Category Archives: music

Sidney Homer’s “Requiem” Op. 15

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Sidney Homer

I knew next to nothing about Sidney Homer before I read around a bit. He was a contemporary of Charles Ives, more or less. But unlike Ives he made his career as a musician: as a professor at the New England Conservatory and as a composer, mostly of songs. His compositions were popularly successful in an era when sheet music purchases were an index of popularity and people still entertained themselves by making music in their parlors.

Wikipedia doesn’t carry much information beyond this wonderful picture. There’s more about him at this PBS site. He was Samuel Barber’s uncle, and the kinship shows in Barber’s songs, I think. Homer was married to the Philadelphia contralto, Louise Beatty, a Metropolitan Opera star for many years during the company’s golden age. Beatty recorded Homer’s “Requiem,” in 1912. You can hear just a fragment here. In the 1950s, when I was entering the Texas Interscholastic League singing competitions, this song was a staple, and Homer’s reputation as a composer remained sturdy. That changed over the next few decades, and Homer is all but forgotten now. Baritone Jeffrey Snider, chair of the vocal studies program at the University of North Texas, performs a number of Homer songs and at one time had some on his website. I wish him success in reviving interest in Homer.

I thought I remembered that John Charles Thomas had recorded Homer’s “Requiem” but failed to find it at YouTube. I had decided that my memory must have been faulty or that nobody had yet posted the song, when my son, Julian, sent me a link to this Thomas performance of “Under the Wide Starry Sky.” It would be interesting to know if Homer did the orchestration and choral background—it’s a little cheesy but somehow right, as my son said when he sent me the link. I think I still like the song better with voice and piano, but there’s no denying the authenticity of Thomas’s performance. This was his kind of song.

Depuis le jour

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My son just sent me a link to this video of a very young Leontyne Price singing one of my favorite arias. I’m still partial to Beverly Sills’ performance, but isn’t this wonderful! Also, try the links at the end of the video for some other fine performances.

Nimm sie hin, denn, diese Lieder . . .

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Just a quick post so that my few readers will know I’m not dead.

I keep getting comments on this post. The Paul Robeson video has attracted four pages of fan comments at YouTube. You can read them here. And it’s even more surprising to me that I’ve attracted no anti-labor comments or rants from Robeson haters.

My post about Mack Harrell also continues to draw comments. In going back to it I discover that YouTube has removed the short Fauré Requiem excerpt. By way of turning the other cheek, here’s some more Mack Harrell, a recording I didn’t know about (and that I will be looking for) of “An die ferne Geliebte.” I’m especially glad to have discovered it because this song cycle was the first thing I studied with Mr. Harrell and the first piece I ever performed as his student.

I said maybe I would tell some stories. Here are a couple. As serious as he was about his vocation, Mr. Harrell was funny too—like the day we started working on the “Schöne Müllerin,” when he came in the studio in a straw hat with a stalk of grass in his teeth. I never called him Mack as some others of his students did; I noticed early on that they only did that behind his back. I also recall that he took a phone call from Rudolf Bing in the middle of one of my lessons once and told Bing that he wouldn’t return to the Metropolitan Opera for the next season, saying he had decided to “forgo opera.” I didn’t know that day that he already knew he was dying.

But the best memory I have is this one. I had failed to get an opera role for which I had auditioned, and I was depressed. When I arrived for my lesson the next day, Mr. Harrell played and sang for me a Schumann song, “Stirb Lieb’ und Freud’.” In it a young woman decides to take the veil, and her lover must reconcile himself to losing her forever. It’s a strophic song, beautifully simple and sublime, refining the emotions of which it treats and rendering them monumental. “We need to remember when we lose things,” Mr. Harrell said, “that there are still lots of good songs left in the world.” I remembered that in the summer of 1959 at Aspen, when he sang a group of Mendelssohn songs he had never sung before.

the snake’s the thing . . .

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This is another “Let’s talk about snakes” post in honor of one of my graduate school professors who had a favorite schtick that began with that expression. I’ve written only fifteen of these in the three-year history of this blog, and it’s been a year since the last one. I should likely do better than that, especially since my habit of using the word, snakes, in a figure of speech that bears on some part of the post’s content is always a challenge to my ingenuity. So here goes:

Summer entertainments: We’ve been making the rounds of community arts events in the city this summer more than in some past years. A “Jungle Boogie” concert at the St. Louis Zoo was wonderful fun back at the end of May and introduced us to the Ralph Butler Band. At the Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park, we saw an excellent Hamlet, with no gimmicks other than Shakespeare’s own. We also took in two summer operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Eugene Onegin at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In spite of a few sublime musical moments, Figaro is a silly opera. Some performances try to recapture some of the social satire lost in Da Ponte’s adaptation of Beaumarchais, but the Opera Theatre’s productiom leaned pretty heavily on soubrette and buffo clichés and stage business that did little to distract one’s attention from the silliness, and vocally the performance was pretty lackluster. The Onegin was better. The cast’s powerful voices and Tchaikovski’s music almost lent credence to Pushkin’s poetic melodrama. The performance of Russian-American soprano, Dina Kuznetsova as Tatiana, was exceptional among fine performances by all the lead singers.

The Biden Leaks: Ben Smith at Politico passes on information about how Vice Preaident Biden’s views on the Afghan war were leaked recently. So—if you’re an administration operative and you don’t like some policy your bosses are pursuing, all you have to do is leak information that among your bosses somebody is disagreeing. I’m not always in favor of punishing leakers, but this is a time when I think somebody (maybe more than one somebody) should be fired.

Old time religion: It’s fitting to remember as we celebrate Independence Day that Jefferson’s ringing claim of god-given rights didn’t extend even to all men, in his own time and afterwards for generations, even for generations after we fought a bloody civil war over slavery. And if we needed reminding, the posting of portions of Samuel Seabuty’s infamous defense of slavery over at Episcopal Café should do the trick. I think it is the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other theological conservatives that the gospel as understood by past ages is sufficient in the present. That view doesn’t survive much inspection of the past, when Christian churches and theologians justified slavery and the vilest anti-Semitism, and that’s only a part of the foreground. Friends have recently returned from President Obama’s home state of Hawaii, where they saw striking reminders of the inequality nourished and fostered there by an iniquitous cabal of missionaries and planters—not exactly the home of the brave, to quote Justice Scalia in another context.

A purloined letter: Over a year ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In light of recent events that I may write about one of these days, I took a look at an old blog post that linked to that letter the other day. Imagine my distress when I discovered that the link turned up this. Talk about dead letters! But today I’m happy to report that my letter is still accessible at the Post, though it is now in a different place. Indeed the listing of my letter amongst regular articles in the paper makes me feel less snake bit.

—though I didn’t exactly get a byline . . .