Soulful,
rooted,
true.
Melynda
Davis
Soprano Melynda Davis, is a Boston-based singer specializing in opera, oratorio, and art song. Ms. Davis has performed with companies such as Boston Lyric Opera, NY Lyric Opera, MassOpera, and the Boston Pops. She has also been a finalist in Connecticut Opera Guild’s Competition, placed first in the Rhode Island NATS Competition, and placed second in Boston’s Leontyne Price Vocal Arts Competition.
Ms. Davis joined the Mount Holyoke Symphony in their East Coast premiere of Mary Watkins’s opera Dark River. She has performed roles such as Countess (Le nozze di Figaro), the title role in Suor Angelica, Nedda (Pagliacci), and Mimi (La Bohème) with companies such as New York Lyric Opera and the Opera Company of Brooklyn.
Ms. Davis made her debut with MassOpera in their workshop premiere of Dan Shore’s Freedom Ride and returned in 2021 as Flora in their production of Verdi’s La Traviata. She made her debut with Seaglass Theater Company in the premiere of Whaling Women.
In 2022–23, Ms. Davis makes her debut with Greater Worcester Opera in the title role of Suor Angelica and returns to Boston Lyric Opera in their productions of Romeo and Juliet, La Bohème, and Omar.
Ms. Davis serves as a board member for Opera on Tap Boston and Boston Singers’ Resource and is a member of their rosters.
Johannes
Brahms
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) dedicated his gentle Wiegenlied to his friend Bertha Faber. Although it was composed to celebrate the birth of her second son, it may contain a touching and bittersweet farewell to Bertha herself, who became a regular alto chorister in the women’s choir Brahms conducted in Hamburg before her marriage. Bertha and the twenty-six-year-old Brahms exchanged many letters, and he was a frequent dinner guest in her home. Although its melody is most recognizable, the cradle song’s piano accompaniment may be more meaningful. It quotes directly from an Austrian duet by Alexander Baumann (1814–1857) called “S’is anderscht” (It’s Not Like That), which Johannes and Bertha sang together in her family parlor. Its lyrics read, in part, “So you think that love can be forced” and “If you trample a flower, it’ll never rise again.” Brahms sent the published lullaby to Bertha’s eventual husband, confessing: “Frau Bertha will realize that I wrote the Wiegenlied for her little one. She will find it quite in order that while she is singing Hans to sleep, a love song is being sung to her.”
O Tod, wie bitter bist du is the third movement of Brahms’s last set of songs, Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs). A series of meditations on life and death, the cycle sets Martin Luther’s translation of an ancient Jewish wisdom text from the book of Ecclesiasticus (also called the Book of Sirach). Brahms had planned to retire from composition but wrote his Four Serious Songs in response to the final illness of his great friend Clara Schumann, around the time he discovered his own cancer. Originally for lower male voicelike Brahms’s own, the group of songs was presented to his publisher on his last birthday.
Brahms composed Geistliches Lied as part of a mutual exchange of contrapuntal works with his friend Joseph Joachim, a composer in his own right and a virtuoso violinist. The choral parts are written as a strict double canon at the ninth, the tenor and bass lines replicating the soprano and alto lines an octave and a step lower and at a distance of four beats. The motet is typically Brahmsian in that its beauty masks the ingenuity and learnedness of its construction. In this case, however, the close canonic relationship among the voices may represent the faithful acceptance of God’s will mentioned in Paul Fleming’s seventeenth-century poem.
Contributors: Laura Stanfield Prichard and Kevin Leong
Gabriel
Fauré
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) was a remarkable French organist and church musician. His musical style preferred elegant and subtle musical language over bombast, and he employed Gregorian chant-like melodies for both sacred and secular texts. His Cantique de Jean Racine begins and ends in D-flat major, and expresses yearning through harmonic modulations, word painting, and subtle atonality.
As a student, Fauré was Camille Saint-Saëns’s protégé and most celebrated pupil. He studied Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, and musicianship for eleven years at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse. Fauré won the École’s premiers prix in student composition in 1865 with his Cantique de Jean Racine for choir and organ. It is dedicated to the composer César Franck.
The text for the Cantique is a translation of a medieval Ambrosian hymn for Tuesday matins, Consors paterni luminis. Jean-Baptiste Racine (1639–1699) was a French dramatist and poet who translated several portions of the Roman Breviary in 1688. The text for the Cantique is his translation of a medieval Ambrosian hymn for Tuesday matins, Consors paterni luminis. Fauré named his work after Racine, calling his translation “elegant and rather florid.” He set this entreaty to God and exchange of faith with a gorgeously restrained charm punctuated by occasional modernist elements of dissonance.
Fauré also made a substantial contribution to French art song, with over one hundred published mélodies. Along with Frank and Henri Duparc, Fauré established the Société Nationale de Musique in 1871. These salon concerts, in which the composers themselves performed, presented a modern approach to French art song, emphasizing the unique rhythmic stresses of the French language. Both Lydia and Après un rêve are early songs, influenced by the strophic French Romance and French Parnassian poetry.
Lydia (1870) was Fauré’s first setting of Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894), taken from his Poèmes antiques of 1852. Its Ancient Greek-inspired strophic poems contrasted with the modern excesses of Charles Baudelaire. The song was composed for the popular salon mezzo-soprano Marie Trélat (1837–1914), the daughter of Napoleon III’s surgeon. Fauré’s vocal contours reflect the text: tumbling descents beginning at the word “roule” (roll), a rising pattern at “le jour” (the day), and a dramatic fall at “oubilons l’éternelle tombe” (let us forget the eternal tomb). The poet describes his beloved’s hair as “fluid gold,” calls her a goddess, and says that he is dying, but with no sense of urgency, so Fauré’s accompaniment floats away to nothing at the conclusion. As a gentle pun on the title, Fauré emphasized the Lydian scale with its raised fourth pitch (B-natural), heard quietly upon the arrival of the word “joues.” Several of Fauré’s special compositional fingerprints are present: tritones; triplets with tied notes; staccato chords that seem suspended in the midday heat; chromatic chords with augmented intervals; and a dreamy, unresolved accompaniment. The undulating thirds at “tes baisers des colombes” is a superlative evocation of the haunting quality of doves cooing. He liked this early song so much that he reused its opening in his later song cycle La Bonne Chanson. The undulating thirds at “tes baisers des colombes” is a superlative evocation of the haunting quality of doves cooing.
Après un Rêve (1877) is best-known as a mélodie, but Fauré adapted it for several instruments (most notably, cello) and authorized versions in multiple keys. The tune fits both an anonymous Tuscan poem and a modern adaptation by Fauré’s friend Romain Bussine (1830–1899), a professor of singing at the Paris Conservatoire. Both texts were included when the song was published in 1878.) Fauré’s simple sounding melody belies stunning sophistication. He maintains a subtle agony that shifts between serenity and anguish, depicting a lover dreaming of his beloved and, upon waking, wishing he could return to the mysterious night.
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John
Rutter
John Rutter was born in Cambridge, England, in 1945. As a child, he remembers improvising melodies “free of the rigorous influences of scales and arpeggios” and credits his own personal style to this improvisatory play. He sang as a chorister at Highgate School and Clare College, Cambridge, composing one of his most successful carols, The Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, at the age of eighteen. In 1963, he was a chorister in the first recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, under the composer’s direction.
While at Clare, Rutter studied harmony and counterpoint under Sir David Willcocks, who arranged for his colorful carol settings to be published by Oxford University Press. In 1975, Rutter was appointed Director of Music at Clare College and began recording his music. Following the overwhelming popularity of his 1974 Gloria, Rutter devoted himself to composing full time. He formed the professional Cambridge Singers in 1981 and his own recording label, Collegium, in 1984.
Rutter’s Requiem was composed in 1985 and premiered in the United States. It is heavily influenced by the music of Gabriel Fauré, especially his own gentle Requiem. Both works emphasize human feeling, compassion, and tenderness over terror.
Rutter’s texts include parts of the Latin Mass for the Dead, English burial sentences from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and English versions of Psalms 23 (“The Lord Is My Shepherd,” accompanied by a plaintive oboe) and 130 (“Out of the Deep,” a typical Anglican funeral text with a stark, unaccompanied cello solo). This combination of languages was inspired by Benjamin Britten's alternation of Latin mass texts with the English poetry of Wilfrid Owen in his War Requiem. Rutter’s seven sections contain prayers on behalf of all humanity, personal prayers to Christ, and in the central Sanctus, an affirmation of divine glory. Although there are grand moments such as the pleading, anguished Agnus Dei, the work is memorable for its most simple, elegant passages in Requiem aeternam and The Lord Is My Shepherd. Building on his long experience with Anglican church music, Rutter alternates between chant-like unisons and resonant eight-part choral explosions. He enhances the subtle modernism of Fauré with stinging dissonances, inserting chromatic, complex chords to intensify the text rather than modulate to new keys.
The composer has written about the inspiration of the work: “The Requiem was dedicated to the memory of my father, who had died the previous year. In writing it, I was influenced and inspired by the example of Faure: . . . intimate rather than grandiose, contemplative and lyric rather than dramatic, and ultimately moving towards light rather than darkness – the ‘lux aeterna’ of the closing text.” His fantastically beautiful setting of Psalm 23 had been completed nine years earlier, fulfilling a commission from Mel Olsen and the Chancel Choir of the First United Methodist Church in Omaha. Movements 1, 2, 4, and 7 were premiered at Sacramento’s Fremont Presbyterian Church on March 14, 1985, under Rutter’s direction. The complete Requiem was premiered under his direction on October 13 of the same year at Lover’s Lane United Methodist Church in Dallas.
Like Fauré and Duruflé before him, Rutter carefully employed sections of Gregorian chant, especially in the Agnus Dei, and briefly in the Lux aeterna. He has compared his Requiem’s overall structure to an architectural arch, with the Latin prayers of the first and last movements as the supports; the second and sixth movements (the psalms) at the ends of the arch; the personal prayers to Christ of the third and fifth movements ascending into the arch; and the central Sanctus as the keystone, both “celebratory and affirmative.” He commented, “For me it stands as a clear sign of humanity’s quest for solace and light amidst the darkness and troubles of our age. Art, André Gide said, must bear a message of hope—a message which is embedded in the age-old texts of the Requiem Mass, and also in the Burial Service.”
