The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt! In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall. It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters. Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries. If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.
Day 3 – BONUS POST! – Hunters’ Chorus by Carl Maria von Weber & Royal Hunt and Storm by Hector Berlioz
A lot can change in 30 years. That’s about as long as I’ve been alive. I was born right around the twilight of the disco era and now…what are all the kids listening to these days? Pug? Bulldog? Oh, right. Pitbull. Well, maybe sometimes not enough changes. But sometimes it really does. In studying music history I am often astounded at how close together the major figures and style periods actually are. We tend to think of the different style periods as these isolated, self-contained blocks of time floating out there in space, but it’s really all continuous. And during certain of the style periods there is simply a phenomenal amount of stylistic development over a short period of time. Do you realize that Beethoven’s 9th symphony premiered only about 75 years before the turn of the 20th century? I don’t always realize these things. We talk about people like Beethoven as if they’re these mythical figures who were never earthbound, never existed in time and space, but it wasn’t actually that long ago, and they really were just humans like us, grappling with the same daily stuff that we do. And a lot of the really prominent figures knew each other, interacted, and shared mutual admiration (or disgust).
The Romantic era is a great example – lots of development in just a little bit of time. The era tends to be book ended in music history texts by middle Beethoven at its beginning and the lush writing of Richard Strauss and Mahler at its end. The time between is barely a century and boy do things look different from one side to the other. We’re going to look right in the middle of that frame and make an interesting comparison between excerpts from two romantic operas that deal with hunting in different ways to observe a fascinating course of development. On the surface they seem to share a handful of things in common: both from the Romantic era, both from operas, both symphonic in their orchestration, both involving choral singing (kind of), both incorporating the theme of hunting, and both acting in a rather diversionary role within their respective opera plots. But the similarities end there and the spirits that animate them could hardly be more different.
Many musicians point to Carl Maria von Weber as European music’s first truly Romantic figure. A bold and daring artist who strove to do everything, and do it well, he was a Romantic to the core, persevering over the course of his life to move German art and music forward whether they were ready or not. It’s his operas that many point to as a summation of his aesthetics, and Der Freischutz is the most famous of his 10 or so, considered by many to be the first Romantic opera. In works like this one, completed around 1820, you can observe the German romantic spirit taking root, but still somewhat caught between worlds. Der Freischutz contains music that is actually quite Classical in its tonal grammar, found side by side with episodes of much more colorful harmony and orchestration. Just listen to the overture and you can hear this fascinating duality as material from all across the spectrum between those poles fills an enchanting 10 minutes.
And it really works in Weber; he is somehow able to take the bold, but still essentially Classical, melodic style of middle Beethoven and juxtapose it with the murkier harmonies and orchestral colors of the impending Romantic sensibility that would come into its own a couple decades hence. But even with these new harmonic and orchestral colors, the melodic grammar never really breaks out of of the Classical mold’s rhythmic squareness and diatonic pitch space. Beethoven was able to imbue this Classical mold with incredible urgency and epic gestures; we hear a continuation of that in Weber’s Freischutz. The Hunter’s Chorus from the third act could be a German folk song (and many have speculated that it and other melodies in the opera are based on them) supplemented with grand orchestral gestures a la Beethoven which seem to elevate this merry band of hunters, singing lustily about their love of the chase, into the realm of the heroic:
Der Freischutz was immediately popular. It was also influential. Richard Wagner would probably have pointed squarely to it as one of his early influences. And it was staged in Paris with a few characteristically French alterations by another great Romantic figure also deeply taken with the opera, Hector Berlioz. He too recognized that the beginnings of the artistic movement in which he found himself working were vested heavily in this opera and those like it. Berlioz’s staging was in 1841, a full two decades after the work’s premiere and about fifteen after Weber’s death. Berlioz was an advanced teenager at the time of Freischutz’s premiere and poised to become a key transitional figure squarely in the middle of European Romantic music.
Hector Berlioz’s unprecedented configuration of gifts, skills and cultural inheritance allowed him to wrestle with music and affect its development in an unusually fresh and striking way. A native Frenchman who devoured all the outstanding models of German music imported into his land, he was able to digest the Saxon grandeur and express it in characteristically Gallic ways with softer edges and pastel shadings, effectively bridging the space between Rameau and Debussy, at least to my ear. His fascination with literature infused his art to the core, constantly motivating him to strive for the noblest and also most intangible artistic ideals. I think it is this idealistic devotion to the literary that fueled his search for a new manner of orchestrating (and perhaps it was his opium use that fired his imagination to conceive of such a vision). He continued to develop the tradition of the tragedie lyrique transmitted to him by his dramatic heroes, Gluck and Mozart. He could probably play a little piano and flute, but certainly not enough to perform on either, and as such he was one of the first European musical artists to declare only the art of orchestration and the conductor’s baton as his primary instruments of expression.
Put all of these influences and predilections in a blender, bake at 350 (although you might measure that in Celsius) for about 50 years and you probably end up with something quite a bit like Les Troyens, “The Trojans”, the 5-act French grand opera that many consider to be Berlioz’s magnum opus. In this full-flowering of all of Berlioz’ passions and sensibilities we experience a very French telling of Virgil’s epic, a Romantic-scale tragedie lyrique orchestrated as only Berlioz could. He was obviously inspired by Weber’s Freischutz and so without that Les Troyens would not have been possible. But listen to even a few seconds and we are clearly in a different world with a much different outlook, with melodic style and orchestral colors to match.
Go ahead and listen to the Hunter’s Chorus from Weber again. You can sense the earthy folksiness and an air of merriment even if the orchestra blows it up to a heroic scale. And Der Freischutz isn’t all like this (there are episodes of demonic darkness that will make your hair stand up), but in Weber’s world we’re never that far from laughing your cares away with the family in the village, no matter what kind of unsettling supernatural incidents are experienced on the way. Not so in Les Troyens. Berlioz takes the tragic heroes of the Aeneid at their word and casts his entire setting in a kind of foreboding, almost existential, dread (granted, that tone does tend to fit the subject matter – stores of Dido and Aeneas never end well!). Listen to this hunting scene, as the heroes Dido and Aeneas are separated from the rest of the royal party and take shelter in a cave as a violent storm rages about them. From just the transparent opening string lines you can feel how different Berlioz’s sensibility is from Weber’s, just a little more than 30 years later (in other words, Berlioz is as long after Weber as we are after the end of disco!):
This “Royal Hunt and Storm” is like am orchestral poem set at the beginning of Les Troyens’ fourth act (out of five). Berlioz was eager to showcase his orchestration, almost like its own character in the drama, and this would influence the similar practice of Richard Wagner, and those he in turn influenced.
Berlioz’s hunting scene and ensuing storm is turbulent, transparent, nuanced, and evanescent in a way that Weber is not. More a mass of colors in the air than a tune, including that eerie contribution from the choir, it does not quite reach the level of musical impressionism, as Debussy would a few decades later, but are you able to sing any melodies or motives from that work? Not as easily as the Weber I’ll bet.
Comparing the hunting scenes from Der Freischutz and Les Troyens encapsulates in a fascinating way just how quickly musical thought and style were moving and changing in Romantic Europe. And so many of the great figures knew each other, talked with each other, performed each other’s music. It really seems to be a tightly-knit club of artists drawing inspiration and ideas from one another. As different as they are, the latter would simply not be what it is without the former.
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