A PROGRAM YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS!

Purcell, G Minor Chacony

Britten, String Quartet No. 2 in C

Gesualdo, “Se la mia morte brami” and “Illumina faciem tuam”

Beethoven, Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132

 

NOTES by Sasha Margolis

Purcell, G Minor Chacony

When the first Spanish conquerors returned home from the Americas in the 1500s, they brought with them a number of bounties–chocolate, corn, the potato, and also, two dances considered by their compatriots to be lascivious and even indecent, and therefore irresistible. Like their agricultural counterparts, the two dances made their way more or less quickly across Europe, where they became more or less domesticated. The sarabanda, a dance characterized by its rhythmic profile (triple meter, with the second and third beats tied, and often, an eighth note on the “and” of three) was adopted as a standard element of the thoroughly respectable dance suite popular in Italy, France, and Germany. As for the chaconne, it became part of the basic source material for much Baroque music, across many genres.

The chaconne shares the rhythmic profile of the sarabanda. But it is further defined by its use of “ground bass”–that is, a bass line a few measures long, repeated again and again for the length of a piece of music. Many of the most famous works of the Baroque, including Purcell’s aria “When I am laid in earth” from Dido and Aeneas, Pachelbel’s famous canon, Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin, and Corelli’s “La Folia,” employed ground bass or a similar melody-based repetitive structure. These repetitive musical devices were, in the first place, the basis for much improvisation-based dance music, much like the twelve-bar blues of a later time. They were also used in operatic settings, both for courtly dances and for climactic arias in which reiteration of the bass lines contributed increasing intensity to the melodic lines sung above them; and in liturgical music, where certain specific bass lines bore recognizable symbolic meanings.

Despite this generalization of its usage, the chaconne did retain traces of its exotic and erotic origins. Lully’s late seventeenth-century operas boast a total of seventeen chaconnes, most of them attached to foreign characters–Moors, Africans, Americans–in amorous situations. Purcell, whose chaconnes are deeply influenced by Lully’s, likewise wrote a “Chaconne for the Chinese Man and Woman” for his opera, The Fairy Queen. As with most chaconnes of the day, these were principally in major keys, and on the fast side. (The ground-bass-based passacaglia, which at a later date became more or less interchangeable with the chaconne, was during the 1600s a sadder and slower form.)

Lully’s courtly and Gallic influence may be heard in Purcell’s Chacony in G Minor. Written around 1680, the Chacony dates from a period when French fashions–silver toothbrushes, sedan chairs, Parisian cuisine–were all the rage in London. The king wanted French opera at his court; and when it came to the instrumental realm, there were the ‘Twenty-Four Violins,’ formed in imitation of Versailles’ Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi. It was probably for this ensemble that Purcell’s Chacony was written.

However, there is a distinctly English touch here, too. Biographer Jonathan Keates posits that, in this Chacony, “the energy is largely generated by the work’s continuous wavering between its ostensible role as dance music and a loftier excursion into the English fantasia style.” He is referring to the style of England’s keyboard composers in the generations before Purcell, who were known for their constant, form-challenging melodic inventiveness. Benjamin Britten, who was a champion of English music and arranged many old works, must have prized this inventiveness above some other traits. In his arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony for modern string quartet or orchestra, courtliness is noticed less than is melodic variety; while in the Chacony from Britten’s own Second String Quartet, daring invention is taken still further.

Britten, String Quartet No. 2 in C

This quartet was commissioned for the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Purcell’s death, in 1945; and was written six months after Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. These two facts do much to explain the presence and nature of the quartet’s Chacony, by far the work’s longest movement. In Peter Grimes, Britten had written a passacaglia, a dramatic interlude consisting of variations on a dotted figure, beginning in a low register, traversing wide-ranging emotional ground, displaying extraordinary compositional freedom and inventiveness, and incorporating, further along, vocal solos onstage. Throughout, there is a highly concentrated expressivity, and a sense of spaciousness which calls to mind the sea–which has been called the opera’s most important character. Many of these same traits characterize Britten’s Chacony–which is, however, a lengthier work, and incorporates, instead of vocal solos, instrumental ones, which also serve to organize the long movement. The Chacony has four sections: prelude, scherzo, adagio and coda. The first three each consist of six variations, the coda three. Sections are set apart by solos for cello, viola, and violin. The movement begins in B-flat, and ends with multiple iterations of C major, so many that a careless audience might be led into premature applause.
The lingering atmosphere of Peter Grimes is not limited to the Chacony movement. Musicologist Philip Rupprecht has noted that, in the first movement, “lyric episodes, ‘tranquillo,’ are interrupted by ‘agitato’ outbursts. This musical dichotomy suggests the character of Peter Grimes himself, given to states of poetic calm and violent instability.” The movement is built on three themes, all of them beginning with a leap of a major tenth, and all of them heard at the movement’s opening. The muted scherzo is closer to Shostakovich than it is to Purcell.

Gesualdo, “Se la mia morte brami” and “Illumina faciem tuam”

It is difficult to name Carlo Gesualdo without calling to mind his unusual biography–a Neapolitan nobleman, Gesualdo is most famous for having murdered his wife and her lover. (Those inspired by the proximity of Gesualdo and Britten on this program may enjoy reading Charles Jessold Considered As A Murderer, a novel about a twentieth-century British composer whose name and biography recall Gesualdo’s.) The temptation to link the dissonance and chromaticism of Gesualdo’s late Renaissance works to his character has long been indulged; the fact is, however, that his compositions are not unlike those of his Neapolitan contemporaries. The chromaticism is a natural element of the musical language of the time; while the dissonance is no more than the natural friction arising from passing chromatic lines, or else, coloristic text-painting–as when, in the five-part madrigal, “Se la mia morte brami,” the word “cruel” is highlighted by a passing tritone.

The madrigal’s text reads: “Se la mia morte brami, crudel, lieto ne moro/ E dopo morte ancor te solo adoro/ Ma se vuoi che non t’ami, ahi, che a pensarlo solo/ Il duol m’ancide e l’alma fugge a volo.” (“If my death you crave, cruel one, gladly I’ll die/ and after death still adore you alone/ But if you wish that I not love you, ah, only thinking of it, the pain kills me, and my soul flees.”) A brief guide to matching words with music: the slow, four-note, upward chromatic scale heard early on corresponds with “my death you crave.” “Gladly I’ll die” comes with the first musical resolution. A particularly poignant “cruel,” on a falling violin sixth, is followed by a second resolution, again matched with “gladly I’ll die.” The next words, “After death …”, pass in ten or fifteen seconds, in a highly imitative fashion. Unison rhythms announce the arrival of “But if you do not wish …” Quickening pace and thickening counterpoint signal the fleeing of the soul. The section from “But if” to “soul flees,” is repeated a second time, exactly.

The setting of “Illumina faciem tuam” is altogether different. The text reads: “Illumina faciem tuam super servum tuum, salvum me fac in misericordia tua/ Domine, non confundar, quoniam invocavi te.” (“Show the light of thy countenance to thy servant and save me for thy mercy’s sake/ Lord, let me not be confounded, for I have called upon thee.”) Here, individual words are stretched out over many notes, and words from different lines of text overlap in the five vocal parts. The music is unusually consonant for Gesualdo, but without many true cadences. The result of all this is that the meaning of the text is expressed in an aggregate rather than local fashion. The song’s musical lines are intertwining, searching, rising, ramifying–and particularly well-suited for transcription into a wordless medium.

Beethoven, Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132

Beethoven’s Quartet Op.132 needs little introduction (nor are words adequate to describe its extraordinary range of color and feeling.) The quartet’s third movement has a well-documented history. In the winter of 1824, while composing this quartet, Beethoven fell seriously ill. Upon recovering, he turned to the ancient Lydian church mode in order to write a song of thanks for his return to health. He called it “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart” (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian mode.”)

The quartet’s first movement opens with a slow and solemn introduction, followed by an ominous first theme which gives way soon enough to friendlier and more lyrical material. The movement’s end is unusual: a double recapitulation, or perhaps a false recapitulation followed by a real one, is capped off by a dramatic, nearly operatic coda.

The Allegro ma non tanto hides, under its veneer of gentle triple meter and playful rhythms, frictions which are first expressed in frequent contrary melodic motion and harmonic wandering, put on hold during the central musette-like section, and then briefly unleashed in a grim little dance and several pained arpeggios, before receding again into the background.

After the Heiliger Dankgesang comes a brief march, the downbeat of which sounds like an upbeat, so that the second beat sounds like a downbeat. This bit of gentle mischief dispels the profound beauty and religiosity of the Dankgesang, before suddenly giving way to a recitative, which then launches directly into the last movement. The finale’s theme, intended originally for the last movement of the Ninth Symphony, begins in a plaintive manner, but eventually takes an optimistic and conclusive turn to the major.