William Wordsworth
Source: Benjamin Haydon / Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

2020 also marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the English poet, William Wordsworth (1770-1850). We’ll take a three-pronged approach to that family name, starting with a selection of works that are based on Wordsworth’s poetry, and opening with a very beautiful song that forms part of William Walton’s A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table. It was commissioned for the 1962 City of London Music Festival and was given its premiere in July of that year by soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf accompanied by Gerald Moore. Wordsworth’s Glide gently provides the text for the second song in Walton’s cycle:

William Walton
© HNH International

Edwin Roxburgh
Source: Divine Art Records

Calm is the fragrant air, and loth to lose
Day’s grateful warmth, tho’ moist with falling dews.
Look for the stars, you’ll say that there are none;
Look up a second time, and, one by one,
You mark them twinkling out with silvery light,
And wonder how they could elude the sight!

Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Calm is the fragrant air (8.570539)

Waters on a starry night (8.570539)

Mohammed Fairouz
Photo: Samantah West

You can follow this link for the complete text, which starts as follows:

A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:
Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
—Her beauty made me glad.

“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.

We Are Seven (8.559783)

And now to William Wordsworth the composer. Yes, you did read that correctly; but, no, it’s not a revelation that posterity has unearthed some of the poet’s dabblings in the art of composition. William Brocklesby Wordsworth (1908-1988) was a great-great grandson of William the poet’s brother Christopher. Born in London into a clerical family, WBW was educated at home by his father, a vicar. However, his musical talents were noticed by a piano teacher, Miss Sterry, who gave Wordsworth piano lessons and steered him into a more general musical education. In his mid-twenties, he went to Edinburgh to study for three years under Sir Donald Tovey. From this liberating experience Wordsworth emerged as a fully-fledged composer, without bothering actually to take the Edinburgh university degree.

In 1955 Wordsworth joined the executive committee of the Composer’s Guild, becoming its chairman in 1959, when he visited the USSR and met Dmitry Shostakovich. Wordsworth’s Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 66 for cello and piano is probably his most important cello-piano composition and was composed in that same year he met Shostakovich in the USSR. There seems to be an audible kinship between the two composers in this dark-hued and often depressive work, which is cast in a single large movement in several contrasting sections. Here’s the opening section.

Sonata No. 2 for cello and piano (8.571361)

Before we leave Wordsworth the composer, let’s listen to his Scherzo, Op. 42, again for cello and piano, which was written ten years earlier than the sonata just heard, during the period of his greatest public success. His handling of tonality in this short piece carries shades of Bartók’s harmonic procedures, an area that Wordsworth had studied. Listen out for its opening tick-tock figure of falling fourths, a dotted-rhythm fanfare figure, and various sharp-elbowed melodic motifs.

Scherzo (8.571361)

Barry Wordsworth

I don’t think we can leave Beethoven out of this anniversary survey completely, however, so to end our blog I’ve chosen a recording of the finale of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

Piano Concerto No. 5 (8.550290)

 

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Those with only a passing knowledge of Alma may recall her as the pitiable, yet distinctly musical wife of Gustav Mahler, who forbade her to compose. The truth was rather more complex. This blog isn’t the occasion to take the microscope to her life, loves and lieder. Rather, if the lady is unknown to you, here’s a wash of the general landscape of her life, which you may find interesting enough to research further.

I’ll start in what may seem an unusual place with an ensemble named in her honour, one that rather reinforces the hard-done-by perception of her as an aspiring musician. Fifteen years ago, the Alma Mahler Sinfonietta was founded in Italy as an ensemble for women musicians dedicated to “Alma Mahler, the wife of Gustav Mahler, a woman of intelligence, beauty and talent, and has the aim of promoting the music of women composers, breaking the apparent conspiracy of silence in this respect.” Our opening extract is taken from the Alma Mahler Sinfonietta’s recording for Naxos of the music of Clara Schumann (8.557552), the close of her Piano Concerto in A minor.

Piano Concerto in A minor:

Fast forward to the present decade and to some commentary on Alma that, again, portrays her less as a femme fatale, and more of a victim of circumstances. American composer Mohammed Fairouz sourced texts from Alma’s writings as the basis of one of his works, Jeder Mensch (8.559783). The composer writes:

“Jeder Mensch was the first song cycle that [mezzo soprano] Kate Lindsey commissioned from me, in 2011. It was born out of an obsession that Kate and I have with the figure of Alma Mahler. This woman, who led such a fascinating life, left us with diaries that Kate and I pored over to find the texts for this song cycle. In them she sings of her firm system of beliefs that the eternal source of all strength is “in nature, in the earth, in people who don’t hesitate to cast away their existence for the sake of an idea.” She concludes: “they are the ones who can love.” Alma Mahler speaks of love, isolation and the many men she had in her life. Her words remain a compelling portrait of a brilliant woman forced to live vicariously through the men she loved and lost.”

Here’s the third and final song from Mohammed Fairouz’s cycle, The Celebration of the Spirit, that sets the following text:

“Gustav Mahler—from the struggles of abstraction, Oskar Kokoschka, the genius, Walter Gropius, the improviser of cultures and wills–And Joseph Fraenkel, the genial improviser … From Walter I want children–from Oskar, works–from Fraenkel, the celebration of the spirit that he never offered me. I wish that Fraenkel [Gustav Mahler’s personal physician 1907-1911] had moved in to spend the rest of his life with me.”

The Celebration of the Spirit:

Before we put those names into context, we should mention another two who were on Alma’s early amatory scene. The first was the symbolist painter, Gustav Klimt. He fell in love with Alma; her response to his advances was tepid and short-lived, though they were to remain friends. Then came the composer, conductor and academic (and Schoenberg’s future brother-in-law), Alexander von Zemlinsky. Alma was one of his composition students; he was her first lover, who continued the set standard of creative genius that would attract Alma throughout her life. Here’s one of Zemlinsky’s songs, Meeraugen, that forms part of a programme of works by Alma, Alexander and Gustav contained on the same disc (C5119). A compact ménage à trois, one might say.

Meeraugen:

Alma went on to marry Gustav Mahler in 1902. She was aged 22; he was 41. Did she love him? or merely admire him greatly? Whatever, she submitted to a life of serving her husband’s day-to-day needs while renouncing any aspirations she may have harboured for her own musical advancement. They had two daughters. The elder died of scarlet fever and diptheria in 1907, allowing Alma the opportunity to reproach her husband for tempting fate by having composed his Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) (8.554156) which he completed in 1904. Here are the first three stanzas of the final song of the set, In diesem Wetter (In this weather), that translate as follows:

In this weather, in this storm,
I would never have sent the children out;
someone took them out,
I could have no say in it.

In this weather, in this turmoil,
I would never have let the children go out;
I would have been afraid they might be ill,
now these are idle thoughts.

In this weather, in this horror,
I would never have let the children go out;
I was worried they might die the next day,
that is now not a thing to worry about.

In diesem Wetter:

This death of the 5-year old child, Alma’s nascent affair with the architect Walter Gropius, and the discovery of Mahler’s heart defect was the perfect cocktail for a distressed marriage. Following Mahler’s death in 1911, Alma embarked on an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka before marrying Gropius in 1915. They had a daughter, Manon, who tragically died of polio at the age of 18. Alban Berg subsequently dedicated his Violin Concerto (8.554755) to Manon, inscribing the work ’to the memory of an angel’. Here are the final moments of the work.

Violin Concerto:

Coda: Alma then began an affair with the Prague-born writer Franz Werfel, subsequently divorcing Gropius in 1920 and marrying Werfel in 1929. One could add codettas, including the song Alma that Tom Lehrer penned following her death, after having read an obituary he described as “the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read.” To maintain decorum, however, we’ll let Alma have the final word with a performance of one of her own songs, Bei dir ist es traut (With you it is pleasant) (ODE1024-2), arranged for voice and orchestra.

Bei dir ist es traut (With you it is pleasant):

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I recall the first time I heard a live performance of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (8.555869), in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The massed—and massive—ranks of chorus and orchestra were supplemented by two brass bands, positioned off-stage and halfway to heaven in that extraordinary auditorium. The cumulative power was impressive. Of equal impact, however, was that brief interlude when a solo baritone gives us a scene-setter about the ancient city of Babylon. Here was a simple story-teller who needed nothing more than his voice and a soapbox, something the Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz referred to when recalling his Egyptian roots.

“I think what’s always fascinated me,” Fairouz said, “is this concept of story. “You can walk on the streets of Cairo and find people reciting poetry out loud and people will be assembled around them in cafés, and people will be crying, moved to tears by this concept of reading poetry out loud; it translates very, very naturally into the recital.”

Maybe Walton was thinking on this wavelength when he wrote the unaccompanied interlude in his oratorio.

Audiences usually outnumber performers at a concert, but there was one extraordinary recital that saw a motley quartet of musicians (a pianist, clarinettist, violinist and cellist) playing before a literally captive audience. The occasion was the first performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (8.554824), given in Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner of war camp in Silesia, before an audience of 5,000 inmates. The work is deeply rooted in Christian spirituality, but one wonders if faith was at the forefront of the prisoners’ minds during the third movement, The Abyss of the Birds, which is scored for clarinet alone and features bird songs mimicking the fanciful style of a blackbird. “Will I ever again be able to hear the live sounds of a real blackbird?” That’s what would have been pressing my mind during those extraordinary eight minutes.

Second only to the opening of his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven is probably best known to Joe Public through the melody he penned for Schiller’s Ode to Joy in the finale of his Ninth Symphony (8.550181). This great platform for the brotherhood of man to shout its message from the rooftops starts, improbably, as a mere seedling; a barely audible whisper from the roots of the orchestra states the single-line melody that soon sprouts wings in the remainder of the movement and has continued to soar through history ever since. What, I wonder, went through the minds of those double bass players when, pianissimo, they sight-read Beethoven’s artless tune at the first rehearsal, giving birth to one of the most popular melodies of all time?

There was a time, of course, when a single-line texture was the norm. Mediaeval plainsong was the daily diet of religious orders during worship. If you’ve ever attended a plainsong service in a monastery, you will know the hypnotic effect that the unaccompanied music’s repetitive process produces (minimalism in all but name). Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th-century example of how women excel at multi-tasking, as suggested by her alternative names: “St Hildegard” and the “Sybil of the Rhine”. A German writer, composer and Christian mystic (to mention just three of her significant talents), she was a Benedictine abbess who founded two monasteries. Quite how she also found time to compose is a mystery, but you can sample a trip back in time to get a glimpse of her genius with O viridissima virgo (8.550751).

Finally, the anonymous Renaissance melody, L’homme armé (8.558057), the words of which translate as:

The armed man should be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man shall arm himself
With a coat of iron mail.

The original melody has turned out to be as well galvanised as the armed man himself, being called on even to this day to act as the basis for new works, witness this extract from Karl Jenkin’s The Armed Man, A Mass for Peace, directed by the Welsh composer. There he is, our fabled armed man, at the start of the movement, still in single-line formation, continuing to demonstrate the power of one.

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