Sunday 22 November 2020

Hail! Bright Cecilia!

Today is November 22, St. Cecilia's Day.  St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music and musicians, and what better time could there be to feature a work of music written in her honour?

There are quite a few, actually.  In England, the feastday of St. Cecilia was for many years a time for special musical festivities.  The work I'm looking at, and listening to, today is a product of a man known as one of the greatest composers in English musical history, Henry Purcell.  He is making his first bow in this blog today.

His ode, Hail! Bright Cecilia, which was composed in 1692, was one of a series of commissions by the Musical Society of London, which began to hold its annual St. Cecilia Festival in 1683.  Purcell himself composed odes for them on two earlier occasions, and Handel too joined the parade at a later date.

The traditional commission called for the setting to music of a poetic ode in honour of the saint, and of music.  These honorary odes were a singular feature of English poetry -- sometimes lengthy, full to the brim with flowery language, and always written in rhyming couplets.  I have to admit that this kind of poetry can often trigger my gag reflex, but the music which it inspired is another matter altogether -- and this 1692 ode is often considered the best of its kind ever composed.

That's not surprising, because Purcell at this time was at the very height of his powers as a composer, and he lavished the complete range of available musical styles and the full force of his gifts as a composer on this celebratory poem by Nicholas Brady.  

In the conventional style, the poem open with general praise of St. Cecilia and of music, then goes into a series of verses praising the characters of different instruments, eventually arriving at the organ as the ultimate musical instrument.  This was due to a mistranslation of an ancient text which seemed to link Cecilia specifically to the organ.  After discussing how the other instruments must yield to the organ, the ode closes with another hymn of praise to the saint.

Purcell's musical setting opens with an extensive overture in multiple sections, lasting 10 minutes and entitled "Symphony."  A slow introduction in dotted maestoso rhythm leads to a vigorous "Canzona", marked allegro, with trumpets and drums prominent.  A more relaxed adagio features the strings and oboes.  The score then directs a full repeat of the Canzona and the adagio.  Another allegro now follows, full of brilliant rapid staccato writing for the trumpets.  After a brief slow passage marked grave, this second allegro is also repeated in full, to bring the Symphony to a spectacular conclusion.

The opening chorus is actually led off by a bass soloist, singing the first phrase of "Hail! Bright Cecilia," complete with a florid cadenza.  The chorus then take up his song of praise.  Both solo and chorus share a curious feature, with the repeated word "Hail! Hail!" sung on the second and fourth note of a four-beat bar, normally the two weakest beats.  The chorus ends with these lines:

May make the British forest prove / as famous as Dodona's vocal grove. 

The reference is to the shrine of Zeus in ancient Greece, where the voice of the oracle spoke through a talking oak tree.  Such references to ancient Greco-Roman history and mythology were an integral part of the English ode tradition.

The succeeding duet, "Hark! Each tree its silence breaks," takes up this idea in a moderate 3/4 time, with the bass and alto voices alternating and overlapping.  With the singers spinning out increasingly elaborate lines, this movement tells how the voice of the forest can be heard in the flute, violin, and harp.  In line with the St. Cecilia tradition, of course, the violin and flute feature as instrumental voices, with the flute being the 17th century version which was made of wood.

The alto continues with an accompanied recitative, "'Tis Nature's Voice," full of lavish ornamentation and musical effects to denote grief, sighing, laughter, and the like.  This bridges into a choral movement, "Soul of the World."   Again the music becomes illustrative as the polyphony of "made up of various parts" segues into the chordal writing of "one perfect harmony."

The next movement, "Thou tun'st this world," begins as a solo for the soprano, and then continues as a choral movement on the same theme.

A trio begins with two altos asking, "With that sublime celestial lay / dare any earthly sounds compare?"  The bass responds by telling them that the organ may do so, and then he proceeds to sing the elaborate aria in praise of the organ, "Wondrous machine."  The accompaniment moves in a steady marching rhythm with a typical Baroque "walking bass" line.  

This is followed by a series of movements telling how the other instruments must yield place to the majestic organ.  "The airy violin," for alto, is a brief but showy solo.  Then comes the very slow and somewhat mournful sound of "In vain the amorous flute," an extended duet for tenor and alto.  

The trumpets and drums return for the first time since the opening to accompany "The fife and all the harmony of war," another alto solo.  When looking at this preponderance of alto solos, it's important to remember that these were adult male altos (countertenors as they are more commonly known today).  The extreme ornamentation of these alto solos makes even more sense when we read that Purcell had for the premiere the services of Mr. Pate, the foremost male alto of his day.

Two basses then sing a duet, "Let these amongst themselves contest."  This number finally affirms the supremacy of the organ.

The way is thus paved for the final majestic chorus, again beginning with "Hail! Bright Cecilia."  The trumpets and drums return, along with the rest of the orchestra, in more elaborate writing around the block chords of the choir.  A slower and quieter central section intervenes before the full forces burst into a reiteration of the first section, bringing the entire ode to a grandiose end on "Great patroness of us and Harmony!"

I've been very fond of this work ever since I had a chance to sing it as a young chorister in Toronto when I was 19 or 20 years old.  It was just one of several unusual and (at the time) adventurous choices of repertoire made by Dr. Melville Cook for his Festival Choir at Metropolitan United Church.  Although the performance we gave predated the great push for authenticity in Baroque music, it was still a great musical work and a great experience for a young singer.

Wednesday 18 November 2020

After Sunrise -- The Rest of the Story

This is one of my periodic posts in which I draw attention to some less-well-known aspects of a well-known piece of music.  In this case, the less-well-known aspects are found in the final 28 minutes of a work which normally lasts 30 minutes in performance, give or take a bit.

So what is found in the first 2 minutes that has caused the rest to fade into relative obscurity?  Simple answer: the most renowned, most often played-to-death, most instantly-recognizable sunrise in all of music.  And here we are, with the symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra ("Thus Spake Zarathustra") by Richard Strauss.

That sunrise shot from relative obscurity to lasting, world-wide fame, when it was used by Stanley Kubrick for the soundtrack of his epic 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Less often remembered is the fact that the four uses of the musical theme in the film are each accompanied by a significant shot of the sun rising over the earth or in alignment with the mysterious black monolith.  Kubrick was undoubtedly aware of the implications when he chose this music for underscoring those scenes.

The majestic grandeur of the sunrise with its brass fanfares and organ chords over, what happens next?  Strauss set himself the unenviable task of trying to somehow capture something of the flavour of the long, densely-written philosophical novel published in segments (1883-1885) by Friedrich Nietzsche. 

The sustained organ pedal note at the end of the sunrise leads us on into the next section, and part by part the music unfolds for us.  The titles of the various sections are perhaps more mysterious than the music itself, unless the listener has in fact waded through Nietzsche's massive work.  But for the sake of completeness, here they are:

Von der Hintenweltlern ("Of the backworldsmen")
Von der grossen Sehnsucht ("Of the great longing")
Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften  ("Of joys and passions")
Das Grablied ("Song of the Grave")
Von der Wissenschaft ("Of Science")
Der Genesende ("The Convalescent")
Das Tanzlied  ("The Dance Song")
Nachtwandlerlied ("The Night Wanderer's Song")

In practice, as section flows into section, it's not easy to discern where one part ends off and the next begins, unless you have recourse to studying the score with the subtitles marked.  But a few sections are instantly recognizable.  Von den Hintenweltlern features a warm, broad lyrical melody on the cellos and (later) the violas.   
 
Von der Wissenschaft opens deep in the bass with the same C-G-C progression that launched the sunrise -- a progression which appears from time to time throughout the work as a motto.  This leads into a slow rising and falling theme which takes the form of four triadic arpeggios that among them comprise all 12 notes of the chromatic octave.  This theme is then treated to a lengthy fugal development -- appropriate, since a well-structured fugue is among the most scientific of musical forms.  
 
The Tanzlied -- no surprise here -- launches into a perky triple-time dance on a solo violin.  The music grows and grows until it erupts into a full-throttle, swirling Viennese waltz in the massed forces of the orchestra.

The greatest climax of the work arises at the end of the Tanzlied as the music swells into frenzied activity, then suddenly darkens and -- amid the thunderous orchestral textures -- a deep bell tolls 12 strokes -- the hour of midnight.  From this point, the music slowly dies down into the spare orchestration of the final pages, the Nachtwandlerlied, inspired by the poem in the novel which begins with these words:

Oh, Mensch!  Gib' acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
("Oh, man!  Take heed!  What does deep midnight speak?")
 
As a side note, that poem also served as text for the fourth-movement alto solo in Mahler's epic Symphony No. 3.

At the very end, the music closes with what some experts have identified as the "World-Riddle Theme."  The deep strings intone the C-G-C motto pizzicato, but above them the woodwinds quietly play the chord B-F#-B simultaneously, leaving the music without a clear resolution in either key.  Evidently, the great riddle continues to resist solution.

Like many of the Strauss tone poems, Also sprach Zarathustra requires a massive orchestra with multiple woodwinds and extra brasses, not to mention that essential organ.  Thus, it's a very costly piece to perform.  Its obscure philosophical programme has also told against it, with audiences more willing and eager to embrace the clearer storytelling of Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegel, or even Ein Heldenleben.  It's been more often performed in the German-speaking countries than in North America, where it enjoyed a brief vogue in the years after 1968 (surprise, surprise) but then lapsed back into the twilight zone on the periphery of the repertoire.  
 
In fact, despite having accumulated three or four recordings of this music, I've never actually heard a live concert performance of it.  The Toronto Symphony Orchestra had it programmed for the spring of 2020, and we all know where those concerts went.  But some day, my luck will be in.  Fingers crossed!