The Food of Love

March 20, 2011: First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

Bimal Desai, Rachel Haimovich, Ranwa Hammamy, Jen Hayman, Allison Hedges, Michael Johnson, Ken Olin, Jordan Rock, Joy Wiltenburg, Caroline Winschel, and Rick Womer

If music be the food of love Jean Belmont Ford (1939–)

I Am the Rose of Sharon William Billings (1746–1800)

Nigra Sum Pablo Casals (1876–1973)

Rise Up, My Love Healey Willan (1880–1968)

Wahre Liebe Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

I Am Not Yours Z. Randall Stroope (1953–)

Of all the birds that I do know John Bartlet (1565–1620)

Dieu! Qu’il la fait bon regarder Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Farewell False Love George Kirbye (1565–1634)

The Tyrant Love George Kirbye (1565–1634)

O Vos Omnes Pablo Casals (1876–1973)

O Vos Omnes Blake R. Henson (1983–)

Frauenklage Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

Dream of Heaven Blake R. Henson (1983–)

Acrostic Song David Del Tredici (1937–)

The title of today’s program may be recognized as the opening lines of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which the lovesick Duke Orsino urges his musicians, “If music be the food of love, play on.” Our title, however––and our opening piece, by the celebrated American composer Jean Belmont Ford (1939–)––comes from Henry Heveningham’s seventeenth-century riff on Shakespeare’s famous prompt, turning Orsino’s plaint into a proper love poem. While Orsino seeks to drown his sorrows in melancholy music, asking for “excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die,” Heveningham’s narrator uses music as flirtation, drawing upon the sensual language of appetite to proclaim the beauty of the listener. It is in the spirit of Heveningham’s poem, celebrating the charms of music alongside those of a beloved, that we have assembled today’s program of love songs.

Ford’s piece is only the first reimagining of a familiar romantic text; “I Am the Rose of Sharon,” “Nigra Sum,” and “Rise Up, My Love” represent three distinct treatments of similar—sometimes identical— verses from the Song of Solomon. Religious interpretations of the Song of Solomon posit that the famously explicit text can be read as an allegory of the Judeo-Christian god’s relationship with Israel or with the Christian church, but more recent scholarship has illuminated similarities between the Song of Solomon and other ancient erotic poetry. For William Billings (1746–1800), Pablo Casals (1876–1973), and Healy Willan (1880–1968), the stanzas seem to signify very clearly as love poems, continuing the flirtatious pursuit begun by Ford. Appropriately for a springtime concert, each composer spotlights the text’s proclamation of spring as a season of renewal and sensuality.

Although both Casals and Willan were twentieth-century composers, their lush styles hearken back to earlier trends in music. Billings, too, a self-taught musician who is often considered the father of American music, bypassed the prevailing sounds of his day in favor of rougher, almost medieval-sounding harmonies. The inherent sprightliness of Billings’ “I Am the Rose of Sharon” contrasts nicely with the more mature colors of “Nigra Sum” and “Rise Up, My Love.” In particular, Willan’s “Rise Up, My Love” has a languorous quality that forecasts the speaker’s amorous intentions.

In “Wahre Liebe,” the last in this set of romantic overtures, Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) continues that depth of sound. Here again, both the text and the music seem drawn from earlier traditions, with the delicate Renaissance-style harmonies complementing the references to the twelfth-century tale of Tristan and Isolde. Those lovers, however, for all that they symbolize pure devotion, were drawn together owing to a magical love potion; by contrast, Hindemith’s gallant declares that his feelings outweigh even Tristan’s in both purity and ardor.

If, as we hope, the lovers in these first pieces succeed in their seductions, Z. Randall Stroope’s (1953–) exhilarating setting of Sara Teasdale’s “I Am Not Yours” might seem an appropriate entrée to the next phase of their relationships. “I Am Not Yours” strikes a different tone from the flirtatious texts with which we began today’s concert; the narrator here need not convince her beloved of her feelings. Instead, the poem reads as though she is simply waiting for an appropriate opportunity to act on her infatuation. The poem’s historical context, however, suggests that it may be less an intent for assignation than a sign of resignation: Teasdale herself, a lyrical poet in the early twentieth century, did not enjoy a happy romantic life. Her unhappy marriage ended in divorce, and she was rumored to have harbored lifelong feelings for a friend and former lover who considered himself financially unable to marry her. “I Am Not Yours,” published only months after Teasdale’s wedding, may have betrayed her inner tumult on––and, perhaps, her resignation to––marrying another man.

Happily, John Bartlet’s (1565–1620) “Of all the birds that I do know” and Claude Debussy’s (1862–1918) “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder” have no such tragic backstory. Indeed, they capture all the giddiness and abandon of new romance. “Of all the birds that I do know,” popularized by the King’s Singers in their Madrigal History Tour, wins the prize for being the most overtly suggestive piece on the program: although the poet celebrates a singing sparrow named Philip, the chorus indicates that Philip may actually be a woman—and she may actually be vocalizing something other than song. Like “Of all the birds,” “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder” is a well-loved choral piece, and Charles d’Orléans’ earnest text is only the first of its many charms. Like the poem’s titular woman, the composition boasts many virtues: the tessitura in all four parts lends itself to very easy and lyrical singing and the voices move in parallel motion while the insistent three-versus-two rhythms—a hemiola, in which one part’s triplet rhythm is set against another part’s duples—keep the melodies moving smoothly forward.

Of course, Shakespeare himself would remind us that the course of true love never runs smoothly, and the delight embodied by Stroope, Bartlet, and Debussy may be finite. Things certainly took a tragic turn for George Kirbye (1565–1634), whose “Farewell False Love” and “The Tyrant Love” begin our descent into romantic despair. Unfortunately, Kirbye’s disappointment in love may not have been balanced by overwhelming professional success; today, his works are little sung and rarely published. As a madrigalist, Kirbye eschewed the light style made popular by his English contemporaries like Morley and Weelkes, preferring instead to work with serious texts, often in a minor mode. Like the Italians whom he imitated, Kirbye devoted careful attention to text setting, framing line and tempo to reflect the content of the verses. Given Kirbye’s relative obscurity, today’s performance may be the Philadelphia premiere of “Farewell False Love” and “The Tyrant Love.” (In fact, this may very well be their world premiere—our research has turned up no extant recordings and only incomplete performance records.) However, his sense of betrayal and resignation after having been crossed in love is likely just as familiar to modern audiences as Charles d’Orléans’ eager infatuation.

Much of today’s program features juxtapositions between musicians of similar eras but different styles, as in the contrast between Kirbye and Bartlet, who were born in the same year but approached their work with vastly different sensibilities. We continue our exploration of the lovelorn, however, with a pairing by composers of different generations but deliberately similar styles: two settings of “O Vos Omnes” by Pablo Casals (1876–1973) and Blake R. Henson (1983–), respectively. The text comes from Lamentations, which, unlike the Song of Solomon, is distinctly religious, bewailing the destruction of Jerusalem and the wrath of an angry god. In the excerpt that becomes “O Vos Omnes,” however, the text is entirely secular, signifying only the speaker’s bleak despair. For all that Lamentations itself is selectively excerpted, the Casals and Henson pairing demonstrates true fidelity to source “text.” The Casals original, composed in 1942, generates a rich, somber tone, suggestive of Casals’ own stylings as an accomplished cellist. Henson’s homage, published in 2006, cites the first two measures of Casals’ piece before plunging into a gentler—but equally moving—setting of the same text. After stewing in Kirbye’s rage and wallowing in Casals and Henson’s sorrow, our narrative of lost love culminates in Hindemith’s “Frauenklage,” the second of his Five Songs on Old Texts. Like “Wahre Liebe,” the first in that collection, “Frauenklage” evokes earlier musical trends, using twentieth-century tonal language to evoke Renaissance harmonic patterns. The individual parts are written in traditional motet style, but they are layered upon one another to create complex polytonality. The text also returns us to an explicitly female narrator for the first time since “Nigra Sum,” although the quiet grief of Hindemith’s lamenting lady would likely seem totally foreign to Casals’ flushed and eager beauty.

Such privileged sorrow, however—the mature understanding that love can be cherished and celebrated despite the gentle ravages of time—is the necessary final development in today’s sequential narrative. Henson’s “Dream of Heaven” is part love song, part lullaby; his use of Samuel Rogers’ (1763–1855) “The Sleeping Beauty” marks the first text on the program in which the lover encourages his beloved to continue without him. The narrator may be telling an alternate version of the traditional fairytale, or he may be its unsung hero: after having presumably wrestled his way through the thickets and thorns surrounding the sleeping princess’ tower, he pauses in his moment of anticipated triumph and allows the young woman to “sleep on secure above control.” The lovers with whom we opened the program were appealingly romantic in their pleas, but the narrator of Rogers’ poem is almost certainly more admirable: in refusing to disturb the sleeping princess, he cherishes and respects her beauty and her mind more than he would have in waking her to live as his queen.

Henson’s setting of the text is unabashedly comforting in moments when the narrator is speaking to the princess, and the music reaches a fever pitch only when the narrator fears that the young woman might be stirring into wakefulness. When the moment of anxiety passes, however, Henson returns to the soothing melodies with which the piece opened, reinforcing the lullaby of his own composition with the familiar strains of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” arcing through the soprano and alto lines. The portrait of a young woman being allowed to grow up gracefully recurs in David Del Tredici’s “Acrostic Song,” although to more sorrowful effect. Del Tredici (1937–), who trained as a serialist in the mid-twentieth century, shocked the musical world with the 1976 premiere of the lush and neo-romantic Final Alice, of which “Acrostic Song” is the fifth act. Final Alice was originally composed for soprano soloist and a modified orchestra, conceived as a series of elaborate arias drawing upon the poetry in and inspirations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. The text for “Acrostic Song” is the concluding poem in Through the Looking-Glass, which was written five years after Alice’s Adventures and almost ten years after the fateful boat trip on which Charles Lutwidge Dodgson made up a story about Wonderland to entertain young Edith, Lorina, and Alice Liddell. Alice Liddell, who was ten years old at the time, became the inspiration for Alice herself, and she is memorialized in the poem, which spells out her entire name—Alice Pleasance Liddell—in the first letter of each line.

Much of Alice’s Adventures is wracked with anxiety about Alice growing up; owing to a combination of magic potions and Wonderland accidents, Alice is repeatedly too large to function properly in Wonderland, unable to fit through the door to the White Rabbit’s garden and eventually so Amazonian as to be able to use the Queen of Hearts and her court as playing cards. The poem at the end of Looking-Glass, however, written when Alice was already an accomplished young lady, does not begrudge her this inevitable and natural maturation.

Like Henson, Del Tredici treats the text with reverence, even shifting to minor tonalities for the most mournful passages of the poem. As a kind of elegy for a lost summer’s day, “Acrostic Song” is not nearly as calming as “Dream of Heaven,” but with its invocations of dreams, it becomes almost as lullaby-like. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” returns in the sopranos’ insistence that life is “but a dream,” and Del Tredici’s deliberate repetition of short phrases of text breaks the verses into nonsense syllables, as if language itself has yielded to the inexorable degradation of time. The piece, like the poem, ends without achieving resolution; for Alice––as for the Sleeping Beauty and as for each of us––there is more to the story, yet to be told.