Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Il Tramonto
OTTORINO RESPIGHI
Born July 9, 1879, Bologna
Died April 18, 1936, Rome

In 1816 the 24-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley married 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecroft, who would write Frankenstein two years later. That spring, Shelley wrote a poem titled The Sunset, which touches many themes central to the romantic imagination: the mingling of love and death, the power of grief, the longing for rest, and the effect of time. Though parts of the poem had appeared before Shelley‘s drowning in 1822, the complete poem was not published until his widow gathered a number of works as his Posthumous Poems in 1824.

Exactly a century after The Sunset was written, it attracted the attention of Ottorino Respighi, who knew it – in an Italian translation by R. Ascoli – as Il Tramonto. At this time Respighi was still virtually unknown as a composer. In 1913, at the age of 34, he had become a professor of composition at Saint Cecelia‘s in Rome, and over the next few years he composed the work that would bring him fame, The Fountains of Rome. At the same time he was writing Fountains, Respighi made a setting of Il Tramonto for the unusual ensemble of soprano and string quartet, and both The Fountains of Rome and Il Tramonto were first heard in February 1918.

Those who know Respighi only as the composer of the splashy Roman trilogy will be in for a surprise with Il Tramonto, for here the Italian master of orchestration writes with subtlety and refinement for this much more restrained pallette. Respighi subtitles this work “poemetto lirico,” and he is quite sensitive to Shelley‘s text: the soprano sings virtually throughout, with only the briefest instrumental interludes, and in fact the entire work is shaped by the evolving moods of Shelley‘s poem. Just as the events of the poem change sharply, moving from the passion of the lovers to the aging woman‘s plea for release, so Respighi shifts tempo and harmony constantly. The mood remains generally restrained: only occasionally does the dynamic rise above mezzo forte, and the climax – on the word “Pace” – is marked triple piano before Il Tramonto fades into silence on a postlude that Respighi marks dolcissimo.

Quintet for Horn and Strings
GUNTHER SCHULLER
Born 1925

Although I was a professional horn player in my earlier life – half a century ago – and wrote a fair amount of music for horn in those years (including making my debut as hornist and composer at age 19 with my first Horn Concerto), the present Horn Quintet is the first time I have written anything for solo horn in almost forty years. The combination of horn and string quartet, as suggested by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, was especially appealing to me because it brought me back to the time when I played Mozart‘s Horn Quintet, K. 407 a number of times. In memory of those days and my deep love for that work I couldn‘t resist the temptation to include a few subtle, virtually hidden, allusions to Mozart‘s Quintet.

I was also very happy to find out that I would be writing the Quintet for Julie Landsman, a player whose work at the Metropolitan Opera I have admired greatly over the past twenty years.

The work is written in my richly harmonic, highly chromatic personal style, a language I have used since my late teen years, and (undoubtedly) developed/elaborated since then. Some listeners may find the music (quite apart from its melodic-harmonic style) somewhat complex and dense. It is often what I would call ‘polyphonic,‘ not in the sense of Bachian counterpoint, but in the larger sense of several things going on linearly simultaneously.

The best way to hear my music is to listen to it holistically – that is to say, not for any particular melodies or familiar harmonies, but for the whole composite of the sounds made by the five instruments. A good idea is to close your eyes and listen undistracted by anything visual. Basically, music is a fusion of shapes (sometimes strange and new) and instrumental colors.

This work was co-commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, La Jolla Music Society for SummerFest and The International Horn Society.

The Seven Last Words of Christ
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Born March 31, 1732, Rohrau
Died May 31, 1809, Vienna

Haydn may have claimed that his thirty years as kapellmeister to the Esterhazy princes forced him to work in isolation, but from that quiet isolation his fame spread steadily across Europe. One of the clearest signs of this came in 1784 when Haydn received a handsome commission from Paris for six symphonies, and he worked on these“Paris” Symphonies (Nos. 82-87) during the years 1785-86. At exactly this same moment came an even more remarkable commission. A Spanish cleric wrote to Haydn to ask for music to accompany the reading–on Good Friday, 1787 – of the seven final statements of Christ on the cross.

Haydn rarely commented on his music, but in 1801 he recalled the circumstances of this work‘s creation, and it is worth quoting him at length:

About fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of Cadíz to compose instrumental music on the Seven Words of Jesus on the Cross. It was the custom of the Cathedral of Cadíz to produce an oratorio every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the church were hung with black cloth, and only a large lamp, hanging from the center of the roof, broke the solemn obscurity. At midday, the doors were closed and the ceremony began. After an appropriate prelude, the bishop ascended the pulpit, pronounced one of the Seven Words and delivered a discourse thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and knelt prostrate before the altar. This pause was filled with music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra falling in at the conclusion of the discourse.

It should further be noted that the Good Friday observances in Cadiz took place not in the cathedral but in the Chapel of Santa Cueva, a cave carved in a hillside beneath the cathedral, so this music was first performed in a profound darkness.

Haydn wrote this set of musical meditations for large orchestra (one that included four horns and timpani), and it was performed in Cadíz on April 6, 1787. But it is a telling indication of the fame of the 55-year-old composer that it was performed almost simultaneously in both Vienna and Bonn; in fact, those two performances took place at the end of March and so preceded the Cadíz ceremony (and it is likely that one of the performers in the Bonn orchestra was a 16-year-old violist named Beethoven). Alert to the commercial possibilities of this music, Haydn quickly arranged it for string quartet – the version heard on this program – and oversaw its transcription for solo piano; some years later – in 1796 as he was beginning work on his oratorios – he made a further arrangement for soloists, chorus, and expanded orchestra. He regarded The Seven Last Words of Christ as one of the greatest successes he ever had as a composer, and he conducted it at his last public performance, in 1803.

There is no question about Haydn‘s devout Catholic faith: he inscribed the words Laus Deo (“Praise God”) at the end of the manuscripts of all of his symphonies. But while he welcomed this commission, he found it a challenge, noting that “it was not an easy matter to compose seven Adagios to last ten minutes each, and follow one after the other without fatiguing the listener...” Uncertain how to proceed, he consulted his friend, the Abbé Maximilian Stadler, who suggested building the main theme of each movement on the rhythm of its Latin text, and this proved a useful procedure.

Haydn said of The Seven Last Words: “Each [movement], or rather each setting of the text, is expressed only by instrumental music, but in such a way that it creates the most profound impression on even the most inexperienced listener.” The challenge for him as a composer was to capture the spirit of these solemn words and to create music suitable for meditation on each of them, yet still to engage a listener‘s interest across the span of seven slow movements. He addressed the last of these in several ways: by making sharp contrasts between the character of the movements (some are lyric and lamenting, others dramatic), by varying keys effectively and by contrasting sonorities – muting the strings for one movement, using pizzicato at other points. Haydn frames these seven slow movements with contrasted outer movements. He establishes a suitably solemn atmosphere with an Introduction in D minor that he marks Maestoso ed Adagio, and he concludes with a musical depiction of the earthquake that rocked Calvary after the crucifixion. At last we have a fast movement – it is marked Presto e con tutta la forza – and it brings The Seven Last Words to a conclusion that is satisfying both emotionally and musically.

Haydn‘s arrangement of this orchestral music for string quartet is particularly successful, and the music is most often heard today in this version. At the time he made this transcription, he had already written 43 of his 83 string quartets, and the music is beautifully conceived for the four instruments in this version. The seven meditative movements do not really require detailed description. Each is in sonata form, which allows Haydn the scope to develop the implications of his opening theme, much as a meditation expands on its fundamental idea. These movements do not offer scene-painting, but instead are emotional correlatives to the words of the dying Christ, and listeners might best approach them as did the listeners at the first performance in Cadíz: by reading the text of each movement and being aware of it as they listen to Haydn‘s musical response.

Poem After the Seven Last Words

by Mark Strand

1.

The story of the end, of the last word
of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.
We tell it and retell it – one word, then another
until it seems that no last word is possible,
that none would be bearable. Thus, when the hero
of the story says to himself, as to someone far away,
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
we may feel that he is pleading for us, that we are
the secret life of the story, and as long as his plea
is not answered, we shall be spared. So the story
continues. So we continue. And the end, once more,
becomes the next, and the next after that.

Someday someone will write a story telling
among other things of a parting between mother
and son, of how she wandered off, of how he vanished
in air. But before that happens, it will describe
how their faces shone with a feeble light and how
the son was moved to say, “Woman, look at your son,”
then to a friend nearby, “Son, look at your mother.”
At which point the writer will put down his pen
and imagine that while those words were spoken
something else happened, something unusual like
a purpose revealed, a secret exchanged, a truth
to which they, the mother and son, would be bound
but what it was no one would know. Not even the writer.

These are the days of spring when the sky is filled
with the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire,
and there is nothing that does not wish to be born;
days when the fate of the present is a breezy fullness,
when the world’s great gift for fiction gilds even
The dirt we walk on, and we feel we could live forever
while knowing of course that we can’t. Such is our plight.
The master of weather and everything else, if he wants,
can bring forth a dark of a different kind, one hidden
by darkness so deep it cannot be seen. No one escapes.
Not even the man who believed he was chosen to do so,
for when the dark came down he cried out, “Father, Father,
why have you forsaken me?” To which no answer came.

To be thirsty. To say, “I thirst.”
To close one’s eyes and see the giant world
that is born each time the eyes are closed.
To see one’s death. To see the darkening clouds
as the tragic cloth of a day of mourning. To be the one
mourned. To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover
what one suspected, that the only word in it
is nothing. To try to open one’s eyes, but not to be
able to. To feel the mouth burn. To feel the sudden
presence of what, again and again, was not said.
To translate it and have it remain unsaid. To know
at last that nothing is more real than nothing.

“It is finished,” he said. You could hear him say it,
the words almost a whisper, then not even that,
but an echo so faint it seemed no longer to come
from him, but from elsewhere. This was his moment,
his final moment. “It is finished,” he said into a vastness
that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it
within him. He contained it all. That was the miracle,
to be both large and small in the same instant, to be
like us, but more so, then finally to give up the ghost,
which is what happened. And from the storm that swirled
in his wake a formal nakedness took shape, the truth
of disguise and the mask of belief were joined forever.

Back down these stairs to the same scene,
to the moon, the stars, the night wind. Hours pass
and only the harp off in the distance and the wind
moving through it. And soon the sun’s gray disk,
darkened by clouds, sailing above. And beyond,
as always, the sea of endless transparence, of utmost
calm, a place of constant beginning that has within it
what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand
has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart.
To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.