Program NotesThese pages contain program notes written for Redwood Symphony. You are free to use the information in your own program notes. If you quote me directly, please attribute it. Thanks! These notes were edited, amended, and otherwise improved by Eric Kujawsky, Peter Stahl, and Doug Wyatt. |
Jewish ComposersSholom Secunda, Osvaldo Golijov, Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen SondheimJewish composers writing for venues as diverse as Yiddish cabaret, Broadway
musical theater, or the formal concert hall have often found a way to share part
of the Jewish experience with the wider world. Today's concert provides just a
small sampling of some representative works by Jewish composers working in
different areas, for different audiences, but whose inspiration stems in part
from the composers' common Jewish heritage. The songs performed today are arranged in the Yiddish klezmer style, characterized by a blend of Eastern European and Middle Eastern harmonic palettes, and, beginning in the 19th century, with a sliding, highly ornamented clarinet line meant to imitate the laughing, weeping chant of the Jewish cantor. The word klezmer is derived from the Hebrew words kley zemer, meaning musical instrument or "vessel of song." Klezmer's roots include Russian, Ukrainian, Bessarabaian, Romanian, and German folk music, music of the Ottoman Empire, as well as Jewish liturgical music. Jewish liturgical music influenced modern composer Osvaldo Golijov in a much different way in his work K'vakarat, based on the last paragraph of the prayer for Rosh Hashana, Un'tahne Tokef Kedushat Hayom, "We will observe the mighty holiness of this day." Golijov, the son of Eastern European Jews who migrated to La Plata, Argentina, is equally at home quoting tango or klezmer, and has created works for the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Silk Road Project, the St. Lawrence Quartet, soprano Dawn Upshaw, and even director Francis Ford Coppola. K'vakarat was written for the Kronos Quartet, and incorporates a traditional Ashkenazic melody from the Jewish prayer service with a string accompaniment that "evolves remarkably," as Allan Kozinn of The New York Times writes: "Its quiet stasis at first suggests the image of electric charges dancing on a wire, but by the end of the setting, the string writing is vehement and explosive." Tying it all together is a line for cantor that provides the work's emotional center. Golijov himself describes the piece as follows: "In the temples of Jerusalem, it's chaos … everyone holds a different attitude toward God. But how do you explore them all in a single refrain? One time it's very sweet, another time it's very angry. [The] refrain is like a wheel, revolving, but [the strings] take off like an arrow. First it's a shepherd's flute, playing in obedient harmony, then it's a sword, raised in defiance, even against the will of God." Composer Kurt Weill explored a different kind of defiance in his collaborations with playwright Bertolt Brecht: that of the common man against society, and against his own worst impulses. The son of a cantor in Dessau, Germany, Weill was encouraged by the director of the Dessau Hoftheater to study musical composition. His first theatrical collaboration was with playwright Georg Kaiser in 1926, Der Protagonist, which met with enough success that he joined up with Brecht a year later. Their Mahoganny-Songspiel (1927) launched a minor pop hit in Europe, "Alabama Song," and was followed by the extremely successful Die Dreigroschen oper (The Threepenny Opera) in 1928. The Threepenny Opera is based on an English play, The Beggar's Opera (1728), by John Gay and Johann Pepusch, who were themselves parodying Italian opera. Both of these "operas" center around an anti-hero from London's Newgate prison, as suggested to Gay by Jonathan Swift: "What think you of a Newgate pastoral, among the thieves and whores there?" Each play satirizes political corruption and moral weak ness, showing how corruption at the top of society influences those at the bottom as well. Both works follow a cad of a hero, Macheath (Mackie Messer or "Mac the Knife"), as he thieves and murders his way through London, marrying or raping women as he goes, until he is improbably pardoned from a death sentence at play's end. Weill's musical forms in this work range from chorale to foxtrot, tango to hymn, and the "opera" is arranged not for orchestra but for jazz band (albeit one with bassoons!). The medley heard in today's concert includes the famous "Ballade of Mack the Knife" (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer); "The Instead-of Song" (Anstatt-dass Song), sung by the Fagin-like Jonathan Peachum and his wife about their daughter's foolish love for Macheath; the instrumental "Tango-Ballade;" and the "Cannon Song" (Kanonen-Song), sung by Macheath and his old army buddy, now chief of police Brown, as they sardonically recall the gruesome effects of war on their friends in the battery. Although successful, the artistic relationship between Weill and Brecht was strained, and the partnership broke up for a time, during which Weill collaborated again with Georg Kaiser. Today's concert features Ich bin eine arme Verwandte ("I am a poor relative") from their play Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake, 1933), which also touched on the gap between rich and poor. By the time Weill and Brecht completed their last work together, Die Sieben Todesünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) in 1934, the Nazi party had already begun threatening them, and Weill and his wife, singer Lotte Lenya, were forced to flee to America. Weill reached New York in 1935 and eventually wrote music for a number of hit Broadway shows, including One Touch of Venus (1943), with book by S.J. Perelman and lyrics by Ogden Nash, from which we hear I'm a Stranger Here Myself. Far from the social criticism of Brecht, this comedy fantasy concerns a young man whose life is complicated when a statue of Venus comes to life and falls in love with him. But now we return to the Jewish shtetl (village), with Aaron Copland's Vitebsk (1928). This trio for piano, violin, and cello was written during his "avant-garde" period in the late 1920s to early 1930s. Vitebsk is based on a Jewish folk theme that Copland first heard in the Yiddish play The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (pen name for Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport). The playwright had recalled the tune from his native town in Russia, Vitebsk, hence the title of Copland's work. Listeners familiar with Copland's later "Americana" phase (e.g. Rodeo or Billy the Kid) may be surprised by the strident harmonies of this piece. It is the only work in which Copland used quarter-tones, with the piano playing major and minor triads together and the strings responding in quarter-tones, "between" the scales. The solo cello presents the Jewish folk theme, leading to the central Allegro vivace section, which Copland described as a "Chagall-like grotesquerie" (painter Marc Chagall being another artist who depicted life in the shtetl). This is also the only work in which Copland explicitly draws on his Jewish heritage for inspiration. Composer Leonard Bernstein was more prolific in his Jewish-themed works, from songs such as "Rhinu" (1947) or "Yigdal" (1950), to his Symphony No. 3, "Kaddish" (1963-77) and the Chichester Psalms (1965), each featuring vocal parts with Hebrew lyrics. Halil (1973), the work performed today, features a flute soloist with orchestra, and celebrates the memory of an Israeli flutist, as Bernstein explained in the program note for the work's premiere with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv in 1981: "This work is dedicated ‘To the Spirit of Yadin and to his Fallen Brothers.'
The reference is to Yadin Tanenbaum, a nineteen-year-old Israeli flutist who, in
1973, at the height of his musical powers, was killed in his tank in the Sinai.
He would have been twenty-seven years old at the time this piece was written. "I never knew Yadin Tanenbaum, but I know his spirit." Bernstein, of course, is perhaps most popularly known for his musical theater works, especially "West Side Story" (1957). His collaborator on that work, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, began his Broadway career being coached by his neighbor, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. After reviewing (poorly) a musical farce, "By George," that Sondheim had written for his school, Hammerstein mentored the young man by asking him to write four different musicals, one based on a play he admired, one on a play he thought was flawed, one on an existing novel or short story not previously dramatized, and one that was a completely original story. None of these juvenile works were ever produced professionally, but they formed the cornerstone of Sondheim's training in musical theater. He also studied composition with Milton Babbit, who famously advised him not to pursue 12-tone composition, telling Sondheim, "I don't think you've exhausted your tonal resources yet." Though Sondheim wanted to be both composer and lyricist, he had to pay his dues writing only the lyrics for several Broadway shows in the late 1950s and early 1960s, until "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962), for which he wrote both music and lyrics. He once claimed that he only listens to music by J.S. Bach, and Sondheim's works certainly contain their share of angular harmonies and intricate polyphony. His musical intricacy is matched by his clever and sometimes hauntingly ambiguous lyrics, which, just as those of his mentor Hammerstein, are always firmly rooted in the character who sings them and his or her situation, and serve to move the story forward. "The Worst Pies in London" is a lament by Mrs. Lovett of "Sweeney Todd" (1979), describing her horrid meat pies to the eponymous Todd, who later conspires with Lovett to improve the quality of her pies by providing a very different source of meat—his murder victims. "Passion" (1994), is a more poignant tale about a disfigured young woman who falls in love with a soldier and gradually wins him over. I Wish I Could Forget You is sung by the soldier, who has begun to realize how her passion for him has changed his attitude toward her. Finally, There Won't be Trumpets was intended for the play "Anyone Can Whistle" (1964), but was cut before opening night. The play's synopsis is so complicated, featuring a cynical mayor and her manufactured "miracle" tourist trap, a charlatan doctor, a sanitarium nurse, and a host of mental patients from the "Sanitarium for the Socially Pressured," that it's easy to see why this song couldn't help move the story forward. It's still a touching piece reminding us that our heroes may not appear to us with the call of trumpets or the bang of drums—but that we'll recognize them all the same. May, 2006 |