Charles Ives was an American original whose musical style was far ahead of his time. Although The Unanswered Question was probably written in 1906, it was not premiered until 1946 when composer Elliott Carter (an Ives fan) arranged for its performance at Columbia University’s Second Annual Festival of Contemporary Music.
Ives was also a religious man with transcendentalist leanings. His first title for this work was “A Contemplation of a Serious Matter or The Unanswered Perennial Question.” Its unusual ensemble combines strings, a solo trumpet—here replaced by Ms. DiDonato’s wordless voice—and an atonal flute quartet. In a note, Ives shed light on its meaning. “The strings play ppp throughout with no change of tempo. They are to represent ‘The Silences of the Druids, who Know, See, and Hear Nothing.’ The trumpet intones ‘The Perennial Question of Existence,’ and states it in the same tone of voice each time. But the hunt for ‘The Invisible Answer’ undertaken by the flutes and other human beings becomes gradually more active, faster, and louder … ‘The Fighting Answerers’ … seem to realize a futility, and begin to mock ‘The Question’ … After they disappear, ‘The Question’ is asked for the last time, and the ‘Silences’ are heard beyond in ‘Undisturbed Solitude.’”
In British composer Rachel Portman, Joyce DiDonato has found a kindred spirit who is equally stirred by the beauties of the natural world. Best known as a composer of scores for more than 100 films and television programs, Portman became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Score in 1996 for Emma. More recently, she has turned to orchestral and chamber music that reflects her life living in the English countryside near London. “I had spent a lot of time immersed in nature,” she says, “and I wanted to try [to] express the beauty of what I see … We’re increasingly unconnected to the natural world. We don’t seem to be part of the land; we seem to use it as a resource instead.”
Portman’s collaborator for The First Morning of the World is American composer and writer Gene Scheer, who has created librettos for Jake Heggie’s Moby Dick, Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy, and many other operas. The First Morning of the World was commissioned by Linda Nelson in memory of Stuart Nelson.
Breathing in the fresh air of that first morning in Eden, this beautiful song introduces this program’s themes and poses the questions of how to recover the peace of an untouched paradise. The predominance of woodwinds and especially flutes evoke the birdsongs of that long-ago world while the clarity of the vocal lines throw emphasis on the eloquent text. Magically, Portman and Scheer pull us into a state of being completely in the moment, absorbing “the language of the trees … the grammar of the earth.”
After Gustav Mahler had exhausted the naïve folk poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection in his earlier songs, he turned with equal passion to Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), a sophisticated Franconian poet and scholar whose verse was refined, delicately beautiful, and often given to word-play.
In 1901 and 1902, Mahler set five of Rückert’s poems for voice and orchestra—and simultaneously for voice and piano—while composing his Fifth Symphony. They were united by their introspective moods and their intimate connection with Mahler’s personal experiences and philosophy. Joyce DiDonato has chosen two of them to be sung at different moments in this concert. First comes “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” (“I breathed in a gentle fragrance”) from Rückert’s 1833 series of spring poems. The poet plays with the different meanings of two similar words, linden (delicate) and Linden (lime tree). Mahler described this song as “the feeling one experiences in the presence of a person one loves … two minds communicating without any word needing to be spoken.” It also perfectly captures the wondrous scent of the linden blossom.
Later we will hear the entranced “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost to the world”), considered by many to be the greatest of Mahler’s songs. It was composed just after he moved into his tranquil lakeside “composing cottage” at Maiernigg in the Carinthian Alps and seems an expression of his contentment creating in that life-giving setting. The music embodies a sublime calm, expressed mostly in simple diatonic harmonies, like “the repose of a Zen garden,” in Henry-Louis de La Grange’s words. The seamless sharing of the melodic line between singer and piano achieves the quality of a vocal duet.
Though we don’t know the exact year, Marco Uccellini was born into a noble Italian family and probably received his musical education at the seminary of Assisi. His skills on the violin as well as his expansive creative powers led him to serve long periods at the Este court in Modena—where he also served as maestro di cappella at Modena’s Cathedral—as well as at the Farnese court in Parma. He was especially renowned for his instrumental music, which made new technical demands on the violin, including the extension of its range into higher registers, the employment of virtuosic runs, and the first use of scordatura tunings.
From Uccellini’s seventh book of instrumental music published in 1668, we hear this sonata for violin and organ. With many sections of contrasting tempos and meters, it resembles a Baroque dance suite more than a sonata. Its fourth section is built around a tuning challenge for the violinist that was a Uccellini specialty: a slow theme of chromatically descending scales that are later sped up and reversed to ascend chromatically.
A prominent composer of the Italian early Baroque period, Biagio Marini was also a virtuoso violinist who joined Claudio Monteverdi’s orchestra at San Marco in Venice. He subsequently led a peripatetic career performing and composing for most of Italy’s princely courts, as well as in Belgium and Germany. Marini was best known for his innovative instrumental music, but he also wrote lighthearted, dancelike vocal music, and a splendid example is the strophic song “Con le stelle in ciel che mai” (“Who has ever seen the sun?”) from his Scherzi e canzonette of 1622. Though the author of its text is unknown, the elaborate imagery is obviously the work of a court poet. Though it addresses “chaste lovers,” this poem is about the birth of the Christ child on a winter night during the reign of Augustus, which brings sunlight to the darkest night and blossoming flowers to barren earth. Its infectious triple-meter pace is set by the chitarrone, an Italian bass lute much loved in this era.
Listeners will probably detect a resemblance in Czech opera composer Josef Mysliveček’s aria “Toglierò le sponde al mare” (“I’ll loose the sea from its shores”) to Mozart’s music of the 1770s, for during that decade he and the considerably younger Mozart, who had met Mysliveček in Bologna in 1770, were close friends. Mozart in one of his letters home described the Czech as “full of fire, spirit, and life,” and frequently borrowed themes from him for use in his own compositions.
Though born in Prague, Mysliveček spent his entire musical career in Italy, where he was a prolific composer of opere serie. And that is the style we find in his oratorio Adamo ed Eva, premiered in Florence in 1771. This oratorio does not take place in the bliss of the Garden of Eden, but after Adam and Eve’s expulsion during which they are guided by the Angel of Mercy and the Angel of Justice. Sung by the more exacting Angel of Justice, “Toglierò” is a dramatic da capo aria full of the vocal virtuosity that was a Mysliveček specialty and driven at a ferociously unforgiving pace.
His creativity rooted in instrumental music, Aaron Copland had composed few songs before writing his vocal masterpiece, 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson, between 1949 and 195. While searching anthologies of verse, he encountered a poem by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), the reclusive genius of Amherst, Massachusetts, and was immediately captivated. “There was something about her personality and use of language that was fresh, precise, utterly unique—and very American,” he wrote. “The more I read, the more her vulnerability and loneliness touched me. The poems seemed the work of a sensitive yet independent soul.”
Copland’s own musical style—by then as spare and incisive as Dickinson’s verse—was an ideal match for his chosen poet. In 1958, he began orchestrating the Dickinson songs and finally published those that best-suited this medium as 8 Poems of Emily Dickinson.
The exquisite “Nature, the gentlest mother” is the cycle’s first song. As in Portman’s The First Morning of the World, its scoring is dominated by woodwinds, which imitate the fluttering of wings and the trilling of birds to begin the song. Arcing over a broad range, the vocal line, nevertheless, illuminates every word and phrase of this enchanting poem to perfection.
A slightly younger contemporary of Monteverdi, the composer and poet Giovanni Valentini was probably born in Venice and studied music there under Giovanni Gabrieli. He became a virtuoso keyboard artist, specializing in the enharmonic clavicymbalum, a large harpsichord with a keyboard of 77 keys spanning four octaves. Valentini’s multiple talents won him important positions in Poland, Graz, and finally at the Viennese court of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. His music is often daring in its harmonies and makes much use of chromatic half steps that could be readily produced on his enharmonic harpsichord. We hear his intriguing Sonata in G Minor, “Enharmonic,” which is an antiphonal dialogue between two instrumental groups. Its brooding motif, repeated many times at the beginning, gradually becomes more elaborate and animated.
Joining the choir of Venice’s San Marco as a boy soprano in 1616 and tutored by Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli in time became his successor in translating the new form of opera from a courtly pass time to a popular entertainment for paying audiences in Venice’s public theaters. Twenty-seven of his operas survive, and their combination of melodious arias with risqué plots have made them very appealing today. Perhaps the most often performed is La Calisto (1651), the tale of the beautiful nymph Calisto who is wooed by the amorous Jupiter, come to earth to restore order after a devastating war. Since Calisto is a follower of the virgin goddess Diana, he disguises himself as Diana to get past her defenses. The poignant air “Pianti ombrosi” (“O shade-giving plants”) is sung by Calisto in Act I as she mourns Nature’s beauty that has been destroyed by the recent war.
Christoph Willibald Gluck’s prominent place in musical history was secured by his opera Orfeo ed Euridice of 1762, in which he reformed the excesses of high Baroque opera by stripping away its elaborate vocal virtuosity and placing the musical emphasis on clear and streamlined expression of the drama’s text. First we hear one of Orfeo’s most famous excerpts, the “Dance of the Furies,” when Orfeo is opposed at the gates of Hades by the infernal spirits, who refuse him entrance until enchanted by his song. Here furious strings are lashed by terrifying dissonances.
The recitative and aria “Misera, dove son! … Ah! non son io che parlo” comes from an earlier period of Gluck’s career when he was still wedded to the conventions of opera seria and wrote for Prague the opera Ezio to a popular libretto by Pietro Metastasio about the last years of the Roman Empire. Flavia, the daughter of a Roman aristocrat is in love with the general Ezio, but she is thwarted by her father’s hatred of her lover. In this dramatic scena consisting of recitative and da capo aria, she bewails her entrapment, caught between warring father and lover. The spare eloquence of the recitative and the beautiful and much slower B section of the aria preview the reform style Gluck would soon adopt.
Despite the fact that it was unpopular with audiences at its 1750 premiere, George Frideric Handel’s penultimate oratorio Theodora was his personal favorite and now is one of his most admired late works. The aging Handel selected a radically different text for this work: the tragic story of the early Christian martyrs Theodora and Didymus, who died in Antioch in 304 CE during the reign of Emperor Diocletian. With a subject closer to the Catholic tradition than to the Protestant, he took a huge gamble and unfortunately paid the price for it at the box office. The beautiful aria
Ms. DiDonato has chosen, “As with rosy steps the morn,” is sung by Irene, the leader of the Christian community and Theodora’s confidante, and keeping to the theme its text employs metaphors from nature. A calmly majestic da capo enriched by a subtly active bass part, it reflects Irene’s character, firmly grounded and never shaken in her faith. The contrasting B section grows bolder and more radiant as she addresses her savior.
—Janet E. Bedell