6 minute read
Zimmerli Series: Epic
Zimmerli Concert Series
now feeling Epic
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SATURDAY April 23
7:00 pm @ Twichell Auditorium, Zimmerli Performance Center 2022
Petite suite de concert, op. 77 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Samuel Coleridge-Taylor 8 min
I. Le caprice de Nannette IV. Le tarantelle frétillante
Symphony no. 1 in D Major, “Titan” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gustav Mahler 53 min
I. Langsam schleppend II. Kräftig bewegt III. Feierlich und gemessen IV. Stürmisch bewegt
Program Notes
Petite Suite Samuel ColeridgeTaylor
(1875-1912)
Programs subject to change | All timings are approximate.
If – as is at least arguable – the Chevalier de St. Georges (page 33) has the most cinematic biography in all of classical music, then surely Samuel ColeridgeTaylor’s story is among its most novelistic.
Coleridge-Taylor was the son of Alice Martin, a suburban farrier’s daughter, and Daniel Taylor, a Krio man from the West African nation of Sierra Leone who had been studying medicine in London. Daniel being unaware of Alice’s pregnancy when he returned to Africa, Alice, a free-spirited 19-year-old lover of literature, named her baby for the poet Samuel TaylorColeridge; young Coleridge, as he was
called, grew up in a working-class suburb with his mother, grandfather, and stepgrandmother.
The family recognized and supported the boy’s musical gifts, and by age 15 he was a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with the noted composer of Anglican church music Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Though he numbered among his classmates and pals Holst and Vaughan Williams, ColeridgeTaylor stood out among them, and by 1898 Stanford had introduced him to Edward Elgar and Elgar’s influential friend, the critic and publisher August Jaeger (the “Nimrod” of the Enigma Variations). The three men arranged for a highprofile performance of Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which set a portion of Longfellow’s poem inspired by the legendary founder of the Native American Iroquois nation.
This piece – a cantata by a Black Englishman setting a poem by a white American about a Native – was not just an unlikely success but an epochal hit: the printed score sold over 150,000 copies before the beginning of WW I, and the Feast, along with its two follow-up works setting other portions of Longfellow’s poem, became the focus of the Hiawatha Season, wherein for 10 days each summer 900 performers took over London’s Royal Albert Hall for massive, sold-out performances of Coleridge-Taylor’s trilogy.
In 1899, Coleridge-Taylor married an RCM classmate, Jessie Walmisley, and a year later she bore a son, christened Hiawatha; both Hiawatha and his younger sister, Avril, grew to be noted musicians themselves. In that same year ColeridgeTaylor was invited to be the youngest delegate in the first Pan-African Congress, which brought hundreds of Black intellectuals and leaders to London. There he befriended W.E.B. Dubois and P.L. Dunbar, among others, and developed an interest in the culture of the African diaspora. By this time he had developed a relationship with his father, whom Queen Victoria had in the meantime appointed Coroner for the Empire in the African province of Senegambia, and he began incorporating musical ideas from African, African-American, and Afro-British sources into his music.
Within the next decade three hugely successful American tours followed, Theodore Roosevelt inviting ColeridgeTaylor to the White House in 1904. Yet for all his success, Coleridge-Taylor was always obliged to work hard to support his young family; in an arrangement not uncommon to impecunious young composers, he had sold all rights to Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast to its publisher upon completing it. When the composer died of pneumonia in 1912, King George VI was sufficiently moved at the Coleridge-Taylor family’s plight to bestow a lifetime pension on them, and British composers and songwriters were inspired to form the Performing Rights Society, the group that guarantees royalty payments in Great Britain and now has 140,000 active members.
While the Hiawatha pieces eventually faded in popularity, Coleridge-Taylor’s Petite Suite has never left the repertoire, especially in Britain. Originally written in 1911 for solo piano, its high-spirited, melodious music falls somewhere between that of Elgar and the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan. Tonight’s performance features two of the Suite’s four movements, the first (“Nanette’s Caprice”) and last (“The Frisky Tarantella”). In 2022, 110 years after Taylor’s death and 83 years after the last Hiawatha Season in London, Coleridge-Taylor’s star is once again ascendant, and a new generation of audiences is coming to know the power and joy of his music.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Symphony no. 1 “Titan” Gustav Mahler
(1860-1911)
“On what dark subsoil our life is built!” Mahler once exclaimed in a letter to a friend. “Where do we come from? Where does the way out lead? Why do I believe myself free, and yet am wedged into my character as into a prison? What is the purpose of suffering? How can I understand cruelty and malice in the creation of a kindly God? Will the meaning of life finally be revealed in death?”
To these questions Mahler sought answers both psychological and spiritual. He consulted for treatment no less a personage than Sigmund Freud – who, unsurprisingly, told the composer that the roots of his angst lay in his early childhood. And he searched in religion, converting from the largelysecular Judaism in which he was raised to Catholicism, and finally drifting into an unorthodox, transdenominational Christianity. And he sought to work out the answers for himself in his nine monumental symphonies, every one of them shot through with its composer’s quest for spiritual and metaphysical truth.
Mahler’s training, and the better part of his fame during his life, was in conducting more than in composition. In less than two decades he worked his way from opera houses in provincial backwaters of the Austrian empire to the directorship of the Vienna State Opera – then the world’s most prestigious position for an opera conductor – and in 1898 added to his responsibilities command (such as it was) of the fractious Vienna Philharmonic. In 1907, disenchanted with the continual squabbles and the anti-Semitism he was subject to in Vienna, he moved to New York, where he directed the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. A heart attack, brought on by a longrunning bacterial infection, ended his life in 1911. “My music is lived,” wrote Mahler in another letter. What attitude should those people take to it who do not themselves truly live, who feel no breath of the rushing gale of our great epoch?” Mahler’s conducting was famed for its obsessive attention to detail, and his compositions unquestionably show the same quality. He composed painstakingly during his summer breaks from conducting, which he spent in the Austrian Alps. His symphonies employ (literally! Most orchestras that program Mahler do so knowing that their instrumentalists’ payroll that week will be the largest all season) vast numbers of players and in several cases add to them a chorus and vocal soloists, but he orchestrated with the delicacy and intimacy of a chamber musician.
The First Symphony was composed over the course of five summers, finally reaching completed form in 1888. Like most of his works it bore a program – that is, it told a specific story – and, like most of his works, that story was largely autobiographical. Its first and third movements call on music Mahler had written earlier for settings of German folk poetry, but those melodies, catchy thought they may be, are nowhere near the most familiar in the piece. That would surely be “Frère Jacques,” which is first stated by the double bass (in what is among the biggest bass solos in all orchestral music!) to begin the third movement and becomes the basis of a mordant, ironic funeral march. The piece’s soul (and, it’s safe to imagine, the composer’s soul) is most clearly revealed in its climactic finale, where Mahler takes the mysterious descending intervals that began the symphony and transforms them into a triumphant and joyous celebration of life.
