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Doors Open!
Festival Concert 8
August 29, 2021
Sunday
One-hour concert at Lincoln Theater
5:00 pm – General admission / open seating; masks required. Tickets available in advance or at the door.
PROGRAM
Robert Schumann Dichterliebe, Op. 48
Gabriel Fauré “Clair de lune,” Op. 46, No. 2
Gabriel Fauré “Les berceaux,” Op. 23, No. 1
Richard Wagner “O du mein holder Abendstern” from Tannhäuser
Richard Hageman “Music I Heard With You Was More Than Music”
James Frederick Keel “Trade Winds” from Salt-Water Ballads
Anonymous “Deep River” (arr. by Getty)
Anonymous “Oh Shenandoah” (arr. by Getty)
Lester Lynch, baritone; Bridget Kibbey, harp
Artists
Lester Lynch, baritone
Bridget Kibbey, harp
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
PROGRAM NOTES
In 1840, Robert Schumann was relatively young and near the beginning of his career. As was often the case with Schumann, Dichterliebe, a song cycle in 16 parts, was written during the heat of inspiration: he wrote literally over 100 songs in that one year. Structurally, Schumann’s achievement is remarkable in that he fuses together ostensibly opposite goals. Songs, written for voice and piano, epitomize the 19th-century ideal of intimacy and music-making within a bourgeois home. On the other hand, a young, ambitious composer typically has a desire to create a magnum opus, something imposing and monumental, with a grandeur to match one’s sense of importance as an artist. In the 16 songs of Dichterliebe, Schumann cleverly enchains a series of interdependent fragments that combine to form a larger unity, transforming this unassuming genre into a bold artistic statement.
For his subject matter he chose what was supreme to the Romantic generation: love—pure, passionate, heart-wrenching, and very nearly sacred. For Schumann and his contemporaries, the love song became tantamount to a prayer and is often accompanied by hymn-like music. The beloved herself becomes an angel—unless, of course, she rejects the lover’s advances (as is almost always the case, inevitably), in which case she is a viper and an instrument of the devil.
The text for Schumann’s songs comes from Heinrich Heine, a book of 60 poems entitled Lyrisches Intermezzo. Through the poems Schumann cleverly chose from this collection, Dichterliebe takes the listener on a musical journey from the exquisite vulnerability of the opening song, “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” where the poets’ love is as delicate as the opening of blossoms, to the magnificent irony of “Ich grolle nicht”—I don’t grumble, an entire song that is one long stretch of grumbling. The changing moods are cleverly illustrated by the piano, where the gossamer dissonances of the first song demonstrate the singer’s need for emotional resolution—he has bared his soul and awaits an answer, just as the harmony comes to rest on an unstable chord. And in “Ich grolle nicht,” the dark, restless rumblings of the accompaniment reveal the blood boiling beneath the surface of the protagonist. The final song is a funeral dirge and a purifying ritual where the poet buries his feelings of love, his poems, these songs, and his innocence—a heavy burden, capable of being borne only by giants.
As has often been noted, Heine both participated in the Romantic movement, and stood at a remove—observing the repeated tropes about tears and weeping and overpowering love with irony and detachment. This has made some wonder about the sincerity of Schumann’s songs. Schumann explained that irony could serve as a means to an end with a sly quote from “Allnächtlich im Traume”:
At certain points in time poetry dons the mask of irony in order to conceal its visage of pain; perhaps for a moment the friendly hand of a genius may lift that mask so that wild tears may be transformed into pearls.
Twice in his career, Richard Wagner chose as his subject matter the town of Nuremberg and the legends of the medieval composers of love songs, the Minnesingers. In Tannhäuser, the dual nature of mankind creates a rift between the spirit and the flesh. Tannhäuser, the character, is a member of this honored band, but having gone astray, the opera tells the story of his attempt to return. Though he wills himself to re-enter the strictures of society, he discovers he cannot suppress the sensual knowledge he gained during his wayward years as the lover of the goddess Venus. The Christian society reacts in horror to his glorification of pleasure. In contrast, society’s ideals of chastity and protective adoration are manifested in the Song to the Evening Star (“O du mein holder Abendstern”), sung by Tannhäuser’s friend Wolfram. Within a few years of its debut, this individual song was lifted from Tannhäuser to become parlor music, performed in the homes and published in dozens of arrangements, making it Wagner’s first “hit tune.”
Two traditional American songs about rivers shed a provocative light on US history. The song “Oh Shenandoah” has developed several known sets of lyrics over time, but it seems to have originated in the early 19th century, where it came from the point of view of the voyageurs, who rode the rivers down from Canada and throughout the states in boats filled with their wares, and told of their interactions with Native peoples. In fact, the protagonist of the song was in love with the daughter of Shenandoah, who was an historical figure and tribal leader. Legend has it that he sent food to General Washington as he and his troops starved at Valley Forge, which led to the naming of the Shenandoah Valley. Shenandoah played a role in the founding of Hamilton College in central New York and is buried nearby. The spiritual “Deep River” owes its popularity greatly to the legacy of Harry T. Burleigh, the African American musician from Erie, Pennsylvania, who studied with Dvořák in New York. Burleigh, who learned traditional music from his parents and grandparents from his childhood, published his arrangement of this song and others in 1916–17, which quickly became a seminal influence and came to be performed widely in concert halls and recordings. “Deep River” brought recognition, though not without controversy, to the critical musical contribution of Black music to the culture of the United States, and can truly be said to be a starting point for a reevaluation that continues through today.
Fauré’s “Clair de lune” (“Moonlight”) contains a world of feeling within its subtle framework. The poem by Paul Verlaine references the commedia dell’arte tradition, which was intensely important to many artists during the fin de siècle. The idea of the impassive or dubious mask which hides the impetuous soul beneath was an attractive one to modern artists who disguised their Romanticism under a cool exterior. Fauré’s music ripples along with circular tunes and simple, strumming accompaniment, but through the choicest of harmonic and textural shifts manages, in the final verse, to open up a doorway into a landscape of depth and emotion, only to bury it again under cover of evening and bustling routine. In “Les berceaux” (“The cradles”), the song draws a parallel between the mighty vessels in the harbor that rock on the waves and the tiny cradles that are rocked by the mothers, the beds of the sailor’s’ children left behind who were frequently orphaned by the sailors’ uncertain fates at sea. In a melody of folk-like simplicity, over an accompaniment that undulates in accord with the swaying scene, the singer’s line rises and falls back, as if accepting an inevitable fate. In the central verse, the vocal line climbs to a dramatic height, amplifying the great disparity between the fates of those who go out to explore and those who remain behind.
Richard Hageman’s career brought him from the Netherlands to the US, where he busied himself as a composer and conductor and performer in many venues. This included Hollywood films, where he was honored with an Academy Award for the music for Stagecoach (1939). His art songs remain his best-known works of serious music, and the setting of verses by American poet Conrad Aiken (a colleague of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) about the persistence of memory through objects and music encountered with a beloved, conveys its message with apt directness and understatement. James Frederick Keel is best known for his song “Trade Winds,” a setting of a poem by the English poet John Masefield, who published his Salt-Water Ballads over a period from 1902 to 1919. The song artfully pays homage to a recognizable, syllabic type of sailor’s song, but branches out into more expressive territory, especially in its last word: an elongated, rising and falling vowel filled with the capricious, perilous energy of the blowing wind.
—By Mark Mandarano