Which Came First, the Symphony or the Song? (Or Is It a Spiritual?)

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(Note: The Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area will be performing this lovely piece in its “American Songbook V” concerts on May 17 and 18, 2024. If you live in the area, make your plans to attend! Tickets may be purchased on this page or at the door.)

Haven’t you vaguely always understood that the second movement of Dvořák’s “New World” symphony was based on an American folk tune? I sure have. Turns out that, like most vague understandings, it’s not true. Dvořák wrote the tune himself; he said to one inquiring conductor that ““I tried to write only in the spirit of those national American melodies.”1 You can assign some kind of folksy charm to the horn solo in Movement #2, but it’s not necessarily American charm:

It has been said that Dvořák’s themes in his symphony were inspired by American folk melodies, especially Afro-American. But his themes are just as similar to Czech or Bohemian folk music and probably came from his own country’s music tradition.2

So all of that is well and good, but my focus in this post is on the words to the song that were written using that horn solo theme in the “Largo” movement. Such a reputable outlet as National Public Radio says that the words were written by Harry Burleigh, a Black composer whom Dvořák befriended while in New York. But they were actually written by another American protégé of Dvořák, a student of his named William Arms Fisher, who was White but who chose to write the lyrics in what he perceived to be some sort of African-American dialect. (Note my somewhat skeptical tone here.) So it’s “jes” instead of “just” and “’spectin’” rather than “expectin’” or “expecting.” And “goin’” is written as “gwine.”

As the song became more popular and mainstream, the dialect was considerably softened or omitted. In fact, although I haven’t been able to find a reproduction of the full original sheet music, I did find an image of the first page, which says at the bottom: “When desired the text may be sung without dialect.”

Here’s what Fisher himself had to say about African-American spirituals in general, in an introduction to an anthology of spirituals that he produced:

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Just How Hallmark Card-y Are the Lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”?

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Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay

(Note: My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a medley of Harold Arlen songs for their May 2024 concert, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Make plans to attend if you live in the area! The following post deals only with the lyrics by Yip Harburg.)

Not at all. I don’t have space to deal with the lyrics as a whole, so let me start with the opening phrase and go on from there. The lyricist himself, a son of Jewish immigrants who had taken the name of “Yip” Harburg, had been writing as a sideline while running a successful business which tanked in 1929. He said, “The capitalists saved me in 1929, just as we were worth, oh, about a quarter of a million dollars. Bang! The whole thing blew up. I was left with a pencil and finally had to write for a living… what the Depression was for most people was for me a lifesaver!”

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What’s the Deal with “Get Happy”?

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Picture(Note: My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is singing a medley of Harold Arlen songs for their May 2024 concert, including “Get Happy.” Make plans to attend if you live in the area!)

This will be yet another of my long, meandering posts telling you more than you ever wanted to know! This time it’s about the song “Get Happy.”

First off, I remember seeing Judy Garland sing it in the famous clip from the 1950 movie Summer Stock. It was some kind of television retrospective on Garland and her career, and I can hear the narrator’s voice saying, “Everyone agrees that this performance was one of her very, very best.” The song, which comes at the end of the movie, also marked the end of Garland’s career at MGM. She had been struggling with drugs and depression and had been let go from the movies The Barkleys of Broadway in 1948 (and replaced with Ginger Rogers) and Annie Get Your Gun in 1949 (and replaced with Betty Hutton). It’s hard to imagine those two movies with Judy in the lead, for me anyway. I don’t think of her particularly as a dancer. She was given another chance with Summer Stock and managed to get through the filming with lots of sympathy and help from her co-stars, but MGM had had enough. Her contract was terminated “by mutual consent” after the film was finished. The final number, though, was filmed two months after the rest of the movie was completed, after Garland had lost a fair amount of weight by means of hypnosis. (That’s the story, anyway.) Observers have noted that she’s thinner in that final sequence than she is in the rest of the film.

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What’s With All the Rockin’ Goin’ on in Jerusalem?

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Image by krystianwin from Pixabay

Warning: Thickets of parsing through a song’s lyrics word by word ahead. Enter at your own risk!

Let me start by quoting myself from the post “How Did We Get the Spirituals?”—

The simplified explanation of how Black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs.

There’s the added wrinkle that the spirituals are true folk songs; that is, they were not originally written down but were passed down orally. Thus there are always multiple versions of any spiritual. Here’s a good explanation of how the process of transcribing the spirituals, but indeed any folk music, worked, as described in an article about the efforts of John W. Work III, a scholar and teacher at Fisk University in the early 1900’s:

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A Bouquet of Roses from Morten Lauridsen

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Image by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay

Lauridsen and His Love of Poetry

Choral composers are always on the hunt for suitable texts. Unless you’re writing something along the lines of the “Humming Chorus” from Madame Butterly or Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” you have to find suitable words. As I’ve outlined in other material, choral texts can have many sources: You may be commissioned to write a piece with the proviso that you use a certain text, or you may love a certain poem and decide to set it to music, or you may have an idea for a melody and look for words that fit, or you may ask someone to write the text for you, or you may write it yourself.

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A Problematic Musical with a Stormy Theme Song–“When You Walk through a Storm”

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Image by Simon from Pixabay

Would a musical be produced today that’s built around the idea of sticking with an abusive spouse no matter what and to some extent normalizing the abuse? Could it include the line, “Has it ever happened to you? Has anyone ever hit you — without hurtin’?” To which the answer is yes: “It is possible, dear, fer someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” And that line is delivered from a mother to a daughter, thus paving the way for perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Honestly! The musical is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel, and it’s an odd duck, often labeled as a “problem” musical or even as “the wife-beater musical.” Billy Bigelow, said wife-beater and main villain, echoes other characters in popular theater such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and John Wayne’s character in the film McLintock!, to name just a couple, who hit their wives and not only get away with it but whose wives respond lovingly. (I am horrified by the spanking scene at the end of McLintock!, and apparently it’s not the only such scene in the movie.) When he’s asked about his abuse by the Starkeeper, head man in heaven’s waiting room, Billy Bigelow says he does not beat his wife. “I wouldn’t beat a little thing like that — I hit her,” he explains. But to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this paragraph: Yes, indeed, Carousel is performed today, sometimes with the problematic lines cut and sometimes with them included. One production compromised by having the dead Billy shake his head “No!” in response to the “not hurt at all” line. That’s perhaps the best way to deal with the issue, since just cutting those few lines in no way erases the overall arc of the plot. Indeed, Carousel was considered groundbreaking at the time of its original production because of its anti-hero lead male character and its tragic plot. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already broken new ground in their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, which used the songs to advance a well-developed plot, and Hammerstein had included controversial ideas about racism in his collaboration with Jerome Kern for Show Boat.

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Three Jewels from Three Bach Masterpieces

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Overview

There are over 1,000 Bach compositions that we know of, and that number doesn’t include the manuscripts that may have been lost after his death. (Reports of his compositions being used to wrap cheese, or as insect-repelling wrappers on trees, or indeed as kindling, are almost certainly apocryphal.) Like Mozart, Bach’s output was so prodigious that, ironically, he’s known best for relatively few of them. Once pieces become part of an established repertoire they tend to get re-programmed frequently. (If I have to sit through one more performance of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Natchmusik I think I’ll lose my mind.)

My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, programmed a concert with three fairly well-known but not overdone works in a concert centered around the theme of “Hope’s Journey.”1 Although I have no idea what the thinking process was for the artistic committee’s choices, we’re doing a piece from a cantata, an oratorio, and a full-blown mass. I’ll take up the definition of each as I discuss the piece.

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Two Hagenberg Hits

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Image by 12019 from Pixabay

My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has performed quite of few of Elaine Hagenberg’s choral compositions, and we were privileged to be part of the original commissioning consortium for her first extended work, Illuminare. She burst on the classical choral world in 2013 with “I Will Be a Child of Peace,” an arrangement of a Shaker hymn, and hasn’t looked back since. (When Ms. Hagenberg came to one of our final rehearsals for Illuminare she graciously submitted to some Q&A, and of course one question was “How did you get started composing?” She said she’d always had a lot of hobbies and decided to try composing. Well . . . I think her getting started as a composer was a little more challenging than, say, trying out that first crocheting pattern. But we were all charmed by her self-deprecation.)

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When Will the “Great Day” Occur?

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Well, it’s complicated.

“Great Day” is a spiritual, meaning that it falls into the category of true folk music, a genre that starts out with oral traditions and only later involves writing the words down. By the time a true folk song is committed to paper it almost always has multiple versions. And why do I keep using the word “true”? Because there are many songs written “in the style of” a folk song that aren’t truly so since they have a known, single author. In the case of this version of the piece (which my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, will be performing in March 20241) there is an arranger, Warren Martin, but no composer or lyricist, so we seem to be in the “true folk” category. In my signature bopping around the Internet looking for clues I’ve found a number of sites that have published the lyrics, but there are none that try to unpack the layers of meaning contained in them. So I’m venturing out on my own here. If you’d like to read a general discussion of spirituals and their origins, I’d recommend that you read an earlier post on this website, “How Did We Get the Spirituals?”

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Beethoven’s Only Opera and Its “Prisoners’ Chorus”

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Image by Mariam from Pixabay

Ludwig von Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio, and it cost him so much vexation as he worked on it, and re-worked it, and re-worked it yet again, that he said he would never write another one. And he kept his word. The history and background of this work, therefore, is long and complicated, well beyond the scope of this post that focuses on just one chorus from the work. But here’s a brief overview:

We know that Beethoven was quite taken with the (supposed) ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and brotherhood. This rather diffuse and wayward event began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille prison, progressed through the establishment of the French Republic which rapidly devolved into the Reign of Terror, and then eventually resulted in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. By 1799 Napoleon had declared himself dictator, and he would be crowned Emperor 5 years later in 1804. By 1805 he was ruler of all Europe, including Austria. In the midst of all this drama and trauma Beethoven had become interested in a French play titled Léonore, ou l’Amour Conjugal (Leonora, or Marital Love). The play couldn’t be set to music directly, of course, so Beethoven needed a librettist. He also needed government approval in order for his opera to be staged publicly, and an opera set in France and having as its theme the evils of political oppression wasn’t going to fly with the Napoleonic government that was in place at the time. So the setting was shifted to Spain, and the emphasis was shifted to the heroine’s faithfulness to her imprisoned husband and away from that thorny issue of civil rights. There were three versions in the end: an unsuccessful 1805 three-act premier, then a trimmed-down two-act version the next year, and a final revision in 1814 as the Congress of Vienna was meeting to decide the future of post-Napoleonic Europe. This last included an additional choral ending that emphasized more clearly the significance of the newly liberated prisoners. That chorus, however, is not the subject of this article and is indeed never called the “Prisoners’ Chorus.” Instead, it’s the chorus at the end of Act I which describes only a brief liberation before the prisoners are hustled back into the prison which was given that title. And, speaking of titles, it is accepted practice to call only the final version of the opera Fidelio, with the earlier ones bearing the name of its heroine Leonora.

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