A WINDOW ON THE WORLD OF MYSTICS, VISIONARIES
AND SEERS
Tuesday May 11, 2010
Wednesday 12, 2010
Programme Notes
by Andrea Budgey
Andrew Ager: From The Rubáiyát, poetry by Omar Kayyám
Benjamin Britten: Les Illuminations, poetry by Arthur Rimbaud
Gerald Finzi: Dies Natalis, poetry by Thomas Traherne
Harry Freedman: Poèmes de Jacques Prévert
The "mystics, visionaries, and seers" of this programme's subtitle are an extraordinarily varied group: a 20th-century surrealist poet, a 19th-century French Symbolist poet, a 17th-century English divine, and an 11th-century Persian philosopher (mediated through a Victorian paraphrase). But they all explore, in their different ways, the interface between the ethereal and the corporeal, the entwining of spirit and body in human consciousness and beyond.
Jacques Prévert has been called a realist, a surrealist and an anarchist – and also one of the most beloved poets of his time. He sought to understand the human condition through gentle humour and deceptively simple language. Arthur Rimbaud, on the other hand, was an enfant terrible of the Symbolist movement, whose sense of alienation from the “ordinary” world extended eventually to his poetic milieu as well – he abandoned poetry at the age of 21, and spent the rest of his short life as a traveller and trader. Nevertheless, his work has been extremely influential throughout the 20th century, not only in literature, but in music and art as well.
Thomas Traherne appears to have lived a quiet life as an Anglican cleric and house-chaplain, but both his poetry and his theology are adventurous and expansive; his life-long fascination with the innocence and wonder – almost the divinity – of childhood would have found itself much at odds with the prevailing doctrine of original sin.
Omar Khayyám is best known in Persian tradition as a mathematician and astronomer, while the West knows him primarily through Edmund Fitzgerald’s re-interpretations of his poetry. He has been variously described: he is identified, at one extreme, as an agnostic rationalist (and hedonist), and at the other, as a Sufi mystic. His own religious writings reveal a spirit of orthodoxy, tinged with a preference for experiencing the Divine through “unknowing”, rather than through any cognitive apprehension.
Andrew Ager (1962- ): From The Rubáiyát (2004), arr. Juliet Hess (2010)
Andrew Ager is currently the music director of Saint James' Cathedral in Toronto. His orchestral and chamber works have been performed abroad, at such venues as Winchester Cathedral, the Ajijic Festival in Mexico, and the Klangfrühling Music Festival in Austria.
From the Rubáiyát (first heard in a Talisker Players programme of 2004 in a version which included horn) is a setting of selections from the Victorian poet Edmund Fitzgerald’s loose translation of quatrains attributed to the Persian philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), on the subjects of love and fate. Fitzgerald produced five editions of the work, and Ager has chosen extracts from the fifth edition of 1889.
The texture throughout the single-movement work is richly orchestral; the instrumental ensemble supports and connects the contrasting moods of the quatrains. An introduction dominated by passages of paired sixteenth-notes sets stanzas 31 and 32, from the middle of the text, leading into a marked rhythmic declamation of Fitzgerald’s dramatic opening, “Wake! Wake!” A gentler section in triple metre sets stanzas 21-24, a meditation on life’s brevity and the inevitability of death. The animated finale of the work registers a protest against the end of youth and decay of beauty, pleading that “some wingèd Angel” might alter the course of destiny (Fitzgerald’s stanzas 96 and 98, taken from near the close of the translation). A brief instrumental postlude recalls the figures of the opening, before tapering off in hushed resignation.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Les Illuminations, Op 18 (1939)
Britten left England from early 1939 until 1942, in part because he believed the British cultural climate of the time to be hostile to artistic expression. He composed Les Illuminations shortly after he arrived in North America, having been introduced to Rimbaud's prose poems (probably by W.H. Auden) before his departure. It is more than likely that the intense alienation which pervades the poetry found an echo in Britten's own sense of displacement: he chose the line J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”) as a unifying element in the cycle of selected poems, reflecting Rimbaud's conviction that it is the artist as “outsider” who alone can make sense of life's “savage parade” of artificiality, chaos, and irrational beauty. The line appears three times, in the opening Fanfare, in the Interlude, and in Parade, its original source.
After Fanfare, which introduces the range of musical contrasts to be exploited in the cycle, Villes presents a disturbing snapshot of the urban “parade”. Britten wrote to Sophie Wyss, the soprano who premiered the work,
This poem, I believe, was written in London and certainly is a very good impression of the chaotic modern city life... I want it sung in a metallic and relentless fashion with the exclamation: “Ce sont des villes!” somewhat sarcastically sung...
Phrase is ethereal, with a high pianissimo vocal line; it is paired with Antique, a dance-like lyric whose apparent triadic simplicity is subtly undermined by genteel metrical discepancies between the voice and the strings.
Royauté was described by the composer as “pompous and satirical” – a caricature of human grandiosity – and in Marine, the instability of human experience is accentuated by the wave figures in the accompaniment, depicting the agitation of nature itself. After the relative calm of Interlude comes Being Beauteous, which Britten dedicated to his partner Peter Pears. It evokes a certain lyrical purity, with gentle but insistent chords, clear triads, and a bel canto melody – and only occasional shadows – but the “savagery” returns in Parade. Britten described this movement to Sophie Wyss as “a picture of the underworld. It should be made to sound creepy, evil, dirty (apologies!), and really desperate.”
The final movement, Départ, at first to echos the expansive tone of Being Beauteous, but ultimately ends the cycle on a note of resignation – or acceptance.
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956): Dies Natalis, Op. 8 (1940)
Dies Natalis is a setting of four lyrics (with an instrumental introduction) by the poet Thomas Traherne (1637-1674), a figure about whose life very little was known until the present century. He is usually associated with the Metaphysical poets, although he seems to have lived a retired life as a cleric, without much contact with the other poets of his period. Much of his work reflects on the ecstasies of childhood, and the affinity of children for the natural world. By the time Dies Natalis was first performed in January of 1940, after the outbreak of World War II caused the cancellation of the 1939 Three Choirs Festival, Finzi had worked on the cycle over a period of almost two decades, and the result is a finely crafted union of text and music.
Dies Natalis is sometimes referred to as a Christmas cantata, and Traherne's text can be read to refer to the Incarnation of Christ. But its wider theme is the entry into the world of any child, and its words are a translation into adult language of a newborn's reponse of wonderment at the beauty and goodness of the world: “I was a stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys: my knowledge was divine.” The five movements of the work include contrasts of tempo, metre, and tonality, but present an extraordinary overall unity of sweeping, long-breathed lines and rich instrumental textures, which support and accompany and interact with the text. The vocal line sets the poetry with remarkable flexibility and naturalism, using a style which shifts fluidly and almost imperceptibly between declamatory recitative and arioso lyricism.
Harry Freedman (1922-2005): Poèmes de Jacques Prévert (1962/1997)
Harry Freedman was one of Canada's most frequently performed composers. He wrote some 175 compositions, including three symphonies, nine ballets, two hour-long stage works, as well as numerous works for orchestra, choir, chamber groups, and much incidental music for stage, television and film. He was a founding member of the Canadian League of Composers (President from 1975 to 1978), and in 1984 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
He was drawn to the poetry of Jacques Prévert early in life. The Poèmes, originally for voice and string orchestra, were composed for the soprano Ilona Kombrink in 1962. Other versions have included arrangements for voice and piano, and the present arrangement for voice and string quartet dates from 1997. The full set includes three poems, of which two will be performed on this programme – both of them characterized by absurdist sleight-of-hand touches which transform symbols into unpredictable actualities, and turn the 'real' world on its ear.