Scoreside Chat number 54 began a series of blogs a couple of months ago celebrating the upcoming centennial of Bernard Herrmann’s birth and which now concludes with this, the seventh installment. The series focused on Herrmann’s concert works rather than his film or radio music since that is an area of Herrmann’s music unfamiliar to many. A fresh topic seemed in order for the celebration, especially considering the huge amount of material devoted to his film music over the years.
I tried to approach each part by prefacing a work with excerpts about it culled from A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann by Steven C. Smith (indicated by italicized dark blue text below). Some works however did not have any appreciable information about them in the book so I relied on recording liner notes and my own personal descriptions. This entry in the series is part 7 of 7 and presents Souvenirs de Voyage, a chamber piece and the last of Herrmann’s concert works.
Souvenirs de Voyage (1967)
Herrmann's Souvenirs de voyage, written in January 1967 for string quartet and solo clarinet, reflects this rise in the composer's spirits. Like the string quartet it is nostalgic and often melancholy, but its romanticism and tonal colors are immeasurably warmer-a change attributable to Herrmann's two key relationships of the period: his professional one with Truffaut and especially his personal one with Norma [Herrmann's soon to be third wife].
The quintet's more specific inspirations come from three distinct artistic sources. The first movement owes its origin to A. E. Housman's poem "On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble" (from the Shropshire Lad collection, the source of musical settings by Herrmann twenty-three years earlier). Unlike Vaughan Williams's song adaptation of the poem in his cycle On Wenlock Edge, Herrmann's use of the verse is more suggestive than literal, evoking, in Palmer's phrase, "the force which plays havoc with the minds of men, now as in the days when Wenlock Edge was part of a Roman encampment. Herrmann alternates a tumultuous setting, filled with gusty clarinet arpeggios and fluttering string tremolos, with a lovely valse triste for violin; the coda suggests Housman's last stanza
The gale, it plies, the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone;
To-day the Roman and his troubles
Are ashes under Uricon.
The second-movement Berceuse also carries Vaughan Williams allusions, shifting to Ireland's Aran Islands, site of John Millington Synge's novel Riders to the Sea, which had inspired an opera by the English composer. In the Berceuse one can envision a cloud-drenched, autumnal sunset off the Irish west coast, Herrmann's swaying, dreamlike rhythm for strings and sighing clarinet appogiaturas rising like wave crests against their foundation.
These dark colorations of "remembered loss" make way for a third movement that is contrastively lush and romantic-not surprisingly, given that Turner's dazzling Venetian watercolors served as the movement's inspiration. (This is Herrmann's only "official" Turner setting, though the artist's influence can be heard throughout Herrmann's music, especially Moby Dick.) A love theme is sung by violins, its gentle ripples heard in viola and clarinet arpeggio responses; "as the lagoons shimmer in the evening sunlight, echoes of a trumpet summons from a distant barracks are born in the wind"-a remote clarinet shanty, one of Herrmann's loveliest and most simple depictions of nature's enticement. A lively tarantella for strings suggests far-off revelry, but Herrmann's lovers ignore it; their theme reappears in blissful solitude, "left to die peacefully into the still of the night."
About the recording: Performers - Lawrence Wheeler, viola; Jeffrey Lerner, clarinet; Kenneth Goldsmith, violin; Albert Muenzer, violin; Terry King, cello – Albany Records. Herrmann’s string quartet Echoes (1965) is also on this recording, but since I don’t currently own the recording and Echoes is not available on YouTube, I was unable to include it in the series. A note of interest about the recording, it was a Grammy semi-finalist. Also, there are other recordings of both of these works out there as well.
A personal note about the recording: Some of the members of this ensemble, in addition to being principle players in the Houston Symphony, Opera and Ballet orchestras, were also faculty members at The University of Houston School of Music back when I studied music there. Jeffrey Lerner, the sometimes imperious clarinet/saxophone instructor, “politely” jumped all over me once for making too much noise in the hallway while I was waiting fo my lesson next door to his studio. To be fair though, the hallway was a loud echo chamber and I should have known better. The late Albert Muenzer taught the beginning string class I was in which music education majors took in order to learn the basics of string playing. He was a very easy going man who took this lowest level of class in good natured stride. Seeing their names listed on this recording pleased me in knowing that these gentlemen of the classical concert world chose to play Herrmann!
This ends the Herrmann concert series of blogs. From the number of views some of the pieces got on YouTube it's safe to say that there isn’t a whole lot of interest in Herrmann’s concert music, but the same can be said of other film composers as well based on some of the discussions on the boards. In any event, for those who did explore some of the works I hope they discovered something new or perhaps developed a new or different appreciation of Herrmann as an artist. Next time out, a look at some of Herrmann’s radio work.
Previous entries in the Herrmann Centennial Concert Work Series: