Audio On Ned Rorem's "Early in the Morning" On Franz Schubert's "Die Krähe" On Claude Debussy's "A Noel for Homeless Children" On Charles Ives's "Tom Sails Away" On Francis Poulenc's: "Hôtel" Hakan Hagegard, a Swedish baritone, introduces the "art song" to MPR's David Molpus Photos Songfest Poster Resources A Saint Paul Summer Song Festival Attend MPR's Strolling Song Picnic, Sunday, June 27, 2-6 pm, outside the Fitzgerald Theate More about Brian Zeger Your Voice Join the conversation with other MPR listeners in the News Forum.

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Speaking of Song
by Brian Zeger, Minnesota Public Radio
June 16, 2004

A Saint Paul Summer Song Festival: seven days of concerts and master classes, featuring renowned singers in a series of recitals celebrating the art of song, June 21 to 27, 2004, SPCO Center (Hamm Building), 408 St. Peter Street, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

In classical music, a song is not simply a song—it's an "art song." Why the difference in terminology? It's mostly to indicate that art song is part of the classical tradition, as opposed to popular song or folk song. The art song calls for a different singing style and it's often in a foreign language. But in the right hands, the best art song communicates just as directly as its more widely known cousins.

The first St. Paul Summer Song Festival begins on Monday June 21 and continues through the following Sunday, June 27. To help set the scene, we've invited in a specialist—Brian Zeger is a pianist who's accompanied some of the world's finest singers—to introduce a few of his favorites.

Ned Rorem: "Early in the Morning"
Maybe there is something to the old adage, "Youth is wasted on the young". In the world of song, young people rarely celebrate their youthfulness. Far more often, songs show us an older person remembering what it was like to be young. American composer Ned Rorem wrote his best-known song "Early in the Morning" when he was all of 22. But the poem he chose, by Robert Hillyer, is not from the point of view of a young man. Hillyer's narrator looks back at an earlier time when he was 20 years old, sitting at an outdoor café in Paris drinking café au lait and waking up to the freshness of the smells and sounds of early morning.

Another 22-year-old composer setting this lyrical poem might have written a song full of joy and energy. Instead, Rorem's musical setting is languid, bittersweet, seen through the lens of a nostalgia far beyond the composer's years. In this performance American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham finds just the right sound to convey the bittersweet melancholy that lurks behind the poet's words, for the poem is not really about youth but youth recollected. Most of the song drifts along in a lazy waltz tempo but listen to how Susan Graham and pianist Malcolm Martineau slow down even a little more when the poet remembers that "He was 20, and a lover and in paradise to stay". The delicate, nuanced harmonies that Rorem drank in during his years in France create a haze around the melody, like a flattering filter on a camera lens, to transport the listener to a dreamy recollection of youth.

Ned Rorem is now more than 80 years old and he's still writing. Since his teens he has composed hundreds of songs, setting the words of dozens of poets, conveying the perspective of a long lifetime on a huge range of subject matter from love to loss, from nature to war. But no other song of his has caught the poignancy of a happy time remembered like "Early in the Morning".

Franz Schubert: "Die Krähe"
The year 1827 was a grim one for Franz Schubert. The 30-year old composer had been suffering from the effects of syphilis for five years. He now knew that the disease would soon take his life. He had many loyal friends, a few of them influential in the circles that mattered in Vienna, but had yet to really make his mark as a composer.

When Schubert came upon 12 poems by Wilhelm Müller that must have struck a deep chord with him. The cycle of poems is called Die Winterreise (The Winter Journey.) It tells the story of a man who leaves his town brokenhearted over his rejection by a young woman. His despair and anger set him off through the frozen landscape where his isolation leads to an obsession with death. Schubert subsequently came across 12 other poems that complete the cycle, leading the desperate wanderer to the point where the frozen surface of a pond is his only mirror and a cemetery seems a welcome resting-place. His close friend, Josef von Spaun, writes about the first time Schubert played these troubling songs for a small group of close friends:

"Schubert had been in a gloomy mood for some time and seemed unwell. When I asked what was wrong, he would only say, "You will all soon hear and understand". He then sang us the whole Winterreise with great emotion. We were shocked at the dark mood of these songs and Schober said that he had only liked one of them, Der Lindenbaum. To that Schubert replied, "I like these songs better than all the others I've written and you will like them too".

The 15th song in the cycle is "Die Krähe" (The Crow). The wanderer has become so lonely and cut-off that a crow circling around his head has come to seem like a companion. We hear the wheeling motion of the bird in the high, smooth piano writing. The wanderer asks the bird, "Will I soon be your prey? I don't have far to go. At least I will have found a faithful companion at last".

No wonder the bitterness of these songs and their strange beauty shocked Schubert's friends. The 30-year old composer expressed bitter truths about misery and death that move audiences to this day.

Claude Debussy: "A Noel for Homeless Children"
When a classical composer looks for a poem to set to music he may be drawn to a specific poem for a million different reasons. It's rare that a personal passion will become so strong that the composer is moved to pick up his pen and write the poem as well as the music.

Claude Debussy lived through the horrors of World War One as he struggled with the cancer that would soon end his life. In 1915 he witnessed the bombardment and occupation of France by the Germans and was so horrified by what he saw around him that he wrote his own poem, "A Noel for Homeless Children" and set it to music. He had done this only once, many years before, in a set of dreamy experimental songs filled with imagination and poetry.

The nightmare of wartime Paris brought forth a very different kind of poem from Debussy: a plea from the children who have lost their houses and their parents to the war. The poem reads, in part:

"We have no more homes! The enemies took everything, even our little beds! [They burned our school and our schoolmaster too! They burned the church and the Lord Jesus and the beggar who couldn't get away!] Daddy is at the front and Mommy died."

This song text closely echoes the anguish Debussy expressed in a contemporary letter he wrote to his wife Emma,

"This year Father Christmas is at the front and communications are so difficult he hasn't been able to respond to my requests.
Noel! Noel The bells are cracked!
Noel! Noel! They have wept too long!"

In another letter to a close friend Debussy wrote:

"The war continues, as you know, but it's impossible to see why. I realize it's not easy to find a solution but there's something irritating about the way they go about the war so nonchalantly! Death exacts none the less its blind tribute. When will hate be exhausted?"

Debussy wrote a jittery, jagged music to express the children's anxiety and their anger. The piano part gallops along in a panicky way, slowing down only for a moment when the children tell Father Christmas, "they don't need any toys this year, just their daily bread". The French soprano Veronique Gens sings with Roger Vignoles at the piano.

Charles Ives: "Tom Sails Away"
Composer Charles Ives reacted to the outbreak of World War I with a mixture of patriotism and horror at the destruction that war brings. He responded to the war with songs steeped in the tunes that were a part of American life: hymn-tunes, folk melodies and patriotic songs. He believed passionately that people had to find the music that spoke to them, whatever its source. He wrote:

"If a man finds that the cadences of an Apache warrior come nearest to his soul… let him use them fervently, transcendentally, inevitably, furiously, in his symphonies, in his operas, in his whistlings on the way to work, so that he can paint his house with them, make them a part of his prayer-book—this is all possible and necessary if he is confident that they have a part in his spiritual consciousness."

Ives wrote the words for "Tom Sails Away" as well as the music and he sets the tone right in the opening line: "Scenes from my childhood are with me". Written in 1917, "Tom Sails Away" is a song about memory in which Ives employs tunes that all Americans knew, weaving them into an unforgettable portrait of American life. The song begins with a haunting memory of childhood when "Mother had Tom in her arms." As the memory comes to life with all the energy and fun of kids playing together, the music seems to go off the rails. Ives loved to take two different kinds of music and play them simultaneously in a kind of jumble of sound. Little snatches of children's tunes bump up against one another then suddenly, the music becomes mysteriously solemn. "For today, in Freedom's name, Tom sailed away" is set to the familiar "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean", then the patriotic anthem, "Over There" is intoned, slowly and wistfully.

Ives had the skill to weave together all these strands of musical Americana to draw a portrait of an America that in 1917 was already losing its innocence and looking back to sweeter time before Tom Sailed Away. Our performers are Jan de Gaetani and Gilbert Kalish.

Francis Poulenc: "Hôtel"
When you attend a classical song recital most of the songs you encounter are about extremes. The singer is singing about being very much in love or miserable at the loss of that love. Or ecstatic at the appearance of the first spring flowers or frozen to the bone by an emotional winter that breaks all records.

Francis Poulenc could write songs that scale these emotional heights. But he could also write a song that's completely seductive because it's about, well, not much. His song, Hôtel, is sung by a character that's content to watch life pass by. He says,

"I sit in my hotel room. I watch the sun through the window. I light a cigarette to create mirages for myself. I don't want to work; I want to smoke."

Now this all sounds like it could be colossally boring, but in Poulenc's treatment, it's magic. He borrowed his harmonies from the musical language he found in the Parisian cafes of the 1920's. The smoky, bluesy atmosphere permeates the piano writing and the lazy, long vocal lines. The singer's voice drifts around as aimlessly as the smoke in the hotel bedroom.

There are listeners for whom Poulenc's music just isn't serious enough, or formal enough to be considered on a level with the songs of Schubert or Brahms. But what fascinates me about Poulenc's music is that this bluesy, apparently casual atmosphere could be turned on its head. He could take the harmonic language we hear in "Hôtel" to describe the anguish of Mary at the cross in his "Stabat Mater". These chords also accompany a group of Carmelite nuns to the guillotine in his powerful opera, "Dialogues of the Carmelites".

A composer who is a master of his craft, as Poulenc was, can use his art to express an infinity of moods and ideas. In this song, "Hôtel", the emotional stakes are low but seen through the prism of Poulenc's art, the result is seductive and unforgettable

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