Concert Notes
The season opens Saturday, October 15, with A MUSICAL B & B, exploring the vast choral and vocal writings of Bach and Brahms. Guest artists Barbara Hollinshead, mezzo-soprano, Rachel Barham, soprano, and James Rogers, baritone, will be soloists in Bach's Lutheran Mass in F Major. Stunning selections by Brahms include an unusual pairing of mezzo-soprano and viola and a set for unaccompanied choir, strophically simple but with gorgeous melodies and texts indeed set by a master.
Tonight’s program showcases a retrospective side of Bach and Brahms. The pieces by Brahms represent his self-conscious attempts to find and secure his place in the world of the great German artist, a world already crowded with the likes of Bach, Schütz, Goethe, and Dürer. The opening “Warum” motet is an example of Brahms’ admiration of his compositional predecessors but is also a revisitation to his own early work. The influence of German folklore and its music is apparent in the secular works on the program. The Bach work is one of four masses made up mostly of revamped cantata movements. Reworking old material might seem like a shortcut for the composers, but in fact the changes are so substantial that it clearly would have been easier for them to write entirely new pieces. Both Bach and Brahms transformed old music in order to hone their skills and to bring some of their earlier works to a new audience.
Brahms: Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen, Op. 74, No. 1
On its surface, this piece is a four-section motet ending in a Martin Luther chorale, an homage by Brahms to Bach. A deeper look, however, reveals much about Brahms’ personality and where he saw his place in the world. Musically, the piece is a reworking of Brahms’ early Missa Canonica, a work in which he had begun to explore his own take on the music of Palestrina. (In fact, he had just copied out the Missa Papae Marcelli by hand when he started work on the Missa Canonica.) Most significantly, in his choice of texts for the piece — a choice of which he was proud — Brahms intentionally sought to bring a new cultural significance to the iconic German motet: the Romantic idea of the suffering of the artist as compared to the suffering of the biblical figure Job.
“Warum?” “Why?” Brahms begins the piece with the existential question that all of us have asked at some time, and he repeats the question as a refrain throughout the wrenching first section of the piece. The anguish of the ultra-chromatic opening fugal section (taken from the Agnus Dei of his mass) relents only when the text mentions the respite brought by death. The second section goes into a 6/4 meter, and the voices, split now from four parts to six, imitate each other in a Renaissance madrigal style and finally come together for a quintessential Brahms cadence. The third section of the piece (Siehe, wir preisen selig) begins with lush and serene harmonic movement that reveals the direct influence of Palestrina. This section closes with another neo-Renaissance 6/4 passage extolling God’s mercy. The voices return to four parts for the closing chorale, a striking part of which is the delayed movement of the bass voices at the end of the third line, a little word painting for “sanft und stille.” This Lutheran chorale would have been seen by Brahms’ audience as a hearkening back to Bach (as it is today).
This motet held great musical and spiritual significance for Brahms. The idea of “the great ‘why’” seemed to be seminal in the identity as a melancholy, suffering artist that Brahms established for himself. He continued to refer to this unanswered question years after he wrote the motet. Further, the homage to Bach was intentional. He dedicated the piece to Phillip Spitta, a friend who was (and still is) known as one of the great Bach scholars. However, Brahms had second thoughts. After he sent the motet to the publisher, he tried three times to retract the dedication to Spitta, worried that he would be ridiculed for trying to compare himself to Bach (who was then seen as the epitome of the German artistic hero). As surprising as it seems, Brahms was quite self-conscious about his work and how it would be received. More than showing the kind of Christological redemption inherent in Bach’s motets, this piece suggests that the patience and endurance of the suffering human heart will be rewarded by the mercy of God. This motet, with its nondogmatic theology, is seen as a predecessor to Brahms’ Requiem: “Selig sind, die da Leid tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden” (“Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted”). The piece was generally well received, and Brahms’ worries were put to rest.
Zwei Gesänge, Op. 91
The texts of these two songs are related — albeit vaguely — through a lullaby theme. The first piece is a setting of a poem by Rückert, a pastoral meditation on the idea that only death will put an end to the turbulence inherent in the human soul. The second text comes from “Cantarcillo de la Virgen,” translated by Emanuel Geibel as part of the Spanisches Liederbuch, a favorite source for several German Romantic composers. Brahms was fascinated with Marian legends. This text belongs to a literary tradition of lullabies in which something — in this case, the waving of the palms — foreshadows the suffering and death of Mary’s infant son Jesus. The piece begins and ends with the viola playing the German folk lullaby “Josef lieber, Josef mein” (still well known today); the vocal melody uses an inverted theme based on this lullaby but does not ever repeat it outright. In both pieces, the voice and viola share equal billing — sometimes in counterpoint and sometimes together — while the piano provides dramatic underpinning. The range of the alto voice was something Brahms struggled with at the beginning of his career, often writing far too low for female altos because he had studied so much early choral music written for castrati and countertenors. In this later opus, though, he seems to have gotten over that early insecurity and found the perfect pairing of voice and instrument.
Vier Gesänge, Op. 17
It is difficult for us in the 21st century to fathom how wild the idea of putting two horns and a harp with a women’s choir sounded to Brahms and his circle of friends. Brahms himself wrote to a friend that he was thinking of trying out these pieces with horns, but that he “naturally couldn’t invite people” to hear the rehearsal. Brahms’ friend and colleague Clara Schumann was astounded when he told her of the idea, noting that Brahms must have had a very pretty girl in his choir who played the harp. When Brahms was in his early 20s, he was the regular conductor of a women’s chorus, the Hamburger Frauenchor. These four pieces are among many that Brahms composed for his admiring group of women. Romantic composers and audiences enjoyed harps and horns because of their association with lyres and hunting horns, seen as ancient, traditional instruments. Brahms completed and performed the first three songs before premiering the fourth song, but the last piece became a clear favorite among his colleagues. The texts have no connection except that they are all laments with an ancient feel.
Sieben Lieder, Op. 62
Drawing on the German folk tradition, Brahms chose the texts of the first two part songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), a collection of hundreds of German folk poems published between 1806 and 1808 and set by many composers, including Schumann, Wolf, and Mahler. The rest are poems by Paul Heyse, excluding the last piece, which is an anonymous “old German” text. These highly contrasting pieces show many facets of Brahms’ skill.
In “Rosmarin,” a maiden wants to weave a garland of roses for her marriage, but instead of roses she finds rosemary, a symbol of death, and weaves a funeral garland instead. This lilting, minor-mode setting is typical of Brahms’ melancholy outlook on life and his propensity for German folk material. “Von alten Liebesliedern,” on the other hand, is certain to bring a smile. Brahms uses the sound of the word trab (“trot”) to evoke the sound of the horse’s hooves. The song is told mostly from the male lover’s viewpoint, but Brahms puts the female lover’s words in the women’s singing voices. “Waldesnacht” is the most well known piece from this set and contains the type of chromaticism so characteristic of Brahms’ style. It is a beautiful example of Brahms’ ability to bring a poem to life through harmony and counterpoint. “Dein Herzlein mild” is a strophic piece with an extended ending perhaps representing the opening of the bud. “All meine Herzgedanken” is reminiscent of a wedding song. The male and female voices move in counterpoint, and the harmonies change on just about every chord, making the listener wait for the resolution. “Es geht ein Wehen” was first composed for Brahms’ women’s choir; he reworked it for SATB chorus and changed the ending to split the voices and add more harmony. “Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil” is starkly different from the other pieces in the set. The harmony is sparse, and the phrases end with open fifths. It is almost as if Brahms wanted to close this set with a Lutheran chorale, as he did his motet.
Johann Sebastian Bach:
Missa in F, BWV 233
Sanctus, BWV 238
Christe, du Lamm Gottes from Cantate 23, BWV 23
Bach was in his early 50s when he began to address the need for more Latin language music in Leipzig. The Mass in F Major is one of four Lutheran masses meant to be used for high feast days and civic occasions. Church cantatas, the standard music for Lutheran worship services, were inexorably tied to the liturgical year because of their texts and could thus be performed only once per year. These four masses, on the other hand, could be used multiple times since they use the Latin text of the Roman Catholic mass (which was nonetheless acceptable in a Lutheran service). Almost all of the music in the Lutheran masses is based on material from several of Bach’s earlier cantatas. Bach also wrote six Sanctus settings (three original and three arrangements of other composers’ works), one of which was incorporated into the Mass in B Minor and one of which will be performed this evening to round out the shortened mass. The Lutheran masses required only the Kyrie and Gloria texts, leaving out the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei.
In all four masses, Bach split the Gloria text into five sections (Gloria, Domine Deus, Qui tollis, Quoniam, and Cum Sancto Spiritu), with two choral sections surrounding three solo movements. The central Qui tollis text was sung as worshipers took communion. In this setting, Bach seemed uncomfortable with the idea of truncating the traditional mass, and he worked in a secret message. In the Kyrie, the horns and oboes conspicuously play the chant “Christe, du Lamm Gottes,” the German Agnus Dei. If you miss it the first time, the chant is the main feature in the movement from Cantata 23 that will close tonight’s program (in that movement, it is featured most prominently in the soprano line). The choral Gloria might well have been a precursor to the Gloria in the Mass in B Minor, or at least part of the same compositional process, but it is not known to be based on any earlier piece. Of the solo movements, the bass aria Domine Deus is possibly reworked from an earlier cantata movement now lost. The soprano and alto solos are substantially reworked arias from Cantata 102, transposed from their original scoring for alto and tenor, and the choral Cum Sancto is based on a movement from Cantata 40. The Sanctus in D major was first performed on Christmas Day in 1723. It is scored for four voices, with the obbligato violin supplying a fifth. The Lutheran Agnus Dei, “Christe, du Lamm Gottes,” closes our program.