Branching Out / Vol. 14

What to listen to next, based on our recent experiences with the melancholy music of Beethoven and Claude Vivier.

Joseph Farquharson (Scottish, 1846–1935). The Shortening Winter’s Day Is Near a Close, 1903. Oil on canvas. National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery / Art UK

Welcome to the latest edition of Branching Out, where works recently featured in Shades of Blue become your launching point for discovering more melancholy music that cultivates calm, connection, and healing. (If you’re a new subscriber — Welcome! 👋🏼 — head over here to explore previous installments.)

To grow our tree of classical music knowledge this month, we’ll explore works inspired by our experiences with Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang, his personal hymn of gratitude for surviving a near-fatal illness, and the mysteries of love, hope, and belonging embedded in Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child.

So let’s dig in and branch out …

If you were moved by the story of Beethoven’s recovery from illness and the profound calm he channeled in his song of thanksgiving, then listen to ...

Béla Bartók / Andante religioso, from Piano Concerto No. 3

In 1940, as fascism flooded the streets of Hungary, composer Béla Bartók and his wife Ditta fled their country for the safe harbor of New York City. Overwhelmed by Gotham’s strident sounds and the ocean that now separated him from loved ones back home, Bartók became increasingly depressed. He composed nothing during his first years in the U.S., writing to his son Peter:

“I have been so upset by world events that my mind has been almost completely paralyzed.”

But it wasn’t just Bartók’s mind that was suffering — his body was also growing increasingly weak. In late 1943, a doctor diagnosed the composer’s condition as tuberculosis and recommended he spend the winter taking in the therapeutic air of Asheville, North Carolina, America’s equivalent to Switzerland’s Magic Mountain. Bartók made the journey south by train and settled into his top-floor room at the Albemarle Inn, where he reveled in the majestic sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a reminder of his beloved Carpathians back home.

Bartók’s condition improved during his stay. He gained weight, his chronic fevers dissipated, and he even began composing again, working on a sonata for solo violin and sketching his third concerto for piano and orchestra, which he intended as a birthday present for Ditta, an accomplished pianist. And as winter turned to spring, a new rush of inspiration washed over him, thanks to the music he heard wafting through the misty mountain air:

“Spring has now indisputably arrived. Dogwood is in bloom, like acacias flowering at home. The birds have become entirely intoxicated and are putting on concerts the likes of which I’ve never heard.”

So moved by the songs of the eastern towhees, hermit thrushes, and wood thrushes that serenaded him each morning, Bartók incorporated their music into the slow movement of his new concerto. After a meditative, prayer-like opening passage from muted strings and piano, in which we can imagine the morning fog rising above the Blue Ridge peaks, we hear a mysterious rustling in the orchestra. One by one, a series of chirps and trills and flutterings enter the scene, one of those “concerts of birds” that had lifted his spirits.

Overtaking the string chorale and inspiring the piano to mimic their music, the birds grow increasingly ecstatic, mirroring Bartók’s own listening experience in Asheville:

“In the early dawn, there came from every single branch a faint piping sound of awakening birds, slowly swelling into such full volume as every green leaf became part of a chorus more invigorating and lively than I could ever have imagined before.

“And this fluid sound did not penetrate the ears alone, but seeped into the body with the strength of a powerful healing potion.”

With his spirits restored and music freely flowing from his pen, Bartók returned to New York, only to receive devastating news: The tuberculosis his doctor had diagnosed was, in fact, leukemia. But even as his condition worsened, Bartók continued working on his final composition — sometimes referred to as his “Asheville Concerto” — completing all but the final 17 measures before his death in September 1945.

Zoltán Kocsis, piano
Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer, conductor

If you were left breathless by Claude Vivier’s “games of color” and his dazzling expression of love both earthly and cosmic, be sure to spend some time with ...

Olivier Messiaen / La mort du nombre (The Death of the Number)

The majority of Olivier Messiaen’s music is rooted in the French composer’s deep devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. But that’s not to say he composed sacred music for masses and feast days. Like the whirling dervishes of Sufism and the Mekubbal exploring the mysteries of the Kabbalah, Messiaen’s focus was on the mysticism and mystery of his religion — “the marvelous aspects of the faith,” as he described them.

Believing that spirituality is woven into every facet of our lives, Messiaen infused his music with a wonder for nature (he was also a devoted ornithologist) and a fervent belief in the power of joy, beauty, and the supernatural.

“I am convinced that joy exists,” he wrote, “convinced that the invisible exists more than the visible, and that joy is beyond sorrow, and beauty is beyond horror.”

Messiaen’s desire to explore the totality of the human experience — both yin and yang — is evident even in early works like La mort du nombre, which he composed in 1930 at age 22, shortly after graduating from the Paris Conservatoire. A dramatic parable for soprano, tenor, violin, and piano, La mort du nombre follows a conversation between two souls: one, sung by the tenor, who laments his earthly suffering and the distance he feels from God’s love; and the other, sung by the soprano, whose poetic descriptions of the eternal bliss that awaits us all provides comfort and solace to the suffering soul.

“I want to draw near,” the tenor sings as storms of rage move through the piano:

“What invisible force is stopping me?
O long, O sad waiting!
O suffering, circle of fire!
Die, time and space!”

A suspended tranquility emerges with each entrance of the soprano, as she sings of human suffering as only a fleeting experience on our journey toward heavenly peace. Accompanied by glistening harmonies in the piano, evoking the angelic harps of heaven, she brings the scene to a close with her ecstatic visions:

“Wait! Hope!
Lighter than feathered birds,
Lighter than the void,
Lighter than that which does not exist,
We shall float above a dream.

Hear the song of our unique soul!
Clear smile, pure gaze, trembling rapture,
It rises up higher than this soul
And soars towards a new brightness,
In an eternal spring!”

Barbara Hannigan, soprano
Charles Sy, tenor
Vilde Frang, violin
Bertrand Chamayou, piano
(Follow along with the French text and English translation.)

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