To finish our short series on music relating to the celebration of Easter, we will listen to Pie Jesu from the Requiem by the great French composer Gabriel Faure. It is performed by the singers of the ensemble Voces8.
Faure’s Requiem was written as a prayerful tribute to his father. It is somewhat strange that he would have written a Requiem, an inherently religious work, given that he was not religious and described himself as a “sceptic.” Yet Faure’s Requiem is unique among religious compositions in that it avoids the somber, often heavy nature of those works and instead creates a light, serene atmosphere.
The Pie Jesu is the most well-known portion of the Reqiuem. Most requiems are based on an opening movement titled dies irae, which introduces the thematic material for the entire work and presents the text of the Latin mass. Pie Jesu is simply the last verse of the dies irae.
Our music for today comes from Carl Orff’s opera Carmina Burana. Carmina Burana is the most frequently performed choral work of the 21st century. The opening chorus is one of the most popular lines in all of classical music. It became famous through an Old Spice commercial in the United Kingdom.
The name means “The Songs of Beuren,” and it comes from the combination of two words. The first is the Latin “carmina,” meaning “songs.” The second is “beuren,” which represents the Beuren region of Bavaria, where Carl Orff lived and is now buried. The Songs of Beuren were a collection of 13th-century poems discovered in the Benedictine monastery in Beuren. Orff’s opera was his effort to set these poems to music. If you are interested in seeing what the words are, they are conveniently displayed as a subscript in the video above.
As we continue our series on the music of Leonard Bernstein, our music for this week is the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein. The composer conducts the Boys and Men’s Choir of the Poznan Philharmonic.
Chichester Psalms was written in 1965 for boy soprano, solo quartet, choir, and orchestra. It is essentially a musical setting of Psalms 2, 23, 100, 108, 131, and 133 that was commissioned by the Revered Walter Hussey of the Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England.
As with
many of his other compsitions, Bernstein wrote extensively about his motivation
for composing the Psalms.
“For hours on end I brooded and mused
On materiae musicae, used and abused;
On aspects of unconventionality,
Over the death in our time of tonality…
Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos
With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos
Played with the forearms, the fists and the palms —
And then I came up with the Chichester Psalms.
… My youngest child, old-fashioned and sweet.
And he stands on his own two tonal feet.”
Unlike
most of Bernstein’s compositions during this time period, the Psalms are not atonal. In his own words,
the piece is “the
most accessible, B-flat majorish tonal piece I’ve ever written.” Bernstein was also
adamant that the Psalms be sung in
the original Hebrew and with the rhythmic style of the Hebrew musical
tradition. Some have observed that by writing a Christian mass for a Christian
church in the Hebrew language and Hebrew style, Bernstein was implicitly advocating
for a peaceful reconciliation between the two faiths.
Here’s a quick rundown of
things to listen for:
First movement: This movement is based on
Psalm 108 and opens with a victorious “Awake, psaltery and harp!” Interestingly,
this movement is 7/4 meter, which, if you are a musician, you will know is an
almost unheard-of meter.
Second movement: listen for the boy soprano
solo that is based on Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) and is accompanied
by the harp (perhaps symbolic of the shepherd-psalmist King David?) Later in
the movement, you’ll hear a quick snippet of a West Side Story melody that Bernstein threw in just for fun.
Third movement: notice how Bernstein ends the
piece with less and less orchestral involvement, eventually giving way to a subdued
chorus without instrumentation.
Our music for this week is the second movement of the German Requiem by Brahms. This week also marks the beginning of a new series on the music of Johannes Brahms. In particular, I want to focus on his larger works, such as the Requiem and his four symphonies.
The Requiem is based on
the following set of verses:
Blessed are they that mourn
Behold, all flesh is as the grass
Lord, let me know mine end
How lovely are thy dwellings
Ye now have sorrow
For we have here no abiding city
Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.
The verses above, which Brahms chose himself from both the Old and New Testaments, is clearly focused on themes of death and mourning. However, there is a consistent message of hope throughout the Requiem, and there is a widespread consensus that Brahms intended this piece to be a comfort for the living rather than a memorial for the dead.
It is likely that he wrote this piece in memory of both his mother and his dear friend Robert Schumann, both of whom died shortly before the composition of this piece. In fact, Brahms wrote the following words about the Requiem after its first performance:
“If you were to consider the situation and how it relates particularly to me, you would know how much and how profoundly a piece like the Requiem is altogether Schumann’s and how, in the secret recesses of my mind, it therefore had to seem quite self-evident to me that it would indeed be sung to him.”
The second movement, written in the especially dark key of B-flat minor, is the funeral march portion of the Requiem. While the later movements of the Requiem (which you are more than welcome to listen to at your leisure) depict the acceptance stage, this movement is fully saturated in the despair of loss. The tenor and bass parts are the foundation of the funeral march, and they repeatedly sing the words “Behold, all flesh is as the grass.” There is a persistence emphasis throughout this movement on the inevitability of our fate.
However, Brahms provides the listener with a brief respite during the middle of the movement, when he transitions to a lighter and more uplifting episode focused on the words “But yet the Lord’s word standeth forever.” These words and the brightness of this section are an excellent example of Brahms’ desire to, as noted above, comfort the living rather than mourn the dead.
The ending of this movement is particularly interesting. You will notice that it does not end in the somber darkness in which it begins. In many ways, this ending is the beginning of the transition from grief to acceptance. It is interesting to note that, despite the persistent focus on fate and grieving in the previous verses, the last words of this movement are simply “Eternal Joy.”
This Week's Music 