SAN FRANSISCO OPERA CENTER

PROGRAM NOTE

In the realm of poetry and song, flowers are rarely just flowers. Nature and its flora and fauna have inspired writers and poets across cultures throughout history. Many, like the German and English Romantics such as Joseph von Eichendorff, looked to nature to unlock the mysteries of the inner soul, and as a necessary escape from the increasingly industrialized, chaotic, polluted urban world. For the American Transcendentalists like Walt Whitman, the refuge nature provided from city life offered a unique opportunity to commune with the divine. For the English Pre-Raphaelites, such as both Rossetti siblings Dante and Christina, the imitation of Nature was one of the purposes of their art itself. To these writers and poets, the cycles of the seasons reflected the cyclical quality of life itself, forests were places of magic and mystery, the nightingale’s song was poetry in and of itself, and flowers were symbols of romantic love and sexual awakening.  

Tonight’s program, which spans almost 4 centuries of music and poetry, delves into these themes of nature and humanity’s relationship to the flora and fauna around them. Much like the characters in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel from which this program’s title is borrowed, poetic protagonists in many of these songs find themselves transformed and healed by their interactions with nature. In others, they see their life experiences reflected to them in the flora and fauna around them. In one special instance just before intermission, the flowers themselves become the characters in an operatic drama by one of the most quintessential German Romantic composers, Franz Schubert.

In addition to Schubert, musical scions of the Romantic movement of many European nationalities are heavily represented on this program, including Lili Boulanger, Johannes Brahms, Ernest Chausson, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gabriel Fauré, Edvard Grieg, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Sergei Rachmaninov, Nikolai-Rimsky-Korsakov, Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Bridging the gap between the so-called New and Old Worlds is the British-American composer Rebecca Clarke, who was born and studied in England with Vaughan Williams’ and Coleridge-Taylor’s teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford, but spent equal parts of her life on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually settling in New York. Best known for her viola sonata (a staple of the instrument’s canon repertoire), she composed a prolific number of songs. Other composers from the Americas include Margaret Bonds, a close friend and colleague of Langston Hughes and a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance;  Harry Burleigh, one of the United States’ most prolific composers of song, who famously inspired Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” during the Czech composer’s sojourn in New York; Aaron Copland; and Argentine composer, Carlos Guastavino. The Bay Area’s own Stacy Garrop rounds out this evening’s bouquet of songs, with her setting of Walt Whitman’s poem, Smile O Voluptuous Cool-breathed Earth, adapted from her oratorio Terra Nostra which was premiered by the San Francisco Choral Society and Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir.