March 19th, 2003
Sasha Gerritson Brauer – Music Minister
David Laub – Bass-Baritone
Where known, exact dates of composition are given
1) Darkness and thunderclouds are round about him (Psalm 97)
2) Lord my shield, my refuge (Psalm 119) - March 7, 1894
3) Hear, oh hear my payer, Lord (Psalm 55) - March 22, 1894
4) Oh, my shepherd is the Lord (Psalm 23) - March 16, 1894
5) Songs of gladness will I sing Thee (Psalm 144 & 145)
6) Hear, oh Lord, my bitter cry (Psalm 61 & 63) - March 18, 1894
7) By the shore of the river in Babylon (Psalm 137) - March 8, 1894
8) Oh Lord, have mercy (Psalm 25) - March 25, 1894
9) My eyes will I to the hills lift up (Psalm 121)
10) Oh sing unto the Lord a joyful song (Psalm 96 & 98)
Dvořák’s Biblical Songs
An expression of God’s constant
love in an un-constant universe.
No musical work is composed in a vacuum, and Antonín Dvořák’s Biblical songs are no exception. He was far from his native Bohemia when he
composed the cycle in March of 1894, being engaged at the time as Director of
the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He was coaxed to America by the lure of the Olympian salary of
$15,000 a year – nearly three times what he had been making as a professor of
music in Prague. We would have not have
some of his finest music, including the “New World Symphony” without his three
year tenure in the U.S. - Dvořák
also visited the Bohemian colony in Spillville, Iowa during the summer of 1893
where he composed his “American” string quartet. Upon leaving Spillville, Dvořák visited Chicago’s greatest tourist attraction of
all time – the World’s Columbian Exposition, which drew nearly 30 million
visitors, and gave the world the Ferris Wheel, elevated electric trains,
Cracker Jacks, Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit,
and the hamburger. Dvořák gave a concert on ‘Czech Day’ at the
fair, conducting members of the newly formed Chicago Symphony in his Eighth
Symphony. During the weeks before the composition of his Biblical Songs, news
reached Dvořák of the deaths of
great musical rivals of his: Tchaikovsky and Gounod. But he started the composition when he received the simultaneous
news of the death of his friend, the famous conductor Hans von Buelow, and,
even more urgently, the news that Dvořák’s own father was lying on his deathbed thousands of miles away. Dvořák
finished composing the cycle in great
haste, in only three weeks, during the Lenten season of March 1894; his father
died two days after he completed the work, on the day after Easter. The songs are all taken from the Old
Testament Book of Psalms. In addition to their innate beauty, the songs helped Dvořák work through eternal issues we must all deal
with: separation, loss, and our place in a sometimes seemingly indifferent
universe.
The simplicity and beauty of the Old Testament Psalms were a source of
great comfort and inspiration to Dvořák. The cycle is a favorite of many
church soloists precisely because of its lack of pyrotechnics: mere humans can
sing it without losing its message, and without being overwhelmed by vocal
technique issues. The cycle explores
many themes of the Psalms, some joyous and many grief-laden, but all humble
expressions of individuals struggling to find or reaffirm their relationship to
God. His setting of the second song (based on Psalm 119) which praises holding
fast to God’s laws and commandments may perhaps seem “obsolete” to some
Christian ears. Which commandments
should be held fast to? Which constants
are we to cling to? Are we talking of
the new covenant of the New Testament, or of the hundreds of laws of the Old
Testament? Is Dvořák, at least
for the moment, eschewing Christianity in favor of Orthodox Judaism? That conjecture is very doubtful; Dvořák was a quite devout Christian - he took Brahms to
task for his “A German Requiem” as being all over the map in its expression of
faith in Christianity, stopping just short of, heaven forbid, calling Brahms a
Unitarian. But sometimes no one view of
God is sufficient to express His greatness or His wholeness.
Many of the songs in the cycle explore the relationship of man to his infinite God. The Psalms allegorical descriptions of our physical universe as metaphors of God’s power – “Mountains melting as wax”, are a most striking example. Our conception of the universe we inhabit has historically been tied to how we believe in God. But our map of the universe keeps changing as older maps are shown to be obsolete. If we are central to God’s love, how can we not be physically central in the universe - to believe otherwise was a heresy of the 16th century for which Galileo paid a heavy price. Misperceiving God’s design of our universe is not limited to clerics - perceiving the “true” nature of cosmology has expanded into the realm of philosophy and theoretical physics, and physicists certainly do not have a perfect record in divining its plan. The greatest mind of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, after showing mathematically that the universe is expanding in his general theory of relativity then promptly “recanted” on his own - he changed his own theory to make the universe “constant” as this fit better with his Judeo/Christian/Western concept of God’s constancy. He was not a happy camper when American astronomer Edwin Hubble looking up at the cosmos from the observatory at Mount Wilson, California showed empirically that a central constant in the universe is that it indeed is constantly expanding. Even more alarming to the beautiful prejudice of Einstein was the possibility that the universe is a random statistical process or worse, has been (re)created/reborn in an infinite number of permutations, and will continue to do so for all eternity as every Big Bang is followed by a Big Crunch. Einstein’s lament was “God does not play dice with the universe”, but if we can see God’s constant love as independent of whatever permutation of the physical universe we currently live in (perchance MS Universe 3.14159 with service pack 7), then perhaps we have no conflict with God’s plan for us after all, something I feel Dvořák’s music and message make abundantly clear without having to resort to Differential Geometry or rabbinical Midrash and/or biblical exegesis.
Singing in translation is a curse - inevitably some of the composer’s
intent gets lost. Because I don’t
speak Czech, we will have to do with English, but whose English? I have abandoned the traditional Schirmer
edition with its more beautiful English, which mirrors translations of the
Bible (particularly the 23rd Psalm) we all know and love, for a
choppier translation which is far more accurately musically (in terms of rhythm
and dynamics) in a new critical edition based on the original score which
“forces” the English to fit the syllable patterns of the original Czech. Even the Schirmer edition is laced with its
share of bad and/or misguided translation - the defensive posture of “pillar of
strength against my enemies” becomes something quite different when translated
as “treading down my enemies”, so allow me to sing this cycle as musically
close to what Dvořák intended
as possible, and, if we wince at some of the words and word order, we can all
go to our favorite version of Bible afterward to remember the “exact” words
that we love. Also, some critics have
taken some of the songs in this cycle to task for being fragmentary, seemingly
ending in the middle of the thought.
The edition I am working with here confirms that some of the manuscript
pages for some of the songs were indeed lost, so we have not a flaw in Dvořák’s musical concept, but the very banal flaw of
bad filing. If Dvořák had a computer back in 1894, then either the
whole cycle would have been lost, or (more likely) everything would have been
just fine. And, perhaps Dvořák
would have been an early adapter of the Dvorak (versus QWERTY) keyboard, but
that is idle speculation. Computers not
withstanding, never discount the value of a paper backup.
I dedicate this performance to my maternal great-grandfather, who like Dvořák, was a stranger in the strange land of America,
having emigrated from Russia, and, also like Dvořák, was quite devout, and would walk to Schul every
day from his Humbold Park apartment well into his 80th year to say
his prayers, no doubt reciting many of the very Psalms we visit today in Dvořák wonderful music.
Bass-Baritone David Laub, somewhat like his namesake in the movie “A.I.”, is still waiting for the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real singer. He woke up one day and realized that writing distributed computer database applications did not realize him, so he started singing, and found a truer purpose. He still earns most of his daily bread twiddling computer bits, but does so out of necessity. He has sung with numerous local opera companies including l’opera piccola, Light Opera Works, and DuPage Opera Theater, but still finds his greatest joy singing at PRCC as the Chancel Choir bass section leader. He is grateful that his voice teacher, his family, and love itself is patient, and no longer dreads the ongoing leaps of faith that transfigure reality, help separate us from the void of inertia, and join God with us.