The
three monumental works recorded here represent three “generations” of
a musical species that evolved with nineteenth-century romanticism and
died out without ever acquiring a distinctive name.
It was nourished above all by a new preoccupation with the
expressive and pregnant “theme”–anything from a motif to a whole
tune–as the essential constructive element of a piece of music. Along
with this went an obsession with unity, specifically, a fascination with
the idea that a large composition could be unified and its parts linked
together by the periodic return or the constant presence of such a theme,
either unchanged or modified, fragmented, and “developed” in the
manner of a Beethoven symphony, or “transformed” into something quite
different in character but still recognizable. The uncertainty about what
to call the new beast can be seen in the variety of labels attached to the
pieces recorded here. Liszt called his a “fantasy and fugue” or,
informally, referring to the origin of its theme in a Meyerbeer opera, “Prophetenfantasie.”
It was published in 1852 as no. 4 in a set of pieces entitled
“Illustrations du Prophète” (the first three were for piano).
Reubke’s great work was published posthumously by his brother under the
title “The Ninety-Fourth Psalm: Grand Sonata for Organ in C minor.”
Stehle called his a “symphonic tone-painting.”
The
form that characterized this new species was consolidated by Liszt, almost
certainly under the influence of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy for piano
(1822). This was a work in the traditional four movements: fast, slow,
minuet or scherzo, and fast, but all connected together without pauses and
all based on the same theme (Schubert’s own song, “The Wanderer”),
or motifs from it, the finale being a free fugue. Liszt omitted the third
movement but retained Schubert’s essentials: the movements were
connected, they were all based on the same theme, and the finale was a
free fugue. Liszt divided the fugue in two large sections, the second of
which
reintroduced
the subject against a new, rapidly moving counterpoint. Reubke followed
Liszt’s example and Stehle followed Reubke, using a theme as well as
many other ideas that strikingly recall those of his model.
Franz
Liszt (1811-1886)
In
the third number of act I of Meyerbeer’s wildly successful grand opera,
Le Propète (1849), based on the life of the religious fanatic John of
Leyden (d. 1536), three Anabaptists come upon a crowd of peasants in the
country near Dordrecht in Holland and begin to preach insurrection to
them. The number is a kind of rondo whose theme, set to the text “Ad nos,
ad salutarem undam iterum venite miseri” (“To us, to the healing
waters, come again [i.e., come to be rebaptised], ye who are in
misery”), alternates with exhortations (in French) to rise up against
the local landowners. The tune is said to have been a traditional Jewish
melody that Meyerbeer knew from his childhood, and indeed it makes a
notably awkward fit to the Latin words (ex. 1). Although Liszt was able to
draw from this brief tune the whole thematic material for a thirty-minute
work, he never used it quite as Meyerbeer wrote it but changed the meter
from triple to duple and raised the archaic-sounding B-flat in the first
phrase (ex. 2).
Liszt
composed his Ad nos in the winter of 1850; it received its first
performance under the fingers of the twenty-one-year-old Alexander
Winterberger at the inauguration of the immense Ladegast organ in
Merseburg Cathedral on 26 September 1855. It was published in an
arrangement that could be played as either an organ solo or a piano duet
(there are often seven staves per system in order to accommodate the
different media). The first movement (i.e., the first half of the
“fantasia”) consists of an introduction and three sections that
develop the first three phrases of the theme according to the following
scheme: introduction with phrases 1+2+3; short cadenza; a quiet section
developing phrase 1; a longer section building in speed and volume and
developing phrases 1+2; a still longer one beginning with a brilliant
fanfare on phrase 3 and continuing with phrases 3+1.
Finally, after a massive climax and a long, slowly subsiding
cadenza, the complete tune, including the fourth and last phrase, is heard
for the first time, pianissimo, unaccompanied, and in F#-major, as far as
you can get from the main key of C-minor. Thus begins the second movement.
The rest of this movement combines and recombines the first three phrases
into a series of imaginative lyrical sections alternating with
recitative-like transitions and stretching the coloristic possibilities of
the instrument to the limit.
After
a hushed and mysterious transition, the last movement bursts out in a
series of powerful diminished chords and brilliant flourishes on the
pedals that bring us back to C-minor and Meyerbeer’s complete tune, now
in its original triple meter but rhythmically transformed into a
marvelously virile, swinging fugue subject. The fugue gradually builds to
a climax and a fanfare in F#-major, returns through a series of virtuoso
modulations to C-minor and duple meter, then lunges into a break-neck
vivace molto, the subject now borne on a torrent of sixteenth-notes. The
work closes with the theme in a luminous C-major apotheosis.
This
recording takes certain liberties with Liszt’s score. Although Liszt
played the organ and was especially interested in registration, he was not
skilled on the pedals. Whether it was because he did not think that the
flourishes introducing the fugue were playable on the pedals at all, or
because they ascended a half-step above the usual pedal compass of the
time, they are written out for two hands. Other passages are more active
in the bass of the duet arrangement than in the organ pedals; some of
these are normally incorporated into the pedal part of modern editions and
thus into recordings, others not (with the exception of the edition of Sándor
Margittay for Editio Musica Budapest, which includes them all), notably
the rapid scales after the F#-major fanfare in the fugue and the brief
arpeggios interrupting the long dominant pedal-point near the end. Also,
near the beginning, the hands sustain loud chords while the pedals play
longish passages. On the piano, the chords die away before their notated
value is up, but on the organ they produce a relentless, static
fortissimo-an effect that many players try to mitigate by rushing the
tempo; they have been enlivened here with inner tremolandos. In several
places the parts have been redistributed between hands and feet and rests
introduced for the sake of clarity; these last sorts of liberties will be
noticed mainly by those who play the piece.
Julius
Reubke (1834-1858)
There
are many (myself included) who think that Reubke’s sonata is the finest
organ work of the nineteenth century. It was completed, shortly after his
only other substantial composition, a massive piano sonata in B-flat
minor, in the spring of 1857, when the composer had hardly turned
twenty-three (Wagner was working on the second act of Siegfried). Both
Reubke and Winterberger were members of the golden circle of Liszt’s
disciples at Weimar in the mid-1850s; Reubke played his Ninety-Fourth
Psalm on 17 June 1857 at Merseburg, less than two years after
Winterberger’s Ad nos on the same organ. In another year, Reubke was
dead of tuberculosis; a warmly phrased note of condolence to his
organ-builder father exists in Liszt’s hand.
Reubke
did not live to publish his sonata; it was brought out shortly after 1870
by his brother Otto. Unlike Ad nos, but like the nine symphonic poems that
Liszt had completed between 1848 and 1857, Reubke’s sonata is
programmatic. The following verses from the ninety-fourth psalm were
printed in the first edition:
Grave;
Larghetto
O
Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God, to whom vengeance belongeth,
shew thyself.
Lift
up thyself, thou judge of the earth; render a reward to the proud.
Allegro
con fuoco
Lord,
how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?
They
slay the widow and stranger, and murder the fatherless.
Yet
they say, The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard
it.
Adagio
Unless
the Lord had been my help, my soul had almost dwelt in silence.
In
the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.
Allegro
But
the Lord is my defence; and my God is the rock of my refuge.
And
he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in
their own wickedness; yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.
How
far this distribution of verses reflects the composer’s intentions
cannot be known, since no manuscript has ever been found. The psalm
contains no narrative and the music suggests none, though Reubke provided
a musical signal at the end of major sections in the shape of a sustained
chord of the minor ninth. This is played triple or quadruple piano after
the Grave, Allegro, and Adagio, and triple forte before the second, faster
section of the fugue. There is no such chord between the Larghetto and
Allegro, which are connected by an extraordinary cadenza that mounts with
steadily increasing speed and power from piano to triple forte.
Reubke’s
sonata is incomparably more coherent than Liszt’s Ad nos, in which the
prevailing method of composing any given section, in the first two
movements, at least, was a kind of ingeniously varied repetition,
resulting in what Gerald Abraham called “wallpaper form” after its
repeating patterns, and in which the composer sometimes seems to have been
unsure how to get from one section to another. While neither more original
nor more noble in aspiration than his master and while admittedly
appropriating wholesale the broad outlines of the earlier work (along with
its key of C-minor), the youthful Reubke was nevertheless able to spin out
long trajectories of music whose themes dissolve into motifs which in turn
evolve into new melodies with their own evolving motifs, all woven into a
fabric now contrapuntal, now massively chordal, now shimmering with
brilliant passage-work, devoid of clichés and stock figures but
generating textures that make the instrument sound its unfailing best.
Both harmony and rhythm in the Reubke sonata also contribute to the
maintenance of tension and forward drive, carrying the music seamlessly
from one section to the next. But the most striking factor differentiating
the two works is the nature of their themes: a four-square tune in Liszt
that frustrates every effort to conceal the joints; in Reubke, an elusive
passage clouded by every kind of ambiguity–harmonic, rhythmic, textural,
phraseological–in which it is not possible even to decide which of the
elements are truly a part of it–a theme that almost guarantees
continuity (ex. 3).
Joha
nn Gustav Eduard Stehle (1839-1915)
J.
G. Eduard Stehle, as he was usually known, spent his whole life within a
radius of hardly twenty-five miles around the Lake of Constance, whose
waters touch Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Born north of the lake in
what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg, he spent most of his
professional life on the south side in Switzerland: in Rohrschach from
1869, when he turned thirty, and as organist and choirmaster of the
cathedral of St. Gallen from 1874 until two years before his death in
1915. Though now virtually extinguished, by 1884 his fame had spread as
far as New York, where he was offered (and declined) the organ and choir
of St. Francis Xavier. By far the larger part of Stehle’s many
compositions were vocal, both sacred and secular, among them twenty masses
and two oratorios. He was active in the late-nineteenth-century German
“Caecilian” reform of church music, in which he supported modernizing
tendencies, and he became a passionate admirer of Liszt. After 1900,
however, his tastes ceased to evolve with the times, and by 1905 he could
not say enough in condemnation of the cacophony of Richard Strauss and
other moderns.
Stehle’s
arrival at St. Gallen coincided with the rebuilding and enlargement of the
cathedral organ by the Swiss firm of Kuhn. While he wrote few important
works for organ, and those mainly concentrated in the years between 1872
and 1880, Saul, composed in 1877 and published the following year, was the
most ambitious. Praised by Liszt but rarely played even when new–an
article of 1900 cites its intensely programmatic character and immense
difficulty as possible reasons–it has totally disappeared from the
repertory since.1 Nevertheless, among the half-dozen or so organists who
played it before the turn of the century were two Americans, John Withe
(sic, for White?) in New York and Clarence Eddy in Berlin. In 1888, Stehle
made an orchestral arrangement transposed from the original B-flat-minor
to C-minor; it was performed in 1894 but has remained in manuscript.
Unlike
the the Reubke sonata, which can be thoroughly enjoyed without a knowledge
of its program, Saul unfolds in a series of musical events that can hardly
be explained except by reference to the events in Saul’s life that they
are intended to illustrate. Yet the piece is so long and complex that the
listener can rarely orient himself in the narrative. A review of a
performance by the composer in 1882–the critic admitted, to be sure,
that he disliked program music on the organ–made precisely this
complaint. That is why this recording has been issued in two versions, one
with spoken narration. Stehle’s score is headed by a “program,” but
no index links the listed events to places in the music, and there are
more contrasting sections of music than there are events in the program to
explain them. Thus it has been necessary to some extent to guess which
part of the “program” the composer might have meant to illustrate with
a given musical passage. One prominent theme, indeed, seems to correspond
with nothing in the printed program, though it makes excellent sense as
the illustration of something in Saul’s story (the mocking song of the
women of Israel; see below), and we have taken the liberty of adding it to
the narration.
The
story of Saul is told in the first book of Samuel2, where it is
complicated by the problem that certain events are recounted twice in
differing versions, as if conflicting sources had been unsatisfactorily
conflated. The following summary has been reduced to a bare outline of
elements relevant to Stehle’s work: The elders of Israel, angered by the
corruption of their rulers (the “judges”), demanded of the prophet
Samuel that he should give them a king. Samuel prayed to God, who, acting
through Samuel, and with great reluctance (since it was as if His people
were rejecting Him in favor of a king), chose Saul. Saul was a proud,
complex, and unstable man who soon offended both God and Samuel. Samuel
rebuked him bitterly and prophesied his downfall. God regretted His choice
and secretly chose David to succeed Saul. Saul’s servants, observing
that from time to time an evil spirit descended upon him, advised him to
summon David, whom they knew only as a skilled player upon the lyre, to
play soothing music to him on these occasions. This David did, to Saul’s
great relief. David also slew the Philistine giant Goliath, and Saul made
him commander of a thousand troops. David was so successful in war with
the Philistines that all the women of Israel came out to greet him
singing, “Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.”
(Samuel 1, 18:7) Saul was enraged by the derisory comparison, saying,
“They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have
ascribed but thousands,” adding prophetically, “and what can he have
more but the kingdom?” And Saul was again visited by the evil spirit,
and again David soothed him with music. But now Saul was suspicious, he
held a spear, and he hurled it at David, missing him. From this time
forward, Saul treated David with extreme ambivalence, and he became
increasingly unsuccessful in war. Finally, abandoned by God, he fell upon
his own sword.
Stehle’s
“program” reads as follows: Triumphal march of the proud conqueror;
his defiant arrogance; the prophet’s rebuke; he is gradually overcome by
the spirit of desolation and night; the struggling king rises up
magnificently; gentle consoling song of the shepherd boy from Bethlehem,
interspersed with dark looks from Saul; the catastrophe; the genius of
consolation [David] escapes, lamenting; the fulfillment of unalterable
fate.3
The
opening march, of almost frenzied grandiosity, celebrates Saul’s first
victory over the Philistines. The introductory trumpet fanfare doubtless
represents the biblical line, “And Saul blew the trumpet throughout all
the land, saying, ‘Let the Hebrews hear’”. (Samuel 1, 13:3) The
music slowly subsides to near silence, after which we hear two passages of
recitative. The first is evidently Saul boasting of his conquest; the
second is Samuel’s rebuke of Saul and the prophecy of his downfall. The
main motif of Samuel’s recitative (ex. 4–strikingly reminiscent of
Reubke) will become the principal thematic germ of the whole piece; we
already heard it as it briefly interruped Saul’s blustering recitative.
Samuel is answered by a defiant outburst from the king that becomes
increasingly vociferous until it finally subsides to a quiet new theme
(ex. 5). This appears to be the theme of night and desolation, again
reminiscent of Reubke; it gradually grows into a struggle at the climax of
which the king with a mighty lurch tries to free himself from guilt and
oppression (grossartiges Aufbäumen des Ringenden: literally, magnificent
rearing-up of the wrestler). But again the music subsides inconclusively
and another dark theme is heard as the process repeats (ex. 6), this time
with a longer buildup of both speed and volume until what can only be the
derisive song of the women of Israel bursts out (ex. 7). Saul reacts with
a struggle similar to the preceding one, after which the music again
subsides, this time with a motive reminiscent of the fate motive in
Wagner’s Ring, coming to rest on the same chord of the minor ninth that
Reubke used to signal the end of a movement.
Now
David is brought with his lyre, and after a quiet prelude made of
extraordinarily elusive chromatic harmonies, he plays the three stanzas of
his consoling song (a “transformation” in the manner of Liszt, with
intervals expanded, of the first theme of night and desolation: ex. 8).
The stanzas are separated by suspicious looks from Saul, his spear in his
hand. The prelude returns as a postlude, then Saul recalls the prophecy of
Samuel. David begins his song again, but in a sudden fury Saul hurls his
spear to pin David to the wall, as the organ makes the loudest possible
smashing sound. But the spear misses, there is silence, and David departs,
lamenting. Again we hear Reubke’s ninth chord as the movement ends.
The
dénouement begins with a fugato on the motif of Samuel’s prophecy (ex.
9). This builds gradually to a fragment from the opening march over rising
chromatic scales (ex. 10), after which a strangely distorted version of
what we have called the women’s song again bursts out (ex. 7). The music
continues with the prophecy motive, until a cadenza brings us to the
second half of the movment. Just as in Liszt and Reubke, the fugue subject
returns against fast-moving counterpoint. From here to the end the music
focuses more and more on the motive of Samuel’s prophecy (ex. 4), which
grows louder and more insistent until, in a passage of detached chords
over a pedal cadenza nearly copied from Reubke, the work reaches its
massive and savage conclusion.
-David
Fuller
1
W. Widmann, “J. G. Ed. Stehle,” Schweizerische Musikzeitung 40 (1900),
233-4; 243-4. On Saul, p. 243. The principal monograph on Stehle is Alois
Koch, Johann Gustav Eduard Stehle (1839-1915) und die katholische
Kirchenmusik in der deutschen Schweiz zur Zeit der caecilianischen Reform
(Lucern: Edition Cron, 1977).
2
The David Story, a lavishly annotated new translation of Samuel 1 and 2 by
Robert Alter (New York: Norton, 1999), has been of great help.
3
See the German translation of these notes for the original. For Stehle’s
own performance of the work in the Grossmünster in Zürich on 11 July
1882, the word “energetic” (energisch) was substituted for
“magnificent” (grossartig). A review of the work by A. W. Gottschalg
(1827-1908), a Weimar organist and friend of Liszt, written just after
publication, evidently from the score without an opportunity to hear more
than the reviewer could sight-read himself, also seems to guess at the
relations between program and music and does not always agree with my
analysis. Contrary to the bible, Gottschalg has Saul’s spear pierce
David, who falls to the floor where “from the breast rich in song
life’s crimson fluid gushes out.” The motif that I have assigned to
the women’s mocking song is labeled by Gottschalg “motif of power”
(Kraft). Gottschalg, who was an ardent partisan of the “new German
school” of Liszt and Wagner, calls Saul “the first symphonic poem for
organ” and heaps praise upon it for its audacious embrace of all that he
considered progressive. (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 74 [1878], 249-51;
261-2). Another reviewer called it “music of the future” (Zukunftsmusik).
For an unenthusiastic review by A. Ruthardt of Stehle’s performance in Zürich,
see Schweizerische Musikzeitung 22 (1882), 115; reprinted in Koch, p. 139,
note 98.