Verdi, Berlioz, Daugherty, & Friends: Dies Irae

'A big hand please, ladies and gentlemen,' he hollered, 'for the Great Prophet Zarquon! He has come! Zarquon has come again!'  

Thunderous applause broke out as Max strode across the stage and handed his microphone to the Prophet. Zarquon coughed. He peered round at the assembled gathering. The stars in his eyes twinkled uneasily. He handled the microphone with confusion.  

'Er...' he said, 'hello. Er, look, I'm sorry I'm a bit late. I've had the most ghastly time, all sorts of things cropping up at the last moment.'  

He seemed nervous of the expectant awed hush. He cleared his throat.  

'Er, how are we for time?' he said, 'have I just got a min--'  

And so the Universe ended.

~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Our piece today is not necessarily of a specific example, but more of a usage of the text and melody which has been placed into the human psyche as a rather forbidding explanation of the days to come. Dies Irae is a poem, though its composer and the time frame in which it was composed is subject to a bit of debate.  We know it was written between 500-1300 AD and historians have attributed at one time or another to the following individuals:

• Thomas of Celano of the Franciscan Order (1200 – c. 1265)
• Latino Malabranca Orsini (~1294)
• St. Gregory the Great (d. 604)
• St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)
• St. Bonaventure (1221-1274)

The text of the Dies Irae centers around the biblical judgement day, heralding the end of the world with a descriptive story-telling of the day as so described in biblical text.  The account of the prophet Zephaniah provides us with the title:

That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of the trumpet and alarm against the fenced cities, and against the high towers.

Dies Irae itself translates from Latin to mean "day of wrath".  Wikipedia does a good job of showing examples of the text in Latin and two translations, so I don't intend to waste time reproducing that here.  There are other portions of the bible that also dictate to the poem, the Revelation being the most prominent.

This piece was originally purposed for use in the Roman Catholic Requiem mass, which is a time where the church turns its attention toward the departed and reflects upon the dead, most times in the context of a funeral.  The music itself is ancient, brought about from a tradition of plainchant, which might be more recognizable to the layperson as "Gregorian Chant".

Plainchant is a single, monophonic melody that is unaccompanied by other instruments. They are often responsorial, meaning that a leader or choir would sing one stanza and the congregation would respond with a sort of "chorus" to put it into today's terms. Alternatively, they could be in antiphonal format where the choir/leader would alternate verses with the congregation instead.

Plainchant evolved in the Christian church out of combined traditions of Jewish and Greek music, replacing the lost art of notation developed originally by the ancient Greeks. Plainchant used "nuemes" instead of notes, each symbol implying a certain sound, but for the most part it remained unstandardized from region to region until the 12th century.  You also begin to see the development of the music staff at this point in history, as seen below:

Now the thing about Dies Irae is that it just sounds so...dark



Now imagine for a moment the Roman church in the 13th century.  Nobody's got their iPhone out. It's probably dark. It's probably pretty musty too since there's no central air and showering wasn't really a thing until after the Black Death some 100-150 years later. Lighting is either natural light filtering dimly through stained glass or candle light.  

If you've attended a Catholic mass today, it's not all that different in terms of format and style.  Then these guys stand up and start singing Dies Irae.  You're just a potato farmer in the middle of Europe and these guys in robes are telling you in Latin that God is going to come back and wreck stuff with flaming swords and angels that look like John Cena on steroids.

And while your medieval mind is trying to wrap around the fact that you have no idea who John Cena is (the saddest part of which being your total inability to appreciate perhaps the most unexpected John Cena in all history) the only other thing you can think of is how cool this sounds.  And that's what has captivated composers ever since.

The first of which we'll look at is Joe Green.

So, Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) is essentially the king of Italian opera in the Romantic era. He was a big fan of Italian culture and a champion of his fellow Italian composers.  So one of his personal heroes, Gioachino Rossini, dies and he and a few other composers decided they needed to create a fitting, Italian tribute to the master. Verdi's vision was that they would construct an Italian Requiem, written by twelve Italian composers.  It would then be sealed it in the Italian archives and performed annually in honor of Verdi's death as a public service and without financial gain toward any of the authors.  Verdi wasn't interested in money or fame (he was already doing alright in both).  Verdi was interested in nationally honoring a fellow whom he held in the highest esteem.  Sadly, the project tanked near the finish line and the work was not performed as intended, though it did receive a revival performance in 1988, some 100+ years after Rossini died.

Verdi was a bit of a firebrand throughout his life and was quite passionate about things he felt were important. As a result of the failed Rossini Requiem, he refused to allow his portion of the work to be performed and five years later rededicated his efforts to write the mass in honor of an Italian author by the name of Alessandro Manzoni, a man who had inspired Verdi in his youth.  Verdi reworked the finale portion of the original mass and wrote the rest of the music himself, premiering the work in 1874.

Critics look at Verdi, a cynic of religion, openly agnostic and with a significant flair for the dramatic, and question why would a man who had such mastery of the dramatic arts compose something so sacred as a requiem mass?  It was denounced by some in the church as "cheapening religion with theatrics" and German conductor Hans von Bülow went as far to say it was "opera in ecclesiastical dress".

In any event, it's a hell of a thing to listen to and I'm willing to bet you've actually heard this work before.  It's very common in movies where you need a scene of comically overt dramatics where all hell is breaking loose.  The whole Requiem is about 70-80 minutes long, so I'll start the video right at the Dies Irae.

The next work we'll look at is something we have explored a bit already.  Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was a French composer in the early portion of the Romantic era.  He struggled greatly to attain recognition for his work, and would spend a great deal of time fighting his critics in the Parisian newspapers some of which seem to take sadistic glee in denouncing his music.  

One piece that managed to break above this negativity was his Symphonie Fantastique which premiered to almost universal acclaim at the Paris Conservatory in 1830. The whole work is programatic in that it is a tone poem that describes a young man's distress at failing to win the affectations of a young lady and in a depressed and dejected state attempts to kill himself by overdosing on opium.  Instead he has a really bad drug trip. As Leonard Bernstein puts it, 'Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.'

So our hapless friend eventually dreams that he has been executed (that's in movement four), and now in movement five, "Songe d'une nuit du sabbat" or Dream of the Night of the Sabbath he finds that he's descended into hell and finds himself at a witch party.  Berlioz's program notes:

He sees himself at a witches’ sabbath, in the midst of a hideous gathering of shades, sorcerers and monsters of every kind who have come together for his funeral. Strange sounds, groans, outbursts of laughter; distant shouts which seem to be answered by more shouts. The beloved melody appears once more, but has now lost its noble and shy character; it is now no more than a vulgar dance tune, trivial and grotesque: it is she who is coming to the sabbath ... Roar of delight at her arrival ... She joins the diabolical orgy ... The funeral knell tolls, burlesque parody of the Dies irae, the dance of the witches. The dance of the witches combined with the Dies irae.

Here you go, kids:





Our last Dies Irae moment for today comes from a time a bit closer to home. Michael Daugherty (b.1954) is an American composer who happens to be a big fan of the comic book hero, Superman. He was commissioned and composed a work entitled The Metropolis Symphony which explores the Superman canon through five movements: Lex, Krypton, MXYZPTLK, Oh Lois!, and...

...the Red Cape Tango.

The fifth movement chronicles a pivotal issue in the Superman comic world where the caped crusader fights a seemingly unstoppable villain known as Doomsday.  The two trade blows through Metropolis and ultimately kill each other, Superman sacrificing his life to save the world from what would have been an unstoppable trail of destruction. The immortal hero, died in 1992.

Daugherty uses the Dies Irae as a recurring theme throughout the piece, transforming it into a sultry tango that is punctuated by cymbal and gong hits emphasizing the massive attacks the two titans deliver upon each other.  The work, originally composed for orchestra, has been transcribed for concert band and I had the privilege to be a part of a performance of this work in front of the composer in my time at FSU. An interesting side note that we learned in hearing from Professor Dougherty: this is allegedly the first time the original melody of the Dies Irae has been used in a tango form.




So I normally have some sort of undercutting metaphor and witty commentary on life to supplement the knowledge I haphazardly impart on you, but today I've got nothing.  I've been mired in a bit of writer's block trying to get one of these off the ground (I've got 3 or 4 half-written ones at the moment), but I can't quite hit my stride. 

In thinking about the Dies Irae, I guess I just find it impressive that we still find meaning and value in a piece of music that is potentially 1400+ years old.  That in our search for the newest and brightest things, we should always remember to look introspectively and remember where we came from as they still exist within us, whether we recognize that or not.

See you next Friday.

-ED

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_Irae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology
http://www.classicalnotes.net/classics2/verdirequiem.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Daugherty

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: The Year 1812, festival overture in E♭ major, Op. 49

"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."

~Frank Zappa  

"Every now and then we have to let the general public know that we can still blow shit up."

~Captain Diel from Rush Hour 

In the late 1700's France was experiencing some pretty significant growing pains which historians have termed, the "French Revolution".  There's a lot of loose ends and rabbit holes to be uncovered when discussing this, but the gist is the regular schmucks got pretty tired of the nobility being famous just because their daddy's had money and went berserk on most of Europe for the better part of ten to fifteen years because why not?  Fortunately, Americans have no frame of reference here.

"Liberté, égalité, fraternité!"

So in the process of this overthrow of Feudalism and creation of a republic comes a guy named Napoléon Bonaparte who it turns out is like the Michael Jordan of warfare and creates an empire the likes of Europe hadn't seen since Rome fell.   Russia had eventually become pretty cool on most of this as they had generated a peace accord with the French from 1807 when Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Napoleon signed the Treaty of Tilsit which concluded with France absorbing most of Prussia and Russia agreeing to help France dominate Europe if they would help Russia defeat the Ottomans.  

"I will never let go, Boney."

Previously, Russia had been allied with Britain and Sweden in telling France the calm the hell down, but with the power of Napoleon's Grande Armée (which we can only assume was made up of pirate jedis) the Russians felt the greater hope for remaining undisturbed lay with such an alliance.  

As this woodcut shows Johnny Depp fighting Prussians at the Battle of Auerstadt

So with the treaty in place, peace was achieved between Russia and France for a whopping four years because in 1811, Russian nobility were getting pretty uncomfortable with the whole French thing about "equality" and "being pissed off at the rich people who are rich just because they were the inbred spawn of other rich people" and encouraged Tsar Alex to put the brakes on the Franco lovefest.  As a precautionary measure, the Tsar began to explore the possibility of an invasion of France through Poland.  This was accidentally leaked and as a result Napoleon beefed up his army to about 450,000 men and tore, thunder and blazes, across Europe straight towards Moscow beginning in June of 1812.  

Now, Napoleon's army was really good at entering a theatre of war and gobbling up resources in short order on a scale of magnitude that was massive enough to satisfy the needs of the ever-enlarging army.  Well-fed troops fight harder and longer and depriving the enemy of rations would frequently tip the scale in the French favor.  The Russians knew from the outset that they were no match for the French army, which at this point was as hench as the Incredible Hulk, so the Ruskies began to retreat towards Moscow, dodging fights and destroying their own resources which was using a page out of the military tactics book known as:  

The Russians finally held a line in Borodino (after Russian nobility understandly completely freaked out) where a vastly overpowered Russian force valiantly got their butts kicked, but landed a definitive "you shoulda seen the other guy,"-esque blow on the French.  Following the defeat, the Russians retreated beyond Moscow and left Napoleon to only assume that he could waltz in and force Alexander to capitulate, but the Russians would be having none of that and proceeded to burn their capital to the ground.  

So at this point, a confused and exhausted Napoleon noticed that it had started snowing, the prize he sought was smoldering away and he had a few hundred thousand hungry soldiers who had about 1,700 miles to walk back to France.  Meanwhile, the Russians were all like-

One of the most bitter Siberian winters had begun to set in and literally began freezing Napoleon's army to the ground.  Thousands after thousands of men began dying from exposure and starvation as they began their retreat back to the homeland, leaving Russia to celebrate victory on account of their polar bear ancestry.  

"Is elixir of the bourgeois." 

So at this point you might be given to wonder when (if ever) we might be listening to something. Well, here's the tie-in.  In 1880 the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was almost finished being built, which was good timing as it had been 25 years since Alexander II was coronated and about 40 years since Alexander I asked them to build it in the first place.  The church was actually built to commemorate the Russian victory, and patriotism was maxed as everything seemed to push towards a blow-out spectacular where they had planned to have Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) compose a fitting piece of music to honor such an auspicious occasion.  Someone (probably in Russian marketing) thought it would be a grand idea to have live artillery and bells and people shouting while the music played to simulate the absolute joy the Russian people experienced when nature liberated them from French occupation. Tchaikovsky thought it sounded like a bunch of crap and quickly and dispassionately composed the piece that would make his family wealthy beyond belief for generations to come.

The original festival ended up being canceled on account of the insane amount of money necessary to do all that cool stuff and that Alexander II was assassinated by members of a Russian liberation movement, thus making a such a celebration a bit superfluous. Despite all this, the piece was premiered on August 20th, 1882 in a tent in front of the unfinished cathedral.

The piece is sort of a mixtape of the entire conflict.  Tchaikovsky employs a Russian Orthadox hymn, O Lord Save Thy People to symbolize his fleeing countrymen as the advancing French army is symbolized by the (eventual) French anthem,  La Marseillaise, and as the conflict escalates toward Moscow you hear cannon fire (presumably the Russians firing the French guns that were left frozen in the tundra) punctuating the anthem as numerous bells ring out over the top of the orchestra.  The bells symbolize the churches ringing their "zvons" loudly as many of the Russian citizenry had resorted to praying to God that they be delivered from the invading army.  "Zvons" were Russian-style cathedral bells that unlike the Hunchback of Notre Dame, used fixed ropes attached to their clappers so that to play them one only had to press down on each rope to sound the corresponding bell.  

Cool hat is sold separately

Now the art of performing the zvons had been mostly lost in the years following the Russian revolution as many of the bell towers were destroyed, so it has proven difficult to authentically replicate the sound Tchaikovsky may have been hoping to achieve.  Not to mention the difficulty of firing off explosives in close proximity to musicians.  Too close everyone dies, too far away and the sound delay causes a miscue as the cannon fire is in fact in the score.  

Drop the bass, Pachelbel

The version I've found for today is, from what I can determine, a performance by the Leningrad Philharmonic on the occasion of Tchaikovsky's 150th birthday, which would put this recording somewhere in the year 1990.  Cannons are used and the bells performed look very similar to what our Orthodox friend up there seems to be playing on.  The other neat part about this work is that in the finale portion a brass band (who had up until this point been hanging out) is used to make it as loud as humanly possible as the Russians finally have a reason to be thankful they lived in the Earth's ice box.  

The overture, a bit paradoxically, is now a frequent staple of the celebration of American independence following Arthur Fiedler programming it during the Boston Pop's annual "Pops goes the Fourth" in 1974.  One could look at the present-day circumstances surrounding the Russian-US relationship and scoff at such use of what is traditionally a Russian anthem of freedom and independence.  One could even make a swift (and truthful) judgement that the Russian people are in many ways still fighting for that freedom.  

But I say look past the differences in our cultures.  Put aside the injustices that still plague our modern societies.  And just pause for a moment and appreciate what Mr. Tchaikovsky has done for young music listeners the world over:

See you next Friday.

-ED

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1812_Overture
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/on-this-day/July-August-08/On-this-Day--Tchaikovsky-s--1812-Overture--Debuts-in-Moscow.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia
Calvin and Hobbes belongs to the unparalleled Bill Watterson

John Newton, William Walker, arr. Victor Wooten: Amazing Grace

"...sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? But sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude, in Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. But sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Aw. I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced him enough."

The Stranger, The Big Lebowski (1998)

Recalcitrant insubordination could be a phrase that might appear in the vast cumulative folders of many students throughout history.  Often when browsing Wikipedia, one is given to attempt to stay coherent through the drawling sentences, written to emulate and perhaps propagate a tone befitting a most verbose tome of the world's knowledge.  It can get a bit dry.  But every so often someone will throw out a certain combination of words that will catch my attention.  In this case it was in an article regarding the brain child of John Newton (1725–1807) who was responsible for creating the combination of words known to many people as "Amazing Grace".  

The article touched on the fact that Mr. Newton had an issue with people who were in a position to tell him what to do.  In schools today, it might be called "Oppositional Defiant Disorder".  You might notice a theme here, that I'm fairly certain has no correlation whatsover, but is interesting none-the-less.  "Recalcitrant" describes an individual who possesses a difficulty when confronted with authority and particularly with following the instructions given by such authority.  Uncooperative is a word that is associated with it, while insubordination is the act of willful disobedience, occasionally with an axe to grind.  Both words are similar enough ways of describing the same trait or personality. It's almost like saying a color is "red red", but with more letters involved.  

By the same token "Oppositional Defiant" is a similar concept, but with- what I feel anyway- is less flowery.  It sounds like something you'd hear in an office as a supervisor is going over employee #2458's personnel file.  "Well, you didn't share the copier with Pete last week, and then you proceeded to staple his tie to the door as you kicked over the water cooler.  I'm sensing some oppositional defiance from you this quarter, Greg."

So the story goes that John Newton was a bit of a renegade and had led a life (as so described by Wikipedia) of recalcitrant insubordination.  Now, in the mid-1700's when Mr. Newton lived, England had a very equitable way of guaranteeing that they had a strong, well-manned Navy.  Each time in port when they needed to acquire more sailors (because the other ones had either run off or died from boredom or malaria) they would task a highly skilled militia with encouraging young men of age to come live a care-free life of ease on the open seas.  This often involved threatening one's life with big sticks and frequently employed blunt force trauma to the head to initiate unconsciousness which would put a prospective sailor in no frame of mind to debate the merits of what was tantamount to indentured servitude.   

Mr. Newton was one such sailor and following his career in the Queen's navy he began working for the Atlantic Slave Trade which meant Newton would be helping to transport actual indentured servants to work unendingly in the English colonies.  As fate would have it, his ship was struck by a fearful storm and like a college student who promises never to drink again whilst in the throes of alcohol-induced vomiting, Newton vowed to take up a life of Christianity should God grant him mercy.  Now, unlike most college drunkards, Newton remained affected and as his ship was in for repairs following the storm he wrote the first verse to the tune we know now as "Amazing Grace".

Eventually, he would be ordained in the Anglican Church and become a curate, working alongside William Cowper who was a fellow poet and hymnodist in Olney which is about 60 miles from London.  The pair were responsible for publishing a number of hymns, but Amazing Grace was written for New Year's sermon in 1773 and quietly forgotten for some time.  We don't rightly know if the text was set to music at this point, but it was eventually published in 1779 and would remain under the radar until the Second Great Awakening in the US around the beginning of the 19th century.  It wasn't until 1835 when it was set to the tune "New Britain" by William Walker (1809-1875).  Now Walker was a composer, but he was not responsible for "New Britain", only setting the words to the melody.  That tune was part of the British oral tradition and while there are a few possible leads from similar folk music, the original author cannot be satisfactorily verified.  

William Walker was the author of a choral education book called "Southern Harmony", in which this incarnation of "Amazing Grace" first appeared.  The early 1800's in the burgeoning United States, music education was being handled most apparently by the churches, and in the southern US particularly the Baptist church.  Walker used the tradition of shape notes, which was a simplified notation system used to indicate a note's pitch (flat, natural, sharp) by changing the shape of the notehead.  

American churches are often considered the soil in which music education flourished in our country, and as a result these songs tend to occupy a place in the American psyche to this day.  Now "Amazing Grace" originally was set to a number of different melodies, and since Mr. Walker's pairing with "New Britain" it has been arranged into what I can only guess is an insane amount of different pieces of music.  Searching YouTube for various versions of the tune would fill an afternoon, but today I will share just one version that is uniquely special to me as it is performed on one of my favorite instruments and by one of my favorite musicians.  

We have discussed Victor Wooten before in the context of his band, the Flecktones.  But the man is an amazing solo musician as well, being the preeminent virtuosic bassists alive today.  He has an understanding and a capacity to the instrument that can be often emulated and observed, but infrequently duplicated.  Victor holds an annual summer music and nature camp where he teaches lessons about playing electric bass to students of all ages and also shares his philosophy about nature and his Zen outlook on life.  

My favorite part about watching any virtuoso perform is the transformation that occurs in their countenance as they practice their art.  Victor Wooten is certainly no exception.  He takes on a new persona as he works the melody from his instrument, stretching its musicality to the zenith as he crafts something that cannot be adequately expressed through word alone.  

I identify with John Newton.  I never liked being told what to do, particularly when I thought what I was told to do was stupid or pointless.  I regularly found myself in predicaments based off those choices that made life more challenging as a result, and I think we all have a taste of that at one time or another.  

He chose...poorly.

But I think the journey to redemption is, if nothing else, as important as the destination itself. Without the cause, there is no effect and without John Newton's "recalcitrant insubordination", we might not have ever had a wretch to be saved in the first place.  

See you next Friday.

-ED

Sources:
http://www.youtube.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace