Celebrate in song the Big Birthdays of Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Samuel Barber, and Osvaldo Golijov. Featuring English National Opera Soprano, Hanan Alattar with Michelle Schumann, piano.

Synchronism Saturday, November 13, 7:30pm at First Unitarian Church, Tickets: $25

Four Songs, Opus 13 | Samuel Barber

Goethe Lieder | Hugo Wolf

Lúa Descolorida (2002) | Osvaldo Golijov

Frauenliebe und Leben, Opus 42 | Robert Schumann

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

Four Songs, Op. 13

The four songs of Samuel Barber that G. Schirmer published in 1940 as his Opus 13 were composed shortly after he returned from his two-year stay in Rome made possible by a generous prize (living quarters, meals and stipend) awarded him “with high praise” by the American Academy in Rome. As it turned out, Barber was not entirely enthusiastic about the community life of the “Fellows,” as he and the other winners were known— he likened it to “a somewhat expatriated Harvard-Club atmosphere” in a disdainful letter to his friend Gian-Carlo Menotti. So he didn’t even bother to unpack—“I am the scandal of the Academy.” Instead he rented a “studio” in refurbished stables abutting the history-rich Villa Aurelia nearby, “full of charm, with a view of gardens, pines under moonlight, Rome in the distance, and some ancient yellow stone stairs.”

All in all, young Barber found the venerable Italian capital very conducive to work; he finished his First Symphony in short order, as well as half a dozen songs. Still, he was eager to get back to America and his friends, and his first project was this group of songs. (He was a very creditable baritone himself, and his favorite aunt was the celebrated mezzo-soprano Louise Homer, so he knew he would never lack for performances or for empathic support.)

He had become attracted to the verse of the mystic-Victorian writer Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), whose poems had been published in 1930, almost 40 years after his death. The lyrical “Heaven Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil” especially appealed to Barber because it echoed his own hopes for calm and tranquility in this world and the next. He changed the order of the title to “A Nun Takes the Veil: Heaven-Haven,” and dedicated the song to Irish patriot and fellow Hopkins enthusiast Rohini Coomara, who had described the poet he admired as “half-musician writing a poetry that was half-music” when he first met Barber in Vienna in 1934, referring thus to Hopkins’s innovative experiments in verbal rhythmic techniques. (Hopkins was a self-taught musician, as well as a Jesuit priest.) Barber matched his music to the text by using a freely lyrical recitative style, supported by rolled chords.

Barber’s affection for the poetry of William Butler Years (1865-1939) can possibly be explained by his hope that, both of them being Irish, they might somehow be related. When he visited Sligo in the north of Ireland, he sought out Yeats’s burial plot, and was surprised to find that it was the only “Yeats” tombstone to be found in the ancient burying ground, whereas there were hundreds of “Barbers.” Sam’s consolation was that every Barber was “Safe in the Arms” of someone or other, whereas Yeats’s stone bore only by the bleak quotation from one of his own final poems: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!”

“The Secrets of the Old” was first published in Yeat’s famous collection, “The Tower,” in 1928. (In it also is the famous “Second Coming” with the line about “the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.”) Barber was always sorry that he could find only two Yeats lyrics to make into songs; “Yeats is really too good to need music,” he wrote. “The Secrets of the Old” affirms everlasting friendship among three agèd women whose bond is perpetuated by the sharing of secrets of youth. The symmetry of Barber’s song, which was completed in September of 1938, corresponds to the three stanzas of the lyric, its lighthearted witty interpretation of the text underscored by the alternating duple and triple meters.

Probably the best-known of Barber’s more than 100 songs for solo voice and piano is the third of Opus 13, “Sure on this Shining Night,” to a text by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer James Agee, who published it in his 1934 collection of poems, Permit Me Voyage. Structurally it resembles songs by Brahms and Schumann, especially in such adroit use of the canon, which Brahms took such joy in (where the voice and the piano imitate each other melodically at the distance of one measure), and by the pulsating accompaniment employed by Schumann in songs like “Ich grolle nicht” or “Liebestreu.”

In 1979, when the telephone company was reluctant to release unlisted numbers, he had just taken a new apartment in Manhattan. Barber needed to call his friend Gian Carlo Menotti, who he knew was at the apartment, but he couldn’t remember his new number. But Barber couldn’t remember his new number. He pleaded with the telephone operator, and to his astonishment, she said, “If you are THE Samuel Barber, can you sing the first line of ‘Sure on this shining night’?” So there he was, standing in a telephone booth, singing the opening of his song. And he got his number.

Frederic Prokosch, born in Wisconsin to parents of Austrian ancestry, wrote successfully in all sorts of genres. The lyrics for “Nocturne” come from his poetry collection, The Carnival, published in 1938. Though it was not among the composer’s favorites of his good friend’s output, he decided to set it to music because of its “intensely enigmatic and super-romantic” mood, and also because “the music for it just popped out in my head!”

-Clair W. Van Ausdall

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)

Mignon Songs from Goethe Liederbuch

Mignon first appeared in Goethe’s draft of Wilhelm Meister Theatrical Mission between 1777 and 1785. However, this Mignon was not known to the 19th century for the manuscript was not discovered until 1920. What 19th-century readers knew of her was from the 1795 Bildungsroman (a novel of formation, of individual education and acculturation: a term describing a person’s; usually a man’s life, his developmental process from childhood (emotional, educational, intellectual development) to maturity; a progressive process of self-perfection up to a point of personal contentment and harmony with society, of which WMA is a prototype) Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship, known in Britain in Thomas Carlyle’s 1824 translation. The 19th century’s fascination with this child-woman figure appropriated Mignon as its own, and evolved her from a pitiful figure to a heroine figure.

The young Wilhelm, sidetracked from his business travel, ends up with a troupe of travelling entertainers. He would later fill the role as the father-protector to the whole troupe in addition to other adherents like the old Harpist. While visiting a town, he encounters the child performer/acrobat Mignon among a troupe of Italian rope-dancers. The pre-teen child possesses endearing yet pitiful qualities; Wilhelm buys her for 30 taler (the price of her costume!!) from her abusive Seiltzanger. Mignon’s long silences, her hysteria, the complex of her inabilities and impressive dexterous abilities make her attractive to Wilhelm. Nobody knows where she comes from, nor can Mignon give any clues other than memories of citrus orchards, huge columns with marble statues, ominous caves and mountain crags. One day, upon witnessing a sexual act between Wilhelm and another actress, she suffers unbearable torment from all the vigorous emotions of passionate jealousy combined with the unrecognized demands of an obscure desire. The impact of it all, added on to her confusing feelings of womanhood, her loss of innocence, a longing for ‘home’ and family, was unbearable. She eventually dies in front of Wilhelm’s very eyes.

As Mignon lies in her marble tomb, Sperata, her mother, who had been searching for her, arrives. The full story is revealed that Mignon was the product of incest, and that Sperata’s lover/brother is the Harpist. Mignon was rejected, sent to live with foster parents on the shores of lake Maggiore. One day the child disappears for good; her hat is found floating on the water not far from the spot where the mountain torrent runs down to the lake. The body was never recovered and the poor mad mother haunted the lake-shore. All the while, Mignon had been abducted and sold to a traveling troupe.

What then does Mignon represent? George Henry Lewes suggest in 1872 that Mignon is a way of feeling, a means of expressing nostalgia, regret or loss. Schiller thought it was a consummate idea to have made Mignon’s death attributable to the world’s failure of understanding, to have derived ‘the practical enormity and terrible pathos in the fate of Mignon and the Harpist from a theoretical enormity, from monstrosities of understanding…that is, to have connected her death to the irrational fears surrounding the question of incest.’

From Wolf’s setting, ”Heiss mich nicht redden” is not set in any particular scene; it is simply appended to Book V, chapter 16 as a poem that Mignon recited once or twice, with great expression’. ”Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” in Book IV chapter 11 is a song of longing for their Italian homeland sung by Mignon and the Harper as a duet. Wolf’s setting is typically complex; the accompaniment suggests the Harper’s presence, if not his participation and the music seeks both to dream and to grieve. ”So lasst mich scheinen” from Book VIII, chapter 2, is a tender apparition of an early death; in her dream this occurs after a children’s show. Mignon is dressed as an angel who refuses to change; she sits with her zither and sings this song. ”Kennst du das Land” is sung with such tender longing – a longing for direction from a ‘father’, and a longing for a homeland, for belonging, for love, for rest.

Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)

Lúa Descolorida (2002)

“‘A dead man in Spain is more dead there than anywhere else’ said García Lorca, explaining that Spanish poets define rather than allude. ”Lúa Descolorida”, a poem by Lorca’s beloved Rosalía de Castro written in Gallego (the language of the Galicia region in Spain) defines despair in a way that is simultaneously tender and tragic. The musical setting is a constellation of clearly defined symbols that affirm contradictory things at the same time, becoming in the end a suspended question mark. The song is at once a slow motion ride in a cosmic horse, an homage to Couperin’s melismas in his Lessons of Tenebrae, and velvet bells coming from three different churches. But the strongest inspiration for “Lúa Descolorida” was Dawn Upshaw’s rainbow of a voice, and I wanted to give her music so quietly radiant that it would bring an echo of the single tear that Schubert brings without warning in his voicing of a C major chord. The original version of this song was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition and premiered by Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish in April 1999.”

-Osvaldo Golijov

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Frauenliebe und Leben, Op. 42

Some have heard Frauenliebe und -leben as patriarchal dictates to 19th-century women about how to worship their husbands, but French aristocrat and poet Adelbert von Chamisso was actually in sympathy with the emerging women’s movement. Though obedience to one’s husband of the sort we find here was an expected aspect of 19th-century marriage, Schumann saw in Chamisso’s words the portrait of a tender, strong, and loving woman.

In the first song, “Seit ich ihn gesehen,” the young woman, not knowing that her love is reciprocated, experiences doubt and darkness; Schumann sets these words as a sarabande, a somewhat slow dance associated with erotic feeling. In the second song, “Er, der Herrlichste von allen,” she sings ecstatically of his worth and her desire that he should be happy, even if that means his marriage to someone else. The miracle of his avowal of eternal love has happened just before the third song, “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben,” and the song is by turns breathless, passionate, tender, and sensual, ending with the clarity of belief. This is real love, no longer fantasy.

In “Du Ring an meinem Finger,” the persona gazes at her wedding ring. We hear a newly mature woman aware of the responsibilities of marriage, but with quickened passion in the fourth verse before the initial sweetness returns. The joyous, bustling *“Helft mir, ihr Schwestern*” ends with music reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s famous wedding march in his incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Nineteenth-century modesty placed severe constraints on the announcement of pregnancy. When the husband finds his wife weeping, he asks why, and that is where “Süsser Freund, du blickest mich verwundert an” begins. In the rising piano interlude, we hear dawning realization on his part and heightened happiness on hers. In “An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust,” the child has been born and suckles at her breast. At the end of the long piano postlude, we hear an echo of the “dein Bildnis” magic from the previous song and know that the child is indeed the longed-for incarnation of its father.

All such happiness must end in death, as we hear her mourn in “Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan.” In a stroke of genius at the end, Schumann brings back the accompaniment (not the vocal part) to the entire first song; in memory, she returns to the beginning of her love for this man.

-Susan Youens