Program 6 - European Imports

Le Boeuf sur le Toit (“The Ox on the Roof”)

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)

Composed in 1919.

Premiered on February 21, 1920 in Paris, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann.

In 1953, Milhaud published (in English) a witty
autobiography under the title Notes without Music. Concerning Le Boeuf sur le Toit, he wrote the following: “Still haunted by my memories of Brazil [in 1919, after returning to Paris], I assembled a few popular melodies, tangos, maxixes, sambas and even a Portuguese fado, and transcribed them with a rondo-like theme recurring between each two of them. I called this fantasia Le Boeuf sur le Toit, the title of a Brazilian popular song.... [Jean] Cocteau proposed that we should use it for a show. He imagined a scene in a bar [called ‘Le Boeuf sur la Toit’] in America during Prohibition. The various characters were highly typical [!]: a Boxer, a Negro Dwarf, a Lady of Fashion, a Redheaded Woman dressed as a man, a Bookmaker, a Gentleman in evening clothes. The Barman offers everyone cocktails. After a few incidents and various dances, a Policeman enters, whereupon the scene is immediately transformed into a milk-bar. The clients play a rustic scene and dance a pastoral as they sip glasses of milk. The Barman switches on a big fan, which decapitates the Policeman. The Redheaded Woman dances with the Policeman’s head. The customers drift away, and the Barman presents an enormous bill to the resuscitated Policeman.”

Selections from Songs of the Auvergne

Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957)

Composed in 1923-1930 and 1955.

Joseph Canteloube was born to an old family in the small town of Annonay in the Ardèche, fifty miles south of Lyons — his country heritage was to shape his life’s work. He went to Paris as a young man, and studied piano with Amélie Doetzer, who had been a pupil of Chopin. In 1901, Canteloube entered the Schola Cantorum, which had been founded by the composer and pedagogue Vincent d’Indy just five years before. D’Indy became his mentor as well as his instructor (he published a biography of his teacher in 1949), and d’Indy’s musical style and passion for French folksong were the model and inspiration for much of Canteloube’s work. (D’Indy, whose ancestral roots were also in the Ardèche, based his most famous composition, the Symphony on a French Mountain Air, on a tune from that region.) Canteloube began composing while still a student, and he went on to create a modest catalog of original works: two operas (the first of which, Le Mas, completed in 1913, won the Huegel Prize, but was not premiered until 1929); a symphonic poem; concerted pieces for violin and piano; some vocal music; and two chamber works. It was his research and arrangements of French folksong, however, that won him enduring fame. He spent much of his life traveling throughout France to collect the music of many regions, preserving traditions soon to be gobbled up by mass media, and he lectured, wrote and broadcast extensively about his findings. He arranged many songs for choir or solo voice, most with instrumental accompaniment, making a special point of preserving the dialects of the originals (though he also gave renditions in modern French). The style and subjects of French indigenous music also influenced his original works, which bear such titles as Dans la Montagne, Rustiques, Eglogue d’Automne and Pièces Françaises; his opera Le Mas is a romance set on a Provençal farm. From 1939 to 1944, Canteloube edited the Anthologie des chants populaires français, a comprehensive collection of regional folksongs. Between 1923 and 1930, he issued superbly atmospheric settings of nineteen Songs of the Auvergne in four volumes for voice and orchestra; he added a fifth set of seven numbers in 1955. The texts treat the subjects of love and seduction, often in a refreshingly earthy manner, and the melodies range in style from simple ditties to country arias.

Sospiri, Op. 70

Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Composed in 1914.

Premiered on August 15, 1914 in London, conducted by Sir Henry J. Wood.

Sospiri (“Sighs”) is a musical tribute to two of Elgar’s dearest friends. The score was dedicated to W.H. Reed, the composer’s close companion (and eventual biographer) and a fine violinist, who was concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra during the time when that organization was performing and recording many of Elgar’s works. It was Reed who gave Elgar invaluable advice during the composition of the Violin Concerto in 1910, four years before Sospiri was written. The subdued mood of Sospiri, however, seems to have been occasioned by the death of Julia Worthington, an American who was an intimate friend of the Elgar family and one of that day’s most prominent hostesses. In form and expression, Sospiri is similar to a slow symphonic movement. It begins with a single preludial chord, after which the violins sing a tender melody over an accompaniment of harp and sustained strings. The music becomes more impassioned, with frequent thematic interchanges among the strings, until it reaches a dynamic climax which is reinforced by the re-entry of the harp. Against a tremulous background, the plaintive theme passes into the middle strings before the violins once again take up the strain to bring Sospiri to its quiet, moving close.

Symphony No. 5 in D major

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Composed in 1942.

Premiered on June 24, 1943 in London, conducted by the composer.

“Art, like charity, should begin at home. If it is to be of any value it must grow out of the very life of [the artist] himself, the community in which he lives, the nation to which he belongs.... The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows, and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.” With these words, these ringing English words, Ralph Vaughan Williams declared his artistic credo. He believed that musical works, “to have a worldwide appeal, [must first] appeal to the people and the circumstances where they were created.” The foundation of Vaughan Williams’ art, then, was the very stuff of British life and culture — its literature and its legends, its history and its topography, its folk songs and its anthems — and his quintessential nationalism is reflected in the titles of his works: A London Symphony, Norfolk Rhapsody, Old King Cole, Sir John in Love, Five Tudor Portraits, An Oxford Elegy.

One monument of English culture that threaded itself through nearly a half-century of Vaughan Williams’ creative life was John Bunyan’s allegory revealing the road to Christian salvation, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, a book that was probably more widely read for the two centuries after its publication in 1678 than any English text except the Bible. Its images and plain-spoken language exert an influence on British thought to the present day. Vaughan Williams first treated Bunyan’s words in a hymn setting of 1904, Who would true valour see, let him come hither. Two years later, he provided music for a dramatization of the story at Reigate Priory, Surrey, and in 1922, completed a “pastoral episode” titled The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains based on a scene from Bunyan’s book. (Vaughan Williams’ interest in Bunyan’s writing was not theological but historical and societal. Ursula, his second wife, said in the biography of her husband that by his later years he had “drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian.”) In 1925, Vaughan Williams returned to The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains with the intention of incorporating it into a full-length opera based on The Pilgrim’s Progress. He sketched various episodes of the work over the next dozen years, but apparently decided nothing would come of the project, and put it aside in 1936. In July 1938, he borrowed material from the piece to include in the music for a pageant titled England’s Pleasant Land, written by E.M. Forster as a benefit for the Dorking and Leith Hill Preservation Society in Surrey. At that same time, he began to draft the successor to his Fourth Symphony of 1935, and noted at the head of the new score that “some of the themes of this Symphony are taken from an unfinished opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress.” A year later, Britain was at war, and for some time Vaughan Williams devoted himself largely to writing background music for films such as 49th Parallel, Coastal Command and The People’s Land, and serving in the local fire brigade. The Symphony in D major (always known as No. 5, though Vaughan Williams did not give numbers to any of his symphonies except the last two of his nine) was largely written in 1942. It was also in 1942 that the country celebrated the composer’s seventieth birthday with six concerts of his major compositions broadcast by the BBC. The Symphony in D major was ready for a two-piano tryout on January 31, 1943; the orchestration was completed during the spring. The London Philharmonic gave the premiere under the composer’s direction at the Promenade Concert of June 24, 1943 in the Albert Hall, London.

More than just thematically related to the operatic version of The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Fifth Symphony grows from the peaceable vision of the Celestial City that is the object of the journey of the opera’s title character, Christian. (Vaughan Williams, incidentally, eventually finished his opera, or “Morality,” as he called it, in 1949, and gave its premiere at Covent Garden in 1951.) “The predominant emotion of the Fifth, which came out during the war, is peace, ultimate and fundamental peace, not the mere absence of armed conflict,” wrote Frank Howes in his study of the composer. “It describes the nature of true peace in the hearts of those who, like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, have faced their conflicts and come through them.” Vaughan Williams himself traced the ancestry of its style, mood and contrapuntal texture: “We pupils of Parry, have, if we have been wise, inherited from him the great English choral tradition which Tallis passed on to Byrd, Byrd to Gibbons, Gibbons to Purcell, Purcell to Batishill and Greene, and they in turn through the Wesleys to Parry. He has passed the torch on to us, and it is our duty to keep it alight.”

Vaughan Williams hesitated for some time before finally deciding to label this a symphony “in D major.” The reasons for his reluctance to settle on a single, traditional tonal designation for the music are two: its pervasive modality and the ambiguity of its key center before the last movement. Vaughan Williams derived his use of modality largely from Renaissance polyphony and English folk song (though the influence of Ravel and the Impressionists was not inconsiderable), and it was an important means by which he created the “pastoral” quality that distinguishes so much of his music. In the Fifth Symphony, he combined this harmonic technique with the long-range structural control afforded by traditional tonality, making the work a superb amalgam of the lyrical beauty grown from English vocal music and the structural integrity of the symphonic form. The work opens quietly, as if from a distance, with a sustained note in the low strings (C, not the titular D) above which the horns intone a tiny, misty fanfare whose rocking, long-short rhythm figures prominently throughout the movement. The violins introduce a brief, lyrical arch-shaped phrase that grows into a longer melody embedded in a subtle yet luxuriant contrapuntal fabric. These motives are treated at some length, become hushed, and are followed by a radiant modulation to the key of E major for the second theme, a melody of warm emotion that is among Vaughan Williams’ greatest inspirations. Rather than a traditional development, the center of the movement is occupied by a contrasting section in quicker tempo based on a scurrying pentatonic motive initiated by the strings. The mood and themes of the first two sections return before the movement closes quietly with sounds recalled from its opening measures.

Some commentators have found in the following Scherzo evidence of the “hobgoblin and foul fiend” which bedevils Christian in Bunyan’s allegory. The music (centered on A) springs from a wide-interval theme first given by the strings and then taken up by the woodwinds. The horns interject a repeated-note motive spiced with a strident grace note that is reminiscent of the “Satan” motive in Vaughan Williams’ ballet of 1930, Job. The first of the movement’s two trios begins with the trombones discussing the opening theme of the Scherzo. This music is soon combined with a hymnal strain for winds which is denied any convincing tranquility by the persistent, agitated string figures rustling beneath it. The Scherzo returns in a mysterious, staccato setting that calls to mind the pizzicato passage in the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The second trio is an energetic, brilliantly scored passage in duple meter. A quiet, brief recall of the movement’s main motive by bassoon and flute closes the Scherzo.

Above the manuscript of the Romanza, the expressive heart of the Symphony, Vaughan Williams inscribed these lines from The Pilgrim’s Progress: “Upon that place there stood a cross, and a little below, a sepulchre. Then he said, ‘He hath given me rest by His sorrow and life by His death.’” Vaughan Williams’ borrowings from his opera here include the plaintive English horn theme and the accompanying curtain of harmonies that serve as the gateway to this transcendent movement. The strings present a smooth melody that is a celestial transfiguration of the demonic theme of the Scherzo. Except to note that the dynamic climax of the movement is achieved by a more animated central section, further analysis is almost an intrusion upon music of such spirituality and rich emotion. “There are some movements in music,” wrote James Day, “which give the listener the sense that time has ceased to exist and which seem to hover in space without any reference to life on earth. Their serenity and profound clarity mark out their composers as belonging to the few transcendentally great masters of all time.”

The Symphony’s nominal key of D major is finally achieved with the last movement, labeled “Passacaglia” (i.e., variations on a short, repeating melodic fragment), though Vaughan Williams’ treatment of the time-honored form is less strict than is Brahms’ in the finale of his Fourth Symphony. The passacaglia theme, presented by the cellos, is joined almost at once by a flowing melody in the flutes and first violins that, through the processes of variation and thematic development, comes to dominate the movement. In the final pages, a grand statement of the horn theme that opened the first movement is spread across the entire orchestra to fulfill the formal cycle of this magnificent Symphony. A coda, sweet and clear, floats above a long-sustained pedal note on D, the glowing goal toward which this magnificent symphonic pilgrimage has progressed.

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda