan)
Concerto No. 2 in G minor for Violin
and Orchestra, Op. 62.........................................Prokofiev
Allegro moderato Andant assai
Allegro ben marcato
Itzhak Perlman
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FIFTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Evening, April 26, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA SMALL CHORUS OF THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION Donald Bryant, Choral Director EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOISTS
BENITA VALENTE, Soprano
MARY BURGESS, Mezzo-Soprano
BIRGIT FINNILA, Contralto
JON HUMPHREY, Tenor
LESLIE GUINN, Baritone
RUDOLF SERKIN, Pianist
PROGRAM
Compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21
Adagio molto; allegro con brio Andante cantabile con moto Menuetto: allegro molto e vivace Adagio; allegro molto e vivace
Fantasia in C minor for Piano, Chorus, Soloists, and Orchestra, Op. 80
Rudolf Serkin, The University Choral Union and Soloists
INTERMISSION
Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 73 ("Emperor")
Allegro
Adagio un poco mosso Allegro
Rudolf Serkin
'Available on Columbia Records
13
ANNOTATIONS
by GLENN D. McGEOCH
The Author of the annotations expresses his appreciation to Ferol Brinkman for her editorial services.
FIRST CONCERT Thursday Evening, April 23
Two Chorale Preludes................Johann Sebastian Bach
O Mensch, bevvein' dein' Siinde gross Wachet auf, ruft uns die stimme (Transcribed for orchestra by Eugene Ormandy)
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, March 21, 1685; died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750.
The profound religious sincerity of Bach found its most direct, com?plete, and unending expression in the Lutheran chorale. It was mani?fested in his first composition as a youth --a simple exercise on a chorale melody. When, in the very shadow of death, he dictated to his son-in-law his last work, it was again in the form which had been most congenial to him. He ended his earthly labors with Von Deinen Thron tret' ich ("I come before Thy throne"). So, at the very end of his life, he sought, through the Chorale, to bid farewell to earth, and this he did with an expression of exquisite peace and trust.
Charles Hubert Parry, writing of Bach and the Chorale, says:
The hold which the German chorales kept upon Bach from first to last is the most significant token of the depth and steadfast earnestness of his nature, and the warmth and sensitiveness of his imagination. The strange love of symbolism which was deeply engrained in him made him feel them to be the embodiments of the religious sentiments which were expressed by the words of the hymns with which they were associated; and when he harmonized them or adorned them with all the subtlety of his art in the forms of "organ chorales," "chorale preludes," "chorale fantasias," "chorale fugues," "chorale variations" he was moved to give expression to the feelings of reverence and devotion which the hymns embodied. In the finest of his compositions in these forms the exquisite skill and sensibility with which he adorned the tunes was no vain'display of artistic ingenuities, but the revela?tion of the deepest workings of his nature, the very musings of his inmost soul. This is apparent even in his unique treatment of the final chorales in the cantatas --where he presents a harmonization of so strange and unconventional a kind that no other composer has ever had the temerity to venture on anything approaching it.
Such work is only possible under special conditions, when the man and the moment are consonant. Bach represented a phase of religious expression in music which cannot recur. All the finest qualities of Teutonic devotionalism and mysticism found their expression in him. Untroubled by the speculations of later philosophy, the central story of Christianity was to him a supreme and vivid reality, and constandy aroused in him the purest and noblest sentiments of which man is capable. And indeed such sentiments as trust, adoration, wonder, hope, humility, gratitude, contrition, submission, self-abasement, and ideal love are most apt to be expressed in music. His imagination dwelt on the story of the supreme sacrifice and loved to meditate on the incidents of the life of one for whom he felt a personal devotion. And these meditations are represented in his chorale preludes and works of that
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type, as though his mind wandered quietly on and the music welled out as the spirit moved him, kept just within the bounds of necessary artistic coherence by the presence of the
sac red s niliol ol ihc hoi.ilc tune.1
"O Mensch, bewein dein Siinde gross" ("O man, bewail they grievous sin") is taken from the Orgelbuchleinj
The original tune was written by Matthaus Greitter (1500-1552) and its text by Sebaldus Heyden (1494-1561). It tells of the perfidy of man that allowed the betrayal of Christ. The moment which tested the loyalty of His friends, intimates, and disciples, proved their courage failing, and He, sinless and betrayed, had not so much as one friend left to comfort Him. The music summons the mind to concentrate on this poignant episode, and expresses the kind of pain which transcends man's power to express in words. It is truly said that, with the chorale, Bach unlocked his heart. It was with this same tune, developed as a great fantasia for chorus and orchestra, that Bach closed the first part of his St. Matthew Passion.
"Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" ("Sleepers awake, a voice is calling") was originally written by Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608) and forms the first of Bach's six Schubler Chorales.
No doubt the exceptional warmth and beauty of this work arose from the fact that the poem was particularly congenial and suggestive to Bach. The idea of the virgins of allegory participating in the welcome of the Heavenly Bridegroom inspired him to one of his most beautiful and melodious moments. The suggestion of a dance tune for the procession of the betrothed and the attendant maidens creates a grace and charm of movement that is suggestive of Botticelli.
Symphony No. 2 in C minor ("Resurrection").........Mahler
Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, July 7, 1860; died in Vienna, Austria, May 18, 1911.
Sensibility which no words can express --charm and torment of our vain years --vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impenetrable.
--Senaucour
Near the end of Mahler's life tremendous changes were taking place in
Charles H. Parry, Johann Sebastian Bach (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1907).
tThe Orgelbuchlein: This little collection was begun by Bach during his residence in Giithen (1717-23). It consists of short movements for the organ based on chorales. The "Orgelchoral" (Organ chorale) was a small movement, merely taking a tune in its complete form straight through, and arranging ii with pans in instrumental style, which emphasize the expression of the time or words to which it belonged, by all the subtlest devices of harmonization and figure ornamentation. The work was incomplete but contained forty-six movements.
Sechs Chorale von verschiedener Art auf einer Orgel nicht zwen Clavieren und Pedal verzuspielen, verfertiget von J. S. Bach. The word chorale as here used is unenlightening to people who are not German Lutherans. They are a group of chorale prelude's and chorale fantasias which in the majority of cases are transfers or arrangements from movements in cantatas.
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the world. It was inevitable that the changing currents in European thought at the end of the nineteenth century would affect music. The romantic spirit that had given the art its tremendous vitality was fading before the advance of the realistic, the logical, and the scientific. Between the end of the romantic nineteenth and the beginning of the scientific twentieth century, music was experiencing a period of the greatest in?tellectual fermentation and creative fertility. Mahler found himself sur?rounded by numerous composers who seemed to have discovered un-trammeled ways into the future of their art. On every hand, in every field of re-creation, he heard about him a host of the most technically skilled performers, and he beheld such huge and eager audiences as the world of music had never before known. Yet before his untimely death in 1911, the first year of what was to be a tragic decade, this active spring of inspiration began to grow sluggish. Curiously enough, the year of Mah?ler's death seems to mark the end of the whole Romantic movement. As Winthrop Sargeant wrote, "That year a great drought seemed to dry up the creative source of the Romantic movement. People went on com?posing, but the work of these composers who were big enough to set styles and lead movements, underwent a sudden strangely unanimous change." Rosenkavalier, the last significant work of Richard Strauss, dates from that same year, and Claude Debussy wrote nothing of import from that time on. In 1911 Arnold Schonberg finished his monumental Gurre-Lieder and turned from its opulently romantic style to arid atonality. Stravinsky wrote Petrouschka, with its bold use of rhythmic devices and dissonances, and his Rite of Spring followed the next year. German music had grown weary of perpetuating the principles of romanticism, and its composers had, by 1911, begun to forsake the past and to follow their new leaders, Stravinsky and Schonberg. The composers of the post-Wagnerian period in Germany were not writing the last chapter of romanticism; they were writing its epilogue.
It was for Mahler alone, among German composers of his period, to reach full maturity while the romantic point of view still survived as a potent source of musical fecundity; his mind, like that of Wagner and Brahms, was nurtured by the rich blood of German romanticism. But with keen instinct and sensitive awareness, he felt that he was ex?periencing the end rather than the climax of a great era. His peculiar position --as the last real romanticist who lived on into the twentieth century, forming, as it were, a bridge between a dying tradition and the birth of a new scientific ideology --is what gave to his art its peculiar distinction and character. His voice echoed from a vanishing world, a world that was becoming increasingly remote, still beheld in the mists of distance, but irrecoverably lost. Yet, with the soul of a mystic, Mahler continued to seek after deeper realities than appeared in the immediate and material world; with the mind of a philosopher he probed the depths
Winthro Sargeanl, "Mahler, the Last of the Romaniics,"Ciorf and Discord, II, I, January. 1140. p. 35.
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of human experience and tried to relate the values he found there to those that were already superseding them.
In his music he sought to keep alive the spirit and high achievement of the nineteenth century, just as the earlier Brahms, at the climax of the Romantic era, had attempted to return to the ideals of the classical, eighteenth-century symphony. As a result, both have given us music imbued with an autumnal spirit, a music that looks backward and at?tempts to recapture the glory of a disappearing age. In this sense, what Nietzsche has said of Brahms might well be applied to Mahler, "If we discount what he imitates --what he borrowed from the great or exotic modern styles-what remains as his most personal, is his longing."
The overwrought pathos, the impassioned eloquence, and fitful in?tensity found in his art have often been accredited to his Jewish origin, but the desperate nostalgia, the restless longing that surges through his pages, is not to be explained merely in terms of race. It was the gloomy premonition of the approaching death of the romantic world view that haunted Mahler. In the wake of an advancing machine age and its insistence upon scientific reality, he was troubled by the fading away of illusion and the loss of the picturesque, disturbed by the slow emascula?tion of the magic, the supernatural, and the mythical symbols that so vitalized the music of the world he knew. It is the consciousness of this receding world, this slipping away of old values, that gives to such works as Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Das Lied von der Erde, and Kindertotenlieder among others, their deeply nostalgic color and their troubled, poignant feeling. Yet Mahler had little in common with the earlier and fully-formed romanticists; he shared their sensitivity and burning passion, but he lacked their fervor and strength, their "soaring flight in grief." There is in him none of the heroic and epic pathos of Wagner; there is only an unconquerable melancholy and infinite regret, a heartfelt protes?tation against the fleetingness and pain of life. As Santayana wrote of those philosophers who, like Mahler, believed that existence was an illu?sion, he was "without one ray of humor, and all persuaded that the universe, too, must be without one."
Mahler, like Wagner, is strictly a contrapuntal composer; his style is essentially linear. In spite of his enormous orchestral forces, he thinks in terms of individual lines and instruments. The melodic material he em?ploys often comes from Schubert and the German Lied, and from folk sources. Like Mozart his instrumental style is nourished by vocal music. Every possible element of Viennese folk and popular music can be found transformed in his works. The waltz, the Landler (an Austrian dance having the rhythm of a slow waltz), and particularly the Lied, gave to his music its essentially vocal character, material which does not lend itself readily to strong thematic contrast and development so essential to sym?phonic treatment. Such incorporation of pure song in any but simple and purely lyrical movements often presents, as Deka Newlin points out, "a
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symphonic problem of the first magnitude." As his melodic ideas are derived from these sources, so his orchestral treatment often finds its genesis in the giants of the Romantic period --Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, and particularly Berlioz. Although he treats each instrument in terms of its individual color and expressive potential, he invariable combines them in a complex contrapuntal texture that foreshadows orchestral practices of the twentieth century. "His style," writes Benjamin Britten, "was mainly 'soloistic' and entirely clean and transparent. The coloring seemed calcu?lated to the smaller shades, and the result was wonderfully resonant --his scores are models of how the modern virtuoso orchestra should be used. Nothing is left to chance, and every note sounding."t
"The Second Symphony," writes Aaron Copland, "which dates from 1894, is thirty years ahead of its time. From the standpoint of orches?tration, Mahler is head and shoulders above Strauss whose orchestrating methods have dated so perceptibly. . . Mahler orchestrated on big simple lines in which each note is of importance. He managed his enormous number of instruments with extraordinary economy. There are no useless doublings; instrument is pitted against instrument, group against group. The present days' renewed interest in polyphonic writing cannot fail to reflect glory on Mahler's consummate mastery of that delicate art."!
The eclectic elements he gathered from past composers are never mere quotations. They all submit to a thorough metamorphosis, guided by his own unique genius, and his own personal romanticism. Aware that the great Romantic era was ending, he inadvertently created a synthesis of practically everything that had been done from Mozart to his own day. This remarkable assimilation of a whole century of music, offered simulta?neously, no doubt accounts for what many musicians, critics, and laymen regard as the shapelessness and inordinate length of his symphonies. His music has been characterized by those for whom he has no charm --and there are many --as "quantity without quality", or described as "grand?iloquence rather than elegance," as the "explosive overgrown expression of a continuous Viennese symphonic tradition," and his symphonies as "monsters of ennui." He, himself, in the face of torrents of critical abuse during his whole life time, acquired a stoical attitude. "Mein zeit wird kommen" ("My time will come"), he often said, and confidently believed. From the increasingly frequent performances of all his nine symphonies (he left a tenth unfinished) on current programs, and the constantly increasing number of their recordings, it would seem that his prophecy has come to pass.
The Second Symphony is the first work in which Mahler consciously attempts to enlarge and extend the symphonic form to epic proportions.
Deka Newlin Bruckner, Mahler and Schonbrrg (New York: Krug Chorus Press, 1947). tBenjamin Britten. "On Behalf of Guslav Mahler," Boston Symphony Orchestra Program notes, 194344, p. 388.
tAaron Copland, "To the Editor", New York Times, April 2, 1925.
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It was composed in 1893-94, although sketches of the score go back to 1886-88 when he was in his middle twenties. Its premiere performance took place December 13, 1895, in Berlin, with Mahler conducting, and created considerable enthusiasm, however much the critics raged. Both the eminent conductors of the time, Arthur Nikisch and Felix Weingart-ner, are said to have been deeply impressed. Muchthe same reception was given it at the American premiere on December 8, 1909, when Mahler conducted the Symphony Society of New York.
Although the Second Symphony contains many powerful and moving pages, it did not attain the heights Mahler scaled in later years with the Ninth Symphony (1909) and Das Lied von der Erde (1909). In them we find the melancholy resignation of his last years. Philip Hale might well have been referring to Mahler, instead of Shubert, when he wrote, "He smelled the mould and knew that the earth was hungrily awaiting him." In these works, he achieves his most poignant expression of loneliness and desola?tion of spirit. The Second Symphony stands as a great shaper of these later works. Here he asks his troubled questions; in them he gives his final answer.
Throughout his entire life, Mahler was obsessed and preoccupied with philosophical ideas of (iod, the futility of life, religion, and death. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, they both emerged from a Vienna in which anxieties were eating away the inner core of a society which was in decay, frustrated and disillusioned. His struggle to achieve resignation in such a world, and his sustaining belief in the reward of an eternal life, led him, particularly in his first three symphonies, to attach programs or verbal explanations of his musical intentions, for the sake of those who found these works incomprehensible. It is undeniable that he was always inspired by some exterior experience or idea. His is a highly subjective and personal art; his compositions are "gigantic diaries in music," his letters and writings are full of implications that he was attempting to translate into sound some deep philosophical conviction. "His music," wrote Ernest Newman, "is a highly personal matter: it is himself and into each successive work he poured virtually his whole self." He leaves no doubt in our minds, however, from his frequent and lengthy dis-avowments, that he did not consider any program necessary or even relevant to the greater significance of his music per se. In a letter to Max Marschalk, at whose request he drew up a "Program" one year after the first performance in Berlin, he wrote on March 26, 1896 "Just as I find it banal to invent music for a program I find it unfruitful to try to give a program to a piece of music. This in spite of the fact that the immediate cause of a musical conception is certainly an experience of the author, that is to say, a fact which is surely concrete enough to be described in
Ernest Newman, "Mahler," Sunday Times, London, England, November 19, December 3, 1944. Re?printed by ihe Bruckner Society of America. Inc., New York.
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words." Referring to the "program" he attached to his First Symphony, he wrote, "I thought up the title ("Titan") and explanatory material after the actual composition --I think they are quite inadequate and do not even characterize the music accurately, but also because I have learned through past experience how the public has been misled by them, but this is the way of every program." In a letter to his wife, December -20, 1901, in reference to the Symphony on tonight's program he wrote in part, "I only draw up a program as a crutch for the cripple. It only gives a superficial indication, all that any program can do for a musical work, let alone this one, which is so much all of a piece that it can no more be explained than the world itself. I'm sure that if Cod were to be asked to draw up a program for the world he had created, he could never do it --at least it would say as little about the nature of God and life as my analysis says about my C-minor Symphony."t
Any textbook analysis of a Mahler symphony, therefore, is not only inapplicable, but if rigorously employed, could be misleading. In the traditional symphonies, the whole derives from the parts by virtue of contrasting subjects and their developments and restatement in more or less clearly delineated designs. To force Mahler into these conventional molds is an impossibility. As stated by Ernest Newman, "to demonstrate the metamorphosis of the seminal element of a typical Mahler movement we should have to quote the whole score . . . with its alternations or fusions of the ecstatic, the philosophical, the ironic, the sardonic (frequently achieved by the same technical procedure), the piling up of tension on tension followed by a sudden relaxation, and then the recom?mencement of the process of strain and release."t The comments preced?ing each movement, therefore, are meant to be merely a token analysis that may aid the listener somewhat in finding his way in this labyrinthian score. For those who desire a verbal explanation of music, Mahler's own words, in condensed form, will preface each movement.
First Movement (Allegro maestoso, C minor, 44)
... at this solemn and deeply stirring moment, when we are released from the paltry distraction of every day life, our hearts are gripped by a voice of awe-inspiring solemnity, which we seldom or never heard above the deafening traffic of mundane affairs. What next it says. What is life, and what is death. Have we any continuing existence Is it all an empty dream Or has this life of ours, and our death, a meaning If we are to go on living, we must answer these questions.
Of the five movements which comprise this gigantic symphony, the first remains the most impressive, and characteristic. Titled by Mahler "Totenfeier" (Celebration of Death), it indicates his preoccupation with
Newlin, op. cil. p. 141.
tAiina Mahler, (iustav Mahler, Memone and Lrtteis. tr.ins. In Basil C'reiirhton (London: John Murrv, 1917), p. 217. Newman, op. cil.
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human tragedy and the spiritual struggle to obtain answers to his perpet?ual questions regarding the meaning of" life and death.
The relationship between this work and the First Symphony (per?formed at the May Festival last year) is not based alone upon the fact that both have programs. There are resemblances between the two works in material and technique, in the handling of the designs of the individual movements, in the cyclic plan with the reappearance of themes from other movements (first and third) in the Finale, and in the inclusion of an instrumental movement based upon a song, this time from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn"). In the Second Symphony, Mahler goes a step further and writes two vocal movements: the fourth, a contralto solo, and the fifth, a choral finale. The solo voice no doubt is meant to represent man, the individual, full of perplexity and pain; the chorus, all mankind seeking for, and finding Mahler's meaning of the Resurrection.
The First Movement is cast into something that resembles a So-nato-Allegro design, with a double or merely extended exposition, a development, a recapitulation, and a coda. There is, however, no attempt to fill out an accepted pattern of "symphonic form." A long, restless string pedal-point accompaniment, with interjections of dramatic segments in the cellos and contrabasses, forms an impressive introduction. From it, the first idea of the "Exposition," a demoniac, upsurging, marchlike theme, evolves slowly and relentlessly, creating a "sense of outrage at the contemplation of death." This aggressive idea will dominate the move?ment; it will be boldly restated but constantly modified; it will interrupt the momentary serenity of the lyrical passages, or be used in its rhythmic-essence to accompany other sections. A sudden change from minor to major, so characteristic of Mahler, is heard in the horns and strings bringing only a temporary relief from the opening theme which returns with surprising suddenness. The end of this section dies away in a des?cending line in the harps, cellos, and basses. It is then that the lyrical subsidiary theme, heard first in the soaring strings, is fully stated in extended form, and like the first, in each reappearance, will undergo change without loss of identity. The startling contrasts of mood in the movement are due to the constant conflict between these two themes, evoking to an intense degree feelings of "consolation, revolt, and des?pair."
Although their constant metamorphosis makes the boundaries of the three divisions of the Sonata-Allegro form vague, the general outline is still apparent. Attention should be drawn to the broader cohesion achieved by the reappearance of themes in several of the movements. In that portion of this movement that resembles a development of great
Twelve orchestrated songs, whose verses are taken from a famous collection of German folk-verse, carols, and lyrics, dating from about 1539 to 1807, assembled by Athim Von Arnim and Clemens Brentano.
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contrapuntal complexity, there appears in the horns a choral-like subject, employing the first four notes of the old medieval sequence Dies irae ("Day of Wrath"). As it continues, it shapes itself into a definite theme which will return with telling effect in the Finale. The restatement of the mate?rial of the exposition is heard in a concise Recapitulation. The Coda, as often found in Beethoven, is a peroration of the total movement and is devised as a long crescendo and decrescendo. Mahler indicates that a pause of at least five minutes be observed before resuming with the second movement.
Second movement {Andante moderato, A-flat major, 38)
. . .a blissful moment in life, and a mournful memory of youth and lost innocence.
In the second movement, we have a wistful Schubertian Landler which evokes the memory of happier days. According to Mahler, "While the first, third, fourth, and fifth movements hang together thematically and spiritually, the second movement stands alone and interrupts, in a sense, the stern and inexorable sequence of events."t If one were to prove Mahler's relation to the Viennese tradition, he would need go no further than the fluid dance movements which are to be found in so many of his symphonies. According to Gabriel Engel, "It exhales that cheerful life-loving atmosphere which found infinitely charming expression at the hands of all the great masters of music whom good fortune had cast under the magic spell of Vienna: the naive contentment of Haydn, the tender ethereal grace of Mozart, the unquenchable goblin laughter of Beethoven, the nostalgic yearning of Schubert, the vivid, healthy pulse of Johann Strauss, the soaring optimistic song of Bruckner, the deep re?strained pathos of Brahms. Young Mahler's soul had thrilled to all these musical wonders, absorbing them as the very essence of Vienna. They were inseparably part of him, when he merged them all into a new integral creation. Such is the subtle alchemy of this great Idyll."t
The structure of this movement is as uncomplicated as its material. The actual design is a free Second Rondo (ABACA). The graceful flowing melody of section "A" appears, first in the string choir alone, and is followed by a second section "B" in the parallel minor key, stated in woodwinds and horns. There is a predominantly triple rhythm which persists in the strings, reminiscent of a Beethoven scherzo. The return of "A" is quite literal, although more fully harmonized. The second digres-
The Dies irae, attributed to Thomas of Celano (early 13th century) has been used in a more obvious
manner by Berlioz (Symphony Fantastique); Verdi (Requiem); Liszt (Totentanz); Saint-Saens (Dance
Macabre); Rachmaninoff (Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) and others.
rCustav Mahler. Britfr. 1879-1911 (Berlin. Vienna, and I.eipsig: 1924) pp. 315-15.
t Gabriel Eiiel. "Mahler's Second, an Interpretative Note." Chord and Ducord, Vol. I. No. 7, December
1935, p. 19.
25
MAY FESTIVAL
sion "C", which, from its thematic material, might be considered to be a second return of the trio section, is characterized by a constantly fluctuat?ing key level. Trombones and trumpets are featured here for the first time in the movement, recalling the angry, disquieting moments of the first movement. In the final return of the principle section "A", the theme is presented twice, first in pizzicato strings, divided into nine parts. When repeated, it is heard in the woodwind choir with the strings adding a flowing counterpoint, while harps and horns sustain the harmonies. Mah?ler indicated that another pause be observed before the last three move?ments are played without interruption.
Third movement: "In ruhig Hiessender Bewegung" ("In calmly flowing motion") C minor, 38
The spirit of unbelief and negation . . . looking into the turmoil of appearances . . . loses the clear eyes of childhood, the sure foothold which love alone gives . . . the world and life become a witches brew; disgust of existence in every form strikes . . . with iron fist and drives to an outburst of despair.
This movement is a purely instrumental setting of Mahler's song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigot" ("Saint Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fishes"), whose text tells of the Saint's futile attempts to appeal to his congregation. In despair he preaches to the fishes who listen attentively, but at the end of his sermon return to their vicious greed, which symbolized in Mahler's mind the spiritual poverty of mankind. A solo kettledrum passage indicates its opening, and is in sharp contrast to the idyllic mood of the preceding movement. The vocal line of the song appears, for the most part, in the woodwinds, and in its opening passages follows the song strictly. A restless sixteenth note figure of the string accompaniment dominates the movement. The rest?lessness of this theme suggested, in Mahler's song, the aimless gyrations of the fish. Without the words which give a key to his musical invention, this theme may evoke any variety of moods, from the sinister to the hu?morous. To Mahler it represented futility and "the spirit of unbelief and negation." There are obvious reminiscences of the "Scene at the Ball" from the Symphonie Fantastique of Hector Berlioz. The design of the movement is a simple Song and Trio (ABA) and takes the place of the traditional Scherzo movement found in the symphonies of Beethoven. Unlike the second movement, the middle section here is closely related to the content of the main section. The Trio "B" begins in fugal style, and climaxes in a sudden marchlike theme presented by full orchestra. Near the end of the return of section "A" there is heard a violently dissonant chord played fortissimo; a sudden outburst of despair ("disgust of exis?tence. . . strikes") which reappears at the opening of the fifth movement. The music gradually fades away, as it restates the material in a shortened version. The fourth movement, according to Mahler's direction, should follow without interruption.
26
FIRST CONCERT
Fourth movement: "Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht" (Very solemn, but smooth) contralto solo, D-Hat major, 44.
The morning voice of ingenuous belief sounds in our ears, 'I am from God and will return to God.' God will give me a candle to light me to the bliss of eternal life.
The contralto voice intones a song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, "Ur-licht" ("Eternal Light"). It is one of Mahler's most beautiful melodies, expressing man's need and suffering, and his hope for eternal life. A choral-like section sets the mood, after the voice sings the first line of the text. At the words "Da kam ich auf einem breiten Weg" ("I came upon a broad road"), there is more movement, as the key shifts to the relative minor, building to a climax with the return of the original key. The light orchestration and exquisite sensitivity of this movement reveal its affinity to the songs. Its emphasis is on a linear texture, pointed up by the use of solo winds and violins. In such movements as this, Mahler anticipated the return of the chamber orchestra in the early twentieth century. The text follows:
O Roschen roth!
Der Mensch liegt in grassier Noth!
Der Mensch liegt in grosster Pein!
Je lieber mikht' ich in Himmel sein!
Da kam ich aufeinen breiten Weg;
Da kam ein Engelein und wollt' mich abweisen;
Ach nein! Ich liess mich nicht abweisen!
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott!
Der Hebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben,
Wird leuchten mir bis in das ewig selig Leben!
Oh, rosebud red!
Man lies in greatest need,
Man lies in greatest pain!
I would rather be in heaven.
I came upon a broad road;
An angel came by and wanted me to turn back;
Oh, no, I did not let myself be turned back
I come from God and will return to God!
Beloved God will give me a little light,
And into eternal life will send me.
The fifth movement follows without a pause.
Fifth Movement: Im tempo des Scherzo-Draftig-Langsam-Mhterioso (B-flat to E-Hat, 44) for chorus, contralto, and soprano soli.
We are confronted once more by terrifying questions. A voice is heard crying aloud: the end of all living beings is come. The Last Judgment is at hand and the terror of the day of days has come. The earth quakes, the graves burst open, the dead arise and stream on in endless procession. . . The cry for mercy and forgiveness strikes fearfully in our ears. The wailing rises higher and higher --our senses desert us, consciousness dies at the approach of the eternal spirit. . . The trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out; in the eerie silence that follows, we can catch the distant, barely audible song of a nightingale, a last tremulous echo of earthly life; a chorus of saints and heavenly beings softly breaks forth:
'Thou shalt arise, surely thou shalt arise" Then appears the glory of Cod! A wonderous, soft light penetrates us to the heart --all is holy calm. And behold --it is no judgment --there are no sinners, no just. None is great, none is small. There is no punishment and no reward. An overwhelming love lightens our being. We know and are.
The theme thai is heard on this line will return in the finale, when the two solo voices sing the words, "with wings I have won for myself, in fervent love I shall soar to the light no eyes have seen."
27
MAY FESTIVAL
With the exception of this last movement, the Second Symphony, which was begun in the summer of 1893 when Mahler was thirty years old, stood nearly completed that year. The finale would not take shape, how?ever, and it was not until Mahler attended the funeral of his associate, Hans von Billow, at Hamburg in 1894, that he received the needed inspiration to complete the work. He wrote of this experience to Arthur Seidl in 1897:
At that time I had long planned to introduce the chorus into the last movement, and only hesitated in fear that this might be interpreted as a superficial imitation of Beethoven. Just then, Billow died, and I attended his funeral here. --The mood in which I sat there and thought of the departed one was exactly that of the work which occupied me constantly then. --At that moment, the chorus, near the organ, intoned the Klopstock chorale "Aufer-stehn!" It struck me like a bolt of lightning, and everything stood clear and vivid before my soul. The creator waits for this bolt of lightning; this is his 'Holy Annunciation'.
To Klopstock's Ode, Mahler added words of his own which will be indicated in the text. "What happened to me with the last movement of the Second Symphony is simply this," he wrote, "I really looked through all the world's literature, even the Bible to find the redeeming Word, and was forced to express feeling and thought in my own words."t
As in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with its choral finale, the structure of this movement is relatively free and conditioned by the text, but underlying it is a definite application of the principles to be found in the Sonata-Allegro design; Mahler still states his ideas and develops them in a purely instrumental fashion. It is the most extended form to be found in any of his symphonies and takes half an hour to perform. The astonish?ing virtuosity he displays in the instrumental section of this movement with its unusual combinations of instruments, and the apotheosis of the idea of spiritual victory, with the peal of organ and bells amid the jubila?tion of the orchestra, is unmatched in symphonic literature for its theatri?cal effect.
After the entire orchestra has introduced the movement in a paroxism of sound, employing the climatic dissonant passage from the end of the third movement --now augmented with brass fanfares --distant offstage horns and trumpet announce the approach of the Resurrection. Some?what later, at the end of the second of many pauses in the movement, the Dies irae chorale from the first movement returns, stated softly in the woodwinds with pizzicato string accompaniment. It is followed by a sec?ond theme in the trumpet which can be referred to as the "Resurrection Chorale" for it is heard at the entrance of the chorus as it intones the opening words of Klopstock's Ode, "Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du mein Staub" ("You will rise again, my dust"). Attention may be drawn to a fragmentary theme in the English horn against tremolo strings which will
Newlin, op.cil.p. 158 tNcwIin.op. cit., p. 158
28
FI RST CONCERT
later identify itself with Mahler's words for the contralto solo "O glaube mein Herz" ("Believe my heart"). The Dies irae chorale can then be clearly heard in full harmony in the brass section. The "Resurrection Theme" and the trumpet calls increase in volume, as the material of this, and the first movement, becomes involved in a development section of great complexity and intensity. The two chorale themes are developed in counterpoint and transformed into a march ("The dead arise and stream on in endless procession. . The Great Summons is heard, the trumpets of the Apocalypse ring out."). After the climax has been reached, there is a quiet interlude of the trumpet calls, joined with bird-like flutterings in the woodwinds ("The barely audible sound of the nightingale, a last tre?mulous echo of earthly life"). The chorus of saints and heavenly hosts begins, almost inaudibly, the first line of the Klopstock Ode, set to the "Resurrection" chorale theme:
(Chorus with Soprano Solo)
Aufersteh'n, ja aufersteh'n wirst du, nein Slaub, nach kurzer Ruh!
Unsterblich Leben! Unsterblich Leben wird Der dich rief, dich riefdich geben.
Wieder aufzubluh'n wirst du gesat!
Der Herr der Ernte geht
Und sammelt Carben
Uns ein, die starben!
You will rise again, my dust,
after a short repose! He who summoned will grant
immortal life;
The seed you have sown will bloom again; The Lord of harvests goes forth To bind the sheaves Of us who died.
The text that follows is that of Mahler, and is sung to a theme already announced in the instrumental section of the movement previously re?ferred to:
(Contralto Solo)
O glaube, mein Herz, O glaube: Esgeht dir nichts verloren!
Believe, my heart, nothing is lost to vou.
(Chorus with Contralto Solo)
Vein 1st, ja dein, was du gesehnt! Dem, was du geliebt, was du gestritten
All is yours, yes, all that you have loved and striven for!
(Soprano Solo)
u glauOe: du wardst nicht umsonst geboren! Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten!
Believe, you were not born in vain!
Kopstock's text is then resumed with:
(Chorus and Soloists)
Was entstanden ist, das muss vergehen! Was vergangen, auferstehen! Hor aufzu beben! Bereite ich zu leben!
What was born must go. What has gone shall rise again. Be not fearful, Prepare to live.
MAY FESTIVAL
At the words "Mit Fliigeln die ich mir errungen" (with wings I have won for myself) in the text that follows, the theme that was heard in the fourth movement with the contralto words, "Ich bin von Gott und will wieden zu Gott" "I am from God, and will return to God" is heard in a faster and more urgent tempo:
(Contralto and Soprano)
O Schmerz! Du Alldurchdringer!
Dir bin ich entrungen.
O Tod! Du Allbezwinger!
Nun bist du bezwungen!
Mit Flugeln die ich mir errungen,
In Liebesstreben werd' ich entschweben
Zum Licht zu dem kein Aug' gedrungen!
0 Pain, penetrating all,
1 have escaped you!
O Death, conquering all,
Now you are conquered!
With wings I have won for myself,
In fervent love I shall soar
To the Light no eyes have seen!
Employing all of the musical resources he can summon, Mahler reaches the pinnacle of orchestral sound to carry to us his reaffirmation of the Christian belief in resurrection and the immortality of the soul.
(Chorus)
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!
Aufersleh'n ja aufersleh'n wirst du, Mein Herz,
in einem Nu
Was da geschlagen
Zu Gott wird es dich tragen!
I shall die in order to live again.
You will rise again, yes rise again, My
heart, in a moment,
Though stricken,
Borne aloft --to God!
Employed in the ending are 2 (lutes, 2 piccolos, 4 oboes, 5 clarinets, 3 bassoons, 10 horns, 6 trumpets, 4 trombones, a tuba, 2 kettledrums, 2 tarn tarns, 3 large bells and the full complement of strings and the organ.
30
SECOND CONCERT Friday Evening, April 24
Stabat Mater..............................................Poulenc
Francis Poulenc was born in Paris, January 7, 1899; died in Paris, January 30, 1963.
I have sought neither to ridicule nor to mimic tradition, but to compose naturally, as I felt impelled to.
-Poulenc
After the end of the First World War a group of young avant-garde composers, rebelling against the rich and wandering chromaticism of Cesar Franck and wearying of the vagueness and evanescence of Debussy (who, they declared, had "drawn French music into an impasse" with his glamorous veiled dissonances), grouped themselves together as the Societe des nouveaux jeunes. It included Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey, and Georges Auric. They were publicly recognized in an article appearing in Comoedia, January 16, 1920, by Henry Collet who referred to them as "Les Six," "an inseparable group who by a magnificent and voluntary return to sim?plicity have brought about a renaissance of French music." The only thing they really had in common as artists was the patronage of Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau and a desire to react violently against the pastel music of the Impressionists and the elaborate and involved grandiose style of late Romanticism. These they opposed with a music that was direct, clean-cut, witty and, for its time, sophisticated. Actually they were quite in?dependent of each other artisticallyOf the six, only Honegger, Milhaud, and Poulenc achieved international recognition, and certainly each of these strongly individual composers maintained a high degree of stylistic independence throughout his career. They were active in the day of the "futurists" and "cubists" in painting, a time of innovation, ridicule, and violent disputes in aesthetic matters, a time when young composers were creating in an artistic vacuum. The long steady tradition of Romanticism had spent its strength. In France, Claude Debussy had both opposed and, in a way, brought it to fruition, but by 1915 his impressive work was finished and no new impulse had taken its place. "Les Six" blithely ignored the problems of composition inherited from him and the late Romanticists. In their gay, trivial, and often impertinent music they
3J
MAY FESTIVAL
scorned all tradition. Behind their disrespect for the "presumptuous com?poser" of the past and his musical conventions was no doubt a fear emanating from the fact that they found themselves lost and wandering in an artistic wasteland. "Atonality," "twelve-tone technique," "quarter-tone technique," "barbarism," "brutism," "futurism' "machine music," and "Gebrauchtsmusik" were some of the signposts that led nowhere.
French music between the two world wars, in spite of its conscious attempt to advance the cause of the new and novel, labored to little avail against the firm purposefulness of Stravinsky and Schonberg. Although much trivial and unsubstantial music was produced in this period, France was able to keep the attention of the musical world upon her, recapturing to a degree some of her former eminence through the highly lyrical and varied genius of Poulenc, an artist who had freed himself from tradition but was not disrespectful of it. In spite of the ambivalence of his style that ranges from witty impertinence to religious fervor and somber tragedy, it remained that of a true classicist to the end, proudly restrained, clear, refined, and elegant.
Poulenc composed many sacred works, among them a Mass, several motets for unaccompanied voices, settings of the Stabat Mater, and a Gloria for soprano, mixed chorus, and orchestra. His last, Sept reports des te'nebras, had its world premiere on April 11, 1963, four months after his death, with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Thomas Schip-pers.
The Stabat Mater ("The Mother Was Standing"), a thirteenth-century hymn ascribed to a Franciscan Monk Jacopo Todi (1228-1306), describes trie grief of the mother of Christ at the Cross. It did not appear in the Roman Liturgy until 1727, although early in the fifteenth century at Cologne, there was instituted a commemoration of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin. Since the sixteenth century, its text, described by Heinrich Heine of "caressing tenderness," has inspired many composers, the most important being Josquin Des Pres (1450-1521) and Giovanni Palestrina (1525-1594), who wrote polyphonic versions of sublime beauty. Later settings occurred in all periods; among the most notable are those of Giovanni Pergolesi (1736), Franz Joseph Haydn (1773), Franz Schubert (1815), Gioacchino Rossini (1842), Antonin Dvorak (1877), Giuseppi Ver?di (1899), and Francis Poulenc (1949). The pathetic beauty of the text reflects characteristic features of the new feeling which came into Western Christianity with the transforming Franciscan movement. In a world filled with a sense of impending doom, fear and terror were mitigated by pity, sorrow, and love.
Christian Bernard, painter and stage set designer, prominent in the Parisian theater for thirty years and an intimate friend of Poulenc, died in 1949. As a tribute to him, Poulenc composed this Stabat Mater which had its first performance at the Strasbourg Festival in 1951. It ranks today among the finest and most beautiful of religious works.
32
SECOND CONCERT
Stabat Mater dolorosa juxta crucem lacrymosa dum pendebal Filius.
II. CHORUS
Cuius animam gementem, contristatam ac dolentem pertransivit gladius.
III. CHORUS
O tuam tristis et ajflkta fuit ilia benedicta Maler Unigenili!
IV. CHORUS
Quae moerebat et dolebat Pia Mater, dum videbat Nati poenas inclyti!
v. chorus
Quit est homo qui nonfleret Matrem Christi si videret in tanto supplicio Quis non posset contristari, Matrem Christi contemplari dolentem cum Filio Pro peccatis suae gentK vidit Jesum in tormentis etflagellis subditum,
VI. SOPRANO AND CHORUS
vidit suum dulcem Natum morientem desolatum, dum emuit spiritum.
VII. CHORUS
Eia, Mater, fons amoris, me sentire vim doloris fac, ut tecum lugeam.
VIII. CHORUS
Fac ut ardeat cor meum in amando Christum Deum, ut sibi complaceam.
IX. CHORUS
Sancta Mater, istud agas, crucifixi jige plagas cordi meo valide. Tui Nati vulnerati, tarn dignati pro me pati, poenas mecum divide.
The grieving Mother stood weeping by the cross where her Son was hanging.
Her spirit cried out, mourning and sorrowing, as if pierced with a sword.
Oh, how grieved and struck down was that blessed woman, Mother of the Son born of One!
How she mourned and lamented,
this Holy Mother, seeing
her son hanging there in pain!
What man would not weep to see Christ's Mother in such humiliation Who would not suffer with her, seeing Christ's Mother sorrowing for her Son For the sins of his people she saw Jesus in torment, beaten down with whips.
saw her gentle Son dying in desolation, breathing out his spirit.
Let me, Mother, font of love, feel with thee thy grief, make me mourn with thee.
Make my heart so burn for love of Christ my God that it be satisfied.
Holy Mother, let it be
that the stripes of the crucified
may pierce my heart.
With thy injured Son
who suffered so to save me,
let me share his pains.
MAY FESTIVAL
Fac me tecum vereflere, cnicifixo condolere, donee ego vixero. Juxta crucem tecum stare, te libenter sociare in planetu desidero.
Virgo virginum praeclara, mihi iam non sis amara: fac me tecum plangere.
X. SOPRANO AND CHORUS
Fac ut portem Christi mortem,
passionis fac consortem
el plagas recolere.
Fac me plagu vulnerari,
cruce hac inebriari
ob amor em Filii.
XI. CHORUS
Inflammatus et accensus, per te, Virgo, sim defensus in die tudicii.
Christe, cum sit hunc exire, da per Malrem me venire ad palmam victonae.
XII. SOPRANO AND CHORUS
Quando corpus morietur, fac ut animae donetur parodist gloria. Amen!
Let me weep beside thee, mourning the crucified as long as I shall live. To stand beside the cross and to join with thee in weeping is my desire.
Virgin lamed of all virgins, be not severe with me now; let me weep with thee.
Let me bear Christ's death,
let me share his suffering
and remember his blows.
Let me be wounded with his blows,
inebriate with the cross
and thy Son's love.
Lest the flames consume me,
be my advocate, Virgin,
on the day of judgment.
Christ, when my time is finished,
grant, through Thy Mother, that I win
the palm of victory.
When my body dies let my soul be granted the glory of heaven. Amen!
Prologue, Op. 75, No. 1, for Soprano, Tenor, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra
Alan Stout was born in Baltimore, Maryland, November 26. 1932.
Alan Stout's academic background includes a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a master's degree from the University of Washington in Seattle. He did further graduate work at the University of Copenhagen. His teachers in composition were the dis?tinguished American composers Henry Cowell and Wallingford Riegger. At present, he is Associate Professor of Theory and Composition in the School of Music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
Mr. Stout's major compositions are the result of a series of commis?sions: "Movements for Violin and Orchestra" (Peninsula Music Festival); Symphony No. 2 (Ravinia Festival); Cello Sonata (Contemporary Con?certs, Chicago); a large chamber work as yet unfinished (Fromm Founda-
34
SECOND CONCERT
tion); and, in preparation, an unspecified work for the Chicago Sym?phony's 80th season.
Prologue was commissioned by the Board of Education of the Methodist Church in 1964. Its premiere performance took place on December 31, 1964, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was dedicated to, and conducted by, Thor Johnson. The University Musical Society had commissioned Mr. Stout to compose an extended choral work for the 1970 Festival, which, because of previous commitments, he was unable to complete. At Mr. Johnson's suggestion, the Prologue was substituted.
"Prologue," writes Mr. Stout, "is a work of approximately fifteen min?utes duration, played without pause, but in five definite movements. Movement one, covering verses 1 and 2 of the text and movement five, covering verse 14, are closely related --both use the solo soprano in-strumentally, the bulk of the text is covered by the chorus, both are dominated by pedal points, which give the sense of the tonal centers, and both use perfect intervals in predominant places. The second movement, covering verses 3 to 5, and the fourth, covering verses 10 to 13, stand out by being on a much higher dynamic level than the other movements. The work builds towards its major climax in verse 13, the only place the entire orchestra is called upon. The third movement, center piece of the arch, is a chamber music movement, largely for soprano solo, with a canonic interlude in the center for orchestra alone. This movement covers verses 6-9. Since the text deals with the mystery of the Incarnation, this attitude was foremost in the composer's approach to the text. It is possibly a very subdued treatment of the Christmas story."
The text is taken from John 1:1-14 (King James Version):
First Movement --Chorus and Soprano (Tranquillo)
1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2. The same was in the beginning with God.
Second Movement --Chorus (Moderate marcalo)
3. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made.
4. In Him was life; and the life was the Light of men.
5. And the Light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Third Movement --Chorus and Soprano (Moderate tranquillo)
6. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
7. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
8. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
9. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
Fourth Movement --Chorus and Tenor (Lento, marcato)
10. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.
11. He came unto His own and His own received Him not.
12. But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God, even to them that believed on His name.
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MAY FESTIVAL
13. Which were born, not of the blood, nor of the will of the Hesh, nor of the will of man,
but of God.
Fifth Movement --Chorus and Soprano (Andante tranquillo)
14. And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld the glory of the
only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.
Concerto No. 19 in F major
for Piano and Orchestra, K. 459......................Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December 5, 1791.
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer whom I have known personally or by name.
-Haydn
In its diversity and scope the music of Mozart is one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of European art. Wherever he directed his pen, to the creation of opera, serious or comic, to cantata, Mass, chamber music, sonata, concerto, or symphony, he left imperish?able masterpieces. In more than six hundred works, created at a breath?less speed during less than thirty years, Mozart revealed a universality unknown to any other composer, for his art was founded upon a thor?ough assimilation and sublimation of the prevailing Italian, French, and German styles of his period; he carried to perfection all instrumental and vocal forms of his day. No composer ever revealed simultaneously such creative affluence and such unerring instinct for beauty. Few artists in any age have been so copious and yet so controlled, or have so consistently sustained throughout their creative lives such a high level of artistic excellence.
Mozart wrote his first original piano concerto (K. 175 in D major) in 1773 when he was seventeen. Initial attempts had been made earlier. At the age of ten he transcribed three sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son, that master of the gallante style Johann Christian Bach, into a series of piano concertos. These were hardly concertos in our sense of the term today, the orchestra involving only a pair of violin parts and a bass. These were written for his own use, when, as a child virtuoso performer, he had embarked upon an extended tour of Europe. Another series came in 1767, when, at the age of eleven, he again arranged sonatas of other composers, popular at that time but wholly unknown to au?diences today (Raupach, Honnauer, Schobert, and Eckhardt). In these he considerably enlarged the orchestra with a pair of oboes and horns as well as strings. These works reveal the beginning of his conception of the concerto that was to guide him throughout his life. From then on he created some twenty-three piano concertos that constitute numerically the
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largest number of great concertos by any composer. Because he com?posed them from 1773 until his death in 1791, we are able to trace the development and progress of his style from his first tentative efforts to those that are on the highest level of excellence, viewed from the total output of the eighteenth century, or any century for that matter. There are more real "masterpieces" among them than in any other group of his compositions. Among the forty-nine or so symphonies, only those of his later years are considered to be the height of achievement in that form, and less than a dozen of the string quartets would fall into this class. Mozart as the absolute master of orchestration is revealed not in his compositions for orchestra alone, but in his concertos. Here his writing for instruments is the richest and most flexible to be found in any of his works.
The piano concerto was of German origin and was late in making its appearance. The concerto for violin, on the other hand, had its inception in Italy and a history of continuous development throughout the sev?enteenth and eighteenth centuries. It so impressed composers in other countries beyond the Alps that, embracing it with greatest zeal, they produced a literature of imposing quantity and quality, but completely neglected the concerto for the keyboard. The one exception was Mozart, who developed it from a work in which the piano had had a prominent place in the orchestra, to where it became the dominating force in the ensemble. He reconciled the conflict between the virtuoso performer and the logic of symphonic continuity. This had presented a problem from the moment that the keyboard concerto was born, springing as it did like Minerva from the head of Zeus, when Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed a number of his own violin concertos, and those of Vivaldi and others, for the harpsichord. The problem of the conflict between solo instrument and orchestra continued with Bach's sons, Emanuel and Johann Chris?tian, who together produced works that were the epitome of rococo elegance. For the most part, however, the eighteenth century considered the early "concertante" style of the keyboard concerto the acme of refined entertainment, and did not concern itself too much with the aesthetic questions inherent in the relationship between the solo piano and the reigning problems of formal construction that the symphony, at the same time, was attempting to achieve. Mozart, more than any other composer, was responsible for the growth of the piano concerto to a stature com?parable to that of the symphony.
Except for writing operas, which was his lifelong ambition, Mozart found no other form as natural a medium for self-expression as the piano concerto. Practically all of his important ones were written between 1782 and 1790, during his stay in Vienna. In the middle of the 1780's, he was at the height of his maturity and enjoying his greatest success as a composer and piano virtuoso. From 1782 he played continually in public concerts and, answering the growing demand for him to perform his own
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works, he produced no less than seventeen concertos, twelve of them among his greatest.
The concerto on tonight's program was the last of six composed in the year 1784. It was completed December 11 of that year and, no doubt, performed by him the same month. (Mozart performed it again October 15, 1790, one year before his death, in Frankfurt during the festivities attending the coronation of Leopold II.) His concerts were supported by 174 subscribers and were attended by a distinguished audience of nobil?ity, wealthy patrons of the arts, foreign diplomats, and high government officials. For one brief moment in his life, he enjoyed the recognition his prodigious talent warranted. But not for long. By 1787, three years later, as his letters attest, he was begging for money. When, in that same year, he tried again to obtain subscribers for a new series of concerts, only one signature among his old admirers appeared. During the last ten years of his life he had no fixed income except a small yearly stipend provided him by the Emperor. "Too much for what I do; too little for what I could do," he wrote on one of his tax returns. He never enjoyed the rewards of official appointments or royal pensions at any time during his life. The personal emotions of grief and anguish Mozart experienced never found expression in his music. Here they were transformed into significant forms of beauty that have brought joy and delight to generations.
The first movement of this concerto is essentially symphonic in its sturdy structure. It shows hints of Beethoven's late methods of thematic manipulation, which had not been detected in Mozart's concertos up to this point, and were seldom heard later. The rhythmic pattern of the opening theme had appeared briefly in the two preceeding concertos (K. 453 in G and K. 456 in B-flat) but here the ensuing treatment differs greatly, for it now dominates the complete, concisely organized move?ment. It is heard in an orchestral ritomello, is used sequentially or con-trapuntally as in a Beethoven development, and reappears in other con?trasting themes. Heard almost as often is another subject in triple rhythm which it occassionally joins. The persistence of the theme or its rhythm, both in the orchestra and piano, is what confers on the movements its truly symphonic character.
The second movement is far removed from the conventional largo usually found in this section. It is marked, rather, allegretto which does not seriously interrupt the continuous exuberance of the whole work. It moves with an easy grace and charm which, although touched momentar?ily with melancholy, never settles into a meditative mood. It still retains the binary form common to several of his andantes and adagios.
The third movement is one of Mozart's finest and most ingratiating sonata rondos. Its clearly enunciated theme, to which the music returns after the necessary digressions, its contrast of homophonic and poly?phonic passages, including a well-developed fugato, is evidence of Mo?zart's ingenious talent for combining spontaneous expression with superb structural craftsmanship.
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Saturday Evening, April 25
Tone Poem, "Don Juan," Op. 20........................Strauss
Richard Strauss was born in Munich, June 11, 1864; died in Garmish-Partenkirchen, Germany, September 8, 1949.
Criticism has always been embarrassed in its attempt to evaluate Rich?ard Strauss. There is no doubt that he was one of the most interesting and extraordinary personalities in the world of music. Whatever his antago?nistic critics have said of him, he remains, in the light of his early works at least, one of the greatest composers of the first half of the twentieth century.
Trained during his formative years in the classical musical tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, he exerted his individuality and in?dependence of thought and expression with such daring and insistence that at his mature period he was considered the most modern and most radical of composers. Critics turned from their tirades against Wagner to vent their invectives upon him; they vilified him as they had Wagner, with a persistence that seems incredible to us today.
The progressive unfolding of his genius aroused much discussion, largely because it was so uneven and erratic. Hailed on his appearance as the true successor to Richard Wagner, this "Richard II" became, for some years, the most commanding figure in modern music. About half a centu?ry ago, except in Germany and Austria, he was almost entirely ignored by the leaders of progressive musical opinion. No composer has ever suffered such a sudden and decisive reversal of fortune. Just when his popularity seemed to be steadily growing and controversy dying down, his works began to disappear from current programs and for a period of approximately ten years became almost inaccessible to the public.
During this period, music was developing at a greater rate of speed than at any time in its history. Russia had begun to exert herself in the field with such great force that it seemed she was about to usurp the position of Germany as the leading musical nation. France had caught the attention of the musical world with late impressionistic and modern de?vices, and England had suddenly revived interest in native art by redis?covering her heritage of Elizabethan music, and by attending to a contem?porary output.
With the interest of the world suddenly caught by the novelty of new styles and held by the rapid shift from one to another, attention was drawn away from Germany just at that period when Strauss was winning
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acceptance. When, after ten years of indifference to his output, the world again began to hear his works, it was with different ears. Music that had been controversial now seemed perfectly acceptable; what at first ap?peared to be novel in harmonic device, exotic in coloration, and new in conception of form was now looked upon as commonplace. Strauss's fresh and ingenious manner of treating old material had been mistaken for startling innovation and open rebellion against musical traditions.
Russia in particular had so extended the expressive powers of music that much that had seemed unusual and even cacophonous now appeared to be utterly prosaic. After the performance of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps (1914), the one-time exceptional harmony, erratic melody, and queer instrumentation of Strauss "left the itch of novelty behind."
When, therefore, criticism again turned to him, it observed that he had not continued to fulfill the great promise of his youth, and that aside from his failure to develop from strength to greater strength, there was a marked decline of his talents. His later works, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die Liebe der Danae (1943), bore witness to the gradual degeneration and final extinction of his creative powers. The world had beheld the tragic spectacle of the deterioration of a genius.
Romain Rolland, in his essay on Strauss, sensed this depletion when he wrote: "The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of dis?couraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away into nothingness. Don Quixote, in dying, foreswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself (Heldenleben) admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent nature."
Strauss had expressed momentarily in his early masterpieces --the great tone poems and the operas Elektra and Salome -the modern psychological point of view; yet he was too strongly marked by the nineteenth-century romanticism to venture far into the new and challenging world. The Romantic movement had persisted longer in music than in any of the other arts, still making in the early years of the twentieth century, as Ernest Newman so colorfully writes, "an occasional effectual effort to raise its old head, ludicrous now with its faded garlands of flowers over?hanging the wrinkled cheeks."t Romanticism had long since outlived itself, yet for composers like Strauss, Mahler, and Rachmaninoff, its fasci?nation proved too strong to be completely resisted. Mahler defended it with a kind of impassioned eloquence; Rachmaninoff embraced it to the end of his life with filial affection; and, although Strauss, in his early sojourn in this dying world, seemed at first to "behave toward it like a graceless, irreverent urchin in a cathedral," he soon fell under its spell. The undercurrent of weariness and disgust, of satiety and disillusion, that runs through his work links him today spiritually, mentally, and psy?chologically with Mahler, Rachmaninoff, and the great Romantics of the
Romain Rolland, Musicians of Today (New York: Henrv Holl & Co., 1915), p. 166. t Ernesl Newman, Musical Studies (3rd ed.; New York: John Lane Co., 1913). p. 274.
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past, rather than with the modernists. He, like them, had his roots in the same soil that nurtured Wagner, Byron, Goethe, Leopardi, and Tchaikovsky, and the tragic spectacle of his gradual but perceptible dete?rioration is a reflection of the disenchantment with life that had caught the Romantic artists in its merciless grip.
More than forty years ago Cecil Gray wrote of Strauss:
His whole career is symbolically mirrored in his own Don Juan, in the splendid vitality and high promise of his beginning, the subsequent period of cold and reckless perversity, the gradual oncoming of the inevitable nemesis of weariness and disillusion, until at last, in the words of Lenau, on whose poem the work is ostensibly based, ergreift ihn der Ekel, und der at der Teufel der ihn halt, and the theme of disgust that is blared out triumphantly in Don Juan reappears in Zarathustra. In place of the arrogant, triumphant figure conceived and por?trayed in Nietzche, we are shown a man tormented by doubt and disillusion, desperately seeking relief in religion, passion, science and intellectual ecstasy and finally ending up where he began, in doubt and disillusion.
In the light of today, therefore, Strauss is no longer considered an innovator of any true significance. But let it be said that, from the first, he has manifested an extraordinary mastery of technical procedure; that he is one of the few composers of our century who has shown himself capable of constructing work on a monumental scale and of approaching the epic conception. His work as a whole is greater than any of its constituent parts, and, in this sense, he possesses an architectonic quality of mind that is impressive. There are in his greatest works a nervous energy and exuberance, a vitality and fertility of invention, and a tech?nique of handling the orchestra that are admittedly outstanding. He has again and again shown this power to create beauty of rare freshness, although he most tragically failed in the complete realization of his high?est achievement. For this, the present generation will never forgive him. His unpardonable sin was that he promised nothing for the future; he offered no challenge, as did Stravinsky and Schonberg, to the composers of our day.
A contemporary and highly individual evaluation of the art of Strauss appeared in High Fidelity magazine for March, 1962. It was written by the pianist, Glenn Gould. He wrote in part:
... The great thing about the music of Richard Strauss is that it presents and substan?tiates an argument which transcends all the dogmatisms of art --all questions of style and taste and idiom --all the frivolous, effete preoccupation of the chronologist. It presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time by not being of it; who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument of individuality --an argument that man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.
Nikolas Lenau, a pseudonym for the Austrian poet Nikolaus Franz Niembsch von Strehlenau, author of the poem "Don Juan," himself ex-
Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). p. 48.
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pounded the philosophy of his poem. "My Don Juan," he said, "is no hot-blooded man eternally pursuing women. It is the longing in him to find a woman who is to him incarnate womanhood, and to enjoy in the one, all the women on earth, whom he cannot as individuals possess. Because he does not find her, although he reels from one to another, at last Disgust seizes hold of him, and this Disgust is the Devil that fetches him."
Lawrence Oilman in his program notes for this work points out the kinship that exists between Lenau's and Strauss's Don Juan and Theodore Dreiser's Eugene Witla and the Michael Robartes of William Butler Yeats. Like Michael, he loved a woman, not really for herself, but rather as an immortal and transcendent incarnation of beauty. This passion for the "ideal beauty" of Plato --"pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life," leads the Don from incandescent ardor and impassioned impulse at the beginning of his search to bitterness and despair at the realization that beauty and love are but fleeting illusions, and unattainable.
"Don Juan" is not program music, strictly speaking; it tells no definite story or series of connected incidents; it is an exercise in musical psy?chology, a field in which Beethoven gave us Coriolanus, Liszt essayed a portrait of Faust, and Mahler created the Second Symphony. In this work, Strauss is a student of human nature and life, no less than an' accomplished musician. With all the colors of the orchestra of his day on his palette, he paints the youthful hero, in search of what the poem calls a ". . .magic realm, illimited, eternal. Of gloried woman, loveliness super?nal!"
Ernest Newman, speaking of Strauss's music itself, noted that in "Don Juan" we get some of the finest development that is to be found in the history of symphonic music; "the music unfolds itself, bar by bar, with as perfect continuity and consistency as if it had nothing but itself to consid?er, while at the same time it adds fresh points to our knowledge of the psychology of the character it is portraying. No other composer equals Strauss in the power of writing long stretches of music that interests us in and for itself, at the same time that every line and color in it seem to express some new trait in the character that is being sketched.
"Don Juan" was the second tone poem of Strauss.t It was composed in 1887-88, when he was but twenty-four years of age, and was published in 1890. The first performance was at Weimar in 1889, at which time Strauss himself conducted from manuscript.
To the score, he prefixed the following stanzas from Lenau's poem:
O magic realm, illimited. eternal
Of gloried woman --loveliness supernal!
Newman, op. cit., p. 272.
f'Macbeth," Op. 23, published a year after "Don Juan," was really his first.
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Fain would I, in the storm of stressful bliss,
Expire upon the last one's lingering kiss!
Through every realm, O friend, would wing my flight,
Wherever Beauty blooms, kneel down to each,
And, if for one brief moment, win delight!
I flee from surfeit and from rapture's cloy,
Keep fresh for Beauty service and employ,
Grieving the One, that All I may enjoy.
The fragrance from one lip today is breath of spring:
The dungeon's gloom perchance tomorrow's luck may bring.
When with the new love won I sweetly wander,
No bliss is ours upfurbish'd and regilded;
A different love has This to That one yonder,
Not up from ruins be my temples builded. Yea, Love life is, and ever must be new, Cannot be changed or turned in new direction; It cannot but there expire --here resurrection; And, if 'tis real, it nothing knows of rue! Each beauty in the world is sole, unique: So must the Love be that would Beauty seek! So long as Youth lives on with pulse afire, Out to the chase! To victories new aspire!
It was a wond'rous lovely storm that drove me; Now it is o'er; and calm all 'round, above me; Sheer dead is every wish; all hopes o'ershrouded-'Twas p'r'aps a flash from heaven that so descended, Whose deadly stroke left me with powers ended, And all the world, so bright before, o'erclouded; And p'r'aps not! Exhausted is the fuel; And on the hearth the cold is fiercely cruel.
-English version by John P.Jackson
Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23, for Piano
and Orchestra.................................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
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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 in?carnate in his Manfred, who reflected an increasing egoism in the ex?pression of melancholy. Chateaubriand, in France, who gave such fluent and beautiful expression to the emotional ideas originated by Rousseau, created the type of the esprit romanesque in his Rene. At odds with himself and the world, sensitive and disillusioned, full of yearning for love and faith without the strength for either, he felt nothing but bitter emptiness. "All," says Rene, "preaches to one of dissolution --everything wearies me, painfully I drag my boredom about with me, and so my whole life is a yawn." Lamartine, in his Meditations poetique carried emotionalism 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, 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 composition. The supersensitive Chopin cried out his longing in the languorous nocturnes, Berlioz in his Symphonie fantastique 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 ills of 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 characterized this feeling in Germany. "People," he
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said, "practiced renunciation and modesty, bowed before the invisible, snatched at shadow kisses and blueflowered scents." This unnatural and unhealthy mental attitude led to a great deal of self-contemplation and introspection which tended to substitute futile or morbid imaginings for solid realities of life. The over-introspective and supersensitive artist cuts himself off from the larger arc of experience and is prone to exaggerate sentiment, and when, as in the nineteenth century, such a tendency 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 me?lancholy expression, his feverish sensibility, his revulsions of artistic feel?ing, and his fitful emotions sank him into morbid pessimism, deadening depression, and neurotic fears on the one hand, or raised him to wild hysteria on the other. "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 magnificantly endowed.
A Russian to the core, Tchaikovsky was nevertheless criticized severely by those self-styled nationalists, "The Five," for being too strongly influenced by German and French methods and styles to be a true ex?ponent of Russian music. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, found much to admire in their art, and was very enthusiastic in his praise of Rim-sky-Korsakov in particular. Nevertheless, he resented the assumption of superiority and the canons of judgment laid down by this coterie. He turned rather to Beethoven and to the scholarly technique exhibited in the construction of his symphonies; at the same time he was not immune to the charm of Italian music. Although he deprecated its superficial treatment of the orchestra, he did sense in the music of Italy the eternal value of pure melody, which he brought to full beauty through his superior and unequaled knowledge of instrumental effects. From Beetho?ven, Tchaikovsky no doubt gained what sense of architectural design and unity of style he had, but 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.
The constant oscillation between sudden exultation, violent passion, and unresisted submission in his temperament excluded the sustaining
Rimsky-Korsakov. Cui, Moussorgsky, Balakircv, and Borodin.
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and impersonal elements necessary to the true epic. He gave himself up, as Sibelius noted when speaking of his music, to every situation without looking beyond the moment. But such is the beauty and power of his themes and so masterful and effective is the use he makes of the orches?tral palette that we cannot consider it a discrepancy to find so lyric an expression in epic forms 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.
Though Tchaikovsky displayed little inspiration or ingenuity in what he wrote for piano solo, his handling of the capacities of the instrument rises to a much higher level when he treats it in combination with other instruments. Of the three concertos, the popular verdict has been un?qualifiedly in favor of the first, in B-flat minor. For a composer who had no special pianoforte technique, either in performance or in composition, this concerto is a distinct achievement.
At the age of nineteen, Tchaikovsky graduated from the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg and entered the Ministry of Justice as a first-class clerk. His parents entertained no thoughts of his possessing unusual musical talent, much less any ideas of his pursuing an artistic career. He had had a few piano lessons and his creative faculty had developed as far as improvising waltzes and polkas. But the emptiness of his daily life was disturbing him, and music was beckoning, timidly at first perhaps, but with increasing intensity. He began the serious study of theory and composition, and, becoming more and more absorbed, final?ly made the great decision; he resigned his position in the Ministry of Justice and, for the sake of his art, entered upon the uncertain struggle for existence and recognition.
It was while living and teaching in Moscow that the first concerto for pianoforte was conceived and completed. "I am now completely ab?sorbed," he writes to his brother Anatol, December 13, 1874, "in the composition of a pianoforte concerto. I am very anxious that Rubinstein [he refers to Nicholas, not Anton] should play it at his concert. The work progresses very slowly, and does not turn out well. However, I stick to my intentions, and hammer pianoforte passages out of my brain; the result is nervous irritability." On Christmas Eve the composer played the work for Rubinstein at the Conservatory; after listening in silence until the end, Nicholas gave vent to his feelings in a torrent of abuse. To him the concerto was "vulgar, trivial, altogether bad, awkward to play, ineffective and utterly worthless." Rubinstein offered to perform the work if certain changes were made, but Tchaikovsky was deeply wounded and adamant. "I shall not change a single note," he answered, "and the concerto shall be published as it now is." And it was. The name of Hans von Biilow, who was about to depart for his first concert tour of America, was substituted
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in the dedication for that of Rubinstein, and the work received its initial performance by von Biilow in Boston on October 25, 1875.
To complete the record it should be added that the second edition (1889) shows numerous alterations in the piano part, which were due to suggestions the composer received from the English pianist, Edward Dannreuther, who, in the first performance of the work in England, had made certain modifications of the awkward passages, which resulted in greater facility of execution. In reply to Dannreuther's letter, Tchaikovsky expressed his appreciation of his friend's interest: "You may be sure that I shall follow your suggestions as soon as there arises a question of a second edition of the concerto."
Such a familiar and over-exposed masterwork as this concerto warrants no analysis or further comment.
"To the Victims of Hiroshima" --Threnody........Penderecki
Krzysztof Penderecki was born in Debica, Poland, November 23, 1953; now living in Berlin.
Hurled headlong flaming from the eternal sky with hideous ruin and com?bustion down to bottomless perdition .... The dismal . . . waste ... on all sides around, as one great furnace flamed.
-Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I
Upon graduating in 1958 from the Superior School of Music in Cra?cow, Poland, Krzystof Penderecki (Pen-der-rete-ki) became recognized as one of the most promising of the younger generation of Polish com?posers. After winning three prizes in a competition sponsored by the Polish Composers' Association, he attracted wide attention in his native land. His highly individual style, his own unconventional method of notation exemplified in Threnody, written for fifty-two stringed in?struments, place him securely in the front rank of avant garde composers. Definite notes, fixed time signatures, bar lines, or the customary treat?ment of instruments give way to independent units of sound lasting from four to thirty seconds, in which the individual players are occasionally given the greatest latitude in selecting notes or rhythmic patterns of their choice; black triangle shapes signify tones of no special pitch; thick, black lines that run through the staff indicate glissando passages of quarter tones; the instruments are played between the bridges and the tail-pieces; arpeggios are bowed on all four strings behind the bridge; vibratos at different speeds and volumes are indicated, and percussive effects are attained by the players tapping the bodies of their instruments.
Threnody was composed in 1960 on the fifteenth anniversay of the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima. On hearing this devastating work for the first time, many may experience sustained feelings of shock.
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dismay, or even outrage. Its onslaught on the sensations is harrowing, but then so was the disaster that inspired its inception. How could con?ventional musical means possibly express the grim corroding desolation of an event, the memory of which still horrifies the civilized world An artist, in our tragic century of two world wars, race massacres, Korea, and Vietnam, is compelled to search for new means of expressing his reactions to such appalling events, and it is natural that he would employ every facet of the contemporary idiom to do so. Reality in our time has dwarfed imagination, but the artist must still attempt to find order in the midst of chaos, even if that order is not immediately perceived. And order there is in Threnody, organization and conscious arrangement of the moving shapes of sound, unorthodox as they may be. Without this order, imposed by the composer, he would never be able to incite the feelings and emotions he intended.
In Threnody, we are immediately plunged into a torrent of savage sound when all the instruments lash out in a fortissimo at the highest possible pitch, which evokes Milton's words from Paradise Lost, "With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire." Massive blocks of tone, interspersed with ominous silences, recall the words of Edward James in his poem Secheresses "Nor any rain, except the rain of ashes, scarred over. Everything lies torpid here. Heights immeasurably dried, hopelessly parched . . . the seat of desolation." The work culminates in a calorific deluge of tone clusters which trail off in a smoldering pianissimo. Whatever the reaction, it will not be a neutral one.
Suite No. 2 from the Ballet, Daphnis et Chloe................Ravel
Maurice Ravel Has born at Cibourne, Basses-Pyrenees, March 7, 1875; he died in Paris, December 28, 1937.
The term "impressionism" passed from a general term to specialized usage about 1863, when a sunset by Monet was shown in Paris at the Salon des Refuse's entitled "Impression." The name was then adopted for a whole group of painters, of which Monet, Manet, and Degas were the leaders, and later for a similar group of composers, of whom Debussy was the most important figure and Maurice Ravel a later member. Impressionism came to reject all traditions and devote itself largely to the sensuous side of art. It subordinated the subject for the most part to the execution; and it interpreted isolated momentary sensations, not thoughts or concrete things. In the words of Walter Pater, impressionism was "a vivid personal impression of a fugitive effect." Debussy used his art as a plastic medium for recording such fleeting impressions and fugitive glimpses. His style and technique, like that of Monet, Renoir, and early Pisarro, render a music that is intimate though evasive, a music with a twilight beauty and
Secheresses, music by Poulenc, was performed at ihe May Festival in 1959.
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glamor, revealing a world of sense, flavor, color, and mystery. And so Debussy, working later, but to the same end as the French impressionists in art, through the subtle and ephemeral medium of sound created an evasive world of vague feelings and subtle emotions --a world of old brocades, the glimmer of moonlight, morning mists, shadowy pools, sun?light on waves, faint odor of dying flowers, the flickering effect of in?verted images in a pool, or the more vigorous and sparkling effects of an Iberian fete day.
In contrast to the ecstatic impressionism of Debussy, the art of Maurice Ravel appeared more concrete. Although he was at home among the colored vapors of the Debussyan harmonic system, Ravel expressed him?self in a more tangible form and fashioned the same materials into set designs. His art, in this connection, stands in much the same relationship to musical impressionism as the art of Renoir does to the same style in painting; it restores formal values. In this structural sense he differs from Debussy. But, like Debussy, he reveals the typical French genius, an exquisite refinement, unerring sense of form, purest craftsmanship, at?tention to minute details, impeccable taste, and a finesse and lucidity in execution.
The ballet. Daphnis et Chloe, was composed for the Russian Ballet in 1910, at the request of Sergei Diaghilev. It was first performed in June, 1912, at Paris, with Nijinsky as Daphnis, and Monteux conducting.
In the score is to be found the following descriptive note:
No sound but the murmur of rivulets fed by the dew that trickles from the rocks. Daphnis lies stretched before the grotto of the nymphs. Little by little the day dawns. The songs of birds are heard. Afar off a shepherd leads his flock. Another shepherd crosses the back of the stage. Herdsmen enter, seeking Daphnis and Chloe. They find Daphnis and awaken him. In anguish he looks about for Chloe. She at last appears encircled by shepherdesses. The two rush into each other's arms. Daphnis observes Chloe's crown. His dream was a prophetic vision; the intervention of Pan is manifest. The old shepherd Lammon explains that Pan saved Chloe, in remembrance of the nymph Syrinx, whom the god loved.
Daphnis and Chloe mime the story of Pan and Syrinx. Chloe impersonates the young nymph wandering over the meadow; Daphnis, as Pan, appears and declares his love for her. The nymph repulses him; the god becomes more insistent. She disappears among the reeds. In desperation he plucks some stalks, fashions a flute, and on it plays a melancholy tune. Chloe comes out and imitates by her dance the accents of the flute.
The dance grows more and more animated. In mad whirlings, Chloe falls into the arms of Daphnis. Before the altar of the nymphs he swears his fidelity. Young girls enter; they are dressed as Bacchantes and shake their tambourines. Daphnis and Chloe embrace tenderly. A group of young men comes on the stage.
Joyous tumult. A general dance.
FOURTH CONCERT Saturday Afternoon, April 26
Magnificat in D major, for Orchestra,
Chorus, and Soloists.......................................Bach
Music owes almost as much to Bach as Christianity does to its founders.
--Schumann
In Johann Sebastian Bach, the musical development of two centuries reached its climax. Coming from a family of distinguished musicians famous in Germany for one hundred and fifty years, he entered into the full heritage of his predecessors and used, with incomparable effect, all of the musical learning of his day.
Born in the very heart of medieval Germany, in the remote little town of Eisenach under the tree-clad summits of the Thiiringer Wald, Bach lived in an atmosphere that was charged with poetry, romance, and music. Towering precipitously over the little village stood the stately Wartburg, which once sheltered Luther and in one of the chambers of which the German Bible came into being. Here also in 1207, the famous Tourney of Song was held, and German minstrelsy flowered.
In these surroundings Bach's early youth was spent, and his musical foundation formed under the careful guidance of his father. The sub?sequent events of his life were less propitious. Orphaned at the age of ten, he pursued his studies by himself, turning to the works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and other predecessors and contemporaries as models.
Singing in a church choir to gain free tuition at school, traveling by foot to neighboring towns to hear visiting organists who brought him occasion?al 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. Of all his church music, parts of only one cantata were printed during his life, not because it was esteemed, but because it was written for an annual burgomeister election! References by contemporaries are scanty; they had no insight into the magnitude of his art. Fifty years after his death, his music was practically unknown, most of the manuscripts having been lost or mislaid.
The neglect, discovery, and final triumph of Bach's music are without parallel in the history of music. His triumphant progress from utter obscurity to a place of unrivaled and unprecedented brilliance is a phe-
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nomenon. 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 universally acknowledged as the supreme master of music.
Certainly masterpieces were never so naively conceived. Treated with contempt by his associates in Leipzig, where he spent the last years of his life, and restrained by the narrow ideals and numbing pedantry of his superiors, he went on creating a world of beauty, without the slightest thought of posterity. The quiet old cantor, patiently teaching his pupils Latin and music, supervising all the choral and occasional music in the two principal churches of Leipzig, gradually losing his sight until in his last years he was hopelessly blind, never for a moment dreamed of immortality. He continued, year after year, to fulfill his laborious duties, and in doing so created the great works that have brought him eternal fame. His ambitions never passed beyond his city, church, and family.
Born into a day of small things, he helped that day to expand by giving it creations beyond the scope of its available means of expression. His art is elastic; it grows, deepens, and flows on into the advancing years. The changed media of expression; the increased expressive qualities of the modern pianoforte, organ, the complex orchestra, and in some cases, the contemporary synthesizer, have brought to the world a realization of the great dormant and potential beauties that lay in his work. What a mag?nificent world did the mighty Sebastian evolve from the dry, stiff, pedan?tic forms, from the inarticulate instruments-of his time! As Wagner put it, "No words can give a conception of its richness, its sublimity, its all-comprehensiveness."
Bach's vocal works outnumbered his instrumental ones, but they suffered comparative neglect. The reasons for this can be found in the fact that during his lifetime Bach was known chiefly as a performer on the organ and harpsichord. Many of his finest works for these instruments were published by himself in the Clavierubung; others were spread abroad in manuscript copies by his pupils. But of the vocal works, only one, the early cantata Gott ist mein KOnig, written at the age of twenty-two, was published during his lifetime. When the Bach Society was formed in 1850 (centenary of his death), most of his compositions existed only in manu?script; of the vocal ones, not more than twenty had appeared in print.
According to Terry, there is reason to conclude that the "Magnificat" was composed for Bach's first Christmas at Leipzig and that it had its first performance, Saturday, December 25, 1723. It was published in 1862 by the Bach Gesellschaft.
The "Magnificat" is one of the most representative of Bach's works, revealing in its treatment of chorus, solo, instrumentation, and setting of the text, procedures that are to be found in all of his great vocal com-
Charles Sanford Terry. Bach, the Magnificat, Lutheran Masses, and Motek (London: Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, 1924).
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positions. It is considerably shorter and more concise, however, than any of the other larger choral works. Shorter, for instance, than the Credo alone of the B-minor Mass, it reveals abbreviated choruses and condensed arias, none of which is in da capo or repeated form. This brevity is due to the fact that it was performed late in the afternoon. After the preacher's prayer, the giving of thanks, church announcements, and so forth, there was little time left, so Bach conceived it in the form of an extended cantata, taking little more than forty minutes to perform.
Few composers have been able to express intelligibly and with certainty the concrete ideas they imagined they were expressing, without verging upon the ludicrous. Music, working in the shadowy realm of the abstract, through a medium little suited to depict the concrete, soon reaches its limits of expression when it leaves the transcendent regions of the vast and vague, the infinite, illusive, and inarticulate, and attempts to repre?sent objects in, or ideas of, reality. In spite of this inherent limitation, it has throughout its history attempted to do so. Pictorial and poetic tenden?cies have, in all epochs, exercised a tremendous force upon recondition?ing musical form, but at the same time they have often led music into pretentious and deceptive ways. When music leaves its unique realm, it does so at the peril of its dignity and power. When, however, music and words join forces as in the art song, opera, or the Mass, words can make specific what is, in the music, only the vaguest kind of feeling; and music can, when words begin to falter, enter and take command of domains which are its own by divine right.
Bach's solution of the problem of expression when dealing with words and music is unique and highly individual. There is in his vocal works the most intimate and personal relationship existing between music and text. This intimacy does not relate to poetic and musical form, ictus and rhythm, but rather to spirit and feeling. Bach's musical style, with its complicated, many-voiced lines simultaneously sung, destroys immediate?ly any verbal form or beauty, stretching as it does, at times, a single syllable of a word upon the rack of many bars --dismembering it for the sake of a musical melisma, repeating words in order to extend musical phrases, and so on. But his music is at all times noble and expressive; it catches the mood, the atmosphere of the text, and conveys it to us at times with overpowering directness.
That Bach's intention while composing was definitely pictorial and representative, Schweitzer has revealed beyond any doubt; by observing and analyzing the regular return and consistent employment of definite musical formulae to express certain feelings, he has proved indubitably that Bach evolved for himself a complete tonal language. Bach himself, so far as we know, never made any reference to this system. Whether it was consciously or unconsciously created by him, and whether or not we are as aware of its details as was Schweitzer, is of no great importance. It is simply based on the fact that for certain feelings Bach preferred certain
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definite patterns and rhythms. These associations are so natural that they at once suggest their meaning to anyone with a musical mind. The images or ideas in the text give opportunities for definite, plastic musical ex?pression; measured, tranquil intervals in a melody, for instance, indicate resolution and confident faith, intervals more widely spaced symbolize strength, pride, and defiance; a motive invariably associated with joy is constructed on an uninterrupted pattern of eighth or sixteenth notes; one that depicts lamentation is built upon a sequence of notes tied in pairs, torturing grief upon a chromatic motive of five or six notes, and so on. Occurrences of these formulae will be noted in the analysis which follows. The text of the "Magnificat" is taken from Luke I: 46-53. It is the song uttered by the Virgin Mary in the house of Zacharius, after she has heard the inspired prophecy of Elizabeth, "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." Each stanza of Saint Luke's narrative furnishes the text of a separate movement, except where Bach particula?rizes the words omnes generationes by making them the basis of a separate choral movement, and where at the end there is the addition of a Gloria.
ANALYSIS
I. Magnificat anima mea Dominum
My soul doth magnify the Lord
The instrumentation of this section is for strings, two flutes, two oboes, three trumpets, timpani, and continuo. To indicate the universal and timeless emotion of the Virgin's text here, Bach has written not for a solo voice, as the words "My soul" would indicate, but for a chorus in a sustained polyphonic or many-voiced style. Thus he clearly indicates his in?tention that this opening be a universal and not a personal paean of praise. Throughout the complicated writing, the word magnificat is heard with emphatic clarity as it appears at different times in the vocal line; the two themes associated with the text are also heard echoing in the orchestra. Note the domination in this section of the "joy" motive made up of uninterrupted sixteenth notes.
II. Exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.
Accompanied by strings and continuo, these words, sung by the solo voice of the Virgin, are set in a concentrated and brief aria without da capo repetition. The orchestra first states the ascending and joyful theme which the voice repeats with the words "And my spirit hath rejoiced." Here again the "joy" motive is heard in the bass and in the cadences.
III. Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae: ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent....
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden; for behold from hence?forth ....
Orchestrated for the oboe d'amore (a minor third below the oboe) and continuo, this setting of the text creates a mood of submission and humility, not only by the unobtrusive tone of the oboe d'amore, but by the descending chromatic melody (progressing by half tones) and the constantly repeating word, humilitatem. Near the end, on the words, beattim me dicenl ("shall call me blessed"), the oboe melody associated with the word humilitatem returns, to emphasize the feeling of resignation and self abasement. At the words omnes generatwnes ("all generations"), Bach interrupts the verse by making these last two the basis of a new section for chorus.
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IV. Omnes generationes
All generations [shall call me blessed]
Two flutes, two oboes d'amore, strings, and continue accompany a great free choral fugue in which the melodic lines are so written as to emphasize the word omnes ("all") by constant repetition, in alternating male and female voices at first a half bar apart and later at intervals of fourths and fifths and through ascending and descending entrances. Here is a stirring example of Bach's unique treatment of text. Although the words of this stanza are those spoken by the Virgin and are realistically given to the solo soprano voice, the text is suddenly interrupted by a shift to the chorus on omnes generationes to again imply the universality of the Virgin's prayer.
V. Quia facil mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen eius.
For He that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is His name.
Only a continuo bass accompanies this aria. As in so many of Bach's continue) basses, a feeling of confidence and strength is created by its onward pulse. The words qui potens est ("that is mighty") quite naturally suggested to Bach the use of the bass voice.
VI. Et mviericordia eius a progenie in progenies limentibus eum.
And His mercy is on them that fear Him from generation to generation.
This duet is accompanied by strings, two Hutes, and continuo. The strings are muted and the Hutes play in unison with the violins; they set the suave and graceful mood that is retained throughout. The unvarying and gentle rhythm is broken for realistic purposes at one place to illustrate the meaning of the words timentibus ("fear") eum. Terry interprets the long line ol unbroken rhythm as signifying Bach's belief in the persistent and changeless flow of divine mercy.
VII. Fecit potentiam in brachio suo, dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.
He hath shown strength with His arm; He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their heart.
A full orchestra of strings, two flutes, two oboes, three trumpets, timpani, and continuo state, with the chorus, a bold, forceful, and vigorously rhythmic theme that maintains the spirit of the words "He hath shown strength." A long embellished theme is made the basis of a striding fugue that rises through five voices to the text disperset superbos ("scattered the proud") and is finally and shrilly sounded in the trumpets. With the austere adagio move?ment at the end, the proud stand rebuked by Divine Might.
VIII. Deposuit potenles de sede et exaltant humiles
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low de?gree.
The opening assertive theme in unison violins and continuo catches the combative spirit of the text. Again, Bach attempts to be graphically illustrative on the word deposuit ("He hath put down") with his downward passage in the voice and unison violins; on the word potentes ("mighty") with the wide leaping intervals; and on exaltavit ("exalted") with the ascending florid line for the tenor voice.
IX. Esurientes implevit bonu et divites dimisit inanes.
?Terry, op. cit.
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He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich He hath sent empty away.
FOURTH CONCERT
Flutes and continuo, as usual in Bach, are used to create an ingratiating and tender mood. Here they illustrate, through employment of the "joy" motive, the idea of an administering providence that brings comfort and help to the needy. To the rich who have been turned away. Bach is less sympathetic; to the words divites dimisit, ("rich sent empty away") he employs a softened version of the downward motive that was.associated with the word deposuit in the tenor aria. Terry points out the subtle and humorous touch at the.end where, in the last bar, the flutes omit the resolution cadence on the word inane ("empty"). "It is no tragedy," he writes, "that the rich not be given more of what they already have."
X. Suscepit Israel puerum suum recordalus mis-ericordiae suae.
He hath holpen His servant Israel, in re?membrance of His mercy.
There is no evidence to show whether this movement is to be sung by a trio or a chorus. On this occasion, it is sung by a trio of women's voices. The accompanying instruments are two oboes in unison and violoncello.
The words Suscepit Israel imply a retrospective view of God's providential guidance, and Bach uses here, as he did later in the Confitior from the B-minor Mass, a traditional plainsong of the Catholic church. The melody is heard in the oboes, while the voices embroider it in imitation.
XI. Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abra?ham et semini eius in saecula.
Even as He promised to our forefathers; to Abraham and to his seed forever.
To a continuo, firm and resolved, Bach emphasized the meaning of the words "He promised." There is unswerving regularity in this rigid and academic little fugue, no doubt meant by Bach to stress the security of man in God's word.
XII. Glora patri, gloria Filio, et gloria Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
This brilliandy conceived setting to the Gloria text is accompanied by strings, two oboes, two Hutes, three trumpets, tympani, and continue It forms a stirring contrast in style and feeling to the austerity of the previous section. In this mighty shout to the Glory of God, each of the Trinity is addressed in turn. Over a low organ point (long held note in the bass) the voices rise in long coloratura passages, building to a majestic climax at which time the trumpets blaze forth. They continue to be heard to the end of the movement. With masterful feeling for constructive unity. Bach brings back the theme of the "Magnificat" (first movement) to the concluding words Sicut erat in principio ("as it was in the beginning").
"La Damoiselle elue" ("Blessed Damozel"),
for Women's Voices, Soprano, and Contralto......Debussy
Claude Debussy was born in Saint Germain-en-Laye on August 22, 1862; died in Paris, March 25, 1918.
He paints with pure colors --with that delicate sobriety that spurns all harshness and ugliness.
-ROMAIN ROLLAND
France had no music of a real national character for over a century before the advent of Debussy. While the nationalization of music in
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France was not the work of Debussy alone, certainly no one approached the expression of so truly a French musical spirit with greater success than he. His style reveals the purest craftsmanship, impeccable taste, and above all a finesse and ludicity in execution.
In our concert halls today, Debussy is definitely out of fashion. Yet among musicians of this generation, his star is in the ascent. They are re-evaluating his position in music history at a time when their art is floundering in a welter of experimentation some of which has already led to a complete annihilation of former expressive and formal values. De?bussy emerges today as one of music's most original composers and effective liberators. In emphasizing sound for sound's sake, he destroyed the old rhetoric of music and invented a contemporary approach to form. He was the first of the really great moderns who prepared the way for the "atonalists" by introducing chords outside of the key signature, creating a vague feeling of tonality without actually rejecting it. His conscious reac?tion against Romanticism, and especially Wagner, rejected the grandiose, the epic, and the aggressive and substituted discreet, subtle, and evanes?cent moods for strong personal emotionalism. Preceded by minor com?posers like Satie, and followed by the major masters of our time --Schonberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Berg --he led music into a new world of enchantment and discovery.
Debussy's music is invariably identified with Impressionistic painting. In truth, they both created similar worlds of vagueness, atmosphere, and vibrant color. The Impressionist painters--Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir --who saw the world as a dynamic, constantly changing reality, offer an interesting parallel to Debussy whose music gives the most fleet?ing existence to immaterial abstract ideas. While they negated all the established rules of painting by reducing evenly colored surfaces to spots and dabs of color, or with abrupt short brush strokes shattered forms into fragments, so Debussy, through his unresolved dissonances, sensitive awareness of delicate instrumental combinations, fragmentary themes, flexible and even vague rhythms, forsook established musical forms in the interest of atmosphere. Debussy, in truth, knew very little about these painters. As has been pointed out by Alfred Frankenstein, there is no evidence that he found any direct inspiration in their paintings. Nowhere in his extensive writing is there any statement that he was conscious of their existence, far less that he acknowledged any indebtedness to them. The Impressionist painters were all of a generation older than Debussy. Frankenstein further points out that their important exhibition was held in 1874 when Debussy was only twelve years of age; that Impressionism as a movement was over before he had seriously begun to compose; that although he was more strictly contemporary with the Post-Impressionists--Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin --he shared none of their violence; and that the neo-primitivism of Picasso, which found such
Alfred Frankenstein, "The Imagery from Without," High Fidelity, September, 1962.
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a striking parallel in Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, left Debussy un?touched. His relationship to the Symbolist movement in literature was much closer. The fluid mysterious imagery of Maeterlinck drew him to the creation of Pelleas et Melisande; Mallarme's "network of illusion," as he referred to poetry, inspired him to compose "Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune"; to the sensuous poetry of Paul Verlaine ("Les Fetes galantes" and "Ariettes oubliees"), and to the richly woven tapestry and mystic passion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti ("La Damoiselle elue"), he added a prolonged eloquence in his music.
As a consequence of the Impressionistic movement in painting, there arose in the eighties a school of French writers --the Symbolists, whose leaders were Stephan Mallarme and Paul Verlaine. One of the events of prime importance in the early history of the Symbolist movement was the discovery of Edgar Allen Poe by the late romantic and the first great decadent of the new age, Baudelaire. In 1852 he published a volume of translations of Poe's tales, and from then on Poe exerted a powerful influence on the whole school, particularly Mallarme, as he had upon the pre-Raphaelites in England earlier in the century. The unearthly music of "The Raven," the monotone of "Ulalume," the ostinato of "The Bells," and the broken fragmentary melody of "Annabel Lee" helped to effect a literary revolution in France.
"I know," wrote Poe, "that indefiniteness is an element of the true music (of poetry), I mean, the true musical expression --a suggestive indefiniteness of vague, therefore spiritual, effect." To approximate the indefiniteness of music was to become one of the principal aims of the French Symbolists.
Poe was indeed the prophet of Symbolism, not only in his predilection for sound above sense but in his confusion between the perceptions of the different senses. Poe "hears" the approach of darkness. "Suddenly lights were brought into the room," he writes, "and issuing from the flame of each lamp there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone." The characteristic peculiarity of the French school of Sym?bolists was the literary use of "Synaethesis" or mixing of the senses; the "hearing" of color, the "seeing" of tones, the "tasting" of odors. For this tendency they were scoffed at and ridiculed, but, in fact, the Symbolists were only consistently working out what had long been recognized in both art and science. For decades it had been observed in experimental psychology that we never take in a single sense impression but always several together, blended or in opposition to each other.
In England, a little before 1850, a coterie of artists with similar interests and aspirations created for themselves an artistic credo and became known as the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Weary of the imperious classic traditions in art, the members of this group saw in the Italian painters before Raphael the truthfulness they sought in art.
"Pre-Raphaelitism," wrote Ruskin, "has but one principle, that of abso-
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lute, uncompromising truth in all it does, obtained by working everytning down to the most minute details from nature and from nature only. Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch in open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person. Eyery minute accesso?ry is painted in the same manner." In their attempt at naturalism, the Pre-Raphaelites soon ran into archaic mannerisms and conventional for?malities that increased the decorative value of their art but made it finally inconsistent with their original aims.
To this group, among others, belonged Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who because of his eminence as both painter and poet, soon became the center of the movement after 1850 and. by virtue of his evangelism, continued to dominate the period to the close of the century. The one erotic among the Brotherhood, Rossetti was motivated in the formation of his diffuse aestheticism by the same forces that were creating the Symbolists in France. His ideal, like theirs, was that of painter-poet-musician. Every poem should strive to become a "symphony" in color, every picture a manifesto in poetry, and throughout both arts there should sound a faint and tenuous music. Almost all the Pre-Raphaelite creations were marked by a high musicality. Poetry and painting, brought into affinity with music, created the vague, the dreamy, and the mystical.
Rossetti found the key to his style in Symbolism and in the La Damoiselle elue he first revealed it. The poem has all the characteristics associated with the poetry, painting, and music of the latter two-thirds of the centu?ry. Here all passion is sublimated into spiritual exultation; all emotion is pervaded by an atmosphere of calm and bathed in a pale spirituality. There is not the slightest betrayal of intensity in this liquid poetry. Its flight from reality makes us feel what is otherwise inexpressible. The orchid-like fragility of the Blessed Damozel whose "eyes that prayed were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at even" and whose "hair lay along her back .... yellow like ripe corn," whose "voice was like the voice the stars had when they sang together" is created not out of the stuff of life but is woven into being like a figure in a medieval tapestry.
La Damoiselle elue was first published in The Germ, a short-lived journal founded by the Pre-Raphaelites to propagate their ideas and opinions. Upon this English Symbolist, the morbidity of Edgar Allen Poe also had its effect and influence. "Poe's 'Raven'," declared Rossetti, "has done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth and I am determined to reverse the conditions and give utterance to the yearnings of the loved one in heaven."
The poem first came to Debussy's attention when he was studying in Rome as a winner of the Prix de Rome. Deeply moved by its sensuous beauty, he decided to set it to music and send it to the Academy at Paris to
John Ruskin, "Lecture on Architecture." Edinburgh Lectures, November, 1853.
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show his progress in composition. Even to this curious art period, his music was strange and unintelligible and the authorities of the Academy were reluctant to give their unqualified approval.
The haunting and melancholy beauty of this music is as elusive as the shimmer of moonlight, and its luminous and shifting colors transport us into a world unreal where we feel things unknown and long for nonexis?tent things.
Chorus
La Damovielle Hue s'appuyait Sur la barriere d'or du Ciel;
Sex yeux elaient plus profonds
Que I'abdme des eaux calmes au soir.
Elle avail trois lys a la main Et sept etoiles dans les cheveux.
The blessed damozel leaned out From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Contralto (Narrator)
Sa robeflottanle n'etait point
Orn'ee dejleurs brodees, Mav, d'une rose blanche, present de
Marie
Pour le divin service justement portee; Ses cheveux, qui tombaient le long des
ses epaules, Etaient jaunes comme le blf mur.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem, No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift, For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back Was yellow like ripe corn.
Chorus
Autour d'elle, des amanLs,
Nouvellement rhtnu, Repelaient pour toujours, entre eux,
Leurs nouveau noms d'extase; Et les ames qui montaient a Dieu,
Passaient pres d'elle comme defines fiammes.
Around her, lovers, newly met 'Mid deathless love's acclaims,
Spoke evermore among themselves Their heart-remembered names;
And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames.
Contralto
Alors, elle s'inclina de nouveau, Et se pencha en dehors du charme encerclanl,
Jusqu'a ce que son sein eut echauffe La barriere sur laquelle ell s'appuyait,
Et que les lys gisent comme endormis Le long de son bras etendu.
And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm; Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm, And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.
Debussy used a French translation by Gabriel Sairazin, omitting certain verses.
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Chorus
Le soleil avail disparu, la lunt annolee Etait comme une petite plume
Flottant au loin dans I'espace;
Et voila qu'elleparla a travers Vair calme.
Sa voix etait pareille e celle des etioles Lorqu'elles chnntent en choeur.
The sun was gone now; the curled moon
Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.
Soprano Solo (Blessed Damozel)
"Je voudrais qu'lfut deja pr'es de moi,
Car il viendra. N'ai-je pas prie dans le del Sur terre,
Seigneur, Seigneur, n'a-t-il pas prie Deux prieres ne sont-ells pas une force parfaite
Et pourquoi m'effairais-je
"Lorsqu-aulour de sa lite s'attachera
Vaureole,
Et qu'il aura rei'etu sa robe blanche, Je le prendrai par la main elfirai
avec lui
Aux sources de lumiare; Nous y entrerons comme dans un courant, Et nous y baignerons a la face de Dieu.
"Nous nous reposerons tous deux a
I'ombre
De ce vivant el mystique arbre; Dans lefeuillage secret duquel on sent
parfois
La presence de la colombe, Pendant que chaque feuilte, touchee par
se plumes, Dit son nom distinctemevt
"Tous deux nous chercherons les bosquets
Ou trine Dame Maria Avec ses cinq servantes, dont les noms
Sont cinq douces symphonies: Cecile, Blanchelys, Madeleine,
Marquerite et Roselys.
"II craindra peut-etre et restera muet; Alors, je poserai majoue contre la
sienne,
Et lui parlerai de notre amour, Sans confusion nifaiblesse, Et la Chare Mtre approuvera mon orgueil, Et me laissera parler.
"I wish that he were come to me,
For he will come," she said. "Have I not pray'd in Heaven --on earth.
Lord, Lord, has he not pray'd Are not two prayers a perfect strength
And shall I feel afraid
"When round his head the aureole clings
And he is clothed in white, I'll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light; As unto a stream we will step down,
And bathe there in God's sight.
"We two will lie i' the shadow of That living mystic tree
Within whose secret growth the Dove-Is sometimes felt to be,
While every leaf that His plumes touch Saith His Name audibly.
"We two," she said, "will seek the groves
Where the lady Mary is, With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies, Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys.
"He shall fear, haply, and be dumb:
Then will I lay my cheek To his, and tell about our love,
Not once abashed or weak: And the dear Mother will approve
My pride, and let me speak.
FOURTH CONCERT
"Elle m'eme nous amenera la main dam
la main A celui autour duquel toutes les
ames s'agenouillent, Les innombrables tetes clair rangees
Inclinees, avec leurs aureoles. Et les anges venue a noire rencontre
chanteront,
S'accompagiiant de leurs guitares et de leurs citoles.
"Alors.je demanderai au Christ, Notre
Seigneur,
Cette grande faveur, pur lui et moi, Seulement de vivre comme autrefois sur
terre;
Dans I'Amour; Et d'etre pour toujours, comme alors
pour un temps, Ensemble, moi el lui."
"Herself shall bring us, hand in hand, To Him round whom all souls
Kneel, the clear-ranged unnumbered
heads Bowed with their aureoles:
And angels meeting us shall sing To their citherns and citoles.
"There will I ask of Christ the Lord Thus much for him and me: --
Only to live as once on earth With Love --only to be,
As then awhile, for ever now Together, I and he."
Chorus and Soprano (Blessed Damozel)
Elle, regarda, preta I'oreille et dit, D'une voix mains triste que douce:
"Tout ceci sera quand il viendra."
Elle se tut: La lumiere tressaillit de son cote
Remplie d'unfort vol d'anges horizontal. Ses yeux prierent, elle sourit;
Mais bientdt leur sentier dei'int vague
Dans les spheres distantes. Alors, elle jeta ses bras le long Et posanl son visage entre ses mains,
Pleura.
She gazed and listened and then said, Less sad of speech than mild,--
"All this is when he comes." She ceased. The light thrilled towards her, fill'd
With angels in strong level flight. Her eves pi.ivrd arid -.he smil'd.
(I saw her smile.) But soon their path Was vague in distant spheres:
And then she cast her arms along The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands, And wept. (I heard her tears.)
Concerto No. 2 in G minor for
Violin and Orchestra, Op. 63...................... Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeievitch Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, Rus?sia, April 23, 1891; died in Moscow. March 4, 1953.
Sergei Prokofiev, a senior member of a very significant group of Soviet Republic composers, of whom Dmitri Shostakovich is perhaps the most sensational member, after a few startling excursions into the grotesque and an only occasional sojourn into the cacophonous realm of musical modernism, produced music that was not merely interesting and clever but brilliantly effective.
At a period when European audiences either were being doped into a state of insensibility by the vacuity of the Post-Impressionists, incensed to
6]
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riots by the shocking barbarisms of Stravinsky, or baffled into boredom by the mathematical cerebrations of Schonberg (whose music seemed, as far as emotional expression was concerned, to be hermetically sealed), the spectacle of a composer who was still able to create music that had a natural ease and fluidity, a freshness and spontaneity that was essentially "classical," was as surprising as it was eventful.
Prokofiev wrote two violin concertos, the first Op. 19 in 1913, the second Op. 63 in 1935. The twenty-two years that separate them saw a subtle change in his style. The Second Concerto was composed after the Soviet had formed its own aesthetic theory based upon utility in art, in which the purely artistic value of a work was far less important than its immediate appeal to the masses, or its purpose in serving a political, social, or educational ideal --a theory that resulted in what Nicolas Nabo?kov referred to as "eclectic collectivistic art." This attitude placed the creative artist in a completely subservient position to the state and to society. Composers, compelled to work under these conditions, had no chance to exert their originality, experiment in new idioms, or adopt any of the modern experiments of Western music. If they did, and they often tried, as is well-known in the cases of Shostakovich, Katchaturian, and Prokofiev, they gave up hope of any publication or performance of their work. The result was that many compositions created under the demands of "Socialistic realism" have been traditional, unoriginal, and generally lacking in deeper values.
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 well-known Classical Symphony (1916-17), the Scythian Suite (1916), the opera The Love of Three Oranges (1921) which he composed for the Chicago Opera Association, and the ballet Chout (1921) had, with their driving energy, clear designs, bright colors, and ironic overtones, carried his name throughout the musical world. Upon his return to Russia in 1934, and his identification with Soviet cultural life and its rigid proscription of free expression, he steered a cautious course between his own artistic instincts and the demands of the State. Gradually, a shift was noted from his former rather abstract and sometimes abstruse manner to one more immediate and acceptable to Russian audiences. "At later stages," he wrote, "I paid more and more attention to lyric ex?pression." In a tempered frame of mind he wrote, among other works, Lieutenant Kije in 1934, the Russian Overture and Peter and the Wolf, both in 1936, incidental music for the film Alexander Nevsky, and a cantata dedi?cated 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.
Aside from Russian folk-song sources to which he turned for these works, a new romantic idiom began to shape itself. Thus the Second
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FOURTH CONCERT
Violin Concerto abounds in ingratiating harmonies, infectious melodies, and vivacious rhythms. In spite of his conscious attempts to abide by the dictates of the State, he, along with Shostakovich and Katchaturian, 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 Khrennikov, 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 continued to give to his music the same sureness and sponaneity 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 is, according the Leonid Se-baneyev and many other critics, the most original and valuable that Russian art of this century has produced.
The Second Violin Concerto was first performed December 1, 1935, by Robert Soetins and the Madrid Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Enrique Fernandez Arbos. The first American performance took place on December 17, 1937, at a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Serge Koussevitzky was the conductor and Jascha Heifetz the soloist. It is written in the conventional manner of the nineteenth-century concerto, as far as its form is concerned.
The first movement (Allegro moderate, G minor) announces its main theme in the violin, unaccompanied, and is then restated in muted violas and double basses. The subsidiary theme, too, is introduced by the violin in the relative major key of B-flat. It then progresses in a traditional manner through development and recapitulation sections.
The second movement (Andante assai, E-flat) adheres strictly to con?vention, being cast in a simple da capo (ABA) form, in a slow tempo. The main theme of the movement is introduced by the solo violin. The tempo of a middle section (Allegretto, D major) increases, and its contrasting subject is heard in the clarinet. A brief transition leads back to the solo violin, in a repetition of the first section, slightly altered in form.
The third movement (Allegro ben marcato, G minor) is cast in the classi?cal rondo form. Its content, however, is brilliant and complex. The solo violin again presents the rondo theme in duple and triple stopped chords. It returns three times after two contrasting digressions (ABACA). There is a spirited coda (con brio) in which the tempo quickens and brings the work to an exciting close.
63
FIFTH CONCERT Sunday Evening, April 26
Program of the Compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, December 16, 1770; died in Vienna, March 26, 1827.
Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21
It is difficult to decide whether the man creates the age or the age the man, but in the case of Beethoven each is true. Certainly, as far as music is concerned, he created the age of Romanticism to such a degree that the new movement which began in the nineteenth century could be called "Beethovenism" as well. On the other hand, there is no more decided proof in music history that the age produces the man than the case of Beethoven. In his life and in his works, he is the embodiment of his period. Born at the end of the eighteenth century, he witnessed, in the formative period of his life, the drastic changes that were occurring throughout central Europe; changes which affected not only the political but the intellectual and artistic life of the world. The French Revolution, breaking up an old civilization, announced the dawn of a new social regime. The spirit of freedom which animated the poetic thoughts of Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, and Byron poured into the music of Beethoven, from the creation of the Appassionata Sonata to the Choral Ninth Symphony.
Throughout this period of chaos and turmoil, Beethoven stood, a colossus, bridging with his mighty grasp the two centuries in which he lived. In his person were embodied the ideas of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; he became the sage and prophet of his period, the center of the classic and romantic spirit.
These two elements were mutually helpful in making him the out?standing representative of each: his romantic tendencies helped him in?troduce Promethean fire into the old, worn-out forms, endowing them with new passion; his respect for classic idioms aided him, the greatest of the early Romanticists, in tempering the excesses and extremes of his contemporaries. Thus, harmonious embodiment of opposing forces, con?trolled by an architectonic mind molding and fusing them together into one passionate, creative impulse, resulted in the production of
64
FIFTH CONCERT
epoch-making masterpieces, built upon firm foundations but emancipated from the confining elements of tradition, and set free to discover new regions of unimagined beauty.
Beethoven was thirty years of age before he produced his first sym?phony--a vivid contrast to Mozart, who, at the age of thirty-two, had composed his forty-first. But Beethoven always approached a new form methodically and attempted it only after elaborate preparation. He felt his way with caution, and it took several attempts before he gained real freedom. This procedure held true of his first works in the other media, whether in piano sonatas, trios, or quartets, in which he leaned heavily at first upon the rococo qualities of his teachers, Haydn and Mozart. Music critics have dwelt too long and too persistently, however, upon the remi?niscences of Haydn and Mozart in Beethoven's early works. There is no question that they are there, but Beethoven, beginning composition ser?iously at the age of thirty, had found his individual voice.
Even in his initial symphony the real Beethoven speaks, if not in a sustained tone at least in utterances that are prophetic of a career that was to free music from the fashionable but worn-out patterns of the "Zopf" world. The opening measure of this symphony with its boldly dissonant chord in the key of F, although the movement is in C, and its leading in the course of three measures to a new key of G, is prophetic. The third movement, although referred to as a minuetto, is in reality and in spirit a scherzo, whose speed broke down the formal and antiquated mold of the minuet and established the scherzo found in his subsequent symphonies. This constituted one of his most epoch-making innovations. In the First Symphony he already sensed the presence of a new world, which he entered with courage and conviction in the "Eroica" (Third Symphony in E-Hat major). The C-major Symphony, appearing in the first year of the new century, left the past and faced a new era of emancipated ideas and emotions.
Reminiscent as his first symphonic utterance seems to us today, we must recall that its boldness offended a Leipzig critic who in 1801 charac?terized it as "confused explosions of a presumptuous effrontery of a young man --a danger to musical art." "It is believed," wrote another critic, "that a prodigal use of the most barbarous dissonances [!] and noisy use of all the instruments will make an effect. Alas, the ear is stabbed, but there is no effect on the heart."
Today we have perspective and judge Beethoven by his greatest and most mature works; and in the light of these the C-major Symphony bespeaks the coming-of-age of the symphonic form.
The first symphony was sketched at an early period, elaborated in 1799, and performed in Vienna in 1800.
ANALYSIS
In the first movement (Adagio molto; allegro con brio), as in the Second, Fourth, and Seventh Symphonies, Beethoven uses an Introduction. It is but twelve measures in length and leads
fi.5
MAY FESTIVAL
without pause to the opening theme of the Allegro which is heard in the strings. A transi?tional passage in the violins and woodwinds presents a new idea (shades of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" overture). The second theme of the exposition is heard as a dialogue between oboe and flute. The opening theme is heard again just before a short coda. The devel?opment section, as in Haydn, is devoted to a working out of the principal theme. The recapitulation recalls the main theme, but modifies it after presenting it first in its original form in the full orchestra. The coda is extended by a further development of the opening theme.
The second movement (Andante canlabile con moto), like the first, is cast into the sonata form with the first subject announced in the second violins, very softly, imitated shortly after in the celli and violas, and again in the basses and violins. The second theme is in the strings, at first, and then carried forth by woodwind and second violins with a counterpoint in the first violins. The coda presents a new theme in triplets in the first violins and a vigorous rhythm in the kettledrum. There is then a repetition of the first part of the movement. The development section works out the potentialities of the second theme, accompanied by the marked drum rhythm. The recapitulation begins as before with the main theme in the second violins, accompanied by a counterpoint movement against it in the celli. The second subject is again in the strings. The coda develops the main theme.
In the third movement (Menuetto, allegro), the main subject, eight measures in length, is announced in the first violins and repeated exactly. The second section is strongly antici?patory of the scherzo of the Seventh Symphony. The trio, on the same key level of C major, is built around a dialogue between strings and woodwinds. As in the minuet, it has two sections, each repeated. The return of the principal song fulfills the classic demand for repetition of this section. '
In the fourth movement (Finale: adagio, allegro molto e vivace) an introduction in an ascending figure for violins leads to the main part, the principal theme of which is an?nounced in the strings. The transitional passage, as in the first movement, is based upon a new theme in the wind instruments with trailing scales in the strings. The second theme of the exposition is heard in the violins in octaves. There is a coda beginning with a dialogue between the woodwinds and the strings. The opening theme is suggested near the beginning of the development group, which is concerned largely with the first measures of the principal theme. The recapitulation is regular, and there is an extended coda bringing the movement to an end.
Fantasia in C minor for Piano, Chorus, and Orchestra, Op. 80
On December 17, 1808, the following notice appeared in the Wiener Zeitung:
"On Thursday, the 22nd of December, Ludwig van Beethoven will have the honor to give a musical academy in the R.I. Priv. Theatre on der Wien. All the pieces are of his own com?position, are entirely new, and not yet heard in public."
On this program the Fifth and Sixth ("Pastoral") symphonies, the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, and the Fantasia on tonight's program had their premiere performances. Thrown in for good measure were the aria, "Ah Perfido" and selections from the C-minor Mass! The concert was a disaster, not only because of its torturous length, but because both the orchestra and the chorus were utterly inadequate; there had never
66
FIFTH CONCERT
been a single full rehearsal; the soprano who was to have sung "Ah Perfido" fought with Beethoven and was replaced by a young, in?experienced singer who was so nervous that under the influence of a stimulant she made a shambles of her performance; a clarinetist made a false entrance, at which Beethoven m a rage admonished the orchestra in front of the audience to the great embarrassment of its members, some of whom threatened to leave the stage; Beethoven, himself, who played his Fourth Concerto, absentmindedly made a repeat which he had agreed to omit, thus throwing the orchestra into a state of chaos; the hall was cold and, with it all, the box office returns were dismaying and cast Beethoven into a deep depression. With this horrendous experience, Beethoven brought his career as a performing piano virtuoso to an abrupt end.
The idea for a choral fantasy had occurred to Beethoven about a decade before he actually composed it. When he finally did, he worked it out in great haste for what he hoped would be a brilliant finale to his concert. It was later published by Breitkoff and Hartel in 1811 and dedicated to Maximilian Joseph, King of Bavaria, without Beethoven's knowledge.
The choral conclusion is a miniature prototype of the finale to the choral Ninth Symphony. In an undeveloped form the familiar theme of this famous movement is heard in the Fantasia. Traces of its germ motive are found scattered throughout Beethoven's work over a period of thirty years, invariably associated with a text that deals with the subjects of joy and hope. It appears in the second part of a song, "Seufzer eines Un-geliehten und Gegenliebe," composed as early as 1795. In 1805 it is again heard in "An die HofTnung" (Op. 32); it reappeared in 1810 in a charm?ing little song, "Mit einem gemal'ten Band" (Op. 85). Its use in the Fantasia, founded on "Gegenliebe," is only a vague suggestion. It reached its fullbodied statement finally in the choral Ninth Symphony where it ultimately carried with it the words of Schiller's Ode to Joy.
The text of the choral portions is by an obscure poet, Christian Kaffner, and is here translated by Lady Natalia McFarren:
Schmeichelnd hold und lieblich Uingen unsers Lebens Harmonien,
Und dem Schb'nheitesinn enhchwingen Blumen sich, die ewig bliihn.
Fried' und Freude gleiten freundlich wie der Wellen Wechsehpiel;
Was sich drilngle rauh und feindlich, ordnet sich vu Hochgefahl.
Wenn der Tone Zauber walten und des Wortes Weihe spricht,
Muss sich Herrliches gestalten, Nacht und Sliirme werden Licht.
Soft and sweet through ether winging sound the harmonies of life,
There immortal (lowers springing when the soul is freed from strife.
Peace and joy are sweetly blended like the waves alternate play;
What for mastery contended, learns to yield and to obey.
When on music's mighty pinion souls of men to heaven rise.
Then both vanish earth's dominion. Man is native to the skies.
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MAY FESTIVAL
Auss're Ruhe, inn're Wonne herrschen filr den Gliicklichen.
Doch der Kiinste Friihlingssonne lassl aus beiden l.tcht enstehn.
Grosses, das in's Herz gedrungen, bl'uht dann neu und Schb'nempor.
Hat ein Grist sich aufgeschwungen, hall't ihm stets ein Geisterchor.
Nehmt denn hin, ihr schonnen Seelen, froh die Gaben schoner Kunst.
Wenn sich Lieb' und Kraft vermahlen, lohnt dem Menschen Gotler-Gunst.
Calm without and joy within us is the bliss for which we long.
If the art of magic wins us joy and calm are turned to song.
With its tide of joy unbroken, music's Hood our life surrounds.
What a mastermind has spoken, through eternity resounds.
Oh! Receive ye joy invited.
all its blessings without guile. When in love and strength united,
man earns the gods' approving smile.
Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 73 ("Emperor")
This magnificent concerto, known as the "Emperor," was the last and most significant of Beethoven's five concertos for the piano. It was com?posed in Vienna in 1809, the year of the death of Beethoven's old teacher, Franz Joseph Haydn.
For some reason it was not presented until November 28, 1811, at Leipzig. The outstanding performance was given in Vienna, February 12, 1812, by the famous piano pedagogue and teacher of Liszt, Carl Czerny. The Vienna correspondent of the Allegemein Musik Zeitung praised Czerny for his remarkable playing, but complained of the excessive length of the work. The Leipzig critic, however, recognized it as "without doubt one of the most original, imaginative, effective, but most difficult of all existing concern."
The name "Emperor" applied to this concerto is meaningless unless it suggests that the work holds a commanding position in its own realm similar to that held by the Violin Concerto, Leonore Overture No. 3, and the Eroica Symphony. Wherever the name came from, it is a significantly designating title; of the five piano concertos, this is the most imposing and commanding.
The fusion of virtuosity and creative inspiration is remarkable. There are brilliant and scintillating passages, far above any suggestion of mere display, passages abounding in driving power and infectious vitality, and those marked by a delicate and infinite grace.
In Mozart's and Beethoven's day, the first movements of concertos were usually cast in modified sonata form with double exposition for orchestra and solo instrument. In this concerto Beethoven prefaces the orchestral exposition of the first movement (allegro, E-flat major, 44) by passages for the piano.
Mozart had done ihis in a piano concerto in E-flat major. Beethoven himself had already adopted this innovation in his C-major piano concerto.
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FIFTH CONCERT
An arpeggio passage in the piano is announced by a fortissimo chord in the orchestra. There are three presentations of this dual idea. The main theme is heard in the first violins. The second subject is announced in E-flat minor, pianissimo, but passes quickly into the parallel major key, and climaxes in the horns.
The piano then presents a chordal version of the main theme, followed by passage work which leads to the second subject (B minor) still in the piano, accompanied by pizzicato strings. The parallel key of B major is then established in a repetition in the full orchestra. The development group concerns itself with the first subject. In the recapitulation, the full orchestra announces the main theme, forte. The subsidiary theme, an?nounced in the piano in C-sharp minor, modulates to E-flat major and is sounded in the full orchestra. Beethoven, against custom, allowed no place for the usual cadenza but specifically directed that the soloist should pass directly to the coda.
The theme of the second movement (adagio un poco moto, B major, 44) is announced in the muted strings and forms the basis of a series of "quasivariations." At the close of the movement, there is an anticipation of the theme of the final movement which follows without pause. The music in this movement is transcendently beautiful in its purity of style and spirit of mystical ecstasy.
The piano announces the principal theme of the third movement (Rondo, allegro, E-flat major, 68) soon reannounced by the complete orchestra, forte. The first deviation follows in the piano, still in E-flat, but modulates in a second section to B-flat major. The first subject then returns. There is a development with the customary recapitulation and a coda in which the kettledrum plays an important part. The whole move?ment sparkles, shouts, and capers with an hilarious abandon.
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA AND MAY FESTIVAL ARTISTS
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA, with the five concerts of the 1970 May Festival, performs here for the thirty-fifth consecutive year.
The Orchestra was born at the turn of the century, when a group of music lovers determined that Philadelphia" should have its own profes?sional symphony orchestra and asked the (lerman musician, Fritz Scheel, to become permanent conductor. Both Scheel and his successor, another (lerman, Carl Pohlig, laid the firm foundations for a great orchestra. In 1913, at the beginning of the Orchestra's thirteenth season, Leopold Stokowski was engaged, and remained in Philadelphia for almost a quar?ter of a century. Eugene Ormandy, who in 1970 observes his 34th anniversary year on the Philadelphia podium, became the Orchestra's fourth conductor. Ormandy and Stokowski are credited with having built The Philadelphia Orchestra into a world renowned ensemble. Ormandy's unique contributions are his superb judgment in maintaining a balanced repertoire for the Orchestra's audiences and a special gift for selecting distinquished first-desk personnel whose musicianship and personalities blend into the tradition of "The Philadelphia Orchestra sound."
The Orchestra is probably the world's most traveled symphonic organ?ization. In addition to extensive touring throughout the United States and Canada, it has played the role of musical ambassador to Europe on three different occasions. In 1949 the Orchestra toured Great Britain, and in 1955 and 1958, all of Europe, including Russia, where its triumphs were certain proof that the United States had sent its very finest. In May and June, 1966, the Philadelphians presented their first concerts in Latin America, during the course of a brilliant five-week, 15,000-mile tour. A year later, in May, 1967, during a three-week trip to Japan, the Orchestra made its debut in the Far East.
The Philadelphia Orchestra was the first to make recordings under its own name with its own conductor; it was the first major orchestra to broadcast over a radio network for a commercial sponsor; it was the first symphonic organization to be televised nationally and the first to be featured in films. The Orchestra records exclusively for RCA Red Seal and, with hundreds of LP's in current catalogues, surely qualifies as the world's most recorded orchestra. Three of its recordings have each topped the million dollar mark in sales, an unprecedented achievement in the recording industry for classical music artists. Dr. Ormandy and
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FESTIVAL A RTISTS
The Philadelphia Orchestra have thus earned three of the six Cold Records ever awarded for classical recordings by the Record Industry Association of America.
The Orchestra will be in residence at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center during August for their fifth season at the Festival.
EUGENE ORMANDY, Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, has appeared annually at these May Festival concerts since 1937. With the 1969-70 concert season, Eugene Ormandy celebrates his thirty-fourth year on the podium of The Philadelphia Orchestra, a record unequaled by any living conductor of any other major orchestra. Born November 18, 1899, in Budapest, he entered the Budapest Royal Academy of Music at five as a child prodigy violinist, receiving his professor's diploma at the age of seventeen. Between concert tours, he taught at the State Con?servatory, and he came to the United States in 1921 as a solo violinist. Dr. Ormandy performed and conducted in New York, becoming an Ameri?can citizen in 1927. In 1930 he directed his first concerts with the Phila?delphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Music Director of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra between 1931 and 1936, he was ap?pointed Music Director and Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936. With this Orchestra he has toured Western and Eastern Europe on three occasions since World War II, has traveled many thousands of miles throughout the United States, and has toured to both Latin America and Japan. He and the Orchestra are represented in the catalogue by nearly four hundred long-playing recordings. As a guest conductor, he has led every major European orchestra and has appeared also in South America and Australia. Among the many awards bestowed upon Maestro Or?mandy are: the Commander of the French Legion of Honor, a Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland, and a holder of the medals of the Mahler and Bruckner Societies. He also holds the highest award the Austrian government can bestow upon a civilian, the Honor Cross for Arts and Sciences, First Class. January 24 of this year, when the Phila?delphia Academy of Music celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the Philadelphia Orchestra, President Nixon presented the Medal of Free?dom to Dr. Ormandy for "bringing to each performance something more precious than his great gifts . . . himself and the rich experience of his life."
Dr. Ormandy has also been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from twelve leading universities, including The University of Michigan (at the May Festival of 1952).
THOR JOHNSON, Guest Conductor of the May Festival, has conducted the University Choral Union performances with the Philadelphia Or-
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MAY FESTIVAL
chestra since 1940, except for four years when he was serving with the United States Army. He is now Music Director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Johnson lived most of his early life in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was graduated from the University of North Carolina and later received a master's degree in music at The University of Michigan. In 1935, under a Beebe Foundation Scholarship, he studied in Europe with conductors Weingartner, Abendroth, Malko, and Bruno Walter. Upon his return he became conductor of the University Symphony Or?chestra, 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 Sym?phony. 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 University. From 1964 to 1967 he was Director and Vice-President of the Interlochen Arts Academy. As a member of the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts, he was sent to Iceland, Czechoslovakia, Korea, the Philippines, and Japan for guest conducting and surveys. He is also Director of the Penin?sula Music Festival in Wisconsin and the Moravian Music Festivals.
DONALD BRYANT succeeds the late Lester McCoy as Director of the University Choral Union, beginning with the season 1969-70. With this appointment Dr. Bryant also became Director of Music at the First Pres?byterian Church and Lecturer in Music at the University School of Music, thereby making academic credit available for singing members of the Choral Union. Dr. Bryant's professional training in voice, choral music, and piano began at Capital University in Ohio, where he earned a Bachelor of Music in 1941, and, after four years of military service, a master's degree in Composition in 1946. In 1948 he earned a master's degree in Piano from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. In 1967 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Westminster Choir College. Dr. Bryant resigned as Director of the Columbus Boychoir School, which has been closely associated with the Westminster Choir College in Princeton. In his twenty years with the Boychoir School he performed over 2,000 concerts as conductor-pianist throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Japan. His Choir appeared in major television shows, including five programs with the Bell Telephone Hour. They have made recordings with Decca, RCA, and Columbia, a cappella and with major symphony orchestras. Dr. and Mrs. Bryant now make their home in Ann Arbor.
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FESTIVAL A RTISTS
ALICIA DE LARROCHA is one of the outstanding pianists of today and one of the consummate artists of all time. She has astounded critics and audiences throughout the world with her superb artistry and in?comparable technique. She was born in Barcelona, Spain, and was a student of Frank Marshall, the successor of the Granados piano school. Mr. Marshall took charge of her piano studies, and the progress made was such that she was allowed to give her first concert in public at the age of five. Today, with the mantle of the "Granados Tradition" passed on to her, she is a Director of the Marshall Academy in Barcelona. Alicia de Larrocha has been heard in concert many times in the music capitals of Europe, since she first began her tours outside Spain in 1947. In the United States her recitals in virtually every major city, including Carnegie Hall recitals and as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleve?land Orchestra, and other reknowned orchestras, have elicited the warm?est praise from her public. Miss De Larrocha has been awarded the Spanish Order of Civil Merit, in addition to having received the Medal of "Harriet Cohen International Music Awards" and the "Paderewski Mem?orial Medal." Ann Arbor audiences heard Miss De Larrocha for the first time last summer when she appeared in the Summer Concert Series.
RUDOLF SERKIN, Pianist, is making his fourteenth appearance in Ann Arbor at this May Festival. An American citizen today, he was born of Russian parents in Eger, Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia), in 1903. He was educated in Vienna, where at the age of twelve he made his debut with the Vienna Symphony. His serious professional career began in Berlin a few years later under the guidance of the late famous violinist Adolf Busch, whose only daughter Irene he married in 1935. The family moved to Switzerland in 1927 and then to America in 1939. Mr. Serkin first performed in the United States in 1933 at the Coolidge Festival in Wash?ington, D.C., before an invited audience. His very significant public debut came in 1936 with the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini. Since 1950, he has been an integral part of the Casals Festivals, first in Prades and then in Puerta Rico. In addition to his concertizing, Mr. Serkin devotes much of his time to teaching at the Curtis Insitute in Philadelphia where he is head of the Piano Department. In the summer Mr. Serkin is closely identified with the Marlboro School of Music and Festival, where his creative abilities are communicated to others on a scholarly as well a performing basis. The ability to perform extraordinarily and, at the same time, imbue others with his exceptional musical ideals is the ultimate achievement of Rudolf Serkin.
ITZHAK PERLMAN, the Israeli violinist who is now recognized in?ternationally as one of the most brilliant musicians of the younger gener?ation, was born in Tel Aviv, the son of imigrants from Poland. Perlman first studied at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music. At the age of thirteen, he was discovered by Ed Sullivan, who was in Israel on a talent search and
73
MAY FESTIVAL
who brought him back to appear on his television show. Perlman re?mained in this country to study at the Juilliard School on scholarships from the School and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. In 1964 he won the much coveted Leventritt Award, which brought him appearances with the New York Philharmonic and subsequently led to appearances with nearly every other major orchestra here and abroad. When he was four years old, Perlman was stricken with polio. The illness and a year's convalescence left his musical ambitions unchanged, tho ever since he has been forced to play his violin while seated. In the midst of a heavy concert schedule, Mr. Perlman finds time to record for RCA-Victor. In 1967 he married Toby Friedlandler, a fellow violin student at the Juilliard, and they now make their home in an apartment on Manhattan's Central Park West. Mr. Perlman is being heard for the first time in Ann Arbor.
VAN CLIBURN is one of the few artists who have attained and held overwhelming popularity coupled with critical acclaim. He was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1934. His earlier studies were with his mother until after high school when he came on the New York to study with Juilliard's famous Mme Rosina Lehvine. He has been the recipient of inumerable awards beginning with the Ci. B. Dealey Award in Dallas in 1952, followed by others such as the Kosciusko Foundation Chopin Award, and in 1954 the renowned Leventritt Foundations Award. He made his debut with the New York Philharmonic, under Mitropoulos, followed by extensive concert tours and appearances with many orches?tras. In 1957 he was the winner of the famous Tchaikowsky International Piano Competition in Moscow, and since then he has received unprece?dented acclaim throughout the world. In addition to his concert tours and appearances with orchestras in this country, he has twice returned to Russia where he has had tremendous success. This performance marks Van Cliburn's third appearance in the May Festival and his sixth in Ann Arbor.
BENITA VALENTE, Soprano, first came to attention of the music world when she won the Metropolitan Auditions in 1960. Rudolf Serkin was so impressed with Miss Valente's voice and artistry that she became Sopra-no-in-Residence at the Marlboro Festival under his direction. Here she presented a series of concerts featuring two Schubert works which she later recorded with Mr. Serkin for Columbia Records. Miss Valente's study has been with such distinquished artists as Martial Singher and Lotte Lehmann. In 1962 she embarked upon a European career and is now a frequent guest artist with many of the major opera houses and orchestras overseas. In the 1968-69 season Miss Valente's concert tours included appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, the Kansas City Philharmonic, the New Orleans Philhar?monic, the Clarion Orchestra of New York, the Philharmonic Hall
74
FESTIVA L A RTISTS
Haydn-Mozart Festival, and recitals in New York, Boston, and Cleveland. During the summer she participated in the Spoleta Festival in Italy and the Aspen Music Festival and the Marlboro Festival in this country. Her most recent recording, Hovhaness' "Triptych;" has been released under the CRI label. Miss Valente has been heard on two previous occasions in Ann Arbor, once in the "Messiah" and once with the Music from Marl?boro program.
BIRGIT FINNILA, Swedish Contralto, first came to this country, quietly and totally unknown, at Christmas of 1967 to sing several performances of the "Messiah" at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Twenty-four months later she has had ten appearances with the Cleve?land, Minneapolis, and San Francisco orchestras, as well as recitals in New York and Washington, D. C. Her 1969-70 season includes guest appear?ances with the Detroit, San Francisco, and Philadelphia orchestras and concludes with her first recording sessions for RCA-Victor. Miss Finnila's first acquaintance with music was listening to evenings of chamber music performed by her family. At seventeen she left home to study voice in Gothenburg. These lessons were interrupted by an early marriage and a new residence in Finland. Two years later she returned for further study in Gothenburg and, later, in London. Since her professional debut six years ago, Miss Finnila's career in Europe has developed quickly as soloist with numerous Festivals and with such orchestras as the Berlin Philhar?monic, and the Stockholm and Oslo Philharmonic orchestras. Miss Finnila is Hying in direct from Sweden for her appearance at this May Festival.
EVELYN MANDAC, Soprano, was born in the Philippines and received her basic training in the Islands, with a degree from the University of the Philippines. This was followed by several years of study at Oberlin College and at the Juilliard School of Music. In addition to her active participation in the Metropolitan Opera Studio and the Juilliard Opera Theater, Miss Mandac pursues a busy recital career. Her extensive repertoire of ora?torio and orchestral works has made her a favored soprano with many of the country's leading orchestras. Her' operatic roles include Mimi in La Boheme, Liu in Turandot, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Norina in Don Pasquale, Nannetta in Falstaff, and Pamina in Zauberflbte. She is equally at home in contemporary opera, having appeared in Luciano Berlo's Passagio and Henze's The Bassarids. Miss Mandac's 1969-70 season was highlighted with appearances with the Pittsburgh, Chattanooga, Dallas, and the Phila-delphi orchestras, and a tour with the Juilliard String Orchestra. This May Festival is Miss Mandac's first appearance in Ann Arbor.
JON HUMPHREY is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory and the School of Music of the University of Illinois. He made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1959, and has since then established himself as
75
MAY FESTI V AL
one of the leading tenors in the United States. In 1962 Mr. Humphrey toured the Soviet Union as soloist with the Robert Shaw Chorale. He has sung with the New York Pro Musica and the Marlboro Festival, where he has been Tenor-in-Residence. Mr. Humphrey has recorded with RCA Victor, Columbia, and Decca. Presently he is Resident Artist at the Uni?versity of Massachusetts; and he is making his first Ann Arbor appearance in these programs.
LESLIE CUINN, a native Texan, studied with Lotte Lehmann and grad?uated from Northwestern University, where he was proclaimed "Most Outstanding Performer of the Year." Moving to Washington, D.C., he spent three years as baritone soloist with the United States Army Chorus. He remained a fourth year to continue studies with Todd Duncan, during which time he performed at the White House and appeared as soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra. He was baritone soloist in the West Coast premiere of Britten's War Requiem at the Los Angeles Music Festival. Other Festival appearances have been at the Alaska Music Festi?val, Tanglewood, Marlboro, Chautauqua, and Worcester. Mr. Cuinn has also appeared as soloist with such major orchestras as the Detroit Sym?phony, the Baltimore Symphony, and the American Symphony. Mr. Guinn is appearing in Ann Arbor for the first time.
MARY BURCESS, Mezzo-Soprano, was born in South Carolina, and did her early musical study in that state. She was also a scholarship student at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina for four summers. After high school she entered the Curtis Institute to study under Mme Eu-femia Giannini Gregory, the teacher of Anna Moffo. Just before she took her bachelor of Music degree there she was signed by the New York City Opera Company, where she remained for three seasons, winning much acclaim for her Gilbert and Sullivan performances with that group. She also became a member of the Metropolitan Opera studio and did the title role in Rossini's Cinderella in Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall. In the summer of 1963, Rudolf Serkin invited her to participate in the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and for five years she was privileged to associ?ate with outstanding chamber music artists. She has toured and recorded on Columbia's "Music from Marlboro" series with such outstanding cham?ber music performers as Alexander Schneider. Other performances in?clude Haydn's opera La Tantarina, at Montreal's Expo' 67, and Lincoln Center's Mozart Festival. She was on the Music faculty of Duke University until the summer of 1969. She now lives in Tucson with her husband, who is a professor of surgery at the University of Arizona, and her two daughters. This is Miss Burgess' first appearance in The May Festival program.
76
FESTIVAL ARTISTS
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 former chairman of the Department of Music Literature and History. He holds two degrees from the University of Michigan and has studied farther at Pea body Conservatory, Baltimore, Cornell, New York, and Wayne Uni?versities in this country; and at Cambridge, England, and Munich, Ger?many. He initiated the first extension courses in music literature in the early 193()'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.
Friends of the University Musical Society are invited to send to the Secretary of the Society. Eric A. Walter, a brief account of concerts in the past which they recall as outstanding. It is planned to include some of these recollections in the May Festival Program Book for 1971, when, for the first time, the Festival will coincide with Alumni Week and Commencement ceremonies.
77
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor
Donald Bryant, Conductor
Paul Keenan, Pianist
FIRST SOPRANOS
Bradstreet, Lola Bryant, Lela N. Clardy, Carol Cox, Elaine Fenelon, Linda E. Fox, Estelle Giles, Elida Gockel, Barbara Gray, Darlene Gustafson, Susan Hanson, Gladys M. Hesselbart, Susan Hinzman, Lillian Hirth, Dana Hoover, Joanne Horst, Leslie Jacobs, MaryAnn Johnsmiller, Betsy Keeler, Ann Leyh, Carolyn L. Luecke, Doris L. Malan, Fannie Belle Malila, Elida Martinez, Leslie McDonald, Ruth M. Pack, Beth Pearson, Agnes Pellikka, N'orma Phillips, Margaret Pickett, Jean Pittaway, Louise Randolph, Susan Jo Raskin, Karen Reynolds, Davetta Robsky, Edith D. Rodgers, Mary Ann
78
Schilt, Margaret Sincock, Mary Ann Vlisides, Elena C. Waggoner, Barbara Wilson, Miriam Winston, Gail Wolff, Deborah
SECOND SOPRANOS
Beening, Catherine
Burr, Virginia
Carr, Nancy P.
Cornell, Gail
Cox, Flora
Datsko, Doris
Gajda, Anne
Goldman, Marsha
Green, Jane
Hiraga, Mary
Horning, Alice R.
Houser, Carolyn
Kirshner, Lily
Lamb, Margaret
Leftridge, Sharon
Lehmann, Judith
Lehmann, Leslie
Line, Linda
Lyman, Frances
McLean, Julie
Miller, Maria
Murray, Marilyn
Nicholas, Patricia
Porter, Mary
Reed, Lisa
Schmitt, Linda
Sexton, Ebba Jo
Stewart-Robinson, Elizabeth
Thompson, Hazel
Vasaris, E. (lay Weinman, Susan Young, Jan
FIRST ALTOS
Abrams, Gloria Adams, Judith Atkins, Susan Beam, Eleanor P. Brown, Marion W. Dalton, Linda Datsko, Deanna Dover, Beth Evans, Daisy E. Feldkamp, Lucy Fowler, Lucille Gale, Wendy Galimberti, Claudia Gerstman, Regina Goodman, Charlotte Hall, Barbara Heitzman, Diedra Johnston, Carol Kulenkamp, Nancy Landon, Joyce Liebscher, Erika McCoy, Bernice McNutt, Martha Mead, Kathleen Miller, Florence H. Murray, Virginia Nelson, Lois Rector, Patricia Schmiege, Susan Schuster, Pamela Scott, Catherine Slee, Beth Slee, Debora
CHORAL UNION
Smith, Marguerite Tandler, Virginia Wargelin, Carol Weaver, Kitty White, Myra Wiedmann, Louise P. Wolfe, Charlotte Wood, Jean D.
SECOND ALTOS
Arnold, Helen Band, Marjorie Bedell, (iarol) n Boehm, Cynthia Clayton, Caroline Crossley, Winnifred Donaldson, Kathryn Gibiser, Martha Goldfarb, Anne Haab, Mary Hagerty, Joan Hannigan, Jayne Hanson, Bernadine Johnson, Elizabeth Koebel, Melly Lidgard, Ruth M. Lovelace, Elsie Manson, Hinda Miller. Rene Murphy, Rosalind Newton, Dorothy Newton, Hollis Olson, Constance Pinsent, Margaret Pratt, Barbara Pratt, Susan Rector, Ellen Richardson, Gloria Robberson, Kay Roeger, Beverly Schenck, Mary Stebbins, Kathryn Steele. Donna Thomas, Carren Williams, Nancy Wilson, Johanna
FIRST TENORS
Baker. Hugh Burch, Christopher Cathey, Owen Gibiser, Gail Goldberg, Helga Grapentine, Christy
C'.raul, Robert Gregory, Kim Jech, Carl L. Klosterhaus, Edwin Leckrone, Gerald Lowry, Paul Miller, Steven Reminschneider, Denny Sakowski, Gayle Schultz, Stanley T. Scott, Phillip Steiner, Ken Stinehelfer, Wesley R. Trager, Natalie P.
SECOND TENORS
Aptekar, Kenneth Barrett, Martin Brokaw, Norman Casai, Tim Chateau, John Clark, Harold R. Clow, Daniel Dilworth, Kirby Etsweiler, Jack Galbraith, Merle Girod, Albert P. Guthrie, Thomas Haines, Michael Haworth, Donald Hermelbracht, Dave Hmay, Thomas Hyde, Peter Kellogg, Larry Kukelhan, Dave Lam, Samuel Lindemann, Michael Newton, Clyde A. Preston, Thomas Reed, Rob Warren, James Weamer, Alan Wheeler, David
FIRST BASSES
Bagby, Lewis Ballard, Gary Barber, Edwin L. Beam, Marion L. Benes, James Brodt, William Brueger, John Burr. Charles F.
Clayton, Joseph F. Conners, John Currie, William Dant, Chris Dill, David Eichenger, Ken Garvey, James Hagerty, Thomas F. Haynes, Jeffrey Heckman, Duane Herren, Donald C. Hill, James Hoag, Edwin C. I loc hstt'ltk'i. I litmus Holly, Tom Huff, Charles R. Kays, J. Warren Kissel, Klair H. Krause, Harry Magretta, William Martinez, Douglas McBride, David McDonald, James Pearson, J. Raymond Petty, Mark Schmitt, Karl Smith, Fred Unnewehr, David Weaver, David Weaver, Richard Wendt, Timothy
SECOND BASSES
Baskerville, Andrew Blake, Rowland DePuit, Gerald Allan Gill, Douglas E. Johnston, H. D. Lehmann, Charles F. Loukotka, Joseph McMurtrie, James Oberhausen, Richard Potter, Kim Powell, Gregg Schonschack, Wallace A. Seilzer, Pete Slee, Vergil
Sommerfeld, R. Thomas Stegler, Richard E. Steinmetz, George Strozier, Robert Tickton, David Wyche, Donald Zimmerman, Eric
?SMALL CHORUS OF UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
FIRST SOPRANOS
Bryant, Lela Clardy, Carol Fenelon, Linda Gray, Darlene Gustafson, Susan Hanson, Gladys Hesselbart, Susan Hirth, Dana Horst, Leslie Johnsmiller, Betsy Leyh, Carolyn L. Malan, Fannie Belle Pellikka, Norma Phillips, Margaret Pittaway, Louise Randolph, Susan Jo Reynolds, Davetta Schlarman, Carol Sincock, Mary Ann
SECOND SOPRANOS
Datsko, Doris Goldman, Marsha Green, Jane Horning, Alice R. McLean, Julie Sexton, Ebba Jo Vasaris, E. Gay Weinman, Susan Young, Jan
FIRST ALTOS
Adams, Judith Brown, Marion
Dalton, Linda Dover, Beih Hall, Barbara Heitzman, Diedra McNutt, Martha Nelson, Lois Wargelin, Carol Weaver, Kitty Wolfe, Charlotte
SECOND ALTOS
Aroian, Lois Baird, Marjorie (libiser, Martha Hanson, Bernadine Lovelace, Elsie Pinsent, Margaret Robberson, Kay Stebbins, Kathryn Thomas, Carren Williams, Nancy
FIRST TENORS
Cathey, Owen Hannigan, Jayne Klosterhaus, Edwin Leckrone, Cerald Lowry, Paul Manson, Hinda Reidy, James Scott, Phillip Trager, Natalie
SECOND TENORS Aptekar, Kenneth
Barrett, Martin Galbraith, Merle Guthrie, Thomas Haines, Michael Haworth, Donald Hmay, Thomas Lam, Samuel Weamer, Alan
FIRST BASSES
Barber, Edwin L. Burr, Charles Buttimore, Nigel Carnes, Richard Haynes, Jeffrey Hill. James
Hochstettler, Thomas Kissel, Klair McDonald, James Magretta, William Petty, Mark Unnewehr, David Wendt, Timothy
SECOND BASSES
Gill, Douglas McMurtrie, James Miller, Warren Powell, Gregg Schonschack, Wallace A. Sommerfeld, Thomas Strozier, Robert Wyche, Donald
Women of ihe Small Chorus comprise the Women's Chorus.
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THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Eugene Ormandy, Conductor William Smith, Assistant Conductor
Boris Sokoloff, Manager Joseph H. Santarlasci, Assistant Manager
VIOLINS
Norman Carol
Concerlmaster David Madison
Associate Concerlmaster William de Pasquale
Associate Concertmaster Morris Shulik Owen Lusak David Grunschlag Frank E. Saam Frank Costanzo David Arben Barbara de Pasquale Max Miller Jacob Stahl Ernest L. Goldstein Herbert Light Meyer Simkin Louis Gensensway Cathleen Dalschaert Irvin Rosen Robert de Pasquale Armand Di Camillo Joseph Lanza Julia Janson Isadore Schwartz Jerome Wigler Norman Black Irving Ludwig George Dreyfus Larry Grika Manuel Roth Louis Lanza Stephane Dalschaert Luis Biava Arnold Grossi
IOLAS
Joseph de Pasquale James Fawcett Leonard Mogill Gabriel Braverman
Sidney Curtiss Darrel Barnes Leonard Bogdanoff Paul Ferguson Wolfgang Granat Irving Segall Donald R. Clauser Charles Griffin
VIOLONCELLOS
Samuel Mayes Harry Gorodetzer Francis de Pasquale Joseph Druian William Saputelli Winifred Mayes Bert Phillips Barbara Haffner Lloyd Smith George Harpham Marcel Farago Santo Caserta
BASSES
Roger M. Scott Fedinand Maresh Neil Courtney F. Gilbert Eney Carl Torellq Wilfred Batchelder Samuel Gorodetzer Michael Shahan Emilio Gravagno
FLUTES
Murray VV. Panitz Kenneth E. Scutt Kenton F. Terry John C. Krell. Piccolo
OBOES
John de Lancie Stevens Hewitt
Charles M. Morris
Louis Rosenblatt,
English Horn
CLARINETS
Anthony M. Gigliotti Donald Montanaro Is.mill Querze Ronald Reuben, Bass Clarinet
BASSOONS
Bernard H. Garfield John Shamlian Adclchi Louis Angelucci Robert J. Pf'eufler Contra Bassoon
HORNS
Mason Jones Nolan Miller Glenn Janson John Simonelli Herbert Pierson
TRUMPETS
Gilbert Johnson Donald E. McComas Seymour Rosenfeld Samuel Krauss
TROMBONES
Glenn Dodson Tyrone Breuninger M. Dee Stewart Robert S. Harper, Bass Trombone
TUBA
Abe Torchinsky TIMPANI
Gerald Carlyss
Michael Bookspan
81
MAY FESTIVAL
BATTERY
Charles E. Owen Michael Bookspan Alan Abel Manuel Roth
CELESTA, PIANO, Af ORGAN
William Smith Marcel Farago
HARPS
Marilyn Costello Margarita Csonka
LIBRARIANS
Jesse C. Taynton Anthony Ciccarelli
PERSONNEL MANAGER
Mason Jones STAGE PERSONNEL
Edward Barnes, Manager Theodore Haupile James Sweeney
PHOTO PUBLICITY
Adrian Siegel
BROADCAST RECORDING ENGINEER
Albert L. Borkow, Jr.
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 1968 Gail W. Rector (Assistant to the President, 1945 1954); (Executive Director, 1957 1968); 1968 -
MUSICAL DIRECTORS
Calvin B. Cady, 1879 1888 Albert A. Stanley, 1888 1921 Earl V. Moore, 1922 1939
CONDUCTORS
ThorJohnson, 1939 1942 Hardin Van Deursen, 1943 1947 Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor,
1947 1956;
Conductor, 1956 1969 Donald Bryant, 1970 -
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 1957 Gail W. Rector (Assistant to the President, 1945 -1954); Executive
Director, 1957 1968; President, 1968 -
OFFICE PERSONNEL
Mary K. Farkas, (Secretary to the President, 1932 1958);
Adminstrative Assistant, 1958 --
Rose Marie Hooper, Secretary to the President, 1968 -Sally A. Gushing, Cashier and Accountant, 1968 -Gayle Sakowski, Typist-Recorder, 1970 -Harold E. Warner, Head Usher, 1952 -
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MAY FESTIVAL
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY, which this year observes its ninety-first season, was organized during the winter of 1879 -80 and was incorporated in 1881. Its purpose was to maintain a choral society and an orchestra to provide public concerts and to organize and maintain a school of music which would offer instruction comparable to that of the University in its schools and colleges. Ars longa vita brevis was adopted as its motto. In 1894, as a climax to its offerings, the "First Annual May Festival" was inaugurated. Gradually the number of concerts in the Chor?al Union Series was increased to ten, and the May Festival from three to six concerts. In 1946, with the development of musical interest, a supple?mentary series of concerts was added -the Extra Concert Series. Hand?el's Messiah, which had been performed at intervals through the years, became an annual production. Since 1946, it has been given two perform?ances each season; and since 1965, three performances are scheduled each year. Beginning with 1967, the May Festival has comprised five concerts.
From 1941 to 1968 an annual Chamber Music Festival of three concerts was held in Rackham Auditorium; and since 1962, an annual Dance Festival of three events, which last season became a Dance Series of five events in Hill Auditorium. During the season the Chamber Arts Series of seven attractions takes place; and the Summer Concert Series of four recitals is scheduled annually for July. (In the summer of 1967, as a special tribute to the University Sesquicentennial Celebration, the elev?en-concert Fair Lane Festival was presented at the site of the Henry Ford mansion, now part of the Dearborn Campus of the University of Mich?igan). Thus, at the close of its ninety-first year the Musical Society will have presented, throughout the season, thirty-six major events by dis?tinquished artists and organizations from a dozen countries.t
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION was an outgrowth of a "Mes?siah Club," made up of singers from several local churches. For a decade and a half, assisted by distinquished 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 86 to 88). The chorus membership numbers about three hundred singers, including townspeople and students, as well as many singers from out of town. Beginning next August, applications will be accepted for the 1969 -70 membership.
"The "Ann Arbor School of Music" was organized in 1879 and in 1892 was reorganized as the "University School of Music." In 1929 the University provided partial support, and students and faculty were given University status. In 1940 the University Musical Society relinquished full control and responsibility for the School to The University f Mil higan.
tA resume of all artists and organizations, together with the repertoire performed during the 1969-70 season, will be published and available during the summer.
84
THE ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Maintained by the University Musical Society and founded by Albert A. Stanley and his associates on the Board of Directors in 1894
MUSICAL DIRECTORS
Albert A. Stanley, 1894-1921 Earl V. Moore, 1922-1939
CONDUCTORS
Thor Johnson, 1940-1942 Hardin Van Deursen, 19431946 Thor Johnson (Guest), 1947 -
GUEST CONDUCTORS
Gustav Hoist (London, England),
1923, 1932 Howard Hanson (Rochester), 1926,
1927, 1933, 1935 Felix Borowski (Chicago), 1927 Percy Grainger (Australia), 1928 Jose Iturbi (Philadelphia), 1937 Georges Enesco (Paris), 1939
Harl McDonald (Philadelphia),
1939,1940,1944 Virgil Thomson (New York),
1959
Aaron Copland (New York), 1961 Igor Stravinsky (Los Angeles),
1964 Robert Craft (Los Angeles), 1964
ORGANIZATIONS
The Boston Festival Orchestra, Emil Mollenhauer, Conductor, 1894-1904.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, Conductor, 1905-1935. Eric DeLamarter, Associate Conductor, 1918-1935.
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Conductor, Saul Caston and Charles O'Connell, Associate Conductors, 1936; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, 1937, 1938; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Saul Caston, Associate Conductor, 1939--1945; Eugene Ormandy, Conductory, Alexander Hilsbcrg. Associate Conductor. 1946--1953. and Guest Conductor, 1953; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, 1954--; William Smith, Assistant Conductor, 1957 -.
The University Choral Unioi, Albert A. Stanley, Conductor, 1894--1921; Earl V. Moore, Conductor, 1922--1939; Thor Johnson, Conductor, 1940-1942; Hardin Van Deursen, Conductor, 1943-1947; Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor, 1947 -; Lester McCoy, Associate Con?ductor, 1947-1956, and Conductor, 1957-1969; Donald Bryant, 1970-.
The Festival Youth Chorus, trained by Florence B. Potter, and conducted by Albert A. Stanley, 1913-1918. Conductors: Russell Carter, 1920; George Oscar Bowen, 1921-1924; Joseph E. Maddy, 1925-1927; Juva N. Higbee, 1928-1936; Roxy Cowin, 1937; Juva N. Higbee, 1938; Roxy Cowin, 1939; Juva N. Higbee, 1940-1942; Marguerite Hood, 19431956; Geneva Nelson, 1957; Marquerite Hood, 1958.
85
UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION REPERTOIRE
Bach: Mass in B minor (excerpts)1923, 1924, 1925 (complete), 1953
Magnificat in D major1930, 1950, 1970
Sleepers, Wake (Cantata 140)1964 Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D major. Op. 123-1927, 1947, 1955
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 1251934, 1942, 1945, 1966 Berlioz: The Damantion of Faust1895, 1909, 1920, 1952
TeDeum-1965
Bernstein: Chichester Psalms1966 Bizet: Carmen1904, 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 Rhapsodic Op. 531939
Song of Destiny, Op. 54-1950
Song of Triumph, Op. 55-1953 Britten: Spring Symphony-1965 Bruch: Arminius1897, 1905
Fair Ellen, Op. 241904, 1910
Odysseus-1910
Bruckner: Te Deum laudamus-1945 Carey: "America"-1915
Chabrier: Fete Polonaise from Le Roi malgre lui-1959 Chadwick: The Lily Nymph-1900 Chavez, Carlos: Corrido de "El Sol"1954$, 1960 Corigliano, John: "Fern Hill'1969 Debussy: "La Damoiselle elue" -1970 Delius: Sea Drift-1924
Requiem1962 Dvorak: Stabat Mater, Op. 581906
Requiem Mass, Op. 891962
ELGAR:Caractacus-1903, 1914, 1936
The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38-1904, 1912, 1917 Finney, Ross Lee: "Still Are New Worlds"1963
"The Martyr's Elegy"1967 Fogg: The Seasons1937 Franck: The Beatitudes1918 Gabrieli: In Ecclesiis benedicto domino-1958 Giannini: Canticle of the Martyrs-1958 Ginastera, Alberto: Psalm 150, Op. 51969 Gluck: Orpheus1902
Goldmark: The Queen of Sheba (March)1923 Gomer, Llywelyn: Gloria in Excelsis-1949
Gounod: Faust1902, 1908, 1919 Gallia-1899
World premiere tL'niled Suites premiere
86
CHORAL UNION REPERTOIRE
Grainger, Percy: Marching Song of Democracy--1928 Hadley: "Music," An Ode, Op. 75-1919 Handel: Judas Maccabeus-1911
Messiah1907, 1914
Solomon1959 Hanson, Howard: Songs from "Drum Taps"-1935
Heroic Elegy-1927
The Lament for Beowulf1926
Merry Mount1933 Haydn: The Creation1908, 1932, 1963
The Seasons1909, 1934 Heger: Ein Friedenslied, Op. 191934t Hoi.st: A Choral Fantasia-1932t
A Dirge for Two Veterans-1923
The Hymn of Jesus1923t
First Choral Symphony (excerpts)-1927t
Honeccer, Arthur: King David-1930, 1935, 1942
"Jeanne d'Are au bucher"--1961 Kodaly: Psalmus Hungaricus, Op. 13-1939
TeDeum-1966
Lambert, Constant: Summer's Last Will and Testament-195It Lockwood, Normand: Prairie-1953 Mahler: "Resurrection" Symphony-1970
McDonald, Harl: Symphony No. 3 ("Lamentations of Fu Hsuan")-1939 Mendelssohn: Elijah1901, 1921, 1926, 1944, 1954, 1961
St. Paul1905
Mennin, Peter: Symphony No. 4, "The Cycle"-1950 Moussorcsky: Boris Godunov-1931, 1935
Mozart: Great Mass in C minor, K. 4271948
Requiem Mass in D minor, K. 6261946
"Davidde penitente"-1956 Orff, Carl: Carmina Burana-1955 Parker: Hora Novissima, Op. 301900 Pierne: The Children's Crusade-1915
Saint Francis of Assissi1928, 1931 Ponchielli: La Gioconda-1925 Poulenc: Secheresses-1959
"Gloria"1964
"Stabat Mater"-1970
Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78-1946 Rachmaninoff: The Bells1925, 1938, 1948 Respighi: l.a Primavera-1924t Rimski-Korsakov: The Legend of Kitesh1932t Rossini: Stabat Mater1897 Saint-Saens: Sawuon and DcMoA-1896, 1899, 1907, 1912, 1916, 1923, 1929, 1940, 1958
World premiere tAmerican premiere
87
MAY FESTIVAL
Schonberg: Gurre-I.ieder-1956
Schubert: Mass in A-Hat1969
Schuman, William: A Free Song (Cantata No. 2)-1945
Sibelius: Onward Ye Peoples1939, 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 Ode1913, 1943
A Psalm of Victory, Op. 81906 Stock: A Psalmodic Rhapsody1922, 1943 Stout, Alan: Prologue-1970 Stravinsky: Symphonic 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: Aida1903, 1906, 1917, 1921, 1924 (excerpts), 1928, 1937, 1957
La Forza del Destino (Finale, Act II)1924
Otello1939
Requiem Mass-1894, 1898, 1913, 1920, 1930, 1936, 1943, 1951, 1960, 1967
Stabat Mater-1899
Te Deum-1947, 1963
Villa-Lobos, Heitor: Choros No. 10, "Rasga ocoracao"1949, 1960 Vivaldi: Magnificat1967 ViVALDi-CASELLA:Gloria-1954 Wagner: Diefliegende Hollander1918
Lohengrin1926; Act. I1896, 1913
Die Meislersinger, Finale to Act III1903, 1913: Choral, "Awake," and Chorale Finale to Act III-1923
Scenes from Parsifal1937
Tannhauser1902, 1922; March and Chorus1886; "Venusberg" Music1946 Walton, William: Belshazzar's Feast-1933, 1952 Wolf-Ferrari: The New Life, Op. 91910, 1915, 1922, 1929
World premiere tAmeritan premiere
GIFT PROGRAM
At the Annual Meeting of" the University Musical Society, held Novem?ber 15, 1969, the "charter" contributors were gratefully acknowledged for their generous and willing response to the Gift Program. Thanks were also extended to include the several anonymous and miscellaneous contri?butions. The list below includes those whose gifts were received by De?cember 31, 1969. Contributors sending gifts after January 1, 1970, will be first listed in the opening Choral Union Series program next fall.
In addition to the gracious gifts which are acknowledged here, the Society continues to be mindful of the loyal support which the mu?sic-lovers of Ann Arbor and surrounding communities have shown throughout the history of the concert series.
GUARANTORS
Miss Esther Betz
Mrs. Charles T. Campbell
Mr. and Mrs. Douglas D. Crary
Mr. and Mrs. Lou M. Dexter
Mr. and Mrs. Peter N. Heydon
Mrs. Dana E. Seeley
Mrs. Victoria S. Wege
SPONSORS
Mr. and Mrs. Robben W. Fleming
Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Hatcher
Mr. and Mrs. Maurice B. Hodges
Mrs. Walter Laubengayer
Mr. and Mrs. John M. McCollum
Mrs. Lester McCoy
Mr. Mack Ryan
CORPORATE SPONSORS
Liberty Music Shop
Wagner and Company
PATRONS
Mr. Edward L. Adams, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Edward Adams, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Wyeth Allen
Mr. George E. Amendt
Mr. and Mrs. Donald H. Bacon
Miss Henricka Beach
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie R. Beals
Mr. and Mrs. Harry B. Benford
Mr. and Mr?. William W. Bishop. Jr.
Mr. C.John Blankley
Mr. and Mrs. Milford Boersma
Mr. and Mrs. Roscoe O. Bonisteel
Mrs. George Granger Brown
Mr. George H. Brown
Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Brown
Dr. and Mrs. K. M. Brownson
Mr. and Mrs. George C. Cameron
Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Campbell
Mr. and Mrs. Walter L. Chambers
Mr. and Mrs. John Alden Clark
Mr. and Mrs. Gage R. Cooper
Mr. and Mrs. A. H. Copeland
Mr. Earl H. Cress
Dr. and Mrs. Clarence Crook
Mr. and Mrs. William M. Cruickshank
Mr. James A. Davies
Dr. and Mrs. Russell Dejong
Mr. and Mrs. William G. Dow
Miss Linda E. Eberbach
Mrs. Minerva E. Eberbach
Mr. Oscar A. Eberbach
Dr. Joseph Eschbach
89
MAY FESTIVAL
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas C. Evans
Mr. and Mrs. George H. Forsyth
Mr. and Mrs. Dale P. Fosdick
Miss Phyllis W. Foster
Mr. and Mrs. Britton L. Gordon
Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Gotz
Mr. and Mrs. Clare E. Griffin
Miss Elsa Haller
Mr. and Mrs. Elmer F. Hamel
Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Hanawalt
Mrs. Julia M. Hart
Mr. Joseph C. Hooper
Mr. Frederick G. L. Huetwell
Dr. and Mrs. F. W.Jeffries
Mr. Thor Johnson
Mr. and Mrs. Paul G. Kauper
Mr. and Mrs. Irvin W. Kay
Mrs. Donald Kehl
Mr. Charles R. Kellermann, Jr.
Miss Ida Kemp
Mr. William R. Kinney
Mr. Alfred F. Lahodny
Mr. and Mrs. Clifford P. Lillya
Mr. and Mrs. Edwin E. Meader
Dr. and Mrs. Joe D. Morris
Mr. Jesse Ormondroyd
Mr. and Mrs. William B. Palmer
Dr. and Mrs. Bernard Patmos
Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Pierpont
Mr. and Mrs. Warren E. Poole
Mr. and Mrs. John J. Porter
Mr. and Mrs. Milliard H. Pryor
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Radock
Dr. and Mrs. Theophile Raphael
Dr. and Mrs. Rigdon K. RatlifF
Mr. and Mrs. Howard Reed
Mr. and Mrs, William D. Revelli
Mr. and Mrs. F. E. Richart
Mr. and Mrs. Edmund B. Rickard
Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rigan
Miss Sara L. Rowe
Dr. and Mrs. A. L. Russell
Mr. Carl F. Schemm
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Schurz
Mr. and Mrs. F. A. Sergeant
Mrs. Frank Siller
Mrs. James H. Spencer
Mr. and Mrs. Stephen H. Spurr
Mr. and Mrs. Neil Staebler
Mr. and Mrs. E. Blythe Stason
Mr. and Mrs. John C. Stegeman
Mrs. Dorothy F. Stolpin
Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilner Sundelson
Mrs. Elizabeth K. Swisher
Dr. and Mrs. E. Thurston Thieme
Miss Virginia W. Tibbals
Mrs. John E. Tracy
Dr. Paul M. Vanek
Mr. and Mrs. Paul C. Wagner
Mr. and Mrs. Erich A. Walter
Mrs. Russell West
Mr. W. Scott Westerman, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Boyd W. Yard
CORPORATE PATRONS
Ann Arbor Bank
Ann Arbor Federal Savings and
Loan Association Ann Arbor Trust Company Bay's Arcade Jewelry
Grinnell's
Hi Fi and TV Center, Inc. Jacobson Stores, Inc. National Bank and Trust Co.
SUSTAINING MEMBERS
Miss Victoria Abdella Miss Adelaide A. Adams Dr. and Mrs. Peter Aliferis Mr. and Mrs. Francis A. Allen Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Allington Dr. and Mrs. David G. Anderson
90
Dr. and Mrs. Oliver C. Applegate
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas M. Atkins
Miss Eileen Atkinson
Mrs. Stephen S. Attwood
Mr. and Mrs. Max K. Aupperle
Mrs. Noyes L. A very, Jr.
GIFT PROGRAM
Mrs. A. W. Baker
Mr. and Mrs. Burton L. Baker
Miss Millicent A. Baranowski
Mrs. Jean Lynn Barnard
Mrs. R. W. Barnard
Mrs. Floyd E. Bartell
Mr. and Mrs. Raymond O. Bassler
Dr. and Mrs. Gerhard H. Bauer
Mr. and Mrs. Elmer G. Berry
Mr. and Mrs. V. T. Bibicoff.
Dr. A. James Blair, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Harlan Bloomer
Dr. and Mrs. Giles G. Bole, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs Jay A. Bolt
Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Bottum
Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Bottum, Jr.
Miss Lola M. Bradstreet
Mr. and Mrs. E. F. Brater
Mr. and Mrs. Allen P. Britton
Mr. and Mrs. George W. Brooks
Mr. Robert H. Brower
Mr. and Mrs. Carl R. Brown
Dr. and Mrs. Gordon C. Brown
Mr. and Mrs. Donald R. Brundage
Mr. and Mrs. Robbins Burling
Mrs. H. S. Butz
Miss Ruby A. Campbell
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Cannell
Dr. Ruth Cantieny
Mr. and Mrs. David Catron
Dr. and Mrs. Alfred Y. T. Ching
Miss Hope H. Chipman
Mr. and Mrs. Halvor N. Christensen
Miss Janice A. Clark
Mr. Carl Cohen
Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Cohen
Mr. and Mrs. W. Oscar Collins
Mrs. Lester V. Colwell
Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Conard
Mr. Will H. Connelly
Mr. and Mrs. George D. Coons
Dr. and Mrs. Leslie Corsa, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Glenn M. Coulter
Miss Marjorie A. Cramer
Mr. and Mrs. H. Richard Crane
Miss Grace Crockett
Mr. and Mrs. John R. Dale
Mr. Paul A. Daniells
Mr. and Mrs. H. W. Davenport
Dr. and Mrs. Thomas J. DeKornfeld
Mr. Julio del Toro
Mr. and Mrs. David M. Dennison
Mr. and Mrs. G. E. Densmore
Mr. and Mrs. W. de St. Aubin
Mr. and Mrs. E. D. Ditto
Mr. and Mrs. John S. Dobson
Dr. Edward R. Doezema
Dr. and Mrs. Bruce Draper
Dr. and Mr. Paul F. Durkee
Mr. Eric S. Eklund
Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Elderfield
Mr. and Mrs. John F. Eley
Mr. and Mrs. John H. Enns
Mr. Nicholas D. Falcone
Mr. Irving J. Feinberg
Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Feldman
Mrs. Alice T. Ferguson
Mr. and Mrs. F. A. Filie
Mr. and Mrs. Carl H. Fischer
Mr. and Mrs. Howard P. Fox
Mr. and Mrs. Versile E. Fraleigh
Mrs. Thomas Francis, Jr.
Mrs. William A. Frayer
Mrs. Charles C. Fries
Mr. and Mrs. Victor Gallatin
Mr. and Mrs. Bernard A. Galler
Mr. S. H. Garland
Mr. and Mrs. Garnet R. Garrison
Dr. and Mrs. Ralph M. Gibson
Dr. and Mrs. William C. Gilkey
Mr. and Mrs. Philip H. Gillies
Miss Pearl Graves
Mr. and Mrs. G. Robert Greenberg
Miss Dorothy Greenwald
Miss Barbara J. Gross
Mr. Robert C. Hansen
Dr. and Mrs. Henry L. Hartman
Miss Margaret A. Harwick
Mr. Harold Haugh
Mrs. Joseph R. Hayden
Miss Ethel Hedrick
Mr. Albert E. Heins
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Henderson
Dr. and Mrs. Keith S. Henley
Mr. and Mrs. S. H. Henry
Mrs. Robert J. Hesse
Mr. Charles A. Highhill
Mrs. Leonard E. Himler
91
MAY FESTIVAL
Mr. Donald A. Hines
Mr. Norman Ho
Dr. and Mrs. Fred J. Hodges
Dr. and Mrs. William N. Hubbard, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. David D. Hunting
Miss Dorothy A. Huskey
Mr. and Mrs. Max L. Hutt
Mr. Raymond F. Hutzel
Miss Ella M. Hymans
Dr. and Mrs. Hideo Itabashi
Mr. and Mrs. Albert C. Jacobs
Mr. and Mrs. Emil Jebe
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Johe
Mr. and Mrs. William Judson Johnson
Mr. and Mrs. Phillip S.Jones
Miss Elizabeth Kahn
Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Kahn
Mrs. Abraham Kaplan
Mrs. Gunnar Karlstrom
Mr. and Mis. ). Warren kavs
Mr. and Mrs. Ted Kennedy, Jr.
Dr and Mrs. William W. Kimbrough
Dr. and Mrs. Paul C. Kingsley
Mr. and Mrs. Robert F. Klein
Dr. and Mrs. Karl S. Klicka
Mr. and Mrs. Harry J. Klinger, Jr.
Mr. Samuel Krimm
Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey E. Krone
Mr. and Mrs. S. R. Lampert
Mrs. and Mrs. Arthur T. Lanning
Mrs. Gertrude Leidy
Mr. and Mrs. John Leidy
Miss H. M. Lloyd
Miss Mildred Loeffler
Mr. and Mrs. D. S. Lowe
Mr. and Mrs. John Duer I.udlow
Mr. and Mrs. Richard Macias
Miss Ella A. Mahnken
Dr. and Mrs. D. W. Martin
Dr. and Mrs. Josip Matovinovic
Mr. and Mrs. Wesley H. Maurer
Dr. Wolfgang W. May
Mr. and Mrs. Allen L. Mayerson
Mr. John A. McMillan
Mr. F. N. McOmber
Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Meranda
Dr. and Mrs. Clarence J. Messner
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Metcalf
Rev. and Mrs. Frederic R. Meyers
92
Mr. and Mrs. Keith G. Mickelson
Mr. and Mrs. Murray H. Miller
Mr. Robert Rush Miller
Mr. John Mohler
Dr. and Mrs. Robert P. Montgomery
Miss Yoshiko Nagamatsu
Dr. and Mrs. James Neel
Mrs. Clifford T. Nelson
Miss Geneva Nelson
Mr. and Mrs. K. K. Neumann
Mrs. Geoge Stribling Newell
Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Niess
Mrs. Roland O. Nissle
Mr. and Mrs. Frederick C. O'Dell
Dr. and Mrs. F. D. Ostrander
Mrs. David Owen
Mr. James R. Packard
Dr. and Mrs. Michael Papo
Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Park
Dr. Beverly C. Payne
Mr. and Mrs. Pedro Paz
Mr. and Mrs. D. Maynard Phelps
Miss Rita J. Pieron
Dr. and Mrs. Richard A. Pollak
Dr. and Mrs. H. Marvin Pollard
Mr. and Mrs. David Ponitz
Mr. and Mrs. Philip Potts
Mr. and Mrs. Emerson F. Powrie
Dr. T. A. Preston
Mr. Robert E. Rann
Mr. Lawrence L. Rauch
Mr. Gerald M. Rees
Dr. and Mrs. Melvin J. Reinhart
Mr. Arthur D. Robinson
Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Robinson
Miss Nancy L. Roe
Mr. and Mrs. Fred H. Rogers
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur M. Ross
Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Roy
Mr. Frank E. Royce
Miss Mabel E. Rugen
Mrs. Margaret R. Runge
Mr. and Mrs. Theodore J. St. Antoine
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert O. Schlager
Dr. David W. Schmidt
Mr. Keeve M. Siegel
Mr. and Mrs. Vergil N. Slee
Miss Beverlyn L. Smith
Mr. and Mrs. Ira M. Smith
V, I FT PROGRAM
Miss Beatrice A. Snider
Mrs. Helen M. Snyder
Mr. W. Allen Spivey
Mr. Russell Stevenson
Mr. George B. Stipe
Mrs. Mira Stoll
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Stubbins
Dr. and Mrs. Walter A. Swartz
Mrs. Florence T. Thomas
Dr. and Mrs. Wallace Tourtelotte
Mr. and Mrs. Lynn A. Townsend
Miss Nancy P. Truog
Mr. Paul W. Ungrodt.Jr.
Miss Rose Vainstein
Mr. and Mrs. B. Condit Valentine
Mr. and Mrs. Barry D. Van Koevering
Mr. and Mrs. W. Russell Virt
Mrs. Elena Vlisides
Mrs. George Wadley
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Warshausky
Mr. and Mrs. Merwin H. Waterman
Mrs. Ralph N. Watkins
Mrs. Paul S. Welch
Mrs. B. T. Whipple
Mrs. Albert E. White
Mr. and Mrs. W. C. Wiers
Mr. George A. Wild
Mr. and Mrs. George W. Willard
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar E. Willis
Dr. and Mrs. Sherwood B. Winslow
Mrs. E. S. Wolaver
Miss Charlotte Wolfe
Col. and Mrs. Ernest A. H. Woodmat
Dr. and Mrs. Jose E. Yanez
Mr. Chia-Shun Yih
Mr. and Mrs. Paul F. Youngdahl
93
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
NINETY-SECOND SEASON
International Presentations for the 1970 -71 Season
SUMMER CONCERT SERIES-JULY, 1970
Rackham Auditorium Four Piano Recitals --Artists to be announced June 1.
CHORAL UNION SERIES
DETROIT SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA......2:30, Sunday, September 27
Sixten Ehrling, Conductor; Judith Raskin, Soprano
L'ORCHESTRE NATIONAL FRANgAIS............Monday, October 12
Jean Martinon, Conductor
MELBOURNE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA.........Saturday, October 24
Willem van Otterloo, Conductor (Program in recognition of
the 25th anniversary of the United Nations). LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC
ORCHESTRA.......................................Saturday, November 7
Zubin Mehta, Conductor
EMIL GILELS, Pianist..................................Wednesday, November 18
"ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD" (Offenbach)-
Canadian Opera Company..........................Saturday, January 9
BEVERLY SILLS, Soprano...................................Saturday, January 30
ISAAC STERN, Violinist...............................2:30, Sunday, February 21
MENUHIN FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA..............Wednesday, March 10
Yehudi Menuhin, Conductor and soloist MSTISLAV ROSTROPOVICH, Cellist......................Monday, March 15
DANCE SERIES
PENNSYLVANIA BALLET COMPANY.............Saturday, October 17
MARTHA GRAHAM AND DANCE
COMPANY.............................................Monday, October 26
BAYANIHAN PHILIPPINE DANCE
COMPANY......................................... Saturday, November 21
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER....Friday, February 12 LES GRANDS BALLETS CAN ADIENS..................Saturday, April 3
94
CHAMBER ARTS SERIES
PAUL KUENTZ CHAMBER ORCHESTRA
OF PARIS..........................................Thursday, October 15
SOLISTI DI ZAGREB..............................Wednesday, November 4
MOSCOW TRIO.........................................Friday, November 13
ELAINE SHAFFER, Flutist; and
HEPHZIBAH MENUHIN, Pianist..................Tuesday, January 19
FESTIVAL WINDS......................................Tuesday, February 2
GUARNERI STRING QUARTET..................Thursday, February 25
MUNICH CHAMBER ORCHESTRA.....................Friday, March 12
Hans Stadlmair, Conductor
ANNUAL CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
"Messiah" (Handel) --Three Performaces...............Friday, December 4
Saturday, December 5 (2:30) Sunday, December 6
Soloists
Lucia Evangelista, Soprano
Elaine Bonazzi, Contralto
John McCollum, Tenor
Jerome Hines, Bass
The University Choral Union
Members of The Interlochen Arts academy Orchestra
Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
Donald Bryant, Conductor
ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL1971 April 29, 30 and May 1, 2 --Five Concerts, Thursday through Sunday
The Philadephia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy,Conductor; Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor, and soloists.
(All Concerts begin at 8:30 unless otherwise indicated.)
95
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
1879