Old Friends

I've reflected before about how a choir member knows he's getting on when concerts include works already sung (sometimes more than once). This time it's the entire programme:

• Fauré: Requiem
  (third or fourth time, with my present and other choirs)
• Bernstein: Chichester Psalms
  (so long ago that I was fit enough to cycle the dozen-or-so mile round trip for the concert-day rehearsal)
• Vaughan Willims: Five Mystical Songs
  (last sung in 2011; our Past Concerts link also lists the 2020 concert which had to be cancelled

Fauré: Requiem

I posted here about an edition of Tales from the Stave, fortunately still available, and well worth a listen. As I wrote it more than 3½ years ago, I've cut/pasted most of it here; if you read it then (in which case thanks for the loyalty) you can skip the indented chunk that follows:

<pre_script>

One of the people commenting on the manuscript also featured as a boy soprano in the King's College Choir recording – Bob (credited at the time as "Robert") Chilcott. (In particular it alerted me to a mistranslation of mine, now fixed. To make matters worse, it was in a section that corrected a common mistranslation [of In Paradisum as *in paradise – which it doesn't mean]).

...In can mean many things  in Latin, but when followed by a noun in the accusative it doesn't mean 'in'. If the words were In Paradiso they would mean 'In Paradise'; but they are In Paradisum ... going on ...deducant Angeli : 'May angels will lead you into Paradise...' One of many other meanings of in, this time followed by the dative, is exemplified in the next phrase: in tuo adventu: that's closer to 'in' in meaning, with a sense something like 'on the occasion of'', though I'd favour a simpler translation: 'When you arrive...'.

More here

My mistake (future simple rather than subjunctive) was perhaps explained (though not of course justified – mea maxima culpa) by Fauré's own attitude to the Requiem as a lullaby of death. I let his view of death as a peaceful return to a state of eternal rest influence me. As Michael Lewanski‘s blog says

Unlike nearly all other works in the genre, it [HD: Fauré's Requiem ] contains none of the drama, anxiety, or fraught emotions one tends to associate with human thinking about death.  Nearly all references to the last judgement from the Catholic liturgy (and trust me, there are plenty) are excised. 

This nonchalance  in the sense of "not getting  hot under the collar" misled me into  assuming on the part of  Fauré a certain (not to say sanctimonious) belief that angels would lead the departed into paradise.

The manuscript, and thus the stuff of the discussion, was an unbound version without some movements added later (Offertorium, Libera me, etc.); it was, in the words of the Bibliothèque Nationale's Head of Music Manuscripts a manuscript de travail working copy rather than a draft of something to be  published.

Bob Chilcott makes frequent additions to the discussion based on his experience as a chorister;   from the sublime (David Willcocks‘s observation that the high strings after the triumphant Hosanna  represent  the angels flying off into the distance) to the ridiculous (after the recording of Pie Jesu, when the sound engineer asked if Chilcott wanted to listen back to his efforts, the response was "Sorry Sir, he's gone off with Marriner [Neville‘s  son Andrew] to buy sweets" [not the exact words – check Bob Chilcott's memory in the 17th minute of the programme]).

At one point (maybe more than one) Bob Chilcott calls attention to Fauré's word painting, which put me in mind of my own favourite example, discussed in an old post of mine:

My choice of 'listen out' [HD: the post was discussing phrasal verbs in  a context that had nothing to do with music] as an example is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem, which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano tune marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

And in the same post I returned to the theme of 'listen out':

<autobiographical_note>
At the funeral of a grande dame yesterday... I witnessed an underlining of the importance of this Ex-  [HD: in exaudi]. We were in the middle of one of those interminable call-and-response prayers, with the congregation saying ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘ again and again. And The Angelus butted in. (For the uninitiated:  The Angelus is a very noisy Call-to-prayer^† – much noisier than the Islamic version: ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause..._{has it stopped?}>  <oh dear me NO, suckers> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING... [ad nauseam]).  And the congregation was bleating (that‘s one for the etymologists: grex = ‘flock‘) ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘. Here was the perfect opportunity for something more robust: ‘Listen out for my prayer‘.
^† Not all believers would recognize this as a call to prayer exactly, but the name 'Angelus' is the first word of the prescribed prayer.                            

<inline_pps>
So it's a call to – and an accompaniment to – a particular prayer, to be prayed wherever the hearer happens to be, rather than [as in the Islamic case] a call to the faithful to come and pray at the mosque.
<inline_pps>

</autobiographical_note>

</pre_script>

Bernstein: Chichester Psalms

In July 2021 an edition of Radio 3's Building a Library dealt with the Chichester Psalms; the programme itself is no longer available, but there is this podcast – also well worth a listen (but be warned: the reviewer is a bit sniffy about the organ/harp reduction, which for obvious reasons is much the more common in local churches rather than professional concert halls: as he says, though, any version that brings this music to a wider audience can only be a good thing).

As Bernstein wrote at the time:

For hours on end I brooded and mused

On materia musica used and abused

Pieces for nattering, clucking sopranos

With squadrons of vibraphones, fleets of pianos,

Played with the forearms, the fists and the palms;

And then I came up with The Chichester Psalms.

These psalms are a simple and modest affair,

Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square:

Certain to sicken a stout John Cager

With its tonics and triads in E♭ major.

But  while tonal and tuneful I certainly wouldn't call it square. In fact, when the Dean of Chichester suggested "Why do the nations..." as a possible text, writing that the setting could have "a hint of West Side Story", he can't have suspected that Bernstein would set that psalm – though not in full – using some unused material left previously unfinished from that very show: the Jets and the Sharks "furiously raging together".

<inline_ps>

And the word they break in with is lama – which, all unbeknownst, is one of the few words in Hebrew that most English people with a church education, will have met (though in a different context: Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani): why?

</inline_ps>

And at the end, in a conclusion strongly reminiscent of the last peaceful bars that accompany the informal funeral cortège at the end of West Side Story, Bernstein has all the voices coming together in unison on the word yahad (which means "together" – a typically brilliant piece of word-painting)

L'Envoi

I have nothing to say about the Vaughan Williams, certainly not enough to justify a Subhead (as for the Fauré and the Bernstein).  And mindful of Schönberg's advice to young conductors (discussed in this blog by our MD – "never be witty" – I shall resist the temptation to mention last week's rehearsal, when George Herbert's "I got me flowers" brought to mind Eliza Doolittle. (Except I didn't.)

But make a date for 19 March:

b

Update 2022.01.25.17:20 – Added <inline_ps>

Update 2022.03.21.12:55 – Added link to review, to give you a taste of what you missed.

The devil's interval - fifty years

Fifteen months ago,  I wrote here about something I had only just noticed:

<pre_script>
The idea for this  post has been bubbling away on the back-burner for some time, but something  struck me today – or more probably the day before yesterday by the time I hit Publish – that has brought it to the fore.  And "Something" is an appropriate choice of words, as it relates to the song Something's Coming at the beginning of West Side Story; specifically the introductory words, when Tony's still stacking bottles of pop ...

Could be,  

Who knows?

... before deciding to sing.  Each ...

<inline_pps>

Correction: only the second – I misremembered.

</inline_pps>

of these lines includes a tritone [HD 2022: three whole tones].... 

[And] In the later song Maria (and Maria transpires to be that something)  the same tritone is there, but spelt differently (it's a rising diminished fifth this time, rather than a falling  augmented fourth). Bernstein is telling the audience something, and it's only taken me sixty-odd years ...

<autobiographical_note>
The film (which the older of my brothers saw in the West End) premiered in 1961, but I heard the original Broadway cast recording in the late '50s.
</autobiographical_note>

...to notice it. I wrote "later song Maria", though Something‘s Coming was an afterthought (as explained here), so Bernstein knew de antemano as they say in Spanish...,

<tangent>
And there's another thing that I've no time to pursue: calques, or "loan translations". Which came first, de antemano or beforehand? ante = before, and mano = hand (where those "=" signs have a fairly loose sense of equivalence).
</tangent>

...what the "Something" was, and what it would lead to....
</pre_script>

And this is no accident. It's not  only in the introduction to "Something's Coming"; it's the first interval in the verse ("It's only just...") and the last interval in the song resolves it to a perfect fourth ("Something great is coming").

On television, some time in the festive miasma (just before Christmas, I think) I saw West Side Story - The Making of a Classic, which mentioned tritones and pointed out that they appeared all over the place in Bernstein's score – in the opening whistle (that's what the programme said, although it doesn't involve all three notes, just the 2nd and 3rd) and in "Cool": "Boy, boy..."

 "Pshaw!", I sneered to myself. "I spotted that years ago". But not so fast: the programme was a repeat, first aired on Boxing Day 2016 (well, the Feast of St Stephen, though like 26 December 2021 it was probably some nondescript Bank Holiday); and I may have seen it then (though if I had I would have expected to remember one of the presenters, Bruno Tonioli, who I associate with neither music nor the history of musical theatre (though maybe there are hidden depths there). So my "spotting" of tritones may not have been original (although, even so, the link between "Something's Coming" and "Maria" was).

The occasion for the re-showing of the Making of... programme was the fiftieth anniversary of the original film and the (hardly coincidental, I imagine) release of the Spielberg remake – which I saw at the weekend. 

<progress_indicator>
Aha... Llegando al grano, as they say in Spain (="Arriving at the grain", in other words "Getting to the point". 
</progress_indicator>

I had mixed feelings; the obvious first question is "Why? Why try to improve on a masterpiece?" That's an easy one: bums on seats; money.  And to have Pop's widow (a sprightly young Rita Moreno, at a mere 90) singing "Somewhere"? What would they do? Change the words? It's addressed by a lover to a lover.

The opening seemed to confirm my fears. The opening whistle, as I said, has a tritone ...

<parenthesis>
I wrote above "three whole tones" (unsurprisingly: we all know what tri- means). But I find it more helpful  to think of it as six semi-tones. The tritone is either an augmented fourth (a semi-tone more than a perfect fourth, e.g. F -B) or a diminished fifth (a semi-tone less than a perfect fifth, e.g. B-F).
</parenthesis>

...between the 2nd and 3rd notes; that is, according to Bernstein's score it has. But the whistler in the 2021 recording overshoots by more than a quarter-tone:

Prologue

So that the resulting note is nearer a perfect fifth than a diminished fifth; an imperfect fifth, perhaps. Given the importance of the tritone throughout the score (read my post and/or watch that Making of... programme for more details) it's surprising that Gustavo Dudamel (who, as conductor, might be expected to have exercised a bit of quality control) let it pass.

But things got better after that. The CGI available to Spielberg meant that the slum clearances were more credible, which supported a general stiffening up of what was in 1961, a fairly flimsy plot. And the reality of the racial tensions (supported by racially-sympathetic casting) was brought further to life in the a capella song sung by the Sharks when Lieutenant Schrank tells Bernardo to leave. He says vamo' to his followers, but his defiance is clear; in the words of their song, Despierta de ese sueño Qu'es tiempo de luchar.... Vamonos... (meaning, roughly, "Wake up; stop dreaming. It's time to fight.... Let's go...").

<inline_ps>
The soundtrack recording lists the Sharks' defiant a capella chant as La Borinqueña, which surprised me at first for two reasons:

• the lyrics include the word "Borinqueño" (helpfully glossed by Wikipedia in their English translation as "boricua")
  
• the words were not – at first sight – those of La Borinqueña (the national anthem...

<hang_on query_term="national">
Well yes, it is, in certain contexts – the Olympics, for example: see this. for some background
</hang_on>

...of Puerto Rico). But in the end it all made sense: a Borinqueño is an inhabitant of Puerto Rico, and the word (with the -o ending) does figure in La Borinqueña. And the words sung by the Jets are not the namby-pamby "hello trees, hello clouds" politically correct words written by  Manuel Fernández Juncos and adopted in 1903 (which read like a particularly starry-eyed travel brochure):         

The land of Borinquén

where I was born

is a flowery garden

of magical beauty.

A constantly clear sky

serves as its canopy.

And placid lullabies are sung

by the waves at its feet.

...etc. Those "placid lullabies" are a far cry from 'Wake up; stop dreaming. It's time to fight". Those words are taken from  what were,  as Wikipedia says, the Original 1868 revolutionary lyrics (dating from a time when Fernández Juncos was still a babe in arms)

</inline_ps> 

The back-story is more credible too, especially Tony's as a once-violent nearly homicidal but now reformed ex-juvenile delinquent. And even "Somewhere" works, as the camera shows a photo of Valentina (Rita Moreno) and Pop on their wedding day; so that it becomes a statement of hope in a mixed-race marriage, and in a multi-racial saociety in general).

And Tony as a barely-competent deus ex machina ("I've fixed it. It'll only be  a fist-fight, one on one") was a bit hard to swallow in the original. Showing his abortive attempt at peace-making (and moving "Cool" to before the rumble) worked well (although bits of the original dialogue playing in the background [my mental background, that is] – "I wanna get even" etc. – were a bit distracting).

To balance the technical advantages that Spielberg had, he had to think aabout anachronisms (whereas fifty years ago that's just the way things were). There was plenty of the low-hanging fruit (like "daddyo" and "copacetic"); but one linguistic slip that stood out for me was in the scene where the Jets are getting tooled up for the rumble. One of the (unwilling, but... you know...OK if you twist my arm) adults uses the term "mutual assured destruction" –  a phrase not coined until 1962 (so at least a year after the original film was in the can, and several years after the Broadway show):

The term "mutual assured destruction", commonly abbreviated "MAD", was coined by Donald Brennan, a strategist working ... in 1962.
Source

Of course, a new word or phrase is often in the zeitgeist for a year or two before it's first recorded in print, but in a case like this I think Wikipedia is probably reliable: the term simply wasn't around until Brennan coined it "ironically, to argue that holding weapons capable of destroying society was irrational" (i.e. millions of people, not just a handful of punks).

Altogether, though, I thought the Spielberg version was enjoyable and worth seeing.

Meanwhile, back at the Real World, I have a translation to submit.

b

Update: 2022.01.07.12:50  – Added <inline_ps />