Atlanta, January
Georgia
14, 1965
!j!!j!!;!!f!::+-~!f!!j!!j!!j!!j!!f!!F=t:=i::i:
We might as well get right down to tho nitty-gritty of it. Last Iv1onday night 's re hearsal was a debacle, completely unworthy of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. The first reading of the Britten War Requiem was superior in every way. The first rehearsal of the season -even with the attendant disruptions ofnew member regiswas tration, music allotment and exchange af greetings-better motivated, better mannered and more constructiva This chorus is not a social club. Such satisfactions as we gain because of musical excellence are achieved through self discipline and undivided responsibility. The fact that we enjoy our collab:>rator1 s company is a splen did bonus, but even this would disappear did we not add re a s ourselves firstly, secondly, and throughout to · the music. /// Rehearsals of a chorus of this calibre should not ever be primarily a p 1.a:ee for note-learning. The problems of ensemble are complex enough. Most o.f the note-learning should be done at home. Monday night should be an oc caaion f.Dr pool±rmour ak:i.lls and k!nowladge, not our ignoranc es • Ill Look at our rehearsal sch ad u l e. Obviously we will have to concentrate on the Beetho :v e n !!inth Symphony. It should be sung fr om memory in Cleveland a lil d New York. /JI Consider ho w little time there is . following that to conclude preparations on the Britten War Requiem -- far too little to allow the lack of attention by 'tobich l a s t .Monday
night!s nil~ sal~
betra;r
oo..II
//So
thae I I •• R
We have another twenty or thirty pages of "Fundamentals of Musicianship f or Cl1oris t ers" (subtitled "Push-Ups for Singers.") The generd org aniza t i on foll ows:
L
Modes and Scales
')
L •
Rhythm
"Accumulative"
- Basic Duple and Triple
J.
Intervals
Seconds
- Major and Minor, Above and Below
4.
Intervals
Seconds
- Extended Patterns
5~ Intervals
Seconds
- Inversions
6.
"Divisive"
- Basic Duple and Triple
7. Intervals
Thirds
- Major and Minor, Above and Below
8.
Intervals
Thirds
- Extended Patterns
9.
Intervals
Thirds
- Inversions
10.
Rhythm
"Accumulative"
- Irregular
11.
Intervals
Fourths
- Perfect and Augmented, Above and Below Extended Patt erns Inversions to Fifths
12.
I ntervals
Fifths
- Perfect and Diminished , Above and Bel ow Extended Patterns Inversions to Fourths
1 ')
J.. - 1 :t
Int ervals
Octaves
- (Against
14.
Rhythm
Silence
15.
Intervals
Sixths
- Major and Minor, Above and Below Inversions to Thirds
] 6.
Intervals
Sevenths
- Large and Small, Above and Below Inversions to Seconds
17.
Dynamics
18 .
Enunciation
Rhythm
(Introduction
to Solfege Syllables) Patterns
to Sevenths Patterns
and Sixths Patterns
Disonance)
values
19 ,, Tone 20 ,
Rhythm
Exercises
in Compound Rhythm
It i s not so much the amount of time spent o:i these drill s which will prove prod.lJf.:tive as it is th e frequency with which you greet them. If you are t he type of perso n w:10 cannot brush after every meal, do five minutes of pns l.i ··Lps :~or sj_r1ger E ~
··2-
Rehearsal Sunday afternoon with George Szell on the Beethoven Ninth Symphony but count definit,ely on :Ji ne;at 5:30 p.m. Please bring scores to all rehearsals, ing performanc es from memory.
8
0 1
Orchestra-Chorus rehearsal Monday and Wednesday nights at our usual tima of c:_ock (not at 7:15 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. as previously scheduled).
However~ Chamber Chorus will meet each night at 7 o 1 clock for reading Brahms Liebesleider Waltzes and Stravinsky Les Noces .
of
Thus: S1,l.Ilday Monday . ·
Wednesday
.-January February
February
31
5:30 p.m.
All
Chorus Room
1
7:00 p.m.
cocc
Chorus Room
8:00 p.m.
All
Chamber Nusic Hall
7:00 p.m.
cocc
Chorus Room
8:00 p.m.
All
Chamber Nusic Hall
3
Freude R. s ..
February 19, 1965 Looks like the 11letter from New York11 got caught in a snow stcrm. It does, however, give me a chance to share with you parts of an article written by Philipp Naegele, a former member of the Cleveland Orchestra. (Incidentally, the entire article was reprinted and distributed by the United States Information Agency in connection with Mr. Shaw's South American tour. ) 1
"And few, the members of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus excepted, can fathom his involvement in his work and the self-sacrificing devotion that carries him through periods of unrelenting effort, which most of us would never survive or even take upon ourselves ••••••• "Choral techniques are indispensable, of course, but it is the man behind them who performs the miracle -- in a way which his singers cannot define, except that with-and-through him they surpass themselves. This they do because he commits, surpasses, and effaces himself •••• He has a rare ability tolose himself completely in his work -- with the courageous certainty that only this way will he find himself again on another plane. Behind the prodigious work-capacity, behind the drenched shirts and suits which represent to the onlooker the typical 11before and after" of a Shaw performance, behind the often stormy rehearsals, and the anything but endearing invective, we find a vision of immense scope, a tonal revelation, a redemptive conception of his art, which make of him a willing, but not unafflicted, instrument of their realization in the here and now of a performance. 11 •••••••
You may be absolutely sure that there are few things in which Mr. Shaw believes so completely as the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and its capabilities and devotion. (Few know as well as I what demands that devotion makes upon you and your family.) This devotion, or call it involvement, begins with rehearsals and your attendance at same. An absence -- excused or unexcused -- still means you're not there. We all know that on any given night there is x-per cent of our membership that will be absent. If that "x" becomes we an 11X11 , and at the same time we have an excess of late arrivals, then have DEVASTATION. rivals
This one-two combination of too many absences* has been the chief factor in those rehearsals
of its
I just hope that by my mentioning happening again.
it we'll
Be thee of good cheer and come out singing
buffer
too many late arwe may call bad. the possibility
E. B,
ANNOUNCEMENTS : Sunday
February
21
5:00 p.m.
Monday
February
22
·_7:30 p.m. 8:30 p.m.
Alt os and Ba_sses Ch2.mher Chorus , , ~
,rl._1_ .L
The special originality and genius of the War F80 ...1iem, it seems t.-, l'T'e, lies in the dramatic infusion of Wilfred Owen's"war p(•.s-':.1_yinto the La~j :-, Mass for the Dead.
- -
- -----.
The Requiem Mass, even apart from its religious significa.l.ce: is itself an extraordinary poetic, dramatic accomplishment. The~ Irae, a ratl:er longish "hymn" from the thirteenth century. written by Thomas of Celano, with j ts enr,rmously compact verse structure and economical lines climaxed by extravagc.nt duple rhymes, is a work of unique colour and vitality. And the poetry of Wilfred Owen, while tragically limited in total output (Owen was killed in action just seven days before the armistice in November, i9lg, after a long, arduous and distinguished service record) is not at all limited in its philosophical sensitivity and vigor or in its poetic invention and individuality. Consider, for instance, the rhymings of 11Move him into the sun" (page 4): "sun-sown, once-France, seeds-sides, star-stir, tall-toil" -- certainly personal, fresh and evocative. "A-B-A-B-C-C-C" is also an individual. and vital stan~a form. But the most provocative-and-moving "technical" thing is the length of lines one and seven. Lines two through six, however free, are four-foot lines; and one is led to expect them to continue. But the three-foot final line, particularly of verse two, comes as with a sudden loss of breath. However, given even these two great text sources, it is Britten's .2!'!!!~and dramatic vision which structures, informs and inspires the War Requiem. I cannot think of a single composer of our time so sensitive to word values. Who else could have contrived Christopher Smart's Rejoice in~ Lamb, Melville's Billy~, Peter Grimes,! Ceremony of Carols, Noye1 s Fludde -- to name scarce a hand£ul out of scores. With what fantastic sensitivity has he infused Owen's 20th Century personal (and cosmic) 11pityt 1 into a centuries-laden liturgical classicism~ For example
~
Page 1, lines 11
•••
6 and 7: Hearken unto my prayer:
"What passing-bells
unto thee shall
.fil
flesh~·"
---
for these who die as cattle?"
In addition to the myriad disturbing fragmentary associations that surround this juxtaposition -- cattle-bells, man made flesh, mand made meat, butcher-boy, boys butchered -- in addition to these connotations, here within the first few minutes of this extended work, is squarely placed its rather total argument, titled (I presume by Owen) "Anthem for doomed youth." Page 2, top: It is of course a "natural" to couple the Tuba Nirum, the "wondrous trumpet", with "Bugles sang." But by the extraordinary collaboration of Britten and Owen in one moment we have the "Tuba Mirum" calling, even "driving" fil unto the Throne; and inunediately foil owing bugles are calling, are II singing", but only bugles answer, "sorrowful to hear". The voices of boys who~ to be by the riverside can never again respond.
-2-
Page 2, middle:
•
1
Verse three: "Quid sum miser ••• " "What shall I say in my misery when scarcely the righteous may be without fear?"
Diabollically pertinent is Britten's placement of "Out there we've walked quite friendly up to Death~' -To which is added Owen's wistful bitter twist at the end. (Like Sandberg's little girl who'd just had her Daddy explain about war: "You know what, Daddy? Someday they're going to give a war and nobody's going to come.") Page 3: This is the only one of Owen's poems -- to my knowledge -- which implies "right or wrong" to that war. In the main his subject, as he states over and over again, is "war and the pity of war, the pity war distills." It is ill wr-ong. There is ~ right. a partisan
But in this poem, in lines five and six, he about to curse." "Reach at that arrogance which down before its sins grow worse ••• " Taken in only assume, I think, that the "arrogance" which at least, was Prussian. It is a partisan line.
says to the "great gun ••• needs thy harm, and beat it ite entire context, one can he had in mind, for the moment,
But Britten -- and this is the stinger -- gives the entire poem to the baritone soloist who, in the great final "Strange Meeting" (page 7), turns out to be the German Soldiert Now -- I could go on concerning Owen's imagery and Britten's poetic genius for more pages then Eddie should have to suffer. (Most of my study this week has been an exploration and memorization of the texts; strangely, I never had come to a "by heart" familiarity with the Missa de Profunctis strictly as poetry; I usually hear Mozart or Verdi along with these words.) But -- if you'll bring these pages along with you on Monday night, I'll go through the entire texts with you with a ravishing Norman Vincent Peale acuity and thoroughness. One footnote. I don't know all the answers to our problems of rehearsing the COCC;but of one thing I 1 m sure: nothing is being accomplished by hurried and harried 45-minute rehearsals on Monday evenings. THEREFORE, everybody: amend your rehearsal schedule to re-instate our usual 8:00 p.m. rehearsal schedule for the full choir. We'll fix the COCCother ways. Monday
March
1
8:00 p.m.
All
Monday
March
8
8:00 p.m.
All
Other rehearsals
as scheduled,
Sunday
February
Sunday
March
28
7
including: 3:00 p.m.
Tenors and Bases
3:00 p.m.
Sopranos and Altos Love, R
/
March 3, 1965 Herewith the second of the forward-looking, positive-thinking, N.V. Pealetype letters in search of succulent conspicuity in the War Requiem text. (In passing, what's the difference between St. Paul and N.V-:--1'eale? Give up? St. Paul's appealing.) Refer now to the complete text which you received last week; and let me make one additional suggestion: namely, that you read the poems, even the Latin text, aloud. Poetry must be sounded to be comprehended and, in my experience, much of it must be read~~~ again. The final meaning is a combination of sense and sound; and the sound in these poems frequently has let me into a discovery of new and unsuspected sense. ("In the silence of my lonely room" where "I think of you Night and Day" ((Ready when you are, C.P. ~)) -- I have wanted to read these to you but, in view of our recent difficulties of communication, it has seemed an unwarranted "drawing-up of blinds.") Therefore, to-wit, perchance to woo -- a consummation devoutly to be wished:
...
"WHATPASSING·-BELLS
II
(Page 1)
We have spoken already of the dramatic placement of this poem and the imagery exploded by the juxtaposition of the Latin "all flesh come" and Owen1 s "who die as cattle." Let me call your attention to the strictly verbal elements of assonance, alliteration and the like -- those matters of speech which exalt meaning with mystery and music. Lines three and four bring us not only the alliteration of "rifles• rattle" but, even more importantly, the inner onomatopoetic alliteration ing, rattle, patter."
rapid of stutter-
Lines five and six set forth "no mockeries for them" or "voice of mourning." Obviously, we have the "m" alliterations, though they are reversed. Perhaps more 11 significantly we have a "v" sound posed against a voiced th" sound. Both of these are voiced consonants and both made at the forward wall of mouth and teeth. The effect in consonants is similar to Owen's "half-rhymes" (I 1 ve forgotten the technical term; is it "sprung-?") "sun ... sawn, once ••• France, etc." Repeat a few times, the "~ockeries for the!!!•••Yoices of !!!ourni!!g. 11 Concentrate upon the alliteration, half- or false-alliteration, and the reverse orders. These are moments wherein music and mystery enter. Line twelve brings "pall".
us a beautiful
play upon robbing "pallor"
to provide a
Consider the last few words in each of lines eleven and twelve: "tenderness of silent minds ••• drawing down of blinds." I certainly must have heard, but I had not-noted until this morning the parallelism of "n" sounds. These certainly contribute enormously to the poem's wistful, saddened diminuendo. BUGLESSANG••• "
11
( Page 2)
During the first several readings I found this poem a bit obscure. I could '"'· place the boys "by the riverside" in their time. When were they by the river,. and what time is it now?
-2-
The poem is incomplete, probably about half of its intended duration; and some of the subsequent lines, even though incomplete, dispel some of the obscurity. Lines nine and ten read: 11 ( ) dying tone Of receding voices that will not return." Almost certainly the poet is recalling the voices of his and others' youth, voices of friends now "mothered" by the "sleep" of death -- "receding voices that will not return." The "voices of old despondency" are those which remain,- "bowed by the shadow of the morrow", who are able to sleep only the sleep of fatigue and resignation, knowing that sooner rather than later the more final sleep will also "mother" them. Again,.note the beautiful rhymes, "air ••• hear, side ••• sad." Recall, also, the sensitive contrast between the "wondrous trumpet" of the Dies Irae which wakes the dead and this sad song, answered only by further sorrow. "OUTTHERE,WE'VEWALKED QUITEFRIENDLY••• "
(Page 2)
The essence of this poem and its placement is its bravado -- satirical, cynical and sorrowful. (We1 ve got to gain a truer understanding of cynicism in our time. It is not the lack of sensitivity which makes the cynic, but its constancy and vulnerability. -"To learn tolerance, one needs a little sorrow and a little cynicism of the Taoist type. True cynics are often the kindest of people, for they see the hollowness of life, and from the realization of that hollowness is generated a kind of cosmic pity. Pacifism, too, is a matter of high human understanding. If man could learn to be a little more cynical, he would also be less inclined toward warfare. That is perhaps why all intelligent men are cowards. The Chinese are the world's worst fighters because they are an intelligent race, backed and nurtured by Taoistic cynicism and the Confucian emphasis on harmony as the ideal of life ••• An average Chinese child knows what the European gray-haired statesmen do not know, that by fighting one gets killed or maimed, whether it be an individual or nation. 11 --So Lin futang wrote in 1935 in .MyCountry and My People, perhaps with insufficent prescience of the pathology of "europeanization. 11) -Back to Hell-fellow, wail-met. Note in lines four, five and six the terms 11 the thick odor of his borrowed from the first-hand experience with poison-gas: breath • • • sniffed ••• wept • • • spat • • • coughed" -- but none of them used in context of gas. Est".
Compare, for example, the latter half of his poem intitled "Dulce et Decorum • • • .•, Gas~ Gas! Quick, boys~ -- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime. As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
-3In all my drea~s before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Forgive if I transliterate: My friend, you would not tell in such high mood To youth, susceptible to your effrontery The old Lie: sweet it is and very good To die for country. The most pathetic of all in "Out there ••• ," it seems to me, is the line "but our courage didn't writhe;" paralysis, choking and spasm omnipresent, except in our will ••• or so we brag. ("Brag" is implied, because brags abound.) "We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe" -- a bitter and certainly intended pun. ( 11Close-shave 11 via "Grim Reaper")
turn of metaphor,
"We laughed at him, we leagued with him" a nice parallelism between "laughed" 11 at" and "leagued," but the line reads more richly if you can point up the disparate and "with" without losing forward motion. "No soldiers' paid to kick against paid to greet him, "old chum;" soldiers The last
three
lines
are a bit
his powers" -- of course not, are paid to die.
obscured,
I feel,
soldiers
are
by punctuation:
%le laughed,
knowing that better men would come, And greater wars, when each proud fighter (will) brag He wars on Death for life, not men -- for flags."
11
BE SLOWLY LIFTED UP •••
11
(Page 3)
Chief relationship between the Latin and Owen here is Britten's sensibility to the imagery of "cursing." Obviously, it is the center of Owen's poem: "O, great gun ••• about to cursel 11 However for the moment you may appear necessary, once your malignancy is accomplished, "may God damn you~ and cut you from our soult" The association with the Latin is made clearer by a better translation of "confutatis maledictis. 11 Male-diction: ill - to speak; to speak ill, to curse. Therefore, "when the accursed are confounded and adjudged to sharp flames ••• 11
-4Notice, also, the parallel imagery between the Latin "flammis acribus" sharp flames -- and Owen's "shapes of name" in line eight.
--
I find lines nine and ten provocative for two reasons: first, the use of the word "malison. 11 We are well acquainted with the word "benison," from the Latin "bene" -- well; (bene-diction: to say well); therefore, a blessing. I have not been able to trace for sure the derivation of the suffix "son." It's in both Middle spellings. I have a feeling it might come from English and Old French in different roots which give us words like sound and senor. If so, then as "benison" is a blessing,"malison" is a cursing. The second interest for me in these lines is that this "blasting, storming, flaming, cursing," must ultimately "wither" (burn) the enmity out of all men, spoiler or spoiled. I said last week that I surmised that this poem in lines five and six might be partisan. I 1m not really sure of this. Lines seven and eight are so utterly cynical, and lines eleven and twelve so impassioned, that it's possible that he may have been totally satirical throughout; that is, he feeds us a crumb of political expediency, leads us to the brink of a quasi-justification for war, only that it may crumble beneath the weight of our own arrogance. In whichever case, Britten skillfully finessed the jingoist by alloting the words to the German soldier. (I suppose we're also old enough to understand that the poem draws some of its power from moment after moment of phallic symbology.) "HOVEHil'J INTO THE SUN
Owens lyrics. I
...
II
surely
is one of the most beautiful
and touching of
Its linking with the I1:i.ssa de Profunctis is at two points. Immediately preceding the poem are the final couplets of the Dies Irae (notable also because the entire Dies Irae with the exception of these ccmcluding four lines has been in threeline verses; the two couplets bring a severity and finality to the whole poem). shall rise "Lacrimosa dies illa ••• 11 -- "lamentable is the day on which guilty~ from the ashes • • • Spare then this ~, 0 God. 11 The first point is that resurrection, a reawakening, is the commontheme. On the o-n e · hand "man shall rise ••• , " on the other, "If anything might rouse him now ••• was it for this the clay grew tall ••• break earth's sleep?" The second point is that the Latin speaks very specifically, "Spare then this one ••• ;" and, similarly, the poet also takes as his point of departure a very specific occurance, this here-now boy, just-now dead. Howpoignant, how wistful is the poet's equation of sunlight with life. -And how succinctly documented by evolutionary recall in the second stanza. (I'm trying for the moment to remember my "beginnings of life" lessons. Was it that the "star" finally cooled enough to support life, or was it that the sun "woke, once, the clays of a cold star?") Whatever the evolutionary sequence, it was certainly not for a moment such as this that the "clay grew tall," that mud became man. "-0 what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?"
-5"SO ABRAM ROSE, ANDCLAv'ETHEWOOD•••
II
This, of course, is the most "natural" of all the linkings: "Which, of old, Thou didst promise unto Abraham and his seed" to "So Abram rose ••• " and disposed of his own as well as "half the seed of Europe, one by one." -But even this is not the entire linking; for it is immediately followed by "Hostias et preces tibi, with prayer. Domine ••• " ~ off er unto Thee sacrifices The first is a natural verbal and narrative association, contrived between liturgy and poet by the composer. The second is a linking which somehow includes all us as participants even in that earlier "sacrifice." ,'1hat began as a parable, in the Hostias infuses the liturgical service as "offering, sacrifices and prayers;" and however "concert" versus "cathedral" our participation may be, we are up to our ears in understanding. Britten makes it doubly sure that we understand. After the parable of "The old and after the Hostias (sung in our behalf by more men and the young" (Owen1 s title) innocent voices), after, in point of fact, the parable which has been completely turned upside down from its original Biblical telling, we are once again allotted the music for "Quam olim Abraham" (note well!) completely upside down, melody inverted, dynamics reversedt Involvement and responsibility are the awful cost of understanding. It 1 s so much more pleasant to seek an addiction which obliterates, booze or main-line. Owen carries us even one step beyond Britten's involvement with Abram. Line eight has those who understand building "parapets and trenches;" for narrative purposes -to catch Isaac 1 s blood, but for Owen's purposes -- whole dugouts full., Pick a war from I to X.
...
AFTERTHEBLASTOF LIGHTNING
11
II
This is the most dense and grave of the poems in the War Requiem. Alongside the lyric fluency of "Move him into the sun" it is lumpy and knotted. Alongside "Out there ••• " and "So Abram rose ••• " it has not even the laughter of cynicism or satire. After its matted, unrubbed honesty, "One ever hangs ••• " comes like Lenten doggerel. It 1 s apparent link is the visual ecstacy of "Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus," a sublime eruption of heavenly light, with "the blast of Lightning from the East. 11 I say apparent because, though Britten has taken the Sanctus and Benedictus very seriously musically, and developed them at some length with flashes of brilliance and shadows of tenderness, what has happened textually is that he has linked the Sanctus imagery to the first line of Owen1 s poem in order to introduce the most uncompromising, unpalatable (to Christian traditionalism) and hope-forsaken sermon on Life and Death. This is a brave despair to raise in the holiest moment of Christian liturgy. And the lines betray this weight. The poem rather lurches along. Neither in word nor rhythm is it fluent. Almost all the lines are loaded with thick nouns and granitic verbs. Out of one hundred fourteen words ninety-four are words of one syllableo This in itself need not yield gnarled density if the poet were content to waste a few of them (as in "One ever hangs ••• 11).
-6Certainly in terms of argument this poem would find its essential environment (in the Miss a de Profunctis) at a point of inconsolable denial of one of the II resurrection" references. That in the Dies Irae, however, was beautifully handled by "Move him gently ••• " Moreover, it was too early for this summation. And, "Heaven" knows, once one has begun the "In paradisum ••• " (Page 7) it is much too late. Were one to c ori6ider putting this poem as epilogue -- one could no'tiiave written the mass at all. Actually, the Hostias offers the most direct confront11 ation: M3.kethem, 0 Lord, to pass from death unto life;' with "It is death t" It had to be said, if Owen was to be a part of the War enemy you killed, my friend ••• " had to be saved to the last. some significance in saying, "It is death," at this holiest Certainly there is no equivocation. Neither Age nor Earth, credit immortality. "Some say the world will end with fire --another poet, another time, wrote; for Owen, too, ill either "ONE EVER HANGS
Requiem; and "I am the ?erhaps there is and most mystical moment. "snow" nor "fiery heart" ••• some with ice ••• " would suffice. 11
II
This is a logical, "occasional" choice for linkage with the Agnus Dei. It appears to have been written for an actual roadside crucifix near Ancre7At a calvary near the Ancre" is the titl!i in his book of published poems). Undoubtedly the Jesus figure on the cross had lost a leg in action. The metaphor sounds as tho the poem came quickly: the priests and the scribes, church and state -- ever enemies of the Lamb of God; peace, to be found only in self-sacrifice. One of Owen's letter from the hospital on the Somme (before his convalescence in England and final return to the Front) can be quoted at this point: "Already I have comprehended a light which never will filter into the dogma of any national church; namely, that one of Christ's essential commands was: Passivity at any price~ Suffer dishonor and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be killed; but do not kill. It may be a chimerical and ignominious principle, but there it is. It can only be ignored; and I think pulpit professionals are ignoring it very skillfully and successfully indeed ••• Am I not myself a conscien~ious objector with a very seared conscience? ••• Christ is literally in "no man's land". There men often hear his voice: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for a friend. Is it spoken in English only and French? I do not believe so. Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism." I find this more concentrated, selected; but the others make their
intense and moving than the verses which Britten point, and a natural three-part form as well.
...
"IT SEEMED THATOUTOF BATTLE
II
"Strange Meeting" is Owen's title for this poem. Unfinished, it is the most haunted and haunting of his war poetry. It is undated, but is surmised to have been written in the last few months of his life. The editor of his poems, Edmund Blunden, reports that it was written in ink with corrections in pencil.
-7I have two comments to make, and then shall leave it to you to re-read (aloud) the poem and some of the "alternate" and "companion" lines which Owen wrote. First I would call your attention (for a last time) to the uniquely sensitive rhymes. They make almost a poem themselves: "
1 scaped groined 'stirred eyes •••
••• scooped ••• groaned ••• stared bless
...
mourn moan years ••• yours wild ••• world laughed ••• left told ••• 'tilled spoiled ••• spilled tigress ••• progress world ••• walled wheels ••• wells war ••• were friend killed
frowned cold"
pasSecond is to report on Britten 1 s editing of the poem in one significant sage. (Eleven lines are omitted in Britten's setting -- two or three of them, I feel, nf real value; and two lines are added from a series of couplets which closely parallel this poem and may have been sketches towards its final form.) -But, as regards the "significant" omission: Between lineseight and nine of the War Requiem text, Owen had written --"And by By his With a Yet no
his snile, I knew that sullen hall, dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. thousand pains that vision's face was grained; blood reached there from the upper ground,"
Now, certainly the last of these lines joins nicely to "And no guns thumped, or do\-m the flues made moan;" but the presence of the first two of them would do gross injury to the final great moments of the War Requiem (as, I think also, they harm Owen's poem). The necessary dramatic point is to maintain the obscurity, mystery and place of this "strange meeting" until the final "I am the enemy you killed, my friend. 11 One must not know until this moment that both are dead. Or if one surmises it, he must not be told. Here is Britten's great sense of peotry and drama helping his "unfinished" work, with an eraser. Of interest Line 1:
to me are the following
discarded
the poet to complete
readings:
"It seemed that from my dugout I escaped" (How greatly that sheds light on lines two, three, four and five: so much more based now in experience, than imagination.)
-8Line 12:
"The unachieved
Line 18:
"The pity of war, the one thing war distilled." (There is an error incur text; ours should read, "The pity of war, the pity war distilled." Omit "of".)
Line 29: Or:
"I was a German conscript, and your friend. rrry friend." I am the German whom you killed,
Compare a few parallel
lines
11
(for hopelessness)
from the groups of couplets:
Lines 19 - 22: "Be we not swift with swiftness of the -1:.igress Let us break ranks, and we will trek from progress. Let us forgo men's minds that are brutes' natures. Let us not sup the blood which some say nurtures." Lines 27 - 28: (These are not in "Strange Meeting"; Britten added them from the couplets. They might have been followed or preceeded by:) "For now we sink from men as pitchers falling, But men shall raise us up to be their filling." "Finally," remarks Blenden, "widely as the setting and substance of "Strange Meeting" are felt and apprehended, it is peculiarly a poem of the Western Front; it is a dream only a stage further on than the actuality of the tunnelled dug-outs with their muffled security, their smoky dimness, their rows of soldiers painfully sleeping, their officers and sergeants and corporals attempting to awaken those for duty, and the sense presently of II going up" the ugly stairway to do someone in the uglier mud above a good turn. Out of these and similar materials Owen's transforming spirit has readily created his wonderful phantasma."
_,,_
What is the final poetic and dramatic result of Britten's "fabrication?" Certainly, in the first place we have an enormous humanizing and contemporizing of a not sostaid but ancient and remote liturgy of remembrance. The wars of this century are our wars; Owen's death, his pity at the death of others are remote neither from our memories nor our premonitions. -And so the ancient words are fused with the immediacy -- of tomorrow. Second, and conversely, Owen's words gain a catholicity, a dignity of i1istorical association. His "pity" becomes somewhat grander by the setting of his parable of Abram and Isaac in a centuries-old matrix. All of his poetry gains stature. But what of the final
philosophic
confrontation:
"Shall life renew these bodies? Or a truth All death will He annul, all tears assuge?" I suppose most of us will call Age and Earth answered a resounding
it as we 1 ve learned 11Negati ve !11
it.
Certainly
for Owen,
-9It is interesting to_note~ it seems to me, that in terms of text alone (setting aside, for the moment, the accretions of tradition) the Missa is entirely a petition: "Make them, 0 Lord, to pass from death to life ••• Deliver me, 0 Lord, from death eternal ••• In paradise may the angels lead you ••• with Lazarus, may you have eternal rest • • • let eternal light shine upon them • • • May they rest in peace. 11 Some, undoubtedly, could recite this in full confidence that it already had been achieved. With others, even of similar religious profession, it might be murmured "kneeling in supplication, a heart contrite as ashes." For still others it must suffic~ that after all, there is still in man's being ......and un-being -- a mystery into which none of the statistical forms of man•s intelligence can carry him. That it involves a life beyond the present most men have hoped and few gainsaid. I will not "tell which way the fox ran," but I will own that Owen's words and Britten's vision are a part of the life-force in the man-thing. l~nether any one of U5 "makes it" in a hereafter is terribly unimportant alongside the presence of humanity such as this.
HMysubject is war and the pity Requiem is a part of that distillation.
of war, the pity war distills."
Peace, -R
The
War
March 11, 1965 Herewith a few further sentences on the Britten-Owen . collaboration. Written by William Plomer, contemporary British poet and librettest of Britten's opera Gloriana, they exhale a slightly more orthodox Christian piety than the letters of the last two weeks, - - -_ and do it with extraordinary sensitivity. I have just come across them, and thought you might enjoy them. R
It is a function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new form. Britten's Nocturne, for example, which unifies musically a group of poems by different hands, is a notable example of his power to connect the seemingly unconnected. It was a totally unexpected and weightier feat of imagination to see the possibility of combining together the traditional form of the Latin Mass for the Dead -- so formidable in its solemn grandeur, so grave in i~s religious and musical associations -- with the utterance of a young English poet killed many years ago in battle. The popular poet of the First World War was Rupert Brooke, who seemed to many to embody an ideal image of radiant British youth sacrificing itself for its countr y. His work was in tune with the conventional patriotic sentiments of the time. But the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in France just before the Armistice in 1918) after winning the Ivi ilitary Cross, had to wait longer to be known. Owen was only 25, but his poems were profound, and are profoundly disturoing. They made no app o.al to the accepted opinions of his time about poetry or war. They were not about what soldiers gloriously did but what they had unforgivably been made to do to others and to suffer themselves. Owen did not accept what he called 11the old Lie" that it was necessarily glorious or even fitting to die for one's own or any other country, or that a country was necessarily or perhaps ever justified in making the kind of war he knew. As he saw and experienced it, war appeared as a hellish outrage on a huge scale against humanity, and a vi olation of Christianity. He shared the destiny of millions on both sides, but unlike them he had the sensibility to see what war now really meant, and the power to explain it. "My subject
is War," he wrote,
"and the pity
of War,
The Poetry is in the pity. :
Into his poetry went the pity, not of a detached outsider or a sentimentalist, nor simply that of a humane officer . for his men whose lives he cannot save and to whom he cannot hold out hope, but the pity of an imaginative man for fello w-suffere:i:¡ s unable to speak for themselves to later generations. And since right could hardly be on either side in a struggle which, by Christian and humane standards, seemed to him utterly wrong, pity led to the vision of some kind of reconciliation beyond the tortured and shapeless present. This is most explicit in the line from the poem "Strange Meeting 11, which comes almost at the end of the baritone solo in the last section of the War Requie~, the quietly and simply sung "I am the enemy you killed,
It is now clear War, and, b'3cause the has been the central yotmg lives tormented
my friend.
11
that Owen was the outstanding English poet of tbe First World Second World War was a continuation of it, of that too. War horror of European history in this century; and Owen, mourning and treated as expendable, was to speak as directly to mourners
-2-
in 1945 as to those of 1918; furthermore, since the fear of war is now universal his elegies speak to us directly. They are a warning. To nobody grieving for the deaths of friends in the War which broke out again more than twenty years after his death did Owen speak more directly than to Britten, who has dedicated the War Requiem to the memory of four of its victims, Perhaps no composer has shown so remarkable a response to poetry, and no English composer has been more responsive to English poetry. And since there is no motif more predominant and recurrent in Britten 1 s works than that of innocence outraged and ruined, what could be more natural than that Britten, deeply moved by Owen1 s poetry, should be no less moved by the fate of the man who wrote it, his youth, his promise, his passionate tenderness, his rare talent cut off by the senseless violence of war? Be.. ing so moved, Britten 1 s impulse was to set Owen's most memorable poems for singing. It was a sure instinct that prevented him from setting them separatelf, . or as a sequence • . Certainly they have a kind of monumental nobility that enaoles them to stand alone, but he saw, as nobody else could have seen, that they could stand besid ~the sacred liturgy of the Mass for the Dead, and, musically, be combined with it. The theme of both is the same: it is death. It is death inseparable from griei and from guilt, death ordained by God for every man, often caused by human stupidity and cruelty, but death associated, in spite of everything, with ideas of mercy, forgiveness, and peace. Owen was the product of a Christian tradition, in which thes8 ideas are inherent. He makes quite clear his disillusionment with the failure of a Christian civilization to practise what it professes, as when he writes of the mutilated wayside Calvary and of those by whom "the gentle Christ's denied." This occurs in the poem that is here brought into the brief and beautiful "Angus Dei 11, with tr..e tenor's slow gravity heard so affectingly against the recurrent choral setting of the Latin text imploring the Lamb of God for peace. Then in the 110ffertoriurn" Owen 's poem about Abraham and Isaac represents the sacrifice as having acutally taken plac9, in defiance of the divine message from the angel. (It is remarkable how naturally the baritone's opening words "So Abram rose ••• " follow, as if intentionally, the Latin phrase about the seed of Abraham; and how the music recalls Britten's canticle Abraham and Isaac (1952) based on one of the medieval Chester miracle plays, and evokes the long scriptural tradition stretching backwards for ages.) Owen imbued with ideas of pity and of reconciliation (both of which imply hope) . shows himself essentially Christian, and, because of this, the elevation of his poE;,,1r to a musical synthesis with one of the most solemn of Christian rites, seems strange · ly in keeping. In achieving this synthesis, Britten has not only written a subli Tie new Requiem Mass, but has brought out the full force and charity of the utterance of an unforgettable poet. Directly and disturbingly he has given it a new, much wider, and perhaps lasting significance, troubling the deeper levels of our human nature .• There seems to be a general agreement that the War Requiem is the profoundest work Britten has yet produced, and good judges have called it his masterpiece, At its three first performances -- in Coventry Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Albert Hall -- its reception was not of the usual kind given to a work that impre~se c its hearers by musical invention and subtleties, and incidentally moves them by phas ~ of passion or of gentleness. It was received as a work of vast scope, in which the composer, by giving it all the technical resources and emotional power at his command, so transcends the personal that he seems to comprehend the sufferings, to transfigure the grief, and to honour the potential goodness of humankind. It is addressed (and with what poignancy!) to "Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity
of tears."
October 7, 1965 Brethren
in Babel -
Enclosed, hopefully (since this must be written before final returns are in on the Janacek Pronunciation Sweepstakes) are (1) some paragraphs concerning the text origin from the Deutsche Grarnmophonjacket of (2) a rough "transliteration" which their recording of M1 sa Glagolskaja, we request you transfer neatly, lightly and "erasably" to your voice-part (3) a comparable (We will have personal "live-coaching" at a later date.), transliteration of the Middle English pronunciation of Britten's Ceremony of Carols - according to authorities from Columbia University (The carols will be sung by women only but others among you may find uses for this rare pronunciation scheme.) and (4) the personnel -- by COGmembership number -- of those selected for the Chamber Chorus. last
With respect to this latter, this is a smaller chorus than that year and, at that, it is larger than it ought to be.
of
For the final performances of .Messiah which Handel supervised, conducted and in which he played -- at a time when his fame and financial backing could have secured him whatever forces he desired -- Handel used only twenty-six or twenty-seven voices including soloists, with boy's voices on the soprano and alto parts. His orchestra consisted of twentytwo strings, four oboes, four bassoons, two trumpets (used only in four out of fifty-three sections -- and one of these off-stage), timpani (used only in the "Hallelujah Chorus" and "Worthy is the Lamb") and organ and harpsichord. Since our attempt will be to reproduce as nearly as possible Handel's final performance of 1754 at the Foundling Hospital, it is apparent that even our Chamber Chorus forces are too large. However, the quality of the Chamber Chor~s auditions was such that it became impossible to make a choice of only twenty-seven voices without doing several persons some injustice. Moreover, today's halls are larger and our instruments more sonorous; so we shall go ahead rehearsing with our forty voices, listening carefully to sonorities and balance. From time to time we will divide int-o chmirs of lesser size; and, perhaps, even at performance we may find it advisable to use different choirs for the various performances or halves of performances. With all the recent scholarship that has revealed and revitalized Messiah the more who can make its re-acquaintance the better. Pax. R
1965-1966 Sopranos
411 . 423 425 428 429
Ed. (Just
463 467 471 478 480 484
CLEVELA ND ORCHESTRA CHAMBER CI-iORUS Altos Basses ' TelX>rs 210 .. .. 208 llO 166 304 . 357
321 330
3.54
355
as we go to press)
374 378 381 382
2.51 2.55 262 267
269 270 274 276
111 126 129 151
The Slavomic Mass will be available
167 171 174 176 Monday night.
"v Janacek - M'sa Glagolskaja
(Historical
notes)
The Glagolitic Mass is a fruit of Janacek's last creative period. At Luhacovice, a favourite health resort of Janacek in Moravia, the 72 years old master wrote on the score: "5th August t.o 15th Octobre 1926n. He several times gave information concerning the origins of this work. Especially important is his statement that with this work he was making his contribution to the celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1928, and that in it he was paying tribute to the "spirit of Cyril and Methodius" which he felt to be missing in the preparations for the official celebrations. In the Glagolitic Mass, therefore, he intended to honour the memo~r of the brothers St. Cyril and St. Methodius of Salonika, who brought Christianity to the Czech people when they settled in Moravia. In this connection he undoubtedly cast his mind back to his youth, studying at a monastic school in Brno, he had since in 1869, while still taken part in the splendid ceremonies marking the thousandth anniversary of St. Cyril at the ancient shrine of Velehrad, the contrepoint for veneration of the two saints. Wishing to celebrate the occasion with a Mass, he considered it appropriate to use for his composition the Church Slavonic Mass-text; the two saints themselves had trnaslated substantial parts of the Bible and liturgical texts into early Church Slavonic (early Bulgarian), and had also preached in that language. For their translations they had employed the so-called Glagolitic script which they had devised, and in which the idiomatic sounds of Slavonic speech could be expressed. This script is the origin of the name given to the Glagolites who, following a tradition dating from the 9th century, still hold services in a Croatian form of Church Slavonic in certain parts of Croatia (on the north-eastern shore of the Adriatic with the island of In recent times the original Glagolitic script has been Krk (tEd.)) replaced by Latin characters, and it was the Church Slavonic text written in Latin characters which Janacek used for his Mass• •••• in this work religious-historical traditions are blended with popular elements. It is this combination of ideas to which the composer gives expression in his wholly untraditional manner: the people praise God but in their own language, proud of the strength which derives from their faith, but also of the ties which link them with their homeland, _proudly aware of the thousand years of history during which they have cherished the land which has s~tained them. V
(Kamil Slapak)
-2-
has translated Janacek's texts into German and who has made ceaseless for him, deserves the highest credit. ,
propaganda
v,
Janacek had already composed two operatic works (Sarka and The Beginning of ~ Romance), also some choruses and other compositions, but was st ill living the inconspicuous life of a small music teacher in a provincial city, such as BrUnn was before Czechoslovakia's declaration of independence. Everything Czech, moreover, was only of secondary importance in this city. When he was 50, hi s opera Jenufa, which was later to become a world success, was produced for the first time at BrUnn's very provincial Czech theatre. But the Prague theatre continued to reject the work and did not produce it until twelve years later, when the composer was 62 years old. In the same year, 1916, it was also performed at the Vienna Court Opera in German translation. Therewith the era of non-recognition came to an end. In the twelve remaining years of his life, in addition t o a whole series of other works, Janacek composed four more operas. In 1925 the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy was conferred upon him by the University of BrUnn; he received special honours in England in 1926; and, inspired with the idea of a new music, he was a central figure at the music festivals of the Interna t ional Society for Contemporary Music. All his remaining operas had their premieres at the same BrUnn theatre which had first produced Jenufa and which had become outstanding in the meantime. Many stages in Germany and in other countries produced the later works. In honour of his 70th birthday (1924) Prague and BrUnn gave Janacek cycles in their opera houses. In the summer of 1928 the composer, who appeared to be the picture of health, suddenly contracted pneumonia in his native land. He was taken to the hospital of Moravian Ostrau and died there, Aug. 12. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death Janacek cycles were aga i n arranged in Czechoslovakia. The underlying principle of Janacek's compositions is a dynamic one; cr i tics have even spoken of his "dynamic leitmotifs." This dynamic quality may originate in the spoken word, for, as we have seen, the vocal element . is always of primary impor t ance with Janacek; it achieves unprecidented effects, particularly in his operas. Perhaps his second most pronounced characteristic is the mystical atmosphere of Nature, its creatures, and human beings in his works: the Volga (Kat'a Kabanova), the forest and its animals (The Sl,y Little Fox). All this is wonderfully depicted by the music, which oftenseeiiis to be put together like a mosaic. Lastly, Janacek and his art are inconceivable without his eastern Slavonic scales. A beautiful humanity is embodied in this art, a faith in mankind (Jenufa), which even in downfall of the individual, as a result of sickness, violence, or death, cannot destroy. But this faith has its roots in suffering and in a certain gentl e and dispassionate pessimism. In the final period of his career Janacek composed the grandiose Glagolitish Mass, based on old Slavonic li t urgy, a very di f ficult chora l work, rich in colourand folkloristic in spirit. One of the most original of his works is The Diary of One Who Vanished, for soloists and chorus. It is based on a curiousnewspaperre port which Ja nacek f ound. In a Moravian village, a well-to-do peasant's son, the hope of his paren t s, disappears. He leaves behind 22 poems, which tell how he had to follow a beautiful gypsy girl. His shame over succumbing to her spell has driven hi m into exile. The musi c contains enchanting sound effects and paints magnificent pictures of Nature and the human s oul.
V
'v
LEOS JANACEK (b. Hukvaldy, East Moravia, July 3, 1854 - d. Ostrau, by Paul Stefan
Moravia, Aug. 12, 1928)
Leos Janacek is one of t,he most interesting, almost mythical figures of East Czech, or strictly speaking, Moravian music, and a remarkable example of a composer who reached his prime late in life. He was born July 3, 1854, one of the many children of the school teacher and musician of the same name in the village of Hukvaldy (Hochwald) in East Moravia, on the Silesian border, in "lachish" country. The population there is influenced in part by its Polish neighbors; consequently words are often accented on the second syllable as in Polish, in contrast to Czech, which explains why Janacek was frequently accused of faulty declamation by his countrymen. His youth was cheerful but very needy. At the age of ten, ; as soon as he was seen to have musical talent, he was taken to BrUnn (Brno), the capital of Moravia. As a chorister in the Old BrUnn Monastery of the Austin Frairs (this same cloister was the home of the epoch-making biologist, Gregor Mendel) the boy received lodging and maintenance in exchange for playing and singing in the choir. The excellent musician Krizkowsky was conductor of the choir; Janacek later became his successor. In 1866 the boy's father died and left the family in dire poverty. Leos earned his living as a music teacher and went to the Organ School in Prague for a thorough education. There he led a life of indescribable hunger and starvation. In 1875 he was back in BrUnn, teaching at the Teachers' School, for which he wrote a manual of instruction in singing, his first theoretical work. He also conducted variou s choruses and a Philharmonic Orchestra, performing many works by Dvorak, a personal friend. In 1879 he attended a conservatory again, this time in Leipzig, and soon after the Vienna Conservatory. In 1881 he married and founded the Bri.lnn Organ School, giving practical and theoretical instruction in music. For almost 40 years he was a teacher there. He published a theory of harmony, not being satisfied with Helmholtz's theory. According to Janacek, harmony is the adjustment of the chaos which arises when a second chord is struck before the first has died away. In this process bold progressions and resolutions result. In 1920 his Organ School was taken over by the state; he became a Professor at the State Conservatory of Prague, where he taught a master-class, but retained his residence in Brunn. Beside s his occupation with the theory of harmony, he was attracted in particular to a study of the folksong of his native land, which has its roots in East Slavonic and Byzantine music. He published several collections of folksongs, but never :used the aoiigs themseive ¡s in his works, rather 11composing folksongs," like Smetana. The relationship between word and sound occupied him from another aspect also. He sought to ascertain the melody of every-day speech and eagerly made note of pitch, rhythm and accent. At a spa he requested a woman to repeat the exact words which she had just addressed to a peasant woman in buying eggs, so th at he could note down the musical equivalent of her speech . This woman later played an impor tant role in his life, for she and her husband kept a quiet room for work in readiness for him at all times in the Bohemian city of Pisek. His dramatic music in particular follows the Czech speech-melody precisely, which makes translating especially difficult. Thus the Prague writer, Max Brod, who
-3Janacek's later operas escape the conventional in story and treatment. Jenufa presents a gripping tale of village life by Gabrielle Preissova and the music is of powerful intensity. Kat'a Kabanova is the story of a Slavonic Madame Bovary, based on a Russian short story by Ostrovsky, and can be described as a mighty tone-painting of provincial life. The Makropoulos Affair, from the drama by Karel Capek, is the story of 300-year-old Elena Makropoulos, her 11elixir of life 11 and her escape in death -- an extremely expressive work and one which is very difficult to present. Aus einem Totenhaus dramatizes Dostoievsky's picture of the Siberian convict 1 s life.The climax is reached in a theatrical performance of the convicts, a comedy which changes from jest to sad earnest. Orchestra, singers and stage-manage.~ent are faced here with new problems. The score which Janacek left had to be revised and supplemented, because the manuscript version was unplayable in many places. Nevertheless, Janacek departed this life with a last powerful achievement. The last word has not yet been spoken about this composer, either by artist or scholar. In any case he is an extraordinary phenomenon: despite all his fantasy, he is earth-born and bound, a new distinction in Czech-Slavonic music. Janacek's works gradually are being assembled, archives of the University of BrUnn under Professor need much work to be completed. This same scholar, Janacek room of the National Museum of BrUnn, which arrangement of the room in which Janacek worked.
his letters sorted. The Janacek Helfert 1 s supervision still moreover, is in charge of the has faithfully preserved the
(From International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, edited by Oscar Thompson; Dodd, Mead & Co., 1949) Fellopolylinguists
-
Thank you for the sustained concentration of last Monday night. Never has so little been accomplished by so many in so much time with such great effort. There must have been a madnius in St. Cyril's Methodius. Chamber Chorus: Now hear thisl As the small red father promised in retrospect of your thrilling reading of Messiah last Sunqay, we will now proceed to cut our pre-orchestra rehearsals by 37 1/2% -- canceling the COCCrehearsals of October 31, November 7 and 14. Note that this leaves us with two rehearsals remaining in October -- 17th and 24th -- followed three weeks later by two: November 21 and 28, which precede the performance week. Take care. Love, R
ANNOUNCEMENTS : Sunday Monday
October October
17 18
¡ 3:00 p.m.
5:00 p.m.
Chamber Chorus Altos and Tenors - COC
8:00 p.m.
All
October 20, 1965 More rehearsals back to back like Sunday's sectional and Monday's vivisectional certainly should qualify us as contenders for the crown of World's Best Losers. Experiences like these certainly are worth a chapter or two in somebody's book of Choral Conducting. The conductor's opportunities for failure are so manifold that it scarcely is worth mentioning those of his collaborators. In the first place it is the conductor's failure if he chooses materials which are beyond his singers' capacities. He already has failed e¡ither in the selection of his personnel or by not educating them to the point where a non-traditional musical language is within their capacities and stirs their interests. It is a further failure if, by pre-rehearsal information and in-rehearsal procedures, he cannot produce performing skills which are accumulative, retentive -- and, in the main, pleasurable. His also is the ultimate responsibility of transforming group lethargy and fluccidity tp commitment and tonus. -So, few of you can match the conductor's failures. Consider for a moment, however, some of the strange phenomena of choral life: Amateur choruses, however badly trained or minimally talented more often than not excel themselves in contests or concerts. More often than noteven""talented, well-trained choruses perform better and accomplish more at a first reading than they do at a second or third rehearsal. More often than not there is a sort of law of momentumin any given rehearsal wherein success pre-disposes toward further success and error compounds error. This latter "rule" operates, of course, among professionals also, from sports through business to the fine arts; but its scale is much more dramatic in amateur organizations -- for the following reasons. The ratio of commitment to ability gen~rally ¡is higher among amateurs than among professionals. This can be due to two factors: first, that the amateur~s talent is, by comparison to his professional counterpart, generally limited; and second, that his is a recreational endeavor, undertaken to provide any one of a number of personal, non-material satisfactions, originally, at least, with high enthusiasm. The point is that while the professional may lose some of his enjoyment and personal commitment to his work without necessarily impairing his craft to a dangerous degree, the amateur, if he loses his commitment and moment to moment enthusiasm and concentration is in danger of diminishing his abilities by fifty to seventy-five percent. This is the nature of a "society" such as ours. Unless it is unremittingly committed to success it only adds failure to failure. It is commitment which discovers, enlarges and refines our capabilities -- not vice versa. Since it is most of what we have it has to be practiced at every rehearsal -- like scales for a Casals. R
ANNOUNCEMENTS : October
24
Sunday
3:00 p.m. 5:30 p.m.
Chamber Chorus Sopranos & Basses
October
25
Monday
8:00 p.m.
All
- coc
The sweetest music of the spheres is a chorus 11WeI re saying, "Snshsh ________ ~" to itself working." It begins to feel
like my old blanket
again.
Linus Oct. 28, 1965
Performance Week Schedule: October November
31
Sunday
S:00 p~m.
All
1
Monday
7:30 p.m.
All
(with orchestra)
3
Wednesday
7:30 p.m.
All
(with orchestra)
4
Thursday
7:15 p.m.
All
Perf.
'v - Janacek
6
Saturday
7:30 p.m.
All
Perf.
'v - Janacek
7
Sunday
2:30 p.m.
All
Perf.
'v - Janacek
SLAVONIC MASS by Leos Jana.eek There is a true story told toward the end of his life, he hotel the shout of a page boy, the shout, and said, "There is
about the composer Leos Janacek: that in 1926, visited England, and overhearing in a London he noted down the musical tones and rhythms of the real England."
It is an enlightening story. First, because it demonstrates what Janacek accepted as reality, and second, because it was no isolated instance of its kind in his life, For years Janacek had notated all sorts of things: the songs of birds, the growls of his pet dog, the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, the cries of wild animals, the folk songs as they came from peasants in his native north Moravian village of Hukvaldy, and, perhaps most significantly, the musical and rhythmical inflections of the spoken Czech language. It all made highly unconventional raw material for a composer to draw on for his musical inspiration, and it was highly unconventional and personal music that Janacek wrought from it. Janacek's musical style is at once easy to recognize and difficult to describe. His music sounds like that of no other composer and, like the work of most strongly individual composers, it sounds very different from the way it looks on paper. One can say that his harmony is usually conservative and frequently modal, that his melodies are short, striking and strongly rhythmic, that his rhythms seem exceptionally free but are always palpable, that his orchestration is totally unorthodox but very effective, that he avoids formal development of his material and prefers patterns of repetition with continual change, that he does not write fugues, canons, passacaglias, sonata-forms or rondos, and that his music is eminently singable without sounding in the least like Wagner or Puccini. And having said this, one still has not conveyed the least idea of the music. Janacek's style is difficult to describe because the words we have to describe it are those that have grown from the "mainstream" of music, and Janacek's mature woFk stands outside that mainstream. His technical devices are not those inherited from Liszt, Wagner or Brahms, or even from Smetana and Dvorak, but were painstakingly built from a foundation of speech inflection, folk song and natural sounds. In Janacek's musical domain, a fu8ue is something that has never even been invented. Hence, it becomes both tricky and misleading to talk about "conservative" harmonies, "free" rhythms and development. His considerations are elsewhere and entirely different. Janacek's music is concerned neither with architecture nor emotion, but with sounds. Even his orchestration is based on other principles; he was one of the few composers who did not look upon an orchestra as strings plus. But it was not always thus. Janacek's early training was thorough and traditional, and he at first seemed destined for a career as an obscure local teacher, organist and conductor. He venerated the music of Smetana, and he was a friend of Dvorak. His early Suite for String Orchestra could easily trade a movement with Dvorak 1 s Serenade forstrings with no resulting inconsistency of style. He was at that time, in effect, a true nineteenth-century composer, and a minor one at that. Had he died at the age of fifty, he would be so considered today.
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Leos Janacek was born on July 3, 18.54, only twnety-one years after Brahms, a terribly early date for a "modern" composer to have been born. He completed what we now recognize to be his first major work (the opera Jenufa) in 1903, at the age of forty-nine. He died on August 12, 1928, at seventy-four, and virtually all his best music was composed during the last ten years of his life. This kind of late flowering is rare in music (Cesar Franck is the only other example that comes immediately to mind), and there is no one to say how this talented but minor musician suddenly evolved into a fire-breathing genius. It took his countrymen several years to understand that such a thing had happened, and it will probably take the rest of the world several more. His star, nevertheless, has been continually ascending. The Slavonic Mass, for all its flaming ardor, was not intended to be a religious work, but a national one. "I wanted to portray the faith in the certainty of the nation, not on a religious basis but on a basis of moral strength which takes God for witness," said the composer in a magazine interview in 1928, He had just released the work for performance (December 5, 1927), although the composition had been finished almost two years earlier. The Mass is based upon the text of the ancient Glagolitic rite, brought to Moravia in the ninth century by the Saints Cyril and Methodius, and extinct in the churches of that country since the fifteenth century. The work, like the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, was never meant to be performed in a church. In spite of the composer's intentions, and his well-known aversion to churches in general, a misled critic wrote that the "old man" had become deeply devout, and that he had finally come to realize that his life work would be meaningless without a musical expression of his belief. "Neither old nor devout," was the terse answer inscribed by Janacek on a postcard. A friend commented that the work might have been composed by an aged Slav of bygone times. "It was composed, and could only have been composed, by the musician Janacek," was the composer's retort. In composing this brilliant, festive mass, a 11primitive 11 work in the way Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps is primitive, Janacek knew precisely what he was doing, andnoone was going to say that he had done something else. . (Notes by James Goodfriend, Masterworks Literary Editor, Columbia Records)
SUGGESTION: Scotch taping narrow strips of paper over the printed text of the Janacek, and then writing in our transliteration was the solution found by one of our number. It has worked for her, and certainly looked clear and easily re1dable. It very well might help you too. Ed.