Pamela Dellal, mezzo soprano
uncommon intelligence, imagination and textual
awareness... |
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Program notes – Emmanuel Music Recital
performed April 1995
Haydn wrote the cantata Arianna a Naxos during one of his trips to London. Unusually, it is written for and intended to be played on the piano, instead of a chamber orchestra. Ariadne is a princess of Crete. She meets Theseus, prince of Athens, when he is sent to Crete as tribute with a group of young Athenians, to be fed to the monstrous Minotaur. Ariadne falls in love with Theseus, and helps him to slay the Minotaur and free himself and his companions. He promises to bring her back to Athens as his wife. On the way back from Crete, they stop at a deserted island called Naxos. There the god Dionysius appears to Theseus, commanding him to leave Ariadne behind on the island for the god. Thus Ariadne appears in this cantata, and in numerous other musical depictions, abandoned and betrayed. Haydn's characterization of her is breathtaking: showing her before she realizes her predicament, we see a confident, vain, slightly spoiled princess who cannot even imagine the extent of her situation at first. Sure that Theseus is just around the next bush, she sings an exquisite aria for his benefit, to make him rush to her side. Haydn illustrates her coyness with clever pauses, as she listens to see if her singing is having any effect. When she discovers the Greeks sailing away from Naxos, we see the imperious princess calling down vengeance from the gods, and a girl suddenly without resources, all at once. This masterful piece belies the common wisdom that Haydn was a weak dramatic composer; even if his full-fledged operas never achieved this subtlety, Ariadne is fully the equal of Susanna, Elvira, or Fiordiligi!
Histoires Naturelles (Natural Histories) is considered by many to be among the very greatest of the French song cycles. This is so even though the texts for these pieces are highly unusual for the classic French song; they consist not of poetry, but prose -- so-called prose-poems by Jules Renard. No one reading these beautiful texts could possibly doubt their poetic nature; but the demands of the prose style drew a revolutionary response from Ravel: he set these texts according to the rules of 'spoken' rather than 'sung' French -- a difference greater in French than most other languages. Final syllables, traditionally sustained in French singing, are here to be dropped or elided as in speech; moments of lyrical line are contrasted with absolute parlando, and the rhythms of speech are painstakingly notated. All of this sophistication and subtlety of execution is at the service of absolutely charming subjects: four birds and an insect. Histoires Naturelles is very like watching a nature special on public television -- the animals are observed in their natural habitat, while the narrator busily supplies a subtext that is unabashedly anthopomorphic in character. The exception is #4, the King-Fisher, which captures "a rare emotion," the wonder and awe of being in the proximity of a wild creature. The splendor of these songs lies in the uncanny balance Ravel achieves between humor, naturalistic precision, and ravishing beauty.
The five songs (op. 4) by Anton Webern were written during a great transitional period for Webern and for music history: they fall on the cusp between 'tonal' music and the first exploration of 'atonality,' the absence of a pitch center around which the melody and the harmony gravitates. This style of musical composition, where harmonic organization strives with its absence, was so difficult to sustain that the composers of the Second Viennese school -- Schönberg, Berg, and Webern -- quickly supplanted it with a new method of musical organization: serialism. Stephan George's poems, the German equivalent of the French symbolists, revolve around emotions that are only weakly linked to people: in #2, the speaker expresses his love by matching the gloom of his depressed beloved; in #3, the speaker gratefully accepts the tenderness of a lover who, nevertheless, is not the true object of his affection. This pervasive sense of misplaced or unattached emotion is perfectly conveyed by Webern. Throughout all five songs, atonality is blurred by moments where a pitch center attempts to prevail. In almost every instance, the 'tonal' moments are the more anxious and disturbed; when the music detaches from tonal harmonic organization it is most at peace. Webern's exquisite sense of proportion and ear for delicate color are very much in evidence in these brief songs.
Pamela Dellal, mezzo soprano
uncommon intelligence, imagination and textual
awareness... |
|
|---|
- Home
- Resume
- Concerts
- Reviews
- Discography
- Audio Links
- Repertoire
- Teaching
- Photos
- Translations, Essays, and Original Works
Program notes – Emmanuel Music Recital
performed April 1995
Haydn wrote the cantata Arianna a Naxos during one of his trips to London. Unusually, it is written for and intended to be played on the piano, instead of a chamber orchestra. Ariadne is a princess of Crete. She meets Theseus, prince of Athens, when he is sent to Crete as tribute with a group of young Athenians, to be fed to the monstrous Minotaur. Ariadne falls in love with Theseus, and helps him to slay the Minotaur and free himself and his companions. He promises to bring her back to Athens as his wife. On the way back from Crete, they stop at a deserted island called Naxos. There the god Dionysius appears to Theseus, commanding him to leave Ariadne behind on the island for the god. Thus Ariadne appears in this cantata, and in numerous other musical depictions, abandoned and betrayed. Haydn's characterization of her is breathtaking: showing her before she realizes her predicament, we see a confident, vain, slightly spoiled princess who cannot even imagine the extent of her situation at first. Sure that Theseus is just around the next bush, she sings an exquisite aria for his benefit, to make him rush to her side. Haydn illustrates her coyness with clever pauses, as she listens to see if her singing is having any effect. When she discovers the Greeks sailing away from Naxos, we see the imperious princess calling down vengeance from the gods, and a girl suddenly without resources, all at once. This masterful piece belies the common wisdom that Haydn was a weak dramatic composer; even if his full-fledged operas never achieved this subtlety, Ariadne is fully the equal of Susanna, Elvira, or Fiordiligi!
Histoires Naturelles (Natural Histories) is considered by many to be among the very greatest of the French song cycles. This is so even though the texts for these pieces are highly unusual for the classic French song; they consist not of poetry, but prose -- so-called prose-poems by Jules Renard. No one reading these beautiful texts could possibly doubt their poetic nature; but the demands of the prose style drew a revolutionary response from Ravel: he set these texts according to the rules of 'spoken' rather than 'sung' French -- a difference greater in French than most other languages. Final syllables, traditionally sustained in French singing, are here to be dropped or elided as in speech; moments of lyrical line are contrasted with absolute parlando, and the rhythms of speech are painstakingly notated. All of this sophistication and subtlety of execution is at the service of absolutely charming subjects: four birds and an insect. Histoires Naturelles is very like watching a nature special on public television -- the animals are observed in their natural habitat, while the narrator busily supplies a subtext that is unabashedly anthopomorphic in character. The exception is #4, the King-Fisher, which captures "a rare emotion," the wonder and awe of being in the proximity of a wild creature. The splendor of these songs lies in the uncanny balance Ravel achieves between humor, naturalistic precision, and ravishing beauty.
The five songs (op. 4) by Anton Webern were written during a great transitional period for Webern and for music history: they fall on the cusp between 'tonal' music and the first exploration of 'atonality,' the absence of a pitch center around which the melody and the harmony gravitates. This style of musical composition, where harmonic organization strives with its absence, was so difficult to sustain that the composers of the Second Viennese school -- Schönberg, Berg, and Webern -- quickly supplanted it with a new method of musical organization: serialism. Stephan George's poems, the German equivalent of the French symbolists, revolve around emotions that are only weakly linked to people: in #2, the speaker expresses his love by matching the gloom of his depressed beloved; in #3, the speaker gratefully accepts the tenderness of a lover who, nevertheless, is not the true object of his affection. This pervasive sense of misplaced or unattached emotion is perfectly conveyed by Webern. Throughout all five songs, atonality is blurred by moments where a pitch center attempts to prevail. In almost every instance, the 'tonal' moments are the more anxious and disturbed; when the music detaches from tonal harmonic organization it is most at peace. Webern's exquisite sense of proportion and ear for delicate color are very much in evidence in these brief songs.
In 1995 we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Paul Hindemith. He remains a somewhat controversial figure in 20th century music, more for his theoretical ideas than for his compositions. Das Marienleben illustrates this well. In 1923, Hindemith, then a rising star of German Expressionism, published this song cycle based on a cycle of 15 poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1948, now as a leading exponent of the Gebrauchsmusik movement, he released a revision of these songs. While a few of the songs (#10-12) remain essentially unchanged, Hindemith explains in an extensive introduction how he rethought and reorganized the song cycle, rejecting a large bulk of his earlier ideas in the process. The earlier songs, he claims, were difficult to sing, the vocal line did not relate to the piano part or sometimes, the poetry, and the songs were not thematically linked to each other to create a unified cycle. In the revised version, his earlier, expressionistic style has largely been replaced with a more conventional melodic line, a consciously restricted harmonic language, and a highly ordered compositional style that includes a variety of formal devices (passacaglia, fugue, theme and variations) and key relationships and motives that carry symbolic meaning and reappear throughout the cycle. To many, these alterations smack of the academician 'correcting' the original but erratic genius of his youth. I feel, however, that Hindemith's later style complements the philosophical immediacy and clear imagery of the poems. The harmonic language may be simpler, but at the same time it embraces a broad spectrum, from Renaissance modality almost to Webern-esque atonality; the studied formalism is not only brilliantly executed, but filled with expressive detail. The two versions of the cycle can be seen in the same light as Schubert's habit of multiple settings of the same poem. Both versions certainly deserve more performances than they commonly receive.
The poem cycle Das Marienleben was a minor work in Rilke's ouvre. His portrayal of the Virgin Mary is drawn from Biblical events and evokes many Medieval images, but is filled with deep psychological insight. One felicity of this cycle is the variety achieved by the change in perspective; Rilke explores third person narrative, the immediacy of the first person voice, and even the highly unusual second person address to the subject (#7 - the Birth of Christ) to paint his portrait. Note how Rilke and Hindemith use minor references to Mary in the Bible to moving and brilliant effect: Mary's gentle prompt to Jesus at the wedding at Cana, "They have no wine," becomes a defining moment in both their lives -- the point at which his destiny becomes fixed, and hers becomes tragic. Also, the passing reference to the robe woven without seam in John 19:23-24 becomes, in #10 (Before the Passion), a metaphor for Mary's love and tenderness for her son.
Today, due to the cycle's extreme length and variety of tessitura, we are presenting only a portion of the entire work. The songs I have chosen, for the most part, are in Hindemith's simpler, more melodic style; with the exception of #9 (On the Wedding at Cana) the more sophisticated formal structures are not presented here. I regret the violence that this does to the scheme Hindemith constructed so carefully in his revision; I hope one day to present the entire cycle.
© Pamela Dellal