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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Sergei Rachmaninoff “Cherubic Hymn” and “The Lord’s Prayer” from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom “Glory to the Mother of God” from the All-Night Vigil (Vespers) Sergei Rachmaninoff studied piano at the St. Petersburg and Moscow Conservatories. During his student years, Rachmaninoff spent all of his holidays with relatives at their various estates. He was particularly close to his grandmother, Sofia Butakova. The time spent with her was his most significant exposure to the Russian church. While Rachmaninoff was known to shun almost all of the doctrinal aspects of a religious life, the music of the church had a very profound impact on him. Rachmaninoff produced his choral setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in July, 1910. The text, in Church Slavonic, was the most frequently used liturgy in the Russian church at the time, named for the fifth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. Rachmaninoff had discussed setting the liturgy for almost thirteen years, so the music flowed quite easily when he finally started writing. His Liturgy contains no traditional chant material. Despite Rachmaninoff’s consultations with the Director of the Moscow Synodical Academy, the Liturgy was deemed unacceptable for use in services. Five years later, Rachmaninoff returned to sacred music. The All-Night Vigil, a collection of texts taken from Psalms and ancient hymns, is an Orthodox service used to welcome festival days. In this case, Rachmaninoff used actual chant material for some of his settings. The richness of the final product, however, is purely the work of the composer. Our sample of Rachmaninoff’s sacred writing this evening is a beautiful suite of pieces from both the Liturgy and the Vigil. The “Cherubic Hymn” is also known as the Great Entrance in the Liturgy:
It builds from a quiet high point among the sopranos across the “Amen” to the forceful affirmation of the angelic hosts and then returns to quiet joy in the closing statement of “Alleluia.” “The Lord’s Prayer” is set with muted but shimmering strength and a dramatic climax on the prayer for deliverance from evil. Maestro Harvey has chosen the finale of the Vigil, “Glory to the Mother of God,” to close the suite:
Rachmaninoff matches the text’s martial imagery with the full force of the choir. Striking in their depth and beauty, Rachmaninoff’s great sacred works speak to the centuries of tradition held in Orthodox Christianity but use a modern voice that reaches across the gap of the Soviet era to audiences in the twenty-first century. Ludwig van Beethoven Beethoven moved to Vienna in 1792 to study with Haydn and to build his career as a performer and composer. He organized the first concert for his own benefit in 1800 but within a year was already noting a decline in his physical vitality and a loss of hearing. He would be stricken with nearly continuous bouts of ill health for the rest of his life and needed to converse with others via pen and paper by 1818 due to nearly complete deafness. The decade between 1802 and 1812 saw the creation of great works like the Symphonies Nos. 3–6 and the opera Fidelio despite personal challenges such as the effect of the Napoleonic Wars on the Austrian nobility and their pocketbooks. Following his emergence from depression (marked by the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, Op. 106), Beethoven seems to have found a measure of transcendence in his creation of music, and he composed a flood of beautiful, complex, and completely original music. These late works — the Missa solemnis, the Symphony No. 9, the late sonatas, and the late quartets — are what music lovers today generally think of as his greatest pieces. Although the works we prize so highly were not all popular when they were first released, Beethoven was still seen by Europeans, and certainly the Viennese, as their greatest living composer. Leonore Overture No. 3 Beethoven composed only one opera, Fidelio. The opera was commissioned by Emmanuel Schikaneder, the impresario who collaborated with W.A. Mozart on The Magic Flute. The libretto uses a story by Jean Nicolas Bouilly that had already been turned into an opera twice before. Leonore disguises herself as a young man (Fidelio) and goes in search of her husband, Florestan. Florestan disappeared after lodging complaints against Don Pizarro, overseer of a prison. Pizarro has secretly (and illegally) imprisoned Florestan in a deep underground cell, and has instructed the jailer to slowly starve him to death. Leonore gains employment at the prison as an assistant to the jailer. Faced with the impending arrival of government official Don Fernando, Pizarro decides to murder Florestan and bury his body in a well. Leonore saves her husband just as the trumpeter signals Don Fernando’s arrival. Pizarro is punished, the prisoners are freed, and the entire assembly hails brave Leonore and faithful marital love. Fidelio was not a success at its premiere in 1805, but Beethoven revised the work and it was performed again in 1806. More revisions were made for a performance in 1814. Throughout this lengthy process, Beethoven composed four overtures: Leonore Overtures Nos. 1–3, and the Fidelio Overture. (Beethoven had intended to title his opera Leonore, but Fidelio was chosen to differentiate it from the previous operas on the same story.) Beethoven composed the Leonore Overture No. 3 for the 1806 version of the opera. It is a microcosm of the opera, containing representations of the depths of despair, the tender love, and the heights of triumph that the characters experience. Listen for the trumpet call (played as if from a distance) that signals the arrival of Don Fernando. The overture ends with the joyfulness of the reunited lovers and their triumph over tyranny. Symphony No. 9 Beethoven finished his Symphony No. 9 in 1824, but his sketchbooks show that he had begun work on the music years earlier. He had been drawn to Friedrich Schiller’s poem An die Freude as early as 1793, when he expressed his intention to set the poem stanza by stanza. The idea gradually developed into a symphony after he received a commission from the Philharmonic Society of London (informally in 1817, and officially in 1822). The symphony received its premiere not in London, though, but in Vienna on May 7, 1824. The London premiere was given on March 21, 1825, with the text sung in Italian because of the difficulty of singing an English translation to Beethoven’s music. The Ninth Symphony takes us on a musical journey for more than an hour. In a beginning that some have compared to the creation of the world, the second violins, cellos, and horns sound an ambiguous sonority of open fifths. The first movement proceeds in sonata form, with an extended coda in which Beethoven masterfully resolves all of the subsidiary themes heard in the development section. Sonata form allows a composer to play with the main themes, developing them in unexpected ways before returning them to their original forms, and Beethoven was a master of this technique. The second movement, Molto Vivace, is a scherzo and trio. A scherzo was similar in form to a minuet, but “scherzo” means “joke,” and thus scherzos tended to be more light-hearted and faster than minuets. This scherzo contains several surprises. The first was its position as the second movement; the usual practice of composers (including Beethoven) was to place the scherzo as the third movement. A second surprise was the use of timpani to reinforce the humor of the movement. The final surprise is the most literal joke of the scherzo. The instruments at the end seem to be heading toward a repeat of the trio, but cut it short with an abrupt ending gesture. The third movement, Adagio molto e cantabile, has beautiful lyrical themes. Listen for the song-like theme in the first violin that has been described as a hymn. The clarinet picks up the theme as an echo. A shift to triple meter makes the second theme sound more like a dance; some have identified it as a polacca or polonaise. The movement ends with a feeling of tranquility. The fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony was unprecedented in its use of a choir and soloists. Beethoven also broke new ground by reviewing themes from the first three movements. The chaotic opening yields to a recitative featuring the cellos and basses. We hear snippets of the earlier themes, which are quickly swept away. The “Ode to Joy” theme enters, and the instruments revel in the music. The chaos of the beginning returns to interrupt the joy, but a voice enters: “O friends, not these sounds! Rather let us turn to sounds more pleasant and more joyful.” Following this bidding, the soloists and choir sing Schiller’s text. The music builds to the words “the cherub stands before God.” At this spine-tingling moment there is a full stop. Then we hear, of all things, a “Turkish” march. (The musical elements have nothing to do with Turkey, but the instrumentation—particularly the triangle—was associated in the minds of the Viennese with Turkish military groups.) The march segues into music that takes us through the rest of our journey in a magnificent fashion. Beethoven’s transcendent music and Schiller’s idealistic text combine to make the Ninth Symphony a powerfully symbolic work. In a memorable use of the symphony, Leonard Bernstein conducted two performances at Christmastime in 1989 to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The concerts took place in both West Berlin and East Berlin. The orchestra included musicians from both sides of the wall, as well as from all four of World War II’s allied powers. Such a celebration of universal brotherhood would have been unimaginable in the Cold War atmosphere of even ten years earlier. The ability of this music to embody our highest ideals makes it fitting that tonight’s performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is part of our community’s Season of Forgiveness. The organizing committee has commented, “Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 has been used by many to celebrate healing and reconciliation. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the European Union and elsewhere, the strains of ‘Ode to Joy’ have marked a positive transformation in how people live and work together. As the closing event to Season of Forgiveness, this piece once again marks a transformation in community life.” © 2009 Karen M. Woodworth and Klayton Woodworth |