Editor's Note: Part of Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music. Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. The playlist choices are occasionally not found on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here.
To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube.
Early on in 5&1, we made a brief dip into the wonders of music written for Advent. So this time, we'll do something a little different. Strictly speaking, only one of these pieces is seasonal, but each reflects an aspect of Advent that I explored in a recent post, especially that sense of anticipation or yearning for light felt by those walking in darkness.
1. Eternal Source of Light Divine (Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, HWV 74)
George Frederick Handel (1685-1759, German/British)
Alison Balsom (trumpet), Iestyn Davies (counter-tenor), The English Concert, Trevor Pinnock (cond.)
Handel was a German composer (born in the same year as J. S. Bach) who first visited London when around 25, little knowing that the city would be his home for the rest of his life. Queen Anne was on the throne when he arrived in 1711 and he quickly found himself swept up in the whirl of court politics and musical commissions. Two years later, he offered one of his most sublime early works for the Queen's birthday, although unfortunately there is no record of her actually listening to it! She apparently had little interest in music.
The piece is a secular cantata (ie a work made up of several short sections, using different instruments, solo singers and choir). Queen Anne's opens with this gorgeous appeal to Sun's creator to ensure it was especially sunny ("to add lustre to this day") for her big celebration (rather necessary in an English February!). It is simple but magical as the two soloists gently cross-weave in between the slowly shifting harmonies. As a musical invitation to bask in sunlight, there is nothing to beat it. This arrangement has one singer, the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, with the other part arranged and played by superstar trumpeter Alison Balsom.
2. Andante tranquillo (from Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106)
Béla Bartók (1881-1945, Hungarian)
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki (cond.)
Of course, the people that Isaiah observed walking in darkness would not have necessarily enjoyed their predicament very much. Like the psalmist's night watchman longing for dawn, they would have been unsettled and yearning for light. So this next piece conveys something of that darkness-induced anxiety. Bartók was a Hungarian composer of particular genius, one who felt the political turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century acutely. He was fiercely opposed to Nazism and despaired at Hungary's incorporation in 1940 into the Tripartite Alliance (between Germany, Italy, and Japan) and fled that year with his wife to the USA. He never really settled, constantly preoccupied with homesickness and worry about his health. He would die in New York soon after the end of the war.
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta was written in 1937 (a celesta is 'bell-piano': instead of hitting wires, hammers controlled by a standard piano keyboard strike tuned metal plates). This opening movement is full of unease, if not dread, but it is more a lurking sensation than something fully fledged or rounded. In dark times, it can often be helpful to find articulations of that darkness as well as alternatives to it.
3. O Radiant Dawn (Strathclyde Motets, 2007)
Sir James Macmillan (1959- , British)
Apollo 5
Now for the one genuinely seasonal work, one of Macmillan's 14 Strathclyde motets, written between 2005 and 2010 for the Catholic chaplaincy at Glasgow's University of Strathclyde. Here he sets a mediaeval Advent liturgy for unaccompanied choir to music that might initially sound as ancient as its text. However, there are subtle harmonic hints early on that more going is on than first meets the ear.
Think of this as a perfect miniature, structured as a kind of a bible sandwich. The central section is a setting of short Isaiah 9 passage for just the soprano and alto lines. Before and after it, the whole choir sings the mediaeval words, which are a prayer flowing out of the Isaiah imagery. Macmillan takes care to let every single word sound clearly throughout. But, the magic comes from small devices that draw our attention. Listen out for what he does with the words: death, light, shone, and especially come. It is a masterclass in expressing Advent yearning
4. Isoldes Liebestod (from "Tristan and Isolde", WWV90)
Richard Wagner (1813-1883, German)
Gewandhausorchester, Andris Nelsons (cond.)
Some may find this inclusion incongruous, if not actually offensive. Wagner is controversial (his vicious antisemitism was part of his appeal for the Nazis) and his life and worldview almost as divergent from Christian orthodoxy as it is possible to be. And yet... It is indisputable that he was a musical phenomenon, one whose innovations uniquely paved the way for twentieth century music.
We are actually still in the Middle Ages, however, becauseTristan and Isolde is an operatic setting of a twelfth-century romance. It has it all: love, lust, potions, passionate yearning, murder and self-sacrifice. The crucial thing here is that Wagner employs unresolved harmonies that create a constant sense of tension, extending it through the entire opera (which usually lasts just under four hours!). You'll be relieved that this is just an excerpt from the very end, when the music resolves at last, as Isolde is finally united with her beloved Tristan by dying and collapsing onto his dead body. That melodramatic, harmonic consummation provides a profound foretaste of the ultimate consummation, which is of course what Advent is all about.
5. Aspiration, Lento, con risoluzione (Symphony No. 1, "Afro-American")
William Grant Still (1895-1978, American)
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi (cond,)
It has been a long-time in coming but at last there is growing recognition for the brilliance of African-American classical composers, such as Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still. All three were associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. Still's 'Afro-American' symphony was the first to be written by an African-American and performed by a first-class orchestra in the USA. It uses many of the standard features of the western classical symphony but incorporates some classic blues harmonies and rhythms.
This, the final movement, is titled 'Aspiration', and as such, expresses yet another form of yearning. Still avoids the more predictable chord progressions of western music, but instead weaves through various keys as a jazz musician might. We don't always know where we're going, but we are always carried by the kind of optimism that helps people to persevere through the toughest of circumstances.
Lux Aeterna (1997)
Morten Lauridsen (1943- , American)
Chamber Choir of Europe, I Virtuosi Italiani, Nicol Matt (cond.)
The full-length work this month combines words from the Requiem mass with other liturgical texts inspired by light. Lauridsen was playing with various ideas on these lines but the final prompt to compose this work was the passing of his mother in 1995. It quickly became a firm favourite of choirs far beyond his native Pacific Northwest.
Inspired by the great legacy of Renaissance choral music, each of the five movements flows seamlessly into the next one, creating a choral tapestry of sounds. The climactic Alleluias are just marvellous.
Introitus
In te, Domini, speravi
O nata lux
Veni, Sancte Spiritus
Agnus Dei - Lux Aeterna
The accumulative effect is one of serenity and security, inspiring the listener to find comfort in gospel hope, in the light that is promised to the people walking in darkness. Byron Adams, commenting on the piece's impact, sums it up:
The ecstatic 'alleluias' that follow express a joyous sense of acceptance reminiscent of the final words of Thornton Wilder's novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey: 'All those impulses of love return to the love that made them ... there is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning?
Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net.