Schubert & Fauré: Masters of Lyricism

SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Selections from Schwanengesang (Swan Song), D. 957 • (22’)

II. Kriegers Ahnung (Warrior’s Foreboding)

IV. Ständchen (Serenade)

V. Aufenthalt (Resting Place)

X. Das Fischermädchen (The Fisher-Maiden)

XIII. Der Doppelgänger (The Double)

XIV. Die Taubenpost (The Pigeon Post)

Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano

Gloria Chien, piano

SCHUBERT

Fantasy for Violin & Piano in C Major, D. 934 • (26’)

Benjamin Beilman, violin

Gloria Chien, piano

GABRIEL FAURÉ (1845-1924)

Piano Quartet No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 45 • (36’)

I. Allegro molto moderato

II. Allegro molto

III. Adagio non troppo

IV. Allegro molto

Gloria Chien, piano

Benjamin Beilman, violin

Paul Neubauer, viola

Zlatomir Fung, cello

In 1828, Franz Schubert’s six-year battle with syphilis began its final lethal phase. Despite his failing health, Schubert worked tirelessly to produce much of his finest music, including the collection of songs known as Schwanengesang (Swan Song).

Schubert never thought of Schwanengesang’s 14 songs as a cycle, nor did he intend to publish them together. Nonetheless, after Schubert’s death, publisher Tobias Haslinger issued the songs in one grouping with an absurdly romantic title, hoping to capitalize on the success of Schubert’s earlier works.

In the bleaker songs, Kriegers Ahnung and Aufenthalt, the piano’s weighty chords evoke anguish and despair. Ständchen, one of Schubert’s most popular songs, uses shifting minor-tomajor harmonies to express the lover’s half-painful, half-pleasurable longing for his beloved.

Heine’s poems inspired Schubert’s greatest efforts in textural interpretation. The text of Das Fischermädchen suggests a pleasing love song, but its many key changes hint at the hopeful lover’s unresolved inner turmoil. In Der Doppelgänger, a wraith torments a lover standing outside a house in which many years earlier his beloved had lived. The lover’s tortured memories are conveyed by the stark stillness of the melody. After such anguish, Schubert ends with a delightful image of the carrier pigeon carrying messages of love in Die Taubenpost

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

In December 1827, Franz Schubert composed his final work for violin and piano, the Fantasy in C Major, D. 934 . The descriptor “fantasy” can be understood as “flight of fancy,” and it allowed Schubert freer rein to provide both violinist and pianist multiple opportunities to take listeners on extraordinarily elaborate virtuosic excursions.

Structurally, D. 934 can be heard as a sonata containing four movements in contrasting tempos. In the third section, Schubert features a theme and variations on his 1821 song, Sei mir gegrüsst (I greet you), set to a poem by Friedrich Rückert. The slowly ascending melody of the opening Andante molto also derives from the song’s primary theme, and as D. 934 progresses, we realize the melody of Sei mir gegrüsst anchors the entire work.

Both piano and violin share equally in the technical demands of the music. At times one accompanies the other; in other instances, the two instruments enter into elaborate conversations with animated dialogues. The fantastical elements of the music lie primarily in Schubert’s signature treatment of harmony as a series of fleeting excursions into distant tonalities.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

Before the year 1870, chamber music was rarely heard in public performances in France. Instead, it was performed privately for the aristocracy or, after the revolution, for the bourgeois class. For the best French composers, much more exposure and profit came from working in the world of opera.

Things changed when Camille SaintSaëns founded the “Société nationale de musique” in 1871. This concert series promoted the works of young composers, taking advantage of the low cost associated with chamber music to share opportunities with new musical voices. As one such composer, Gabriel Fauré, later recalled, “before 1870 I would never have dreamed of composing a sonata or a quartet.”

Many of Fauré’s most significant chamber works date to the period of 1877-87 and premiered at the Société nationale, including his highly successful First Violin Sonata and both of his piano quartets. The Piano Quartet No. 2 in G Minor premiered on January 22, 1887, with Fauré himself at the piano. Very little is known about the circumstances of its composition, but Fauré must have taken the quartet seriously, since it occupied him as his primary project from 1885-1886.

This quartet displays a broad, symphonic approach, inspired by composers like

César Franck, who had premiered his Piano Quintet at the Société nationale to an enthusiastic reception in 1880. Most prominently, Fauré employs Franck’s trademark “cyclic” form, in which melodies introduced early in the piece recur in later movements.

Fauré typically avoided writing program music, or music that references ideas or stories outside of the music itself. A poignant exception occurs in the second movement of this quartet. Fauré later remembered how, when writing the movement, “without really meaning to, I recalled a peal of bells we used to hear of an evening...whenever the wind blew from the West. Their sound gives rise to a vague reverie, which, like all vague reveries, is not translatable into words. It often happens, doesn’t it, that something plunges us into thoughts that are so imprecise...Perhaps it’s a desire for something beyond what actually exists; and there music is very much at home.”

—© Ethan Allred

Saturday, July 1

Kaul Auditorium | 8pm Sponsor:

Prelude Performance | 6:30pm Young Artist Institute

CMNW Presents the Oregon Bach Festival: Magnificat

TELEMANN (1681-1767) GRAUPNER (1683-1760)

Selections from Hamburger Admiralitätsmusik, TWV 24:1 • (8’)

I. Overture in D Major

II. Unschätzbarer Vorwurf erkenntlicher Sinnen!

Cantata: Aus der Tiefen rufen wir, GWV 1113/23a • (14’)

I. Aus der Tiefen rufen wir

II. Wenn Aber Kommt Einmal

III. Brunnquell der Gnaden

J. S. BACH (1685-1750)

Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe, BWV 22 • (18’)

I. Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe

II. Mein Jesu, ziehe mich nach dir

III. Mein Jesu, ziehe mich, so werd ich laufen

IV. Mein alles in allem, mein ewiges Gut

V. Ertöt uns durch dein Güte

Intermission

J. S. BACH

Magnificat in D Major, BWV 243 • (29’)

I. Magnificat anima mea

II. Et exultavit

III. Quia respexit

IV. Omnes generationes

V. Quia fecit mihi magna

VI. Et misericordia

VII. Fecit potentiam

VIII. Deposuit

IX. Esurientes

X. Suscepit Israel

XI. Sicut locutus est

XII. Gloria Patri

OBF Chorus

OBF Period Orchestra

Jos van Veldhoven, conductor

MaryRuth Miller, soprano

Sylvia Leith, alto

Steven Soph, tenor

Edmund Milly, bass

Rhianna Cockrell, alto

Steven Soph, tenor

Edmund Milly, bass

MaryRuth Miller, soprano

Olivia Miller, soprano

Corey Shotwell, tenor

Harrison Hintzsche, bass

In 1723, Georg Philipp Telemann was asked to compose a celebratory cantata to mark the 100th anniversary of the city of Hamburg’s Admiralty. The resulting work, Hamburger Admiralitätsmusik, was performed at an all-night gathering of city officials, naval officers, and ordinary citizens. The jubilation of the occasion is clearly reflected in the glorious, majestic sweep of the Overture, and the florid prose provided by local author and professor Michael Richey: “O all—surpassing subject! Flaming tinder for a joyous beginning! O peace of many years! May this observance be accompanied with shouts of joy; enthuse our words, inspire our strings, lift up our voices, quicken our hands!”

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

places, alternate with solo sections. Harmonically, Graupner’s setting features specifically modal rather than tonal moments, as in the setting of the word “Tiefen,” that recall earlier music.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

Johann Sebastian Bach submitted Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe as one of his two audition cantatas for the post of Kantor in Leipzig; it was written to be performed on the final Sunday before Lent. The text describes Jesus summoning his disciples for the fateful journey to Jerusalem, while the disciples, unaware of the coming events, faithfully follow Jesus onward. The tone of the music moves from one of prophetic sorrow to a redemptive joy, as Christians rejoice in the certainty of salvation.

sections so it could be used throughout the church year, and lowering the key to D Major, a more trumpet-friendly key.

The Magnificat showcases Bach’s unparalleled ability to write spiritually uplifting music that can also create an experience of sacred intimacy. The expansive musical forces include a five-part choir, five vocal soloists, and a substantial orchestra with three trumpets, pairs of flutes and oboes, continuo, and strings. Trumpets herald the joyful news sung by the chorus: “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Bach uses the chorus for the declarative extroverted sections, like Omnes gentes (All people), and scores the more introspective texts for solos and duets.

Fun Fact!

Graupner was a humble Lutheran, and would not allow his portrait to be painted.

Fate played a dirty trick on Christoph Graupner. In 1723, he applied for and was awarded the position of Cantor in Leipzig, but Graupner’s patron, Landgrave Ernst Ludwig, refused to release the talented composer from the remainder of his contract. A contemporary of Graupner’s, one J. S. Bach, took the job in Leipzig instead.

Best known for his 1,450 surviving cantatas, Graupner composed approximately 2,000 works in virtually every genre, including operas, religious works, and a large body of instrumental music. Graupner’s music was well regarded by his contemporaries, including Bach and Telemann, but after his death his music languished in obscurity, due in large part to a legal dispute regarding ownership of his manuscripts. Beginning in the 1920s, scholars and historians began researching and rediscovering this overlooked Baroque master.

Graupner’s cantata Aus der tiefen rufen wir (Out of the Deep We Call to Thee) served as his audition piece for the Leipzig cantor’s position, and it was first presented there on the second Sunday after Epiphany in 1723. Expansive choral passages, enhanced by brass in some

The music includes the standard elements of a Bach cantata: choruses, solos, chorale settings, virtuoso instrumental writing, and careful attention to presenting the texts so that the meaning of the words is amplified, rather than obscured, by the music.

In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach secured a position as Kantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig; he remained in that post until his death in 1750. Leipzig’s considerable musical resources and the busy church calendar afforded Bach the opportunity to compose his greatest choral works, including both the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, the Mass in B Minor, the Christmas Oratorio, more than 250 church cantatas, and the Magnificat.

The Magnificat is part of the Vesper service, and takes its text from the Gospel of Luke. After Mary is informed by the Angel Gabriel that she will bear the Son of God, she declares, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Aside from the words of the Mass itself, the Magnificat has been set to music more often than any other liturgical text.

Bach wrote his Magnificat for the 1723 Christmas Vespers service. The original version, in the key of E-flat major, included Christmas-specific texts as well as the standard Magnificat liturgy. About ten years later, Bach revised the Magnificat, removing the Christmas

Bach indulged his penchant for text painting in several places: for example, the soprano soloist’s rising arpeggio on the words Et exultavit (Rejoicing), and the agitated downward spiral of the tenor soloist’s Deposuit (He has Put Down). In the closing verse, “Sicut erat in principio…Amen” (As it was in the beginning), Bach sets the text to the same music as the opening Magnificat anima mea, a musical pun for the attentive listener.

—© Elizabeth Schwartz

Sunday, July 2

Lincoln Performance Hall | 4pm Sponsor: Rick Caskey, in honor of Sue Horn Caskey