I marvel at how some musicians can create amazing music off the top of their heads. I’m also amazed at how some composers can write down music that sounds like it’s being improvised. Our first program, Off the Top of Your Head, celebrates that feeling of spontaneity. It’s also a reference to Albert Einstein’s hair, a prominent and amusing subject in the final work on the program.

— Jeffrey Sykes, DMA, Artistic Director (all program notes by Jeffrey!)

Mel Bonis (1858-1937)

Suite dans le style ancien, op. 127, for flute, violin, viola, and piano (1928)
Our program opens with the Suite dans le style ancien (“Suite in the antique style”) of French composer Mel (Mélanie) Bonis (1858-1937). Bonis was born into a devout lower-middle class Parisian family. She taught herself to play piano and began to compose. She was so good at it that she captured the attention of the great composer and organist César Franck, who convinced her parents to enroll her in the Conservatoire. At the Conservatoire, she enjoyed great success, and her prospects seemed good. She met and fell in love with a fellow student, Amédée Landély Hettich, but unfortunately things took a southward turn. Her parents strongly disapproved of a match that they felt would take her into a “dangerous artistic world.” They withdrew her from the Conservatoire—over the objections of Franck and the Conservatoire leadership—and arranged her marriage to Albert Domange, a businessman 25 years her senior who did not like music. Bonis settled into a domestic life, and her dreams of composing seemed over.

Things might have stayed that way were it not for a chance re-encounter with Hettich several years later. He, too, had married, and he had started teaching voice privately. He hired her to accompany his students and started encouraging her to compose. He introduced her to her future publisher, Alphonse Leduc, and her works began to be played in Parisian homes. Bonis and Hettich began an affair, but it broke off when Bonis became pregnant. She traveled to Switzerland for an alleged “health cure” where she secretly gave birth to a daughter whom she would never be able to legally recognize. The child was put in the care of one of her former chambermaids. Bonis was caught between her feelings for Hettich, her intense piety, her domestic obligations, and the expectations of society at the time.

Despite a lifetime of tragedy, Bonis was a prolific composer, writing more than 300 pieces: songs, piano pieces, organ works, religious works, and about 20 chamber music pieces, all of high quality. Bonis wrote at a time when many French composers were looking to the past for inspiration. This was a time when the Abbey of Solesmes was beginning its work reviving Gregorian chant and French medieval popular songs were being rediscovered. The Suite dans le style ancien is one of several works Bonis wrote inspired by that newly-revealed past. Interestingly, each of its four movements takes inspiration from a different period of the past. The Prélude uses modal melodies and open fifths, creating a medievalist quality. The Fughette is more neo-Baroque in inspiration. The Chorale is inspired by the chorales sung in church services to this day. And the Divertissement “seems to allude to the modern-sounding music of some of Bonis’ own contemporaries” in the words of Bonis scholar Rachel Harlene Rosenman. The Suite was written in 1928 but not published until 2006, nearly 60 years after her death. It exists in two versions, the quartet version you will hear tonight, and a version for wind septet, both of which are long-overdue additions to the repertoire.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) 

Piano Concerto no. 17 in G Major, K. 453 for piano, flute, clarinet, and strings (1784)

Mozart wrote incredible works in every genre of music he touched, but I’m in agreement with critic Charles Rosen that there are three genres that truly stick out from the rest. Mozart was a transformative composer of opera. His ability to tell a story and depict shades of character in music is without parallel. Mozart’s six string quintets for two violins, two violas, and cello, plus the amazing clarinet quintet, are all works that redefined what chamber music could be. And Mozart’s 19 mature piano concertos, along with the clarinet concerto, have never been equaled for their beauty and inventiveness. These works established structural norms that are still in use in concertos today.

The year 1784 was a busy one for Mozart: he wrote six of his greatest piano concertos that year. The Concerto no. 17 in G Major, K. 453, was completed on April 12, 1784. We know this date with such accuracy because right around this time, Mozart began keeping a detailed record of his works as he completed them. The manuscript bears a dedication to Mozart’s student Barbara Ployer, the niece of Salzburg’s official agent in the Imperial Court of Vienna. She premiered the work at her uncle’s home on June 13th of that year, with Mozart in attendance. Mozart usually wrote his concertos for himself to play; he clearly held Ployer in high regard to provide such a masterpiece for her. Ordinarily, Mozart did not write out cadenzas for his concertos—he improvised his cadenzas on the spot. However, because he was writing for his student, he wrote cadenzas for her for both the first and second movements.

The concerto is a collection of beautiful ideas from beginning to end. It opens with a march-like rhythmic theme that manages to somehow sound inviting and delightful rather than martial. The second movement is a stunner, featuring incredible writing for the wind instruments. This movement reminds us that concertos and operas are very closely related genres. The finale is a set of variations on a jaunty tune that sounds like Papageno, the bird catcher from The Magic Flute. On April 27, a few weeks after completing the concerto, Mozart bought a pet starling. Clearly the theme of this finale was still in Mozart’s head, because he taught the starling to sing it! The bird lived as a beloved pet in his household for three years. When it died on June 4, 1787, Mozart buried it in his garden with complete funeral rites, including the recitation of an epitaph he wrote:

Here rests a bird called Starling,

A foolish little Darling.

He was still in his prime

When he ran out of time,

And my sweet little friend

Came to a bitter end,

Creating a terrible smart

Deep in my heart.

Gentle Reader! Shed a tear,

For he was dear,

Sometimes a bit too jolly

And, at times, quite folly,

But nevermore

A bore.

I bet he is now up on high

Praising my friendship to the sky,

Which I render

Without tender;

For when he took his sudden leave,

Which brought to me such grief,

He was not thinking of the man

Who writes and rhymes as no one can.

(Translated by Robert Spaethling)

Kevin Puts (b. 1972) 

Einstein on Mercer Street (2002)

Many of you will remember that several years ago, CPMF commissioned Pulitzer-Prize winning composer Kevin Puts for the song cycle In At The Eye. We premiered that masterpiece in 2017 with Timothy Jones as soloist. The first major work Puts wrote for the voice was also written for Jones, his cantata Einstein on Mercer Street. Written in 2002 while at the American Academy in Rome, it was commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble with the sound of Jones’ voice clearly in mind. Given the current renewed interest in Einstein because of the movie Oppenheimer, I thought this was an opportune moment to program this masterpiece. As I mentioned earlier, tonight’s program is entitled OFF THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD, and the title connects to this piece. One of my favorite parts of Puts’ cantata happens early on when Einstein sings about his “floating hair” and what a publicity magnet it has become. (Ironically, it turns out that Einstein likely had a rare genetic condition called “uncombable hair syndrome.” I promise I am not making this up.) 

Puts writes eloquently of his work: 

In the summer of 2001, I talked to Fleda Brown about the idea of a project involving a set of poems written especially for use in a musical composition. I had just been asked by Kevin Noe to write something for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and my idea for a vocal piece was as intriguing to him as it was to me. I have set Brown’s poetry in the past. Fishing With Blood, for soprano and orchestra was written as a sort of “senior project” while I was an undergrad at Eastman, and a couple of years later I set two more poems of hers, Arch and Kitty Hawk for mezzo-soprano and piano. But the idea of a real collaboration from the ground up, so to speak, was a new one. 

The current poet laureate of the state of Delaware, Brown is the author of four books of poetry which include several poems on historical figures such as painters, artists, writers and the like. She has written on O’Keefe, Edward Hopper, Chagall, Emily Dickinson, and even Elvis Presley, with humor, poignancy, and beautiful lyricism, and I wondered what would be the result if she chose a subject for whom her voice was seemingly at odds. I mentioned Einstein (we were limited to male figures, since Kevin Noe had already raved to me about baritone Timothy Jones and then contracted him for the piece!) and she didn’t seem to respond at once to the idea. So I left for the American Academy in Rome (where I have spent the last year) and a few weeks later I learned that she had read several biographies on Einstein and had almost completed the first draft of a manuscript. We talked by phone about the shape of the piece and I decided it was best to simply let her write and I would worry about the musical form it would take later. I wanted her to be able to publish the poems exactly as she saw fit in poetry journals or as part of a future collection, and I didn’t want her to feel encumbered by the considerations a composer must make with regard to rhythm, pacing and proportion. I do remember saying that I hoped the audience would get the sense of a large-scale narrative arch and an almost operatic sense of completion by the end of the work.

She gave me the complete set of nine poems a few months later, and after playing around with it for several weeks I realized that its musical trajectory ought to be something very different than that which a set of nine discrete poems immediately suggests. Perhaps it’s just that I have become so weary of the song cycle, the kind of piece where you sit there in the audience and check off the poems as they go by, praying to God the next one will be set at a fast tempo! Or maybe it’s my current interest in broad, expansive musical forms that led me to the belief that Einstein on Mercer Street was particularly well-suited to a division into three large parts. I heard the first poem as an introduction in every possible way, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the music before carrying on to the second poem. I imagined the ends of many of the poems spilling into the beginnings of others. So there are only two breaks, after Poem II (“...the mathematics we made of our marriage,—against the emptiness”) and after Poem IV (“...vast, primordial energy—you can never put your hands on again”) which in many ways feels like the climax of the piece. Poems V and VII are spoken, and another poem originally existed between what are now V and VI, but I felt strongly that “and in Germany, Hitler rose up—like all my dreams of deformed children,—children sinking in the waves, children lost” needed to flow directly into “I note the universe goes from order to disorder,” at least in a musical sense, and Brown ultimately decided to cut this poem from her manuscript as well. 

Because there are places where I have rearranged the order of the text or even cut a line here or there for the sake of musical continuity, I have printed Brown’s manuscript below in its original version.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL TEXT OF EINSTEIN ON MERCER STREET.

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