Showing posts with label classical music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classical music. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Carmen



Went to the Edmonton Opera's presentation of Bizet's Modernist Opera; Carmen last night. It's one of my fav's. it's an opera that has all of my favorite themes; the rise of the proletariat who are cigarette factory girls, who smoked on stage, wanted to light one up in solidarity.

Carmen is a scarlet woman, a gypsy and a witch, she is an independent proto-feminist declaring her belief in free love. She is a threat to the patriarchal male and thus she must be destroyed. It was a social statement that still carries much meaning even today.

And it's an Opera that has more hit singles than the average rock n roll album.

The opera was premiered at the Opéra Comique of Paris on March 3, 1875. For a year after its premiere, it was considered a failure, denounced by critics as "immoral" and "superficial".

The story concerns the eponymous Carmen, a beautiful gypsy with a fiery temper. Free with her love, she woos the corporal Don José, an inexperienced soldier. Their relationship leads to his rejection of his former love, mutiny against his superior, turn to a criminal life, and ultimate jealous murder of Carmen. Although he is briefly happy with Carmen, he falls into madness when she turns from him to the bullfighter Escamillo.


Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen, is one of the most beloved operas of all-time. It is a French opera with a libretto by Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy that is based on the novel by the same name, written by author Prosper Mérimée. Bizet found great opposition to the work, as many at the time found the plot of the opera to be “immoral.” Carmen, first performed in 1875 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1875, broke new dramatic ground for French opera as it moved away from opera buffa, or comic opera, towards a more profound and tragic story. Bizet did not live to see that his work, once highly controversial, was to become one of the most often performed operas in the world.


Fans (Malcolm McLaren album) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Most people, if they get the chance, have to settle for one great achievement in the cultural arena. Not for Malcolm McLaren. Besides being an imperialistic cultural plunderer (a non-judgmental designation), he is one of rock's true visionaries. His role in the formation and promotion of the Sex Pistols has been construed as everything from inspired instigator to Machiavellian manipulator, and his solo career has been as influential as it has been criticized: he tends to bring out the moral indignation in people. A brilliant carpetbagger whose precise talents — beyond aestheticism and the canny ability to peg influential trends in a wide panorama (fashion, retail, politics, music, art, film, literature) early enough to exploit them as a pioneer rather than a bandwagon-jumper — are difficult to pin down, McLaren has made himself the star of his own entrepreneurial undertakings. Despite the odds stacked against him mounting a successful recording career (that he's not exactly a musician is high on the problems list), McLaren has crafted a bizarrely significant oeuvre of high-concept adventures. It's hard to say just what McLaren does as an artist. He's more an assembler than a creator, piecing together artifacts from various musical cultures in such a way that, at the end of the day, his own input seems invisible. And yet his perspective as hip outsider has continued to provide a link between his Anglo-American audience and Third World forms. If McLaren's a musical tourist, these records are his home movies.

His next venture was exponentially more improbable. Feeding classic opera into a hip-hop blender, McLaren came up with the surprisingly entertaining Fans. McLaren mainly uses opera for its recitative form and story lines (namely Carmen, Madam Butterfly and Turandot) and, damn it, the thing works more often than not.


Opera and Pop Culture

When Luciano Pavarotti recently passed away, opera lost not only a magnificent voice, but also an ambassador. While the average person (myself included) has a limited knowledge of opera, the world knew Pavarotti. Millions of people watched “The Three Tenors”, whether in thrilling live performances or via video and television. But Pavarotti also stepped out of the opera world to enter the realm of pop culture. Take a jog through the internet and you’ll find performances with James Brown, U2 and the Spice Girls. His various television appearances include Saturday Night Live and he even starred in a movie (the critically lambasted film “Yes, Giorgio”). And that got me thinking about an experiment that tried to weld together opera and pop culture.
In 1984, the single “Madame Butterfly” hit the Top Twenty charts in England and with it, the release called “Fans”. The mastermind behind “Fans” was Malcolm McLaren, an artist who had a bit of notoriety in his career. McLaren was the manager of the Sex Pistols and depending on the point of view, was involved with the formation and promotion of the band. Malcolm also handled Adam Ant, raiding his backing band to put together Bow Wow Wow. But when the 1980s rolled around, McLaren decided to become an artist himself.
“Fans” was an interesting hybrid of opera and hip-hop. This was hip-hop circa 1984 and he relied more on the beat than anything. With the hip-hop backdrop, McLaren would mix it together with the story line and arias of famous operas. Simple programmed drum beats along with a synthesized melody and an operatic soprano or tenor floating on top of it.
“Fans” was a fairly short undertaking as the album consisted of only six tracks clocking in at just over 30 minutes. McLaren stayed with familiar operas with five of the tracks based on Puccini operas (two from “Madame Butterfly”) while the remaining track used Bizet’s “Carmen” as a starting point. To further flesh out the album, McLaren adapted the storylines into English, then personally provided narration (he left the actual singing to the professionals) as he takes the role of several characters.

In hindsight, opera and hip-hop seem to be a good match because of the element of tragedy that exists in both. However, the overall experiment turned out to be a partial success, mostly in England. The single “Madame Butterfly” received some praise from the critics and as earlier mentioned, was also a hit. However, critics weren’t as nice about “Fans”, considering it simply padding for the single. That wouldn’t stop McLaren from continuing his musical career as he had a few more hits in the U.K. although he left opera behind.

The concept of the East Village Opera Company is totally fresh, but not unprecedented in pop. In 1985, for example, former punk-rock impresario Malcolm McLaren released Fans, an album of "hip-hopera" that brought funky beats and electronic programming to the works of Puccini and Bizet. But EVOC is a whole new thing: an integrated, eleven-strong working band dedicated to rocking the opera and electrifying the classics, as the ensemble has been doing to spectacular effect ever since its New York stage debut in the spring of 2004.







SEE:


Labour, Opera and Anarchy

Acoustic Ecology

What's Opera Doc

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht

Daniel Barenboim's Dream

Classical Rock



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , ,

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Acoustic Ecology

I was listening to CBC 2 radio this week and they played Canadian acoustic ecologist performance artist and composer R. Murray Schafer.

Who in the 1980's blew me away with his eight hour invocation of RA at the Ontario Science Centre. While I was not there, I got to hear it on CBC. Which of course I would not hear on private for profit radio.

Schafer shows that musick is magick and vis versa, that it is one of the key elements to ritual, and thus all music is sacred, even when it is profane.

If you like the minimalist and avante garde music of Edgar
Varèse ,Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, or Steven Reich, you will love Schafer.

R. Murray Schafer has achieved an international reputation as a composer, an educator, environmentalist, scholar and visual artist. Born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1933, he was raised in Toronto.

Schafer entered the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto in 1952 to study with John Weinzweig. His casual contact with Marshall McLuhan on campus in that period could arguably be singled out as the most lasting influence on his development.
He went to Vienna in 1956. After two years he went to England, studying informally with composer Peter Racine Fricker. While in Britain Schafer supported himself by writing (resulting in a book, British Composers in Interview) and by the preparation of a performing edition of Ezra Pound's opera Le Testament (1920-1) broadcast by the BBC in 1961.

As the 'father of acoustic ecology' Schafer has been concerned about the damaging effects of noise on people, especially dwellers of the 'sonic sewers' of the city. His booklets The Book of Noise and The Voices of Tyranny are pleas for anti-noise legislation and urban soundscape improvements through reduction of potentially destructive sounds. Of the various publications Schafer released after his work with the World Soundscape Project, the most important is The Tuning of the World (1977) where he summarizes his soundscape research, philosophies, and theories. The concept, central to Schafer's thinking, has influenced his composing. The background rhythmic structure for String Quartet No. 2 ('Waves') is based on the intervals at which ocean waves crest; the graphic notation of No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes was influenced by charts made of Vancouver traffic noise.

While Schafer's focus in the 1970s was his soundscape work, in the 1980s it was Patria, a 12-part cycle of musical/theatrical works begun in 1966. Schafer's dramatic works employ music and theatre in a manner which he calls the 'theatre of confluence' (a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk reflecting his urge to explore the relationships between the arts). Schafer has used ritual as a way of revitalizing contemporary theatre, several works transforming the theatre audience into participants. Patria 6: RA is a dusk-to-dawn ritual enacting the descent to the underworld and resurrection of the Egyptian sun god. For its Ontario Science Centre premiere in Toronto, the audience was led through 29 different performance sites during the 11-hour ritual.


And again this August he will be performing in the wilderness.


Princess of the Stars

R. Murray Schafer, Banff Festival of the Arts, 1985. Performed in Two Jack Lake, near Banff, August 8-10, at dawn for the Banff Festival of the Arts (photo by Scott Rowed).

Suppressing a youthful urge to become a painter, Schafer entered the Royal Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto in 1952 to study with Alberto Guerrero (piano), Greta Kraus (harpsichord), John Weinzweig (composition), and Arnold Walter (musicology). In view of Schafer's later proclivities, however, his casual contact with Marshall McLuhan at the university might be singled out as the strongest and most lasting influence on his intellectual development. Disillusioned by what he came to view as the confining atmosphere of the university, Schafer terminated his formal studies in 1955 and embarked upon an intensive autodidactic routine with an emphasis on languages, literature, and philosophy. The LRSM remains his only formal diploma.



The CBC recorded Schafer's Wolf music which he has performed for 15 years, in a forest for a select audience, but mostly for the ambiance of playing in the forest. So if a trumpet sounds in the forest do we hear music? The wolves do.

Wolf Music is not only a composition: it is an annual ritual music-drama involving sixty to seventy people over eight days, taking place on a lake in the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve. The composer and six professional musicians each lead small groups of people whose very presence are part of the performance. So, too, are the flora and fauna, the lake,the wind and even a passing jet. This description of the work could be very unappealing to those who are not attracted to ecologically-based spirituality, or those that feel this style of composition is passé. However, apart from Schafer's narrative (which, frankly, I could have done without) the listener is easily able to bypass the philosophy to get at the music, which is beautiful and imaginative.

R. Murray Schafer's environmental music drama, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon (1988- ), stands at the nexus between the lived experience of performance in the Canadian wilderness and Schafer's romantic idea of the North. A collaborative project involving 75 volunteer participants, the work takes place over an entire week each August in the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve near Ontario's Algonquin Park. It forms the epilogue to the composer's massive Patria series (1966- ). Simultaneously performers, creators and audience, the participants camp together as they enact Schafer's participatory and ritualistic theatre - a theatre specifically designed for performance in the Canadian wilderness.

When they camp and work together each summer, members of the Wolf Project participate in Schafer's idea of the North, his vision of a Canada reconciled to, and integrated with, its wilderness environment. They return from this liminal realm to their urban lives distinctly changed, no longer the uneasy inhabitants of a humanly undigestible wilderness.


My articles on music:

What's Opera Doc

Summer Solstice Give Or Take A Day

Thick as a Brick

Dion Sucked

Shaft

Trumpetlingus

Christy Moore Viva La Quince Brigada

Brown, Ford, Castro

The N Word

Hip Hop Gun Culture

John Lennon Working Class Hero

Revolutionary Music Flashback

Happy Birthday Mozart

Soul of a City

Before MTV

Nazanin

Happy Birthday Bob

Daniel Barenboim's Dream

Rich Man's War

Classical Rock

Ennio Morricone A Fistful of Composer

find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , ,, , , , , , , , ,

What's Opera Doc

A tribute to the Bugs Bunny Cartoon 'Whats Opera Doc' from the Toronto Star. Which makes the same point I did here in tribute to Chuck Jones. And see my post at the Carnival of Anarchy on Bugs the anarchist drag queen.


Elmer Fudd, left, and Bugs Bunny in a scene from Warner Bros.' What's Opera, Doc?

At any other time, the film would not have been made. Imagine the pitch: "Let's steal time and funding from our other projects so we can go way over budget making a cartoon with no jokes, and no real gags. The score will be a German opera. Kids won't get it. Most adults won't get it, but I don't care because I think it's funny."

Fortunately, the time was 1956, the director was Chuck Jones, and the place was the Warners Bros. backlot animation studio dubbed "Termite Terrace." The result – released 50 years ago this week – was "What's Opera, Doc?," voted by animators in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals to be the greatest cartoon of all time.

It is the antithesis of the routine cartoon. In place of snappy one-liners we see Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny singing their parts with complete sincerity and commitment. The backgrounds are beautifully textured paintings. The score is powerful and moving. Bugs cuts a striking figure in a metallic brassiere before Madonna was even born. It's audacious and decadent and beautiful and bold and everything the vast majority of cartoons would never dare to be.




Thanks to Bugs and folks like Chuck Jones we got a classical education on TV. Classical as in music, and opera. Masses of folks from the Forties through the Seventies, experienced these cartoons on the big screen and then on the little screen and were introduced to Wagner, Rossini, Verdi, Mozart etc.

The fact that all these composers were the popular music of their day gets forgotten by those who would make classical music some form of 'long haired' intellectual haute culture. Thanks to Bugs and his creators we came to see and hear the music in a pop culture format.

Which is just a sneaky way to promote the fact that this week we are discussing libertarian education on the Carnival of Anarchy.






Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, April 30, 2007

Tax Time and Walpurgisnacht


There is something sinister about the Canadian Tax system. It is declared that we must file taxes by Midnight April 30. This is Walpurgisnacht, or night of the witches, the ancient pagan festival of fire; Beltane, and consumption of the last of the salted meat from harvest in celebration of the new life of spring.

Death and Taxes as they say. Leads to rebirth new life.

Walpurgisnacht,night of the witches the celebration of the end of darkness and the fire rituals of spring. We pays our taxes and hopes we gets some back from the tax man. A sacrifice, even if it is in coin, as the season demands.

Goethe and Mendelssohn express this Euroean pagan tradition in verse and song.
Mendelssohn's Choral arrangement is a modernist paenan to paganism. But damn we still must give unto Caesar; the real meaning of the festival of fools........

Mendelssohn’s Walpurgisnacht
Conductor :
Valérie Fayet
Walpurgis Night, based on a work by Goethe, celebrates the popular tradition which talks about pagan gatherings taking place on the “witches' mountain” during the night of May 1 st.
Mendelssohn's work is admirably clear, colourful and full of energy.

Die erste Walpurgisnacht Op. 60: So weit gebracht, dass wir bei Nacht
Listen
Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, cantata for chorus & orchestra, Op. 60 So weit gebracht, daß wir bei Nacht
Composed by Felix Mendelssohn
Performed by Chamber Orchestra Europe
Conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt

A period of travel and concert-giving introduced Mendelssohn to England, Scotland (1829) and Italy (1830-31); after return visits to Paris (1831) and London (1832, 1833) he took up a conducting post at Düsseldorf (1833-5), concentrating on Handel's oratorios. Among the chief products of this time were The Hebrides (first performed in London, 1832), the g Minor Piano Concerto, Die erste Walpurgisnacht, the Italian Symphony (1833, London)


6533 Mendelssohn: Walpurgisnacht

5. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: Ouverture: 1. Das schlechte 2. Der Ubergang zum Fruhling -
6. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: I Es lacht der Mai! -
7. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: II Konnt ihr so verwegen handeln? -
8. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: III Wer Opfer heut' zu bringen scheut -
9. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: IV Verteilt euch hier -
10. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: V Diese dumpfen Pfaffenchristen - Kommt mit Zacken und mit Gabeln -
11. Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, Op. 60: VII So weit gebracht - VIII Hilf, ach hilf mir, Kriegsgeselle - IX Die Flamme reinigt sich vom Rauch -
O+1+2.nwc:0: Overture
:1: Now may again
:2: Know ye not a deed so daring?
3+4.nwc :3: The man who flies
:4: Disperse, ye gallant men
5+6+7+8+9.nwc:5: Should our Christian foes assail us
:6: Come with torches brightly flashing
:7: Restrain'd by might
:8: Help, my comrades
:9: Unclouded now, the flame is bright


"...don't you think this could become a new kind of cantata?" Rituality, Authenticity and Staging in Mendelssohn’s Walpurgisnacht

Assuming a potential analogy between art and ritual, or between art and the interpretation of ritual as a Gesamtkunstwerk,
the question arises as to what degree boundaries or transitions between aesthetic presentation, staging and identification with ritual can be determined in art. This topic could be discussed in terms of reception-aesthetics, with the question of the participation of an implicit or exclusive audience in ritual or in art. On the other hand, the perspective of this question can also be developed, as in this article, in terms of production-aesthetics, using the model of a musical composition based on a preexisting literary text. In Goethe's and Mendelssohn's texts,' not only their cultic-religious rituality will be investigated, but also the problem of how far beyond the cultic subject the immanent formative principles of ritual in terms of music are effective. Although in his early ballad Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night) of 1799 Goethe distinguished the pagan Walpurgis night from the classical and romantic in both stages of Faust, in his own way Mendelssohn related these three forms of ritual directly to one another within one work.

Cantata - LoveToKnow 1911

In modern times the term cantata is applied almost exclusively to choral, as distinguished from solo vocal music. There has, perhaps, been only one kind of cantata since Bach which can be recognized as an art form and not as a mere title for works otherwise impossible to classify. It is just possible to recognize as a distinct artistic type that kind of early r9th-century cantata in which the chorus is the vehicle for music more lyric and songlike than the oratorio style, though at the same time not exclude ing the possibility of a brilliant climax in the shape of a light order of fugue. Beethoven's Glorreiche Augenblick is a brilliant "pot-boiler" in this style; Weber's Jubel Cantata is a typical specimen, and Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht is the classic.

The Jews seem fated to wanDer forever among other nations and be faced perpetually with minority status and a legitimate pressure to acculturate and assimilate. If one compares the ending of The Eternal Road to Felix Mendelssohn's setting of Goethe's Die erste Walpurgisnacht, one is struck by a vital difference. Mendelssohn, although bearing the most celebrated name in early nineteenth-century German-Jewish history, had been converted and become a devout Protestant. Nevertheless through his music he celebrated with empathy and pride the courageous resistance of the Druids to the siege on their traditions and beliefs laid by violent Christian attackers. In contrast, The Eternal Road ends much more ambiguously with a vague hope for a return to Zion among a defeated and divided community, bowing to a fate of perpetual exclusion, persecution, and powerlessness.


Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night

The Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700-1850
John Michael Cooper


Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night is a book about tolerance and acceptance in the face of cultural, political, and religious strife. Its point of departure is the Walpurgis Night. The Night, also known as Beltane or May Eve, was supposedly an annual witches' Sabbath that centered around the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains.
After exploring how a notoriously pagan celebration came to be named after the Christian missionary St. Walpurgis (ca. 710-79), John Michael Cooper discusses the Night's treatments in several closely interwoven works by Goethe and Mendelssohn. His book situates those works in their immediate personal and professional contexts, as well as among treatments by a wide array of other artists, philosophers, and political thinkers, including Voltaire, Lessing, Shelley, Heine, Delacroix, and Berlioz.
In an age of decisive political and religious conflict, Walpurgis Night became a heathen muse: a source of spiritual inspiration that was neither specifically Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim. And Mendelssohn's and Goethe's engagements with it offer new insights into its role in European cultural history, as well as into issues of political, religious, and social identity -- and the relations between cultural groups -- in today's world.


Among some of his (Goethe’s) most engaging/compelling musical experiences of his late maturity were the visits of Felix Mendelssohn, who was 12 years old in 1821 and had been introduced to Goethe personally in Weimar by his (Mendelssohn’s) teacher, Zelter. Further visits took place in 1822, 1825, and 1830. Goethe had Mendelssohn play for him and explain to him technical matters concerning music and music history. This relationship became one of tender devotion on the part of Goethe towards Mendelssohn: in 1822 Goethe said to Mendelssohn: “I am Saul and you are my David,” and in his last letter to Mendelssohn, Goethe began with “My dear son.” Mendelssohn dedicated his Piano Quartet in B minor, opus 3 to Goethe and composed music for “Die erste Walpurgisnacht” (1st version in 1832)…. Goethe was eager to hear instrumental music which was played by Reichardt, Kayser, Zelter, Eberwein, Hummel, Spohr, Beethoven, Baron Oliva, Szymanowska (female pianist), J. H. F. Schütz, and finally by Mendelssohn whom he repeatedly asked to play something for him.”]


Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht, one of his greatest cantatas, was based on Goethe's Faust, and on Goethe's personal interpretation of the scene (Grove Dictionary 146). Mendelssohn's friendship with the poet lasted for a great many years, up until Goethe's death in 1832.

The first Walpurgisnacht

The Ouverture represents the transition from the winter to spring. The beginning in A-Moll is overwritten with “the bad weather”, while with the idiom into the Dur variant approaching the Walpurgisnacht in spring is announced. It is described in the following, as the priests and Druiden of the Celts meet secretly in the inhospitable mountains of the resin, in order to address after old custom with fire their prayer to the all father of the sky and the earth. Since their rites are forbidden by the Christian gentlemen however, everything must happen in the secret one. With cheat and to linings the soldiers of the Christians were frightened in such a manner that the Celts in peace can celebrate their Walpurgisnacht.
There are two Walpurgisnächte in Goethe's work. Admits is above all that from that fist I, in which a typical Hexensabbat is sworn to in visionär grotesque way. On the other hand Goethe takes poem the first Walpurgisnacht a heidnisches victim celebration developed to 1799 in that during thunderstorm eight to the cause to confront two incompatible ways of thinking and being LV each other.
Whole 19. Through century the romantic composers let themselves fist be inspired again and again from the picture world of the I and fist II, while the first Walpurgisnacht remained almost unknown. Only Carl Friedrich Zelter, Goethe friend and musical advisor, have try, the poem tone. It kept full fifteen years it under its papers, before it took distance finally from a project, which exceeded its imagination.
That was introduced by Zelter at that time twelve-year-old boy Mendelssohn with around sixty years the older Olympier Goethe, whom time and fame had coined/shaped. By Beethoven and Schubert to judge, understood the old gentleman not much about music. In its youth he had heard some of the Mozarts' works, whose clarity and harmony it zollte still at the age attention and acknowledgment; and it found favours to feel with the citizen of Berlin miracle child from good family the aftereffect of those melodies in those the ideal of its own youth lived. It would be inaccurate to speak of a co-operation between Goethe and Mendelssohn. The first important piece, to which the poet energized the young musician, was the Ouvertüre sea silence and lucky travel, which arrived only in the year 1832, Goethe's death year, at the public performance. That Goethe would have known to appreciate a music, so clearly under Beethovens the influence is to be doubted. Just as little it the score of the first Walpurgisnacht would have probably behagt. The work, in which orchestras and voices verwoben closely into one another are, becomes not completely fair the central thought of the artist Philosphen. From its “Faible for witches” seduced, Mendelssohn stated little interest in the deeper meaning of the poem: the always-lasting conflict between the instinktiven natural forces on the one hand and the mental clarity of a thought world coined/shaped by the clearing-up on the other hand. With the primarily romantic treatment of the article it remains on the level of a descriptive poem and tears us in tumbles uncontrolled thunderstorm eight.
The 1831 completed first minute of the score experienced substantial changes, before she arrived to 1842 at the premiere. Goethe did not experience no more, which regulation to his verses assign became, whose Vertonung lends a fascinating juvenile fire to them. Mendelssohn proves here as genuine romantics. It uses a pallet of magnificent tone qualities, lets the horns from the supple fabric of the Streicher step out and gives to the Holzbläsern a most personal note. The choirs are from a Schlichtheit, which lends occasionally the serious character of a Volksliedes to them, while proper large airs are assigned to the soloist.
The whole wealth of the romantic opera is united in this musical illustration of a poem, which reminds at the Feenzauber of shakespearscher scenes. The choir of the Druiden (No. 6 of the score) is from an imaginativeness, which only the late Verdi in the last act of its Falstaff reaches again. The composer, at whom Goethe estimated the causing its own youth, somehow not completely up-to-date one, appears here surprisingly as one of the prophets of the music 19. Century. With deciveness it secures the transition from Beethoven to the large rhapsodies of Brahms.
Jean Francois Labie
(Translation: Ingrid trusting man)


G O E T H E ' S   P A G A N   P O E T R Y

Goethe, a genius with unmistakable Pagan sympathies,
excelled as a poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist,
philosopher and scientist (his works occupy 140
volumes!). Here are several of his Pagan poems,
including his ballade "The First Walpurgis-Night," in
which the Pagans score a Discordian victory over their
oppressors. (I'm sure Goethe now dwells happily among
the Pagan Gods.) The ballade has been set to music by
Mendelssohn (Die Erste Walpurgisnacht), which is quite
good, but not suitable for small group performance.
Perhaps the Muses will help some modern Pagan to
compose a version for contemporary witches' sabbats.
Although only the God (Allvater) is mentioned, I've
left Goethe's text unchanged; it's easy to substitute
"Mother" for some or all of the "Father"s if you like.
-- John Opsopaus


THE FIRST WALPURGIS-NIGHT
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A DRUID.

Sweet smiles the May!
The forest gay
From frost and ice is freed;
No snow is found,
Glad songs resound
Across the verdant mead.
Upon the height
The snow lies light,
Yet thither now we go,
There to extol our Father's name,
Whom we for ages know.
Amid the smoke shall gleam the flame;
Thus pure the heart will grow.

THE DRUIDS.

Amid the smoke shall gleam the flame;
Extol we now our Father's name,
Whom we for ages know!
Up, up, then, let us go!

ONE OF THE PEOPLE.

Would ye, then, so rashly act?
Would ye instant death attract?
Know ye not the cruel threats
Of the victors we obey?
Round about are placed their nets
In the sinful Heathen's way.
Ah! upon the lofty wall
Wife and children slaughter they;
And we all
Hasten to a certain fall.

CHORUS OF WOMEN.

Ay, upon the camp's high wall
All our children loved they slay.
Ah, what cruel victors they!
And we all
Hasten to a certain fall.

A DRUID.

Who fears to-day
His rites to pay,
Deserves his chains to wear.
The forest's free!
This wood take we,
And straight a pile prepare!
Yet in the wood
To stay 'tis good
By day till all is still,
With watchers all around us placed
Protecting you from ill.
With courage fresh, then, let us haste
Our duties to fulfil.

CHORUS OF WATCHERS.

Ye valiant watchers now divide
Your numbers through the forest wide,
And see that all is still,
While they their rites fulfil.

A WATCHER.

Let us in a cunning wise,
Yon dull Christian priests surprise!
With the devil of their talk
We'll those very priests confound.
Come with prong and come with fork,
Raise a wild and rattling sound
Through the livelong night, and prowl
All the rocky passes round.
Screech-owl, owl,
Join in chorus with our howl!

CHORUS OF WATCHERS.

Come with prong, and come with fork,
Like the devil of their talk,
And with wildly rattling sound,
Prowl the desert rocks around!
Screech owl, owl,
Join in chorus with our howl!

A DRUID.

This far 'tis right,
That we by night
Our Father's praises sing;
Yet when 'tis day,
To Thee we may
A heart unsullied bring.
'Tis true that now,
And often, Thou
Favorest the foe in fight.
As from the smoke is freed the blaze,
So let our faith burn bright!
And if they crush our olden ways,
Who e'er can crush Thy light?

A CHRISTIAN WATCHER.

Comrades, quick! your aid afford!
All the brood of hell's abroad:
See how their enchanted forms
Through and through with flames are glowing!
Dragon-women, men-wolf swarms,
On in quick succession going!
Let us, let us haste to fly!
Wilder yet the sounds are growing,
And the arch fiend roars on high;
From the ground
Hellish vapors rise around.

CHORUS OF CHRISTIAN WATCHERS.

Terrible enchanted forms,
Dragon-women, men-wolf swarms!
Wilder yet the sounds are growing!
See, the arch fiend comes, all-glowing!
From the ground
Hellish vapors rise around.

CHORUS OF DRUIDS

As from the smoke is freed the blaze,
So let our faith burn bright!
And if they crush our olden ways,
Whoe'er can crush Thy light?

[Bowring translation]


THE CONSECRATED SPOT

When in the dance of the Nymphs, in the
moonlight so holy assembled,
Mingle the Graces, down from Olympus in secret
descending,
Here doth the minstrel hide, and list to their
numbers enthralling,
Here doth he watch their silent dances'
mysterious measure.
[tr. Bowring]


[All selections from "The Poems of Goethe," New York:
John D. Williams, 1882.]

finis



The Romantic Mendelssohn: The Composition of Die erste Walpurgisnacht

JSTOR: The Music of To-Day

THE FAUST LEGEND IN MUSIC



SEE

Paganism


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , ,