This evening’s program features two well-loved French pieces entitled “Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”), though they bear no relationship to each other. The first is a song by Gabriel Fauré, the master of the late–19th-century mélodie, two additional examples of which are also performed tonight; the second is an understated piano piece by Fauré’s younger contemporary Claude Debussy.
Fauré’s “Clair de lune” sets a poem by the great symbolist poet Paul Verlaine drawn from his collection Fêtes galantes—evocations of the aristocratic 18th-century world of Watteau from the more jaded perspective of the 19th century. At the centennial of the French Revolution, the French were beginning to look back at this mannered world with a certain affection. Poised on a charming melody for the piano, Fauré’s song exudes the formal grace of a minuet. In Graham Johnson’s words, “Under the unruffled surface of this music, passion and spontaneity are tightly corseted by etiquette and intrigue.” With another text by Verlaine, “Mandoline” (“Mandolin”) comes from Fauré’s Cinq mélodies “de Venise” (Five Venetian Melodies) of 1891; the composer was at this time considering writing an opera to a libretto by the poet. For “Mandoline,” Fauré creates music of extreme refinement enlivened by a tone of mocking wit.
Extremely atypical of Fauré’s usually restrained style in its unbridled passion—not to mention its use of the voice in full-throttle operatic splendor—is “Fleur jetée” (“Discarded Flowers”) of 1884 to verse by Paul-Armand Silvestre. The piano’s virtuoso fury is used to portray the fierce wind carrying away the despised flower as well as the anger of the spurned lover.
Debussy could never have imagined that his brief piano piece “Clair de lune” would become his most popular work—indeed one of the most popular works in all of classical music. It was the third piece in his keyboard set Suite bergamasque, and he was not even in any hurry to publish it. Though written in the early 1890s, he did not get around to publishing it until 1905 after the success of his opera Pelléas et Mélisande.
Even then, “Clair de lune” was not instantly embraced by the public. Today we think of it as the perfect nocturne, its gentle melody and soft colors enchanting our ears. But at the turn of the 20th century, Debussy was considered a dangerous radical who had spurned the lush late-Romantic style dominating that era. His harmonies and approach to tonality were vague, his rhythms blurred over the bar lines, and his dynamics were usually muted rather than full-bodied. And, though he was a pianist himself, he refused to create the sort of spectacular keyboard showpieces with which virtuoso pianists could dazzle audiences.
Not a passionate reader of poetry himself, Sergei Rachmaninoff was inspired to write songs for particular singers he admired. Most of them fell into the category of the Russian romance: a 19th-century style that emphasizes open and impassioned emotional outpouring, nearly always about romantic love yearned for, enjoyed, and lost. And he knew the type of poetry that worked best for his temperament. Writing to poet Marietta Shaginyan, who often selected poems for him to set, he cautioned: “The mood must be sad rather than happy. The lighter shades do not come easily to me.” Like much of his instrumental music, his songs favored minor keys.
One of Rachmaninoff’s most beloved songs is “Spring Waters,” which treats a subject dear to many artists: the sudden arrival of spring after the long night of winter. Here Rachmaninoff throws off his habitual gloom as the singer greets the season with soaring, breathless joy, while the pianist conjures the “running and glittering” of snow-fed waters. Another very popular song, written in 1893 when the composer was not yet 20, is “Sing not to me, beautiful maiden” to a poem by the great Alexander Pushkin. Taking his cue from its reference to Georgian songs, Rachmaninoff clothes it in the exotic melismas of the Russian orientalist style, clearly influenced by Borodin.
Published in 1902, the songs of Op. 21 reflect a particularly happy period of Rachmaninoff’s life when he was about to marry Natalia Satina, a wife who was able to soothe his black moods. Capturing a timeless moment of contentment, “How Peaceful” (also known as “How fair the spot”) is one of the composer’s most beautiful lyrical creations—and one of the rare ones in a major key. Aided by a warmly supportive piano part, the singer extolls the peace and beauty of a tranquil country scene, where “Here is only God and I.” The final vocal line floats beautifully downward from a pianissimo high B.
Before turning his passion for the human voice to opera, Richard Strauss was a prolific songwriter, composing his first song at age six. He recalled it was a Christmas carol, “for which I ‘painted’ the notes myself, but my mother wrote the words below the notes since I could not then myself write small enough.” In all, he created more than 200 lieder, and at his death at age 85, a half-finished song lay on his writing desk.
Strauss spent little time analyzing the words he set; instead, he sought to convey the overall emotional mood of each poem. And he was a superb melodist, knowing exactly how to create melodic arches that would exalt the human singing voice. As he described his approach to songwriting: “Musical ideas have prepared themselves in me … and when, as it were, the barrel is full, a song appears in the twinkling of an eye as soon as I come across a poem more or less corresponding to the subject of the imaginary song.”
Having written more than 40 songs as a child and adolescent, Strauss waited until 1885 when he was 21 to create his first for publication: The eight songs of his Op. 10 setting verse by Hermann von Gilm. Op. 10 closes with one of his best-loved songs, “Allerseelen” (“All Souls’ Day”). November 2 is “All Souls’ Day,” the day in the Catholic calendar for honoring those who have died. Although obviously indebted to Brahms, this magnificent song paints a scene of mature love gazing nostalgically backward that is astonishing for so young a composer.
In September 1894, Strauss married soprano Pauline de Ahna, and the two performed many concerts of his songs together until her retirement. Though she was a capricious and difficult woman, he never ceased adoring her throughout 55 years of marriage. “Heimliche Aufforderung” (“Secret Invitation”) is one of four songs he presented to her as a wedding gift. The verse is by the Scottish-born socialist John Henry Mackay, who spent most of his life in Germany. Buoyed by swirling arpeggios, this ardent invitation to a lovers’ tryst reveals the seeds of Strauss’s operatic voice germinating, even with his first stage success, Salome, still a decade away.
We hear two more of these Op. 27 songs. Mackay was also the author of the extraordinary “Morgen!” (“Morning!”). Since this poem seems to begin in mid-thought, then drift away without a true conclusion, Strauss artfully mirrors these qualities in his music. The piano, not the voice, is given the radiant melody, and the singer (as though too entranced by it to sing) only joins later. Both singer and piano close on unresolved chords. “Cäcilie” (“Cecelia”) was composed by an eager Strauss on the eve of his wedding; with its voluptuous arpeggios and surging vocal climax, it is surely one of the most passionate love songs ever created.
“Befreit” (“Released”) from 1898 is a much more mature song, one of Strauss’s greatest and most moving. The poet is Richard Dehmel, famous as the author of the text that inspired Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Here a magnificent piano part joins an exalted yet subtly inflected vocal line to portray the emotions of a devoted couple soon to be parted by death. The contradictory exclamation “O Glück!” (“O joy!”), returning as a refrain at the close of each stanza, expresses the singer’s conviction that their love will triumph over death. However, its last reiteration significantly includes the aching half-step rise that has haunted the song, revealing the underlying pain.
An unabashedly lyrical melodist amid a sea of radical musical movements, Lee Hoiby defied the various “isms” of the 20th century in favor of a long career creating pieces that singers actually wanted to sing. “If music doesn’t have melody and harmony and rhythm as I understand it,” he said, “I’m not interested.” Though he composed many instrumental works, Hoiby devoted himself primarily to creating vocal music—operas, choral works, and quantities of evocative songs. “Singers, you can’t fool them. When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going to make them sound good. And mine do.”
The great Leontyne Price can testify to that. For decades until her retirement, she championed Hoiby’s songs, singing them frequently in her programs at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. As a gift to her, he wrote the collection Songs for Leontyne, from which Ms. Blue has chosen the beautiful “Winter Song.”
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Hoiby was a piano prodigy, who originally trained to be a concert artist under virtuosos Gunnar Johansen and Egon Petri at the University of Wisconsin. Moving to California where he became a student of Darius Milhaud at Mills College, his interest in composing took over. When a Philadelphia friend sent some of his compositions to Gian Carlo Menotti, Menotti summoned him to study with him at the Curtis Institute. There Hoiby found his real voice as a neo-Romantic in the style of Samuel Barber, Menotti’s partner.
“Lady of the Harbor” sets the famous words of the l9th-century poet and activist Emma Lazarus that are placed inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. In 1883, Lazarus included them in her sonnet “The New Colossus” (comparing the new statue to the Colossus of Rhodes of the ancient world) to aid a fundraising campaign for the pedestal. Hoiby chose to set just the immortal five last lines of the poem, which begin “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Making a reference to its position on the waters of New York Harbor, the piano plays a rocking barcarolle rhythm throughout, over which the singer soars to a radiant high note of welcome.
From Hoiby’s Songs for Leontyne, we hear the beautiful “Winter Song,” which weaves the beloved’s face into the transforming colors of autumn fading into winter. The words are by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died in World War I and whose stunning poetry drives Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Here Hoiby shows great skill in illuminating the words clearly over the subtle caress of the accompaniment.
Another of Price’s favorite songs was “There came a wind like a bugle,” a setting of one of Emily Dickinson’s most powerful poems published in Hoiby’s Four Dickinson Songs of 1988. A piano tremolo with crescendo evokes the roar of that terrible wind that disturbed the serenity of Dickinson’s home in rural Massachusetts. Both singer and pianist are given virtuoso assignments in this dramatic song that relies on the power of the soprano’s high register.
Between his two successful careers in musical theater in Germany and America, Kurt Weill was forced to make a detour. Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he spent two frustrating years in Paris trying to make ends meet. One of the assignments he accepted was providing an instrumental interlude for Jacques Deval’s French play Marie Galante, in which the title character is abducted from her home in France and lives a precarious existence as a prostitute in Brazil.
Seeing vocal potential in this instrumental piece, Weill joined with lyricist Roger Fernay in 1934 to create “Youkali,” an entrancing song in tango-habanera rhythm about an island “almost to the end of the world,” where all human desires are fulfilled. Of course, as the singer finally admits, Youkali does not exist; it is only a folly, only a dream. The song was forgotten after Weill moved on to America, but fortunately soprano Teresa Stratas rediscovered it and sang it on her 1981 album The Unknown Kurt Weill.
By the end of the 1930s, Aaron Copland was rapidly becoming established as the quintessential “American” composer, who could write music that perfectly reflected the American spirit and landscape. Thus it is not surprising that Hollywood soon came calling: Between 1939 and 1961, Copland created scores for eight films, including The Heiress, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and Our Town.
In his autobiography, Copland remembered his approach to scoring Our Town, the 1940 film version of Thornton Wilder’s beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning play:
When Sol Lesser, the Hollywood producer, asked me to compose the music score for the screen version of the play about life in the small town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, U.S.A., I welcomed the opportunity. For one thing, I admired Wilder’s play; for another, I was irritated that film music had become so pat, so conventionalized, when the medium was still so young.
Copland also liked Grover’s Corner being modeled after Peterborough, New Hampshire, site of the MacDowell artist colony where Wilder had written the play and Copland had happily worked.
He was very clear about what kind of music he should write:
My job was to create the atmosphere of a typical New Hampshire town and to reflect the shifts from the real to the fantasy world. Because of the nostalgic nature of the story, most of the music had to be in slow tempo … In the open countryside scenes, I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the play … I used harmonies suggestive of church hymns associated with small New England towns of the early 20th century.
All these qualities can be found in the score’s central theme, “Story of Our Town,” which gently captures a mood of rural peace.
Best-known for his immortal “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for Judy Garland in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, Harold Arlen also contributed quantities of other songs—“Stormy Weather,” “That Old Black Magic,” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon”—to the Great American Songbook. After his death at age 81, Irving Berlin said of him: “He wasn’t as well known as some of us, but he was a better songwriter than most of us, and he will be missed by all of us.”
Arlen was a popular composer for movies, Broadway, and Harlem’s Cotton Club. His 1946 Broadway show St. Louis Woman, however, was one of his few relative failures. Designed to be a showcase for Lena Horne, it revolved around the beautiful Della Green, the toast of St. Louis, and her on-again, off-again love affair with the winning jockey Little Augie. It ran into immediate trouble when the NAACP criticized it for “offering roles that detract from the dignity of our race”; Horne turned down the role for similar reasons. But its songs have lived on, including “I Wonder What Became of Me,” Della Green’s melancholy Act III song about how her once-sparkling life seems to have gone off the tracks. A relentless, dragging accompaniment epitomizes her weariness and regret.
Written for the movie musical The Goldwyn Follies of 1938, the effervescent “Our Love Is Here to Stay” (with lyrics by Ira Gershwin) was the last song George Gershwin composed before his premature death from cancer in 1937. Strangely, it created little attention at the time the film was released. But when Gene Kelly sang it in the 1951 hit An American in Paris, it suddenly took off and became one of Gershwin’s most popular songs and remains so today.
In The Music of Black Americans, Eileen Southern eloquently sums up the role of music in the lives of enslaved Black Americans: “Music was a primary form of communication for the slaves, just as it had been for their African forebears. Through the medium of song, the slave could comment on his problems and savor the few pleasures allowed him; he could voice his despair and his hopes, and assert his humanity in an environment that constantly denied his humanness.”
Today, the religiously inspired songs of the enslaved are known as “spirituals.” The term may have had its origin in the hymnal A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors published in 1801 in Philadelphia by the Black Methodist minister Richard Allen. The word spiritual was derived from the New Testament book of Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms and Hymns and Spiritual Songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto the Lord.”
Emerging after the Civil War, gospel music as a term first appeared in a publication in 1874. Drawing on the roots of the spiritual, it was a more celebratory style that emphasized Black citizens’ newfound freedom and especially the joy of faith in Christ. It remains today the most popular musical style in Black Christian churches. Great gospel artists like Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin broadened the audience for this infectious musical style to mixed audiences.
First published in 1927, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” became the emblem of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s. In 1953, the great Marian Anderson sang it before a live television audience of 60 million people broadcast over the NBC and CBS networks. This arrangement for voice and piano, simply called “In His Hands,” was one of two spirituals set by British pianist Stephen Hough for Ms. Blue.
“Deep River” first appeared in a collection published in 1867. It became an American classic in 1916 when the Black 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. The program closes with Hall Johnson’s arrangement of “Ride on, King Jesus,” a song inspired by Jesus’s triumphant ride into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week when He was crucified.
—Janet E. Bedell