Branching Out / Vol. 2
What to listen to next, based on our experiences with the melancholy music of Mozart and Britten.
Welcome to the second edition of Branching Out — a new series where I use works recently featured on Shades of Blue as your launching point for discovering even more melancholy classical music that cultivates calm, connection, and healing. If you missed the first installment last month, head over here to get to know works by Claude Debussy, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Samuel Barber.
To grow our tree of classical music knowledge this month, we'll explore music based on our recent deep dives into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Benjamin Britten. So let's dig in and branch out …
If you loved the intimate world Mozart conjures in his Fantasy in D Minor, here are two pieces to queue up for your next candlelit listening session ...
Baldassare Galuppi / Keyboard Sonata in C Minor
Pianist Vikingur Ólafsson's album Mozart & Contemporaries did more than provide me with my new favorite recording of Mozart's unfinished fantasy — it also introduced me to the music of Baldassare Galuppi. An 18th-century Italian composer who spent years as head of music at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, Galuppi's body of work ranges from sacred music to comic opera and more than 100 keyboard sonatas, most of which languished in obscurity for more than 200 years.
The opening movement of Galuppi's Sonata in C Minor captivated me from the first listen. The way waterfalls of broken chords cascade down the keyboard before blossoming into hushed hymns of longing. The serpentine harmonies that slowly rise like heaving breaths of passion until they evaporate into thin air. I fell in love immediately with the music's mystery and ambiguity — and had I not seen the composer's name before listening, I would have easily thought this a piece written in a completely different century.
Turns out the English poet Robert Browning, who lived his final years in Venice, was a big fan of Galuppi's music. So much so that he penned a poem, "A Toccata of Galuppi's," that playfully captures the experience of hearing the composer's music at a midnight masquerade ball. In the poem's central stanzas, each melodic interval Galuppi introduces triggers a new wave of emotion in its listeners:
VII What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh, Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—"Must we die?" Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! We can but try!" VIII "Were you happy?"—"Yes."—"And are you still as happy?"—"Yes. And you?" —"Then, more kisses!"—"Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?" Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to! IX So, an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say! "Brave Galuppi! That was music! Good alike at grave and gay! "I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play!"
Ludwig van Beethoven / "Moonlight" Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp Minor)
You've likely heard this music countless times, even if you didn't know the title or even that Beethoven wrote it. But there's a reason for its ubiquity in pop culture: With its persistent, undulating rhythms and a mood of achingly beautiful longing, listening to the "Moonlight" Sonata's opening movement is a viscerally enchanting musical experience.
Beethoven composed the sonata during a period of intense physical and emotional stress. Not only was he suffering in silence and shame with an acute case of tinnitus — a recurring ringing in his ears that evolved into total deafness — he was also nursing a broken heart. He had fallen in love with one of his aristocratic pupils, Countess Julie Guicciardi, but given that Beethoven was a freelancer with no position or social standing, there was no chance Julie's father would let her marry the 31-year-old composer. Bereft, Beethoven dedicated his new sonata — subtitled Sonata quasi una fantasia (Sonata in the style of a fantasy) — to Julie in 1801, and two years later the countess married another man.
Where did the title "Moonlight" come from, if not from Beethoven's pen? We have the German music critic Ludwig Rellstab to thank. In his 1824 short story "Theodor," Rellstab described the shadowy world of the sonata's first movement with cinematic clarity:
The lake reposes in shimmering moonlight, muffled waves strike the dark shore; gloomy wooded mountains rise and close off the holy place from the world; ghostly swans glide with whispering rustles on the tide, and an Aeolian harp sends down mysterious tones of lovelorn yearning from the ruins.
If you were moved by the story of Benjamin Britten and his muse, Peter Pears, and the decades of artistic inspiration and collaboration they shared, then you'll want to listen to …
Francis Poulenc / "Sanglots" (Sobs), from Banalités
The French composer Francis Poulenc composed reams of songs — the majority of them written for one singular voice, that of baritone Pierre Bernac. Although it's unclear whether the two shared an intimate relationship (Poulenc was openly gay — and good friends with Britten and Pears — while Bernac remained a confirmed bachelor all his life), the two performed together for more than 25 years.
Even today it's impossible to mention Bernac's name and not immediately bring Poulenc's music into the conversation. Poulenc himself said:
"No one will ever sing [my songs] better than Bernac, who knows the inner secrets of my music. It was also through accompanying him in Schubert, Schumann, Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel that I learnt my trade as a melodist."
Among the many mélodies Poulenc wrote for Bernac was a collection of five songs titled Banalités, based on poems of Guillaume Apollinaire. Composed in 1940 in Nazi-occupied Paris, the final song of the set, "Sanglots" (Sobs), speaks to the same desire for a return to innocence in a world wracked by tragedy that we experienced in Britten's "Before Life and After."
But whereas the Thomas Hardy text Britten set is defiant in its desire to return to days of Edenic innocence, Apollinaire's poem is more resigned to the eternity of suffering we're predestined to endure. As the opening stanza shows, we can't help but collectively feel every laceration of the heart humankind has endured:
Our love is governed by the calm stars Now we know that in us many men have their being Who came from afar and are one beneath our brows It is the song of the dreamers Who tore out their hearts And carried them in their right hands Remember dear pride all these memories
And if the final moments of Britten's song — the majestic tolling of bells in the piano and Pears's repeated bellows of "How long? How long?" — still ring in your ears, be sure to check out:
Kurt Weill / Wie lange noch? (How much longer?)
Like Poulenc's "Sanglots," Kurt Weill's tempestuous song "Wie lange noch?" arose from the dense fog of World War II. In 1944, after Weill and his wife and muse, the singer Lotte Lenya, had found safe harbor in the United States after fleeing war-torn Europe, he received a commission from the Office of War Information in Washington, DC. The office was compiling a collection of songs to be recorded and shipped off to Germany to galvanize soldiers stationed at the front lines, and they were eager to include a number from Weill.
For his contribution to the American war effort, Weill set a poem by Walter Mehring saturated in emotional conflict. Exploring feelings of abandonment and regret, Mehring's text takes us inside the mind of a jilted lover — someone promised a future of blue skies and security, who cared for and nurtured their paramour like they would a beloved parent. But all they received in the end was torment and broken vows that compel them to lash out in the song's refrain:
Look at me, will you! When will the day come When I can say to you: It's over! When that day comes, oh how I will tremble. How much longer? How much longer? How long?
Given the wartime context in which Weill composed the song, it's impossible not to hear the song as an indictment of the Third Reich, with Hitler serving as the lover/tormentor who's eroded all hope for a peaceful tomorrow. It's time for Germany to break up with him — but how long will that take?
(Weill and Lenya's recording is miraculously available on YouTube and well worth a listen. But my favorite recording has to be that of Teresa Stratas, who moves from quiet resignation to heaven-storming rage and back in heart-breaking fashion.)
What was your experience listening to these works? Let me know in the comments! And if you enjoyed your time here at Shades of Blue, how about tapping that little heart below? 👇🏼
Loved this post. I used to noodle around on a hand-me-down, out-of-tune piano as a kid and I played the Moonlight Sonata by ear. To be honest it didn't sound much like the original but it was my own interpretation. Just goes to show the power of the piece. It certainly captured my imagination!
I enjoyed this so much it was as much as I could do to get to the end of it before restacking. Thanks Michael!
Wow really enjoyed Wie Lange Noch! Powerful singing. So great to hear the backstory and read over some of the lyrics too! Thanks for including that in your writing!!