Immortal Belated

1. Hallelujah - Christ on the Mount of Olives (Beethoven, Ludwig)
2. Egmont Overture (Beethoven, Ludwig)
3. Creation’s Hymn (Beethoven, Ludwig)
4. A Silence Haunts Me (Runestad, Jake)
5. Choral Fantasy (Beethoven, Ludwig)

Program Notes — Griffin Choral Arts concert, 24 March 2022 –Immortal Belated

The title of tonight’s concert—Immortal Belated—is at least a double pun. The concert is “belated” in observing the immortal musical genius of Ludwig van Beethoven, whose 250th birth anniversary was in December 2020. But celebrating that anniversary was made impossible by the Covid pandemic. Thus, Season Fifteen of Griffin Choral Arts continues to reflect upon the local challenges met and overcome by the past two years of social and cultural isolation, beginning with the season-opening concert, The Sun Also Rises, which featured music of re-emergence and hope.

The phrase “Immortal Belated” also alludes to the epithet “Immortal Beloved,” a mystery woman Beethoven mentioned in his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter he wrote in 1802 while staying at an inn located in the central German town of that name and which he gave in sealed form to his brothers to open upon his death in 1827. In this letter (which also functions as his will) he laments his tragic hearing loss, which most likely began in his late teen years but increased until becoming total by 1819. The letter importantly also addresses his “Immortal Beloved” as the other great influence upon his life. The term “Immortal Beloved” further echoes as the title of a controversial 1994 feature film that depicts in heavily Freudian terms the search for the identity of Beethoven’s “Beloved.”

Beethoven’s own immortality has never been in doubt. Unlike many other composers, he was immensely popular in his own time, even from the publication of his first works. Worldwide, his name has become synonymous with “classical music” and with the stereotype of the tormented genius. Both his famous tunes and his facial image have become deeply ensconced in pop culture.

Another important theme running throughout GCA Season Fifteen is that of collaboration—in the case of tonight’s concert the renewed collaboration begun in October 2015 with the Carrollton Symphony and its pianist-music director Terry Lowry. Still further welcome collaboration is with the Griffin Area Arts Association, which co-sponsors the event.

“Hallelujah,” from Christ on the Mount of Olives, Op. 85

Christus am Őlberge is Beethoven’s only oratorio (the musical form popularized by Handel’s Messiah). He claimed to have composed it in less than three weeks, starting in the fall of 1802 (the same year he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament), with its first performance in Vienna in 1803. The vocal drama portrays Christ’s agonies in the Garden of Gethsemane. Beethoven assisted the poet Franz Xaver Huber with the text, creating an even more humanistic portrayal of Christ than was common for this already most humanlike portrayal of this scene from the Passion Not wildly popular in its time (not even with Beethoven himself), the oratorio’s reputation now stands almost exclusively on the enduring appeal of its concluding “Hallelujah Chorus,” which has become a staple of the church choir repertoire. Tonight, the “holy songs of joy” clearly anticipate the Choral Fantasy concluding the concert.

Overture to Egmont, Op. 84

A man of his turn-of-the-19th-century Revolutionary time, Beethoven was attracted to the Romantic ideal of the Hero. His Third Symphony (1804) bore the subtitle “Eroica” for its original dedication to Napoleon, but Beethoven later deleted the dedication in anger at the Frenchman’s assuming the title of Emperor. The great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was not to publish a full version of Part One of his Faust until 1806 but had begun preliminary versions of the story as early as the mid-1770s, at about the same time he published his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, a popular model for the Suffering Romantic Hero. Thus, when in 1809 Beethoven was offered a chance to compose the overture and incidental music for Goethe’s 1787 play Egmont, he accepted partly out his admiration for the great literary champion of the Romantic Hero.

The historical figure described in the play is the 16th-century Flemish nobleman Lamoral, Count of Egmont, a Protestant leading the Dutch resistance to the oppressions of the Spanish Inquisition under Spanish King Charles V. When captured, Egmont is sentenced to death. Egmont’s lover Klärchen intercedes for him, but to no avail. Yet before his execution Egmont has a redemptive dream-vision in which he sees the triumph of freedom as an embodiment of the beloved Klärchen, in much the same fashion as Faust’s love-ideal Gretchen redeems him.

Even in the brief form of an overture, Beethoven’s music is almost symphonic in scope and impact, beginning with the dramatic fate-invoking opening movement, reminiscent of the Fifth Symphony of two years earlier. After a long silence in the music that may indicate Egmont’s execution, the orchestra immediately launches into one of the most exuberant, horns blazing, heroic finales in the orchestral repertoire, capped off by the triumphant sounds of freedom in the soaring piccolo riffs at the end. With uncanny prescience of today’s crisis in Ukraine, in 1955 the Egmont Overture served as the unofficial anthem inspiring the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet invasion.

“Creation’s Hymn”

Like the “Hallelujah” from Christ on the Mount of Olives, this familiar choral work is another staple of the church choir repertoire. Relatively little is known about this work except that it is the fourth in a series of six songs known as the Gellert Lieder by the German poet C. F. Gellert (1715-1769) that Beethoven also completed in the Heilgenstadt Testament year of 1802. (An earlier setting of the Gellert poem was by C. P. E. Bach.) The text is Gellert’s adaptation of Psalm 19, “The Heavens Declare the Glory of God.” Beethoven excerpts only two of Gellert’s six stanzas for the hymn and, revealingly, selects the passages that describe the Creator God as “ein Held’—a Hero.

A Silence Haunts Me Jake Runestad

The famously enigmatic address to his “Immortal Beloved” (in German, “Unsterbliche Geliebte,” more literally “Undying Beloved”) is the popularly romantic highlight of the Heiligenstadt Letter, as illustrated in the 1994 film and in the still ongoing scholarly speculation as to the identity of this mysterious woman.

Yet this romantic near-obsession tends to overshadow the truly tragic import of the Heiligenstadt Letter: its revelation of the agonies of Beethoven’s confrontation with the increasing deafness that threatens what quite possibly was his ultimate “Immortal Beloved”—his art.

Thus, it is fitting that tonight’s concert explores this crucial aspect of Beethoven’s soul in an extraordinary 2018 choral work by acclaimed young American composer Jake Runestad, based upon a text by American poet and librettist Todd Boss.

In addressing their profound subject matter, both Boss and Runestad create a soul-wrenching “testament” of their own, as witnessed by the extensive program notes provided in the prize-winning score. Key portions of these notes are so important that Runestad and Boss urge that they be read aloud to the audience just before the performance begins.

Further insights into the text are provided in the choral score by Todd Boss:

This loose adaptation of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous Heiligenstadt Testament was unusually difficult to write. . . . I was often in tears during the process. I myself was traveling alone, and as the process was uniquely intense, I was six years into the loss of everything I held dear, and so I inhabited Beethoven’s state of mind bodily, muscles quaking, unsettled for hours after each of the poem’s twelve major revisions.
I invented many things that don’t appear in Beethoven’s letter. The plea “Take my feeling, take my sight, etc.,” occurred to me as a way of declaiming the terrible agony of Beethoven’s loss, a momentary bargaining as happens as a stage of grief. Comparisons of his plight to that of the accursed Prometheus, Jake’s idea, are in reference to The Creatures of Prometheus, the ballet Beethoven finished a year prior to his sojourn at Heiligenstadt. A “bell” tolls at the end of the letter, and it might be he suddenly hears one, it might be his tinnitus, or it might be a figurative acknowledgment of a newfound hope.
The poem [reprinted in this program booklet] is set in italics against ragged margins to look like a letter. I’ve isolated the letter I wherever it appears, and further isolated nouns that refer to people (I, you, me, brothers, etc.) with nine spaces on either side to isolate them, in recognition of Beethoven’s isolation from himself and others, and in honor of his nine composed symphonies. No punctuation is utilized. All these odd typographical choices force the reader to read the poem with a halting brokenness [as an] attempt to relay the halting and broken frame of mind Beethoven must have been in when he wrote this very sad letter to his brothers.

Still further insight into this remarkable blending of text and music is provided in program notes by Dr. Jonathan Talberg, Director of Choral Activities at California State University Long Beach:
In 2017, Jake Runestad travelled to Leipzig, Germany, to be present at the premiere of Into the Light, an extended work for chorus and orchestra commissioned by Valparaiso University in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of . . . the Reformation. While traveling after the concert, Runestad found himself in the Haus der Musik Museum in Vienna, where he encountered a facsimile of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament.
It was the first time he had read the famous text, which is almost equal parts medical history (including Beethoven’s first admission to his brothers that he was going deaf), last will and testament, suicide note, letter of forgiveness, and prayer of hope. Runestad was flabbergasted and found himself thinking about Beethoven, about loss, and about the tragedy of one of the greatest musicians of all time losing his hearing. Beethoven put it this way: “Ah, how could I possibly admit an infinity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.”
When the American Choral Directors Association offered the Raymond W. Brock Commission to Runestad for the 2019 National Conference he took many months to settle on a topic, finally deciding on setting Beethoven’s words. While researching Beethoven’s output around the time of the letter, Runestad discovered that Beethoven wrote a ballet, Creatures of Prometheus, just a year before penning his testament. “Beethoven must have put himself into Prometheus’ mindset to embody the story,” Runestad noted. “Just as Prometheus gifted humankind with fire and was punished for eternity, so did Beethoven gift the fire of his music while fighting his deafness, an impending silence. What an absolutely devastating yet inspiring account of the power of the human spirit. In the moment of his loss—when he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament—he had no idea how profound his legacy would be” (“legacy” being one of the themes of the ACDA’s anniversary conference).
Because of the length of the letter, a verbatim setting was impractical; Runestad once again turned to his friend and frequent collaborator Todd Boss, to help. Boss’s poem . . .creates a scena—a monologue in Beethoven’s voice for choir. The poem is both familiar and intimate; Boss has taken the fundamentals of Beethoven’s letter and spun it into a libretto that places the reader/listener into the same small, rented room as one of the most towering figures of the Romantic Era.
To these words, Runestad has brought his full array of dramatic understanding and compositional skill; A Silence Haunts Me sounds more like a self-contained monologue from an opera than a traditional choral piece.; . . .{Runestad] sets the poetry with an intense, emotional directness and uses some of Beethoven’s own musical ideas to provide context. Stitched into the work are hints at familiar themes from the Moonlight Sonata, the 3rd, 6th, and 9th Symphonies, and Creatures of Prometheus, but they are, in Runestad’s words, “filtered through a hazy, frustrated, and defeated state of being.”
In wrestling with Beethoven, with legacy, and with loss, Runestad has done what he does best—written a score where the poetry creates the form, where the text drives the rhythm, where the melody supports the emotional content, and where the natural sounding vocal lines, arresting harmony, and idiomatic accompaniment—in this case, piano in honor of Beethoven—come together to offer the audience an original, engaging, thoughtful, and passionate work of choral art.

Faithful GCA concertgoers may also notice striking similarities to the highly original work by another prominent young choral composer/librettist team that anchored the season-opening concert in October: Ola Gjeilo’s Dreamweaver, with libretto by Anthony Silvestri. Both works are “internal epics,” beginning with similar “Hear me!’ calls for the listener’s attention and concluding–after struggle–in as much musical and emotional peace as their situations allow.

Fantasia (“Choral Fantasy”), Op. 80

Tonight’s closing work serves many of the same climactic purposes in the concert order as Beethoven had in mind for the premiere of the work on December 22, 1808, in the 1,200-seat (and unheated!) Theater of Vienna. He wanted the finale to unite the wide variety of previous works in the program but also to extend the overall impact of the night’s music into new realms, and to end the concert with virtuosic bravura.

Other works on the four-hour Vienna program were Symphonies 5 and 6, the Fourth Piano Concerto, an aria, two excerpts from his as-yet-unfinished Mass in C, and a solo piano improvisation–the true source of Beethoven’s fame at the time.

In retrospect, if we were to try to fit Beethoven’s music into a representative “time capsule,” we might very well end up with the contents of this program: perhaps the best and most tightly-constructed of his symphonies (the famous Fifth); his most programmatic symphony (the 6th), which also reflected his fondness for long walks finding inspiration in the nature; his large-form choral works (such as tonight’s Mount of Olives oratorio and his masses, including the Missa Solemnis), and solo piano improvisations.

In combining and extending this array, Beethoven purposely selects the form of the fantasia (in English, “fantasy”). From the Baroque period onward, the fantasia was known as a composition relatively free from pre-defined rules of music structure. The improvisatory nature of the fantasia even extended to the premiere concert, which was semi-improvised even beyond Beethoven’s legendary skills at improvisation. The concert was performed with very little prior rehearsal, and parts of the score for the Fantasy had still-wet ink, almost literally. This musical high-wire act resulted in a near-catastrophic breakdown in the Fantasy when Beethoven played a repeat passage but the orchestra moved on. After the concert, members of the orchestra vowed never to play under Beethoven again, but seem to have relented eventually, so great was Beethoven’s popularity.

What most audience members still today find most fascinating about the Fantasy is how similar the choral ending is to the later and more famous “Ode to Joy” which forms the climax of Beethoven’s titanic Ninth Symphony. The melodies are quite similar, though the texts differ (an unknown poet for the Fantasy’s chorus and the ‘Ode to Joy” text by the great German Romantic poet/playwright Friedrich Schiller). Both choral melodies are of Beethoven’s invention: the first melody from Beethoven’s 1795 song “Gegenliebe” (“Mutual Love”), with the more famous latter melody perfecting the earlier tune in grander musical and philosophical context.

The “Choral Fantasy”—even before the Ninth Symphony—thus presents a revealing irony: the composer credited as being the first to “liberate” musical form and structure from the dictates of the sung melodic line becomes the first to invite choral song “back” into the larger musical texture, in democratic fashion as an equal partner in that astonishing community.

Program notes by Bill Pasch © 2022, except where indebted to program notes from the Runestad/Boss score for “A Silence Haunts Me” and to commentaries by Herbert Glass and Christopher Breuning in other sources.

Terry Lowry, pianist

CARROLL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Violin I
Edward Eanes
Robert Givens
Jason Economides
Patti Baser
Kirsten Browning

Violin II
Jessica Stinson
Chuck Gunsaullus
Martha Yasuda
Perry Wetmoreland
Alison Mueller

Viola
Joe Lester
Samantha Lester
Teri Abler
Michelle Volz

Cello
David Lloyd
Alexandria Haines
Tara Suswal

Bass
Eric hanson
Bob Goin

Flute
Candace Keach
Sarah Ambrose

Oboe
Lisa Sayre
Pam Holloway

Clarinet
Christopher Mothersole
Jonathan Goodin

Bassoon
Nib McKinnon
Eryn Oft

French Horn
Ellie Jenkins
Keelan Lovvorn

Trumpet
Paul Lowry
David Trumble

Timpani
Todd Mueller

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