SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DE WAART CONDUCTS MAHLER 4 a Jacobs Masterworks Concert Edo De Waart, Conductor
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SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DE WAART CONDUCTS MAHLER 4 A Jacobs Masterworks Concert Edo de Waart, conductor March 1 and 2, 2019 FREDERICK DELIUS “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” from A Village Romeo and Juliet SAMUEL BARBER Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 Joélle Harvey, soprano INTERMISSION GUSTAV MAHLER Symphony No. 4 in G Major Bedächtig; nicht eilen In gemächlicher Bewegung; ohne Hast Ruhevoll Sehr behaglich Joélle Harvey, soprano A SOPRANO, AN ORCHESTRA, INNOCENCE There are two choral works on this program. Both are scored for soprano and orchestra, both are some of the most beautiful music ever written, both offer the voice of the child, and both are about innocence. The child in Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 sings from a moment of complete security – a warm night when he is safely surrounded by a loving family. The child in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony sings rapturously of the pleasures that await in heaven and names those simple pleasures with happy anticipation. Part of the beauty of both the Barber and the Mahler is that we know that this innocence will not last. The little boy in Knoxville will soon have his life ripped apart, the child in the Mahler has yet to taste what life will impose. But for a brief shining moment these two great pieces bring us the world of the child in all its shining hope and innocence. “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” from A Village Romeo and Juliet FREDERICK DELIUS Born January 29, 1862, Bradford, Yorkshire Died June 10, 1934, Grez-sur-Loing We think of Frederick Delius as an English composer, but the connection is very slim. Born in England to German parents (his birthname was Fritz Delius), the young man learned to play the piano and violin as a boy. His father wanted him to go into business, but at age 22 Delius talked his father into setting him up as the manager of orange groves in Florida. In Florida Delius had very little to do with oranges but did take music lessons and soaked up African-American folksongs and tales of magic and voodoo. After brief stints in Virginia and New York, Delius moved to Leipzig for formal training with Reinecke; in these years he became good friends with Edvard Grieg and lived briefly in Norway. In 1888 the 26-year-old Delius moved to the village of Grez-sur-Loing, about forty miles south of Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life. The rest of his life was not happy. Delius suffered from disease so debilitating that he eventually lost the use of his legs and became blind. He was assisted in his final years by Eric Fenby, an amanuensis to whom Delius dictated his music. Delius wished to be buried in the garden of his house in Grez-sur-Loing, but French law would not allow this, and after a year his body was disinterred and buried in England. Delius’ music is generally unfamiliar to American audiences, but it has had passionate advocates, mostly prominently Sir Thomas Beecham. Delius composed six operas (one of them, Koanga, is set in Louisiana and tells the tragic tale of a voodoo prince), as well as orchestra and chamber music and a number of choral settings. One of his most famous works is Appalachia, a set of variations for orchestra based on a slave song he heard in America, but today Delius is best remembered for his short orchestral pieces, beautifully shaded and evocative of particular moments or places. In 1907 Delius’ opera A Village Romeo and Juliet was premiered in Berlin. An updated retelling of Shakespeare’s play, it tells of the lovers Sali and Vrenchen, the children of rival farmers locked in a bitter dispute over the ownership of land. The dispute becomes violent, the lovers try to flee to peace, but when they discover that they cannot, they unmoor a hay barge, float out into the river, scuttle it and drown together. Rather than being in acts, the opera is in six scenes, and the musical interlude between the fifth and sixth scenes has become known as “The Walk to the Paradise Garden.” “Paradise Garden” is the name of an inn where the couple has been told they can be alone and dance all night, but once there, they discover this to be a false promise – the inn is full of sketchy types and The Dark Fiddler, the mysterious spirit who hovers over the entire opera. But the walk itself is a moment of pure peace and love, and Delius captures this beautifully. Sali and Vrenchen walk through the warm evening, bound together in what will be (though they do not know it) the last moments of their lives. (The influence of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is clear.) Delius drew themes from the previous five scenes of the opera and wove them together to create this gentle music. In the opera, Delius called for a huge orchestra (quadruple woodwind and six horns), but today “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” is always heard in an arrangement for smaller orchestra by Sir Thomas Beecham. Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 SAMUEL BARBER Born March 9, 1910, West Chester, PA Died January 28, 1981, New York City James Agee (1909-55) was a writer of unusual gifts – he was a poet, novelist, critic and screenwriter. Agee died suddenly at 46, and his reputation rests on two extraordinary works: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a study of Southern sharecropper families, and his novel A Death in the Family, left in manuscript at his death and published posthumously in 1957; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1958. The novel tells the story of the closely-knit family of Jay and Mary Follett and their children Rufus and Catherine; that family is shattered by the death of the father in an automobile accident. (Agee’s middle name was Rufus, and he really did lose his father in this way at age six.) Much earlier, in 1938, Agee had written a sort of prose-poem, composed in one sudden burst of stream-of-consciousness, a piece he called Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Several pages long, it is a vision of childhood as recalled through the eyes of a child – Agee had grown up in Knoxville, and he set out to recreate his memory of being five years old. When, after his death, his editors prepared A Death in the Family for publication, they used Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as a poetic prologue to that novel. Barber had come to know Knoxville when it was still a separate work, and in 1947 – for soprano Eleanor Steber – he made a setting for high voice and orchestra, using approximately the final third of Agee’s text. This was first performed on April 9, 1948, by Steber with Serge Koussevitsky and the Boston Symphony. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 may be the single most beautiful creation in American music. Barber recognized that Agee’s prose-poem captures a universal experience, and his music – by turns nostalgic and bittersweet – is worthy of that text. (Agee, by the way, heard and liked Barber’s setting.) Musically, Knoxville is a sort of rondo: it is sectional in structure, and a few basic themes return in various forms throughout. It opens quietly as the boy sets the scene: a summer evening, quiet, with people watering their lawns or talking. A moment of agitation intrudes as a streetcar passes, clanging and sparking in the night, and then (“Now is the night one blue dew”) the mood changes, almost magically. The family takes quilts out into their back yard and lies looking up at the stars (“On the rough wet grass”). The boy recalls and enumerates – with perfect childlike simplicity – the members of his family around him in the dark and their boarders. It is a moment of security, warmth and wholeness, but – as the reader of the novel knows – a moment that will be shattered by subsequent events. Perhaps some of the profound impact of this child’s vision is the inevitable knowledge that this warm summer night, loving and warm, cannot last. But for these few rapt moments, it does, and the boy blesses those around him and is put to bed, momentarily secure, but – like all children – adrift and alone in the world. Symphony No. 4 in G Major GUSTAV MAHLER Born July 7, 1860, Kalischt, Bohemia Died May 18, 1911, Vienna In April 1897 Mahler was named director of the Vienna Court Opera, the most prestigious post in the world of music, and the grueling demands of this position brought his composing to a standstill: from the summer of 1896 until the summer of 1899 he composed no new music. Finally established in Vienna, he could return to creative work, and during the summer of 1899 he retreated to the resort town of Alt-Aussee in the Styrian Alps and began his Fourth Symphony. He composed the first two movements that summer and completed the symphony on August 5 of the following year at his new summer home at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee. Mahler led the successful first performance in Munich on November 25, 1901. That simple chronology belies the complex genealogy of the Fourth Symphony. In February 1892, when he was the chief conductor of the Hamburg Opera, Mahler had composed a song, Das himmlische Leben, on a text drawn from Das Knaben Wunderhorn portraying a child’s vision of heaven. A few years later, Mahler planned to use this song as the seventh and final movement of his Third Symphony, but when that work grew too long he detached the song and made new plans to use it as the last movement of a projected six-movement Fourth Symphony.