PROGRAM NOTES
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Sir Arthur SULLIVAN
(1842-1900)
Overture to “The Gondoliers”
English composer Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900) was known in his own time for his serious music as well as for his comic opera affiliation with W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911). Sullivan’s father, Thomas, was an Army Bandmaster who was anything but eager to have his son follow him as a musician. When he discovered that his eight-year-old son was quite familiar with every instrument available to him, he allowed his talent to blossom. The younger Sullivan soon joined the choir of the Chapel Royal, and, at age 14, won the Mendelssohn Scholarship at the Royal Academy. In 1858, he went to study in Leipzig, where his teachers included Ignaz Moscheles and Julius Rietz. By 1861, Sullivan began to make an impact on the London music scene. His music to Shakespeare's The Tempest was performed at the Crystal Palace winter concerts in 1862 and he became the organist at Covent Garden in 1864. While Sullivan is principally known today for his partnership with W.S. Gilbert, he was active in other compositional forms throughout his career. Sullivan was acclaimed for his oratorios, including The Prodigal Son, and hymns, of which Onward, Christian Soldiers remains particularly popular. In 1883, Queen Victoria rewarded Sullivan for his contributions to English music with a knighthood. Sullivan never married but did carry on a discreet relationship with Mary Frances (Fanny) Ronalds (1839-1916), an American-born woman who was separated from her husband. The two remained together until Sullivan’s death on November 22, 1900.
The twelfth comic opera (operetta) collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, the story of The Gondoliers (aka The King of Barataria) concerns brothers Marco and Giuseppe Palmieri, a pair of Venetian gondoliers who are told that one of them is heir to the throne of the fictional kingdom of Barataria. Until it can be discovered by the Grand Inquisitor which of them is the heir, they must rule jointly. Unbeknownst to the brothers, who have just married Venetian farm girls, the heir was wed in infancy to the daughter of the Spanish Duke of Plaza-Toro, who is herself in love with her father's servant. A subplot concerns the impoverished Duke attempting to improve his finances by forming a limited liability company.
The Gondoliers was Gilbert and Sullivan's last great success. In this opera, Gilbert returns to the satire of class distinctions figuring in many of his earlier librettos. The libretto also reflects Gilbert's fascination with the "Stock Company Act", highlighting what he saw as the absurd convergence of natural persons and legal entities. By setting The Gondoliers comfortably far away from England, Gilbert was emboldened to direct sharper criticism at the nobility and the institution of the monarchy itself.
Premiering at the Savoy Theatre in London on December 7, 1889, The Gondoliers was an immediate hit, running for a very successful 554 performances (the fourth longest of their collaborations after The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore, and Patience). It earned more money than any other Savoy opera in its original run and 20,000 copies of the published score and over 70,000 copies of various arrangements were sold within a few days.
The run-up to the opening performance was a frantic rush and it wasn’t until after the first orchestral rehearsal (just five days before opening) that Sullivan cobbled together the Overture. Originally, the Overture ended on a bit of a down note, so a new up-beat ending, incorporating the lively Spanish cachucha from the second act, was added by the English composer, organist, and conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967).
OF NOTE:
There was a command performance of The Gondoliers for Queen Victoria and the royal family at Windsor Castle on March 6, 1891, marking the first performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera to be so honored and the first theatrical entertainment to take place at Windsor since the death of Prince Albert some thirty years earlier.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
(1872-1958)
English Folk Song Suite
March: Seventeen Come Sunday
Intermezzo: My Bonny Boy
March: Folk Songs from Somerset
In a long and extensive career, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) composed music notable for its power, nobility, and expressiveness, representing, perhaps, the essence of ‘Englishness’. He received his musical training from Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry at the Royal College of Music, Max Bruch in Berlin, and Maurice Ravel in Paris. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was among the very first to travel into the countryside to collect folk-songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations to enjoy. For many years, Vaughan Williams conducted and led the Leith Hill Music Festival and was also professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in London. During his lifetime, he eschewed all honors with the exception of the Order of Merit, which was conferred upon him in 1938. In a long and productive life, music flowed from his creative pen in profusion and hardly a musical genre was untouched or failed to be enriched by his work which included nine symphonies, five operas, film music, ballet and stage music, several song cycles, church music, and works for chorus and orchestra. An artist of extraordinary creative energy, Vaughan Williams continued composing with undiminished powers until his death at 87.
Having served during World War I, Vaughan Williams had been exposed to the music of the military brass band and was not overly impressed with what he heard. When he was invited by Colonel John Somerville, Commandant of the Royal Military School of Music, to compose a work for the School's band, he accepted with alacrity. Having just written the ballet Old King Cole for a branch of the English Folk Dance Society, he returned, quite naturally, to his love of traditional English songs. The resulting English Folk Song Suite was premiered at Kneller Hall, Twickenham on July 4, 1923, by the Royal Military School's Band as conducted by Lieutenant H. E. Adkins. The following year, he asked his student, Gordon Jacob, at the Royal College of Music to re-score the work for full orchestra.
Regardless of the arrangement, the English Folk Song Suite is sprightly and effective. In three movements, the Suite contains many different folk songs from the Norfolk and Somerset regions of England, including Seventeen Come Sunday, Pretty Caroline, Dives and Lazarus, My Bonny Boy, Green Bushes, Blow Away the Morning Dew, High Germany, and The Tree So High. Historically, the suite is considered (along with Gustav Holst’s two suites for military band) to be a cornerstone work in the literature, and one of the earliest “serious” works for the wind band.
OF NOTE:
The original composition also included a fourth movement, Sea Songs, which Vaughan Williams later decided to publish separately. While the English Folk Song Suite is a cornerstone of the wind band repertoire, it is not fully demonstrative of Vaughan Williams’s compositional powers. Only the Intermezzo approaches the harmonic daring and lyricism that mark the rest of his work. The remainder of the piece is a fairly straightforward, faithful setting of the folk songs.
GUSTAV HOLST
(1874–1934)
The Planets, opus 32, H. 125
Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic
Known primarily for The Planets, Gustav Holst (1874-1934) embraced a wide variety of musical models, from Arthur Sullivan, Edvard Grieg, and Richard Wagner to the melodic simplicity of English folk music. Holst's first musical instruction came from his father, Adolph, a piano teacher and, by the age of 12, the young Holst was composing. In 1892, he traveled to London and experienced a performance of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, conducted by Gustav Mahler. This was a life-changing experience for him, and he chose to enter the Royal College of Music the following year as a composition student. Between 1903 and 1907, Holst accepted teaching positions at James Allen's Girls' School, St. Paul's Girls' School, which he would retain until his death, and Morley College in 1907. In 1920, he accepted a post teaching theory and composition at the Royal College of Music. All the while, his fame as a composer was growing domestically and internationally. Beginning in December 1928, Holst made a series of trips abroad that included visits to France, Italy, Sicily, and the U.S. In 1932, while in Boston, he was diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer. On May 23, 1934, he underwent surgery for the ulcer, dying two days later.
When it came to outside interests, Holst usually concerned himself only with those that stimulated his creative imagination. During a tour of Spain in 1913, a fellow traveler introduced him to astrology. Soon afterwards, he wrote to a friend, “. . . recently the character of each planet suggested lots to me, and I have been studying astrology fairly closely.” Holst's starting point for the music was the astrological character of each planet, though his interest in astrology went no deeper than its musical suggestiveness. His daughter, Imogene, wrote that once the underlying idea had been formulated “he let the music have its way with him”. There was, therefore, no program for the suite and the composer himself pointed out that it had no connection with the deities of Classical Mythology. Imogen Holst also recalled that her father "hated incomplete performances of The Planets, though on several occasions he had to agree to conduct three or four movements at Queen's Hall concerts. He particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a 'happy ending', for, as he himself said, 'in the real work the end is not happy at all'".
The Planets was, by far, Holst's largest orchestral work. A Suite of seven unique movements, he began work on this monumental composition in early 1914 and completed it in 1916 with the first complete public performance being held on November 15, 1920 at the Queen’s Hall by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Albert Coates.
The Suite's success was unrivaled. Surprisingly, Holst was dismayed by its international popularity - it was his first and only composition to reach such a wide audience. He wrote, "Every artist ought to pray that he may not be 'a success'." It is remarkable that this work, loved the world over, was resented by its own creator to his dying day simply because it was "a success”. Fellow English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Holst's best friend, once said that The Planets was "the perfect equilibrium" of Holst's nature - melodic, precise, and structured combined with the mystic and unexplainable.
With the exception of Earth, each planet in our solar system has its own movement.
OF NOTE:
The actual premiere of The Planets, conducted at Holst's request by Adrian Boult, was held on short notice on September 29, 1918 during the last weeks of World War I. It was hastily rehearsed, the musicians of the Queen's Hall Orchestra first saw the complicated music only two hours before the performance, and the choir for Neptune was recruited from Holst's students at Morley College and St Paul's Girls' School. It was a comparatively intimate affair, attended by around 250 invited associates, but Holst regarded it as the public premiere, inscribing Boult's copy of the score, "This copy is the property of Adrian Boult who first caused The Planets to shine in public and thereby earned the gratitude of Gustav Holst."