Stagestruck from an early age, Handel adored the imported Italian opera that was all the rage both in his native Germany and in his adopted England. Joseph Addison ridiculed his countrymen’s addiction to foreign opera in 1711, the year that Handel’s Rinaldo premiered in London. “Our great Grand-children,” he observed wryly, “will be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to sit together like an Audience of Foreigners in their own Country, and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand.” Handel himself understood Italian perfectly well, though he undoubtedly spoke it, as he did English, with a thick German accent. Born in Halle, he cut his musical teeth in Hamburg before transferring to Italy for finishing school. The Venetian production of Agrippina in the winter of 1709–1710 gave him his first taste of success as an opera composer. From Italy, he proceeded to London, where he scored another hit with Rinaldo. In 1719, a group of aristocratic opera lovers offered him the directorship of the newly formed Royal Academy of Music, and for the next nine years, his life revolved around the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, where he wore multiple hats as house composer, impresario, conductor, opera coach, and talent scout.
Although “Eternal source of light divine” was written for the royal court rather than the theater (the ode was evidently commissioned for Queen Anne’s birthday in 1713), the supple lyricism of the vocal line, to which the solo trumpet responds in informal canon, reflects lessons Handel learned in the opera house. The historical drama Tolomeo is set in ancient Cyprus, where the deposed Egyptian king Ptolemy Lathyrus has been exiled by his mother in a palace coup aimed at replacing him with his younger brother. The action culminates in the false “poisoning” of the protagonist, who sings what he mistakenly believes to be his swan song in the plaintive da capo aria “Stille amare” (“Bitter drops”). Rinaldo is based on Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata, in which crusaders led by the Christian knight Rinaldo recapture the Holy City from the Turks. Infused with magic and exotic locales, and written for an orchestra that included four trumpets, Rinaldo was a runaway success in London. (It was also the first Handel opera to reach the stage of the Met, in 1984.) In “Or la tromba” (“Now the trumpet”), the conquering hero rallies his troops in a display of sparkling coloratura that epitomizes what Alexander Pope called Handel’s power “to stir, to rouze, to shake the Soul.”
Descended from Eastern European Jews, Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov carved out a niche for himself in the 1990s with his distinctive fusion of Latino, klezmer, African, Arab, and Western classical idioms. He rose to international prominence in 2000 with the success of La Pasión según San Marcos (The Passion According to Saint Mark), commemorating the 250th anniversary of J. S. Bach’s death. Since then, he has become a bona fide classical music superstar, composing operas, oratorios, film soundtracks, and an offbeat array of chamber works for such venturesome artists as Kronos Quartet, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. After studying composition in Argentina and Israel, Golijov earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania as a protégé of the late George Crumb, with whom he shares both a polystylistic idiom and a penchant for poetic, hauntingly atmospheric works that straddle the boundaries between music, ritual, and theater.
The Fire Outlives the Spark celebrates the life and artistry of Geoff Nuttall, the much-admired first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Before he died of cancer in 2022, Nuttall asked Golijov—who calls the violinist “my brother in life as in music”—to compose a posthumous memorial for him. Golijov selected three quatrains from Adonais, Shelley’s elegy on the death of Keats, that he considered a perfect portrait of Nuttall. “Musically speaking,” Golijov explains, “the piece has near-quotations of composers he loved (Strauss, Schumann), and it ends with a big quotation of Haydn’s sunrise in The Creation. Geoff worshipped Haydn above all.” Countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and an instrumental ensemble comprised of Nuttall’s friends premiered the aria last year at Stanford University, where the St. Lawrence String Quartet is in residence.
Golijov’s latest work is another musical memorial, this time to a dog. Listeners of a certain age may remember the photogenic mongrel Laika (“Barker” in Russian) as the four-legged cosmonaut who literally rocketed to fame in 1957 aboard the Soviet Sputnik 2 spacecraft. Since the technology did not yet exist to bring either the satellite or its passenger safely back to earth, Laika’s handlers understood that they were sending her to her death. “I asked her to forgive us, and I even cried as I stroked her for the last time,” a space-agency biologist named Adilya Kotovskaya recalled in a 2017 interview. The scientists hoped that Laika would survive for several days, but the capsule’s temperature-regulation system failed, and she died of overheating hours into the flight. Russian officials obfuscated about the cause of the dog’s death until the truth belatedly emerged in 2002.
“I’ve been fascinated with the story of Laika since childhood,” says Golijov, “and have been thinking about an opera with her as a character.” His collaborator, American novelist and nonfiction writer Leah Hager Cohen, “chose the crucial moment in which [Laika] is beginning to burn in her capsule. Leah’s style allowed me to write something that is epic and of course full of emotion, but not pathetic, and with room for delight too,” as signaled by the playfully reversed letter “k” in the titular dog’s name. According to the composer, LAIꓘA has “as much expression as in my most expressive music, but there’s a sense of proportion, an architecture that I feel is classical.” More unconventional is Golijov’s instrumentation, a dusky, unearthly sounding ensemble of low-pitched winds and strings that sets the countertenor’s melody in sharp relief.
Shy, sensitive, and prone to depression, Elgar was a late bloomer musically speaking: Not until he was well into his 30s and happily married to a worldly, supportive wife did he make his mark with a series of large-scale vocal works, culminating in the biblical oratorio The Dream of Gerontius of 1900, a moving and intensely personal testament to his lifelong Catholic faith. The previous year had seen the premiere of the masterly Enigma Variations, a set of orchestral pen portraits of the composer’s friends that was destined to become one of his signature works. Popular chestnuts like the five Pomp and Circumstance marches, the colorful overture Cockaigne (In London Town), the patriotic anthem “Land of Hope and Glory,” and the sentimental salon piece Salut d’amour helped establish Elgar’s reputation as the poet laureate of England’s imperial heyday. But the Romantic vitality and grandiloquence of these pieces masks a deeper ambivalence that found voice in such introspective works as the Violin Concerto of 1909–1910 and the Cello Concerto of 1918–1919. By the time he was belatedly appointed Master of the King’s Music in 1924, four years after his wife’s death, he had virtually stopped composing.
Although best known for his choral and orchestral works, Elgar was trained as a violinist and wrote chamber music throughout his career, beginning with a series of lightweight wind quintets in his early 20s. In later years, he concentrated on pruning away the luxuriant textures that had long characterized his music; the critic Ernest Newman, to whom the Piano Quintet is dedicated, remarked that “Elgar’s style has become one of extraordinary slenderness so far as the mere notes are concerned.” This simpler yet still lushly melodic style can be heard in the three major chamber works—the Violin Sonata, String Quartet, and Piano Quintet—that Elgar wrote in quick succession in 1918–1919. After attending a private preview performance of the quintet in London, George Bernard Shaw enthused that the music “knocked me over at once.” But the work’s public premiere at Wigmore Hall on May 21, 1919, elicited a mixed reaction from the critic of the London Times, who found Elgar increasingly out of touch with modern artistic currents. “It is not ugliness, and still less vulgarity, that one craves as an antidote to the Elgarian type of beauty,” H. C. Colles wrote. “It is the contrast of a more virile mind, something less purely visionary and more touched by hardness.”
Above a sustained, singing melody in the piano, the strings initially stammer out broken, nervously twitching figures in which Elgar’s wife heard a “reminiscence of the sinister trees” near their beloved country cottage in the Sussex woods. The strings introduce a typically Elgarian “sighing” motif that leads to a vigorous Allegro in 6/8 time, the four voices nipping at each other’s heels in fugal style. (When Shaw complained that “you cannot begin a movement in such a magical way as you have begun this Quintet and then suddenly relapse into the expected,” Elgar retorted: “It was meant to be square at that point and goes wild again—as man does.”) These three themes intermingle as the first movement wends its way toward what the composer called its “ghostly” conclusion. The central Adagio is more consistently lyrical, even nostalgic, in character. The finale opens with a slow introduction that briefly recalls the first movement’s sighing motif before launching into another Allegro featuring a broad unison theme marked “with dignity, songlike.” Echoes of music heard earlier pile up, and the Quintet closes with a sonorous climax that Elgar described as an “apotheosis.”
—Harry Haskell