I’ve had the great privilege of singing this work with my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale. We loved it! (So did the audience.) All three parts of the Nocturnes have lyrics from American poems, and I’m going to take a stab at clarifying them. As I’ve said this before, though, taking a poem apart to pry out the meaning is a little bit like explaining a joke: when you’re all done, you’ve destroyed the original. Still, there are some intriguing lines in all three selections that repay analysis. If you’d rather leave the mystery intact, you can skip the following.
Image accessed via Wikipedia; original painting is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City
First of all, I have to confess my (former) utter ignorance about who Don McLean is. I was of course familiar with the song “American Pie,” but for some reason had never actually noticed who its original performer was. (And I’m much more taken with the parody version of it from Weird Al Yankovic.) So when I got the music for a 2017 concert with my own choir and I saw McLean’s name as the author of “Vincent,” I just assumed he was some sort of obscure artsy-jazzy guy who was interested in art and liked Vincent van Gogh. Well, au contraire! One YouTube version of McLean’s performance has had almost ten million views. (“American Pie” has had over 71 million views from one video; I didn’t go through and add up the numbers from them all but would guess it’s close to 100 million.) McLean is still alive and still performing, although none of his songs has ever approached the popularity of these two, both of which were on his second album, also titled American Pie, released in 1971.
If you had been around in 1902 and invited to the coronation of Queen Victoria’s son Edward VII (“Bertie” to his friends), you would have heard the premier performance of Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of Psalm 122 from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, always known by its opening words: “I Was Glad.”
Psalm 122 in the Jewish Bible is one of a group of Psalms (songs) usually called “Psalms of ascent.” Scholars disagree on what exactly the word “ascent” refers, but the idea that’s usually listed first is that these psalms were sung by pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to participate in various festivals in the Jewish calendar. Jerusalem is built on several hills (one of which had the name “Zion,” sometimes used to refer to Jerusalem as a whole), so you would indeed be ascending as you made your approach into the city.
When I sang this piece with my own choir, I was intrigued by the title of this piece, as I associated Racine with Greek mythology. As a French minor in college I had read Racine’s play Phèdre, which has a story line about the hero Theseus, his second wife Phaedra, and his son from his first marriage, Hyppolite. I won’t go into the story here, but it sure doesn’t have anything to do with Christian theology!
Well, duh. From the Bible, of course. We all know that. But when a pieces becomes so familiar, so ingrained in our consciousness, we forget sometimes that they’re actually about something–that the composers started with an idea, a nugget of truth, a theme.
Let’s first look a selection from Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation: “The Heavens Are Telling,” is not from the first chapter of Genesis as you might have expected. Instead, it’s from Psalm 19, the first verse of which is: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. (King James Version, thus the strange spelling of “sheweth” and “handywork.”)
I’ve sung with my choir a version of Gregorio Alberti’s “Miserere” edited by John Rutter, who includes a rather lengthy and somewhat technical commentary about how the current version of this piece came about. Rutter does not include the most famous story about how the piece became available to the general public, though, a tale about the child prodigy Mozart and his ability to write down music from memory, even music that he had heard only once. I’ll get to that story in a minute. (Don’t you just hate it when writers do that?)
The “Les Voici” chorus from Bizet’s opera Carmen, which takes place in Act IV as the bullfighters parade into town, makes a fine addition to a choral concert. The hero of the day is Escamillo, the “espada, la fine lame” (“The Matador, the skilled swordsman”), who first appeared in the opera back in Act II, when he and his fellow bullfighters visited the inn where Carmen was drinking and dancing. Escamillo was quite smitten with her at the time, but she had other fish to fry, namely the soldier Don Jose.
Haven’t we all known someone like Carmen? All the guys are after her and yet she herself is untouched. Her heart is never fully engaged. She tells us this herself in her famous “Habanera”–”Love is a rebellious bird that none can tame.” For Carmen, it is all about the thrill of the chase: “If you do not love me, I love you.” She is quickly bored, always ready to move on to the next lover; she’s a female Casanova. It’s fair to say that she has only one great love in her life: herself.
As long as her lovers are as footloose and fancy free as she is, all is well. She can garner admiration and passion and then move on. But the danger comes when someone takes her seriously, and that someone is Don Jose. What she considers to be a harmless flirtation he takes very much to heart. He ends up getting himself into more and more trouble because of her, deserting both the army and the kind, gentle girl from back home, Micaela, and in the end he kills Carmen.
I have some very happy memories of this opera. But first a funny one. My mother used to sing me to sleep with a certain tune using the words: “Loo loo la loo loo, loo loo loo loo loo.” It was very soothing and carried with it a nice association with her. Imagine my surprise years later when I heard Carmen for the first time and realized that my mother had actually been singing the “Toreador Song”! (This piece occurs when Escamillo the bullfighter makes his first appearance in the opera and also meets Carmen.) I have no idea why she was using the melody from a song about the glories of bullfighting as a lullaby. It was just a part of our family’s private phraseology, like my father saying “Baloney in the purest form yet devised” to describe anything he found particularly nonsensical, usually in the realm of politics. When I went to college and we did declamations in speech class, suddenly I was hearing those words in a slightly different form from General Douglas MacArthur’s farewell address to Congress: “human liberty in the purest form yet devised.” My father was a great admirer of Gen. MacArthur, and that phrase apparently got stuck in his mind but used in a very different context.
Back to Carmen. Two performances stand out for me: one in the theater at the base of the Parthenon in Athens in 1977, during the same trip where I saw Aida in Rome. Quite a cultural excursion, eh? What I remember most clearly is Micaela’s aria from Act III, when the hometown girl is alone in the mountains hunting for Don Jose in order to bring him back from the brink. (Of course she fails.) As I recall, the Carmen that night wasn’t all that great, but there was stomping and shouting for Micaela. The other performance is the 1984 filmed version with Placido Domingo and Julia Migenes. I have to say that Migenes truly captured the essence of Carmen—rather elfin and playful, yet very conscious of her power over men, never taking anything or anyone too seriously—until the very end, when she is forced to do so. I’ve seen a number of Carmens, but most of them were may too serious about the whole thing. Hey, Carmen works in a cigarette factory and gets into a knife fight with another girl! She’s down with the smugglers. She reads Tarot cards. (Those she takes seriously.)
Migenes became famous in the opera world when she got the cliched call at the last minute to substitute for the star in a 1980 televised “Live from the Met” performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu. I remember seeing an interview with her after the success of the Carmen film in which she told the story of that night. Teresa Stratas was supposed to sing the role and Migenes was the understudy. Stratas was apparently known for canceling at the last minute, but I don’t think anybody thought she’d do it on such an important night. Well, she did, and Migenes’ number was called. She was at home, somewhere in the outer boroughs of New York City, and she had to get all the way downtown. The cab she took was crawling through the heavy traffic. They were never going to make it on time. She spotted a subway station and got out of the taxi. The lines at the station were long, but she got to the front by telling people she was pregnant. (Which she was—four months, as I recall.) She said in the interview that she didn’t know if people would believe her or be impressed by her saying that she had to get to the Met to sing the lead, so she fell back on the pregnancy line. It worked, she got there, they only had to hold the curtain for a short time, she went on and was a triumph. Most of her career up to that point had been in musical theater and not opera, but that performance put her on the map and surely led to her casting in the Carmen film.
Did she go on to a long career in opera? Actually no. She went off and did other things that interested her, including the performance of her own songs. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Migenes is very much a real-life Carmen in that she has consistently refused to do the conventional thing. She’s also been divorced four times, for what it’s worth. (If you’d like to read a fascinating article about her, here’s the link: ”Reunion: Julia Migenes.”)
One last topic in this rather lengthy post: bullfights. “Les Voici” portrays the people of the town welcoming the bullfighters who are going to perform in the ring. There are several terms that need explaining:
1. “quadrille”–the entire group of bullfighters.
2. “picador”–the man who jabs the bull with a lance during the first part of the bullfight ritual.
3. “banderilleros”–men who insert the barbed sticks into the bull’s shoulders during the second part of the bullfight.
4. “toreador”–a general name for bullfighters.
5. “chulos”–cocky or arrogant ones
6. “alguazil”–the sheriff or mayor, whom the street urchins don’t like very much.
When my husband and I went on a month-long trip to Europe in 1993 we decided to attend a bullfight in Seville, which supposedly had the most traditionally-correct format. I had read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and was particularly concerned about the use of horses in the ring who were often terribly injured by the bulls. I will spare you the details Hemingway used; suffice it to say that the horse’s abdomen seemed to be a favorite target. By the time of our trip, though, the horses were wearing protective armor. As the horse galloped around the ring the bull made a pass at it; I shrieked or squeaked or something, and the nice Spanish gentleman sitting next to me leaned over to Jim and said, “Es nerviosa.” Yes, I was indeed nervous. That’s a funny memory of the experience, but I’d have to say that the actual killing of the bulls was pretty gruesome. Again, I will spare you the details, but there was a lot of blood involved. (A line from Escamillo’s song says, “the arena is full of blood,” which isn’t much of an exaggeration.)
Try not to think too much about the fate of the poor bulls (and of Carmen herself) as you listen to this rousing selection! I haven’t been able to find any good clips online from the film, but here’s another fully-staged version:
Because the “Grand March” from Aida is so familiar, it’s easy to lose sight of what a masterpiece it is and what its significance is in the opera as a whole. The piece plays a central part in the plot of the opera and is also a great performance possibility on its own for choral groups. I’ve enjoyed singing that version with my own choir.
So, to begin, how does this music fit into the opera’s story? Aida has as one distinction that its plot actually makes a certain amount of sense. Basically (or, as my son used to say when he was little, basicawwy), Egypt is at war with Nubia. Aida is a Nubian princess who has been captured and is serving as the maid of Amneris, the Pharaoh’s daughter. No one at court knows Aida’s true identity, though. Both Aida and Amneris are (of course) in love with the same man, Radames, the captain of the army. So it’s a nice setup: Aida is obviously going to have to choose between her love for her country and her love for Radames. She ends up choosing . . . both. I think the ending of this opera is bone-chillingingly beautiful. Radames has been sentenced to death for the supposed betrayal of his country (by giving info on troop movements to Aida’s father, except he didn’t mean to!), and he’s been buried alive in a tomb, but Aida willingly shares his fate with him, having hidden herself there ahead of time. They sing “O terra, addio” (Oh earth, farewell) as they die, while Amneris kneels above at the entrance praying for Radames’ soul: “Pace, t’imploro, pace t’imploro, pace, pace, pace!” (“I pray for peace, I pray for peace!”) That final “pace” just floats out over the audience. (It didn’t strike me until I looked up a plot summary that Amneris doesn’t know Aida is down there dying, too.)
Maria Callas as Violetta; image accessed via Wikipedia
Here’s the storyline of Verdi’s La Traviata (“The Fallen Woman”): Alfredo, a young man from the provinces, has come to Paris and fallen in love at a distance with a woman of rather uncertain reputation named Violetta Valéry, finally getting to meet her face to face at a party she’s giving. He’s the one who leads the festivities with the chorus, “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici”– “Drink from the joyful cup.” (I’ve sung this chorus with my own choir on a program that featured selections from opera–it was great fun.) Then everyone except for Violetta moves into the next room for dancing, but she’s having a coughing fit. (Ominous foreshadowing here.) Alfredo comes back to find her and declares his love in the lovely “Un dì, felice, eterea”– “One day, happy and ethereal.” He leaves, Violetta declares that she must be “sempre libera”–”always free,” but we know she’ll get together with Alfredo when we hear his voice as he goes down the street outside, giving an encore of “Un di.” And that’s the end of Act One.
You wouldn’t believe the highways and byways I’ve traversed trying to get the full scoop on this one little phrase. I started out by googling, as usual. Of course the movie by that name came up—I’ll get to that in a minute. For the phrase itself, there was a lot about angels dropping coins from Heaven as a way of showing support and sympathy. Or departed loved ones doing so. Or both. It was a little confusing. The Oxford English Dictionary entry said: “pennies from heaven: money acquired without effort or risk; unexpected benefits, esp. financial ones.” It said that the phrase’s first use, at least in a printed source, was from something called Ghetto Messenger by A. Burstein, published in 1928. Well, I thought, that’s easy. I’ll just look it up on Google Books. Alas, they didn’t have the entire story but just part of the page with the phrase. There seemed to be a group of little boys involved, so I assumed that they were messenger boys, probably African-American, living in an inner city. I found the book in my library system and put it on hold, finally got it last week, and found out that my assumptions were pretty much wrong.
Um, I guess so. I’m going to try, anyway.
If you had been around in 1902 and invited to the coronation of Queen Victoria’s son Edward VII (“Bertie” to his friends), you would have heard the premier performance of Sir Hubert Parry’s setting of Psalm 122 from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, always known by its opening words: “I Was Glad.”
When I sang this piece with my own choir, I was intrigued by the title of this piece, as I associated Racine with Greek mythology. As a French minor in college I had read Racine’s play Phèdre, which has a story line about the hero Theseus, his second wife Phaedra, and his son from his first marriage, Hyppolite. I won’t go into the story here, but it sure doesn’t have anything to do with Christian theology! 
I’ve sung with my choir a version of Gregorio Alberti’s “Miserere” edited by John Rutter, who includes a rather lengthy and somewhat technical commentary about how the current version of this piece came about. Rutter does not include the most famous story about how the piece became available to the general public, though, a tale about the child prodigy Mozart and his ability to write down music from memory, even music that he had heard only once. I’ll get to that story in a minute. (Don’t you just hate it when writers do that?)
