From GSC Recordings GSC 7:

One should begin with the poetry, which is where Hindemith began.

Das Marienleben is a cycle of fifteen poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), generally recognized as the finest poet lyric writing in the German language in this century. Others of Rilke's large poetic works - especially the Duino Elegies - are better known than Das Marienleben, but this is nevertheless a very beautiful example of Rilke's art, rich in esthetic and human meanings as well as in religious and mystical ones. Dealing with the life of the Virgin Mary, it invites reference to other art works on the same subject - Giotto's series of paintings in Padua, for example, and Durer's sequence of woodcuts. Stephen Spender, in the preface to his translation of the poems, relates that Rilke's cycle originated in an early (1900?) plan for a volume of Marian poetry to be illustrated with drawings by Heinrich Vogeler. But when Rilke actually set his hand to the task a dozen years later, he had evidently lost sympathy with Vogeler's work.

Nevertheless, Rilke's inspiration must have been at least partially pictorial, for the visual imagery of the poems is very rich and powerful. In the second poem, "The Presentation of Mary in the Temple," all consciousness seems centered in the eye: the poet speaks of columns, steps, arches, space, stones, walls, stairways, vaulting, balconies, clouds from incenseburners, all suggesting a kind of Piranesian architectural fantasy. "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" is almost cinematic: fleeing Herod's massacre of the children of Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary wander across the desert, while idols topple in the pagan temples as the couple with their child pass, and a tree bends to give them shade as they rest. Each poem creates its own picture or reminds one of a familiar masterpiece.

For all the brilliance of Rilke's pictorialism, it is his portrait of Mary that distinguishes the poems. She embodies simplicity and womanliness. She herself is never aware of the purity, devotion, and inner beauty that mark her. In the second poem, where she appears as a child, it is the praise in her heart. not an awareness of her destiny, that overwhelms the majestic scene. In "The Visitation" she feels her own abundance, not the land's and she craves communion not with some heavenly messenger but with another woman. Later, the star over Bethlehem reveals itself as "the shining of her lovingness," not of her glory. At Cana it is her motherly delight in Jesus' powers that makes her urge him to perform the miracle, though later she realizes how she had brought on the ultimate sacrifice "in the blindness of her vanity." In "Before the Passion," when she asks "Why was I raised in the women's house to weave a clean dress with no seam to press against you?" she is still thinking of her son in his untroubled infancy. What could be more touching than the picture of her giving away her two dresses as she lay dying, or the image of her drawing the heavens so close "that her soul needed but to stretch itself a little further." Rilke's subject is not Mary the Queen of Heaven but Mary the woman and mother.

In projecting this image of Mary, Rilke needs no more help from a composer than from a painter. Nor does a composer intend to say again what a poet has already said perfectly. What attracts a composer to a poem is the possibility of creating a musical composition that might illuminate the verse with the composer's kind of light and still live by the laws of music. In this situation, music is metaphor. A few examples at random: In "The Birth of Mary," music is suggested by the image of angels soaring over the house where Mary is being born; of their refraining from song, holding themselves silent. Hindemith's music moves very quietly, hovering harmonically in a state of suspended animation, indulging in no expansive lyricism. It is music that waits. In "Presentation of Mary," the pictorial imagery is Hindemith's point of departure. The description of elaborate space suggests a comparable musical architecture. The form is a passacaglia, twenty variations on a seven-measure subject. This is a cumulative form, growing by addition, just as does Rilke's architectural imagery. Here it gathers power and sonority up to where the poet asks, "How can you bear it?" Then, as the view shifts to Mary, the music is suddenly quiet and slower, and the theme shifts to a higher octave. Lyricism signals Mary's surrender to "the inner signs." At the end the theme descends again to the bass register, the architectural zone.for Mary's fate, as the poet says, is "higher than the hall ... and heavier than the house."

In "Annunciation to Mary" there is a remarkable passage, perhaps the most imaginative of Hindemith's musical metaphors. The angel's entry is likened to the play of sunbeams in Mary's room. In the upper register of the piano a tiny trumpet sounds, with horn-like echoes below. The trumpet sounds again near the very end where the poet says, "This is startling. And both were terrified." Now nothing in the poem hints at trumpets; but the composer means to say that, after all, it is an angel of the heavenly host who is on this extraordinary mission. The trumpet is like a single palpable element in a scene redolent with mystery. It is almost as though the trumpet were "real" and the poem a metaphor. Something quite similar happens in "Birth of Christ." The poem meditates on this event, even assesses the ephemerality of the gifts bestowed by the kings. But his last line, "He brings joy," reminds Hindemith that this is the first Christmas, and that the joy of Christmas is typically represented by carols. In this instance not literal carols, but the stuff of which carols are made, especially harmony in thirds, which become the dominant figure in the piano part, with imitations of it for the voice.

Further relationships between Rilke's poems and Hindimith's music will become apparent to the attentive listener - who will also be attentive to the composer's personal kind of music-making. Song-writing requires that the music observe its own laws as well as those of the text. Foremost among those laws is the necessity of formal organization, for it is through form that content becomes comprehensible. (The reverse is also true.) Although the dissonance level of Hindemith's music is very high, the course of events is relatively clear because of the repetition of motifs, themes, melodies, and instrumental figurations. With only one exception the songs end with recapitulations, more or less exact, of the opening subjects. And it is mostly repetition that outlines the course of musical events and gives the strongest clues to the formal structures. Some of these structures fall into familiar categories, like the passacaglia of 'The Presentation" and the variation form of 'The Death of Mary, II." And sections within the songs have mini-structures of their own. In "Annunciation to the Shepherds," for example, the four lines beginning at "Oh glances shut from light" are sung over an ostinato in the bass. And the whole passage from "You fearless ones..." to "Cherubim would not surprise you ..." consists of a five-fold, slightly varied eight-bar melody. In short, the musical structures are revealed as clearly here as are distances and directions on a map.

As in Baroque music, the vocal and instrumental parts are equal partners in a dominantly polyphonic texture. Only in one song, "Pieta," is the piano part reduced to a mere accompaniment, and though this relationship occurs elsewhere, it is only occasional and brief. These roles are often reversed, however, with a resultant Wagnerian relationship between the instrumental and vocal elements.

These fifteen songs were composed in 1923. They signaled a change in Hindemith's style, a new orientation toward the neo-classicism of which he became the German symbol as Stravinsky was the Russian and Bartok the Hungarian. Das Marienleben quickly earned a reputation as the composer's best work up to that time (he was then only twenty-eight). But for all its reputation, Hindemith became dissatisfied with it, and in 1948 he published a new version on which he worked intermittently for many years. Some of the songs, he said, were completely rewritten five times in totally different forms, and individual passages were altered more than twenty times. The subjection of this youthful, bold, and spontaneous music to a compositional method developed nearly a quarter of a century later engendered considerable debate, though no one could question the composer's right to revise his own work. In spite of Hindemith's eloquent apologia for the revision, published as a preface to the new edition, not everyone was persuaded by the argument. Musicians who had learned the music when it was new and had come to regard it as an essential element of their musical culture, and younger musicians who, without any prejudice whatever, compared the two versions, were not willing to abandon the original version. Ingolf Dahl, for example, found it impossible to transfer allegiance to the revised version after having performed the original repeatedly since the early 1930's. He felt that the early faults were more tolerable than the later perfections, that the inventiveness of youth was preferable to the moral and ethical certainties of maturity. In these judgments, Dahl intended no disrespect - indeed his loyalty to Hindemith, engendered by the early works, remained constant when others of his generation renounced neo-classicism and allied themselves with the serialists.

Happily, the time for polemics on this subject has passed, and this recording makes it possible for every listener to compare the 1923 version with existing recordings of the 1948. It will be more important to make distinctions than to pass judgments.

LAWRENCE MORTON Los Angeles, Calif.


INGOLF DAHL was born of Swedish parents in 1912 in Hamburg, Germany. He was educated there, and in Sweden and Switzerland. In Zurich he served as coach and conductor at the Municipal Opera, leaving that post in 1939 to settle in Southern California, where he became active as pianist, conductor, and composer. He performed regularly at Monday Evening Concerts and occasionally in film and radio studios.

In 1945 he joined the music faculty of the University of Southern California where he taught conducting, composition, and music history, directed the University orchestra, and founded the collegium musicum. He was a very strong advocate of contemporary music and gave Los Angeles premieres of works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Hindemith (including Das Marienleben,), Ives, Copland, and others. He lectured on campuses from Hawaii to Vermont, led the Tanglewood Study Group from 1952 to 1956, and was Director and Conductor of the Ojai (California) Music Festival from 1964 to 1966. He won composer awards from the Society for the Publication of American music, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Alice Ditson Foundation of Columbia University. He was commissioned to compose works for Sigurd Rascher, Benny Goodman, the Koussevitsky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation, and the College Band Directors National Association. Some of these commissions were aided by grants from the Guggenheim and Huntington Hartford Foundations. He died in 1970 while on sabbatical leave in Switzerland.

PEGGY BONINI has had a varied career as a singer in concert, opera, musical comedy, and oratorio, and as an actress in the legitimate theatre. She was a principal singer with the New York City Opera company for several reasons. Her versatile vocal talent has allowed her to sing a variety of roles, from Susanna in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, to the title role in Bizet's Carmen.

Peggy Bonini and Ingolf Dahl first worked together in 1952 while Miss Bonini was still a student at the University of Southern California. Mr. Dahl was conducting Menotti's The Consel, directed by Carl Ebert, and Miss Bonini had been chosen to sing the lead. The combination was very successful and for many years thereafter Miss Bonini and Mr. Dahl performed together in concert.

Mr. Dahl requested Miss Bonini to work on Das Marienleben, because he was interested in the original 1923 version of the work and felt it was well suited to her abilities. The successful performance, in 1967, was for Monday Evening Concerts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the recording was made the following day.

GSC RECORDINGS, 2451 Nichols Canyon, Los Angeles, Ca. 90046.  PRODUCED BY: Herschel Burke Gilbert, Julian Spear, Don Christlieb. RECORDING ENGINEERS: Steve Markham & Paul Ford. MASTERING ENGINEER: Bernie Grundman.