Robert Robinson: Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

The wise have eyes in their heads, while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize that the same fate overtakes them both. 

Ecclesiastes 2:14 (NIV)

When I was younger I was in the Boy Scouts and at one point we began a relatively serious study of survival and the techniques associated with taking care of oneself in various wildernesses and with limited resources.  It is a delicate thing to balance the existence of a human body against such challenging circumstances and it is no small task to not only maintain the metabolic processes necessary for sustaining life, but to also combat the mental hurdles one is presented with in most (if not all) survival situations.  One of the things my scoutmaster told us then has stuck with me through the years since my youth.  He looked around the room full of mostly teen-aged boys and explained that part of embracing the mindset necessary to live through a survival situation was to come to terms with the fact that, above all else, every single person seated in that room will one day cease to live.

It is a sobering thought to grapple when you've barely begun your own life.

But no doubt an important one.  Survival requires a calm and persistent rationale, one without panic. Fear, to paraphrase George Washington, is a flame best stoked gently and guarded carefully lest it should consume.  Fear keeps us alive, but it can also paralyze us and so must be our constant companion, but never a trusted friend.

Robert Robinson (1735-1790) composed Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing in 1757 at the age of 22.  

Robinson was born in Swaffham, Norfolk to a Scottish father who was an exciseman (a sort of tax collector) and a mother who was born to a wealthy family. When Robert was five his father died and he was left alone with his mother who we are told was already struggling to support him.  Her father, who did not approve of Robert's father's social stature, disowned his grandson and Robert's uncle was left with the job of supplying for the boy's education. We know that Robert was an avid reader and had a considerable interest in the application of Christian baptism, but didn't possess the social standing necessary at the time to pursue a life in the clergy and so he was apprenticed to a barber in London.

There is a story that has been corroborated along a few sources that claim Robinson had fallen in with a rough crowd while in London.  On one outing, they came across a fortune teller who they persuaded with alcohol and convinced her to tell them their futures.  The story goes that Robinson's future was that he'd live to see children and grandchildren and as a result it caused him to rethink his life's choices and eventually turn towards religion and become a minister.

The story of the drunken seer concludes with Robert wandering in darkness for approximately three years whereupon he happens to hear the Calvinist pastor George Whitefield, a renowned evangelical Methodist who was instrumental in spreading the Great Awakening throughout Europe and the American colonies as well. Robert first heard Whitfield around the time he was 17.  Long story short, he leaves his post as hairdressing apprentice and begins to preach regularly.  Over time he also would supplement his income with odd jobs and farming, but his true passion would lie in the pulpit.  It is curious that he only wrote a handful of hymns and only two of real consequence, one of which we will listen to today.

Another, less verifiable tale comes from the latter portion of Robert's life when sharing a carriage with a young lady she began humming Come Thou Fount. She grew aware that he had overheard her and apologizes to which Robinson supposedly replies, "Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."

There's no real evidence that exchange took place and looking subjectively at Robinson's early life of losing his father, his abandonment by his mother's family, his young apprenticeship to an unfamiliar trade in an unfamiliar city all lend to the thought that he indeed was "prone to wander" and justify creating a dramatic story of this nature.  His reconciliation of faith gives the text of Come Thou Fount an autobiographical flavor and as such he is somewhat of a poster boy for the tenets of divine grace.

In the US, the text was eventually set to a folk tune called Nettleton which was written by either John Wyeth or Asahel Nettletonin.  In the UK, Normandy by C Bost, is the preferred treatment.  Nettleton is a simple melody, repetitive and written in A-A-B-A form.  The tune has been set numerous times, by Charles Ives in the 20th century and by several modern artists since.  It is a frequently heard hymn both in traditional and contemporary protestant worship services to this day.

The text itself has undergone several revisions following its inception, perhaps most apparent being the subtraction or addition of the "Here I raise my Ebenezer" line, most likely because it causes modern individuals to recall scenes from the Muppet Christmas Carol.

In reality, "Ebenezer" is a reference to 1 Samuel where God helps the biblical character Samuel and the Israelites fend off the attacking Philistines.  Ebenezer roughly translates from Hebrew to mean 'stone of help' and Samuel erected a stone monument near the battle to honor the assistance their people received from God.  It's use in Robinson's text comes out of a statement expressing gratitude from God for the protection offered thus far, while also implying that the journey home is not yet complete.  

Wikipedia itself cites at least 10 variations of the text throughout the different publications and renditions of the work throughout time.  One almost uniform omission is of Robinson's fifth and final stanza, reproduced here:

O that day when freed from sinning, 

I shall see Thy lovely face; 

Clothèd then in blood washed linen 

How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace; 

Come, my Lord, no longer tarry, 

Take my ransomed soul away; 

Send thine angels now to carry  

Me to realms of endless day.

And to be perfectly honest, the fact that it does regularly get cut is complete crap.  The whole work is about accepting the fact that we all screw up at a consistent pace and on a regular basis.  He's constantly asking for the intervention of divine grace to supercede his own selfish wants and desires and to retrain his mind and heart to a more Christian mindset. Part of that comes with the acceptance of the fact that one day we are all going to cease to exist.  Part of that is the understanding that our time here and now is so very precious.

I've written about this before, but I tend to get a bit weary of the breathless and dogmatic teachings of Christianity in relation to the salvation of humanity.  The redeeming death of Jesus is obviously a large part of Christian faith, but eternity in heaven versus ~80 years farting around this rock is a very lopsided juxtaposition, so much so that it defies comprehension.  Robinson in his own way is seeking strength and compassion from his creator to execute Jesus' vision of humanity on Earth, right now, in his own time.  If we've got all eternity to kick up our feet and chill on the cloud-tops, then it seems prudent to get to work while we're down here on this pale blue dot.

My grandmother passed away three Friday's ago.

She probably would not have liked much of the music I've talked about here in this online listening experiment.  She probably wouldn't even want to understand that it was on the internet, nor what the internet actually is.  I wouldn't go as far to call her and my grandfather Luddites, but when they signed up for cable TV it was somewhat Earth-shattering.

It was also like 1998.

Full disclosure: That is not my grandmother.

She had a very defined vision of the afterlife in her mind.  It was biblically based out of her life-long education in the Methodist church.  Out of all the people in my life, her's was the most unquestioning faith I have ever known.  She knew what Robinson knew when he wrote that fifth stanza, and she lived that to her last.

My faith tends to be a bit more towards where I imagine my grandfather's mind dwelled.  He never felt completely at ease in a chapel and it was thought that the church might actually fall over should he poke his head inside.  But his spiritual place could not be found in something fabricated by the hands of man, and so he found his walk took him into creation, in nature itself.  He was a selfless man and his evangelism was quiet, often silent as a stream percolating from a hillside.

This blog has evolved a fair amount since it's inception almost two years ago.  In its history it has had three of what I'll term 'leaves of absence'.  Gaps between entries that vary from 3 weeks to a couple months in length.  All three correspond to specific circumstances in my life that prevented whatever muse I summon to actually write this crap from inspiring me to get the written word transposed upon the flickering screen.

I'd like to think that this process is anemic and removed from my own present emotional and mental state, but the truth of it is I write from personal experience and I always have. Each piece of music that has been presented here has had some sort of impact or correlation to events, choices, or relationships that I have experienced in the past 31 or so years.  In that sense this blog becomes a tapestry of sorts of yours truly.

I've since discovered that the rationale I utilize to comprehend and interpret my emotions is like a large desk scattered with papers.  Papers symbolizing the various experiences that elicit emotional responses.  When an event occurs, the paper is placed on the desk on top and I endeavor to find a stack in which it can find a suitable home.  On occasion a paper's arrival can be a disruptive force, serving to uncover other papers that have long since been forgotten and buried underneath layers upon layers of content.

I used to think this was bottling up, but it's a very different process.  At any time I can revisit the stacks and leaf through these states of mind and exist in that moment once more. Or I can choose to ignore them and let the dust fall where it may. I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's theory of time travel as described in the book, Slaughterhouse-Five. He explains that our experience of time is akin to being strapped to a moving train car while peering at the grand canyon through a telescope, one tiny section at a time. We experience time in a uniform, forward manner, but in the book the protagonist drifts from moment to moment as though he were a leaf on the wind.

At my mind's desk I can see my life set before me in the scattered papers.  Some are much more worn than others and, to the contrary, some have never been touched.  So when these papers arrive and sort of mess up everything I often get these unfamiliar recollections thrown to the surface of my consciousness, whether I like it or not. As I said before, occasionally this unintended reorganization serves to disrupt this process I utilize to write, and I think, perhaps, that Mr. Robinson, in his own way, suffered this phenomenon as well.

So today, in this moment, I celebrate him and his final stanza in the sense that we know nothing beyond this present in which we exist and the stack of papers that lay before us, save for the fact that the papers will one day stop arriving.  We have no idea when they will stop, nor what will be the penultimate circumstance of their cessation. We only know what is going on right now, and as a result no other instant should hold more importance.

Neither of the renditions we will hear today include the final stanza, but both provide a sense of contrast for the scope of this work.  From simple folk tune to a magnificent opus.

In spite of the internet, I'd like to believe that my Grandmother would've approved.

See you next Friday.

-ED







Sources:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robinson,_Robert_(1735-1790)_(DNB00)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Robinson_(Baptist)
http://www.stempublishing.com/hymns/biographies/robinson.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Thou_Fount_of_Every_Blessing
http://www.sharefaith.com/guide/Christian-Music/hymns-the-songs-and-the-stories/come-thou-fount-of-every-blessing-the-song-and-the-story.html

Franz Schubert: Symphony No. 8 in b minor, D.759

So many of us in life start out building temples: temples of character, temples of justice, temples of peace. And so often we don’t finish them. Because life is like Schubert’s "Unfinished Symphony." At so many points we start, we try, we set out to build our various temples. And I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we, like David, find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is an excerpt from a sermon given by Dr. King at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on March 3rd in 1968.  One month and one day later he would be dead from an assassin's bullet in a Memphis, Tennessee motel.

I like to think that in this world, there still exist prophets.  And I don't mean that in the crazy "drinking the Kool-Aid", riding-the-comet sense.  I mean that there are people who can perceive their own actions and thoughts outside the ebb and flow of humanity.  My 7th grade English teacher would call them aliens.  She claimed that if in fact there existed sentient beings among us who were not of Earth, they would easily blend in under the guise of our most revered and famous minds.

I don't know if that's entirely true, but I will readily agree that there are a class of people who exist above the din of our structured society.  They often speak quietly, and are very rarely recognized significantly before their death, and a great tragedy is that their death is often part of their legacy.  A capstone on their contribution to our history.

My scoutmaster from my youth often would claim that "you can't see the forest through the trees." It is a strange adage to be certain, since we normally equate trees and forest as cut from the same cloth. However, we often are unable to see greatness when looking directly upon it.  We have to see it from another angle before we can perceive that what we are observing is in fact something significant.

Like many composers of art music, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was more popular in death than life. If I had to wager a guess, I would have to blame the inherent lack of Facebook for this seemingly perpetual travesty.

Don't worry, they're not.  This was the least stupid one I could find.

The internet has given us many, many wonderful things, chiefly the ability to research ad nauseum pretty much anything you can imagine.  Hell, this blog is a testament to that in and of itself! More so, the internet, in some ways, has leveled the playing field a bit and given a voice to the previously voiceless masses.  This...has not always been such a good thing.

So Schubert lived in Austria and grew to be well-respected among a decent circle of musicians and music-lovers in Vienna, but it wasn't until after he died that people really began to understand the scope of what the young musician had accomplished.  The communication and marketing of his time was nowhere near the break-neck pace that we experience in daily life today.

Schubert died at age 31, but at his death he had composed over 1,500 works of music- including "over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music" and one incomplete symphony.  This is a massive amount of music to have been written by an average composer.  This is an insane amount of music for someone to write in under three decades.

The crazy part is that his family and friends sat on most of his library for quite a while after he died. Eventually, Felix Mendelssohn discovered several works and began performing them and pushing them to the forefront of the musical circles of his time.  Franz Liszt began transcribing and performing his lieders (songs), followed by Antonín Dvořák, with Hector Berlioz and Anton Bruckner all paying tribute or claiming influence from Schubert's pen.

Schubert, by all accounts, was a Classical Era composer.  He was studied in the form and function of Mozart and Beethoven and composed in a style that was indicative of the unyielding format of his time.  The example for today follows the traditional sonata form that was pioneered in the early 18th century.

If you'd like a more entertaining explanation of this format, Peter Schickele AKA PDQ Bach has a wonderful video (shown below) that explains it in baseball terms:

If you watch that all the way through you'll notice that at a few points the announcers get frustrated with the deviations from the standard sonata form that's detailed above.  You see, Beethoven himself would bend these conventions of form from time to time and that's why he was considered to transcend the Classical Era and also be a founding member of the Romantic Era.  Schubert was also given such a distinction.

His "Unfinished Symphony" is a bit of a mystery.  He began writing the work in 1822, as a means of expressing gratitude to the Graz Music Society whom had awarded him an honorary diploma.  He sent his friend and leader of the society, Anselm Hüttenbrenner, a copy of the first two movements and a few pages of a scherzo that was intended to be the 3rd movement.  That surmises what we know for certain about this symphony in b minor.  

There's some reason to believe that there might have been more to this work and several scholars have posited that Schubert did indeed complete a fourth movement, but simply reworked it into the incidental music for Rosamunde, a play by Helmina von Chézy.  The other peculiar thing noticed by historians is that the copies sent to Hüttenbrenner had a few pages torn out.  So Schubert dies in 1828 and Hüttenbrenner sits on this partial symphony for a whopping 37 years!  It wasn't until 1865 that this work was premiered.  We don't know why Hüttenbrenner held onto it for so long, or why there were pages missing, but it raises a lot of questions.  

What we do know about the work is that it is a remarkable piece of music.  Schubert places a great emphasis on melody, which is where some stake the claim that this is the first true Romantic symphony. The major difference between Classical and Romantic music is the departure from the strict forms established in the 17th century, but another part to that is the triumph of melody in the 19th century.  Program music was born at this time and was designed to tell a story through song and melody and as a result much more expressive themes had to be invented and more loquacious harmonies to compensate.  The rigid construct of Classicism would not allow for such liberties, but such lofty compositional goals could not have been built without first given the foundation and framework established in the Baroque and Classical eras.  

When you listen to Schubert's "Unfinished" you hear a true sonata form work to the core. However, deep within the structure, particularly through the development in the 1st movement, you begin to hear the boundaries being tested.  Without delving too much into the theory of it, he breaks quite a few conventions with what would be the expected tonalities throughout the middle of the piece. It's almost as if he were testing the proverbial waters for what was possible through expanding beyond the confines of the traditional sonata form.  

Schubert was dead for almost four decades before this symphony was published.  We don't fully know if this was a dream mistakenly deferred and went unrealized from a life cut short or even if he meant to return to the work and finish it as a symphony at all.  What we do know is what Dr. King told us at the beginning of this article- there is not one among us who will live to see the culmination of the entirety of our dreams.  

And that's OK.

We still struggle with violent opposition to equal rights in our world today.  Does that mean that the struggles Martin Luther King, Jr. and his contemporaries went through in the 60's were not worthwhile?  Or does that simply mean that they were an irreplaceable cog in the vast machinery of humanity as we continue to grind out a path toward enlightenment?  

Would the Romantic Era of music have happened without the influence of Schubert?  The answer is a pretty resounding yes as much of his music went undiscovered until well into the midst of Romanticism.  But did his contributions have an immeasurable impact on the future compositions that would follow in the centuries after his passing?  It's evident they did as we still remember Schubert for what he wrote.  

You see, the beauty of humanity is that we are blessed with the ability to collectively enhance our intelligence from generation to generation, that the sum of our entire existence is carried forward to the youngest of our species.  We are continually updating ourselves and furthering our knowledge and understanding of the universe and passing that forward to those that will come after.  

So, while we may not live to see the ratification of our efforts we can rest easy knowing that the dent was made, the first ground was broken and the foundation laid.   For in spite of our own unfinished symphonies, time will pass also.

See you next Friday.

-ED

Sources: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mnrHf7p0jM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert#Numbering_of_symphonies_2
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/unfulfilled_dreams/

Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 "Choral", Mvt. IV

It's not often I hit a stumbling block with regard to picking music to write about.  It's not exactly like there's a shortage of music.  Humans have been creating organized sounds in rhythm for essentially the past 8,000+ years.  Written music and the like came later, but the concept has existed almost as long as we have.  In the cosmic sense of things, it's really not even on the scale of the blink of an eye.  It's like half a blink.  But on the human scale, from the standpoint of interpreting it from the scope of a single lifetime.  It's enormous.  However, this week I feel compelled to choose just one, out of potentially billions.

Thankfully, not this one.

The composer we're examining today should not be unfamiliar to you.  I only hesitate in presenting the maestro to you in light of last week's piece exploring the life of Johannes Brahms, who spent at least a portion of his life wishing that he was Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). It seems a little abrasive to Brahms to jump right back to Beethoven, but in any event he would probably want to devote a blog to writing about Beethoven were he alive today, but I digress.

Let's examine what most of us know and understand about Beethoven, having been drilled from day one of public education that he was the greatest composer to ever walk the earth.

1.  He was deaf.
2.  He wrote Ode to Joy.
3.  He wrote "bum-bum-bum-baaaaaaaaa"

Here are some facts you might know about Beethoven.

1. He became deaf later in life, losing his hearing gradually as he aged.
2. He wrote a piece called Symphony No. 9 in which the 4th movement takes its text from a poem, "Ode to Joy"
3.  He wrote a piece called Symphony No. 5 in c minor, the first 4 notes of which are now infamous.

We all know history's Beethoven.  We know that he wrote important music and we also equate all things "Classical" with him on a societal level. The irony in this of course is that Beethoven wasn't really a Classical era composer.  He was a pivotal figure in ushering in a new era of musical composition and is almost universally regarded as the father of Romanticism.  He was born and raised into the Classical form, but took liberties with it as a young man and adult, shaping it and molding it to suit his needs, rebelling against the classic instruction he received from greats such as Haydn.

There is much about the man that is conjecture and mythological in nature.  For example: that his father, himself a musician, made him practice at the piano as a small child until the young Beethoven would break down in tears, or that when on his deathbed his final gesture was to reach toward the ceiling in agony as a tremendous clap of thunder shook the building to its foundation.  While it is plausible that Beethoven's father was overzealous in his pursuit to sire the next Mozart, it is equally plausible that such a tale was invented to bolster the already mighty composers identity.  There are also some reports that the day Beethoven died was sunny, not a cloud in the sky.

So wind.  Much tree.

Who are we to know?

What we do know about Beethoven is more interesting to me in any event.  We know that when he was 32 he was already experiencing significant difficulty in hearing.  It was 1824 when he finally completed the 9th symphony, essentially deaf as a stump.  In 1802, he wrote a letter (known as the Heiligenstadt Testament) addressed to his brothers, Johann and Carl in which he pours out his heart and expresses the gloomy darkness that occupied his soul.  Beethoven never married, though not for a lack of trying. He had little respect for the authority of his time, mostly tied up in Austrian aristocracy and unfortunately most of the women he fell for happened to be of this higher slice of society and couldn't be seen cavorting with a commoner musician, despite Beethoven's admirations being often reciprocated.

I'm sure Beethoven felt very alone.  In his nephew, Karl, it seems he placed a great burden as his only heir. Tragically, Karl's father died in 1815.  Complicating this, Beethoven pretty much hated his sister-in-law, viewing her as an unfit wife to his brother and publicly declared her an unfit mother for his nephew.  He spent a great deal of his resources in battling to procure custody rights of Karl to avoid him being raised with his mother's influence.  This had a not altogether desired effect with Beethoven being the 19th century equivalent of a helicopter parent and forcing Karl to study music (even though he wasn't interested and also pretty much sucked at it).  

Karl attempted to kill himself in 1826, went to live with his mother to recover and last saw the elder Beethoven in 1827, shortly before Karl left to join the army and Beethoven left to join the dead.

In his Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven expressed a desire to end his life 25 years before he did eventually die.  Before he even had a chance to compose the bulk of his symphonic works.  One bit he wrote sticks out to me:

...with joy I hasten towards death - if it comes before I shall have had an opportunity to show all my artistic capacities it will still come too early for me despite my hard fate and I shall probably wish it had come later - but even then I am satisfied, will it not free me from my state of endless suffering? Come when thou will I shall meet thee bravely.

For Beethoven, this letter was a last will and testament from a tormented composer who did not fully know if he'd be around much longer.  In this letter he touches on his hearing loss as being a contributing factor to his unhappiness, contrasting it with the fact that as a composer hearing ought to be his best attribute.  This was to be an inevitability however, and something that we remember Beethoven for, maybe even more than his symphonies.

In the end, I'm not sure if it's strength of character, stubbornness, or sheer determination that forced Beethoven to sally forth, back to the wind, into the heart of the gale.  Perhaps a deep love for his nephew and eventual heir to his small fortune? Or maybe he knew that he would be remembered for his contributions to our musical identity as a species?

I don't know.

What I do know is this. Each and every one of you reading this must listen to Beethoven's 9th in its entirety at some point in your life.  And I don't mean now.  And I don't mean on a computer.

I want you to seek out and find an orchestra performing it. Now, if it's the Vienna Phil, then all the better, but keep in mind the premier of this work wasn't its best rendition either. Under-rehearsed and dealing with a totally deaf Beethoven trying to give musical critique gave a certain "flavor" to be sure. But, quality and skill-set aside, you need to find an orchestra performing it live.

And you need to sit through it.  If for no other reason than to say you've done it, because I guarantee that you will not regret it.

Because when you listen to it, if you listen closely, you will hear the Romantic Era being born.



See you next Friday.

-ED

Watch 1st.  

Watch 2nd.

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.wikipedia.com


Epilogue: 

One last bit before we go for this week.  When I was 7 or 8 I was riding the bus from school to my house. I was staring out the window as one often does on buses and observing the blur of the scenery roaring by my young face.  I got the idea that it may look interesting if I were to turn my head 90 degrees so that instead of moving left to right, it would appear to be moving top to bottom, like I was flying or rushing up really quickly.  So, get that image in your head of a small child tilting his head at a strange angle staring blankly out the window.  The bus attendant became concerned.

"What are you doing?!"

I panicked.  I had done strange things like this before, but had never been noticed and I didn't know how to respond any way other than being honest.

"I'm looking at the world from a different viewpoint."

"What?!"

I was mortified.  I had been discovered.  I was different and it would be impossible to explain to someone who was probably just concerned that a good solid bump in the road might be enough to pop a vertebrae out of my neck, bent at such an angle.  I mumbled something incoherent and turned forward, head down.

Beethoven looked out his bus window at weird angles too.  And so does this guy, Leif Inge.  He took Beethoven's 9th and stretched it out digitally to a length of 24 hours (it's normally 90 minutes or so) and calls it "9 Beet Stretch".  Purists will probably turn their noses up at it, citing Beethoven's tempo markings while thumping their chests proudly.  And that's fine.  But to listen to it so slowly, so exposed really seems to me like taking a microscope to the master.  It has a certain trance-like, ethereal quality to it.  After listening to it, for any length of time, your ears and brain begin to invent these sort of artifacts inside the lengthened chords that just come in and out of nowhere.

It's quite surreal.

You can find a live stream of it here: http://www.expandedfield.net/  (Since it's so long, presumably the size of the audio file precludes it from being uploaded to YouTube or the like).  You might like it, I don't know.

Lastly, I want to leave you with a link to a hilariously funny webcomic that puts Beethoven into a unique light, particularly with regards to his relationships with Haydn, his brother and his nephew.

Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp minor, Mvt. 4 Presto, Adagio "The Farewell Symphony"

Ok.  Confession time.  I have a hugely strong bias towards the Romantic Era of music.  I mean, I put Brahms in headphones as our mascot.  Come on, that's just...ridiculous.  

The 18th century style saw a major departure from the Classical reverence for the order of antiquity and that burgeoning freedom from repressed emotion has always been something of interest to me.  The whole concept of pairing strong emotional content with musical motifs as a means of communicating a concept or vision produced such amazingly beautiful results.  In my mind, the Romantic era saw the final triumph of the melody as art.  It is the perfect answer to the rigidity of the Classical period's framework.

Anyways, I have noticed a tendency of mine over the years to pick Romantic works for LF over that of the other eras of music.  Bearing that in mind, I have decided (almost unwittingly) to begin these fledgling posts on this blog by working backwards in time.  I guess you can call it a series of sorts.  You may have noticed that the piece from two weeks ago was a modern work, last week's was from the heart of Romanticism, and now this week's comes from one of the more interesting composers of all times in my opinion (certainly a composer who had some interesting and unusual circumstances within which to live).  I present to you, a Classical composer extraordinaire, none other than Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and his "Farewell Symphony".

Before we dive in, here's a general timeline of music history as we know it to be today.  We've done Modern/Contemporary and Romantic.  Now we move backwards into Classical:

Not shown: Flintstone Epoch and Jetson's Dynasty

Haydn's story intrigues me.  He had such a remarkable relationship with his employer and was himself just a generally happy and easy to work with person.  Far different from the bizarre personality types of the Beethoven's and Mozart's and other "starving artists" of the day, Haydn was a well-adjusted (not to mention well-paid), generous, and funny guy.  His humor frequently shone through his composition. 

Haydn worked for most of his life as the court musician (or Kapellmeister) for the wealthy Esterházy family, who were Hungarian nobility whose family lines date as far back as the middle ages and still amazingly have bloodline relatives surviving today.  Basically, Haydn's job was to write music and put on concerts and operas (as many as 100 per year) for the family and their guests as they traveled from Eisenstadt to other residences throughout Austria and Hungary.  

Haydn was essentially given all that he wished and was allowed almost entirely free reign to compose for some of the finest musicians of his time (all of whom were hired specifically for Haydn to write for).  Both Prince Paul Anton (who originally hired Haydn) and his brother, Nicklaus (who would succeed Paul as Prince following his death) were avid musicians in addition to being wealthy, military-minded nobility.

The Esterházy family occupied several homes, and the family frequently resided in or around Vienna, Austria.  However, Prince Nikolaus disliked the bustle and aristocracy of Vienna and preferred to stay in hunting lodges or the family headquarters in Eisenstadt, Austria, far off from the rest of the nobility.  Eventually, Nikolaus built a huge compound on the site of an old hunting lodge where he would take his summer residence.  Known as Esterháza, it is often likened  as the Hungarian version of the Versailles.  

MTV Cribs 18th Century, son.

So, Prince Nick started spending more and more of his time at Esterháza and as such required that Haydn and the musicians in his employ remain out in the middle of nowhere.  What originally started as a summer holiday to the mansion turned into 10 months out of the year.  The musicians knew they had a good paying gig, but their lovely wives were waiting for them back in Austria.  

Although...

Tensions began to rise and Haydn was pressured to make a move.  Not wanting to anger his benefactor, as they had always enjoyed a fruitful and incredibly amicable relationship, he allowed his wit to come up with a viable solution.  Haydn was famous for his humor (and large, aquiline nose) and he often incorporated it into his compositions.  Most Classical period symphonies were written in four movements (typically: fast, slow, minuet, fast).  Haydn followed suit with Symphony No. 45 (often referred to by the informal title of "Farewell Symphony"), but as the fourth movement approached its completion a coda-like section (remember the Tangelo!) begins.  

This "5th" movement was slower and featured several solos among the musicians.  The whole idea of a "5th movement in a symphony" thing almost certainly surprised Prince Nick, as he was a fairly accomplished musician himself and would take notice of the unexpected slow section following what appeared to be the conclusion of the fourth movement.  

An interesting aside on the Prince's musical abilities- Haydn wrote some 175 pieces for his favorite instrument the 'baryton' (which was a kind of bass violin with extra strings you pluck through the back of the neck with your thumb or just let them vibrate sympathetically while bowing the other strings).  Prince Nick would frequently play with Haydn and the other musicians as well.  

Dude.  There's just no way I'm in tune.

But getting back to the "Farewell" in Symphony No. 45.

I love thinking about a warm concert hall in Hungary filled with some of the most important and wealthy people of the time, and Prince Nikolaus down in front expecting the atypical conclusion to another enjoyable Haydn symphony.  As that irregular coda dawns, I can just imagine his reaction.  

And as his confusion fades to understanding, one by one the stage grows darker and darker as each of his musicians extinguish their candles and slowly drift into the wings.  

I see a smile growing on his face.  

In the end, in the darkness of that concert hall is Haydn and his concertmaster playing at the front of an empty stage before they too snuff out their lights and fade into the night.  

Prince Nikolaus and his musicians returned to Eisenstadt the next day.


Homework: Write about a goodbye you've experienced (painful or otherwise) that remains strong in your memory.

You can leave your answers in the comments.

See you next Friday.

-ED

YouTube wouldn't allow me to embed the content, but here's a link that starts at the final portion of Movement 4 with a very theatrical performance by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Daniel Barenboim.


Sources:
www.youtube.com
www.wikipedia.com
The baryton image is attributed to http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Rik86 and used under the regulations of the Creative Commons.
The aerial view of Esterháza is attributed to Daniel Somogyi-Tóth, www.legifotok.hu and used under the regulations of the Creative Commons.
The image of the 18th century couple has an unknown origin.  I will gladly document authorship if someone can find out who owns it!
The timeline image is my own work and I license it for use under the Creative Commons.