Bless the Lord - Mikhail Ipolitoff-Ivanoff
Variaitions on a Theme of Haydn - Johannes Brahms
Hymns: #697 Song 67, #304 Loand of Rest, #674 Detroit
The music this week is mostly Brahms. It is broad and
expansive, highly chromatic and flexible.
The gradual anthem is the opening movement of Brahms’s (1833-1897) German Requiem Op. 45. The Brahms Requiem is a piece that was at the time groundbreaking, and looking at the literature which has been written since, trend-setting. This work draws on the text of the Lutheran Bible rather than the Latin Mass for the Dead and is written to comfort the living rather than to pray for those who have died. Indeed, this piece has paved the way for Requiems by composers like Britten, Hindemith, Rutter, Chilcott, and Leavitt that have combined the Latin texts with other Biblical texts or poetry. The German Requiem was premiered at Bremen Cathedral on Good Friday 1868 and was an enormous success which marked a turning point in Brahms’s career. Brahms added the fifth movement in memory of his mother and the piece received its first complete performance in 1869. As with his first symphony, Brahms was very deliberate about the composition of the Requiem. The piece makes use of thematic material that he composed as early as 1854. The piece opens slowly but deliberately with a steady throbbing pulse. The organ and choir go back and forth between the choir’s sustained chords and the organs lyrical line the choir tells us that “they that mourn will be comforted.” The next section starts in a new key and leads us to a more animated theme that bounces through the voice parts and the accompaniment. Brahms moves us back to the original key and the accompaniment from the beginning and takes us again through the same modulation followed by a coda that leads to an almost celestial conclusion with accompaniment meant to imitate the harps of the orchestral version.
The communion anthem is by Russian composer and conductor Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935). He started his career as a choir boy and then began his formal education at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He studied composition with the renowned composer Risky-Korsakov and then took a position in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1905 he was appointed director of the Moscow Conservatory, a position he held until 1924 when he returned to Tbilisi to organize a music conservatory there. Bless the Lord is taken from Op. 37 Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom which is the most celebrated liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. This simple piece takes its text from Psalm 103 and very simply outlines the attributes of God and why we should praise Him.
The prelude and postlude are taken from an organ transcription of a piece by Brahms that is an arrangement of a theme by Haydn. The Brahms Variations on a Theme of Haydn take the “St. Anthony Chorale” from Haydn’s Divertimento in Bb, H2/46. Some scholars believe that this piece may have actually been written by Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831). Regardless of its origin, Brahms believed them to be by Haydn and named his piece accordingly. This transcription uses the theme, third variation, fourth variation, and seventh variation. These are the lighter more sprightly variations as opposed to some of the fast and dark ones of the set. I first learned these pieces through the version for two pianos which was probably composed before the orchestral version. We studied them in my graduate theory class. The challenge of playing both this and the Requiem movement is trying to translate Brahms’s lush orchestrations to the organ. This organ does not easily lend itself to this music so some creative registration and open minded listening may be required to hear these pieces in the way that they are presented.
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