by Bart de Vries

TRANSITION

BY BART DE VRIES The centerpiece of this month’s preChristmas concert is Gerald Finzi’s cantata Dies Natalis. It is flanked by two classic works, one by Mozart and one by Schumann, each composed at a turning point in their careers.

When Mozart composed his 15th piano concerto in March 1784, his career was on the rise. In February of that year, he had started to keep a catalogue of his works to keep his increasing output in order. The growing number of copyists, students and concert organizers that had to be accommodated made Mozart decide to move to a bigger and three times more expensive apartment. Mozart was doing well.

Although his most famous concertos were still to come, the Fifteenth is sometimes seen as a transitional work. It was the first piano concerto that carried the adjective ‘grand’ to indicate the size of the orchestra deployed. While his previous concertos were like chamber music in style, from the Fifteenth onwards the wind instruments were becoming more numerous and prominent, expanding the composer’s possibilities to create a wider variety of sounds and musical textures, thus giving the concertos a more symphonic character. Mozart at the time, and pianists to this day, consider the Fifteenth one of his most difficult concertos to play due to its fast sequences of chords and scales.

Just like Mozart in 1784, Robert Schumann went through a prolific period in his career as a composer (he was also a music critic and conductor), as well as through a change in his way of working, when he started writing his Second Symphony in 1845. (Schumann incidentally quoted the first theme of the third movement of Mozart’s 15th piano concerto in his piano quartet in E Flat Major.) Until that time, Schumann typically used the piano (the instrument for which he had thus far written most of his works) in the process of composing, but from 1845 on he started to write without any instrumental support.

In the same year, Schumann had once again slipped into a bout of depression, from which he deeply suffered. As was his method, he sought to drag himself out of it by studying counterpoint, which influenced his Second Symphony profoundly. The chorale in the brass section at the outset of the first movement and the use of the BACH motif (B flat, A, C, B) in the second movement testify to this.

If it weren’t for the outbreak of the Second World War, Gerald Finzi’s cantata Dies Natalis might have been his breakthrough. The British composer (1901–1956) based his cantata for voice and string orchestra on the prose and poems of the 17th-century poet and cleric Thomas Traherne. His admiration for Bach is most easily heard in the last movement. Although from Jewish descent, Finzi, affected by the loss of his father, his three brothers and a beloved teacher early in life, may have found comfort in the mystical words of the Christian poet.

Finzi’s cantata isn’t a nativity piece per se, but the texts he uses are full of a divine naivete, simplicity, innocence, wonder and openness that could be associated with somebody new to a paradisiacal but corrupted world, thus making it a suitable piece for the time of year.