Program Notes

“Today's ruling affirms what millions of people across this country already know to be true in our hearts: Our love is equal.” --Jim Obergefell

On June 26, 2015, as supporters of human rights gathered in front of the Supreme Court steps to celebrate the Justices’ decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington sang The Star-Spangled Banner to cheers from the crowd. That night, the crowds assembled in front of the rainbow-lit White House sang it again. Today Coro Allegro opens our musical celebration of this year’s historic marriage equality decision with The Star-Spangled Banner, to honor the fact that marriage equality is now the law of the land. As Coro singers have reported in rehearsal, the words of our national anthem about “the land of the free and the home of the brave” now have new resonance for them. As Attorney Mary Bonauto, who argued for the Mass Equality decision in 2004 said: “I love the idea that there are these principles in our State and Federal Constitutions about equality, and that as time goes on, people who were once seen as outsiders come to be seen as the full human beings and citizens that they are.” Eleven years later, outside the Supreme Court where she and others had successfully argued for marriage equality, Mary Bonauto spoke to the assembled singing crowd of one such promise fulfilled: “This is a great day for our Constitution, make no mistake about it. Today the court stood by a principle in this nation that we do not tolerate laws that disadvantage people because of Who. They. Are.”

“Come, said the muse, sing me a song that no one has yet chanted.” The text of Paul Rardin’s My Spirit is Uncaged, comes from another great American song, Leaves of Grass by gay poet Walt Whitman, in particular A Song of Joys. Rardin’s jubilant fanfares and exuberant syncopated lines move between unison and harmony as if emphasizing the voice we share. Likewise, the middle ‘a capella’ section passes the melody from one single voice to the next, celebrating oneself, but also the song of companionship.

Earlier this fall, Coro Allegro was honored to perform at another musical celebration of human rights, the Terezin Music Foundation’s 2015 gala “LIBERATION,” in honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps. Coro Allegro performed the world premiere of Leaving Limerick, a work commissioned by the TMF, by composer Pablo Ortiz, on a poem by U.S. Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco. Mr. Blanco, the fifth Inaugural Poet, and the first gay man and immigrant accorded this honor, spoke movingly from the stage before reading his poem, that liberation can be found in the moments where we recognize our shared humanity. As Pablo Ortiz says:

“Having lived many lives in many countries, I was immediately drawn to the section in the poem that says:

How terrifyingly beautiful and free to be everything
inside everything, never having to say I’m from here
or there, never remembering my childhood home
where I first played house, or the palm tree shadows
down the street where I learned to ride a bike, or
my backyard with my father chasing fireflies caught
like stars in a glass jar, or the room where I heard
my voice first say, Richard, my name separating me
from the world, the world suddenly fallen into
geography, histories, weather, language, wars.

In setting the poem, I tried to convey, somewhat abstractly, the feeling of palm trees and fireflies in jars, through a mixture of ”tropical“ rhythms and seven-part polyphony, just like the layers and transparencies in watercolor painting.”

Blanco’s full poem “Leaving Limerick in the Rain: A Letter to Ireland,” is set on a train, whose undulating rhythm, tracks and whistle we hear in Ortiz’s setting. Looking at strangers and recalling the home of a friend, the poem is a meditation, in harmonies that rub shoulders with each other and wash like rain on the window, of the blurring and refraction between ourselves and our fellow passengers, and the histories that separate and bring us together.

Coro Allegro revisits an old friend in Julian Wachner’s somewhere i have never traveled, the title track of our second CD. This lovely and lyrical song serves as the first movement of sometimes I feel alive (1998), a setting of three love poems by E.E. Cummings. It is a love poem, but it's not known whether Cummings wrote it for his second wife or about the four-year-old daughter he lost when his first marriage dissolved. There is an incredible intimacy to Wachner’s setting, as if you were lying on your side breathless, watching a loved one sleep. Singing this song, a staple of Coro Allegro weddings after the Mass Equality decision of 2004, reminds us that though we as a country have gone somewhere we have never traveled, marriage equality is also just people having the right to marry whom they love.

On May 17, 2004, on the first day Massachusetts issued licenses to same-sex couples, some of the members of Coro Allegro got married. Later that month in Boston, we all sang Moses Hogan’s The Battle of Jericho, to celebrate the walls tumbling down. Hogan’s extraordinary setting with its percussive text setting and dramatic word painting gives new power to an African-American spiritual of liberation. Coro Allegro sang it again that summer at the international GALA Festival of LGBT and allied choruses in Montreal, Quebec (which had passed their own version of marriage equality in March 19, 2004.) Today we sing it with joy to celebrate all the Joshuas who fought the battle for marriage equality nationwide.

To conclude the first half and bridge to the second, Coro Allegro presents Exsultate, jubilate (K. 165) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart wrote this sacred motet of celebration and rejoicing in the days leading up to his 17th birthday. He was visiting Milan with his father Leopold, writing opera and enjoying himself, as we can tell from this charmingly silly and grammatically mixed-up note he sent to his sister:

“I for have the primo a uomo [leading man] motet compose which to tomorrow at Church the Theatine performed be will. Keep well, I you beg. Farewell. Addio.…kiss hand. kiss too thousand times am always faithful at and as your brother Milan.” (The young Mozart often liked to send his sister letters in jumbled prose in order to be playful.)

The leading man Mozart mentions was the celebrated castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, who played Cecilo in Mozart’s Lucio Silla which opened on December 26, 1772. Inspired by Rauzzini’s range and effortless coloratura, Mozart completed Exsultate, jubilate by the end of the opera’s run, premiering it on January 17, 1773. Although the text of Exsultate, jubilate is sacred, its bravura coloratura passages are almost operatic in style. Due to its three-part form, virtuosic solo writing, and cadenzas, musicologists have deemed it a concerto for voice. The first aria “Exsultate, jubilate” opens in calls to joy and culminates in felicitous invention. A brief recit leads to the slower “Tu virginum corona,” whose passionate longing sighs belie its prayer for a calm heart. In the last movement, Mozart rejoices in a single word, “Alleluia,” playing with its accents and ornamenting them with glorious figurations and flourishes. You can sit back and just enjoy this piece as exuberance in musical form. Or you can take pleasure in the brilliance with which Mozart develops the opening image—the heavens resounding with echoes of sweet singing — with echoing ritornellos and motives, rippling back and forth like laughter. Either way, rejoice and be glad with us.

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While Mozart was working on Die Zauberflöte during the summer of 1791, a stranger approached and commissioned him to secretly compose a requiem. (The mysterious patron behind the request was Count Walsegg-Stuppach, an amateur musician who wanted to present the Requiem as his own in memory of his wife.) Mozart accepted the commission and worked on it throughout the autumn until his untimely death in early December prevented him from finishing it.

Constanze, Mozart’s wife, approached a number of composers to complete the score. As a result, the autograph manuscript became cluttered with notation and the workings of at least three different composers. Finally, Franz Xavier Süssmayr, a young composer of somewhat questionable ability who would later become known as composer of Singspiele, accepted her request to finish the work. This is the traditional score that still survives today.

The score first appeared in print around 1800, and almost immediately drew sharp criticism for its unimaginative orchestration and poor mechanics. Since then, many people have tried their own hand at completing the work, including Benjamin Britten (1970), Richard Maunder (1982) and more recently, Robert D. Levin of Harvard University.

The version we are hearing today is by Franz Beyer, completed in 1971. This version was chosen because it most closely resembles the autograph and Süssmayr’s original score. Beyer corrects Süssmayr’s mechanical mistakes (particularly in the winds) and restores certain fragments from the autograph now believed to be authentic Mozart. He also refrains from too much conjecture about how Mozart would have written certain movements (for instance, the Osanna fugues).

For all this talk of finishers, however, one must not lose sight of the fact that the real hero of this story is Mozart. The power and beauty of his Requiem transcend any dry analysis of its convoluted past. Experience his profoundly moving final work, as we remember those who struggled for but never saw this day and the great, unfinished work of human rights worldwide.

Program notes © 2015 Yoshi Campbell, Program Annotator, and David Hodgkins, Artistic Director (Mozart Requiem). These notes are published here for patrons of Coro Allegro and other interested readers.  It is permissible to use short excerpts for reviews.  For permission to copy, publish or make other use of these notes, please contact the author and make a donation to Coro Allegro.