We invite you to read through Michael Allsen’s program notes for the February 20th Organ Concert Series No. 3.
Program Notes
Tenor Limmie Pulliam has already thrilled Madison audiences with a pair of back-to-back performances last season: in the Madison Opera production of Tosca in November 2023, and MSO’s 2023 holiday program in December. He returns to Italian opera in this performance with Greg Zelek, singing selections by Verdi and Puccini. Later in the program, he turns to black spirituals and gospel music. For his part, Zelek plays transcriptions of instrumental sections of operas by Mascagni and Rossini.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Triumphal March from Aïda
Celeste Aïda
La donna è mobile from Rigletto
In 1869, Giuseppe Verdi was asked to provide an appropriate piece to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. Though he refused this commission, a few months later, he read a scenario by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, an invented story about Aïda, an Ethiopian princess held captive by the Egyptians. Camille du Locle, a Parisian impresario had sent the story in hopes of interesting Verdi in writing a piece for the opening of the new Cairo opera house. Verdi, who had grown fairly picky about the stories he set to music by this time, was intrigued, and quickly engaged Antonio Ghislanzoni to create a libretto. Though its premiere was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War (the sets could not be sent from Paris), Aïda was finally premiered in Cairo on December 24, 1871. Verdi did not attend—he hated sea travel and jokingly remarked that “I might turn into a mummy.” However, the premiere was wildly successful, as was a second performance in Milan a few months later. The great Triumphal March comes from Act II. In the great square of Thebes, an Egyptian army is parading after their victory over the Ethiopians. The populace sings strews flowers in their path, and sings a joyous hymn. The mood is broken briefly as the priests intone a solemn prayer. The scene ends with the famous Triumphal March, featuring an onstage “banda” of herald trumpets. At this program, we hear an adaptation for solo organ by Edwin Lemare. One of grand opera’s grandest scenes, this is usually staged with a large chorus and as many non-singing “extras” (Egyptian soldiers and enslaved Ethiopians) as will fit on stage. And, of course, no self-respecting production would be without live horses or an elephant or two! The great tenor aria Celeste Aïda is sung in Act I by the young Egyptian captain Radamès, who hopes not only for victory over the Ethiopians, but who also dreams of winning over the princess Aïda, with whom he is secretly in love.
Verdi’s 16th opera Rigoletto initially had great trouble getting by the Austrian censors who controlled everything that went on stage in most of Italy. Its dark story, centered on the immoral Duke of Mantua, his court jester Rigoletto, and Rigoletto’s daughter Gilda was cited for its “immorality and obscene triviality.” When Verdi and his librettist Francesco Piave did manage to get it on stage at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice , on March 11, 1851, it was a triumph. The hit of the night was clearly the Duke’s Act III canzone La donna è mobile—one of Verdi’s greatest tunes used to set a text brimming with toxic masculinity. Not only was it encored multiple times, it was being sung on the streets in Venice the day after the premiere.
Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)
Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana (arr. Greg Zelek)
In his first opera, Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), Pietro Mascagni was at least partly responsible for inaugurating the new verismo (realism) style. This style featured gritty stories in contemporary settings, with plots driven by sex, violence, and revenge. It began as Mascagni’s entry in a contest for young Italian opera composers, sponsored by a music publisher. The winners would receive a full-scale production in Rome in 1890, and there were some 73 entries. Two of the winning operas—by Niccola Spinelli and Vincenzo Ferroni—have long since been forgotten, but Cavalleria rusticana was a sensation. Mascagni was called back to the stage some 40 times at the premiere and was quickly performed across Europe—and almost as quickly crossed the Atlantic to be produced several times in the United States. It remains a part of the standard repertoire today, often produced as a double bill with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s verismo masterpiece Pagliacci. Cavalleria rusticana, based upon a popular play by Giovanni Varda, is a torrid tale set in a small Sicilian village. A soldier, Turridu, returns home to the village to find his fiancé Lola has married another. In revenge, he seduces the girl Santuzza, setting off a series of events that will end in her disgrace and his own death. The wistful Intermezzo heard here is a melancholy but fervent orchestral interlude which portrays Santuzza’s state of mind as her world crumbles around her. Zelek plays his own arrangement here.
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
E’lucevan l’estelle from Tosca
Nessun dorma from Turandot
Giacomo Puccini composed the grand romantic aria E’lucevan l’estelle for the final act of Tosca (1900). Another great example of verismo style, this opera was centered on the doomed love affair between the painter Mario Cavaradossi, and the singer Floria Tosca. The aria is sung by Cavaradossi as he is languishing in prison, awaiting execution, a passionate love song to Tosca. Cavaradossi is indeed executed, as part of a high “body count” in this work, including Tosca herself in the last moments of the opera: the passionate main theme of this aria returns in the orchestra as she hurls herself from the ramparts.
Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, is based upon a dramatic fairytale by the 18th-century playwright Carlo Gozzi. Puccini had seen a production of the play in Vienna in 1911, and in 1919 he and his librettists Guseppe Adami and Renato Simoni began adapting Turandot as an opera. It proved to be one of the most complex tasks of Puccini’s career, and in the end it was left unfinished at his death in 1924. The opera was completed by Puccini’s protege Franco Alfano and was premiered at La Scala on April 25, 1826. As in his earlier Madama Butterfly, Puccini worked to create an “exotic” character by using oriental elements—Chinese in this case. The story tells of the Chinese Princess Turandot, who can only be wed by a Prince who answers her three riddles. The penalty for answering wrong is death, and a dozen princes have already tried and been beheaded. Calaf, a young prince whose name is unknown to her, announces that he will try the challenge, and to Turandot’s dismay, he answers the riddles correctly. He offers her a challenge of his own: if she can discover his name by dawn, he will renounce his claim and be put to death. Turandot decrees that no one in the city may sleep until his name is discovered. Calaf’s aria Nessun dorma comes after this decree, as he exults in his love for Turandot, and swears to triumph. Even the sound of women in the distance lamenting their punishment for not finding his name cannot break the mood, and he ends with a passionate Vincerò! (I will win!)
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
Overture to Guillaume Tell (arr. Edwin Lamare and Greg Zelek)
Just whether or not there was a real William Tell is uncertain, but Switzerland’s greatest folk hero was mentioned in writing for the first time in the 15th century. By that time, most of his legend was complete: a 14th-century Swiss crossbowman who was forced to shoot an apple from his son’s head as punishment for disrespecting the tyrannical Austrian governor. He later led a revolution against the Hapsburgs who had conquered his homeland. Gioacchino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell is based upon an 1804 play by Friedrich Schiller, where the Swiss hero became a more universal romantic hero and a symbol of freedom from oppression. By the time he completed Guillaume Tell in 1829, Rossini was, without a doubt, the most popular opera composer in Europe. But for a whole host of reasons—personal, medical, and political—he retired from opera composition after Guillaume Tell, very nearly his final large-scale work. (Only the grand sacred Stabat Mater of 1841 was yet to come, though in the last few years of his life, he returned to composition, producing over a hundred small pieces he referred to as the “sins of my old age.”) William Tell was something new for the great master of Italian comic opera—a true romantic grand opera, set in the French style. Though he had written several earlier serious operas, William Tell is unique in the depth of its characters and the grandeur of its plot. It is also Rossini’s longest work: if performed without cuts—as it almost never is today—it lasts over four hours! Its first production in Paris was a success every bit as huge as the opera itself.
The overtures to Rossini’s operas are unfailingly good music, and many have survived as concert works, some after their operas have been forgotten. Like its opera, the overture to William Tell is longer and more profound than its predecessors: more like a programmatic symphonic poem than the usual brilliant and breezy opener. It is heard here in an adaptation by Edwin Lamare and Greg Zelek. It begins with a lovely passage—solo cello and cello/bass choir in the orchestral original—painting a quiet picture of Swiss pastoral life. There are occasional rumbles of thunder in the distance, and the music suddenly erupts into a full-blown thunderstorm. When the storm dies away, there is another pastoral interlude, with English horn in the original, a shepherd’s song in call and response. (Berlioz, who admired William Tell, stole this idea a year later for his Symphonie Fantastique.) Suddenly this calm is shattered by a trumpet fanfare, heralding the approach of Tell’s Swiss army. This passage is if course inextricably linked—for those of us of a certain age—with another great freedom fighter of radio and 1950s TV. Rossini’s intent was to show the summoning of the Swiss people to rise up against tyranny, and their eventual victory.
Moses Hogan (1957-2003)
Give Me Jesus
The next set draws on the rich heritage of black spirituals. These songs, many of them anonymous and dating from the time of slavery, were popularized widely in the 1870s by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choral group—many of whom were former slaves—from Fisk University in Nashville. Their national and eventually international tours raised money needed by the financially strapped college, but more importantly, brought black American music to an enormous audience. Spirituals have continued to be a touchstone for 20th- and 21st-century black singers and composers. Give Me Jesus is one of the few songs in the repertoire that originated among white congregations: it first appeared in Baptist and Methodist hymnals in the 1840s and quickly became a popular song at outdoor revival meetings. The song was also enthusiastically sung by black congregations as well, who adapted it to more traditional spiritual style. The arrangement heard here is by composer, singer, and pianist Moses Hogan. Hogan grew up steeped in the black Baptist traditions—spirituals and gospel music—of his home church in New Orleans. He would eventually lead the acclaimed Moses Hogan Singers.
Hall Johnson (1888-1970)
Ride On, King Jesus
Ride On, King Jesus is an upbeat “jubilee”-style spiritual, which was certainly well known by the time of the Civil War: there is a record of black Union soldiers singing a version of this song while on the march. Like many jubilees, it focuses on the promised life in heaven to come, with its hopeful refrain “No man can a-hinder me!” Composer Hall Johnson, like Burleigh, built his reputation, largely on dramatic arrangements of spirituals like this one.
Wallace Willis (1902 – ca. 1884) and Minerva Willis (ca. 1838 – after 1900)
Steal Away (arr. Harry T. Burleigh)
Like many spirituals, Steal Away features “coded” language—phrases that would be clear to those who sang it, but not to their overseers. Steal Away encourages those who hear it to “steal away” —whether to a prayer meeting safely away from the eyes of slaveholders, or to escape on the Underground Railroad. Unlike most spirituals, we know the songwriters and something about its origins. Steal Away is one of a couple of spirituals (including the famous Swing Low, Sweet Chariot) attributed to Wallace Willis and his daughter Minerva Willis. They were enslaved in Mississippi by a member of the Choctaw Nation, Irish-born Britt Willis, who became a member of the Nation by virtual of his marriage to a Choctaw woman. When the US government removed the Choctaw to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, on the infamous “Trail of Tears,” the Willises travelled with them arriving by the early 1840s. Wallace and Minerva were sent to work at the Spencer Academy, a boarding school for Choctaw boys. At some point in the early 1860s, the superintendent of the Academy, Rev. Alexander Reid, heard the Willises singing and transcribed several of their songs. In 1871, Reid heard the Fisk Jubilee Singers in concert, and gave them Steal Away, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, and other songs he had learned from the Willises. The Fisk group quickly adopted them as part of their repertoire. The arrangement heard here is by Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949), an early 20th century composer whose arrangements were largely responsible for introducing the spiritual to classically trained singers.
Andraé Crouch (1942-2015)
Through It All (arr. Greg Zelek)
We close the set with an adaptation of a gospel song by Greg Zelek. Gospel emerged in as a style in the 1930s, when Thomas A. Dorsey and others began to merge the traditional spiritual with influences from jazz and the blues. Though it was initially quite controversial, gospel eventually became the music of the black church and became the “soundtrack” of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. It has also continued to be a kind of musical sponge, absorbing influences from a whole series of popular musical styles over the last 60 years: rhythm and blues, rock & roll, doo-wop, soul, R&B, hip-hop, and more. Andraé Crouch was a gospel superstar, who was widely known as “the father of modern black gospel music.” Through his own performances, and through collaborations with secular artists as varied as Michael Jackson, Chaka Khan, Elton John, Madonna, and many others, Crouch became a powerful influence across several genres of music. He is credited with over 1700 songs. One of his greatest hits, Through It All, originally appeared in 1972, in a lush soulful version by his group The Disciples.
program notes ©2025 by J. Michael Allsen
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