Art Songs

John Tavener and William Blake: Two Mystics Team Up to Produce a Masterpiece

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This image represents copy C, object 8 of Blake’s original poem, currently held by the Library of Congress, public domain.

I have been privileged to sing John Tavener’s “The Lamb” twice with the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area. It’s interesting for me to look back on that first performance in 2013 and to realize how little I understood the piece’s complexities. Our 2021 concert gave me a chance to dig a little deeper.

Let’s start with the author of the text, William Blake. If you remember your English literature class, you’ll know that he was an early Romantic mystic who claimed to have had visions starting in early childhood; he was actually more interested in his art than his poetry. He and his wife put out an illustrated edition of some of his poems, with a few initial copies including his own hand-colored engravings. “The Lamb” is from his poetry collection Songs of Innocence. It seems like a simple little ditty, almost a child’s poem, until you look at it closely, which I will now proceed to do. Here’s my own line-by-line analysis:

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How Did the Moody Robert Schumann Come to Write the Spritely “Zigeunerleben”?

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Image by William Adams from Pixabay–these are obviously costumed actors/dancers, but they are quite true to the Romantic idea of this people group.

In May 2013 the community choir to which I belong, the Cherry Creek Chorale, performed a concert with the title “Isn’t It Romantic?” One of the pieces was the rousing song “Zigeunerleben” by Robert Schumann. I got a little tickled with myself when I realized later that not only did I not read a translation of the text in preparation for the concert, having only a vague idea that it was something about gypsies, but I also assumed that the song was by Robert Schubert. (The confusion of Schubert and Schumann is very common; East Germany issued a commemorative stamp in 1956 that had a picture of Schuman against a backdrop of music by Schubert; the stamp had to be re-issued in corrected form.) But during some later work on Johannes Brahms, who was closely associated with the Schumanns, I realized that Robert was a fascinating study unto himself. There’s no way I can do justice to the whole complicated story of this complicated man, so let me attempt to explain how he came to write this song.

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A Smaller Version of the Brahms “Requiem”–“Nanie”

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“Orpheus and Eurydice” by Anselm Feuerbach, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

It has been fascinating to read about the life of Johannes Brahms, and his late composition “Nänie,” written over the course of a year from 1880-1881, is a good example of how he viewed relationships. This piece comes well over a decade after his Eine Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) was finally completed in 1869, but both that major work and this single piece are focused on the theme of consolation for those who are mourning a death. (As I write this article in early February 2021 I’m planning to make my next project in book form to be on the Requiem. This is therefore a good warmup! If the subject of the Requiem intrigues you, be sure to check back on this website for updates. And of course the best way to be sure you do that is to subscribe to the blog. Go to the sidebar to do that.)

“Nänie” was written to honor the memory of Brahms’ friend Anselm Feuerbach, a painter who died at the tragically young age of 50. Brahms knew Feuerbach because of his own interest in art; he had a circle of friends who were painters, among them Feuerbach. In fact, the painter’s style was compared to that of Brahms: both were interested in severe classical restraints on personal emotion. Feuerbach’s paintings were focused primarily on Classical themes and subjects, so when he died Brahms’ choice of text illustrated the painter’s style as well as his own. The piece was dedicated to Feuerbach’s stepmother Henriette; more about her below.

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Who are the two heavy hitters involved in the light, shimmering piece “A Boy and a Girl”?

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

And they are: Eric Whitacre, one of today’s most popular American composers of classical choral music, and Octavio Paz, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, essayist and diplomat. Quite a team!

Let’s start with Paz and his poem. While the title’s translation from the original Spanish is typically rendered as “A Boy and a Girl,” I ran into an interesting blog post that had this to say:

As a side note, the title “Los Novios” is very difficult to translate into English without losing something.  The word “novio” means a boyfriend or a romantic partner and comes from the Latin novus, or new.  The feminine form “novia” means the same thing, and in Spanish, if there are multiples in a group consisting of females and males, the plural word takes the masculine plural.  While “los novios” could be translated as “the boyfriends,” context here is clear that it is the sum of a boyfriend and a girlfriend and not some sort of homoerotic message.  Because “The Boyfriend and the Girlfriend” is an awkward title, I took the liberty of translating the title as “The Lovers,” which seems to me to capture the essence of what Paz was trying to convey. (from “The Lovers”: A New Translation of Octavio Paz’ “Los Novios”)

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How Has the Jewish Bible book of Ecclesiastes Been Used in Musical Settings?

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Wooden carving of an Jewish prophet or preacher
Image from Pixabay

I’ve had the privilege of singing a piece titled “Beautiful In His Time” by the American composer/arranger Dan Forrest, which uses a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 in the Jewish Bible. Forrest is by no means the first to set verses from this chapter to music, though; there’s a long history of doing that, going all the way back to Brahms. Before I get to an overview of that history, though, I’d like to comment a bit on the book as a whole, since Ecclesiastes is fascinating in and of itself, considered to be part of the “wisdom” section of the Old Testament along with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon. Yet it seems to have a very different message from any other book of the Bible, for it can come across as cynical and fatalistic, especially in the earlier chapters. Most Bible scholars believe that it was written by Solomon, king of Israel after David, who would certainly fit the description of “teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem” given in the first verse. But why would Solomon, whom the Bible says had the greatest wisdom of all mankind, say in verse 2, “It is useless, useless . . . life is useless, all useless”? We are given at least a partial answer at the end of chapter 1: “The wiser you are, the more worries you have; the more you know, the more it hurts.” (Good News Translation)

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The Little-Known but Greatly-Affecting “Rainsong” by Houston Bright

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Image by Ioannis Ioannidis from Pixabay

Until I sang this gorgeous and poignant piece with my own choir back in the spring of 2017 I had never heard of Houston Bright, a prolific and esteemed composer and conductor who lived from 1916-1970, dying far too young at age 54 from cancer.

Bright spent his entire career teaching music at West Texas State University, although his 30 years there were punctuated with a stint in the military during World War II and some time off to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. Along the way he taught composition and music theory, formed and led choirs, and worked on his own compositions, which number over 100, for piano, solo voice, band, orchestra, and, especially, choir. Interestingly, one of the few poems by someone other than himself that he set to music was Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” I was very interested in finding a performance of this piece since it seems so outside the range of Bright’s other music, but even the vast resource of YouTube doesn’t seem to have an example.

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A Motet by a Master

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Stanford as a young man; anonymous public domain photograph; accessed via Wikipedia.

The master of this motet, “Beati Quorum Via,” was Charles V. Stanford, an Irishman who lived from 1852-1924 and who had an extremely distinguished career as a composer, teacher, and conductor. Out of the extensive list of his accomplishments I’ll just mention that he was one of the founders of the Royal College of Music, which is still around today. He produced over 200 works, including symphonies and operas, but nowadays the performances of his works are limited to some of his church music and an iridescent, shimmering piece “The Blue Bird” which I’ve performed with my own choir. Head over to that post if you’d like to read about it.

Two interesting tidbits about Stanford’s productive years: 1) He really, really wanted to be recognized for his operas and wrote nine of them. Only one had any success to speak of, Shamus O’Brien, which premiered in 1896 and ran for 82 performances. But it was a comic opera, not at all what he’d been writing previously in the genre. Alas! And while that number of performances was pretty good, guess who his comic opera competition was? None other than Gilbert & Sullivan. (Arthur Sullivan was also Irish, by the way). So Stanford was probably never going to get much traction if he’d pursued that path. But his serious operas got basically no traction at all, with a review of one, Savonarola, calling the music “crushingly tiresome.” 2) He was known for his combative personality. Here’s a description from his time on the board of the Royal College:

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Just how much literary and historial wonkery can be mined from Longfellow’s poem “Jugurtha,” which forms the text for a song by Daniel Morel?

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Jugurtha in chains before Sulla, from Sallust’s La conjuracion de Catilina y la Guerra de Jugurta (Madrid, 1772)

Answer: You won’t believe how much. Keep reading to find out.

The contemporary American choral composer/arranger Daniel Morel has set to music a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about an African king named Jugurtha who was captured during (what else?) the Jugurthine Wars with Rome in the first century B.C. The king was brought back to Rome to be paraded in chains as a spoil of war by the Roman general who had defeated him. He then was taken to the Tullianum, a dungeon in Rome, and left to starve to death. I have no contemporary descriptions of Jugurtha as he lived out his last miserable days, but I was reminded of a scene in a historical novel about another captured king, the Gallic leader Vercingetorix, as he sits underground awaiting his own fate:

I moved the lamp so that I could see him. He shivered and trembled. He hid his face in his hands. Insects and glistening slugs crept amid the strands of his matted, filthy hair. A rat skittered between us. (from The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor, accessed via Amazon)

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In the Blurred Line Between Waking and Sleeping, Reflections on the Past in “The Stilly Night”

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Billie Grace Ward from New York, USA / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

As I write this post my beloved choir has recently performed a great concert of Irish music in the latest of our every-other-year Celtic concerts. (Sadly, because of the pandemic, as of March 2020, we have just had to cancel our final concert of the year that would have been performed in May. But we’ll be back!) The tenors and basses (in other words, the men plus me) sang “Oft in the Stilly Night” with text by the early-19th-century Irish poet Thomas Moore. So I want to explore the imagery of the poem and then take a look at the composer of the version we sang.

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What’s the “Story Behind the Song” for “The Awakening”?

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Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel! Joseph M. Martin, the author of the lyrics and composer of the music for our selection “The Awakening” has written a definitive essay about the meaning of this piece, and there’s nothing more I need to say. With his kind permission I’m including a quotation here of his opening statement and then encourage you to follow the link and read the entire piece:

When I was asked to write the commissioned anthem for the 20th anniversary of TCDA (Texas Choral Directors Association), I knew that the piece would be sung first to music teachers and I wanted to encourage them in their work and remind them of how important they are to the lives of our young people.

“The Story Behind the Song” by Joseph M. Martin