NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
Va, Pensiero Va', pensiero, sull'ali dorate; vah pehn-­‐seeyeh’-­‐roh sool-­‐ah’-­‐lee doh-­‐rah’-­‐teh Va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli, vah tee poh’-­‐sah soowee klee’-­‐vee soowee koh’-­‐leee ove_o lezzano tepide_e molli oh’-­‐vehyoh leh-­‐tsah’-­‐noh teh-­‐pee’-­‐deh moh’-­‐lee l'aure dolci del suolo natal! lah_oo’-­‐reh dohl’-­‐chee dehl soowoh’-­‐loh nah-­‐tahl’ Del Giordano le rive saluta, dehl jee_ohr-­‐dah’-­‐noh leh ree’-­‐veh sah-­‐loo’-­‐tah di Sionne le torri atterrate… dee see-­‐oh’-­‐neh leh toh’-­‐ree ah-­‐tehr-­‐rah’-­‐teh Oh mia Patria sì bella e perduta! oh meeyah pah’-­‐treeyah see beh’-­‐lah eh pehr-­‐doo’-­‐tah O membranza sì cara e fatal! oh mehm-­‐brahn’-­‐tsah see kah-­‐reh eh fah-­‐tahl’ Arpa d'or dei fatidici vati, ahr’-­‐pah dohr deh_ee fah-­‐tee-­‐dee’-­‐chee vah’-­‐tee perché muta dal salice pendi? pehr’-­‐keh moo’-­‐tah dahl sah-­‐lee’-­‐cheh pehn’-­‐dee Le memorie nel petto raccendi, leh meh-­‐moh’-­‐ree_eh nehl peht’-­‐toh rah-­‐chehn’-­‐dee ci favella del tempo che fu! chee fah-­‐vehl’-­‐lah dehl tehm’-­‐poh keh foo O simile di Solima_ai fati, Oh see-­‐mee’-­‐leh dee soh’-­‐lee-­‐mah_ee fah’-­‐tee tragi_un suono di crudo lamento; trah’-­‐jee_oon soowoh’-­‐noh dee kroo’-­‐doh lah-­‐mehn’-­‐toh o t'ispiri_il Signore_un concento oh tee-­‐spee’-­‐reel see-­‐nyoh’-­‐reh_oon kohn-­‐chehn’-­‐toh che ne_infonda_al patire virtù! keh neh_een-­‐fohn’-­‐dahl pah-­‐tee’-­‐reh veer-­‐too’ 1
Hasten thoughts on golden wings. Hasten and rest on the densely wooded hills, where warm and fragrant and soft are the gentle breezes of our native land! The banks of the Jordan we greet and the towers of Zion. O, my homeland, so beautiful and lost! O memories, so dear and yet so deadly! Golden harp of our prophets, why do you hang silently on the willow? Rekindle the memories of our hearts, and speak of the times gone by! Or, like the fateful Solomon, draw a lament of raw sound; or permit the Lord to inspire us to endure our suffering! NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
Super flumina Babylonis Super flumina Babylonis illic sedimus et flevimus, cum recordaremur Sion. In salicibus in medio ejus suspendimus organa nostra: We sat down by the streams of Babylon and wept there, remembering Sion. Willow-­‐trees grow there, and on these we hung up our harps Et incarnatus est (from Mass in B minor) Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine: et homo factus est. And became incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary: And was made man. Crucifixus etiam pro nobis; sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus est. He was also crucified for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. Crucifixus (from Mass in B minor) Placido è il Mar (from Idomeneo) Placido_è il mar, andiamo; plah-­‐chee’-­‐doh_eh eel mahr ahn-­‐dee_ah’-­‐moh Tutto ci rassicura. too’-­‐toh chee rahs-­‐see-­‐koo’-­‐rah Felice_avrem ventura, feh-­‐lee’-­‐cheh_ahv’-­‐rehm vehn-­‐too’-­‐rah Su su, partiamo or or. soo soo pahr-­‐teeyah’-­‐moh ohr ohr 2
The sea is calm; let us go; everything is reassuring; we shall have good fortune; come, let us leave at once! NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
12. Schlosser auf, und made Schlösser (from Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52) Schlosser auf, und mache Schlösser, Shlah’-­‐ser ah_oof oont mahX’-­‐uh shlö’-­‐ser Schlösser ohne Zahl; shlö’-­‐ser oh’-­‐nuh tsahl denn die bösen Mäuler will ich dehn dee bö’-­‐sehn moh_ee’-­‐ler vihl ihx schließen allzumal. shlee’-­‐sehn ahl-­‐tsoo-­‐mahl’ Locksmith -­‐ get up and make your locks, locks without number; for I want to lock up all the evil mouths. 13. Vögelein durchrauscht die Luft (from Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52) Vögelein durchrauscht die Luft, fö’-­‐guh-­‐līn doorX-­‐rah_oosht’ dee looft (“ein” rhymes with “mine”) sucht nach einem Aste; zooXt nahX ī’-­‐nehm ah’-­‐stuh und das Herz, ein Herz, ein Herz begehrt's, oont dahs hehrts īn herts īn herts buh-­‐gehrts’ wo es selig raste. voh ehs zeh’-­‐lix rah’-­‐stuh The little bird rushes through the air, searching for a branch; and my heart desires a heart, a heart on which it can blessedly rest. 14. Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar (from Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52) Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar, Zee vee ihst dee veh’-­‐luh klahr blickt der Mond hernieder! blihkt dehr mohnt hehr-­‐nee’-­‐dehr Die du meine Liebe bist, dee doo mī’-­‐nuh lee’-­‐buh bihst liebe du mich wieder! lee’-­‐buh doo meex vee’-­‐der See how clear the waves are when the moon gazes down! You who are my love, you love me back! 3
NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
11. Nein, es ist nicht auszukommen (from Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52) Nein, es ist nicht auszukommen nīn ehs ihst neex ah_oos-­‐tsoo-­‐koh’-­‐mehn mit den Leuten; miht deh_een loh_ee’-­‐tehn (“den” rhymes with “rain”) Alles wissen sie so giftig Ahl’-­‐lehs vih’-­‐sehn zee zoh gihf’-­‐tihx auszudeuten. ah_oos-­‐tsoo-­‐doy’-­‐tehn Bin ich heiter, hegen soll ich bihn ihx hī’-­‐ter heh’-­‐guhn zohl ihx lose Triebe; loh’-­‐zuh tree’-­‐buh bin ich still, so heißts, ich wäre bihn ihx shtihl zoh hīsts ihx veh’-­‐ruh irr aus Liebe. eer ah_oos lee’-­‐buh No, there's just no getting along with people; they always make such poisonous interpretations of everything. If I'm merry, they say I cherish loose urges; if I'm quiet, they say I am crazed with love. 4
NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
Super flumina Babylonis Psalm 137 (Greek numbering: Psalm 136) is one of the best known of the Biblical psalms. Its opening lines, "By the rivers of Babylon..." (Septuagint: "By the waters of Babylon...") have been set to music on several occasions. The psalm is a hymn expressing the yearnings of the Jewish people in exile following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The rivers of Babylon are the Euphrates river, its tributaries, and the Tigris river (possibly the river Habor, the Chaboras, or modern Khabur, which joins the Euphrates at Circesium).[1] In its whole form, the psalm reflects the yearning for Jerusalem as well as hatred for the Holy City's enemies with sometimes violent imagery. Rabbinical sources attributed the poem to the prophet Jeremiah,[2] and the Septuagint version of the psalm bears the superscription: "For David. By Jeremias, in the Captivity."[3] The early lines of the poem are very well known, as they describe the sadness of the Israelites, asked to "sing the Lord's song in a foreign land". This they refuse to do, leaving their harps hanging on trees. The poem then turns into self-­‐exhortation to remember Jerusalem. It ends with violent fantasies of revenge, telling a "Daughter of Babylon" of the delight of "he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks." Both in his life and after, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was renowned for the perceived perfection of his style. Legends quickly grew that he had "saved church music" during the Council of Trent, and the papal choir continued singing his music for centuries after his death. The seventeenth century viewed the "Palestrina style" as antique, but classical and still worthy of emulation; it remained an active musical language in the eighteenth. The nineteenth century's Cecilian movement sought to reclaim church music's Golden age by revisiting Palestrina's music, and in the twentieth, the early music revival gave him yet another vogue. Each era has looked at Palestrina's music and seen something that is balanced and pure, that deals judiciously with dissonance, and that carefully molds each phrase into an elegant arch. This is not to call his music bland; Palestrina was perfectly capable of writing poignant and affective melodies as well as classically elegant ones. He also frequently used subtle "madrigalisms" to paint the nuances of his text. All these elements of style are present together in one of his more famous motets, Super flumina babylonis. Palestrina's four-­‐voiced Super flumina babylonis was first printed in his second book of motets. This 1581 volume, from the Gardano press in Venice, contains a large number of his most popular works, some of which must have graced the liturgy of the papal chapel for many years. As is common in Palestrina's motet style, each phrase of his text receives one musical phrase; several begin with classic Points of Imitation. The Psalm text, however, paints the extraordinarily somber image of the Israelites in captivity: they sit by the side of the rivers in Babylon and hang up their harps, unable to sing in this strange country. Palestrina responds to this text by allowing each voice to sing the first melody in the mournful Hypophrygian mode. There follows a phrase about the Israelites' weeping, and the composer sets it to an uncharacteristically chromatic series of chords, flats following sharps. This is not his usual "perfection!" A second imitative passage, again to a downward-­‐leading melody, speaks of the memory of lost Zion. The last and longest phrase of the piece actually contains two musical puns. At the word suspendimus (we hang), Palestrina gives each voice a melody just like a common "suspension" figure. In Latin, the object of the hanging is the organa; here he writes a clever evocation of "ancient music," or organum. 5
NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
Va, Pensiero "Va, pensiero" (pronounced [va penˈsjɛro]), also known in English as the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, is a chorus from the third act of Nabucco (1842) by Giuseppe Verdi, with words by Temistocle Solera, inspired by Psalm 137. Known as Verdi's "Jewish" work of art, it recollects the story of Jewish exiles from Judea after the loss of the First Temple in Jerusalem. The opera with its powerful chorus established Verdi as a major composer in 19th-­‐century Italy. The full incipit is Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate, meaning "Fly, thought, on wings of gold" (note that the first word is in modern orthography spelled Va', with an apostrophe, but this is absent in the libretto.) Verdi composed Nabucco at a difficult moment in his life. His wife and small children had all just died. He had contracted with La Scala to write another opera and the director forced the libretto into his hands. Returning home, it happened to open to "Va, pensiero" and seeing the phrase, he heard the words singing. At first rehearsal "the stagehands shouted their approval, then beat on the floor and the sets with their tools to create an even noisier demonstration". As he was subsequently to note, Verdi felt that "this is the opera with which my artistic career really begins. And though I had many difficulties to fight against, it is certain that Nabucco was born under a lucky star". Upon Verdi's death, along his funeral's cortege in the streets of Milan, bystanders started spontaneous choruses of "Va, pensiero..." Mass in B minor The Mass in B minor (BWV 232) is a musical setting, by Johann Sebastian Bach, of the complete Latin Mass. The work was one of Bach's last, not completed until 1749, the year before his death. Much of the Mass consisted of music that Bach had composed earlier: the Kyrie and Gloria sections had been composed as a Missa in 1733 for the Elector of Saxony at Dresden. The Sanctus dates back to 1724, and the Crucifixus movement was based on a cantata chorus dating from 1714. To complete the work, however, in the 1740s Bach composed new sections of the Credo such as Et incarnatus est. The completed Mass was his last major composition. It was unusual for composers working in the Lutheran tradition to compose a Missa tota and Bach's motivations remain a matter of scholarly debate. The Mass was most probably never performed in totality during Bach's lifetime, and the work largely disappeared in the 18th century. Several performances in the early 19th century, however, sparked a revival both of the piece and the larger rediscovery of Bach's music. Today, it is widely hailed as one of the greatest compositions in history and is frequently performed and recorded. Placido è il Mar (from Idomeneo) 6
NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante (Italian for Idomeneo, King of Crete, or, Ilia and Idamante; usually referred to simply as Idomeneo, K. 366) is an Italian language opera seria by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712. Mozart and Varesco were commissioned in 1780 by Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria for a court carnival. He probably chose the subject, though it might have been Mozart. Allegro (from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major), K. 525, is a 1787 composition for a chamber ensemble by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The German title means "a little serenade," though it is often rendered more literally but less accurately as "a little night music." The work is written for an ensemble of two violins, viola, and cello with optional double bass, but is often performed by string orchestras. The serenade was completed in Vienna on 10 August 1787, around the time Mozart was working on the second act of his opera Don Giovanni. It is not known why it was composed. Hildesheimer (1991, 215), noting that most of Mozart's serenades were written on commission, suggests that this serenade, too, was a commission, whose origin and first performance were not recorded. The traditionally used name of the work comes from the entry Mozart made for it in his personal catalog, which begins, "Eine kleine Nacht-­‐Musik." As Zaslaw and Cowdery point out, Mozart almost certainly was not giving the piece a special title, but only entering in his records that he had completed a little serenade. The work was not published until about 1827, long after Mozart's death, by Johann André in Offenbach am Main.[2] It had been sold to this publisher in 1799 by Mozart's widow Constanze, part of a large bundle of her husband's compositions. The Swingle Singers are a mostly a cappella vocal group formed in 1962 in Paris, France by Ward Swingle with Anne Germain, Jeanette Baucomont, Jean Cussac and others. Christiane Legrand, the sister of composer Michel Legrand, was the group's lead soprano through 1972. Until 2011, the group consisted of eight voices: two sopranos, two altos, two tenors and two basses. The French group performed and recorded typically with only a double bass and drums as accompaniment. The current group performs primarily a cappella. In 1973, the original French group disbanded and Ward Swingle moved to London and recruited all new members who debuted as Swingle II. The group later performed and recorded under the name The Swingles and then, The New Swingle Singers and eventually, simply, The Swingle Singers. Since the London group's incarnation, the group has never disbanded. As individual members have left the group, the remaining members have held auditions for replacements. The group, directed originally by Ward Swingle (who once belonged to Mimi Perrin's French vocal group Les Double Six), began as session singers mainly doing background vocals for singers such 7
NMC Music Department
CANTICUM NOVUM – Spring 2013 Texts
as Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf. Christiane Legrand, sister of Michel Legrand, was the original lead soprano, and they did some jazz vocals for Michel Legrand. The eight session singers sang through Bach's Well-­‐Tempered Klavier as a sight-­‐reading exercise and found the music to have a natural swing. They recorded their first album Jazz Sébastien Bach as a present for friends and relatives. Many radio stations picked it up and this led to the group recording more albums and winning a total of five Grammy Awards. Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52) You’ve probably heard about Brahms’s enduring relationship with Clara Schumann; you may not know as much about his affection for her daughter, Julie. His infatuation, which began seven years earlier when Julie was only 16, drove him as he sought to pen another hit—something as popular as his four-­‐hand piano waltzes—for his publisher in the summer of 1868. What he came up with was his Liebeslieder waltzes, a collection of 18 songs for four singers (Brahms and Julie, Robert and Clara, perhaps?) that begins with an amorous request to a young maiden and ends with these words: “My soul trembles with love, desire and grief, when it thinks of you.” It ends up that the songs were a big hit, but clearly Julie didn’t get the message hidden in the Liebeslieder waltzes. Although he had never directly expressed his feelings for the young daughter of his mentor, Brahms was devastated when Clara announced that Julie was marrying. Never mind that a relationship would have “verged on incestuous,” as biographer Jan Swafford put it: Brahms could barely contain his frustration. As a sarcastic “epilogue” to the Liebeslieder waltzes, he wrote “a bridal song for the Schumann countess—but I wrote it with anger, with wrath!” It was his mournful ode to lost love, the Alto Rhapsody. 8