Though he wrote much instrumental music, Samuel Barber seemed destined to excel in music for the voice. His talented family included his aunt, the world-renowned contralto Louise Homer, and her husband, composer Sidney Homer. Barber himself had a beautiful baritone voice and pursued a triple-major in piano, voice, and composition at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Barber’s skills as a songwriter were enriched by his extensive and discriminating reading of poetry, with a special affinity for Irish poets.
Julia Bullock has chosen three songs that span—in reverse order—different moments in Barber’s career. Third to be sung will be “The Daisies,” written in 1927 when Barber was only 17 and a student at Curtis. Setting an idyllic text by Irish poet James Stephens, this song possesses characteristics that mark the composer’s vocal work throughout his life: a fresh, lyrical melody and a sensitivity to word stresses and nuances.
During an era of tonal experimentation, Barber followed a conservative course and generally adhered to tonality. But his 1947 song “Nuvoletta,” setting passages from James Joyce’s linguistically inventive novel Finnegans Wake, prompted him to leave his comfort zone. One of the composer’s favorite poets, Joyce here describes the character Nuvoletta (“little cloud” in Italian), who is based on one of his daughters. Vain, capricious, and 16 years old, she is as much a spirit associated with the natural forces of clouds, rain, and rivers as an actual human being. Employing virtuoso wordplay that combines invented words, borrowings from other languages, and puns, Joyce captures her evanescent qualities. One interpretation is that her final leap into the river, or abyss, below is not so much a suicide as a return to her essence. Either way, she chooses to transform and transfigure herself.
In an interview in 1978, Barber admitted that he didn’t fully understand this text himself. “What can you do when you get lines like [these] … except to set them instinctively, as abstract music, almost as a vocalise?” Having recently written the evocative Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for soprano Eleanor Steber, he drew on her special qualities of pure intonation, a wide range, and flexibility. Another of his muses, Leontyne Price, also became a champion of this demanding song. A nonchalant waltz propels the piano part throughout most of the work, only easing for the melancholy announcement of the arrival of dusk and the weeping cries of “O! Par la pluie,” voiced as a keening cadenza high in the soprano range.
Bullock opens this Barber group with “My Lizard (Wish for a Young Love)” from the 1969 cycle Despite and Still. At this time, just before his 60th birthday, Barber was beset by feelings of mortality, episodes of depression, and dry spells in his creative output. In 1966, his grand opera Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of its new home at Lincoln Center, was a critical failure. After a career of successes, the composer never really recovered from this failure. The fear of old age and creative sterility haunts the five songs of Despite and Still. Nevertheless, “My Lizard,” set to a poem by Theodore Roethke, is the lightest in mood, buoyed by a brilliant, twisting piano part inspired by the title. Barber chose to change Roethke’s title from “Wish for a Young Wife” to “Wish for a Young Love” to align with his own queer identity. Generosity mingles with a touch of envy and sadness as the older man wishes happiness for the younger lover after he is gone.
Born in 1924 in New Hampshire to a conservative Baptist family, Elizabeth “Connie” Converse was thwarted from her dream of becoming a successful folk singer-composer by her shy personality and the barriers against women composers in mid–20th-century America. Moving to New York City in the 1950s, she worked at various jobs while composing songs to her own lyrics, which she performed at Greenwich Village parties. Unable to catch a break, she gave up composing and moved to Michigan, where she edited an academic journal. In 1974, depressed at her professional struggles, she sent letters to her friends and family saying she was searching for a better place and drove away, never to be heard from again.
But her songs lingered on, captured on tapes by a friend who was a semi-professional recording technician. In 2004, they came to life again as they were played on a popular New York radio show. And this time, people were finally ready to embrace them. Many singers have started singing these poignant songs with their spare loveliness. In Bullock’s words: “Converse writes so much about solitude, isolation, self-protection, and needing connection, without casting darkness as negative, frightening, or ugly, and lightness as the optimal force, as it’s often been positioned culturally. Instead, darkness is a place of protection, intimacy, desire.”
The Converse songs Bullock has chosen reflect a modest, bittersweet life in which small pleasures nourish a solitary soul. Steeped in melancholy with its downward-sinking chromatic notes, “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)” sings of loneliness and the loss of a loved one, but the singer is cheered by the sounds of rural birds and animals who talk like the departed. “I Have Considered the Lilies” is inspired by Jesus’s parable from the Gospel of Matthew in which he urges his followers not to worry about their everyday needs. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” In this seemingly straightforward song, Converse’s musings may appear simple, but open deeper philosophical questions: How do we act like the lilies, who are supported and clothed by a higher power? In 1974, she seems to have decided to do just that. At the end of this concert, Bullock returns to Converse for the poignant ballad “How Sad, How Lovely,” in which the coming of night is compared to the brevity of life itself.
Composers are usually complex people, but few could match Francis Poulenc in this respect: part–worldly Parisian sophisticate and part–sincere, devout Catholic. With his extraordinary sensitivity to poetry (which he enjoyed reading aloud), he became a worthy successor to the great French art song tradition of Debussy and Fauré. His spare, yet eloquent, melodies are always closely molded to the text, and they are enriched by imaginative, subtly colored harmonies that express the words’ emotional depths.
However, in “Non, Monsieur mon mari,” the soprano showpiece of Poulenc’s 1947 opera Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Teats of Tiresias), the words come in a high-speed torrent as Thérèse—the fed-up wife with ambitions beyond producing children—tells her husband she will no longer play the role of a subservient woman. Declaring herself a feminist, she wants to be a soldier, a politician, a bullfighter—anything a man can be. To an airy waltz, she watches her breasts fly away like balloons. She is now the liberated Tiresias!
First a play by one of Poulenc’s favorite poets, Guillaume Apollinaire, produced in 1917 as World War I ended, Les mamelles is a hilarious farce with a serious message. In a time when France had lost millions of its people, Apollinaire was using humor to deliver this urgent call: “Heed, oh Frenchmen, the lessons of the war / And make babies, you who hardly make them at all!” In 1947, at the close of World War II, Poulenc thought it was appropriate to deliver this advice again, with the added power of music.
Composed in 1939 as the war began, the six songs of Fiançailles pour rire (Engagement for Laughs) were drawn from a larger collection of poems by Poulenc’s close friend, French aristocrat Louise de Vilmorin. Poulenc tells us he wrote them to forge a spiritual link to Vilmorin, married to a Hungarian count and now “imprisoned in her castle in Hungary for God knows how long.” Some of the poems are about mortality, and “Mon cadavre est doux comme un gant” (“My cadaver is soft like a glove”) expresses the detachment of the soul from the body it has left behind with vivid imagery that is, however, rendered by Poulenc with beautiful serenity.
Within the brief 50-year span of his life, Kurt Weill packed three distinctive creative careers. Growing up outside Berlin, he was the prize pupil of the ultra-serious Ferruccio Busoni and a relatively conservative composer of chamber music and symphonies. His musical style took on an abrasive theatrical edge—a mixture of avant-garde and German urban popular music—in the 1920s when he began his successful partnership with playwright Bertolt Brecht, culminating in The Threepenny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In 1933, he fled Nazism, going first to Paris for a year and then settling in America, where he flourished on Broadway in partnership with Moss Hart and Ira Gershwin. Weill famously told an American interviewer: “I have never acknowledged the difference between ‘serious’ music and ‘light’ music. There is only good music and bad music.”
“Complainte de la Seine” (“Lament of the River Seine”) was written in 1934 during that brief stay in Paris. It was a dark time for Weill, who had not only been forced to leave Berlin, but had just been divorced from Lotte Lenya (though they would later reunite). There was little work for him in Paris, but French cabaret singer Lys Gautier commissioned this song, which became a popular hit. The harshly repellent language of Maurice Magre’s poem strips away all the romance of the Seine, informing us that, besides gold, jewels, and flowers, cadavers and all the refuse of a pitiless city lie beneath its roiling waters. Weill sets the text to a grim march that juxtaposes minor and major chords.
Two other songs are products of Weill’s work with Brecht, who intensified his socialist political beliefs and his censure of early–20th-century institutions driven by voracious greed. In 1928, Weill was commissioned by Radio Frankfurt to write a secular cantata, which he named Das Berliner Requiem. The composer chose seven poems by Brecht for the Requiem’s movements, several of which were inspired by the 1919 assassination of the revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, revered as a martyr of the leftist cause. The second movement is the “Ballade vom ertrunkenen Mädchen” (“Ballad of a Drowned Maiden”), envisioning Luxemburg’s body decaying in Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. The song is as stark as the words: a bleak recitative originally accompanied by guitar.
From 1929, the Weill/Brecht/Hauptmann musical Happy End contains some of Weill’s best Weimar-era songs, but its cynical conclusion doomed its success with the public. A much tougher version of the 1950 American musical Guys and Dolls, it revolves around a gang of bank robbers and a romance between the criminal Bill Cracker and Lieutenant Lilian Holiday of the Salvation Army, who sets out to reform him. “Song of the Hard Nut” is Bill’s brutal response to Lilian’s pleas: If you want to make it in the real world, you can never be soft. In the “happy end,” the robbers and the Salvation Army decide to join forces since they both have the same goal: One steals money and the other begs for it!
Weill’s career in America brought him greater success than he’d known in Germany and a lighter touch to his songs. A case in point is the clever tour-de-force “The Princess of Pure Delight” from his 1941 Broadway hit Lady in the Dark, with words by Ira Gershwin and book by Moss Hart. During a session of psychoanalysis, a fashion editor has a dream that takes her back to a school play when she was devastated not to be picked to play the princess. The scintillating Gertrude Lawrence made it into a showstopper.
Rarely heard from Richard Strauss’s rich legacy of songs are the Lieder der Ophelia: settings of portions of Ophelia’s mad scene in Act IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet after the title character has killed her father, Polonius. By the time Strauss came to compose these songs in 1918, in a German translation by Karl Simrock, he had already thoroughly explored the subject of insanity in his operas Salome and Elektra, and thus he chose a more expressionist style for them. In “Wie erkenn’ ich mein Treulieb” (“How shall I know my true love”), a wayward line high in the piano over an unresolved dissonance in the bass represents the disordered state of Ophelia’s mind. Perhaps stirred by the betrayal of her fiancé, Hamlet, she chatters explicitly about young men’s abuse of young women in “Guten Morgen, ’s ist Sankt Valentinstag” (“Good morning, it is St. Valentine’s Day”). Like the first, this song simply trails off instead of ending. She then grows more serious as she envisages her dead father in “Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloß” (“They carried him on the bare bier”). Though Ophelia’s derangement emerges in snatches of a bizarre Straussian waltz, this song explores her plight with real pathos and sympathy.
Countering the harshness of many of the preceding songs is the beloved Black American spiritual that closes the concert’s first half. “Deep River” first appeared in the collection The Story of the Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs, published in 1867. It became an American classic in 1916 when African American baritone Harry T. Burleigh, a close colleague of Antonín Dvořák during his stay in America, published his arrangement of it in Jubilee Songs of the United States.
In March 1913, the first, partial performance of Alban Berg’s Altenberg Lieder at a concert in Vienna provoked as great a scandal as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring did two months later in Paris. Already disgruntled by Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1, the audience erupted into jeering and frenzy while just the second and third of the five Altenberg songs were played. The police arrived to restore order, and the concert was not resumed. Having just completed his studies with Schoenberg, the young Berg was devastated and never allowed the complete cycle to be premiered in his lifetime.
Today, the Altenberg Lieder are considered a great work: Berg scholar Mark De Voto deems them to be the composer’s “greatest achievement in song form.” Though we will hear them tonight in an arrangement for voice and piano, they were his first pieces for orchestra and scored with a brilliance astonishing for a relatively inexperienced creator. They anticipated Schoenberg’s 12-tone system by loosening the bonds of tonality such that, as De Voto writes, they constituted an “amazing leap into the visionary unknown.” Their texts, too, were unusual. Poet Peter Altenberg was a darling of the experimental “Young Vienna” movement, and wrote his aphoristic, enigmatic verses on postcards he sent to friends. Whether they were to be taken seriously or humorously—or both—was up to the reader.
Before the singer enters, “Seele, wie bist du schöner” (“Soul, you’re more beautiful”) seizes our attention immediately with a long prelude of sparkling, out-of-sync motifs painting the falling snow. It also rises to a dramatic climax before fading to “a blurred haze.” Continuing the imagery of stormy nature, “Sahst du nach dem Gewitterregen den Wald?” (“Have you seen the woods after the thunderous rainstorm?”) recalls the beauty that comes after a thunderstorm; the singer’s shimmering high entrance on “Siehe” is spellbinding. In “Über die Grenzen des All” (“Beyond the borders of all”), Berg captures the breaking of boundaries by using all 12 tones of the scale in the voice and accompaniment to explode tonal music’s boundaries. He captures the mood of “Nichts ist gekommen” (“Nothing has come”) perfectly: The tempo is very slow, and motives drift wearily as the singer yearns on expectantly rising lines for something to happen.
Longest of the songs, “Hier ist Friede” (“Here is peace”) releases the singer’s emotional longing and pain in the accompaniment’s most explosive outbursts. Like the first song, there is an expansive opening prelude, here built out of a repeating passacaglia pattern. That crystalline motive reveals itself later to be the gentle dripping of snow, which brings peace to the singer’s soul.
While they were students at Columbia University in the early 1920s, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II teamed up for the first time to write songs for the college’s varsity show, Fly with Me. However, it was not until the early 1940s when the composer and librettist joined forces again for the mega-hit Oklahoma!, a show that changed the course of American musicals forever. From then on, this legendary team would create musical dramas that paired unforgettable songs with stories that were not afraid to mix entertainment with serious, even controversial subject matter.
This fearlessness was epitomized by 1949’s South Pacific, which tackled the subjects of racism and colonialism as they affected romances between two very different couples: the feisty American nurse Nellie Forbush and the older, expatriate French planter Emile de Becque; and naval lieutenant Joseph Cable and beautiful, Tonkinese Liat during World War II’s Pacific War. Nellie is swept away by Emile until she meets his two children by a deceased Polynesian woman. In love but afraid to take Liat back to the Philadelphia Main Line, Joseph wrestles with his own prejudice in “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” the first Broadway song to tackle the subject head-on. On tour, some American cities wanted the song cut, but Rodgers and Hammerstein refused.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical together (Hammerstein died of cancer in 1960), The Sound of Music, which premiered in 1959, was a bit less controversial, though it was a true story set in Austria in 1938—the year of the Anschluss, when Nazi Germany took over the country and Austrians had to decide which side they were on. This enchantingly melodious drama revolves around the romance between the Catholic postulant Maria Rainer and the Austrian naval captain Georg von Trapp, and her transformation of his seven children into gifted musicians, who would eventually become the world-famous Trapp Family Singers. Offered a commission by the German government, the anti-Nazi von Trapp decides that he, Maria, and the children must flee Austria immediately to eventually settle in America.
The 1965 film starring Julie Andrews was an even greater success than the original theatrical version. Rodgers was asked to write two additional songs, but since Hammerstein had died, he wrote the words himself. Bullock will sing one of them: the tender confession “Something Good,” which Maria and Captain von Trapp sing as they decide to wed.
Composing talent ran in the Rodgers family. Richard Rodgers’s daughter, Mary, inherited it and passed it on to her son Adam Guettel, whose music for the 2005 show The Light in the Piazza won the Tony Award for Best Score. In 1959, the same year The Sound of Music premiered, Mary wrote the music for the popular fairytale farce Once Upon a Mattress, a humorous take on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale “The Princess and the Pea.” Beginning off-Broadway, it soon transferred to Broadway and made Carol Burnett, cast as the scuffed-up Princess Winnifred, a comic star. Brought in from the swamps by residents of a tiny, 15th-century European kingdom as a candidate to be the bride of Prince Dauntless the Dull, Winnifred—or Fred, as she prefers to be called—must face the trials the prince’s mother has used to drive away 12 other princesses. In her bouncy, irreverent song “Happily Ever After,” Fred complains that, though she too aspires to wed and live “happily ever after,” she has no fairy godmother to help her. However, she succeeds in her quest—with a little help from sympathetic courtiers.
One of the fiercest of all protest songs is “Masters of War,” based on a traditional folk tune “Nottamun Town” and given an unflinching text by Bob Dylan that condemns the leaders of the military-industrial complex who make their riches from war. It was sung throughout the Vietnam War, though Dylan wrote the words in 1962 and 1963, before America actually joined the fight. It is also strongly associated with the legendary folksinger, guitarist, and civil rights activist Odetta, and Bullock’s arrangement is inspired by Odetta’s version recorded on the 1965 album Odetta Sings Dylan.
Bullock closes her program with three songs written by or associated with the legendary Black American folk singers and guitarists Odetta and Elizabeth Cotten. Born more than a generation before Odetta, Cotten was one of the pioneers of the American folk song movement, influencing many others including Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Odetta herself. Born outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1893, she taught herself to play the guitar while working as a domestic servant from childhood on. Since she was left-handed, Cotten had to adapt to her right-handed guitar by playing it upside down with a technique that became renowned as “Cotten picking.” She was discovered by the famed Seeger family when she took a job as a housekeeper for them. Living to age 94, she won many honors for her concert tours and recordings throughout her senior years.
Cotten was only a teenager when she composed one of her most famous folk songs, the vivacious “Freight Train” saluting Number Nine, which ran through her hometown; it became virtually an anthem of the American folk movement. This song medley also has a deeper travel theme: the long-awaited journey home to a place of eternal peace and joy after death. The haunting theme of “Going Home” comes from the beautiful second movement of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. The lyrics were added by William Arms Fisher and the arrangement Bullock will sing is by Odetta. In “When I Get Home,” a song attributed to Charles Austin Miles and popularized by Cotten, a lively, yet serene, melody describes the rewards heaven promises to those who have struggled all their lives.
—Janet E. Bedell
© 2024 Carnegie Hall