Legacy

Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (1873-1916) was born in northern Bavaria at the end of the nineteenth century. He was widely known for his skill as an organist, conductor, and composer. The apogee of his career came in 1911 with his appointment as director of the Meiningen Court Orchestra. He died of a heart attack on May 11, 1916 while visiting Leipzig. The printer’s proofs of the Acht Geistliche Gesänge were found open at his bedside in the room where he passed away. 

Reger took all of the texts for the Acht Geistliche Gesänge from the Deutsche Psalter, edited by Will Vesper and published in 1913. Vesper’s anthology contains non-denominational religious poetry selected for what Vesper perceived as an essential, enduring Germanic character. Reger’s religious sensibilities – he was excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his marriage to a divorced Protestant – along with the start of the First World War in July 1914 likely influenced this ecumenical and nationalistic composition. J.S. Bach’s pristine chorale writing was another influence, as Reger edited several works of Bach’s while drafting the Acht Geistliche Gesänge. In contrast with his other, often highly chromatic later works, Reger wrote the Acht Geistliche Gesänge with clear melodic and harmonic restraint to convey a sense of interior piety, complimenting the religious texts he selected. 

See notes for first movement.

Amy Beach (1867-1944) lived, wrote, and performed in New England for most of her life. Her music was often inspired by the natural world around her, especially the natural world as she found it at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in New Hampshire where she spent several summers. Many of her choral and vocal works were set to contemporary poetry, including this piece, which takes its text from William Lisle Bowles’s epic “The Grave of the Last Saxon.” Originally composed for children’s chorus, Beach arranged this piece for SATB voices in 1925. 

The Greenwood begins with a joyful depiction of a springtime walk through a meadow, and an appreciation of the beauty of nature together with a loved one. In the second part, the same musical theme returns in minor. The text here laments the change of season, bringing loss and deception. The end of the piece reverts to the original key, and brings with it the recognition that memories of spring and summer bring comfort and peace even in a time of sorrow.

See notes for first movement.

Much of Beach’s music was composed for instruments, including works for piano, orchestra, and chamber ensembles. Her choral and vocal music is less well-known. Dusk in June is a particularly clear illustration of this. Composed for upper voices in 1917 to the poetry of Beach’s contemporary Sara Teasdale, the piece was later arranged for French horn, and is more commonly performed in that form. Dusk in June features heavy chromatic harmonies, and the text uses images from the natural world to express the sense that one lacks a joy or calm that others seem to find easily, and the longing to experience these feelings. The mood of the piece may have been influenced by Beach’s relationship with her aunt Ethel, who came to live with her in New Hampshire in 1916, and died of a terminal illness in 1918. 

The four voices intertwine and create dense harmonies and prolonged resolutions that leave the listener with the same feeling of longing expressed in the poetry. The first section ends with a nod towards a positive certainty, but the upper three voices bring back the opening theme, rocking the piece anxiously back towards uncertainty. The climax of the piece is a plea from the speaker to “like the birds, sing before night,” a hopeful prayer which the final bars suggest may be granted.

See notes for first movement.

R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) was a Black Canadian-American composer, pianist, and educator, considered one of the leading American composers of his time. Most of his works incorporate Black folk melodies into western classical forms. Gently, Lord, O Gently Lead Us is a perfect example. While the composition’s structure and harmony are based on classical models, its themes are taken from a Bahamian spiritual originally sung at funerals. Dett lowers the original melody by a third and doubles all rhythmic values.

Even before Dett published Gently, Lord in 1924, its melodic source (“Dig my grave long an’ narrow”) drew attention from musicologist and critic Henry Krehbiel—remarkable at a time when Black art was more frequently discouraged or ignored. In a 1914 review, Krehbiel described the melody as “fairly Schumannesque in breadth and dignity.” Dett’s setting of the piece, which replaces the Bahamian text with the words of a hymn by Thomas Hastings, is written in a traditional rounded binary (ABA’) form in which the repeated A section is modified slightly. In this case, it accommodates the coda, set simply to the word “amen” as the basses create a pedaltone on a low F.

See notes for first movement.

When the Last Sea is Sailed is one of just eight pieces that Beach wrote for tenors and basses (compared to her output of over 150 pieces). The author of the piece’s text, John Masefield, was known for his depictions of life at sea, having spent several years in the British merchant marine in his youth. He published his first collection of poetry, Salt-Water Ballads, in 1902. These ballads include one of his most famous poems, “Sea-Fever,” as well as “D’Avalos’ Prayer,” which Beach sets in this piece. The poem is likely written from the perspective of the titular speaker, Alfonso d'Avalos, a naval captain and prisoner of war during the 1528 Battle of d'Orso.

Beach sets Masefield’s text with two markedly different sections in rounded binary (ABA’) form. The A section of the piece begins with a solemn tone, with the speaker resolved to his nearing end. Suddenly, the piece shifts to a quicker compound meter as the speaker describes a raging storm. The piece ends in a return to the original music, with an extended coda and a final prayer for God’s grace.

This motet is one of Beach’s earliest pieces for choir, published in 1903. Help Us, O God requires both sensitivity and stamina from the choir, with expansive vocal ranges matched by a demand for refined musicianship. For this piece, Beach selected verses from the Book of Psalms (Psalms 79:5, 9; 95:6; 44:26) around themes of repentance, divine justice, and deliverance. The composition’s musical ambition is well suited to the gravity of its text.

Beach opens the first of three parts with a dense polyphonic texture, leading the choir along dramatic dynamic and melodic contours. The second part gives way to a calmer trio of upper voices. Beach’s affinity for close harmony is especially clear in this middle section, as the trio make use of and play off of each other’s melodic lines. The textural change also brings about a textual shift, with an invitation to worship and kneel before God. In the third and final part, Beach introduces a five-voice fugue. The altos lead the other parts, which follow in turn and explore the fugal subject’s melodic dimensions. Finally, all voices join together in a climactic, homophonic end to this masterful work.

See notes for first movement.

See notes for first movement.

While the first of Dett’s pieces on our program borrows and modifies the melody and text of a Bahamian spiritual, O Holy Lord takes both melody and text without substantial alteration from a call-and-response Black American spiritual. Dett drew the original melody from The Story of the Jubilee Singers, a biographical history of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers which includes a large collection of the repertoire they performed as they toured across the country. This melody is thus preserved secondarily in Dett's piece we are singing tonight, and first in the written repertoire of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

O Holy Lord—one of Dett’s only pieces for 8-part choir—begins with the tenors and basses in four parts, slowly building to add the altos in unison, who then split when the sopranos enter together. When writing the modified call-and-response verses from the original spiritual, Dett invokes the six-winged seraphs, using the first entrance of upper voices to sing “holy, holy, holy” in place of new verse text. This is then followed by the “done with sin and sorrow” response found in the original verses. Fittingly, the first time the choir opens up to a widened eight-part texture is to sing the second iteration of “holy, holy, holy.” The original text is literally about being set free from sin by Jesus’s resurrection, and metaphorically a celebration of the eventual liberation of the enslaved people who likely first sang this melody. Given that Dett published this setting of the piece in 1916, it’s not impossible to imagine that, though the original meaning of the phrase “sin and sorrow” surely rang true for Dett, the ongoing First World War may have added another layer of meaning to the piece for him and for singers and audiences who performed or listened to it at the time.

See notes for first movement.

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was one of the foremost pianists and composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born in Russia, and lived there and in Germany until the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917. He spent the rest of his life touring as a concert pianist, with residences in Switzerland and the United States. 

Rachmaninoff’s opus 37, the All-Night Vigil, premiered in March of 1915 at a benefit concert for war relief. He wrote the entire fifteen-movement composition in less than two weeks from January to February 1915. The All-Night Vigil is widely regarded as the finest example of Russian sacred music and the culmination of decades of choral excellence in and around the Moscow Synodal School, the center of Orthodox church music in Tsarist Russia. Rachmaninoff selected texts for his composition from the Orthodox all-night vigil service, which comprises prayers to be said at certain times of day designated Vespers, Matins, and Prime. Rachmaninoff’s setting of the morning office, Matins, begins with movement seven of the All-Night Vigil. In the Shestopsalmiye or Six Psalms, the choir imitates the bells rung during this service while chanting “Glory to God in the highest.”