by Bart de Vries

OF HEAVEN AND HELL

BY BART DE VRIES The 2022/23 season opens with a concert, in which the odds are stacked between heaven and hell. The three pieces before the intermission are an expression of the first. Liszt’s 65-minute long Faust Symphony represents the last. But in the end, redemption is near.

While Johann Sebastian Bach served as the organist to the court of the Duke of Saksen-Weimar, he wrote almost all of the 46 chorale preludes (for organ) of his Orgelbüchlein. The Swedish composer Anders Hillborg (this season’s ‚Composer in Residence’, born 1954) has arranged one of them, Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, for solo violin and strings.

Just like The Lark Ascending for violin and orchestra by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), Hillborg’s piece has a spiritual and ethereal quality that seems to spiral straight up to heaven. Of The Lark it is said that the orchestra evokes the landscape from which the bird, represented by the violin, takes off to reach the skies. The flute, often deployed to emulate the sound of a bird (for instance in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Messiaen’s Le Merle Noir) connects the two.

This concert, however, opens with Lili Boulanger’s Psaume 24 “La terre appartient à l'Eternel” (The earth is the Lord's). The music to the psalm (for organ, choir and orchestra) is majestic and glorious, describing the entrance of the eternal King (God) into Jerusalem and declaring that only those who have led honest, truthful lives without sin can obtain His blessings. Boulanger (1893–1918), a Parisian child prodigy, was, at only 19 years old, the first woman to receive the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata Faust et Hélène. Although not performed tonight, one could see her prize-winning composition as a linking pin to Liszt’s Faust Symphony in this month’s concert.

Although he wasn’t very fond of the character of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil (Mephistopheles) in exchange for earthly pleasures, Liszt was most impressed by Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust. Living in the city of Goethe (Weimar) it was almost inevitable that sooner or later Liszt would use Goethe’s play as the source of inspiration for a composition. The famous Gretchen-story is as follows: Mephistopheles helps Faust seducing Margaret (or Gretchen), who subsequently kills her mother to be with Faust. Gretchen drowns the child from their rendezvous. Due to her innocence (link to Psalm 24) – she is the victim of an evil pact –, God eventually comes to her rescue. After her execution for murder God bestows his grace on her (link to Ich ruf zu dir).

The symphony doesn’t follow this short account, but instead consists of three musical renditions of the main characters: Faust (first movement), Gretchen (second) and Mephistopheles (third).

Musically, the first movement is the most important – its thematic material returns in the others. The opening bar consists of all the twelve notes of a scale, thus leaving the key fuzzy and unclear, and more importantly, betokening the twelve-tone system that wasn’t systemically worked out until half a century later. In the Mephistopheles movement the Gretchen theme remains audible, indicating she has been saved. The final words of the tenor in the third movement underscore the gift of salvation, bringing the concert to a merciful end where heaven prevails.