Tonight I saw a miracle, and it left me in tears.

When I was sixteen I started having dizzy spells and fainting. My ears rang and rang. I already wore hearing aids, but something was wrong. Seventeen; I’ve been in an arts magnet program for music for three years and wanted to be a performer badly. But then I was diagnosed with a degenerative hearing loss on top of being born hearing impaired. I was told I would likely be deaf by the time I’m forty. I was devastated, but after reading Beethoven’s letter known as the Heiligenstadt Testament I decided to try my best to keep going.

Well, it was my thirty-ninth birthday this week, much of which I’ve been lucky to spend in my first concert series back with Master Chorale of Tampa Bay since the pandemic started. While I am legally deaf I am lucky: I have hearing aids that greatly help me continue to communicate, to hear and sing. What were we singing? I’m glad you asked: A concert all about Beethoven.

First, we performed a peice about Beethoven’s famous aforementioned letter to his brothers where he laments his hearing loss, set to an entirely perceptive and emotional work “A Silence Haunts Me” by Jake Runestad. He talks about the church bells he can’t hear, and I remember the first time I sat on the beach and realized I couldn’t hear the waves anymore. The desperate clamoring on the keys isn’t the accompianist Dr. Rodney Shores having a bad I-forgot-how-to-piano day but sounds rather similar to when I want to sight-read on my keyboard before I’ve had my coffee and put my hearing aids in. The pleading, the trembling and asking of why, not dissimilar to the one I certainly asked as well. And I’m not anywhere cloooooooose to the scope of what Beethoven’s abilities were and if I was devastated, I cannot even imagine how absolutely crushed he must’ve been.

Hearing loss is an invisible disability in that we are often ridiculed or misunderstood. Especially in Beethoven’s time. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it is easy. So to see people leap up to their feet tonight as soon as Beethoven’s Ninth ended, applauding and cheering with such enthusiasm for a piece written by someone who was deaf… I started crying, and I’m crying as I write this. Because even if you don’t know much about Beethoven, everyone knows he couldn’t hear but still wrote such powerful and passionate (not for you, Napoleon) music. It’s just really wonderful to see hundreds of people appreciate that. Even if it was just for a moment before they go back to the parking garage to be stuck for twenty minutes and then return to their homes and lives - this guy wrote this piece two hundred years ago that people are still talking about.

I wish I could tell them what he might’ve heard, if he was there. If he heard anything at all at the conclusion of this premiere back in his time, it would sound something like a distant rumble of hums of percussion above water and he was in it. Maybe just the vibrations from the applause with no actual pitch to it, which would explain why he had to be notified of the audience’s reaction. But as I said (in my goofy manner, but with every bit of truth to it), my favorite part of the concert would be the end of “A Silence Haunts Me”. For a minute, the audience gets to hear like Beethoven. Like me. Like the entire deaf and hard of hearing community. The notes fade away but the choir is still singing - but there’s nothing to be heard. In a time where we live in social distancing, covered faces, isolation and more it’s important to find the times we are all united. In that moment everyone in the room was together, experiencing firsthand a small miracle. For one minute, Jake Runestad, Master Chorale, Brett Karlin and the opportunity granted by The Florida Orchestra all made the invisible disability, -visible-.

I think back to the time I went to Vienna, Austria in my twenties and visited Beethoven’s grave. It was quiet, and his prominent site was among many of the greats in a spot dubbed “Musician’s Row”. There, I wrote a single word on a bit of paper and tucked it into the flowers I laid on his grave.
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“Danke.” (Thanks.)

Button above links to The Florida Orchestra

• Friday, January 28 - 8:00 PM - Straz Center, Tampa
• Saturday, January 29 - 8:00 PM - Mahaffey Theater, St. Pete
• ​Sunday, January 30 - 7:30 PM - Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater

​Health and Safety
Face masks are required in all concert venues, regardless of vaccination status.
The Straz Center has additional requirements related to performances at their hall. For full details, click here.

In 2017, Jake Runestad travelled to Leipzig, Germany to be present at the premiere of Into the Light, an extended work for chorus and orchestra commissioned by Valparaiso University to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Luther nailing his Ninety-Seven Theses to a door in Wittenberg, thereby kicking off the Reformation. While traveling after the concert, Runestad found himself in the Haus der Musik Museum in Vienna, where he encountered a facsimile of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament.

It was the first time he had read the famous text, which is almost equal parts medical history (including Beethoven’s first admission to his brothers that he was going deaf), last will and testament, suicide note, letter of forgiveness, and prayer of hope. Runestad was flabbergasted and found himself thinking about Beethoven, about loss, and about the tragedy of one of the greatest musicians of all time losing his hearing. Beethoven put it this way, “Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.”

When the American Choral Directors Association offered the Raymond C. Brock Commission to Runestad for the 2019 National Conference, he took many months to settle on a topic, finally deciding on setting Beethoven’s words. While researching Beethoven’s output around the time of the letter, Runestad discovered that Beethoven wrote a ballet, Creatures of Prometheus, just a year before penning his testament. “Beethoven must have put himself into Prometheus’ mindset to embody the story,” Runestad noted. “Just as Prometheus gifted humankind with fire and was punished for eternity, so did Beethoven gift the fire of his music while fighting his deafness, an impending silence. What an absolutely devastating yet inspiring account of the power of the human spirit. In the moment of his loss —when he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament — he had no idea how profound his legacy would be” (“legacy” being one of the themes of this ACDA’s anniversary conference).

Because of the length of the letter, a verbatim setting was impractical; Runestad once again turned to his friend and frequent collaborator, Todd Boss, to help. Boss’s poem, entitled A Silence Haunts Me – After Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament creates a scena — a monologue in Beethoven’s voice for choir. The poem is both familiar and intimate; Boss has taken the fundamentals of Beethoven’s letter and spun it into a libretto that places the reader/listener into the same small, rented room as one of the most towering figures of the Romantic Era.

To those words, Runestad has brought his full array of dramatic understanding and compositional skill; A Silence Haunts Me sounds more like a self-contained monologue from an opera than a traditional choral piece. Runestad, who has published three operas to date, shows his flair for melding music with text even more dramatically than in familiar settings like Let My Love Be Heard and Please Stay. He sets the poetry with an intense, emotional directness and uses some of Beethoven’s own musical ideas to provide context. Stitched into the work are hints at familiar themes from the Moonlight Sonata, the 3rd, 6th, and 9th Symphonies, and Creatures of Prometheus, but they are, in Runestad’s words, “filtered through a hazy, frustrated, and defeated state of being.”

In wrestling with Beethoven, with legacy, and with loss, Runestad has done what he does best—written a score where the poetry creates the form, where the text drives the rhythm, where the melody supports the emotional content, and where the natural sounding vocal lines, arresting harmony, and idiomatic accompaniment — in this case, piano in honor of Beethoven — come together to offer the audience an original, engaging, thoughtful, and passionate work of choral art.
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Program note by Dr. Jonathan Talberg

"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God."

The awe and beauty of Handel's Messiah is not only in its masterful musical and lyrical composition but also in its story telling. From each movement, each of the 3 parts, we are on a journey together, exploring the birth, the sacrifice, and the resurrection. The Hallelujah chorus, which is so familiar to us during the Christmas season, actually comes at death, although Christmas, of course, celebrates the birth of Jesus. 

Through Handel's narrative, we find ourselves among the prophetic ("Behold, a virgin shall conceive"); among sarcastic, sneering crowds ("if He delight in Him, let Him deliver Him"), mocking and treacherous; among blithe, naive people ("All we like sheep"); and also within the precious moments of great love and empathy ("thine has led captivity captive and received gifts for thine enemies"). And in the end, "Part the third" celebrates the resurrection, finishing with a grand and massive Amen. 

Messiah is a musical journey that is part of our collective history. As we move through the holiday season, we often revel in traditions and memories of family and friends, memories of comfort, and opportunities for peace and connection. Moments of reflection and care in the present may be especially important this year as we emerge into venues and gather again to experience the magic of music in this festive season. Michael Francis, conductor of the The Florida Orchestra for the Messiah asks us to "commit to the masterpiece that it is" with our "quorum of knowledge", and each of us on the stage and in the audience commit ourselves to this masterpiece, together. 

Join us for our performances with The Florida Orchestra at the Straz in Tampa on December 17 at 8pm, Mahaffey Theater in St. Pete on December 18 at 8pm, and Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater on December 19 at 2pm. 

Rehearsing online has it's silver lining in the sense that we have had more opportunities to connect with and learn from the composers and conductors of the contemporary choral music on our program.  We were delighted that Marques Garrett, Susan Brumfield, and Jake Runestad were all able to join us and lead online rehearsals in preparation for our virtual choir recordings of their music. In addition, each of them presented workshops to our singers on spirituals as a musical genre, non-idiomatic choral music of Black composers, and American folk singing.

​All three virtual choirs will premiere on our American Voices Virtual Concert on April 24, 2021 at 7pm. 

• "My Heart Be Brave" by Marques Garrett
• "No Time" by Susan Brumfield
• "Flower Into Kindness" by Jake Runestad

by Brian Hathaway

“When life hands you lemons, make lemonade”

To me the larger nugget of wisdom in this saying is that things don’t always go our way in life, but when we encounter an obstacle, how we respond is a measure of who we are and what we are made of. We can either accept defeat or we can decide that we will overcome the obstacle by turning it into an opportunity to achieve a greater good.

In March 2020, the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay was handed a big lemon in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we were in the final preparations for a concert of Bach’s “St. John Passion” with The Florida Orchestra, we all went into hiatus as part of efforts to slow the spread of the pandemic. Live singing was put on the back burner as arts organizations around the world cancelled rehearsal and concert schedules. 

by Brian Hathaway

by Brian Hathaway

​The performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem by The Florida Orchestra and The Master Chorale of Tampa Bay are only about a month away on the weekend of April 20-22.  As part of The Florida Orchestra’s Masterwork Series, Verdi’s Requiem is one of the most dramatic Requiems in the choral repertoire. 
 
When I prepare for a Masterwork Concert, there are several components to my preparation, including score study, individual practice, and rehearsal with my Master Chorale colleagues.  To further enhance my understanding of the music, I research the history of the music, so I can better appreciate what the composer was trying to achieve in composing and performing it.  During my research for this concert series, I uncovered several facts about Verdi and his Requiem.  Some of these facts are very well known, while others may qualify as trivial or little-known facts.  I would like to share the facts I uncovered.

At the time of Rossini's death, Verdi called him "one of the glories of Italy," asking, "When the other one who still lives is no more, what will we have left?" The other one was Alessandro Manzoni, a celebrated poet, and the author of the landmark nineteenth-century novel, “I Promessi Sposi” (The Betrothed), a book Verdi himself had read when he was sixteen.  When Manzoni died on May 22, 1873, Verdi returned to the idea of a requiem.
 
When poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni died, Verdi was too grief-stricken to attend his funeral, and the entire country mourned the loss of one of its leading cultural icons.  Verdi shared the same national aspirations that Manzoni had, and Manzoni’s literature helped fuel an Italian national identity.  Verdi also supported Italian unification, and his last name was used as an acronym for support of unification under Sardinian King Victor Emanuel: Vittorio Emanuel, Rei di Italia (Victor Emanuel, King of Italy).  Following unification in 1860, Verdi served as a Senator.

​Verdi went to the mayor of Milan and proposed composing a memorial in the form of a requiem to honor the memory of Manzoni. Verdi reworked the existing Libera me from the “Messe per Rossini” and incorporated thematic material from it in the other movements. While he was quite sincere in his desire to memorialize Manzoni, Verdi, a successful businessman, was also aware of the commercial possibilities for the Requiem. While he was negotiating with the city of Milan to underwrite the premiere and with the Church to allow women singers to appear, he was also arranging publication and performance royalties.  As part of the arrangement with the city of Milan, Verdi offered to pay for the score printing himself on the condition that Milan assume responsibility for the cost of the performances.
 
The premiere took place in May 22, 1874, at the Church of San Marco as part of a liturgy so no applause was allowed. Women (Soprano Theresa Stolz and Mezzo Maria Waldmann, soloists who performed in Verdi’s European premiere of Aida four years earlier) were given a special exemption to perform by the local Archbishop on the condition that they must be veiled in black and hidden behind a grating.  Verdi also arranged three concert performances at La Scala a few days later which were greeted with great enthusiasm. In the year following the premiere, it was performed all over Italy, in Paris, London, Vienna and even in America. The Requiem had become one of Verdi's most popular compositions.

​Verdi composed his Requiem with Soprano Theresa Stolz and Mezzo Maria Waldmann in mind as the female soloists.  Soprano Stolz has been described as "the Verdian dramatic soprano par excellence, powerful, passionate in utterance, but dignified in manner and secure in tone and control” and premiered many of Verdi’s Operas.  Verdi hired Mezzo Waldmann for the mezzo-soprano role in his Requiem, for which he wrote the Liber Scriptus with her voice in mind. Verdi particularly valued her for the rich, dark color of her lower, contralto register.  For a Paris performance, Verdi revised the Liber Scriptus to allow Maria Waldmann a further solo for future performances.  Previously, the movement had been set for a choral fugue in a classical Baroque style. With its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall performance in May 1875, this revision became the definitive edition.
 
When German conductor, composer, and virtuoso pianist Hans von Bülow, a close friend of Verdi’s rival Richard Wagner, stole a look at the Requiem score just days before the Milan premiere, he offered his famous snap judgment, "Verdi's latest opera, though in ecclesiastical robes," and decided not to attend the concert. When he finally heard it, at a parish performance eighteen years later, he was moved to tears. Bülow wrote to Verdi to apologize, and Verdi replied, with typical generosity, that Bülow might have been right the first time. By then, Verdi had grown accustomed to critical disdain, especially from the followers of Richard Wagner. And he knew that Bülow, who once switched his allegiance from Wagner to Brahms, wasn't the last listener who would change his mind about this music as well.

​Playwright and music critic George Bernard Shaw had a different opinion.  Attending the London premiere, Verdi’s Requiem captivated him.  His first impression stayed with him, as he had the “Libera me” performed at his funeral in 1950. 
 
In January 1901, while staying in Milan, Verdi suffered a stroke. He died a few days later. Arturo Toscanini conducted the vast forces of combined orchestras and choirs composed of musicians from throughout Italy at his funeral service in Milan. To date, it remains the largest public assembly of any event in the history of Italy.

The Nazis tried to make Terezin a model village as an example of how they were treating Jews humanely.  Part of the façade was to create an active cultural environment in the ghetto, so shortly after arriving, Schacter was given the task of assembling a choir of 150 to perform Verdi’s Requiem.  Not having enough scores for all the singers, he taught them the music by rote.  The first performance took place in January 1942. 

It is interesting to note that this Requiem for the dead premiered in January 1942, the same month that SS General Rheinhard Heydrich led the Wannsee Conference that approved the “final solution” to the Jewish question.  Immediately following the premiere, about half the chorus members were loaded on a train bound for Auschwitz.  Rafael Schachter was forced to reconstitute the chorus for the fifteen subsequent concerts as chorus members were either taken away or died in Terezin.  The final concert was performed for members of the International Red Cross, who were visiting the camp at the invitation of the Nazi SS.  Rafael Schachter was finally taken by train to Auschwitz in October 1944, subsequently dying while a prisoner. ​

​Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem has been loved by audiences and performers since its premiere in 1874.  It is recognized as one of the most frequently performed masterworks in the choral repertoire.  For me, I will have a completely different emotional connection to the Requiem because of the research I completed for this blog post. 
 
Foremost in my mind will be the unknown victims who created a work of drama and beauty in the face of death and terror.  I am drawn to recall the opera “Nabucco” by Verdi, where in The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, they sang “let the Lord inspire you a harmony of voices which may instill virtue to suffering.”  For the prisoners of Terezin, the closing “Libera me” (Deliver me) was their most fervent plea for deliverance. 
 
Even if you have listened to recordings of Verdi’s Requiem, the beauty and drama of the music is best experienced during a live performance.  Please consider attending one of our concerts to experience it yourself. 

By Brian Hathaway

​Yes!  “Dacci un Dramma!”, or in English “Give us drama!” is the topic of my latest post.  I was drawn to this phrase because the current season of the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay is all about drama, especially the way we create it through our voices in collaboration with The Florida Orchestra.  To make it more interesting, this season is unique in that through four concerts, we take a “grand tour” of the history of creating drama with the voice through several musical genres that go back five hundred years.  Let us take this tour in chronological order, even though the concerts this season do not necessarily follow that order.

​Genre #1: Opera. Opera was the first musical form that combined voices and instruments to create drama as entertainment.  The first opera, “Dafne” was composed by Jacopo Peri in Italy in 1597, although it is now largely lost.  The earliest opera still performed is Claudio Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” composed in 1607.  The opera genre was exported to Germany in 1627 and later to England and France in the mid 1600’s.  As an art form, the opera has been widely performed up until the current time, although the mid to late 19th century is widely recognized as the “golden age of opera”, dominated by Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi.

​Giuseppe Verdi started composing his Requiem in June 1873, shortly following the death of famed Italian writer and humorist Allessandro Manzoni, whom Verdi met in 1868.  Manzoni’s death was the impetus for Verdi to write a complete Requiem, expanding upon the “Libera me” that he wrote in Rossini’s memory following his death in 1868.  Verdi’s Requiem is not normally regarded as a liturgical Requiem and is primarily performed as a theater piece, and the music is infused with the same level of drama we would encounter in his operas such as “Aida” (1872) or “Othello” (1887).  For me as a singer, I love dramatic moments such as the pounding of the bass drum in the “Dies Irae”, the unison opening of the “Sanctus” or the power of the opening phrase in the “Rex Tremendae”.  The Verdi Requiem will be performed with The Florida Orchestra on the weekend of April 20-22.

Genre #2: Musical Theatre.  Musical theatre grew out of the comic operettas of the 1800’s by composers such as Jacques Offenbach in Paris and Johann Strauss Jr. in Vienna.  From 1871 to 1896, William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan collaborated on numerous comic operettas such as “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Mikado” that poked fun at English society and became internationally famous.  In America composers such as George M. Cohan and Victor Herbert gave musical theatre a distinctively American flavor.  Throughout the first four decades of the 20th Century composers such as Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin popularized the musical theatre genre.  Songs from musicals have become part of The Great American Songbook and an integral part of American culture.
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In the 1940’s Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma” was the first fully integrated musical, incorporating song and dance to develop the characters and the plot.  The three decades of the 1940’s through 1960’s were marked by the worldwide popularity of the genre spurred on by the availability of original cast recordings and film versions of the musical.  There are so many dramatic moments arising from musical theatre that they are almost too numerous to mention.  Personal favorites of mine are the title song from “Oklahoma,” “I Am a Pirate King” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance,” and “It’s a Grand Night for Singing” from Rodgers and Hammersteins’s “State Fair.”

Concertgoers will be able to hear many of their favorites in the “Celebrate Broadway” concert series with The Master Chorale and The Florida Orchestra during the weekend of April 27-29th.

Genre #3: The Film/TV Score.  As musical theatre became a dominant force in bringing live music to the masses, the advent of films allowed even more people to experience the way music can combine with the moving picture to add drama and meaning to a story.  The development of talking pictures starting with “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 added the component of sound to movies. This film incorporated a musical play where singer Al Jolson played a cantor’s son who ran away from home to become a famous jazz singer.  The film is recognized as one of the 100 most influential films of all time.

Genre #4:  The Video Game.  Since the advent of electronic gaming in the late 1970’s, their complexity of the stories and images has been increasingly coupled with the development of music scores that are now equal to and in some cases exceeding the level of artistic expression in film scores.  We are now light years beyond the “beeps” and “boops” we heard when playing “Pong” or the simple 8-bit compositions we heard when playing “Donkey Kong” almost 40 years ago. 
 
Video game score composition now attracts some of the best composers who have embraced this avenue of artistic expression.  These include Koji Kondo (Legend of Zelda), Jeremy Soule (The Elder Scrolls) and Michael Giacchino (Medal of Honor).  Michael Giacchino also composed music scores for J.J. Abrams, producer of the current generation of Star Trek movies.  Nobuo Uematsu, composer of the Final Fantasy music scores has been composing them for more than two decades, and concerts of his music play to sell-out crowds around the world.

​In conclusion, do you remember what we were discussing 1,300 words ago?  Looking back at the operatic roots of combining the human voice with instruments, we can see a kind of musical karma.  I think if Richard Wagner were alive today, he would enjoy an animated conversation regarding leitmotifs with Nobuo Uematsu.  What is seen through these very broad brush-stroke discussions of musical history is the unmistakable impact the human voice can have on listeners.  The current Master Chorale Season still offers opportunities to experience live music that you will find enjoyable and memorable.  As a singer, it is a joy to be a part of the creative process that takes place when we prepare and present great music for our Tampa Bay community.
 
Dacci un Dramma!