I am playing a Halloween Concert!
When: Wednesday, October 31st, 12:10-12:40
Where: Pasadena Presbyterian Church 585 E. Colorado Blvd. Pasadena, CA
Program:
Schubert-Liszt Song transcriptions: Gretchen am Spinnrade, Ave Maria
Chopin Etude in C-Minor Op. 10-12 “Revolutionary” and Prelude Op. 28-15 No. 8 “Raindrop”
Federico Mompou Prelude No. 8 “On a Drop of Water”
Admission: Free
Halloween is “Hallow (=holy) evening (=en).” It beings the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical calendar dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints, martyrs and all the faithful departed. There is a folk belief that Halloween is the evening where the veil between the material world and the afterlife is at its most transparent.
My program will focus on two nineteenth-century composers fascinated with the notion of death: Franz Schubert (1797-1828), and Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), then end with a piece by a twentieth-century Catalan composer, Federico Mompou (1893-1987).
The first half of the program features famous songs by Schubert transcribed by Liszt for solo piano.
The program starts with two gory and dramatic songs;Â Erlking and Gretchen am Spinnrade. Both are by Schubert, still in his teens, are set to poems by Goethe.
Erlking is depicted in Goethe’s poem as a force of death, preying on a child in his father’s arms. They are on a horse riding through the dark woods. The rhythm of the horse racing through the wood, and perhaps the anxious hearts of the boy and the father, are portrayed by the repeated octaves in the piano. [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3nxyS8wf8E[/embedyt] In Liszt’s transcription, the pianist plays both the piano part and the singer’s part, making the already challenging piece exceedingly demanding. It not only requires a good technique and endurance from the pianist, but also a well-regulated piano. In fear of injury, I always decide whether to play the piece or not, after finding out the condition of the piano at the venue, on the day of the performance.
Regardless of Erlking on the program or not, Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) by itself already is spooky enough to set the right spooky tone for this Halloween program. Here, Schubert excerpts Gretchen’s monologue from Goethe’s play “Faust.” Faust, who has sold his soul to the Mephistopheles, seduces Gretchen. Mindlessly spinning her wheel, Gretchen sings “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I shall find it never and never more”[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0eeotSDi8[/embedyt] At this point in the play, Gretchen does not yet know her doomed fate: she will end up killing her mother inadvertently, with the sleep potion given to her from Faust for their secret rendezvous; she will find herself pregnant out of wedlock; she will lose her brother who challenges Faust to a dual for his sister’s honor; and finally, she will end up imprisoned for the murder of her newborn baby after being abandoned by Faust. Knowing her impending doom makes her song even more haunting to her listeners.
Halloween, however, is not only about the haunted, but about the celebration of the holy spirits and the spirits of our dearly missed. There are many traditions of celebrating the spirits of the dead returning our realms globally. In Japan, it is obon, or bon-festival celebrated during the summer. We light candles to guide the spirits to show our ancestors their way home, and treat them to feats. I find a remarkable resemblance between obon, Day of the Dead, and of course, Halloween. In these festivals, the deceased are not considered a threat, but are welcomed back with nostalgia, and appreciated for their legacy.
Here, I play another famous song by Schubert, transcribed to solo piano by Liszt; “Ave Maria,” written three years before his death at the age of thirty-one.
With these songs, we will now move on to Chopin, who composed the famous funeral march.
I begin by playing his “Revolutionary” etude, Op. 10-12 in C-Minor. It is nicknamed “Revolutionary” because of its association with November Rising, where student-led revolution for Poland’s independence failed. Chopin found out about this and wrote his emotional outburst in the so-called “Stuttgart Diary“:
Suburbs destroyed â burned â Jan! â [Wilhelm Kolberg] at the ramparts, most likely perished â Marcel I can picture as a prisoner â dear old SowiĹski in the hands of those rogues! Oh God, You are there! You are there and take no revenge! Have You not had Your fill of Muscovite crimes â or â or else You are Yourself a Muscovite! [âŚ] What has happened to her? Where is she? â The poor thing! â Perhaps in Muscovite hands! [âŚ] And I sit here idle, and I set here with my hands bare, sometimes just groaning, grieving at the piano, in despair…
Then, I will play his Prelude No. 15 from his 24 Preludes, Op. 28, “Raindrop.” The set of 24 preludes, Op. 28 was mostly composed during Chopin’s vacation with his then-lover, Aurore Dupin, more famously known by her pen name, George Sand. It was during this trip that Chopin was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which eventually killed him, 11 years later. They ended up at a gloomy, abandoned monastery. Sand included an anecdote in her autobiography from this trip which inspired the nickname to this prelude.
âWe hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as thou congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful prelude⌠When I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should interpret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might â and he was right to â against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds.’
In contrast to the soothing outer sections in D-flat Major, the middle section is in C-sharp Minor, with its melody starting like a distant moan in the bass. Some interpret this melody as the monk’s chants Chopin may have imagined in the abandoned monastery.
Throughout the longest of the preludes, the repeated notes keep sounding, like the raindrop on one’s roof.
I end the program by echoing Chopin’s Raindrop with Prelude No. 8 “On a Drop of Water” by a twentieth-century Catalan composer, Federico Mompou (1893-1987). The singular line of the main theme opens the piece with a descending minor second: an interval that symbolizes sighs, tears, or more specifically Virgin Mary’s tears, in a composition technique called “word painting.” The them is repeated three times, overlapped in a canon, like a ripple on a water surface.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdJzRsFiDr0[/embedyt]
As opposed to the descending main theme, the middle section presents an ascending scaler figure, perhaps hinting at the evaporation of water into gas which will eventually come back down as condensed liquid. It is as though the minimalist composer is pointing to the cycle of all things, including life. The nineteenth-century fascination with tragedy, pathos and death are sublimated into a more objective, distant perspective, perhaps influenced by the Eastern philosophy in the twentieth century. What will we decide our worldview to be in the twenty-first century?
