Context

Performance

Instrumentation

f soli, barnkör, bl.kör och ork

Classification

Operor

Subject heading

Xr

Language

swe

First performance

Date

1992-09-12

Location

Stockholm, K Teatern

Performers

Hillevi Martinpelto, Håkan Hagegård m fl, operakören, barnkör från Adolf Fredrik, Hovkapellet, dir Kjell Ingebretsen

Background

Comments about the work

During the Romantic era, innumerable solo songs were written and performed,but the output in our own age is very small. There are those who say that thehuman voice no longer serves as a source of inspiration, but they are wrong.For one thing, new works of music drama are being composed, and for another,more choral music is being sung and composed today than ever before. Manycomposers have simply changed tracks. Ingvar Lidholm is a typical example.His solo songs are few in number and date from early on in his career, but hiscompositions for unacconapanied choir are all the more numerous and veryimportant It all started with Laudi in 1947. That composition was not written in a vacuum,in the pious hope of a conductor and choir eventually getting to grips with thescore. The occasion was a very tangible one. Eric Ericson and his ChamberChoir were there. Modern Swedish music for unaccompanied choir was bornwith the chorales in Hilding Rosenberg's symphonic oratorio The Revelation ofSt John (1940), but Laudi marked the unique development of selfcontainedchoral compositions which, in the decades following, was to become one ofSweden's voices in international music There is nothing evocatively Scandinavian about Laudi. It is a Biblical work inLatin, with Palestrina and Stravinsky among its starting points The choir openswith long melodic lines - as in plainsong - and ends rejoicingly. Laudi means"songs of praise". The choice of words for this and subsequent works is interesting. Only a few ofthem - such as Fyra körer, 1953 - are based on Swedish poetry. Instead IngvarLidholm turns to the big languages Canto LXXXI (1956) is a setting of a reflectivepoem by Ezra Pound, a morality with the refrain "Pull down thy vanity". It is along, very cunningly contrived setting (technically inspired by twelve-tone music,as in Ritornell, for example), close-packed and full of dramatic climaxes In ... ariveder le stelle, written in 1973, the author is Dante and the words are the finalverse of his Inferno. Dante and Virgil have descended into the circles of Hell,and seen all that is to he seen of human suffering and man's inhumanity toman. Now, at last, as they re-ascend, they see once more the arch of heavenand its shining stars: ... a riveder le stelle. At the beginning of this compositionwe still hear voices of anguish and torment. And then - in splendid chords -comes the indescribable the light can be seen! Finally the soprano, in a high register, sings prolonged vocalises to abackground of sustained, expressive chords. When listening to the music for A Dream Play, let us recall this unique line ofdevelopment in Ingvar Lidholm's output, and especially when we hear the choralsection De profundis (in Act I) and Vindarnas klagan (in Act II). There are many composers for whom literary experiences and literary educationare an essential stage of they artistic development. Ingvar Lidholm is one ofthem. Three times Strindberg Strindberg can mean such an immense variety of things, including idyllicballads and evocative miniatures of natur poetry. This is where Ingvar Lidholm'sStrindberg inspiration begins. Between 1957 and 1959 he wrote A cappella bok,an instructional choral composition progressing from the easy to the difficult -rather like Béla Bartók's famous Mikrokosmos for the piano. The first four movements - the easiest ones, that is, - are all settings of wordsfrom Ordalek och småkonst, the collection of poems published by Strindberg in1905. Välkommen åter, snälla sol is a children's song, Sommarafton a lyricalpicture, Näktergalens sång an onomatopoetic scherzo for sopranos and altos,and Ballad - for baritone solo wit choral refrains - a setting of Sju rosor och sjueldar, one of the bitter-sweet ballads from the Dream Play years. Strinberg,then, means such a great variety of things, and not least to composers. TureRangström knew as much, as during the 1910s he composed both Kronbrudenand a Strindberg Symphony. But in a long-term perspective - encompassingmore than three decades - Strindherg means every bit as much to IngvarLidholm. In 1967 Lidholm presented his first opera, a .Strindberg Opera (!) entitledHolländarn. It was written for television, with Åke Falck directing and withElisabeth Söderström and Erik Saedén creating two unforgettably fascinatingcharacters. The performance was conducted by Herbert Blomstedt. This opera is a chamber play - and a dream play - about the rootless wanderer'slonging for love and the joys of union, and his disintegration in hate, despair anda new solitude. In form (it runs for not quite a full hour) I would describe thiscomposition as a music-dramatic poem Just over ten years later, Lidholm sketched A Dream Play - an evening-longopera - comtilissiolled by the Stockholm Opera and its Director Folke Abenius. Perhaps we should add that Ingvar Lidholm has been addressing problems ofmusic drama ever since the mid 1950s. An opera for radio, based on a play byLorca, remained at the sketching stage, as did a television drama based onNelly Sachs' one-act play Den magiske dansaren.. A Dream Play - something about the music A Dream Play - a play about dreams: what does such music sound like in thecommon mind? Many of us, I believe, hear beautiful sounds hovering freely ormoving in and out of each other or perhaps monotonously repeated. Weassociate with impressionism. Nothing could be more unlike the overture to Ingvar Lidholm's opera - the actualapproach. We have a heavy, austere, forceful music from the trombones andtuba, and when Indra calls out to his daughter ("Where are you, daughter "), wehear, not the powerful bass or baritone voice but a male voice choir! Works of reference tell us that Indra, the ancient Indian god of war, was aviolent personality and a dragon-killer. It could hardly be these tales which haveinspired the beginning of the opera. Instead what is conjured forth is a mythical,as distinct from a human, dimension. The myth - timeless, living throughmillions of people. This interpretation is reinforced by the part of Indra's daughter - before shedescends to mankind and becomes one of us, before she becomes the femaleprincipal character of the opera - being sung by a children's choir (composer'sremark "For she is still so naïve, so inexperienced"). Once more, then, amultiple voice. Ingvar Lidholm himself wrote the libretto, based on Strindberg's drama. Thismay seem surprising. After all, there are so many eminent conoscenti in bothliterary research and theatre. But an opera is an opera. It is very much a workon its own terms, not a kind of abridgement of a play or a novel. It is the musicwhich ultimately sustains the plot, with the composer as helmsman for theduration of the voyage. The libretto was completed in 1979, but was to go through several revisionsafter that. Ingvar Lidholm was also a long time working out the sound of themusic. To begin with, he has related, it was too highly complicated. The directcommunication he is aiming for demands a simpler tonal language. And a moremobile one: the music must be characterised, not only through the creation ofthe characters but also through the orchestral writing, which is more articulatein A Dream Play than in any other Swedish operatic score (I mean this). The"dream form" with all its shifts and sudden, dramatic turns, is a challenge to thecomposer's fantasy. The heavy sound at Fingal's Cave must be given its owntonal language, as must the beautiful, superficial elegance heard across thewater from Fagervik, the mockery of the scene with the Lord Chancellor and thefour Deans must have its music, as must the impulsive mood of the scene inthe lawyer's office, redolent of the memories of life's evil. Needless to say, Lidholm's portrayal of the characters presents the sameabundant variety. But if the nuances of the orchestral writing are fixed in thescore, to the acting on stage there is added everything that the director and thepersonal profiles of the actors can bring it. Even in the score, we find the Officersinging and shouting his "Victoria!" in the widest variety of emotional states:enthusiastically, wistfully, pathetically, sorrowfully ... but every new creator ofthe part will endow the melodic expressiveness of the lines with new substance.Two sections of the score have long been known, namely De profutidis andVindarnas klagan, the two movements for unaccompanied choir. This is aunique feature of the opera. Throughout, as we already know, the choir plays animportant part, and not least in the conferment of doctorates in the church (inAct I), where it sings a hymn, this time accompanied by orchestra, which IngvarLidholm has taken from a medieval manuscript. Rex caeli, domine maris (Kingof Heaven, King of the Sea). Here the composer is moving in a sphere offantasy which we recognise from his orchestral work Kontakion. That work isbased on an Orthodox hymn. In the opera he actually goes as far as to makethe whole of the final scene a paraphrase of the latter part of Kontakion. This, the Daughter's painful farewell to mankind, ends with the whole companysinging a few lines from Stora landsvägen: "Oh eternal one! I will not release thyhand, thy hard hand, until thou hast blessed me!" - with the addition of the Latinwords "Oh Crux Ave Spes Unica" - "Blessed be thou, Oh Cross, our solitaryhope." Those words are inscribed on August Strindberg's gravestone. Text: Bo Wallner. From Phono Suecia nr 70 (1993) Translation: Roger Tanner

List

The work

Composer

Ingvar Lidholm

Source of lyrics

eft Aug Strindberg

Title

Ett drömspel : Opera i två akter

Duration

120 minutes

Composition year

1990

Information

Identification number

111045

Work administrator

NMS (Gehrmans Musikförlag)
Box 42026
Stockholm
Phone: vxl 08-610 06 00
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.gehrmans.se

Format

SCORE

Reference to physical copy

L-klav

search.example

Preview