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William Schuman is
remembered today chiefly for his concert scores, which
include ten excellent symphonies and several concertos
and overtures. But throughout his life he maintained a
keen interest in music for theater and dance, and the
present disc brings together three works with origins in
stage music: the ballet Judith (1950),
one of the composer’s most acclaimed scores; Night
Journey (1947), composed for the dance but heard
here in the composer’s concert version of 1981; and In
Sweet Music, which grew from Schuman’s own
incidental music for a 1944 production of
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The first two works were
created for Martha Graham, whom Schuman once called
“the preeminent seminal force in the development of
American modern dance.” The third brings together
the multifarious strands of Schuman’s outlook, in a
taut, focused chamber work that must count among the best
Shakespearean settings by an American.
Born in New York in 1910, Schuman spent his youth writing
popular songs and performing in jazz bands, and in
general not paying much heed to “serious
music.” Nevertheless in April 1930 he attended a
concert of Toscanini conducting the New York Philharmonic
in music of Wagner, Kodaly, and Schumann, and the
experience electrified him. Thereafter he began seeking
formal training in music, first at the Malkin
Conservatory and at Columbia University Teachers College,
then from 1936 at the the Juilliard School, where he was
a student of Roy Harris. In 1938, Schuman’s Second
Symphony won a composition contest, and Aaron Copland
(who was on the jury) was so impressed with the work that
he brought it to the attention of conductor Serge
Koussevitzky, at that time the most powerful advocate of
new music in America.
Clearly, there was something in this music—the
synthesis, perhaps, of vernacular and cultivated
styles—that struck a nerve in the American psyche.
During the 1940s Koussevitzky championed many of
Schuman’s works on his Boston Symphony concerts,
including the Second and Third Symphonies, the American
Festival Overture and the New England
Triptych. Schuman won nearly every conceivable
award, grant, and prize available in music, including two
Guggenheims, membership in the National Institute of Arts
and Letters (1946), the Horblit award (1980), and two
Pulitzer prizes (1943 and 1985). In addition to his
musical stature, he exerted a potent influence on
American music throughout his long life—first, as
the Juilliard School’s director (1945–62, the
period in which the school took on its international
renown) and then as director of Lincoln Center during its
initial years. At one point the New York Times wrote that
Schuman was “probably the most powerful figure in
the world of art music.”
In the 1940s Schuman found himself inspired, like many
musicians of his generation, by the innovations of Martha
Graham (1894–1991), whose restless experimentalism
demanded the continual creation of new scores. “What
can so easily be overlooked,” the composer wrote,
“is the enormous contribution she made through her
insistence upon specially composed music for each of her
creations.” He pointed out that a list of the
composers who wrote for her was like a Who’s Who of
American music of the era. In 1949 the Louisville
Orchestra commissioned Graham to create a solo piece, and
permitted her to choose the composer. She selected
Schuman, who completed Judith in August
1949 for a premiere on January 4, 1950 in Louisville,
with Robert Whitney conducting. Graham danced in front of
a translucent scrim that hid the orchestra, which was
seated onstage. The work’s success was so vigorous
that the event was later credited with having saved the
struggling Louisville Orchestra, which during the ensuing
decades would grow into a bellwether for the performance
of new orchestral music.
Graham’s striking “choreographic poem” (as
the collaborators called both it and the earlier Night
Journey) was based on a story from the Biblical
Apocrypha, in which the heroic Israelite widow Judith
frees her people by defeating (and beheading) the
Assyrian despot Holofernes, who had deprived the
Israelites of food and water. Longing to defeat this
symbol of death and male power, Judith cries out to God:
“Give into mine hand the power I have conceived. . .
. Break down their stateliness by the hand of a
woman.” Appearing at Holofernes’ tent, Judith
makes off with the fellow’s head. That the tale is
imbued with deep social and psychological ramifications
is attested by the many depictions of its image in
Western art—that of Judith holding the tyrant’s
severed head by the hair. “The story has its
foundations in some ancient fertility rite or ritual of
re-birth,” Graham wrote, “in which the woman
casts off the garments of mourning . . . symbolic of her
isolation, and puts on her garments of gladness . . .
symbolic of her femininity, thereby defeating the enemy .
. . Death.”
Schuman’s score is a vivid representation of the
tale, yet at the same time it maintains a symphonic
coherence through its division into five clearly
demarcated sections. The initial Adagio, mournful and
potently dramatic, depicts the Israelites in downtrodden
state; a scherzo-like Moderato con moto follows,
representing Judith’s self-preparation and her
journey to the tent of Holofernes. She dwells in the
tyrant’s camp for three days (Tranquillo) before she
is called in to see Holofernes’ extravagant
imbibing—to the accompaniment of a Presto of
thrilling dynamism. The concluding Andante presents the
stately, triumphant heroine. “Behold the head of
Holofernes,” she says. “The Lord has smitten
him by the hand of a woman. . . . I will sing unto the
Lord a new song.”
Judith was not Graham’s first
collaboration with Schuman. Three years before, the two
had created Night Journey for
performance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 3, 1947.
It became a staple of the Graham repertoire. Based on the
Oedipus myth, this version lends the tale a spin all its
own. “It is not Oedipus but Jocasta who is the
protagonist,” writes Schuman. “The action turns
upon that instant of Jocasta’s death when she
relives her destiny, sees with double insight the
triumphal entry of Oedipus, their meeting, courtship,
marriage, their years of intimacy which were darkly
crossed by the blind seer, Tiresias, until at last the
truth burst from him.
A quarter-century later, Schuman created a concert score
of Night Journey for the Endymion
Ensemble, which performed the new version in Albany, New
York, on February 27, 1981, under the baton of Jon
Goldberg, and shortly afterward at Carnegie Recital Hall.
The concert score—which contains only small
alterations of the original—divides itself into
coherently delineated segments, beginning with a gentle
introduction and followed by music that is alternately
furious, mysterious, and bacchanalian.
In 1978 the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
commissioned Schuman to write a chamber work for its
1978-79 season. The result, In Sweet Music:
Serenade on a Setting of Shakespeare, also took
an earlier work as a point of departure—this time
the deliciously lyrical Shakespearean song from
Schuman’s 1944 incidental music for Henry VIII. But
this new work bore little resemblance to its model; it
was a marvelous new creation. In Sweet Music
received its first performance on October 19, 1978, with
Jan DeGaetani, soprano, Paula Robison, Flute, Walter
Trampler, viola, and Osian Ellis, harp.
After briefly intoning the song’s title (“In
sweet music”), the soprano falls silent; the full
text to the song is not heard until the end of the piece.
Significantly, however, Schuman prints the lyric below
the alto flute line, “to enable the flutist to
perform the melody with the clarity of a singer’s
projection.” The work is cast into three sections,
A-B-A, with the flute’s initial
“text-declamation” balanced by the
soprano’s final presentation of the whole song,
accompanied by an instrumental fabric of rich color and
delicacy. In the central section, mounting instrumental
virtuosity is employed to create a dazzling climax,
bolstered by the soprano’s intoning of wordless
melodic fragments.
—Paul J. Horsley
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