A HEROIC JOURNEY

The works on this program celebrate heroism, as envisioned by five iconic composers. Aaron Copland, long seen as the archetypal American composer, was inspired by a speech given in 1942 by Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. This speech, by a farmer who had served as Secretary of Agriculture, honored the coming era of the “common man.”

Scored for brass and percussion (timpani, gong, bass drum), many see this fanfare as a true depiction of the American ethos:  bold, brassy, and strong with the wide intervals tracing vast open spaces.  Few, though, recognize the challenge this piece poses with instruments often at the extremes of their ranges playing in octaves or the pure intervals of fourths and fifths, where the slightest error would blare like a siren.

A generation later in 1986, the Houston Symphony commissioned the first of six fanfares “for the uncommon woman” by American composer Joan Tower. In her individual voice, Tower boldly goes where no American woman had gone before, using Copland’s “male” ensemble of brass and percussion to celebrate heroic “women who take risks and are adventurous.” But she adds melodic percussion (glockenspiel, marimba, chimes) and swirling figures in the trumpets, perhaps portraying Ginger Rogers in a ball gown doing everything Fred Astaire did, but “backwards and in high heels.” Bear in mind that in the Eighties, Paula Hawkins heroically ran and became the first woman elected to the US Senate on her own merit (not replacing a husband or father) and El Paso-born Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to be confirmed to the US Supreme Court. True heroes.

Nearly two centuries earlier, Ludwig van Beethoven had suffered disappointment in a hero. Having dubbed  his third symphony “Eroica [Heroic],” dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte, a leader he thought would usher in a glorious French republic, he erased Napoleon’s name from the 1804 dedication when Bonaparte crowned “emperor.” Beethoven composed an overture for a play by Heinrich von Collin, telling the tragic story of Coriolanus, a general who betrays both enemies and friends. The true hero of this story is the general’s mother (represented in the second theme) who convinces him not to continue his betrayal. In the tradition of German romanticism, the deeply troubled Coriolanus repents and commits suicide. Beethoven’s setting is both strong and sensitive, determined and delicate.

Similarly with power and pathos, John William‘s overture to the 1978 film Superman, tells the story of Kal-El, an immigrant from a foreign land, determined to be of service to truth, justice, and the American way. Using his strengths, while conquering his weaknesses, Superman became a symbol of hope during America’s Great Depression.

A century before Willams’ mythical hero, Gustav Mahler began composing his first symphony. For a decade after it was first performed in 1889 as a two-movement symphonic poem, he edited and revised, named and renamed until 1899 when it reached its final form as a four-movement symphony.  Titan, a novel by Jean Paul, inspired the symphony’s initial program, telling the story of a passionate youth whose bravery leads him to lead his nation.

Those who attended the VBF lieder program will not be surprised, then, that Mahler used excerpts from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen [Songs of a Traveling Freelancer], songs of a young man traveling bravely on his own, celebrating nature’s beauties, while mourning unrequited love.  With offstage hunting horns and the oboe as the cuckoo, the first movement’s main theme comes from the second song in the cycle, Ging heut morgen übers Feld [I walked across the fields this morning]. Mahler sets the second movement, traditionally a minuet or scherzo, as a ländler, a sturdy Austrian folk dance.

The third movement dirge is based on a woodcut for children by Austrian Moritz von Schwind (often attributed to Jacques Callot). It illustrates hares, deer, foxes, and owls of the forest who escort a hunter’s funeral carriage. Cats in the forefront play instruments. The main theme is the children’s tune Frère Jacques, known in German as Bruder Jakob, a tune Mahler intended to be “eerie and ironical, brooding and sultry.”

The final movement, ending both this symphony and this concert portrays an epic scene as the valiant hero battles against the forces of hell (F minor) in order to reach victory in heaven (D major). This is an energisch [energetic] ending for an energetic program honoring heroes both distant in time and among us in the here and now.

–Dr. Yvonne Kendall, © 2023