Tra-la! It’s May! The lusty month of May!
Join me this afternoon for a dance around the maypole. We’ll have a selection of madrigals, music inspired by birds and flowers, some morris dances, and musical evocations of Robin Hood, a figure traditionally associated with May Day festivities. Along the way, we’ll mark the birthdays, I hope, of Hugo Alfven, Jon Leifs, Leo Sowerby, and Walter Susskind.
We’ll spring into May, from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Strap on your goat leggings! Sunday is Walpurgis Night, the eve of the feast day of 8th century abbess Saint Walpurga. It’s a great witches’ holiday – the “other” Hallowe’en – and therefore a popular celebration in Europe, where they still know how to make everything festive creepy. And more power to them. This Thursday morning on WPRB, we’ll have music in celebration of Walpurgis Night and May Day.
Music lovers and devotees of German romantic literature, of course, already know a thing or two about Walpurgisnacht. It’s the night Mephistopheles escorts Faust to the Harz Mountains, where they encounter witches and warlocks cavorting on the Brocken. It’s also the night Faust, Mephistopheles and Homunculus travel to ancient Greece to encounter the shade of Helena (a.k.a. Helen of Troy). We’ll hear appropriate selections from Arrigo Boito’s opera, “Mefistofele.”
Mendelssohn wrote a fairly tame cantata, “Die erste Walpurigisnacht” (“The First Walpurgis Night”), on another Goethe poem about prankish Druids freaking out some Christians. (EDIT: Sandy Steiglitz tells me she’ll be playing this piece as part of this week’s Sunday Morning Opera with Sandy. The featured work will be Franz Lehar’s “Paganini.” Tune in to WPRB to hear it this Sunday between 5:30 and 10 a.m.)
Brahms composed a song, “Walpurgisnacht,” about a mother scaring the living daylights out of her daughter, by telling her a thunderstorm is actually the sound of witches celebrating on the Brocken; as if that isn’t enough, she tells her that she herself is a witch. Ha ha! So German.
Among our other works will be Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Beltane Fire,” Gustav Holst’s “The Morning of the Year,” Nikos Skalkottas’ “Mayday Spell,” and Benjamin Britten’s “Spring Symphony,” a piece which climaxes in a setting of the 13th century May Day round, “Sumer is a-cumen in.” It’s all verrrry Wicker Man.
We’ll be leaping naked over bonfires, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. Keep Walpurga in Walpurgis Night, with Classic Ross Amico.
Happy May Day, everyone! It’s been a raw and clammy day in the Philadelphia/Princeton area. Hopefully your ribbons and hobby horses didn’t get too damp.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we don our finery and caper around the Maypole, with two works by English composers. The first is by Sir Arthur Sullivan – he of Gilbert & Sullivan fame – who, in 1897, set to music a “Jubilee Hymn,” as part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations surrounding the reign of Queen Victoria, which were held in May of that year.
Concurrently, he was commissioned to write a ballet to mark sixty years of the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square. The result was “Victoria and Merrie England,” which was made up of nationalistic tableaux celebrating the history, legends, and royalty of Great Britain.
We’re going to be listening to Scenes II & III from the ballet, together titled “May Day in Queen Elizabeth’s Time” (this alluding, of course, to the reign of Elizabeth I). The suite includes colorful descriptive subsections like “Procession of the Mummers and the Revelers,” “Knights and Rose Maidens,” “Friar Tuck and the Dragon” and “Maypole Dance.”
My original intention had been to cobble together selections from operas and ballets featuring maypoles, but I didn’t have time to distill the high points of Howard Hanson’s “Merry Mount,” Antonin Dvořák’s “The Cunning Peasant,” and Ferdinand Hérold’s “La Fille mal gardée.”
So instead we’ll fill out the hour with one of the earliest programmatic works by Arnold Bax (later SIR Arnold Bax). “Spring Fire,” composed in 1913 and 1914, is meant to suggest the awakening of mythological beings in early spring.
The subject matter was an attempt to cash in on the fashionable “paganism craze” sparked by the Ballets Russes and its composers. Bax’s affection for the writings of Algernon Swinburne had recently yielded the symphonic poem “Nympholept.” Quotations from Swinburne also adorn portions of the score to “Spring Fire.”
The piece was scheduled for performance several times, but repeatedly cancelled, first because of the outbreak of war, then because of the work’s difficulty. In fact, it would never be performed during Bax’s lifetime. The manuscript was consumed in a fire in 1964, and all hope of ever hearing the score vanished. Fortunately, a copy was discovered, and the piece was finally recorded in 1986.
The work is meant to evoke a woodland sunrise in early spring, as ancient denizens of the forest shrug off their winter sleep. They skip with mad antics down the glades. Forest lovers loll in their ecstatic dreams, until they are rudely awakened by a turbulent rout of satyrs and maenads. Sounds like spring to me.
I hope you’ll join me for “Spring into May Day,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
I know I said I wouldn’t post about Shakespeare anymore for a while, but here’s an interesting piece about Shakespeare, May Day and the hobby horse:
Another about Thomas Morton vs. The Puritans, and the Maypole of Merry Mount:
Now is the Month of Maying…
Here’s “A May Day Overture” by Haydn Wood:
And Howard Hanson’s Borodin-esque “Maypole Dances,” from the opera “Merry Mount”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumPqSm1oRo
With a toast to Merrymount’s Thomas Morton:
https://almostchosenpeople.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/thomas-morton-of-merrymount/
And a belt for Beltane:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane
Happy May Day!
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