Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, HWV 76 G.F.

I. Overture

II. Recitative

From harmony, from heav’nly harmony, This universal frame began.

III. Accompagnato

I. In a garden shady this holy lady with reverent cadence and subtle psalm, like a black swan as death came on poured forth her song in perfect calm: and by ocean’s margin this innocent virgin constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer, and notes tremendous from her great engine thundered out on the Roman air.

Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited, moved to delight by the melody, white as an orchid she rode quite naked in an oyster shell on top of the sea; at sounds so entrancing the angels dancing came out of their trance into time again, and around the wicked in Hell’s abysses the huge flame flickered and eased their pain.

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire: translated Daughter, come down and startle composing mortals with immortal fire.

II. I cannot grow; I have no shadow to run away from, I only play. I cannot err; there is no creature whom I belong to, whom I could wrong. I am defeat when it knows it can now do nothing by suffering. All you lived through, dancing because you no longer need it for any deed. I shall never be different. Love me.

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire: translated Daughter, come down and startle composing mortals with immortal fire.

III. O ear whose creatures cannot wish to all, O calm of spaces unafraid of weight, where Sorrow is herself, forgetting all the gaucheness of her adolescent state. Where Hope within the altogether strange from every outworn image is released, and Dread born whole and normal like a beast into a world of truths that never change: restore our fallen day:

O re-arrange.

O dear white children casual as birds, playing among the ruined languages, so small beside their large confusing words, so gay against the greater silences of dreadful things you did:

O hang the head, impetuous child with the tremendous brain, O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain, lost innocence who wished your lover dead, weep for the lives your wishes never led.

A cry created as the bow of sin is drawn across our trembling violin. O weep, child, weep away the stain. O law drummed out by hearts against the still long winter of our intellectual will. That what has been may never be again. O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath of convalescents on the shores of death. O bless the freedom that you never chose.

O trumpets that unguarded children blow about the fortress of their inner foe. O wear your tribulation like a rose.

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians, appear and inspire: translated Daughter, come down and startle composing mortals with immortal fire.

When nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And could not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high: “Arise! Ye more than dead.” Then cold, and hot, and moist and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music’s pow’r obey.

IV. Chorus

From harmony, from heav’nly harmony, This universal frame began, From harmony to harmony, Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in man.

V. Air

What passion cannot music raise and quell! When Jubal struck the chorded shell, His list’ning brethren stood around, And wond’ring, on their faces fell, To worship that celestial sound. Less than a god they thought there could not dwell

Within the hollow of that shell, That spoke so sweetly and so well. What passion cannot music raise and quell!

VI. Air and Chorus

The trumpet’s loud clangor Excites us to arms, With shrill notes of anger, And mortal alarms. The double, double, double beat Of the thund’ring drum Cries: “Hark! the foes come; Charge, charge! ‘Tis too late to retreat.”

VII. March

VIII. Air

The soft complaining flute In dying notes discovers The woes of hopeless lovers, Whose dirge is whisper’d by the warbling lute.

IX. Air

Sharp violins proclaim Their jealous pangs, and desperation, Fury, frantic indignation, Depths of pain, and height of passion, For the fair disdainful dame.

X. Air

But oh, what art can teach, What human voice can reach The sacred organ’s praise? Notes inspiring holy love, Notes that wing their heav’nly ways To join the choirs above.

XI. Air

Orpheus could lead the savage race, And trees, unrooted, left their place, Sequacious of the lyre.

XII. Accompagnato

But bright Cecilia raised the wonder high’r: When to her organ, vocal breath was giv’n, An angel heard, and straight appear’d, Mistaking earth for Heav’n.

XIII. Solo and Chorus

As from the pow’r of sacred lays The spheres began to move, And sung the great Creator’s praise To all the bless’d above;

So when the last and dreadful hour This crumbling pageant shall devour, The trumpet shall be heard on high, The dead shall live, the living die, And music shall untune the sky.

Ode to St. Cecilia (Hail! Bright Cecilia)

HENRY

PURCELL

By

1683

Purcell had been the first composer commissioned to write an Ode to celebrate St. Cecilia’s Day by the newly formed ‘Musical Society’. Nine years later the Society was flourishing and the ‘Gentleman Lovers of Musick’ once again turned to Purcell to ‘propagate the advancement of that divine Science’. As Motteux wrote, ‘A splendid entertainment is provided, and before it is always a performance of Music by the best voices and hands in town’. With Hail! Bright Cecilia Purcell excelled himself and was the first to call for obligato instruments and the first to suggest that Cecilia invented, rather than simply played, the organ. The text by the Anglo-Irish Anglican cleric and poet, Nicholas Brady, was derived directly from John Dryden’s 1687 A Song for St. Cecilia. Most of Purcell’s Odes were written for the relatively small forces available at Court, but on this occasion, he was given the opportunity to write for a large group of performance [employing his choir at Westminster Abbey]. Purcell chose to mix large, contrapuntal choruses with a sequence of airs for soloists and obligato instruments. With a text full of references to music and musical instruments . . . everywhere we find writing of great originality, word-setting of the highest calibre, and music of startling individuality.

-Robert King

Hymn to St. Cecilia

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

In 1942 after three years of living in New York where he composed, among other things, his first opera (Paul Bunyan) and a choral work (Ballad of Heroes), Benjamin Britten boarded a Swedish cargo ship, returning to his home in England in the midst of World War II. The U boat threat was very real at the time and yet while sailing across the Atlantic ocean Britten composed two of his most joyful choral works, Hymn to St. Cecilia and 7 Christmas Carols which became A Ceremony of Carols.

Upon boarding the ship Britten’s draft for the first section of Hymn to St. Cecilia was confiscated by customs officials thinking it might be coded information!) but Britten simply wrote out the words and what he had already composed from memory and proceeded with the work – a piece in honor of St. Cecilia (the patron saint of music), whose birthday (November 22) is the same as Britten’s. As there is a long tradition in England of writing odes and songs to St.Cecilia he wished to do the same. Poet W.H. Auden had supplied the composer with the text for the hymn in 1940.

In the opening section Auden’s text celebrates an aesthetic and spiritual appeal as well as an erotic one, moving in the second section (“I cannot grow”) to words spoken by music itself. The third section begins by praising music for its power to express all emotion innocently (“O dear white children, casual as birds”) but then moves to an admonition of failure. Auden concludes by asking the reader to accept one’s loss of innocence and celebrate it (“O wear your tribulation like a rose”).

Musically, Britten opens the Hymn with a spacious, graceful lilt – the women’s voices in triplets floating on simple triads while the men in duple time descend in fourths, coming together at each cadence. The first section, as is true of all three sections, concludes with an invocation (“Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions to all musicians”), the first being soft and in unison. The second section is a scherzo, light and fast, playful and childlike, with the sopranos and tenors tossing the words to each other while altos and basses offer us a quasi-cantus firmus on the same text. Once again this section concludes with the invocation, harmonized this time. The final section is more instrumental in feeling (St. Cecilia odes traditionally describe different instruments), beginning with a ground which comments on Auden’s reference urging us (with solo voices) to end the struggle and concluding with the solo tenor’s trumpet call, which brings us back to the tonality of the opening of the work. The final invocation comes to a sublime, peaceful cadence in E major.

And so Britten arrived back in England with a work of great joy and beauty, having completed it on 2 April 1942. It was first performed that year on St. Cecilia’s Dau, one of the marvelous choral treasures of our time.

-Philip Brunelle

Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day

GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

George Frideric Handel composed his Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (HWV 76) in September 1739. It received its first performance on Cecilia’s Day, on 22 November of the same year in the London theatre of Lincoln’s Inn Field. At the end of the 17th century English musicians celebrated this day with concerts dedicated to St. Cecilia, who is the patron saint of music. With his setting of John Dryden’s Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day Handel began to revive this tradition dating from the time of the Restoration.

The eight strophes Dryden’s Ode sings the praises of the power of music: in accordance with the idea of “musica speculative,” creation is born out of chaos through the harmony of the spheres and it dies again with the inaudible sounds of the music of the heavens on the Day of the Last Judgement.

After the model of earlier Cecilian odes, Handel employs the charming practice of assigning individual tone colors to specific passions in that an instrument is introduced for each aria and is given a lengthy prelude. In the interpretation of the text, Handel’s music portrays the ‘vagueness of chaos, disorder of the elements, harmony and order, and the creation of man as the choir ascends to the perfect interval of the octave.” The closing chorus begins as a solemn anthem, which is a genre in English church music related to the cantata. The final choral fugue passes through all the harmonies of the music of the spheres.

Handel’s Cecilian Ode came at a turning point: following the financial ruin of his opera company in 1736, Handel distanced himself from Italian opera and transferred his vivid musical pictorial skills and their dramatic power to the English oratorio and to its related ode compositions. It was not in vain that the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day has proven to be a lasting inspiration even for Mozart’s Requiem and Haydn’s The Creation