HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: O Virtus Sapientiae (1140–ca. 1179)
O Wisdom’s energy!
Whirling, you encircle
and everything embrace
in the single way of life.
Three wings you have:
one soars above into the heights,
one from the earth exudes,
and all about now flies the third.
Praise be to you, as is your due, O Wisdom.
HEINRICH BIBER: Battalia à 10 (1673)
Battalia was written in 1673 during the Baroque era. Some historians have attributed this work as composer Heinrich Biber’s feelings toward the Thirty Year War. This was a religious war fought from 1618 to 1648 involving most of Europe. It began as a conflict between Protestants and Catholics and spread throughout many European countries. The war often used mercenary armies and created much famine and disease that devastated many countries. Biber might have expressed serious emotions about the war as it was recorded that almost half the male population of German states and over a third of the Czechs were killed. Biber grew up in the Czech area and spent his adulthood in the German state of Austria. Battalia seems to be a statement about all aspects of war, including statements about the social and historical impact of war and the toll on humanity.
BONGANI NDODANA-BREEN: “Hymn” from Umuntu, Threnody and Dances
“Hymn” is an interlude from the monodrama Umuntu: Threnody and Dances commissioned in 2000 by the soprano Linda Bukhosini through a grant from the National Arts Council of South Africa.
The title alludes to the hymns that were deliberately sung slowly at weekly funerals in South Africa’s Black townships during the 1980s. This is at the time the apartheid government had declared a state of emergency. Church hymns were not only sung as such slow tempi, but would also be woven with improvised polyphony metrically unaligned to the original metre of the hymn. The experience was an enveloping ocean of sound that held and comforted the community in a moment of grief.
—Bongani Ndodana-Breen, composer
REMO GIAZOTTO: Adagio in G Minor on Two Themes and a Ground Bass by Tomaso Albinoni
Adagio in G Minor is a composition attributed to Tomaso Albinoni. Widely familiar through its frequent use in film scores, the work is slow of pace and solemn of mood, and is frequently transcribed for various combinations of instruments. It often appears on recordings of various short Baroque classics.
This famed work is actually not by Albinoni at all. It is a mid-20th century creation by Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto, who claimed to have found a fragment of an Albinoni composition in the archives of a German library. According to Giazotto, the fragment contained only the low-pitched supporting continuo part and a few phrases of the melody itself. From that meager beginning, Giazotto fleshed out a complete composition according to established Baroque principles of composition, creating something generally in the style of a chaconne, in which a set of repeated pitches underlies an evolving melody.
The new adagio—supposedly only edited by Giazotto, though, in fact, nearly entirely his own work—was published by the Italian publishing house Ricordi in 1958, nearly 300 years after Albinoni’s birth. Although it is not, strictly speaking, an Albinoni composition, it does bear characteristics of the Italian Baroque style, particularly in its overall structure.
It is a gentle and ethereal work, one that has helped to bring Albinoni back to the musical mainstream and preserve Giazotto’s name for future generations. Some scholars point out that even Giazotto’s origin story for the adagio may be a fiction, as no one other than he ever saw this supposed Albinoni fragment whence the few phrases originated.
—Betsy Schwarm, Britannica
ALFRED SCHNITTKE: Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1977)
Concerto Grosso No. 1 for two violins, prepared piano and strings, is the first of Schnittke’s six compositions with the common title Concerto Grosso, written between 1977 and 1993. Schnittke builds his concerti grossi on the Baroque idea of intensive dialogue between orchestra and soloists. Concerto Grosso No. 1 is one of the best-known of Schnittke’s “polystylistic” compositions. Here, there are many “musics” within the neoclassical frame: a melody in the style of a Soviet popular song (the beginning of the preludio and the climax of the rondo), a nostalgic atonal serenade (middle section of the toccata), quasi-Corellian allusions and, finally, in Schnittke’s own words, “a favourite tango of my grandmother’s, played by my great-grandmother on the harpsichord” in the middle section of the rondo. In Concerto Grosso No. 1, as in many other compositions, Schnittke uses fragments from his incidental music and film scores. “One of my life’s goals,” Schnittke remarked about his Concerto Grosso No. 1, “is to overcome the gap between ‘E’ (ernste musik, serious music) and ‘U’ (unterhal tungsmusik, music for entertainment), even if I break my neck in doing so.”
—Alexander Ivashkin
