JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS: White House Christmas Card, 1963

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This evening’s program covers a range of songs, spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Their musical settings take their cue from the poems, which are like mini-dramas, and all deal with topics of love and connection.

The recital begins with two about the freeing power of love.

The first is Jake Heggie’s “Music,” whose poignant text was written by Sister Helen Prejean, best-known for her 1993 book Dead Man Walking, subsequently turned into both a film and an opera. Using the sparest of means, Prejean underscores the prisoner’s humanity: through the miraculous power of music, he is restored briefly to “the land of the living.” The song matches the simplicity of this utterance, beginning and ending with an unadorned, blues-inflected vocal line, the piano joining midway to illustrate the prisoner’s transcendent experience.

Benjamin Britten repainted Henry Purcell’s “Music for a While” with a thicker brush, doubling the ascending, repeating bassline to illustrate the weight of the “eternal bands” shackling the dead and give a sense of time suspended. Britten enhances the harmonies with jazzy colors, exaggerates Purcell’s word painting of the snakes and whip dropping away, and builds to a dramatic finish that magnifies Purcell’s liberating message.

In the next set, Schubert’s “An die Musik” extends this theme of music’s revitalizing power, his exquisitely artless setting proving the poet Schober right in saying that music “has kindled my heart to the warmth of love.”

The final two songs show another side of love, the allconsuming obsession it becomes if unrequited.

In Goethe’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” the speaker is filled with longing, futilely awaiting her lover’s arrival. Schubert makes her suspense audible, as the accompaniment mimics the spinning wheel, turning incessantly like her disquieting thoughts.

Goethe’s “Rastlose Liebe” reflects his dozen years-long love for a married woman, memorialized in 7000 letters. Goethe matches the restlessness in nature with emotional tumult, and Schubert underscores this with a propulsive musical setting.

The next set is by women composers presently experiencing a long-overdue renaissance in performances and recordings.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “The Poet and His Song” returns to the theme of music as respite from suffering. In Florence Price’s setting, the rocking accompaniment provides a sense of the “hours of toil,” as well as the pealing bell that marks their end, and the “rebellious passions [that] rise and swell” against life’s hardships. The vocal ascent at the end of each verse shows the speaker transcending the mundane through music.

The next three songs are settings of poetry about the ephemerality of life and love.

Lili Boulanger was drawn to the dreaminess of Maeterlinck’s Symbolist language and Debussy’s musical style. The unresolved chords in “Attente” create a sense of movement without direction reflecting the poem’s unfulfilled expectation, a state of limbo Lili knew well from the chronic illness that took her life all too soon. The vocal line climaxes on the words “Whose lilies do not bloom,” which may be a veiled reference to her own unrealized potential.

In Robert Browning’s poem “Ah, Love, But a Day,” the speaker frets over whether her love will change, like the seasons. In Amy Beach’s song, the keys and character do indeed change. Each time the vocalist exclaims “Ah love!” she strives higher, and her hope that love will last is revealed when minor gives way to major.

Nadia Boulanger composed “S’il arrive jamais” with her teacher (and likely lover) Raoul Pugno. Émile Verhaeren’s poem expresses anxiety that the love the speaker shares with another may someday turn to pain, and suggests in that case, they should choose death. The song’s dramatic musical sweep matches the poem’s single run-on sentence, ending in the lovers’ imagined journey following “one soaring path, our souls bathed in sunlight,” and “exaltedly go to our death.”

Langston Hughes’ spare poem counsels that one should “Hold Fast to Dreams” because life has no meaning without them. As in Lili Boulanger’s song, Debussy’s impressionistic musical style clearly influenced Florence Price’s expressive musical setting.

The three Brahms songs present a natural landscape that either matches or masks an inner psychic landscape.

Georg Friedrich Daumer’s poem “Unbewegte laue Luft” contrasts the stillness of nature with the suppressed yearning the speaker feels, and Brahms’ song reflects this incongruity. The ascent to the climax argues persuasively for the urgent fulfillment of this desire, and the ethereal, pianissimo ending suggests it has indeed been achieved.