Autumnal Classics - Hugo Weisgall's Four Songs, op. 1

You might be wondering why I'm finishing up my Autumnal Classics series well into December, a month so strongly associated with Winter that people eagerly put up fake snow for Christmas decoration well before it gets cold enough for snow to appear.  Aside from the practical reason of getting waylaid by professional engagements there's a more poetically satisfying reason for saving the last for so late.  Seasons are meaningless if they don't change, and virtually all the poetry of Autumn is drawn from what it will eventually become, the long night of Winter.  Autumn, more than any other season, signifies the inevitability of death, and now that Winter Proper is fast approaching it's time we approach its looming specter with as much dignity as can be mustered, which is where Adelaide Crapsey comes in.  I mentioned this seminal American poet in my article on Henry Leland Clarke's Puget Sound Cinquain, a voice and violin duet based on a poem using the cinquain form developed by Crapsey.  Crapsey's cinquains are some of my favorite poems of all time, marvels of untroubled, distilled beauty, and in the process of finding songs using them I've discovered a fascinating series of song sets.  A very diverse group of American composers set her poems, including George Antheil, Ben Weber and Harrison Kerr, many of whom were first spreading their compositional wings and saw these poetic baubles as perfect objects upon which to etch their first opuses.  A literal example of this is the Four Songs, op. 1 by Hugo Weisgall (1912-1997), one of the most acclaimed and prolific of American opera composers.  Published in 1940 and almost totally forgotten today, the Songs are some of the most sensitive and haunting songs of the American art song repertoire, as well as personal favorites of mine, and, luckily for my purposes, the first and last songs are both leaf-like.

All of the poems are about the chilling finality of death, and the first reflects a love long gone, and Weisgall intimates this wonderfully through gently insistent pulsations and an elliptical melody, pleading directly from the heart.  The harmonic language is nearly impressionistic (very far off from his mature voice), though with these being his first "official" pieces the song features some great surprises, such as that E-flat/B-flat perfect fifth six measures from the end.  He puts a real pressure on the pianist to play as palely as possible while still maintaining a round tone quality, and luckily the pianist on the only recording of these songs found a good enough piano for the job.

The internal songs aren't short enough to technically feature on this blog, but seeing Christmas is coming up I'd like to generous, and these songs certainly deserve bending the rules in order to be heard:

And now to the final song:

"Dirge" is the most adventurous of the four in terms of shaping melodies, staggering flow and harmonic outbursts.  The arching major 9th in the right hand of the first measure is a faint recollection of birdsong, quite apt for a song about never hearing birds again.  The last three measures close out the set with ambiguity and dull pain, each hand of the piano straggling through inverse motion and clamoring sonorities and that C infecting an otherwise normal E-flat minor triad.  It takes a great deal of restraint to write songs like this, making their maturity and wan sincerity all the more remarkable for a young artist.  Equally remarkable is the recordings here by singer Caroline Heafner and pianist Dixie Ross Neill, taking some achingly slow tempi with enormous grace.  Death is rarely welcome but we can still leave room in our lives for depictions of death as gorgeous as these.

~PNK