“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Walt Whitman’s pastoral elegy, written in the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, drew its most famous musical response from Paul Hindemith. Hindemith dedicated his requiem to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we continue our celebration of the bicentennial of the birth of America’s national poet (on May 31, 1816) with two lesser-known works inspired by the same source.
Karl Amadeus Hartmann died within weeks of Hindemith (who fled Germany in 1938), in December of 1963. An anti-fascist composer who made the decision to remain at home during Hitler’s reign of terror, Hartmann’s music was condemned as degenerate and banned from public performance. Holding fast was a dangerous game for an artist at odds with the regime. This type of opposition was described by writer Thomas Mann as “inner immigration.”
Following the war, Hartmann was one of the few surviving anti-fascists in Bavaria whom the Allied Forces could promote to a position of responsibility. He used that trust to reintroduce the world to music which had been prohibited since 1933 under National Socialist aesthetic policy.
Hartmann remained in Munich for the rest of his life, where his administrative duties cut heavily into what would have been his own compositional time and energy. His own greatest champions were his contemporaries, and performances of his music nearly died out with them. However, in recent years, his works have received more exposure thanks to recordings.
Hartmann wrote Symphony No. 1 in 1935 as an act of political dissidence. Naturally, at the time, no one in Germany would touch it, and Hartmann cemented his “undesirable” status. It would be over a decade before the piece would receive its first performance, in 1948. Following revisions, the work reached its final form in 1955.
Subtitled “Versuch eines Requiems” (or “Attempt at a Requiem”), the symphony employs texts selected from Whitman’s poetry. Unusually, it falls into five movements, as opposed to four. Four of them employ a contralto, but the third is purely instrumental, a set of variations on a theme from Hartmann’s anti-war opera, “Simplicius Simplicissimus.”
Closer to home, Philadelphia-based composer Jennifer Higdon scored her setting, “Dooryard Bloom,” for baritone and orchestra. The work was written on a commission from the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 2004.
Higdon, born in Brooklyn in 1962, but raised in Atlanta and Seymour, TN, took up composition while studying as a flutist at Bowling Green State University. She went on to earn an Artist’s Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, and a Master’s Degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She is now on the faculty of Curtis, and her works are frequently programmed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2010 for her Violin Concerto.
I hope you’ll join me for the third of four weeks devoted to music inspired by the verse of Walt Whitman. Whitman chants his song of “sane and sacred death,” on “Lilacs Last,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Clockwise from left: Lilacs, Whitman, Hartmann, and Higdon (with helper)
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