Words, Ideas & Sound

This concert brings music and big ideas together. Berlioz’s Three Excerpts from The Damnation of Faust tell Goethe’s story with bold orchestral colors. Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, inspired by Nietzsche, takes you on a philosophical journey with striking melodies. Fetler’s Three Poems of Walt Whitman turns the poet’s words into music that’s full of imagination. It’s an evening that’s thoughtful, exciting, and easy to follow.

“Maestro’s Musings” pre-concert talk starts at 6:30pm.

Wes Kenney, Music Director

Shane Sheridan, Narrator

Repertoire
Berlioz – Three Excerpts from The Damnation of Faust
Fetler – Three Poems of Walt Whitman
Strauss – Also Sprach Zarathustra

Three Excerpts from The Damnation of Faust, Op. 24—Hector Berlioz

Most audiences are familiar with Berlioz’ evergreen Symphonie fantastique, with its lurid and phantasmagorical program. It is his best-known work, and representative of his very French fascination with storytelling. The Damnation of Faust—first performed in Paris in 1846–is somewhat unusual in that it is not exactly an opera, it is not an oratorio, nor a symphony with chorus. In typical Berlioz fashion it is unique. He called it a “dramatic legend”—but it is occasionally staged as an opera; it is scored for full orchestra, solo voices, and chorus. Loosely based upon a French translation of Goethe’s Faust, various scenes in that drama provide suitable fodder for Berlioz’s wonderful musical imagination.

The three excerpts, the Marche Hongroise, the Ballet des sylphes, and the Menuet des follets, taken together, are a commonly performed suite. The Hungarian march was well known, and was simply thrown into the original composition by Berlioz for effect. The composer puts Faust in Hungary (unlike the original by Goethe) where he hears the march past of the Hungarian troops. The tune is apparently based on a traditional Hungarian theme, and the celebrated reception of Berlioz’s version in Budapest motivated him to include it in his drama. 

The ballet of the sylphs occurs after Faust has been lulled to sleep, and dreams of Marguerite. The menuet of “follets,” or wills-of-the-wisps, is from Part III, where, after the beloved Marguerite has sung her famous “King of Thule” aria, Mephistopheles summons spirits to dance around her house. This last movement is a work of eccentricity, even grotesquery. Really a parody of the eighteenth-century, dignified dance, it is full of strange tempo changes, odd “wrong notes,” and other effects. But, it is in the end a true child of the genius of orchestration that Berlioz was, and is a masterpiece of unusual scoring for the orchestra.

Three Poems of Walt Whitman—Paul Fetler        

Until his death in 2018 Fetler was Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. His diverse background includes living as a child in Latvia, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.  An exponent of what he described as “progressive lyricism,” he received his musical education at Northwestern and Yale universities, as well as at Minnesota and the Berlin Academy of Music.   He was a widely successful composer, composing over 150 works, and was the recipient of several national awards.  His self-professed goal as an artist was to “. . . reach out to people.  My goal is the merger of listener and music.”

His Three Poems of Walt Whitman, written in commemoration of the American bicentennial in 1976, sensitively combines music as an evocative, collaborative partner with the drama of poetic declamation. The poems are from Whitman’s most celebrated collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855.  

The combination of spoken voice and music is a formidable one, and the bar has been set high by perhaps the best of the genre:  Lincoln Portrait by Aaron Copland.  Fetler succeeds by adroitly avoiding music that parrots each word, on the one hand, or simply writing “mood” music, on the other.  Rather, he skillfully weaves the two approaches, as suggested by the poems. In each setting his mastery of orchestra and keen ear for instrumental color is the foundation in his remarkable, nuanced partnership with Whitman’s words.

In “I Am He That Walks With the Tender and Growing Night,” from “Song of Myself,” Fetler conjures up a romantic, lush atmosphere to complement Whitman’s evocative celebration of earth, night, nature, and the cosmos.   The poet seems to abandon his human form and simply melds into the nocturnal earth first evoked by bassoons. The second poem is the well known “Beat! Beat! Drums!” that evokes the disaster of war.  Fetler serves up an aptly cacophonous and delirious setting of the crushing effects of war penetrating into every public and private aspect of society.

The concluding poem, “Ah, from a Little Child,” from “Proud Music of the Storm,” quietly and reflectively celebrates all delightful natural sounds as music—divine, universal music played by a cosmic orchestra.  As the movement ends, the child’s innocence is poignantly pictured by Fetler’s use of a toy piano.

Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30, TRV 176—Richard Strauss  

Composed in 1892-93 while Strauss was recovering from serious illness, Also sprach Zarathustra is loosely based upon the writings of the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche.  Until then Strauss had more or less subscribed to the tenets of Schopenhauer and the latter’s view of humanity’s futile striving.  But now, with his immersion in Nietzche, Strauss saw that he resonated with Nietzche’s agnosticism and belief in the power of humankind to assert, exercise, and triumph over its environment.  With or without God, man controlled his destiny.

If there is a single thread that runs throughout the music, it is that of the eternal conflict between man and nature—an idea that is represented by the great simplicity of the key of C major (no sharps or flats) for nature, and the somewhat more complicated key of B major for man (five sharps). While close together physically, they are a world apart musically. 

The work opens, of course, with the famous sunrise prologue, which, while stupefying in its power and grandeur, nevertheless contains ambiguity in the major to minor and back to major chords right at the beginning.  Zarathustra is descending from the mountaintop to bestow his wisdom upon mankind in the fight between good and evil. It is the beginning of humanity: apes to humans to Nietzche’s Übermensch (“superman”). 

In the first section you’ll hear an old ecclesiastical plainchant, following by a lush string passage of almost unbearable Romantic splendor (both depicting true believers in God, seeking an afterlife in Heaven).  In the following three sections you will constantly hear familiar, unifying themes treated variously, as they continue to examine humanity’s engagement with the world’s joys and tragedies, while yet seeking to escape the grave.

In Of Science we find a typical Straussian touch:  Man has embraced science as a solution to its existential hopes.  It fails, of course.   Science is represented by a fugue not only based on the first three notes in the sunrise, but one utilizing all twelve notes of the scale. Moving on, Zarathustra, weakened by his struggle, must convalesce (we’re now in the key of humanity’s futile aspirations–B major).  But a remarkable passage leads us to a most improbable Viennese waltz of stunning beauty (The Dance Song) featuring a solo violin.  What does this mean?  Joy in the midst of humanity’s struggle?  It’s ambiguous.  

Finally, The Night-Wanderer’s Song, introduced by the familiar trope of a bell tolling midnight.  The concluding reality is not a waltz, but a dark meditation.   Human existence, for Nietzche and Strauss, and it would seem, for all agnostics, is a riddle—an enigma.  An attempt to overcome religious superstition. And so the famous ending: soft, high woodwinds float a B major chord of human striving, answered by an equally soft, more insistent pluck of a low C–the note of nature, where we began.  The B major chord tries and tries, but nature always replies with the low C, and, of course, nature wins in the end with the final, soft, but emphatic, say.  Nietzche said “God is Dead.”  Strauss did not, although many of his works dance around that idea–but also that “Man is alive.”

–Wm. E. Runyan

© 2026 William E. Runyan