Passionate Clarity

Helmuth Rilling occasionally stops in the midst of rehearsal, and, with somewhat exasperated patience, asks, “What is most important?”  And answers his own question: “Clarity. We must be together.”  He has a funny, telling gesture-- the choir yells or slops its way through some passage, and he stops them, grimaces, wipes both sides of his mouth—as though cleaning off drool or spilled food.  It is cute; the choir giggles.  But the point is made.  Clarity must be achieved, before nuances or “interpretation” can be of any value.

Bach’s St. John Passion presents us with the canonic three fronts upon which we must fight for clarity:  language, pitch, and rhythm.  The first is the singer’s peculiar charge, and particular battle:  given a text, we must make that text clear to our listeners.  In terms of this particular work and its role in the liturgical calendar, one could argue that language is the most important element with which Bach works.  We do well to remind ourselves, now and then, that Bach's job in Leipzig was, at base, to save souls;  and in his urgency to reach his listeners, he uses pitch and rhythm to clarify his presentation of text, to render it all the more effective and compelling.  The words of the Passion story, and their power to change the hearts of his parishioners, were his highest priorities. Not that he ever composes less than glorious music, or that his incredible musical invention and imagination can really be separated from his text setting; but his priority is to get the text out where listeners can hear it and be edified by it, learn from it.

Bach’s text is a compilation from three sources:  the Passion narrative from the Gospel of John, contemporary poetry which explores emotional and theological questions raised by this narrative, and familiar (to his target audience) chorale verses.  Each type of text is important; each requires careful presentation by the performers.  Some conductors and ensembles, honoring Bach’s primary purpose in presenting this work, choose to translate these texts into the native language of the performers and audiences for particular performances; most ensembles, though, sing the Passion in its original German, out of consideration for Bach’s considerable art and skill in setting that language.  The accents, rhythms, and sentence structure of German determine, to a startling degree, Bach’s rhythmic patterns and melodic contours; and these patterns and contours don’t necessarily fit another language so well. Most performers, and listeners, want to experience Bach at his musical best; we are not so compelled by his evangelical fervor, any more, that we are willing to compromise his art.

Nonetheless, it helps me, as singer and as conductor, to assume that the meaning of the text is paramount, and that the rest of what happens stems from it.  It also helps to assume that Bach fully intended that his listeners understand the words he had set-- and that he succeeded in bringing this about.  The buildings in which Bach and his fellow church musicians performed were highly reverberant spaces, constructed of stone, glass, and wood; clear verbal expression was very difficult.  Voices could not be too “fruity”—they had to be relatively free of vibrato by modern standards, clear and unwavering in pitch, bright and somewhat “cutting” in quality. They had to be light enough in production that they could easily sing all the coloratura Bach required of them, clearly and absolutely in tempo.  Loud, heavily produced, broadly-colored voices would cloud the acoustic; and details—including all the details which make words comprehensible—would be lost.   A detached, almost staccato articulation would also have been necessary--a legato approach, in choral singing especially, would caused pitches in a reverberant acoustic to smear together, distorting on all three fronts: language, pitch, and rhythm.

German is a good language to sing, in dealing with such requirements.  The consonants are strong, the vowels are clear, and there are “stops” between words—all of which, when presented with a clear, bright, light, detached vocal production, contribute to a text’s comprehensibility in a difficult acoustic environment.  And the accompanying instrumentalists, responding appropriately to the singers’ priorities and needs, provide the same sort of lightness, articulation, and word-influenced accents—in fact, I suspect that an awful lot of what we now expect from “baroque” instrumentalists, in terms of style, articulation, volume, etc., is based not only in the physical nature of their instruments, but in the needs of the singers who collaborated with these instruments almost three hundred years ago, and who insisted that their words be heard and understood. If singers and instrumentalists alike are compelled to perform with this verbal comprehensibility in mind, compelled to communicate the Passion text to listeners, they will of necessity rein in and channel their resources, expending their energies far differently than they would be required to do in concerted music composed a hundred years and more later, when orchestra size and volume, as well as performance halls, had grown and changed to such a degree that composers were confronted with a very different set of priorities.

Behind the performance

Chicago Classical Review has honored Chorale’s recent performance of The Sealed Angel with the #1 position on their “Top Ten Performances of 2012” list.  Fantastic, that a volunteer group, operating on a shoestring budget, should be recognized in this way.  As I wrote to Chorale members when the list came out, “Let’s enjoy this!” We all know that the CSO, Lyric Opera, Music of the Baroque, Chicago Opera Theater, and other local, professional ensembles consistently produce world-class performances of great music; to appear on this list with them is something we will always treasure.

Whatever the level we reach in our performances, our work reflects certain core disciplines and procedures; we don’t go at this haphazardly, depending on luck and inspiration.  As Robert Shaw often said in rehearsals, the dove won’t land, if you don’t make a good nest for him.  The attached photo says it all:  what happens in performance reflects an immense, unseen investment. These past few days, I have been reminding myself of just what those disciplines and procedures are:

1. Auditions:  though Chorale does not pay its singers, we audition our singers very carefully.  They must have exceptional ears for pitch; they must read music; their tone must be warm, flexible, and easily produced; they must be able to negotiate their vocal registers cleanly.  They must demonstrate that they can think musically, learn and perform significant repertoire, and pronounce sounds that do not occur in English.  And they have to know when and how to back off and put ensemble values first. I am cautious in considering large, colorful voices, whose owners clearly wish to sing opera or other solo work—not because the voices are not good, but because I want to be sure the singers understand and enjoy choral singing.

2. Placement within sections: singers must be positioned where they can sing most comfortably and effectively, and contribute most positively. Each section must finally sing as a unit, whatever the contents of the section, voice by voice; I never want us to sound like a collection of individual voices and personalities.

3. Repertoire:  first, it must be worthy literature-- we sing it because it is good, reflecting the highest aspirations of great composers, not because it reflects or inspires particular seasonal, ethnic, or religious sentiments.  Second, it must be repertoire suited to Chorale—to our size, to our talents, to our available rehearsal time, to our audience.  We want to be stretched; we also want to be reasonably sure we will accomplish the stretching. We want to stretch our audience, as well-- but want them to enjoy what they hear.  Having chosen to be high-brow, we still want to be within reach.

4. Venues:  the spaces in which we sing are a big part of the overall musical experience, both acoustically and visually.  We seek venues which enhance our sound, and enhance our understanding—for the singers as well as for the audience.  On a practical, and sometimes conflicting, level, we also seek venues we can sell to audiences—there are many beautiful spaces in Chicago to which we cannot attract listeners.  We need paying audiences.  We have been fortunate in finding spaces which satisfy both requirements, and always have our eyes and ears open.

5.  Strong mission:  finally, we need to believe powerfully in what we are doing.  Singers, workers, board members, donors, will not continue to contribute if they are not committed to what we are doing-- or if they sense that I am not committed.  We ask a great deal of our singers, knowing they can go elsewhere, or stop singing altogether, if they are not fed by the Chorale experience. We need to provide a milieu in which they feel supported and stimulated on many fronts.  They have to be proud of what they are doing.  Similarly, our many volunteers, singers and non-singers, have to be proud of our product and our ethos; and our board members have to feel that their time and energy is profitably spent.  And everyone involved needs to be confident that we will not fail to reach and maintain a certain level of performance, and that we will always strive to be better than we currently are.  We can’t afford to be less driven, or less idealistic, than we are.

I believe that the best music is made by people who love what they are doing, no matter their day job.  And I am convinced that people who make good music as well as they can, must be the happiest people.  This conviction underlies all of my work with Chorale. I am glad our work is bearing fruit, and that others are being fed.

Chorale begins work on Bach's turba choruses

Having devoted two rehearsals exclusively to the major choruses which begin and end the St. John Passion, Chorale begins work this week on the turba choruses, the crowd scenes, which give the work so much of its special character, and have caused such controversy in recent years.

J. S. Bach composed no operas.  He was not positioned, or trained, to do so; the Bach family genius, up to his time, had found its home, for several generations, in church music.  Bach did compose a good deal of “secular” instrumental and keyboard music, especially when he was in Weimar; and part of his job in Leipzig was to compose secular cantatas and scenas to celebrate birthdays and other special, civic events.  But not operas—unlike numerous of his contemporaries, most notably Handel, a North German who went to Italy and became one of the outstanding opera composers in Western music history.  There is no evidence that Bach was dissatisfied with the essential outlines of his professional life, and craved an operatic stage on which to display his talents.  Presented with the inherent drama of the Passion narrative, however, he did not hesitate to utilize techniques and procedures then current in operatic composition; and his genius made the most of them, enabling him to illustrate his text in startlingly visceral, emotional, compelling ways.

From a technical standpoint, the extensive turba scenes are difficult because of constantly shifting tempos, frequent transitions, and the interplay of the various vocal and instrumental forces—only the continuo players (keyboard, cello, occasionally violone or lute) play, as the word suggests, continually; everyone else-- soloists, chorus, the remaining instruments—jumps in and out, often with no preparation other than an upbeat from the conductor.  The conductor has to keep everything straight, have a mental diagram of what he wants to accomplish with pacing, dynamics, articulation—and he, in turn, depends upon the cellist and the keyboardist, to keep things moving, and make split second decisions as the performance progresses.  Chorale is fortunate in its continuo players:  Craig Trompeter and David Schrader are among the best players of this sort in town, and their participation places the performance on a sure footing.  While I focus on setting tempos and cueing the various instruments and voices (accuracy here is especially difficult for the chorus), they keep the music moving.

The chorus portrays, by turns, the crowd of soldiers seeking Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane; the crowd outside the high priest’s residence, questioning Peter; the crowd urging Pilate to crucify Jesus, which they are not allowed, themselves, to do; the crowd urging that Barabas be freed, rather than Jesus; the crowd mocking Jesus when he is crowned with thorns;  the crowd dividing Jesus’ clothing;  and so on.  The verbal language, as well as its musical expression, tends to be alternately wheedling, mocking, angry, and violent.  And many listeners respond angrily to Bach’s graphic, direct setting of John’s biblical language, which insistently identifies the crowd as Jews, and effectively accuses the Jews of crucifying Jesus, portraying Pilate as a blustering, but weak, character, giving in to their demands rather listening to his doubts and conscience.

Bach sets John’s text brilliantly—and disturbingly.  German anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life, sanctified in the writings of Martin Luther, with whose works Bach was intimately familiar. Bach’s contemporaries would likely have heard his choruses through anti-Semitic ears, and would have identified the screaming, hate-filled crowds with the Jews Luther describes and condemns.  Now, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, performers and audiences alike are sometimes deeply disturbed by the force of Bach’s setting; I personally have participated in three separate preparations of the work which have been picketed by sincere, thoughtful people, and have known singers who refuse to participate in such performances.  A good deal has been said and written on this subject, particularly by scholars Michael Marissen and Robert Marshall; and later on in Chorale’s preparation period, we will post, on this blog, a paper Marshall wrote just last year, in which he lays out as clearly as possible the issues he, both as a musicologist and as a Jew, identifies in performances of this great work, and his thoughtful responses to these issues.  In the meantime, Chorale’s job is to prepare Bach’s music, and text, as faithfully as possible, and follow where he leads us.

Shchedrin, J.S. Bach, and a touch of Duparc

This week we said goodbye to Rodion Shchedrin, turned in our Sealed Angel scores, and began rehearsing the St. John Passion, by Shchedrin’s favorite composer, J.S. Bach.  Shchedrin himself says that Bach is 50% mathematics, 50% stupidity; and at this stage of our learning, we can’t afford to explore any of the stupidity: the math is so incredibly demanding.  Why would I expect otherwise… whether it is one of his weekly cantatas, a one-movement motet, or one of the Passions, Bach’s music takes no prisoners.  With each work Chorale learns and performs, we begin in total bewilderment-- how could he think of all that?  How can his harmonic language be so rich, his rhythmic pulse so complex, that he can fool us, again and again, by taking us in directions we do not foresee, with a new chord on every beat of the measure, a new metrical twist with every phrase?

Chorale will do fine. Each time we undertake a new Bach work, we sound terrible for the first couple of rehearsals.  I look up from my own score, and see singers twisting themselves in knots, valiantly trying to plow ahead and keep up, skipping bars, grimacing, laughing helplessly, as they confront what seems impossible.  As I specify breath marks, ornaments, dynamics, I see that singers are befuddled—why does he talk about ornaments, when I can’t even get the basic pitches?   I see that some of the singers are even angry—angry that Bach asks so very much, angry that I expect them to be up to Bach’s demands. Every now and then, some singer will raise his hand and ask, How are we supposed to breath?  There are no rests, no commas in the text…for two pages!

Finally, though, the math starts to sink in—or, rather, to surface, through the cloud of notes—and the singers begin to perceive patterns; they put more and more pieces of the puzzle together, and the whole thing starts to make glorious sense.  Chorale is fortunate in its singers:  so many of them are highly intelligent, and highly educated, graduates of elite colleges and universities, accustomed to confronting problems with confidence and chutzpah.  I wonder if any other nonaffiliated choir has so large a proportion of MDs, JDs, PhDs, as Chorale has—to say nothing of the growing number of trained music teachers and performers who are joining our ranks. I often envision them with sharpened number two pencils behind their ears, analyzing, comparing, criticizing, ready to astound me with their observations and insights.  And once they perceive the patterns, and unlock some major portion of the Bach system, they race through, joyously, picking up pitches and relationships, which had completely stumped them previously.  When we reach that point, I am astounded by their rate of learning, and by their understanding.

The other 50%, the art and inspiration, the stupidity part, is, in the long run, far more difficult for us.  The mathematics part stumps and frustrates Chorale’s singers because they know it is there, they know it makes sense, and they know that they fall short; but the stupidity part can all too easily escape them—their predilection, and their training, suits them for ratiocination, not for emotional transcendence.  An uncle of mine once told me that he loved Bach because the composer left nothing to chance:  one just turns on the “baroque machine” and everything takes care of itself, happens in proper order with no fuss.  My uncle did not realize that the other 50% existed.  And many of Chorale’s singers do not, either.  Teaching them to hear, feel, understand, inhabit, that other 50%, is the conductor’s greatest challenge—much less leading them to express it in performance.  The easier thing, given smart, prepared singers, is to aim for cleanliness, for museum-quality reproduction, for “expression of the composer’s intentions,” for unimpeachable clarity; musicology, and “historically informed performance practice,” tend to encourage this, and to free the performers from personal, emotional involvement, other than the satisfaction and euphoria that come with doing a thing well.  The less easy thing—the difficult thing—is to allow oneself to become vulnerable to the emotion, the pain, the joy, the passion, which are so clearly essential components of Bach’s genius.  Once encountered and acknowledged, they can be dangerous and subversive; Bach then enters ones whole being, like a virus for which there is no cure.  I often think of the great Duparc song, Le Manoir de Rosamonde:

Love, like a dog, has bitten me with its sudden, voracious teeth... Come, the trail of spilt blood will enable you to follow my tracks.  Take a horse of good pedigree and set off on the arduous route I took, through swamps and overgrown paths, if that's not too exhausting a ride for you!  As you pass where I passed, you will see that I travelled alone and wounded through this sad world, and thus went off to my death far, far away, without ever finding Rosemonde's blue manor-house.

Music bites like that; and Bach’s music, of all musics, is certainly the Rose of the World.

Chorale aims for the whole potato—the entire 100%.

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Sunday, March 24, 3 p.m.  Be there.

Chicago Chorale delivers transcendent performance of Russian rarity

Sat Nov 17, 2012 at 2:17 pm

By Lawrence A. Johnson

The Chicago Chorale performed Rodion Shchedrin’s “The Sealed Angel” Friday night at Hyde Park Union Church.

Rodion Shchedrin is known, if at all these days, for antic orchestral works like Naughty Limericks and the Carmen Suite, his free-wheeling one-act ballet that both celebrates and satirically deconstructs music from Bizet’s opera.

Yet the Russian composer—who turns 80 next month—is also clearly capable of writing music that is serious, profound and deeply expressive. Indeed, Shchedrin’s The Sealed Angel, performed in a glowing and revelatory performance by the Chicago Chorale led by Bruce Tammen Friday night in Hyde Park, may well be Shchedrin’s masterwork.

Shchedrin wrote his nine-movement cantata in 1988 to mark the millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. The work was inspired by a Nicolai Leskov story that concerns the Old Believers. The sect’s healing icon of an angel is confiscated by state authorities who cover the angel’s face in wax. Ultimately, the Believers prevail and the icon is restored by a master painter to its former glory.

Even in the Yeltsin-era of perestroika, writing such an openly religious work was still a dicey proposition, and Shchedrin judiciously renamed the cantata, which was originally titled “Russian Liturgy.”

Reflecting the tale, Shchedrin mines an array of Russian musical styles of the past from ancient Orthodox chant to polyphony, and the late 19th- and early 20th-century liturgical music of composers such as Grechaninov and Bortniansky.

Yet Shchedrin also brings elements of his own modern style and biting asperity to the score. The late 20th century is manifest in the tart, folk-like angularity of the oboe solos, which bridge sections of the work, as well as several striking choral effects, which include the singers stamping their feet rhythmically and some impossibly steep crescendoes.

Bruce Tammen Photo: Jasmine Kwong

Artistic director Bruce Tammen has offered some stellar performances with his 57-member chorus, but Friday night’s performance of The Sealed Angel at Hyde Park Union Church offered one of the most transcendent, beautifully sung and immaculately directed choral performances of this or any other year.

From the hushed bars of the opening prayer, “Angel of the Lord,” the otherworldly radiance and seamless purity of ensemble tone were remarkable. Scrupulously prepared by Tammen, the singers sang with what sounded like idiomatic Russian (to my untrained ears) and handled the myriad challenges of the score with technical assurance and radiant expression. The sudden crescendo in Part III was put across with startling impact and the ensuing denunciation of Judas’s betrayal, delivered with surprising power and imposing sonority.

So skillfully moulded and inevitable was the flow of the performance that when one of the sopranos fainted halfway through, she was quietly and quickly helped offstage without Tammen and the singers missing a beat.

Adele-Marie Buis performed the obbligato oboe passages with polish and clarity though one wanted more dynamic shading and expressive nuance in her playing, which felt rather tight and literal Friday.

Members of the Chorale acquitted themselves in fine fashion in their solo moments, particularly Sammi Block, Jessica Melger, and Elizabeth Tuazon, who brought a plaintive vulnerable expression to the seventh movement (“Let my prayer be set forth”).

All credit to Tammen, one of our finest choral hands, who has clearly worked tirelessly on this difficult work with his gifted singers, resulting in a moving, incandescent performance, which unfolded in a single hour-long arc. There is one more performance tonight in Lincoln Park, and this is not an event to miss.

The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Saturday at St Vincent de Paul Parish, 1010 W. Webster Ave. in Lincoln Park. chicagochorale.org.

An advance look at our November 16-17 program notes

Rodion Shchedrin (b.1932) composed his nine-movement cantata, The Sealed Angel, to commemorate the millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. Despite the official atheism of the Soviet era, Shchedrin’s family had retained its religious identity--- his grandfather was an Orthodox priest, and he himself had been secretly baptized.   At age twelve, he was admitted to the Moscow Academy of Choral Art, where he received a rigorous choral music education, singing sacred works both by Russian composers and by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, but with nonreligious texts—“awful, new, especially written words by terrible poets—about the wonderful weather, the birds singing, the grass growing, praising the Motherland—just terrible!” In an interview with David Wordsworth, Shchedrin says that he had long wanted to compose a major religious work in the Russian choral tradition, exemplified in the major works of Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, “but for the great composers of the time, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for instance, this was impossible; such religious feelings could be punished very seriously.  They had to write choral works called ‘Hymn to Stalin,’ ‘Hymn to Lenin,’ and such things.  I finished my work in 1988 and wanted to call it a ‘Russian Liturgy’ but knew even then that it would not have left my desk, despite perestroika, so not even a religious title.  I had no commission and no choir in mind at all.” He instead entitled the work The Sealed Angel, after a well-known story by celebrated novelist Nicolai Leskov (1831-1895).

Leskov's story concerns a community of "Old Believers," a conservative sect that sought to keep sacred icons and texts free from the influence of modern reforms. The community’s greatest treasure is an icon of an angel, believed to provide healing and guidance.  Outsiders come to know of this angel, and the community is denounced to state officials, who confiscate the icon, coat it with wax, and emboss an official seal onto the angel’s face.  Ultimately, a famous painter of icons named Sebastian is able to restore the icon to its full glory and power.  Though Shchedrin’s cantata borrows very little from the story’s actual content, his choice of the story’s title is far from random—the restoration of the icon in many ways reflects the restoration of Orthodox faith and practice, during the period of the Soviet order’s disintegration; and Shchedrin’s text features liturgical texts and prayers Leskow mentions in his book. One particular passage, “Angel of the Lord, may thy tears be poured forth wherever thou wilt,” heard in its entirety in both the first and last movements, and in abbreviated versions elsewhere, and set to the dominant musical theme of the work, comes directly from Leskov’s story—it is a prayer said before the icon by one of the story’s characters.

Fortunately, Shchedrin’s timing was good, and the degree to which his title hid his religious intent, sufficient.  He was able to organize a performance of the work in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall in 1988, the year of its completion, and the performance was well-received.  Just four years later, in 1992, he and his cantata were awarded the Russian State Prize, by President Boris Yeltsin.  The first American performance took place in Boston, in 1990, under the direction of Lorna Cooke de Varon.

Musically, as well as religiously, Shchedrin’s work looks backward at least as much as it looks forward-- backward toward the remarkable musical flowering in the realm of Russian Orthodox liturgical music during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which in turn was based upon the traditional chant of the Russian Orthodox Church. This chant, which can be traced back to the 11^thcentury, consisted only of unison voices singing sacred texts, clearly and continuously, with no accompaniment, harmonization, or musical procedures such as polyphony or canonic imitation, which might obscure audibility or meaning.   But contact with western European music and musicians in succeeding centuries weakened this practice; by mid-19^th century, Russian choirs generally sang four-part harmony, following prevailing Italian and German musical styles. Harmonized according to the western system of functional tonality, the modal system of the ancient chants lost its integrity, and the resulting music lost meaning and interest.  Composers, conductors, and church officials, aware of this, worked in the waning years of the century to develop a new style of church music, which revealed and preserved the nature of the ancient sources, while adapting the best of what had come from the outside.  This music reached its peak in the compositions of Rachmaninoff, Chesnokov, Grechaninov, and others, and was halted only by the Revolution of 1917, when the composition and performance of church music was banned.

The Sealed Angel clearly owes a great deal to this liturgical tradition.  Though newly composed, rather than based on pre-existent chants, Shchedrin’s music sounds comforting and accessible to listeners familiar with the pre-revolutionary style-- his melodies and their modal harmonizations, the voicing of his chords, the free metrical nature of his rhythms, unabashedly hark back to the music of his models. At the same time, he adds much that is outside the strict liturgical tradition:  broadly expressive accelerandos and allargandos, extensive atonal passages, and unpitched screams, along with foot-stomping and hand-clapping.  More importantly, he uses a solo instrument (forbidden in traditional liturgical music) both as accompaniment, and as a character in the drama—perhaps voicing the spirit of the angel, or the spirit of God.  Shchedrin says of this instrument, in his interview with Wordsworth, that he had wished to use a Russian folk instrument, “a sort of Russian pipe, maybe like your recorder,” which would evoke the Russian folk tradition, “the music of the countryside, the Russian peasants I heard around me as a boy.”  He concluded that the instrument he had in mind “would create pitch problems for the choir and is not able to play fast music, a very primitive but beautiful instrument, but many technical limitations.  So I decided to use perhaps the nearest Western equivalent, the oboe, but this can also be a flute.”

Shchedrin accomplishes his purposeful combination of traditional elements with modern sounds, techniques, and procedures, so smoothly, and so unselfconsciously, that the listener is not jarred or confused by the result-- the music sounds very much of a piece, and unified in its impact.  One senses that its stature will only grow over the coming years, as more choirs and audiences learn of it and experience it.

Creating a tradition

The Sealed Angel is a new work, by the standards of the “classical” music canon.  Premiered in Moscow on June 13, 1988, it has had the good fortune to have received numerous performances, world-wide, since that time, under several noted conductors, and to be the subject of at least six commercially available recordings.  Utilizing only one instrument, and written in an accessible harmonic idiom, it is approachable, and affordable, which cannot be said of many major contemporary works—too often such pieces are so massive, so difficult, so expensive, and so inaccessible at first hearing, that they enter retirement soon after their first performances—presenters cannot afford to take a chance on them.  On the other hand, The Sealed Angel, premiered in the United States in 1990, has gradually entered the consciousness of American choral enthusiasts, and has created a positive buzz, though few have actually heard a live performance of the piece, much less participated in one.  The William Ferris Chorale presented the work’s  Chicago premier on March 20, 2009; so far as I can determine, it has not been heard here, at least in a complete performance, since that time.  I expect this will change, that many groups will rise to the challenge of presenting this work, and that audiences will react positively to it.  The most off-putting aspect of the work is its title-- we will all have to get used to that.

One hears, listening to recordings, that conductors have not yet settled on a tradition regarding the work’s performance practice.  Yes, the score looks complete: one assumes that Shchedrin had specific tempos and dynamics in mind, as well as over-all pacing; a specific version of the Old Slavonic language, specific musical transitions, etc.  But he wrote all of this down before he actually heard the work performed, himself; and conductors seem not to trust him completely—they take their own tempos, change his transitions, correct (or at least change) his text, utilize alternate pronunciations, and even change the specific sounds of the non-verbal sections (which are many).  Some add spoken narration; some incorporate interpretive dance.  They seem to respond to the “50% mathematics, 50% stupidity” that I wrote about last week-- perhaps they take him at his word, and feel emboldened to change those things with which they don’t feel comfortable.  I have no idea how Shchedrin feels about all of this, himself; perhaps he is mostly glad that the work is taking off, and trusts that it will develop a performance tradition all its own. As he has said, he sees himself as the medium through which the music is transmitted, rather than as a dictator; perhaps he conceives of this further growth and development as an inevitable part of a work’s history.

This creates difficulties for me, as conductor and interpreter.  I am supposed to make decisions; based upon what?  I am not Russian, not Orthodox, and no expert in this specific style.  I do not speak or read Old Slavonic.  Recordings present a range of possibilities; are these possibilities based on personal preference, or do they represent study, erudition, informed interpretation?  Each week, I come to rehearsal with changes and suggestions-- and hope that Chorale will be flexible enough, and trusting enough, to try something new.  I am somewhat freed to experiment, by the fact that so few in the audience will ever have heard the work; I am not likely to get a letter after our performances, criticizing me for my tempo relationships in movement VI, for example.  But one does want to get it right.  Inevitably, Chorale will add a new layer of varnish to the gradually accumulating layers which will become this work’s tradition; we trust that our contribution will be a positive one!

Shchedrin on Shchedrin

The following is excerpted from an interview Bruce Duffie conducted with composer Rodion Shchedrin when the latter came to Chicago in October of 1990, for performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of a new work.  The entire interview is available at http://www.kcstudio.com/shchedrin3.html.

“[Shchedrin] was a delight to talk with.  He shared a big smile, lots of laughter and a few tears.  His speech was a mixture of Russian-accented English with a better knowledge of German.  Indeed, he dropped German words into his responses on several occasions and freely admitted that he speaks English in a primitive manner, adding, slyly, that his Russian is much better.  But when listening to him - with concentration - it is easily possible to understand his thoughts and ideas…. I have left many of his mannerisms, awkward constructions and sentence fragments in the text.” Bruce Duffie.

“Shchedrin: I think music must be clever.  50 percent.  And 50 percent must be stupid.  But altogether it's clever. Our poet, Pushkin, said that poetry must be a little stupidity.  Then this is really great poetry.  But I think because music is some part of mathematic, not only your feeling.  All, without any exception, genius work, possible to make mathematic.  Without this, this is just impossible.  This is just improvisation.  This is difference between improvisation and real composer, if you give some mathematic.  But if it's only mathematic, this is not music.  This is something very difficult to explain, but I think that music must be clever. I think just with the inspiration, impossible to be real good musical work.  And without mathematic, also it's impossible.  I think that Bach music is maybe 75 percent of mathematic and 25 percent of inspiration. I think this [the music of Bach] is highest point of music.

“I think that my score which is the best, that somebody dictate to you.  Somebody, I don't know who, told me this.  The few of my works which I like the best, somebody dictate it to me.  I just was little machine. Just write this because somebody, I don't know, inside my head or outside, maybe in the sky, dictate me.  Nothing else.  But this is happy and lucky moment. Something, somebody, I don't know, maybe is God, maybe is one of his friends.  Something like this.

“In the process of the work, usually you must be satisfied, because in other case you stop it immediately.  But after you know something may be wrong, you need clean piece of paper.  Always is better like you write of him because the best idea and best realizing [of the] idea, best of all on the clean piece of musical paper. This is ideal.  And you know, "Ahhh, this must be fantastic, great, unique"; and then you write, and something uncomfortable "Ahhh, something it's a little wrong," so you try a little change in something.  This is difficult to explain, like make love - how is possible to explain how you make love?  It's impossible!  It's really some feeling, some ... This is emotional thing.  Yes, yes.  It's difficult to explain it, yes.

“It's two things very important for me:  first is reaction of orchestra, or if it's not for orchestra, for chorus.  I see and look how they react.  If they just snoring and just want sleep it's not good.  But if you see that the eyes is fire and they like it, then is good.  And second what is important for me:  the reaction of audience.  If I feel I took audience in my hand, that nobody cough, that everybody full of attention, then I think I win.  And then critics say, "Ohhh, this is not too good, [uses syllables the way an American might say "da-da-da-da-da" or "yadda-yadda-yadda"]  du-du-du-du-ze."  For me it's important, of course, 'cause I am human being!  But the two things most important for me is my relationship in rehearsal of the performance, and reaction of the concert hall audience.  Because then you decide, this is a live music or this is artificial music - this is just notes on the five-lines score.”

I reprint this because I find Shchedrin’s explanations helpful in understanding his work.  That extra 25% of “stupidity/inspiration” he assigns to his compositional style, compared to Bach’s, is important to keep in mind:  while he places Bach at the very pinnacle of composition, he places himself much more in the inspired moment. I doubt Bach could have produced anything like even his known output, had he been waiting for dictation, or depending upon blank sheets of paper and the reactions of his performers and audience.  And the resulting music, and our experience of it, reflects this difference.  Bach’s genius shines from within, and even in spite of, a regular, pre-determined approach to composition (the 50%), and reflects a communal, even bureaucratic, motivation for music-making in the first place: Bach built music the way other people built buildings or roads. This aspect of Bach’s music makes it easier to understand, prepare, and perform. If one learns the rules and techniques, and follows his blueprint carefully, one will have music.  Shchedrin cares little for regularity, consistency, “blueprint”:  he writes down what he likes, in the moment, and hopes others will like it, too.  At one point, a given phrase will end with a whole note; the same phrase will end with a half note on the following page, “just because.”  Tempos are likely to change every few bars or so, and to change inconsistently—he indicates tempo according to his feelings at the moment, rather than in relationship to motivic materials.

None of this makes for better or worse; it just makes for different.  What a “romantic,” emotional performer might do with Bach, in response to his feelings or the mood of his audience, Shchedrin himself builds into his own music.  Sometimes this seems tyrannical-- but the results are undoubtedly very beautiful and emotionally evocative.

Chorale retreat: bratwurst, beer, and Old Church Slavonic

Chorale held its annual day-long retreat Saturday, September 15, in a new location:  Ellis Avenue Church, at the corner of 50^th and Ellis, just a few blocks north of our usual rehearsal space.  A former Kenwood mansion, reconfigured as a worship space and community center, the church proved to be ideal for our needs:  an assembly area large enough to accommodate sixty singers, with good chairs, a piano, plenty of bathrooms, and plenty of room for eating and socializing.  The weather was gorgeous, and the group was in a good mood.  Rehearsal was divided into two parts, morning and afternoon; we had sandwiches for lunch, then a major grilling event for supper, with plenty of brats (with every imaginable trimming).   Attendance was great, and we made a good deal of progress on learning our new music, in addition to the obvious benefits of getting the choir, old members and new, together for a day of socializing.

One of the major pluses of this calendar arrangement is that we rehearse several times within a short time span:  Wednesday night, twice the following Saturday, and again the following Wednesday.  Our usual pattern is one rehearsal per week, on Wednesday night.  I haven’t measured the percentage of data and vocal edge that is lost from one week to another, but I am sure it is very high; too much time intervenes, too many other activities and priorities shove music, and vocalism, out of the way.  Consequently, a major portion of our time at each weekly rehearsal is spent working us back up to where we were, the previous week, before moving ahead.  I have found, singing in intense sshort-term programs, where the ensembles rehearse as much as six hours per day, that very little is lost from rehearsal to rehearsal, and that the entire ensemble is greatly exhilarated by the progress made in a relatively short time.  Chorale’s necessary structure, dictated by the lives of its singers, makes such an arrangement impossible; we build repetition and relearning into our rehearsal time, and don’t have that privilege. And the rehearsal pattern has to be “one size fits all,” which means some people are less stimulated than they might be, and others are pushed harder than they might wish.  So—I really look forward to those times when we do rehearse with more frequency, and schedule them as often as I can.

One particular aspect of our current preparation, Shchedrin’s The Sealed Angel, which requires an awful lot of the aforementioned repetition, and profits from close and frequent encounter, is the language of our text:  Old Church Slavonic.   Our edition of the music has an incomplete and otherwise troublesome, inaccurate transliteration of the Cyrilic text, fraught with typos; we need professional help just to correct it, plus constant drilling and re-correction to get the thing right.  Our primary and essential resource in this is Slava Gorbachov, a professor in the University of Chicago Department of Linguistics; in addition to being native Russian and of Orthodox background, he specializes in this particular language.  We could not have done better, had we conducted a national search:  Slava is brilliant, enthusiastic, hard-working, and imaginative.  He has already spent countless hours working through the text, correcting it, translating it word for word, finding original sources, recording his own slow, careful pronunciation of the text, and discussing the project on tape, for the promotional video Chorale will release later in the preparation period.  One of his university students, Drew Boshardy, who sings with the group, works with us at rehearsals, reading the text to us, listening to phrases as we sing them, correcting us again and again; later in our rehearsal period, Slava will come to rehearsal, himself, and refine Drew’s invaluable work.

Careful, repeated, long-term work like this, begun early in the rehearsal period, is very important to Chorale’s success with this, and any, project.  We sing difficult, demanding music; and a great deal of our personal joy and satisfaction comes through doing the very best we can to present it honestly and conscientiously.  Only through meeting basic requirements and practicing basic disciplines can we enable the composers’ works to come alive—for us and for our audiences.

Beginning rehearsals on The Sealed Angel

Chorale convened for its first rehearsal of the 2012-13 season last Wednesday, to begin learning The Sealed Angel, by Rodion Shchedrin (b.1932).  After spending an hour and a half placing singers in a new seating arrangement, we read through the final two movements—movements we sang in concert two seasons ago, and therefore familiar to a goodly percentage of the group.  Although  a recording of the work has been available to the group for some weeks, there is nothing quite like getting a piece into ones own voice, and hearing it up close for the first time; clearly, members, especially the new ones, were surprised and relieved to discover that this strangely named work is hauntingly, evocatively beautiful, promising lots of meat for the singers, and a rare, thrilling experience for listeners.   It is risky to commit ones group to a virtually unknown work, gambling that your risk will pay off three months down the road; presentation and marketing can turn into a major financial loss, if you guess wrong.  I believe I have guessed right; we are going to have a great time with this work.

Shchedrin, currently one of Russia’s premier composers, wrote this nine-movement cantata in 1988, in commemoration of the millennium of the conversion of Russia to Christianity.  It received its premier that same year, and was awarded the Russian State Prize in 1992 by President Boris Yeltsin.  Originally titled Russian Liturgy, the hour-long work references pre-1917 Russian Orthodox worship, with its sacred, Old Slavonic texts, chant-based melodies, and modal harmonies. Shchedrin comes from a religious family, which maintained the forms and habits of its faith through the Soviet era;  and his goal in composing this work was to enable a  reawakening of orthodox Christianity, within the changing but still officially atheistic state.  But rather than promote a literal resumption of this tradition, Shchedrin suggests a new approach to it, represented through his use of instrumental accompaniment, which would have been forbidden in traditional orthodox worship.

As the date of the work's premier approached, Shchedrin became cautious concerning official censorship, and he changed the work's title to the relatively harmless The Sealed Angel, after a well-known story by the celebrated Russian novelist Nikolai Leskow (1831-1895), thus veiling the work's liturgical basis.

Leskow's story concerns a community of "Old Believers," whose greatest treasure is an icon of an angel, said to perform miracles of healing.  The prohibited sect is denounced to the state, and the official seal is embossed onto the middle of the confiscated angel’s face.  Though Shchedrin’s work is not programmatic, it explores the most ancient practices and liturgies of the Orthodox Church in its musical materials, and features liturgical texts Leskow mentions in his book. In both its monumental dimensions and subject matter, The Sealed Angel is rooted in the tradition of large-scale liturgical compositions, particularly all-night vigils, which were prominent up to the time of the Revolution, particularly as set by such composers as Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Gretchaninoff, and Chesnokov.

The work is set for chorus a cappella, soloists, and "svirel"-- a generic term for Russian folk woodwind instruments. The notes in the German edition from which Chorale is singing, translate “svirel” as ”Flöte,” and, indeed, all the recordings of which I am aware utilize obligato flute, though a small-print footnote in the score states that “the actual instrument, whether a flute or a reed instrument, [is] open to choice.”  I have decided to use oboe, rather than flute, for a couple of reasons.  From a practical standpoint, an oboe is far easier for singers to tune to, than a flute, especially in the acoustically rich spaces in which we will sing; in addition, I find the somewhat straight and plaintive sound of the oboe more folk-like, than the rich, cultivated sound of a modern flute.  Besides; since we will be producing a studio recording of our efforts, we will effectively be making available an alternative example of the work.

Program Notes for Voices Aloft May 13, 2012, 3 p.m., Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Today's concert focuses on three canonic, desert island works, two motets and a mass, which, together with their respective composers, reside at the very pinnacles of their respective genres.  Chorale has chosen to present them because they are particularly suited both to the sacred space which is Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, and to the Chapel's magnificent E.M. Skinner pipe organ.

The motets of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) comprise a very small subset in his overall compositional output:  he personally used that label for only six works, which he composed for special occasions, probably funeral services.  Like their historical, sixteenth century models, they for the most part lack separate instrumental parts; instruments would likely have been used in performance, both as continuo and for doubling the voice parts, if they were available, but most of the motets are performable without instrumental accompaniment, and would have been performed so for special graveside services.  The texts, all in German, are based on biblical quotations and chorales; Komm, Jesu, komm is the only one which utilizes freely-composed poetry.

Bach composed Komm, Jesu, komm, BWV 229, before 1732. No autograph or substantiating materials survive; only a copy, made by Bach’s pupil, Christoph Nichelmann, has come down to us. The text is taken from the first and last stanzas of a funeral hymn written by Paul Thymich (1656-1694). Bach sets the first stanza for double four-part choir, giving each phrase of text its own individual musical treatment, in which texture and expression are constantly varied, in madrigal style.  The first forty-three bars, in triple meter, proceed in typical early Baroque polychoral fashion, with blocks of sound exchanged antiphonally between the two choirs; at measure forty-four (der saure Weg wird mir zu schwer), however, Bach abruptly shifts texture to a single, eight-part choir, for an expressive fugal exposition.  Then, at bar sixty-four, he returns to double four-part choir, but switches to an energetic quadruple meter (Komm, komm, ich will mich dir ergeben) for fifteen bars, pulling the listener from the halting fatigue and resignation of the earlier, triple meter phrases, toward the lilting, 6/8 setting of the affirming text, “You are the way, the truth, and the life,” paraphrased from the Gospel of John, which occupies the next eighty-eight bars, more than half the duration of the entire motet.  Bach then sets the final stanza more simply, as a homophonic, four-part chorale-- a rare case in which Bach has composed the chorale melody himself, rather than setting a pre-existent melody, already familiar to his listeners.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), raised in an orthodox Jewish family, converted to Lutheran Christianity in 1898. Though he later returned to Judaism, his conversion was presumably sincere and heartfelt; and he responded musically to his new faith by setting Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s Christmas poem, Friede auf Erden, opus 18, for unaccompanied 8-part choir, in 1907.

The text begins with a description of the shepherds receiving the angels’ tidings of “Peace on earth,” and visiting the Christ child, moving from an undefined but minor-colored key center to D Major, as the focus of the poem shifts from earth to heaven, from humanity to God.  This use of tonality, and particularly of D major, continues throughout the work, and serves its major structural idea:  Schoenberg introduces all of his musical materials, his melodic and harmonic blocks, in this opening section. He then transforms them when they appear subsequently in the work, according to the character of the text he is setting, moving between consonance and dissonance as the poet contrasts the works of God, with the works of humankind.  The second section describes the history of the world since the birth of Christ, as a time of war and bloody deeds, utilizing these motifs in a painfully dissonant harmonic matrix; only when the text describes the intercession of the angel voices, imploring “Peace, peace on earth,” does the music resolve into a recognizable major tonality.  D Major returns with the work’s climax, when the text describes the building of a kingdom that seeks peace on earth, where swords will be forged, not to menace, but to flame for justice, as peace becomes reality for future generations.

Schoenberg was thirty-three years old when he completed the work, young in terms of the brutal geopolitical realities of the twentieth century.  He subsequently served in World War I; his health deteriorated under the strain, and he developed asthma and other ailments.  He virtually ceased composing for four years.  Then, in 1923, his wife died.  In a 1923 letter to the conductor Heinrich Scherchen, he described Friede auf Erden as “an illusion for mixed choir, an illusion, as I know today, having believed, in 1906, when I composed it, that this pure harmony among human beings was conceivable.”  Fortunately for succeeding generations of singers and listeners, he could not withdraw the work; we are allowed to experience his grand vision, with its beauty and its pain, for ourselves, and to be inspired by his youthful hope.

Louis Vierne (1870-1937) was one of the most admired and celebrated organists of his time.  Born nearly blind as a result of congenital cataracts, he nonetheless received a thorough musical education, first in his home town of Poitiers, and then, beginning in 1880, at the Institution National des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris. He was noticed there by composer and organist César Franck, who, from 1886 to 1890, gave Vierne private harmony lessons and included him in his organ class at the Paris Conservatoire. Vierne entered the Conservatoire as a full time student in 1890 and, after Franck’s death, became the student and protégé of Franck’s replacement, Charles-Marie Widor.  In 1892 Vierne became Widor’s assistant at the church of Saint-Sulpice, and won the Conservatoire's first prize for organ in 1894. In 1900 he took over as principle organist at the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, and stayed in that position until his death (at the keyboard, in the midst of a concert!) in 1937.

Among the great fin de siècle French organists, Vierne is considered the greatest improviser. The few improvisatory performances that were recorded are said to sound like finished, polished compositions. Typical among French composers of his time, his music is characterized by elegance and formal clarity, with a restrained harmonic palate.  Reviewing his Symphony No. 2 for organ, completed in 1903, no less a critic than Claude Debussy wrote, "M. Vierne's symphony is truly remarkable. It combines rich musicality with ingenious discoveries in the special sonority of the organ. J.S. Bach, the father of us all, would have been well pleased...."

Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, Opus 16, for two organs and chorus, premiered at St. Sulpice on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1901, with Widor and Vierne playing the two organs.  Today’s performance features an arrangement of the work for one organ, appropriate to the physical arrangement of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.  Vierne's mass, unlike such "concert" works as Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, was clearly intended as a liturgical work, albeit one of grand proportions, demanding both a great organ and a great organist for its presentation. Vierne treats liturgy as theater, alternating the high, thunderous terror of the Kyrie and the joyfully majesty Gloria with such ethereal, introspective sections as the Benedictus and the Dona nobis pacem.  Surely, worshipers participating in a mass accompanied by this music would experience their Christianity in a highly vivid way.

The cost of engaging with great music

Bach did not write any wrong notes.  Nor did he write too many notes.

If these assertions bother you, or if you disagree with them, you are in good company.  Plenty of people, from Bach's time forward, have been angered, frustrated, or dismissive about the challenges Bach sets, performers and listeners alike.  And modern scholarship has uncovered interesting information about the fact that plenty of people did not like the man Bach much either-- he drank a stupendous amount of beer and brandy, and an equally stupendous amount of coffee.  He was short-tempered and irritable;  he was hard on the performers allotted to him; he constantly lobbied for better pay and privileges and musicians;  he "rubbernecked" ceaselessly for better positions;  he tended to duck out of responsibilities that were distasteful to him;  he angered and frustrated his employers.  He spent, I think, six weeks in jail at one point for insubordination.  He set a very high bar, seems never to have doubted himself and his own gifts, and was unbending, right to his death.  His Leipzig employers, fed up with the power he wielded, put a cap on the position he had held-- no Kapellmeister following him ever had the pay, the title, or the privileges he had enjoyed, ever again.  Bach was as relentless and difficult as his music is.

After one of our more grueling rehearsals, one of Chorale’s singers laughingly commented on my emotional attachment to Bach, and to the motet we are preparing.  I'm glad he was able to laugh.  Performing Bach brings out the worst, as well as the best, in me.  Each time I prepare even a relatively short work of his, the effort consumes me-- and consumes a disproportionate amount of rehearsal time.

When I sang with Robert Shaw, the singers sat in a circle, with him and the accompanist in the middle.  If there were too many singers for a single row, we sat in two rows-- but he frequently moved the back row to the front, and the front to the back, so that all of use were equally scrutinized and under pressure.  As we rehearsed, he would prowl around inside the circle, like a lion pacing in its cage-- watching us, listening to us individually, unexpectedly barking or screaming when he saw or heard something he did not like.  It could be terrifying.  Plenty of people did not like Mr. Shaw.  He might stop in front of you, stare at you, listen for a few minutes, prowl on-- you wouldn't know if he liked or hated what he heard.  One thing, though-- you were sure you could never hide from him; and you were sure you could never hide from the music.

Mr. Shaw's singers were highly skilled and presumably very committed; by definition, we were expected to live up to his standards, or else hit the road.  We were expected to want what he wanted, see the same possibilities he saw, and do what was necessary to satisfy his goals.  Of course, he would tell us that we were serving the music, the composer, and not him-- but it was hard to separate the two.  Some wanted this push, this discipline; others did not, and really would not take it.  Rehearsal breaks would often devolve into small groups, griping about him or defending him;  some singers who were clearly disenchanted just shut down-- and once a particular preparation or project was over, disappeared, never to be seen again.  One thing we all wondered:  how could we possibly treat our choirs the way Mr. Shaw treated us?

Chorale members who were singing with me at The University of Chicago way back when I first sang for Mr. Shaw remember how galvanized I was, when I returned to my own choirs after my first summer with him.  I have no doubt that I became, in the course of that summer, a better choral conductor, as well as much less fun to spend an evening with at Jimmy's.  Most conductors have something of Mr. Shaw’s temper and drive in them-- and much of what he did, besides teaching us invaluable techniques, was to unlock that guy and let him loose in us.  And inevitably, when we returned to our own choirs, we discovered we could not behave that way and get away with it-- too many of our singers would quit, and we did not have an infinite number of good singers waiting around to take their places.  We had to come to some sort of compromise with our own situations, and work at the level that was possible for each of us.

I am completely committed to amateur choral singing.  I probably was so before meeting Mr. Shaw, but he defined this and solidified it in me.  I believe that singing great music together is the closest we will ever get to heaven; I perceive through it the salvation of the world. I know that Bach did not compose for anything like an American amateur community-based choir; neither did Schoenberg, neither did Vierne.  I know that what those composers ask of Chorale-- and what they ask of me, as conductor-- is impossible.  I also know that, in our troubled world, life might not be very much worth living, if we do not continue to believe in the impossible, and act on that belief.  I do not exaggerate or grandstand when I maintain, week after week, year after year, that we will, as individuals, as a choir, as a society, be utterly changed, if we can just finally sing all the right notes in this Bach motet, in this Schoenberg "illusion" (he himself did not finally believe in his piece, or its message)-- that through singing them, we will come to understand why we sing them, and why Bach and Schoenberg wrote them-- and, like Tennyson's flower in the crannied wall, we will finally know what God and man is.

Reflections on Chorale’s High School Apprenticeship Program

We had four high school singers from throughout the greater Chicago area, chosen through competitive auditions.  They were full participants in our Beethoven Missa Solemnis preparation and performance, attending all rehearsals, working on their notes between rehearsals, while continuing with their normal high school activities.  One significant thing we all learned: generous parental involvement is very important to the success of our program. A couple of the students live considerable distances from Hyde Park, and had to be driven in each week by their parents, who then waited patiently in the back of our rehearsal room until we were done.  Another thing we learned was that there are some very talented, committed high schools singers out there, who can contribute significantly to Chorale’s success while have a new and challenging experience.

In their words:

Maggie Blackburn: I have learned so much from this experience. I got to be surrounded by people who truly loved being there and who worked hard to put this piece together. I have not had the chance to be part of a choir like this before and it has helped me improve vocally so much. My voice developed quite a bit just from this. There was no one fun moment, because the whole experience itself was fun! I really had a great time doing this work and it has shown me so much. I loved every minute of it and always looked forward to rehearsal and the performance. This opportunity has definitely impacted my future. It helped my voice develop immensely and that will help my voice only progress farther from here. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to perform with the Chicago Chorale.

Elijah Smith: Working with the Chicago Chorale was simply amazing. It helped me develop as a musician. It helped me with my sight reading, because as you can imagine, sight reading Beethoven in your first rehearsal is no easy task. It also helped me with my music theory. While analyzing this choral work, you discover new theoretical and musical functions and you see the functions that you already knew, used to their fullest. If it wasn’t for the Chicago Chorale’s High School Mentorship Program, I never would have had the opportunity to learn all this.

It is very hard to pick one favorite moment of working with Chorale. Performing on the stage of Chicago’s Symphony Center is an experience I will never forget. The atmosphere of the building is just simply magical and when standing up there in the lights and the tuxedo, you are engulfed in the majestic reality of the event. Snack time during rehearsal was also a blast. The conversations that you hear between members of the chorale never fail to crack me up.

Working with Chorale has reassured me that being a professional singer is exactly what I want to do. It has given me the sense of what skills I will need to be successful and it has showed me what I need to work on and how I can work on it. It has also exposed me to an entirely new side of singing that I would still not have discovered if I had never sung with Chicago Chorale.

Adrienne Bertsche: In Chicago Chorale’s mentorship program, I learned just how much work goes into perfecting music for a concert. But endless hours of drilling notes, rhythms, dynamics, and enunciation are only the mechanics of a choir’s beauty. I have also learned how a strong artistic vision and a deep understanding of the works performed can inspire me and help me connect to the music and the audience.

Singing with this choir, I’ve learned not just how to sing, but how to cultivate the artistry needed to produce a sound that you can be proud of. Hearing the opening chord of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis ring out through the hall of Chicago’s Symphony Center, and standing in unison with the 124 other people that you’ve worked beside for three months is an unforgettable experience.

Sasha Lilovich:1) I discovered that Beethoven spared no one. As well I've found that my sight reading has improved greatly. 2) Break time was a fun time. 3) It opened me up to the idea that balancing a musical career and another profession is a possibility.

Auditions for the 2012-13 Apprenticeship Program will take place May 18-20; the program itself will run September 5- November 20, 2012.  For more information, or to schedule an audition, contact me, Bruce Tammen, at bkt3y@hotmail.com.

Komm, Jesu, komm and Friede auf Erden

Chorale has completed five rehearsals in our current preparation; we have five more to go.  The Vierne Messe Solenelle is no romp;  but much of the greatest difficulty lies in the organ part, and in coordinating with the organist in terms of balance, sight lines, time lag—all things which the choir cannot work on, until we get together with our organist, Tom Weisflog.  He is really the star of this piece.  From the choir’s point of view, the more difficult, and less noticeable, portion of the coming concert, is our two extensive, a cappella motets, J.S. Bach’s Komm, Jesu, komm and Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden.

These are quite distinctive pieces, but they do share several things in common.  Most importantly-- they are built on a very sophisticated harmonic base, and find their very life and being, as well as expression, through accurate presentation of their mutual harmonic journeys.  In practice that means pitch accuracy and understanding.  Both Bach and Schoenberg are extraordinarily concerned with harmony; each and every note they put on paper, has its special and irreplaceable role in the story they tell.  If a pitch is out of tune, or altogether wrong, the journey is obstructed.  In rehearsal I ask the singers to strike each pitch right on the head--  as if they were hammering in nails;  if they miss, they will hit your thumbs, perhaps cripple themselves, and the house won't be built solidly.  The image of threading a needle comes to mind, as well:  one has to get all the strands together, and twist them tight, to get them cleanly through the needle's eye; if you just try to cram the thread through the eye without taking that kind of care, not only will you not get the needle threaded, you'll ruin your piece of thread.  These pieces present a new needle for threading, a new nail to strike, with alarming frequency, often on every beat of the bar.

Yes, these motets are really difficult to pull off.  It is not that Bach and Schoenberg ask us to hear and reproduce unconventionally-- Bach, in fact, asks nothing unconventional at all:  I challenge anyone to find a chord change in our motet which is not actually a commonplace in our Western, common-practice tradition.  He just throws them at us in such rapid succession!  and expects the performers of each each vocal line, in perfect unison, to accomplish his will over a very broad vocal range.  Schoenberg of course is a different matter;  but at base, he does much the same thing Bach does, throwing chord changes at us in such rapid succession that they even overlap each other, sometimes over the course of many beats, and expecting us to hear where, in the end, it will all resolve itself.  Our solution has to be--  to understand, aurally if not theoretically, what is happening;  and this can come only through familiarity and experience.  Some Chorale singers are more accustomed to the tasks the composers present us; they have sung these works previously, they have sung works like them, they are fluent enough in this harmonic language to hear what will happen next, as well as what is happening around them-- and they have trained their voices to be similarly fluent and responsive, so that they can physically accomplish what their ears require of them.  Others have less experience, less training, less innate quickness; and they find this music intimidating, irritating, even defeating.  That is the nature of amateur singing-- we combine a broad range of performers and talents in a single project. I, as conductor, am requiring more clarity and precision than ever before, in the Bach motet—and because so many have sung it previously, they are accustomed to a certain, in most cases lower, standard, than we are now demanding.

I expect Bach had good choirs, despite his many complaints about them.  They sang his music every day of their singing lives, and knew what he was doing.  If what I read is true, they could sing a funeral motet like Komm, Jesu, komm with instruments in the church, then without instruments at the grave site, and it would be all the same to them. This was their language.  Schoenberg, on the other hand, did not compose much choral music; and I doubt any singer, soloist or chorister, would ever claim to have become comfortable with his language, particularly 105 years ago, when Friede auf Erden was composed.  He intended it to be performed without accompaniment; but the first attempt to do so, failed, and he was forced to compose an orchestral accompaniment, doubling the choral parts.  Schoenberg was a revolutionary, a pioneer; following his lead, subsequent composers have adopted many aspects of his harmonic language, or invented their own-- and singers have adapted.  I dare say the best professional choral singers today are expected to be ready for just about anything, and can sing whatever they see on the page, so long as they are given a starting pitch.  Very few singers are in that elite group, of course-- and the tendency of composers after World War II to compose music so difficult that it could only be performed by such singers, has pretty much died out-- there simply are not singers, or audiences, to support the composition of such music.  We know it is out there, and our ears are looser and more accepting than the ears of Schoenberg's singers; but Friede auf Erden has not become easy for anyone.

So why sing it? So much work, so much frustration, so much headache, for about ten minutes of music.  Most choirs do not sing it—it absorbs too many resources for too little product. It is peculiarly Chorale's mission-- a mission admittedly shaped by me-- to work on such pieces almost out of stubbornness, as an assertion that we, too, have a right to this music, that it is too good to be left to the professionals.  I never thought I would be a musician, and certainly never planned my life so that I would end up doing what I do: it just happened that way, I got lucky-- and once I was there, I thought, if I can do this, just about anyone can.  And should. Chorale happened because I acted upon this assertion-- not just for me, but for all of us.  Friede auf Erden, Komm, Jesu, komm, and all the rest, open for us our own window on the divine;  rather than just eavesdrop on the pros, listen to their recordings, go to their concerts, and accept a bottomless gulf between them and us, I would erase the gulf altogether.

In the meantime, preparing for this concert, I ask our singers to listen to good recordings of Friede auf Erden; to listen over and over again, following in their music; to sing along;  to do everything they can to jump start their understanding of Schoenberg's language and intent, and to become, if not quite comfortable, at least solidly competent in doing what he asks.  Figure out why, later.  I believe that they, and our audience, will discover that these two stupendously difficult works, when understood, are also stupendously beautiful, wondrous expressions of the human spirit and its aspirations.

On to our next concert: Bach, Schoenberg, and Vierne

Two weeks into our current preparation, I am struck, first, by the similarities between Bach and Schoenberg; and, second, by the dissimilarity between these two composers, and our third composer, Louis Vierne.  The three works on the program—Bach’s Komm, Jesu, komm;  Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden;  and Vierne’s Messe Solennelle – are strongly individual; each presents its composer’s language sharply and clearly.  No listener would mistakenly attribute a single bar of any one of these pieces, to the wrong composer.  I find that Chorale’s singers are comfortable moving between the Bach and Schoenberg, but awkward and non-fluent when we switch to the Vierne.   This despite the fact that the Vierne and Schoenberg pieces are closely contemporary, composed in 1899 and 1907 respectively, while the Bach received its first performance in 1731-32!

Through my vocal studies I was drawn particularly to the art song genre; and within that genre I identified particularly with the German subgenre, exemplified in the works of Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf, and with the French songs composed by Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Poulenc.   I found it challenging to perform works from these two subgenres on the same program-- I would tune my brain, my ear, my feelings, to German music and poetry, and then have to accomplish the major switch to “feeling French” in order to sing the French pieces.  The most obvious difference, of course, is linguistic:  not only are French and German different in terms of vocabulary and grammar, they are different in word order, in accentuation, in emphasis; a singer must learn to recite poetry accurately and expressively, to sing these songs. Even in large, universally recognized works like the choral pieces on Chorale’s program, especially those composed to texts in the composers’ native languages, great care must be taken with the way in which these languages influence articulation and accentuation of text.  Bach and Schoenberg, native German speakers, set meaningful, complex German texts, and intend that these texts be understood on multiple levels by their listeners.  Vierne on the other hand sets a “standard” Latin text; and this complicates any clear comparison between German and French linguistic styles.

Question:  how does Vierne’s setting differ from Bach’s settings in the same, neutral language, for instance in the latter’s B Minor Mass?  Answer:  in too many respects to discuss in a weekly blog.  I think we conclude, though, that Chorale’s challenge is far more than linguistic.  In fact, much of our current rehearsal time is spent singing on neutral syllables—yet the awkwardness in switching from German composers to French composer persists.

I tend to grapple with this perceived awkwardness as a function of “Lutheran” versus “Catholic” music.   For all kinds of reasons, the Gregorian chant background of Catholic music does not inspire the rational, orderly structure and progression we associate with Bach and those who follow him—the best, most idiomatic French music is characterized by uneven phrase lengths, and by surprising, “nonfunctional” harmonic progressions, inspired by melodies which follow and express the irregular contours of language, more than the regularity of dance rhythms.  I think that the later nineteenth century turn, in France, away from Wagner and his influence, toward a more idiomatic French style, made this inevitable-- Fauré’s music in particular exemplifies an almost complete break with German models, and his thorough grounding in Roman Catholic church music is always evident in his non-church music.  As head of the Paris Conservatory 1905-1920, he greatly influenced the overall character of French musical composition; but the reforms and development he represented predated this appointment, and were a more general aspect of French musical composition, influencing Vierne and other contemporaries.

Bach’s music, on the other hand, grows out of the Lutheran chorale tradition-- and without minimizing in any way Bach’s incredible breadth and universality, I still think it is important to acknowledge the mathematical logic and regularity of his tradition, and his ingenuity in manipulating this tradition—harmonically, melodically, structurally—while never deserting his sources.  Bach not only inherited functional, common practice harmony; he built upon it, strengthened it, made it the rule for all who followed him, up to the time of Schoenberg.  In many ways, it really was Bach that the French were repudiating, rather than Wagner.  It seems far-fetched to call Schoenberg, a Jew living in Vienna, a Lutheran composer-- but in musical terms, it was Bach’s influence that he inherited, and which he attempted to overthrow in developing his twelve-tone practice, soon after the completion Friede auf Erden, one of his final tonal works.  The chromaticism of Friede auf Erden is dense, far-reaching, and very difficult to perform; but at base Schoenberg follows Bach’s rules, and I think performers sense this, hear it, when they sing the work.  Schoenberg puzzles the ear and the brain in the same way Bach does, and the brains and ears of Chorale’s singers pick this up, and respond appropriately.  Vierne’s basic rules and assumptions are different, and require that ears and brains be attuned to a different set of rules.

Chorale’s concert, on May 13, will express this quintessential German/French dichotomy, through performances of these canonic works.  We will do our best to express German structure and spirituality in the first half, from the choir gallery; French grace, charm, and monumentalism in the second half, from the chancel.  Our goal is to do both traditions justice, and to present, quite aside from other considerations, three glorious pieces of music.

Tragic Beethoven

In my reading and study leading up to Chorale’s Missa Solemnis project, I encountered, again and again, the “problem” of the final movement.  Beethoven’s models, his predecessors, would have concluded so grand a work with a glorious, triumphant finale:  think Messiah, B Minor Mass, Creation-- each ends with an immensely satisfying, uplifting, triumphant conclusion, bringing exhilarated audiences to their feet.  Missa Solemnis, by contrast, seems almost to end with a whisper (Maynard Solomon).

Almost thirty years ago, I sang in a master class for the great English tenor, Peter Pears, at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Ostensibly, the class was about the music of Benjamin Britten; somehow, though, Pears got onto the subject of Beethoven—specifically, Britten’s distrust, dislike, even hatred, of Beethoven, and his life-long struggle to come out from under Beethoven’s shadow.  I think I remember this so vividly because I have felt the same way about Beethoven—nothing rational or justifiable, just visceral resentment concerning his power, his dominance, his “heroism.” And despite the many times I have had the opportunity to sing Missa Solemnis, I have never, until this preparation period, been able to free myself of this resentment.  Now, though, after these months of immersion, I find myself leaving this strange resentment behind—and I believe my way out, has been through this final movement, the Agnus Dei/Dona nobis pacem.

The Agnus begins, traditionally enough, with a dark, mournful setting, in low voice, of the text, “Lamb of God, have mercy upon us.”  And the Dona, “Grant us peace,” answers, also traditionally, with positive, upbeat, polyphonic music, which seems to gather force and build toward a traditional, triumphant ending—when, suddenly, this stirring music is interrupted by a passage of what William Drabkin calls “war music”—he describes the remainder of the movement as a struggle between War and Peace.  Study of Beethoven’s sketches reveals that this is the portion of the movement which gave Beethoven the most difficulty—he composed several versions of it, the final one of which was the last part of the Missa to be completed.  In rehearsal, I refer to this music as the “Napoleon music”—Napoleon’s armies are just on the other side of the hill, destroying, sowing chaos, laying waste, negating the peace which we are proclaiming, praying for, celebrating—soloists and chorus alike scream out, “Lamb of God, have mercy on us!”  The Dona music returns, reassuringly, only to be interrupted, again, by War music so chaotic in its rhythm, its harmonic structure, as to destroy all the progress chorus and orchestra have made to that point—again, the chorus cries out, “Lamb of God!” and the Dona music returns.  We are not so reassured this time; indeed, the War music interjects itself twice more before the end of the movement, reminding us that Napoleon is still just over the hill, still destroying, still sowing chaos.  Almost with a sense of exhaustion, certainly of realistic sobriety, the movement closes without ceremony—a final “Give us peace,” but no “Amen.”

I find here Beethoven the man—his greatness, his heroism, his mastery, but also his sense of his own mortality, his weakness, his various failures, his approaching end.  He did after all understand what the rest of us understand-- that we all stumble and fall, and sometimes God doesn’t seem to catch us before we hit the ground.

My family experienced a tragic death this past week; a promising, shining fifteen year old boy, suddenly dead before his promise could be realized.  His funeral and the events surrounding it were heartrendingly sad; he stumbled and fell, and was not caught in time.  His family, his friends—all wonder why this happened, what sense there could be to it; and throughout these days, I have been hearing Napoleon in the next valley, threatening, destroying, leaving chaos where we thought order reigned.  I think I shall always re-experience Nathan’s death when I hear this final movement of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; and I shall always honor Beethoven for giving up his triumphant finale, and instead revealing this truth so skillfully, so artfully, so feelingly.

Beethoven's Missa Solemnis: March 5, 2012, 7:30 p.m. Symphony Center

Our Beethoven Missa Solemnis performance looms over and ahead of us—Monday, March 5, it all comes together.  Chorale’s eighty-six singers have now met and rehearsed with Oak Park/River Forest’s forty-two, and begun the process of melding our sounds and approaches into one grand chorus of 128.  Each ensemble has “retreated” for a few days, to continue its own detail work, before joining forces again next Saturday, February 25; from that point forward, we are one group.

What an immense project this is!  I was gratified to read in an article by New York Times music critic Alex Ross, that a perfect performance of this work is impossible—glad to know that I was not alone in discovering this.  Any performance of late Beethoven must necessarily include in its experience the striving, the sweat, the fatigue, the flawed heroism, the all-too-fragile mortality, as well as the genius, of Beethoven himself—as Ross wrote, only cyber-musicians could get it all right; and then we would miss the very life Beethoven expended in composing this masterwork.  Glenn Gould’s iconic recordings of Bach’s keyboard works would be incomplete without the pianist’s breathing, grunting, and singing, always present in the background as a part of the listeners’ experience; in like manner, the herculean attempts of Beethoven’s performers, sharing in the composer’s own humanity, to scale this mountain, reveal the truth behind Beethoven’s vision-- exposing us, with Beethoven, as necessarily less-than-godlike in our striving.

Chicago architect Daniel Hudson Burnham, born nineteen years after Beethoven’s death, wrote, “Make no little plans…aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency…Think big.”  I wonder if Burnham’s vision, which shaped so much of the Chicago we know today, doesn’t have a lot to do with Chicago’s ever-renewed love affair with Beethoven.  Between them, Beethoven and Burnham dominated a century, informing and challenging all who followed them in their respective fields.  Beethoven is in our civic DNA; the very ground rises to meet him, when he walks abroad.  Hate him or love him, he grabs our attention.

The greatest, most profound challenge confronting the performers, is to hear and comprehend the work—to understand Beethoven’s harmonic, rhythmic, rhetorical vocabulary, to feel and be able to predict where he is going next, to sense the whole amongst all the seemingly random, awkward, disconnected details.   Really, they never are random, awkward, or disconnected; but Beethoven’s structure is so enormous, we don’t hear or feel or understand from one end to the other, without agonizing repetition and immersion in his seething cauldron of materials.  Vocal production, intonation, rhythmic clarity, pronunciation-- all of these very important aspects of our performance finally hang from one central crosspiece: oneness with Beethoven and his vision.  One can rant, as I often have:  “This guy is an egomaniac!  He requires total conformity, total submission, total sacrifice; who does he think he is: God?” --and I expect that response will always inform at least a portion of my feelings about the man and his music. Finally, though, one has to trust, become what Beethoven wants one to become, and do ones darnedest to be faithful to him.  One can’t wait to sing the performance; and one can’t wait to be free of him, once it is over.

Like Shakespeare, Beethoven fires on every level.  No audience member is left out-- he presents challenges, and joys, that can be shared by all.  My eight-year old son has been sitting in on rehearsals, and has memorized much of the “Et vitam venturi” fugue subject—not because he tried, or was required to do so, but because it is a great fugue subject; it is fun, it is clever, it is balanced.  He enjoys whistling it for his friends, tapping any surface within reach to keep his syncopations straight.   The whole experience sends him off into a different world.  In like manner—when the military, “Napoleonic” music interrupts the “Dona nobis pacem” theme of the final movement, causing soloists and chorus to scream out, “Agnus, agnus Dei!” in terror, Joey gets it—Beethoven’s technique is direct, visceral, compelling, immediately perceived by anyone within earshot.    Beethoven is not holed up in some sound-proofed office, with headphones on—he is among us, he shares our life, our joys and fears and pains and aspirations.

Beethoven is one of our greatest composers; he, himself, called Missa Solemnis his greatest work.

A few words from the Missa's conductor, Jay Friedman

By Jay Friedman, Missa Solemnis Conductor and Music Director

Being the conductor of this upcoming performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is a great honor and a great responsibility as well. Besides preparing the orchestra I have the responsibility of preparing the soloists. Luckily we have choral director Bruce Tammen and the wonderful Chicago Chorale as well as our own symphony chorus, Bill Chin, chorus master, to fulfill Beethoven's demanding choral writing. Beethoven's writing for voices has long been viewed as some of the most difficult in the repertory. He seems to have viewed the human voice as an orchestral type instrument, capable of the facility of a violin or flute. He seemed to have no reservations about writing long, high exhausting, passages for soprano and alto voices, as well as the men. The fugues in the Missa Solemnis are especially taxing and have long been thought to be the most difficult to sing. As fiercely difficult as many tutti passages are for the chorus there are moments of great beauty and expression. It's as if Beethoven had a vision of setting the Mass to music with no thought of sparing the performers any practical considerations toward that goal.

We suspect that Beethoven was not a religious person in the normal sense of the word. He seemed to believe in a more encompassing view of humanity, as exhibited by the text in the ninth symphony, and his crossing out of the dedication of the Eroica symphony to Napoleon when the latter declared himself emperor.

An insight to his thoughts on life and humanity are best illustrated by his own words in a document he penned in 1802 called the "Heiigenstadt Testament." It is interesting to note that Beethoven lived another 25 years and wrote some of his greatest works when completely deaf, one being the Missa Solemnis.

HEILIGENSTADT TESTAMENT For my brothers Carl and Johann Beethoven Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. From childhood on, my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill, and I was even inclined to accomplish great things. But, think that for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years or, perhaps, be impossible). Though born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon compelled to isolate myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget all this, oh, how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, "Speak Louder, shout, for I am deaf". Oh, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the hightést perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed. – Oh I cannot do it; therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would have gladly mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas. I must live almost alone, like one who has been banished. I can mix with society only as much as true necessity demands. If I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed. Thus it has been during the last six months which I have spent in the country. By ordering me to spare my hearing as much as possible, my intelligent doctor almost fell in with my own present frame of mind, though sometimes I ran counter to it by yielding to my desire for companionship. But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life. It was only my art that held me back. Oh, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had forth all that I felt was within me. So I endured this wretched existence, truly wretched for so susceptible a body, which can be thrown by a sudden change from the best condition to the worst. Patience, they say, is what I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so - I hope my determination will remain firm to endure until it pleases the inexorable Parcae to break the thread. Perhaps I shall get better, perhaps not; I am ready. - Forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eight year, oh, it is not easy, and for the artist much more difficult than for anyone else. Divine One, thou seest my inmost soul thou knowest that therein dwells the love of mankind and the desire to do good. Oh, fellow men, when at some point you read this, consider then that you have done me injustice. Someone who has had misfortune may console himself to find a similar case to his, who despite all the limitations of Nature nevertheless did everything within his powers to become accepted among worthy artist and men. You, my brothers Carl and Johann, as soon as I am dead, if Dr. Schmid is still alive, ask him in my name to describe my malady, and attach this written documentation to his account of my illness so that so far as it is possible at least the world may become reconciled to me after my death. At the same time, I declare you two to be the heirs to my small fortune (if so it can be called); divide it fairly, bear with and help each other. What injury you have done me you know was long ago forgiven. To you, brother Carl, I give special thanks for the attachment you have shown me of late. It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery. Thanks for it and to my art, I did not end my life by suicide - Farewell and love each other. I thank all my friends, particularly Prince Lichnowsky and Professor Schmid; I would like the instruments from Prince L. to be preserved by one of you, but not to be the cause of strife between you, and as soon as they can serve you a better purpose, then sell them. How happy I shall be if I can still be helpful to you in my grave - so be it. With joy I hasten towards death. If it comes before I have had the chance to develop all my artistic capacities, it will still be coming too soon despite my harsh fate, and I should probably wish it later - yet even so I should be happy, for would it not free me from the state of endless suffering? Come when thou wilt, I shall meet thee bravely. Farewell and do not wholly forget me when I am dead; I deserve this from you, for during my lifetime I was thinking of you often and of ways to make you happy - be soo - . Ludwig van Beethoven Heiligenstadt, October 6th, 1802

Behind Beethoven

As Chorale digs into Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, becomes more familiar with the music, and begins to develop some overview of the score, we become increasingly aware of Beethoven’s debt to the composers who preceded him.

We deal with two separate but overlapping aspects of this debt question:  contributions to Beethoven’s overall compositional style and voice, and specific contributions to the Missa Solemnis, reflecting the composer’s concept of what the work should be, and represent.  The former issue is huge, and beyond my analytical powers to describe; the latter, however, is curiously present for us, throughout our study of the work.

In 1814, writer and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote an essay, published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, entitled “Alte und neue Kirchenmusik,” in which he decries the steady decline in the quality and dignity of church music since the baroque period.  The only two works he values are Handel’s Messiah and Mozart’s Requiem (Bach’s B Minor Mass was not even published until 1818, and few people knew of it); contemporary composers, he feels, write in far too theatrical a style, when they write church music at all.  He ignores Beethoven’s earlier Mass in C altogether. Twentieth century writer Carl Dahlhaus suggests that Beethoven’s Missa was composed against the background of this essay, and that Beethoven, ever a fierce competitor, saw an opening here in which to produce something that would draw Hoffmann’s attention and praise.  He wrote as early as 1809 that “in the old church modes the devotion is divine…and God permit me to express it someday;” we know, through remarks in his conversation books and letters, that, having determined to compose the Missa, he set about systematically studying the religious music of earlier periods, from the time of Gregorian chant, through Palestrina, Handel, and Mozart-- all composers whom he greatly esteemed-- and that his musical language throughout the Missa often hearkens back to such “old-fashioned” procedures and archaisms as chant, modal harmonies, recitative, fugues, and plagal cadences.  Just prior to beginning work on the Missa, he wrote “In order to write true church music go through all the ecclesiastical chants of the monks etc.  Also look there for the stanzas in the most correct translations along with the most perfect prosody of all the Christian-Catholic psalms and hymns in general.”  The resulting Missa is a combination of modern and archaic styles, more deeply connected to older traditions than any other work Beethoven composed.  In the hands of a lesser composer, it would be a pastiche; but Beethoven never simply co-opts procedures and styles from earlier composers or musical forms; he completely absorbs what he co-opts, and synthesizes a statement that is wholly his own.  Performing the Missa, one seldom stops to scratch ones head and say, “Aha!  I know where he got this!” It all sounds like Beethoven, but Beethoven enriched.

As a boy, Beethoven studied and performed published keyboard works of J.S. Bach.  We have no record of his expressing great affection for Bach (in comparison to his effusive, public admiration of Handel), but, in his own way, he absorbed Bach's commitment to counterpoint, if not his ease and gracefulness with it.  He later studied counterpoint with Haydn, who did acknowledge his debt to Bach, and he seems to have absorbed, second hand, much of what Haydn learned from studying Bach.  Beethoven’s first mass had no fugues, and he was criticized for this by the very man for whom he composed the Missa; he made up for this in the Missa Solemnis, which contains two, in both the Gloria and Credo movements.  Neither fugue sounds anything like Bach; but each contains procedures Bach perfected, worked out in excruciating detail.  For many, Bach’s music typifies German church music of the 18^th century; and to the extent to which this is true, Beethoven perhaps grudgingly acknowledges his debt to Bach, and to that tradition.  Clearly though, his greatest admiration and loyalty is reserved for the music of Handel and Haydn, and particularly for their best-known major works, Messiah and The Creation, each of which seems to lurk just below the surface of the Missa Solemnis. Bars 216-240 of the Beethoven’s Agnus Dei movement are linked by many writers to the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, which Beethoven is known to have particularly admired; Beethoven’s sketchbooks do not suggest that he knowingly quoted this passage, though the music corresponds closely to Handel’s passage “And He shall reign forever and ever.”  Similarly, the Präludium, the instrumental passage beginning at bar 79 of Beethoven’s Sanctus/Benedictus movement, with its improvisatory character and lack of tonal center, recalls the “Representation of chaos” with which Haydn’s Creation commences.

Beethoven ends his Missa in a manner totally his own, without reference to anything preceding him.  Instead of a triumphant, Handelian assertion of the rightness of the cosmos, he ends a grand, 75-minute “Divine Heroic Symphony” (Paul Bekker) on what feels like a quiet question mark.  As Maynard Solomon concludes in his magisterial biography, “one wonders whether Beethoven indeed felt that he, or humanity, would win the prize of life everlasting.”  No antecedent existed for that sort of doubt;  here, Beethoven ventures into uncharted territory, pointing the way for those who followed him.

Chorale's high school mentorship program

On and off, over the course of its existence, Chorale has included high school singers in its ranks.  My justification for inviting these young people to sing with us, has been my memory of the wonderful experience I personally had, as a high school student, singing with an adult choir in my home town. In my mind, they were so serious, so business-like; they moved so fast; and they sang such advanced repertoire.  My high school choir was good, but this was something special—it reinforced for me the idea that I would be singing for a long, long time, and that singing was something adults loved and worked at.  I hoped to make such an opportunity available for high school students through Chorale, and broached the subject of establishing a “high school mentorship program” (one needs to name a thing, I guess) to Chorale’s board of directors-- and was met with an enthusiastic response.  We decided that we wanted to include four students in our ranks, and that we would hold competitive auditions to fill these positions.  Things moved slowly—for the first year and a half we had only one young soprano with us.   Now, finally, we have four high school singers, learning Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.  I’ll have them introduce themselves:

“My name is Adrienne Bertsche, and I am currently a senior at Whitney Young High School in Chicago. It has been exciting for me to sing with the ChicagoChorale for the last two seasons, where I have learned some wonderful choral repertoire, increased my depth of knowledge about music, and developed my understanding of what it means to be a singer in the contexts of different eras, works, and composers. Singing in Chorale has also helped to develop my sight-reading, technical proficiency, and language pronunciation. My experience in Chorale has nurtured my passion for music to the point where I am now applying and auditioning at a number of conservatories, and looking to continue my vocal studies as a performance major. “

“My name is Maggie Blackburn and I am a senior at Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox. I sing in my school choir, church choir, University of Saint Francis Singing Saints Choir, and now sing with the Chicago Chorale for this production. I plan on pursuing a degree in vocal performance and cannot wait to see where that takes me. Singing with the Chicago Chorale is a wonderful opportunity for me to grow as a singer and performer, and also gives me a chance to get a feel for how my career might be. I am extremely excited for the opportunity to participate in this production of Missa Solemnis and hope to sing with the Chicago Chorale again in the future.”

“Hello, my name is Sasha Lilovich and I am a sophomore at Crown Point High School. I've enjoyed music since I was small, and began music lessons at around the age of nine. I've since begun classical voice studies with Brenda Roberts, and had the opportunity to sing with the Northwest Indiana Symphony Orchestra. I was a member of Northwest Indiana Childrens Choir for five years. I also was able to receive gold status each of the four years I competed in ISSMA. I've used my talents in singing at benefits raising funds for various charities such as the St. Jude battered Women's Shelter and the Northwest Indiana Food Pantry. Right now I'm in my school's concert choir and take lessons with Brenda. I hope that my time with Chorale will help me improve my sight reading, as well as be a pleasant experience. As for my future, that's a mystery even to myself. Although I'd love a career in music, I also want a steady income. Nonetheless I still plan to, at the very least, double major with music when the time comes.”

My name is Elijah Smith and I am currently a junior at ChiArts High School, studying classical voice. I plan to go to college for and make a career out of classical singing, and Chicago Chorale will help me prepare for what lies ahead. Outside of the Chicago Chorale, I perform with my high school, ChiArts at many events around Chicago. I chose to audition for the Chorale in hopes of gaining musical and professional experience in the music world. Not only does it help me with the actual singing part of classical voice, it helps me learn more about music theory and the actual rehearsal life of being in a choir. I hope to continue singing with Chicago Chorale in the events to come.”

Each singer has as “mentor” a regular member of Chorale, who makes them feel at home and helps to interpret Chorale’s culture for them. We are exploring ideas about specific programs and opportunities we might institute in the future; mostly, though, these young singers have had to jump right in and do the work that adult singers do, and experience the learning of this very difficult music just as the adults do.  So far, things are going very well; we plan to continue with, and expand, this program in the future.