Fancies & Inventions, for baritone and five instruments, is a work of large scope, lasting almost 25 minutes. The composer has carefully chosen 9 poems from the Hesperides of Robert Herrick [for the full text, see http://herrick.ncl.ac.uk/Hesperides and His Noble Numbers.txt] to provide contrast and variety and perhaps a bit of unconscious autobiography. Several themes run through the cycle. Bitterness toward critics is juxtaposed with the soothing qualities of music; love is viewed through the eyes of an old man. The placement of the songs presents a kind of argument-resolution idea. The harshly declaimed To Criticks for piano and voice alone is immediately followed by Soft Musick, its resolution. The flower-song duets act as nostalgic interludes, and employ deliberately archaic-sounding devices, such as the choral prelude technique in To Davvadills.
In this work, Weisgall has made the voice a virtuoso instrument employing a wide range, long sustained lines, intricate melismatic passagework, and operatic declamation. Similarly, each instrument is treated as a soloist as well as a member of the close-knot ensemble. The instrumental style is varied from song to song. Sometimes on hears delicate chamber music and sometimes orchestral textures. Every instrument has a chance to show off.
The last song of the cycle is a kind of microcosm of the main ideas. the argument is resolved by the soule-melting Lullabies after a big orchestral climax, and the cycle is rounded out with the chiming sheres music that had first appeared in To the Detracter.
The composer writes: This work achieved its over-all formal structure some time after I had finally decided to set a series of poems with differing subject matter, but by a single poet. I realized that what I wanted to do in this instance was to write a group of pieces which, together, would make up a whole, but in which the individual challenges were primarily musical and not dramatic ones. Hence the title. Both words have definite musical connotations as well as nonmusical meanings. Fancy refers to a form found frequently in 17th century English instrumental music, and invention, of course, harks back to Bach. Though neither of these terms is traditionally associated with vocal music, I chose to use them this way because the separate songs making up the cycle do resemble fantasias or Bach-like inventions.
The work is dedicated to Randolph S. Rothschild as a token of gratitude for his many years of continued artistic support and friendship. It was commissioned by the Baltimore Chamber Music Society.
Hugo Weisgall has devoted most of his professional life to the study and creation of opera and vocal music. He was born in Czechkoslovakia in 1912 of German-speaking Jewish parents. Singing was part of his daily life; his father was a singer, in fact is still a practicing cantor in Baltimore, where the family settled in 1920. Even as a child he was familiar with the Schubert-to-Mahler song tradition as well as the major operatic literature, and he played the piano as his father sang. He was produced a large body of focal works including six operats, numerous songs and choral works, and three song cycles: Soldier Songs (1946), A Garden Eastward (1952), and Fancies and Inventions (1970).
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9:04Hugo Weisgall, Fancies & Inventions - Part Twoby lendallpitts808 views
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