PROGRAM NOTES

My generation is guilty through and through: no justification is possible. At most there may be extenuating circumstances...You know that the first appearance of an unknown disease – in every period of history – causes general dismay and confusion. The same thing happened when humanity found itself confronted with the use of a new secret weapon, from which it didn’t know how to defend itself...a weapon much mightier than the magnetic mines. In comparison, even the atomic bomb begins to look trifling. The weapon I refer to is much more subtle and underhand. It took years to realize this and to discover its secret. The first to use it systematically and on a vast scale in the west was Benito Mussolini. This weapon is called propaganda. With it and with the stifling of the press, its first derivative, a lie can be turned into truths.1

Luigi Dallapiccola’s response to a query as to how artists tolerated the repressive force of fascism for so many years is humble and honest. Often, the personal and professional choices artists have made in the face of forces greater than themselves–threatening and oppressive ones, or even ones of the ordinary social environment–have been complex, subtle, and varied. Such should be no surprise. Although poets, authors, painters and composers may possess unique tools for reaching people’s minds and hearts, they make no unique claim to a wise perspective on the social and political environment. When they see trouble they often speak, although, as the English poet Wilfred Owen said, “All a poet can do is warn.” But often the poet cannot see the danger, or he may be caught in its deluding snare, for the seductive power of evil can be every bit as potent as that of good. Artists respond to the choices presented them with all the blindness, stupidity, self-serving, integrity and courage that all human beings do.

Further, because artists work in mysterious hues, ephemeral sounds, or allusive words–rather than with blunt political speeches and even blunter military force–their own responses to prejudice, suppression or oppression can be enigmatic and even puzzling, regardless of their intentions. What was Dmitri Shostakovich trying to communicate through his music after the Soviet authorities roundly criticized his compositions for being ‘decadent’? Did he relent, as some suggest and, quietly aligning himself with the forces that were pushing down on everyone, compose music that was more likely to please the authorities? Or did he, as others argue, embed his music with a subversive, anti-government message, however hidden? Entire books have taken one side or the other, with many lovers of his music convinced of his quiet subversion. But we cannot be certain.

Regardless, we might ask whether the quality and strength of Shostakovich’s music is ultimately dependent upon the answer to the political puzzle. Would his music be better music if its ultimate message excoriated, rather than supported, the Soviet regime? Perhaps. From the safety of our democracy, we would like to believe that Shostakovich was protesting. But, perhaps he, like so many others, was simply trying to survive, unable to see beyond the immediacy of his culture, history and circumstance. How tempting is it to apply today’s perspective to the hearts and minds of artists of another day, and then, by implication, to their works?

Shostakovich, of course, is an easy object of any such discussion, since he and his music are shrouded in such obvious mystery and controversy. But, throughout history, artists’ intentions have always confused us. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint John Passion, a work of indisputable artistic merit, confounds many people today. Should we now judge this work, imbued as it is with the culture both of the Book of John and of Martin Luther, through a post-Holocaust perspective? Should we vilify Bach or his music for the air this 18th century man breathed? The answer is not easy.

Moreover, what would it mean for a piece of music, especially one absent a text, to be anti-Semitic, or pro-Soviet, pro-Nazi, or anti or pro anything? Do we make our deliberations based simply upon what we know of the artists’ lives, holding their work accountable to the foibles and realities of their own existence? Ultimately, how do the lives of artists really figure in our love or abhorrence of their work? Should we–and can we–evaluate their art divorced from what we know of their personal lives, lives that were filled with knowing, and with unknowing, choices? Or may we hold them (and their work) accountable for the perspective of hindsight that only we may have? Does a bit of knowledge so sway our views that we lose out on the marvels of such artists as Salvador Dalí, Frank Sinatra, Ludwig van Beethoven, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wagner because of what we know about them as people?

* * * * *

The questions are messy ones, and the answers messier still. Each of the three composers at hand, Kurt Weill, Luigi Dallapiccola and Carl Orff, responded in his own way to enormous political, social and personal challenges. In the face of growing repressions, Kurt Weill did what was personally necessary, leaving Germany in 1933, and eventually settling in the United States. At the same time that he was fleeing intensifying repression, he had, paradoxically, begun to abandon in his music some of the very characteristics of complexity and chromaticism that were so severely criticized by the controlling fascist regime.

Luigi Dallapiccola never left Italy, despite the danger presented him and his wife, and his own art developed underground, following its own innovative, intellectual and radical path. Carl Orff, staying in Germany throughout the war years, found his music already rather well in sync with the fascists’ desire for a powerful simplicity. Its aesthetic, whose roots lay in ancient theater ritual, ultimately received official support that proved difficult to reject.

* * * * *

Over fifty years after Kurt Weill’s death, we see his musical life deeply reflecting his views of politics, culture and the world. His early years as a composer placed him among the intellectual avant-garde that included composers Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Ferruccio Busoni (Weill’s composition teacher) and the father of them all, Arnold Schönberg, as well as architects Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Eric Mendellsohn, and film makers Josef von Sternberg and Fritz Lang. The music of Weill that spotlighted him as one of Germany’s most exciting young composers fit perfectly in the world of forward-thinking and challenging music–music fueled by sophisticated and fascinating complexities,

However, upon meeting and beginning to work with Bertolt Brecht in 1927, Weill began to reject some of the wild toughness and roughness that had driven pieces like his contorted First Symphony (1921) and his thorny, exhilarating Violin Concerto (1924). Although he never overtly subscribed to Brecht’s socialist views, nor to his stringent views of utilitarian art, Weill did begin to compose music that was motivated less purely by artistic concerns, and increasingly by political or social purpose. This shift required a commensurate shift in his musical language, and the complexities of his earlier music had to be supplanted by newfound communicativeness; at least on its surface, the music had to be simpler. Even before meeting Brecht, Weill had begun rethinking the nature of his work. In 1922, he had joined a group of German artists loosely assembled under the name Novembergrüppe who were intent on fostering the “closest interrelationship between art and people.” Music for its own sake faded, but that with a social or political message blossomed. Even Hindemith, an intellectual among intellectuals, had begun to move in such a direction, saying that “The composer today should write only if he knows for what purpose he is writing. The days of composing for the sake of composing are perhaps gone forever.”2  Weill, too, wrote in 1929, “The boundaries between ‘art music’ and ‘music for use’ must be brought closer together and gradually eliminated. That’s why we’ve attempted to compose music that’s capable of meeting the musical needs of the broad population without giving up artistic substance.”3 And the Marxist composer Hans Eisler said that it was necessary to develop “new methods of musical technique which will make it possible to use music in the class struggle better and more intensively,” Moving people, and moving them toward some action, grew more pressing.

The paradox is inescapable: a simple, direct speaking music that would appeal to the masses, the likes of which Weill and others were developing, happened to be exactly what the fascists wanted, encouraged and, when they came to power, supported, even though their political purpose was quite the opposite of the radical left’s. For both the fascists and the radical left, art driven by the intellect, experiment and complexity was undesirable; instead, simplicity and directness of expression had become important. Of course, there were colossal differences between Weill’s shift toward a simpler language, and the type of music that the Nazis loved and came to require. If nothing else, the fascists could not abide Weill’s corrupting jazz influences or the seamier side of his and Brecht’s radical musical theater. But it is odd that the music characteristics that the Nazis would quash–complexity, atonality, intellectuality–were also the very ones on which Weill, largely for his own reasons, turned his back. Even Weill’s rejection of purely instrumental music as elitist (the 1933 Second Symphony was to be his last significant orchestral work), carries some bizarre and uncomfortable parallel with the Nazis’ belief in the power of vocal music, especially that of masses singing together. Ultimately, the political system that Weill’s newer music, including his and Brecht’s Happy End, would suggest was one that, when fully manifest, would prove as humanly destructive and repressive as German Fascism–Soviet Communism.

Weill’s brief Die Legende vom toten Soldaten, composed in 1929 for a cappella four-part chorus, was his only work based upon a melody by Bertolt Brecht, a ballad that, because of its anti-war, anti-Germany and anti-establishment sarcasm, deeply offended the right wing. Weill composed this brief ‘workers chorus,’ along with a choral arrangement of his song Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen, for Universal Edition’s series, Die rote Reihe, and it received its first performance on a program with music by the German Marxist composer Hans Eisler. Weill later suggested that Die Legende vom toten Soldaten could be folded into his earlier Berliner Requiem, but it was never included, if only because the Requiem did not include a mixed chorus.

Throughout this steadily unfolding music, the voice parts move in near unison rhythm, poignant and pointed harmonic twists lifting each phrase well beyond the plainness of the melody, much as Franz Schubert pulled the tiniest detail out of a phrase and spun it further than all expectations. The directness of Weill’s musical language belies its sophisticated and sensitive treatment, and the musical and emotional power of the work resonates well beyond its compact dimensions.

* * * * *

Luigi Dallapiccola himself was–at first–a fervent fascist, enthusiastic about, if nothing else, the man who made the Italian trains run on time. But Mussolini’s increasing acceptance of Hitler’s strident influence, the signing of a “Gentile Manifesto” by more than 250 Italian artists, the publication of a manifesto by university professors stating that Italians were Aryans and, finally, the dictator’s 1938 declaration of racial laws similar to Germany’s all conspired to turn his thinking around. The threat of Fascism to him and the Jewish woman who was his partner and would become his wife in the same year, Laura Coen Luzzatto, had become real. The artistic restrictions in Italy were in some ways a bit softer than in Germany. Whereas German National Socialism forbade most music of a modernist nature and certainly all Jewish music, fascism in Italy led more toward provincialism striving to insulate its music from outside influences. But Dallapiccola, never wanting to turn back from the stunning impact of Arnold Schönberg’s and Anton Webern’s atonal modernisms, had no choice but to develop his own musical ideas underground. He and his wife spent much of the war in hiding.

About the composition of Canti di prigionia, the composer wrote:

How should I describe my state of mind when I learned from the radio of the decision of the Fascist government on that fateful September afternoon? I should have liked to protest; but, at the same time, I was aware that any gesture of mine would have been futile. Only through music could I express my indignation...

I had just finished reading Mary Stuart by Stefan Zweig. Through this book, I became acquainted with a short prayer written by the Queen of Scots during the last years of her imprisonment:

                                                O Domine Deus! speravi in Te.
                                                O care mi Jesu! nunc libera me.

My intention was to transform the prayer of the queen as an individual into a song for all mankind. I wanted to dwell at length upon the word ‘libera’ in music, to have everyone shout this divine word.

In sketching the Preghiera di Maria Stuarda, I had no preconceived idea of the general construction of the Canti di prigionia. However, one number alone seemed to me too little to express my protest completely. I had to find other texts, of other illustrious prisoners, of other individuals who had fought for liberty and for the triumph of justice.

Boethius, the sixth-century philosopher, provided me with the text for the second number, written in the summer of 1940. This was to be a sort of scherzo in which the ‘apocalyptic’ character should be very much in evidence...Among the various aspects of terror is the terror that freezes; there is not only that which finds its natural outlet in a shriek. I chose the first of these aspects.4

Dallapiccola was unable to identify an appropriate text for a third movement until he and his wife heard Hitler’s 1940 radio speech from the Reichstag threatening to bomb England, and then British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare’s answer to Hitler, “exhorting the British people to prayer.” He had found his inspiration, a passage from Gerolamo Savonarola’s Meditatio on Psalm 30, In Domine speravi–“I praise you, LORD, for you raised me up and did not let my enemies rejoice over me.”

Mary Stuart, Boethius, and Gerolamo Savonarola all died by execution.

The first performance of the first movement of Canti di prigionia took place on April 10, 1940, and was broadcast on radio from Brussels, four weeks before Germany’s invasion of Italy; the first complete performance was in Rome on December 11, 1941, the day Mussolini declared war on the United States.

The work’s three movements follow a slow-fast-slow sequence. The quick middle movement has its own symmetrical shape; the outer sections are purely instrumental, and the voices, here the women only, appear (exclaim!) only in the contrasting, center section. Though the two outer movements are slow, and each dies away at its end, the contrast between them is enormous. The first, the prayer of Mary Stuart, seems to crawl out of the dank prison, barely able to whisper, barely alive, and only slowly able to gather enough energy for a cry of protest. The third movement, on the other hand, begins with a violent instrumental eruption and a dramatic declamation by the entire chorus. In the movement’s closing moments, however, the music fades into oblivion, as if it were evaporating from this world.

Canti di prigionia is scored for mixed chorus (often in eight parts), two pianos, two harps, and eight percussionists who play timpani (two players), xylophone, vibraphone, tubular bells, crash cymbals, suspended cymbals, small, medium and large tam-tams, triangle, snare drum and bass drum. Its acoustical roots lie in the four piano-percussion world of Igor Stravinsky’s Les noces, completed in 1923; its harmonic roots, in a freely applied fascination with the twelve-note world of Arnold Schoenberg; and its melodic roots, in all of Italian music, from Monteverdi to Verdi and Puccini. Though Dallapiccola had not yet fully developed his own way of using Schoenberg’s organizational thinking, he was captivated by Schoenberg’s ground-breaking music. Canti di prigionia became the first of Dallapiccola’s compositions in which a twelve-note row both appears throughout and influences virtually all of the musical material. The particular sequence of the twelve pitches he used is palpably vocal in its shape, and its three rising waves suggest a human yearning and pleading. With the row’s emphasis on major and minor thirds, it also allows for and easily develops harmonies that are soft-edged and warm. The resulting music has a sensuousness that Schoenberg would never have desired. The coldest music, as it turns out, derives from the first pitches of the plainchant that speaks of the Day of Judgement, Dies irae. A constant reminder throughout, it is first heard in extraordinarily slow motion at the beginning of the first movement.

Combining an unabashedly diatonic language suggested by the Dies irae chant with his own freely expressive version of a fully chromatic language, Dallapiccola created an extraordinarily rich and expressive world. In the constantly shifting interactions of the two languages–one ancient and timeless, the other contemporary and forward-looking–and in the contrast between the sympathetic human voice and the crystalline clarity of the instrumental ensemble, the music transforms the voices of the ancient and individually condemned into the exhortations of a community whose faith is about to be put to the ultimate test. Liberation is sought, but seldom found. The cry of the oppressed transcends human pain, but its urgency is too overwhelming to be quieted even by the music’s closing whispers. Resolution may come only later. In every composition that he composed after Canti di prigionia, especially his second opera, Il prigioniero (1948), and his large work for chorus and orchestra, Canti di liberazione (1955), Dallapiccola sought to resolve this, his first deep-throated protest.

* * * * *

Carl Orff is a mystery, partly of circumstance and partly of his own doing.  He was, most lastingly, a brilliant innovator in music education whose understanding of the natural physical capabilities of school children as an entrance to music making still influences the teaching of music today. He was a largely self-made composer, and a man seemingly uninterested in anything but music, music theater and music education. And he was a man who lived, and in some ways thrived, in Germany during the Second World War. Since then, Carl Orff has been seen either as an indirect target of the Nazis who occasionally found in his music an impetus for the kind of art they endorsed or, at the other extreme, a German National Socialist who cultivated every opportunity afforded him, regardless of its implications. His post-War reluctance to discuss anything but his music has not helped his personal reputation, and thus the standing of his music. Even when he did speak about his life in Germany during the Nazi regime, he sometimes indulged some rewriting of history that cast him in more favorable light than perhaps was warranted.

There is no evidence that Orff actively subscribed to the tenets or actions of Nazism, or to any racial aversions (one of the artists who had the greatest influence on him, and whose work he set with great commitment, was the poet Franz Werfel), but the questions about his life and beliefs nonetheless color many people’s opinions of his music. Three specific circumstances have, for his critics, cast a shadow on Orff’s political, personal and professional life. First, eager for his education design, Schulwerk, to be adopted by the government for use in the schools, he overtly courted party officials who were in a position to help him. Second, he accepted an offer, already declined by many others, to compose incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream that could replace that of the Jewish Felix Mendelssohn. Though he later said that the music he created was really the third version of an idea for bringing a fresh aesthetic to the theater that he had developed many years before, his apparent awareness of the purpose of the commission made his decision at best distasteful. Regardless of his own motivation–consciously political, opportunistic, or born of a legitimate rethinking of German theater–taking advantage of an offer with such a clearly stated despicable purpose did his creative efforts no ultimate good.

Third, some of the most pointed questions arise concerning the composition that made him famous, a work that, today, remains one of the most well-known and popular choral compositions in the literature–Carmina Burana. Some people find the hypnotic seductions of its primal energy troubling, for in them they hear the very qualities that the Nazis sought–strength through uniformity, unshakeable simplicity, a musical language devoid of corrupt atonality, and an expression that could provoke an immediate and uninhibited response. Richard Taruskin, ever the uninhibited musicologist, said that, “aesthetics or not, Carmina Burana to me is fascist music.”

Immediately after its 1937 premiere, however, Carmina Burana was the subject of some criticism. It was not a distinctly German music (though neither was it distinctly non-German), and its musical language, while tonal, was occasionally suggestive of exotic Asian cultures and of Igor Stravinsky. Further, the texts were not all in German, but instead in a mixture of Latin, middle-high German and mediaeval French. Worst of all, the texts were unabashedly hedonistic, filled with eroticism that, to regressive and rigid party officials, was simply pornographic. Even as Orff’s work began to be accepted and embraced, questions persisted. In 1944, Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels wrote, “Carmina Burana exhibits beauty, and if we could get him to do something about his lyrics, his music would certainly be very promising.” Of course, the texts for Orff’s Catulli carmina, from 1943, were even more sexual than those of Carmina Burana from six years earlier.

Carl Orff found inspiration for his Carmina Burana in an 1884 translation of forty-six of the more than 320 13th century poems that had been discovered in a southern Bavarian monastery in 1803. With the help of Michel Hoffmann, a poet and law student fluent in Greek and Latin, he chose twenty-four that would become the basis for his music-theater composition Carmina Burana; Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis (Songs of Beuern; secular songs for singers and chorus to be sung together with instruments and magic images). The collection of mostly brief poems was the product of what are referred to as “Wandering Scholars,” who traveled from university town to university town, commenting in song and verse, and with unusual freedom, upon the foibles of life. The poems fall into four categories: satirical and moralizing verses (carmina moralia), verses of love and springtime (carmina veris et amoris), gambling and drinking songs (carmina lusorum et potatorum), and religious songs (carmina divina). Of these four groups, Orff chose poems only from the first three, and any religious references in the chosen poems satirize the authority of the church.

Orff’s cantata falls into twenty-four movements that, in turn group into five grand scenes. Two large sections form the frame for three central sections that focus on, in turn, Spring, the Tavern, and Love. The introductory section, O Fortuna, evokes the ever fickle nature of fate–shifts from joy to anger, or from optimism to despair–that blithely twists the meditations on nature, drinking and lust.

Orff’s response to the often torrid lyrics was largely one of emotional remove, and he created a music that is both formal and, in many ways, static, though the music’s powerful physical thrust is inescapable. Out of a desire to develop a world of “total theater,” one in which words, music and movement were unified, Orff created something at once ancient and quite bold. It is, on the one hand, ritualistic theater, both Asian and Greek, with scenes like frozen poses. And, on the other hand, it is music almost without any details, either of subtle shifts in the musical fabric that could underscore motion (or emotion) in the text, or of counterpoint, chromaticism, or traditional musical development. Even the kind of rhythmic fluidity that drives Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex and Les noces, two works that clearly exerted great power over Orff’s thinking, is largely absent; in its place is a more purely architectural thinking–a radical simplicity. It is quite shocking that music so lacking in adornment can pack such a wallop.

Some of Carmina Burana’s radical simplicity may be obscured by the composer’s choice to employ an enormous orchestra with the voices. To this listener, the colorization of music that is emphatically black and white sounds bloated, notwithstanding Orff’s skillful and imaginative use of the orchestra. The larger version seems weaker (if louder) and unnecessarily so, since Orff also created a version for pianos and percussion that speaks with a clarity consonant with the music’s character. His specification that this smaller version was intended for smaller ensembles, or ones unable to support a full orchestra, suggests that he considered it a significant compromise. It may be too cynical to wonder if Orff’s stated preference was tied to the inevitably larger performance royalties received from the orchestral version, or to imagine that he might have been concerned that the piano-percussion version would draw too close a comparison with Les noces. I want to think that his preference was purely artistic. Regardless, however, it is the clattering crispness of the version for two pianos and percussion that led me to take seriously a piece I never imagined I would perform, that allowed me to relinquish some questions about Orff the man that may have reinforced my musical questions, and that has allowed me to hear a mysterious and powerful voice in the ancient-modern ritual of Carmina Burana.

1. Luigi Dallapiccola, Parole e musica, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi, Milan, Il saggiatore, 1980, as quoted and translated by Roberto Illiano, Italian Music During the Fascist Period, Speculum Musicae, Vol. X, Pietro Antonio Locatelli Foundation, Cremona, 2004.
2. Ian Kemp,“Paul Hindemith,” Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Macmillan Publishers Limited 1980, vol. 8, p. 579.
   
3. Kurt Weill, “Opera—Where To?” translated by Kim H. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, UMI Research Press, 1979, p. 506.
   
4. Luigi Dallapiccola, “The Genesis of the Canti di prigionia and Il prigioniero: an Autobiographical Fragment,” The Musical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3,G. Schirmer, New York, July 1953, pp. 355-72.

<Back to Concerts