Chansons and Carmina

Program Notes

by Richard H. Trame, S.J., Ph.D. Les Chansons des Roses has become one of the most performed choral cycles in the world since its Oregon premiere in 1993 and subsequent performance at the World Choral Festival in Vancouver, B.C. The entire cycle has become a staple in the repertoire of professional and finer university choruses, and the final movement, Dirait-on, set as a chanson populaire by Mr. Lauridsen, is widely performed in a variety of arrangements made by the composer. Les Chansons des Roses was recently featured in concerts by the Robert Shaw Chamber Singers in Atlanta and the Dessoff Choirs at Merkin Hall in New York, where John Shepard, curator of rare books and manuscripts in the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, provided the following notes about Rilke and the choral cycle: Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is commonly regarded as one of the greatest German poets of the twentieth century. His poetry and prose have a wide international following today, both in their original language and in translation. Rilke's career path may partly explain his worldwide appeal, for he formed a European, rather than German, cultural outlook early on. At age 24, he began a restless wandering throughout Europe and Russia, sometimes returning to Germany. On one of these returns Rilke joined an artists' colony near Bremen and, inspired by the painters there, became obsessed with the visual arts. In 1901 he married the sculptor Clara Westhoff, a former student of Auguste Rodin, and the next year received a commission from a German publisher to write a book about Rodin. In 1902, he traveled to Paris (his primary residence through 1914) and began a close association with Rodin. While an artistic (in the broadest sense) apprentice of Rodin, Rilke developed a new lyric style, manifested in the so-called "object poem" - an attempt to capture in words the sculptural essence of a physical object. Rilke had an aptitude for languages and wrote scores of poems in French, very often as a kind of mental relaxation after the struggles over his long poems. In 1924, after the completion of his German masterpieces the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, he wrote his wife Clara: "I wrote down for my own pleasure a little volume ... Quatrains Valaisans ... and in addition a whole little cycle, Les Roses, likewise in French." It was this little volume, Les Roses, that caught the eye of Morten Lauridsen (b.1943) shortly after he had accepted a commission from the Oregon chamber choir Choral Cross-Ties in 1993. Lauridsen first composed "Dirait-on" as an independent piece for chorus and piano, then added four a cappella choruses to other rose poems, occasionally using motives drawn from the long melody in "Dirait-on." Les Chansons des Roses form an arch, beginning and ending in the key of D-flat major. Lauridsen's harmonies in these five movements are replete with intervals of a second, yet in the context of the voices these dissonances create a sensuous, rather than harsh, effect. "En une seule fleur" begins with just such harmonies, as the chorus addresses the rose in parlando style. Lauridsen has adapted Rilke's poem for musical purposes by extracting its last line ("But you never did think otherwise") as a refrain after each verse. The second verse ("Tu étais assez riche") blooms as a supple melody (to reappear, transformed, in the last movement) sung by the sopranos with responses by the altos and tenors. A repeat of the first verse returns to the chordal parlando style. "Contre qui, rose," described by the composer as "a wistful nocturne," begins with a hushed melody whose hesitant rise culminates in the sopranos' dramatic leap of a ninth at the words "vous a-t-elle forcée." Soaring melody and chordal mass, rather than volume, create the climax on the words "au contraire." In "De ton reve trop plein," sopranos and tenors simultaneously sing a lively melody and its strict inversion, creating an ambiguous tonality (C-sharp major or C-sharp minor?). Lauridsen heightens Rilke's bittersweet mood by halting the motion before the choir sings the poem's second and third lines ("flower ... wet as one who weeps") very slowly, almost as a sudden misgiving. These contrasting characters alternate until a contrapuntal climax arrives, with melody and inversion overlapping in both augmented (fast) and diminished (slow) versions. The melody of "La rose complète" is yet another that will reappear transformed in the fifth movement. It dwells on undulating major seconds before climbing - first hesitantly, then deliberately - to complete a beautiful arch. Its penultimate rise, on "route Ia vie," is underscored by a sudden harmonic modulation. After yet another ecstatic outburst, the melody returns to its opening register, and the choir's cadence is a segue into the piano accompaniment which introduces "Dirait-on." This melody, which Lauridsen has called a chanson populaire, grows from a transformation of the melody of "La rose complète." The refrain "dirait-on" ("so they say"), refers melodically back to the second verse of the first movement, and liberated from harmonic duties by the piano, the entire choir is allowed to sing it in unison. Carl Orff (1895-1982) emphasized his already-developed philosophy of musical composition by selecting 25 piquant secular poems from a 13th century manuscript (found in 1803 in the German Benedictine Abbey of Beuron) for his Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuron). Until 1936, Orff had composed several works under the strong, late romantic influence of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Scriabin. Most of these works Orfflater destroyed or repudiated. In 1937, after its first performance in Frankfurt, Orff firmly asserted that Carmina Burana "begins my complete works." Orff rejected high-blown Romanticism with its harmonic vagaries and thematic principles derived from Wagner's music drama. He broke with this tradition because of his concern for the growing estrangement between music and the listening public. With this frame of mind, he ostensibly returned to the principles of Monteverdian opera, and grew in artistic kinship with Stravinsky and Hindemith. Using Stravinsky's The Wedding and Oedipus Rex as models for Carmina Burana, Orff described the work in its subtitle (translated from the Latin): "Secular songs to be sung by singers and choruses accompanied by instruments and magical tableau." Orff provided specific stage directions for the visual setting of Carmina Burana, but the music's primitive power and attractiveness have caused it to be heard more often in concert than in its proper quasi-operatic setting. The 25 exuberant poems selected provided the grist for Orff to demonstrate his new-found style. The poems are written in a straightforward rhythmic and rhymed manner utilizing vulgar Latin, medieval French and German. The style has been succinctly summarized by musicologist David Eagle. He observes that the cantata has a direct and immediate appeal because of its basic simplicity and its primitive rhythmic drive. Harmony is reduced to unisons, octaves, thirds and fifths. There is no polyphony or counterpoint. Melodic figurations are repeated obsessively and hypnotically. "Since melody and harmony are relatively unimportant, we often find," observes Eagle, "entire sections based on a simple harmony O the rhythmic ostinato is the thing, but rhythms are kept simple with each pattern being repeated until it is exhausted, or another pattern begins. Elements of I9th century popular songs are mixed with quasi-Gregorian chants, secular medieval song and dance in an eclectic hodgepodge." The sections of Carmina Burana are framed between a prologue and epilogue, both of which are entitled "Fortune, Empress of the World." The three main sections are called "In the Springtime," "In the Tavern" and "In the Court of Love." Soloists, children's choir, large and small mixed chorus and men's chorus are accompanied by a complex orchestra, the orchestra providing the most novel musical interest. Not only is the instrumentation distinctive, with its featured wing and percussive instruments, but the instrumentation is also extraordinary in clearly profiling the individual tone colors of the various instruments.  The prominent German commentator Karl Schumann provides an excellent summary overview of the more philosophical aspects of Orff's achievement. "Evocative melody, unambiguous rhythms, and primitive pictures in sound are the basic features of these profane songs; the tendency is toward universality and objectivity. No individual destiny is touched upon - there is no dramatis personae in the moral sense of the term. Instead, primeval forces are invoked, such as the ever-turning wheel of fortune, the revivifYing effect of love and those elements in man which prompt him to enjoy earthy, all too-earthy pleasure. The principle figure is man as a natural being delivered over to forces stronger than himself. This universality of intention corresponds to Orff's concept of his 'synthesis of arts (gesamptkunstwerk),' a unified combination of movement, song, dance, sound and magical enchantment."

Archival Recording