Program Notes - "Music from Proust's Salon - Symposium 82

HELICON SYMPOSIUM LXXXII

MUSIC OF PROUST’S SALON

Program Notes by James Roe

“I believe that the essence of music is to arouse
the mysterious depths of our souls.”
Marcel Proust

It is no surprise that Marcel Proust—a writer consumed with exploring the experience of memory—was a dedicated lover of music, the invisible art that only exists in the passage of time. Helicon’s 82nd Symposium presents music important in Proust’s life and work with readings from his poems and “In Search of Lost Time.”

Reynaldo Hahn (1875-1947)

I. PROUST IN LOVE — Marcel & Reynaldo

Poems of Marcel Proust
Premières valses pour piano by Reynaldo Hahn

When I contacted Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Richard Howard about participating in Helicon’s Proust concert, he was not only delighted at the prospect, but said he had some new material to offer. He was making new translations of little known Proust poems for an upcoming book, and had recently finished several he thought might be of interest. So, I paid a visit to his book-lined apartment near NYU. The poems he showed me were lyrical portraits of individual painters and composers and fit Helicon’s program perfectly. They were written in the mid-1890s, shortly after Proust met the composer, Reynaldo Hahn.

One of twelve children, Hahn was born in Venezuela to a Catholic mother and a Jewish businessman. To escape growing political unrest, the family left South America for Paris in 1877. By 1893, the year the two young men met, Hahn had already distinguished himself as a composer and performer. With sympathetic tastes and dispositions, the two quickly fell in love. Considering the time in which they lived, Proust and Hahn conducted their relationship with uncommon conspicuousness. (Oscar Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency” began in 1895.) Their romance lasted several years, but the two artists remained life-long friends.

Though Hahn wrote music in every genre including, opera and ballet, his gifts shine brightest in smaller forms. His songs are exquisite, and he often sang them at parties accompanying himself at the piano. He also produced a large body of salon music for solo piano, which displays his characteristic wit and sophisticated charm. To open our program, we will intersperse readings of Proust’s poems between his friend’s Premières valses pour piano.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)II. THE LITTLE PHRASE — Swann & Odette

A Passage from Swann’s Way translated and read by Richard Howard
Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Minor by Camille Saint-Saëns

In Swann’s Way, Book One of “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust introduces a fictive composer named Vinteuil, whose presence and music recur throughout the multi-volume work. The cyclic structure of Proust’s novel is mirrored in a composition by Vinteuil, a Sonata for Violin and Piano. Swann is particularly taken by this music, especially a “little phrase” that reappears throughout the piece and subsequently comes to symbolize the love he shared with Odette. “The national anthem of our love,” they called it. Through Swann’s evolving experience of this piece, Proust traces the development of his characters’ relations while illuminating complex connections between music, emotion, and memory. Swann’s reflections on the Vinteuil Sonata are among the most eloquent descriptions of musical experience in literature. Richard Howard will read his own translation of Swann’s first encounter with the sonata and the effect of its “little phrase.”

That this imaginary sonata must be based on an actual piece has spawned nearly a century of speculation. Swann describes a work so sublime, that César Franck’s great Sonata in A Major is often suggested as the model. Another candidate is the First Violin Sonata of Gabriel Fauré, a composer Proust knew and admired. (Helicon has presented both pieces, the Franck on our 38th Symposium, 21 April 1996, with Pedja Muzijevic and Mark Steinberg, and the Fauré on our 73rd, 13 March 2005, with Pedja and Jennifer Frautschi.) Reynaldo Hahn’s diaries reveal that the “little phrase” was based on the recurring melody in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Violin Sonata in D Minor, which closes the first half of this program.

César Franck (1822-90)III. SPIRITUAL NOURISHMENT — Proust & Music

Piano Quintet in F Minor by César Franck

“For some years Beethoven’s last quartets and the music of Franck has been my principal spiritual nourishment,” wrote Proust in 1916. It was listening to the music of Franck and Beethoven, as well as Schumann, Wagner, and Mozart, that stimulated Proust’s thinking about the creative process and informed the narrator’s musical meditations late in his novel.

Proust attended concerts by the celebrated Parisian string quartet, Quatuor Poulet, and became acquainted with their violist, Amable Massis. During a post-concert conversation, Proust proposed a private performance in his home. The musicians agreed in principle, though no specific plans were made. Some days later, Proust made a surprise visit to the first violinist’s apartment around 11:00 P.M., consumed by the desire to hear a string quartet of César Franck that very night! The violinist followed Proust to a waiting car where he was offered a bowl of mashed potatoes. They then drove around Paris collecting the other quartet members. By the time the performance began, it was nearly one in the morning. Upon finishing the demanding hour-long work, Proust sat in silence a long time. He then asked to hear the whole work again from the beginning.

Massis later remarked on the novelist’s attention during their performance, “Proust was a marvelous listener, straightforward, direct, a man who drank in music without raising any questions.” One can only imagine the heightened experience of such intimate music making and the spiritual nourishment it provided the musicians and their solitary, marvelous listener.

“Music may be the unique example of what might have been
the means of communicating between souls.”
From “In Search of Lost Time”

Program Notes - The Art of English Song - Sympoisum 81

HELICON SYMPOSIUM LXXXI
Sunday, 11 February 2007
THE ART OF ENGLISH SONG

In February Helicon presented its 81st Symposium, titled "The Art of English Song," which featured music by Purcell, Vaughan Williams, and Britten. It was a great night. The tenor, Nicholas Phan is an impressive young artist and a major rising star. I met him while playing principal oboe in the Houston Grand Opera back in 2004, and had wanted to make this program happen ever since. The continuo team is from the Orchestra of St. Luke's and is one of the best in this country. I particularly wanted to present a program combining English Baroque and 20th-C. music to explore the connections and contrasts that might result. Purcell is, of course, the great progenitor of English music and so was a strong influence on Britten and Vaughan Williams. Hearing these works together in one evening turned out to be illuminating.

Here is the program followed by my program notes.

HELICON SYMPOSIUM LXXXI
Sunday, 11 February 2007

THE ART OF ENGLISH SONG

Nicholas Phan, tenor
Robert Wolinsky, harpsichord
Myron Lutzke, ’cello
Pedja Muzijevic, piano
James Roe, oboe

PROGRAM

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Songs for Voice and Continuo

If Music Be The Food Of Love
Music For A While

I Attempt From Love's Sickness To Fly
Sweeter Than Roses
Not All My Torments
There's Not A Swain
An Epithalamium: Thrice Happy Lovers

Olinda In The Shades Unseen
An Evening Hymn

---INTERMISSION---

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Canticle I for Tenor and Piano, Op. 40 (1947)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Ten Blake Songs for Tenor and Oboe (1957)

Britten
Three Folk Song Settings for Tenor and Piano

PROGRAM NOTES

Word painting in “The Art of English Song”
by James Roe, Artistic Director

Song is the ubiquitous form for expressing emotion through words and music. Helicon’s 81st Symposium presents art songs by three of England’s greatest composers, Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. These composers were masters of a compositional technique called “word painting,” which is the use of musical tools to enhance the meaning of the text. Since the songs on this program are in English, we have direct access to the interplay between words and music.

Among the first musical choices a composer makes when approaching a text is that of key or mode. There are two main musical modes, major and minor. Major modes are generally happy, minor the opposite. One expects a sad sentiment to be sung in a minor mode, however composers can play with these expectations to highlight an underlying ambivalence in a text. One of the Purcell songs we’ll hear opens with the line: “I attempt from Love’s sickness to fly in vain, since I am myself my own fever and pain.” Purcell sets this unhappy realization in the sunny key of A Major. This surprising choice emphasizes not the pain of love’s sickness but our hapless complicity in it. The song becomes a self-amused realization of our own susceptibility to love’s traps. A successful song reveals such layers of meaning not evident in the music or the text alone.

Another musical choice is that of tempo. The famous Purcell song, “Sweeter than Roses,” opens with expansive, improvisatory music that evokes the nostalgic images of the opening line: “Sweeter than roses, or cool evening breeze, was the dear kiss.” This kiss seems to have gone exceedingly well, “first trembling made me freeze, then shot like fire all over.” On this phrase, Purcell launches into a fast tempo, painting the kiss’s fiery passion with shooting musical notes. The next line reads “What magic has victorious love!” Here, Purcell sets up a brisk, regular tempo emphasizing the power of love’s magic over us.

A composer’s most direct tool for word painting is melodic shape. Words are set to melody in two ways, syllabic and melismatic. Syllabic is the most common. With one note per syllable of text, it emphasizes clarity and flow. A melisma is more than one note sung on a single syllable. This expressive device highlights certain words and enhances their emotional impact. A fine example of syllabic word painting from this Symposium comes in the second of Vaughan Williams’ Blake Songs, “A Poison Tree.” Blake’s poem, from his “Songs of Experience,” is a chilling depiction of the progression of anger to fatal revenge. In the last line, the speaker sees his foe dead on the ground, poisoned by the fruit of enmity. “In the morning glad I see, my foe outstretched beneath the tree.” Vaughan Williams sets this line syllabically, each word descending step-by-step to the song’s final note, a long unaccompanied “D.” This unadorned, outstretched note represents the final resting place of the speaker’s victim. (Could the note “D” also denote the word “death”?) Melismatic text setting is a special expressive choice. When a composer writes a melisma on a word, the clarity of that word can be partly or even greatly obscured as the shape of the melody takes prominence over the natural flow of the text. A fine composer will use melismas in important moments where the expressive meaning of a word overwhelms its grammatical or rhythmic place in the poem. There is an irresistible example from Handel’s “Messiah” in the chorus “All We Like Sheep.” The opening line, “All we like sheep, have gone astray,” is set syllabically until the word, “astray.” On its second syllable, Handel writes a long undulating melisma. The melody practically goes haywire, jumping and leaping all about. Quite literally, it goes astray. Melismas offer performers great opportunity for personal expression. In his song “Not All My Torments,” Purcell writes exquisitely complex melismas to color key words such as “torments,” “pity,” and “sorrows.” The two final bars of the song are given over to a weeping melisma on the words, “I despair.” Listen for the way our musicians respond to passages such as these

I cannot leave the topic of word painting without mentioning one of my favorite examples in all of music, which happens to be on this program. It comes in Purcell’s sublime song, “Music for a While.” Referencing the story of Orpheus, the text tells of music’s power to calm a troubled mind, if only temporarily. The song's second section describes music’s affect on one of the mythological Furies, Alecto. This Alecto is a singularly unpleasant girl. Armed with a whip, she has snakes for hair, bat wings, a dog’s head and blood dripping from her eyes. Yet music has the power to calm even this beastly creature, causing “the snakes to drop from her head and the whip from out her hands.” In his setting, Purcell repeats the word “drop” nine times, each one iterated with a single short note sung on the weak half of the beat. The effect is onomatopoetic word painting, and is immensely charming.

The songs featured in this Symposium are rich in these devices and many others. Keep your ears open. Let your imagination be stimulated by the words, the music, and the performers’ interpretations to heighten your experience of these masterpieces of art song written in our shared language.