The complete idiot's guide to classical music (64 page)

Pay attention now, because this gets complicated. The Lord of the Gibichungs is Gunther, who’s the half-brother of Hagen, who’s the son of Alberich, the Niebelung who started the whole megillah in the first place. They hatch a nifty plot to enhance their fortunes, by which scheme Gunther would marry Brunnhilde while Gutrune hooks up with Siegfried. There are a couple of hitches to this plan, among them the love Brunnhilde and Siegfried have for each other and the fact that only Siegfried can penetrate that ring of fire to fetch her out. The solution: another love potion, like the one that sizzled Tristan and Isolde. Siegfried drinks it, develops an instant passion for Gutrune, and goes (disguised as Gunther) to bring back Brunnhilde.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When Arturo Toscanini came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1908, his first rehearsal at the house was of
Gotterdammerung
. Soon afterward, a delegation of orchestral players stormed into the office of the new general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, complaining about the foul names the conductor had hurled at them. What sort of foul names, Gatti wondered. Reluctantly, the players repeated the insulting words, whereupon the manager let out a loud laugh. “You think that’s bad,” he said; “you should hear what he calls me!”

When Brunnhilde realizes what is going on, she angrily accuses her lover of betrayal, but his mind still dulled by the potion, Siegfried denies everything. Brunnhilde, unable to reconcile her conflicting emotions of love, despair, hatred, and jealousy, reveals to Hagen that the one vulnerable part of Siegfried’s body is his back. So guess where Hagen sticks his spear?

Hagen also kills Gunther, while he’s at it, and as Siegfried’s companions somberly place him on his shield and carry him off into the mists, the orchestra throbs out the overpoweringly poignant Funeral Music. The truth finally known to all, Brunnhilde orders a great funeral pyre built for the slain hero, and as the flames burn ever more fiercely, she plunges into its midst to join her beloved Siegfried. The Rhine overflows, putting out the local fire and drawing Hagen to his death beneath its swirling waters. Gleefully, the Rhine Maidens hold aloft the Ring, at long last returned to its rightful place, but in the distance, the fire’s glow appears again, this time-consuming Valhalla and ending the reign of the gods. As Anna Russell wryly notes, “After nineteen and one half hours, you’re back exactly where you started—and at those prices!”

The problems of casting and staging this mighty cycle were bewildering in their profusion (amongst other disasters, the set builder sent the dragon to Beirut instead of Bayreuth), but the premieres went off on schedule on four successive nights in August, 1876. The occasion was, for Wagner, a simultaneous moment of jubilation and despair. On one hand, here was his dream come true—his colossal set of operas produced in a modern new theatre especially created to display them. On the other hand—there was the vicious sniping of the critics, which led to poor attendance at the subsequent performances and a huge financial loss for the entire project.

Wagner’s day would come, of course, and when it did, the nay-sayers were swept under the rug of history. As the French composer Camille Saint-Saens put it with prophetic eloquence, “Here we have the theatre of the future. A thousand critics, each writing a thousand lines a day for ten years, would injure these works about as much as a child’s breath would go towards overthrowing the pyramids of Egypt.”

 

• Wagner is known for his orchestral music as well as his operas.
  
 

• Wagner broke new operatic ground with
  Tristan and Isolde.
  
 

• Wagner created a style of opera without arias.
  
 

• The Ring Cycle opera is about an ancient Nordic myth and is nineteen and one half hours long.
  

Chapter 24
 
Let Us Pray

 

• More than monastery music
  
 

• The ordinary and the proper
  
 

• Requiems and oratorios
  
 

• Motets, hymns, and psalms
  

In the 1960s and ’70s, when churches began presenting rock sermons and folk masses, many of the faithful were horrified at this presumed sacrilege. The history of religious music, though, follows the same evolutionary pattern as secular music, which is why Handel’s
Messiah
sounds very different from Brahms’
German Requiem
. Monophony gave way to polyphony in church as well as court, and music for prayer was influenced by the same social, political, and philosophical climates that help shape the creation of worldly compositions.

There were many line-crossings within religious music too. On the surface, Masses were Catholic and hymns were Protestant, but you couldn’t count on it. The Oxford Movement of the 19th century sought to bring back traditional Latin chants into Church of England services, while the magnificent Mass in B Minor, perhaps the most famous of all the Catholic masses, was the creation of the devoutly Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach.

It’s easy enough to recognize Gregorian chant, even if the CD doesn’t have a picture of a monk on it. The hypnotic effect of those unaccompanied voices has one visualizing a stone-walled monastery, with a well-tended garden and hooded figures moving silently through long, austere hallways.

Gregorian chant, often called plainsong or plainchant, is named for Pope Gregory I (c. 540–604), who collected and codified various melodies, designating them for specific aspects of Roman Catholic liturgical services. He also established the first singing school in Rome (Schola Cantorum), where these chants were taught. They are monophonic, their melodies flowing without regular accented rhythms, abrupt variations in volume, or instrumental accompaniment of any sort.

The original development of chants is a matter of speculation, since the earliest extant collections date from around 900. There are more than 500 chants in those early books, though, most of them designed for portions of the Mass, and while they continued to be faithfully reproduced in volumes throughout the Middle Ages, new chants were added as well. In almost all cases, the melody was created to enhance the text—either moving one note per syllable, or proceeding as a melisma, with a single syllable set to a series of notes.

While shopping in your friendly neighborhood music superstore, you may have been startled to see the CD
Chant
, with its solemn monk pictured on the cover, sharing the best-seller aisles with such not-quite-so early music artists as Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and The Cranberries. What a brilliant marketing approach!
Chant
is being snapped up by people who might otherwise contemplate a visit to the “classical” room with as about much enthusiasm as they would muster for a vacation in the Arctic Circle.
Chant II
was another big-seller, and one company after another has been issuing Gregorian Chant albums that they hadn’t been able to give away only a few years previously.

 
Important Things to Know
Among many other examples of brilliantly marketed albums of medieval and other early vocal music that nonetheless have high artistic value and integrity are those by the women who call themselves The Anonymous Four (if you promise not to tell anybody, their names are Susan Hellauer, Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, and Johanna Rose); or, if you prefer to bask in the glow of performances by the spiritual descendants of the original chanters, sample the CD collections by the Benedictine Monks of Luxembourg, the Carmelite Prior Choir, or the Gregorian Choir of Paris.

Much the same thing happened with Baroque music in the 1950s when, after decades of obscurity, Vivaldi came rushing back to high visibility and enormous popularity, his coattails dragging all manner of lesser contemporaries along for the commercial ride.

Classical Indian music zoomed to sudden Western popularity in the 1960s, and today, opera seems to be more popular than ever, with younger audiences flocking to works of John Adams, Philip Glass, and other contemporary composers. Is there a pattern here? Maybe so: Each generation discovers something “new” that has actually been around for centuries.

The proponents of New Age music gave a modern twist to the ancient chants, attempting to duplicate their mystical, reflective, calming effects, but ignoring the sacred soul that lay at their heart. Some recordings of this music bear the dual classification Early Music and New Age (another marketing coup), but the ersatz quality of so many New Age creations may well have encouraged listeners to go back to the source, and thus explain the resurgent popularity of Gregorian chant.

The original chants, as we said, were designed to fit into the solemn ritual of the Catholic Mass, and as polyphony entered the tonal picture, the Mass continued to dominate sacred composition. This became, as
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians
tells us, “one of the seminal forms of European art music.” Indeed, the texts of the Mass have given inspiration to composers of every era and stylistic persuasion.

The rites of the mass have evolved along with the music, but essentially they are divided into the Ordinary and the Proper. The Proper contains Introductions, Alleluias, and sequences chosen for selected occasions, such as Communion. Most composers, however, have been drawn to the texts of the five unvarying sections of the Ordinary: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.

The first complete setting of a mass in this form was by Guillaume de Machaut during the Ars Nove (“New Art”) period at the end of the Middle Ages but before the Renaissance. This was the Mass de Notre Dame. It was composed for the Coronation of King Charles V of France in 1364.

 
Music Words
Cantus
in Latin means song or melody, and
firmus
translates as just what it sounds like: firm or steady. A
cantus firmus
refers to the main or given melody (often borrowed from other religious pieces or secular songs) upon which a composer builds a more complicated piece by the addition of contrasting themes.

For centuries, the music of each consisted of a chant melody, called the cantus firmus (fixed song) followed by one created in polyphonic style. By the 15th century, composers were venturing beyond the piece-by-piece method and creating fully polyphonic Ordinary masses to those same texts. By the time of Palestrina in the 16th century, it was no longer unusual for composers to write complete masses. Nor was it uncommon for them to borrow themes from other sources, including bawdy songs (though obviously taking care not to import the lyrics as well). A popular French secular ballad called “L’Homme arme” (The Armed Man) pops up in at least 30 Renaissance masses, among them Palestrina’s masterpiece “Missa Papae Marcelli,” dedicated to the Pope Marcellus.

Getting back to the five sections of the Ordinary: The text of the Kyrie is “Lord have mercy upon us; Christ have mercy upon us.” Then follows the familiar hymn of praise, “Gloria in excelsis Deo” (Glory be to God on High). The Credo is a confession of faith: “I believe in one God, the omnipotent Father;” the Sanctus simply says “Holy, Holy, Holy,” before proceeding to the often jubilant “Hosanna in excelsis” (Praise in the Highest) and the Benediction: “Blessed is He who cometh in the name of the Lord.” The final section, often the most touchingly beautiful, is the prayer for peace to Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world”).

Another important form of the Mass is the Requiem, titled for its introductory text “Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine” (“Give them eternal rest, O Lord”). Since its function is to mourn the departed, the Requiem normally omits the jubilant Gloria and Credo parts of the Ordinary, replacing them with psalm verses and a new segment titled “Dies Irae” (Day of Judgement).

The oldest polyphonic Requiem (that has come down to us) was written by the Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem (c.1410–1497). More than 40 polyphonic Requiems survive from the 16th century, and from the 17th on, there were hundreds. The most famous being the uncompleted final work of Mozart, and the elaborate, grandiose Requiems in full-blown Romantic style by Berlioz and Verdi.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
The far more gentle “A German Requiem” by Brahms caused something of a scandal when it was first sung—precisely because it was set in German, not Latin, and it also used Biblical texts on the themes of death and mourning, rather than the prescribed words of the Mass. (The Brahms, in other words, is a Requiem all right, but it’s not a Requiem Mass.)

In the 20th century, France’s Faure and Durufle and England’s John Rutter, are among the composers who have given us Requiem Masses of astonishing beauty, while the English master Benjamin Britten (in his
War Requiem
) and America’s own Leonard Bernstein (in
Mass
) follow the Brahms lead by combining the Latin texts of the mass with other poetic expressions.

Even if it often gives rise to music primarily conceived for concert or theater performance, the text of the Mass was intended for religious ritual. The oratorio takes a different path to purity: without any pretense to liturgy, it tells a Biblical or other sacred story. In this it is related to opera, and indeed the musical style of oratorios tend to mirror that of operas created during the same period. Operas, of course, carry forward the drama with sets, costumes, and stage action; oratorios are content to convey their musical and moral messages through the fusion of words and music alone.