To the Soul
Songs on the Poetry of Walt Whitman

* Songs by Rorem, Bridge, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Bacon, Hindemith,
Burleigh, Weill, Ives, Thomas, Bernstein, and others
Thomas Hampson (baritone), Craig Rutenberg (piano) EMI 55028 Total time: 74:49

Summary for the Busy Executive: A mixed bag, O Soul!

In the latter quarter of the Nineteenth Century, Whitman's poems broke
into general public consciousness.  With Whitman's distrust of Europe, it
must have at least struck him as ironic that his first widespread critical
acceptance took place in England, among the Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and
Decadents (particularly Swinburne, Rosetti, and Symonds) rather than from
his own countrymen.  Americans in general first learned to pick up Whitman
and read from their English cousins.  Whitman quickly became more than a
poet - a symbol for several simultaneous things:  the New World's poetic
Declaration of Independence from European forms, largely French and
Italian, and British poetic diction.  It's unlikely, for example, that
anyone used the word "yawp" in a serious poem before Whitman.  Emerson and
Thoreau had freed the essay from its belle-lettristic confines.  Melville
had given the novel a range and metaphysical power, as well as a sense of
a huge natural landscape, beyond even that of Dickens.  Emily Dickinson
introduced the sound of American common sense into lyric poetry, a sound
that echoed in such diverse writers as Pound, Stein, Cummings, and
Williams.  Mark Twain did the same for prose and shifted the American
culture firmly from Eurocentrism to Americentrism.  If Washington Irving
went to Europe to find the center of the cultural universe in his travel
essays and tales, Mark Twain took the center of the universe with him
wherever he went.

Whitman, on the other hand, has always had more constituencies than
any other American writer.  Indeed, the poet Roethke declared that every
American poet sooner or later has to make his peace with Whitman.  He has
passed from the Decadents to the British and American Socialists to macho
American jingoists to various gay constituencies and advocates of sexual
liberation.  His sub-collection, Calamus, has been raided for texts by the
latter.  Along with Shakespeare, Housman, and Blake, Whitman is probably
the poet in English most often set.

The program on this CD interests me mainly for its range of musical
styles and for its demonstration of how the notion of song has changed.
Songs in English have been mainly rhymed and metered, especially in the
Common Time ("As I was going to St.  Ives, / I met a man with forty wives")
and the Common Meter ("How doth the busy little bee / Improve each shining
hour?") of hymns and folk songs.  Whitman's poetry explodes almost all hope
in this sort of musical solution.  The only poem he ever wrote that comes
close to the traditional song is "O Captain!  My Captain!" - not one of
his best, unfortunately, but at one time his most popular, especially in
U.S. schoolrooms.  A strenuous attempt was made to smooth Whitman out -
"the good, gray poet" - and we see its reflection in many early settings.
One of the most grotesque is William H.  Neidlinger's "Memories of Lincoln"
from 1920, which glues parts of "Beat!  beat!  drums," "When lilacs last,"
and "O Captain!" in a campy composite.  One suspects that we get this
misshapen mess because Neidlinger can't handle Whitman's complex rhythms,
which blow the normal song-writing strategies of the time all to hell.
Neidlinger keeps trying to find the conventional equivalent.  Thus, he
begins his "Beat!  beat!  drums!" with a kin to "On the Road to Mandalay"
and, when he gets to "When lilacs last," slips into "My Buddy." The same
sort of thing defeats Henry Thacker Burleigh's "Ethiopia Saluting the
Colors" (1915), although Burleigh (a pupil of Dvorak) does much better
than Neidlinger and, taking off from the poet's reference to Sherman,
manages to weave in strands of "Marching through Georgia." Elinor Warren
("We Two," 1947) and Robert Strassburg ("A Prayer of Columbus," 1993,
radically abridged - almost always a bad sign) resort to hokey repetitions
solely in order to get the phrasing "to come out right," ie, according to
the lights of the conventional song.  Indeed, it's difficult for me to
believe Warren studied with Nadia Boulanger.  Her song sounds like it
could have been composed by Oley Speaks for Lawrence Tibbett - whom,
incidentally, she accompanied at the piano for many years.

Stanford's "To the Soul" (1906-08, the same text his pupil Vaughan
Williams set for Toward the Unknown Region, 1905-1907) takes a harder,
Brahmsian route; he ingeniously finds a musical structure, to some extent
distinct from the poetic one, but not at cross-purposes.  We can say the
same for Ernst Bacon's later "One thought ever at the fore" (1930) and
Bernstein's "To what you said," a highpoint from his magnificent late
Songfest (1976), a work filled with highpoints.  Both essentially begin
a song in the instruments, which the voice decorates and comments upon.

One of the more interesting settings, though not entirely successful,
is Philip Dalmas's "As I watch'd the ploughman ploughing," composed
sometime before the composer's death in 1928.  Dalmas intuits that perhaps
Whitman's new poetic expression suggests a new musical expression.  He
doesn't find one, but he stretches the traditional pretty far, with mostly
the voice and piano insisting on their own pedal points -- essentially,
the singer becomes, until just before the end, "Johnny One-Note." It's
a song of great risk, which to a great extent comes off.

With the modern era, Whitman setting comes into its own.  The
asymmetrical phrase, practically a hallmark of Modernism, handles Whitman's
rhythms admirably.  Frank Bridge's "The Last Invocation" (1919) sensitively
ties the poem together through a piano figure, rather than through the
vocal part.  Vaughan Williams's "A Clear Midnight" and "Joy, shipmate,
joy!" (both 1925) revel in and emphasize the irregularities of Whitman's
rhythms - the first in the way of a folk singer humming to himself, the
second a more straightforward Modernism.  Into this last category we can
also put Ives's "Walt Whitman," the only time our musical Whitman ever set
the literary one.  Typically, Ives puts us through a complex experience -
part pure music, part cultural and metaphysical comment - in less than a
minute.  Michael Tilson Thomas contributes a beautiful Coplandsmann version
of "We two boys together clinging" (1993).  It doesn't make you forget
Copland, but, on the other hand, Copland would probably have loved to have
written a song this good.

The American popular song has also contributed to breaking down old poetic
rhythms, as anyone can tell who takes the trouble to scan a Lorenz Hart
lyric.  Kurt Weill's "Dirge for Two Veterans" (1942-47) could have come out
of Street Scene.  One hears the same kind of pop-rhythm shuffle in Charles
Naginski's "Look down fair moon" (1940) as well as a startling resemblance
to Gerald Finzi's (probably later) "Come away, death." It's unlikely,
however, that Finzi ever heard the earlier song.

My favorite songs on the album include the Vaughan Williams, the Ives,
the Bernstein, the Bacon, the Thomas, and Hindemith's "Sing on there in
the swamp" (1944).  If you know Hindemith's setting in When lilacs last
in the dooryard bloom'd, this ain't it.  Completely different, it's yet
another perfect setting of this text.  The most amazing songs, as a group,
on the CD belong to Ned Rorem.  None of them seem "worked" at all - each,
rather, a spontaneous musical expression of its poem, words and music cling
together so intimately.  I can't see a point in dissecting them, since I'll
never learn how Rorem did it in the first place.

As for Hampson's performances, to me this is one of his best CDs.
Sometimes he can ruin a song from trying too hard for an over-fussy, even
corny Interpretation, but not here.  The songs serve the singer less than
the singer serves the songs (try saying that fast three times), and it's
all to the good.  His virtues - a long, seamless vocal line, impeccable
American diction, an ability to find the right dramatic persona for the
song, and direct communication with the listener - shine.  He does well
even by the weaker songs.  Even the Warren and the Neidlinger come off with
less of a curse because Hampson has taken the trouble to show them in their
best light and doesn't condescend.  Rutenberg matches him.  His extended
solos in the Thomas and Bernstein are exquisite.

Now to complain.  Four minutes of this CD Hampson gives over to spoken
recital of certain Whitman poems.  I have no idea why he does this.  He's
a good reader, but not a great one.  He does no better than you would if
you read these poems to yourself and certainly reveals nothing new about
them.  I mean, it's not like we're listening to Olivier or Rip Torn.  On
the other hand, this still leaves over seventy minutes of music.

Hampson, collaborating with Carla Maria Verdino-Suellwold, also tried
to provide scholarly liner notes, but typos and other editorial slips
sink that boat.  For example, they make much of Whitman's early lack
of musical sophistication because he uses the word "band" to mean an
orchestra.  This is a common nineteenth-century usage, persisting even
in such musical yokels as Ernest Newman, George Grove, Donald Tovey, and
George Bernard Shaw (sarcasm mode off).  Just below this assertion, they
include an extensive Whitman quote which uses the word "orchestra" more
than once ("band" is nowhere in sight).  This could very well be a later
excerpt, but as it stands, it just confuses people.  At one point Ernst
Bacon is lumped with Hindemith as "transplanted Europeans." At another,
the notes state that he was "born and educated in Chicago."

There's also a track goof.  The Hindemith appears at the tail of the
Strassburg track 8 as well on its own track 11.  Somebody just wasn't
paying attention.

But these things shouldn't stand in the way of enjoying a fine recital.

Steve Schwartz