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Saturday, Dec 1 & Sunday Dec 2, 2018

Program Notes

Luciano Berio (Born in Oneglia, Italy in1925; died in Rome in 2003)

Rendering (1988-90)

  1. Allegro
  2. Andante
  3. Allegro (Scherzo, Finale)

Italian composer Luciano Berio became popular in the 1960’s and, until his death, he continued to experiment, challenge and dazzle with music-making in nearly every genre.  Though his music is considered “modern,” his appreciation of the basics of melody and harmony were a cornerstone of his compositional aesthetic.  And his appreciation of the orchestra and writing for its unique set of instruments remained generally traditional despite his continuous experimentation.  In his 1988-90 Rendering, Berio uses the musical sketches that Schubert left unfinished for his planned Tenth Symphony and “renders” them into a new piece – a classic example of Berio’s keen sense of mingling tradition with experimentation.

Rendering came late in Berio’s life, when he could perhaps empathize with a Schubert who was running out of time.  From his letters in his last year (1827-8), Schubert seems cognizant of the real possibility of his imminent death, pining for the past, and searching for a life in music after death.  He was in some ways lost but in other ways still forging ahead – beginning his Tenth Symphony (numbered as D. 936A) just weeks before his death, creating fragments that were scribbled onto manuscript paper that he was using for counterpoint lessons he had just begun to attend.  He was clearly trying to explore new musical directions while trapped with the shortness of time.  In Rendering, Berio the musical modernist, was also aging and looking both backwards and forwards, with his own wonderful genius for merging familiar with unfamiliar.  Using those Schubertian fragments, Berio didn’t “complete” the Symphony so much as recast them for full orchestra, with all that was left unfinished.

Rendering’s form is recognizably “informal.”  Though structured into three movements much like Schubert’s other Unfinished Symphony (No. 8), Rendering more so follows the technique used in the restoring of frescos and unfinished paintings: by the end of the process you can see/hear the original fragments surrounded by the foamy white of the unpainted repaired wall or ceiling/manuscript, hence its title.  The results of Berio’s recasting sound like a vivid capturing of the fractured musical memories of a ghost.  It begins with a robust theme by Schubert meant for his first movement – here rich and opulent.  Soon a celeste (a toy piano-like instrument) quietly appears and the musical logic begins splintering, the theme evaporating into wisps as the music is reduced to mists, remnants, just faint, meandering sounds.  This, as Berio called it, is the “cement” that keeps the Rendering together, a recurring “emptiness,” or musical glue, holding together each of Schubert’s themes.  He also instructs that these connective sections should be performed without any expression, “as if soundlessly.” Within those connective gesso-mists are bits of themes from other Schubert works as well, and always with the soft and constant murmurings of the ethereal celeste.

The entire piece works its ghostly magic – beautiful and filled with a kind of wonderment.  But Berio was very clear to call his work “co-authored” with Schubert, and certainly, many of the great delights in this work are the staggeringly beautiful themes that Schubert was working on for his Symphony.  Particularly gorgeous is the second movement, Andante, which shows us that Schubert was discovering musical beauties beyond his contemporaries, Mozart and Beethoven.  Reflecting on this, Robert Schumann said “It is pointless to guess at what more [Schubert] might have achieved. He did enough and let them be honored who have striven and accomplished as he did.”  For years, Berio had resisted incorporating Schubert’s music into his own, but with Rendering, his fusion is more of a reverent invitation to discover Schubert’s gems in settings of quiet gold.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Born in Salzburg in 1756; died in Vienna in 1791)

Requiem Mass in D-minor (K. 626)

Mozart’s astonishing and beautiful Requiem has, since its creation, been surrounded in legend and fanciful tales. Perhaps most famously is the play and popular film, Amadeus (1984), by Peter Shaffer, that perpetuated a general bevy of misinformation that was based on a play by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) entitled “Mozart and Salieri,” later made into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov.  With all the misinformation that flooded the literature shortly after Mozart’s death, scholars may never know the last detail surrounding his extraordinary Requiem and the composer’s last days, or indeed, how much he left unfinished.  Nonetheless, researchers are sure that it was mainly Franz Xaver Süssmayr, one of Mozart’s students and at the request of Mozart’s widow, Constanze, who completed the Requiem as we know it today.

At the time, Mozart was a composer on fire with ideas.  Having struggled for some years to satisfy the Viennese public, and facing financial difficulties, Mozart finally seemed to be reversing his fortunes with the success of his new opera, The Magic Flute.  He was, in 1791, eager to compose, and his letters indicate how full of ideas he was at the time.  Besides The Magic Flute, he also penned his exquisite Clarinet Concerto and another extraordinary opera, La Clemenza di Tito, and a few other works (including his glorious Ave verum Corpus) in this same year.  Alongside these other masterpieces, his Requiem was being written, at times, almost as an afterthought, and ironically, it may have been this hectic schedule that led to his death: a weakened immune system from feverishly busy days and all-night sessions of composing.

The Requiem begins with one of the great passages in music.  As the strings set down a mournful, slowly undulating motive, the wind instruments, one by one, emerge out of the silence, blending into each other and fading away.  We get the impression that this is an eternal music – it has been playing long before we began to hear it.  It’s an exceptional moment, too, in that it so magically sets the tone for the rest of the work.  Certainly there’s fire and brimstone to come, but here we sense that Mozart is capturing something ethereal beyond the human realm.  Amazing moments appear throughout, one of the finest being the Dies irae movement, or Day of wrath, in the Sequentia – fiery and frightening, yet belied with a human tenderness.  Mozart divides this section into several movements as tradition dictated in this ancient genre of the Catholic Mass for the Dead.  And one of them is the remarkable Tuba mirim (The Trumpet of the Last Judgement) with its exquisite trombone and basso solos and duets.  It may seem exceptional to us today that Mozart would have used no less than three trombones in this work, without any French horns, but this was common practice for sacred music in Mozart’s time.  What’s most extraordinary in this moment of God’s vengeance, ironically, is its human touch, its lyricism.  The words speak of the vengeance to come – Mozart’s music pleads for our mortal hopes, for Divine mercy.

Interwoven throughout the entire Mass are fugues of impeccable craftsmanship, and at first it may seem surprising that Mozart looked backwards for his inspiration – to the beloved fugues of Haydn and Bach in their excellent sacred works.  The church fugues of those past masters were Mozart’s models in this realm, and their genius at the craft was not lost on Mozart’s own.  What’s so lovely in Mozart’s Requiem is when and where they’re placed, and how progressive they sound – these older-styled fugues often occur when the same line from the Old Testament returns again in a new segment of the Mass.  But in Mozart’s hands, these olden fugues are as charged with energy as they are masterful – sometimes with fire and sometimes with joy.  Finally, the Requiem ends by bringing back its two opening movements, but in reverse order.  This again was a time honoured tradition of the genre, but with Mozart’s touch, we come back to that eternal music that first awakened us at its beginning, reminding us that death and life and grief are part of a more cosmic cycle.

Although the Requiem is predominantly Mozart’s ideas, it can be justly considered a jointly written piece with Süssmayr.  Recent scholarship has fairly distinctly discerned which music was written by Mozart and which was by his student, and some have rankled at Süssmayr’s contributions, leading to the creation of some “more authentic,” “Mozart-only” versions.  Nevertheless, this joint version is the one we have come to know and love, and it is so deftly crafted that several decades after its first performances, Beethoven summed up its excellence when he noted that “it certainly sounds like Mozart.”  In fact, the Requiem seems to almost transcend human authorship.

Program notes by Max Derrickson