BENJAMIN BRITTEN Composer, pianist, conductor (1913, Lowestoft, Suffolk, England — 1976, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England) FOUR SEA INTERLUDES FROM PETER GRIMES, OP. 33A Composed: 1944-1945 Premiered: June 7, 1945 by the Sadler’s Wells Company, London, conducted by Reginald Goodall Duration: ca. 15 minutes Scoring: two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings Overview Peter Grimes, one of the most characteristically English of all operas, was born in California. Benjamin Britten had followed his friend the poet W.H. Auden to the United States in 1939 both to find greater artistic freedom and to escape the frustration and depression of the European political situation. Britten was also an avowed pacifist, and he probably viewed the American sojourn as a time when he could sort out his feelings and decide on what his stance should be as his country headed inexorably into war. He lived for several months with Auden in a Brooklyn apartment, but had to leave because the ceaseless commotion of visitors made concentration impossible. He moved into a private home in Amityville, Long Island, and composed no fewer than six major scores over the three years of his American visit, including the Violin Concerto, Les Illuminations and Sinfonia da Requiem. It was during a holiday in California in summer 1941 that he chanced upon a back issue of The Listener, the periodical of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which contained an article by E.M. Forster on the poet George Crabbe (1755-1823). The article led Britten to Crabbe’s poem The Borough, which dealt with the rugged life in the fishing villages of the region in Suffolk in which the composer had grown up. Overwhelmed by homesickness, he wrote, “I suddenly realized where I belonged and what I lacked. I had become without roots.” The seed for Peter Grimes had been sown. On January 2, 1942, Britten was in Boston for a performance of his new Sinfonia da Requiem. Sergei Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, inquiring about the composer’s plans, asked him if he were considering writing an opera. Britten said he was, that he even had a subject in mind, but that it was financially impossible for him to set aside the time required. Koussevitzky, who had established a foundation to commission new musical works in memory of his late wife, Natalie, assured Britten that the Foundation would help subsidize the composition, so when Britten was finally able to book passage to England that spring he had a firm commission in hand. Shortly after his return home, Britten appeared before the Tribunal of Conscientious Objectors and was exempted from active military service. Instead, he performed in hospitals, shelters and bombed-out villages while he continued to compose during those difficult years. As for Grimes, Montagu Slater was engaged to write the libretto and worked on it from June 1942 until the end of the following year. Britten had already established the personality of the protagonist before he left America, a process in which his personal situation played no small part: “A central feeling was that of the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for my own situation. As a conscientious objector I was out of it. I couldn’t say I suffered physically, but naturally I experienced tremendous tension. I think it was partly this feeling which led me to make Grimes a character of vision and conflict, the tortured idealist he is, rather than the villain he was in Crabbe.” Britten began work as soon as the libretto was completed. Since his home village on the east coast of England was still in danger of air attack, he carried the manuscript pages of his opera with him whenever he was out so that he could save them from being burned, should the village be bombed. Peter Grimes was put into rehearsal by the Sadler’s Wells Company early in 1945, with its premiere planned for the return of that organization to its own auditorium, which had been bombed in 1942. The date was set for June 7th. The announcement of the production generated tremendous excitement, not only because of the resurrection of the venerable Sadler’s Wells, but also because it marked the premiere of the first important British opera in many years. The opening night was a triumph, and established Britten as one of the most important modern composers. Michael Kennedy, among others, cited the premiere of Peter Grimes as the most momentous event in British music since the presentation of Elgar’s Enigma Variations in 1899. “A milestone in modern opera,” said The New York Times. The American writer Edmund Wilson reflected on the Sadler’s Wells performance, “The opera seizes

you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end.” Part of the reason for the success of Grimes was Britten’s empathy with his subject. “For most of my life I have lived closely in touch with the sea,” he wrote. “My parents’ house directly faced the sea, and my life as a child was colored by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on our coast and ate away whole stretches of neighboring cliffs. In writing Peter Grimes, I wanted to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea — difficult though it is to treat such a universal subject in theatrical form.” The brilliant insight and musical power with which he delineated the story on the stage carries over into the concert music derived from it, the Four Sea Interludes. (A fifth excerpt, the Passacaglia, is sometimes performed with the Interludes.) The Interludes, played with the curtain down in the opera house, are used to preface the action of each act and link together its two scenes. In the words of Britten’s first biographer, Eric Walter White, “The main purpose of these Interludes is to serve as impressionist and expressionist introductions to the realistic scenes of the opera.” The story of the opera deals with Grimes’ relationship to his community. Grimes, a fisherman, has had one apprentice die under suspicious circumstances, and, though a court trial has officially cleared him of guilt, the rumors in the village continue. One of the few who support him is the schoolmistress, Ellen Orford, and Grimes believes all will be well if he could only marry her. Grimes takes another apprentice and, despite Ellen’s pleadings, treats the boy roughly. The villagers decide to take the law into their own hands, and their march on Peter’s shack produces such excitement that the boy, in running to assess the trouble, slips over the cliff to his death. Balstrode, Grimes’ only other friend, arrives ahead of the mob, and advises Peter to sail his boat into the sea and scuttle it, taking his secrets and his unhappiness to a watery grave.

What To Listen For The Four Sea Interludes not only set the moods for the scenes to follow, but also reveal the conflicts and motivations of the characters. The first, “Dawn,” describes the somber atmosphere of the little fishing village at daybreak as the men begin their day’s work. Its craggy sonority also suggests the harsh, continuing struggle of the villagers against the forbidding natural forces that shape their world. “Dawn” comprises only two musical elements: one, a bleak melody high in violins and flutes punctuated by swift arpeggios from harp, clarinet, and viola, like a sudden glint of sunlight off a grey wave; the other, slow, hard chords from the brass. The second Interlude, “Sunday Morning,” portrays, with a certain sullen numbness, the call to worship on the day of rest. Church bells, large and small, echo through the town. Three times the sweeping arch of Ellen’s song (“Glitter of waves and glitter of sunlight”), a broad theme begun by violas and cellos, soars above this background tintinnabulation. The third Interlude, “Moonlight,” paints the scene of the village at night with music of troubled restlessness. Edward Downes wrote, “[It] suggests anything but a glamorous moonlit scene. The mood is lonely, brooding and stark, as if the moon could only emphasize the surrounding blackness.” The closing “Storm” describes not only the frightening wind and waves crashing upon the shore, but also the tempest raging in Peter’s troubled soul. The tumult of the storm slackens three times near the end of the movement to admit Peter’s arching melody, “What harbour shelters peace? ... What harbour can embrace terrors and tragedies?” This music, rather the eye of the hurricane than the passing of the tempest, is, like Peter’s life, soon swept away by the unhearing ocean. In his discussion of this masterwork of 20th-century opera, Milton Cross noted, “This grim and relentless tragedy evoked from Britten music of overwhelming power. The stark fatalism is echoed in a score that is high-tensioned, realistic, surging with dramatic force, yet combined with passages that are poetic, sensitive, even tender.” JAKE HEGGIE (1961, West Palm Beach, Florida) THE WORK AT HAND FOR MEZZO-SOPRANO, CELLO AND ORCHESTRA Composed: 2014-2015

Premiered: May 15, 2015 by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and cellist Anne Martindale Williams, conducted by Michael Francis Duration: ca. 18 minutes Scoring: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, percussion, harp and strings Overview Jake Heggie, one of America’s most gifted composers of vocal music, was born in West Palm Beach, Florida on March 31, 1961 and raised in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Though he took piano lessons from childhood and started writing music when he was eleven, Heggie did not study composition formally until his family moved to San Francisco in 1977, when he became a student of Ernst Bacon, the American composer, critic, conductor and writer who is best remembered for his many songs. Heggie also studied composition at UCLA with Roger Bourland, Paul Reale, Paul Des Marais and David Raksin and piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but he found his most influential mentor in 1981 at UCLA in Johana Harris, widow of the distinguished American composer Roy Harris. With Mrs. Harris, Heggie formed both a close personal relationship and a two-piano duo that performed across the country. She inspired her young colleague and student not only with her commitment to the Classical repertory (she changed her name from Beula to Johana in honor of Johann Sebastian Bach), but with her love of American folk music, which she researched with the pioneering folksong scholar Alan Lomax in the 1940s. Since 1993, Heggie has lived in San Francisco. Jake Heggie has transmuted the elements of his musical experiences — the simplicity and lyricism of American vernacular song, the direct and spacious idiom of Harris and Copland, the harmonic subtleties of the European tradition — into a style of immediacy and expressive sincerity that has won the advocacy of such noted performers as Frederica von Stade, Jennifer Larmore, Dawn Upshaw, Renée Fleming, Audra McDonald, Joyce DiDonato and Sylvia McNair. Though Heggie has written several instrumental, chamber, choral and orchestral compositions (including his 2013 Ahab Symphony), his reputation is largely founded upon his vocal works, which include folksong settings, more than 250 art songs, a 1997 piece titled So Many Notes! for eleven solo singers and orchestra (commissioned by San Francisco Opera to celebrate its 75th Season and the reopening of the War Memorial Opera House) and several song cycles. In 1998, Heggie was named the first Chase Composer-in-Residence for the San Francisco Opera, which premiered his Dead Man Walking in October 2000 to extraordinary international acclaim. Dead Man Walking, with a libretto by the eminent American playwright Terrence McNally based on Sister Helen Prejean’s award-winning book, has since been recorded on the Erato label, performed across the country and in Australia, Europe and South Africa, and made the subject of a PBS documentary. Heggie has continued his exceptional success as an opera composer, in collaborations mostly with librettists Gene Scheer and Terrence McNally, with The End of the Affair (2003, based on Graham Greene’s novel, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera), To Hell and Back (2006, based on the myth of Persephone, Boston’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra), Three Decembers (2008, based on McNally’s original play Some Christmas Letters, Houston Grand Opera and San Francisco Opera), Moby Dick (2010, after Melville’s novel, the opera companies of Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary and South Australia), Out of Darkness (2013, Music of Remembrance, the Seattle-based organization remembering Holocaust musicians), and Great Scott (2015, Dallas Opera). Heggie’s adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life, based on the Philip Van Doren Stern story that also inspired Frank Capra’s classic 1946 film starring James Stewart, will be premiered by Houston Grand Opera in December 2016. What To Listen For Heggie wrote of The Work at Hand, “The late Laura Morefield (1960-2011) was a private poet, unknown to most people. Her mother, the gifted San Diego poet and writer Charlene Baldridge, has been a friend for nearly twenty years and I’ve set several of her poems. Laura was the friendly, bright-eyed, soft-spoken powerhouse I knew primarily as Charlene’s daughter, who I would sometimes see when they traveled on their annual mother-daughter adventures: a couple of times to a premiere of mine, then on a cruise through the Baltic when Frederica von Stade and I gave recitals as the entertainment. Laura was immensely proud of her mother’s poetry, but was fairly quiet about her own work. Shortly after the Baltic cruise in 2008, Laura was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. That’s when I found out about her poetry and asked if she would send me several, including her top ten favorites. Shortly after, a packet of shatteringly beautiful poems arrived with The Work At Hand on top. I was completely overwhelmed and asked if I could set this poem one day. She was delighted. Not long after that — but after an extraordinarily brave fight — Laura passed away. None of us could believe it. She was fifty years old. “The Work At Hand is one of Laura’s post-diagnosis poems. It is about the difficult and deeply human experience of knowing it is

time to say goodbye and let go: resenting, fighting, struggling, and then finding peace in acceptance. The language and imagery she chose is particularly striking: origami, the yoga Warrior 1 position, and a shimmering reconnection to nature. “The opportunity to set The Work At Hand presented itself when Jamie Barton asked for a new set of songs for her Carnegie Hall recital and Anne Martindale Williams asked for a new piece to perform with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, where she is Principal Cellist. Being a little too busy these days (and counting my blessings for that), I suggested we combine it into a piece that exists as both a chamber and an orchestral work. Both agreed. [The chamber version was premiered on February 17, 2015 by Ms. Barton, Ms. Williams and pianist Bradley Moore at Carnegie Hall in New York.] “Laura’s final request to her mother was that she publish a collection of her post-diagnosis poems in a chapbook, and that exists as The Warrior’s Stance. All proceeds from sales of the book benefit the Colon Cancer Alliance (thewarriorsstance.com). I’m deeply grateful to Laura’s amazing husband, Dan Morefield, for his generosity in granting me permission to set The Work At Hand; to Charlene for her passion, friendship and guidance; and to Jamie and Anne for saying yes to the journey.” EDWARD ELGAR (1857, Broadheath, England — 1934, Worcester, England) SEA PICTURES, A CYCLE OF FIVE SONGS FOR MEZZO-SOPRANO AND ORCHESTRA, OP. 37 Composed: 1899 Premiered: October 5, 1899 in Norwich, conducted by the composer with Clara Butt as soloist Duration: ca. 23 minutes Scoring: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, organ and strings Overview It was the lightning success of the Enigma Variations following its premiere under the direction of Hans Richter in London on June 19, 1899 that propelled Edward Elgar to international notoriety. Cambridge University made him a doctor honoris causa in 1900; Oxford did so five years later. With his choral ode for the coronation of Edward VII in 1901 and the appearance of the first two Pomp and Circumstance Marches in 1902, Elgar became England’s unofficial music laureate; he was knighted in 1904. Alberto Randegger, director of the Norwich Festival, sought to capitalize on the composer’s burgeoning fame by commissioning from him a large vocal work to be premiered at the Festival in October 1899, Elgar’s first major project after Enigma. Elgar first mooted a piece for chorus, but finally settled on a cycle of songs when he learned that the splendid contralto Clara Butt, then just beginning her career, would be performing at the Festival. Elgar began the composition by reworking a setting he had made in 1897 of a poem by his wife, Alice, which he published in that year as Lute Song. Alice’s images of the sea suggested to him a cycle of verses by different poets on that subject, rather in the manner of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”). Sea Pictures was duly composed in July 1899 at Birchwood Lodge, a secluded cottage near Worcester to which Elgar retreated during those years when he needed to work in solitude. The premiere, conducted by the composer with Miss Butt as soloist at the Norwich Festival on October 5th, was a fine success. “The cycle went marvelously well, and we were recalled four times — I think — after that, I lost count,” Elgar wrote to A.J. Jaeger, his publisher and close friend (who was immortalized as “Nimrod” in the Enigma Variations). Sea Pictures was introduced to London before a packed house at St. James’s Hall two days later, and given a command performance before Queen Victoria at Balmoral on October 22nd. Elgar performed it frequently with Clara Butt and other singers, and recorded it with Leila Megane and the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra in 1922-1923. Sea Pictures, with its broad melodic writing and burnished orchestral sonority, masterfully reflects the sweep and majesty of its panoramic subject.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862, St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris — 1918, Paris) LA MER, TROIS ESQUISSES SYMPHONIQUES (“THE SEA, THREE SYMPHONIC SKETCHES”)

Composed: 1903-1905 Premiered: October 15, 1905 at the Concert Lamoureux in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard Duration: ca. 23 minutes Scoring: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, two cornets, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings Overview “You may not know that I was destined for a sailor’s life and that it was only quite by chance that fate led me in another direction. But I have always held a passionate love for the sea.” With these lines written on September 12, 1903 to the composer-conductor André Messager, Debussy prefaced the notice that he had begun work on La Mer. Debussy’s father was a sailor and his tales of vast oceans and exotic lands held Claude spellbound as a boy. A family trip to Cannes when he was seven years old was Claude’s first experience of the sea, and it ignited his life-long fascination with the thoughts and moods evoked by moving water. Twenty years later, in 1889, he discovered an aspect of the sea very different from the placid one he had seen on the resort beaches of the Mediterranean. In early June of that year, he was traveling with friends along the coast of Brittany. Their plans called for passage in a fishing boat from Saint-Lunaire to Cancale, but at the time they were scheduled to leave a threatening storm was approaching and the captain advised canceling the trip. Debussy insisted that they sail. It turned out to be a dramatic, storm-tossed voyage with no little danger to crew and passengers. Debussy relished it. “Now there’s a type of passionate feeling that I have not before experienced — Danger! It is not unpleasant. One is alive!” he declared. These early experiences of the sea — one halcyon, the other threatening — were to be captured years later in La Mer. Debussy began work on La Mer in the summer of 1903 at the vacation house of his in-laws at Bichain in the Burgundian countryside, far from the coast. To André Messager he wrote a rather startling explanation for this geographical curiosity: “You will say that the ocean does not exactly wash the Burgundian hillsides — and my seascapes might be studio landscapes; but I have an endless store of memories and, to my mind, they are worth more than the reality, whose beauty often deadens thought.” At another time he claimed that “the sight of the sea itself fascinated me to such a degree that it paralyzed my creative faculties.” In addition to the memories of his own direct experience of the ocean, Debussy brought to La Mer a sensitivity nourished by his fascination with visual renderings of the sea. He was certainly in sympathy with the Impressionistic art of his French contemporaries, but more immediate inspiration for this particular work seems to have come from the creations of two foreign artists — the Englishman Turner, whom Debussy called “the finest creator of mystery in art,” and the Japanese Hokusai. A selection of Turner’s wondrous, swirling sea paintings, as much color and light as image, had been shown in Paris in 1894 and were probably seen there by Debussy. Eight years later, during the 1902-1903 Turner exhibit at London’s National Gallery, Debussy again sought out these brilliant canvases, and this visit may have been the catalyst for creating La Mer. (A half century before Debussy, Turner experienced the violence of the sea first-hand when he had himself lashed to a ship’s mast during a furious storm just to see what it was like.) Japanese sea- and landscapes were popular in Paris during the 1890s as a result of their introduction there at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, whose most famous souvenir is the Eiffel Tower. The exquisite drawings of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) so pleased Debussy that he chose one of them, The Hollow of the Wave off Kanagawa, to grace the cover of the full score of La Mer. Debussy was never a fast worker in his large compositions, and La Mer was some two years in the making. It was written largely in Paris and other land-locked locales, but the finishing touches were applied (at 6:00 p.m. on March 5, 1905, according to the manuscript) at the fashionable English seaside resort of Eastbourne. “The sea rolls with a wholly British correctness,” he observed. “There is a lawn combed and brushed on which little bits of important and imperialistic England frolic. But what a place to work! No noise, no pianos, except for the delicious mechanical pianos; no musicians talking about painting, no painters discussing music. In short, a pretty place to cultivate egoism.” The premiere had been offered to Camille Chevillard and the Concerts Lamoureux almost a year before the work was finished, and a date for the first performance was set in the fall of 1905. When the orchestra received the parts, they were found to have been poorly proof-read and were aglare with mistakes. Chevillard complained also of the difficulty of the new piece, but Debussy was reluctant to withdraw the work from him and give it to the superior Concerts Colonne lest he create a row. The composer did not get much support from the Lamoureux players, either. Stravinsky recalled Debussy telling him, “The violinists flagged the tips of their

bows with handkerchiefs at the rehearsals, as a sign of ridicule and protest.” It is little wonder that the premiere on October 15, 1905 was a lackluster occasion which created little stir in the Parisian musical community. If the uninspired performance by Chevillard was not enough to dampen the success of the premiere, Paris also seems to have been repaying Debussy for what it considered the moral outrage of abandoning his first wife, Rosalie Texier, the previous year for Emma Bardac, a gifted amateur singer and the wife of a noted financier as well as the former mistress of Gabriel Fauré. The rumors that his affection had been bought by a woman of wealth still circulated when La Mer was given, and Louis Laloy said that the premiere’s success was clouded because “prudish indignation had not yet been appeased, and on all sides people were ready to make the artist pay dearly for the wrongs that were imputed to the man.” La Mer created considerably more stir when the composer conducted it at the Concerts Colonne on January 19, 1908. The cheers and applause of the composer’s supporters mingled with the hisses and catcalls of the anti-Debussyists for a quarter of an hour before the violinist Jacques Thibaud could begin the Bach Chaconne as the next piece on the program. A performance of La Mer in London a fortnight later was greeted with enthusiasm, and the work has remained steadily in the orchestral repertory ever since as one of the great masterpieces of the early 20th century. La Mer marked an important advance in Debussy’s style of composition. “Without in any way abandoning the delicate sensitivity of his earlier works (creating delightful impressionistic pictures out of atmospheric vibrations) which is perhaps unequaled in the world of art, his style has today become more concise, definite, positive, complete, in a word, classical,” wrote Louis Laloy after hearing the work at its premiere. The three movements of La Mer, despite their modest subtitle of “symphonic sketches,” are carefully integrated to form a single, unified composition, unlike the trio of independent musical essays which constitutes the Nocturnes, completed six years before. There is a certain technical and structural validity in David Cox’s assertion that La Mer is “the best symphony ever written by a Frenchman.” This is, however, a symphony in the modern, expanded sense, which “lacks those fixed points which can be recognized in the description of the traditional symphony and to which can be related details of departure from, as well as conformity with, the familiar patterns. It is not feasible to refer to tonalities, since there is a kind of incessant modulation. To attempt to particularize thematic material is also futile, because of equally incessant transformations,” assessed Oscar Thompson in his study of the composer. It is just this ineffable balancing of traditional with innovative qualities that makes the music of Debussy continually fascinating. What To Listen For The opening movement is titled De l’aube à midi sur la mer (“From Dawn to Noon on the Sea”). Its form, built around the play of thematic and rhythmic fragments rather than conventional melodies, is perfectly suited to expressing the changing reflections of the morning sun in the air, clouds and water. Though Erik Satie quipped that he liked the part at quarter to eleven the best, there is no specific program in this music other than a general progression from the mysterious opening of first light to the full blaze of the noon sun shining in the luminous brass chorale at the movement’s end. Jeux de vagues (“The Play of the Waves”) is a brilliant essay in orchestral color, woven and contrasted with the utmost evocative subtlety. “The sea has been very good to me,” wrote Debussy shortly before finishing La Mer. “She has shown me all her moods.” Many of them found their way into this piece. The finale, Dialogue du vent et de la mer (“Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea”), reflects the awesome power of the sea as well as its majesty. Lines from a letter that Debussy wrote in 1915 seem an appropriate complement to this music: “Trees are good friends, better than the ocean, which is in motion, wishing to trespass on the land, bite the rocks, with the anger of a little girl — singular for a person of its importance. One would understand it if it sent the vessels about their business as if they were only disturbing vermin.” Fragments of themes from the first movement are recalled in the finale to round out this magnificent tonal panorama by a composer who believed that “[Music] is a free art, gushing forth — an open-air art, an art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea!” ©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda