A Most Sublime Torso: Unraveling the Threads of the Mozart Requiem

 

Wolfgang Amade' Mozart
The unfinished
enlargement of the original
1782 oil painting by
Mozart's brother-in-law,
Joseph Lange

Of the many ineffable compositions birthed from the genius that was Wolfgang Amade’  Mozart (1756-1791) none has engendered more fascination  than his last and most powerful work, the unfinished Requiem Mass. The reasons for the Requiem’s commission, the tragic and premature end of Mozart’s life while he was in the process of writing it, and the strange and unlikely trajectory taken by this haunting composition, combine to make for an extraordinary narrative. 

   
In the summer of 1781, after years of concertizing in and away from Salzburg, and always chafing there under his subjugation by Archbishop Colloredo, Wolfgang Mozart moved permanently from his birthplace to Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg empire and one of the epicenters of musical life in Europe.
Mozart soon thereafter married Constanze Weber, and he developed a reputation and modest income as a piano tutor and musician giving subscription concerts. While continuing to work in the musical vernacular of his time, that of Classical Style, Mozart transformed the felicitous ideas of Johann Christian Bach, and Michael and Joseph Haydn, investing them with an extraordinary tonal harmony and a richness of invention. Mozart achieved an evolutionary summit of sublime and polished perfection across the spectrum of compositional genres: symphony, concerto, string and instrumental trios, quartets and quintets, as well solo piano, lieder, sacred music, and opera.  

By the summer of 1791, Mozart had been appointed assistant Kapellmeister at St Stephen’s Church, had scored varied successes with the three da Ponte operatic collaborations (Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi' fan tutte), and was about to be commissioned by his  friend and fellow mason, Emanuel Schikaneder, to compose a Singspiel, a german-language fairy tale and masonic allegory, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). 

Sometime in July, 1791, under pressure to finish  both Zauberflöte and another commission (this time from Prague, a work which would become the opera La Clemenza di Tito, for the installation of Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia), Mozart received a visitor, the mysterious and so-called “grey messenger,” who asked him to write a Requiem Mass, a musical work for the deceased. Mozart was handed 30 ducats, half the total commission, with the balance to be given him upon its completion. The other strange proviso from the messenger was that Mozart was never to know or inquire about the individual who commissioned the work. 

Amadeus
The poster for the
1984 film, based
on the 1979 play
by Peter Shaffer

    Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman saw the potential to take this incredible story and conjure both a play (1979) and ultimately the eight Academy-award winning film (1984), Amadeus.  In their highly-fictionalized version, Antonio Salieri was the “grey messenger” (here, however, Salieri wears a black, Janus-faced Venetian carnival mask), and the moral of both play and film was the cosmic and metaphysical irony that Mozart, the musical genius with the scatological mouth, absolute pitch and eidetic memory, could effortlessly toss off masterpieces, while Salieri, a devoutly religious man but a journeyman court composer, could only create mediocrity.  Despite many stretches of the truth in both the play and movie, they were both deservedly hailed not only for bringing Mozart’s sublime music to a broader public, but also for demonstrating the creative process of genius. The real account of the commission of the Requiem is more prosaic but stranger than fiction. 

Count Franz Walsegg zu Stuppach (Stuppach is a town 30 miles south of Vienna) was a wealthy gypsum mine owner and a passionate amateur flutist and cellist. His curious pastime was to commission works from professional composers, copy them out, and then pass them off as his own compositions, performing them with his colleagues, family and friends in twice-weekly chamber recitals on his estate at Schloss Stuppach. 

The Requiem commission which Walsegg sought from Mozart through an intermediary was to honor the anniversary of the death of Walsegg’s bride, Anna, who had passed away at the age of twenty from puerperal sepsis in February. The mysterious "grey messenger" who visited Mozart was either Franz Anton Leitgeb, who was Walsegg’s steward, or more likely Johann Sortschan, his lawyer. Mozart sketched a few ideas for the Requiem in August, 1791,  but quickly put away the work to concentrate again on Zauberflöte and Tito. During that time, Mozart was revisited by the messenger, who was checking  back on the Requiem's progress.

     Mozart began to have paranoid ideations that the Requiem commission he had begun composing was intended for his own funeral.  Constanze recalled the two of them walking in Vienna’s Prater Gardens in September, 1791, when Mozart confided to her that, “I believe that I am writing my own funeral mass.” Mozart was convinced he was being slowly poisoned; he was not, neither by the Freemasons, who revered him, nor by Antonio Salieri, though that latter tale became fodder for an 1830 Pushkin play and an 1897 Rimsky-Korsakov opera, Mozart and Salieri.

    Despite his young age at the time of his death, not yet thirty-six, Mozart was plagued with episodes of ill health. The litany of diseases which Mozart presumably had at various times in his include, inter alia, recurrent streptococcal infections, variola (smallpox), quinsy (tonsillar abscess), rheumatic fever, infectious endocarditis, chronic renal disease (from post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis or Henoch-Schönlein purpura), cyclothymia, antimony overdosage (paradoxically, Mozart was self-medicating with this potential poison), subdural or extradural hematoma, and hypertension. Even the possibility of acute trichinosis has been suggested, as Mozart had eaten some under-cooked pork cutlets a month before he died.

   A distinction should be made between Mozart's many possible chronic illnesses and the medical conditions which were immediately proximal to and causative of his abrupt demise.  Peter Davies M.D. (J. Roy. Soc. Med. 1991) has suggested that Mozart died as a consequence of a cerebral hemorrhage resulting from hypertension secondary to an acute nephritis (kidney inflammation); Mozart was likely severely anemic and already in uremic coma. 

No autopsy was performed on Mozart's corpse. The death certificate stated “hitziges Frieselfieber” (“a heated miliary fever”), a common diagnosis of the time, but one which is far too non-specific a term on which to opine a diagnosis. It may relate to the inflammatory rash of rheumatic fever, which in turn may have been a result of Mozart's presumed streptococcal infections. 

Richard Zegers M.D. (Ann Int. Med. 2009) reviewed the records of 5,011 Viennese adults who died in the two months before and after December 1791, and compared that data to comparable months in 1790 and 1792,  finding a higher than normal rate of death from an epidemic of presumed streptococcal infection.    

     Even the details of Mozart’s last days are fraught with inconsistencies. Constanze’s testimony and that of her sister Sophie Weber Haibl not only do not jibe, they were only offered in 1825, thirty-four years after Mozart expired!  On the last full day of his life, December 4th, 1791, Mozart was said to be in bed composing the Lacrimosa and rehearsing other sections of the Requiem with family and colleagues.  Mozart had been working in the prior week with Franz Xaver Süssmayr, a composer of modest repute who was also the copyist who had previously assisted him with several of the Tito arias. According to Constanze, Mozart had given Süssmayr instruction on how to finish the Requiem in the eventuality that Mozart would die before its completion.

The putaive death mask
of Wolfgang Mozart,
either by Count Dehm or
by Taddeus Ribola

     Mozart was extremely uncomfortable by this point, his body markedly edematous (Wassersucht), with myalgias that made it painful for anyone even to touch him. Sophie Haibl recalled that Mozart was puffing out his cheeks to imitate the trombone solo in the Tuba Mirum section of the Requiem when he lost consciousness. Mozart’s physicians, Thomas von Sallaba and Nicholas Closset, two of the most respected in Vienna, who also consulted with Doctor Gudener von Lobes, diagnosed him as having “una deposita sulla testa  (“a deposit on the head)” from rheumatic fever. They hastened the demise of their patient by recommending venesection (blood-letting), creating in him a hypovolemic state, even as he was already anemic from the putative renal disease. At 12:55 AM on December 5, 1791, Mozart died.


Mozart Requiem
Introitus:Requiem aeternam
Note forged signature  by Sussmayr
on  top right
1792 "W.A. Mozart"

    At the time of his death, of the fourteen individual sections in the Requiem, Mozart fully completed only the first section, Introitus: Requiem aeternam.  He wrote out the vocal parts and supporting bass line for eight subsequent sections (particella writing), along with episodic inner instrumental motivic measures in some of the movements, from the Dies irae to the Hostias.  Mozart composed only the first eight bars of the Lacrimosa, but did not put pen to paper for the Sanctus, Benedictus or Agnus Dei.

    On December 10, 1791, Schikaneder and Baron Gottfried von Swieten arranged for a memorial service for Mozart at which the Requiem was played. What Requiem could this have been? What was performed of Mozart’s work was only the completed first movement, the Introitus:Requiem aeternam and a patched-up Kyrie Eleison, scored by Süssmayr and Franz Freystädtler by doubling the vocal parts in the orchestra. 

    Constanze, in significant debt, needing to raise funds immediately, and knowing that there was the balance of the commission owed her for the completed Requiem, began to seek out a composer who could finish the Requiem score as it then existed, in a handwriting style close to Mozart’s, and continue the deception by delivering it as the autograph to Walsegg.  She asked Joseph Eybler, a composer admired by Mozart, to do the completion, but after a few weeks with the autograph he only finished a small portion, and curiously returned it to Constanze.  She eventually offered the score back to Sussmäyr, who completed it and, mirabile dictu, did so in a handwriting style that was indistinguishable from Mozart’s (at least to Walsegg), forged Mozart’s signature on the frontispiece, and returned the “finished” Requiem sometime in late February, 1792.  




Constanze Weber Mozart
(1762-1842)
As a widow in 1802

    The deceptions continued. Though Constanze promised the autograph only to Walsegg and did get the balance of the commission, she also had several copies made of it, one of which she sold to the publishers Brietkopf and Härtel; Constanze shrewdly made money on each sale. Walsegg eventually found out, threatened legal recourse, then backed off when he realized he would be outed as a fraud.

    Süssmayr was later contacted by Breitkopf and Härtel, who requested his statement on authorship. Süssmayr maintained he finished the orchestrations of the Dies irae to Hostias, and composed the Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei completely on his own. The Breitkopf edition of Mozart’s Requiem never mentioned Süssmayr’s contribution.

     Constanze claimed that Mozart had written a majority of the composition, and that there also existed, according to Constanze, some “scraps of paper” (Zettelchen) from Mozart, such as the one containing the other-worldly Amen Fugue" fragment for the end of the  Lacrimosa next to a Rex tremendae sketch, (discovered by Wolfgang Plath in 1962 and the only sketch ever found), which she said gave Süssmayr the melodic ideas for those last three sections, as well as recommending that Süssmayr repeat the theme of the Kyrie eleison after the Lux aeterna in the last movement Communio. This allowed Constanze to maintain that the overall concept of the Requiem, if not every note, was indeed Mozart’s.

Requiem: Dies Irae
Sussmayr completed the inner
instrumental parts

    The first performance of the “completed” Requiem was in January 1793, at a benefit for Constanze arranged by von Swieten.  Walsegg finally performed it (as his own composition!) in December 1793, almost three years after his wife’s passing, had it transcribed for string quintet, and never performed it again. Upon his death, the autograph score in his possession passed to what is now the Austrian National Library, which also received a fragment that Eybler had obtained and subsequently donated (right after he had a stroke while conducting the Requiem in 1833) and another fragment which Süssmayr had been given by Constanze in 1800. The totality of these fragments is the torso which has come down to us as the Requiem and which most modern audiences recognize.

      As a result of these insufficiencies, there have been a number of modern-day completions of the Requiem, including efforts by Richard Maunder, Robert Levin, Duncan Druce, H.C. Robbins-Landon and Franz Beyer. Of these, the Beyer version (1971), which is being performed this evening, has certain advantages. Beyer elected not to add any of his own musical ideas or additional scoring.  He allowed Mozart’s music, with the completion by Süssmayr (who was, despite all the criticism heaped upon him for his compositional inadequacies, a late eighteenth-century composer  in the Viennese international Classical Style just like Mozart, who was Mozart's copyist, who had an understanding of  what Mozart envisioned in his  Requiem, and whose version of it is widely recognized), to stand out.

   Beyer corrected numerous and obvious technical errors that Süssmayr had made, and which, ironically, further demonstrate that the autograph score could not have been only in Mozart’s hand. These mistakes were most evident in the basset horn parts, a clarinet-like instrument which Mozart much admired, knew intimately from his close friendship with Anton Stadler (for whom he wrote the clarinet concerto, K.V. 622, two months prior) and for which he would have never sloppily composed.

W. Mozart
The posthumous 1819 oil
by Barbara Kraft
Gesellschafft der
Musikfeunde
Vienna

     Those two essential aspects of musical genius, eidetic memory and absolute pitch, gave Mozart an extraordinary ability to recall and adapt, whether consciously or not, a vast array of melodic material he had heard during his life; during his Vienna years, he became obsessed with Baroque music and J.S. Bach in particular.  Musicologists have discerned a number of thematic antecedents in the Mozart Requiem. Strains of Handel’s The Ways of Zion do Mourn from the Funeral Anthem of Queen Caroline, With his Stripes we are Healed from Messiah,  and a refrain from one of his Dettingen Anthems, have been found in the score. One of the te decet hymnus Gregorian chants from Michael Haydn’s Requiem can also be heard within (ref. Wolff). 

Yet these possible borrowings do not detract from the many sublime and uniquely Mozartean melodies which abound in the Requiem: four-part settings; archaic double fugue cadences in the Kyrie eleison; the French Baroque motif of the royal double-dotted figures in the Rex Tremendae; the empfindsamer stil melody echoing C.P.E. Bach that underpins the aching beauty of the Recordare; the agitated strings which open the Confutatis and which accompany the powerful double chorus and suddenly create soft arpeggios; adventurous chromatic intervals and  counterpoint throughout; and moments that prefigure Romanticism (ref. Wolff, ibid). Given Mozart’s strong Masonic beliefs, despite his Catholic faith, there are Masonic references in the Requiem as well, in the prominent use of basset horns and bassoons that he had employed in his earlier Freimauermusik, and in certain specific triadic chordal and motivic structures throughout the work.

The Domine Jesu section of
the Requiem, with the
 "Quam Olim d.c. (da capo)"
Note the tear in the lower right.
Were these Mozart's last words?

    Mozart, who had not composed any sacred music since he left Salzburg ten years earlier, was now pointing in a new direction, first with the motet, Ave Verum Corpus (KV 618), which he penned in June of 1791, and then  the Requiem, towards a  textured and nuanced trajectory for sacred music, a style that was at once chordally complex and melodically rich.

           
    The Mozart Requiem has served as an enduring memento through the centuries. It was played at the funerals of Haydn (1809), Beethoven (1827), Napoleon (reburial, 1840), Constanze Mozart (1842) and Chopin (1849), and at the funerals of both of the Mozarts’ surviving sons (1844, 1858). It was part of President Kennedy’s memorial mass in Boston in 1964. Most poignantly, it was performed by over two hundred orchestras and choruses around the world on the anniversary date of 9/11.

     We can never hope to hear the Requiem fully as Mozart had fully conceived it.  There will never be found a version from Mozart’s hand that has not been amended by another composer, and it would be a fool’s errand to assume that this essay has answered fully the many questions which still swirl concerning the Requiem or the cause of Mozart’s illnesses and death. The Mozart Requiem will always be a torso, a musical composition unfinished by its creator. Each time one experiences the Mozart Requiem, even as  they are transported by the architecture and sweep of this composition as gloriously and uncontestably that of Mozart,  it remains the product of more than one mind and one heart.  Nonetheless, this mystical, transcendent work of art is imbued with such an overwhelming feeling of sacred, uplifting nobility and hope, that it will always remain one of the greatest touchstones of civilization.

 ©Vincent P. de Luise, M.D. 2012

Sic transit gloria mundi

Sources:

P. Davies, J. Roy. Soc. Med., 1991
C. Wolff , Mozart's Requiem: Historical and Analytical Studies, Documents and Score,
     U. California Press, 1994

D. Leeson, Opus Ultimum: The Story of the Mozart Requiem, Algora Pub., 2004.

B. Dewitt, Mozart's Requiem:Labyrinth of Deception
     http://www.salieri-online.com/mozreq/pg1.php   2009

R. Zegers, Ann. Int. Med., 2009

© Vincent P. de Luise,  M.D.  2012        

SOPHROSYNE, AND WHY WE NEED HER NOW




As humanity hurtles through time and space in this fast-paced twenty-first century, hard questions must again be asked about what exactly it is that we are doing here, and even more urgently, what it is that we are doing with our lives.  We are stressed out, anxious, off-kilter and unbalanced. 

We worry about this. 
So, we diet (episodically and in the long run, never quite successfully enough), we run (rarely), we do yoga and pilates, drink green (or  preferably white) tea, learn to play golf, eat less bacon, forego that second scoop of ice cream, buy organic tomatoes, and yearn for more sleep. Yet, all of these many and noble endeavors remain fragmented and directionless without an overarching principle on how to lead one's life.

Among the splendid and life-affirming philosophies that were birthed by the ancient Greeks during their Golden Age between the 6th through 4th centuries B.C.E., there is one that is foundational. It is the concept of Sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη).

Sophrosyne was one of the
"Eudaimonia" or "Good Spirits," who
escaped Pandora'"s box, as seen in this
pre-Raphaelite style painting
J.W. Waterhouse (1849-1917)

In Greek myth, Sophrosyne was one of the "Eudaimonia," or "Good Spirits," who, along with Pistis (Trust), escaped from Pandora's box when she opened it. Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, commented on the notion of eudaimonia, defining it as "living well and doing well." A better definition for the present-day would be "fulfillment" or  "purpose." 

The goddess Themis, (one of the original Greek Titans birthed through the union of Ouranos (Uranus, or Sky) and Gaia (Earth)), also manifests  the qualities of Sophrosyne in the aspect of   "divine order."

Themis,
Divine Order

  
I have long enjoyed going to the Online Etymology Dictionary (that other O.E.D.), to find the sources of words, back to their P-I-E (Proto-Indo-European) roots. 
The P-I-E sources for Sophrosyne:

Sophrosyne Greek, “prudence, moderation,” from sophron “of sound mind, prudent” (see Sophronia):

Sophronia Greek, feminine, proper name, from sophronia, from sophron, sophronos, "discreet, prudent," prop. "of sound mind," from sos, "safe, sound, whole" + phren, " heart, mind, midriff."

The Egyptian
foundational goddess
Ma-at, embodying
Restraint, Justice,Balance

Inherent in the notion of Sophrosyne is the concept of moderation, integrity and humility, that everything that the individual does should be done in perfect balance. These ideas are so essential that all great civilizations have thought about them and grappled with their meaning and import. Before the Greeks, the Egyptians recognized the relationship of balance and integrity, and anthropo-morphized it in the goddess Ma-at, which they also rote about as the principle of Ma-at. To the Egyptians, Ma-at was a central tenet of an individual leading the "good life," the life of balance, restraint and self-awareness. Ma-at was represented by a young woman with an ostrich feather on her head, which was used on a balance scale as a weight against the "lightness" of a person's heart before they entered the after-life.

As Helen North discusses in her eponymous book on the subject, Sophrosyne contains all of these many and disparate principles of self-knowledge, self-awareness and self-restraint. Sophrosyne thus becomes a moral belief system which, if intuited and practiced, can lead to a healthier and more wholesome life.

The Greek philosopher Socrates equated Sophrosyne with temperance, "everything in moderation," and that those who practiced this belief system, "would not need medication except in the most extreme of cases." Socrates believed that the pursuit of self-development was more noble than the achievement of material wealth, and that virtue was the most valuable of all of one's possessions.

Socrates' pupil, Plato, wrote about Sophrosyne in his Republic, as one of the four cardinal virtues, along with prudence, justice and fortitude.  Plato stated that physical exercise should be done in combination with "cultivating the mind" and "exercising the intellect" which would accrue to the betterment of one's memory. This concept of mind-body synergy was the personification of Sophrosyne. 

One of the virtues of Sophrosyne is self-control. For the Stoics, Sophrosyne was one of the cardinal virtues, along with courage, prudence and justice. Plato, in the Charmides, discusses this attribute of Sophrosyne.

The Romans conceptualized several ideas akin to Sophrosyne: in Juvenal's maxim, mens sana in corpore sano, which captured the balance and mutual necessity of "the sound mind in a sound body," and in their constructs of constantia (fidelity), sobrietas (restraint), temperantia (temperance) and dignitas. The term dignitas  does not translate to "dignity" as one might intuitively expect; it is more complex and nuanced than that. In the Roman context, dignitas was defined as an aspect of social standing, wherein a person's integrity was seen as a manifestation of the idealized life, much as the Egyptians understood a life under the rubric of Maat. 

Sophrosyne is also rooted in the notions of balance and health-mindedness.  The concepts of balance and integrity are embedded in the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and the analects of Confucianism.

The universality of these ideas can be found, for example, in Hinduism, where parallels to Sophrosyne are seen in the concept of dharma (the law supporting the order of the universe),  in the hathayoga (the balancing of opposite forces), and in the tenet of artha  The artha is one of the four puruṣārthas (Sanskrit पुरुषार्थ : "goals of life")  within Vedic belief, which concern themselves with the concept of "proper living" as espoused in its great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Thus, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Hindu philosophies each contain similar concepts embedded within Sophrosyne.

A few years ago, I enrolled in the course in Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Mindfulness, viewed through the lens of Sophrosyne, becomes its modern-day avatar, a philosophy which also incorporates balance, thoughtful (which is to say, mindful) quietude, self-observation, meditation and basic hathayoga. It was at the U. Mass Medical Center in 1979 that Dr. Jon-Kabat Zin first defined and then developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, articulating it as a methodology for reducing life stress and anxiety, and increasing life balance. Over the last thirty-five years, a rich and robust series of controlled trials published in the peer-reviewed literature, at different medical centers, has corroborated both the validity and efficacy of Mindfulness.

What struck me as I got to know some of my fellow students in the Mindfulness course was that many were health care professionals as myself - there were physicians, nurses, medical technicians in our group. What also became abundantly evident as the course unfolded was how necessary this type of strategy is in the lives of us all.

One of several tools one learns in Mindfulness practice is to internalize, and then actualize in daily practice, the acronym S.T.O.P. - Stop, Think, Observe, Proceed. The S.T.O.P. acronym has utility as a response to life stressors. Even as this S.T.O.P. mnemonic may appear to be yet one more self-evident and "throw-away" concept, it is also a much ignored aspect of modern-day life. There seems to be no time to stop and observe anymore. Today, society moves at warp speed, with multi-tasking being largely rewarded, and only rarely punished (for example, if one gets caught texting while driving). There is no time to actually listen, to smell the flowers, as it were. Yet the Mindfulness practitioner actually takes the time to think and observe before responding. Responding,  instead of Reacting Reflexively.

Andrew Weill M.D. has coined the term "news fast." Avoid TV, radio and internet news for, say, a week. Read books.  Yes, a physical book. Look at nature. Play music, or an instrument, if you do. See what happens to your stress and blood pressure.

Chade-Meng Tan, one of the original engineers at Google, founded a course at the company that he named "S.I.Y." for "Search Inside Yourself." He developed S.I.Y. with nine instructors in mindfulness in the workplace. One of the mantras in the S.I.Y. course is a notion similar to S.T.O.P. and has its own acronym - S.N.B.R.R. for "Stop, Notice, Breathe, Reflect, Respond." (Given that this is Google, that acronym also has an affectionate technological nickname - "Siberian North RailRoad"). Both of these mantras - The Mindfulness S.T.O.P. and the S.I.Y. term S.N.B.R.R.- remind us to reflect and respond, and NOT simply react, to stress.

In the workplace, this concept of reflection and response leads to more mindful interactions with colleagues, mindful e-mailing (meaning not just firing off endless reactive e-mails, but taking the time pre-emptively to think about the recipients of those myriad zingers), and less anger, envy and resentment among coworkers.

A common response one gets when telling peers and colleagues about the Mindfulness course is that, to them, it sounds and feels way too "touchy-feely" or "new age." 
Yet many of the principles intrinsic to Mindfulness are the very things that we already do in our daily routines, whether individually or in groups. Yoga, for example, is quite popular as a stand-alone activity, even rising to the level of cult sport-like status in some circles. Blending some of the more straightforward tenets of yoga's basic postures and salutations (asanas) with mindful meditation can become a potent resource in achieving life balance. Others of us meditate, engage in breathing exercises, or spend time in quiet reflection, all of which are aspects of Mindfulness, during our increasingly busy and disrupted days.

Within the quiet place that Mindfulness resides, one does not judge, one does not react, one is never defensive. Instead, Mindfulness teaches the concept of being "in the present moment," of acceptance and letting be, and that beyond a certain point, no one is truly in control.

I believe that aspects of Sophrosyne should populate medical school education, as part of what I have termed and collated as  "A Curriculum in Compassion." This curriculum of  "High Touch" should include narrative and reflective writing, mindfulness and yoga, art and aesthetic appreciation, basic music performance and appreciation, dance and movement, and a deeper understanding of nutrition and exercise. The skills that comprise the curriculum would be transferred to the medical students, throughout their four years of medical school, thus informing them as physicians. This curriculum should also be extended back into college and university in the education of "pre-meds", and extended forward into the internship and residency years, and into clinical practice when physician burn-out and disengagement is greatest.

Sophrosyne is no longer a long-forgotten  Greek word; it has been reborn in our own time. Sophrosyne has become a vital and relevant concept today, spawning modern-day correlates like S.T.O.P. and S.N.B.R.R., and being a part of a humanistic medical school  education, indeed a roadmap for everyone, that when practiced, will be enduring and life-enhancing.

copyright 2012 Vincent P. de Luise M.D. A Musical Vision.

Food, Wine and Operatic Song to headline upcoming Woodbury Gala

This is the flyer and the press release  for The Litchfield Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala - A Musical Feast! which will be held on Saturday, September 8^th, 2012, from 6 PM to 10 PM at The Country Loft, 557 Main Street South, Woodbury CT. Tickets are 100 dollars. Please call 203-266-4500 for tickets and reservations. (Below the flyer is the press release, which was also published as part of a feature article that appeared in LCT, The Litchfield County Times, written by editor Douglas Clement, Friday, August 24, 2012  www.countytimes.com).

      On an uncommonly warm early spring day in April, Karen Hughes of Abrash Galleries, Carole Winer of The Country Loft and Vincent de Luise were in a musical mood. As they shared a bottle of prosecco and some cheese in the aerie of one of Woodbury’s Main Street bistros, the conversation soon turned to song. They noticed that there weren’t that many cultural goings-on in this part of Litchfield County in the summer, and very few that featured vocal music.  Tanglewood, Caramoor and Music Mountain each had their own long-standing summer events, but they all were a bit far away, even by car. So, the trio began to discuss the possibility of joining forces to put together a summer dining and musical event in the community.

    From that germ of an idea at an informal meeting in May was birthed  The Litchfield  Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala !   “A Musical Feast!”, to be held on Saturday evening, September 8^th, on the grounds of  The Country Loft , on Main Street South in Woodbury.

The expansive and verdant grounds of The Country Loft,
the venue for the Sept. 8th Gala

    The trio also decided at their wine and cheese get-together that the Gala they had just conjured should not be a one-off event; rather, there should be an enduring purpose for the festivities, one that would be on-going and resonate with many in the community and beyond.

     And so, from that additional concept, they founded a new non-profit arts organization, The Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation (CSOF). CSOF will serve to support a summer residency in operatic vocal training, as well as engage in educational outreach by bringing operatic music to grade schools and elementary schools, to introduce the art form to the next generation of concert goers.  The Gala on September 8^th will thus also be the first fundraiser for CSOF.

    The evening will unfold with a farm-to-table tasting  dinner curated by four of Connecticut’s most renowned chefs - Tom Gould of Brass City Bistro, Denis Niezes of Ovens of France, Carole Peck of Good News Café, Jerry Reveron of Taft School and founding chef of The Woodward House, and Rio Alexander, each of whom will use locally-sourced produce and ingredients to fashion their entrees. The dinner will be paired with wines selected by the chefs.
 

    The repast will be followed by an hour-long recital of vocal highlights from some of the world’s most beloved operas, including works by Rossini, Puccini, Verdi, Mozart and Bizet, as well as selections from America’s own composer and conductor laureate, Leonard Bernstein and his sparkling musical  (really, an American opera),  Candide.  After the recital, guests will be able to linger on and savor French-styled desserts, coffees and teas.

   
The Gala will take place on the lovely and expansive grounds of The Country Loft, which has its own interesting history. In 1745, Deacon Samuel Bull moved from Farmington to 100 acres in Woodbury where he set up a blacksmith business and built the Bull House, barns and silo, all of which became the Samuel Bull Homestead. The Bull family lived on the property until 1994, when the buildings and 19 acres of the land, including a pond framed by a dramatic rock escarpment, were purchased by Ms. Winer to create The Country Loft, an antiques dealership specializing in late 18^th century and 19^th century French antiques.

    Putting on large-scale events like the September 8^th Gala is nothing new to Ms. Hughes, Ms Winer or Dr. de Luise. Ms Hughes and Ms. Winer have mounted several highly successful hospital and special-cause fundraisers at The Country Loft and elsewhere in Woodbury and Roxbury, each drawing several hundred guests. Dr. de Luise, a retired area ophthalmologist who still teaches at Yale School, Medical and Weill Cornell Medical School, has also been active over the years as a clarinetist, organizing the thirteen-concert Connecticut Mozart Festival in 1991, and before that, co-founding the annual classical music recital of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

    Dr. de Luise also serves on the Music and Medicine Initiative at Weill Cornell Medical College and on the Board of Directors of the acclaimed Opera Company of Brooklyn. It is his relationship with that superb New York City-based musical organziation that became another key reason he wished to bring opera to Woodbury.              
                                                                               

     Beyond that, there is simply the natural and wonderful connection between fine dining and great music.

   “There is a long tradition of food and wine with opera,” says de Luise. “When you think about it, more than a few operas feature food and wine. Some operas even have banquet scenes, most famously the one in the second act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, when the Don invites the “Stone Guest” (in reality the already dead Commendatore) to dinner, right before the Don’s own inevitable demise. In Verdi’s Macbeth, there is a Lucullan feast of a banquet, and Verdi’s title character in his opera Falstaff has already eaten and drunk pretty much the whole menu at the tavern at the Garter Inn by the middle  of  Act 1 !

    “And even opera novices will recognize the drinking song, “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” from Verdi’s La Traviata, one of the most famous of all operatic melodies, which will be a featured ensemble piece at the Gala, replete with champagne glasses, no less ! " added de Luise.

   “The relationship between food and opera extends even to opera’s own superstars,” de Luise went on. “Back in the 1920s, the Australian soprano Nellie Melba was so popular that several dishes were named after her by their creator, the master French chef Escoffier, including peach Melba and Melba toast. The Italian coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini's vocal talent has lived on in the popular dish, chicken Tetrazzini.”

The Renée Fleming-inspired Daniel Boulud
dessert "La Diva Renée"

   de Luise went on to mention that “in our own day, the reigning American soprano, the luminous Renée Fleming, has captured the imagination of so many, including another great French chef, Daniel Boulud, who has created a sumptuous dessert in her honor, called, what else? “La Diva Renée.” It is, according to Ms. Fleming’s website, “… a confection of a sablé cookie layered with hazelnut wafers, milk chocolate-Champagne Chantilly,  a    chocolate biscuit with a coating of bittersweet chocolate, and a final layer of an almond-Amaretto biscuit crowned with a milk chocolate emblem sporting the notes of the Marschallin’s aria from Richard Strauss'  (opera)  Der Rosenkavalier” “And it all sounds at once sinfully delicious and absolutely scrumptious,” added de Luise. Que Magnifique !

    Dr. de Luise has invited four splendid singers from New York City's acclaimed Opera Company of Brooklyn to perform the recital portion of the Gala. Soprano Roseanne Ackerley is a graduate of Mannes College of Music and has performed with Connecticut Grand Opera and Miami Lyric Opera. Tenor Darren Anderson, a graduate of the Opera Institute at Boston University, has appeared with New York City Opera, Glimmerglass Opera and Boston Lyric Opera. Mezzo-soprano Lauren Pastorek has degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Cincinnati Conservatory and has performed at City Center and Symphony Space in New York City, as well as with Opera Brooklyn. Baritone Kenneth Overton, a winner of the national Leontyne Price Competition, has appeared with San Francisco Opera, Opera Memphis, Sacramento Opera and the Norwalk Symphony. Maestro Jay Meetze, a graduate of Cincinnati Conservatory’s Masters Degree program in conducting, has been leading Opera Brooklyn since he founded the Company in 2000 and will conduct the vocalists at the Gala. Pianist Ming Kwong, who among his many appearances has performed at Tanglewood and Glimmerglass is one of the master class pianists of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, will be the accompanist.

    Of course, it wouldn’t be a true gala without some surprises - both musical and culinary - in store for the attendees as well !

    Attire for the Gala is casually elegant.

    “Food, wine and song! Curated by stars, performed by stars, under the stars, on September 8^th !"

The Litchfield Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala ! A Musical Feast!  will be held on Saturday, September 8^th, 2012, from 6 PM to 10 PM at The Country Loft, 557 Main Street South, Woodbury CT. Tickets are 100 dollars. Please call 203-266-4500 for tickets and reservations.

The Litchfield Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala !

SAVE THE DATE!
SEPTEMBER 8TH, 2012

The Litchfield Hills Food,
Wine and Opera Gala
"A Musical Feast!"

 at: The Country Loft
557 Main Street South
Woodbury, CT

Tickets: 203-266-4500

   The  Litchfield Hills Food, Wine and Opera Gala, "A Musical Feast!", will take place on Saturday evening, September 8th, 2012, from 6 PM to 10 PM, at The Country Loft, in Woodbury, Connecticut.

    It will be an evening of wonderful farm-to-table dining, fine wines  and glorious operatic arias, all to benefit a new  music foundation, The Connecticut Summer  Opera Foundation (CSOF)  www.ctsummeropera.org  

   The goals of CSOF are twofold: first, to  provide support for conservatory-trained vocalists to study operatic technique and performance through an annual two-week summer program , with mentor-student teaching, while ensconsed here in the beautiful and serene Litchfield Hills; second, to engage in educational outreach by presenting opera highlight programs to grade schools and middle schools, thereby introducing the next generation of concert goers to this sublime art form.

The Gala on September 8th evening will unfold with a spectacular farm-to-table dinner with paired wines,  prepared by three of Connecticut's most celebrated chefs: Carole Peck of Good News Cafe, Tom Gould of Brass City Bistro, and Jerry Reveron, founder of the Woodward House and executive chef at the Taft School.

   
    I have invited some of the operatic vocalists from Opera Company of Brooklyn (OCB), on whose Board of Directors I serve, to perform a program of operatic highlights after the dinner. OCB, which mounts concert performances of opera  in midtown Manhattan venues, features and mentors conservatory-trained operatic vocalists from Juilliard, Mannes College, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, Yale and Harvard.  We will be featuring four of these splendid singers at the Gala - lyric soprano Roseanne Ackerley, mezzo-soprano Lauren Pastorek, tenor Darren Andersen and baritone Kenneth Overton. Maestro Jay Meetze will conduct and Ming Kwong will provide piano accompaniment. There will be other musical surprises as well !
  
     I won't tell you what the food courses will be. But, I will give you a lagniappe, a musical aperitif as it were, from the opera program. One of the pieces to be performed at the Gala on September 8th is the famous duet from George Bizet's Le Pecheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers ), the iconic Au fond du temple saint. Here is a 1957 performance  by tenor Jussi Bjorling and baritone Robert Merill, what many consider the best essaying of this most famous of operatic arias:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PYt2HlBuyI&feature=related

    Food, wine and song, curated and performed by stars, under the stars, on September 8th !
     Tickets are $ 100. All proceeds after expenses will  go to benefit The Connecticut Summer Opera Foundation. For more information, please call 203-266-4500 or go to  www.ctsummeropera.org

   

Choral Societies Capture Grandeur and Beauty of the Sea

(This essay will be published as a music review of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 1  in D major "A Sea Symphony," and Camille Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 3 in C minor "Organ Symphony,"  by the Connecticut Choral Society and the New Jersey Choral Society under the baton of Maestro Eric Dale Knapp at The Fine Arts Center at Naugatuck Valley Community College on June 3rd 2012).

Wave Series-Momentum  by Ira Barkoff, whose
 work was featured as part of the multimedia
experience which accompanied the
performance of A Sea Symphony

    “Behold the Sea!”  Indeed.  On Sunday (June 3rd) a capacity crowd at the Naugatuck Valley Community College Fine Arts Center in Waterbury did just that, as the Connecticut Choral Society joined forces with the New Jersey Choral Society under the masterful direction of Maestro Eric Dale Knapp, in a stunning performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ neglected masterpiece, his Symphony No.1 in D major, known as A Sea Symphony.

    It is lamentable that so many works of Vaughan Williams, one of England’s greatest composers, remain underperformed. Most music lovers know Vaughan Williams as the British composer who often used pastoral and folksong themes in creating distinctively “English traditional” compositions, but in A Sea Symphony, he crafted a truly modern, all-encompassing musical treasure. Modern as in Mahler, Debussy, and Stravinsky; and all-encompassing as the sea.

    In this, his first large-scale orchestral work, Vaughan Williams created a transcendent choral symphony with solo voices, set to a text drawn from Walt Whitman’s monumental book of poems, “Leaves of Grass,” written in what was then the still controversial style of free verse. Vaughan Williams labored for over six years, from 1903 to 1909, on both which verses of Whitman’s elegiac poetry to use and on the score itself, before premiering A Sea Symphony at the Leeds Festival in 1910.

    To be sure, other composers had previously written music about the ocean. In the 1830s, Felix Mendelssohn wrote three symphonic overtures on the subject, the most popular of which has come down to us as “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage,” and Claude Debussy wrote his atmospheric tone poem, La Mer (The Sea), in 1905. But neither composer had the grand vision  which Vaughan Williams  had  imagined  and  then  actualized in A Sea Symphony,  composed in a way that had never been conceived before, wherein the vocal forces, both soloists and full choral ensembles, shine throughout all of its four movements.

    Vaughan Williams’ unique talent for creating what can be aptly described as “pictures in sound” resulted in memorable and moving melodies in his large-scale compositions. From the opening of A Sea Symphony, the listener is awash in its brilliant chords, which lead directly into an exultant D major chorus rejoicing in and announcing the sea. There is a revolutionary, indeed transformative originality in the chordal structure of this work, even in comparison to Vaughan Williams’ later output, that at times verges on the mystical or religious. Awe-inspiring, mysterious, majestic and compelling are adjectives which can only suggest vast portions of this symphony, and thus, the awesome power of the sea itself.

    The combined forces of the Connecticut Choral Society and the New Jersey Choral Society seamlessly collaborated in their ensemble passages throughout the work to create a shimmering wall of sound, which conjured the oceanic waves. A superb orchestra of selected first-chair players accompanied the singers and convincingly essayed the ascending and descending chromatic passages, evoking those very wave-like undulations. The choruses sang the accompanying melodic lines splendidly, and crisply adjusted to the abrupt changes in dynamics and tempo, channeling in music the fury of fickle weather and water on the high seas.  It is testimony to Maestro Knapp’s conducting technique - precise or grandly gesturing as called for – that he was able to draw such texture and nuance from this fine collaboration of instrumentalists and vocalists.

    The excellent soprano Jessica Rivera made the most of her several brilliant solo turns, intelligently informing her musical lines, with her upper register especially radiant and blooming in the second movement. Mark Womack’s clarion and dramatic baritone voice was ideally suited to announce the power of the ocean in his elegant solo work in the first and third movements. The two singers also had moments of sublime vocal duet, richly intertwining their voices.

     Maestro Knapp has developed a well-deserved reputation for curating "musical concept"  performances that  are truly visionary in scope and incorporate many of the various art forms. Whitman’s complete verses from Leaves of Grass that Vaughan Williams used in his score were all included in the deeply referenced program book. The concert itself began with a prelude that was thoughtfully chosen to complement the Vaughan Williams work, namely the spectacular last movement of Camille Saint-Saens’ magisterial Symphony No.3 in C Minor, which showcased the Choral Societies' accomplished organist (and accompanist) Linda Sweetman-Waters. Before the performance, there was a fascinating and visually rich lecture by Professor Laura Dolp of Montclair State University on the nautical history of England. And, to top it off, the foyer of the Fine Arts Center was festooned with paintings by a number of prominent maritime artists, including Ira Barkoff, Joanne Conant and Charles Raskob Robinson, accompanied by several scaled-down models of the great ocean liners of yesteryear, handcrafted by Michael Jedd, to complete this  thoroughly immersive, interactive and kaleidoscopic feast for all of the senses. 

    An additional acknowledgment needs to be made about the core of this superb group of musicians.  Both the Connecticut Choral Society and the New Jersey Choral Society are fully comprised of dedicated non-paid, amateur vocalists. The word “amateur” stems from the Latin, “amare,” meaning “to love.”  These singers’ evident love of performing the great vocal literature is a splendid example of amateurism at its finest, and we as listeners are the beneficiaries of their abiding musical passions.

Storm by Joanne Conant,
whose works were also
featured at the performance of
A Sea Symphony

Copyright 2012  Vincent P. de Luise  M.D.   A  Musical Vision