I know, I know, I know. Long time, not much content. In my defense, though:
This can only mean one thing: I’m writing my ass off, getting the first draft of Orion’s Huntress done. Above is a screenshot from the Session Statistics tool that Scrivener (my main writing program these days) gives. For me, anything over 2000 words is a big day, and I’ve been averaging 1500 or so a day for the last week and a half. I’m close, folks. I am so close!
So what does this mean for Tone Poem Tuesday? A piece of familiar music that doesn’t need a lot of introduction? Why, yes! So turn up your speakers and watch the pretty people in Egyptian dress as they perform the Triumphal March from Verdi’s Aida.
After this draft is done I won’t be doing any first-draft writing for a long time as I have a bunch of manuscripts that need first mark-ups, so hopefully I’ll settle into a more consistent schedule here. Meanwhile…Excelsior!
Not a tone poem this week, but an actual symphony, one written originally for a very large wind band for an outdoor ceremonial purpose by Hector Berlioz. This work, called the Grande symphonie funebre et triomphale, was actually one of Berlioz’s most popular works during his lifetime, although like everything he else he wrote that wasn’t the Symphonie fantastique, it languished out of the repertoire for many years after his death. The symphony consists of three movements: a funeral march, followed by a “funeral oration” (including a lyrical part for a solo trombone), and then a triumphal march which Berlioz later edited to include optional strings and chorus. While there is no connection between this work and the Cathedral of Notre Dame, it seems to me that this work suits the mood surrounding yesterday’s disaster at that great building: grief, and mourning, and the certainty that the building will rise again as it has more than a few times in its 800-year history.
Sorry for the late posting, but geez, I’m having a busy bunch of days here. Wowza.
Anyway, here’s an old favorite of mine. I haven’t heard a lot of Edward Elgar’s music, but whenever I listen to him I come away thinking I need to listen to him a lot more. Elgar wrote this piece while spending several months in the Italian Riviera with his family. I don’t know the first thing about the Italian Riviera, but in this piece I hear adventure and wistful remembrance and drama and excitement. This concert overture reminds me of the very best film music from that form’s Golden Age, and for me, that is a compliment.
Here is “Alassio (In the South)”, by Sir Edward Elgar.
I am really stretching the idea of a “tone poem” with today’s selection, because what we have today is not an orchestral piece at all but rather a choral one, with much of it being a capella (there’s a piano at one point). I heard part of this work whilst driving home the other day and I just had to share it here, where it sort-of ties in to April being National Poetry Month. American composer Morten Lauridsen set five poems by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, each of which deals with the subject of a rose. Lauridsen–who was a forest ranger and firefighter before he turned to music–has this to say about this piece:
In addition to his vast output of German poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) composed nearly 400 poems in French. His poems on roses struck me as especially charming, filled with gorgeous lyricism, deftly crafted and elegant in their imagery. These exquisite poems are primarily light, joyous and playful, and the musical settings are designed to enhance these characteristics and capture the delicate beauty and sensuousness of the poetry. Distinct melodic and harmonic materials recur throughout the cycle, especially between Rilke’s poignant “Contre qui, rose” (set as a wistful nocturne) and his moving “La rose complète.” The final piece, “Dirait-on,” is composed as a tuneful chanson populaire, or folksong, that weaves together two melodic ideas first heard in fragmentary form in preceding movements.
Lauridsen’s composition is deeply intimate and full of harmonic resolution; modern dissonance has no place here. The music is almost luminous at times.
Here is the text of one of Rilke’s rose poems (he apparently wrote more than five, so how Lauridsen chose which ones to set, I don’t know), as sourced from poetry blogger Clarissa Ackroyd.
THE ROSES (Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from French by Clarissa Aykroyd)
VI
One rose alone is every rose,
one, but manifold meaning:
perfect and irreplaceable,
framed by words of being.
How could we ever speak
without the rose,
of sweet interludes in constant farewell,
or of our hopes?
(Original French)
VI
Une rose seule, c’est toutes les roses
et celle-ci: l’irremplaçable,
le parfait, le souple vocable
encadré par le texte des choses.
Comment jamais dire sans elle
ce que furent nos espérances,
et les tendres intermittences
dans la partance continuelle.
Here is Les chansons des roses by Morten Lauridsen.
I heard this work on the radio this past Sunday, and I made a note to look up what it was. Sadly I didn’t remember to do that until Monday, when St. Patrick’s Day was already over, because it turns out to be In Ireland, a rhapsody for flute, harp, and orchestra by Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty. Harty was an Irish composer who wrote in the post-Romantic vein, but he had the misfortune to live in a time when Romanticism was well and truly a thing of the past, so as Modernism was taking hold, composers like Harty were often forgotten. This is a pity, because his music is dramatic and picturesque. Not everything can be remembered, but not everything deserves to be forgotten, either.
Time for something of a musical homecoming. I’ll be featuring the music of Hector Berlioz a lot over the next few months, as we’ve just past the 150th anniversary of his passing after a 65-year life of struggle and hardship that was too rarely punctuated by triumph. Nevertheless Berlioz produced some of the most remarkable music of the 19th century, music that took well into the 20th century to find its greatest appreciation. And that appreciation is only growing as Berlioz grows in esteem.
Here we have one of the earliest works of his to survive. Berlioz was highly self-critical and thought nothing of destroying early works if he later judged them wanting; thus we actually know little of his most youthful work. This concert overture, based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley, bursts with youthful exuberance and energy, especially in the thrilling allegro section that follows the score’s lyric portion. Scott wrote picturesque novels of adventure and intrigue, and Berlioz tries to capture some of that here. He’s not entirely successful, and the Waverley overture has its awkward moments like many of Berlioz’s works to come. But one can already hear the orchestrally-focused imagination at work, as Berlioz’s was a musical mind unfettered by training on the piano. What wonders would come later, once Berlioz had discovered Shakespeare and Byron and Beethoven!
An old favorite returns. This work is the kind of thing I return to when I need the world to slow down, when I need to recall that there is room in this world we’ve built for quiet moments and serene thoughts.
Here is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. Vaughan Williams called the work a “romance”, and that fits. What always captivates me about this piece is the way it doesn’t so much begin as arise. A sequence of soft chords sounds in the orchestra before the solo violin begins to emerge with a series of figures that seem almost to flutter. The Lark Ascending is a meditative song that returns the world to a better speed.
I imagine I’ve featured this work before, but that’s what’s great about classical music: You can keep coming back to it! Sir Edward Elgar composed this concert overture, “Cockaigne (In London Town),” in fulfillment of a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The resulting work proved to be one of Elgar’s most popular works, a programmatic depiction of the typical kinds of scenes of Edwardian London, from the bustling workers all the way up to the nobles on procession. The piece starts off rather quietly, but by the end it’s full on Elgarian pomp and pageantry. Here is Elgar’s overture “Cockaigne (In London Town).” Sir Adrian Boult, one of the finest conductors of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, leads the London Philharmonic.
Jacques Offenbach might well have been the French equivalent of Franz von Suppe and, later on, Vienna’s Strauss family in that he wrote a great deal of very pleasing music of high energy which was often infused with the rhythms and vibrancy of the dance. His most famous work is likely his operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, a scintillating operetta indeed whose tuneful and wonderfully sparkling overture is full of singing melodies that culminate in one of the most famous melodies of all time, the brassy Can-can. Here is that very overture, performed quite wonderfully by a youth orchestra I had never heard of before, the Gimnazija Kranj Symphony Orchestra. They have a lot of neat performances available on YouTube, quite a few of which I recommend seeking out.
