Tag Archives: Fabio Luisi

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

Orffully Popular!

By Posted in Music Writing, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations Tagged , , , , 3 Comments
The German composer Carl Orff, looking like someone I’m rather certain I would like.

I have been doing this program-book annotation work for about 10 years now, possibly a little longer, since I never seemed to bother paying attention to when I started. But I think I can say with some confidence that this is the first program I have ever written about that came with a warning, to wit: “PLEASE NOTE:  Carmina Burana addresses adult themes and contains some adult language.” (Catulli Carmina, also on the program, probably contains more, but I digress.)

At any rate, I write about Orff fairly often, and I always resist the urge to use any of the atrocious name-based puns that flap around in my sorry noggin like deranged bats. But this is my blog–I pay for it entirely myself and do not profit from it in any way that would interest my accountant–and I’m going to share one of my Orfful Orff puns in the headline. I have always felt that it’s supremely unfair to mock people for their given names, but when the composer has been dead for a long time, I think it’s slightly more forgivable. Or less Orfful. (Please let this usage exorcise my demons)

Here are the notes I wrote for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert that’s taking place tonight and this weekend at the Meyerson.

Luisi Conducts Orff

by René Spencer Saller

Carl Orff (1895–1982): Catulli Carmina (Songs of Catullus)

If you are alive today, chances are you have been exposed to the influence of Orff. Don’t recognize the name? Doesn’t matter. You probably had a grade-school music teacher who did. Maybe you lucked out and got to attend an elementary school with a collection of Orff instruments, specially chosen percussion instruments tuned to sound harmonious even in (especially in!) untrained hands, and maybe you learned about pitch and meter by playing Orff-prescribed games and using your body in motion to express these abstractions, as my public grade-school classmates and I did, in an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis in the 1970s. 

But even if you never took a music class, you can surely hum the main hook to Orff’s “O Fortuna,” from his iconic Carmina Burana, whose ubiquity in the popular culture is, as Alex Ross memorably quipped, “proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever.” Orff’s music might not have a message, but it is an undeniably effective vehicle. His musical language—relentless rhythms, hammered-home melodies, crude harmonies—helped the Nazis sell their poison, and the same music helped sell laundry detergent a generation later.

The late musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin rejected the art-for-art’s-sake argument that music is essentially innocent, pointing out that questions about Orff’s intentions—specifically regarding the use of his music by the Nazis—are irrelevant because “[t]hey allow the deflection of any criticism of his work into irrelevant questions of rights: Orff’s right to compose his music, our right to perform and listen to it. Without questioning either, one may still regard his music as toxic, whether it does its animalizing work at Nazi rallies, in school auditoriums, at rock concerts, in films, in the soundtracks that accompany commercials, or in [the concert hall].” (With no disrespect toward Taruskin’s memory, I’d be astonished if you leave the Meyerson tonight any more animalized than you were upon entering it.)


The commentator Anne-Charlotte Rémond of France Musique recently observed that if Orff’s music isn’t “Nazi art,” it’s art “made for Nazis.” For many that’s a distinction with no real difference. Never mind that Orff never actually joined the Nazi party, or that his music wasn’t universally admired by Nazi listeners; one prominent Nazi critic, in fact, argued that Carmina Burana, with its pungent “jazzy atmosphere” and “incomprehensible” Latin text, reflected the decadence and depravity of the Weimar Republic, not the wholesome athleticism that the Nazis tried to celebrate in their racist and revisionist interpretation of ancient history. But with a few vocal exceptions, the Nazis loved Carmina Burana, programming it repeatedly until the regime was defeated after World War II.

If not quite a one-hit wonder, Orff remains a somewhat enigmatic, even polarizing figure. He completed Catulli Carmina in 1943, two years after receiving the commission and about six years after his breakthrough work, Carmina Burana.  Catulli Carmina received its premiere during World War II. With Trionfo di Afrodite, from 1953, the three works form a conceptual trilogy, but the two later installments never took off like their predecessor and are virtually unknown today. But whether acknowledged or not, Orff’s influence can be heard in the driving rhythms of John Adams, the hypnotic ostinatos of Glass and Cage. There’s a reason that generations of listeners have found his music so compelling, and it has little to do with politics or anything that cerebral: Orff made music that speaks to the body and to the subconscious.

Although Orff had loved the classics since childhood, he was 35 years old when he first encountered Catullus’s Odi et Amo (c. 85), while on holiday at Lake Garda, in northern Italy. He saw a postcard with the poem on it and instantly heard it as music in his head. When he returned to Germany, he bought an edition of Catullus poems and chose 10 to set for mixed choir, which he then edited in a two-volume set titled Catulli Carmina, in 1931 and 1932, respectively. 

When his Carmina Burana grew increasingly popular, theater directors requested more musical material to fill out their programs, so Orff revised the score, adding and deleting certain poems and surrounding them with a “framing” story, which places the drama within a drama, enhancing the artificiality of the narrative. The new version of Catulli Carmina—which he now called ludi scaenici, or a scenic cantata, and no longer a collection of songs for mixed choir—premiered on November 6, 1943, at the Leipzig Opera. 

A Closer Listen

The cantata contains three parts: a prelude, a central section made up of Catullus poems, and a short postlude that repeats the main ideas of the prelude. Orff scored it for a full mixed choir, soprano and tenor soloists (portraying Lesbia and Catullus, respectively), and an entirely percussive orchestra, thought to be inspired by Stravinsky’s Les noces: four pianos, four timpani, castanets, maracas, antique cymbal, tam-tam, lithophone, metallophone, two glockenspiels, xylophone, tenor xylophone, and more. The orchestra plays only in the prelude and postlude; in the play-within-the-play, the soloists are accompanied only by the chorus, which also functions as a traditional Greek chorus.

Orff uses Catullus poems for the bulk of the text, but he wrote the prelude, the framing device that turns the selected poems into a play within a play. The plot, such as it is, involves a group of exuberant young horndogs who, in the prelude, describe what they want to do to one another in pornographic detail, if not quite in grammatical Latin. Then a chorus of elderly crabasses propose a lecture in the form of dramatized Catullus poems, all designed to prove conclusively that love is for losers and nothing lasts. The young folk agree to listen attentively.

The internal play begins with the entrance of Catullus, accompanied by the chorus singing Odi et amo (“I hate and I love”). When his beloved Lesbia appears, he sings Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus (“let us live, my Lesbia, and love”). Eventually, though, Lesbia proves untrue by dancing in front of a tavern, loitering on corners, and engaging in other activities for which Catullus tries to slut-shame her. Conflicted, he sleeps outside her front door and dreams of their reconciliation. Meanwhile, the real-life Lesbia sings him a lullaby while he sleeps (Dormi, dormi, dormi ancora—note that it’s in Italian, not Latin, a sign that she’s a modern lady). But Catullus wakes with a jolt when he hears the bass voice, and he experiences an epiphany: his friend Caelius, to whom he has often confided, is Lesbia’s secret lover—cuckolded by his best pal!

After much anguished back and forth with the pleading Lesbia, Catullus decides that her actions have ruined him and he can neither love nor hate her now. The score boasts several memorable passages, including some bel canto soprano numbers worthy of Delibes. Then, in one of the best punch lines in the history of the cantata form, Orff subverts the entire spectacle by showing, in the postlude, that the production was a waste of time. No longer willing to endure the sour old dudes and their strange diatribes, the young people blithely resume hooking up.

Carmina Burana 

After the successful premiere of his scenic cantata Carmina Burana, Orff issued the following instructions to his music publisher:

“Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin.”

First performed by the Oper Frankfurt on June 8, 1937, Orff’s Carmina Burana is based on a collection of poems by a motley assortment of itinerant monks, scholars, and other speakers of Latin, the lingua franca of the medieval age. Old French and Middle-High German, along with macaronic hybrids, add linguistic variety to these stubbornly secular, often bawdy verses, which touch on the corruption of the clergy, the benefits of intoxication, the sorrow of love, the glories of nature, and the pitiless wheel of fortune that determines our destinies. The original manuscript dates to the early 13th century. Lost for centuries before being rediscovered at a Benedictine abbey near Munich, the score was first published in 1847. 

With the help of Michel Hofmann, his fellow classics enthusiast, Orff selected two dozen poems from the collection and set them to music. “It’s not sophisticated, not intellectual,” he wrote, “There is a spiritual power behind my work, and that’s why it is accepted throughout the world.”

Orff In and Out of Time

Another way to understand Orff’s work is by understanding Orff, who was both a product of his culture and also something of an aberration.

Born in Munich, which was then part of imperial Wilhelmine Germany, Orff was brought up in a Bavarian military family, in a culture that understood itself to be the natural extension of both Athens and Rome, an aspirational lineage connecting the not-yet-unified Germany with the Golden Age of the Greco-Roman empire. Even as a young composer in post-WWI Germany, Orff, who studied at the Munich Academy of Music from 1912–14, was a devoted antiquarian. Although he set the occasional text by a contemporary or near-contemporary, such as the unapologetically leftist German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, or by canonical German poets such as Heinrich Heine and Friederich Hölderlin, Orff increasingly preferred engaging with centuries-old Latin and Archaic Greek texts by Catullus and Sappho, the primary sources for Carmina catullus and Trionfo, respectively. For his musical enjoyment he preferred poring over the scores of J.S. Bach, Monteverdi, and other early composers of choral music. And although his parents were devout Roman Catholics, Orff lost his religion fairly early and chose not to have his own daughter baptized.

Like most of his non-Jewish colleagues, Orff remained in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, although he never went so far as to join the Nazi Party. He was drafted into the German Army in August 1917 but was quickly incapacitated in a trench collapse and spent months recovering from his serious injuries. When he was healthy again, he began to work in various administrative capacities for opera houses while studying music and dance and developing his pedagogical theory, which he called Schulwerk. Although he associated with a leader of the Resistance who was later executed, he distanced himself from politics, mostly by keeping to himself and making the kind of art that wasn’t likely to endanger himself or his family. He wasn’t notably brave, and he was no doubt relieved when the Nazis put him on a list of approved composers they called the Gottbegnadeten (Those Graced by God, or Those with God-Given Talent—which would no doubt be more impressive as a title if Nazis hadn’t bestowed it). 

Though not technically a Nazi, Orff was a member of the Reichsmusikkammer, a requirement for all active musicians in the Third Reich. And despite any reservations he might have expressed privately, he did agree to compose new music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream to replace Mendelssohn’s classic score, which the authorities had banned on account of the composer’s Jewish ancestry—never mind that Mendelssohn had been a devout Lutheran since childhood. And never mind that one of Orff’s Catholic grandparents was a former Jew turned Catholic. The Nazis weren’t ideologically consistent, and they didn’t need to be. As with any genocidal regime, approval was granted or denied according to the whims of the powerful.

 After completing his denazification process in 1946, Orff was rated “Grey C, acceptable,” a designation intended for Germans who were “compromised by their actions during the Nazi period but not subscribers to Nazi doctrine.” He married four times and was thrice divorced. His only child, Godela Orff, was born in 1921, to his first wife, the singer Alice Solscher. Although the couple separated about six months after Godela’s birth and divorced in 1927, Orff assumed primary custody of his daughter when her mother moved to Australia in 1930. Orff’s relationship with Godela was often rocky, with periods of estrangement, but they reconciled about a decade before his death, at age 86, from cancer. His tombstone, which is located in the Andechs monastery, bears the Latin inscription Summus Finis (the Ultimate End), a quotation from the end of his final work, De temporum fine comoedia.

A Closer Listen

Orff’s score bears a lengthy Latin subtitle, which, in translation, reads: “Profane songs to be sung by soloists and chorus with an accompaniment of instruments and magic tableaux.” By turns crude and celestial, the songs reflect Orff’s passion for the plainchant of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. As anyone who has ever sung it will attest, some of it amounts to vocal-cord torture. The aria Olem lacus colueram, for instance, is sung almost entirely in falsetto, straining the poor solo tenor’s voice to the breaking point—which makes sense when you remember that the lines are sung from the perspective of a roasting swan. A wildly erotic passage in “Cours d’amour” forces the soprano soloist to reach beyond the upper limits of her range, creating an exquisite tension. 

“In all my work,” Orff wrote, “my final concern is not with musical but with spiritual exposition.” This claim might seem at odds with the visceral, almost orgiastic sonic thrust of Carmina Burana, but Orff, like the medieval poets who inspired him, knew that the spiritual and the profane are spokes of the same cosmic wheel.
Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

Luisi Conducts Negrón, Beethoven, and Brahms

By Posted in classical, Music Writing, Program Notes Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Angélica Negrón, the composer of Arquitecta, which receives its world premiere May 4-7.

This weekend (starting Thursday evening), Music Director Fabio Luisi conducts the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Angélica Negrón‘s Arquitecta, sung by Lido Pimienta. After the Negrón world premiere, the DSO and pianist Francesco Piemontesi perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The concert concludes with Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, which will be recorded for a future audio release.

Luisi Conducts Negrón, Beethoven, and Brahms

by René Spencer Saller

Angélica Negrón (b. 1981): Arquitecta (World Premiere)

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and now based in Brooklyn, New York, Angélica Negrón is the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence. The multi-instrumentalist, composer, educator, and music journalist has written numerous works for chamber ensembles and orchestras, as well as film scores and assorted pieces for accordions, toys, and electronic and robotic instruments. Her original compositions have been commissioned and performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, loadbang, MATA Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, and the American Composers Orchestra, among others. As a founding member of the transnational electro-acoustic group Balún, she sings and plays accordion and violin. In 2022 the Hermitage Artist Retreat awarded Negrón the Greenfield Prize, which includes a $30,000 commission and a six-week residency.

Negrón received her early training in piano and violin at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, where she later studied composition with Alfonso Fuentes. She holds a master’s degree in music composition from New York University, where she studied with Pedro da Silva, and she has completed coursework toward a doctorate in composition at The Graduate Center (City University of New York), under Tania León. Her distinctive style filters an eclectic range of influences—Arvo Pärt, Björk, Juana Molina, Meredith Monk, John Cage, and former DSO composer in residence Julia Wolfe, among others—through her unique and wildly fertile imagination. 

Arquitecta, a song that features Colombian Canadian vocalist Lido Pimienta, was co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Bravo! Vail. Although Negrón has written several other major vocal works, both for chorus and solo voice, this is her first composition for voice and full orchestra. Augmenting Pimienta’s live singing are sampled voices, an essential part of Arquitecta‘s sound world. 

In a recent conversation with Denise McGovern, DSO Vice President of Communications, Negrón explained that the sampled voices are “mostly in Spanish” or singing something that more closely resembles “sound and gesture than language,” sourced from “the actual recorded voices of women I love and admire who have shaped in some way or another my life—family and friends.”

One of these formative female relationships is with Pimienta. “Lido and I go way back to 2008, when we were both featured in Club Fonograma, an influential music blog dedicated to Latin American and Spanish music and culture,” Negrón explains. “Club Fonograma created a really special online community of Latinx music makers and shaped a lot of the Latinx indie sound with their monthly compilations Fonogramáticos. We heard each other’s music for the first time there and started to correspond virtually and then finally met in person a few years ago in New York. During 2020 we did a collaboration for Prototype Festival with the Puerto Rican comedian and illustrator Mariela Pabón. That said, it was not until I saw her beautiful piece with the New York Ballet, in sky to hold, in [October] 2021 that I realized the potential of her voice as a force in front of an orchestra.”

Negrón refers to Pimienta’s recent score, Lux Aeterna, used in sky to hold, choreographed by Andrea Miller for the New York City Ballet. Among the very few female composers in NYCB history, and the first-ever female composer of color, Pimienta sang her piece on stage with the company. 

Amanda Hernández, the young Puerto Rican woman who wrote the poem that provides the song’s text, describes its mood as equal parts elegiac and optimistic: “I wrote this poem thinking about the house I grew up in, the houses I have lived in and the houses I had to say goodbye to. It’s an ode to the pain that comes with farewell and the celebration of what that ‘new door that opens’ promises when another one closes, or collapses.” 

The Composer Speaks

“In “Arquitecta,” Hernández captures the maternal spirit and its connection to tangible spaces often burdened by a lifetime of memories and labor, both visible and invisible. The physical and emotional weight of caring for family and home transcends the passage of time and endures beyond loss; it ultimately becomes inextricable from the conception of self and, paradoxically, a solace. 

“For the last several years, my mother became her own mother’s primary caregiver—in the wake of my grandmother’s recent death, Hernández’s evocative imagery of the house as Matriarch resonated deeply. Lido Pimienta’s experience as a mother and her vulnerable but powerful voice bring life to Hernández’s celebration of women and the spaces they traditionally inhabit. 

“The piece is a through-composed 10-minute orchestral song. It begins with an extensive, rhythmically driven instrumental introduction, sonically ‘building’ the house of Hernández’s poem through repetitive and increasingly arduous orchestral gestures. From here, the song unfolds with Lido’s voice embodying each verse through expansive melodies and hypnotic melismas, exchanging expressive melodic runs and dynamic shimmering soundscapes with the orchestra. 

“Throughout the song, the orchestra will have recurring moments of flourishes incorporating disjointed fragments of Caribbean music as well as gestures inspired by natural soundscapes from Puerto Rico, sound-painting the landscape within which the house stands. These will be punctuated by occasional electronics in the percussion, sampling everyday household objects as well as environmental recordings, capturing a domestic atmosphere. Joining Lido will be a cascade of sampled female voices—also played live by the percussion—intensifying as the piece develops, building up to a deluge of emotion evoking distant and fragmentary memories from a collective past.” 
—Angélica Negrón

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827): Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37

The Third Piano Concerto evolved over years. Beethoven had an idea in 1796, put it aside for a long time, and left the written version of the concerto in flux at the 1803 premiere (the first and last time that he played it in public). Then, in 1804, while writing out the piano part for a student, he revised the C Minor Concerto again. As originally composed, the Third Concerto requires the soloist to play a high G, which is believed to be the earliest instance of that note in the piano repertoire. In 1804, after trying out a new expanded keyboard design, Beethoven extended the range to include the C that sits over the fifth ledger line above the treble staff. Even though going so high meant that his concerto could be played only on new, state-of-the-art pianos, Beethoven wanted the work to reflect these technological advancements. 

Beethoven was known for being difficult. His savage performance style—louder, harder, faster! —meant that he occasionally damaged the fragile keyboard instruments of the age, like an Enlightenment-era Jerry Lee Lewis. As a young man (and a middle-aged one, too) his rough yet haughty personal code compelled him to quarrel with others over slights real and imagined. He often scandalized his devout teacher Joseph Haydn, who believed him to be an atheist and referred to him mockingly as “the Great Mogul.” 

But Beethoven’s skills as a pianist far eclipsed Haydn’s, and pretty much everyone else’s after Mozart’s untimely death. In a letter written around the time that Beethoven was sketching out ideas for his Piano Concerto No. 3, Frau von Bernhard, an habituée of the same Friday morning musical salon, described the wigless young virtuoso’s behavior as “unmannerly in both gesture and demeanor,” with Beethoven even refusing, on one particularly galling occasion, to play for the hostess’s mother, who got down on her knees and begged. Mozart had admired the gracious and cultured Countess Thun, yet this “small and plain-looking” man with an “ugly, red, pock-marked face” dared to snub her!  

Although he seldom bothered to transcribe the dazzling improvisations that came to him so easily, Beethoven did something unusual with his Third Concerto. In 1809 he composed—as in committed to staff paper—a cadenza for the first movement that functions much like an extended development section. As his deafness worsened, he felt increasingly incapable of public performance. If his music was to be heard at all, he needed other people to play it.

Over the years, other pianist-composers have created their own cadenzas, a traditional form of musical tribute that Beethoven practiced, too, when he was still a hot-shot virtuoso. Clara Schumann, who was 49 years old when she performed Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto for the first time, described the experience in a diary entry from November 3, 1868: “I played Beethoven’s C Minor Concerto for the first time (almost unbelievable) with real delight.  I composed a cadenza for it, and I believe it is not bad.”

A Closer Listen

Piano Concerto No. 3 marks the end of Beethoven’s early period and the beginning of his middle period, when he dismantled and reassembled everything he knew about form, tonality, and genre.

A dotted drum-beat motif pulsates through the opening Allegro. The second theme, carried by violins and clarinets, is lyrical and lithe, a frisky contrast to the somber martial passage that it follows. The piano rushes in: a flurry of mad ascensions. After a magnificent cadenza, Beethoven gives the timpani the drum-beat motif he’s been teasing us with since the opening measures. 

The central Largo is in sharp-studded E major, a key so far removed from C minor that it barely inhabits the same hemisphere. According to biographer Jan Swafford, Beethoven played the entire opening with the sustain pedal down. 

The rondo finale begins in the home key of C minor, but a lighter touch prevails. In the mighty coda, the tempo speeds to Presto, and the rondo resolves in euphoric C major.  

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98

Brahms’s fourth and final symphony draws on a lifetime of experience and immersive study, resulting in a work that’s both intensely experimental and deeply traditional. Although the E Minor Symphony is now widely considered to be the capstone of his career as a symphonist, it was not warmly welcomed. After the composer and pianist Ignaz Brüll performed a two-piano reduction of the score for a small gathering of Brahms’s closest friends, an awkward silence fell. The conductor Hans Richter and the music critics Eduard Hanslick and Max Kalbeck, all loyal supporters, were unable to say a single nice thing about it. Hanslick later wrote, “I felt as though I were being thrashed by two extremely clever fellows.” Kalbeck told him that the finale, now regarded as the very heart of the work, was unsuitable for a symphony and should be replaced. 

Although the Fourth’s premiere, conducted by the composer himself on October 25, 1885, in Meiningen, was a great success, it flopped badly in later performances in Vienna. The Austrian composer and critic Hugo Wolf dismissed it as “the art of composing without ideas.” Even the conductor Hans von Bülow, who famously anointed Brahms the successor to Bach and Beethoven, described it as “difficult, very.” For more than a decade, audiences were unmoved, if not openly hostile. 

It was not until his final appearance in public, less than a month before he died, that Brahms witnessed a positive response to his final symphony. His former student and biographer Florence May described the performance in Vienna of March 7, 1897, in poignant detail: “A storm of applause broke out at the end of the first movement, not to be quieted until the composer, coming to the front of the artists’ box in which he was seated, showed himself to the audience…. The applauding, shouting house, its gaze riveted on the figure standing in the balcony, so familiar and yet in present aspect so strange, seemed unable to let him go. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there in shrunken form, with lined countenance, strained expression, white hair hanging lank; and through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that they were saying farewell.”

A Closer Listen

Today, in the wake of modernism, postmodernism, and all its atonal offshoots, we struggle to understand why Brahms’s contemporaries found the Fourth Symphony so perplexing. Although it is certainly cunningly made, its cerebral underpinnings never distract from its beauty. The repeating cycles of descending thirds, which appear throughout the symphony in myriad motivic patterns, unite contrasting moods. Darkness permeates light, minor shifts to major, and vice versa. 

The springing Allegro theme of the first movement gives rise to an overt quotation from one of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs: “Oh death, how bitter you are.” The gorgeous Andante moderato begins with a theme in the medieval-church Phrygian mode—which Brahms understood as the expression of deep need, a longing for heavenly comfort—and then gives way to the scherzo-like Allegro giocoso, a triangle-happy romp in C major. 

Yet it is the finale, based on the almost archaic passacaglia form (a set of variations over a repeated bass line), that renders the work truly sublime. A masterful compendium of everything Brahms had learned as a symphonist, it’s loosely based on Bach’s death-drunk Cantata No. 150, “For Thee, O Lord, I Long,” and transforms the passacaglia, an ancient procedure, into a recognizable but astonishing take on 19th-century sonata form. 
Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

Bruckner’s Fourth, plus a MacMillan U.S. premiere

By Posted in classical, Music Writing, Program Notes Tagged , , , , 2 Comments
Anton Bruckner, one of those guys who was born very old in certain ways while remaining eternally youthful in others. A man of many facets, you might say!

I realized that I never posted the notes I wrote for a concert that happened last November, in 2022. This was one of those cases when I wrote the notes so far in advance of the concert that I sort of forgot about it until after the fact. At any rate, it was a splendid performance by all accounts, and here are the notes I wrote for the concerts at the Meyerson.

But before I do that, I wanted to post a link to a fantastic performance of the Bruckner so that you could listen to it first. In my experience, Bruckner is underappreciated, at least in this country, and despite the occasional longueurs, his music offers many Wagnerian thrills, minus all of that Gesamtkunstwerk showbiz and twincest. (Don’t get me wrong: Like Brahms, I am the best of the Wagnerians, and also a lover of camp, as in early John Waters, but I have deduced that many other listeners prefer the werk minus the Gesamtkunst, if that even makes sense in German, in which case they might find that they actually prefer Bruckner to the composer he worshiped so obsequiously.)

Here’s Gunter Wänd leading the NDR Elbphilharmonie, since the Luisi performance for which I wrote these program notes is, alas, not currently YouTubeable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziXfdU6iTp4

Luisi Conducts MacMillan and Bruckner

by René Spencer Saller

James MacMillan (b. 1959): Violin Concerto No. 2

The Scottish composer and conductor Sir James Loy MacMillan first attracted international attention in 1990, after the rapturous response at the BBC Proms to his large symphonic work The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. Subsequent successes range from his extraordinary (and unusually popular) percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel to his Fourth Symphony, which was first performed on August 3, 2015, by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conducted by his fellow countryman Donald Runnicles. MacMillan’s recording with Britten Sinfonia of his Oboe Concerto, for the Harmonia Mundi label, won the 2016 BBC Music Magazine Award. In 2019 The Guardian deemed his Stabat Mater the 23rd greatest work of art music since 2000. MacMillan completed his Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2021, and the world premiere—performed by the work’s dedicatee, the Scottish virtuoso Nicola Benedetti—took place on September 28, 2022, at Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. This is its U.S. premiere. 

The Composer Speaks

“My Second Violin Concerto is written in one through-composed movement and is scored for a medium-sized orchestra. It opens with three chords, and the notes which the soloist plays in these (pizzicato) outline a simple theme which is the core ingredient for much of the music. This three-note theme incorporates a couple of wide intervals which provide much of the expressive shape to a lot of the subsequent melodic development throughout the concerto.

“When the soloist eventually plays with the bow, the character of the material sets the mood for much of the free-flowing, yearning quality of the music throughout. The prevailing slow pulse is punctuated by some faster transitional ideas, and after a metric modulation the second main idea is established on brass and timpani, marked alla marcia. The wide-intervallic leaps in the solo violin part continue to dominate in a passage marked soaring, even as the music becomes more rhythmic and dancelike.

“An obsessive repetitiveness enters the soloist’s material just before the first main climax of the work, where the wind blare out the wide-intervalled theme. The central section of the work is reflective, restrained and melancholic, where the soloist’s part is marked dolce, desolato and eventually misterioso, hovering over an unsettled, low shimmering in the cellos and basses.

“The martial music returns and paves the way for an energetic section based on a series of duets which the violin soloist has with a procession of different instruments in the orchestra—double bass, cello, bassoon, horn, viola, clarinet, trumpet, oboe, flute, and violin. After this we hear the three notes/chords again developed in the wind over a pulsating timpani beat, which sets up the final climax marked braying, intense and feroce.

“The final recapitulation of the original material provides a soft cushion and backdrop to the soloist’s closing melodic material, marked cantabile, before the work ends quietly and serenely.

“My Second Violin Concerto is dedicated to Nicola Benedetti and in memoriam Krzysztof Penderecki, the great Polish composer who died in 2020.” —Sir James MacMillan, 2022

Anton Bruckner (1824–1896): Symphony No 4

Trained by his schoolmaster father and the Augustinian monks of St. Florian, the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner worked as a cathedral organist for 13 years, earning a strong regional reputation for his virtuosic playing and brilliant improvisations. A late bloomer, he didn’t enter his maturity as a composer until midlife. Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was his first major composition to earn acclaim almost from its debut. 

The Hissing and Laughing Multitude

The enthusiastic response to his revised Fourth came as a huge relief to its 57-year-old creator at the 1881 premiere. Four years earlier, his Third Symphony, which was inscribed with an unctuous dedication to Richard Wagner, went nightmarishly awry at its Vienna premiere. Bruckner, an anxious and inexperienced conductor, was leading—or attempting to lead—openly hostile musicians who seemed determined to humiliate him. Before he even lifted his baton, he was losing audience members; each successive movement sent more patrons scuttling out of the concert hall. 

As his publisher Theodor Rättig later recalled, “the applause of a handful of some 10 or 20 generally very young people was countered by the hissing and laughing multitude…. When the audience had fled the hall and the players had left the platform, the little group of pupils and admirers stood around the grieving composer, attempting to console him, but all he could say was, ‘Oh, leave me alone; people want nothing to do with me.'”

Bruckner revised the “Wagner” Symphony at least six times, an exacting and time-consuming process to which he subjected all nine of his symphonies save the last, whose finale he left unfinished when he died, a little over a month after he turned 72. 

As Bruckner’s first real success (and his last popular triumph until the groundbreaking Seventh Symphony), the Fourth brought much-needed validation—perhaps even vindication. He would work it over numerous times, sketching out a fanciful “Romantic” program only to disavow most of the extramusical content just a few years later. Despite many attempts (some of them likely unsanctioned “corrections” by ambitious disciples and associates), Bruckner never improved on the 1878–1880 version of the Fourth Symphony, which is performed for this concert.

Paradox and Perfection

For most of his life, Bruckner was badly underestimated. His worldly Viennese contemporaries ridiculed him as a pious dolt, a rural church organist with no redeeming cleverness. But despite his unfashionable accent and gauche manners, Bruckner was no country bumpkin. His music, which reflects his dual roles as church organist and composer of symphonies, revels in paradox: it’s massive and nuanced, dense and subtle, ancient and modern. Intricate polyphony is draped in sumptuous Wagnerian orchestration. An expansive tone poem morphs into an elaborate fugue. Before our very ears, musical forms adapt and evolve in a state of transcendent flux. 

There’s nothing simple about Bruckner’s Fourth, including its date of completion. For Bruckner, a self-doubting perfectionist, no composition was ever truly finished. All told, there are approximately three dozen different versions of Bruckner’s nine symphonies. Maybe these multiple versions exist not because the composer was indecisive but rather because he saw his music as mutable, subject to change over time. Musicologists argue about the authenticity of various editions of Bruckner’s nine symphonies and speak of “the Bruckner Problem” —shorthand for the vexed debates about authorial intention and the relative virtues and drawbacks of the various revisions. Some editions include “corrections” that Bruckner never saw, much less sanctioned; other editions reflect changes that he made because he was insecure and possibly too receptive to suggestions from others.

Bruckner composed the first version of his Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major between January and November 1874, but that original iteration was never performed or published during his lifetime. He continued to tinker with his Fourth Symphony, along with most of the others, for another 14 years. Bruckner researchers have identified at least seven authentic versions and revisions of the Fourth Symphony. For this concert the 1878–1880 version (ed. Nowak), which is the version of the Fourth most commonly performed and recorded today, was selected. Bruckner scored the Fourth for one pair each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, with four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Starting with the 1878 revision, a single bass tuba is included in the instrumentation.

Romantic Revisions

The nickname Romantic was used by Bruckner, who also created, and eventually abandoned, a program for the symphony. Bruckner marked the autograph of the Scherzo and Finale of the 1878 version of the symphony with brief descriptions such as Jagdthema (hunting theme), Tanzweise während der Mahlzeit auf der Jagd (dance tune during the lunch break while hunting), and Volksfest (people’s festival).

Also for this revision, Bruckner replaced the original scherzo with a new movement that’s commonly known as the “Hunt” Scherzo (Jagd–Scherzo). The new movement, Bruckner explained in a letter, “represents the hunt, whereas the Trio (Tanzweise während…) is a dance melody which is played to the hunters during their meal.” In 1880 Bruckner replaced the Volksfest finale with a new one based on an earlier melodic idea.

After one especially productive rehearsal of the Fourth, Bruckner gave the conductor, Hans Richter, a coin and urged him to buy himself a beer to celebrate. (Richter was charmed by the gesture and kept the money as a keepsake.) On February 20, 1881, Richter presided over the first performance, in Vienna. It was the first premiere of a Bruckner symphony not to be conducted by Bruckner himself, and it was also his first unqualified success. After years of enduring hisses and insults, the composer finally heard real applause and basked in the unfamiliar warmth. To his delight and astonishment, he was summoned for a bow after each movement. 

The Composer Speaks

In a letter to the conductor Hermann Levi dated December 8, 1884, Bruckner supplied a vivid, if abbreviated, program: “In the first movement, after a full night’s sleep, the day is announced by the horn, 2nd movement song, 3rd movement hunting trio, musical entertainment of the hunters in the wood.” 

Six years later, in another letter, he expanded on the program somewhat: “In the first movement of the ‘Romantic’ Fourth Symphony the intention is to depict the horn that proclaims the day from the town hall! Then life goes on; in the Gesangsperiode [the second motif] the theme is the song of the great tit [a bird] Zizipe. 2nd movement: song, prayer, serenade. 3rd: hunt, and in the Trio how a barrel-organ plays during the midday meal in the forest.”

Yet when asked years later to elaborate on the meaning of the finale, Bruckner confessed, “I’ve quite forgotten what image I had in mind.” 

Bruckner and Wagner

At the age of 41, when he attended the Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde, Bruckner became a committed Wagnerian. In 1873 he made his first pilgrimage to Bayreuth, uninvited and barely tolerated, so that he could show his idol the score to his Third Symphony, dedicated “in deepest veneration to the honorable Herr Richard Wagner, the unattainable, world-famous, and exalted Master of Poetry and Music, by Anton Bruckner.” Upon meeting his hero, Bruckner allegedly fell to the ground, yelping, “Master, I worship you!” Despite or because of his strenuous enthusiasm, he made a dismal impression on his hosts. In her diary, Wagner’s wife, Cosima, speaks disparagingly of the visitor as “the poor Viennese organist.” 

In summer 1876, Bruckner made his second trip to Bayreuth, where he attended the first complete performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle. He was so profoundly affected by the experience that he immediately began major revisions of several earlier works, including his Fourth Symphony. 

A Closer Listen

Bruckner’s 1878–80 revision of the Fourth has the following tempo markings and key signatures: 

Bewegt, nicht zu schnell (With motion, not too fast), in the home key of E-flat major

Andante, quasi allegretto, in C minor

Scherzo. Bewegt (with motion)—Trio: Nicht zu schnell (Not too fast), in B-flat major

Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell (With motion, but not too fast), in E-flat major

Copyright 2022 by René Spencer Saller

Luisi Conducts Mahler and Brahms

By Posted in classical, General, classical, Music Writing, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations Tagged , , , , 2 Comments
Gustav Mahler in 1893, by E. Bieber

The great German baritone Matthias Goerne recently performed selections from Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Fabio Luisi. I wrote about the program, taking some time to digress about the so-called War of the Romantics, one of the dumbest but funniest culture wars ever to consume the second half of any century.

I had hoped to include some supplementary boxes, but I fear those might have been cut from the program, so here is the (unedited by anyone but myself) version of the notes.

Luisi Conducts Mahler and Brahms

By René Spencer Saller

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911): Selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Mahler accepted his first paid conducting gig when he was only 20, presiding over third-rate operettas at a spa in Upper Austria. From then on, the ambitious and cash-strapped composer spent his entire life as a professional conductor, holding posts in Ljubljana, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and, at the end of his life, New York City. From the podium, he demanded much from each musician but gave even more, responding to the orchestra with an electric empathy and an intense physicality. Widely considered among the greatest conductors in the world, he applied his galvanizing intelligence to other composers’ scores, reinvigorating the repertoire and setting the interpretive bar impossibly high for future generations of professional maestros. 

By 1888, when he began his Second Symphony, he was, if not as famous as he would someday become, widely well-regarded—as a conductor. As a composer, however, he felt misunderstood and undervalued, the eternal underdog. He wasn’t wrong. The disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in late 1889 hit him hard. Because of certain ugly socio-political and cultural realities—most obviously, an antisemitism so pervasive that it’s only remarkable in its occasional absence—Mahler’s career would be rocky, never mind his formidable talent and drive and his voluntary conversion to Catholicism. 

After receiving a terminal diagnosis of heart disease in 1907, Mahler resolved to compose as much music as possible, of the highest possible quality, culminating in a flurry of late-life masterpieces, including Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony No. 9, and the unfinished Tenth. And despite being fired regularly for factors unrelated to his job performance, he kept conducting, leading the New York Philharmonic in the last two years of his life. He died at age 50, from complications of the heart condition that had been diagnosed four years earlier.

Wondrous Wunderhorn

In Mahler’s distinctive sound world, song and symphony are closely intertwined, even interdependent. His first four symphonies are called his Wunderhorn symphonies because they incorporate so many of his settings of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). This fanciful collection of German folk poetry, originally published between 1805 and 1808, was praised by literary luminaries like Goethe, who wrote of his hope that “this little book would find a place in every house where bright and vital people make their home…. Best of all, [that] this volume might lie on the piano of the amateur or master of musical composition so that these songs might come into their own by being matched to familiar and traditional melodies, that they might have appropriate tunes fitted to them, or that, God willing, they will inspire new and significant melodies.”

Eventually consisting of three volumes and a thousand or so poems, the Wunderhorn collection did indeed inspire a generation or two of Romantic composers and their successors. Among many others, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg all wrote settings of these provocative and often grotesque fairy-tale poems, which touch on everything from famine to frivolous flirtation; from doomed drummers to fish prophets; from the magical riverine journey of a mower’s golden ring to the brutal execution of a child. The tales are spooky and preachy, pious and violent, funny and profound. For years they ignited Mahler’s imagination like nothing else.

Between 1887 and 1902, the year of his momentous marriage to Alma Schindler and the completion of his Fifth Symphony, Mahler set more than a dozen poems from the Wunderhorn collection for voice and piano or orchestra, and a half-dozen or so of these story-songs surfaced in the first five symphonies. In 1899 he published 12 of the Wunderhorn songs in the collection titled Humoresken (Humoresques)—informally, and confusingly, also known as Mahler’s “Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.” Although Mahler had originally conceived these songs for voice and orchestra, he was shrewd enough to create alternative arrangements for voice and piano, tailored to the growing sheet-music market for amateur musicians.

Not all of the poems in the Wunderhorn collection are actual folk relics; some appear to be imitations or homages. The two editors, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, could also be described as authors—not so much disciplined collectors and compilers as resourceful recyclers and fabulists. The authenticity of any given tale mattered less to them than its entertainment value, and if they needed to invent certain details in the service of a greater truth, so be it. At any rate, Mahler, who was almost as sensitive to poetry as he was to music, took additional liberties with his source material, adding lines and verses as he saw fit. In fact, he wrote his own text for the 1892 song “Das himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), which also served as the penultimate movement of his Fourth Symphony.

In addition to “Das himmlische Leben,” five other Wunderhorn songs functioned as pivotal movements in Mahler’s symphonies, including two featured in this concert: “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” and “Urlicht,” which did double duty in his Second Symphony as the Scherzo and fourth movement, respectively. Nicknamed the “Resurrection” Symphony, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor deals with death and rebirth, in the Christian tradition.

Born into a large and poor Jewish family, Mahler was still technically Jewish at the time of its composition. His interest in the spiritual aspects of Christianity predated his official conversion to Catholicism, in 1897, when he was 37 years old. Part of the reason he needed to make his faith a matter of public record was pragmatism, or self-preservation: the ever-worsening antisemitism of late 19th-century Austria made it impossible for a Jewish man, even an eminently qualified one, to land the desirable conducting posts, especially in Vienna, where Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima, the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, and a vicious antisemite, still exerted enormous influence. 

A Closer Listen


1. “Rheinlegendchen” (Little Rhine Legend). Set in G major, with a 3/8 meter reminiscent of a Ländler, the richly evocative “Rheinlegenchen” is lightly scored—just a wind quintet with strings. It was so popular at its first performance that the audience demanded an immediate encore. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of a lovelorn young mower, who imagines what might happen to a ring tossed into the Rhine. The ring eventually ends up in the belly of a fish served at the King’s table, at which point, the mower predicts, the absent sweetheart will be unable to resist returning the ring—and returning the mower’s love. Throughout the song, Mahler sprinkles folk-inflected, improvisational-sounding riffs and licks, imparting a rollicking, rural flavor to the “little Rhine legend.”  

The world premiere of the song took place at the Hamburg Konzerthaus, in October 1893,  sung by Paul Bulss and performed by the Julius Laubesche Kapelle under Mahler’s own baton.

2. Composed in the summer of 1898 and published the following year, “Wo die schönen Trompete blasen (Where the Splendid Trumpets Sound), in C minor, is a strangely subdued song in which the singer assumes two roles: an ardent young woman and the soldier she loves, who may be a ghost—or, if not yet a ghost, a future ghost. Mahler contrasts the swooning, almost hallucinatory waltz of the lovers’ union with the doomy, inexorable 2/4 beat of the marching army, with its “splendid trumpets,” which are typically and unexpectedly soft when not actually muted. The song was first performed, along with “Das irdische Leben,” on January 14, 1900, sung by soprano Selma Kurz, with Mahler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

3. Completed in 1892 and first performed that December, in Berlin, “Verlor’ne Müh” (Wasted Effort) is another he-said-she-said dialogue song, with the singer again performing both male and female roles. Mahler deploys a lilting, Ländler-like 3/8 rhythm, along with sassy interjections and imitations. The comical lyrics are in the Swabian dialect (related to Alsatian and other Swiss-adjacent forms of German) and dramatize a persistent village maiden’s failed seduction of a young man, who not only rejects her offerings of “tender morsels,” “nibbles,” and “my heart,” but persists in insulting her, with increasing harshness, as a “foolish girl.” Her beloved, an obstinate and unloving prig, might get the last word, but the maiden gets the last laugh. (It’s safe to say that most of us, including the long-dead Mahler, would greatly prefer a leisurely meal with this agreeable, lamb-tending creature than another negging session with Buzzkill Boy.)  

4. Mahler composed “Das irdische Leben” (The Earthly Life) sometime after early spring 1892. He shortened the source poem, originally titled “Verspätung” (Delay), but retained the haunting poignancy that befits a song about a child who begs his mother for bread until he starves to death: “And when at last the bread was baked/The child lay dead upon the bier.” Divided—and typically muted—strings convey the bereaved parent’s torment, that churning grief and choking helplessness. Early on, Mahler conceived of his Fourth Symphony (1899–1901) as a six-movement work that would also feature “Das irdische Leben” (The Earthly Life). This gritty ballad, a kind of proto-Kindertotenlied, serves as a dramatic counterpart to the celestial joy and abundance of “Das himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), the spiritual climax of the Fourth Symphony.

5. Set in the remote key of D-flat major, “Urlicht” (Primal Light) functions in the Second Symphony as a transition, or a kind of introduction, to the finale. Mahler composed it in 1892 and orchestrated it the next year. His tempo indication is “Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht” (Very solemn, but simple). Originally written for mezzo-soprano or contralto, the singer’s radiant innocence transforms a simple declaration of faith into a passionate rhapsody. Listen to the winds curling around the singer’s voice; they seem to complete his thoughts, much as birdsong bends the night sky toward morning:

I am from God, I want to return to God.
The loving God will grant me a little light,
Will light my way to blissful life eternal and bright.”

6. Mahler repurposed “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” (Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish,” in C minor, as the third-movement scherzo of his Second Symphony. Composed in summer 1893 and set in a dreamy 3/8, the song is marked “In ruhiger fließender Bewegung,” which in English means “In quietly flowing motion,” a fair description of its sound, if not its ironic humor.  A magically twisty clarinet melody slips through skittery cross-currents of pizzicato and bowed strings as the singer describes the aquatic audience’s rapt attention to Saint Anthony. Like any good joke that lands, the song builds suspense through repetition, concluding with this devastating punchline on misplaced piety:

  
The crabs still go backwards,

The cod are still bloated,

The carp are still gorging,

The sermon’s forgotten.

The sermon was pleasing.

All stay as they were.

7. The intense and jarring “Revelge” (Reveille), also in C minor, depicts a death march: rattle-trap drums and strident trumpets, stomping feet and rotting corpses. The soldiers might as well be zombies, grimly enacting their pointless rituals at every predawn reveille, compulsively charging and slaughtering. The speaker is an army drummer, an adolescent, in fact, who has been wounded in battle and is now being left for dead, even trod on, by his marching comrades. The young drummer’s lament is all the more heartbreaking for its growing self-awareness:

“I will well play my drum

or else I will lose myself completely.

The brothers, plentiful sowed

tralali, tralalei, tralalera,

they lie as if they’ve been mowed.”

A revenant, he returns to his darling’s home, not yet aware that he’s dead. (Listen for the col legno strings, meant to mimic the grinding, scraping sound of bone on bone.) That morning, in a ghoulish twist, the drummer’s bones and those of his comrades appear arranged “in rank and file, like tombstones” at her front door, with the drum out in front “so that she can see him.” Mahler composed this song in July 1899.

8. Composed in summer 1901, around the time that he was beginning his Fifth Symphony, “Der Tambourg’sell” (The Drummer Boy) was the last of Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings—and wouldn’t you know it, it’s another song in C minor from the perspective of a doomed young drummer. This time the singer and first-person narrator is in prison, not underfoot on a bloody battleground, but he’s dying all the same: marched from his cell to the gallows. Never mind that he’s still a child—too young to fight, but old enough to be killed. The music, a protracted funeral march, is somber, even sepulchral. 

As with “Revelge,” Mahler conjures up all manner of spooky effects from col legno strings. In an elegiac address to everything he can see on his march to the scaffold, the singer ticks off a series of farewells, repetitively, almost self-soothingly—think Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, only infinitely sadder—before closing with a pair of final, heartbreakingly understated “Gute Nacht”s. Mahler’s indications call for the first “good night” to start loud, then go suddenly quiet; the second is supposed to be sung “mit brechender Stimme” (with broken voice).

If all this sounds a bit morbid, it might help to remember that Mahler had almost died that February, when he woke in bed to find the sheets soaked in blood from a hemorrhage. He would marry the next year, but he would die within the decade, after suffering the grievous loss of his eldest daughter, Maria, who succumbed to scarlet fever. 

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Technical Tip

Col legno is a shorter form of the musical term col legno battuto, which is Italian for “with the wood being struck.” It’s essentially an instruction from the composer to strike or, more rarely, scrape the violin, viola, cello, or bass strings using the wooden part of the bow, normally used as the handle, instead of gliding the hair part over the strings in the conventional way. The col legno technique turns the stringed instrument into a distinctive percussion instrument. Hector Berlioz famously exploited the hollow, unearthly timbre in Symphonie fantastique, transforming the strings into cavorting skeletons.

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Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Symphony No. 3

In May 1883, Brahms turned 50. Richard Wagner, his esteemed adversary, had died a few months earlier; Clara Schumann, his intimate friend, cheerleader, and steadfast muse, was nearly 64 and quite frail; he had already outlived many friends and musical mentors. Yet he was robustly healthy, if somewhat fat, and had a lust for life—as well as for young women. That summer he followed one of them, the contralto Hermine Spies, to Wiesbaden, on the Rhine. There he composed his Symphony No. 3. It had been six years since his previous symphony, another product of a single fertile summer. 

Although he continued to tweak the score until its publication, the Third was a triumph from the start. After he sent the score to Clara, she gushed, “From start to finish one is wrapped about with the mysterious charm of the woods and forests…. [By the finale] one’s beating heart is soon calmed down again for the final transfiguration which begins with such beauty in the development that words fail me!” 

Except for the predictable demonstration from the Wagner Club, whose members briefly disrupted the Vienna premiere, Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 was hailed as a masterpiece by audiences and critics alike.  

A Closer Listen

The shortest of Brahms’s four symphonies, the Third is formally rigorous and tonally inventive, thematically integrated and rhythmically complex. Unusually, all four movements end softly, even the seemingly heroic finale. The first movement begins with two audacious wind chords, a strong F major succeeded by a more tentative diminished chord—preparation for a series of wrenching major and minor shifts. Harmonic ambiguities and metrical instabilities abound. The figure that haunts all four movements, in various configurations, is the bass line: F–A-flat–F, Brahms’s personal motto. It stands for “Frei aber froh” (Free but happy), a play on his friend Joseph Joachim’s motto “Free but lonely.”

The more lyrical main melody is borrowed from Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony. First presented by the strings, this theme imbues the entire work. It is an obvious tribute to Brahms’s late friend, the man who hailed the 20-year-old tavern pianist from Hamburg as the next Beethoven and set him up as his musical proxy in the so-called War of the Romantics—as the foil to Wagner and all that he represented. But as biographer Jan Swafford persuasively argues, Brahms’s Third recalls another Rhine besides Schumann’s, another monumental forefather: Wagner’s “atmospheric string textures,” his “grand triadic leitmotifs and themes” echo throughout. Ever the reconciler, Brahms united his mentor and his supposed rival in a symphony that ultimately stands for nothing beyond itself. 

Free but happy indeed. 

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Progressive Versus Conservative

Aside from the occasional duel, the War of the Romantics was mostly bloodless, but it galvanized concert-music culture during the second half of the 19th century. Every critic, composer, musician, and reasonably well-educated person in Central Europe wound up in one camp or the other. The opposing sides made Wagner and Brahms their proxies in a culture war that dragged on for years after the composers’ deaths. Although 20 years older than Brahms, Wagner represented the progressive faction. Part high priest, part revolutionary, he aimed to create the “music of the future,” a distillation of all the arts culminating in his “universal music drama.” Liberal-minded and relatively modest (or at least not messianic), Brahms was cast, perhaps by default, as the conservative. Most of his compositions could be classified as absolute music—free, at least explicitly, of any programmatic associations—and he chose to adapt conventional forms rather than invent new ones. 

Yet the composers admired each other, in a lopsided way. During a visit in 1864, Brahms, a superb pianist, played for the maestro, who intoned equivocally, “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.” In his diary he recorded, somewhat grudgingly, that Brahms was “no joke.” Brahms, by contrast, collected and studied Wagner scores, repeatedly declaring that he was “the best of Wagnerians.” When he was notified of Wagner’s death, he put down his conductor’s baton and announced, “Today we sing no more. A master has died.” 

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Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

Fabio Luisi conducts the DSO

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American composer and conductor William Grant Still

On April 18, 2019, Music Director Designate Fabio Luisi led the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a concert featuring William Grant Still’s Poem for Orchestra (1944), Frank Martin’s Concerto for Wind Instruments, Percussion, and String Orchestra (1949), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 (1813).

If you weren’t lucky enough to be present at the Meyerson, you can still check out the concert thanks to the wonders of Vimeo. The video is available to stream until May 23, 2019. It’s an exciting program, and the first two works aren’t programmed nearly often enough.

Here is a link to the concert. Remember to watch it before it disappears on May 23:

https://tinyurl.com/y2bvn482

Here are my program notes:

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And just for the hell of it, here is another photo of Still, because he’s a brown-eyed handsome man:

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