Information about the concert: the composers and music
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A glorious concert awaits music lovers, as Congleton Choral Society presents its Spring concert on April 13th, with a choir of 85 singers, 3 soloists and a 33 piece orchestra. Get your tickets early as space will be limited!
The Composers
Both of the composers featured were famous in their lifetimes and enjoyed the riches their musical talents brought them. Both knew the value of a musical ‘earworm’ and were contemporaneous but very different. Think of a great English composer with memorable tunes and Elgar comes to mind. Think of a great Italian composer with memorable tunes and Puccini presents himself.Both found happiness and stability through marriage, although each had his own difficulties. Puccini eloped with a married woman, causing a huge scandal and Elgar married a colonel’s daughter ‘Alice’ Roberts whose family were so horrified at Elgar’s lowly status – he worked in a shop at the time – and Roman Catholicism, they disinherited her. Less happily both men died of cancer, Puccini in 1924 and Elgar in 1934.
Giacomo Puccini b. 1858, was the last descendant of a local musical dynasty in Lucca, where they had composed church music and the occasional opera for 124 years. Orphaned young, his musical education was supervised and helped by his uncles. He is a composer known primarily for his operas and is regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi. His most famous works are La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot with the first three amongst the ten most frequently performed operas worldwide, despite condescension by some music critics who find his music insufficiently sophisticated or difficult.
Edward Elgar was born in a small English village in 1857 and was musical from an early age, along with his six siblings. His friend and biographer wrote that Elgar's early surroundings had an influence that "permeated all his work and gave to his whole life that subtle but none the less true and sturdy English quality”. Elgar is probably best known for the first of the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches, familiar to millions of television viewers all over the world every year who hear it at the "Last Night of the Proms". He told his friend Dora Penny, "I've got a tune that will knock 'em – will knock 'em flat".
The Music
Puccini composed the Messa di Gloria as his graduation exercise with its first performance in Lucca on July 12, 1880. Somewhat like Elgar’s The Music Makers, it received a lukewarm response, belying the richness and variety of the music, and was not performed until sixty years later. Puccini fans will spot some of its themes in other works, such as the Agnus Dei in his opera Manon Lescaut and the Kyrie in Edgar.Elgar composed The Music Makers for the Birmingham Festival in 1912 and was his last major choral work. It was received politely but without enthusiasm; again a mystery given its exquisite melodies. The text of the work is the 1874 poem Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy. The mood is clear in the first lines, which depict the isolation of the creative artist:
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams...
But the verse ends postively:
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams...
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Of the world for ever, it seems.
For Elgar fans the piece is satisfyingly scattered with musical references to his other works, The Dream of Gerontius, Sea Pictures. the Symphonies, the Violin Concerto and "Nimrod" (from the Enigma Variations); but most of the music however is original.
Sandie Boynton (editor: Phil Edwards)
Congleton Choral Society © 2024
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