Concerts: Rapunzel & The River

Rapunzel (1952)
Lou Harrison (b. 1917)

Aptos composer Lou Harrison needs no introduction to Cabrillo Music Festival audiences. A founding member of the Festival more than 35 years ago, his works have been represented at practically every Festival since, including a significant number of world premieres. Although for many years the Festival was one of the few venues for Harrison's work, in the last decade he has achieved international fame, with his music regularly performed by major orchestras.

A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 enabled Harrison to spend two years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where his opera Rapunzel was composed between August 21 and October 7 the same year. He completed the orchestration in New York the following year and soprano Leontyne Price sang the prayer scene from the third act at the 1954 International Conference of Contemporary Music in Rome, winning Harrison a Twentieth Century Masterpiece Award for the best voice and chamber orchestra composition. The entire opera was staged for the first time on May 14, 1959 at Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City.

Although a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, Rapunzel was Harrison's last serious attempt to incorporate Schoenberg's 12-tone system into his own music. Even here, although it sometimes comes into conflict with Schoenberg's rigid rules, Harrison's gift for lyricism wins out; this opera is surely proof that dodecaphonic music doesn't have to be uncompromisingly dissonant.

The story of Rapunzel is familiar to most from the collection by the Brothers Grimm. Harrison, however, bases his version on a psychological reinterpretation by the British poet William Morris (1834-1896). The original story tells of a couple, childless for many years, whose bargain with a witch (or dwarf, in some versions) concerns the promise of a daughter in return for the witch's possession of the child at the age of twelve. Rapunzel is duly born, taken by the witch and shut up in a high tower with no stairs. She must grow her golden hair and let it down only when she hears the words, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." A handsome prince sees her in the tower, overhears the secret words and rescues Rapunzel, although in some versions there is more imprisonment, separation and other tribulations before they are finally reunited.

Harrison wrote the following note for the West Coast premiere performance at the Cabrillo Music Festival in 1966:

William Morris was a remarkable man and a very important artist. His influence is everywhere about us today (in principles of design, in decoration, furniture, calligraphy, typography and much else) and his essays are as fiery and pertinent now as when he wrote them. My composing a little opera on the text of his Rapunzel (found in his first volume of poems, 1858) was, then, an expression of wide and deep interest in Morris. I am not alone, it turns out, for there is a William Morris Society in England, to which any may belong.

Though the poem is about the fairy tale found in Grimm, it is also full of very modern introspection and psychological detail. It is this dream work, as it were, which I've emphasized in my setting. The setting is complete save for one word which, in the original, is in parentheses and which I simply forgot to set.

It may be of some interest to musicians that the 12-tone row used in the composition turned out to be a trick one. About halfway through the composition of Rapunzel I began to suspect something of the sort and gave it a careful examination. Sure enough - unlikely as it seems - the row makes is own retrograde (or backwards) form in the inversion. There are no true retrogrades in it.

This meant, of course, that exactly half the resources usually available in row composition were not to be had with this row. Indeed, rows of this sort are generally found only in books - as curiosities - and I could not voluntarily and consciously invent one in a million years.

The third act won an international prize in Rome in 1954. This took place in one of Michelangelo's lovely buildings on the capitol hill. There the handsome and immovable men of the Mayor's Honor Guard, all done up in brilliant red and gold, with tall black fur headpieces, and the Mayor himself, guests and colleagues. Igor Stravinsky handed me the prize.

The work is dedicated to my friend and mentor, Virgil Thomson.

Suggested recording:
Patrice Maginnes, soprano, Lynne McMurtry, mezzo-soprano, John Duykers, tenor, ensemble conducted by Nicole Paiement
New Albion NA 093

The River (1937)
Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)

Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri and educated at Harvard University. Starting in the early 1920s, he spent an extended time in Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and associated with artists such as Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Darius Milhard, Francis Poulenc and author Gertrude Stein, with whom he collaborated on two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All. On returning to the United States, he became chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. In addition to his compositions, he was the author of eight books, including an autobiography. He was composer-in-residence at the Cabrillo Music Festival in 1979.

The River is the second of two films made by documentary film producer-director Pare Lorentz for which Thomson provided the scores. The first, made in 1935 for the Farm Services Administration, was The Plow That Broke the Plains, documenting the history of the Great Plains and the abuse of the land that led to the creation of the Dust Bowl.

Lorentz's second documentary, The River, inspired by a stylized map of the Mississippi he had seen in the office of the Secretary of Agriculture, was intended to document the history of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Originally, he noted, "knowing that 51% of the population of the country lived in the Mississippi Valley, my proposal was simple - to take an engineer's boat, put a couple of pickup trucks on it, start in Minneapolis and go clear to the Gulf." As Lorentz's research progressed, however, this concept proved impractical and the focus of the film changed to demonstrate that the misuse of the river and its valley, particularly urbanization and over-cultivation of farm land, bore much of the responsibility for the economic misery of the Depression. Lorentz wanted to show that only through construction of dams on the tributaries, such as those built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, could the country control the Mississippi and put it to use, rather than allowing its flood waters to destroy crops and property.

Lorentz's script for The River grew out of a long article he was asked to write for McCall's Magazine in the spring of 1937 about the condition of the Mississippi River Valley. Concerned that the article was too long and technical, Lorentz spent a week writing a kind of prose-poem, similar to the free-verse poetry of Walt Whitman. He sent both to McCall's, letting it decide which to print, and the magazine chose the poem. After 150,000 readers requested copies, Lorenz decided to use it as the narrative text for The River. Author James Joyce called it "the most beautiful prose I have heard in ten years," and it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938.

Splitting his crew into two groups, Lorentz began filming in October 1936, eventually shooting in 14 states, primarily Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, finishing in January 1937. He had originally planned to use stock footage of floods, but when the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers flooded that spring, he reassembled his crew and shot additional material until the beginning of March. Lorenz spent six months editing The River and it opened in New Orleans on October 29, 1937 to glowing reviews. The government made the film available to theaters at no charge and Paramount Pictures picked it up for national distribution. Although a Farm Security Administration protest against the Motion Picture Academy led to its exclusion from Oscar competition, The River went on to become the first American film to win a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1938.

Normally in the film production process, the music is one of the last elements to be added, often only days before the film's release. For The River, Thomson entered this process at a much earlier stage, while it was still being edited. Lorentz explained, "Virgil made piano sketches of each section of the movie, each large sequence, and then the crew and I tried to edit it down to a preconceived time, at which point Virgil would get some ideas, genius ideas, and we would work back and forth so you didn't have a completed score put on top of a completed movie or vice versa." This gives The River a remarkably integrated sense of balance and harmony, with music and visual images functioning together to express a single idea.

Thomson's music is divided into four large sections, called "The Old South: Prologue," "Industrial Expansion in the Mississippi," "Soil Erosion and Floods" and "Finale." Based on extensive research into American folk music, Thomson produced a deceptively simple score that complements the film perfectly. His desire to incorporate American music led to the inclusion of several traditional hymns and songs, including "Resignation: My Shepherd Will Supply My Need," "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" and "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." The Cabrillo Festival performance marks the West Coast premiere of The River in this format, with live musical accompaniment and narration.

Suggested recording:
Philharmonia Virtuosi conducted by Richard Capp
ESS.A.Y.Recordings CD 1005

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