|
Songs of John Alden Carpenter
Robert Osborne, bass-baritone
By the time of the great emergence of the recording industry in the 1930's, John Alden Carpenter's exquisite songs, which had enjoyed such widespread acclaim in the 1910's and 1920's, had begun to lose favor. Even to this day, very few of these songs, most of which date from the early 1910's, have found their way into the recording studio. All the more reason, then, to welcome this historic recording by Robert Osborne and Dennis Helmrich of nearly all of Carpenter's mature songs. This includes some, mostly from Carpenter's later years, that the composer never even published. (Only someone as unsparingly scrupulous as Carpenter would think twice about bringing out the likes of “Spring Joys,” “Midnight Nan” or “The Hermit Crab.”)
Carpenter's choice of texts - from Wilde and Yeats to Tagore and Li Po, from Langston Hughes and James Agee to a few minor poets now forgotten, but still contemporaries of quality - reveals an astonishing sensitivity toward new poetic trends. (It helped that he lived in the Chicago of Harriet Moore's Poetry and Margaret Anderson's Little Review.) Complementing this refined literary sensibility one finds a highly sophisticated command of harmony and counterpoint, though the music always serves, never overwhelms the poetic idea, somewhat in the tradition of Debussy, whose songs clearly made a deep impression.
For all their delicacy, many of Carpenter's songs show a pronounced and rather melancholy preoccupation with loneliness and death, but faced with extraordinary calm and restraint. Even the love songs and humorous songs have a certain wistfulness, a bittersweet quality that is pure Carpenter. Congratulations to Robert Osborne and Dennis Helmrich for helping to make them newly meaningful and accessible.
Songs of John Alden Carpenter
I first heard songs by John Alden Carpenter when I was a Fellow at the Tanglewood Festival in the early 1980's. Several songs from Gitanjali, including “The Sleep that Flits on Baby's Eyes” and “When I Bring You Colored Toys,” were exquisitely sung by a talented mezzo-soprano, also a Fellow at the summer festival. I hated them. The poetry creaked with old-fashioned sentiment. The songs were ear treacle. Little did I know that these two songs, though admittedly from one of Carpenter's most renowned works, were hardly representative of his vast output of songs from the 1890's to 1930's. I just felt trapped, as if I were in an airless parlor on a Sunday afternoon, stifled by antimacassars, doilies and forced pleasantries. Well, times change. So do ears. And sensibilities. I have since heard these two songs, from time to time, and now recognize their irony, craftsmanship, modernity, and fleetness of gesture. I can understand why Kirsten Flagstad, Rose Bampton, Conchita Supervia, and Marilyn Horne have enjoyed singing them. But I still don't really like them. It is all the other songs of Carpenter, aside from Gitanjali, that have caught my fancy.
Several years ago, I happened upon Howard Pollack's Skyscraper Lullaby, a 1995 biography of Carpenter. Mr. Pollack brings the Chicago arts scene in the first three decades of the twentieth century vividly to life, placing Carpenter in context and revealing his modernist credentials:
“In his lifetime John Alden Carpenter won a success almost unparalleled for an American composer of concert music ... Critics and colleagues warmly acknowledged Carpenter's originality ... Critics admired the music's craftsmanship — it's polish, elegance, rhythmic ingenuity, harmonic sophistication ... he epitomizes American music's transition from romanticism to modernism. At the start of his career, his name was linked to MacDowell ... later to Henry Gilbert and Deems Taylor; still later to Gershwin, Copland and Sessions; and finally to Samuel Barber. He was the first American composer — or at least among the first — to recognize the importance of Debussy and Stravinsky and to experiment with rhythm, color and harmony in the modernist fashion .... Similarly, he argued for the importance of American popular music to high art, thus anticipating the music of Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein, Harbison, and many others, including a whole new generation of composers born in the 1950's and 1960's ... His best work deserves comparison with such contemporaries as Ravel, Holst, de Falla and Janacek. Still, many works await revival, including ... dozens of magnificent songs.”
Dozens of magnificent songs? Well...I started collecting. Armed with over a hundred, three quarters of which were published in Carpenter's lifetime, the rest in manuscript, Dennis Helmrich and I set out to mine for gold. “Why are they all so slow?” “How can I ever get away with singing lines like: I have touched the trillium/Pale flower of the land?” “What is a trillium?” “Why in God's name can't I get the rhythm right in that Spanish number?” Well, we asked many questions. We read through hours of songs. And we let the music work on us over time. Eventually they didn't all seem slow. Singing about a common lily-like wildflower while enveloped in Rachmaninov harmonies and opulent piano arpeggios felt fabulous. And inevitable. And the rhythms, well, they were designed, sometimes, to be downright tough. Without realizing it, we had stopped questioning. The magic of Carpenter's craft had reached us.
For those of you not in the know, John Alden Carpenter, descended from the famous John Alden of Mayflower fame, was born in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1876. After graduating from Harvard, where he had studied with John Knowles Paine, he joined his father's shipping supply business in 1897. He became vice-president in 1909 and retired in 1936. While conducting his successful business career, he made time for studies with Edward Elgar in Rome in 1906 and with Bernard Ziehn in Chicago from 1908 until 1912. He married a bewitching socialite, Rue Winterbotham, and together they were the toast of progressive Chicago. They hosted Chicago visits of Yeats, Stravinsky, Tagore, Prokofiev, and many other cutting-edge artists. Together they advanced the poetic, musical and artistic avant-garde.
Carpenter's orchestral suite Adventures in a Perambulator (1915) and the ballets The Birthday of the Infanta (1919), Krazy Kat (1921), and Skyscrapers (1926), which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House, won him considerable fame. By casting off the yoke of German influence Carpenter became one of the first to lighten the fabric of American music. His catalogue, which includes over a hundred songs, primarily favors French impressionism, but also incorporates popular American materials. Clearly his first love, the song idiom perfectly suited his innate cultivation and refinement. His mother, Elizabeth, having studied abroad with two renowned voice teachers, William Shakespeare in London and Mathilde Marchesi in Paris, clearly inculcated an appreciation of vocalism and vocal literature in her son.
Carpenter had excellent taste in poetry. He and Rue were fluent in French, from summers spent in France, so that his settings of French poetry spring from a deep identification. And he had such a instinctual, fluid way with text that in his best settings each poem reveals its qualities as if music and words had been conceived as one. William Treat Upton wrote in 1930 in his landmark book, Art-Song in America:
“Surely, 1912 was a memorable year in American song, for during this year appeared John Alden Carpenter's first published songs. These songs ... ushered in a new era in American song literature. Here spoke a new voice, permeated with French influence, to be sure, but yet thoroughly individual and with something definite to say, together with the skill in the saying of it.... I find in Carpenter, to a greater extent than in the case of any other American songwriter, the meditative spirit, the love of expressing the genius of nature, the out-of-doors, in its quieter aspects and in its influence upon human experience.... To Brahms it was given in perhaps the fullest measure ever granted, and we may well congratulate ourselves that in Carpenter we find one so worthily following where he led.”
During his lifetime, Carpenter's songs were sung and recorded by such illustrious singers as Kirsten Flagstad, Conchita Supervia, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Alma Gluck, John McCormack, Louise Homer, Maggie Teyte, Eleanor Steber, Eva Gauthier, Rose Bampton, Gladys Swarthout, Povla Frijsh, Mina Hager, and Jean-Emile Vanni-Marcoux. More recently, Carpenter's songs have been sung and recorded by Donald Gramm and Marilyn Horne.
Carpenter died in 1951, having written his last song sixteen years before. This recording surveys his mature songs in roughly chronological order.
In “Go, Lovely Rose,” a setting of the famous lyric by Edmund Waller (1606-1687), Carpenter sets only the first, second and fourth stanzas, repeating the first at the close to round off the song. Carpenter frequently took liberties with the poems he set, often molding them to fit the ternary form that he favored for songs. The Waller setting, composed in 1908, is a graceful and sweet song characterized by a charming parlando melody over delicate, fluid triplets. The chordal middle section is based on a pentatonic scale, so favored by the Impressionists. Upton calls it one of Carpenter's “most ingratiating songs” and noted the “weirdly conceived harmonies.” “Go, Lovely Rose” was a favorite of tenor John McCormack.
“The Green River,” composed in 1909, is a setting of the somewhat purple verse of Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945). Carpenter again takes liberties with the poem, making three slight changes. This magical song received favorable marks from many of Carpenter's early critics, who alluded to the perceived influence of his teacher, Edward Elgar. The singer, Mina Hager, intrigued by the recitative nature of the vocal line, wrote, “What he uses is not Sprechstimme; it is rather what one critic called Glorified Speech, because it sings almost as one would speak it.” Arthur Farwell described the song as follows: “Modernity, ultra-modernity, if you will, animates this song from first bar to last.... Each successive thought is crystal clear, and expressed with a simplicity and lucidity which are among the composer's happiest characteristics.” When Alma Gluck sang “The Green River” at Carnegie Hall in 1912, the audience demanded an immediate reprise.
Composed in 1909, “Looking-Glass River” is the first of two settings Carpenter made of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Carpenter sets only the first and second stanzas of this six-stanza poem, number 35 from A Child's Garden of Verses, repeating the first to make his favored ABA form. The languid vocal line describes the smooth sliding river over lazily flowing eighths in the piano accompaniment. It is a wonderful, atmospheric song made from the simplest of materials. Upton admired the song, which he described as “rich in carillon effects of great attractiveness.” “Looking-Glass River” is one of the many examples of Carpenter imagining childhood's perspective in his art.
The Five Paul Verlaine Settings were composed in 1910. Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) was the seminal source of lyrics for composers writing in French in the first decades of the twentieth century. Remarkable Verlaine songs were written by Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Hahn, and Stravinsky. Carpenter's Verlaine settings hold their own, though the prosody in his later French-language settings of Mireille Havet is surely more advanced. “Dansons la Gigue!” is the lightest of the Verlaine settings. It is characterized, in Howard Pollack's words, by “polymetrical high jinks” and the “Spanish-French style of Bizet and Lalo [which] points to the Hispanic style of Porter and Bernstein.” It is one of two examples on this recording, with “Serenade,” of Carpenter's brand of Spanish-inflected music. In the atmospheric “Chanson d'automne,” Carpenter subtly conveys the melancholy of the text. He uses a consistently low register and the minor mode as well as a four-chord ostinato to affect a heavy weariness. “Le Ciel” resembles “The Green River,” with its introductory piano chords built note by note from bass to treble. Pollack considers it of great “intimacy and poignance” and counts it as “one of the composer's finest songs.” The haunting song's anguished climax is all the more startling as it is surrounded by music both bleak and spare. Verlaine's title for the poem is “Le Prison” — it was written when Verlaine was incarcerated in Brussels after unsuccessfully attempting to shoot his lover, the poet Arthur Rimbaud. “En Sourdine” is a suspended and lovely song. It was published in a bilingual version, with Carpenter's own English singing translation, as “When the Misty Shadows Glide.” The evocative and plangent “Il pleure dans mon coeur” is driven by a repeated one-note pedal, suggesting incessant rain, which was praised by Felix Borowski as “worthy of all praise.” Verlaine's poem has an incipit by Rimbaud, “Il pleut doucement sur la ville”/It rains gently on the town. Carpenter also wrote a sixth Verlaine song, the unpublished “Triste était mon âme.”
Carpenter wrote only two settings of William Blake (1757-1827), though they would seem a natural pairing since both composer and poet often expressed their art through the adoption of a childlike and innocent voice. “Little Fly,” composed in 1909, was dedicated to the composer, conductor and new music advocate, Kurt Schindler. A supple melody and an accompaniment rife with clever word painting and harmonic daring characterize the song. In “A Cradle-Song,” composed in 1911, Carpenter uses only the first two stanzas of Blake's five-stanza poem, repeating the first stanza to make an ABA form. He also makes a slight change in the second line of the first stanza. Pollack describes the song as a “reserved, thinly textured, limpidly diatonic lullaby, with a vaguely pentatonic ostinato that gives the whole a delicate, oriental coloring.”
In 1911 Carpenter composed “Bid Me to Live” by the English poet Robert Herrick (1591-1679). He set only the first, second and fifth stanzas of Herrick's six stanza poem. Pollack writes: “Although not as ecstatic as such later love songs as `Light, My Light' [from Gitanjali] or `Serenade,' `Bid Me To Live' strikes a new, impassioned note unheard before. Its thick chords in the piano make it the richest of Carpenter's early songs... the song has an alluring, distinctive elegance.” Carpenter dedicated “Bid Me To Live” to Henry Blodgett Harvey, a singer and author of the satiric text of an earlier Carpenter song, “The Debutante.” Harvey sang both these songs at informal gatherings in Chicago.
“Les Silhouettes” is a 1912 setting of a poem by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Wilde's words aptly inspired an impressionistic seascape from Carpenter which worthily compares with the Wilde settings of Charles Tomlinson Griffes. “Les Silhouettes” was a favorite of Maggie Teyte, and Carpenter himself so liked the song that he arranged it for voice and orchestra in 1943. The song is a series of constantly changing moods and images deftly unified by Carpenter's pervasive use of a motivic dotted rhythm. In 1913 Carpenter set one other Wilde poem, “Her Face.”
In 1912 Carpenter composed his biggest, most full-throttle song to date, setting Helen Dudley's “To One Unknown.” Dudley's poem was published in the first issue of Harriet Monroe's Poetry in October 1912. Carpenter was a financial supporter of the Chicago-based magazine and intimate with the circle of poets and writers who published their work there. Helen Dudley's sister was Dorothy Dudley Harvey, wife of the singer Henry Blodgett Harvey to whom “Bid Me to Live” was dedicated. Describing “To One Unknown,” Pollack writes: “The rhetoric — both poetic and musical — harkens back to Tchaikovsky, but some melodic turns in both the voice and the accompaniment provide fresh, modern touches.”
In the year following Carpenter's 1913 composition of Gitanjali, a set of six settings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), he returned one final time to Tagore, setting an independent song, “The Day Is No More.” Tagore, perhaps the most important poet and philosopher of modern India, won the Nobel Prize in literature for Gitanjali: Song Offering in 1913. “The Day is No More” is number 74 from this collection. Pollack writes that the poem “is full of dread and uncertainty” chosen by Carpenter “in response to the war.” He writes further that the song “has a cold, empty sadness that is new for Carpenter. Indeed, the song marks a poignant turning point in the composer's life: it bids farewell to the overflowing joy and hopefulness of [his earlier works] and turns, with a shiver, toward some brave new world.”
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) visited Chicago in early 1914 to lecture and read poetry. Carpenter and his wife, Rue, participated in the festivities in honor of the Irish poet. No doubt inspired by Yeats' appearance, Carpenter set, that same year, “The Player Queen,” a poem which had been published in Harriet Monroe's Chicago-based journal Poetry. The poem, intended for a play that Yeats never completed, recollects a mother's lullaby in the guise of a dramatic ballad. This lilting song, along with “Les Silhouettes,” was a personal favorite of Maggie Teyte.
Carpenter composed five settings of ancient Chinese poetry in 1916. Carpenter used translations drawn from Gems of Chinese Literature by the eminent English orientalist Herbert A. Giles. He published “The Odalisque,” “On a Screen,” “The Highwaymen,” and “To a Young Gentleman” under the collective title Watercolors; the fifth setting, “Spring Joys,” remained unpublished. Two years later, Carpenter orchestrated Watercolors for chamber orchestra. Watercolors is not really a cycle, but rather a set of miniatures with each song complementing the others. Each of these songs is characterized by a lyrical declamation of the poetry set over a gossamer and impressionistic accompaniment.
Legend has it that Li Shê (9th C. A.D.), author of the poem Carpenter set as “The Highwaymen,” fell into the hands of brigands who were great admirers of his verse. The robbers insisted that he compose a poem on the spot for them. Li Shê obliged with this poem and the brigands are said to have laughed heartily and set him free. Carpenter's fleet song moves from an impressionistic depiction of the traveler's journey through a rainy landscape to a rapid, diatonic setting of the punch line.
Liu Yü-hsi (772-842), the author of “The Odalisque,” was a statesman with a checkered career of successes and exiles. He was also a poet who was such a purist that he left a beautiful poem unfinished because it was necessary to use the word dumplings, a word not found in the works of Confucius. Carpenter's setting of “The Odalisque” is described by Pollack as an “exquisite bit of chinoiserie ... full of life and charm. The ironically tearful musical setting for `bewailing' and `flower' is delicious, only slightly short of musical comedy.”
“On a Screen” is an especially sensitive setting of Li Po (701-762). Li Po's poem is curiously entitled “A Snap-shot” in Gems of Chinese Literature. Li Po, regarded by many as China's greatest poet, is popularly known as “The Banished Angel.” He was exiled for years as a result of a court intrigue from the very court where he had initially garnered his reputation. Legend has it that the dissolute Li Po drowned by leaning over the gunwale of a boat in a drunken effort to embrace the moon's reflection. Carpenter's impressionistic landscape is unusually pared down in texture, no doubt in response to the simplicity of Li Po's text. Christopher Palmer wrote in Impressionism in Music (1973) that “On a Screen” could well be Carpenter's masterpiece.
“Spring Joys” is a lovely setting of a poem by Wei Ying-wu (8th C. A.D.). Wei Ying-wu served as a soldier early in his life, but later, after a course of study, entered upon a civil career. His poetry has been described as being simple in expression, yet pregnant with meaning. Pollack writes: “the song ... seems less complex and exotic than the other Chinese settings, the vaguely Chinese trillings in the piano notwithstanding.”
The Chicago Arts Club hosted a visit by the English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) in April 1920. Carpenter probably attended Sassoon's reading, for within a month he had composed Two Night Songs, settings of his verse. “Slumber Song” is perhaps the culmination of Carpenter's life-long series of lullabies. The song lulls the beloved to sleep and promises a benign forgetfulness of war. Pollack praises the song for its “form [which] shows unusual formal subtlety and daring.... The song contains a new, provocatively abstract element, in that the text is not so much a lullaby as it is a poem about lullabies. The persona is neither the mother nor the lover but the poet, whose poetry has the magic to comfort.” Carpenter arranged this song for voice and chamber orchestra in 1943, just as another world war was raging. In “Serenade,” the second Sassoon song, Carpenter uses a sultry, flamenco-flavored idiom. Harry Thorpe wrote a glowing analysis of the song in 1929 calling the song's ending “one of the noblest and most stirring in the entire literature of American song.” The first and last stanzas of Carpenter's setting are from Sassoon's poem entitled “Lovers,” while the middle stanza is of unknown provenance. The ecstatic song attracted many singers, including Povla Frijsh and Gladys Swarthout.
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) had wanted Carpenter, a long-time friend, to set his verse for nearly a decade before Carpenter finally composed “The Little Turtle” in 1926. Carpenter, ever drawn to children's verse, chose a rather uncharacteristic poem Lindsay had written as “a recitation for Martha Wakefield, three years old.” Pollack writes that the “tune is folkish but somewhat jazzed up, with snazzy syncopations in the vocal lines and blue notes in the accompaniment. It is a children's song for the jazz age and one of Carpenter's most delightful.” The song is unpublished.
Carpenter set five Langston Hughes (1902-1967) poems between 1926 and 1927 at a time when Hughes was still virtually unknown. Pollack writes “Carpenter might have heard about Hughes from Vachel Lindsay, who discovered the black poet-busboy in 1925, and who helped arrange for publication of The Weary Blues.” Carpenter's settings constitute a pioneering work in the use of jazz and blues in serious song. Carpenter took great liberties with Hughes' verse, eliminating repetitions, deleting short sections, adding words, and giving each a new title. In “Shake your brown feet, honey,” originally entitled “Song for a Banjo Dance” by Hughes, Carpenter depicts the banjo accompaniment by means of broken chords and staccato articulation. The song also has an especially effective coda. Hughes' poem “Harlem Night Club” became Carpenter's “Jazz Boys,” an infectious jazz song which recalls the Charleston. Prior to the song's publication, major changes were made to Hughes' poem to expurgate the interracial sexuality; for this recording we have reinstated the original poem. “The Cryin' Blues” is hailed by Pollack as “arguably among the finest songs Carpenter ever wrote.” Hughes' original poem is entitled “Blues Fantasy.” Carpenter, accentuating the despondency of Hughes' poem, eliminated the last five lines in which the narrator takes action, saying: “I got a railroad ticket,/ Pack my trunk and ride.” After the premiere, Hughes reported that “The Cryin' Blues” “brought down the house” and that it, coupled with “Jazz-Boys,” were “particularly successful in capturing the mood and feeling of the poems.” “Midnight Nan,” called “Midnight Nan at Leroy's” in Hughes' original, perplexed both Hughes and the audience at its premiere perhaps on account of its ambiguous, harmonically unresolved ending. Hughes thought the audience didn't get it, which probably explains why Carpenter didn't include it, replacing it with “That Soothin' Song,” when his set was published as Four Negro Songs in 1927.
“The Hermit Crab,” composed in 1929, is a setting of a poem by Robert Hyde. Pollack praises the text as “trenchant and finely wrought, like a poem by Li-Po.” The song paints an impressionistic seascape with rich harmonies in the piano accompaniment and a supple melodic line that has phrases of great breadth and fluidity. It is unfortunate that “The Hermit Crab” was never published for its beauties would rank it highly among the songs of Carpenter were it more widely known.
Likewise, the Two Mireille Havet Settings remain unpublished but are rich in compositional interest. Mireille Havet (1898-1932) was a friend of both Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In fact, Apollinaire published the fifteen-year-old Havet's “Le petit cimetière” in 1913 in his journal, Les Soirées de Paris, No. 19. Both poems were published in Havet's 1917 collection of prose poems for children, La Maison dans l'oeil du chat, with an introduction by Colette. Outside the literary realm, the maudlin Havet originated the role of La Mort, at Cocteau's request, in the stage premiere of his Orphée produced in Paris in 1926. Havet was, for a time, the lover of Mary Butts, the English novelist. Havet eventually died at the age of 34 in a Swiss sanatorium from her addiction to opium. Carpenter took liberties with Havet's prose poems, eliminating substantial sections from each poem in making his settings. “Les cheminées rouges,” which Carpenter recommended as the better of the two, was composed in 1922 and “Le petit cimetière” was composed the following year. Carpenter wrote these songs for the French-Canadian soprano, Eva Gauthier, dedicating them to her. Although she often programmed Carpenter's songs in her recitals, she never performed the Havet settings, finding them ill suited to her voice. Carpenter, aware of Gauthier's reticence about the songs, revised both in 1934. This recording is of the revised versions.
Carpenter most probably found Mabel Simpson's “Rest” in the September 1925 issue of Dial, the avant-garde arts journal of the time. The text was also published the same year in Simpson's collection Poems. Simpson was a Chicago-based poet, playwright, and children's writer who published her work in such other journals as The New York Tribune, Poetry, The Smart Set, The Bookman, The Newark Evening News, and Voices. Pollack writes that the poem “featured the kind of melancholic, symbolist imagery that had earlier attracted Carpenter to Lord Alfred Douglas, Paul Verlaine ... and Helen Dudley.” He goes on the call “Rest,” composed in 1934, “perhaps the most perfect of the composer's late songs.”
Carpenter discovered James Agee's poetry several months after Agee's one collection, Permit Me Voyage, was first published. Pollack suggests that it may have been Carpenter's friend Archibald MacLeish, author of the volume's laudatory forward, who introduced Carpenter to Agee (1909-1955). Agee's “Sonnet XX” became Carpenter's 1935 swan song “Morning Fair.” Carpenter's organically structured setting struggles with the density of Agee's metaphysical language and, as such, does not readily reveal its subtleties without repeated listening. “Morning Fair,” an invocation of the dawn, requires a delicate balance between full-throated singing, an unusually large vocal range, and a controlled lyricism. Pollack writes: “Carpenter could not have known that `Morning Fair' was to be his last art song, but it satisfies romantic expectations of what a last song should be: slow, autumnal, full of deep humanity and tenderness.”
Songs of John Alden Carpenter
Go, Lovely Rose (Edmund Waller)
Tell her that wastes her time and me
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
And shuns to have her graces spied,
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
The common fate of all things rare
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
The Green River (Lord Alfred Douglas)
I know a green grass path that leaves the field,
And like a running river, winds along
Into a leafy wood where is no throng
Of birds at noon-day, and no soft throats yield
Their music to the moon. The place is sealed,
An unclaimed sovereignty of voiceless song,
And all the unravished silence belong
To some sweet singer lost or unrevealed.
So is my soul become a silent place.
Oh may I awake from this uneasy night
To find some voice of music manifold.
Let it be shape of sorrow with wan face,
Or Love that swoons on sleep, or else delight
That is as wide-eyed as a marigold.
Looking-Glass River (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Smooth it slides upon its travel,
Here a wimple, there a gleam —
Sailing blossoms, silver fishes,
Paven pools as clear as air —
Smooth it slides upon its travel,
Here a wimple, there a gleam —
Dansons la gigue! (Paul Verlaine) Let's dance the gig!
Dansons la gigue! Let's dance the gig!
J'aimais surtout ses jolis yeux, Above all I loved her pretty eyes,
Plus clairs que l'étoile des cieux, Brighter than the stars of the skies,
J'aimais ses yeux malicieux. I loved her malicious eyes.
Dansons la gigue! Let's dance the gig!
Elle avait des façons vraiment She truly had ways
De désoler un pauvre amant, Of desolating a poor lover,
Que c'en était vraiment charmant! That were truly charming!
Dansons la gigue! Let's dance the gig!
Mais je trouve encore meilleur But I find still better
Le baiser de sa bouche en fleur, The kiss of her mouth in flower
Depuis qu'elle est morte à mon coeur. Since she has been dead to my heart.
Dansons la gigue! Let's dance the gig!
Je me souviens, je me souviens I remember, I remember
Des heures et des entretiens, Hours and conversations,
Et c'est le meilleur de mes biens. And that is the best of what I have.
Dansons la gigue! Let's dance the gig!
Chanson d'automne (Paul Verlaine) Song of Autumn
Les sanglots longs The long sobs
Des violons Of the violins
Blessent mon coeur Wound my heart
D'une langueur With a monotonous
Tout suffocant All stifling
Et blême, quand And pale, when
Sonne l'heure, The hour sounds,
Je me souviens I remember
Des jours anciens Days of long ago
Et je m'en vais And I am tossed
Au vent mauvais By the cruel wind
Qui m'emporte Which carries me
Feuille morte. Dead leaf.
Le Ciel (Paul Verlaine) The Sky
Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, The sky is above the roof
Si beau, si calme! So beautiful, so calm,
Un arbre, par-dessus le toit, A tree above the roof
Berce sa palme. Rocks its branches;
La cloche dans le ciel qu'on voit In the sky that one sees, a bell
Doucement tinte. Sweetly tolls,
Un oiseau sur l'arbre qu'on voit On the tree that one sees, a bird
Chante sa plainte. Sings its plaint.
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, la vie est là, My God, my God, life is there,
Simple et tranquille. Simple and tranquil!
Cette paisible rumeur-là That peaceful sound
Vient de la ville. Comes from the town.
Qu'as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà What have you done, O you there
Pleurant sans cesse, Weeping unceasingly,
Dis, qu'as-tu fait, toi que voilà, Say, what have you done, you there,
De ta jeunesse? With your youth?
En Sourdine (Paul Verlaine) Muted
Calmes dans le demi-jour Calm in the half-light
Que les branches hautes font, Made by the high branches,
Pénétrons bien notre amour Let us permeate our love
De ce silence profond. With this deep silence.
Fondons nos âmes, nos coeurs Let us join our souls, our hearts
Et nos sens extasiés, And our raptured senses,
Parmi les vagues langueurs Amid the vague languors
Des pins et des arbousiers. Of the pines and arbutus trees.
Ferme tes yeux à demi, Close your eyes half-way,
Croise tes bras sur ton sein, Cross your arms on your breast,
Et de ton coeur endormi And from your drowsy heart,
Chasse à jamais tout dessein. Forever chase all scheme.
Laissons-nous persuader Let ourselves be persuaded
Au souffle berceur et doux, By the lulling soft wind
Qui vient à tes pieds rider That comes, rippling at your feet
Les ondes de gazon roux. The waves of russet grass.
Et quand, solennel, le soir And when the solemn evening
Des chênes noirs tombera, Falls from the black oaks,
Voix de notre désespoir, Voice of our despair,
Le rossignol chantera. The nightingale will sing.
Il pleure dans mon coeur (Paul Verlaine) Tears fall in my heart
Il pleure dans mon coeur Tears fall in my heart
Comme il pleut sur la ville, Like rain upon the town
Quelle est cette langueur What is this languor
Qui pénètre mon coeur? That pervades my heart?
Ô, bruit doux de la pluie O gentle sound of the rain
Par terre et sur les toits! On the ground and on the roofs!
Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie For a listless heart,
Ô, le chant de la pluie! O the song of the rain!
Il pleure sans raison Tears fall without reason
Dans ce coeur qui s'écoeure. In my sickened heart,
Quoi! nulle trahison? What! No betrayal?
Ce deuil est sans raison. My mourning has no cause.
C'est bien la pire peine Indeed it is the worst pain
De ne savoir pourquoi, Not to know why,
Sans amour et sans haine, Without love and without hate,
Mon coeur a tant de peine! My heart feels so much pain.
Little Fly (William Blake)
A Cradle-Song (William Blake)
Sleep Sleep beauty bright
Dreaming in the joys of night
Sleep Sleep: in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit & weep
Secret joys & secret smiles
Little pretty infant wiles
Sleep Sleep beauty bright
Dreaming in the joys of night
Sleep Sleep: in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit & weep
Bid Me to Live (Robert Herrick)
Bid me to live, and I will live
Or bid me love, and I will give
A heart as soft, a heart as kind,
A heart as sound and free,
As in the whole world thou canst find,
That heart Ile give to thee.
Bid me despaire, and Ile despaire,
Under that Cypresse tree:
Or bid me die, and I will dare
E'en Death, to die for thee.
Les Silhouettes (Oscar Wilde)
The sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.
Etched clear upon the pallid sand
The black boat lies: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.
And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.
To One Unknown (Helen Dudley)
I have seen the proudest stars
That wander on through space,
The winds and waves rejoice
I have touched the trillium,
I have kissed the shining feet
Opened the gates of Dawn —
I have dreamed unwonted things,
Visions that witches brew,
The Day is No More (Rabindranath Tagore)
The day is no more, the shadow is upon the earth. It is time that I go to the stream to fill my pitcher.
The evening air is eager with the sad music of the water. Ah, it calls me out into the dusk. In the lonely lane there is no passer by, the wind is up, the ripples are rampant in the river.
I know not if I shall come back home. I know not whom I shall chance to meet. There at the fording in the little boat the unknown man plays upon his lute.
The Player Queen (William Butler Yeats)
My mother dandled me and sang,
“How young it is, how young!”
“He went away,” my mother sang,
“When I was brought to bed,”
And all the while her needle pulled
The gold and silver thread.
She pulled the thread, she bit the thread
And wept because she'd dreamt that I
Was born to wear a crown.
“When she was got,” my mother sang,
And saw a flake of the yellow foam
That dropped upon my thigh.”
How therefore could she help but braid
And dream that I should carry
The rainy mist sweeps gently
o'er the village by the stream,
And from the leafy forest glades
the brigand daggers gleam...
And yet there is no need to fear
or step from out their way,
For more than half the world consists
of bigger rogues than they!
The Odalisque (Liu Yü-hsi)
A gaily dressed damsel steps forth from her bower,
Bewailing the fate that forbids her to roam;
In the courtyard she counts the buds on each flower,
While a dragon-fly flutters and sits on her comb.
A tortoise I see on a lotus-flower resting;
A bird 'mid the reeds and the rushes is nesting;
A light skiff propelled by some boatman's fair daughter,
Whose song dies away o'er the fast-flowing water.
Spring Joys (Wei Ying-wu)
When freshets cease in early spring
and the river dwindles low,
I take my staff and wander
by the banks where wild flowers grow.
I watch the willow-catkins
wildly whirled on every side;
I watch the falling peach-bloom
lightly floating down the tide.
Slumber-Song (Siegfried Sassoon)
Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed
A paradise of dimness. You shall feel
The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell
Throned in your silence: and one hour shall hold
Summer, and midnight, and immensity
Lulled to forgetfulness. For, where you dream,
The stately gloom of foliage shall embower
Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.
And there shall be no memory of the sky,
Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.
But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep
Through drowned and glimmering colour, Time shall be
Only slow and rhythmic swaying; and your breath;
And roses in the darkness; and my love.
Serenade (Siegfried Sassoon)
You were glad to-night: and now you've gone away.
Flushed in the dark, you put your dreams to bed;
But as you fall asleep I hear you say
Those tired sweet drowsy words we left unsaid.
I am alone, all alone: but in the windless night
I listen to the gurgling of the rain,
That veils the gloom with peace.
And whispering of your white limbs,
And your mouth that stormed my throat with bliss,
The rain becomes your voice, and tells no tales,
That crowd my heart with memories of your kiss.
Sleep well: for I can follow you, to bless
And lull your distant beauty where you roam;
And with wild songs of hoarded loveliness
Recall you to these arms that were your home.
The Little Turtle (Vachel Lindsay)
There was a little turtle.
He climbed upon the rocks.
He snapped at a mosquito.
Shake your brown feet, honey (Langston Hughes)
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake your brown feet, chile,
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Shake `em swift and wil' —
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Sun's going down this evening —
Sun's going down this very night —
Might never rise no mo' —
So shake your brown feet, Liza,
Shake your brown feet, Liza,
(The music's soft and wil')
Shake your brown feet, honey,
Jazz-Boys (Langston Hughes)
Sleek black boys in a cabaret.
Play, PLAY! Tomorrow ... who knows?
Tomorrow ... is darkness.
The Cryin' Blues (Langston Hughes)
So, now those cryin' blues
Midnight Nan (Langston Hughes)
And you don't mean maybe.
The Hermit Crab (Robert Hyde)
With the sound of the sea,
The sea can sing, so solemnly,
The storm winds sing their songs to me
And what they sing belongs to me
To me who dwell below the swell
And with their songs, I fill my shell
Le petit cimetière (Mireille Havet)
Derrière le mur du petit cimetière, il y a une chèvre
blanche qui mange de l'herbe verte. Derrière le mur
Devant le mur du petit cimetière, il y a la place aux
pavés inégaux. Devant le mur du petit cimetière.
A l'intérieur du petit cimetière, il y a des rangées
de tombes et un champ de croix. A l'intérieur du petit
cimetière il y a des croix, des croix, des croix!
Là, sont réunis sous la terre, tous ceux que la vie a
séparés. Mais la chèvre blanche mange son herbe verte,
derrière le mur du petit cimetière.
Ah! que de gens, que de gens, que de gens!
Behind the wall of the little cemetery, there is a white goat who eats the green grass. Behind the wall of the little cemetery.
In front of the wall of the little cemetery, there is a square with uneven paving stones. In front of the wall of the little cemetery.
Inside the little cemetery, there are rows of tombs and a field of crosses. Inside the little cemetery there are crosses, crosses, crosses!
There, reunited under the earth, are all who life has separated. But the white goat eats its green grass behind the wall of the little cemetery.
Ah! so many folks, so many folks, so many folks!
Les cheminées rouges (Mireille Havet)
Vingt-huit cheminées rouges dansent sur le toit gris. Vingt-huit cheminées rouges qui ont pour bras des rayons de soleil et l'air bleu pour chapeau. Vingt-huit cheminées rouges font la ronde autour du toit gris.
En bas, le monde s'agite. En bas, on souffre, on pleure, on rit. Des gens passent, toujours les mêmes; ce sont des hommes, ce sont des femmes, des jeunes gens, des jeunes filles et de tous petits enfants.
Des enfants jouent - pour la coutume - des enfants jouent l'air ennuyé. Depuis le temps qu'ils jouent ils sont si fatigués.
Enfin, un prêtre passe. Enfin le prêtre, lisant son bréviaire, ne s'apercevant pas qu'il est passé hier. Comme le monde est vieux! Comme le monde est vieux!
Et pareille aux autres, je reprends ma route. Là-haut, les cheminées rouges, continuent leur ronde au soleil, font leur ronde sur les toits, font leur ronde au soleil. La lumière est bleue ... d'un bleu infini.
Twenty-eight red chimneys dance on the gray rooftop. Twenty-eight red chimneys, which have sun beams for arms and blue sky for a hat. Twenty-eight red chimneys dance a round-dance across the gray rooftop.
Below, the world bustles. Below people suffer, cry, laugh. Folks pass, always the same folks, there are men, there are women, young guys and young girls, and tiny little children.
The children play - as is their wont - the children play, with a bored air. Since the time they've played they are so tired.
And then, a priest passes. Then the priest, reading his breviary, not even noticing that he passed by here yesterday. How old this world is! How old this world is!
And like the others, I walk on. Up there, the red chimneys, continue their round-dance in the sunshine, do their round-dance on the rooftops, do their round-dance in the sunshine. The light is blue ... of a blue like infinity itself.
Morning Fair (James Agee)
Now stands our love on that still verge of day
Where darkness loiters leaf to leaf releasing
Lone tree to silvering tree: then slopes away
Before the morning's deep-drawn strength increasing
Till the sweet land lies burnished in the dawn:
But sleeping still: nor stirs a thread of grass:
Large on the low hill and the spangled lawn
The pureleaved air dwells passionless as glass:
So stands our love new found and unaroused,
Appareled in all peace and innocence,
In all lost shadows of love past still drowsed
Against foreknowledge of such immanence
As now, with earth outshone and earth's wide air,
Shows each to other as this morning fair.
ROBERT OSBORNE has sung extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Russia, and Asia under such distinguished conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Dennis Russell Davies, Michael Tilson Thomas, Vladimir Spivakov, and John Williams. His television appearances have been on the BBC Omnibus Series, Soviet Arts Television, and on the PBS Great Performances broadcast of the Bernstein at 70! Gala from Tanglewood as well as Musical Outsiders: An American Legacy featured at the Louvre and on PBS, German and Austrian television. His operatic recordings include Meredith Monk's Atlas on ECM, Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis on Arabesque, both Hindemith's Hin und zurück and Elias Tanenbaum's monodrama Last Letters from Stalingrad on Albany, and Stewart Wallace's Kaballah on Koch International. His solo recordings include Orchestral Songs of Shostakovich on Arabesque and, on Albany, both My Love Unspoken: Songs of Leo Sowerby and Songs of Henry Cowell, which was hailed by Tilson Thomas in the New York Times 1998-99 season preview as one of the most eagerly anticipated musical events of the season.
His operatic repertoire includes over forty roles in operas by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Britten, Cimarosa, Copland, Donizetti, Menotti, Mozart, Partch, Puccini, Purcell, Rameau, Rossini, and Weill, which he has sung with companies in Berlin, Paris, Houston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Santa Fe and New York. Mr. Osborne's extensive concert repertoire has taken him to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Royal Albert Hall in London, Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris, Victoria Hall in Singapore, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow. He has appeared with the Boston, New World, Singapore, Tanglewood, Schleswig-Holstein, Moscow Virtuosi, and Racine Symphony Orchestras and with the United States Military Academy Band singing such works as Bernstein's Songfest, Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony, Six Romances on British Verse, and Eight British and American Folksongs, Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon and Serenade, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Copland's Old American Songs, Mozart's Requiem, Arvo Pärt's Miserere, Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death and Prokoviev's Lt. Kije. Mr. Osborne has also appeared with the Tanglewood, Schleswig-Holstein, Nakamichi Baroque, USArts/Berlin, Redwoods, Storm King, Cape May, Aspen and Marlboro Festivals. He holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Yale University and is on the faculty of Vassar College.
Recent engagements included making three recordings: Aaron Kernis' vocal chamber work Death Fugue for the Milken Archive, Harry Partch's microtonal hobo-opera, The Wayward, for Wergo, and Frank Martin's Le vin herbé for Newport Classics, singing Toby Twining's microtonal Chrysalid Requiem at the Concertgebouw, Shostakovich's Ten Songs of the Fool from King Lear with the Vassar Orchestra, Shostakovich's Six Romances on British Verse with the RWCC Orchestra, a Beethoven Lieder recital for the annual Beethoven Festival in Oyster Bay, a tour of Winterreise sponsored by the American Schubert Institute, performing Aaron Kernis' chamber work Le quattro stagioni della cucina futurista with the Eberli Ensemble for the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, singing on the Twentieth Century Masters: Samuel Barber Festival at the Kaye Playhouse in New York, performing Partch's Ring Around the Moon and Dean Drummond's Congressional Record with Newband at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, and performing Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King on a seven-city tour with the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble which the New York Times praised as “thrilling, both vocally and dramatically.”
DENNIS HELMRICH graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree cum laude, a master's degree with honors, and prizes from the Lockwood and Ditson Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, having studied piano with Donald Currier and theoretical and historical subjects with a numerous and distinguished faculty. After pursuing doctoral studies at Boston University under Bela Boszormenyi-Nagy, at the age of 24, he joined the music faculty of Antioch College in Ohio, and subsequently the faculties of the State University of New York campuses at Albany and Purchase, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, and New York University.
Invited to the Tanglewood Music Festival in 1969 to aid in the musical preparation of Berg's Wozzeck under Erich Leinsdorf, in the following year Helmrich was appointed Vocal Music Coach of the Tanglewood Music Center, where after more than a quarter century of continuous service he is the occupant of an endowed chair in Vocal Studies. During the summer of 1996 he supervised the musical preparation of two casts of singers for the 50th anniversary performances under Maestro Seiji Ozawa of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.
Almost from the outset of his career Helmrich has concentrated on chamber music and the art song literature in addition to the solo repertoire. It is as a sonata partner and accompanist that he now makes most of his concert appearances, in a schedule which in the last few years has taken him to thirty states, Canada, Latin America, Europe, and the Far East, to stages such as Avery Fisher, Alice Tully, and Carnegie Halls in New York, the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, Symphony Hall in Boston, and Severance Hall in Cleveland, with artists such as Kathleen Battle, Richard Stilwell, Mary Ann Hart, D'Anna Fortunato, Eugenia Zukerman, Claire Bloom, Carol Wincenc, Gary Schocker, Roberta Peters, Frances Lucey, Petra Lang, and the late, legendary Charles Holland.
A continuing interest in contemporary music has led Helmrich to give first performances of many American compositions. For four years he was co-director of Hear America First®, a New York concert series devoted to the performance of American music. He has recorded chamber music and songs on the Orion, Spectrum, Nonesuch, Chesky, Musical Heritage, Albany, Newport Classics, Delos, and Samsung labels. His publications include translations of opera libretti and song texts, as well as opera supertitles.
We would like to express our gratitude to the following people and organizations who assisted in this project: The Aaron Copland Fund for Recording, Rue Hubert, Carpenter's granddaughter, Pauline G. Hubert, Carpenter's great granddaughter, the Estate of John Alden Carpenter, Howard Pollack, whose Skyscraper Lullaby: The Life and Music of John Alden Carpenter (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1995) was of immense help, Joan O'Connor, author of John Alden Carpenter: A Bio-Bibliography, Brian Mann and Richard Wilson, as well as the entire faculty and staff of the Music Department of Vassar College, Pierre Vallet, Friends and Enemies of New Music, Linda LoSchiavo and the Fordham University Library, George Boziwick and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Julius Rudel and the Spoleto Festival, Susan Feder and Katie Plybon at G. Schirmer.
Recorded at Skinner Recital Hall, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York on June 11, 13 and 14, 1999. Steinway Piano.
Produced and engineered by Gregory K. Squires
Digital editing and mastering by Richard Price
All songs are published by G. Schirmer with the exclusion of six unpublished songs (Spring Joys, Midnight Nan, The Hermit Crab, The Little Turtle, Le petit cimetière, Les cheminées rouges) which were obtained from the collection of the Library of Congress. We thank Rue Hubert and the Estate of John Alden Carpenter for permission to record the unpublished songs.
English translations of the poems of Paul Verlaine and Mireille Havet are by Robert Osborne.
Photo of John Alden Carpenter:Courtesy G. Schirmer/AMP
Photo of Robert Osborne:Beatriz Schiller
Cover Art:Michael J. Peery
Songs of John Alden Carpenter
Robert Osborne, bass-baritone
1 Go, Lovely Rose (Edmund Waller) [1908] [2:16]
2 The Green River (Lord Alfred Douglas) [1909] [3:21]
3 Looking-Glass River (Robert Louis Stevenson) [1909] [2:05]
Five Paul Verlaine Settings [1910]
4 Dansons la Gigue! [2:12]
5 Chanson d'automne [2:11]
8 Il pleure dans mon coeur [2:12]
Two William Blake Settings
9 Little Fly [1909] [1:28]
10 A Cradle-Song [1911] [3:04]
11 Bid Me to Live (Robert Herrick) [1911] [2:15]
12 Les Silhouettes (Oscar Wilde) [1912] [2:33]
13 To One Unknown (Helen Dudley) [1912] [3:30]
14 The Day is no more (Rabindranath Tagore) [1914] [3:53]
15 The Player Queen (William Butler Yeats) [1914] [2:49]
Four Settings of Ancient Chinese Poetry [1916]
16 The Highwaymen (Li Shê) [1:39]
17 The Odalisque (Liu Yü-hsi) [1:14]
18 On a Screen (Li Po) [1:59]
19 Spring Joys (Wei Ying-wu) [1:27]
Two Night Songs (Siegfried Sassoon) [1920]
22 The Little Turtle (Vachel Lindsay) [1926] [:37]
Four Langston Hughes Settings [1926]
23 Shake your brown feet, honey [1:57]
25 The Cryin' Blues [2:10]
27 The Hermit Crab (Robert Hyde) [1929] [2:28]
Two Mireille Havet Settings
28 Le petit cimetière [1923/34] [2:37]
29 Les cheminées rouges [1922/34] [4:01]
30 Rest (Mabel Simpson) [1934] [2:51]
31 Morning Fair (James Agee) [1935] [4:36]
|
