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Notes on the Program Four Songs, Op. 13 Samuel Barber Born on March 8, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania; Died in New York City on January 23, 1981
The four songs of
Samuel Barber that G. Schirmer published in 1940 as his Opus 13 were
composed shortly after he returned from his two-year stay in Rome made
possible by a generous prize (living quarters, meals and stipend) awarded
him “with high praise” by the American Academy in Rome. As it turned out,
Barber was not entirely enthusiastic about the community life of the
“Fellows,” as he and the other winners were known—he likened it to “a
somewhat expatriated Harvard-Club atmosphere” in a disdainful letter to his
friend Gian-Carlo Menotti. So he didn’t even bother to unpack—“I am the
scandal of the Academy.” Instead he rented a “studio” in refurbished
stables abutting the history-rich Villa Aurelia nearby, “full of charm, with
a view of gardens, pines under moonlight, Rome in the distance, and some
ancient yellow stone stairs.” All in all, young Barber found the venerable Italian capital very conducive to work; he finished his First Symphony in short order, as well as half a dozen songs. Still, he was eager to get back to America and his friends, and his first project was this group of songs. (He was a very creditable baritone himself, and his favorite aunt was the celebrated mezzo-soprano Louise Homer, so he knew he would never lack for performances or for empathic support.)
He had become attracted to the verse of the mystic-Victorian writer Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), whose poems had been published in 1930, almost 40 years after his death. The lyrical “Heaven Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil” especially appealed to Barber because it echoed his own hopes for calm and tranquility in this world and the next. He changed the order of the title to “A Nun Takes the Veil: Heaven-Haven,” and dedicated the song to Irish patriot and fellow Hopkins enthusiast Rohini Coomara, who had described the poet he admired as “half-musician writing a poetry that was half-music” when he first met Barber in Vienna in 1934, referring thus to Hopkins’s innovative experiments in verbal rhythmic techniques. (Hopkins was a self-taught musician, as well as a Jesuit priest.) Barber matched his music to the text by using a freely lyrical recitative style, supported by rolled chords.
Barber’s affection for the poetry of William Butler Years (1865-1939) can possibly be explained by his hope that, both of them being Irish, they might somehow be related. When he visited Sligo in the north of Ireland, he sought out Yeats’s burial plot, and was surprised to find that it was the only “Yeats” tombstone to be found in the ancient burying ground, whereas there were hundreds of “Barbers.” Sam’s consolation was that every Barber was “Safe in the Arms” of someone or other, whereas Yeats’s stone bore only by the bleak quotation from one of his own final poems: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!”
“The Secrets of the Old” was first published in Yeat’s famous collection, “The Tower,” in 1928. (In it also is the famous “Second Coming” with the line about “the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.”) Barber was always sorry that he could find only two Yeats lyrics to make into songs; “Yeats is really too good to need music,” he wrote. “The Secrets of the Old” affirms everlasting friendship among three agèd women whose bond is perpetuated by the sharing of secrets of youth. The symmetry of Barber’s song, which was completed in September of 1938, corresponds to the three stanzas of the lyric, its lighthearted witty interpretation of the text underscored by the alternating duple and triple meters.
Probably the best-known of Barber’s more than 100 songs for solo voice and piano is the third of Opus 13, “Sure on this Shining Night,” to a text by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Agee, who published it in his 1934 collection of poems, Permit Me Voyage. Structurally it resembles songs by Brahms and Schumann, especially in such adroit use of the canon, which Brahms took such joy in (where the voice and the piano imitate each other melodically at the distance of one measure), and by the pulsating accompaniment employed by Schumann in songs like “Ich grolle nicht” or “Liebestreu.”
In 1979, when the telephone company was reluctant to release unlisted numbers, he had just taken a new apartment in Manhattan. Barber needed to call his friend Gian Carlo Menotti, who he knew was at the apartment, but he couldn’t remember his new number. But Barber couldn’t remember his new number. He pleaded with the telephone operator, and to his astonishment, she said, “If you are THE Samuel Barber, can you sing the first line of ‘Sure on this shining night’?” So there he was, standing in a telephone booth, singing the opening of his song. And he got his number.
Frederic Prokosch, born in Wisconsin to parents of Austrian ancestry, wrote successfully in all sorts of genres. The lyrics for “Nocturne” come from his poetry collection, The Carnival, published in 1938. Though it was not among the composer’s favorites of his good friend’s output, he decided to set it to music because of its “intensely enigmatic and super-romantic” mood, and also because “the music for it just popped out in my head!”
Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire FRANCIS POULENC Born in Paris on January 7, 1899; Died in Paris on January 30, 1963 L’anguille (The Eel) Carte postale (Postcard) Avant le cinéma (Before Going to the Movies) 1904
Born into a well-to-do Parisian family, with a mother who was an excellent pianist and linguist and a father who was rich, Poulenc’s education and advantages were impeccable. While music seemed easy for the young man, he was eager to polish his skills. He applied to Maurice Ravel for lessons, but their personalities did not really mesh. He went to Vienna to seek out Arnold Schoenberg, but their æsthetics were not really compatible. He went to Rome to visit Alfredo Casella, but their attempts at communication were really impenetrable. (Casella spoke no French and Poulenc no Italian.) Finally he came back to Paris, and settled down to compose in his own style: jazzy, sentimental, dry, lyrical and romantic in equal portions, and in doing so enriched the world’s song literature with a variety unparalleled in this century. In addition to talent he had taste. Among his many close friends were some of the finest of French poets: Guillaume Apollinaire, of course, and his sometime mistress, painter Marie Laurencin (herself a casual poet under the pen name of Louise Lalanne), Max Jacob, Paul Éluard, Louise Vilmorin, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon and Colette.
First, a word about the whirling tornado that was Apollinaire. Part clown, part scholar, part drunkard (a large part), part gourmand, lover, criminal, littérateur, soldier, Roman Catholic, pornographer, wanderer, soldier, husband—he packed a lot into his woefully short life, because he was breathlessly enthusiastic about all aspects of everything. He joined the army in World War I, fighting with “all the enthusiasm of a convert,” in Roger Shattuck’s phrase. Two years later he sustained several wounds to his head, which necessitated repeated surgery and barred further military service. He married his beloved Jacqueline Kolb in March of 1918, only to die of aggravations of his war wounds and the Spanish grippe the following November 19, just after the Armistice, at the age of 38.
But back to Poulenc. At first critics were put off by his simplicity and directness. It was the American music writer Edward Tatnall Canby who was among the earliest to point out the virtues of that ease and balance, that intentional light hand in the development of his material.
Throughout most of his life he composed music to poems and other works by Apollinaire: all told, he wrote thirty-two Apollinaire songs, more than a quarter of his total output, and an opera, Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Apparently he liked the poet’s suggestive insouciance and slangy wit as much as his more lyrical and nostalgic qualities. The four songs we hear this evening were composed in 1931, and first performed on a recital of Poulenc’s songs in the Salle Chopin in Paris on June1 of that year by mezzo-soprano Suzanne Peignot. Poulenc himself was the pianist. The songs were published by the Paris firm of Salabert later that same year.
Poulenc himself wrote these notes in his Journal de mes Mélodies about these Apollinaire songs:
I have a predilection for “L’Anguille,” which always evokes for me one of those sleazy, “by the half-hour” hotels, with its rhythm of little footsteps in chenille slippers. It ought to move one. Sing the song without irony, believing in the text. The word “Sunday” is definitely in the poem. [Here Poulenc refers to a rather vulgar saying, current in his time, about what Sundays are good for; the bourgeoisie always go to church, while the rich and lazy involve themselves in other, far different, pleasures at home.] “Postcard” must have an imperturbable rhythm; one thinks of Misia Sert [who became the astonishingly exotic wife and mistress to several, finishing up with her last marriage to the Spanish muralist José Sert] at the piano, as painted by [Pierre] Bonnard. “Before Going to the Cinema” should also be sung without irony, perfectly straight. “1904”—how much I love this kaleidoscope of words! Colette pointed out to me a typo in the original edition of the poem, which I changed to “Hebe, who served wine to the gods,” not “Hebe who was served by the gods.” Do not exaggerate overmuch the satiated and erotic side of the final plunge. The music will do it for you.
Fünf Rückertlieder GUSTAV MAHLER Born in Kalischt, then Bohemia, on July 7, 1860; Died in Vienna on May 18, 1911 Ich abnet’ einen linden Duft (I breathed a gentle fragrance) Liebst du um Schönheit (If you love for beauty) Blicke mir nicht in die Liede (Do not look at my songs) Um mitternacht (At midnight) Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I have become lost to the world)
The first four of the five glorious songs we refer to by the name of their poet, Friedrich Rückert, were composed in the spring of 1901 when Mahler was also close to finishing the villa he had been promising himself for years. In fact, he himself recognized that this was the most productive summer of his life. He finished not only the villa but a number of Rückert songs, and began enthusiastically on early sketches for his Fifth Symphony.
Gustav was ecstatic about the house. “Would you ever have believed that we should be in such a little bit of heaven, with the light sparkling over the lake and the nightbirds lulling us as the late afternoon sets?” He quickly learned to begin his day with a brisk dip into the water. Today the house stands pretty much as before, a rather graceless mass of wood and masonry, but the view is still breathtaking. Mahler always thought it brought back his childhood and the many memories of days of pleasure when he could sit out under a linden tree in his native Bohemia and read book after book.
Early in his reading life he had discovered Dostoevsky, and had found in the Russian’s writing almost everything he was trying to express in music. To Mahler the famous conversation in The Brothers Karamazov between Ivan and Alyosha with their thoughts about the sorrows of the world (“How can one be happy on this earth while a single being is unhappy?”) were an exact replication of his own mood. A kind of choked grief was never far below the surface. Not surprisingly, he was also an ardent reader of Ibsen. And he could be easily reduced to tears by poetry. He was too receptive to it not to understand that the most beautiful, the most perfect poems are complete in themselves and that, in consequence, the greatest poets are always betrayed by composers.
That July of 1901, Mahler’s first completed composition was “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft,” possibly unique in evoking the delicate fragrance of the lime tree which Rückert associates with his love.
There follows a particularly romantic miniature, “Blicke mich nicht in die Lieder.” With a rather unusual theme, the poet warns us not to trust the process of creation too much. Only the finished work is what counts, not how it was achieved. The second stanza, with its analogy to the work of bees, provides Mahler with one of his famous musical images. The accompaniment provides an unmistakable buzzing sound.
Next comes “Im Mitternacht,” turning from most brilliant day to deepest night, and the accompaniment grows bleak for a song that is almost more symphonic than lyrical in character. Each of the four stanzas the poet sends his thought upward into the dark sky but finds no answer to life’s struggles and sorrows; only in the final stanza does he hear the calm voice of the “Lord of death and life,” in a hymn-like conclusion.
The song to be last composed, “Liebst du um Schonheit,” is the most traditional of the five. It is clearly strophic, stressing the words “Liebe” (love) and “Immer” (always): Love must be for its own sake, not for beauty, youth or riches.
One of Mahler’s most moving and affecting songs, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” is again unusual. It invokes the peace that is achieved though the poet’s withdrawal from the workaday turmoil of the world. The melodic development, the transparent interweaving of the accompaniment and the vocal lines fluctuate ever so subtly between the song’s inner tension and its heavenly repose.
Mahler was so delighted with his new songs that on August 10 he summoned his old school friend and confidante, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, to hear them. She was as delighted as he; the powerful ending of “Im Mitternacht” reminded her of the glorious climax of the Second Symphony. As for “Blicke mir nicht an die Lieder,” the text seemed to her so typical of him that he could have written it himself. About “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” he was particularly satisfied. To Natalie he confessed, “It’s I myself. It’s the feeling that fills one and rises to the tip of one’s tongue but goes no further,” whereas “Ich atmet” described the way one feels “in the presence of a beloved being of whom one is completely sure without a single word needing to be spoken.”
Why Rückert? This poet, the son of a wealthy lawyer, was born in Bohemia in 1788 and lived the life of the well-to-do; in time he married the daughter of a rich man and wrote love poetry to her, eventually becoming an Orientalist and translator. When a couple of his sons died tragically, he found the poetic ton that spoke so directly to Mahler and would shortly produce his Kindertotenlieder in 1904, but even before that, the composer told his friend Anton von Webern, “I really could not compose anything but Rückert; his is lyric poetry from the source; all else is lyric poetry of a derivative sort.”
Chansons de Bilitis CLAUDE DEBUSSY Born in St. Germain-en-Laye on August 22, 1862; Died in Paris on March 25, 1918
Debussy, an unusually well-read poetry maven (in French, Flemish, German and English), always took great care in selecting the poets whose work he wished to set to music. In the autumn of 1890, a bookseller friend of his introduced him to a poet who would soon become his closest friend and wisest, if nuttiest, adviser: Pierre Louÿs, born in Ghent, Belgium, with the surname Louis, which he changed to Louÿs as an adolescent because he thought the original sounded too Jewish. Louÿs published his first erotic stories at the age of 18, and shortly thereafter, in 1894, a collection of 143 fragments purportedly written by an ancient Greek courtesan, Bilitis, born c. 630 B. C. on a remote Greek island. This publication of Chansons de Bilitis made famous the name of Pierre Louÿs, and stunned the literary world, which was completely taken in by the hoax. Soon the “experts” were exposed. The true author of the poetic fragments was in a few months easily recognized as Louÿs himself, who had carefully drawn on historically recognized documents like The Palatine Anthology, its material drawn from authentic writers like Meleager of Gadara, and even a few epigrams by the great Sappho of Lesbos. Classicists scoffed at the Bilitis claims but universally admired the mellow sensuality and polished style of the faux fragments. Debussy was enchanted with them, and soon he had selected three of “these enchanting and licentious poems in prose” to set to music.
Louÿs, newly popular because of his “scandale” and brilliantly successful socially, continued to publish lubricious novels like Aphrodite, a wild best seller and “another fount of elegant sensuality and refined style,” as well as a Manual of Etiquette in 1917, reputed to reach unparalleled limits of obscene, though gorgeous, prose. Different as their paths seemed now to have become—Debussy slightly prudish and withdrawn, Louÿs ever on the lookout for elegant thrills—the two men remained lifelong friends, and their main contribution to the musical repertoire, Chansons de Bilitis, still as sophisticated a masterpiece as ever.
“La flûte de Pan” contrasts the ingenuousness of Pan’s flute with the darker register of the classical instrument, the pathetic croaking of the green frogs, and the nervousness of Bilitis who frets that her mother will not believe it took her so long in the forest to looks for her sash. And then there are the even less reticent avowals in “La chevelure” with its undulating, passionate eroticism. Or the glacial landscape of “Le tombeau de Naïades.” Where do they lead, those mysterious footsteps marked out against the snow? Through the pale expanse of wintry sky are reflected great blocks of ice Pan has hewn from the tomb, and the palpitating Bilitis evoking similes of honey and gleaming hair that translate into a colorless disillusionment. Is this the stuff of a new sensuality?
Three songs
When Rachmaninov and Natalia Alexandrovna returned from their honeymoon to live on Sergei’s family estate, Ivanovka (which Rachmaninov dearly loved and eventually bought for himself from a cousin), the young composer polished up some songs he had composed in those idyllic days with his new bride and collected them into Opus 21, which his friend Karl Gutheil published in December of 1902, on the heels of Rachmaninov’s wedding and the overwhelming success of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus 18. From this song collection comes “How fair this spot!” Opus 21, No. 7. The text is a lyric by the sometime political writer Glafira Adolfovna Einerling, almost Rachmaninov’s exact contemporary, who published love poems like this one under the pseudonym G. Galina. Another (perhaps slightly jealous) young friend of Rachmaninov’s, Marietta Shaginian, who took a great interest in his songs and their lyrics, wrote to him, objecting to the poem and calling the words “doggerel,” but for once—actually, several times—Rachmaninov simply paid her no mind. Galina’s brief lyric says, succinctly and achingly, “In this beautiful spot, where the brooklet reflects the clouds above it, I can at last be alone with God and my thoughts of you.” It is dedicated to his new wife, Natalia Alexandrovna, whom he indicates with a curlicued capital “N” in the score.
Another touching lyric, “Oh, Do not Grieve,” this one by Alexei Aboutkhim, appears in twelve songs collected as the composer¹s Opus 14, published in 1896 and dedicated to Nadezhda Alexandranrova, who was the gypsy sister of Anna Lodizhenskaya and her husband Peter Lodïhensky. Both were friends of the composer, and Rachmaninov had dedicated a Capriccio on Gypsy Themes, Opus 12, to Peter. At least one biographer suggests that Rachmaninov's feeling for the beautiful Anna was almost on a level of that by Anna Karenina for Prince Vronsky; he had at least dedicated the song, “Oh, no, I beg you, do not forsake me,” which Leonid Yakovlev introduced to the world.
Opus 14, comprising twelve songs, was composed in the fall of 1896, when Rachmaninov found himself once again strapped financially. He wrote to a friend that he was churning out compositions; at least, he joked, his need for money kept his nose to the grindstone. No. 11 of these is “Floods of Spring,” setting a text by Feodor Tuchev (1803-1843), a minor clerk in a Russian embassy. The song is dedicated to Rachmaninov¹s first piano teacher, Anna Ornatzkaya, who had been responsible for getting Sergei into the St. Petersburg Conservatory almost two decades earlier. In her affectionate letter of thanks, she confesses that, alas, she has grown arthritic, and the song’s accompaniment is now a little too difficult for her stiff fingers.
—Program notes by Clair W. Van Ausdall especially for Susan Wadsworth and Young Concert Artists, Inc. |