Lehigh Choral Arts opens its final concert of the season with two works for solo singer and
orchestra, both of which speak to separation and longing. Gustav Mahler’s cycle of four songs,
Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), was composed between 1884 and 1885.
Originally for voice and piano, and Mahler later orchestrated the accompaniment. This version
was first performed in 1896 under the direction of the composer. Mahler wrote the text as well
as the music, taking his cue from the well-known collection of folk poetry, Des Knaben
Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). His motivation for composing the cycle may be an
instance of art imitating life: in the fall of 1883, Mahler was conducting a second-rate opera
company in Kassel; he hated the job, but fell into an intense, ill-fated affair with one of the altos,
Johanna Richter. Mahler likely identified himself with travelling Wayfarer (or, more accurately,
“apprentice”) and Johanna with those tantalizing “two blue eyes” (“zwei blauen Augen”) which
leave him to marry another. In the first song, we find the Wayfarer encompassed by darkness.
Even as he looks to nature, he finds no solace. The second song begins in a pastorale, again
invoking the world’s beauty; but for the Wayfarer, the world can “never bloom again.” We hear
him in despair in the third song: his passion transforms into a gleaming knife, cutting deep into
his heart. In the final song of the cycle, he takes leave of the world: a peace settles on him as he
bids his final “Ade” (“Adieu”).
The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, is based on the first of the Two Letters from Chang-Kan”
by Chinese poet Li-Po (701-762), as interpreted by the American poet, Ezra Pound (18851972). In 1912, Pound had met Mary Fenellosa, the widow of the respected East Asian literature
scholar Ernest Fenellosa. Mary shared her late husband’s notes on translations of Chinese poetry
with Pound. Pound studied the Chinese pictograms and “translated” them into English poetry,
though he spoke no Chinese and his English might not correspond to the meaning of the Chinese
characters. In this way, he created a new collection, Cathay, published in 1915, including The
River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.
Like the Songs of a Wayfarer, A River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter speaks to love and
separation. The young wife has not seen her husband for five months. She recalls each year of
their growing relationship: their youth together, a time when “my hair was still cut straight across
my forehead” (in the style of an unmarried girl); when they played together, when they married,
and when she felt the first stirrings of passion. When he departs on the river for business, she
writes to him. We hear her longing as the season changes and she “grows older” without him,
and she implores him to send word when he will return.
Like the Songs of a Wayfarer, A River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter was originally composed for
voice and piano, and later orchestrated. It is this version that is being presented tonight for the
first time.
Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem)
In contrast to the feelings of isolation and loneliness heard tonight in the works for solo voice,
Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) creates a world of community, solace and healing.
The solemn first movement arises from the grief of death, but communicates the message that
will guide the entire work: “blessed are those in sorrow, for they shall be comforted.”
The composition of Ein Deutsches Requiem occupied Brahms from 1861 to 1868, directly after
the deaths of both his mother and his musical mentor, Robert Schumann. The Requiem was at
once the medium for Brahms to work through his own grief and an attempt to make sense of
mortality by finding a positive expression in mourning. Departing from the traditional Catholic
settings of the Latin requiem mass, Brahms drew on texts from Luther’s Bible, often juxtaposing
Old and New Testament passages, as in the first movement’s pairing of verses from the Sermon
on the Mount and part of Psalm 126, or the settings in the fifth movement taken from Job, Isaiah,
and Ecclesiastes. There is no reference to Christ nor to the terror of death as depicted in the
“Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) of the Catholic requiem mass. Writing to Karl Reinthaler, the
organist of the Bremen Cathedral who prepared the chorus and orchestra for the first
performance, Brahms declared, “As for the text, I confess I would gladly leave off the ‘German’
and say simply ‘Human.”
Brahms created a structural balance in the texts of the seven movements, shifting from the
subjective experience of the mourner in the first three movements to the beatific state of the dead
in the fourth movement (“How lovely are Thy dwelling places”) to the promise of resurrection
and eternal peace in the final three movements. Additionally, a musical symmetry results from
the use of the same thematic musical material in the contemplative outer movements, in the
solemn opening marches in minor mode transformed to fugues in the major in the second and
sixth movements, and in the prominent use of soloists in the third and fifth movements, setting
off the serene choral writing of the central fourth movement.
Brahms’s solo writing conveys the most personal sentiments of the Requiem. The baritone of the
third movement is a soul searching to know its end. The soprano in the fifth movement is at once
the voice of the lost mother and the source of eternal solace. Brahms added this movement after
the Bremen premiere and dedicated it to his mother. The baritone of the sixth movement is the
voice of St. Paul prophesying the defeat of death through resurrection. By contrast, the choral
writing is an expression of the universal. The opening texts of the second, third, and sixth
movements express sorrow and uncertainty. In each case, this searching is answered in fugues
offering statements of faith: the “everlasting joy” offered to the ransomed of the Lord, “the souls
of the righteous are in the hand of God,” and the confirmation of the worthiness of the Lord, due
all “honour, glory, and power.” It was this talent to express universal humanity which Schumann
surely recognized when he exhorted Brahms to write “in order that the truth in art may shine
forth more and more brightly, everywhere spreading joy and peace.”
Ein Deutsches Requiem was not always hailed as the masterwork we consider it today. The trial
performance of the first three movements by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna in
1876 was an unmitigated disaster: the timpanist played his 36-bar sustained pedal tone at the end
of the third movement fortissimo, completely obliterating the rest of the ensemble. The Requiem
was a great success at its official premiere in Bremen in 1876, but its New York premiere in
1877 was a dismal failure. The New York Times reviewer stated, “its length and monotonousness
are such that it is scarcely likely to impress any but students,” and the New York Herald
commented that “it possesses many features which will do much to prevent its ever becoming
popular here.” By 1907, the Times critic wrote more kindly: “it was a monumental work...of so
lofty and supreme beauty as to place it among the greatest masterpieces of its kind.”
Bios on the soloists:
Jee Hyun Lim
http://robertgilder.co/jee-hyun-lim/
Troy Cook
http://www.troycookbaritone.com/#!biography/c10fk