CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The MET Chamber Ensemble

Zankel Hall
Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 5:00 PM

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director and Conductor
Grazia Doronzio, Soprano
Kate Lindsey, Mezzo-Soprano

DALLAPICCOLA Tre poemi for Soprano and Chamber Orchestra
WAGNER Siegfried Idyll
DALLAPICCOLA Commiato for Soprano and Ensemble
J. STRAUSS "Rosen aus dem Süden," Op. 388 (arr. Schoenberg)
ELLIOTT CARTER In the Distances of Sleep
J. STRAUSS JR. "Kaiserwalzer," Op. 437 (arr. Schoenberg)

Carnegie Hall's celebration of Elliott Carter's centenary is funded, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program Notes:

LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA (1904–1975)
Tre Poemi

Like many inhabitants of Central Europe in the years before the First World War, the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola was exposed to several cultures, having been born and raised in Istria, a region then claimed by both Italy and Austria (and today part of Croatia). While interned by the Austrian government in Graz in 1917, Dallapiccola encountered the music of Mozart and Wagner. After the war’s end, he studied music in Trieste and Florence, initially planning a career as pianist, but a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire stimulated him to take up composition as well. In 1934, he visited Vienna, met Alban Berg, and studied the music of Schoenberg and Webern. He was the first Italian composer to take up the 12-tone technique.

During the Second World War, his strong anti-fascist sentiments made life difficult, but after the collapse of the Axis powers his politically oriented works—notably the Songs of Imprisonment (1938–1941) and the opera The Prisoner (1943–1948)—won wide attention. In the postwar years he remained quite prolific, and established ties with the United States, where he taught for a time at Queens College in New York.

The Tre poemi (Three Poems) for solo voice and chamber orchestra, setting texts by James Joyce, Michelangelo, and Manuel Machado, were completed in Venice on September 13, 1949, and first performed on March 13, 1950, at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, by the soprano Magda László; Hermann Scherchen conducted. The dedication in the score reads “to Arnold Schoenberg for his 75th birthday.”

The three elements of the Tre Poemi are from disparate sources. The first is from James Joyce’s small volume Pomes Penyeach, a copy of which Dallapiccola acquired in London in 1948; he set an Italian translation by his compatriot, the poet Eugenio Montale. The second is from the writings of Michelangelo and the third from the Spanish poet Manuel Machado (1874–1897), translated by Dallapiccola himself.


Texts and Translations

Tre Poemi

I.
Text: James Joyce (1882–1941)
Italian translation: Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)

Per un fiore dato alla mia bambina
Gracile rosa bianca e frali dita
di chi l’offerse, di lei
che ha l’anima più pallida e appassita
dell’onda scialba del tempo.

Fragile e bella come rosa, e ancora
più fragile la strana meraviglia
che veli ne’ tuoi occhi,
o mia azzurro-venata figlia.


A flower given to my daughter
Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rose frail and fair yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
my blueveined child.


II.
Text: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)

Chiunche nasce a morte arriva
Nel fuggir del tempo, e‘l sole
Niuna cosa lascia viva.

Manca il dolce e quel che dole
E gl’ingegni e le parole
E le nostre antiche prole,
Al sole ombre, al vento un fumo.

Come voi uomini fumo,
Lieti e tristi come siete;
Ed or siam, come vedete,
Terra al sol, di vita priva.

Ogni cosa a morte arriva.

Giá fur gli occhi nostri interi
Con la luce in ogni speco;
Or son voti orrendi e neri,
E ciò porta il tempo seco.


Everyone who is born arrives at death
Through time’s swift passage, and the sun
Leaves nothing alive.

They lack sweetness and what brings pain,
Man’s thoughts and words
And our ancient lineages are
Shadows to the sun, smoke to the wind.

Like you, we were men.
Happy and sad as you are;
But now, as you see, we are
Dust in the sun, smoke to the wind.

Everything arrives at death.

Once our eyes were fully formed
Shining in both sockets;
Now these are empty, horrible and black,
Such is the work of time.


III.
Text: Manuel Machado (1874–1897)
Italian translation: Luigi Dallapiccola

Figlio, per riposar,
Dormir.
Non pensar.
Non sentir.
Non sognar.

Madre, per riposar,
Morir.


Son, in order to rest,
Sleep.
Do not think.
Do not feel.
Do not dream.

Mother, in order to rest,
Die.


LUIGI DALLAPICCOLA
Commiato for soprano and chamber ensemble

The Tre Poemi (1949) stand at the beginning of Dallapiccola’s dodecaphonic period; the Commiato (1972), commissioned by the Steiermark Studio of the Austrian Radio, proved to be his final completed work.

Completed on July 6, 1972, Commiato was first performed the following October 15, at the Festsaal in Murau, a district in the Austrian state of Steiermark (Styria). Marjorie Wright was soprano soloist, with the Ensemble Kontrapunkte of Vienna directed by Peter Keuschnig. The work is dedicated to the memory of Harald Kaufmann, a friend of Dallapiccola’s from Graz, who had helped the composer to revive earlier contacts with people in that city.

Commiato is in 5 more or less continuous sections:

1. Impetuoso, ma non precipitato: wind and string chords hammer under the soprano’s repeated grief-stricken cries of “Ah!”

2. Lento assai, quasi cadenza; various textures, eventually fading to a pause.

3. Lento, flessibile: the soprano returns, singing the lines attributed to Latini:

O fratel nostro, che se’ morto e sepolto,
nelle sue braccie Iddio t’abbia raccolto,

O fratel nostro, la cui fratellanza
Perduta abbiam, chè morte l’ha partita,
Dio ti dia pace e vera perdonanza
Di ciò che l’offendesti in questa vita:
L’anima salga, se non è salita,
Dove si vede il Salvatore in volto.

Oh, our brother, who art dead and buried,
The Lord has gathered you into his arms.

Oh, our brother, whose brotherhood
We have lost, for death has taken it away.

May God give you peace and true pardon
For what has offended him in this life:

The soul ascends, even if not yet risen to where
It can see the saviour’s face.

4. Molto sostenuto: another instrumental movement.

5. Impetuoso, ma non precipitato.


ELLIOTT CARTER (b. 1908)
In the Distances of Sleep, for mezzo-soprano and ensemble

In his 20s and 30s, Elliott Carter wrote a number of vocal works, both solo and choral. However, his highly original piano sonata of 1946 signaled a concentration on instrumental music, notably string quartets (five to date) and orchestral pieces on an ambitious scale, with powerfully novel textures, colors, and scenarios. Not until 1975 did he return to vocal music, with A Mirror on Which to Dwell, a cycle setting poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Syringa (1978) juxtaposed an original poem on the Orpheus legend by John Ashbery alongside ancient Greek texts on the same subject, and In Sleep, In Thunder (1981) mined the feverish poetry of Robert Lowell. In the 1990s, Carter drew upon the work of yet another major American poet, John Hollander, for the cycle Of Challenge and of Love (1994), and 1998 brought the chamber opera What Next? (with a libretto by the English music critic Paul Griffiths).

The poet of Carter’s song cycle In the Distances of Sleep is Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), a resident of Hartford, Connecticut, where he worked as a specialist in surety law for an insurance company beginning in 1916, eventually becoming a vice-president. Between 1931 and 1950, Stevens published six volumes of poetry; in 1954, along with some later poems, these were collected into a single volume, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry the following year.

Mr. Carter has provided the following note about the cycle:

Always an enthusiastic admirer of Wallace Stevens’s poetry since the early 1930s, I frequently read his poems over and planned to set them to music. What appealed to me were his quick changes of character, irony, and unusual use of words, which seemed hard to deal with musically. Around 2003, I finally decided to try, stimulated by a commission from the Carnegie Hall Corporation for a work to be performed by James Levine and his Met Chamber Ensemble of excellent musicians. I set to work, starting with one of his most remarkable poems, Puella Parvula, which seemed to epitomize his special point of view, and carried on from there.

In his 1964 book about American music, Music in a New Found Land, the English critic Wilfred Mellers chose some lines from Stevens’ poem Esthétique du Mal (1950) as epigraph to his chapter about Carter:

… out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the midday air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur
Merely in living as and where we live.

In a 1969 program note, Carter cited these lines as drawing “attention to some of the main aims of my work,” including “contrasts of many kinds of musical characters … forming these into poetically evocative combinations … filling musical time and space by a web of continually varying cross references … And to me, at least, my music grows ‘out of what one sees and hears and out of what one feels,’ out of what occurs ‘Merely in living as and where we live.’” This remains a good introductory handle with which to grasp this music and its fluent, metamorphosing fluidity.

The poems selected for In the Distances of Sleep come from five of Stevens’s published volumes, spanning two decades of his work (1930–1950). Persistent threads among the texts include images of age and autumn, night and wind, and references to music and its sounds. The generous chamber ensemble comprises a variety of woodwind instruments (but no brass), two well-equipped percussionists (an orchestral resource long a Carter specialty, notably in his Double Concerto of 1961), piano, and strings. As noted below, several of the songs use less than the full ensemble, and the music for both singer and ensemble ranges between lyrical repose and declamatory violence.

I. Puella Parvula [Very young/small girl]: for all players; Allegretto–Allegro–Allegretto. The cataclysmic advent of autumn, “this season of memory,” serves as a preface to “the human tale.”

II. Metamorphosis: for 3 flutes, marimba, metal pipes, solo cello, and contrabass; Leggierissimo. A more demotic account of autumn’s arrival.

III. Re-statement of Romance: for strings only, accompanying the vocal line with a wide-ranging, continuous line; Adagio. An intense love poem.

IV. The Wind Shifts: for woodwinds, percussion, piano, and double basses; Agitato. A vivid weatherscape, which continues into the next piece without pause.

V. To the Roaring Wind: for all players; Presto. The initial vocalizing syllables were added by Carter.

VI. God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night: for all players; Tranquillo. The final poem touches again upon the cycle’s principal tropes.


Texts and Translations

ELLIOTT CARTER
In the Distances of Sleep
Texts: Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

I. Puella Parvula
Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.
By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured
And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.
But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,
The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blasting,
The bloody lion in the yard at night or ready to spring
From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees
Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows
Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,
Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs
Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,
When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,
Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch. O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.
Write pax across the window pane. And then
Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins ...
Flame, sound, fury composed ... Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

II. Metamorphosis
Yillow, yillow, yillow,
Old worm, my pretty quirk,
How the wind spells out
Sep - tem - ber. ...
Summer is in bones.
Cock-robin’s at Caracas.
Make o, make o, make o,
Oto - otu - bre.
And the rude leaves fall.
The rain falls. The sky
Falls and lies with the worms.
The street lamps
Are those that have been hanged,
Dangling in an illogical
To and to and fro
For Niz - nil - imbo.

III. Re-Statement of Romance
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

IV. The Wind Shifts
This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

V. To the Roaring Wind
[Oh ah. Oh ah.]
What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

VI. God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night
Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,
Look round at the head and zither
On the ground.
Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,
At the book and shoe, the rotted rose
At the door.
This was the place to which you came last night,
Flew close to, flew to without rising away.
Now, again.
In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.
It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial
Rendezvous.
Picking thin music on the rustiest string,
Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump
Of summer.
The venerable song falls from your fiery wings.
The song of the great space of your age pierces
The fresh night.

From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1923, 1931, 1935, 1937,
1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1954 by Wallace
Stevens. Copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Published by Vintage Books.



RICHARD WAGNER (1813–1883)
Siegfried Idyll

The premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde took place in Munich on June 10, 1865, under the auspices of the young King Ludwig of Bavaria, a fervent Wagnerian. Though an event long awaited by the composer, it was also a complicated one. The conductor was Wagner’s disciple Hans von Bülow, whose wife Cosima (daughter of Franz Liszt) and Wagner had earlier secretly vowed that they “belonged to one another.” On April 10, 1865, Cosima bore a daughter, christened Isolde, widely (and correctly) believed to be Wagner’s child. In the circumstances, Wagner found it sensible to leave Munich, and he eventually settled.

In 1866, Wagner’s wife Minna died, and Cosima joined him in Geneva. They settled at Villa Tribschen, outside Lucerne, where he completed the score of Die Meistersinger. Having obtained a divorce from von Bülow, Cosima joined Wagner, with their two daughters (the second one was named Eva), leaving the other two with their father. On June 6 she bore Wagner a son, who was christened Siegfried.

To express his gratitude to Cosima, Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll, incorporating motives from the opera Siegfried (some related to the initial encounter of Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the opera’s final act), and arranged to have it performed on Christmas Day in 1870 as a surprise for her birthday (which she always celebrated on December 25, though her real birthday was on the 24th). It seems likely that some of the Idyll’s musical material was bound up with emotional aspects of their marriage, and the piece remained an intimate family treasure until 1877, when financial pressures forced them to sell it to a publisher. It has remained the most beloved of Wagner’s non-operatic works, whether played as chamber music or by a larger ensemble.


JOHANN STRAUSS, Jr. (1825–1899)
Rosen aus dem Süden Walzer (Roses from the South, Op. 388; Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz, Op. 437) (arranged for chamber ensemble by Arnold Schoenberg)

In November 1918, discouraged by the atmosphere of contention surrounding Viennese concerts of his new music and that of his pupils, Arnold Schoenberg founded an Association for Private Musical Performances, which would offer its members well-rehearsed performances and second hearings. The project initially attracted more than 300 members, but by 1921 funds were running low. To raise new funds, Schoenberg arranged a special benefit evening, including arrangements by himself, Berg, and Webern of four waltzes by Johann Strauss, scored for salon ensemble—in this case, piano, harmonium, and string quartet.

The performers on May 27, 1921 were Eduard Steuermann (piano—for whom Schoenberg slyly devised a particularly difficult part), Alban Berg (harmonium), Rudolf Kolisch and Schoenberg (first violins), Karl Rankl (second violin), Othmar Steinbauer (viola), and Anton Webern (cello). The evening’s success was amplified by the proceeds from an auction of the manuscripts of the arrangements.

In April 1924, Schoenberg’s Spanish pupil Roberto Gerhard arranged a “Festival of Viennese Music” in Barcelona. In addition to performances of chamber music by Schubert, Beethoven, and Mozart, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire was performed, and for the occasion, the composer made an arrangement of Johann Strauss’s “Emperor” Waltz for the Pierrot ensemble.

The anatomy of a Strauss waltz is usually straightforward: an introduction, perhaps not in waltz time, gives the dancers time to gather. (The introduction to the “Emperor” Waltz is specified to proceed at a “slow march tempo,” and that for Rosen aus dem Süden is in an andantino 6/8.) The individual waltzes that follow aim for variety in pace and instrumentation.

—David Hamilton

David Hamilton has written music criticism and record reviews for High Fidelity, The Nation, The NewYorker, the Financial Times, and the New York Times. He has been program annotator for the METOrchestra since the beginning of its Carnegie Hall concerts, edited the Metropolitan OperaEncyclopedia, and was co-producer of the Met’s Historic Broadcast Recordings.

© 2008 David Hamilton