CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The Philadelphia Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 8:00 PM

“Dutoit knows how to alchemize musical forces.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphian bass-baritone Eric Owens performs Mahler’s first song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) in honor of the great soprano Marian Anderson. Ms. Anderson, a native Philadelphian, performed at Carnegie Hall 57 times throughout her life—the third highest number of performances by an African American. Lilacs, a musical setting of Walt Whitman’s “When the Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” won George Walker the Pulitzer Prize for music, making him the first African American ever to win such an honor.

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Dr. Aaron A. Flagg, Executive Director of the Music Conservatory of Westchester.

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Charles Dutoit, Chief Conductor and Artistic Adviser
Russell Thomas, Tenor
Eric Owens, Bass-Baritone

MILHAUD La création du monde, Op. 81
GEORGE WALKER Lilacs
MAHLER Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 9, "From the New World"

Major funding for Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Alice Tully Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation's New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, Howard University, and the A. L. and Jennie L. Luria Foundation.

The opening performance of Honor! is sponsored by Bank of America.

Honor! is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program Notes:

DARIUS MILHAUD (1892–1974)
The Creation of the World

Darius Milhaud, a French-born composer and exponent of the neoclassical aesthetic that followed Impressionism in France, beat Gershwin to the punch by writing a jazz-flavored classical composition the year before Rhapsody in Blue. Nor was he the only one. Louis Gruenberg, Cole Porter, Wallingford Riegger, Ernest Schelling, and Emerson Whithorne all wrote pieces using jazz elements in an orchestral context—and all in 1923, a watershed year for the marriage of jazz and classical music.

Alone among those works, Milhaud’s The Creation of the World has survived. It was created to a ballet scenario prepared by Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars in which the subject was not the “Genesis” story, but African legends. University of Tennessee professor Glenn E. Estes, who has written extensively about creation myths, describes the story: “Blaise Cendrars devised the scenario for the ballet taking his inspiration from African folklore: giant deities; magic spells; trees uprooting themselves and impregnating the ground with their fruit from which new trees suddenly appeared whose leaves were turned into animals; male and female dancers emerging from the middle and dancing the dance of desire and the mating dance, then melting away to leave one couple, united by love, alone on the stage.” It was only natural that Milhaud would draw upon his experiences listening to bands in Harlem nightclubs during a lecture tour of the US. The sort of jazz in which “front-line” instruments play all kinds of improvised lines against syncopated rhythmic and bluesy harmonic frameworks suited the African myths of fecundity bordering on chaos. Milhaud didn’t allow for literal improvisation, yet there is a spontaneous feeling to the wind parts of this work, which Milhaud scored for “an orchestra of 19 soloists.”

Performed without stop, The Creation of the World divides into sections along the lines of the ballet. A saxophone intones a haunting, slow melody, punctuated by trumpets, symbolizing the serenity of the gods. In the next section, chaos confronts the gods in the form of a sharply syncopated rhythmic gesture—first heard on the double bass—over which a variety of wind instruments seek to make themselves heard. Every aspect of existence seems to vie for attention.

The third section, in which the gods quiet the chaos, features a slow march over a persistent ostinato that at length leads to a blues melody on the oboe. The tree appears, drops its fruit and animals spring forth. The new creatures interrupt the tree’s gentle blues with a rhythmic dance spotlighting a pair of violins. A sudden lyrical interlude leads to a jaunty, jazzy tune in the clarinet: Men and women have made their first appearance. As more humans make the scene, the music goes through various transformations, slow and fast, until at last the chaos of the second section seems to have reappeared in human form. This melts away to leave the single couple, the story of creation complete in two human beings, alone onstage as the saxophone ends things blissfully and peacefully—though the echo of conflict is tellingly present.

Milhaud openly detested the division between “art” and popular music. His many students represent an array of genres: jazz pianist / composer Dave Brubeck, popular songwriter Burt Bacharach, and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer William Bolcom.
—Kenneth LaFave

[mini-bio TK.]


GEORGE WALKER (b. 1922)
Lilacs

A half-century before America elected its first African-American president, George Walker was achieving “firsts” in classical music right and left. He was one of the first blacks to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music, to make a debut at New York’s Town Hall, to earn a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music, and to perform with The Philadelphia Orchestra (in November 1945, with Eugene Ormandy). But perhaps the sweetest “first” of all came in 1996, when at age 73 he received the phone call every American composer yearns for: The Pulitzer committee was on the line, and Walker had become the first African American to win music’s most prestigious award. The winning piece was Lilacs, which the Boston Symphony had first performed that February.

“It’s always nice to be known as the first doing anything,” Walker said to USA Today at the time, “but what’s more important is the recognition that this work has quality.” The Pulitzer was a culmination, of sorts, of a quietly heroic career that has helped transform the music world. Blacks are still too rare in the world of classical composing, but thanks to the efforts of pioneers like Walker, who is 86, in recent years American concert music has taken on an increasingly broad ethnic spectrum. Walker’s legacy lies also in the many students he taught over half a century, at Smith College, the University of Colorado, the Peabody Institute, the University of Delaware, and especially at Rutgers University, where he spent many years as department chair and distinguished professor.

Walker’s father was a physician who emigrated to the US from Jamaica; his mother was a native of Washington, DC. Already at age five their son showed promise at the piano. He played his first public recital at Howard University at age 14, entered Oberlin College on scholarship at 15, and finished his Bachelor of Music degree at 18. Back in Philadelphia, he studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Rosario Scalero at Curtis. By the time of his successful New York pianistic debut, his interest was already turning to composition. He went to Paris for further work with counterpoint guru Nadia Boulanger, also studying piano with Robert Casadesus. Walker still loved the piano deeply, but during his first European concert tour in 1953 he was plagued with ulcers, an experience that led him to rethink his career as a concert artist. After earning his doctorate in composition at Eastman, he settled into a productive teaching career.

Among Walker’s works are orchestral pieces (overtures, two sinfonias, concertos); chamber music (two string quartets, a brass quintet, sonatas for violin, cello, and viola); four piano sonatas; extensive choral music (a Mass, a Gloria, Psalm settings, a Cantata); and songs. His Lyric for Strings, derived from his First String Quartet, remains one of the most-performed orchestral works by a living American. Walker has received Fulbright, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim fellowships and many other awards. In 1982 he was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Lilacs was commissioned by the Boston Symphony to honor Roland Hayes, a renowned black tenor who was a fixture of Boston’s musical scene for decades. It was composed in spring 1995 and first performed under Seiji Ozawa’s baton. The singer was Faye Robinson, who recorded it on Summit Records. It was Walker’s 70th published work.

The 16-minute composition consists of four brief songs set to verses 1–3 and verse 13 of Walt Whitman’s Lincoln elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” one of the most frequently set poems in the English language. Scored for a large orchestra yet achieving striking transparence, it is tinged with delicate colors and deft text-painting. The opening “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d” creates an atmosphere redolent of both lilacs and mourning, with a declamatory climax on the hope-inducing phrase “ever returning spring” (reaching a high C). Growling trombones and trumpet-blasts usher in “O powerful, western, fallen star!,” which moves at a quicker pace toward the climactic line “O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul.” A lone alto flute is answered by an oboe at the start of “In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house,” where lush string textures convey the scent of spring. Piquant, trilling wind instruments come to the fore in “Sing on! sing on you gray-brown bird,” an almost-optimistic close to the cycle.
—Paul J. Horsley

Paul J. Horsley is a freelance author and former classical music and dance critic for the Kansas City Star.
From 1992 to 2000 he was program annotator and musicologist of The Philadelphia Orchestra. He has
written for the New York Times, Symphony magazine, Chamber Music, and other publications.


GUSTAV MAHLER (1860–1911)
Songs of a Wayfarer

The Romantic song was so intimate a genre that it was normally performed in living rooms, for a coterie of friends and acquaintances, with transparent and often minimalist accompaniments furnished by piano—the instrument that of course occupied a central place in every bourgeois home. It remained largely the achievement of the 20th century to bring the song into the concert hall, and to provide the vocal line (now sung by voices grown large through training for big operatic roles) with busy and often quite heavy orchestral textures. Yet a few examples of “orchestral song” exist from the 19th century, most notably Hector Berlioz’s haunting Les nuits d’été and Gustav Mahler’s early songs of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) and Des Knaben Wunderhorn. (Wagner’s Wesendonk Lieder from the 1850s were conceived for voice and piano, and although the composer himself scored one of them, the orchestral version by which we know them today is the work of others.) All of these composers tried to bring the full resources of the orchestra to bear while preserving the intimacy of the Romantic song.

Mahler’s Wayfarer Songs of 1883–1885 might be viewed as a glance backward, despite a natural inclination to consider them as the first in the marvelous succession of orchestral songs that would culminate in the extravagant Das Lied von der Erde. The latter is less a song cycle than a symphony with voices, while the Wayfarer Songs appear more as a final moment of the Romantic song tradition perfected by Schubert and Schumann. The connections to Schubert’s Winterreise are palpable, in fact, especially the use of the solitary wanderer as protagonist, whose thoughts always seem to turn to gloom. But unlike the disconsolate fellow in Wilhelm Müller’s poetry, who treads on snowy paths that are as icy as his beloved’s heart, Mahler’s wayfarer takes his stroll in late spring, and its blossoms and merry birds serve only to mock his pitiful condition.

Mahler took up his pen in 1883, soon after being appointed to a new post as second conductor at the Kassel court theater. There he managed to fall in love with one of the principal singers, Johanna Richter, and the Wayfarer Songs became his declaration of love—as well as a clear acknowledgement that nothing could come of the passion. “I have written a song cycle dedicated to her,” he wrote in 1885. “She does not know the songs. But they can tell her only what she already knows. Their message is this: a man who has found only sadness in love goes forth into the world a wanderer.”

Mahler apparently penned the Wayfarer texts himself, though some of the poetic material (especially that of the first song) is adapted from the delightful poems in the folk collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, known to the 19th century in the published versions of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. (In subsequent years Mahler would of course draw upon this collection for his many Wunderhorn songs.) The Wayfarer Songs were first scored for voice and piano, but the composer referred to this as a “piano reduction,” suggesting that his orchestration of the songs in the 1890s was no afterthought, but instead the realization of a long-held intention. The orchestral songs were premiered in Berlin in March 1896, and were published the following year.

The most striking thing about these songs, for those familiar with Mahler’s work, is their musical connection to the composer’s early symphonies. The first strophe of Song 2, particularly, “Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld,” would become the principal subject of the opening movement of the Symphony No. 1, begun in 1884—a work that shares not only thematic material but also the emotional outlook of the Wayfarer Songs. (The Wunderhorn songs, too, would become important in Symphonies 2 through 4, causing some critics to refer to this period of Mahler’s life as the “Wunderhorn years,” implying a connection both to the songs and to the cycle of poems as well.) The first song, “Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht,” is sorrowful in a truly Schubertian manner, and it begins the cycle with a sentiment that could be directly from Winterreise: As the poor poet watches his beloved marry another man, a damned bird sings cheerily, and the poet withdraws into his chamber and weeps bitterly. The tonality of the cycle is progressive: Song 1 moves from D minor to G minor, the second from happy D major through B and finally toward an icy F-sharp. Song 3, the chilling “Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer,” begins wildly in D minor and moves into the almost paralyzingly “neutral” key of C major. The final song is a sort of funeral march (the first of many Mahler would compose), which moves from E minor to desperate F minor, recalling along the way nothing so much as “Der Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde of a quarter-century hence. If this song lacks the earth-shattering grandeur of that late utterance, it at least demonstrates that the seeds of Mahler’s late style, with its hue and cry and its near-dissolution of tonality, were sown in the Wayfarer Songs, by general agreement the composer’s first masterpiece.
—Paul J. Horsley


ANTONÍN DVOØÁK (1841–1904)
Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”

The moving Czech national anthem starts with a question: “Kde domov mùj?” (Where is my Home?). Antonín Dvoøák, the most famous of all Czech composers, might well have asked the same thing given the course of his career. Born in a small provincial town in Bohemia, he was initially educated in Zlonice, a town not much bigger, before moving to Prague to complete his studies. He started his career there as violist at the Provisional Theater under the direction of Bedøich Smetana, the country’s leading composer at the time. Soon his own compositions began to pour forth and get noticed. Powerful figures from Vienna’s musical scene repeatedly awarded him a state stipendium, and Brahms arranged a crucial introduction to his own German publisher.

Within two decades, Dvoøák’s fame and popularity extended far beyond his homeland. The English became particularly enamored of his music. Dvoøák made eight trips there, was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, and basked in the adulation of enormous audiences. His longest time abroad was the two and a half years he spent in America beginning in late September 1892. He came at the invitation of a visionary music patron, Jeannette Thurber, who made such a lucrative offer to become director of the National Conservatory of Music that Dvoøák felt he could not turn it down. He spent the academic year in New York City, living with his wife and children in a brownstone at 327 East 17th Street. In the summer they traveled to Spillville, Iowa, which boasted a large Czech community.

The Symphony in E Minor was the first of a series of works Dvoøák wrote in America, and was followed by such pieces as the String Quartet in F Major, the String Quintet in E-flat Major, the Violin Sonatina in G Major, and the magnificent Cello Concerto. Composing such substantial music was one of the reasons Thurber sought out Dvoøák. She was interested not only in finding someone to lead the Conservatory, but also in a figure who could make a contribution to enhancing American musical life. As Dvoøák wrote in a letter to a friend back home: “The Americans expect great things of me. Above all, I am to show them the way into the Promised Land, into the realms of a new independent art—in short, to create a national music.” Thurber provided him with American poems and other materials, and even took him to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

Dvoøák began writing his new symphony less than four months after his arrival and made rapid progress. By mid-April he reported in a letter: “I have not much work at school now, so that I have enough time for my own work and am now just finishing my E-Minor Symphony. I take pleasure in it, and it will differ very considerably from my others. Indeed, the influence of America in it must be felt by everyone who has any ‘nose’ at all.” In another letter two days later, he repeated how pleased he was with the work and how different this symphony was from his earlier ones, adding, “It is perhaps turning out rather American!!!” Dvoøák initially labeled the work as his Eighth Symphony—he thought the first one he had written was lost—and shortly before the premiere added the subtitle “Z nového svìta” (“From the New World”), by which he explained he meant “Impressions and Greetings from the New World.”

The eminent Wagnerian conductor Anton Seidl conducted the premiere performances with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on December 15 and 16, 1893. Dvoøák recounted that “the newspapers are saying that no composer has ever had such a triumph. I was in a box, the hall was filled with the highest New York society, the people clapped so much that I had to acknowledge the applause like a king!” One prominent critic declared it “the greatest symphony ever composed in this country.” Some of the reviews raised the issue of writing a distinctively American symphony, commented on the mood of the work, and noted its use of indigenous sources.

Dvoøák had indeed been influenced by his surroundings and his exposure to a new culture and its music. He noted that the famous second-movement Largo “is in reality a study or a sketch for a longer work, whether a cantata or an opera which I propose writing, and which will be based upon Longfellow’s Hiawatha.” It seems that among the materials Thurber had given him was Henry Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha, first published in 1855 and which Dvoøák had long known in a Czech translation. Although he never wrote a cantata or opera on this story, it is clear that at least two of the Symphony’s movements, the middle ones, are based on parts of the story.

Dvoøák also called upon American musical resources. He read an article that included musical examples of spirituals and also heard some sung by an African American student at the National Conservatory, Harry T. Burleigh (1866–1949). In an interview in the New York Herald, Dvoøák discussed the influence of music by Native Americans: “I therefore carefully studied a certain number of Indian melodies which a friend gave me, and became thoroughly imbued with their characteristics—with their spirit, in fact. It is this spirit which I have tried to reproduce in my symphony. I have not actually used any of the melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestral color.”

Listeners have long been fascinated by Dvoøák’s references to these American sources, presented with a heavy Czech accent. That Czech musical accent is, of course, just as much a construction as the American idiom; Dvoøák was crucial in its formation through his Slavonic Dances and other works. In his Czech pieces Dvoøák also invented his own tunes; he resented insinuations that he was calling upon actual folk material. Moreover, in its formal construction and ambition, the “New World” Symphony presents a Germanic heritage drawn both from the symphonies of Brahms and the symphonic poems of Liszt—there is even a brief allusion in the last movement to Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.

The four-movement Symphony begins with a mournful Adagio introduction that builds to an Allegro molto initiated by a prominent horn theme. One of the “Germanic” features of the Symphony is the recycling of themes between and among movements, leading to a parade of them in the fourth movement finale. The second theme is given by the flute and bears some resemblance to the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

The famous Largo second movement relates to Hiawatha, although there is some debate about exactly which part of the story; a lamenting section in the middle seems to allude to funeral of Minnehaha. The well-known English horn solo that opens the movement is not an actual spiritual, although through Dvoøák’s invention it has in some ways become one—a student of his, William Arms Fisher, provided words for it in the 1920s as “Goin’ Home.”

The Molto vivace scherzo opens with a passage that seems to refer to the scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Dvoøák again acknowledged the influence of Longfellow: “It was suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance, and is also an essay I made in the direction of imparting the local color of Indian character to music.” The finale (Allegro con fuoco) provides a grand conclusion in its propulsive energy and review of themes from the previous movements.
—Christopher H. Gibbs

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival, and Associate Editor of the Musical Quarterly. He is the author of The Life of Schubert and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert and Franz Liszt and his World.


Program notes © 2009. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.