GO
Advanced Search

hope

Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 7 pm

Voices of Hope

by Victoria Looseleaf

How is it possible that the composer known as a scatological clown, one in constant conflict with his vulgar inner child — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — could create music of such ineffable beauty? Music that not only shocks us from the humdrum of our torporous lives, but music that, by dint of its transcendent nature, continues to move us? Such is the case with Mozart’s Coronation Mass. Written in 1779, when the composer was 23 and beginning to break free from a fabled adolescence (as well as a domineering father), the piece is regarded as his most popular sacred work, one nearly on a par with the Missa and perhaps even the Requiem. As for the nickname, it was rumored that Mozart had been inspired after seeing a painting of the Coronation of the Virgin Mary, while evidence suggests that the opus, though not composed for Leopold II’s 1791 coronation, was probably performed during those festivities, as it surely was for Leopold’s successor, Francis I, the following year.

And much like VH1’s Behind the Music, the Mass’s backstory finds Mozart unplugged, or at least unemployed in Mannheim and Paris. The antithesis of a Gen-X slacker, the wunderkind, besides thriving on graphic letter writing, bawdy jokes and a keen appreciation of his own sexuality (shades of rapper 50 Cent), had a profound need to make music, thus precipitating his return to Salzburg. Finding work as a composer-for-hire, Mozart also placated his father (however reluctantly), by becoming court organist and, between doing chapel duty, zealously penned the Mass. (Think Jack Kerouac, who cranked out “On the Road” on a continuous roll of typing paper in a quasi, speed-induced, three-week frenzy.)

Celebratory in nature, the compact, 26-minute Mass (Mozart omits formal closing fugues for the Gloria and Credo), makes use of Salzburgian string orchestration — sans violas. Listen to the robust violin part, with alto, tenor and bass voices of the chorus complementing trombones. Mozart’s signature texture dazzles with oboes, bassoons, trumpets, horns and timpani, and the soloists are heard as a quartet, in pairs or in solo lines set against the larger powers of the choir. The Kyrie, a sonic cornucopia, heralds solo entries of soprano and tenor who then overlap in the Gloria. For unabashed beauty, look to the central, exquisitely muted Credo, with its F minor croonings of ‘Et incarnatus’ that offer the work’s most mystical moment (and whose reverberations can be traced today to the numinous works of, say, an Arvo Pärt). Following the brief Sanctus, aural enlightenment again permeates the Hosanna section of the Benedictus before flowing into a divine Agnus Dei. There, in a seemingly unbroken circle, the Kyrie theme returns, propelling us to the ‘Dona nobis pacem,’ a potent plea for peace.

According to Music Director Grant Gershon, Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” is like a good vodka. “You can mix it with anything and it sounds great,” he says of his decision to pair it with Billy Childs’ world premiere cantata, The Voices of Angels, a commission from the Master Chorale. With this deeply spiritual (another Mozartian link), 50-minute work, the four-time Grammy®-nominated pianist/composer plunges into a musical world that explodes with an astonishing array of moods and colors: harmonically rich, rhythmically provocative and breathtakingly profound, “Voices” grabs the audience by the jugular and never lets go. If, as Leonard Bernstein once said, “music can make the unknowable knowable and the incommunicable communicable,” Childs has, undeniably, written a work for the ages.

Scored for full orchestra, full chorus and two soloists, including a 15-year old child soprano, Voices is set to six poems from the book “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” Written by children imprisoned in the Terezin concentration camp as a way to express their feelings, the poems were collected by Freidl Dicker-Brandeis, who, herself, perished in the camp. The poetry, after languishing on a Prague shelf for a decade before being discovered and eventually published, is both heartbreaking and hopeful, and was the impetus for Childs’ foray into so daunting a subject. Stories of extreme suffering and humanity, Childs says, remain relevant today, with hatred and adverse situations continuing to rear their ugly heads in places such as Rwanda, Croatia and Serbia. The poems transcend race, class and generations; they speak from the nakedness of the heart to the yearnings of the soul; they are your children, they are children of the universe; and finally, in death they become life, life from which Childs has fashioned bone-rattling art.

Beginning with a plaintive viola that not only foreshadows doom, but represents an utterance of grief, Childs set his own words — “darkness, madness, merciless prism and chamber of sorrow” — to establish a stirringly dark tone. This pastiche of sound — woodwinds, brass, percussion, piano and harp — jolts the listener into a world of pain, albeit one with occasional jazz rhythms and no established key, or, as Childs explains, “I’m in whatever key I need to be in at the moment.”

Soon the chorus thrums with Debussyesque texture before splitting in two, announcing the entrance of the adult female soloist. This vocal condemnation of mankind flows into the first poem, “Terezin,” where the camp’s barbarisms (“That bit of filth and all around barbed wire”), become a musical counterpoint to the kaleidoscopic emotions of anger, hope and depression. Lush chords abound, as the choir offers a descending (“falling-angel”) soundscape, followed by the child soprano’s entrance: “I am no more a child for I learned to hide.” The portentous bass underscores a panoply of chords after which an a cappella chorus bleeds into the fast, furious and pumped-up “Fear” section. Insistent rhythms (thousands of beating hearts?) melt into an orchestral fanfare that augments the gut-wrenching text,” Seldom A Human Being.”

This pivotal transition — creeping from darkness to light — is realized with bright orchestration, the listener trekking from an abyss of anguish to glimmerings of hope: “The Butterfly.” Here a piccolo sounds one note as nature is conjured, before ceding the tone to alto flute and English horn. This is the titular centerpiece where beauty conquers brutality: Calm, wistful, almost waltz-like, with Ravelesque harmonies, the adult soloist soars – indeed floats, her rhapsodic voice a metaphorical butterfly, “dazzling yellow,” aching to be forever free. An extended fermata erupts into an arpeggiated run; the butterfly, alas, is gone. But hope hovers, as trumpets sound and this drama of the heart marches onward. The accelerated tempi and expansive orchestration punctuate the poem “On a Sunny Evening,” with hearty fugues infusing sonic bliss into the words “the sun has made a veil of gold.”

From the depths of despair to a world where beauty can — and does — exist, the cantata concludes with “Birdsong,” and the child soloist sweetly summoning the text, “blackbird greets the dawning after night.” The chorus repeats, “the world is full of loveliness,” the orchestra crescendos with an enormous brass flourish, the tympani resound, and mighty voices proclaim, “How wonderful it is to be alive.” A tiny word, “alive,” but encompassing so very much, it saturates us with joy, and, like a mantra, a prayer, a plea — like absolution — the chorus repeats: “alive.”

To breathe, to see, to speak, to listen, to share, to sing, and, at last — to love.

Download a guide to the season: chorale-seasonguide0405.pdf, 808KB