The Theatre
Saturday, October 16th, 2021
THE PROGRAM
Jean Marie Leclair, Overture I, Opus 13
George Frideric Handel, Music for The Alchemist
Henry Purcell, Songs and tunes for the Theater
Georg Philipp Telemann, Don Quixote
THE ARTISTS
Pascale Beaudin, soprano
Olivier Brault & Evan Few, violin
Kyle Miller, viola
Loretta O’Sullivan, cello
Scott Pauley, lute and guitar
Andrew Appel, harpsichord
Recently I watched Stage Door, the Hollywood depiction of life in a rooming house for young actresses in New York City. At the conclusion, we are in a Broadway theater and Katherine Hepburn delivers her “the Calla Lilies are in bloom…” speech. Just before the curtain rises on the play we see and hear a large orchestra playing an overture. This reminds us that all theater (movies as well) included music, whether integral to the play or simply as an embellishment to the evening. Our program presents music written with the “legit” theater in mind. But, allow me a short digression.
The 18th century saw the birth of the public concert both in Paris and in London. There had been taverns with music (where Handel and Bononcini played), and German collegiums where music-loving students gathered to play in and listen to new music and where Telemann and Bach presented their own compositions as well as those of others who they admired. But the institution of a commercial venture in which subscriptions and ticket sales were imperative for the success of the business of public music, and in which entrepreneurs organized the appearance of internationally renowned virtuoso performers and composers was born in the 1720’s Paris with Les Concerts Spirituels and in London with J.C. Bach and C. F. Abel’s concert series in the Carlisle House music room (1765-1782).
Here music performance became theater. No longer the refined delectation of a selected elite in a private salon, the audience was diverse and the taste was far-reaching. Refined expression be gone! Volatile emotion and astounding virtuosity sold seats. Couperin’s statement of artistic values “I prefer that which touches me to that which surprises me” is replaced by the painter Girodet’s “I prefer the bizarre to the insipid.”
Let us just imagine two scenarios. First, the young Mozart leads fine musicians of the resident orchestra in 1773 Paris in his “little” G minor symphony. The tempestuous music, disturbing rather than reassuring, brings to the audience’s ears a theater in a sound similar to a Schiller play. These emotional affects and images have no place in the salon but almost define the contemporary heroic and tragic theater. Second and similarly, yet some decades earlier, in the same concert hall, Leclair takes center stage and unleashes a kaleidoscope of violin tricks to beguile the ear and capture the imagination. If this were not theater, it would be heard as vulgar. Everything is all “too.” Too exciting, too difficult, too lyrical, too sensual. Music and theater collide in Leclair’s overtures, concertos, and sonatas. In fact, this G major work is a transcription of the overture to his opera, Scylla and Glaucus.
We should recognize whenever we ask an audience to forget the reality of their lives and the demands of their moment and to focus on either a Chopin nocturne or Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, that we are creating and experiencing theater.
In recent memory, theater and music were not so constantly aligned. We don’t expect or want musical interludes to embellish a night of Tennessee Williams or Ibsen on stage. Streetcar doesn’t desire a jazz band and A Doll’s House doesn’t need a piano. Yet many of us remember going to the movies and hearing an organ prelude before the feature. In the not too distant past, most theaters had in-house musicians to play overtures, curtain tunes, and incidental music when wanted. Racine in his most painful tragedies and Moliere in his most hilarious romps would not imagine a performance without the inclusion of music.
For an early 18th century production of Ben Jonson’s comedy, The Alchemist a hack composer gathered and organized a set of pieces from Handel’s previously mounted opera Rodrigo. The demands for music at the theater inspired easy piracy in a time before intellectual property protections. Few cared about such integrity and the audience enjoyed this attractive suite of overture and dances reminiscent of movements from the Water Music. How do they relate to the play? How do they enhance the production? I think we might compare the role of these dances to that of delicious hors d’oeuvres served at a cocktail party. Our attention is focused on conversations yet the food adds a secondary level of pleasure to the evening. So these dances stolen from Handel heard between scenes, enliven the time and enhance the laughter we enjoy from the comedy at hand.
Handel’s great theater skills are found in his oratorios. Here, the miracles of the Old Testament are rendered into musical theater, invisible to the eye but potent in the mind. He is charged with creating a world of exciting images and drama in our ears from the magical stories of a shared ancient mythology.
Purcell was a man of the spoken theater working with Congreve and virtually all the important Restoration authors. Unlike Handel’s stolen pieces incorporated into the Jonson play, Purcell integrates and molds his music to the themes and feelings of the play. They are indispensable and often make for the most powerfully expressive art of the evening. His songs clarify the personalities of each character more effectively than words can possibly accomplish. Take Music for A While as an example. It is difficult to hear beyond the pure beauty of the work. Sung in recital by fine sopranos, it can satisfy as a vessel for beautiful vocalism and melody. But this evades its true power. This is a song of torture, sung by a demon and used to magnify despair. The repeating figure in the accompaniment is a ticking clock in which the passing of time will only bring the fulfillment of Oedipus’ tragedy. Each passing second brings him closer to catastrophe. The images of snakes dropping and endless bondage are not pretty. They remind us that there is no end to misery and that music will not bring relief even if the opening and repeated line is “Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.”
Purcell wrote countless songs for the theater. Like George Gershwin, he sets the English language to music in the most natural way, marrying poetry with melody, and making the meaning of the text and the expression of tones work together to move us in a way only found at the theater. If a theater songwriter must be able to cobble tunes that live in our minds, then think of On the Street Where You Live and If Love’s a Sweet Passion.
Purcell’s last work for the theater was Don Quixote. Cervantes' seminal work, the first novel, the first Baroque literary masterpiece, attracted the affection and attention of every artist in every country in which it was translated. There exist paintings, tapestries, fabrics on chairs, cantatas and operas, essays, ballets, and Broadway shows that were inspired by the delusional knight, his earthy sidekick, and his object of desire. Telemann at the end of his life composed two works of Don Quixote, a serenade-comic opera based on a chapter in the novel and, a few years later, an instrumental suite of musical images illustrating a day in the life of the hero. The comic opera reminds us of Telemann’s colleague and friend, Bach, and his Coffee Cantata. It also gives us an important example of German musical theater when Italian opera was all-powerful in the north of Europe. As fine as that piece might be, the instrumental entertainment of an overture and six descriptive scenes show Telemann at his impressive, entertaining best. Here he is a master of the picturesque and of humor. And Telemann’s balance of wit and sentiment is so remarkable and so characteristic that for our concert of music for the theater, we have decided to send you off into the evening accompanied by an old horse and a mule with their riders.
Andrew Appel
October 11, 2021
Hillsdale, NY