Notes on the Program - Cantata Singers

the magisterial ardor
Many of the pieces from this year are ones I love most. Among them, the Vier doppelchörige Gesänge
quiver between the intimate and impetuous, evanescent and muscular, and elusive and forthright.
Finding varied ways to use the two four-part mixed choruses, Schumann moves effortlessly between
antiphonal writing, intertwining the vocal parts like individual instruments of an orchestra, and
treating the entire ensemble like an organ. The choruses’ moving in and out of dialogue mirrors the
permeating tensions and resolutions: light into twilight, sorrow within rapture, love over death, and
even the simplest inhaling and exhaling. And, in the impetuous last movement, any line between
West and East dissolves. Throughout, the light of autumn—the season when he composed these
songs—glows.
In 1848, Schumann founded the Dresden Verein für Chorgesang, a 100-plus mixed chorus with which
he worked (along with his wife, Clara, as accompanist) every Wednesday night for five years. Their
repertoire reached from Palestrina to both Schumanns, and it included many compositions he
wrote for the chorus, the Vier doppelchörige Gesänge among them. Cantata Singers has performed
the pieces in their original unaccompanied form, and it is that sound that first drew me to them.
But the music’s gestures and opulence (they were written “für grössere Gesangvereine”) have also made
me imagine the chorus bursting at its seams, perhaps yearning for instrumental companionship. At
moments, I also have glimpsed Anton Webern peeking through in the first movement, Hugo Wolf
in the second, Claude Debussy in the third and, well, Schumann’s orchestra in the last. Perhaps
imagining instruments as part of the texture prompted my associations, or the other way round.
Regardless, some years ago I created an “orchestration” for chorus, pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns,
bassoons, cellos, and one double bass. This performance hears these marvelous pieces in yet a
different way, with chorus and string orchestra. I hope Schumann wouldn’t mind.
—David Hoose
Marjorie Merryman: Beauty, Grief and Grandeur
Poems by Gerard Manly Hopkins
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh fire-coal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and piece – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
he fathers forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Spring and Fall
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! As the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now, no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What the heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
God’s Grandeur
the world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed.Why do men not now then reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and bears man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
there lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings
teXts aNd traNslatioNs
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