VC Program Notes: A Romantic Celebration

Below are my program notes for the Virginia Chorale's upcoming concert of Romantic choral music.

The 19th century is arguably the most beloved period in Western music history, as the enduring popularity of Romantic composers from every corner of Europe attests. Our first program of 2009 is a mid-Winter toast to this grand tradition . It is also a tribute to my predecessor, Robert Shoup, whose first concert as the Virginia Chorale’s second music director was devoted to music from this rich epoch.

The period is notable for many reasons. With the revolutionary, “heroic” style of Beethoven in the early years of the century, the orchestra emerged as one of the most important vehicles for substantive music via the still developing genre of the symphony. The important forms of the preceding Classical period canonized by Haydn and Mozart—the symphony, solo concerto, & string quartet—were given programmatic weight and depth by Beethoven and his successors, like Brahms, Bruckner & Mahler. At the other end of this colorful spectrum, composers like Schubert & Schumann concentrated as much creative energy into miniature forms like the art song, and intimate “musical moments” for solo piano. The rise of choral societies—both amateur and professional—championed by the likes of Mendelssohn and Brahms, laid the groundwork for organizations like ours. Concurrently, 19th century opera flowered in Italy with the triumvirate of composers—Bellini, Donizetti & Rossini—writing virtuoso vocal music in the style we call Bel Canto (literally “Beautiful Singing”). Giuseppe Verdi inherited this mantle. As Beethoven did with the symphony & string quartet, Verdi interwove form and content with Shakespearian dexterity to create a body of musical dramas unparalleled in the history of Italian opera. Space limitations prevent me from further developing these threads of analysis, thus we will leave Berlioz, Wagner, Russia, and the English musical Renaissance for another program (the latter is here represented by Stanford’s exquisite motet, Beati quorum via).

The first half of the program is a novel twist on the most traditional of sacred music forms, the Mass. Our “eclectic and romantic” mass is framed by sublime movements from Joseph Rheinberger. Like Dietrich Buxtehude two centuries earlier, Rheinberger is an unjustly neglected composer known primarily for his organ music. His Mass for double choir in E-flat is a masterwork indebted to the poly-choral style of the Venetian baroque. Dedicated to Pope Leo XIII, its style places Rheinberger in opposition to the conservative Cecilian movement, which sought to restore supposed Renaissance-style “purity” to liturgical music and rejected the expressive, subjective mien of Romanticism. Even so, Rheinberger (like Brahms) was not a musical pioneer aligned with Wagner and the so-called New German School, and his idiosyncratic style resists pat classification. Another idiosyncratic composer whose output refuses simple categorization is Anton Bruckner. A self-effacing, diminutive, late-blooming, Wagnerian disciple who was a master organ improvisationalist, Bruckner is known for his massive, Teutonic symphonies and his Cecilian-inspired motets. "Os Justi" is a gem of the latter genre, inspired by the Cecilian movement’s interest in Renaissance polyphony but highly expressive and individual and therefore not in line with the movements’ reforms. Following the successes of Elgar and Holst, Charles Villiers Stanford was among the generation of English composers indebted to Wagner and German romanticism, and thus one of several sparks responsible for the “English Musical Renaissance. “ So-called because of the dearth of successful English composers in the 18th and early 19th century, this romantic Renaissance in Britain produced a vast body of music for the concert hall and the cathedral. "Beati quorum via" is an exquisite 6-part motet displaying Stanford’s characteristic melding of a continental romantic idiom to a refined Anglican sensibility.

While not liturgical, the trio of opera choruses that form the heart of our eclectic Mass function as a Credo. Verdi’s opera choruses have been beloved of singers and audiences since their composition. In the case of these two popular examples from "Macbeth" and "Nabucco," the chorus is pivotal—functioning at both the dramatic and symbolic levels, in a counterpoint of meaning and significance. Both the Chorus of Scottish refugees and the Chorus of Hebrew slaves comment on the action like a Greek chorus. Both choruses speak for their collective peoples, and thus represent the dramatic conflict of their respective narratives, even as they transcend the specificity inherent in the unified drama. Verdi is the Shakespeare of opera for this singular gift: humanizing the particular into the universal. In between Verdi’s inspired choruses we insert the miniature “cantata” sung offstage in Act II of "Tosca." (I wrote a blog about operas at the movies--Tosca and Die Walküre--last month, for enquiring minds). The earnest prayer of the chorus accompanying the eponymous soprano is rarely heard, such as it is, subjugated to the action onstage where the villain Scarpia interrogates and prepares to torture the artist Cavaradossi. We beg the indulgence of the opera purists among us, and hope the airing of this chorus will illuminate a new angle on it.

We conclude our multivoiced Mass with 2 double-chorus settings of the Sanctus. Mendelssohn’s German version, "Heilig," is a miniature treasure from this beloved composer whose bicentennial we celebrate in 2009. With characteristically deft voice leading and harmonic control, the 8 voices enter independently and sequentially, and the texture varies between antiphonal exchange and homophonic statement. Rheinberger’s "Sanctus" is an apt companion to Mendelssohn’s version. It also features descending sequential writing of melodic and harmonic efficacy, here in voice pairs. As in the Kyrie, the fluent antiphonal dialogue unabashedly betrays its debt to the opulent textures of the Venetian Baroque.

"Der Gang zum Liebchen" is responsible for my enduring love affair with the music of Johannes Brahms, and one of the most intimately shaped examples from the dozen vocal quartets the composer wrote throughout his prolific career. Incidentally, I learned this chorus as a member of the 1988 Virginia Honors Choir, which performed at a conference that also featured music of Brahms by the Virginia Pro Musica, under the direction of Donald McCullough. "O schöne Nacht" and "An die Heimat" are also among Brahms’ greatest miniatures (the oxymoron is deliberate) and as such, represent the essence of romanticism distilled. Love and longing, the artist as wanderer and sojourner, the allure and mystery of night—moon, stars and heavens—and the search for meaning are all central components to “Der Romantik.” This is the “stuff” of poetry, indeed the sentiments that engendered some of the most enduring art we have.

Nänie is among a handful of major choral-orchestral works still underappreciated by a composer whose immortality could stand on the stature of his greatest choral masterwork alone, the German Requiem. Composed in 1881 in memory of his friend, the painter Anselm Feuerbach, "Nänie" (Song of Lament) is a choral tone poem evoking the mythological references central to Schiller’s poem. Along with Goethe, Schiller (most known to English-speaking audiences for a particular “Ode to Joy” immortalized in Beethoven’s 9th) played a vital role in reviving interest in the Greek myths and in the ancient world in general. Schiller’s readers would have registered the mythological references in the poem that serve as metaphors for lament over mortality. I am struck by the irony that the translation in the classic modern recording (by Robert Shaw) contains 5 footnotes explaining the references to: 1. Hades/Pluto, 2. Orpheus & Eurydice, 3. Adonis, 4. Achilles, and 5. Nereus. The poem laments that neither human supplication nor divine intervention can preempt death. The first reference is the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice. When his beloved died, Orpheus charmed the underworld with his beautiful music and persuaded Pluto to return Eurydice to life. The god set the condition that Orpheus proceed & not look back, but Apollo’s son doubted, and Eurydice vanished. Adonis was a mortal beloved by the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who could not save him from death when he was killed by the jealous god of war, Ares/Mars, who took the form of a wild boar. Achilles was a Grecian hero, the son of Peleus and the sea-nymph, Thetis, herself daughter of the sea-god, Nereus. Achilles was killed at the gates of Troy with an arrow shot through his heel, by Paris, son of King Priam. While a poem with so many references to violent deaths in epic tales might inspire music of a martial character, Brahms emphasizes the lamentations in music of lyric sweep and pathos. Fittingly, for a work memorializing an artist, Brahms laments the loss of beauty (ie: art) and links Feuerbach to the most artistic of the mythological characters, Orpheus. This sets the stage for the other metaphors, and Brahms finds musical character for each reference, most strikingly for Achilles’ mother, Thetis who “ascends from the sea” in vocal lines that rise in unison and resound in a soprano & tenor duet as the sea nymphs “raise the lament for the glorified son.” It is this image of glorious memory with which Brahms rounds off his evocation. Where Schiller’s lament ends with an image of all going “down to Orcus [the underworld] unsung” Brahms seizes the penultimate line of the poem as the inspiration for the work’s close. In a master -stroke return of the opening theme, this lyrical line also serves as a sublime coda (“to be even a song of lamentation in the mouth of the beloved is glorious”).

Following excerpts from Brahms’ rousing, Hungarian-influenced Zigeunerlieder (“Gypsy Songs”) we will close our Romantic program with another kind of sublime coda. "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" is one of the great songs of Gustav Mahler. Written at the turn of the 20th century, it is as a poignant essay on sublimation, transcendence through art, by a composer at the zenith of this remarkable period of music history.