CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
THIS CONCERT HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Deborah Voigt: Let it Snow!

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Deborah Voigt, Soprano
Orchestra of St. Luke's
Patrick Summers, Conductor
Oratorio Society of New York
Kent Tritle, Music Director

Program Notes:

To put listeners in a festive mood, there are few composers to beat Handel, and we begin tonight with a late masterpiece, composed when its creator was 63: his English oratorio Solomon, a work about a golden age that his listeners would surely have construed as an idealization of Georgian England. This monumental oratorio depicts the three highpoints of the Biblical monarch’s life: the construction of the temple, the famous judgment of Solomon, and the visit of the Queen of Sheba, stopping tactfully short before the revelations of licentiousness that might prompt comparisons to George II and the oppressive taxation that funded his lavish court entertainments. The Cecil B. DeMille sumptuousness of Solomon’s court prompted Handel to call for properly imperial performing forces: “Above one Hundred Voices and Performers,” he wrote, would be required. Always prone to artful borrowing, Handel availed himself of parts of Giovanni Porta’s opera Numitore of 1720, a concerto by Georg Philipp Telemann, and a keyboard gigue by Georg Muffat for the “Sinfonia,” later dubbed “Entrance of the Queen of Sheba,” at the beginning of the third act. The effervescent fizz of this joyous work can only be matched by the very best Champagne.

It would not be Christmas without Handel’s Messiah, and tonight we hear four numbers from this immortal work, beginning with the first air from the Third Part, “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.” How ironic that its text compiler did not, at one time, think all that highly of the work: “I shall show you,” Charles Jennens wrote to Edward Holdsworth, “a collection I gave Handel, call’d Messiah, which I value highly, & he has made a fine Entertainment of it, tho’ not near so good as he might & ought to have done.” To give him credit, Jennens had to admit shortly thereafter that “’Tis after all, in the main, a fine composition” (although that did not prevent him from making trenchant suggestions for emendation), and audiences ever since have agreed. The first performance of Messiah took place at the New Musick-Hall in Dublin’s Fishamble Street on April 13, 1742, in aid of three Dublin charities; in order to squeeze in as many people as possible (about 700 attended), the stewards of the charitable society requested “the Favour of the Ladies not to come with Hoops” and the gentleman “to come without their Swords.” It was not until 1750 that regular performances of this oratorio became a regular feature of his Lenten oratorio season at Covent Garden. The text of the beloved soprano air, “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth,” comes from Job 19: 25–26 and I Corinthians 15: 20 and is, like all of Part 3, commentary mainly on the theme of resurrection.

John Jacob Niles was one of the 20th century’s most notable collectors of American folk songs and was influential in the folk music revival of the 1950s and ’60s. Niles studied music in France at the Schola Cantorum and composed songs, many of them based on traditional sources; the haunting song, “I Wonder As I Wander,” has its origins in a fragment of a song collected on July 16, 1933 in Murphy, North Carolina. A young girl named Annie Morgan sang only a single line (or two or three—Niles’s accounts change from one recollection to the next), which Niles then expanded and published in Songs of the Hill Folk in 1934. The lovely alliteration of “wonder-wander” frames this plaintive meditation about how “Jesus the Savior did come for to die” on either side.

Baron Gottfried van Swieten (1733-1803) was the prefect of Vienna’s Imperial Library (he was the first to institute a card catalogue) and a music lover obsessed with Bach and Handel; he shared the Bach manuscripts he had collected in Berlin with his friend Mozart. In 1780, van Swieten assembled a number of wealthy patrons who called themselves the Gesellschaft der Associierten, and it was for their private concerts that Mozart re-orchestrated Messiah in 1789; he had already rescored Handel’s Acis and Galatea the year before and would do the same to the Ode for Saint Cecilia’s Day and Alexander’s Feast the year after. When Handel went to Dublin in 1741, he might have been unsure what orchestral resources would be available and therefore kept matters simple. The calculated sobriety of the original scoring would have seemed very plain to the Viennese of Mozart’s day, and therefore Baron van Swieten asked him to make the scoring richer and more colorful. Mozart accordingly added a hearty complement of brass and woodwinds, in part to make up for the missing continuo organ in the houses where the Mozart version was performed. For the lovely “Pifa,” a “pastoral symphony” that follows the chorus “For unto us a Child is born” in the first part of Messiah (the Nativity portion), Mozart called on piccolo, flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, and muted strings to give this gentle interlude its distinctive timbre.

Handel’s librettist for Messiah took the text of the beloved aria, “Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion,” from the Old Testament book attributed to the prophet Zechariah (the name means “God has remembered”), whose ministry circa 520–518 BC took place during the reign of Darius the Great, after the fall of Jerusalem in 586; the ninth through the eleventh chapters are an “oracle” outlining God’s providential plans for his people to the time of the Messiah’s coming. This is, like many of Handel’s arias, a three-part form (da capo aria) in which the same music frames an internal section that is often of contrasting character: the frothing, foaming, bubbly, and irresistible rejoicing of the outer wings encloses a heartfelt meditation on “peace unto the heathen” in the interior. And how better to reinforce the message of “the gospel of peace” than with the exquisite aria, “How Beautiful Are the Feet” from the second part of Messiah? Jennens took this text from the Pauline Book of Romans, most likely written between 56 and 58 AD, perhaps dictated to a man named Tertius during Paul’s third missionary journey from Corinth. This lyrical air, with its gentle, dance-like lilt, has been bringing “glad tidings of good things” to audiences for more than two-and-a-half centuries.

“O Holy Night” (Cantique de Noël)” is a carol composed in 1847 by the French composer Adolphe Charles Adam—he composed the popular ballets Giselle and Le corsaire in 1844 and 1856, respectively—to the French poem “Minuit, chrétiens” (or “Cantique de Noel”), by a wine merchant and poet named Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure, friend of Alphonse Daudet and Frédéric Mistral. Because Cappeau was a man of socialist, republican, and anti-clerical views, and because Adam was a Jew, the song was for a time denounced by the French Catholic church as unfit for services because of its “total absence of the spirit of religion.” An American Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight, editor of Dwight’s Journal of Music and an ardent abolitionist, was drawn to the French carol because of the sentiments in Cappeau’s third verse: “Truly he taught us to love one another; his law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name, all oppression shall cease.” In 1855 Dwight published an English translation, “O Holy Night,” in support of his views regarding slavery in the South, and it quickly found favor, especially in the North during the Civil War. According to one anecdote, it was sung by a French soldier on Christmas Eve 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War, with a German infantryman responding by singing “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her.” One hopes the lovely tale is true.

The late-Romantic Bavarian composer Max Reger was of Roman Catholic peasant and artisan stock and was first trained in music by his father, a passionate amateur musician who played the oboe, clarinet, and double bass. His earliest harmonic experiments were on a discarded school organ that he and his father rebuilt, and his subsequent music was influenced by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, whatever the undeniable presence of Wagner in the room. In 1902, he married Elsa von Bercken; unable to have children of their own, they adopted two orphans, and some of the 60 songs in the Op. 76 Schlichte Weisen (Simple Melodies) are expressions of Reger’s love for all children, including the tender “Mariä Wiegenlied.” This song is the first of Neun Kinderlieder (Nine Children’s Songs) within the Schlichte Weisen, and the heading is “From Christa’s and Lotti’s childhood.” For all the song’s simplicity (far more than Reger’s usual wont), there are downright ravishing harmonic shifts when the summer breezes blow through the leaves and when the Virgin bids the Child, “Lay your weary little head on your mother’s breast.”

As Schubert originally conceived it in April 1825, “Ave Maria” belongs to his group of “Ellen songs,” inset songs in Sir Walter Scott’s immensely popular narrative poem, The Lady of the Lake. As the Highlands chieftain Roderick Dhu summons his clansmen to defend their land against the English king’s forces, Ellen prays to the Virgin in the last pages of Canto III. In a letter to his father and stepmother written from Steyr on July 25, 1825, Schubert wrote of this song, “It seems to touch all hearts and inspires a feeling of devotion. I believe the reason is that I never force myself to be devout and never compose hymns or prayers of that sort except when the mood takes me, but then it is usually the right and true devotion.” Entire treatises on melody could be derived from the perfection of Schubert’s melodic design in this beloved “chestnut” of a song.

Leroy Anderson had the original idea for “Sleigh Ride” during a heat wave in July 1946; he completed the work in February 1948, with lyrics provided by Mitchell Parish in 1950. Leroy Anderson has been described by John Williams as “one of the great American masters of light orchestral music”; he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1988. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Swedish parents, he studied at Harvard before coming to the attention of Arthur Fiedler in 1936. Anderson’s “Blue Tango” was the first instrumental recording to sell one million copies, and he became a regularly featured composer with the Boston Pops. Anderson’s evocation of jingling harness, horses’ hooves, and whips cracking in the midst of an exuberant melody and occasional jazzy accents is an irresistible Christmas tradition.

“Toyland” comes from Victor’s Herbert’s enchanting 1903 operetta, Babes in Toyland, which contains some of Herbert’s most famous songs. The creators wanted to imitate the success of The Wizard of Oz, produced on Broadway in January 1903 by the same producer and director. The characters include the orphans Alan and Jane, Jack and Jill, Bo-Peep, Contrary Mary, the Rag Doll, Santa Claus, and Inspector Marmaduke, among others. “Toyland” comes from Act II and was originally sung by Tom Tom the Piper’s son and a male chorus. “Snow” comes from the classic movie musical White Christmas of 1854, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen; this celebration of the frozen accessory to any proper Christmas occurs early in the film when the producers Phil and Bob (Kaye and Crosby) are about to go with Betty and Judy (Clooney and Vera-Ellen) to the Columbia Inn in Pine Tree, Vermont, run by the guys’ former commanding officer, Major General Tom Waverly.

“I’m Gonna Be an Angel” comes from Broadway’s longest-running music and lyric team, John Kander and Fred Ebb, both native New Yorkers and famous for Cabaret, Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and more, while “Santa Baby” is a deliciously tongue-in-cheek Christmas list sung by a woman who really wants very little for Christmas: yachts, decorations from Tiffany’s, sables ... just a few small things. A huge hit for Eartha Kitt when it first appeared in 1953, the song subsequently became a vehicle for the immortal Miss Piggy, the Pussycat Dolls, and Madonna, to name just a few; it was also featured in the film Driving Miss Daisy in 1989.

Many of Jerry Herman’s show tunes from Hello, Dolly!, Mame, La cage aux folles, and others, have become pop standards; he is the first composer-lyricist to have three musicals run on Broadway for more than 1,500 performances and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1982. “We Need a Little Christmas” comes from Mame (1966), with a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (no relation to the Confederate leader) based on the novel Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis. Angela Lansbury starred as the exuberant Mame, the embodiment of joie de vivre and the first woman in “tony” riding circles in the Deep South to bring the fox back alive. When times seem desperate, she proclaims instant Christmas, although it is actually early December: “We Need a Little Christmas, ” she declares. If listeners haven’t yet “hauled out the holly” and “sliced up the fruitcake,” they might be inspired to do so by this song.

“Let It Snow! ” was written by the lyricist Sammy Cahn and the composer Jule Styne in 1945 and became a huge popular hit: No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 1946 and one of the best-selling songs of all time. Styne, born in London to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, began his long musical life as a child prodigy performing with the Chicago, Saint Louis, and Detroit symphonies before he was 10 years old. When Mike Todd commissioned him to write a song for a musical act he was in the process of creating, Styne embarked on an illustrious career as a composer of more than 1,500 songs for musicals, movies, and dance bands (including his own). His shows include Bells Are Ringing, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Gypsy, and Funny Girl. He was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972 and the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981 and was also a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1990. His lyricist for this song was Sammy Cahn, born Samuel Cohen in the Lower East Side of New York to Jewish immigrants from Poland; he received more Oscar nominations than any other songwriter (26 in all) and won four of them.

The great jazz singer, actor, and composer Mel Tormé preferred the nickname “The Blue Fox” to the more endemic “The Velvet Fog”: It Wasn’t All Velvet is the title of his 1988 autobiography. Born to Russian Jewish parents in Chicago, he was a child prodigy; until a stroke in 1996, he was seldom far from musical view. “The Christmas Song, ” or “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” was first recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946; Tormé once said that he wrote the music to the song (one of about 250 in total) in only 40 minutes and that it was not one of his personal favorites ... but it is one of ours.

In Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Judy Garland’s character Esther sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to her five-year-old sister Tootie, played by Margaret O’Brien. When Garland and Vincente Minnelli first saw the song, they criticized it as depressing and exerted pressure on Hugh Martin to make the song more upbeat; the original lines, “It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past” became the familiar “Let your heart be light,/ Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” In 1957 Frank Sinatra instigated another change to the lyrics, replacing “Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” with the new line, “Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” The creation of this perennial favorite has always been credited to the team of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane; Blane, born Ralph Uriah Hunsecker in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, began his career as a radio singer for NBC in the 1930s before turning to Broadway, while Martin, born in Birmingham, Alabama, was a close friend of Judy Garland’s. In a 2006 NPR interview, Martin said that Blane had encouraged him to write “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” but did not have anything more to do with its actual composition.

For anyone feeling a trifle dyspeptic about Christmas (and who doesn’t, every now and then?), for anyone who has ever quarreled with his or her sweetheart (and who hasn’t?), Frederick Silver’s “The Twelve Days After Christmas” is the perfect prescription. In the wake of a fight with her boyfriend, a woman who is both vengeful and resourceful concocts various ways to destroy or get rid of her “true love’s” gifts: she shoots the partridge, chops down and burns the pear tree, wrings the turtle doves’ necks, turns the three French hens into chicken soup, gives the gaggle of geese to the ASPCA, and sends all (well, almost all) of the assorted people back by collect mail. And finally, we close with “The Christmas Festival” by Leroy Anderson: an arrangement of “Joy to the World,” “The Yuletide Carol,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Old King Wenceslas,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Silent Night,” “Jingle Bells,” and ending back at “Joy to the World.” The world could use a little more joy, come to think of it.

—Susan Youens

© 2008 The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Deborah Voigt, Soprano
“Arguably the leading dramatic soprano singing today” (New York Times), Deborah Voigt has starred in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin and in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Egyptian Helen, Elektra, Rosenkavalier, and Salome.

Ms. Voigt opened the 2008–2009 season at the Metropolitan Opera, singing the title role in Ponchielli’s La gioconda (her role debut); soon afterward she hosted the broadcast of Salome for the Met’s Live in HD series. Other US opera engagements this season include her Lyric Opera of Chicago debut as Isolde under Sir Andrew Davis, beginning in January, as well as tonight’s concert of popular and traditional Christmas and holiday music.

Ms. Voigt’s engagements abroad include appearances in Fidelio with the Vienna State Opera on tour in Japan, and in Salome, which she will perform for the first time in Europe with the company in Vienna. She will also perform Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Opéra National de Paris, Bastille, and early next summer gives London audiences her first local performances as Puccini’s Tosca at the Royal Opera House. In June, she will also perform a concert of opera arias by Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Highlights of last season included Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera (including an international Met: Live in HD transmission), the Empress in Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the scene of her triumph the previous season in her first staged performances as Salome.

Ms. Voigt has received accolades in such Italian roles as Amelia, Aida, Lady Macbeth, Tosca, and Leonora (in both La forza del destino and Il trovatore), and as Cassandre in Berlioz’s Les Troyens. Her discography of complete operas ranges from Tristan und Isolde to Les Troyens and Die Frau ohne Schatten. Her solo discs for EMI Classics are All My Hear, featuring songs by American composers, and the best-selling Obsessions, with arias and scenes by Wagner and Strauss.

Ms. Voigt’s numerous awards and honors include first prizes in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition and Philadelphia’s Luciano Pavarotti International Voice Competition, and France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She was Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year in 2003 and received a 2007 Opera News Award for distinguished achievement in the art form.

Orchestra of St. Luke's
Patrick Summers, Conductor

Oratorio Society of New York
Kent Tritle, Music Director