program - SVIZ

y his own opera company. Soon competing companies arose in the royal
city, and after changes in the political and intellectual climate the epoch of
opera began to gradually fade. Thus Handel sought shelter in composing
oratorios. These were formally very similar to opera, as they were made up
of solo numbers, recitatives and choruses, but they did not require the scenic
realisation, which, of course, meant significantly reduced performance costs.
At the beginning of 1751, the already greatly weakened master began to write
his final oratorio – Jephtha. At the centre of the oratorio is the suffering of
Jephtha, who has promised that for God’s help he will sacrifice the first person
he comes across in front of his doorstep. Before Jephtha steps his daughter,
whom Handel portrays with the most gentle tones. The extraordinary depth
and religious devotion that radiate from Handel’s oratorio most likely reflect
a presentiment of the composer’s own approaching death.
England had to wait a long time for a new musical ‘giant’; it was not until
the 20 th century that such a figure arrived, in the form of Benjamin Britten.
Britten returned from USA in 1942 and finally settled down in England. Realising
that as a symphonic composer it would be difficult to compete with the
great master of the symphony, Vaughan Williams, he decided to dedicate
himself to opera. Very soon he commenced writing the opera Peter Grimes,
during which time, almost as a kind of break, he also wrote the Serenade for
tenor, horn and strings. To a large extent, two excellent young musicians were
‘responsible’ for the emergence of this work: horn player Dennis Brain and
Britten’s life partner, tenor Peter Pears, who was also the first Peter Grimes.
We can almost understand the Serenade as a kind of anthology of English
poetry written on the theme of the night. However, the composer made
use above all of the dramatic potential of the individual poems, which he
deployed in an extremely efficient way in terms of drama. To a large extent,
the work is marked by the sound of the horn, which is the bearer of its ‘romantic’
connotations. The introductory ‘Pastoral’ really does lead us to the
world of romantic nature, in the ‘Nocturne’ we hear the sequences of thirds so
characteristic of the horn, the ‘Elegy’ is built around melancholy semitones,
the ‘Dirge’ is conceived as a gradually building ostinato, while it seems that
the ‘Hymn’, with its melodic ornamentation, is almost conceived in baroque
terms. In the last song the horn is ‘silent’, but it returns in the solo ‘Epilogue’,
which the performer plays from a distance. This movement is identical to
the ‘Prologue’, and in it we can find one more link with nature: the composer
specifies that the performer must play all of the tones with the aid of natural
harmonics and not with the valves of the horn, which introduces certain
specific colours in terms of intonation.
PROGRAM / PROGRAM
Something of the structural logic that determines Britten’s Serenade can
also be found in the sixth movement of Messiaen’s extensive work From
the Canyon to the Stars, written for a small orchestral ensemble in which
numerous diverse and exotic percussion instruments take a leading role.
Messiaen composed this work between 1971 and 1974 on a commission from
the American society ‘Musica Aeterna’. The main inspiration for the work was,
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