This February program opens with Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture, the opening to his great operatic tribute to heroism and liberty. We then turn to the music by Joseph Schwantner, New Morning for the World, which provides a dramatic orchestral background to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. Our narrator is Kitara Johnson-Jones, a local activist and director of Spokane’s Community-Care Education and Empowerment Center. We close with William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, a fine work of the 1930s that channels the influence of Black spirituals. This work has had a recent resurgence among American orchestras after decades of neglect.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Born: December 17, 1770 (baptism date), Bon, Germany.

Died: March 26, 1827, Vienna, Austria.

Overture to “Fidelio,” Op. 72b

• Composed: 1814.
• Premiere: May 23, 1814, at the Kärtnertortheater in Vienna.
• Duration: 6:00.

This dramatic overture initially steps at the stage for Beet oven’s only opera, Fidelio.

Background

No composer was more willing to revise and re-revise than Beethoven. The history of the overtures he wrote for his only opera, Fidelio (originally titled Leonore), is a case in point. The overture, now known as Leonore No.2, was composed for the opera’s premiere in 1805. This first performance was a dismal failure, and Beethoven staged an early unsuccessful performance of the opera in 1806. The most important revision in the 1806 version was Beethoven’s substitution of a new overture, Leonore No.3, a streamlined and dramatically remodeled version of Leonore No.2. Beethoven wrote the overture known by the somewhat misleading title Leonore No.1 in 1807, in anticipation of a performance of the opera in Prague, which never took place. (In the 1970s, Beethoven scholar Alan Tyson discovered that the composer made a few preliminary sketches for a fourth Leonore overture—yet another reworking of Leonore No.2.)

After the failures of 1805 and 1806 and his abortive attempt to produce Fidelio in Prague, Beethoven put the opera aside until 1814, when it was successfully produced, with substantial dramatic and musical revisions. This 1814 version—the version of Fidelio we know today—was provided an entirely new overture, which abandoned the Leonore music altogether. While Leonore No. 3 is a wonderful piece of music, the triumphant conclusion, a reference to the grand rescue scene at the end of the opera, must have dramatically obliterated the opera’s opening act. The Fidelio Overture was partly a response to this problem—it is a more modest piece (under half the length of Leonore No.3) and a bit more subtle in the way it sets up the drama.

What You’ll Hear

The introduction alternates between a blustering three-note figure and a dark passage that is a reference to the dungeon where the opera’s hero, Florestan, is imprisoned. The introduction ends with a long passage of gradually increasing brightness until the horn takes up the first main theme, which spins off from the overture opening figure. The second group of ideas is just as high-spirited, referring to music symbolic of the heroine, Leonore. After a terse development section, Beethoven brings back the main theme in a conventional way, but has a surprise in store when we reach Leonore’s music—suddenly turning to a minor key. The music of the introduction returns briefly, now transformed into a major-key hymn, before a blazing coda closes off the overture.

Joseph Schwantner

Born March 22, 1943, Chicago, Illinois.

New Morning for the World: Daybreak of Freedom

• Composed: 1982.
• Premiere: January 15, 1983, in the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, by the Eastman Philharmonia Orchestra, with narrator Willie Stargell, conducted by David Effron.
• Duration: 28:00.

This work provides a colorful, constantly evolving orchestral background to the words of Martin Luther King Jr.

Background

Joseph Schwantner trained at the Chicago Conservatory and Northwestern University. Now retired from academic life, Schwantner served on the faculties of the Juilliard School, the Eastman School of Music, and Yale University. In 1979, his orchestral composition Overtones of Infinity won the Pulitzer Prize for music. His New Morning for the World was composed during his tenure at the Eastman School and was suggested by the school’s director, Robert Freeman, in 1981. Writing about the work in 1982, Schwantner said:

“I was excited by the opportunity to engage my work with the profound and deeply felt words of Dr. King, a person of great dignity and courage whom I had long admired. The words that I selected for the narration were garnered from a variety of Dr. King’s writings, addresses, and speeches and drawn from a period of more than a decade of his life. These words, eloquently expressed by the thrust of his oratory, bear witness to the power and nobility of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ideas, principles, and beliefs. This work of celebration is humbly dedicated to his memory.”

At the premiere, the narration was performed by Pittsburgh Pirates star Willie Stargell.

What You’ll Hear

The obvious predecessor to this work is Copland’s famous A Lincoln Portrait of 1942, which sets five excerpts from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches and letters above a dramatic orchestral background. Schwantner’s musical style is quite different than that of Copland, but his setting is no less effective. After an atmospheric introduction, the narration opens with the words, “There comes a time when people get tired.” (from King’s 1958 Stride Toward Freedom). This sets

up a pattern that will be used throughout the piece, as the orchestral accompaniment reacts in turn to each section of narration and sets up the next. The music Schwantner writes to underlay the narrations themselves is generally quiet and sensitive, as in the hushed accompaniment to an excerpt from King’s 963 Letter from Birmingham Jail (“Before the pilgrims landed in Plymouth…”). One of the grandest and most forceful interludes follows King’s stirring words, “How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” (from his Behind the Selma March of 1965). The closing and climactic narration is drawn from King’s great 1963 I Have a Dream speech.

William Levi Dawson

Born: September 26, 1899, Anniston, Alabama.

 Died: May 2, 1990, Montgomery, Alabama.

Negro Folk Symphony

• Composed: Completed 1934, revised 1952.
• Premiere: November 20, 1934, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
• Duration: 29:00.

Dawson’s symphony brings together a host of Black musical styles, most importantly the spiritual, in a profound reflection on African American history.

Background

William Levi Dawson was one of the most talented Black composers in a generation that included Harry T. Burleigh, William Grant Still, Florence Price, Ulysses Kay, and others. He was born in Alabama and at age 15, left for Tennessee to study at the famed Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). After graduating, he taught public school music in Kansas and gigged as a jazz trombonist while earning a music degree at Kansas City’s Horner Institute of Fine Arts. Dawson spent the late 1920s in Chicago, pursuing additional studies at the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music while also leading a church choir and performing on trombone. (He performed with Louis Armstrong and other notable jazz musicians while also playing principal trombone in the Chicago Civic Orchestra!) In 1931, he accepted an invitation to return to Tuskegee as a professor. He would teach there until 1956 and built the Tuskeegee Choir into an internationally-recognized ensemble. Following his retirement, Dawson toured extensively as a guest conductor.

For Dawson and many of his Black contemporaries, the spiritual was a wellspring of inspiration. Many of these traditional religious songs—both “sorrow songs” and “jubilees”—dated from the days of slavery, and the no less turbulent late 19th century. Dawson was involved with spirituals throughout his life, arranging and publishing dozens of them for chorus. Spirituals were also the foundation for his own orchestral work, the Negro Folk Symphony. He explained in his program notes for the Carnegie Hall premie  in 1934: “In this composition, the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee.” Earlier that year, Dawson showed the score to the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who suggested a few changes and programmed the symphony on four concerts performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra that November in Carnegie Hall. Despite an enthusiastic response from both audiences and critics, the Negro Folk Symphony remained largely forgotten after this. In 1952, following a trip to  West Africa, Dawson revised the work, particularly the first movement, to incorporate African musical elements, rhythm, and instruments. Stokowski finally recorded the work, in this new version, with the American Symphony Orchestra in 1963. Like the works of Florence Price, there has been renewed interest in the Negro Folk Symphony in recent years.

What You’ll Hear

The symphony is in three movements, beginning with The Bond of Africa, which represents the “missing link from a human chain when the first African was taken from the shores of his native land and sent into slavery.” Dawson channels Black musical idioms throughout, beginning with the bluesy horn and English horn solos at the opening. (This phrase—the “missing link”—reappears in the movement as a kind of lament.) A theme introduced by the oboes is the spiritual “Oh, My Little Soul Gwine Shine.” The movement continues in an energetic classical form, with a series of themes introduced and developed. However, there is an overlay of references to Black styles ranging from the juba dance, banjo songs, and African rhythms to 1930s Jazz and Blues.

According to Dawson, Hope in the Night represents “the humdrum life of a people whose bodies were baked by the sun and lashed with the whip for two hundred and fifty years; whose lives were proscribed before they were born.” This desolate music begins with a tolling gong and a plodding background to a lament. This idea alternates with livelier and more hopeful music.

The main theme of the final movement is the spiritual that Dawson uses as its title, O, Le’ Me Shine, Shine Like a Morning Star! This emerges playfully in the opening section. He also incorporates Hallelujah, Lord, I Been Down Into the Sea. Though the overall effect of this movement is lively and upbeat, there are hints of darkness intruding throughout. This is in keeping with Dawson’s note that it depicts “the merry play of children yet unaware of the hopelessness beclouding their future.”

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Program notes ©2024 by J. Michael Allsen