Tuesday and Wednesday, May 5 & 6, 2009
ballads, legends and folk songs from ancient times, heard through modern ears.
Programme Notes
by Andrea Budgey
Lucian Berio: Folk Songs
Alexander Rapoport: The Pilgrimage of Henry Pyne
R. Murray Schafer: Minnelieder
Save for the malleable evidence of human memory, and the incomplete traces of written and recorded history, the past and its traditions are largely inaccessible to us, our perceptions ineluctably coloured by our own preoccupations and preconceptions. What our grasp of the past lacks in accuracy, however, it more than makes up for in tenacious fascination – the very remoteness of bygone ages makes them a fertile ground for imaginative reinterpretation, and entire cultural industries are based on the human impulse to retell and reshape the past in our own image – or at least in a readily digestible and comprehensible form.
The works on this evening's programme engage with the traditions of the past – those of literature and those of “folk” music – in an altogether different way, acknowledging their alterity, and exploring them from a consciously detached and sophisticated perspective. No attempt is made, in any of these pieces, to create a pastiche of the forms or styles of the past; such “imitation” as there may be is explicit, and even ironic. The “backward glance” is a circumscribed gaze through veils of genre and instrumentation and tonality, and, in each case, the composer introduces additional layers of observational distance by means of reference to other, earlier “re-interpreters”.
Luciano Berio (1925-2003): Folk Songs (1946-1964) for mezzo soprano, flute, clarinet, viola, cello, harp and percussion
Written for the extraordinary American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, Berio's Folk songs are a remarkable assortment of tradition and faux-tradition, all reinterpreted in a broad range of instrumental colours, with rhythmic and chromatic complexities which are sometimes ornamental and sometimes structural, but which were certainly seen in 1964 as a break with the more outrageously experimental idiom of the composer's recent work.
The two American songs were published by the “collector” John Jacob Niles, but are now generally thought to have been composed by him; two of the Italian songs, La donna ideale and Il Ballo, were originally composed by Berio in the late 1940s in a more straightforwardly traditional style – in the later setting, like the American songs, they represent a reworking of something already a step removed from any “authentic” evocation of the past. The remaining songs are drawn from France, the Auvergne, Sicily, Sardinia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, from sources of varying accuracy, the collectors having been motivated in differing degrees by nationalism, romanticism, and nostalgia. The tune and text of the final song, identified only as Azerbaijan Love Song, were transcribed by Berberian from a 78-rpm recording, and the translation must be described as tentative, since Berberian had no knowledge of the language she was attempting to reproduce (a combination of Azeri and Russian). The setting of a borrowed tune and text, by a composer and performer who could not know their original meaning – either literal or cultural – is somehow characteristic of the perspective of the entire work. A note on the score states that “These eleven songs constitute a unity; therefore, any interruption between them must be avoided” – the unity in question is one which only a modern, cosmopolitan audience could be expected to recognize.
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Alexander Rapoport (1957- ): The Pilgrimage of Henry Pyne (2009) for mezzo soprano, flute, viola, bassoon, and harp
A work commissioned for this performance, The Pilgrimage of Henry Pyne is a reworking in miniature of the legend of the 13th-century German Minnesinger Heinrich Tannhäuser, and a tribute to Wagner's opera on the same theme. Rapoport has written
Why in the world would I want to take up the Tannhäuser story, inviting comparison with an immortal masterpiece? I have two answers. In the first place, I consider Henry Pyne to be not only about Tannhäuser but also about my love for Wagner’s music. It is an unabashed homage, and I make use of many techniques of composition which he perfected, including leitmotiv and declamatory text setting.
Aside from the Wagnerian colouring of the legend, the composer has used a text in archaic, “post-Elizabethan”, English, thus creating a second distancing lens for his look at an ancient legend (“Henry Pyne” is a partial translation of Tannhäuser's name). The entire story is told through the utterances of three female characters, the virtuous village girl Bess (Elisabeth in the legend and the opera), Sybil (Venus), and an abbess, who takes the role of church authority occupied in the earlier version by Pope Urban. Without giving away the plot of the drama, it is safe to say that Rapoport presents a more unitive – and less tortured – understanding of the roles played by spiritual and physical love than either the medieval legend or Wagner's reinterpretation of it.
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R. Murray Schafer (1933- ): Minnelieder (1956) for voice and wind quintet
This cycle sets thirteen texts in Middle High German, from the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries (none of them attributed to Tannhäuser), and were composed at a time when Schafer was studying German in Vienna. He has said of the composition that it is “the first work I would regard as a useful contribution to music... I feel no less fondness for it, than I do for some of my other best pieces.”
Minne is the medieval German term for amour courtois, the unrequited chivalrous devotion to an unattainable love, often expressed through images from nature and daily life. Schafer has left the texts in the original language, but while some Minnesänger songs have survived with their original melodies, he makes no attempt to imitate or evoke the modal language of the Middle Ages. The unrequited passion of the poems is expressed in the variety of accompanimental figurations and instrumental colours (especially in the contrasting timbres of the various woodwinds and horn), and in flashes of chromatic intensity. Schafer biographer Stephen Adams has detected in these products of the composer's “Viennese period” the influence of that great reinterpreter and re-shaper of archaic and “folk” traditions into larger, contemporary forms, Gustav Mahler.