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Tuesday Evening, April 5, 2016, at 8:00 Isaac Stern Auditorium / Ronald O. Perelman Stage Conductor’s Notes Q&A with Leon Botstein at 7:00 presents A Mass of Life LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor FREDERICK DELIUS A Mass of Life Part I Animato Animoso Andante tranquillo con dolcezza Agitato ma moderato Andante molto tranquillo Intermission Part II: On the Mountains Introduction: Andante Con elevazione e vigore Andante Lento Lento molto Allegro, ma non troppo, con gravità Largo, con solennità SARAH FOX, Soprano AUDREY BABCOCK, Mezzo-soprano RODRICK DIXON, Tenor THOMAS CANNON, Baritone BARD FESTIVAL CHORALE JAMES BAGWELL, Director This performance is generously supported by the Delius Trust. This evening’s concert will run approximately two hours and ten minutes including one 20-minute intermission. American Symphony Orchestra welcomes the many organizations who participate in our Community Access Program, which provides free and low-cost tickets to underserved groups in New York’s five boroughs. For information on how you can support this program, please call (212) 868-9276. PLEASE SWITCH OFF YOUR CELL PHONES AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES. ASO’S 2016–17 VANGUARD SERIES AT CARNEGIE HALL Wednesday, October 19, 2016 Troubled Days of Peace with the Bard Festival Chorale Two one-act operas with strikingly different reactions to tyranny. Ernst Krenek – Der Diktator (“The Dictator”) Richard Strauss – Friedenstag (“Day of Peace”) Friday, November 18, 2016 Bernstein and the Bostonians This concert pays tribute to a group of composers known as the “Boston School” who lived, studied, taught, and composed in and around that city. Leonard Bernstein – Candide Overture Irving Fine – Symphony Harold Shapero – Symphony for Classical Orchestra Arthur Berger – Ideas of Order Richard Wernick – …and a time for peace Friday, February 10, 2017 Prague Central: Great 20th-Cenutry Czech Composers Though right in the center of the group of countries that defined the Western musical tradition, Czech composers often felt like outsiders looking in. Víteˇzslav Novák – In the Tatras Bohuslav Martinu˚ – Symphony No. 3 Josef Suk – Fantastické scherzo Erwin Schulhoff – Symphony No. 5 Friday, May 12, 2017 The Apostles with the Bard Festival Chorale England’s greatest composer after Purcell wrote a magnificent but rarely-heard setting of the New Testament, following the story of the Twelve through the Resurrection. Edward Elgar – The Apostles SUBSCRIBE TO ASO Subscriptions for the 2016–17 season are now on sale at AmericanSymphony.org/subscribe and (212) 868-9ASO (9276). Just choose three or four concerts, and all seats in all locations are just $25. FROM THE Music Director A Mass of Life notably the African-American popula- by Leon Botstein tion of the South. Delius’ training after he returned from America was largely The life and work of Frederick Delius German, though among his staunchest defy both characterization and compar- advocates were Scandinavians. But he ison. His music is distinctive in the attached himself to no school or style sense that its individuality is unmistak- and his improbable sojourns in Europe able and its style reveals influences only and North America ended up rendering obliquely. Delius was born a British him an outsider everywhere: an English subject, and we have become used to composer who lived in France, whose associating him with an “English” sen- work was championed and published in sibility, but Delius suggests little of Germany and who was as attached to what sounds English in the music of the poetry of Walt Whitman as he was Elgar, for example. In fact there are to that of Friedrich Nietzsche. those who reject entirely the idea that there is anything particularly “English” Delius’ uncompromising but intuitive about his music. Perhaps this is because individuality led not only to his being at there seems to be too much unedited the margins of European musical life expressiveness in Delius’ music; indeed during his lifetime, but an object of there is a fabric of sonority and har- controversy, which he remains. Few monies we would more likely think of composers seem to elicit such strong as French. He did write a symphonic reactions. Delius’ partisans have been poem in 1899 entitled Paris: Song of a and remain uncommonly vociferous. Great City and he took up residence Most famous among them was Sir there eventually. Delius was in the habit Thomas Beecham, who worked tire- of connecting landscape with musical lessly on Delius’ behalf. But the list form. In terms of form, in his instrumen- includes the conductor Fritz Cassirer, tal and operatic music, one can therefore scion of one of Germany’s most illustri- detect the influence of Liszt and a Wag- ous extended families, and Florent nerian impulse towards extended musical Schmitt, the French composer. Detrac- narration, sustained by dense reliance on tors have found the music too mean- chromatic harmonies free of the rigorous dering, too atmospheric and ill-formed formal and rhythmic traditions champi- and without any persuasive rhythmic oned by Max Reger. pacing. Deryck Cooke, the eminent Eng- lish scholar who was one of the first to Delius may have grown up in England, attempt a completion of the tenth sym- but his family was of German origin phony of Mahler, is reputed to have and as an adult he only lived in England quipped that to admit to being a Delius briefly during World War I. But before partisan was akin to confessing to being he settled outside of Paris, he also lived a drug addict. in Florida and Virginia, nominally run- ning a citrus farm and pursuing music Delius was born to a prosperous mer- as both student and teacher. This was chant family and struggled to persuade unusual for an aspiring European. his father to support a career in music. America left an indelible impression on He essentially trained himself, with Delius—both its landscape and people, periods of formal study (primarily in Leipzig), but he was never a performer journey. It confirmed his atheism and and he never entirely shed the image of offered a defense of his commitment to being perhaps nothing more than a self- music. Nietzsche himself harbored trained gentleman amateur. Readers dreams of becoming a composer, and may bristle at this or the following no art form was as central to his out- comparison, but in terms of reputation, look as music. It is therefore no wonder context, and reception, Delius is sug- among Delius’ finest works is the set- gestive of the career of Charles Ives in ting of Nietzsche’s text in the ironic America. Ives’ music is certainly Amer- form of a “Mass”; but this Mass is pre- ican in a way Delius’ is not English, but cisely an inversion of the Christian both were innovators who lived at the orthodoxy implied by the title. Delius margins of musical culture, operating employs the ritual association of the on their own, iconoclasts and fiercely word Mass against itself. For this independent individuals. Both had a “Mass” celebrates the human and tem- biographical connection to the turn of poral existence, not the promise of the century world of business and the death and salvation on the grounds that tensions between artistic sensibilities and life on earth, in one’s body, is somehow the world of commerce. Amateurism a punishment, a temporary compromise was lauded and professionalism derided. whose end will be, one hopes, the immor- Delius and Ives lived in a culture in tality of the soul. which the central argument of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece—the fate of the A Mass of Life is one of the great choral aesthetic in modernity—in the 1901 works of its time. Its infrequency in novel Buddenbrooks resonated through- concert is to be lamented. The reasons out Europe and North America, well for its obscurity include of course its beyond Mann’s native Bremen. logistical demands and Delius’ own reputation and marginal place in the The mention of Thomas Mann is apt, standard repertory. But the reasons also since he and Delius came of age in the his- include the text. Delius’ Whitman set- torical moment when Friedrich Nietzsche tings seem more inviting, since Whitman was the key influential philosophical is embraced as the true voice of Ameri- voice for a new generation. Nietzsche’s can patriotism. Nietzsche on the other most famous book, perhaps the finest hand has gained a reputation as a destruc- piece of German poetry to be written tive voice, as an apologist for nihilism since the death of Goethe, Also Sprach and violence, for the anti-social, for elit- Zarathustra, A Book for All or None, ist snobbery, obscurantist thought, and was a sensation when it first appeared in above all as an inspiration for the Nazis. 1883. It put forward a trans-valuation of the meaning of good and evil, chal- Nietzsche’s writings are truly hard to lenged the language of morality, lamented categorize, and the disputes about his the influence of Christianity, pilloried meanings and influence will not cease. the marketplace, journalism, social con- But only selected attributes about the ventions, hierarchies of learning, the con- text inspired Delius. First, Nietzsche’s ceits of democracy, and celebrated the language is as musical as possibly can potential of the individual, as artist—in be imagined. It sings and dances its way the world, in the present—without any off the page. Second, one of the few concern for a mythic afterlife. philosophers and writers Nietzsche admired deeply was Ralph Waldo Delius was awestruck by this text. It Emerson. That fact links him oddly to seemed to vindicate his personal life America, and thereby offers another perspective on why Delius, an English- poet, Whitman, would have been so sus- man who worked in America, who fell in ceptible to the greatness of Nietzsche’s love with aspects of its non-aristocratic Zarathustra, one of the few works of culture (consider Delius’ 1903 work literature to have, for better or worse, a Appalachia) including its most populist decisive historical impact.