Classic Remembrances
November 12, 2011

PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter

EARL GEORGE

A Thanksgiving Overture 

Earl George was born in Milwaukee on May 1, 1924, and died in Syracuse, New York, in September 1994.  He composed his Thanksgiving Overture in 1949.  The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, tenor drum, triangle, glockenspiel), piano, and strings. Duration is about 5 minutes.

As a high school student, Earl George demonstrated his prowess both as a performer (playing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with the Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra) and as a composer (writing and conducting his own music for the All-City High School Chorus.)  He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Eastman School of Music between 1942 and 1946. In the latter year he was a composition fellow at Tanglewood, where  he studied with Bohuslav Martinů and Nikolai Lopatnikoff, continuing his studies with Martinů in New York City after the end of the summer session in the Berkshires. He taught at the University of Minnesota from 1948 to 1956, then returned to Eastman to earn his doctorate in composition.

In 1959, George became professor of theory and composition at Syracuse University, where he remained active until his retirement in 1988. His musical output—over eighty works—is evenly divided between orchestral music, vocal music (both for chorus or solo voice), and chamber music, along with two short operas and pedagogical piano pieces. He often set the words of American poets and chose musical topics that celebrated American figures. In fact, his earliest published work, Four American Portraits, written when he was just 17, featured musical depictions of Jefferson and Lincoln. His Midwestern origin and Americanist interests made Eastman an appropriate place for George to study in those years, when the Nebraska-born Howard Hanson was director of the conservatory and a kind of broad, flowing “down home” melodic style with opulent scoring was the order of the day.

The Thanksgiving Overture is an early work, composed when George was 25 years old, for a competition jointly sponsored by the University of Illinois and the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes. Five works made it to the semifinals and were performed by the University of Illinois Orchestra in 1949 before a panel of judges consisting of three distinguished American composers: Aaron Copland, Wallingford Riegger, and Otto Luening. Earl George’s piece was declared the winner notable for what Copland called its “energy and spirit of optimism.” It is based on one of the oldest Protestant tunes in existence, published in the Genevan Psalter of 1551, where it was sung to the words of the 100^th Psalm, so the melody came to be called “Old 100^th”. In many churches today it is sung as the Doxology, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” George presents this tune in a spacious peaceful manner at first, but puts it through various rich treatments that suggest the spirit of the season.

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Variations on a Theme by Haydn, op. 56a

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna, Austria on April 3,1897. He composed this set of variations first for two pianos (in the form we know as Opus 56b) in the early summer of 1873. He orchestrated it soon after, completing it by October. The composer conducted the first performance at a Vienna Philharmonic concert, November 2, 1873. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, triangle, and strings. Duration is about 17 minutes.

Few composers have been as thoroughly at home with the music of the past as Johannes Brahms, whose carefully assembled library of scores and theoretical treatises are filled with marginal annotations and other signs of serious study. Brahms was one of the first composers who also functioned as a musicologist by editing the music of older composers in modern editions (he prepared Schubert’s symphonies for the complete edition of that composer’s works and keyboard pieces by François Couperin, among others). When he ran across a piece of old music that interested him, he copied it out by hand and kept it in a folder labeled “Copies of outstanding masterpieces of the 16th‑18th centuries for study purposes.”

One sheet in this collection contains music bearing the heading, “Second movement of a divertimento for wind instruments by Haydn. Chorale St. Antoni.” Brahms evidently copied this piece at some time in the early 1870s. Scholars are not certain that the music really was by Haydn; today they are more likely to attribute it to his pupil Pleyel. Still, Brahms found it full of possibilities. It consistently moves by step, with few leaps. The first phrase (immediately repeated) is unusual in taking five measures, rather than the more normal four. That touch of irregularity, followed by a middle section with phrases of the standard four measures, intrigued Brahms and challenged him. In the spring of 1873 he composed a set of variations on this tune for two pianos. After playing it with Clara Schumann in August of that year, he decided that he would orchestrate it. The work went quickly, and the orchestral variations had their premiere on November 2, with Brahms himself conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Brahms considered both versions of the work authentic (that is, the two-piano version was not simply a draft for the orchestral version), and he published them separately as Opus 56a and Opus 56b.

The notion of an individual set of variations as an orchestral piece by itself (rather than serving as a movement in a symphony) was new in 1873. Brahms shaped his piece as an introduction, eight variations, and a finale. The introduction is a nearly literal quotation of the original wind-band theme. The variations are strongly contrasted in tempo, mood, orchestration, and harmonic sense, but they all retain the unusual phrase structure of the theme, with the five-bar phrase at the opening and the four-bar coda of repeated notes at the end. The rich imagination with which he elaborates the original tune leads so far afield that by the time we reach the mysterious Variation VIII it would be difficult to find the original theme in Brahms’s material, except that we have been able to eavesdrop as he derived it from one variation to the next, following the rules that he laid down in this particular game at the beginning of the first variation.

To cap off the score, Brahms boldly essays a technique that he had learned from his study of early music, one that was so old (and so long forgotten) that it was daring and new: he wrote a passacaglia, a set of variations over a repeated bass line. The theme of the bass line is a simplified version of the opening theme. The repeated fragment is five measures long, presented at the tempo of the theme at the beginning of the work. As this fragment repeats, over and over, Brahms superimposes new variations on top, to a total of 17. By the tenth statement the repeated bass figure begins to move upward in the texture, so that by the last statement it reaches the top of the orchestra and returns to its original full shape as the theme, coming back as a brilliant, joyous climax.

The Variations on a Theme of Haydn was Brahms’s first work for full orchestra (he had previously composed two serenades for small orchestra). It demonstrated at one blow his astonishing mastery of the resources of the orchestra; the work’s success no doubt encouraged him to continue in his long-delayed completion of a symphony. Yet the Variations are remarkable enough in themselves, controlled but imaginative, rhythmically and harmonically inventive, sustained through their length by an architectural plan leading to a thoroughly satisfactory close.

Gabriel Fauré

Requiem, op. 48

Gabriel Fauré was born in Pamiers, France, on May 12, 1845, and died in Paris on November 4, 1924. The history of the Requiem, which extends between 1877 and 1900, is detailed below. Fauré conducted the first performance of the bulk of what we now know as the Requiem at the Church of the Madeleine in Paris on January 16, 1888, in memory of his parents. The final version with full orchestral accompaniment received its premiere at the Trocadéro on July 12, 1900, with Paul Taffanel conducting the Lamoureux Orchestra. In its fullest version the score calls for soprano and baritone soloists, mixed chorus, two each of flutes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, two harps, organ, and strings.

Gabriel Fauré stands apart from almost all the significant composers of his age. His long life spans the period from Berlioz (who was composing La Damnation de Faust at the time of Fauré’s birth) to Berg (who had completed Wozzeck three years before Fauré’s death). The late romantic era and the rise of modernism was a time of noisy excess. Fauré’s music, though, is quiet, subdued, even tentative in effect. When other composers were writing gigantic symphonies and tone poems or lengthy operas, he was turning out songs and chamber music.

Notoriously uninterested in the process of instrumentation once he had conceived the musical material, he often had his students finish the job of orchestrating most of his works for larger ensembles. A composer of such artistic reserve is not likely to attract hordes of enthusiasts or to claim an important role for himself and his works. But the support that Fauré did attract was at the most exalted level--on the part of his fellow composers and his pupils, including Maurice Ravel, Georges Enesco, and Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger always regarded him as one of the greatest masters of his time, and passed on her enthusiasm to her pupils. It was a Boulanger pupil, Aaron Copland, who wrote one of the first substantial appreciations of Fauré in English.

 Born in the south of France, Fauré studied in Paris at the École Niedermeyer, where he received an unusually broad musical education in three respects that set him apart from the products of the “official” school: a thorough understanding of older music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras; familiarity with the German tradition, including Bach and Beethoven; and a more-than-nodding acquaintance with such dangerous moderns as Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner—this last element through the good offices of the young Saint-Saëns, who from 1861 on was professor of piano at the school. Fauré himself went on to become one of the most distinguished teachers of the turn-of-the-century era.

French music in the late 19th century was divided into highly politicized camps—the Wagnerians, the Franckists, the followers of Massenet, and others. Fauré kept largely to himself, not joining any clique; even after making the customary pilgrimage to Bayreuth to hear the Ring, he revealed almost no influence of the experience in his own work. Thus his music has always stood somewhat apart, sometimes overlooked and misunderstood. He left virtually no big works of the kind that attract general audiences, but singers have always delighted in his exquisite songs, and chamber music performers have reveled in the range and variety of his work for various small ensembles. The two largest works to achieve general popularity are the suite arranged from his incidental music for a London production of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, which dates from the late 1890s, and his largest choral work, the Requiem, the composition of which, in one stage or another, covered most of the last quarter of the 19th century.

Fauré’s Requiem is absolutely typical of his work in its avoidance of melodrama or overblown effect. His earliest conception was an intimate one, as far as possible from the heaven-storming theatrics of Berlioz’s Requiem, which he detested. He made a careful selection of passages from the liturgical text, omitting all of the melodramatic images of the Last Judgment that had been the dramatic high points for both Berlioz and Verdi. When the work was first performed in 1888, in memory of the composer’s parents (his father had died in 1885, and his mother died at the end of 1887, while he was composing the Requiem), it consisted only of the following movements:

Introit et Kyrie

Sanctus

Pie Jesu

Agnus Dei

In Paradisum

It was scored for a small orchestra of low-pitched instruments (violas, cellos, double basses, harp, timpani, and organ) for a somber sonority brightened only by an unmuted solo violin in the Sanctus soaring high above the ensemble like an angel of grace (in the full orchestra version, Fauré uses the same violin melody, but gives it to combined first and second violin sections, muted, and puts it an octave lower). The soprano solo in the Pie Jesu was intended for a boy soprano, while the choral soprano line was taken by the children’s choir that Fauré trained at the church.

Almost at once he expanded on this original plan. By June 1889 he had completed the Offertoire, which now comes after the first movement. And he decided to make use, just before the end, of a Libera me for baritone and organ that he had composed as early as 1877 (this brings in the one brief passage that recalls the dramatic “Dies irae” of the full Requiem text). This version, complete in its number of movements and with an orchestra enlarged to include horns, trumpets, and trombones, was performed at the Church of Saint-Gervais on January 28, 1892. The third and last version (and the first to be published) involved the addition of woodwind parts and the reduction of the prominence of the organ; it has become the standard version of the work, though the first version was published and recorded within the last decade.

Even in its largest version, Fauré’s Requiem is a singularly tranquil and subdued piece, a work almost of classical elegance - not in terms of musical style, but in its extraordinary serenity and restraint. The chorus, for much of its part, sings in a chantlike manner with only a few outbursts (“Hosanna” in the Sanctus). One would be hard put to think of music more sweetly tranquil and serene than the Pie Jesu or more graceful than the unison violins and violas--so similar in character to the ritornello of a Bach cantata aria--introducing and underlying the Agnus Dei. Only once, and very briefly at that, are we reminded of the fear of death that was the central image of other Requiem settings as the somber D minor tread of the strings underlies the baritone’s Libera me and the horns (but not the trumpets!) provide a nervous rhythmic background to the choral “Dies illa, dies irae”(the only explicit evocation of the Last Judgment in the score, and which flows, almost without break, into the delicate tranquility of the In Paradisum, where the harps and organ add a touch of celestial brilliance to the quiet close.)

INTROITUS AND KYRIE

OFFERTOIRE (baritone solo)

SANCTUS

PIE JESU (soprano solo)

AGNUS DEI

LIBERA ME (baritone solo)

IN PARADISUM

César Franck

Psalm 150, op., for chorus, organ, and orchestra

César Franck was born in Liège, Belgium, on December 10, 1822, and died in Paris on November 8, 1890. He composed his Psalm 150 in 1883. The work calls for a mixed chorus in four parts, pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, cymbals, harp, organ, and strings. Duration is about 6 minutes.

César Franck spent most of his long life as a distinguished teacher of a group of unusually devoted (indeed, almost idolatrous) pupils and as one of the leading organists in France, the years-long incumbent at the organ bench of Ste. Clotilde in Paris. He was also constantly involved in composition, though the works by which we remember him came, almost without exception, from the last 10 or 15 years of his life. These include the Piano Quintet in F minor (1878‑9), the symphonic poems Le chasseur maudit (1882) and Les Djinns (1884), the Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra (1885), the Violin Sonata (1886), the Prelude, Aria, and Finale for piano (1886‑7), the D-minor symphony (1886‑8), the string quartet (1889), and the three chorales for organ (1890). Of the rest of his music, little is performed much these days—especially not the grandiose Biblical oratorios in which he put so much stock and which played a large part in earning him the nickname of pater seraphicus (“seraphic father”):  Ruth (1843‑6, revised 1871), Rédemption (1874 in its final version), Les béatitudes (1869‑79), and Rébecca (1880‑81).  For the most part, religious music in France at this period was filled with cloying sentimental harmonies and avoided the contrapuntal backbone that would firm up the structure of a piece. And Franck’s strength, in any case, was not in the theater. The most successful oratorios of his day were almost operatic, creating strong characters representing sin and redemption or salvation to provide a welcome contrast to both performer and listener. But Franck, the “seraphic father,” simply didn’t express the negative aspects of this mortal coil to allow the positive aspects to bring forth a strong contrasting glow of heavenly beauty.

In Franck’s setting, the chorus seems to arrive in a kind of subdued march, from a distance, uttering their repeated cries of “Hallelujah.” The dotted rhythm that marks this march runs more or less throughout the short piece as Franck alternates two essential ideas for the chorus: a broadly flowing melody heard in one voice part (basses the first time) for the opening (“O praise the Lord, hidden in his holy place”) with a lively, almost chattering effect of the four choral parts entering one after another with the words (in French) “Praise him with the voice of the ringing trumpet.” The Hallelujas return with full-throated energy to close the piece.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)