Music Notes 7-14-24

Andrew Lloyd Webber has become an icon in the world of theatrical music, writing his first pieces, a suite of 6 pieces, at the age of nine.  Over the years he has written 21 musicals (several of which have run for over a decade both on the West End of London and on Broadway),  a song cycle, a set of variations, 2 film scores and a Latin Requiem Mass.  The Requiem was written during 1984 in memory of his father, William Lloyd Webber, a composer and organist.  It was premiered in 1985, conducted by Lorin Maazel, with soloists Placido Domingo, Sarah Brightman (Webber’s wife at the time) and boy soprano Paul Miles-Kingston.  It contained elements of his melodic, pop-oriented style with more angular, austere musical environments.  The recording proved to be quite popular, although the piece is seldom performed live, partially due to the large forces needed and the fact that the vocal writing is very tricky and demanding.  The Requiem debuted in Los Angeles in 1986 at the Shrine Theatre.  It was the backdrop for the American Ballet Theatre, under the leadership of Mikhael Baryshnikov.  I was singing with the Roger Wagner Chorale at the time, and we were hired to be the pit choir for the performance.  It turned out that the iconic Pie Jesu was choreographed and danced by Baryshnikov himself, and subsequently, none of us were paying much attention to the conductor (our eyes were glued to the stage – we had, after all, the best seats in the house).  The Pie Jesu features both the soprano soloist, the boy soprano (although this week we’re substituting a real soprano) and the choir.  Probably the most popular piece in the Requiem, the Pie Jesu is, for my money, also the best piece of music in the work.

Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise is a Christian hymn with words written in 1867 by the Free Church of Scotland minister, Walter Chalmers Smith.  It is usually sung to the tune, St. Denio (referring to St. Denis, the patron saint of France), originally a Welsh ballad tune, which became a hymn (under the name Palestrina) in Caniadau y Cyssegr (Hymns of the Sanctuary), edited in 1839 by John Roberts, also known by his Welsh name, Ieuan Gwyllt (wild John), to distinguish him from numerous other John Roberts. Of this hymn, musicologist Erik Routley has written:  "Immortal, Invisible should give the reader a moment's pause. Most readers will think they know this hymn, the work of another Free Kirk minister. But it never now appears as its author wrote it, and a closer look at it in its fuller form shows that it was by no means designed to be one of those general hymns of praise that the parson slams into the praise-list when he is in too much of a hurry to think of anything else but a hymn about the reading of Scripture. Just occasionally editorial tinkering changes the whole personality of a hymn; it has certainly done so here."

All Creatures Of Our God And King is a hymn written by William Henry Draper, based on a poem by St. Francis of Assisi written in 1225 in his poem Canticle of the Sun, which was based on Psalm 148.  William Henry Draper was rector at a Church of England parish in Abel, near Leeds.  He paraphrased St. Francis’ poem and set it to music sometime between 1899 and 1919 (the exact date is unknown).  It was written for his church’s children’s Pentecost celebrations, and was first published in 1919 in The Public School Hymn Book.  It is usually associated with the tune Lass Uns Erfreuen, a German Easter hymn published by Friedrich Spee in 1623 in his book Auserlesene Catholische Geistliche Kirchengesäng.  The most famous arrangement of the melody was written by Ralph Vaughn Williams in 1906 when he was on the committee for the Church of England hymnal.  At last count, it has been published in 264 hymnals.