This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” with the Artemis I Orion spacecraft and the James Webb Space Telescope keeping NASA very much in the news these days, we look to the heavens, with an hour of music inspired by the cosmos.
When Spanish master Joaquin Rodrigo was in the United States in 1970 to attend the world premiere of his “Concierto Madrigal” at the Hollywood Bowl, he decided to make a side-trip to Houston, where he visited what is now the Johnson Space Center. There, NASA saw to it that the composer, blind since the age of three, was introduced to astronauts and permitted to handle moon rocks.
The experience left him with a powerful impression, so that when he was commissioned by the Houston Symphony Orchestra several years later to write a piece of music to celebrate the American Bicentennial, his thoughts returned to his friends at NASA and the idea of space exploration. The result was something worlds away – if you’ll excuse the expression – from his popular works for guitar: the symphonic poem “A la busca del más allá” (“In search of the beyond”).
Another Spaniard inspired by extraterrestrial concerns was Enrique Granados, very well-known for his music for the keyboard. Perhaps Granados’ most unusual work is a concerto of sorts for piano, with choruses and organ, “Cant de les estrilles” (“Song of the Stars”). This music was composed as a vehicle for Granados himself and dedicated to the long-lived pianist, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who died as recently as 1993 – one month shy of his 101st birthday.
“Song of the Stars” was given its first performance in 1911, on the same program as the premiere of Granados’ enduring piano suite “Goyescas.” However, the manuscript would remain unpublished. Granados died in 1916, only a few years later, on a return trip from the United States, when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine while crossing the English Channel.
The manuscript found its way to New York in the 1930s, brought there by the composer’s son, who was lured by businessman and conductor Nathaniel Shilkret with the promise of publication. Legal entanglements ensued, involving other members of the Granados family. A fire in the 1960s was feared to have destroyed the work, and efforts by the family to recover the piece with the assistance of José Iturbi and Alicia de Larrocha came to naught.
In 1982, Granados’ daughter enlisted the American pianist Douglas Riva to act as the family representative. Finally, an agreement was negotiated with Shilkret’s grandson, and the work was performed again for the first time in nearly 100 years. The unattributed Catalan text is said to be a response to the poetry of Heinrich Heine, about love and the stars, from the perspective of the stars themselves.
Finally, we’ll round out the hour with music by contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Saariaho evokes both the mythological and astrological in her work for orchestra, “Orion,” from 2002. The piece falls into three movements: “Memento mori,” “Winter Sky,” and “Hunter.” With spacecraft Orion just wrapping up its lunar mission, how appropriate is that?
Pour yourself some cosmos; then look to the skies in wonder! I hope you’ll join me for “Creating Space,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
