Category Archives: Music Writing

Shostakovich’s 15th

By Posted in Admirable Others, Music Writing, Program Notes Tagged , , , , , Leave a comment
One of the last photographs taken of Dmitri Shostakovich, in his Moscow studio, June 1975.
Credit: A. Zuyev

I have been remiss in updating my blog lately, although my writing continues apace. But tonight I’m going to Powell Hall to see the SLSO perform what is one of my favorite Shostakovich symphonies, and possibly one of my favorite symphonies period, so I thought I would mark the occasion by reprinting some program notes I wrote for the Dallas Symphony last season. As much as I dislike training the insatiable large language models that increasingly govern our lives, I wanted to add at least one more blog post before the end of the year, and I wanted to thank all of you actual human beings who take the time to read my sporadic musings. So thank you!

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975): Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141

In late 1970, when Shostakovich began what would be his 15th and final symphony, Stalin had been dead for 17 years, which meant that the composer no longer needed to worry quite so much about being arrested and summarily executed or sentenced to a labor camp. Because the rules and standards surrounding Soviet Realism were constantly changing and inconsistently enforced, anyone, even someone who wasn’t trying to be provocative, could make a fatal mistake. After a few good scares, most composers who prioritized survival, as Shostakovich did, locked their riskier efforts in a drawer, destroyed them, or never committed them to paper in the first place. Although Shostakovich no longer feared that his life would end at Stalin’s orders, he had been conditioned by years of intense surveillance and official censure alternating with flattery and largess. Anxiety was his patrimony. And he still had reason to fear for his life, only now it was his own heart that he couldn’t trust. 

At first he intended Symphony No. 15 as a present to himself on his 65th birthday. He wrote a friend that he wanted to compose a “merry symphony.” But his merriness went only so far. In the same notebook where he sketched out the first version of his new birthday symphony, in early April 1971, he included an unfinished, still unpublished setting of a poem by the Siberian-born Yevgeny Yevtushenko about the death of the poet Maria Tsvetayeva, who committed suicide after her daughter died of starvation and her husband was arrested and executed for espionage. 

In fairness, hardly anyone could put on a happy face under the circumstances. Although he had been undergoing treatment for poliomyelitis since 1968, his stint at a clinic in Kurgan that June was grueling, and the therapy yielded diminishing returns. “Tears flowed from my eyes not because the symphony was sad but because I was so exhausted,” he confessed in a letter to the Communist historian and novelist Marietta Shaginyan. “I even went to an ophthalmologist, who suggested that I take a short break. The break was very hard for me. It is annoying to step away when one is at work.” 

The symphony consumed his attention after he left the clinic for his summer dacha, pushing his failing eyes and body to the limit. Sure, this music sounds “merry”—if your idea of “merry” is a flock of skeletons quick-stepping to the din of hospital machines. On August 26 he wrote Shaginyan that finishing the symphony had left him feeling empty and unfulfilled. 


Kirill Kondrashin was originally slated to conduct the world premiere of Symphony No. 15, but poor health forced him to cancel. Luckily, Shostakovich had the ideal backup: his own son Maxim. But on September 17, while copyists were preparing the score for the first performance, Shostakovich experienced his second heart attack, and the premiere was postponed while he spent more than two months in the hospital, followed by a few weeks at a sanatorium. He was released in time to attend the rescheduled rehearsals, and the world premiere took place at the Large Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on January 8, 1972, with Maxim Shostakovich conducting the All-Union Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra. 

Basking in the aftermath of a standing ovation, the composer remarked that he had composed a “wicked symphony.” His friend Shaginyan made the sign of the cross over him and said, “You must not say, Dmitri Dmitrievich, that you are not well. You are well, because you have made us happy!”

A Closer Listen
Symphony No. 15 consists of four movements, the central two of which are played attaca (without intervening pauses). Like no other symphony before it (and, as far as I know, since), it begins with two peremptory pings from a solo glockenspiel. Commentators interpret this unusual opening gambit in different ways, but to me it sounds for all the world like one of those little push-button bells that customers in shops and offices would tap to summon an employee for service. (Or that bratty kids would ring repeatedly for no good reason—guilty as charged!) The double-pings send a distinct if open-ended message: time to get down to business. 

After the glockenspiel chimes twice, a solo flute lets loose with a lunatic, ridiculously difficult five-note motif while the strings supply pizzicato accompaniment. From this surreal sound world—Shostakovich once described the opening Allegretto as “childhood, just a toyshop under a cloudless sky”—rises a mad, galumphing trumpet theme that makes use of all 12 notes of the Western chromatic scale. Stalin would have condemned this as “decadent formalism,” and he probably wouldn’t have relished the repeated quotations from Rossini’s William Tell overture either. Later, in the finale, Shostakovich quotes from two Wagner works (the Ring cycle and Tristan und Isolde), his own Seventh Symphony, and Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances.

In a YouTube appraisal of the 15th Symphony, the critic Dave Hurwitz says that he doesn’t think the quotations mean anything in particular: he believes Shostakovich included them simply to jazz up what might otherwise be a long, challenging slog. Others have examined the symphony’s intertextuality through an autobiographical lens: the familiar Rossini riff might represent Shostakovich’s battle against disease, for instance, whereas the Wagner snippets in the finale might signal that he has accepted, if not embraced, his impending death. 

Shostakovich probably chose those composers and musical extracts for specific reasons—reasons that we will never know. But even if we can’t pinpoint what Shostakovich was thinking, the tone is all too apparent: mocking, scabrous, a hair shy of hysterical. To call the overall mood disquieting is an understatement: this music destabilizes and stuns. 

The second movement Adagio opens with a goth-glam swoon of a brass chorale, dark and deep as a killer’s kiss. Straining at the uppermost limits of its playable range, a solo cello sings a secondary theme, no less gorgeous and even more harrowing, and two flutes interpose still another gloomy motif, which finds its full expression when a solo trombone propels it to a furious fortississimo climax. But the slow movement ends not with a bang but a whimper. Muted strings murmur the opening chorale, but their hearts aren’t in it. Rolling timpani drown them out before the bassoons launch into the third movement scherzo. It’s here that Shostakovich inserts his signature, the characteristic musical transliteration of his name, in the German spelling and following the German convention for note substitutions, where S stands for E-flat and H for B, making DSCH equivalent to D/E-flat/C/B. The finale begins with the “fate” motif from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, shortly followed by the main motif from Tristan und Isolde, the chord that blew the collective mind of the Western world. (Read Alex Ross’s Wagnerism if you think I’m exaggerating.) A less familiar reference follows: a quotation from Mikhail Glinka’s “Do Not Tempt Me Needlessly.” Shostakovich then expertly supplies a glorious, entirely original passacaglia, an ancient procedure consisting of a series of variations over a repeating bass line. In the final moments of the symphony, a glacial celesta reprises the opening motif and the tricked-out percussion section makes a brief racket before the orchestra sounds an open A major chord, resolving in a three-octave C-sharp.

The American auteur director David Lynch listened to Symphony No. 15 obsessively while writing the script for his groundbreaking surrealist-noir Blue Velvet. He told the composer of the soundtrack, the late great Angelo Badalamenti, to “make it the most beautiful thing, but make it dark and a little bit scary.” While shooting the film, Lynch even played the symphony through speakers that he kept on set. Badalamenti’s haunting, synth-hollowed score contains several allusions to the symphony, along with nods to technicolor ’50s pop arias such as Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.”

Copyright 2024 by René Spencer Saller. All rights reserved.

Happy 80th Birthday, Keith Jarrett

By Posted in classical, Program Notes Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment
“We also have to learn to forget music. Otherwise we become addicted to the past.” –Keith Jarrett

Today Keith Jarrett turns 80, so I thought I would revive my flagging blog with some Jarrett-specific content. As luck would have it, the Dallas Symphony recently programmed his Elegy for Violin and String Orchestra, which gave me the opportunity to write annotations on an artist I have enjoyed and admired for most of my life but have never been assigned to write about, in my dozen-or-so years doing this. These recent DSO concerts, led by guest conductor John Storgårds, also featured a major concerto by the undersung harp visionary Henriette Renié as well as Beethoven’s Romance No. 2 in F Major and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 3 in C Major, but I’m going to lead with the Jarrett, never mind that it was the penultimate work presented, not the opener. We’ll call it the birthday boy’s prerogative.

Keith Jarrett (b. 1945): Elegy for Violin and String Orchestra

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to a mother of Slovenian descent and a mostly German father, Jarrett ranks among the most distinctive—and commercially successful—pianists of all time. Very early in his career he collaborated with jazz legends such as Art Blakey, Charles Lloyd, and Miles Davis; before he turned 30 he was one of the world’s top solo pianists, as well as the leader of diverse ensembles. His 1975 recording of live improvisations, The Köln Concert, ranks as the best-selling piano recording in history. 

Jarrett has always defied category and catechism, a killer improviser who could riff on a Bach fugue as easily as he could vamp over a walking-blues progression or rework a jazz standard. Although piano is his primary instrument, he is also proficient on harpsichord, clavichord, organ, soprano saxophone, and drums. He is much better known as a jazz artist, but he has been composing and recording classical music since the early 1970s. In addition to his own compositions, he has recorded interpretations and transcriptions of works by Bach, Handel, Shostakovich, and Arvo Pärt. Elegy for Violin and String Orchestra appears on his 1993 collection of original compositions, Bridge of Light.

Jarrett received the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in 2003, becoming only the second jazz musician ever to win, after Miles Davis. In 2018 he suffered two strokes that left him partially paralyzed and unable to perform.

The Composer Speaks

“Music programs are often rife with explanatory notes concerning the technical details of the pieces. This distracts us from entering the state of ‘listening’ and, instead, makes us more likely to live in our head than in our heart. We seem more concerned with whether the program notes make sense than whether we can be touched by the sounds themselves.

“Elegy for Violin was written for my maternal grandmother, who was Hungarian and loved music.

[…]

“Actually, all of [the works on the album Bridge of Light] are born of a desire to praise and contemplate rather than a desire to ‘make’ or ‘show’ or ‘demonstrate’ something unique. They are, in a certain way, prayers that beauty may remain perceptible despite fashions, intellect, analysis, progress, technology, distractions, ‘burning issues’ of the day, the un-hipness of belief or faith, concert programming, and the unnatural ‘scene’ of ‘art’, the market, lifestyles, etc., etc., etc. I am not attempting to be ‘clever’ in these pieces (or in these notes), I am not attempting to be a composer. I am trying to reveal a state I think is missing in today’s world (except, perhaps, in private): a certain state of surrender: surrender to an ongoing harmony in the universe that exists with or without us. Let us let it in.” —Keith Jarrett

Here’s a link to the music–the first part anyway. You can easily find part 2 of 2 in the YouTube feed.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827): Romance No. 2 in F Major for Violin and Orchestra 

Beethoven wrote Romance No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra in 1798, a heady time for the wigless 28-year-old virtuoso, who had relocated to Vienna from unfashionable Bonn about six years earlier. Now a coveted guest in the capital’s most exclusive salons, he routinely slayed anyone foolish enough to challenge him to a piano duel. His bad-boy panache and superhuman passagework endeared him to well-born ladies, who indulged his flirtation despite his lack of a title or family money. He also played violin and viola more than capably, which accounts for his supple, idiomatic writing for the stringed instruments. In his native Bonn, he had played viola in the opera and chapel orchestras. In Vienna, the musical capital of the German-speaking world, he could collaborate with some of the finest players alive.

These were Beethoven’s glory days, but disaster loomed: he was beginning to experience early symptoms of deafness, a roaring static that swallowed up all other sound. He didn’t yet know that his hearing loss was irreversible, incurable, and worsening, but he knew enough to be terrified. Life without music was meaningless. In 1802 he expressed his suicidal thoughts in an unsent letter to his brothers that was discovered only after his death, more than two decades later. In this letter, the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, he vowed to endure his misery for the sake of his art, his sacred mission. 

A Closer Listen

Although Beethoven composed it before Romance No. 1, Romance No. 2 was published later, in 1805, which is why it has the higher number.  Like its counterpart, it is styled as a rondo, with a recurrent theme and contrasting sections (ABACA, plus coda). Because Beethoven typically favored this form in the third movements of his piano concertos, some scholars believe that he may have originally intended the romance as the slow movement of a concerto. 

If the young Beethoven was still formulating a distinctive style, his voice is unmistakable.

The main hook keeps finding new ways to ensnare us even after the countless repetitions required by the rondo form. The harmonies and shifting instrumentation change the way we hear the theme—more sunlight here, more shadows there—but for the most part Beethoven suspends us in the golden hour and lets us linger there. 

From the opening bars the aria-like main tune and lilting dotted rhythms announce their Mozartean mandate: charm suffused with mystery, and vice versa. Beethoven marked the tempo Adagio cantabile—slow and singing—and the Romance really does sound like an instrumental outtake from a long-lost Mozart opera. It leaves us grateful but not quite sated, basking in the remembered light.

Henriette Renié (1875–1956): Concerto for Harp and Orchestra
Unless you are a harpist, you probably don’t know the name Henriette Renié. Instead of bemoaning her unjust obscurity, let’s hope that the Renié Revival is finally upon us while we brush up on this underrated prodigy.

As a small child, the native Parisian played piano, but she switched to harp after hearing a leading virtuoso, Alphonse Hasselmans, perform in Nice. Although little Henriette had never touched the instrument, she predicted that Hasselmans would teach her someday. She began playing as soon as her parents brought her a harp, at age eight. Because her legs were still too short to reach the pedals, her father (a singer who had studied with Rossini) devised special extensions for her. At 10 she enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire, under Hasselmans, and won second prize in harp performance. She would have won first prize if the popular vote had carried, but the director of the Conservatoire intervened to keep her from being designated a “professional” too early. A year later, when she was 11, she won first prize and kept it this time. After graduating from the Conservatoire at 13, she went on to win all the major prizes, remaining in high demand as a performer and teacher. She kept her original compositions under wraps for years and focused on concertizing, making her public solo-recital debut at 15.

Perhaps in part because of her gender and her devout Catholicism, Renié wasn’t appointed successor to Hasselmans, her former mentor and (sometime frenemy) at the Conservatoire, but she gave lessons, often at no charge, and managed to support her own family as well as that of a former student. She started her own international competition and organized charity concerts to raise funds for impoverished musicians during World War I. In the 1920s she made several recordings until physical exhaustion and other ailments limited her ability to perform. During the Second World War she worked on her magnum opus, the two-volume Complete Harp Method, and continued teaching and giving occasional concerts, despite worsening health. She died in March, 1956, a few months after her last concert.

A Closer Listen
Renié began the Concerto in C Minor in 1894 and completed it in 1901. Set in four movements, it’s one of the most technically challenging works in the harp repertoire, bursting with dramatic contrasts and polyphonic intrigue. She dedicated it to Hasselmans, the harpist who first inspired her. 

After reviewing the score, the composer-conductor Camille Chevillard was so impressed that he booked Renié for a series of concerts, which were not only warmly received but also enormously influential. These performances marked the first time that a harp was featured as a solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment. Thanks to Renié’s technical and interpretive brilliance, as well as the widespread appeal of her Harp Concerto, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and other major composers began writing major works for the instrument. 

Henriette Renié (right) with Harpo Marx

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957): Symphony No. 3 in C Major, Op. 52
One hallmark of the Sibelian style is the affinity for brief, almost fragmentary motifs that cunningly connect and cohere in the development section, only to shatter without notice. Describing his compositional method, Sibelius wrote, “It is as though the Almighty had thrown the pieces of a mosaic down from the floor of heaven and told me to put them together.” His Second Symphony, an immediate hit in his native Finland, was hailed as a “Symphony of Independence,” a defiant rebuke to Tsarist Russia in response to recent sanctions. Sibelius completed it in 1902, just two years after the patriotic anthem Finlandia, and his political convictions were well known. Several of his works had been censured by the authorities for inciting rebellion. 

Three years later, as he struggled with his worsening alcoholism and the stringent standards that he had imposed on his unfinished Third Symphony, Sibelius found himself at a creative crossroads. “This is the crucial hour,” he wrote his wife, Aino, “the last chance to make something of myself and achieve great things.” He conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic in the first performance of the Third on September 25, 1907. 

Symphony No. 3 represents one possible path forward, beyond nationalism to something profoundly personal and therefore universal. As with so many groundbreaking achievements, it baffled or bored most of his contemporaries, who felt let down by its relatively restrained instrumentation, its brevity, and its overall lack of expressive indulgence. As he confessed in a letter, “After hearing my Third Symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov shook his head and said: ‘Why don’t you do it the usual way; you will see that the audience can neither follow nor understand this.’” Later Sibelius would call the Third a “relapse,” a nostalgic, neoclassical backward glance.

A Closer Listen
Of all the keys, cheerful, reliable C major ranks as the real workhorse, the first scale and chord in our piano workbooks, a cleansing, restore-to-factory-settings signature that leaves us refreshed and ready for future harmonic mischief. If you were trained in the Western Classical tradition, as Sibelius was, C major feels like home. But the musical home Sibelius creates for Symphony No 3 is more David Lynch than Thomas Kinkade. Sibelius deconstructs C Major—”strangifies” it, as the theory nerds might say—until he compels us to hear the key anew, in all of its sovereign glory.

The opening Allegro moderato marshals dramatically building cellos and basses, which create suspense and melodic interest as the mood shifts from vaguely ominous to downright festive.

Set in dreamy, slightly destabilizing 6/4, the folk-inflected central movement is marked Andantino con moto, quasi allegretto, which means “a little faster than walking pace with movement, almost moderately fast.” Despite the lulling tempo—Sibelius uses hemiola, a rhythmic device that staggers sets of two beats against three—the nocturne-like vibe prevails, casting wistful shadows over the lustrous surface of the tunes. He also found a way to repurpose some material from an unfinished tone poem for soprano, Luonnotar. Listen for the chorale-like passage, which one of the composer’s friends described as a kind of “child’s prayer.”  

Sibelius marked the last movement Moderato – allegro ma non tanto. He described this concise scherzo-finale twofer as “the crystallization of thought from chaos.”

Copyright 2025 by René Spencer Saller

All Hail the King (of Instruments)

By Posted in classical, General, classical, Music Writing, Rants and Appreciations, Various Worthwhile Things Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
That’s me, or the back of my head, in the left foreground, marveling over the glorious pipe organ at St. Francis de Sales this past November, while the legendary Olivier Latry demonstrates the features of the recently restored instrument after a wonderful recital that I will eventually get around to discussing in a separate blog post (that’s the aspiration, anyway). Photo by Amy Bautz copyright November 2023.

As much as I would prefer to pretend that a good four months hasn’t elapsed since my last blog update, I feel obliged to attempt some kind of explanation. The truth, sadly, is that I have been very lazy and didn’t feel like it. Instead of blogging, I have been doing my best to keep up with my freelance work while indulging my fitful enthusiasms, which range from French perfume to Chappell Roan to the Dolly Parton crazy quilt I started a few months ago in a kind of aspirational delirium. I began the crazy quilt as a coping mechanism because I was having nightmares about the news and felt a conflicting need to stay informed. Essentially, my one crazy trick is that I work on my Dolly quilt while I listen to my embummening world-news programs. I peer at my crooked stitches instead of the endless footage of starving babies, burned and mutilated children, flattened neighborhoods, and inconceivable civilian carnage. I can’t swear my technique is morally defensible, but it’s allowing me to stay informed without going entirely insane. I would describe my primitive needlework as a form of meditation, only with supplementary blood and cursing. If it’s not quite a thought preventer, it’s also not a thought promoter.

An actual photograph of me, not updating my blog with the many program notes I have written in recent months. The only difference, if you must know, is that I’m wearing a flannel shirt, old Adidas track pants, and a co-dependent elderly Chihuahua mix.

I might have continued lolling indefinitely on my reliable dilettante setting, but I feel strongly compelled to evangelize on an unrelated topic, one that’s more interesting than my lamentable work habits, and that is the pipe organ. More precisely, I would like to recommend one of my favorite ways to learn more about it: the superb weekly radio program The King of Instruments. I’ll get around to reviewing this treasured resource soon, I promise, but in the meantime, click on that hyperlink, choose any episode from the show website’s clearly organized archives, and listen for yourself. Do yourself a favor and listen through some decent speakers or headphones, not your dogshit built-in phone or laptop speakers. The best argument in favor of pipe organ music is always going to be listening to it.

The pipe organ is a difficult instrument to master, but it’s also difficult to understand if you’re not an organist, which is true of myself as well as almost everyone else on this planet. It’s a gigantic, implausible, Rube Goldberg–like contraption that transforms a building’s architecture into an enormous amplifier and speaker to transmit the baddest-ass sounds you’ve ever registered in your actual ass (those wooden church pews are startlingly good conductors). If you tried to describe the instrument to someone who had never seen or heard of one, they might imagine something out of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, or maybe a sentient gargoyle-ghost who speaks through the walls and makes your spine and molars vibrate with his godlike basso profundo. What other instrument can be felt in the body—not just in the organist’s body but in the bodies of all the audience members, all those inside the uncanny musical valley carved out by the pipe organ? As a teenager I used to attend punishingly loud punk-rock concerts, made possible by towering stacks of crackling Marshalls—I’m lucky, undeservedly so, that my hearing remains intact—but the loudness of a pipe organ is altogether different from the Ramonesian, feedback-blasting-out-my-ears-makes-me-so-high kind of loudness that I craved from age 14 to 17 or so. Even at its shrillest or most stentorian, the pipe organ doesn’t hurt your ears so much as rattle your bones.

Thanks to my regular longtime freelance gig for the fabulous Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which contains one of the finest concert pipe organs in the country, the Lay Family concert organ at the Meyerson, I have been writing about the vast organ repertoire for years. If nothing else, I’m a diligent researcher, so I know a fair amount about the composers and the histories of the various organs and organ builders (ask me about Aristide Cavaillé-Coll!), and I always interrogate organists if I’m given half a chance, but I never try to conceal the fact that I couldn’t begin to tell you how the whole thing works. In my defense, few people could, apart from organists, and it takes them many years of study to get remotely competent. To play the organ requires a peculiar devotion, even beyond the hours and hours of disciplined practice that musicians who play other instruments routinely log. You need to be one part pianist, one part tap dancer, one part music historian, and one part carpenter-handyman-bricoleur. Strictly speaking, you don’t need to be a skilled improviser, capable of spontaneous feats of complex counterpoint at a moment’s notice, but it helps a lot, insofar as most of the superstar organists can do this in their sleep, especially if they’re trained in the French school—and more on that later, when I finally get around to writing about the Olivier Latry recital at St. Francis de Sales Oratory Catholic church, a short stroll from my home in St. Louis.

I would assume that most proficient organists possess unusually good, maybe even photographic, memories, because how else would they possibly remember where all the stops are, especially if they play numerous organs, all with varying numbers of ranks and manuals? Sure, every piano feels different to a pianist, and every piano has its own personality, its own quirks and distinctive voicings, but pipe organs vary a lot more than pianos do. In fact, I would propose (or wildly speculate) that every pipe organ is unique, because even if two organs were created by the same builder, around the same time, they are still housed in different acoustical structures—the New Cathedral in St. Louis, with its acres of glittering mosaics and its vaulted ceilings, is going to create a very different sonic environment than a concert hall expressly designed for and by audiophiles. As much as I love the organ rep, I am a lazy sod, too busy huffing perfume and stitching my crazy Dolly Parton Crazy Quilt to study the organ with the kind of discipline it demands, so I’m grateful for the many organists I have encountered, both IRL and online, who share their knowledge and passion for the instrument with the legions of total dumbasses like myself. (Please don’t be offended that I’m corraling, or chorale-ing, you into my dumbass cohort—to organists we are all rank amateurs when it comes to their instrument.)   

Early on, when I first started covering the organ-recital series at the Meyerson in Dallas, my longtime friend and birthday buddy Jim Utz, a legend in his own right, introduced me to his friend Brent Johnson, the organist at Third Baptist. Through Brent’s late and sadly lamented (by meeeeee) organ recital series at the church, Friday Pipes, which is currently on hiatus, I renewed my passion for pipe organ and began peppering the endlessly patient Brent with dumb questions and comical mispronunciations of German composers’ names (I cringe to recall how I once put a French flair on the name Reger, even though I knew he wasn’t French, simply because I don’t speak German and tried to wing it—one of the perils of being an autodidact who gets most of her information from reading books.) Anyway, via Brent I discovered his YouTube series for the Organ Media Foundation, in which he gives tours of various organs that he visits, discusses with the resident organist, and (I would assume) helps keep in good repair. These videos are absolutely invaluable to me as a researcher because I’m a visual learner, and it helps me to see where the pipes and reeds are located. I also enjoy the interviews with the organists, who know their instruments the way Brent knows his charge at Third Baptist. 

Most organists are ambassadors, if not evangelists, for their instruments, which are poorly understood and often unfairly maligned (don’t get me started—no, really, don’t—because my digressions are approaching David Foster Wallace territory, which is no place for anyone besides DFW to be, and likely not even him insofar as he is long dead). But Brent is an especially effective and tireless advocate for his instrument, and one of my favorite discoveries among his good works is the radio program that he produces, The King of Instruments, which airs in the St. Louis area on Classic 107.3, on Sundays at the unreasonable hour of 7:00 a.m CT, and is available online everywhere, at a more humane hour, for which we night owls are grateful. On the website or Soundcloud feed, you can listen to many, many hours of hour-long archived programs, all thoughtfully conceived and organized according to a particular theme or concept. The two hosts, Mark Scholtz and Bill Stein, speak smoothly but never smarmily. They’re authoritative but never pedantic when they introduce these composers, works, performers, and organs. I especially enjoy learning how many ranks and manuals a particular organ has, when it was built, and by whom, because these details aren’t as readily available as, say, the birth and death dates of a specific Baroque contrapuntist. Having listened to a good dozen or more of these archived programs, I find that the hosts provide precisely the correct amount of nerdly detail. Scholtz and Stein leave you feeling cheerful and enlightened, not bored and hopelessly overwhelmed by unrelated factoids.

The best part, of course, is the music. Despite the hundreds of organ annotations and blurbs that I have cranked out over the past decade, The King of Instruments constantly reminds me how little I know and how lightly I have scratched the surface of the repertoire. Even if I stopped listening to Linda Smith and Lloyd Miller and Sexyy Red and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and all the thousands of other, unrelated music makers that I find myself listening to, I wouldn’t be able to hear more than a tiny fraction of all the gazillions of gorgeous fugues and toccatas that have been piling up over the centuries, not to mention all the ones that were improvised on the spot and therefore lost forever, unless they were captured on tape, as many improvisations these days seem to be, fortunately. (Glass-half-empty version: think of all the brilliant Bach improvisations that we’ll never hear simply because they were never recorded—in a perfect world, we might all be trading Bach tapes like the Deadheads do with Jerry Garcia bootlegs.) 

The King of Instruments is a highly enjoyable listen if you’re looking for a pleasant soundtrack rather than a college-level lecture enumerating the differences between the French and German schools of organ building. I’m looking for both, as it happens, so I’m content regardless, but I understand if you just want to listen to something while you fold laundry or vacuum the car or respond to emails. I get it because I use music for such purposes myself, and the house of music has many rooms, blah blah blah. It turns out that The King of Instruments suits this function, too, because the show is mostly devoted to music, not to the blah blah blah that I am doing too much of while attempting to sing the praises of this blameless radio program. 

One caveat that will be obvious to organists and experienced organ lovers: no matter how great your speakers are, this music simply will not and cannot sound as good as it did when it was being performed, in its native environment. It isn’t possible, so don’t freak out too much, audiophiles. To get that sound, you would need to have a pipe organ in your home (like some lucky Edwardian heiress!), and unless you also occupy a limestone mansion with soaring ceilings, you’re just not going to nail that Notre-Dame de Paris vibe, sorry. Nevertheless, Brent ensures that the sound quality is as good as it can possibly be, especially if you avail yourself of a decent sound system, or better yet headphones, which more closely approximate the immersive effects of hearing this music performed live, on a real pipe organ, although it obviously can’t achieve the full body effects of the live performance. 

Despite their limitations, recordings preserve performances by the dead or otherwise unavailable, so they will always have that going for them. I don’t know about you, but counterpoint works a peculiar magic on me. I suck at math (I failed beginning high-school algebra two years in a row), and consequently I would never be able to compose true counterpoint myself, except in the most rudimentary fashion, after tearful hours of trial and error on my tragically underused Knabe parlor grand, whereupon I might come up with something that kindasortamaybe resembles a campsite round, but this is a limitation I cannot correct at my age. Besides, I think my ignorance of the procedure surely contributes to my awe. A Bach fugue is a balm to the ears and brain, exerting a magical organizing effect on my flibbertigibbet consciousness, which typically compels me to mutter Nelly lyrics when I’m supposed to be researching Das Rheingold, or to get sucked down YouTube rabbit holes that invariably lead to Soul Train, my own little Lotos-Land, where I linger for long stretches, propped on beds of amaranth and moly, beneath a heaven dark and holy, etc.

At any rate, if your brain functions or malfunctions like mine, it’s often better to leave the listening choices in expert hands for at least an hourlong chunk or so while you recalibrate. You could pick any episode of The King of Instruments at random, and you would have chosen wisely. I have yet to hear a show that didn’t contain something new and wonderful that I would almost certainly never have heard elsewhere, including many recordings that aren’t even commercially available, recordings that members of the Organ Media Foundation made themselves, with the performers’ permission, of course. 

One recent KOI episode (February 11, 2024) was devoted entirely to the organist, composer, and organ consultant Charles Callahan, who died last year on Christmas day. Going into the show, I was completely ignorant of Callahan; one hour later, I understood why they wanted to do a tribute show on this fascinating and talented person. To my delight, the Callahan playlist included a pair of older recordings (2008-ish) that were recorded in the magnificent Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, which we natives usually call the New Cathedral and which I first had the privilege of touring as a gape-jawed 16-year-old. The organ—and the late Callahan—sound exquisite.  

On another, specially expanded recent episode—the last show of 2023, dated December 31—a panel of organist guests join the hosts to discuss their favorite organ works. This was an especially compelling installment for me because I love to hear organists discuss their own experiences learning and then performing a piece—which often means relearning it if they need to play it on a different instrument. “Playing something like this,” one organist says of a favorite toccata, “is the reason we all became organists.” 

I’m especially grateful for the shows that focus on the many composers and musicians whose works have been historically underrepresented and underprogrammed, talented people who more than deserve our attention. Many of them are featured on the following first-rate episodes: Women Organists, American Women Composers, European Women Composers, and Black Composers. The good news is that these marginalized artists are getting programmed more frequently, and audiences are increasingly eager to hear music that has been unfairly neglected or deemed unworthy of the canon; the bad news, at least from the annotator’s perspective, is that there is seldom much in the way of reliable information on these works, which means it’s that much easier to make and perpetuate errors. (Ask me how I know, lolsob!) These research challenges make me even more grateful for resources like The King of Instruments. For instance, I thought I knew a fair amount about Florence Price, a brilliant Black American composer who has interested me for a long time and about whom I have written intermittently. Despite this knowledge, I learned a few new facts about her from The King of Instruments and enjoyed a performance that I probably wouldn’t have heard otherwise. I also appreciate the fact that even though the hosts might focus on the artists’ shared race or gender in those aforelinked episodes, they don’t pigeonhole their subjects on the basis of demographic data. For instance, the female composer Fanny Mendelssohn, the prodigiously talented sister of Felix Mendelssohn, is represented in her brother’s episode, which makes sense when you consider how close the two siblings were and how deeply they influenced and complemented each other.

This review is too already too long, or I’d go into more detail about why I consider The King of Instruments to be an invaluable resource for the organ lover. I also maintain that everyone is a potential organ lover. One way to test the truth of that boast is to tune in to The King of Instruments sometime soon. Who knows, it might even inspire you to darken the door of a church in search of your next pipe fix.





MTT Conducts Beethoven’s Ninth with the SFS

By Posted in classical, Music Writing, Program Notes Tagged , , , , , 3 Comments
Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony

My second set of notes for the San Francisco Symphony has been published and printed. I wrote about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for a concert conducted by the great Michael Tilson Thomas. I also wrote about St. Louis native and Sumner graduate Olly Wilson, but unfortunately that part of the concert had to be canceled, so only the Beethoven notes were published. I considered holding them until the work is performed again, as I fervently hope it will be, but ultimately decided to publish the Olly Wilson notes anyway, even though that part of the concert never happened. I was paid for them, so that’s not the issue; I just want to evangelize on behalf of an underprogrammed composer whose life story is compelling to me and (I am vain enough to presume) other people also. 

Anyway, Ben Pesetsky, one of my SFS editors and a prince of a fellow, not to mention a top-notch music writer and editor, sent me this photo of the concert last night, from his seat at Davies Symphony Hall, with the program open to “my” spread. You’d think I would be used to this by now, but it’s always a thrill and a weird shock to see something in print that has lived only as a Word document in your mind. 

Ben was kind enough to send me a photo of my printed notes from beautiful Davies Hall, at what was by all accounts an extremely moving occasion. Don’t try to read it; the notes are printed below my intro.

As Joshua Kosman of the SF Chronicle wrote in his sensitive and insightful review of the concert Thursday night, the mood in the hall was elegiac, with the musicians and audience all too aware of the Maestro’s precarious health. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to say that many of those present must have been weeping openly.

When I submitted my notes for this concert to Ben, the program was supposed to open with a work by the brilliant and underprogrammed late Berkeley composer Olly Wilson. Michael Tilson Thomas has been one of Wilson’s most passionate and persuasive advocates, but his fragile health forced him to streamline the repertoire so that he could marshal his reserves of energy for the enormously demanding Ninth Symphony. An understandable decision, especially under the circumstances.

To make up for my lamentable inconstancy these days, I will include the Olly Wilson notes even though this part of the program had to be cut. My hometown pride (or hyperprovincialism) demands it! Shango Memory really is an exciting and cunningly constructed piece. Please listen for yourself, especially if you don’t know it. Here is a recording by the SF Symphony led by MTT himself. While you’re at it, listen to some of Wilson’s groundbreaking electronic compositions, too, which he began making when electronic music was in its infancy.

Olly Wilson

Shango Memory

OLLY WILSON

Born: September 7, 1937, in Saint Louis
Died: March 12, 2018, in Berkeley, California

Composed: 1995
SF Symphony Performances: First and only—September 18, 1997. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, antique cymbals, suspended cymbals, high‑hat, sizzle cymbal, wind chimes, bell, large gong, tubular chimes, timbales, bass drum, steel drum, vibraphone, xylophone, and marimba), and strings
Duration: About 8 mins

Over a long and productive life in music, Olly Wilson distinguished himself as a composer, jazz musician, electroacoustic innovator, musicologist, professor, university administrator, and arts activist. Born to working-class parents in segregated Saint Louis, Wilson graduated from Sumner High School, founded in 1875 as the first secondary school west of the Mississippi for Black students. By the early 1950s, when Wilson enrolled, Sumner was a jewel of the city’s public school system, renowned for both its academic excellence and its superb arts curriculum. Among his classmates was future opera star Grace Bumbry; other illustrious Sumner alumni include the musicians Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Robert McFerrin, Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake, and Oliver Nelson.

Wilson, who played jazz piano and double bass, stayed in Saint Louis long enough to earn his bachelor of music degree from Washington University before leaving to complete his master of music at the University of Illinois and a PhD in music composition at the University of Iowa. He taught at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and in 1970 joined the music faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. A respected leader who helped establish programs in African and African-American musical studies, he chaired the department from 1993–97 and was appointed emeritus professor in 2002, when he retired.

In 1968 Wilson won Dartmouth College’s First International Electronic Music Competition. Over the decades he collected many other awards and honors, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and a residency in Italy funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1971, after his first full term teaching at Berkeley, he used his inaugural Guggenheim grant to travel in West Africa, where he studied the indigenous musical traditions with a scholar’s analytical acumen and a jazz player’s devotion to a real gone groove.

Wilson once defined music as “experience consciously transformed,” adding that his own compositions reflect his experience as an African American. He understood “Africanness” as “a way of doing something, not simply something that is done.” Shango Memory, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 1997, reveals both his passion for ethnomusicology and his aversion to genre constraints. In interviews he cited influences ranging from Luciano Berio to Charlie Parker, from Edgard Varèse to Miles Davis. Although it’s difficult to generalize about his eclectic catalogue—which includes everything from free jazz improvisation and electroacoustic provocation to conventionally notated large-scale projects for organ and symphony orchestra—the impulse behind all his work is syncretic, filtering a choice blend of cultural traditions through a singular imagination. Shango Memory translates Stravinskyan dissonance and syncopation to a post-bop jazz idiom, transforming field research into felt experience. In his own program notes, Wilson discussed how his source materials help connect the cultures of the African diaspora: 

“Shango Memory is inspired by the Yoruban deity Shango, the god of thunder and lightning, who holds a prominent position in the pantheon of deities of not only the Yoruba people of West Africa but also in many places of the African diaspora, particularly the Caribbean and South America. In this composition I attempted to use Shango as a metaphor for West African musical concepts that were reinterpreted in the American context and became the basis for African-American music.”

—René Spencer Saller

René Spencer Saller is the main program annotator for the Dallas Symphony and has also written for the Saint Louis Symphony and Tippet Rise Art Center. Formerly music critic and editor for The St. Louis Riverfront Times, she won first prize in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Awards.

Beethoven, in haut-badass mode.

Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Baptized: December 17, 1770, in Bonn
Died: March 26, 1827, in Vienna

Composed: 1822–24
SF Symphony Performances: First—April 1924. Alfred Hertz conducted with Claire Dux, Merle Alcock, Mario Chamlee, and Clarence Whitehill as soloists.
Most recent—December 2022. Xian Zhang conducted with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and Gabriella Reyes, Kelley O’Connor, Reginald Smith, Jr., and Issachah Savage as soloists
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, cymbals, and triangle), and strings.
The Finale (Ode “To Joy”) adds 4 vocal soloists (soprano, mezzo‑soprano, tenor, and bass) and chorus.
Duration: About 65 mins

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony feels like a unifying force across the globe, a cultural common good, even in our hyperpolarized times. The fourth-movement choral setting of a Friedrich Schiller poem—the ultra-hummable “Ode to Joy”—has been recycled countless times. It’s the official anthem of the European Union. It pops up in movie soundtracks and television commercials. Huge crowds belt it out before sporting events. Beethoven’s immortal earworm marks occasions, endings, and beginnings around the world.

But the price of ubiquity is steep. Monuments get buried beneath layers of interpretive grime. Something that means so many different things—international diplomacy, Enlightenment values, pasteurized cheese product—might even start to seem meaningless after two centuries or so.

For Beethoven, who mulled over parts of this music for decades, the meaning of the Ninth Symphony was urgent, immediate, vital. He wanted his music to enact a journey of transformation, exploring themes of struggle and salvation, community and compassion. Although he wasn’t a churchgoer, he found spiritual sustenance in his art. In a letter from 1821, a few years before he completed the Ninth Symphony, he explained to his pupil and patron, the Archbishop Rudolph, what composing music meant to him: “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals and by means of that contact to spread the rays of the Godhead through the human race.” (A lofty claim, but it ain’t bragging if it’s true.)

“Always keep the whole in mind,” Beethoven liked to say, a maxim that the Ninth embodies. Everything leads to the inevitable finale, the apotheosis of the “An die Freude” (Ode to Joy) motif. He first read Friedrich Schiller’s “An die Freude” as a teenager in Bonn, and set a few of its lines in a cantata marking the accession of Emperor Leopold II, in 1790. Three years later, in a letter to the poet’s wife, Charlotte Schiller, Bartholomäus Fischenich praised Beethoven as “a young man of this place whose musical talents are universally praised… [who] proposes also to compose Schiller’s ‘Freude,‘ and indeed strophe by strophe.” Some evidence suggests that Beethoven may have composed a setting of the ode in 1798, although the score was lost, if it ever existed. Schiller’s ‘Freude’ seems to have been on Beethoven’s mind, but he moved it to a backburner, where it simmered in his subconscious for more than 20 years.

In the decades after his first exposure to Schiller, Beethoven had seen his cherished Enlightenment ideals trampled by Napoleon and other repressive forces. The conservative Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859), appointed by Emperor Francis II, cracked down on all forms of expression, political and artistic, that promoted liberal democracy or otherwise diminished the Habsburgs’ domestic and global power. Since 1819, when Metternich and his allies imposed the draconian Carlsbad Decrees, German and Austrian universities had been intensively monitored and censored. In collaboration with a network of spies and informants, a commission in Mainz investigated all the academic institutions, branding and then blacklisting the supposed dissidents. The Decrees were renewed in 1824, the same year that Beethoven finished his final symphony. At a time when ordinary Austrians could be arrested for saying the word “freedom” or gathering in groups of more than a few unrelated people, resurrecting Schiller’s humanist anthem was a subversive act.

Because Beethoven wanted his choral finale to seem like the inevitable outcome of the preceding three movements, he needed to keep his foundational motif in mind from the outset. He wrote the first eight measures of the “Freude” tune fairly quickly, but he went through dozens of drafts before he figured out a way to finish it. Simplicity is hard.

After some tense negotiation with local patrons, performers, and financiers, the first performance took place on May 7, 1824, at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. There were only two full rehearsals before the premiere, and at least one singer walked out in a snit because the score was, in his opinion, “impossible.” The symphony was commissioned by an organization in London and Beethoven had threatened to hold the premiere in Berlin, but he agreed to Vienna after extracting certain concessions. He successfully lobbied for extra musicians to augment the standard orchestra, thereby balancing out the 90-voice chorus. He also insisted on conducting the performance, never mind that he was by that point profoundly deaf. The musicians and singers, who had all been discreetly instructed to follow the concertmaster, did their best to ignore the wildly gesticulating man at the podium. In the words of one witness, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.”

Beethoven was so intently focused on the music in his head that he failed to notice when the music in the hall stopped. The mezzo-soprano soloist, Caroline Unger, made him turn around and see what he could no longer hear: all those cheering faces, clapping hands, waving handkerchiefs. The sons and daughters of Elysium, drinking joy at nature’s breast. 

The Music

Marked Allegro ma non troppo e un poco maestoso (Cheerful but not excessively and slightly majestic), the first movement begins with a stark open fifth and dissonant tremolos. Out of this void emerges the first faint sign of the “Freude” theme, inverted here as three descending notes. Just as the universe arose from nothingness, the theme seems to arise, in fits and starts, from a yawning abyss. Set in 2/4 meter, the opening Allegro develops in complex and unexpected ways. Two keys are dramatically juxtaposed: D minor (the home key, or tonic) and B-flat major. Throughout we get brief flashes of D major, foreshadowing the euphoric finale.

The second movement, a scherzo with fugal and sonata-form elements, is also in the home key, at least nominally. Marked Molto vivace, it combines an anarchic opening (check out that hell-raising timpani) and a pastoral central interlude, where the key changes to D major and triple meter shifts to duple. The first notes of the “Freude” theme return, but they’re tricked out in a different rhythm: another subliminal glimpse of future pleasures.

Structurally, the ravishing slow movement is a loose adaptation of a theme-and-variations form. Beethoven marked it Adagio molto e cantabile, or “very slow and singing,” and the indication reminds us why the chorus has been waiting there patiently all this time, waiting to let loose with the part we’ll be humming as we leave Davies Symphony Hall, and possibly for weeks afterward. But Beethoven was the master of deferred gratification. Never mind those brief rebukes from the brass: in this paradise of hushed strings and gentle winds, melodies linger, suspended in bliss.

The choice of key—B-flat major—signals a break from the tonal tumult, the minor-key chaos of the preceding movements. “Melody must always be given priority above all else,” Beethoven explained in a letter. His sketchbooks suggest that he worked intensively on the Adagio in 1823, hashing out the first theme in several stages; his secondary theme, in 3/4 time, came to him more or less intact.

Even when you know what’s coming, the first moments of the finale are a visceral jolt. Richard Wagner called it a “terror fanfare,” Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford called it a “brassy burst of fury,” and no matter what you call it, you will flinch when it smacks you at full volume. It’s supposed to hurt a little: a bracing slap to wake you up for the Big Reveal, when the theme bursts loose in a torrent of delirious variations. Never has the transition from minor to major felt more satisfying, more essential. For listeners the ecstasy only mounts, but for singers the finale is downright scary, a brutal tessitura that demands impossibly high notes to be held for an impossibly long time.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” the critic Walter Pater famously observed, and the saying resonates because it feels true. So why do we expect music to do more when it already gives us everything? We want it to tell us a story about ourselves, but music tells its own stories, in its own language. If it’s not the Godhead, it’s close enough. —R.S.S.

Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

These notes ran in a slightly different form in the SFS Program book. I owe Ben Pesetsky much thanks for his excellent suggestions and thoughtful feedback. He always makes my work better, and I’m eternally grateful to him for it.

The Muse Known as Misia

By Posted in Admirable Others, classical, General, classical, Music Writing, Rants and Appreciations, Various Worthwhile Things Tagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Misia photographed by her great friend and admirer Edouard Vuillard, in 1901

In 2009 the French musicologist David Lamaze identified a distinctively Ravelian three-note motif, E-B-A, as a musical cipher for “Misia.” The concise theme, which surfaces at critical points in La Valse and throughout Ravel’s work, is expressed as mi-si-la in French solfège intervals. This is likely a coded reference to the composer’s friend Misia Sert (née Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska), the glamorous and enigmatic pianist, muse, patron, painter, and artist’s model who was known as the Queen of Paris. Ravel dedicated La Valse to her, along with his famous song “Le Cygne” (The Swan). Her piano teacher, Gabriel Fauré, was disappointed when she chose not to follow his advice and pursue a career as a concertizing pianist. She decided instead to marry, which she did three times (and was thrice divorced).
 
Because she was a great friend of its founder, the designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the French luxury brand Chanel named a limited-edition fragrance after Sert in 2016. Created by the parfumier Olivier Polge, Misia is meant to conjure the ambience of opera-hall dressing rooms: a complex concoction of rose, iris, and violet, with hints of talcum powder, amber, leather, and tonka bean. Like my beloved bottle of Misia eau de parfum, which I store in the refrigerator to delay the inevitable process of oxidation, La Valse is decadent: laden with a sense of lateness, the ripe promise of rot. And to quote the great philosopher Peggy Lee, “If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing.”
 
 
Misia by Pierre Bonnard
Misia by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
Misia with Renoir and friends
Misia with her first husband and their dog, by Bonnard
Misia with her second husband, whom she married at the urging of her first husband, who was badly in debt. This one, she said, turned her into the most spoiled girl in the world (she didn’t mean this in a good way).
Misia with her great friend Coco Chanel and Diaghilev (background). I don’t know who the woman holding the parasol is. Misia is the one holding the happy dog.

Misia on the cover of the literary journal she founded with her first husband
Misia (foreground) with her great friend Coco Chanel, who would prepare her body for burial and mourn her the rest of her life.

Misia in profile

Weird Work in Progress

By Posted in Admirable Others, classical, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations, Various Worthwhile Things Tagged , , , 5 Comments
Sergio Larrain, 1957

I kept thinking I ought to update my blog because I was probably falling behind, but I didn’t bother to check to see when my last update was, and I’m genuinely surprised to learn that it was nearly a month ago. I don’t feel like I have been messing around and slacking off, but the page views don’t lie.

I have been busy writing, but I am not always writing what I ought to be writing, the writing for which I am paid and which my clients have a reasonable expectation of receiving. I have been writing the first draft of a novel that has been marinating in my mind for the past three years or so, maybe longer. I know I am definitely using sections that I wrote back in 2021.

I’m too superstitious to say too much about it, and I don’t want to jinx it by discussing the plot too much before the first draft is complete, but it’s kind of a magical-realist horror novel about identity, art, and motherhood, with a special emphasis on muses and monsters.

Instead of prattle on too much about something I may very well never finish, I will share some of the photos that are inspiring me for reasons that I hope will be clear to at least a few people someday. As a lifelong compulsive reader, I have always suspected that there are far more great novels out there than I will ever be able to read, which is a huge disincentive to write, because why contribute to the glut, right? Most people don’t read anything close to the 70 or so novels that I’ll probably end up reading this year, and believe me I don’t make a dent in my Daunting Queue. I could show you my Goodreads stats, but why bother? We all know that the world needs another novel like it needs another novel coronavirus.

And yet why not finish it, even if it never gets published? I already know it’s not going to be another Moby Dick, and that manuscript was a total flop in Melville’s lifetime, so who can say what will happen? But if I never finish writing it, I’ll for sure never know.

All the subjects in these photos are somehow significant in the novel, but it is not a historical novel. And that’s the last thing I’ll say about it because I hate enigmatic posts and related forms of rhetorical coyness!

Many of these photos are of Manon Gropius, whose Wikipedia entry lists her occupation as Muse.

Some gig, huh? Berg called her an angel, and Canetti called her a gazelle, and her polarizing mother pawned her off on Austrofascists. Kid never stood a chance.


The young Alma Mahler (Alma Schindler)
Alma Mahler with her daughters Maria and Anna
Alma with her daughter Manon Gropius
Manon Gropius, with her father, Walter
Manon and Walter
Manon Gropius, 1933, shortly before she contracted the polio that eventually killed her.

Oh, and just to keep this connected to my regular writing career, here are some program notes that I wrote about Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, which he wrote in memory of Manon, whom he called an angel.

A Double Requiem

Berg’s Violin Concerto, his last completed composition and arguably his most beloved, serves both as an elegy for Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old girl that he had loved like a surrogate daughter, and as a requiem for himself. Indeed, he died shortly after finishing it. According to his wife, he worked at a frantic pace, as if he knew his days were numbered. “I cannot stop,” he explained when she begged him to slow down. “I do not have time.” 

In 1904, when Berg was 19 years old, his older brother brought a stack of his lieder to Arnold Schoenberg, who had placed a newspaper ad seeking composition students. Although Berg’s family was too poor to pay for lessons, Schoenberg took him on anyway. Between 1901 and 1908, Berg wrote approximately 150 songs and other vocal works. After the dismal failure of his Altenberg Lieder in 1912, he stopped writing songs. Until his sudden, squalid death at age 50, from an infected insect bite, Berg focused almost exclusively on two operas: Wozzeck, which he completed in 1922, and Lulu, which remained unfinished when he died, on Christmas Eve, 1935.

Commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner, the Violin Concerto was Berg’s last completed work. When Krasner first approached Berg with the proposal, the composer was busy with Lulu and reluctant to crank out a glitzy showpiece. “You know that is not my kind of music,” he told Krasner. He needed money badly, however, so he eventually relented. On April 22, two months after he had accepted Krasner’s commission, he learned that Manon Gropius, the beautiful 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler (Gustav’s widow) and the architect Walter Gropius, had succumbed to poliomyelitis. Inspired by the death of a girl that he “loved as if she were his own child, from the beginning of her life,” as her mother phrased it, Berg began to work in earnest. He composed most of the Violin Concerto at his country home, Waldhaus, in Velden am Wörthersee, in the Carinthia region of Austria. 

In early June, Berg invited Krasner to join him and his wife, Helene, at Waldhaus. The two men played through the first part of the concerto together, hashing out the solo part. As Berg worked on the second half of the concerto, he asked Krasner to improvise in another room. When the violinist would tire, after playing nonstop for hours on end, Berg would suddenly appear and urge him to continue. By July 15, the score was more or less complete; the orchestration was finished less than one month later. “I have never worked harder in my life,” Berg declared, “and what’s more, the work gave me increasing pleasure.” After obtaining permission from Alma Mahler, he dedicated the Violin Concerto “to the memory of an angel.”

Berg never got the chance to review and correct the published score, and he died before the premiere could take place. Krasner performed the solo role on April 19, 1936, at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Barcelona. 

A Closer Listen

Cast in two large movements instead of the conventional three, Berg’s Violin Concerto can be further divided into four parts. The first movement comprises an Andante section and a longer Allegretto section. The second movement begins with an Allegro section and concludes with a substantial Adagio. According to many commentators, the first movement represents life, the second death and transfiguration. In the first movement, Berg quotes from a Carinthian folksong, a rustic Ländler that some scholars interpret as a wistful allusion to Marie “Mizzi” Scheucl, the servant girl who bore his illegitimate daughter in 1902, when he was 17 years old. 

Early in the summer of 1935, Berg asked his research assistant, Willi Reich, to send him some of Bach’s cantatas. In the last part of the second movement, Berg incorporates a series of variations on “Es ist genug!” (“It is finished!”), using some of Bach’s original harmonies. The chorale’s melody begins with the last four notes of Berg’s tone row: B, C-sharp, E-flat, and F. Because it contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, the tone row is the foundation for twelve-tone composition, a formal procedure that Schoenberg developed and taught to Berg. But Berg’s series of notes also lends itself to a looser, more tonal mode of expression, which accounts for the Violin Concerto’s considerable emotive power.

Copyright 2018 by René Spencer Saller

A bit of bonus content for the true fans:

Alban Berg (born in Vienna, 1885; died in Vienna, 1935, reportedly from an infected insect bite.
Manon and her dad, who doted on her (he wanted custody of her when he and Alma split, but sadly it didn’t work out because Alma, despite her promises during the divorce negotiations, had other ideas).

Verdi’s Requiem

By Posted in classical, Music Writing, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations Tagged , , , 2 Comments
Giuseppe Verdi (molto bello!)

I wrote about Giuseppe Verdi’s monumental Requiem for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra back in November, and it seems that I never posted my notes for this stunning performance. Either that or the WordPress searchbots are lying to me, and I’m experiencing short-term memory loss, both possibilities I would prefer not to contemplate.

At any rate, here are the notes I wrote, which can also be found on the DSO website, if you click around and expand some menus and so forth. Or you could just read them here.

Verdi’s Requiem

by René Spencer Saller

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901): Messa da Requiem

I asked a friend, Patty Kofron, a versatile mezzo-soprano who has sung Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem several times, to describe the experience from the performer’s perspective. “I don’t know if I can express how much more it is than the complexity of the double choruses, or the beauty and terror of the music,” she said. “When I sing the ‘Libera me,’ I feel like I am personally begging God to spare me from eternal damnation… and I’m not even religious. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever sung or will ever sing. As much as I love the Brahms, Fauré, Mozart, and other requiems, the Verdi puts my own mortality and my maker right in my face.”

You don’t need to be singing to feel a similar rush. You don’t even need to believe in God. Despite its obvious Judeo-Christian framework, its churchy fugues, and its incense-steeped Latin trappings, this Requiem deals more with the secular than the sacred. For long, delectable stretches, if you tune out the Latin text and simply let the melodies wash over you unmediated, you might convince yourself that you’re listening to a love duet or an arietta, perhaps a quartet backed by large chorus or some showstopper from one of his recent operas. Indeed, Verdi finished Aida, a commission to honor the Suez Canal, in 1871, a few years before the first performance of the Requiem; the two scores share a similar intensity, a dark grandeur bleeding into raw emotion. 

No wonder the Requiem appeals to the nonreligious: Verdi himself was often accused of agnosticism. His second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, described the composer’s spiritual outlook as a matter of temperament: “Everyone agrees that …he’s the soul of honesty, he understands and feels every noble and delicate sentiment; yet for all that, [he] allows himself to be, I won’t say an atheist, but certainly not much of a believer, and all with a calm obstinance that makes you want to thrash him.”

Everyone who loves Verdi’s Requiem has a favorite part. The concluding “Libera me” gets most of the attention, and deservedly so, but highlights abound. Sometimes it’s the glittering majesty of the “Sanctus” that satiates my brain’s pleasure centers; sometimes it’s the intimate, chamber-music bliss of the “Lux aeterna.” But the Requiem is more than the sum of its parts, and most of its power is cumulative. When the unstoppable “Dies irae” theme returns, it hits us like a sucker punch: we can’t escape our certain deaths. All we can do, awaiting judgment, is express our all too human selves. 

Verdi does more than resurrect the Requiem form: he re-humanizes it, bringing the drama back to individual sinners with enormous needs: for grace, for redemption, for eternal peace, or at least an escape from hellish torment. The singers are relatable in the same way that opera heroes and heroines are relatable: larger than life but fatally flawed. 

Late-Life Superachiever

Over a six-decade career, Verdi wrote 28 operas, easily half of them masterpieces. He produced many of his greatest works when he was in his 70s, at a time when 60 was considered old. He was still at the peak of his powers when he died, on January 27, 1901, a few days after suffering a massive stroke. To this day his funeral ranks as the largest public assembly ever recorded in Italy.

Beyond his genius for indelible melodies, Verdi was a master dramatist. A devotee of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron, and Voltaire, he read widely and deeply, always on the hunt for the next opera plot. He worked closely with his librettists to ensure minimal flab and maximal feeling. In the world according to Verdi, rage and terror rule, desire redeems and destroys, and the tenor loves bravely forever. 

He was born in Le Roncole (now known as Roncole Verdi), in a rural area then under the control of France. Although he liked to call himself a peasant, his parents were innkeepers, with enough disposable income to pay for his private organ lessons at age four. During his adolescence he lived in Busseto with a patron’s family, growing close to the patron’s daughter, his music pupil. After he failed the entrance examination for the Milan Conservatory, his wealthy future father-in-law paid for three years of private composition lessons.

In 1836, two months after Verdi was appointed director of Busseto’s Philharmonic Society, he married Margherita Barezzi, his patron’s daughter. They had two children, both of whom died as babies. In 1840, a year after the successful premiere of his first opera, Oberto, Verdi’s 26-year-old wife suddenly died, probably from encephalitis. His next effort, a comedy, was a flop, and he considered giving up. But in 1842, Nabucco, his third opera, became the first in a long series of overlapping hits, launching the 29-year-old composer’s international career and securing his fame. 

It was during rehearsals for Nabucco that Verdi met his second wife: the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who stepped into the role of Abigaille at the last minute and saved the production. Verdi and Strepponi invited scandal by living together “in sin” (technically, in Paris, Busseto, and finally an estate in Sant’Agata, in his ancestral Parmesan countryside). They married in secret in 1859, and the union lasted until her death, in 1897; Verdi died a few years later. 

At his funeral, thousands of mourners lined the streets while Arturo Toscanini conducted a 900-voice choir in the “Va, pensiero” chorus from Nabucco. Although Verdi was first buried in the Cimitero Monumentale, in Milan, his remains were relocated to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a retirement home for musicians that Verdi had founded.

Roots of the Requiem

In 1868, soon after the death of Gioachino Rossini, whom he revered, Verdi pitched a kind of compilation Requiem in honor of the late composer to his publisher, Tito Ricordi, with the various parts supplied by himself and a dozen of Italy’s other leading composers. Verdi composed the final “Libera me.” The memorial mass was not performed in 1869, as originally scheduled, the first anniversary of Rossini’s death. The complete compilation version of the work wasn’t debuted until 1988. 

In 1873, at Verdi’s request, Ricordi returned the “Libera me” score, around the same time that the Italian novelist and poet Allesandro Manzoni died. Verdi’s grief over the loss of Manzoni, a hero of the Risorgimento (the 19th-century Italian unification movement), likely compounded the grief he felt for Rossini. Whatever the source of these strong emotions, Verdi sought expression in the elegiac: he decided to complete the remaining movements of the Requiem—everything save “Libera me,” which he revised significantly. He spent the summer of 1873 composing, or reverse-engineering, a complete Requiem. He believed in the project so strongly that he spent his own money printing the sheet music for the first performance, which he conducted, at the Church of San Marco, in Milan, on May 22, 1874. 

Verdi’s Requiem translates the ancient Latin mass for the dead into the vernacular of Italian opera. Ferocious and crude as a gut punch, tender and transcendent as a kiss, Verdi’s Requiem revels in the dramatic, or at least doesn’t refute the charge lobbed by the conductor Hans von Bülow, who dismissed Verdi’s Requiem as “his latest opera, in ecclesiastical vestments.”

Johannes Brahms, Bülow’s close ally and associate, disagreed. “Bülow has made an almighty fool of himself,” Brahms said after taking in Verdi’s Requiem. “Only a genius could have written such a work.”

Verdi, for his part, tried to distinguish his Requiem from his previous works for the stage. “One mustn’t sing this Mass in the way one sings an opera,” he explained, “and therefore phrasing and dynamics that may be fine in the theater won’t satisfy me at all, not at all.”

Theatricality aside, Verdi taps into the divine by way of the carnal. All the best evangelists understand the link between the loins and the great hereafter. As for theological matters, he was an agnostic and loath to get too preachy. Maybe that’s why his lead quartet often sounds like pairs of lovers singing to other lovers. He understood divine mercy through his art, those melodies that sear our souls like sudden truths. 

In Memory of Two Great Men

Verdi’s “Libera me” was originally written to honor Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), the composer Verdi once called “a glory of Italy.” Verdi called Manzoni’s 1827 novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) “not only the greatest book of our epoch, but one of the greatest ever to emerge from a human brain.”  He called Manzoni himself a “saint.” 

Later, when Manzoni died at age 88—coincidentally, the same age at which Verdi himself would die almost 30 years later—he remembered his contribution to the compilation Requiem and realized that he could build upon this promising foundation.

On June 3, 1873, Verdi wrote to Ricordi of his plans: “I too would like to demonstrate what affection and veneration I bore and bear to that Great Man who is no more, and whom Milan has so worthily honored. I would like to set to music a Mass for the Dead to be performed next year on the anniversary of his death. The Mass would have rather vast dimensions, and besides a large orchestra and a large chorus, it would also require… four or five principal singers…. I would have the copying of the music done at my expense, and I myself would conduct the performance both at the rehearsals and in church.” 

Verdi asked Ricordi to obtain permission from the mayor of Milan. After the project was approved, Verdi got to work. By using the music that he had written for the earlier compilation Requiem, he would need only about an hour’s worth of additional music to frame and complete it. He composed the settings for a multipart “Dies irae” and other sacred texts, and finished it on April 10, 1874. He printed the score at his own expense, as promised, and conducted the first performance in Milan on May 22, one year after Manzoni’s death. Verdi’s original title: “Requiem Mass for the anniversary of the death of Manzoni, 22 May 1874.”

Varieties of Requiem

Technically speaking, a Requiem refers to a musical setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead. Sometime after 1450 and possibly as late as 1470, the Franco-Flemish composer-turned-priest Johannes Ockeghem wrote an early, incomplete polyphonic rendition, minus the Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Communion. Many significant Requiem settings followed, from the 15th century onward, including Mozart’s iconic unfinished composition from the months, indeed hours, leading up to his death in 1791. Closer to Verdi’s time, Luigi Cherubini composed a stellar pair (1816 and 1836), and Hector Berlioz contributed another even more famous one, sometimes called the Grande Messe des morts (Great Mass of the Dead; 1837). Verdi would have been familiar with all those composers’ works, although his own Requiem was less rooted in the liturgical.

Verdi responded to the Latin text by locating its emotional core, the dramatic significance of each singer’s moral confession. He offers no comforting lies, no confident speculation. Let other composers traffic in the theological; Verdi’s heart is with the human: the soprano, pleading in terror for her salvation, sinful but shining, shining. The tenor, the mezzo, the bass-baritone: all kissed by the holy, implicated and yet innocent. 

A Closer Listen

I. In the opening movement, an appeal on the behalf of the recently departed for a peaceful rest, the chorus sings from the perspective of the mourners. Prefaced by austere low strings, the singers begin with the standard lines “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine” (Grant them eternal rest, O Lord), which the chorus and orchestra intone with a hushed gravitas. Verdi translates the Lord’s promise of endless light into the luminous language of late Romanticism, turning a grief-laden hymn into an operatic anthem. The four solo singers join the chorus and orchestra for a jubilant “Kyrie eleison” (Lord have mercy).

II. The doomy and demonic second movement, the nine-part “Dies irae” (Day of Wrath), slashes and burns through a terrifying series of scenarios wherein the sinners individually confront their wretched souls. What awaits us after death? Eternal perdition or a joy so perfect that the most celestial fugue can only approximate it? The singers roar, wail, whisper, shriek, and hiss; the orchestra invests each scene with the appropriate mood and color. 

The “Dies irae” is based on a poem about Judgment Day commonly attributed to Thomas of Celano, a 13th-century Franciscan monk. In his setting of the ancient text, Verdi squires us through all the stages of grief. Against punishing bass drum and shrieking piccolo, and preceded by apocalyptic brass fanfares, the choristers describe the day that fire consumes the world. Verdi’s melodies do 90 percent of the persuasion, and his Technicolor scoring does the rest. Only a robot could resist the “Recordare,” in which the soprano and the mezzo-soprano sing a lustrous Mozartian rhapsody. Other highlights include the godlike trumpet fanfare of the chorus-driven “Tuba mirum”; the sensuous grip of “Liber scriptus”; the delicate, wind-driven pastorale of “Quid sum miser”; and the pathos-drenched “Lacrymoso,” for solo quartet and chorus, the sinner’s tearful plea for salvation.

III. The solo quartet sings the “Offertorium,” a light-rinsed, lullaby-like testament to the creator’s tender mercies. Here the four singers describe the holy radiance that God promises to bestow on Abraham and his descendants.

IV. The “Sanctus,” a resplendent double fugue for two choruses, is sung from the angelic perspective: divinity casting a fond downward glance at the suffering humans. The angels’ joy seems almost explosive, in contrast to the anguish of the human characters: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts! Heaven and earth are filled with your glory!” 

V. Against spare orchestral accompaniment, the chorus, the soprano, and then the mezzo-soprano sing the “Agnus Dei”: “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them rest.” 

VI. Sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by shimmering strings and delicate winds, the mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass deliver the luminous prayer “Lux aeterna” (Light eternal). The violins are divided into six parts to enhance the celestial effect.

VII. The soprano returns, with chorus, for the transcendent “Libera me,” which redirects our attention to the singular terrified sinner. On one level, you can appreciate the final movement as an aria, a gracefully emotive outpouring of bel canto splendor. At its climactic midpoint, the soprano’s high C rips through the chorus to remind us of her individual suffering. The chorus responds, a soothing balm made of light. A wild fugue develops, jagged with accidentals, propelled past terror into panic. Is the sinner consoled or even redeemed by this onslaught of beauty, or simply distracted from the potential terrors of the afterlife? Did she do enough—will we have done enough?—to atone? 

Verdi respects us too much to speak for a God he wasn’t entirely sure even existed. He puts his faith in our collective capacity to figure it out for ourselves. The Requiem ends with the soprano and chorus crooning so softly that they might as well be whispering, “Libera me”: Deliver me. 

Into what, who can say?

Copyright 2022 René Spencer Saller

Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde

By Posted in Music Writing, Program Notes Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860 (happy belated birthday, G!), which made me think I might as well post some notes I wrote a few years back for the Dallas Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, in chamber reduction. (I have written about the full orchestral version, too, I’m pretty sure, but I think both versions of the work are fascinating and urge you to listen to both, if you haven’t already.) I’m pretty sure I have never posted them before, but if I’m repeating myself, please take it up with the subscriptions department, which will reimburse you in full.

If you’d like to listen to a lovely performance that’s readily available on YouTube, I recommend this performance by Cantata Profana, from 2018:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKY2xQLdteU

Mahler’s Song of the Earth

by René Spencer Saller 

In 1907, about a year before he started writing Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) endured three brutal losses. First, through no fault of his own, he was forced out of his longtime position as conductor of the Vienna Court Opera. Next, his cherished four-year-old daughter died from scarlet fever. Then his physician told him that he had a fatal heart condition. Frightened and grieving, Mahler confronted his mortality crisis by working harder than ever. Despite being warned by his doctor to get more rest, he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—slow down. 

In July of 1908, he wrote to Bruno Walter, who would conduct the posthumous premiere in Munich, not quite six months after the composer’s death:  

“If I am to find my way back to myself, I have got to accept the horrors of loneliness, since you do not know what has gone on and is going on within me. It is, assuredly, no hypochondriac fear of death, as you suppose. I have long known that I have got to die…. Without trying to explain or describe something for which there probably are no words, I simply say that with a single fell stroke I have lost any calm and peace of mind I ever achieved. I stand vis-à-vis de rien [face-to-face with nothingness], and now, at the end of my life, have to begin to learn to walk and stand.”

Two months later, he wrote another, less morbid letter to the conductor. “I have been hard at work,” he reported. “I do not know what the whole thing should be called. I have been granted a time that was good, and I think it is the most personal thing that I have done so far.” 

Unsure how to classify Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler finally settled on “a symphony for tenor and alto (or baritone) and orchestra.” Nominally a song cycle, with alternating movements for two singers—usually, but not always, male and female—the composition was originally scored for a large orchestra, although Mahler’s many small instrumental groupings often suggest the intimacy and expressive clarity of chamber music. He indicated that a tenor should sing movements 1, 3, and 5, and assigned the remaining three, including the sprawling sixth, to either a contralto or a baritone. (In most cases, a contralto is chosen.)


Schoenberg/Riehn Arrangement

Thanks to Mahler’s gossamer textures, the score for Das Lied von der Erde lends itself to a chamber-music reduction. In 1921 the largely self-taught Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) began an arrangement for a small (14-instrument) ensemble. Schoenberg never meant for the arrangement to be published or performed publicly. He created it mostly for educational purposes, under the auspices of The Society for Private Musical Performance, which he and his musical disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern had co-founded in Vienna in 1919.

The goal of the Society—which denied entry to music critics and forbade applause during or after performances—was to promote new and underperformed music by contemporary composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy, and Bartók. Over its roughly three-year existence, the Society staged more than 100 performances. Each piece on the program was performed twice in a single evening to help subscribers absorb and appreciate what were likely to be totally unfamiliar works. Owing to financial constraints and other practical considerations, many scores (such as Mahler’s) were stripped down to more economical arrangements for piano or chamber ensemble. 

Schoenberg arranged Das Lied von der Erde for string quintet (standard quartet, plus double bass), wind quintet, bassoon, horn, piano, harmonium, and percussion (glockenspiel, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, small and large drum). By the time the Society folded in 1922, he had abandoned the project, after orchestrating only the first song. For the remaining songs, he left extensive notes, which, in 1983, decades after his death in 1951, the German composer, conductor, and musicologist Rainer Riehn (1941–2015) used to finish the score. Making a slight adjustment to Schoenberg’s instrumentation, Riehn added a part for celesta in “Der Abschied.”

Instead of the lustrous orchestration of Mahler’s original, the Schoenberg/Riehn arrangement calls for solo instrumentalists to accompany the singer, with a single violin or cello standing in for Mahler’s massed strings. Comparing Mahler’s original orchestral score to a painting, Riehn called the chamber arrangement a woodcut rendition. 

Song by Song

The lyrics are based on texts from Die chinescische Flöte (The Chinese Flute), a collection of ancient Chinese poems translated into German by Hans Bethge. Mahler chose poems by Li Tai-Po, Mong Kao-Yen, Wang Wei, and Tchan Tsi, but adapted the lines as needed, sometimes augmenting them with his own words. All six songs touch on the brevity of life and the certainty of death. 

The first song, “Das Trinklied von Jammer der Erde” (The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow), seems at first like a jovial tribute to the analgesic properties of alcohol, but each of the three stanzas ends with the same ominous refrain: “Dark is life, and so is death.” Mahler raises the pitch of this line with every repetition, ramping up the emotional tension.  

Next,  in the delicately scored “Der Einsame in Herbst” (The Solitary One in Autumn), a seamstress laments her loneliness over a long, sleepless night: “Sun of love, will you never shine again/To dry my bitter tears?” A spectral oboe and spare, shuddering strings intensify the autumnal flavor.

The third and briefest song, “Von der Jugend” (Of Youth), describes a gaggle of pretty young things under a porcelain pavilion. Pentatonic patterns and Asian-inspired percussion set the scene while darting woodwinds mimic the partygoers’ passing remarks.

In “Von der Schönheit” (Beauty), the singer depicts a group of maidens gathering lotus blossoms by a riverbank. The loveliest one gazes longingly at a young man, who doesn’t notice her. Despite the sad lyrics, the music is sprightly, buoyed by frisky winds, pizzicato strings, and dotted rhythms.

In the fifth song, “Der Trunkene im Frühling” (The Drunkard in Spring), the booze-fueled male protagonist tries in vain to obliterate his thoughts while birds twitter mindlessly in the background: “What does spring matter to me?” he concludes. “Let me be drunk!”  

A sinuous, sorrowful solo oboe glides over swaying strings and pulsing rhythms in the half-hour-long finale, “Der Abschied” (The Farewell). “I shall no longer seek the far horizon,” the singer declares. “My heart is still….” Mahler combined two poems by different authors, punctuated by a magnificent orchestral death march. He marked the end Gäzlich esterbend (completely dying away), and added his own words as conclusion: “Everywhere and forever the luminous blue of the horizon… Forever… forever…” That last word, ewig, summoned from the depths of the contralto’s register, is repeated nine times as the music melts into radiant silence. 

Copyright 2020 René Spencer Saller

Reena Esmail’s Black Iris

By Posted in Music Writing, Program Notes, Various Worthwhile Things Tagged , , , 6 Comments
Reena Esmail

I had the great honor of contributing some notes for a recent–and newly revised–orchestral composition by the singular composer Reena Esmail for the San Francisco Symphony program book. The concert runs this weekend, so by all means snag some tickets if you plan to be in San Francisco then.

I wasn’t able to make the performance last night, but my friend and colleague Ben Pesetsky, the Associate Director of Editorial at the SF Symphony and a fine composer in his own right, was kind enough to take a photo of my byline in the paper version of the book and email it to me. (I will include the notes in a more legible format below the photo.)

Black Iris at a Glance

Originally titled #metoo, Black Iris (2017) responds to composer Reena Esmail’s own experience of sexual abuse and that of other survivors. “I always get asked why there aren’t more women composers,” she explains. “This piece is one response—of many hundreds of responses—to that question.” Although the one-movement orchestral composition is performed on Western instruments and notated according to Western conventions, its slippery microtonal melodies and shadowy harmonies evoke the Hindustani art music that Esmail studied in India on a Fulbright-Nehru grant. 

Black Iris

Reena Esmail

Born: February 11, 1983, in Chicago

Composed: 2017 (rev. 2022)
First San Francisco Symphony Performances
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, cymbals, chimes, snare drum, bass drum, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and marimba), harp, piano (doubling celesta), and strings
Duration: About 14 mins

In both her work and her person, the composer Reena Esmail reflects the global diaspora. Her Indian mother, a member of India’s Portuguese-influenced Goan community, grew up in Kenya; her father, also Indian, lived in Pakistan, where his family moved after Partition. Esmail herself was born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, but she felt connected to her ancestral homeland. After earning an undergraduate degree in composition at Juilliard and midway through graduate studies at Yale, she knew that she needed to learn more about Indian classical music. She spent 2011–12 in India on a Fulbright-Nehru grant, studying under such masters as singer Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and sitarist Gaurav Mazumdar. Her doctoral dissertation at Yale outlined methods of collaboration between Western and Hindustani forms of art music. As an artistic director of the nonprofit Shastra, she promotes music that links the cultural traditions of India and the West. This devotion to cultural syncretism carries over to her substantial catalogue, which includes orchestral, chamber, and choral works.

Originally titled #metoo, the one-movement orchestral composition Black Iris responds to Esmail’s own experience of sexual abuse and that of other survivors. When the hashtag stopped trending, and the #metoo movement began to shift meaning, she decided to rename the piece after the famous Georgia O’Keeffe painting, explaining that “the light petals on the top, and the dark petals beneath—the image was so resonant with the experience about which this work was written.”

Approximately 10 minutes long, Black Iris is performed on Western instruments and notated according to Western conventions, but many of the melodies involve quicksilver microtonal shifts, subtle shadings of notes that slip between the lines and spaces of the staff or the steps on the scale. As any fan of Hindustani ragas or Delta blues or early Sonic Youth will attest, these liminal spaces contain vast stores of power and pleasure. Rather than “resolve” any harmonic ambiguities, Esmail delights in them.

The piece was commissioned by Chicago Sinfonetta, which premiered it in March 2018. Esmail substantially revised and reorchestrated it for its first San Francisco Symphony performances this week. In her original program note, Esmail wrote:

I always get asked why there aren’t more women composers. This piece is one response —of many hundreds of responses—to that question. So many of us decide to become composers when we are young women because we fall deeply in love with individual pieces of music. We listen to them incessantly, we memorize every note of them, we live our lives through the lens of that music. And then at some point, for some of us, as we engage with that music, something devastating happens to us—often by the very person who has introduced us to that music. We hate ourselves, we blame ourselves, we bury it deep within our psyche—until we hear that piece of music again. It could be at a concert, it could be in a theory class, it could be on the radio. We are powerless to fend off that tidal wave of sensory memory. The very music we once loved becomes a trigger that slowly destroys our love for our art. . . .

I was so filled with rage while I was writing this work. The rage of seeing the injustices that plagued even the strongest, most powerful women among us, the rage of having to relive the worst moments of my own life over and over again, every time I checked Facebook or turned on the news. The rage that as women, some of the strongest bonds we share are forged from the most devastating and corrosive experiences.

Lest this seem like a war cry, I want to say this: I have yet to meet a truly happy, fulfilled man that has sexually abused a woman. The outcries of #metoo are a symptom of issues that are affecting men. Women are the bystanders who get caught in the crossfire. Every day, even as my rage simmers, I have to ask: what is the endgame here? What does a healthy society look like? And how can we put systems in place that truly allow men to address these underlying issues, so that we can create stronger bonds with one another, and build stronger communities with higher standards of accountability to each other? I look forward to imagining and creating that world together.

—René Spencer Saller

Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

A Juneteenth Program

By Posted in classical, Music Writing, Program Notes, Various Worthwhile Things Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Adolphus Hailstork

In recognition of Juneteenth tomorrow, here is a program I wrote about a couple of years ago for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. I don’t think I ever uploaded it to the blog, and if I did, the link is surely dead by now, so it seems worth reposting. Juneteenth is an especially significant holiday for Texans, but I’m happy to say that Dallas is programming most of these composers all year round. In fact, Adolphus Hailstork, pictured above, has a new co-commission from Dallas Symphony scheduled for premiere next season, the subject of which is the last speech JFK gave before he was assassinated.

Jubilant Juneteenth 

by René Spencer Saller

Variously known as Emancipation Day, Jubilee Day, and Black Independence Day, Juneteenth holds a special significance for Texans. The name, a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, refers to the date in 1865 when the Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 in Galveston. This proclamation freed the enslaved people of Texas—more than 250,000 men, women, and children. Technically speaking, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had already banned slavery in Texas nearly two-and-a-half years earlier, but enforcing the law required the intervention of Union troops, and getting approximately 2,000 soldiers to the most remote Confederate state took time. (Contrary to popular belief, Texas wasn’t the last state to end slavery; it was still prevalent in Delaware and Kentucky until December 1865, when the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.) 

In Texas Juneteenth festivities date to 1866, and the practice eventually spread throughout the nation. On June 7, 1979, Texas became the first state to make Juneteenth an official state holiday. Today Juneteenth is widely celebrated throughout the United States, and activists are currently lobbying Congress to recognize it as a national holiday. [Update: It became a federal holiday after I turned in my notes and remains a federal holiday today, hooray!]

Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941): American Fanfare
Born in Rochester, New York, Adolphus Hailstork studied composition at Howard University, the Manhattan School of Music, and the American Institute at Fontainebleau before earning his doctorate from Michigan State University. His diverse catalogue includes works for orchestra, organ, piano, and solo voice, as well as chamber and jazz ensembles. In October 2020 he received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Manhattan School of Music. Current projects include his Fourth Symphony and A Knee on a Neck, a tribute to George Floyd for chorus and orchestra. Completed in 1985, American Fanfare is scored for brass and percussion. 

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) and John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1954): “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (arr. Tyzik)

To call James Weldon Johnson multifaceted is an understatement. The distinguished poet, novelist, newspaper publisher, lawyer, diplomat, translator, and civil rights activist also wrote what is commonly known as the Black National Anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Born in Jacksonville, Florida, to a hotel headwaiter and a schoolteacher, he attended college at Atlanta University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1894. He wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a poem in 1899; his older brother composed the music the following year. 


“A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900,” Johnson later wrote. “My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. […] Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of 500 colored school children. 

“Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within 20 years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. […]. 

“The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.”

Nkeiru Okoye, courtesy of the composer

Nkeiru Okoye (b. 1972): “I Am Harriet Tubman”

Born in New York City to a Nigerian father and an African American mother, Nkeiru Okoye [in KEAR roo oh KOY yeh] was brought up in the United States and Nigeria. She started piano lessons at age 8, and just five years later won a national competition for her first musical composition. She holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Rutgers University and serves on the composition faculty at the State University of New York at New Paltz. The inaugural recipient of the International Florence Price Festival Award for Composition, Okoye is currently a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her wide-ranging works have been performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Indianapolis Symphony, Virginia Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and many other ensembles.

“I Am Harriet Tubman” comes from her two-act theatrical work Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom (2014). “I wanted to write an opera about a woman who did great things and survived,” she explained. “My music doesn’t easily fit into a single category, though I incorporate many musical influences in a way that creates a sound that is uniquely mine. I think a lot of people are surprised to hear connections between the gospel aria and the jazz aria in Harriet Tubman.”

Mary D. Watkins (b. 1939): Soul of Remembrance

Mary D. Watkins

Eclectic and prolific, the Denver-born composer and pianist Mary D. Watkins began studying piano at age three, in Pueblo, Colorado. Five years later, she was improvising and composing original works. At 15 she won second place in a piano competition with her own arrangement of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” After earning a degree in music composition from Howard University in 1972, Watkins played with numerous jazz ensembles in Washington, D.C., and later moved to the West Coast, where she founded her own jazz quartet and recorded several albums. Among her many compositions are the scores for the jazz musical Lady Lester Sings the Blues, based on the life of legendary tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and The Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie, an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. In 2009 she composed and wrote the libretto for Dark River, an opera based on the life of the civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer.

Composed in 1993, Soul of Remembrance is the second movement of her orchestral suite Five Movements in Color. In a 2016 interview with the National Education Association, Watkins described the proudest moment of her career: “It was in 2009 when I was in Chicago standing in the corridor outside the auditorium. I heard the orchestra rehearsing [Soul of Remembrance]. The music wasn’t flashy, technically challenging, or anything like that. It was serene, beautifully executed, and I let go of whatever it was I had been holding on to. It was the first time I really felt validated as a composer.” 

William Grant Still (1895–1978): Ennanga, for harp, piano, and strings (first movement) 

William Grant Still

Nicknamed the “Dean of African-American composers,” Still completed more than 150 works, including eight operas and five symphonies. He was the first Black American to write a symphony that was performed by a major orchestra, and the first to conduct a major orchestra. In 1949 his opera about Haiti, Troubled Island, was produced by the New York City Opera—another historic first. 

Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi, to college-educated teachers. His father, the town bandmaster, died when he was three months old. He and his mother moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she remarried. He began taking violin lessons at age 14 and taught himself viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, oboe, and saxophone. In 1911 he enrolled at Wilberforce College in Ohio, where he directed the band. His studies at Oberlin Conservatory of Music were interrupted by his Navy service. He played as a sideman for bluesman W.C. Handy, who brought him to Memphis and then New York City, where he became an oboist in Eubie Blake’s pit and made arrangements for theater orchestras and jazz and blues artists. He also studied with the influential atonalist Edgard Varèse. 

Still completed the three-movement chamber composition Ennanga in 1956. The title is a Ugandan word that refers to a small harplike instrument, and the score contains a prominent part for the Western harp, as well as piano and string quintet. For technical advice, Still consulted the harp virtuoso Lois Adele Craft, who also performed at the Los Angeles premiere. In the first movement, the harp and piano alternate between percussive and melodic roles, often evoking Juba, or hambone, a centuries-old African-American dance form that calls for stomping, slapping, clapping, and patting the body.

Traditional: “A City Called Heaven” (arr. Tyzik)

Like many traditional spirituals, “A City Called Heaven” predates the American Civil War and exists in numerous versions, under many titles, including “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow,” “Poor Pilgrim,” “Tossed and Driven,” and “Tryin’ To Make Heaven My Home.” It was first documented in the 1907 collection Folk Songs of the American Negro, compiled by John Wesley Work, Jr. (1871–1925), an influential African-American scholar of folk songs and spirituals.

Still: Symphony No. 1 in A-flat Major (Afro-American Symphony) (third movement, Animato) 

Still began sketching his most famous work, the Afro-American Symphony, in 1924, not long after he played in the pit orchestra for Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s Shuffle Along, which featured Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, among other luminaries of the nascent Harlem Renaissance. The sketches remained in limbo for some time while Still worked on other projects. As he later explained, “it was not until the Depression struck that I went jobless long enough to let the Symphony take shape. In 1930 I rented a room in a quiet building not far from my home in New York and began to work.” Two months later, Still’s First Symphony was complete. In a notebook that he kept during composition, he assigned alternative titles to each movement: the third, Animato, was designated “Humor.”

In 1931 Howard Hanson conducted the premiere—marking a milestone in Still’s career, as the first symphony by a Black composer to be performed by a major orchestra—and the 36-year-old composer’s career took off. He received commissions from several orchestras and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he arranged film scores and popular music while honing his own powerful musical idiom: a blend of European post-Romanticism, jazz, blues, and spirituals. 

In 1964 Still described the creative impetus behind his Afro-American Symphony: “I wanted, above all, to write music that would be recognizable as being in the idiom employed [by the American Negro] or recognized, I should say, as that of the American Negro. It was the object that I desired most of all.” 

John Newton (1725–1807); William Walker (1809–1875): “Amazing Grace” (arr. Tyzik)
First published in 1779, the words to the iconic Christian hymn “Amazing Grace” were written by the English poet and Anglican clergyman John Newton.  A former seaman and slave-ship captain, Newton experienced a spiritual epiphany, converted to Christianity, and eventually became an ordained curate in the Church of England, as well as an abolitionist. He wrote “Amazing Grace” to accompany a sermon for New Year’s Day of 1773. Although the poem has been associated with at least 20 different melodies over the years, its most famous iteration was created in 1835 by the American Baptist song leader and compiler William Walker, who set it to a tune called “New Britain” and transcribed it in a shape-note format. 

Traditional: “Ride On, King Jesus” (arr. Tyzik)

Another anonymous antebellum spiritual, “Ride On, King Jesus” appeared under the title “No Man Can Hinder Me” in the first anthology of published spirituals, Slave Songs of the United States (1867). In the late 19th century, it became a concert staple of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who performed several tours to raise money for Fisk University, a historically Black institution founded in 1866, in Nashville, Tennessee. Henry (“Harry”) T. Burleigh (1866–1949), who had studied with Dvořák, collected and arranged “Ride on, King Jesus” as well as many other songs in his Jubilee Songs of the United States of America, first published in 1916.

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): “Goin’ Home” (arr. Tyzik)
In the spring of 1893, when Antonín Dvořák was finishing his Symphony No. 9 in E minor (“From the New World”), the Czech composer made a bold prediction: “I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.”

The Ninth Symphony was the first of several works that Dvořák wrote entirely in the United States. Although he urged his National Conservatory students to explore indigenous musical forms, he had at that point heard only a smattering of American folk songs, notably the spirituals that his Black student and assistant Henry (“Harry”) Thacker Burleigh sang for him. 

For the symphony’s most famous theme, Dvořák chose the English horn because it reminded him of Burleigh’s voice. This deceptively simple, deeply moving melody—apotheosized in the second movement but present, in some form or another, throughout—gives many listeners the mistaken impression that they are listening to an existing spiritual. In 1922 William Arms Fisher, another of Dvořák’s former students, added lyrics to Dvořák’s original theme, thereby creating the nostalgic ballad “Goin’ Home.”

Traditional: Medley (arr. Tyzik): “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”

This medley is dedicated to Henry T. Burleigh, a gifted Black baritone singer, composer, and arranger who dedicated his life to promoting the spiritual as a serious American art form. 

Of unknown authorship, “Every Time I Feel the Spirit” predates the American Civil War. The first stanza refers to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on the mountaintop; the second describes being baptized in the Jordan River and the “heavenly train,” which is sometimes interpreted as a coded reference to the Underground Railroad. 

“Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” is another anonymous spiritual of a similar vintage. (“Fit” is African-American Vernacular English for “fought.”) The words allude to the biblical story of the Battle of Jericho, when Joshua led the Israelites into battle against the Canaanites. 

The haunting and heart-rending “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was composed by another unknown enslaved poet. The great American bass-baritone, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson—himself the son of a former slave—made multiple recordings of the song, beginning in 1926.

Although its exact origins are unknown, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is often attributed to Wallis Willis, an enslaved Black man who was born in Mississippi and forcibly moved to Oklahoma by his enslaver, a member of the Choctaw Nation. Alexander Reid, a minister at the Choctaw boarding school where Willis and his wife were employed, heard the couple singing it and then transcribed the words and melody, which he sent to the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. In 1909 the Jubilee Singers made the first recording of the song, which is worth seeking out on YouTube.

Copyright 2021 René Spencer Saller