Program Notes (November 7, 2008 @ 8pm)
Benjamin Britten Hymn to the Virgin
Nicholas Maw One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand
First Boston performance
Britten Cantata misericordium
Gabriel Fauré Requiem
Notes by David Hoose
Almost every composer has a public musical face and a personal musical face. But the lines between the two can be elusive.There is no doubt that music with a public thrust does not necessarily keep the private from cutting through–Mass in B minor, Missa Solemnis, War Requiem. And seemingly intimate music, such as some chamber works, can be as public as any music requiring hundreds of performers—Brahms’ G Major Sextet, Mozart’s E-flat Piano Quartet perhaps (I accept that some may not agree). All three of this evening’s composers wrote music that was quite public, including Fauré, whose piano quartets and numbers of songs strike me as reaching out a good deal more than his Requiem. But here, Britten, Maw and Fauré give us musical thought that in-drawing and that asks us to come to it more than it comes to us. When we travel the distance, even if it’s a short distance to a work we already love, the rewards are infinite.
Benjamin Britten: A Hymn to the Virgin (1930, revised 1934)
Composed for two unaccompanied SATB choirs.
The eloquent and modest A Hymn to the Virgin that opens this Benjamin Britten season gives us a sense of just how precocious this young boy was. That someone would be writing music even before reaching ten years is not that peculiar, but that a sixteen-year-old would have the technical command to create a work of this extraordinary poise, proportion and eloquence is startling. Britten wrote the Hymn while studying with Frank Bridge, whose insistence on impeccable technique and musical honesty—qualities that would steadily govern Britten throughout an entire lifetime of compositions—already shows. About Bridge’s teaching, Britten said, “In everything he did for me, there were perhaps above all two cardinal principles. One was that you should try to find yourself and be true to what you found. The other—obviously connected with it—was his scrupulous attention to good technique, the business of saying clearly what was in one’s mind.”1
The gracious design and fine interweaving of the four vocal lines, the inventive responsorial relationship of the two choirs (singing a 14th century anonymous text in which English words are answered by Latin), and the very natural flowering of the work’s center all suggest highly unusual musical maturity. Equally remarkable, however, are the poignant harmonic and contrapuntal details that hint at the authoritative and vivid musical personality that would rapidly blossom.
Britten composed A Hymn to the Virgin when in the Gresham’s School sickbay; having no music writing paper, he drew out the staves and composed it on plain paper. At the beginning of the next year, the Lowestoft Musical Society sang the first performance; three years later Britten slightly revised the work, and it was published shortly thereafter, when he was twenty-one. Throughout Britten’s life, the Hymn held an affectionate place in his heart, and at his funeral in Aldeburgh on 7 December 1976, it was the only music of his performed.
Nicholas Maw: One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand (1990)
Composed for eight-part mixed chorus, four-part SATB chorus, with optional organ accompaniment.
“It’s one of the arrogances of the 20th century that art has to contain only the new. Previously it contained something people knew and something they didn’t know.... I’m becoming more and more concerned with what music has lost, with the things a composer can’t do any more. I want to be able to do them again.... There was a break in the natural tradition around 1914, for obvious social and political reasons.... It seems that I am trying to regain that tradition.”2
Nicholas Maw, one of the most significant and brilliant living British composers, has straddled two seemingly contradictory musical worlds—the one pursued by Arnold Schoenberg and his musical descendants, and the one encouraged by an entire English tradition reaching back to the Baroque and up through one of Maw’s strongest influences, Benjamin Britten. Born 5 November 1935, in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England, Maw studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Lennox Berkeley (a close musical colleague of Britten), and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (musician and teacher of staggering influence and innumerable students, though Maw says he didn’t get much from her other than fascinating anecdotes about her friends Diaghilev, Cocteau, Ravel, and Picasso) and Max Deutsch (pupil of Schoenberg, about whom Maw said, “All he did was talk about three works: Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw and Strauss’s Elektra, but it was a revelatory experience.”)
Maw’s desire to reconnect to musical roots that he thought had been lost toward the beginning of the 20th century led to his feeling like an outsider. “I felt my work wasn’t really taken seriously for about 20 years, but this is no longer the case. One of the things about that time was that you had to go down that path or you weren’t a contemporary composer. Now there is no single way and there is an enormous variety of music, which I find a very healthy state of affairs. I’m happy to see the way the contemporary scene has developed in these last two decades.”3 His apparent poor self-image appears to have been focused more on the composers who may have rejected his musical choices than on the steady stream of musical organizations eager to commission him, and the many musicians and listeners equally excited to hear his music.
Among Maw’s most significant large compositions are Scenes and Arias (1962), for three women’s voices and orchestra; the enormous and enormously complex 96-minute Odyssey (1972-1987), for large orchestra–perhaps the longest continuous orchestral work ever composed; Violin Concerto (1993), composed for Joshua Bell and Orchestra of St. Luke’s; and two operas, The Rising of the Moon (1970), and Sophie’s Choice (2002). Among his many works for smaller ensembles are La Vita Nuovo and Ghost Dances, three string quartets, and Personae I-VI, for solo piano.
Nicholas Maw’s choral works look in two directions. One, represented by Ruin (1980), for double chorus and solo horn, and Hymnus (1996), for large chorus and orchestra, is inspired by dense and complex thought akin to the world of his intricate orchestral music. The other direction, of which One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand is an example, has strong roots in the great English choral tradition that reaches from Purcell through Holst, Vaughan Williams and Britten. Maw composed some of these more traditional works for amateur choruses; they are, consequently, on the surface, simpler and more direct, though in them no compromise in artistic integrity or imagination can be found.
Maw composed One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand in 1990, for the King’s College Choir, Cambridge, on the occasion of the 550th anniversary of the College’s founding. He chose to set a poem by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959) that focuses on the Fall in the Garden of Eden and on the consequent loss of innocence. Edwin Muir thought his own fall from innocence had happened very early, when his family moved from the idyllic Orkney to the hell of industrial Glasgow:
I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day’s journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time.4
Like Britten’s A Hymn to the Virgin, Maw’s motet divides the chorus into two parts that call and respond to each other. And like the Hymn, One Foot in Eden moves largely in homophonic textures, although with a varied and sometimes rugged harmonic language. The larger of the two choruses frequently divides into a rich fabric of eight parts, against which the smaller ensemble stands in bright relief. The two groups relate to each other more freely than in the Britten, overlapping each other unpredictably, contradicting or developing the other’s material, and finally joining for the poem’s climax and turning point:
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Quickly the music subsides, and it sinks to a serene, luminous close.
Benjamin Britten: Cantata misericordium (1963)
For tenor and baritone soloists, four part chorus, string quartet, small string orchestra, piano, harp and timpani.
Britten composed his Cantata misericordium to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Red Cross, only nine months after the premiere of his War Requiem, his most public and dramatic statement of deeply held political and moral belief. Cantata misericordium, far more compact and modest in every external way than the Requiem, professes belief just as powerful as the anti-war message of the larger work. Using Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, here told in a dramaticized version by Patrick Wilkinson that includes a prelude and postlude universalizing the Christian message, and told in Latin, a language long free of national allegiance, Cantata misericordium confronts the difficult question with which we continue to struggle: who is my neighbor?
The preamble to Jesus’ telling of the parable, as told in Luke, reads:
And behold, a man versed in the law stood up, making trial of him and saying: Master, what shall I do to inherit everlasting life? He said to him: What is written in the law? How do you read it? The man answered and said: You shall love the Lord your God from all your heart and in all your spirit and in all your strength and in all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. He said to him: You have answered right. Do this and you will live. But the man, wishing to justify himself, said to Jesus: and who is my neighbor?
The question and the ensuing parable direct us to reach beyond compassion as inert feeling to compassion engaged in action.
Jesus answered and said: There was a man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell in with robbers who stripped him and beat him and went away leaving him half dead. And by chance a priest went down the road, and when he saw him passed by on the other side; and so likewise a Levite coming to the place and seeing him passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan came there on his journey, and when he saw him he pitied him, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them, and set him on his own beast and took him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the next day he put out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said: Take care of him, and any extra expense you have I will repay you on my return journey. Which of these three do you think was the neighbor of the man who fell among robbers? He said: The man who treated him with mercy. Jesus said to him: Go on, you also, and do likewise.5
While horrifying violence can seem to dominate the War Requiem, the beating of the traveler in this narrative is passed through quickly enough to keep us squarely focused on the fundamental question, as well as on its implications: how real shall we let the boundaries of politics, language, race and belief be?
In his Cantata misericordium, a masterpiece of economy and focused expression, Britten speaks truth unimpeded by ceremony, ambition or artifice. Through eloquent, finely tuned detail and a beautifully balanced large design, and by the avoidance of any overstatement, he lets the message ring clearly and profoundly. And, without apparent intent to do so, Benjamin Britten, for a moment, becomes a musical preacher in the spirit and power of the highest of them all—J.S. Bach.
Gabriel Fauré: Requiem, op. 48 (1887-1890)
Composed for soprano and baritone solos, mixed chorus, and—in its three different versions–orchestras of varying sizes, but all including strings, harp and organ.
Other than the Brahms German Requiem, there may be no more beloved choral work than Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D minor. Indeed, these two are extraordinarily different works. Brahms saw his work as a “human requiem,” and the music consequentlybursts at the seams with the full range of emotions experienced by those left here—anger, fear, struggle to understand, sorrow, and even joy. Fauré, on the other hand, considered his Requiem “an aspiration toward happiness above.”
The sense of heavenward focus—and of the kind of stillness that heaven may bring—is unmistakable in the transported and transporting final movement, In Paradisum. But it is as present in the rest of the work—the tenor and then soprano lines in the Kyrie that circle about themselves, traveling, but without a particular goal; the opening and closing of the Offertory, in which the soprano and tenor lines circle around each other only to find themselves rocking gently together; the Sanctus, where the vocal lines, again, continually turn back on themselves, never really moving forward; the Pie Jesu, an exquisite interweaving of motion and stasis; the Agnus Dei, whose viola lines float up and down hypnotically, while the tenor line, moves at its own patient pace, climbing effortlessly, curling over the top and calmly turning back.
Progression, the sense of moving forward and of earning a goal—all-powerful forces in the Brahms—is nearly absent in this Requiem, so much so that the passage of time seems irrelevant. In fact, it can be difficult to tell just how long the entire work really is, and it’s equally easy not to care, for the music surrounds us with some glimpse of a timeless eternity. Even the moments when one feels uplift and push—as in the thrilling outburst in the Sanctus—quickly evaporate, to be recalled as not the point.
Admittedly, much of this sensibility is born of French musical thought, music in which forward motion that is common to German music thought from Bach through Mahler and Schoenberg is supplanted by a different kind of fluidity—flowing, but not necessarily flowing forward. But, even for Fauré, the Requiem seems unusually free of striving, if compared to his piano quartets, violin sonatas and his Pelléas et Mélisande, all substantial works in which that Germanic sense of earning each new moment is still present. The Requiem breathes with uncommon freedom–freedom from gravity, from tension and resolution, from any inevitable destiny.
It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its over inclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.6
The Requiem comes down to us in at least three different versions—three different sized orchestras—as well as the possibility of modifications within each of these. The first performance, in which only five of the eventual seven movements were given, took place in 1888, at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, where Fauré served as choirmaster. On this occasion, the orchestration was quite modest–violas, cellos, basses (likely only a few in number), organ, harp, solo violin and timpani. Later, Fauré added parts for bassoons, horns, trumpets and a section of violins; some of the added instruments, in retrospect, seem dispensable, while others are essential to the music’s spirit. Possibly to make the work more marketable as an orchestral work, a third version was created (thought to be by one of Fauré’s students) that added flutes, clarinets and trombones. It is the second, middle-sized, version that we use in this performance.
Fauré and Britten? The connection is, first, one of musical metabolism. Britten, though strongly affected by the goal-oriented energy of German Romanticism, developed a musical voice that was denied that thrust of progression. While his music is always going somewhere, it is not always urging us to move ahead and get there. It is this characteristic that may tie Britten’s music more to the French than the German. Alas, this observation carries a quite unintended patronizing message that suggests that English music, somehow not worthy unto itself, must be defined in terms of some other tradition. Britten’s music is—in the first and final hearing—British, however touched in various ways by the breathing of French, German, and eventually, Russian music. Just as Fauré’s is French, regardless of whoever may have touched him.
Second, the connection is one of spirit. When I imagine what music a composer might have wanted played (other than his own) at his funeral, I can sometimes imagine more closely that composer’s heart, even if my fantasy might be completely wrong-headed. What music might have Britten wanted if he were planning his funeral? Perhaps the Victoria Requiem, or music of William Byrd. Certainly Henry Purcell. But not Beethoven or Brahms. It may be the unexpected music that could make the truest connection. Of that music that could grace as inward and gentle a person as Benjamin Britten, perhaps Gabriel Fauré’s transcendently gracious Requiem would be right at home.
1. Imogen Holst, Britten (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1966).
2. Nicholas Maw (Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.)
3. Maw, ibid.
4. Edwin Muir, Diary 1937-39.
5. Luke 10:25-37, trans. Richard Lattimore (North Point Press, 1996)
6. Robert Orledge, Gabriel Fauré (Eulenburg Books, 1979).