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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
Overture Concert Organ
Series No.2
96th Season
February 15, 2022
Michael Allsen
In
this concert, the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s principal
organist, Greg Zelek, and countertenor Reginald
Mobley perform a program including a diverse
range of styles: from Baroque arias by Bach, Handel, and
Purcell and organ works by Bach and Liszt, to Black
spirituals, Gospel music, and George Gershwin. Also included are
rarely-heard art songs and an organ work by pioneering
African American composers Harry S. Burleigh and Florence
Price.
Traditional Spiritual
Deep River (arr.
Moses Hogan)
One of America’s first great
homegrown musical traditions, the spiritual had its origins in
the culture of enslaved Africans in the early 19th century.
Spirituals, whether reflective “sorrow songs” or joyful
“jubilees,” were informal hymns that often celebrated the
afterlife that awaited after the bitterness and pain of
slavery. Many of these songs predate the Civil War, and were
passed down through the oral tradition. In the later 19th
century, the spiritual became the first of many Black musical
styles that became part of the broader American culture. They
were first popularized by the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers and
other Black performers, and were later collected and published
by arrangers like Harry T. Burleigh. Since the early 20th
century, African-American singers like Marian Anderson, Jessye
Norman, and many others have also made it a tradition to
incorporate spirituals into classical programs. One of the one
of the most famous spirituals, Deep River, is first
mentioned in print in 1867, but it certainly comes from before
Emancipation. Like many of these songs, there are subtle
shades of meaning: crossing the Jordan River is a metaphor for
crossing into the next life, but for enslaved Blacks of the
early 19th century, freedom often met crossing a real body of water,
the Ohio or Mississippi, into a free state, or the Great Lakes
or St. Lawrence into Canada.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Widerstehe
doch der Sünde, BWV 54
and Fugue in A minor, BWV
543
The great majority of Bach’s
sacred cantatas were written in the 1720s, during his first
few years working as a church musician in Leipzig. However, he
also composed cantatas for most of his earlier postings. His
cantata for solo alto, Widerstehe
doch der Sünde (Stand firm against sin),
which was composed while he was working the ducal court of
Weimar in 1708-17. Bach served as organist, and after 1714,
as the court’s music director, a position whose duties
included producing a new cantata each month to be sung in
the court chapel. Most of his church cantatas were written
for a specific Sunday or holiday within the church year, and
Widerstehe doch der
Sünde has usually been dated to 1714 or 1715, either
for the third Sunday in Lent or Trinity Sunday. However,
more recent biographers have suggested that was composed a
year or more before 1714, and that this piece—an
encouragement to avoid the traps of sin—was not tied to a
particular part of the church year. The brief libretto comes
from a set of cantata texts published in 1711, by the poet
Georg Christian Lehms. Written originally for alto voice and
a small string ensemble with continuo, the cantata is played
here with organ accompaniment. The opening aria begins with
a striking dissonance: probably a pointed musical reference
to the “poisons of sin” described in the text. Like most
contemporary arias, is set in da capo form: two
contrasting musical sections, and a concluding repeat of the
opening section that allows for ornamentation by the
soloist. Here the opening section is rather relaxed, while
the second section, with its reference to Satan is more
tense.
The Fugue in A minor also
dates from Bach’s years in Weimar. Bach is of course
recognized today as the great Baroque master of the fugue.
This is certainly a masterful example, written by a young
Bach, but it also imitates the style of his own acknowledged
master, Dieterich Buxtehude. In 1705, the 20-year-old Bach
took a leave from his church position in Arnstadt to walk 250
miles to Lübeck, where he hoped to study with Buxtehude—the
only truly long journey Bach ever made. Though he was not
exactly AWOL from Arnstadt, his employers complained that Bach
had requested a four-week leave, but stayed away for “about
four times that long.” Just how much he actually studied with
Buxtehude is unclear, but several of his organ works over the
next few years clearly show his admiration for Buxtehude’s
music. The Fugue in A
minor is set in 6/8, lending a dancing quality to this
intensely complex work. In the opening, the fugue subject is
presented four times, lastly by the pedals. The fugue includes
some long, chromatic episodes—typically passages without the
fugue’s opening subject, though Bach subtly manages to work in
fragments of this theme. The ending is dramatic: the writing
for the manuals fades away, leaving the pedals exposed for a
final showy passage. The work ends with a brilliant flourish
from the manuals.
George Friderick Handel (1685-1759)
Più non cura,
from Il trionfo del
Tempo e del Disinganno
Handel is of course forever linked
with the oratorio: the great series of English oratorios he
began writing in
the 1730s, particularly Messiah of
1741, remain some of his most often-performed works. However
his first
oratorio, Il trionfo
del Tempo e del
Disinganno (The
Triumph of Time and
Disillusionment), was composed long before these
famous English works.
Handel had written his first Italian operas while working in
Hamburg, and in
the fall of 1706, the 21-year old composer travelled to
Italy. After producing
his opera Rodrigo
in Florence, he
moved on to Rome by the end of 1706, and spent the next two
years there.
Italian opera was at the time banned in Rome, but its place
was taken by
large-scale productions of Italian oratorios. The oratorio,
essentially an
unstaged sacred opera, had originated as a form in Rome a
century earlier.
Handel wrote two oratorios in Rome, Il
trionfo in early 1707, and La Resurrezione (The Resurrection) in April 1708. The most
important Roman sponsors
of music were the wealthy cardinals, who maintained large
musical
establishments, and competed in mounting lavish
performances. Il
trionfo was performed in the palace
of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, one of Rome’s leading patrons.
Leading the
orchestra was Archangelo Corelli, Rome’s greatest violinist,
and an important
composer in his own right. Handel and Corelli reportedly
clashed at rehearsals,
when Corelli claimed not to understand the music of the
overture, which was in
the French style. Handel eventually wrote a new, more
Italianate overture, with
a showy violin part for Corelli. (The phrase “When in Rome,
do as the Romans
do.” was already ancient in 1707, and clearly applied here!)
Cardinal Benedetto
Pamphili wrote the libretto, an allegory with a Christian
message. The
characters are Belleza (Beauty), Piacere (Pleasure), Tempo
(Time), and
Disinganno (usually translated as “Disillusionment,” but
perhaps better
understood as “Undeceived.”) Belleza is initially seduced by
Piacere, and Tempo
and Disinganno patiently reason with her to resist. Belezza
eventually rejects
the attractions of Piacere to begin a life of penitence and
prayer. The roles
of Piacere (soprano) and Disinganno (alto) were probably
intended for male castrati,
but they are typically
performed today by countertenor or female voice. The da capo aria Più non cura
(No longer does he
care) is sung by
Disinganno to Belleza in Act II, a gentle, pastoral song of
persuasion. Handel
was clearly fond of this early oratorio, and reworked it for
performances in
England decades later: first in 1737, still in Italian, and
again in 1757, as The
Triumph of Time and Truth.
Jean
This program includes three
works by Florence Price, beginning with two of her art songs.
Price was born Florence Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, into a
well-respected family. (Her father was the only Black dentist
in this strictly segregated city.) She studied at the New
England Conservatory of Music, graduating in 1906. She then
taught music for several years in Atlanta and Little Rock, but
following a lynching in Little Rock in 1927, her family
resettled in Chicago, where she would spend the rest of her
life. It was in Chicago that Price finally began to have
success as a composer. However, she struggled financially,
particularly after she divorced her abusive husband in 1931,
leaving her single mother to two daughters. Price wrote
advertising jingles and popular songs under a pen name and
played organ in silent movie theaters to pay the bills, but
her classical compositions began to attract attention. This
culminated in 1932, when her Symphony No.1 was performed by the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra—the first work by an African American woman
to be played by a major orchestra. Though her music continued
to be played and championed by star performers like Marian
Anderson, she struggled to make ends meet throughout her life.
Interest in
Price’s music has increased dramatically following the 2009
discovery of a collection of some 200 of her pieces, including
many previously lost works.
Price wrote for the solo
voice throughout her life, both settings of spirituals and
original art songs. The art songs heard here, Because and Sunset, come from a
collection published by Richard Heard in 2015 that includes 44
of her art songs and spiritual arrangements, nearly all of
them published for the first time. The solemn Because sets a 1905
poem (originally titled Compassion) of Paul Laurence Dunbar, widely
considered to be America’s first influential Black poet. Like
many of her settings of noted Black poets like Dunbar and
Langston Hughes, this music emulates the sound of the
spiritual in its simple, unadorned melody, and in the striking
“blue note” near the end. It is a truly effective setting of
this poem of unrequited love. Little
is known of the poet Odessa P. Elder, who wrote Sunset. Price gave this
highly romantic text—wistful memories of an unnamed “golden
town” inspired by a beautiful sunset—an appropriately
romantic setting.
Born a generation before Price,
Harry T. Burleigh was a pioneer in fusing Black musical
styles, particularly the spiritual, and Western classical
music. He studied with Antonín Dvořák in the 1890s,
when the
Bohemian composer was in the United States, teaching at the
National Conservatory in New York City. It was Burleigh who
introduced Dvořák to the spiritual, an influence on
Dvořák’s well-known “New World” Symphony. Burleigh had a
successful career as a singer, but was particularly well-known
for his published arrangements of spirituals: arrangements
that brought this style into the homes and churches of
thousands of Americans of all races. Burleigh was also a
composer in his own right, writing well over 200 compositions,
most of them art songs. His Jean was published in
1903, with a dedication to Mrs. James (Ellin Prince) Speyer, a
New York philanthropist noted for her work to help Black women
and children. Jean
would be one of Burleigh’s greatest successes. In 1916, a
writer in the New York Age, one of America’s leading African
American newspapers, called it “one of the most popular songs
ever heard from the concert stage.” Jean is a thoroughly
romantic setting of a sentimental poem by Frank L. Stanton.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Liebestraum No.3
(arr. Nigel Potts)
Franz Liszt was the
preeminent piano virtuoso of the 19th century, and the model
for many pianists to follow. He was also an imaginative and
ground-breaking composer, but as a young man, he was so much
in demand as a soloist that he was allowed little time to
develop his composing skills. Liszt’s concert tours in the
1830s and 1840s were nothing short of
phenomenal—contemporaries used the term “Lisztomania” to
describe the frenzy surrounding his playing. He performed
hundreds of concerts to packed houses throughout Europe, and
produced for the most part compositions that focused on his
own technical showmanship, rather than musical content. It was
not until he settled in Weimar in 1848, taking a secure and
stable job as music director to the Weimar court, that Liszt’s
music takes a turn away from these showy pieces. Among other
experiments, he began to explore the idea of program music:
works that tell a story or which are based upon poems,
paintings, or other nonmusical inspirations. Most famous are a
series of symphonic poems written in Weimar, but he also wrote
programmatic works for piano. In 1850, he published an
innovative set of three piano works titled Liebesträume (Dreams of Love). Each
of these works is based upon a poem, and each represents an
aspect of love: exalted love in No.1, erotic love in
No.2, and mature,
unconditional love in No.3.
Liebestraum No.3,
the most popular of the three, was inspired by Hermann
Ferdinand Freilgrath’s O
lieb, so lang du lieben kannst!
The poem’s opening stanza, repeated as a refrain, translates
as: “O love, love as long as you can! / O love,
love as long as you will! / The time will come, the time
will come, / when you will stand grieving at the grave.”
Liszt’s interpretation of this poem opens with a lyrical
melody supported by gentle keyboard figures. The middle
section begins in the same way, but moves into more agitated
music. After a dreamy cadenza, Liszt returns to a meditative
and sad version the opening music, and ends with a wistful
coda.
Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Music for a While
Henry Purcell was the most
important English composer of theatrical music prior to the
20th century. English-language opera had a relatively brief
heyday in the later 17th century, after the Restoration of the
royalty, and before English tastes turned to lavish and
pompous Italian opera. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is
well-known, and still performed today, but he also produced
vocal and instrumental pieces for masques and incidental music
for dozens of stage plays in the flourishing theatrical scene
of the Restoration period. Much of his incidental music was
published posthumously, including the aria Music for a While,
which appeared in 1702 in the second volume of a collection
titled Orpheus
Britannicus—its title a tribute to Purcell, the “British
Orpheus.” Purcell wrote the aria for a 1792 revival of the
play Oedipus by John
Dryden and Nathaniel
Lee. Oedipus,
based loosely upon the Sophocles tragedy, included some
spectacular staging effects, and Purcell’s music was an
integral part of these scenes. Music for a While,
originally divided among several singers, appeared in the
opening of Act III, a scene where the soothsayer Tiresias
summons a pack of ghosts from Hell, including the ghost of
Oedipus’s father, the murdered Laius. (Alecto, who is
mentioned in the aria, is a terrifying Fury who, like Medusa,
has snakes for hair.) The ghosts are commanded to stay still
and listen to an aria that testifies to music’s power to “all
your cares beguile.” The aria is built over a ground bass—an
ominous repeating figure that supports the vocal line
throughout. Purcell includes some dramatic word-painting:
winding, chromatic music representing the ghosts’ “eternal
bands” and a vivid picture of the snakes dropping from
Alecto’s head!
Florence Price
(1887-1953)
Suite No.1 for Organ
Though it is not clear if she
had had any formal training on organ while in Little Rock,
Florence Price studied organ at the New England Conservatory,
and played frequently in Boston as an organ accompanist and
soloist. After graduation, she briefly worked as a church
organist at the Unitarian Church in Nantick, Massachusetts,
but it is unclear whether or not she ever had a regular church
position after this. However, after moving to Chicago in 1927,
Price studied in the American Conservatory of Music’s
newly-established school of Theatre Orchestra Playing, and
worked frequently as a theatre organist for the next few
years. She was part of the Chicago Club of Women Organists,
and she frequently performed at the club’s concerts, often
presenting her own music. The premiere of her Suite No.1 was
likely at one of these programs, on April 6, 1942, at
Chicago’s Grace Episcopal Church. Like most of her nearly two
dozen works for organ, the Suite No.1 was never
published during her lifetime, and appeared in print only in
1993. One of her largest organ works, it is set in four
movements. The Fantasy
opens with a blues-flavored flourish, heard several times,
between sometimes startlingly chromatic passages. Though she
does not directly quote any spiritual tunes in the last three
movements, many of Price’s melodies sound very much like
spirituals. This is clearly the case with the subject of the
second movement, Fughetta.
The Air’s relaxed
theme, played above a chromatic accompaniment, resembles a
traditional spiritual “sorrow song.” The closing movement, Toccato, is tied
together by repeated statements of a dancelike “jubilee”-style
main theme that alternates with other equally lively ideas.
George Gershwin
(1897-1936)
Our Love Is Here To
Stay
Many of the songs of George
Gershwin, written for Broadway and the movies, have become
“standards” of American popular song. We end with one of them,
Our Love Is Here To
Stay. Gershwin’s witty and expressive music often
provided a counterpoint to the equally witty and expressive
lyrics of his brother Ira. Our Love Is Here To Stay was actually their very
last collaboration, though sadly it was a posthumous one.
George completed the chorus of the song shortly before his
death on July 11, 1937. Ira later wrote lyrics, and with the
help of their friend Oscar Levant, reconstructed the
introductory verse. Our
Love Is Here To Stay appeared in the largely-forgotten
1938 movie musical The
Goldwyn Follies, but then reappeared as the title music
for the classic An
American in Paris (1951).
Wallace Willis
(ca.1820-1880)
Steal Away (arr.
Harry T. Burleigh)
Many spirituals are
anonymous, but Steal
Away is credited to Wallace Willis, a biracial
(Black/Choctaw) musician born into slavery in Mississippi.
Willis’s owner, Britt Willis, was also half Choctaw, and was
forced to leave Mississippi by Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal
Act of 1830. Britt Willis and some 300 of his slaves walked
the infamous “Trail of Tears” to Indian Territory (Oklahoma).
Wallace Willis remained in enslavement until Emancipation,
working in Britt Willis’s cotton fields, until shortly before
the Civil War, when Wallace and his wife were sent to work at
the Spencer Academy, an Indian (and later freedmen) school.
They remained at the school in the years after the Civil War.
The Spencer Academy’s supervisor, Alexander Reid, heard a
performance of spirituals by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1871,
and sent them a few of Willis’s songs, including Steal Away and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
The Jubilee Singers immediately made them part of their
repertoire, and popularized them on their tours of the United
States and Europe. Like many spirituals, Steal Away is about
hope for redemption after death, but also had coded meanings:
“stealing away” out of sight of slaveowners for religious and
other meetings, or even escaping to freedom by way of the
Underground Railroad.
Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993)
Precious Lord, Take My
Hand (arr. Greg Zelek and Reginald Mobley)
Known as the “Father of
Gospel Music,” Thomas A. Dorsey started his career in the
early 1920s as a Blues pianist and composer, working the name
of Georgia Tom. Dorsey experienced a religious revival in 1928
after a long period of deep depression. Though he continued to
work as a Blues musician, he also begin to write religious
songs that blended Blues with the spiritual and other Black
traditions—the style eventually known as Black Gospel. This
music was controversial in some quarters: for many churchgoing
people, the Blues was the “Devil’s Music” and had no place in
church. However, the new style caught on quickly and in the
1930s became the dominant form of music in the Black church.
Dorsey was hired as music director at Chicago’s Pilgrim
Baptist Church in 1930, a position he held for 50 years. By
1932, Dorsey had set the Blues aside and devoted all of his
time to the church and to Gospel music. He founded the National
Convention
of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, which was devoted to
spreading and teaching the new style. Dorsey’s best-known
Gospel song, Precious
Lord, Take my
Hand, was
written in 1932, when he was devastated by the deaths of his
wife Nettie, who died in childbirth, and of their infant son
a day later. The song, an emotional cry for comfort in a
time of grief and loss, remains a standard at funerals
today.
________
program notes ©2022 by J. Michael Allsen