Program Notes

Suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80

For most of the concert-going public, Fauré is associated with his well-known work, the graceful Requiem, and little else.  While he did contribute a modicum of symphonic works to the literature, they largely met with little success, and frankly, the composer’s bent was not directed to the orchestral medium.   Rather, he was hugely successful as France’s most respected composer of song, and made important contributions to chamber music, as well.  Consequently, the incidental music that he wrote for Maeterlinck’s play, Pelléas et Mélisande is about his only work that is commonly heard in orchestral concerts—but a fine one, it is.

While admittedly not a symphonic composer by nature, he did enjoy writing incidental music for plays—even telling Saint-Saëns that only that genre suited his “meager talents.”  The most successful attempt was, of course, the suite extracted from his music for Pelléas et Mélisande.   He spent much time in London during the 1890s, and received a commission there for music for a performance in English translation of the play.   He wrote it for small orchestra—a student did the actual orchestration, but later Fauré picked four episodes from the material, and orchestrated them for full orchestra, himself.  Interestingly, for a major composer of the time—and French, at that!—he evinced little interest in orchestration and the infinite subtleties of colors and color blends that are one of the glories of the symphonic orchestra.   He obviously preferred to let his rich harmonies and inimitable melodies speak untrammeled by the blandishments of the rich orchestral palette.

The story of Pelléas and Mélisande is a typical love story from traditional literature in its predictable and inevitable tragedy.   Debussy achieved great success with his opera on the subject, and Sibelius, Schoenberg, and others were attracted to it, as well.  The first movement ("Prélude") of Fauré’s suite sets the general tone of the drama, with his smooth, sinuous, undulating textures suggestive of the many important references to water in this metaphor-laden play.  The rather surprising intrusion of the bucolic solo horn near the end is often explained as symbolic of a lover’s discovery of Mélisande in the forest.  The second movement ("Fileuse")—featuring a solo oboe--is a traditional “spinning song,” depicting Mélisande at the spinning wheel, perhaps dreaming of a lover (there are two).  The third movement ("Sicilienne") is cast in the traditional siciliano dotted rhythm, and although in a minor key, accompanies one of the rare happy moments of the doomed couple.

© 2016 William E. Runyan

Ave verum corpus

Toward the end of his life, Mozart wrote one of the most simple and perfect works of his extraordinary career, a setting of the hymn Ave verum corpus.  It was written in June of 1791 for Anton Stoll, the choirmaster of the local church in Baden, where his wife Constanze was taking a cure at the spa.  The manuscript, dated June 18, 1791, is on a piece of paper from the batch that he was using to write The Magic Flute.  The piece, for chorus with strings and organ, is only forty-six measures long, but they are perfect measures.  In less than three minutes and with very few notes, Mozart reaches an emotional depth that few artists have achieved.

Four Songs from the Weary Blues

That Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) was part of the library of Florence Price, herself a voracious reader of poetry as well as prose and a writer of considerable gifts, is not surprising. Like the eponymous poem that had been published in Opportunity in 1925, the volume stands as a quintessential artistic utterance of the Harlem Renaissance — a poetic articulation of the African American experience that was authentic, bold, and startlingly original, all the more remarkable because it was published during Hughes’s first year as a student at Lincoln University. The volume as a whole is organized into seven thematic sections: “The Weary Blues” (fifteen poems), “Dream Variations” (six poems), “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (seven poems), “Black Pierrot,” (seven poems), “Water- Front Streets” (eleven poems), “Shadows in the Sun” (eleven poems), and “Our Land” (eleven poems). Although the first three of these sections are the best-known today, the collection as a whole is a profound contemplation of life and death, labor and rest, poetry and music, love and loss and betrayal — and, most importantly, of dreams, those aspirations toward equality, justice, and full celebration of the inherent beauty of Blackness that were central to the African American experience of the time (and remain so today).

So it is not surprising that the short song cycle presented here is, at its core, a cycle about dreams in the sense of those longed-for imaginings that inspired Hughes’s iconic collection. Although the cyclical nature of the collection is obvious — the songs are all composed by the same poet and have the same lyric persona; deal with the same subject, dreams (of various sorts); possess similar poetic imagery; and share certain melodic and accompanimental gestures — the songs presented here have until now never been published together or in the order that Price used. Indeed, Price also copied them into a separate manuscript for legendary contralto Marian Anderson on April 26, 1935 — there presenting the songs in the same order as in the autograph used for the present edition.

The opening song, which Hughes titled “Dream Variation,” is a contemplation of the beauty of Blackness in harmony and at peace with nature. The second and third songs (“Songs to the Dark Virgin” and “Ardella”), both in C major, are songs of physical, romantic, and deliciously sensual love for a beloved whose beauty — in stark contrast to the racist, dehumanizing, White-centric attitudes toward beauty in much of Hughes’s and Price’s own worlds — resides precisely in Blackness. And the final song (titled “Water-Front Streets” by Hughes and retitled “Dream Ships” by Price) emphasizes the importance of “carrying beauties” in one’s heart and one’s dreams, even if they are not at hand — a solicitation to perseverance and to willingness to pursue one’s dreams, however remote they may seem. Price’s music gives eloquent voice to this wide range of ideas, images, and emotions in this little cycle of poems, and we can easily interpret her decision to choose these four for a cycle and set them to music of extraordinary originality and beauty as one born of her identification with these themes.

Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 (Pastorale)

In 1808 Beethoven completed his sixth symphony at a time during which he was enjoying a rising popularity, albeit one without financial security. He already had written some of his most memorable and lasting works, and was a composer fully in possession of technical mastery and supreme musicality—in other words, even if he had composed no more, his place in music history would have been secure. His previous symphony, of course, is now the quintessential model of musical works that exemplify so-called economy of means, integrated technique, unified composition, or any other of a number of terms that simply mean one thing more or less: it’s all about the music—not any experience or object in the physical world. And, of course, that famous composition stems from the skilled manipulation of just a few basic ideas, wonderfully worked out. As we all know from the fifth symphony: “ta-ta-ta-taaah!” This approach to composing became the high altar for the rest of the century for those who reproached music with “stories” or about “real” things.

And then Beethoven did something quite unexpected (being Beethoven): he wrote a symphony about something in our real world of experience! Beethoven openly described his sixth symphony as a reflection of feelings about being in the countryside, replete with birdcalls, a rainstorm, and happy peasants. He nicknamed the work, “Pastoral,” himself, and even precisely noted in the score the names of particular species of birds when he wrote imitations of their calls. However, he was intent that the listener not try to exercise his imagination too specifically, when he cautioned that the symphony was really “. . . more the expression of feelings than painting.” The feelings were good, though, and after the incredible intensity of the fifth symphony, this one is full of serenity, peaceful contentment, and the untroubled enjoyment of nature. Unique in Beethoven’s symphonies, the composer gave each of the five movements (he added an additional one to the more or less standard four) an explanatory title.

But Beethoven being Beethoven, we shouldn’t expect loose formal construction aimed at simply illustrating bucolic scenes with pictorialism driving the cart, like so many composers later in the century—names you know! Rather, in his distinctive and typical fashion he was able to serve both the God of architectural rigor and the Mammon of story telling. That is, we experience the feelings and understand the allusions to birds, storms, and peasants, but all of it is thoroughly shaped by the same principles of tight, logical musical construction that we expect in a more abstract piece like a string quartet, or even a Bach organ fugue. It takes musical skill and inspiration of a high order to pull this off. It’s simply a “perfect classic symphony” that also happens to create a magic evocation of the out of doors.

The first movement is notable for its relaxed exploration of clear-cut themes with little of the tension and drive that we have come to associate with the composer. The harmonies stick to relatively close and straightforward relationships, with little exploration of the remote. There are plenty of rustic little tunes to entertain us as Beethoven skillfully explores the description of the feelings that he alluded to in its title. The second movement is clearly one of his great ones, wherein the composer, as did Schubert, conjures up the brook of the title with a constant murmuring string accompaniment. Listen carefully near the end of the movement for the famous passage of the three birdcalls: one hears successively quite accurate depictions of a nightingale (flute), a thrush (oboe), and a cuckoo (clarinet). The third movement is the standard scherzo, or dance movement, and here we encounter a country festival with a country band. The middle section of this movement is noteworthy for its duple metre (rather like a march), rather than the usual triple (think of a fast waltz). Listen for a bit of Beethoven’s rough sense of humor in the bass notes of the second bassoon—a real country bandsman! The fourth movement, of course, is the storm, and Beethoven really goes after some degree of realism, here. He adds the piccolo and two trombones for the first time in this symphony, and they help to achieve the thunder, rain, lightning, and wind effects. Some listeners claim there is a rainbow at the end as the storm peacefully fades away. The last movement purports to be a “thanksgiving after the storm,” and is a bright rondo (a repeating theme). One hears a very simple, clear theme—possibly the shepherd’s tune--and after a through working out of its possibilities, the movement and the symphony ends with the theme played on a muted horn. One of Beethoven’s sunniest compositions thus ends peacefully, with a rare look into a part of his personality not often seen.

© 2015 William E. Runyan