Immortal Fire
by John Hoffacker
"Immortal Fire" was performed on May 10 & 11, 2003

You know already how well the arts illumine what passes for reality. For centuries, musicians and poets have been inspired to illuminate life. In this program, we perform some of the music inspired by this Immortal Fire.

To respond to life in a musical way was, for Auden, to be in touch with the Divine, to hear the divine muses. His poem listens to the muses, then reflects back their glory. The poem is impressionistic: it begins in a garden, a pastoral scene, where the power of the divine inspires in a blinding array.

The second stanza is a Mendelssohn-like "fairy scherzo," an attempt to capture the evanescence of life. The third stanza hearkens back to Henry Purcell's "Ode to Saint Cecilia" by using a Purcellian form known as a "ground," in which a repeated bass line supports variations above.

Cecilia's day is November 22, which is also the birthday of Benjamin Britten. He wrote the piece on board a ship returning him to England in 1942. He'd gone to America when life in England became to him unbearable. Britten was a lifelong pacifist, and he left England when bombs started falling around him. So did Auden. Both were regarded as cowards, but they were also envied. Auden and Britten, homesick, both returned before hostilities ended. Britten composed his "Ceremony of Carols" on the same trip.

The next song on our program is "Cantique de Jean Racine," composed by Gabriel Fauré for a competition in his final year studying at the Conservatoire de Paris. The text comes from a collection of sacred poetry from the French classic period – an age the equivalent of Elizabethan poetry in the England. Jean Racine was France's Shakespeare. The music expresses Fauré's customary restraint and command of dramatic structure.

The third set in our program is three "Chansons" (songs) by Maurice Ravel, composed at the height of the First World War. Ravel reacted to the horrors of that war by writing music extolling the glories of French culture with a very light texture and exquisitely balanced poetry. Ravel composed the texts himself.

The first is a pastorale, describing the flight of sweet young Nicolette from all kinds of suitors - flight from all except an old but rich fellow who wins her hand in the end. The second song poignantly describes the loss felt by Ravel for his friends who have gone off to war, many never to return. Three birds of paradise, in the colors of the French flag, ask him what they can bring him, and he responds by asking them to take his heart, because it has gone with his friends. The last song is the climax of the set, describing the terrors of monsters, dragons, sylphs, and an amazing list of other scary creatures. The music paints a delightful picture of what my son calls "funny scary," allowing all the singers to recite the list of creatures at breakneck speed, and finally to realize that the old people have chased all the monsters away.

We close our first half with five songs from a set of Old American Songs. These were collected by Aaron Copland and originally arranged by him for solo voice. The Boston composer Irving Fine then transcribed Copland's solo songs for chorus. We sing five of them.

In our second half, we present Chichester Psalms, written by Leonard Bernstein in 1965 while on sabbatical from the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein combined a 1960s jazz idiom with contemporary classical orchestration to set several Hebrew psalms for choir (originally) of men and boys, with boy soloist. The orchestra for which he wrote had no woodwind instruments, only brass, percussion, and strings. He arranged it later for organ, harp, and percussion – the orchestration we will use.

In the first movement, he asks the musicians to "boisterously" perform the line "Enter his gates with praise." The music casts inhibitions aside and sets the texts in an unabashed joyful and intimate awareness of connection with the Divine. The second movement is a sublime solo for boy alto and chorus, using the Hebrew text of Psalm 23. The concluding movement avoids the "big finish" found in splashier psalm settings, opting for a quiet, firm chorale setting of the text "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" Thank you for joining us.