Classical
Break: Shakespeare
Hullo, this is Classical Break,
and I’m Mike Burrows.
Today on Classical Break we
shall be hearing works inspired by the plays of Shakespeare, and we start with
the concert overture Julius Caesar by the German composer,
Robert Schumann. This year, in fact a
few days ago, was the bicentenary of Schumann’s birth in Saxony on June the
8th, 1810. He died at the Endenich
Hospital outside Bonn on July the 29th, 1856.
Julius Caesar was written in
1851 and is intended to evoke the splendour of Caesar’s career and the vain masterfulness
of his nature, as portrayed by Shakespeare, rather than actual scenes from the
play. The fact of Caesar’s assassination
is turned around by a coda in the major.
Some have said that this piece could be about any tragic hero; how does it evoke Caesar or Ancient Rome, Circa 44BC?!
Track
One: Julius
Caesar (Robert Schumann)
Perhaps he should have called it
A Hero’s Life, and thus confounded our
more literal-minded critics! This is a
very German Caesar - a Rhineland Caesar.
Though never of the extreme Nationalist tendency, Schumann was very
conscious of his Germanness and desired to make German music. For the rest, as in all his character studies,
he identified with the figure portrayed. Here, in its monumental but unWagner-like
scoring - some tricky parts for valved brass instruments and violins, a warm, glowing
woodwind palette softening their effects - a strong bass and stubborn dotted rhythms
- Schumann created a kaleidoscopic work of nobility and real determination - well
worthy of Shakespeare, or Caesar!
Julius
Caesar has been
described as magnificently aggressive! Schumann
was forty-one when he wrote it, starting out on a new career as Kapellmeister
at Dusseldorf. His first year in his position
- from 1850-1 was successful; this piece was written with his work with the
orchestra in mind. In music, he could
feel with a conqueror: in life...it was
not to be.
When a patient at Endenich, the Overture
may have been the last music that he played with another - the young Brahms
visited and they performed it together in its piano-duet-arrangement. Poignantly, Brahms remarked later that Schumann
confessed to being out of practice.
This is Classical Break and Somer
Valley Radio, and I’m Mike Burrows. We’re
hearing music inspired by the plays of Shakespeare.
For our second piece I have chosen
music by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, born in 1865, who again came to Shakespeare
surprizingly late in his career, most substantially when he was asked to write
incidental music for a prestigious Copenhagen production of The Tempest. Overall, this music seems to me quite
possibly the greatest expression in music of Shakespeare’s magic and romance. As the entire score lasts just under an hour,
it was extremely difficult to choose a number from it; many of them last under two
minutes, some only a matter of a few seconds, but all are miracles of
economical expression and character.
Others have written striking music to The Tempest, composers as diverse in time and style as Purcell, Tchaikovsky
and Frank Martin, but to me, Sibelius simply comes
closest to realising the Shakespearian interplay between the magic of elementals and the warmth
of human love and anger. My excerpt
comes from Scene Two Act Two, The Oak
Tree: the Spirit of the Air
contemplates the punishment of being imprisoned in an oak tree as threatened by
his master, Prospero the magician. Sibelius
wrote extensively for symbolist plays by Finnish, Swedish and French dramatists
and writes here in a similar, infinitely subtle, terse and uncanny strain.
Track
Two: The
Oak Tree (Sibelius)
My next piece is the song from As you like it: It was
a lover and his lass, and this was the work of Thomas Morley, whose dates
are 1557-1602. He was the organist at St
Paul’s Cathedral and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He and Shakespeare were neighbours for a time
and his would have been the tune used in contemporary performances of the
play.
Track
Three: It was a lover and his lass (Morley)
Now we move on to the music of
Sir Edward Elgar, who lived from 1857-1934 and was born and died in
Worcestershire. Falstaff, A Symphonic Study,
dates from 1913. This tone poem portrays
the famous character from Henry IV Parts 1
and 2 and Henry V as opposed to the Falstaff of the Merry Wives of Windsor.
A complexly comic figure, this man, a Knight, has lived out the end of his
life in the stews of London trying to maintain a riotous pace in the company of the young
Prince Hal and his more fashionable companion, Poins, and the common folk of
the tavern, figures such as Mistress Quickly, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol.
Like Shakespeare’s prose, Elgar
makes the most of his larger-than-life personality. Latter Spring, All-hallown Summer. We shall hear the death-bed scene at the very
end of a highly eventful score.
The old King has died; his son,
whom Falstaff thought his friend is now Henry the Fifth, and has banished Falstaff and his Eastcheapers,
commanding them sharply never again to come near his person on pain of
death. We are with the old Knight -
perhaps we are he - in his last, slowly lapsing moments when, stricken by flux,
‘he babbles o’ green fields’, drifting in and out of consciousness, the
thematic material not merely pathetically descriptive of his state but recalling former
times. The violin-slide at the start is like a bed-curtain lifted. We hear him stirring, his deep, unsteady voice
rising out of the murk he feels about him.
A soft music seems like echoes of the orchard or childhood. Mistress Quickly is recognised dimly, he hears her, not so shrilly
as during the rest of the tone-poem... Softly,
very fondly, there is a full statement of the Prince’s theme, the strings
leading it. All seems to drift
away. Falstaff tries to respond, but
sinks deeper. At last, listen for the
clarinet - beautifully despairing and swooning, a brass C-major cadence - and a
leap, brazen and with side-drum - the old man starts up for the King, all Hal’s
humanity has been purged away, his title, perhaps, is a last cry - before a
still more abrupt, pianissimo, pizzicato chord tells us that he falls back,
dead. A terrible war was about to change
Elgar and the world forever.
Track
Four: Falstaff (Elgar)
And now, we're going to hear Watchman’s Song by Edvard Grieg, who was
born in Bergen in Norway in 1843 and died in hospital in Oslo in 1907. Watchman’s
Song comes from the first book of Lyric
Pieces for piano. He wrote ten books of these genre pieces. They
were extremely popular in the Nineteenth Century and more than once, Grieg
bewailed the popularity of his simple music for amateur performance, on one
occasion, writing that itwasn’t his fault that his music was
played in third-rate restaurants and by schoolgirls. It was his misfortune, no-one else’s, it has
to be said. Every time he mailed the later
books, his publishers, on receipt, raised a flag on top of their
buildings! This music was written in Copenhagen, not long after he
had left the Leipzig Conservatoire. It owes
much to the character pieces of Schumann.
The watchman is the porter in Macbeth. The central section, comprised chiefly of
little scale figures perhaps suggests the man’s superstition and...things that
go bump in the night. For such a short
piece, Watchman’s Song is very
effective and memorable.
Track
Five: Watchman’s Song (Grieg)
That was Watchman’s Song. At the age
of three I listened as my mum played it.
Either you grow up with music like this or it grows up with you. Grieg
loved his country’s folk-tunes but was also one of the most
exciting harmonists in Nineteenth Century music. Throughout his career showed that it was
possible to use harmony to create a size in music alike to Wagner on a
miniature scale. It may be because of
this and because he was extraordinarily gifted at paring back his style that he
remains one of the more consistently fresh voices in music.
Our next piece is an overture to
The Taming of the Shrew by the
Liverpool composer, Alfred Reynolds, who was born in 1884, and died as recently
as 1969. This work is about as far as you
can imagine from Kiss Me Kate and
belongs to what is known as the British Light Music tradition - which in
practice often used to mean warmed-over Sullivan. This is much much better than that! It is a lively, brightly-scored piece and has
a poignant humour about it that makes me wish it were much better known. It was composed for a 1927 production at the Lyric
Theatre. Reynolds worked chiefly as a
conductor and composer for the theatres of London.
Track
Six: Overture,
The Taming of the Shrew (Reynolds)
Gerald Finzi was born in 1901 and
died in 1956. He was a musician quite
different from Reynolds. One of the more self-critical and anxious of
composers, he wrote in the traditions of the folksong/pastoral school of
British music. Like all the best of
such composers he was not over-indebted to
existing melodies. Like many driven artists, he had other interests to fall
back on. Besides building a wonderful library of contemporary poetry - he was a
superb song-writer - he planted an orchard of rare strains of British apple in
the garden of his farmhouse at Ashmansworth in Berkshire. He refused to make his living from
professional music-making or, for most of his career, from teaching. He did not solicit commissions, either,
believing that inspired music was the only music worth writing. Inspiration was fitful and it was only
towards the end of his life that he produced works on a large scale. Here is a song from the cycle Let Us Garlands Bring, which was written between 1929 and 1942, the year in
which he wrote O Mistress Mine, from Twelth Night.
Track
Seven: O Mistress Mine (Finzi)
Back to Sibelius: a setting of Come Away, Death (from Cymbeline)
in Swedish translation. It is one of two
settings of songs from Shakespeare, the other being When that I was and a little tiny boy. Sibelius wrote these two songs at the age of
forty-four and living with the threat of throat cancer. On this recording the soloist is the great
and versatile soprano, Kirsten Flagstad.
Her performances of Sibelius songs with orchestral accompaniment date from near the close of her long
career. The music looks forward to the
mysteriousness, rich technique and emotional appeal of the music for The Tempest.
We return to The Tempest for a part-song by Ralph Vaughan
Williams (1872-1958), whose gift for ‘magic’ ranks with that of Sibelius. Of the Three Shakespeare Songs we are going to
hear Full Fathom Five. This was written to a commission associated
with the Festival of Britain in 1951. Vaughan
Williams - it was always Vaughan Williams, not
Williams - refused the commission, then changed his mind. He sent them these songs with the words “Here
are the three Shakespeare settings, do what you like with them.” This wasn’t the spleen of a famous composer put
on the spot but his habitual attitude of modesty towards his own
productions. You may remember that he
said of his devastating Fourth Symphony that he wasn’t sure he liked it, but it
was what he had meant at the time!
Track
Eight: Full Fathom Five (Vaughan
Williams)
Vaughan Williams wrote a piece
for brass band descriptive of the Battle of Agincourt. In it he employed two of the tunes that were used
also by Sir William Walton in his soundtrack for Sir Laurence Olivier’s film of
Henry V. This music, written in the middle of a war whose
outcome was becoming more certain and on which far more depended than it had on
Henry V and his band of brothers, is one of the finest achievements in not only
patriotic British music but also art-music as a whole. I choose to end this programme, then, with
two pieces from the later stages of the film, the Battle of Agincourt and the
Agincourt Song. The means of
describing battle are little different from those of say, Prokofiev’s portrayal
of Alexander Nevsky’s defeat of the Teutonic
knights in the Battle on the Ice (also
written for a film), but the music remains terse.
Track
Nine: The Battle of Agincourt (Walton)
The
Agincourt Song
rises in full glory of choir, brass and strings in-filling. It is grandeur on the greatest scale, though
within short duration. It has much to do
with who we might be and nothing to do with football!
You have been listening to
Classical Break from Somer Valley Radio, and this is Mike Burrows. Hope to have your company again, soon.
Track
Ten: The
Agincourt Song (Walton)
© Mike Burrows 2010
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