Saturday, May 19th at 7:30 pm
Fine Arts Center, UMass-Amherst

"IN TIMES OF WAR AND PEACE"

PROGRAM NOTES

To cap its season of “Music of Peace and War,” the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus join the Hampshire Choral Society for a program that takes us to both extremes. 

The title of Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage combines those of two poems by the greatest German poet, Goethe, which served as inspiration for this overture.  (Beethoven set those poems to music for chorus and orchestra, under the same title; the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Paul Phillips performed that work several years ago.)  To a sailor, a calm sea is ominous (Goethe: “not a zephyr is in motion, sunk to rest is every wave”) but then a breeze fills the sails.  The end of the voyage, when the sailors “see land beyond” is celebrated with exuberant fanfares and a brief prayer of thanksgiving.

Of Haydn’s fourteen masses, the Mass in Time of War (Haydn’s own title; it’s also known as the Paukenmesse, or Kettle Drum Mass, for its prominent use of that instrument ) is the ninth, and one of the grandest.  At the height of his powers, Haydn had enjoyed a triumph on his second sojourn in England in 1794-5, especially with his final set of “London” symphonies.  Now he was back in Austria in the service of his patron, Prince Esterhazy.  One of his tasks was to compose an annual mass for the Esterhazy family church, the Bergkirche at Eisenstadt.  It had been fourteen years since his last setting of a religious text.  In 1796 Austria, having suffered battlefield defeats, faced invasion by Napoleon’s forces.  The score of the Paukenmesse reflects the uncertainty of the times, with actual “battle music” incorporated into the Benedictus and Agnus Dei sections.  (This jarring juxtaposition prefigures Beethoven’s vast Missa Solemnis composed thirty years later.)  It also shows the influence of Handel, with whose choral music Haydn had become acquainted during his stay in England.  The long-lived composer went on to further choral glory with five more masses (PVS has performed one of them, the Harmoniemesse), as well as his two great oratorios The Creation and The Seasons.             

William Walton rippled the British music scene in 1923 with his cheeky “entertainment” Facade to a set of colorful but cryptic poems by Edith Sitwell.  He made an even bigger splash in 1931 with Belshazzar’s Feast for Mixed Choir, Baritone Solo, and Orchestra to a text fashioned by Edith’s brother Osbert from Old Testament sources.  (The text conflates, or confuses, the stories of two Biblical figures, Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar.)  Nothing like its brashness and exuberance had previously emerged from the English oratorio tradition.  Walton, intensely competitive, was jealous of the success achieved by his contemporary Constant Lambert with The Rio Grande (now rarely heard, though PVS performed it several years ago).  So he decided to outdo Lambert.  Belshazzar’s Feast was commissioned by the BBC to be a “small” choral work; what Walton delivered called for huge forces.  Though only 27 years old, he was already an experienced and successful composer, but had written almost no vocal music and certainly nothing on such a large scale.  His musical education was spotty.  His father, a singing teacher, gave him his first lessons.  At age ten he entered Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral School and matriculated as an undergraduate at the early age of 16, but was kicked out; as a composer he was largely self-taught.  His association with the Bloomsbury circle of writers and aesthetes -- the Sitwells, Ronald Firbank, Siegfried Sassoon -- helped; they supported him financially and put him in touch with the advanced artistic currents of the day.  Sir Thomas Beecham, who was slated to conduct the Leeds Festival premiere, did not like Belshazzar’s Feast.  According to Walton, he told the composer, “As you’ll never hear the thing again, why not throw in a couple of brass bands?”  Walton did, but their use is optional.  Though some of his other early efforts are comparably incendiary (notably Symphony #1, which the PVS has performed under Maestro Phillips), Walton eventually became more conservative, and his works paid less heed to the contentious musical fashions of the twentieth century.  As a result they’ve been undervalued.  His sumptuous opera Troilus and Cressida languishes in the shadow of Benjamin Britten’s more austere stage works, and his concertos (for violin, viola, cello) get fewer performances than those of his prominent contemporaries.  Perhaps Walton’s greatest contribution was to film music.  The dramatic flair of Belshazzar’s Feast anticipated the great scores he composed for Laurence Olivier, including the Shakespeare trilogy of Henry V, Richard III, and Hamlet.  Henry V was intended to bolster morale on the home front during World War II; Walton's rousing music was a major factor in its success.  In addition to a suite from that film, given under former director Nathan Gottschalk, PVS and Maestro Phillips have played Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue from a film about British fighter pilots.  As for Belshazzar’s Feast, think of it as movie music so vivid that it doesn't even need a movie.  

Zeke Hecker