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Gabriel Urbain Fauré (born: Pamiers, May 12, 1845; died: Paris, November 4, 1924)
Paul Moravec (born: Buffalo, November 2, 1957)
Tonight’s program brings together music separated by time and place but united in their very personal themes.
Gabriel Fauré’s lyrically haunting music is an ironic byproduct of the French Revolution. Although he displayed his musical talents at an early age, not until his ninth year did he begin his formal musical education when one of his teachers urged his parents to send him to the newly formed École Niedermeyer in Paris. Having tried his hand at composing in Vienna, Rome, and Naples (where he formed a lasting friendship with Rossini), in 1853 Swiss-born Louis Niedermeyer had reopened the Institution Royale de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris. His goal was to revitalize the performance of traditional sacred music, which had become secularized and operatic in the aftermath of the revolution. Fauré was one of his first students and a favored protégé.
Fauré remained at École Niedermeyer until his twentieth year, studying under Saint Saëns after Niedermeyer’s death in 1861. In 1865 Fauré won first prize at the school’s annual competition with a hymn composed to a prayer by the seventeenth-century poet and dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine. So impressed were the judges by
Cantique de Jean Racine that they granted Fauré the prize even though he had not met all of the competition’s requirements.
Cantique de Jean Racine is a masterpiece of simplicity and clarity, a blending of chanson and liturgical music whose poignant beauty enhances the intimacy of Racine’s poetry and, like his requiem more than twenty years later, presents a faith based in hope and mercy.
Having finished his studies, Fauré became the choirmaster and organist at a succession of churches. In 1877 Saint Saëns and Gounod helped him secure a position at Paris’ fashionable Madeleine, where he remained for nearly twenty years. He augmented his salary by giving lessons throughout Paris, which left only summer holidays for undisturbed writing.
Following the death of his parents in the mid-1880s, Fauré began to consider writing a requiem. Part of it was performed at the Madeleine in 1888 for the funeral of Joseph Le Soufaché, a well-known architect. It was not well received by his superiors. According to one account, the vicar told Fauré, “Monsieur Fauré, we don't need all these novelties. The Madeleine's repertoire is quite rich enough. Just content yourself with that.” A more extended
Messe de requiem was completed in 1893 and a version for full orchestra in 1900.
Fauré’s shockingly sensual harmonies and suave melodies were condemned by some of his contemporaries as pagan despite the obvious and haunting echoes of ancient Christian plainchants. It was not, however, Fauré’s intention to shock his audience. The work, his only large-scale religious composition, was intended for liturgical, not concert, performance and was reminiscent of his studies at Ecole Niedermeyer.
Fauré deviated from the Requiem text generally used by composers, most significantly by the omission of the
Dies irae with its images of the terrors of the Last Judgment and hell. Instead, he substituted texts from the
Order of Burial, prayers for mercy and forgiveness that are addressed directly to God. Fauré’s goal was to provide comfort to the living, and more, to offer the ultimate assurance of Paradise. As Charles Koechlin, his student at the Paris Conservatory, noted, Fauré rejected “the cruel anthropomorphism of divine justice modeled upon the sanctimonious prudery of human courts” and stressed instead “tenderness, pardon, and hope.” Fauré began and ended his
Messe de requiem with the word requiem, “rest,” and through its ethereal texture and compassionate perspective, created a work that stands as a testament to the human transcendence of suffering.
In a more human-based vein, Paul Moravec also addressed the transcendence of suffering.
Songs of Love and War, composed in 1997, draws its text from four letters from a century of U.S. wars: Vietnam, World War II, World War I, and the Civil War—son to mother, wife to husband, Marine to the mother of a fallen comrade, and husband to wife. The emotional intensity increases throughout the cantata: the first two letters expect the soldiers to return, the third addresses another’s death, and in the fourth letter the writer confronts the very real possibility of his own death. Throughout, a solo trumpet functions not as a battlefield instrument but, in Moravec’s words, as a “shadow narrator” linking the songs together.
In each of the songs, the writer’s voice is prominent—a baritone soloist in the first and fourth letter, women in the second and men in the third. Throughout, the chorus acts to echo, enhance, or support the letter writer’s voice, speaking with a voice reminiscent of ancient Greek chorus.
Through the letters, Moravec puts a face on war, an intimate and very private face. He does not state a position on war or pacifism, but rather focuses on the ambiguities of the duty and longing, the pain and loss that the warriors and those who love them endure—and transcend. These ambiguities come through in the speech-pattern melodies, the unsettling harmonies, in the hints of popular (“home”) music, and in the musical quotations from Vaughn Williams
Dona nobis pacem which incorporated the ambivalent war poetry of Walt Whitman. The result is a timeless glimpse of war tenderly revealed through songs of love that linger in the last, hushed “always.”
Paul Moravec is currently chair of the Music Department at Adelphi University and Artist-in Residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. He has composed more than ninety orchestral, chamber, choral, lyric, film, and electro-acoustic works. In fall 2008 his
Brandenburg Gate, commissioned for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, will premiere at Carnegie Hall and
The Blizzard Voices will premiere at Opera Omaha. His opera,
The Letter, commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera will premiere in July 2009. In 2004 Moravec was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music for his Tempest Fantasy, a meditation on Shakespeare’s play for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Choral music, however, is an idiom especially suited to his style which, in
Songs of Love and War, he described as “tonal, lyrical, and immediately comprehensible to the performer and listener alike.”
Songs of Love and War premiered in 1998 at Merkin Hall with the Dessoff Choirs under the direction of Kent
Tritle.
Marie Gangemi
Gabriel Fauré: Cantique de Jean Racine
Word of God the most high, our only hope,
Eternal day of the earth and of the heavens,
We break the silence of the peaceful night.
Divine Savior, turn your eyes toward us!
Bestow on us the fire of your powerful grace,
So that hell itself will flee at the sound of your voice.
Chase away the sleep that leads our languishing souls
To forget your laws.
O Christ, show your favor to your faithful people
Who have come together to worship you.
Accept their hymns of your everlasting glory and your gifts
So that they may come back renewed.
Paul Moravec: Songs of Love and War
Don’t Ask (baritone & tenor/bass chorus)
The Vietnam War, 1966
[Dear Mom]
Don’t ask questions when I come home. If I feel like talking about it I will, but
otherwise—don’t ask.
[PFC George Jay Robinson]
Dearest Rowland (chorus)
World War II, March 7, 1944, home
Dearest Rowland,
No letter again today. I hope I get one this afternoon. The poor postman, he hates to come without a letter. He never looks my way when he hasn’t got one. And I can tell by the way he says “hello” whether he has one or not.
I love you so, darling. I get all tongue-tied when I try to tell you. When I go to church these noontimes, I kneel and I start to pray and I can’t describe the feeling that comes over me. You and God and love are all mixed up, and my heart and mind are thinking of you and God! It’s such a strong feeling. It just surges out of me and wraps itself around you wherever you are, whatever you’re doing.
My mind usually sees you in a plane, and I can feel myself putting my arms around you, standing beside you while you’re seated, and cradling your head against my breast and protecting your body with mine—my spirit really, I guess. And it’s so real to me. I love you so, and miss you so.
Be strong and have faith. It will be such a thrilling day! I hope it comes soon. God bless you darling. I love you.
Your Marjorie
Here Hard by That Lonely Grave (chorus)
World War I, June 26, 1918, at the front
Dear Mrs. Spearing,
Many months ago, Walt and I promised each other that should the “God of Battles” call to one, the other would console the sorrowing mother.
Now Walt has gone west to home and to you forever. But his figure, his voice, his wonderful personality will always be living truths to me.
Whatever sorrow fills us, one thing I swear to you, here hard by that lonely grave. I swear that Walt is well avenged, that he has not died in vain, for his spirit leads us on to ultimate victory.
Dear lady, the very thought that you are in grief tears my heart. Do not sorrow. Death, after all, is not so terrible, and here—why here, it is glorious. Mother, in the name of the Twenty-third Company, in the name of the Marines, I salute you, and all my comrades salute you.
Devotedly, Sol Segal
Always, Always (baritone & chorus)
Civil War, Camp Clark, Washington, July 14, 1861
Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence can break. And yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and draws me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.
I have but few claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me. Perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I should return to my loved ones unharmed.
If I do not, dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you. If the dead can come back to the earth and flit unseen around those they love, I will always be near you. In the gladdest days and in the darkest nights.
Always, always.
And if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it will be my breath. As the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it will be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead, but think that I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.
[Sullivan Ballou]
Intermission
Gabriel Fauré: Messe de requiem
Introit and Kyrie: Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine (chorus)
Lord, grant them eternal rest and let perpetual light shine upon them. To you, Lord, are
due songs of praise in Zion. To you offerings are made in Jerusalem. Hear my prayer.
To you come all who lived as flesh. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
Offertory: O Domine, Jesu Christe, rex gloriae, libera animas defunctorum de poenis inferni
(baritone & chorus)
O Lord Jesus Christ, king of glory, deliver the souls of the departed from the punishment
of hell and the bottomless abyss. Lord Jesus Christ, king of glory, deliver the souls from
the lion's mouth, that hell not swallow them up. O Lord Jesus Christ, king of glory, do not
let them fall into darkness.
We offer, Lord, sacrifices and prayers of praise. Receive them for the souls of those whose
memory we keep this day. Let them pass from death to the life that you promised
Abraham and his seed. Amen.
Sanctus, Dominus Deus sabaoth (chorus)
Holy Lord, God of multitudes, heaven and earth are filled with your glory. Hosana in the
highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis sempiternam requiem (soprano)
Affectionate Lord Jesus, grant them everlasting rest.
Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi dona eis requiem
(chorus)
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant them rest. Let eternal light shine
upon them, Lord, in the company of your blessed through eternity, because you are
compassionate. Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon
them.
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna (baritone &
chorus)
Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death on that fateful day when heaven and earth are moved.
Until you come to judge the generations with fire, I tremble and am afraid of the
devastation that is to come, and of your anger. On that day of wrath, of calamity and
distress, that momentous day of intense bitterness, grant them eternal rest and let
perpetual light shine upon them.
In paradisum deducant angeli
(chorus)
May the angels lead you into paradise. May the martyrs receive you on your arrival, and lead
you into the holy city of Jerusalem. May a chorus of angels receive you, and with Lazarus,
once a poor man, may you have eternal rest.
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