PROGRAM NOTES by Daniel Maki Serenade to Music by Ralph
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PROGRAM NOTES by Daniel Maki Serenade to Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 -1958) Duration: Approximately 15 minutes First Performance: October 5, 1938 in London Last ESO Performance: These are the first ESO performances of the work Little is known about Shakespeare’s own musical abilities and predilections but one thing is certain: his verbal art has over the centuries had an enormous impact on the related art of music. The vast amount of music generated by his work begins with the music meant to be heard as part of the plays themselves - there are reportedly some 300 stage directions for various types of music in the plays. We can then move on to so-called incidental music, i.e., music written to enhance the production without being part of the action itself. (Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is perhaps the best known example.) These two categories mark only the beginning of the Shakespeare inspired music literature: they don’t count the many instrumental works that stand by themselves but were inspired by the Immortal Bard, or the hundreds of operas, ballets, and other stage works based on his works, or the literally thousands of songs and choral works that have been set to his words. A Shakespeare Music Catalog, published in 1991, listed more than 21,000 Shakespeare inspired works, and that number is surely substantially higher by now. Of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ several contributions to Shakespeareana, the best known is the Serenade to Music, a work that beautifully celebrates both the poet and the art of music itself. It is special occasion music, originally written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the performance debut of conductor Sir Henry Wood, a major figure in English musical life. These days, Sir Henry is best remembered as the founding father of that uniquely English cultural institution popularly known as “the Proms”, and, more formally, as the BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts. The Proms, which present serious music in an informal atmosphere sometimes closer to that of a rock concert than of a traditional concert hall, trace their lineage back to 1895, when a 26 year old Henry Wood conducted the series for the first time. He would conduct the Proms until his death nearly half a century later in 1944. Although he was offered positions as conductor of both the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony, he chose to stay in Britain, where he served as a major influence in raising performance standards and in developing the public taste for music. For the gala jubilee celebration held in Royal Albert Hall in October of 1938 conducted by Wood himself, Vaughan Williams had the idea of choosing 16 leading English singers, hand picked by composer and conductor, who would sing Shakespeare’s words from The Merchant of Venice sometimes together as a chorus but occasionally also as soloists. The composer went so far as to print the initials of each singer in the published score to indicate their separate parts. The orchestra was made up of players from three major London orchestras that Wood would have known very well. Incidentally, participating in the emotional event was Serge Rachmaninoff, who after performing his own music on the first half of the program, sat in a box with Lady Wood for the remainder. He was reportedly moved to tears by the Serenade and commented that he had never become so deeply emotional about a piece of music. The composer soon realized that it would be impractical for future performances to assemble 16 star singers, so he eventually prepared several other versions, including ones for chorus and orchestra, chorus and piano, and even orchestra alone. The text is a slightly adapted form of Lorenzo’s speech to Jessica in Portia’s garden from Act Five of The Merchant of Venice. As the lovers enjoy the beautiful, moonlit Mediterranean night, Lorenzo comments on the beauty of the scene and then moves on to a celebration of the power of music and its connection to celestial movements, i.e., a reference to the philosophical concept of the music of the spheres, a recurring theme in Renaissance thought. Setting the beautifully dreamy nocturnal atmosphere is the exquisite opening violin solo that introduces the chorus singing “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!” The mood changes and darker emotion intervenes as male voices describe celestial bodies. Horn calls announce the goddess Diana leading to a melancholy passage set to the famous words describing “the man that hath no music in himself”. Such a fellow, the Bard tells us, “is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils”, and is not to be trusted. Diana’s horns return once again and the music finally returns to the dreamy softness of the opening as the chorus sings, “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.” The music gradually trails off into ethereal silence. * * * Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) by Gustav Mahler (1860 -1911) Duration: Approximately 16 minutes First Performance: March 16, 1896 in Berlin Last ESO Performance: November, 2010; Hugh Russell, baritone; Stephen Squires, conductor There is a popular notion, spurred on by many a novel, play, and Hollywood movie, that composers invariably simply pour the emotions of the moment into their work in a fit of wild despair or ecstasy as a kind of catharsis. That theory is easily refuted- many a musical masterpiece has been written in roughly the same frame of mind as that of a good carpenter crafting a bookcase or house for a client. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky once captured this business-like attitude very well: “I sit down regularly at my desk at 9 o’clock and Mesdames les Muses have learned to keep the appointment.” On the other hand, it would be a great mistake to assume that personal emotion plays no role in artistic creation, and the career of Gustav Mahler stands as a particularly good example. Some composers have indeed striven for an objective approach to their music but Mahler’s mercurial temperament is well known and there is no doubt that many of his works reflect that quality and fully deserve the adjective “autobiographical.” Songs of a Wayfarer aptly proves the point. It is a young man’s music, perhaps his first truly mature masterpiece, completed in its first version at the age of 24 when he was involved in an unhappy love affair. As assistant conductor of the opera house at Kassel he had fallen in love with a coloratura soprano named Johanna Richter. It was the young artist’s first deep emotional attachment and seems to have caused a personal crisis. Matters apparently came to a head on New Year’s Eve of 1884. In a letter to a friend Mahler said that he had cried all night but had written her a group of songs. “She does not know them. What could they tell her beyond what she knows already? ..... The songs are planned as though a wandering journeyman who has suffered some sort of fate sets out into the world and wanders musingly and alone.” The exact genesis of the songs has been the subject of much scholarly debate. It is now generally agreed that work may have begun as early as 1883, but that they were whipped into shape in a fury of inspiration in the week before the above mentioned crisis and were completed in some form by January 1, 1885. This version was for voice and piano but it would not be until 1896 that Mahler would complete the version for orchestra. The skillfully written poems are by Mahler himself, showing influences of the German folk poetry that would serve as a strong influence throughout much of his work. It is important to note that the four songs form a unified whole known as a song cycle, a concept that had been an important part of romantic music since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because cycles had traditionally been for voice and piano, Mahler’s orchestral cycles – he wrote several – belong to an entirely new and important genre. An important technical feature of the work is the use of so-called progressive tonality: i.e., the practice of ending a work or movement in a different key from that of the beginning. Here this untraditional technique produces the effect of “wandering” from song to song, exactly as our wandering wayfarer moves through his melancholy life. The opening song, “When my Darling has her Wedding Day”, begins with a chirpy sounding figure in the orchestra technically known to musicians as a gruppetto. (It is a commonly used ornament consisting of a note that is surrounded by its neighboring higher and lower notes and then returning to the original. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas begins with a gruppetto figure.) This figure will appear more than 20 times throughout the movement, quickly in the orchestra to portray the liveliness of the wedding but much slower in the solo voice to indicate his despair and isolation from the joyous event. After his declaration that he will weep alone in his room while his beloved is being married, the mood changes suddenly as our wayfarer finds solace in nature and we hear beautifully orchestrated bird calls and joyously colorful passage work. His happiness is short lived, however, as he tells birds not to sing and flowers not to bloom. “Spring is past”, and his sorrow returns. The second song, “I walked across the fields this Morning”, presents the highest spirits of the work. Listeners familiar with Mahler’s popular Symphony No.