A purple glow shines from afar, Golden now the bright day sinks, One by one the silver stars Awaken in the skies. And the Queen of the Day Bows her head and goes to sleep; One more greeting, now goodbye! No farewell! No departure!
Shadows cover the broad earth, Night lies on the meadows. Pray be still now, poor heart, That the day has wearied so! O appear, gently, mildly, Sweet image in my dreams. One more greeting, now goodbye! No farewell! No departure!
Ah, hot tears run down my cheeks; Now a feeling of bliss, Now a painful, fearful longing Is set to break my heart. Only dreams can restore That happiness too quickly vanished. One more greeting, now goodbye! No farewell! No departure!
When I gaze into the dusk, And the sun sets, I think of all the pain That I have endured. Ah, perhaps the morrow Will banish all cares. So be of good cheer! Goodbye! No farewell! No departure!
What Romantic themes can you identify in the text and in the music?
The cycle performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.
Read the texts and see facsimiles of the “Immortal Beloved” letters here.
Canadian composer James K. Wright composed a cycle of three songs based on the letters for voice and piano trio. The piece, Briefe an die unsterbliche Geliebte (Letters to the Immortal Beloved), was premiered in 2012, two hundred years after the date on Beethoven’s letters. Read Wright’s discussion of the background and process of his piece here.
Listen to it here.
Wright argues for the identity of Josephine von Daym as the Immortal Beloved (you will be familiar with her from the BBC Eroica film). What do you think? Other possibilities are listed here.
In 2018, in response to pushback against her longtime claims of Native American ancestry (including from President Trump, who refers to her mockingly as “Pocahontas”), Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren had her DNA tested, and made the results public. The test indicated that Warren had a Native American ancestor between six and ten generations ago.
However, according to Chuck Hoskin (above), the Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation (like other Native tribes, a sovereign nation within U.S. territory), this does not make Elizabeth Warren an Indian:
What does this argument have to do with our understanding of music — of American music in particular?
In 1892, famed Czech composer Antonín Dvořák came to America at the invitation of the wealthy arts patroness Jeannette Thurber (above) — who, by the way, was born not far from here, in Delhi, New York — to lead the new National Conservatory of Music in New York City. It was hoped that he would train young American composers to develop a national style of music. Soon after he arrived, Dvořák told the New YorkHerald newspaper:
In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source. The American musician understands these tunes and they move sentiment in him.
In another unprecedented move, Dvořák welcomed black and female composition students into his classes at the conservatory. Among his students were violinist and composer Will Marion Cook, who had studied with Brahms’s great friend Joseph Joachim in Berlin, and singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh.
“A Negro Sermon,” an art song by Cook.
“Lovely Dark and Lonely One,” an art song by Burleigh.
Harry T. Burleigh’s song “The Young Warrior,” a setting of a poem by James Weldon Johnson, was translated into Italian and sung by the Italian army as they marched into battle During World War I.
Mother, shed no mournful tears,
But gird me on my sword;
And give no utterance to thy fears,
But bless me with thy word.
The lines are drawn! The fight is on!
A cause is to be won!
Mother, look not so white and wan;
Give Godspeed to thy son.
Now let thine eyes my way pursue
Where’er my footsteps fare;
And when they lead beyond thy view,
Send after me a prayer.
But pray not to defend from harm,
Nor danger to dispel;
Pray, rather, that with steadfast arm
I fight the battle well.
Pray, mother of mine, that I always keep
My heart and purpose strong,
My sword unsullied and ready to leap
Unsheathed against the wrong.
While Dvořák’s Symphony no. 9 in in E minor, “From the New World” (written in New York City in 1893) was not actually based on spirituals, the famous second movement largo sounded like a spiritual, and later “became” a sort of spiritual, migrating from the concert hall to public (and private) spaces less formally rigid.
Dvořák’s great success in America inspired other composers to take note of, and advantage of, “Negro melodies.” In the early years of the twentieth century, white American and European composers came out with pieces with such titles as “Negro Folk Symphony” (William Dawson), “Rapsodie nègre” (French composer Francis Poulenc), and “Negro Suite” (Danish composer Thorvald Otterstrom).
The question one might ask about these composers and their work is one that will come up for us again and again in this class: were they writing these pieces in a spirit of fellowship with African-Americans? or in a spirit of opportunism, even of exploitation?
One of the strangest and most egregious examples of a white composer writing in the black style is John Powell’s “Rhapsodie Nègre.”
John Powell was a Virginia-born, Vienna-trained pianist and composer who promoted American folk music. In 1931, he founded a short-lived but influential Appalachian music festival in Virginia called the White Top Festival. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (standing, fourth from right) visited the festival in 1933.
John Powell was also an avowed white supremacist, and helped to draft Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924, also known as the “one-drop rule.” This law legally classified anyone who had any amount of African ancestry (even “one drop”) as black, and hence subject to segregation under Jim Crow.
In spite of the fact that Powell had drawn upon African-American folk music themes in his “Rhapsodie Nègre,” he sought to promote the idea that American folk music derived exclusively from “Anglo-Saxon” sources, an idea that was disputed even in his own time. The White Top Festival was a public attempt to showcase this controversial idea: in other words, he harnessed folk music in the service of his social-political agenda.
Can you think of other historical examples of the co-opting of culture in the service of politics?
Powell was by no means an outlier in his attempts to whitewash the African roots of traditional American music. Around the same time that he was giving lectures on the “Anglo-Saxon” derivation of Appalachian music, Henry Ford (yes, that Henry Ford), a virulent racist and anti-Semite, was spearheading a square dance revival, in the hopes of counteracting the pernicious influence of jazz. What Ford neglected, probably out of ignorance, was the fact that square dancing, like Appalachian music, has deep roots in African-American culture.
(Howard University students square dancing in 1949.)
When we think of American folk music, especially fiddle-and-banjo music from the region of Appalachia, we tend to think of it as white people’s music, as in this famous scene from the 1972 film Deliverance.
She is an artist of color who plays and records what she describes as “black non-black music” for mainly white audiences . . . a concert for the prisoners at Sing Sing . . . was the first time she’d played for a majority-black crowd . . . Giddens [says], “. .. I would like to see more people from my . . . community at the shows and in the know” . . . The prospect of gaining a wider, and blacker, audience is, one imagines, always an option for Giddens . . . But she has been unwilling to compromise her quest . . . to remind people that the music she plays is black music.
Black music like this:
And like this:
And this:
And all of this:
Rhiannon Giddens is not the only young black musician to focus on the traditions of American folk music.
Twenty-four-year-old banjo-and-fiddle player Jake Blount is dedicated to resurfacing old-time Americana music’s roots in Blackness.
Here is multi-instrumentalist Los Angeles native Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, who plays both country blues and Appalachian music, and even sometimes performs in the dress of a black Southern field hand.
Valerie June draws on Appalachian, bluegrass, and blues traditions in her music:
The New York City-based old-time string band The Ebony Hillbillies:
Toronto-born Kaia Kater:
As we think about and explore ideas of authenticity in American music, we would do well to remember that the DNA of American music in all of its genres has a great deal more than one drop of African ancestry.
Appendix A: Read this article and watch this brief video documentary about the residents of an Appalachian town who identify as black, although they appear white.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some African-American composers working in classical music chose to compose in the standard forms of the European classical music traditions. William Grant Still, for instance, known as the “Dean of African-American Composers,” could be considered an “internationalist.” Among many other works, Still wrote five symphonies — the large-scale, multi-movement orchestral form that dominated eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European musical output. Nevertheless, Still infused much of his formal orchestral writing with what we might call “nationalist” feeling.
His 1937 Symphony no. 2 in G minor, for instance, is subtitled “Song of a New Race,” and uses black folk themes as melodic and rhythmic material. The second movement is marked “Slowly and deeply expressive.”
Does it remind you in any way of the second movement of Dvořák’s Symphony no. 9 in E minor, “From the New World”?
Still’s 1956 concerto for harp and piano is called Ennanga, which is the name of a small Ugandan harp. Again, the piece combines internationalist form and nationalist themes.
W.E.B. DuBois’s second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, was also a composer.
Sadly, little of her music has been published or recorded. Here is a short piano piece. Does it sound nationalist or internationalist to you?
She was the first black woman composer to have an opera performed, Tom-Tom,which was staged at the Cleveland Stadium before an audience of 25,000 in 1932. Tom-Tom’s subject matter is the history of the black experience in America from enslavement onwards. The score was thought to be lost, but in 2018 the unpublished manuscript was found in Ms. Du Bois’s papers by a Harvard undergraduate.
A great deal of belated attention has been given lately to the heretofore almost forgotten composer Florence Price (1887-1953), the first African-American woman to have a composition performed by a major orchestra. In 2009 a collection of scores by Price was found in a dilapidated old house in St. Anne, Illinois that was undergoing renovation, and the music world responded with overdue excitement.
Price’s Symphony no. 1 in E minor:
An art song by Price, “At the Feet o’ Jesus.” Note that Price is using the internationalist form of the art song/lied, and, like the great nineteenth-century lieder composers, set an existing poem by a great poet, in this case Langston Hughes. Again, she negotiates the boundary between nationalist and internationalist forms, and between high art and folk art: the song sounds like a folk spiritual, after all, and yet it’s a new composition to a poem by a major poet — a poem that Hughes wrote in African-American Vernacular English, no doubt in the same spirit as Florence Price’s composition.
At the feet o’ Jesus, Sorrow like a sea. Lordy, let yo’ mercy Come driftin’ down on me.
At the feet o’ Jesus At yo’ feet I stand. O, ma little Jesus, Please reach out yo’ hand.
Another Price/Hughes collaboration, “Song to the Dark Virgin”:
I
Would That I were a jewel, A shattered jewel, That all my shining brilliants Might fall at thy feet, Thou dark one.
II
Would That I were a garment, A shimmering, silken garment, That all my folds Might wrap about thy body, Absorb thy body, Hold and hide thy body, Thou dark one.
III
Would That I were a flame, But one sharp, leaping flame To annihilate thy body, Thou dark one.
In 1933, pianist and composer Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), above, was the first black woman to perform with the Chicago Symphony, in the same concert at which Price became the first black woman to have a work performed by a major orchestra.
Bonds was also a composer; one of her best-known works is “Troubled Water,” a piano piece that draws on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”
Bonds also collaborated with Langston Hughes on many art songs.
Because my mouth Is wide with laughter And my throat Is deep with song, You do not think I suffer after I have held my pain So long?
Because my mouth Is wide with laughter, You do not hear My inner cry? Because my feet Are gay with dancing, You do not know I die?
Discussion assignment:
Self-described queer Lebanese Nebal Maysaud believes that “It’s Time To Let Classical Music Die” in order to liberate composers of color. Read the article and the comments, and start a discussion in the comments box here, in which you address the following questions:
How do Nebal Maysaud, in this essay, and Kira Thurman, in this one (which you’ve read already), differ in their ideas about classical music and communities of color?
Do you agree with Maysaud that classical music must die in order to liberate composers of color? Why or why not?
Do you believe that western/classical art music traditions offer meaningful pathways of self-expression for composers, musicians, and audiences of color? Why or why not?
Include at least one example of classical music by a black composer as a source for your argument. Describe the piece — you don’t have to use technical musical language! What does it sound like? Does it “sound black”? Is it nationalist (i.e., drawing on African-American folk or popular music styles) or internationalist (i.e., sounds like “generic” classical music)?
W.E.B. Du Bois (above), who spent several years studying in Germany in the 1890s, greatly admired German classical music, and considered it a repertoire full of freedom and possibility for black performers. He especially loved the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and in 1936 he made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the opera house in Bavaria where a festival of Wagner’s operas is put on every year. By this time, it was widely known that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer: here is Hitler at the 1934 Bayreuth festival.
Inspired by Du Bois, and by the remarks made by historian Kira Thurman (above) in the “Studying the Lied” colloquy in the Summer 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, here is a playlist of most of the singers mentioned by Thurman, singing German repertoire. Read a transcription of the colloquy here.
A live recording of the African-American baritone Aubrey Pankey from 1941 (starts at around 15:00; I couldn’t figure out how to cue the audio, so you may need to listen to a violin sonata by Paul Hindemith first).
I may be old-fashioned, but I like to think that I am a better singer for having learned to plow a straight furrow when I was a boy in the [Georgia] Flatwoods.
Back in the United States on tour, however, Hayes was brutally beaten by a white shoe store clerk in Atlanta when his wife and daughter sat in the “whites only” area of the store. Langston Hughes wrote a poem about the incident, which he later re-titled “A Warning”:
Roland Hayes Beaten (Georgia, 1942)
Negroes, Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind: Beware the day They change their minds!
In the cotton fields, Gentle breeze: Beware the hour It uproots trees!
Ellabelle Davis:
Kenneth Spencer:
Leontyne Price:
Simon Estes:
William Warfield:
Grace Bumbry:
Reri Grist:
Kathleen Battle:
The late, great Jessye Norman, who, in the tradition of Roland Hayes, devoted her artistic life to German music:
Why do you think Black American singers would have found a particular kind of artistic and personal freedom in German classical music?
Young Black singers of our own time: here, South African soprano Pretty Yende improvises in Zulu, her native language, in a spoken monologue in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment at the Metropolitan Opera:
Schubert’s room, as drawn by his friend Moritz von Schwind, 1821.
Franz Schubert at age 16.
Franz von Schober.
The Austrian poet Franz von Schober (1796-1882) was evidently the driving force behind the Schubertiades, the semi-private salon gatherings at which Franz Schubert premiered many of his Lieder. Schober was in fact such a close friend of Schubert’s that together they were known as “Schobert” among their circle of friends, a mashup of their names à la Javanka or Brangelina.
Schubert’s setting of Schober’s poem “An die Music” (To Music) has become one of his best-loved Lieder. In the text, the poet addresses music as an allegorical figure of healing:
You, noble Art, in how many grey hours, When life’s mad tumult wraps around me,
Have you kindled my heart to warm love, Have you transported me into a better world, Transported into a better world!
Often has a sigh flowing out from your harp, A sweet, divine harmony from you
Unlocked to me the heaven of better times, You, noble Art, I thank you for it, You, noble Art, I thank you!
The theme of Death and the Maiden comes from the Middle Ages, where the visual motif of the danse macabre or Totentanz (the dance of death) was a popular decoration in painting and architecture. The danse macabre usually shows the allegorical figure of Death leading an unsuspecting group of the living in a round dance which ends in the grave or with a plunge from a cliff. The dancers generally include all ages and social classes, showing the universality and inevitability of death. Here, Death compels a prince and a bishop to dance.
The sub-allegory of Death and the Maiden adds an erotic element:
Schubert wrote a Lied called “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” to a poem by Matthias Claudius. In translation:
The Maiden:
Pass me by! Oh, pass me by!
Go, fierce man of bones!
I am still young! Go, dear,
And do not touch me.
And do not touch me.
Death:
Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!
I am a friend, and come not to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,
Softly shall you sleep in my arms!
Later, he used the Lied as the basis for an entire string quartet:
Why do you think he was so interested in this theme?
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1830).
Words and images you will encounter over and over again in the Lieder of the Romantic era: night, dark, moon, dream — in German, Nacht,dunkel, Mond, Traum (German nouns are capitalized).
Think of the thick, dark (dunkel), overgrown forests in which so many of the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm take place, and recall that the Brothers Grimm were philologists (linguists) as well as folklore collectors. The brothers’ other great project, in addition to their folktale collecting, was the publication of what is still today the most comprehensive German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch.
In his song “Mondnacht” (Moonlit Night), notice how Schumann begins with a feeling of indeterminacy in the piano, and how, when the voice enters, it appears to be singing just a fragment of a melody. The poem is by Joseph von Eichendorff.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a traveling robe on a trip to Italy.
In 1795, Goethe published his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), a Bildungsroman (novel concerned with the growth of the individual human spirit) about a young merchant who, dissatisfied with his life in business, goes off to join a group of traveling street performers. He meets Mignon in their midst, a vulnerable and melancholy young singer and actress with a shadowy past. Goethe gives Mignon several memorable songs, written in verse, to sing in the course of the novel’s narrative. These few verses in a now largely-forgotten novel would become generate some of the greatest Lieder of the nineteenth century.
Mignon by Dutch artist Ary Scheffer, 1836.
Mignon, it is eventually revealed, is the product of an incestuous union between a brother and sister who had not been raised together and met later in life. She has been kidnapped from Italy and taken to wander the German-speaking lands with the other performers. She is in early adolescence, androgynous (other characters in the novel don’t know at first whether she’s a boy or girl), a creature seemingly on the threshold of this world, who longs for another one.
Mignon’s song “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (Only he who knows longing) was set to music hundreds of times, both in German and in various translations, throughout the nineteenth century. Here are several settings.
Schubert:
Schubert again:
Schubert again, in a setting for Männerchor:
Beethoven:
Schumann:
Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel:
Which of these do you think best expresses Sehnsucht?
“Oh, Susannah” was written for a blackface minstrel troupe, the Ethiopian Serenaders.But the song used to be sung by most American schoolchildren. Here is the Canadian folk ensemble The Be Good Tanyas’ version.
What about this, more in the original context?
We’ll be discussing these things at length this semester.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a traveling robe on a trip to Italy.
