UMS Concert Program, April 29, 30; May 1, 2, 1971: The Seventy-eighth Ann Arbor May Festival -- The Philadelphia Orchestra

Season: Ninety-Second
Concert: FIFTH
Hill Auditorium

ANN ARBOR
1971
Ninety-Second Season UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
of The University of Michigan
The Seventy-Eighth
ANN ARBOR
MAY FESTIVAL
Five Concerts
APRIL 29, 30; MAY 1, 2, 1971 Hill Auditorium
Published by the University Musical Society, Ann Arbor, Michigan
CONTENTS
University Musical Society, Board of Directors.................... 5
Performing Artists .............................................. 7
Festival Programs .............................................. 9
Annotations
First Concert ..................................................17
Second Concert ................................................32
Third Concert..................................................42
Fourth Concert ................................................53
Fifth Concert ..................................................60
Personnel
The University Choral Union....................................67
The Philadelphia Orchestra......................................69
History
The University Musical Society ..................................70
The Ann Arbor May Festival....................................72
Gift Program....................................................73
Contributors ...................................................73
International Presentations for the 1971-72 Season................80
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 Charles A. Sink E. Blythe Stason Thor Johnson Henry F. Vaughan
THE SEVENTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL
ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL
Conductors
Eugene Ormandy, Orchestral Conductor Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor Donald Bryant, Choral Director
Organizations
The Philadelphia Orchestra The University Choral Union
Soloists
Leontyne Price___.....____________________________Soprano
Maralin Niska__________________________________ Soprano
Eleanor Felver________________________________ Contralto
John Stewart ___________________________________ Tenor
Donald Bell__________......__________________________ Bass
Barbara Nissman _________________________________ Pianist
Andre Watts_____________________________________Pian ist
Christopher Parkening.......______________________ Guitarist
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.
This season of the Philadelphia Orchestra is sponsored in part
by a grant from The Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.
FIRST MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Thursday Evening, April 29 at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
LEONTYNE PRICE, Soprano
PROGRAM
"Two Portraits," Op. 5__.......______________________Bartok
"One Ideal" (Norman Carol, Violin) "One Grotesque"
"Dove sono" from Le Nozze di Figaro___________..........Mozart
"Ritorna vincitor" from Aida ______________________.....Verdi
Leontyne Price
fSymphony No. 8 in B minor ("Unfinished") ________Schubert
Allegro moderato
Andante con moto
INTERMISSION
Four Last Songs___________________________Richard Strauss
Friihling
September
Beim Schlafengehen
Im Abendrot
"Pace, pace" from La Forza del Destino_________________Verdi
Miss Price
@@@@'Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks," Op. 28________R. Strauss
Available on Columbia Records t RCA Red Seal
9
SECOND MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Friday Evening, April 30, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION Donald Bryant, Choral Director
THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
MARALIN NISKA, Soprano DONALD BELL, Bass-Baritone
BARBARA NISSMAN, Pianist
PROGRAM
"A Sea Symphony," for Soprano, Baritone,
Chorus, and Orchestra____.............____Vaughan Williams
A Song for All Seas, All Ships On the Beach at Night, Alone Scherzo (The Waves) The Explorers
University Choral Union, Maralin Niska, and Donald Bell Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
INTERMISSION
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for
Piano and Orchestra, Op. 43______________Rachmaninoff
Barbara Nissman
io
THIRD MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Saturday Evening, May 1, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
PROGRAM
Sinfonietta ____________________......._________.......... Janacek
Allegretto
Andante; allegretto Moderato
Allegretto
Andante con moto
"La Mer"--Trois esquisses symphoniques____________Debussy
De 1'aube a midi sur la mer
Jeux de vagues
Dialogue du vent et de la mer
INTERMISSION
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100___.............Prokofiev
Andante
Allegro marcato Adagio
Allegro giocoso
Available on Columbia Records
11
FOURTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Afternoon, May 2, at 2:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION Donald Bryant, Choral Director
THOR JOHNSON, Conductor
SOLOISTS
MARALIN NISKA, Soprano
ELEANOR FELVER, Contralto
JOHN STEWART, Tenor
DONALD BELL, Bass
CHRISTOPHER PARKENING, Guitarist
PROGRAM
Mass No. 3 in F minor ("The Great") _______.....____Bruckner
Kyrie Sanctus
Gloria Benedictus
Credo Agnus Dei
University Choral Union, Maralin Niska, Eleanor Felver, John Stewart, and Donald Bell Mary McCall Stubbins, Organist
INTERMISSION
'Fantasia para un gentilhombre" for
Guitar and Orchestra ____________________......Rodrigo
Christopher Parkening
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FIFTH MAY FESTIVAL CONCERT
Sunday Evening, May 2, at 8:30
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA EUGENE ORMANDY, Conductor
SOLOIST
ANDRE WATTS, Pianist
PROGRAM
Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor_____________________Bach
(Transcribed for orchestra by Eugene Ormandy)
Variations on an Original Theme ("Enigma"), Op. 36_____Elgar
c.a.e. w.n.
H.D.S.P. Nimrod
R.B.T. Dorabella-Intermezzo
W.M.B. G.R.S.
R.P.A. B.G.N.
Ysobel X.X.X.-Romanza
Troyte E.D.U.-Finale
INTERMISSION
Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major for
Piano and Orchestra, Op. 83___............__________Brahms
Allegro non troppo
Allegro appassionato Andante
Allegretto grazioso
Andre Watts
Available on Columbia Records
19
ANNOTATIONS
by GLENN D. McGEOCH
The Author oj the annotations expresses his appreciation to Ferol Brinkman for her editorial services.
FIRST CONCERT
Thursday Evening, April 29
Two Portraits, Op. 5............Bartok
Bela Bartok was born in Nagyszentmiklos in Hungary, March 25, 1881; died in New York, September 26, 1945.
Bela Bartok was distinguished in every sphere of the music he served so conscientiously and selflessly; no creative artist in any field was ever so completely dedicated to his art, or lived such a life of self-denial in its in?terest. The extent of his musical activity as composer and scholar is stagger?ing to contemplate; even to begin to recount his manifold achievements would quickly consume the space allotted to this whole program.
More than two decades after his death, his music retains a powerful individuality and refreshing originality seldom encountered in our day. It offers perhaps the greatest challenge known to contemporary musical thought and will no doubt do so for some time to come. His appearance in the world of music was marked by nothing sensational or spectacular--no fierce debates, no manifestos called public attention to his work. Yet in the 1920's his idiom had become the standard of "modern music" everywhere in the world; he was the inventor of one of the most experimental and widely practiced styles of the period between the two wars. From this era of spiritual atrophy and prevailing sterility he emerged not only a continuing experimentalist to the end of his life but an artist of the most exacting standards. From a relentless harshness and baffling complexity, his art matured and mellowed into something warmly human and commun?icatively direct, without sacrificing any of its originality, certainty, or tech?nical inventiveness. He seems to have realized, as Oscar Wilde once observed, that "nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly."
Bart6k was equally distinguished as a musical scholar; with his encyclo?pedic knowledge of folk music, he became one of the leading authorities of our time. The profundity of his scholarship was unique among creative artists. He not only investigated the music of his native Hungary, of Ru?mania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and French North Africa, with the authority and thoroughness of the most meticulous scientist, but as a composer he subjected it to a complete artistic transformation and distillation. It
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was never used as an exotic element for spicing up his own musical language in the manner of Franz Liszt and Brahms, who, with their so-called "Hun?garian" rhapsodies and dances, misled generations of musicians as to the true nature of real Hungarian folk music. A nationalistic or racial artist like Bartok has to do more than transcribe literally the music of his people. It is not the task or the aim of a composer merely to make arrangements of a few folk songs. He has to be so permeated with the spirit of his people that its characteristic features are woven into the texture of his score almost unconsciously. Thus, a personal style becomes so blended with the racial or national ideas that to distinguish between the two is impossible. With Bartok, it became the very substance of his musical thought and substratum of every score written by one of the greatest creative musicians of the twentieth century.
Bart6k's popularity with the public was slow in coming, for he made no concession whatever to popular taste and was in fact disdainful of im?mediate success. He was fearless and obdurate to his own disadvantage while he lived, and the world consequently treated him unjustly. It is a tribute to his sincerity, profundity, and the richness of his art that he is emerging slowly but surely from the oblivion and neglect he experienced during his life, to be received affectionately by sincere audiences eager for new and exciting musical experiences. All honor to an artist of Bartok's uncompromising integrity and modesty, who could survive the conscientious paranoia of our time and emerge from the unhealthy morass with such dedi?cation and sustaining strength of purpose.
Shortly after Bartok's death a memorial concert of some of his chamber music, given at the New York Public Library, was attended by a company of his friends and colleagues. On that occasion the musicologist Curt Sachs discussed some aspects of his work and his personality:
Bela Bartok was one of the greatest composers and one of the greatest teachers of our time. But this does not tell us all. He was one of our greatest scholars too. He spent his life collecting, transcribing, and evaluating thousands of melodies of the people of Hungary, of Romania, of Yugoslavia, and the Arabian countries. We would be wronging him were we to stress only these multifarious activities--composition, teaching, research--and brand them virtuosity. In a universal genius such as he, these things go to make up the whole. Beta Bartok's creative, intellectual and educational powers were merely the multiple expression of an all-embracing personality.
Again we would be wronging him were we to stress only his superlative musicianship. This he achieved because as a human being he was so honest, so pure and so affectionate. No one who has not looked into his bright and knowing eyes, who has not plumbed the depths of his loving heart, who has not felt the warmth that permeated his whole being can do full justice to the man and the artist.
It is this very universal quality of the man that docs not permit us to call Bela Bartok a Hungarian nationalist as critics have been prone to do until now. True,
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he was profoundly rooted in his native country and he had great affection for its folk melodies. Although his roots were deep sunk in the fertile soil of Hungary and although he drank richly of her sap he grew to such stature and sent his business so far beyond her horizons that we can rightfully say he belonged to the world. In his struggle to free himself from degenerate romanticism and to attain a new classicism, a struggle in which all the masters of his generation participated, he, like his friend and brother-in-arms, Zoltan Kodaly, found his best inspiration in the vigorous melodic lines and rhythms of folk music. For him this music was not a foreign folk lore and a stimulating exoticism as it was to Liszt and Brahms; it was a language which he spoke without affectation and which he was able to oppose to the accepted idiom of his time. Therefore, we say once again, Bartok is not to us an honored guest from Puszta, but a beloved citizen of the world and of our country as a part of that world. It is in the spirit of such kinship that we are gathered here... in celebrating Bela Bart6k this evening we do not mourn the dead, but we honor, lovingly and gratefully, the ever-living.
The first of the Two Portraits makes use of material from an early violin concerto which was long believed lost. The manuscript, however, was later discovered in the effects of a deceased Hungarian violinist, Miss Stefi Geyer, for whom Bartok had written the work. Before her death she left instructions that it should receive a public performance. It had its premiere in Basel, May 30, 1958, almost thirteen years after the composer's death, as Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (Post?humous.) It had been composed fifty years before, when Bart6k was twenty-seven years of age, and dedicated to Miss Geyer, with whom he was deeply in love. Mystery shrouds the reasons why he never published it, or even acknowledged its existence, for it was his finest achievement at that period of his career. The Two Portraits were intended to be musical impressions of Miss Geyer. The first portrait, titled "One Ideal" (adagio), is derived from the first movement of the Concerto. In it, the solo violin, which dominates the work, announces what Bartok designated as the "Stefi motive." It develops in contrapuntal style, with the addition of other violins. The theme is then heard in oboe, English horn, bassoon, and bass clarinet, as the solo violin engages in various modifications of its theme. Two orchestral climaxes of some intensity do not destroy the prevailing serenity of its mood, which returns at the close.
The second portrait with the title, "One Grotesque," uses the same "Stefi motive" in an energetic presto. After a brief introduction, it is heard in the flutes, oboes, and E-flat clarinets, and undergoes "distorted" transformations and considerable development. The closing section returns to the woodwind version of the theme with mild embellishments. As in the first portrait, much of the material of the second is taken from a former composition--the fourteenth of a series of Bagatelles for Piano, Op. 6.
Philadelphia Orchcslra Programs. Season 1947-48. pp. 513-15.
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Recitative: "E Susanna non vien" and Aria: "Dove sono"
from Le Nozie di Figaro.........Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, January 27, 1756; died in Vienna, December 5, 1791.
Over one hundred and eighty-five years ago (1785--86) Mozart composed an enchanting opera The Marriage of Figaro to a text by Lorenzo da Ponte, based upon Beaumarchais' comedy by the same name. Since its first performance in Vienna, May 1, 1786, its music has constantly enlivened and refreshed men's spirits with its sparkling, insouciant humor and spicy plot. At the period of its creation, Mozart was at the height of his powers, having already composed Die Entf Mining axis dem Serail, the "Haffner" symphony, the six "Haydn" quartets, and many of his great piano concerti. With this work he brought to a climax the opera buffa (comic opera) which had replaced the opera seria by the end of the eighteenth century.
The Count Almaviva has transferred his affection from his wife to her maid, Susanna. Longing for peace of mind and the return of domestic tranquility, the Countess Almaviva, although she suffers from her husband's infidelities, does little more than hope for their termination. In her lovely aria, "Dove sono," the Countess reflects sorrowfully and regretfully upon her unhappy situation. The following is a condensation:
Recitative: My Lord is always so impulsive and jealous. Oh, heavens, what humiliation I suffer! Oh, cruel husband, to reduce me to this! Did ever a woman have to bear such a life of neglect and desertion, such jealous fury, such insults Once he loved me, now he deserts me, and even betrays me. Ah! must I now beg for my maid's assistance
Aria: I remember days long departed, days when love knew no end. I remember fond and fervent vows; all were broken long ago. Oh, why, if I was fated to fall from the heights of happiness, must I still recall those joyful moments in my hour of pain. Must I languish all in vain or will I be rewarded Some day, surely, my devotion might regain his heart.
"Ritorna vincitor" from Aida.........Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi was born in La Roncole, Octo?ber 10, 1813; died in Milan, January 27, 1901.
Aida was written for the Khedive of Egypt and was first performed in Cairo, December 24, 1871, and since that time has exerted its perennial appeal wherever opera is performed. For Aida has no rivals in the field for the dramatic power of its music and the living intensity of its plot.
Stirring choruses and magnificent orchestration, myriads of vibrant colors, abundance of pure Italian melody against richly-moving harmonies sound throughout a story of intrigue, love, hate, jealousy, and sacrifice. All this
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is acted, with attending pomp and spectacular pageantry, against the background of an Egyptian and Ethiopian war in the time of the Pharaohs. Aida, daughter of Amonasro, King of Ethiopia, has been captured by the Egyptians and is a slave at the Court of Memphis. She and the young soldier Rhadames have fallen in love. The Ethiopians, under the command of Amonasro, have invaded Egypt to rescue Aida, and Rhadames is named to lead the Egyptian army against them. Ai'da, forgetting temporarily her native land, and under the spell of her love for Rhadames, joins the frenzied crowd in their cry, "Return victorious." Left alone, after their departure, Aida expresses the conflict in her heart between her duty to her father and her love for Rhadames:
Return victorious! From my lips went forth these blasphemous words for the enemy of my father who now takes arms to save me. Recall them, O gods, return me to my father; destroy the armies of our oppressors. But shall I call death upon Rhadames Love, break thou my heart and let me die! Hear me, you gods on high.
Symphony No. 8 in B minor ("Unfinished") . . . Schubert
Franz Schubert was born in Lichtenthal, a suburb of Vienna, January 31, 1797; died there November 19, 1828.
A blissful instrument of God, like a bird of the fields, Schubert let his songs sound, an invisible grey lark in a plowed field, darting up from the earthy furrow, sent into the world for a summer to sing.
-Friedell
Franz Schubert belongs to that galaxy of youthful romantic prodigies who died at the height of their careers, having reached a state of perfection in their art but before their greatest potential had been realized. Schubert was dead at the age of thirty-one.
There is no need to recount the dreary details of his short and uneventful life, filled with poverty, humiliation, and disappointment. His whole tragic story of neglect and failure to receive recognition is recorded in his own words. Two-and-a-half years before his death, he applied for a position of Vice-Capellmeister at the Court of Emperor Francis I. In a pathetic letter dated April 7, 1826, he reviews his qualifications:
1. The undersigned is a native of Vienna, son of a schoolmaster, and twenty-nine years of age.
2. As a court chorister, he enjoyed the supreme privilege of being for five years a pupil at the Imperial Choir School.
3. He received a complete course in composition from the late First Court Capellmeister, Anton Salieri, and is thereby qualified to fill any post as Capellmeister.
4. Through his vocal and instrumental compositions, his name is well-known, not only in Vienna, but also in all Germany.
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5. He has in readiness, moreover, five masses for either large or small orchestra, which have been performed in various churches in Vienna.
6. Finally, he now enjoys no appointment whatsoever, and hopes in the security of this permanent position to be able at least to attain completely the artistic goal which he has set for himself.
His request was ignored, as was every application for a position he ever made. He was, furthermore, never associated with the great publishing houses of Germany--Breitkopf and Hartel. Schott, or Peters. Unlike Mozart, he was not a virtuoso performer on any instrument and had no means of earning money from that source. He was unduly shy and retiring, and, with the exception of a small close group of friends, lie shunned society. His life, with the exception of a few journeys into lower Austria, was confined to the city of Vienna. After the age of twenty-one, the only position he still had was that of a teacher. In the summers of 1818 and 1824, he taught piano to the daughters of Count John Esterhazy, for free maintenance and two gulden (less than one dollar) a lesson! His whole heart and soul were dedicated to composition. A momentary insight into his loneliness and desperation is to be found in a letter to Leopold Kupelwieser, March 31, 1824:
Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast vanishing; and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy.f
In a letter to his friend Schober, he enclosed a poem he had written in 1824, titled "Complaint to the People." In part it read:
O youth of this our time, you fade and die!
And squandered is the strength of men unnumbered--
Too great the pain by which I am consumed.
And in me, but one dying ember flashes;
This age has turned me, deathless, into ashes--
To this 'tis given, holy Art and great,
To figure forth an age where deeds could flourish
To still the pain, the dying hope to nourish--J
To his "holy Art and great" he dedicated ten symphonies and other orchestral works; seventeen operas, mostly fragmentary; fourteen string quartets and other chamber music; twenty-two piano sonatas; many inci?dental pieces for the piano and over six hundred songs! Schubert's gift for
Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc. 1947), p. 86. t Grove's Dictionary o) Music and Musicians; 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1935) Vol. IV, 604. + Einstein, oft. cit.
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spontaneous melody and his insatiable desire and capacity to compose has never been surpassed. Art for him was an escape from the grim realities of his life, and his immortal melodies his only fulfillment.
A certain type of academic criticism has never ceased to call attention to the constructive weakness of Schubert's instrumental works, and to his lack of musical education that resulted in stiff, inelastic forms, extended repetitions, short development sections, and a lack of contrapuntal treatment of material. What this kind of criticism fails to recognize is that every major work Schubert left us is, in a sense, an early work. He died at the age of thirty-one, having produced in the incredibly short creative period of eighteen years over one thousand works. Who knows what perfection he might have achieved had he lived to his full artistic maturity.
It is no defense of his weaknesses to note that in Schubert there are no artful concealments of art, no skillful artifices to cover his failures. With all the natural faults of youthful expression, where is there to be found such honest statement, such exuberance and irresistible gaiety of spirit; where are there so many effects discovered with so few means detected With disconcerting naivete, how gently but firmly this artless art of his defies the probe.
At the end of 1822 and early in 1823, Schubert's illness was developing at a rapid pace. His increasing poverty and the continual failure to interest publishers and the public in his compositions had left him deeply discour?aged and full of despair. Yet nothing could stop the flow of his music which he continued to write with little hope of ever having it sold or performed. From his period of physical suffering and mental distress came some of the richest products of his genius--Rosamund, the Schone Miillerin cycle, such immortal songs as "Du bist die Ruh" and "Der Zweig," and the "Unfinished" Symphony.
Why Schubert failed to complete the B-minor Symphony will always remain one of the major unsolved mysteries in the history of music. Whether his inspiration ran out, or he lost interest after becoming absorbed in other works, or whether the rest of the manuscript was carelessly destroyed--there are countless explanations--we will perhaps never know with certainty.
These facts we do know, however. He composed the symphony as a gift for the town of Graz in Styria, Austria, which had elected him an honorary member of its Musikverein. The following letter of acknowledgment was written by Schubert, September 20, 1823:
Honored Musical Society:
I sincerely thank you for the Honorary Member's Diploma which you have been so good as to send me, and which, on account of my long absence from Vienna, I received only a few days ago. May my devotion to the art of music succeed in mailing me worthy one day of this distinction. In order to express my liveliest thanks in music,
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I will make so bold as to present your honored Society at the earliest date with the score of one of my symphonies.
With the deepest respect. I remain The Society's most grateful and devoted servant,
Franz Schubert
He had begun the symphony in September of 1822 at the age of twenty-five, and after completing two movements and sketches for a third, he gave it (August, 1824) to his friend and champion, Josef Hiittenbrenner, to present in the Graz Musical Society. Josef delivered the manuscript to his brother Anselm in Graz with Schubert's request. For some unknown reason, it never reached its destination, and for forty years no trace of it was found. In March, 1860, Josef Hiittenbrenner wrote to Johann Herbeck, then conductor of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde urging him to perform a work of his brother Anselm, remarking incidentally that Anselm had in his possession the manuscript of a Schubert Symphony in B minor which he considered "equal to any one of the symphonies of Beethoven." It was not until 1865, five years later, that Herbeck finally visited Anselm at Graz, ostensibly to get his permission to perform one of his works, but no doubt using this means to acquire the Schubert work. Among the piles of yellow manuscripts, he found inscribed in Schubert's handwriting "Sinfonia in H moll von Franz Schubert. Wien, den 30 Octob. 1822."
With Anselm's permission, he took the symphony with him and two months later, on December 17, 1865, conducted the first performance at a Gesellschaft concert in Vienna. Thus, forty-three years after its creation, and thirty-seven years after the death of its creator, one of the world's most cherished and beloved works was given to the world.
"Four Last Songs" (Vier letzte Lieder).....Strauss
Richard Strauss was born in Munich. June 11, 1864; died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, September 8, 1949.
Trained during his formative years in the classical musical tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Strauss exerted his individuality and inde?pendence 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. There is no doubt that he was one of the most interesting and extraordinary personalities in the world of music. Whatever his antag?onistic 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.
After the advent of Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms, German music
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began to falter and lose its direction. By the end of the nineteenth century it was confounded by multitudinous trends, most of them having been conditioned by the dictates of the past. Only Richard Strauss seemed to have found a sure path into the new century with the creation of all of his symphonic tone poems. In them he transformed the enlarged orchestra, inherited from Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, into a dazzling ensem?ble capable of the most prodigious virtuosity. Through it he displayed an apparently inexhaustible fertility of mind. None of his contemporaries possessed his orchestral mastery. Believing that music could express not only inner states of mind but outward appearances of reality, he surcharged his works with incisive, erratic rhythms and tense, impetuous themes, that, in a moment, would sweep through the whole gamut of the scale. He filled his scores with realistic sound effects created by extending the available instruments beyond their expressive limitations, introducing unheard-of combinations, and even including such sound-making devices as wind and thunder machines, cowbells, and so forth. In general, he created a "Gothic abundance" that bewildered and shocked the public. He became, like Wag?ner before him, the enfant terrible of his time. Each successive tone poem-"Macbeth" (1887); "Don Juan" (1888); "Tod und Verklarung" (1889); "Till Eulenspiegel" (1895); "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (1896); "Don Quixote" (1897); "Ein Heldenleben" (1898)--attempted to increase the descriptive powers of music beyond the mere evocation of elementary emo?tions. He was accused in his attempts, as was Schonberg a few years later, of cold-blooded calculation which, said his critics, took the place of artistic impulse. The problems he set before the musical world at the beginning of this century seem almost elementary today. Tonal effects which sounded irredeemably cacophonous to contemporary ears now in many instances seem innocuous; every daring feat of orchestration which in its day seemed im?possible, ultimately became a matter of routine practice.
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 overhanging the wrinkled cheeks." Romanticism had long since outlived itself, yet for composers like Strauss, Mahler, and Bruckner, its fascination proved too strong to be completely resisted. Mahler defended it with a kind
Ernest Newman, Musical Studies (3rd cd.; New York: John Lane Co., 1913). p. 274.
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of impassioned eloquence; Bruckner 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, too, soon fell under its spell.
In the light of today, therefore, Strauss is no longer considered an in?novator of any true significance. But let it be said that, from the first, he 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 technique 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 highest 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 sub?stantiates 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.
The history of the art song is largely the record of the separation rather than the union of poetry and music. In its early stages of evolution poetic rhythm and structure exerted an imperious control over music. Through the genius of Franz Schubert, however, the song was emancipated. With his freely composed and fluently expressive piano accompaniment, Schubert enriched and deepened its musical meaning; with his incomparable melodic gift he transformed what was for the most part ordinary poetry into inde?scribable musical beauty. In Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf this freedom continued, and the more the accompaniment ex?pressed, the more firmly the song became established as a musical form. The more music asserted itself the further poetry receded into the back?ground.
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Poetic rhymes lose their effect through the lack of correspondence between musical and verbal phrases; accented notes in music do not always coincide with the stress in the verse; the measure in music is often at cross purposes with the meter in the poetry; a single word is often dismembered by the bar line; a multiplicity of notes often spreads over a single syllable; the slower pace of music plays havoc with the natural tempo at which words are spoken; and most serious of all, the subtle word sounds and the direct intellectual and emotional appeal of the poem are swept away in a flood of pleasure derived directly and overwhelmingly from the music. Instead of poetry giving meaning to music, music adds meaning to and enforces the expression of the words. The suggestion of an atmosphere is the most direct service which poetry renders to music. The poet merely furnishes a mood and an inspiration; the art song emerges primarily as an expression of the composer's art.
A tendency had already begun in Beethoven ("An die feme Geliebte," Op. 84) and was continued in Schubert ("Die schone Miillerin" and "Die Winterreisse") to group poems together to create a larger framework and scope for music than the single song allowed. In these song cycles, the composer, by writing piano preludes, interludes, and postludes (Schu?mann's "Dichterliebe") continued to increase music's share in the respon?sibility for expression. A later development saw the piano finally give way as an accompanying instrument to various instrumental ensembles and to the full orchestra. It was Richard Strauss and particularly Mahler who, in thus accompanying their songs, destroyed perhaps some of their intimacy, but without question increased their musical effectiveness.
With the cycle Mahler and Strauss were able to achieve the detailed subtlety that the single song invited, and yet, within the fuller span it pro?vided, accomplish a more dramatic effect; with the orchestra, they could realize the possibilities of subtle instrumental color and nuance, of which they were such complete and incomparable masters.
Strauss's pre-eminence as a composer of tone poems and opera has eclipsed his genius as an indisputable master of the art song. In this capacity, he is really not well known to the general public. Perhaps this is due to the fact that of his one hundred-and-fifty published songs, only about two dozen are constantly performed. His most successful--"Zueignung," "Morgen," "Allerseelen," "Traum durch die Dammerung," "Stanchen," "Cacilie," "Ruhe, meine Seele"--appear with unremitting frequency on singers' programs.
His greatest output of songs was composed between 1885-88, and 1894-98, interrupted by the years in which he was producing his more epoch-making symphonic poems (1887-98). Not essentially a lyricist like Franz
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Schubert, Robert Schumann, or Johannes Brahms, the best and most char?acteristic songs sprang from the time-honored Romantic tradition of the German lied in which melody, not just ejaculations of verbal sounds, is indispensable. Between the first published songs of 1882, when he was eighteen years of age, and the "Vier letzte Lieder" of 1948, when he was eighty-four, Strauss rightfully won his place among the great masters of this intimate and subtle musical form.
Between the age of seventy-six and eighty-four, Strauss wrote, to mention his major efforts only, one opera, "Capriccio" (1941); two concerti, "Second Horn Concerto in E-flat major" (1942) and "Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra" (1945); one orchestral work. "Metamorphosen," a study for twenty-three solo instruments (1945); and the "Vier letzte Lieder" (1948). In these works of his old age, there are no revolutionary ideas, no attempts to indicate new paths, no striving for startling harmonic or orchestral effects that are to be heard in "Till Eulenspiegel" (1895) at the end of this program. More than half a century elapsed between these two works. In the songs the idiom is relaxed, the instrumentation refined and ethereal, the tonal balance between the voice and the orchestra delicate. There is an autumnal and twilight mood created here, as in Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde"--a sense of the ebbing away of life and the quiet resignation to death. They are recollections of the past "remem?bered in tranquility."
Frilhling (Spring); written July 18, is scored for double woodwinds with extra English horn, bass clarinet, and bassoon. The only one of the four songs that is marked allegretto begins in minor keys (C and A-flat) and finally reaches the key of A major. With this simple means of progressing keys, and with radiant orchestration, Strauss suggests the lifting of winter gloom and the miracle of spring's return:
In dim lit tombs I dreamt of your trees and blue horizons and of your fragrance and song birds. Now you lie open to beauty, illuminated as a wonder before me. You entice, your blissful gifts tremble through all my being.
September; written September 20, the same month in which he died one year later. It was the last of the songs to be written, and his final composition. To the instrumentation he added a third flute and two trumpets. The orchestra, through the most subtle orchestration, suggests gentle autumnal rain. This farewell of Strauss is a deeply moving experience. At the words "sehnt sich nach Ruh, langsam tut er die grossen miidgeword-nen Augen zu" (longing for peace, slowly he closes his weary eyes), there is the calm acceptance of death:
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FIRST CONCERT
The garden mourns--the cool rain sinks into the flowers. Summer sim?mers silently toward its end. Golden leaves drop from the acacia trees. In the dream garden summer smiles, astonished and tired. He stops awhile by the roses, longing for peace in the vanishing dream of spring. Slowly he closes his weary eyes, awaiting the end.
Beim Schlafengehen (Going to Sleep); composed August 4, adds three trombones and tuba for fuller orchestration. In many performances of this cycle, it is placed at the beginning, according with the last wishes of Strauss. It is a sweetly melancholy song, created by the gentle modulating melody, in solo violin and voice, which protracts the feeling of weariness suggested by the text, "sol mein sehnliches Verlangen freundlich die gestirnte Nacht" (all my longing, all my craving shall receive the starry night):
The day has made me weary. Should my longing gladly receive the starry night as a weary child Hands let rest the toil, let mind forget every thought. AH my longing, all my craving shall receive the starry night.
lm Abendrot (In the Twilight); the first of the songs to be composed, was conceived separately from the rest of the group. Sketches for the song are to be found in a sketchbook from the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947. When published, it was placed at the end of the cycle of the three Hesse songs. Its poet (Eichendorff) had awakened the thought of approaching death, two years before Strauss set the three Hesse poems. It is the longest of the songs and its orchestral prelude and postlude justify it being placed at the end of the cycle. In the final lines, "Wie sind wir wandermiide, ist dies etwa der Tod" (So weary we of wandering, can this perhaps be death) At the word "death," the horn is heard pianissimo intoning the principal theme of the tone poem, Tod und Verklarung (Death and Transfiguration), composed at the height of his creative life almost sixty years before (1889). Gentle trills in the piccolos suggest the song of the larks with the words Zwei Lerchen, and return at the end of the postlude. This poignant song recalls the long journey through life with his wife, for whom he has written so many of his songs.
We have gone through joy and trouble hand in hand. Now we rest from roaming. Valleys lean around us, the sky already darkens. Yet two larks soar into space. Let them flutter, soon it is time to sleep. Let us not lose this solitude. Oh, endless, peaceful calm, so deep at sunset. So weary of wandering; can this be death
Like Brahms' last published work, the "Vier ernste Gesange" ("Four Serious Songs"), and Mahler's swan song, "Das Lied von der Erde" ("The Song of the Earth"), the "Vier letzte Lieder" of Strauss are retrospec?tive and meditative--the last noble expression of his old age. In the words of Neville Cardus, they are "the most consciously and beautifully delivered
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abschied (Farewell) in all music." Written at the very brink of death, Strauss never heard these songs performed. They had their premiere eight months later in London when Kirsten Flagstad, under the direction of Fiirtwaengler, introduced them to the world.
"Pace, pace, mio Dio," from La Forza del destino . . . Verdi
In La Forza del destino, written in 1862 and later revised in 1869, Verdi made obvious advances in musical style over II Trovatore (1853) and La Traviata (1853). Equally melodious, the music reveals a greater seriousness and depth of purpose. The orchestral accompaniment, no longer a mere pedestal for the voice, is full-bodied and darkly hued; the harmonies are richer and more varied. The score, which anticipates the later Don Carlos (1867), Aida (1871), Simon Boccanegra (1881), and Otello (1887). is surcharged with genuine dramatic feeling and tragic foreboding.
The beauty of the music atones for the incredibility of the tale of this gloomy opera, which takes place in Spain in the early years of the eighteenth century. It tells the story of Don Carlos' revenge upon his sister Leonora and her lover Don Alvaro for the accidental death of his father, the Marquis of Calatrava. Pursued by every turn of fate, Leonora seeks refuge in a cave near the monastery at Hornacuelos, when, in the robes of a nun, she attempts to evade the "force of destiny."
Don Carlos is wounded by Don Alvaro, who, thinking he has killed him, enters the monastery as a monk. Don Carlos pursues his enemy to the very entrance of Leonora's cave, and there is mortally wounded by Don Alvaro. Leonora rushes to embrace her dying brother, who, gathering his last strength, stabs her to the heart. Don Alvaro then throws himself from the cliff upon the rocks below.
The aria, "Pace, pace, mio Dio" ("Peace, Peace, My Lord"), is sung by Leonora in Act IV, Scene 2. She comes from her cavern to pray, still tortured by memories of her ill-fated love. She prays for peace in a melody of haunting beauty, which rises more and more poignantly as memories of Alvaro come crowding back. In it she exclaims that her longing for peace is in vain, and she finally implores Heaven to let her die.
Tone Poem--Till Eulenspiegel and His Merry Pranks,
Op. 28...............Strauss
In "Till Eulenspiegel," completed on May 6, 1895, slightly more than a half century before the "Four Last Songs," Strauss, at the height of his power, taxed the orchestra to the utmost, calling for a revision and extension of techniques in every direction. He was thirty years of age
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FIRST CONCERT
at the time and had already established his sensational reputation with Don Juan. Even to an innovator like Debussy, it was "like an hour of new music in a madhouse." For us hearing it tonight, seventy-six years almost to the day of its creation, it provides through its exhilarating rhythms, its myriad colors, and its occasional touches of humor and pathos, nothing but unmitigated joy and pleasure.
There is much wisdom contained in an old German proverb, Der Mensche erkennt seine Fehler ebensowenig wie eine Affe oder eine Eule die in den Spiegel sehn, ihre eigene Hessliclikeit erkennen--"A man is as little prone to recognize his own shortcomings as an ape, or an owl, looking into a mirror, is conscious of his own ugliness."
The name "Eulenspiegel" itself is translated "owls' glass" or "owls' mirror," and the rascal Till first came into prominence in the pages of Dr. Thomas Murner's Volksbuch or book of folklore, supposed to have been widely read by the German people in the year 1500. Till's escapades, household tales in Germany, consisted of crude horseplay and jests that he--insolent, perverse, arrogant, defiant--practiced without any discrimina?tion, and, in some instances, with a very studied lack of propriety.
Strauss's tone poem was presented without an explanatory program. In fact, Strauss demurred at the demand for such a program. "Were I to put into words," he wrote at the time of the first performance at Cologne in November, 1895, "the thoughts which the composition's several incidents suggested to me, they would seldom suffice and might even give rise to offense. Let me leave it, therefore, to my readers to crack the hard nut which the rogue has prepared for them."
Almost immediately after the first performance, a lengthy and detailed description of practically every bar in the score was made by one Wilhelm Klatte, in the Allgemeine Musik Zeitung. Paraphrased and reduced, it is somewhat as follows:
Once upon a time, there was a pranking rogue, ever up to new tricks, named Till Eulenspiegel. Now he jumps on his horse and gallops into the midst of a crowd of market women, overturning their wares with a prodigious clatter. Now he lights out with seven league boots, now conceals himself in a mousehole. Disguised as a priest "he drips with unction and morals," yet out of his toe peeps the scamp. As cavalier, he makes love, first in jest, but soon in earnest, and is properly rebuffed. He is furious and swears vengeance on all mankind, but meeting some "Philistines," he forgets his wrath and mocks them. At length his hoaxes fail. He is tried in a court of justice and is condemned to hang for his misdeeds; but he still whistles defiantly as he ascends the ladder. Even on the scaffold he jests. Now he swings; he gasps for air; a last convulsion. Till is dead.
Murncr stated that Till Eulenspiegel was born at Kneilinger, Brunswick, in 1282, and that after various wanderings through Germany, Italy, and Poland, he died of the plague in 1350 or 1.153 at Molln near Lubcck.
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Friday Evening, April 30
A Sea Symphony for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus,
and Orchestra.........Vaughan Williams
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Gloucester?shire, England, October 12, 1872; died in London, August 26, 1958.
About the man, Ralph Vaughan Williams, the world at large knows little. He dedicated himself to composition, teaching, and study. He rarely made public appearances, and only in unguarded moments did he reveal anything about his personal feelings or tastes. The world came to know him almost entirely through his music. "One might say," writes Hubert Foss, his recent biographer, "that he has a great deal of music, and very little biography." Indeed his output was prodigious. He wrote in all forms--for theater, symphonic orchestra, chorus, solo voice, chamber en?sembles--and never did his high purpose and artistic integrity falter.
He was born the son of a clergyman and spent his youth in an atmosphere of quiet and comfortable living. He was educated in a public school, attended several large conservatories (pupil of Parry and Stanford in London, Bruch in Berlin, Ravel in Paris), and at Trinity College in Cam?bridge in 1901 received the Doctor of Music degree. Early in his career he became vitally interested in English folk music and by 1904, at the age of thirty-two, was an ardent and creatively active member of the English Folk Song Society. Later he broadened this interest to include old English art music, particularly that which had issued from the Tudor period, the most glorious of all eras in the history of England's music.
Vaughan Williams always had faith in the corrective and purifying effect of folk song as a guard against insincerity and oversophistication. This faith guided him through a long creative life and conditioned an art that is innately English, yet one that speaks to the hearts of men of other lands.
In "Three Norfolk Rhapsodies" for orchestra (1906--7) and the opera Hugh the Drover (1911-14), the folk music impulse was strongly evident, but in the better known "Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis" for strings, the broader, more artful English style that springs from the music of the
Hubert James Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, a Study (London: Harrap, 1950), p. 12.
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Tudor period began to show its influence. Ultimately, his expression became highly personalized, often quite bold and uncompromising; but in achieving universality it never lost its truly nationalistic traits. He did much for English music by correcting the romantic excesses that were still dominating his era. His penchant for folk song expression, with its essential modal harmony and melody, helped him escape the chromatic indulgences of his immediate predecessors. He brought a new freshness, a new gusto and humor, a challenging simplicity and honesty to his country's music.
Like Verdi, Vaughan Williams retained, over a long life, all of his intellectual and creative energies, shifting his style at will, ceaselessly experimenting with new idioms, and constantly aware of new trends. He was not only regarded as "the grand old man of English music" but the fountain-head for a generation that followed him, upon which he exerted a tremendous influence.
Walt Whitman's first book of verse Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855. The unique quality of the versification, in which the conventions of rhyme, meter, and form were discarded, and where a sort of excited prose without any attempt at measure or regularity was substituted, not only affected poets, but provided composers with constantly shifting moods created by a wealth of evocative imagery. By the end of the nineteenth century, Whitman's pioneering poetry had become a vogue. Vaughan Williams was introduced to it by Bertrand Russell in the 1890's, while both were under?graduates at Cambridge; it remained a source of inspiration to him through?out his life.
The Sea Symphony was in the process of composition from 1903 to 1910. On October 12 of that year, the composer, then thirty-eight years of age, conducted its first performance at. the Leed's Musical Festival. In this work, as in the earlier Toward an Unknown Region, text also by Whitman (1907), The Wasps (1909) and the Tallis Fantasia (1910), he indicated his indebtedness to his predecessors Purcell, Parry, Sanford, and Elgar. These compositions announced to the world the arrival of yet another composer of the English musical renaissance.
No image appeared with greater frequency in Whitman's poetry than that of the sea. His lines, in their rhythmical proselike declamation, often suggest the great undulation of the rise and fall of the ocean he loved so much. It was the feeling of the ebb and flow, the endless motion of the sea, that Vaughan Williams reflected throughout the Sea Symphony. The use of the word Symphony for an essentially choral work in which there is little, if any, self-contained instrumental writing, is justified by the fact that, like a Symphony, four of its movements are cast into symphonic
Sec notes on Elgar, Enigma Variations, Fifth Concert.
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designs: the first movement a Sonata allegro with two contending themes; the second, a slow ternery form; the third, a Scherzo; and the finale, like that of Beethoven's Choral Ninth, a free movement whose form is condi?tioned by a poem.
Composers who attempt to set great poetry to music, ipso facto, destroy the poem in the ways indicated in the notes of the Last Songs of Strauss, see pages 24 to 30). Vaughan Williams is no exception. Like Robert Schu?mann, perhaps the worst offender, he deletes lines, selects passages from one poem and appends them to another, as in the case of the opening section, where he introduces a stanza from Whitman's Song of the Exposition and continues the movement with lines from Sea Drift, or where, in the fourth movement The Explorers, he selects The Journey to India, deleting whole lines or repeating single words to accommodate his musical impulses. This practice, of course, is always justified, provided the composer creates significant and expressive music. As Susanne Langer writes in Problems of Art, "The poetic creation counts only indirectly in song, in exciting the composer to compose. After that, the poem as a work of art is broken up. Its words, sound, and sense alike; its phrases, its images, all become musical material. The words have been musically exploited . . . they have entered into a new composition, and the poem has disappeared in song . . . there are no happy marriages in art--only successful rape."
In the Sea Symphony, poet and composer seek for a meaning to life. The poet makes this meaning specific through words; the composer, through the abstract nature of his art, catches the spirit of the text and protracts it in sound. In the last movement in particular, Vaughan Williams, moved by the exultant, pantheistic theme of The Passage to India, creates the finest music in the work. In this poem Whitman makes full use of the ocean as a symbol of life, leading to some sort of ultimate reality. Here the poet pleads with his soul to venture forth on its journey unto death, and to "Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only"; and here the composer reaches an ecstatic musical climax on the words, "The true son of God shall come singing His songs." The conclusion of the work sinks to a molto adagio as the voices fade away from our hearing on the line, "are they not all the seas of God O farther, farther, farther sail."
1. A Song For All Seas, All Ships Baritone, Soprano, Chorus
Behold, the sea itself,
And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships;
See, where their white sails, bellying in the wind, speckle the green and blue,
Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribncr's Sons, 1957) pp. 84 and 86.
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See, the steamers coming and going, steaming in or out of port, See, dusky and undulating, the long pennants of smoke. Behold, the sea itself, And on its limitless, heaving breast, the ships.
--Song of the Exposition
Baritone and Chorus
Today a rude brief recitative,
Of ships sailing the seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal,
Of unnamed heroes in the ships--of waves spreading and spreading far as the eye can
reach
Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing, And out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations, Fitful, like a surge.
Of sea-captains young or old, and the mates, and of all intrepid sailors, Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate can never surprise nor death dismay, Picked sparingly without noise by thee old ocean, chosen by thee, Thou sea that pickest and cullest the race in time, and unitest the nations, Suckled by thee, old husky nurse, embodying thee, Indomitable, untamed as thee.
Soprano and Chorus
Flaunt out, O sea, your separate flags of nations!
Flaunt out visible as ever the various flags and ship-signals!
But do you reserve especially for yourself and for the soul of man one flag above all the
rest,
A spiritual woven signal for all nations, emblem of man elate above death, Token of all brave captains and of all intrepid sailors and mates, And all that went down doing their duty, Reminiscent of them, twined from all intrepid captains young or old,
Baritone, Soprano and Chorus
A pennant universal, subtly waving all time, o'er all brave sailors, All seas, all ships.
--Sea Drift
2. On The Beach At Night, Alone Baritone, Chorus
On the beach at night, alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and
of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all, All distances of space however wide. All distances of time,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, All nations, all identities that have existed or may exist,
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All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spanned,
And shall forever span them and shall compactly hold and enclose them.
-Sea Drift
3. [Scherzo] The Waves Chorus
After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad, myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks.
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,
Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant with curves,
Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface,
Larger and smaller waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully flowing,
The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing and frolicsome under the sun,
A motley procession with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,
Following the stately and rapid ship, in the wake following.
-Sea Drift
4. The Explorers Baritone, Soprano, Chorus
O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Covered all over with visible power and beauty.
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters.......
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention, Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.
Down from the gardens of Asia descending,
Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after them,
Wandering, yearning......with restless explorations, with questionings, baffled, form?less, feverish, with never-happy hearts, with that sad incessant refrain,--'Wherefore unsatisfied Soul Whither O mocking life'
Ah who shall soothe these feverish children
Who justify these restless explorations
Who speak the secret of the impassive earth.....
Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be carried out, Perhaps even now the time has arrived.
After the seas are all crossed,......
After the great Captains......have accomplished their work.
After the noble inventors,
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Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.....
O we can wait no longer.
We too take ship O Soul,
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O Soul),
Caroling free, singing our song of God,
Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.....
0 Soul thou pleasest me, I thee,
Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night,
Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like water flowing,
Bear me indeed as through regions infinite,
Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over,
Bathe me, O God, in thee, mounting to thee,
1 and my soul to range of thee.
O thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath.
Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them.
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O Soul, thou actual me,
And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space.
Greater than stars or suns,
Bounding O Soul thou journeyest forth;.. ..
Away O Soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers--haul out--shake out every sail!......
Reckless O Soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me.....
Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
O my brave Soull
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God
O farther, farther, farther sail!
--Journey to India
37
MAY FESTIVAL Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini .... Rachmaninoff
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born April 2, 1873, in Novgorod; died March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills.
The leafy blossoming present springs from the whole past, remembertd and unrememberable.
--Cari-yi.e
Rachmaninoff was born in the gloomiest period Russia had experienced for over a century. All the sublime efforts of the generation that had entertained such high hopes in the seventies, had ended in defeat. The great social reforms (including the abolition of serfdom in 1861) brought about by Alexander II were looked upon as grave mistakes. The reactionary elements that rallied around Alexander III, after the assassination of his liberal-minded father in 1881, tolerated no opposition. The new emperor counteracted the excessive liberalism of his father's reign by indicating that he had no intention of limiting or weakening the aristocratic power inherited from his ancestors. A feeling of hopeless despair was shared by the young "intellectuals" whose inability to solve problems of renovation or to break the inertia of the masses soon became tragically apparent. Their loss of faith in the future, the destruction of their illusions, was impressively reflected in the short stories of Vsevolod Garshin and in the nostalgic fiction and drama of Anton Chekhov.
The somber beauty and brooding melancholy that course through Rachmaninoff's art mark him as one of the last of the Titans of musical romanticism, an artist who lived beyond the fulfillment of an era. He carried to an anticlimax the spirit of an epoch filled with the gloom and despair of man's struggle against relentless destiny. Like the other late Romanticists, Mahler, Bruckner and Strauss, he clung tenaciously to a dying tradition, regretful at its passing, nostalgic with its memories.
Virgil Thomson, writing in the New York Herald Tribune for Sunday, February 26, 1950, has summed up his position thus:
The career of Sergei Rachmaninoff was that of a major talent. His natural gifts of ear and hand were impeccable; his training was nowhere short of completeness; recognition in professional life came early. The only kind of success he never enjoyed was that of intellectual distinction. He would have liked being a popular musician, a conservative musician and an advanced one all at the same time. But as a young modernist he suffered defeat at the hands of his contemporary, Alexander Scriabin, and there is reason to believe that later he entertained some bitterness about the im?pregnable position occupied in the intellectual world of music by his junior compatriot, Igor Stravinsky.
There is no question, however, about Rachmaninoff's mastery. He composed, as he played the piano, in complete fullness and control. The nature of his expression--his
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passionless melancholy, his almost too easy flow of melody, his conventional but highly personal harmony, the loose but thoroughly coherent structure of his musical discourse--is often distasteful to musicians. They tend to find it a retreat from battle, an avoidance of the contemporary problem. But it is not possible, I think, to withhold admiration for the sincerity of the sentiments expressed or for the solid honesty of its workmanship. Rachmaninoff was a musician and an artist, and his expression through the divers musical techniques of which he was master, seems to have been complete.
Whether success in the world was a deep desire of Sergei Rachmaninoff I do not know, but success was his in a way that musicians seldom experience it. It came to him in his own lifetime, moreover, and through the practice of three separate musical branches. As a composer, as a conductor, and as a touring virtuoso of the pianoforte he received worldwide acceptance and acclaim. His domestic life, too, seems to have been remarkably satisfactory. A more optimistic temperament than his would probably have glowed with happiness.
Actually, his letters and recorded conversations are consistently gloomy. Like Tchaikovsky, whom he adored, and who usually wept a little on almost any day, he seemed to find his best working condition a dispirited state. Indeed, even more than in the case of Tchaikovsky, his depressive mentality has come to represent to the Western world a musical expression both specifically Russian and specifically attractive through the appeal of sadness. Whether this opulence of discontent is found equally present in the Soviet Union I do not know; but Rachmaninoff, in spite of his conservative political opinions, has been adopted since his death as a Russian classic master in Russia. This success is another that would have pleased him profoundly, I am sure, though he would no doubt have acknowledged it with a mask of woe.
There is probably some resemblance between contemporary Russia and the United States underlying Rachmaninoff's great glory in both countries. The official mood of cheerfulness is in both cases a thin surface through which wells of rich blackness gush forth constantly, relieving the emotional poverty of sustained optimism and providing for accepted states of mind both a holiday and a corrective. Rachmaninoff's music is no toner-up of depressed nations. It is most heartily enjoyed in those countries where the national energies are strong enough to need a sedative.
In the days of ancient Greece, a rhapsodist was a professional reciter of epic poetry, and a rhapsody was his song. An epic poem was a sequence of such rhapsodies sung in succession or written down so as to form a series; when a long poem such as the Iliad was chanted in sections at different times and by different singers, it was said to be rhapsodized.
The term rhapsody has been used by composers, past and present, with little specific meaning as to musical form. Today by definition it is "a string of melodies arranged with a view of effective performance in public, but without regular dependence of one part upon another," or "a composition in an indefinite form, usually based upon popular melodies," or again "a piece loosely constructed, improvisatory, and distinct from all architecturally constructed music."
The musical meaning today is identified largely with such composers as Liszt, Brahms, Dvorak, Lalo, Gershwin, and Bart6k and signifies an
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instrumental composition, irregular in form, improvisatory in style, with a somewhat heroic or national character.
In the hands of Liszt, the term acquired its present meaning. His "Rhapsodies hongroises" and "Reminiscences d'Espagne," which he later published as "Rhapsodie espagnole," were in reality short transcriptions of Hungarian gypsy tunes--free fantasies with a strong nationalistic flavor. Brahms too, often used the term in this sense, but his strong instinct for structure gave to his compositions in this genre a more epic and formal quality. His "Rhapsodien," Op. 79, for piano, are impassioned aphor?istic pieces of simple but obvious form, solidly constructed. The "Alto Rhapsody," for contralto, male chorus, and orchestra, is indeed a rhapsody in the Greek sense of the term, in that it is a "recitation" of a part of Goethe's poem "Harzreise im Winter"--a compact, carefully constructed work. His "Klavierstiicke," Op. 119, is a series of intermezzi and rhapsodies written more in the free, improvisatory manner of Liszt.
Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on tonight's program is, in the popular sense of the term, not a rhapsody at all, but a formal set of twenty-four variations on a theme written by the great violin virtuoso of the past century, Niccolo Paganini. Today there is little respect left for Paganini as a composer; the tendency is to accuse him rather of trickery and bad taste, and to feel that, except for a few technical effects and indications as to the lengths to which instrumental virtuosity might be developed, the world has not profited by his advent. In his day, however, the greatest composers of the times, beside recognizing that Paganini was endowed with a mechani?cal perfection that surpassed belief, paid their tribute to his creative talent as well. One of Chopin's earliest compositions was "Souvenir de Paganini"; Berlioz composed "Harold in Italy" for him, as a violist; Schumann dedicated a movement in his "Carnaval" (section 15, Intermezzo, "Paganini") and also transcribed several of his violin caprices for the piano (Sechs Concertetudien componicrt nach Capricen von Paganini, Op. 3); Liszt produced a series of studies based on Paganini works (Six grandes etudes de Paganini); and two sets of variations. Twenty-eight Variations ("Studien") for Piano Solo were composed by Brahms on a theme from Paganini's twenty-fourth Caprice in A minor. It is upon this same theme that Rachmaninoff has built his variations for orchestra and piano, joining an illustrious company of composers who have shown their respect for a musician who could write a good tune.
The Rhapsody was composed by Rachmaninoff between July 3 and August 24, 1934, while he was living at Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. It was given its first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction
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of Leopold Stokowski in Baltimore, November 7, of the same year, with the composer as soloist.
A nine-measure prelude, in which fragments of the Paganini theme are heard, introduces a series of twenty-four rather brief, but brilliantly ornamented and orchestrated variations. The Paganini theme is not fully stated until the first variation, where it initially appears in the violins and later in the piano. In addition to this recurring theme, structural unity is achieved by the recurrence of the old medieval melody Dies irae, from the Catholic mass for the dead. It occurs first in the piano in the seventh variation, and recurs in the tenth variation in the strings, concur?rently with the solo instrument playing a highly elaborated version of the Paganini theme. In the final variation it reaches a torrential climax in the full orchestra.
Initial phrases of this old melody are used, among other composers, by Berlioz in his "Fantastic Symphony" and in his "Grand Mass for the Dead"; by Liszt in his Symphonic Poem. "Dante"; by Saint-Saens in his "Danse macabre." and by Mahler in The Resurrection Symphony (No. II).
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Saturday Evening, May 1
Sinfonietta...............Janacek.
Leos Janacek was born in Hukvaldy, Moravia, July 3, 1854; died in Moravian Ostrau, August 12, 1928.
Leos Janacek is emerging as one of the most prolific and original figures in twentieth-century music. As an artist he matured very slowly; he was in his forties before he composed music of any true consequence. There is little of interest to relate about his life, aside from the fact that he was the son of a village schoolmaster; studied organ in Prague, and later conducting and theory at the Leipzig Conservatory; wrote ten operas, a mass, numerous choral works, piano and chamber music, and art songs; did research in and published collections of Moravian folk music, and finally achieved international fame with the production of his first successful opera, Jenufa, thirteen years after its composition, when he had reached the age of sixty-two. It is as a composer of operas that he won his greatest distinction, and through them has been proclaimed one of the most provocative talents of this century.
Like his countrymen and predecessors, Smetana and Dvorak, he was strongly influenced by native folk music. His musical style was based upon a strict adherence to the complex rhythmic pattern and inflections of the Czech language. He evolved a mosaic of sound, created by continuous variations rather than development, of a few basic musical nuclei. His operas presaged, in their essentially declamatory idiom, those of today when verbal inflection has practically negated the romantic, long, sweeping vocal line. In the instrumental music, whether found in the dominating orchestra of the operas, or in independent works, these "speech melodies" and their manipulation disclosed a striking originality of orchestral form. The thematic variants are mainly diminutions (the presentation of a theme in notes of smaller value) or augmentations (the presentation of a theme in notes double the value of those originally assigned to it.) They are used continuously not only to create the flow of the theme itself, but can often be heard in figurative accompaniments, or in sudden interjections,
The recent performances (1970) of his The Makropolns Affair by the New York City Opera Com?pany, and the Excursion of Mr. Broucek to the Moon and The Little Vixen at the Edinburgh Festival, attest to his rising popularity.
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at times penetrating contrasting themes. Consequently Janacek's music is terse, concentrated, and definitely anti-romantic in its sustained intensity.
Other characteristics of his idiom to be noted in this very typical Sinfonietta are a luminous orchestration (even when writing for a full or?chestra he uses his instruments sparingly), an elastic and expressive harmony, and an almost total absence of polyphonic (simultaneous playing of two or more melodies) texture. Everything is clear, direct, and unencumbered.
Janacek was indeed ahead of his time and thus is gaining a recognized position among contemporary composers. He made many discoveries which finally led to a new school of composition. Independent of Debussy, he often employed the whole-tone scale; like Schonberg he often dispensed with key signatures; he sensed, in his lean orchestration and economy of orchestral colors, the modern tendency toward a chamber music style. His recent biographer, Jaroslov Vogel, writes: "Certainly the time is not far away when historians of music will be obliged to place him among the most original inhabitants of the Musical Parnassus."
The Sinfonietta was inspired by a performance of a military band playing in the public park of Pisek in 1925. It was dedicated to the Czecho?slovak Armed Forces, with its original title "A Military Sinfonietta." Of it, he wrote: "I think I succeed best in getting as close as possible to the mind of the simple man in my latest work, my Sinfonietta--although I am getting on in years, I have a feeling a new vein is beginning to grow in my work--my latest creative period is also a new jet from my soul, which has made its peace with the rest of the world and seeks only to be nearest to the simple Czech man."t
Titles given to musical compositions are more often bewildering than enlightening. This is particularly true in the case of the Sinfonietta. Music cannot by itself convey concrete ideas or definite images. When a composer feels impelled to call upon words to make his meaning explicit he confesses the inability of his art to do so. He may use them in titles or descriptions, however, to indicate what, in some instances, has inspired him. The brevity of the names given by Janacek to each movement of this work leaves the listener completely uninformed. What "castle" What "queen" What "monastery" What "street", he well may ask.
The only key we have to their significance is not to be found in his titles, but in an article written December 24, 1927, called "My Town." Janacek is here recounting his feelings upon his return to his home town, Brno, after nine years of absence during the Occupation by Austria and Hungary.
Jaroslav Vogcl, Leos Janacek, His Lift and Works, trans, from Czech by Geraldine Thomsen-Muchova (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1962) p. 395. t Ibid., pp. 345-46.
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"As if by a miracle," he writes, "the sheen of liberty spread, shining over the town, the resurrection of October 28th, 1918. I saw myself in it. I belonged to it. And the blare of the victorious trumpets, the holy peace of the Queens Monastery, the shadows of night, the breath of the green hill and the vision of the growing greatness of the town was giving birth to my Sinfonietta."
The observations made on the musical materials and their manipulation in these five movements are not intended as a guide to aid the listener through the labyrinthian complexity of this score. They are meant simply to indicate, more specifically, the nature of Janacek's idiom, previously described in general terms, and to account for the total effect of the work.
First Movement: Allegretto ("Fanfares")
The function of this opening section is that of a prelude to the movements that follow. It is a concentrated series of short fanfares for nine trumpets, two tenor tubas, two brass trumpets, and two pairs of timpani. Typical of Janacek's idiom, the concise musical motives grow out of each other. From a series of open fifth interval chords, stated in two tubas, is generated a persistent figure in the timpani and bass trumpet which accompanies them as an ostinato (frequently repeated bass). Almost immediately these two ideas develop lively variants in oscillating tonalities. Augmentation and lean canonic imitation are the technical means used to bring this brief introduction to its conclusion. It will return briefly at the end of the work. Janacek requested that the musicians perform this movement standing up as they had at the concert in Pisek.
Second Movement: Andante ("The Castle")
This, the most elaborately organized movement of the five, is introduced by clarinets playing thirty-second notes in arpeggios. The tempo changes to an allegretto, as two oboes over an ostinato in the trombones, present a roguish dancelike theme. This minimum of musical material is manipu?lated with structural ingenuity into a complex of modifications by means of simultaneous diminution and augmentation. What appear to be new melodic ideas--the most obvious first heard in the horns and lower strings-are in truth derivations so subtle in nature that they do not justify further analysis. There is a return to the first buoyant theme heard in the oboes.
Third Movement: Moderato ("The Queen's Monastery")
Over a low E-flat in the tuba and bass clarinet, a cantalina (songlike) theme is announced in chordal octaves in the violins and cellos played against arpeggios in the harp and violas. It is a gentle, nostalgic theme
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which establishes the all-over mood of the movement. This serene theme is then transferred from the English horn, and in turn to the oboe and violins, and subsides into pianissimo octaves in the flutes and cellos. There is then heard a sudden intrusion in the trombone (fortissimo) in syncopated rhythm, while flutes and piccolo, in diminution of the arpeggio figuration previously heard, dart and whirl around the theme. There is a return of the opening, but with greater intensity, as the theme quickly shifts to the trombone while the rest of the orchestra creates a moment of wild abandonment. The opening mood returns at the end. The flute and piccolo figuration now re-establishes the serenity of the opening, leading to a giadual return of the peaceful melody that introduced the movement.
Fourth Movement: Allegro, 24 ("The Street")
The simple, brief theme that dominates this movement is announced by three trumpets in unison leggiero (lightly.) It, in effect, is a fanfare which is transformed in approximately fourteen variants. At its close, presto and adagio features alternate.
Fifth Movement: Allegro ("Town Hall")
The theme of this finale is a variant in the minor of the fanfare of the pre?vious movement. It is interrupted by a diminution of its final notes. The first three notes of the theme are then developed over figurations in the cellos leading into an agitated diminution of only the second bar, while the upper strings reiterate brusque chords. The climax is achieved with twelve trumpets in unison fanfares--a return of the opening movement, now more elaborately orchestrated. A short, impelling coda brings the Sinfonietta to an effective close.
"La Mer"--Trois esquisses symphoniques.....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 France was not the work of Debussy alone, certainly no one approached the expression of so truly a French musical spirit with greater success
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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 more or less 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. Debussy 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 reaction against Romanticism, and especially Wagner, rejected the grandiose, the epic, and the aggressive and substituted discreet, subtle, and evanescent moods for strong personal emotionalism. Preceded by minor composers 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 fleeting existence to imma?terial 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 instru?mental combinations, fragmentary themes, flexible and even vague rhythms, forsook established musical forms in the interest of atmosphere. Debussy, in fact, 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
Alfred Frankenstein, "The Imagery from Without," High Fidelity, September. 1962.
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Gauguin--he shared none of their violence; and that the neo-primitivism of Picasso, which found such a striking parallel in Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps, left Debussy untouched. His relationship to the Symbolist move?ment in literature was much closer. The fluid mysterious imagery of Maeterlinck drew him to the creation of Pellens 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.
An analysis of the three movements of "La Mer" is neither possible nor desirable. Form, as such a thing was understood by the classical masters, did not ordinarily enter into Debussy's artistic calculations. Debussy set forth his attitude toward academic music in statements made in 1911 to an interviewer for the Paris paper Excelsior: "No fixed rule," wrote the composer of "La Mer," "should guide the creative artist; rules are established by works of art, not for works of art. One should seek discipline in freedom not in the precepts of a philosophy in its decline--that is good only for those who are weak. I write music only in order to serve Music as best I can and without any other intention; it is natural that my works should incur the risk of displeasing people who like 'certain' music, and perseveringly stick to it alone."
"It is for love of music," he said, "that I strive to rid it of certain sterile traditions that enshroud it. It is a free, a spontaneous art, an open-air art, an art to be measured with the elements--the winds, the sky, the sea. It must not be made confined and scholastic." This doctrine sounded more revolutionary in the early years of the century than it does today; the music of "La Mer" itself will prove similarly clear and reasonable by comparison with many more adventurous pieces which have since been produced.
We have never been able to translate into words the tongue of winds and waves, but it may be that Debussy, through the mysterious power of music, has here caught for us the true intimations of its meaning.
For those who prefer a verbal description of music, Charles O'Connell has written the following:
L'aube a midi sur la mer ("The sea from dawn until noon")
The ocean, mother of myriad immemorial dawnings, slowly heaves and writhes in a mysterious quiet, and another day is born. Muted strings and murmuring drums, and ascending notes of the harp merge into a mist that lies over the orchestra. A single flash of the awakening sun is reflected in the vaguely shimmering waters, and the light grows. Muted horn and cor anglais against descending strings suggest the limitless line
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of the horizon as it materializes through the mist, and the shadowed hues of the darkness before dawn are dissipated, with the clinging mists, in the broad light of morning.
The music shifts in color and transparency like the sea itself, and it is no more possible to separate from its curiously incorporeal and amorphous structure the myriad beauties of which it is compounded, than to regard, in the wide expanse of ocean, the gleam, and play of each individual wave. But nowhere in music is there so magical a suggestion of the sea, and its incredible blues and greens, its sparkle and motion and clear depths, its mysterious and unforgettable murmurings and its power.
Jeux de vagues ("Sport of the waves")
The mocking, stormy, placid, deceiving monster is revealed here in yet another mood. The ocean merrily disports itself, and in the orchestra a seeming thousand voices entangle and collide and sparkle like the ocean's own waves and wavelets. Frisky waters throw themselves glittering against the blue air; long rollers rush toward the shore and dissolve in snowy foam; vagrant winds snatch the white caps from tossing billows, and fling the wet spray across the sky. There arc little solos for cor anglais and horn, for oboe, and for violin; and finally the music, stirred up gradually by its own sportiveness, rises to a brilliant climax of revelry, then wearily subsides into calm.
Dialogue du vent et de la mer ("Dialog of the wind and the sea")
Now the ocean is not playful, but lashed to wild fury by fierce winds descending upon it from the endless reaches of heaven. Madly it heaves itself against the blast; roaring, the invisible demons of the air hurl its waters back into its distorted face. Throughout the movement--here in the climax of the stormy dialog as well as in the sometimes angry concluding passages--strings and wind instruments are played against each other in bewildering and wonderful fashion.
"La Mer" was given its first performance at the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, on October 15, 1905. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, two cornets-e-pistons, three trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, bass drum, cymbals, tarn tarn, glockenspiel, two harps and strings.
Symphony No. V in B-flat major, Op. 100 .... Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeievitch Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, Russia, April 23, 1891; died in Moscow, March 4, 1953.
The Fifth Symphony was a very important composition to me, since it marked my return to the symphonic form after a long interval. I regard it as the culmination of a large period in my creative life.
--Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev, a senior member of a very significant group of Soviet Republic composers, of whom Dmitri Shostakovich is perhaps the most
Charles O'Connell, The Victor Book of the Symphony (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), pp. 173-74.
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sensational member, after a few startling excursions into the grotesque and an only occasional sojourn into the cacophonous realm of musical modern?ism, produced music that was not merely interesting and clever but brilli?antly effective.
At a period when European audiences either were being doped into a state of insensibility by the vacuity of the Post-Impressionists, incensed to riots by the shocking 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.
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 Nabokov re?ferred to as "eclectic collectivistic art." This attitude placed the creative artist in a completely subservient position to the state and to society. Com?posers, compelled to work under these conditions, had no chance to exert their originality, experiment in new idioms, or adopt any of the modern ex?periments 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 com?poser. 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 expression." In a tempered frame of mind he wrote, among other works, Lieutenant Kije in 1934, the Russian Overture and Peter and the Wolf,
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both in 1936, incidental music for the film Alexander Nevsky, and a cantata dedicated to Stalin Zdravitsa in 1939, an opera based upon Tolstoy's War and Peace in 1940, his Fifth Symphony in 1945 .(his Fourth Symphony had been written seventeen years before), the Sixth Symphony in 1947, and his last, the Seventh, in 1953, the year of his death.
Aside from Russian folk-song sources to which he turned for these works, a new romantic idiom began to shape itself. Thus the Fifth Sym?phony 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." Regardless 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 spontaneity that has always been its chief distinction. At the time of his death he was at the very height of his creative powers; he had become infinitely more than a clever composer who delighted in the grotesque. His music, according to Leonid Sebaneyev and many other critics, the most original and valuable that Russian art of this century has produced.
The Fifth Symphony was conducted by the composer in Moscow, Janu?ary 13, 1945, and met with immediate success. There are obvious reasons why it has remained the most popular and most frequently performed of his seven symphonies: it is written in a neoromantic manner that makes an instant appeal; its material is richly melodic, and its workmanship sure and masterful; there is no conscious striving for novel effects; it is less turgid and dissonant than other representative works that were consciously antiroman-tic and ascerbic; it makes no attempt, as did many of his earlier works, to caricature or parody; it is unburdened by political ideology that so often characterizes Soviet art. Some critics, especially those in Russia, insist that the symphony carries a political message. This Prokofiev categorically denied, unless, as he declared, it is "a hymn to the freedom of the human spirit." "I didn't choose this theme deliberately." he wrote, "it just came into my head and insisted on being expressed."
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It was composed during the summer of 1944, seventeen years after the Fourth Symphony. Much of its spontaneity is no doubt due to the fact that it was created with great haste, in a single month, although he had been gathering themes for it in a special notebook for several years. Structurally, its sequence of themes appears in related form throughout its four move?ments. There is a steady and irresistible growth from its serene, but reso?lute, opening theme, to its stirring climax at the end. At no time does it degenerate into formal padding, or vacuous repetition; it never loses its sense of direction and urgency.
The Symphony consists of the usual four movements, each quite orthodox in form, but contemporary in sound. Its themes are clearly defined, but do not progress in the classical manner of a Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven. They are generated from a few motivic ideas that ultimately shape them?selves into well proportioned statements:
First Movement (Andante, B-flat major) opens immediately with a theme stated in flute and bassoons in octaves. (It is re-stated in the introduction to the last movement, thus forming a link in the over-all structure.) A second theme in flute and oboe is clearly defined, as is the third, in the violins. The material is fully developed and elaborated in many rhythmic contrasts. The re-statement of the opening theme is heard in trumpets. The other ma?terial returns in the proper order. A monumental coda ends the movement.
Second Movement (Allegro marcato, D minor) is in Scherzo style, with a steady 44 instead of the usual 34 time. A jocular and buoyant theme played in the clarinets, is immediately heard in the other wind instruments in modified versions. A contrasting middle section, similar to the Trio in a typical symphonic Scherzo, is sounded again in the clarinets and woodwinds. The ebullient first section reappears in an extended, gradual speeding up of the tempo, and builds to sonorities of increasing dissonance, climaxing in a perfectly focused tonic chord.
Third Movement (Adagio, F major, 34, 98). "I strove to write music that was supremely human," wrote Prokofiev of this section. This whole movement is beautifully conceived as a lament or elegy, in nostalgic retro?spection. Each variant is an expression of the initial theme stated in the clari?nets, then continued in the strings. A livelier section builds to a fortissimo and relieves momentarily the mood of the opening, which returns at the close to re-establish an even more reflective serenity.
Fourth Movement (Allegro giocoso, B-flat major, 24). In the final move?ment, Prokofiev reassembles much of the thematic material previously heard. The opening subject of the first movement is quietly stated as an introduc-
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tion. A gay and vigorous dance ensues, introduced by the clarinet, and pro?ceeds with many fanciful devices of instrumentation and sonorous effects. The percussion joins the last section in the grand manner of a nineteenth-century coda, with brasses blaring and woodwinds and strings playing in frantic profusion. The whole exhilarating movement bristles and sparkles with life and gaiety.
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Sunday Afternoon, May 2
Mass No. 3 in F minor, "The Great"......Bruckner
Anton Bruckner was born at Ansfelden, Austria, September 4, 1824; died at Vienna, October 11, 1896.
Into the dark abyss he made his way,
Both nether worlds he saw, and in the might
Of his great soul beheld God's splendor bright,
And gave to us on earth true light of day:
Star of supremest worth with its clear ray,
Heaven's secrets he revealed to us through our dim sight,
And had for guerdon, what the base world's spite
Oft gives to souls that noblest grace display.
--Michael Ancelo (Sonnet--tribute to Dante)
Anton Bruckner has remained one of the most puzzling figures in the history of music. In spite of all explanations, the discrepancies between the man, patient, naive, and sensitive, accepting defeat from life, and the artist, adamant in his artistic faith, never once forsaking it however the world might judge or ignore him, have never been satisfactorily re?conciled. His modest and subservient demeanor and his retiring nature will always stand in the strangest opposition to the imperial grandeur and dignity of his musical mind and the full majesty and rich eloquence of his music.
To recount the details of his life would be to enumerate the cruel tricks of fate, disillusionments, failures, and unbelievable personal hurts that were his lot on this earth. His life offers no drama, no romance; it is simply the sad story of a poor schoolmaster who seemed destined to face an un?sympathetic world alone, and incapable of revealing, in terms the world could understand and would accept, the beauty of which he alone seemed to be aware. For his futile attempts he won no other reward than neglect, scorn, and spiritual abuse beyond description.
Inarticulate in the world, he spoke, however, a strange and exalted language in his own sphere of music. Here he was the seer speaking of in?credible things, "uttering magnificence like a Hebrew prophet whose imag?inings were penetrated by the suggestion of indescribable wonders, echoing with a strange murmur of revelation." It is difficult to account for this exalted utterance or to find any satisfactory way to describe it. To say that
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it is a religious, ecstatic, and cosmic music, arising from the concept of the sublime grandeur of the Deity, the creation, and the universe, is to state only a half truth. We cannot ignore its sometimes primitive, naive, and unrefined accents, its tendency to be verbose and grandiloquent, its some?what limited range of mood. But there is always that inexplicable total effect of nobility of style, loftiness of purpose, and above all, profound sincerity of intention. It is music, for all its obvious faults, that carries a medieval firmness of conviction. After all, a more devout or more religious man than Anton Bruckner never lived, and his music is the ecstacy of a pious believer, who nevertheless is disturbed by agitations of doubt and despair. We never leave him excited or depressed, however, for there always sounds a tone of faith and confidence, and of consolatory tenderness. Al?though he was always engaged in tragic inner conflict, he had that inesti?mable gift of sublimating his personal emotions into pure musical expres?sion, the beauty and sublimity of which lift, edify, and make tranquil the human spirit.
According to Bruno Walter, "his faith is so great, his vision so clear, that inconsistencies of style, workmanship, successions of ideas, are immaterial in the face of the revelations his pages unfold. ... he is the prophet of infinity."
In his youth, while a student at a Foundation of Augustine Monks at St. Florian, Austria, Bruckner composed, but left unfinished, several religious choral works, among them four Masses. Not until 1864, at the age of forty, when organist at the Cathedral in Linz, did he achieve full maturity with the composition of three Masses--No. 1 in D minor, 1864; No. 2 in E minor, 1866; and his last and greatest, the Grosse Messe in F minor on this afternoon's program.
In the summer of 1866, Bruckner suffered serious physical exhaustion and spent three months at Bad Kreutzen to effect a cure. It was during this period of enervating illness that he conceived the idea of writing "The Great" Mass. The first sketches were made early in 1867, and the work completed on September 9, 1868. Revisions were made in 1881 by him, but by 1890 others had tampered with the score, particularly with the orchestration, which in some cases approached Wagnerian proportions. The 1881 revisions, insertions, and fragments of new sketches in Bruckner's hand were preserved in the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, and in 1944 they became the basis of what is now considered to be the "Original Edition." The first performance took place on June 16, 1872, in the Hofkirche St. Augustine in Vienna, at a time when the composer was teaching at the Conservatory. The performers and the audience received it with excessive praise; the critics with scorn and ridicule. In its lofty intention and sustained inspiration, in its remarkable fusion of Baroque contrapuntal techniques and Romantic
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harmonic richness, in the power and grandeur of its musical discourse, the Bruckner Mass is a sacred masterpiece in the category of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, to which it has often been compared.
Of far greater significance than a detailed musical analysis of its five sec?tions is the following rather lengthy but penetrating general analysis of Bruckner and his art, written by Felix Gatz, distinguished aesthetician, conductor, and Bruckner scholar:
What sort of man, then, was Bruckner All who knew him were impressed with his deep piety. Piety, in its deepest sense, is the conviction that there exists a super-earthly Power in the face of which all that is merely earthly becomes as naught, and yet that there is some mystic link between this spiritual Power and what is merely of the earth. The ability to envision and realize this Power from the Beyond in the Here is the kernel of piety. Let it not be thought that this piety, this gift of super-earthly vision, is an everyday occurrence. It is far more than a theory-propped affirmation of some creed-bound phenomenon. It predicates that the soul of the truly pious being must burn inextinguish?ably with faith in a reality beyond that of the senses. It demands soul, phantasy, the ability to universalize, a boundless sense of coherence, an unerring gift for discerning essentials. This piety requires, above all, greatness of soul. Perhaps spiritual greatness may also arise from other sources, but there can be no doubt that the soul is truly great which can trace step for step the path from reality to super-reality. This piety alone suffices to prove its possessor a being far above the ordinary. Bruckner's was such piety; he was a great being, even outside his music.
A philosopher is one who can formulate his relationship to the world in systematic thought, one who can translate his world-feeling into world-concepts. The philosopher, however, does not stand alone in his possession of a world-outlook. Bruckner was no philosopher. Yet he had an outlook upon the world so consummate that philosophers might well have envied him for it. Perhaps I should not say that Bruckner had such an outlook, but rather, that he personified it, for what is a man if he is not his outlook upon things Bruckner's view was that of the mystic, for whom the earthly world is a mere shadow.
A man's attitudes toward music and' the world are inseparable. What he demands of music depends upon how he regards the cosmos and God. Much like the mystic's view of the world, there is a view of music which will not permit intrusion upon the art by the realm of things, of happenings, or of experiences of the ego. Such was Bruckner's outlook upon music. He had no so-called philosophy or esthetics of music, a dialectical presentation of the essence of the art. Nevertheless the basic secret of music was known to him--the secret that the tonal realm is one apart from all that which is describable as nature or soul, matters that may be, more or less adequately, clarified by verbal concepts. Bruckner knew the secret of the basic autonomy of music without having been able to formulate it in the manner of an esthetician. Yet since he never expressed this knowledge in so many words, how may we affirm with certainty that he possessed it Should we deduce his musical views from his tonal creations, we would only be going in a circulus vitiosus. There is, happily, a better means of ascertaining what he understood by music and what he expected of it--his decades of unceasing musical study. No one today will dare to say that such study was necessary for him because he was insufficiently gifted musically. If music had meant for him merely the art of representing nature or personal experiences in tone, he would have dispensed with the bulk of that long period
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of "preparatory" study (it lasted more than thirty years) which, naturally, struck misunder?standing observers as grotesque, if not actually pathological in character. He need only have studied nature and the soul before venturing upon symphonic composition. It was not nature in tone, but rather the very nature of music that he sought to fathom, as he analyzed again and again, with infinite care and patience, every known principle of harmony and counterpoint. However superfluous these protracted studies may seem to have been, Bruckner's zeal in their pursuit, once stupidly attributed to the "village organist's" feeling of inferiority, reveals one thing: his belief in the impersonality, auton?omy, and complete self-sufficiency of music.
Just as the composer's attitude toward music is closely akin to his view of the world, so the nature of his musical creation depends upon his musical outlook. Of course, the prime prerequisite for musical creation is the possession of a musical creative gift, without which even the soundest outlook upon the art will avail one but little in the actual creation of valid tonal works. On the other hand, it is possible for the gifted composer to create good music, even though his musical outlook be false and unsound. Many a composer, who has given expression to a faulty musical esthetics, has nevertheless instinctively taken the correct road in his musical creation. Wagner's splendid Walkilre score came into' existence despite its composer's false tonal esthetics, musical views which he later altered. When a highly gifted composer also possesses a sound view of the nature, purport, and aim of music, as Bruckner did, he cannot fail to produce eminently musical music. To be sure, all music is musical, absolute, autonomous--the bad as well as the good, the music reflecting a faulty as well as that reflecting a sound musical outlook. Indeed nothing but music can take place during the unfolding of any music. Yet the purely musical quality of different compositions will necessarily vary in degree. Just as there are distinguishably different degrees of reality, so is it possible to differentiate between varying degrees of musical quality as represented in the comparative musical autonomy of various compositions. All music is autonomous, absolute, but some music is more absolute, more autonomous than other music. Bruckner's music has always been regarded as particularly "unliterary," and what, in the final analysis, can the term "unliterary" music signify but autonomous music Even Bruckner's outspoken enemies, who opposed his symphonies out of honest misunderstanding, felt that here was a composer who drew so little upon the things and feelings of this world for his inspiration, that those who listened to his music from any "literary," i.e., extra-musical viewpoint whatsoever, found themselves completely at a loss for even the most general literary (programmatic) background that might throw light upon the music's content. Thus when those who believed themselves enthusiasts for Bruckner's art actually strove to circulate such extra-musical explanations to sanction their fealty to the master in the eyes of a skeptical musical world, they did his cause more harm than good. They loved him, to be sure, but understood him perhaps even less than his enemies, who denied and persecuted him openly for a reason which, however cruel, was founded in truth. The reason was this: Bruckner's music was, as every unprejudiced hearer could clearly feel, literally overflowing with sheer music; that is, with absolute-musical content, and hence was but music, with no significance beyond itself. Bruckner's music is unalloyed music incarnate.
Still this music is at the same time the expression of the man Bruckner, though not in the sense that it reflects or portrays his personal feelings, as if the composer had sought by means of it to reveal himself and his soul. The man Bruckner does find expression in his music, an expression unwilled, one which could not have been conjured up by conscious purpose. The soul of the man Bruckner rested securely on
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a plane beyond the earthly. It was upon that plane that his entire will and being were focused. Therefore, music meant to him a realm apart, an independent world of impersonal spirituality. That such was his view of music and that his music was indeed an expression of that world, these truths constitute the revelation of his individual personality, a personality wholly impersonal, beyond the personal. Only such an individ?uality could have been the source of music so wholly impersonal, so supremely auton?omous.
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.
Gloria in excelsis Deo,
et in terra pax
hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Laudamus te, benedicimus te,
adoramus te, glorificamus te.
Gratias agitnus tibi
propter magnam gloriam tuam.
Domine Deus, Rex coelestis,
Deus Pater omnipotens:
Domine fili unigenite Jesu Christe:
Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, filius Patris:
Qui tollis peccata mundi
miserere nobis.
qui tollis peccata mundi,
suscipe deprecationem nostrum.
Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris,
miserere nobis.
Quoniam tu solus sanctus,
tu solus Dominus,
tu solus altissimus,
Jesu Christe, cum sancto Spiritu
in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.
Credo in unum Deum,
Patrem omnipotentem,
factorem coeli et terrae,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium:
Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum,
Filium Dei unigenitum,
ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula:
Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine,
Deum verum de Deo vero,
KYRIE
Lord, be merciful. Christ, be merciful. Lord, be merciful.
GLORIA
Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will. We praise thee, we bless thee, we adore thee, we glorify thee. We give thanks to thee for thy great glory. Lord God, King of heaven, God the Father omnipotent: Lord Jesus Christ, only-begotten son: Lord God, Lamb of God, son of the Father: Thou who takest away the world's sins, have mercy upon us. Thou who takest away the world's sins, receive our prayers.
Thou who sittest at the Father's right hand, have mercy upon us. For thou alone art holy, thou alone art the Lord, thou alone art most high, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. Amen.
I believe in one God,
Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of things visible and invisible:
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
only-begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all time:
God of God, light of light,
very God of very God,
Felix M. Gatz, "Bruckner's Musical World," Chord and Discord, I, No. 8 (December, 19S6), p. 16.
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genitum, non factum,
consubstantialem Patri,
per quern omnia facta sunt:
Qui propter nos homines
et propter nostram salutem
descendit de coelis:
Et incarnatus est de Spiritu sancto
ex Maria virgine, et homo factus est:
Crucijixus etiam pro nobis,
passus sub Pontio Pilato
et sepultus est:
Et resurrexit tertia die,
secundum Scripturas,
et ascendit in coelum,
sedet ad dexteram Patris;
et iterum venturus est cum gloria
judicare vivos et mortuos,
cujus regni non erit finis:
Et in Spiritum sanctum,
Dominum et vivificantem,
qui ex Patre Filioque procedit:
qui cum Patre et Filio
simul adoratur et conglorificatur,
qui locutus est per Prophetas:
Et unam sanctam catholicam
et apostolicam ecclesiam.
Confiteor unum baptisma
in remissionem peccatorum;
et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.
begotten, not made,
and consubstantial with the Father,
by whom all things were made:
Who for us men
and for our salvation
descended from heaven:
And was made incarnate of the holy Spirit
by the virgin Mary, and was made man:
He was crucified for us,
suffered under Pontius Pilate
and was buried:
And rose again on the third day,
according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sitteth at his Father's right hand;
and will come again with glory
to judge the quick and the dead,
of whose reign there shall be no end:
I believe in the holy Spirit,
the lord and giver of life,
which proceedeth from the Father and the Son;
which equal with the Father and Son
shall be worshipped and glorified,
as it was spoken by the prophets:
And in one holy catholic
and apostolic church.
I trust in one baptism
for the remission of sins:
and I look for the resurrection of the dead
and future life everlasting. Amen.
SANCTUS
Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth! Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua, hosanna in excelsis!
Holy is the Lord God of Hosts! Heaven and earth are full of thy glory; hosanna in the highest!
BENF.DICir.S
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!
ACNUS DEI
Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi: dona nobis pacem.
I.amb of God, who takest away the world's sins, have mercy upon us.
Lamb of God, who takest away the world's sins, grant us peace.
FOURTH CONCERT
Fantasia para un gentilhombre,
for Guitar and Orchestra........Rodrigo
Joaquin Rodrigo was born in Sagunto, Spain, in 1902.
Since the death of Manuel de Falla in 1946, Joaquin Rodrigo, blind from the age of three, has established himself as Spain's most gifted and prolific composer. The list of his compositions is too extensive to enumerate, but since he won sensational success in 1939 with his Concierto de Aranguez for guitar and orchestra, he has made a distinguished contribution to his country's art with a tremendous output of superior works, both instru?mental and vocal, that have their roots deep in Spanish tradition and culture. Rodrigo is not an innovator or experimenter. His respect for con?ventional nationalistic idioms has resulted in an art that is prevailingly lyrical and appealing.
The Fantasia on today's program is based upon themes of the seventeenth-century composer of the Spanish court, Gaspar Sanz, a famous guitarist, theologian, philosopher, and author.
This enchanting, slightly melancholy work was written in 1958 for Andres Segovia, the famous Spanish guitar virtuoso.
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FIFTH CONCERT
Sunday Evening, May 2
Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor______________......_J. S. Bach
Transcribed for orchestra by Eugene Ormandy
Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, March 21, 1685; died in Leipzig, July 28, 1750.
Disregarding the dialectical discussions of the doctors as to the derivations of and what constitutes the difference between a passacaglia and a chaconne, the passacaglia was a baroque form of music employing a continuous set of variations upon a clearly distinguishable bass theme, which, however, was often transferred to an upper voice.
Bach derived part of his theme for this work from a Trio en passecaille by Andre Raison, a French organist of the late seventeenth century. From it, he created an eight-measure melody in moderately slow triple rhythm, which, after repeating twenty times, he brought to a tremendous culmination in a double fugue. In adding constantly to the interest of his subject throughout the variations, Bach employed all of the polyphonic devices known to his time, creating a magnificent Gothic structure in tone.
Originally composed for the harpsichord with two keyboards, this mighty work soon found its way to the organ. "Its polyphonic structure fits so thoroughly for the organ," wrote Albert Schweitzer, "that we can hardly understand nowadays how anyone could have ventured to play it on a stringed instrument." Today it has passed from the medium of the organ to the great and complex modern orchestra, where its huge chordal masses are projected with titanic and overpowering effect.
In the words of Stokowski, "This 'Passacaglia' is one of those works whose content is so full and significant that its medium of expression is of relative unimportance; whether played on the organ, or on the greatest of all instru?ments, the orchestra, it is one of the most divinely inspired contrapuntal works ever conceived."
Mr. Ormandy's transcription has, with telling effect, made full use of the color possibilities of the modern orchestra.
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FIFTH CONCERT Variations on an Original Theme ("Enigma") , Op. 36 . Elgar
Edward Elgar was born in Broadheath, England, June 2, 1857; died in Worcester, England, February 23, 1934.
The great school of English composers, which began with John Danstable (died in 1453), and continued through the Madrigalian Period with William Byrd (1543--1623) as its supreme figure, had finally come to an abrupt end with the death of Henry Purcell in 1695. When the German, Italian-trained Georg Friedrich Handel arrived in London in 1710, English national music was quite dead. Not a single composer of stature had appeared in the interim. This period of sterility, as far as native-born composers were concerned, continued for almost two centuries, and English music sank to its lowest level, which led Nietzsche, Heine, and the world at large to refer to England as "a land without music."
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, three figures appeared who exerted a tremendous influence over the musical destiny of their country: Herbert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Edward Elgar. These men possessed remarkable creative gifts and a wide-ranging scholarship. But it was Elgar whose loftiness of purpose and tenacity of true genius made him the musician laureate of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and that ultimately won for him a knighthood in 1904.
It is not possible to rate too highly his importance in the history of his country's music. Without his copious output, the state of music in England would have remained pathetically provincial. His intellectuality was evident in his wide acquaintance with history, literature, and art; and his music reflected a versatility and a new sense of values that were immediately discerned; it was "like a fresh breeze blowing stagnation away." He not only restored a continuity to English music, but he freed it from the stilted, decadent domination, and anemic imitation of foreign composers. His place in history is secure whatever the ultimate fate of his music will be. Since his time, his position at the head of English music has been challenged by such composers as Gustav Hoist (1874--1934), Frederick Deli us (1862-1934), Arnold Bax (1883-1953), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), William Walton (1902), and Benjamin Britten (1913).
Elgar was as truly a product of his age and his race as were Byrd and Purcell. He expressed not only a strong personality, but the aspiration and sorrows of his generation, and is the lesser and the greater for doing so. He revealed at times the self-conscious restraint of his country's music, for the Victorian age liked complacent, modest, sentimental art of careful deportment. Cecil Gray, an English critic, sensed in some of his music an atmosphere of "pale cultured idealism" and an "unconsciously hypocriti-
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cal, self-righteous, pharisaical gentlemanliness" which was so characteristic of British art in the nineteenth century. Philip Hale, American critic, referred to his music at best as "respectable in a middle-class manner... the sort of music that gives the composer a degree of Mus. Doc. from an English University."
It is true that Elgar had his platitudinous, pedantic, and stilted moments. But we should not judge him by his weakness alone. "Salut d'Amour," "Land of Glory," "Pomp and Circumstance," pieces by which the world at large has come to know him, are not representative of the real Elgar. We do not judge Tennyson as a poet by his "Charge of the Light Brigade." Elgar, too, had his "In Memoriam" in his "Dream of Gerontius" and in the exquisite lyricism of the slow movements of his two symphonies, in the violin and cello concertos, and in the Enigma Variations there is rare beauty which the world does, and should, cherish. Elgar's music, even in its unprecedented sweep and majesty, was never disturbing, or excessive in feeling. After all, he was not writing for a mad world. Harmony of spirit, fought for and won, is the essence of his art.
These Variations were composed at Malvern in 1899 and were first performed under the direction of Hans Richter in London, June 19, 1899. After this performance, Elgar added a coda and made various changes in the orchestration throughout. In this revised form, they were produced at the Worcester Festival, September 13, 1899, conducted by the composer. The score includes an original theme and fourteen variations, dedicated by Elgar to "his friends pictured within." This cryptic statement aroused the curiosity of many at the time, who began a ceaseless search to find the identity of the personalities referred to. "In this music," he once said, "I have sketched, for their amusement and mine, the idiosyncrasies of fourteen of my friends, not necessarily musicians; but this is a personal matter and need not have been mentioned publicly. The Variations should stand simply as a 'piece' of music. The Enigma I will not explain--its 'dark saying' must be left unguessed and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another theme 'goes' but is not played--so the principal theme never appears, even as in some late dramas, e.g., Maeterlinck's "L'Iniruse" and "Les sept Princesses": the chief character is never on the stage."+
To the public today nothing could matter less than the identification of utterly unknown individuals. At the time of the composition, however, feverish activity continued unabated until curiosity was finally satisfied when
Performed at former May Festivals in 1904 (American premiere). 1912. and 1917.
t Ph'lip Hale. Great Concert Music; Symtohony Program A'ot. edited by John N. Burk (New York: Garden City Publishing Co.. Inc., 1939). pp. 137-38.
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FIFTH CONCERT
one Sir Ivor Atkins, a close friend of the composer, published his "research" in the London Musical Times after Elgar's death.
The Variations are introduced by a melancholy theme (Andante, G minor, 4-4) followed by fourteen variations:
I. "C.A.E." L'istesso tempo, G minor, 4--. The initials are Lady Elgar's. The theme, changed in rhythm, is given to the second violins and violas tremolo; flute and clarinet in octaves. The close, pianissimo, is in G major.
II. "H.D.S.-P." (H. D. Stewart-Powell). Allegro, G minor, 3--8. The theme finally appears in the violoncellos and basses under a staccato figure for woodwind, later violins.
III. "R.B.T." (Richard Baxter Townshend). Allegretto, G major, 3--8. Fragments of the theme are played by oboe and violins (pizzicato) against a counter theme for woodwind.
IV. "W.M.B." (William M. Baker, a country squire). A spirited, vigorous variation. Allegro di molto, G minor-major, 3--4. Strings, woodwind, and horns proclaim the theme. The last measures call for the full strength of the orchestra.
V. "R.P.A." (Richard Arnold, son of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold). Moderato, C minor, 12--8 (4--4). A counter melody is developed against the theme (bassoons, violon?cellos, and double basses), first above the theme and then below it.
VI. "Ysobel." (Isabel Fitton, a viola player). Andantino, C major, 3--2. A lyrical move?ment with a cantilena for solo viola, while gentle phrases are given to the woodwind and horns.
VII. "Troyte." (Aggressive and vehement Arthur Troyte Griffith). Presto, C major, 4-4. Woodwind and violins have a bold figure over a basso ostinalo for violoncellos, double basses, kettledrums. This figure, changed, is afterwards given to the basses.
VIII. "W.N." (Winifred Norbury, a patrician lady of the preceding generation). Allegretto, G major, 6--8. Clarinets vary the theme.
IX. "Nimrod." Moderato, E-flat major, 3-4. This and the next variations are in strong contrast to each other and to those that precede. "Nimrod" is a tribute to Elgar's friend Jaeger. Elgar's "Variations" were performed at a memorial concert to Jaeger in London on January 24, 1910. Hans Richter conducted. Elgar wrote this note for the programme: "The Variations are not all 'portraits.'.. . Something ardent and mercurial, in addition to the slow movement (No. IX), would have been needful to portray the character and temperament of A. J. Jaeger. The variation is a record of a long summer evening talk, when my friend grew nobly eloquent (as only he could) on the grandeur of Beethoven, and especially of his slow movements." The strings (2d violins, violas, and violoncellos divided) sing the theme, pianissimo. Later the wood-wind and brass enlarge it.
X. "Dorabella-Intermezzo." (Dora Penny, an intimate friend). Allegretto, G major, 3--4, a sparkling, joyous variation, scored lightly for muted strings and woodwind; a horn is heard in one measure, and there are a few strokes on the kettledrums.
XI. "G.R.S." (George Robertson Sinclair, organist of Hereford Cathedral and his bulldog Dan). Allegro di molto, G minor, 2--2. An English reviewer says of this variation: "The furious pedaling in the basses seems to confirm our suspicion that this is the 'picture' of a well-known Cathedral organist." The basses play a staccato variation of the theme. Later the brass has it fortissimo.
XII. "B.G.N." (Basil G. Nevinson, cellist). Andante, G minor, 4--4. A song for violoncellos in which violas join later with first violins for the climax.
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XIII. "X.X.X. (Lady Mary Lygon) Romanza." Moderate), G major, 3-4. The story is that "X.X.X." was at sea when Elgar wrote this variation. We quote from Mr. Daniel Gregory Mason's essay on Elgar: "Violas in a quietly undulating rhythm suggests the ocean expanse; an almost inaudible tremor of the drum gives the throb of the engines; a quotation from Mendelssohn's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (clarinet) completes the story. Yet 'story' it is not--and there is the subtlety of it. Dim sea and dreamlike steamer are only accessories, after all. The thought of the distant friend, the human soul there, is what quietly disengages itself as the essence of the music."1 Ernest Newman speaks of the "curious drum roll, like the faint throb of the engines of a big liner."f
XIV. "E.D.U. (Composer's self portrait) Finale." Allegro, G major, with an introduction. There are various modifications of tempo; the final section is a presto. The organ part was added after the first performance. "The finale is an elaborate movement, starting pianissimo, but soon developing strength and brilliancy in a richly scored marchlike strain, with which anon the ritmo di tre of Variation IX, 'Nimrod' (but in augmentation) is combined in a grandiose and triumphant passage, which virtually forms the climax of the work." There it also a reminiscence of the opening strain of Variation I, pianissimo.
Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 83
for Piano and Orchestra.........Brahms
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, May 7. 1833; died in Vienna, April 3, 1897.
No other work of Brahms is more characteristic than this magnificent piano concerto. It contains music that arises from his most secluded spiritual realm and is among the richest and best balanced works he ever produced. Nowhere else does he reveal such conscientiousness and solid thoroughness.
The concerto was begun in May, 1878, at Portschach in southern Austria, on the day before his forty-fifth birthday. It was completed in 1881 at Pressbaum, near Vienna. In letters that year to Clara Schumann and Elizabeth von Herzogenberg, Brahms jestingly announced that he had writ?ten "quite a little concerto with quite a little scherzo." What he had actually created was a piano concerto and a symphony in one work. Here, as in the first piano concerto, he found a new solution of the problem of reconciling the piano with the orchestra. By embedding its sound in that of the orchestra, and at the same time preserving its contrasting quality; by suppressing all display of technical virtuosity in the soloist as an end in itself; by relating every theme, figure, chord passage, scale, and run organically to the whole, Brahms created an overpowering concerto.
Unlike the earlier classical concept of the form founded on the alternation of orchestral ritornelli and solo episodes, and the later highly romantic
D. G. Mason: Contemporary Composers, 1918. t Ernnt Newman: Elgar, 1906.
64
FIFTH CONCERT
display pieces of Liszt, with their magnificent tone colors, breath-taking bravuras, and ostentatious effects, Brahms allows the soloist's vanity no satisfaction in his symphonically constructed passages where the parts are firmly molded into one radiant whole. The piano part, often dense and slow-moving, with its constant preference for working with massive chord effects and broken chord passages, drives into the very tone center of the orchestra to contribute its thread and color to the rich symphonic texture:
The principal theme of the first movement (Allegro non troppo, B-flat major, 4--4 time) is foreshadowed by a short dialogue between the first horn and piano, creating a quiet twilight atmosphere. The piano dramatically leads to a full, sonorous statement of the theme in the orchestra. This prepares for the contrasting lyricism of the second subject, announced by the violins with pizzicato violas and cellos, and, after a vigorous passage, the piano enters in octaves, leading to its modified statement of the principal theme. Part of the opening in the orchestra and the second theme are now developed to some extent. After a passage in F minor for the piano, which leads to a statement in the full orchestra, the development section begins. The principal themes are elaborately treated. The recapitulation begins on the quiet subject of the horn that was heard at the opening of the movement, but the rest of the section is not a literal re-presentation of the exposition material. A tremendous coda, derived from the themes heard in the orchestral opening of the concerto and summarizing in a broad melodic sweep the content of the main section of the movement, closes this section.
The second movement (Allegro appassionato, F major, 3--4 time) is the "quite a little scherzo" to which Brahms referred in his letters, although it is not designated as such in the score. The theme, recalling the piano scherzo in E minor. Op. 4 and the later piano capricci in its uncouth and sullen tone, is stated in the piano. An episode in the orchestra, derived from the rhythmic figure of the piano theme, is continued later in the solo instrument. This forms a concise sonata-form exposition which closes in A major, and is repeated. A development follows which introduces a new jubilant theme in D major, which has the effect of a trio section. There is a free sonata-like recapitulation of the themes of the exposition, after which a coda, giving freest scope to the piano and orchestra, brings this unique movement to a close.
The orchestra begins the third movement (Andante, B-flat major, 6--4 time) with a broad melody for the cello, a forethought of the sad sweet melody of the later song "Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer"; and, after its restatement, in which the oboe joins the cello, the piano sounds a figure derived from the same theme. Then in typical Brahms fashion there is a closely woven passage which, in spite of its familiar material, is treated in an improvisatory manner. After a sudden change to F-sharp major, a new melody, found in the song "Todessehen," Op. 86, is stated by two clarinets in the accompaniment. "The melody", writes Tovey, "consists of few notes spaced like the first stars that penetrate the sky at sunset. When the strings join in, the calm is as deep as the ocean that we have witnessed in the storms of his huge piece of music." The first theme returns to the cello in F-sharp minor, and a recapitulation of the
" Donald Francis Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 111, 124.
65
MAY FESTIVAL
opening in the orchestra, this time ornamented by a figure in the piano, brings this lovely movement to a quiet and serene close.
The fourth movement (Allegretto grazioso, B-flat major, 2--4 time), an airy, glittering, and delicately animated finale, presents no trumpets and drums, although after such a tremendous treatment as this concerto has received, one might expect a more triumphant close. The piano states the first rhythmic theme, and it is soon followed by another idea, almost Hungarian in style, which alternates between woodwinds and strings. Another section of it is heard in the solo instrument which leads to a playful subject, still in the piano and accompanied by pizzicato strings. An elaborate development of this and subsidiary material follows, and all is climaxed with a lengthy coda.
fifi
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION
Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor
Donald Bryant, Conductor
Nancy Hodge, Pianist
FIRST SOPRANOS
Bradstreet, Lola Bryant, Lela N. Cox, Elaine Fenelon, Linda Fox, Estelle (..ill.iv Carole Gockel, Barbara Goslee, Jeanne Gray, Darlene Gustafson, Susan Hanson, Gladys Headen, Nancy Hcsselbart, Susan Hinzman, Lillian Hoover, Joanne Jerome, Ruth Johnsmiller, Betsy Keeler, Ann Leyh, Carolyn D. Luecke, Doris L. Martinez, Leslie McDonald, Ruth M. Pack, Beth Parkllan, Darcy Phillips, Margaret Pickett, Jean Randolph, Susan Jo Robsky, Edith D. Schilt, Margaret Schlarman, Carol Schneider, Alice Siegrist, Linda Sincock, Mary Ann Smith, Karen Wilson, Miriam
SECOND SOPRANOS
Babineau, Margaret Burr, Virginia Cappaert, Lael Carr, Nancy P. Datsko. Doris Datsko, Paula Dickson, Roseinarie Dombrowski, Helene Dunn, Karen Gilroy, Kathleen Ham, Susan Hinckley, April Hiraga, Mary Horning, Alice R.
Jarvi, Ann Kayle, Hilary Leftridge, Sharon Lehmann, Judith Lyman, Frances Maher, Cindy Mixter, Sudie Rector, Patricia Sexton, Ebba Jo Stenson, Judith Stewart-Robinson, Elizabeth Taylor. Susan Thompson, Cheryl Tompkins, Patricia Vlisides, Elena C. Walden, Jane Weinman, Susan Winzenz, Sandra Wood, Kathleen Woodward, Joan K.
FIRST ALTOS
Abrams, Gloria Adams, Judith Beam, Eleanor P. Boesche, Diane Brown, Marion Dotson, Camile Dover, Beth Evans, Daisy E. Feldkamp,Lucy Fisher, Sarah Gewanter, Ruth Goodman, Charlotte Heitzman, Diedra Jones, Mary M. Karp, Nancy Kaufman, Kay Keppelman, Nancy Kulenkamp, Nancy Ladney, Jane Landon, Joyce Langille, Tory Maas, Prudence McCoy, Bernice McNutt, Martha Mead, Kathleen Murray, Virginia Nelson, Lois Polacek, Lydia Porter, Mary Purdy, Lisa
Reid, Mary Rudner, Heidi Schafbuch, Shirley Schuster, Pamela Scott, Catherine Slee, Beth Slee, Debora Smith, Marguerite Tandler, Virginia Tull, Claudia Wargelin, Carol White, Myra Wiedmann, Louise Wolfe, Charlotte Wolpert, Linda
SECOND ALTOS
Anderson, Sandra Baird, Marjorie Barron, Marcelline Bedell, Carolyn Bowes, Barbara Clayton, Caroline Gibiser, Gail Gibiser, Martha Gorthey, Katherine Haab, Mary Hagerty, Joan Hannigan, Jayne Homan, Joan Johnson, Elizabeth J. Johnson, Katherine Lidgard, Ruth M. Lovelace, Elsie MacDonald, Jane Miller, Rene Olson, Constance Pratt, Barbara Robberson, Kay Roeger, Beverly Schenck, Mary Stebbins, Kathryn Steele, Donna Sweet, Elizabeth Thomas, Carren Tuss, Barbara Williams, Nancy Wilson, Johanna
FIRST TENORS
Baker, Hugh Burch, Christopher
(17
MAY FESTIVAL
Cathey, Owen Dombrowski, Timothy Goldberg, Helga Grimm, Marshall J. Jech, Carl L. Kaeuper, David Lowry, Paul Miller, Gerald Reidy, James Thurman, Russell Weaver, Lawrence
SECOND TENORS
Ansted, Albert Atkins, Anthony Barrett, Martin Caducio, Fred Chateau, Michael Clark, Harold R. Cleland, D. Thomas Clow, Daniel Cochrane, Alan Dilworth, Kirby Enns, Philip Galbraith, Merle Girod, Albert P. Haworth, Donald Hellstedt, Peter Hmay, Thomas Hutchinson, James Hyde, Peter Lam, Samuel MacGregor, Robert Marsh, David Melcher, Philip Miller, Jonathan Pack, Jon Pomann, James
Preston, Thomas Reed, Rob Snabes, Michael Warren, James Weamer, Allan
FIRST BASSES
Adams, Darwin Alpern, Wayne Anderson, Burr H.ill.iid. Gary Beam, Marion L. Bond, Craig Broner, Dan Brueger, John Burr, Charles F. Carnes, Richard C. Carpenter, Keith Chateau, John Clayton, Joseph F. Conners, John Daehler, Max Datsko, Robert Dill, David Garvey, James Gitterman, David Gottfried, Ralph Hagerty, Thomas F. Hamilton, Edgar Haynes, Jeffrey Herren, Donald C. Hillmer, John Hoag, Edwin C. Hochstettler, Thomas Hoi brook, Robert Holly, Tom Huff, Charles Kays, J. Warren
Kelleck, Ken Kissel, Klair Krause, Harry Magretta, William Markley, Robert Martinez, Douglas Matthews, Stan McDonald, James Olson, Steven Shalwitz, Howard Silva, Felipe Smith, Fred Sutton, Wade Tompkins, Terril O. Unnewchr, David Williams, Donald
SECOND BASSES
Allen, Neville Anderson, Frederick M. Barber, Edwin L. Bond, W. Howard Goeb, Carl I.ehmann, Charles F. Martsolf. Robert McCoy, Keith McMurtrie, James Miller, Warren P. Powell, Gregg Schick, Helmut Schonschack, Wallace A. Slee, Vergil
Sommcrfeld, R. Thomas Steinmetz, George Strozier, Robert Wyche, Donald Zimmerman, Eric
THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA
Eugene Ormandy, Music Director and Conductor William Smith, Assistant Conductor
Boris Sokoloff, Manager Joseph H. Santarlasci, Assistant Manager
VIOLINS
Norman Carol
Concertmaster David Madison
Associate Concertmaster William de Pasquale
Associate Concertmaster Morris Shulik Owen Lusak David Grunschlag Frank E. Saam Frank Costanzo David Arbcn Barbara de Pasquale Max Miller Ernest L. Goldstein Herbert Light Luis Biava Larry Grika Cathleen Dalschaert Meyer Simkin Louis Gesensway Irvin Rosen Robert de Pasquale Araiand Di Camillo Joseph Lanza Julia Janson Isadore Schwartz Jerome Wigler Norman Black Irving Ludwig George Dreyfus Louis Lanza Stephane Dalschaert Vcra Tarnowsky Arnold Grossi Manuel Roth Booker T. Rowe
VIOLAS
Joseph de Pasquale James Fawcett Leonard Mogill Gabriel Braverman Sidney Curtiss Darrel Barnes Leonard Bogdanoff Charles Griffin Wolfgang Granat Irving Segall Donald R. Clauser Renard Edwards
VIOLONCELLOS
Samuel Mayes
Winifred Mayes Harry Gorodetzer Francis dc Pasquale Joseph Druian William Saputelli Barbara Haffner Bert Phillips Lloyd Smith George Harpham Marcel Farago Santo Caserta
Roger M. Scott Michael Shahan Neil Courtney Ferdinand Maresh F. Gilbert Eney Carl Torello Wilfred Batchelder Samuel Gorodetzer Emilio Gravagno
FLUTES
Murray W. Panitz Kenneth E. Scutt Kenton F. Terry John C. Kxell, Piccolo
OBOES
John de Lancie Stevens Hewitt Charles M. Morris Louis Rosenblatt, English Horn
CLARINETS
Anthony M. Gigliotti Donald Montanaro Raoul Querze Ronald Reuben, Bass Clarinet
BASSOONS
Bernard H. Garfield John Shamlian Adelchi Louis Angelucci Robert J. Pfeuffer Contra Bassoon
HORNS
Mason Jones Nolan Miller Glenn Janson John Simonelli
Herbert Pierson Kendall Belts
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
Gerald Carlyss Michael Bookspan
Charles E. Owen Michael Bookspan Alan Abel Manuel Roth
CELESTA, PIANO, AND 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 Hauptle 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 VV. 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
Thor Johnson, 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);
Administrative Assistant, 1958-
Rose Marie Hooper, Secretary to the President, 1968-Sally A. Cushing, Cashier and Accountant, 1968-Jessica Kaplan, Typist-Recorder, 1971-Harold E. Warner, Head Usher, 1952-
70
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY, which this year observes its ninety-second season, was organized during the winter of 1879--80 and was incorporated in 1881. Its purpose was to maintain a choral society and an orchestra to provide public concerts and to organize and maintain a school of music which would offer instruction comparable to that of the University in its schools and colleges. Ars longa vita brevis was adopted as its motto. In 1894, as a climax to its offerings, the "First Annual May Festival" was inaugurated. Gradually the number of concerts in the Choral Union Series was increased to ten, and the May Festival from three to six concerts. In 1946, with the development of musical interest, a supple?mentary series of concerts was added--the Extra Concert Series. Handel's Messiah, which had been performed at intervals through the years, became an annual production. Since 1946, it has been given two performances 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 in 1968 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 re?citals is scheduled annually for July. (In the summer of 1967, as a special tribute to the University Sesquicentennial Celebration, the eleven-concert Fair Lane Festival was presented at the site of the Henry Ford mansion, now part of the Dearborn Campus of the University of Michigan.) Thus, at the close of its ninety-second year the Musical Society will have presented, throughout the season, thirty-seven major events by distinguished artists and organizations from a dozen countries.f
THE UNIVERSITY CHORAL UNION was an outgrowth of a "Messiah Club," made up of singers from several local churches. For a decade and a half, assisted by distinguished professional artists and organizations, it participated in numerous Choral Union concerts. In addition to its Messiah concerts, since 1894 it has performed at the annual May Festivals, offering a wide range of choral literature over the years. The chorus membership numbers about three hundred singers, including townspeople and students, as well as many singers from out of town. Beginning next August, applica?tions will be accepted for the 1971--1972 membership.
The "Ann Arbor School of Music" was organized in 1879 and in 1892 was reorganized as the "Uni?versity 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 respon?sibility for the School to The University of Michigan.
t A resume of all artists and organizations, together with the repertoire performed during the 1970-71 season, will be published and available during the summer.
71
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, 1943-1946 Thor Johnson (Guest), 1947-
GUEST CONDUCTORS
Gustav Hoist (London, England),
1923, 1932 Howard Hanson (Rochester), 1926,
1927, 1933, 1935 Felix Borowski (Chicago), 1927 Percy Grainger (Australia), 1928 Jose Iturbi (Philadelphia), 1937
Georges Enesco (Paris), 1939 Harl McDonald (Philadelphia),
1939, 1940, 1944
Virgil Thomson (New York), 1959 Aaron Copland (New York), 1961 Igor Stravinsky (Los Angeles), 1964 Robert Craft (Los Angeles), 1964
ORGANIZATIONS
The Boston Festival Orchestra, Emil Mollenhauer, Conductor, 1894-1904.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Frederick Stock, Conductor, 1905-1935. Eric DeLamarter, Associate Conductor, 1918-1935.
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Conductor, Saul Caston and Charles O'Connell, Associate Conductors, 1936; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, 1937, 1938; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Saul Caston, Associate Conductor, 1939-1945; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, Alex?ander Hilsberg, Associate Conductor, 1946-1953, and Guest Conductor, 1953; Eugene Ormandy, Conductor, 1954-; William Smith, Assistant Conductor, 1957-.
The University Choral Union, Albert A. Stanley, Conductor, 1894-1921; Earl V. Moore, Conductor, 1922-1939; Thor Johnson, Conductor, 1940-1942; Hardin Van Deursen, Conductor, 1943-1947; Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor, 1947-; Lester McCoy, Associate Conductor, 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, 1943-1956; Geneva Nelson, 1957; Marguerite Hood, 1958.
72
GIFT PROGRAM
The Gift Program, begun in November 1968, has, in accordance with its purpose, offset the annual deficits so as to enable continuation of the traditional series, including the May Festival. Next season's schedule, you will note on pages 80 to 82, has been expanded in its scope and concept with a varied series of presentations in the new Power Center for the Perform?ing Arts. Contributors have made this possible--including the many gifts, large and small, that were a part of the Benefit concert in January.
We are grateful to the charter members of the Gift Program, many of whom have continued their support annually. We also appreciate the special notice given the Society in the University's "Annual-Giving Fund." Gifts to The University of Michigan, designated by donors for the University Musical Society, are now credited to the Annual-Giving Fund.
Thanks are also expressed to the several donors who wish to remain anonymous, to the many concert subscribers, and to those who in other ways have supported the programs of the University Musical Society.
The Board of Directors
THE UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
All contributors recorded since January 1, 1970, are listed below. The asterisks indicate those who have contributed both in 1970 and in 1971 (to April 1).
GUARANTORS
Mr. and Mrs. William L. Brittairi Mr. and Mrs. Douglas D. Crary Mr. and Mrs. Lou M. Dexter Mr. and Mrs. Peter N. Heydon Mr. and Mrs. Edwin E. Meader Mr. and Mrs. Eugene B. Power
(corporate) Wagner and Company
SPONSORS
Mrs. Charles T. Campbell
Mr. and Mrs. Maurice B. Hodges
Mr. and Mrs. John M. McCollum
Mrs. Lester McCoy
Dr. and Mrs. Bernard Patmos
?Mrs. Victoria S. Wege
(corporate) Liberty Music Shop
PATRONS
Mr. and Mrs. Gardner Ackley Mr. and Mrs. Edward Adams, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Edward L. Adams, Jr.
Dr. and Mrs. Peter Aliferis Mr. and Mrs. Wyeth Allen Dr. and Mrs. David G. Anderson
7.S
MAY FESTIVAL
Mrs. Donald H. Bacon
Mr. and Mrs. Raymond O. Bassler
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie R. Beals
Mr. and Mrs. Harry B. Benford
Mr. and Mrs. William W. Bishop. Jr.
Mr. C. John Blankley
Mr. and Mrs. Milford Boersma
Mr. and Mrs. Roscoe O. Bonisteel
Mr. and Mrs. Allen P. Britton
Mr. James L. Brown
Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Brown
Dr. and Mrs. K. M. Brownson
Mr. and Mrs. George G. Cameron
Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Campbell
Mr. and Mrs. Walter L. Chambers
Dr. and Mrs. Charles Gardner Child
Dr. and Mrs. Alfred Y. T. Ching
Mr. and Mrs. John Alden Clark
Mr. and Mrs. Alfred F. Conard
Mr. Will H. Connelly
Mr. and Mrs. George D. Coons
Mr. and Mrs. Gage R. Cooper
Mrs. Arthur H. Copeland
Mr. and Mrs. Cecil C. Craig
Mr. and Mrs. H. Richard Crane
Mr. Earl H. Cress
Dr. and Mrs. Clarence E. Crook
Dr. and Mrs. William M.
Cruickshank Mr. James A. Davies Dr. and Mrs. Russell Dejong Mr. and Mrs. John S. Dobson Mr. and Mrs. William G. Dow Miss Linda Eberbach Mrs. Minerva E. Eberbach Mr. Oscar A. Eberbach Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Eschbach Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Evans Mr. and Mrs. Robben W. Fleming Mr. and Mrs. James W. Ford Mr. and Mrs. George H. Forsyth
74
Mr. and Mrs. Dale P. Fosdick
Miss Florence B. Fuller
Mr. and Mrs. Victor Gallatin
Mr. and Mrs. Garnet Garrison
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. and Mrs. Harlan Hatcher
Mr. and Mrs. Harold Haugh
Mr. Donald A. Hines
Mr. and Mrs. George J. Huebner
Mr. Frederick G. L. Huetwell
Mr. and Mrs. Donald L. Katz
Mr. and Mrs. Paul G. Kauper
Mrs. Donald Kehl
Mr. Charles R. Kellermann, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Paul R. Kempf
Mrs. James A. Kennedy
Mr. William R. Kinney
Mr. and Mrs. Harry J. Klingler, Jr.
Mr. Alfred F. Lahodny
Mr. and Mrs. Clifford P. Lillya
Mrs. Alice McKinney
Dr. and Mrs. Joe D. Morris
Mr. Marvin Niehuss
Mr. Jesse Ormondroyd
Mr. and Mrs. William B. Palmer
Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Pierpont
Mr. and Mrs. Warren E. Poole
Mr. and Mrs. Millard H. Pryor
Dr. and Mrs. Theophile Raphael
Dr. and Mrs. Rigdon K. Ratliff
Mr. and Mrs. Gail W. Rector
Dr. and Mrs. William J. Regan
Mr. and Mrs. William Revelli
Mr. and Mrs. F. E. Richart, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Edmund B. Rickard
GIFT PROGRAM
Mr. and Mrs. James Riecker
Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rigan
Mr. Carl F. Schemm
Dr. and Mrs. David W. Schmidt
Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Schurz
Mr. and Mrs. F. A. Sergeant
Mr. Clifford Simmons
Mr. and Mrs. Everett J. Soop
Mrs. James H. Spencer
Mr. and Mrs. Stephen H. Spurr
Mr. and Mrs. Neil Staebler
Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Staples
Mr. and Mrs. E. Blythe Stason
Mr. and Mrs. John C. Stegeman
Mrs. Dorothy M. Stolpin
Mr. and Mrs. J. Wilner Sundelson
Dr. and Mrs. E. Thurston Thieme
Miss Virginia W. Tibbals
Mrs. John E. Tracy
Dr. and Mrs. Paul M. Vanek
Dr. and Mrs. Henry F. Vaughan
Mr. and Mrs. Paul C. Wagner
Mr. and Mrs. Erich A. Walter
Mr. and Mrs. Russell West
Mrs. Earl S. Wolaver
Mr. and Mrs. Walter Wormser
Mr. and Mrs. Boyd W. Yard
(corporate)
Ann Arbor Bank
Ann Arbor Federal Savings and
Loan Association Ann Arbor Trust Company H. F. Campbell Co. Conlin Travel Bureau
Grinnell's Jacobson Stores, Inc. Al Nalli Music, Inc. National Bank & Trust Co. Pittsfield Products, Inc.
SUSTAINING MEMBERS
Miss Adelaide A. Adams
Mrs. John Alexander
Mr. and Mrs. Francis A. Allen
Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Allington
Mr. and Mrs. George Amendt
Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Angell
Mrs. Robert Anse
Dr. and Mrs. Oliver C. Applegate
Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Arnold
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas M. Atkins
Mrs. Stephen S. Attwood
Mr. and Mrs. Max K. Aupperle
Mr. and Mrs. Burton L. Baker
Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan Baker
Dr. and Mrs. Norman Banghart
Miss Millicent A. Baranowski
Mrs. Jean Lynn Barnard
Mrs. R. W. Barnard
Mrs. Floyd E. Bartell
Dr. and Mrs. L. E. Bartholomew
Mrs. Paul H. Bassow
Dr. and Mrs. Gerhard H. Bauer
Miss Alice R. Bensen
Mr. and Mrs. V. T. Bibicoff
Dr. A. James Blair, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Josef Blatt
Mr. and Mrs. H. Harlan Bloomer
Mr. W. M. Blumenthal
Dr. and Mrs. Giles G. Bole, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Jay A. Bolt
Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Bottum, Jr.
Miss Lola M. Bradstreet
Dr. Ralph L. Brandt
Miss Phyllis J. Brannan
MAY FESTIVAL
Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Brater
Mrs. Joseph Brinkman
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. Kirby Brown
Mr. and Mrs. Donald R. Brundage
Mr. and Mrs. Robbins Burling
Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert E. Bursley
Mr. and Mrs. John Bum
Mrs. Helen S. Butz
Mr. William F. Cairns, Jr.
Miss Ruby A. Campbell
Dr. Ruth Cantieny
Dr. and Mrs. James T. Cassidy
Dr. Joseph C. Cerny
Miss Hope H. Chipman
Mr. and Mrs. Halvor N. Christensen
Mr. and Mrs. A. A. Christman
Mrs. W. S. Clarkson
Mr. Carl Cohen
Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Cohen
Mrs. Wendell P. Coler
Mr. and Mrs. W. Oscar Collins
Mr. and Mrs. William J. Conlin
Mr. and Mrs. Brian Connelly
Dr. and Mrs. Leslie Corsa, Jr.
Miss Joyce Coulson
Mr. and Mrs. Glenn W. Coulter
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Courte
Miss Marjorie A. Cramer
Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Crawford
Miss Grace Crockett
Mr. and Mrs. John R. Dale
Mr. Paul A. Daniells
Mr. and Mrs. John Daly
Mr. Peter Darrow
Mr. and Mrs. Horace W. Davenport
Mr. and Mrs. Henry deKoning
Dr. and Mrs. T. J. DeKornfeld
76
Mr. Julio del Toro
Miss Mildred F. Denecke
Mr. and Mrs. David M. Dennison
Mr. and Mrs. Gail E. Densmore
Mr. and Mrs. Edmond F. DeVine
Mr. and Mrs. John B. DeVine
Mr. and Mrs. George Dibble
Dr. and Mrs. Reed O. Dingman
Mr. and Mrs. Russell Dobson
Dr. and Mrs. Edward R. Doezema
Dr. and Mrs. Bruce Draper
Dr. and Mrs. Paul F. Durkee
Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Elderfield
Mr. and Mrs. John F. Eley
Mr. and Mrs. O. Herbert Ellis
Mr. and Mrs. John H. Enns
Dr. and Mrs. S. M. Farhat
Mr. Irving J. Feinberg
Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Feldman
Mr. and Mrs. Carl H. Fischer
Dr. and Mrs. John C. Floyd, Jr.
Miss Phyllis Foster
Mr. and Mrs. Howard P. Fox
Mrs. Thomas Francis, Jr.
Mrs. H. E. Fraumann
Mrs. William A. Frayer
Dr. and Mrs. Arthur B. French
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gallagher
Mr. Charles Gelman
Dr. and Mrs. Ralph M. Gibson
Miss Deborah Goldin
Dr. and Mrs. William A. Gracie, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Louis Graff
Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Graham
Mr. and Mrs. Serge Gratch
Miss Pearl Graves
Mr. Albert Green
Miss Dorothy Greenwald
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie A. Grimord
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur R. Grix
Dr. and Mrs. John A. Gronvall
GIFT PROGRAM
Miss Barbara J. Gross
Dr. and Mrs. Richard F. Gutow
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hadcock
Mr. and Mrs. George N. Hall
Dr. and Mrs. Henry L. Hartman
Miss Margaret A. Harwick
Mrs. Joseph R. Hayden
Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Hayes
Miss Ethel Hedrick
Mr. and Mrs. Albert E. Heins
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Henderson
Dr. and Mrs. Keith S. Henley
Mrs. Stanley H. Henry
Mr. Charles A. Highhill
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hilbish
Mr. T. H. Hildebrandt
Mrs. Leonard E. Himler
Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Hodesh
Mr. and Mrs. Howard S. Holmes
Mrs. S. S. Holmes
Dr. and Mrs. Sibley W. Hoobler
Miss Marguerite V. Hood
Mr. Gregory Horning
Mrs. John H. Hough
Mrs. Virginia Hunt
Mr. and Mrs. David D. Hunting, Sr.
Miss Dorothy A. Huskey
Mr. and Mrs. Raymond F. Hutzel
Miss Ella M. Hymans
Dr. and Mrs. Hideo Itabashi
Mr. and Mrs. Albert C. Jacobs
Mr. and Mrs. Emil Jebe
Dr. and Mrs. F. W. Jeffries
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Johe
Dr. and Mrs. Michael E. Johns
Mr. Thor Johnson
Mr. and Mrs. William Judson
Johnson
Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth L. Jones Mr. and Mrs. Phillip S. Jones Dr. and Mrs. Rudolph Joseph
Dr. and Mrs. Richard D. Judge Dr. and Mrs. Edgar A. Kahn Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Kahn Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Kaplan Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Kaplan Mrs. Gunnar Karlstrom Mr. and Mrs. J. Warren Kays Mr. and Mrs. Norman E. Kemp Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Kerry Mr. Gilbert Key-Smith Dr. and Mrs. William W.
Kimbrough
Dr. and Mrs. Paul C. Kingsley Mr. and Mrs. Robert Klein Dr. and Mrs. Karl S. Klicka Dr. and Mrs. Richard O. Kraft Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Krimm Mr. Lawrence A. LaFontaine Mr. Arthur T. Lanning Dr. R. K. Laros Mrs. Gertrude Leidy Mrs. Albert Lerner Mr. Frederic LeVine Dr. and Mrs. Clayton Lewis Mr. Grant Lindenschmidt Mr. and Mrs. Charles Lipson Miss H. M. Lloyd Miss Mildred Loeffler Mrs. Albert J. Logan Mr. and Mrs. Donald S. Lowe Mr. and Mrs. John Duer Ludlow Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd S. Ludwig Mr. and Mrs. Ross Macmillan Dr. and Mrs. Kenneth R. Magee Mrs. Paul M. Mancell Dr. and Mrs. Donald W. Martin Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Mason Dr. and Mrs. R. G. Mathewson Dr. and Mrs. Josip Matovinovic Mr. Arthur Mayday Dr. Wolfgang W. May
77
MAY FESTIVAL
Mr. and Mrs. Allen L. Mayerson
Mr. and Mrs. John A. McMillan
Mr. and Mrs. F. N. McOmber
Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Mengel
Mr. and Mrs. E. W. Meranda
Rev. and Mrs. Frederick R. Meyers
Dr. Barry Miller
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rush Miller
Mr. and Mrs. John D. Mohler
Mr. and Mrs. Cruse W. Moss
Dr. and Mrs. John H. Moyer
Mr. William Muschenheim
Miss Yoshiko Nagamatsu
Mr. B. J. Naughton, Jr.
Mrs. Arch W. Naylor
Dr. and Mrs. James V. Neel
Mrs. Clifford T. Nelson
Mr. and Mrs. Kurt K. Neumann
Mrs. Roland O. Nissle
Mr. and Mrs. A. Geoffrey Norman
Mr. and Mrs. Frederick C. O'Dell
Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Olsen
Mr. and Mrs. J. L. Oncley
Mr. and Mrs. David W. Osier
Dr. and Mrs. F. D. Ostrander
Mrs. Erwin C. Overbeck
Mr. and Mrs. Oliver E. Overseth
Dr. and Mrs. Michael Papo
Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Park
Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Patterson
Mr. and Mrs. John Paul
Mr. and Mrs. Pedro Paz
Mr. and Mrs. D. Maynard Phelps
Dr. and Mrs. Charles W. Phillips
Miss Rita J. Pieron
Dr. and Mrs. Richard A. Pollak
Dr. and Mrs. H. Marvin Pollard
Mr. and Mrs. John J. Porter
Mr. and Mrs. Emerson F. Powrie
Mrs. J. Donald Prendergast
Mr. Ernst Pulgram
78
Dr. and Mrs. Gardner C. Quarton
Mr. and Mrs. Carles F. Raber, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Radock
Dr. and Mrs. Robert Rapp,
Mr. Lawrence L. Rauch
Dr. and Mrs. Melvin J. Reinhart
Dr. and Mrs. George A. Richardson
Miss Kathryn Robeson
Mr. Arthur D. Robinson
Mr. Milton Rochman
Miss Nancy Roe
Mr. Erich H. Rothe
Miss Sara L. Rowe
Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Roy
Mr. Frank E. Royce
?Miss Mabel E. Rugen
Miss Margaret R. Runge
Mr. and Mrs. Theodore f.
St. Antoine
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Savarino Mr. Charles H. Sawyer Mr. and Mrs. Frank J. Scheinost Mr. and Mrs. Herbert O. Schlager Mr. and Mrs. Herbert E. Schlesinger Mr. Neill R. Schmeichel Dr. and Mrs. Richard C. Schneider Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Schriber Miss Dorothy Seiferlein Mr. Maurice Sell Mr. James D. Shortt, Jr. Dr. Bruce M. Siegan Dr. and Mrs. Vergil N. Slee Mr. and Mrs. Allan Smith Mr. and Mrs. Ira M. Smith Miss Beatrice A. Snider Mrs. Helen M. Snyder Dr. and Mrs. Harvey Sparks, Jr. Mr. Robert Spicer Mr. W. Allen Spivey Mrs. F. C. Standiford Mr. and Mrs. Eric Stein
GIFT PROGRAM
Mr. Russell Stevenson
Mr. George Stipe
Mrs. Mira Stoll
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Stubbins
Mr. Julius Stulberg
Dr. and Mrs. Walter H. Swartz
Mrs. Florence T. Thomas
Mr. and Mrs. Lynn A. Townsend
Miss Nancy P. Truog
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ullman
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert H. Upton, Jr.
Miss Rose Vainstein
Mr. and Mrs. B. Condit Valentine
Mr. and Mrs. W. Russell Virt
Mrs. Elena Vlisides
Mrs. George Wadley
Mrs. Charles Wagner
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Warschausky
Mr. and Mrs. Merwin H. Waterman
Mrs. Ralph N. Watkins
Mr. and Mrs. Lyndon Welch
Mr. J. Philip Wernette
Mr. and Mrs. W. Scott Westerman,
Jr-
Mrs. B. T. Whipple Mrs. Albert E. White Mr. and Mrs. William C. Wiers Mrs. George W. Willard Dr. and Mrs. Sherwood B. Winslow Miss Pauline P. Wohlford Mr. Joseph E. Wojtowicz Miss Charlotte Wolfe Mr. and Mrs. Ernest A. H. Woodman Mr. Horace H. Work Mrs. Lee Yeckley Mr. Chia-Shun Yih Mr. and Mrs. Paul F. Youngdahl Mr. and Mrs. R. Roger Zauel
79
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
NINETY-THIRD SEASON
International Presentations for the 1971-1972 Season SUMMER CONCERT SERIES-JULY, 1971
Rackham Auditorium Four Piano Recitals -Artists to be announced June 1.
CHORAL UNION SERIES
Hill Auditorium
ARTURO BENEDETTI MICHELANGELI, Pianist . .Monday, October 4
NATHAN MILSTEIN, Violinist .................Monday, November 8
SHIRLEY VERRETT, Mezzo-Soprano..........Thursday, November 18
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA..................Wednesday, December 8
Pierre Boulez, Conductor
ANDRES SEGOVIA, Guitarist ...................Saturday, January 22
JACQUELINE DU PRE, Cellist ...................Friday, Februray 11
PRAGUE SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ............Sunday, February 27
Jindrich Rohan, Conductor BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA .............Tuesday, March 14
William Steinberg, Conductor VIENNA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA .........2:30, Sunday, March 19
Josef Krips, Conductor MINNESOTA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ...........Sunday, April 9
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Conductor
INAUGURAL SERIES FOR THE POWER CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
(Choice of any four for a series.)
MARCEL MARCEAU, French Mime ..............Friday, October 15
and Saturday, October 16 SIERRA LEONE NATIONAL DANCE COMPANY (AFRICA)
Saturday, October 30
80
ROYAL WINNIPEG BALLET COMPANY ..Wednesday, November 10
SWINGLE SINGERS FROM PARIS ............Friday, November 19
CHORICA DANCE THEATER (ATHENS) ....Saturday, November 20
and Sunday, November 21 NATIONAL BALLET OF WASHINGTON
Full production of "Cinderella" (3:00) Saturday, November 27
PARIS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA ...............Monday, January 17
and with Choral Union Singers ............Wednesday, January 19
HERMAN PREY, Baritone ....................Thursday, February 17
JULIAN BREAM, Guitar and Lute ..............Wednesday, March 1
"ENTERTAINMENT FOR ELIZABETH," New York
Pro Musica ....................................Sunday, April 16
(Curtain time 8:00 for all Power Center events except where noted)
CHAMBER ARTS SERIES Rackham Auditorium
PRO CANTIONE ANTIQUA from London ......Monday, October 11
SAAR CHAMBER ORCHESTRA ...............Tuesday, October 26
Antonio Janigro, Conductor
CONCENTUS MUSICUS from Vienna ..........Saturday, November 6
PRAGUE STRING QUARTET ...............Tuesday, November 16
BERLIN OCTET ................................Friday, January 28
OSCAR GHIGLIA, Guitar, and
FRANS BRUEGGEN, Recorder Wednesday, February 23
BOSTON SYMPHONY CHAMBER PLAYERS .....Monday, March 13
EAST ASIAN SERIES
Rackham Auditorium
EDO FESTIVAL OF MUSIC AND PANTOMIME___Friday, October 29
Japanese troup in sacred music and masque dances
P'ANSORI, music of legends from Korea............Friday, February 25
Kim So-Hee, singer, with musicians, all titled "cultural treasures"
SHANTUNG TRADITIONAL MUSIC, from China ... .Friday, April 7
Lu Sheng ensemble of the cheng, p'i-p'a, and the nan-hu (Concerts in Hill Auditorium and Rackham Auditorium at 8:30 unless noted otherwise)
81
MAY FESTIVAL
ANNUAL CHRISTMAS CONCERTS
"Messiah" (Handel)-Three Performances .........Friday, December 3
Saturday, December 4 (2:30) Sunday, December 5
The University Choral Union
Members of The Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra Donald Bryant, Conductor
Soloists to be announced.
ANN ARBOR MAY FESTIVAL 1972 MAY 4, 5, 6, 7 -Five Concerts, Thursday through Sunday
The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Conductor; Thor Johnson, Guest Conductor, and soloists.
Brochures on next season's presentations with ticket information available on request.
82
UNIVERSITY MUSICAL SOCIETY
1879