Secular music

Since the vast majority of secular vocal works of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were written with soloists in mind rather than a chorus, this repertory will be dealt with in a later section of this article. A truly secular choral tradition does not really emerge until the 17th century, apart from dramatic works, which are mainly dealt with in the section on opera. Choruses were, however, supplied by way of incidental music to plays in the late 16th century; outstanding examples include the music written in 1585 by Andrea Gabrieli for the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles and that of Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi for Battista Guarini’s play Il pastor fido (1590; The Faithful Shepherd). Choruses appear in 17th-century drama from time to time, as well as in masques and comparable extravaganzas. In the age of Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Purcell, and Matthew Locke, their position is clearly established. Secular cantatas tended for the most part to rely on solo voices, and when the chorus does make its appearance it sometimes consists only of three-part writing, as in Purcell’s setting of Abraham Cowley’s poem “If ever I more riches did desire.”

The majority of Bach’s secular cantatas call for solo voices only, in addition to the orchestra. Among those that do make full use of the chorus are Phoebus and Pan (Geschwinde, geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde, BWV 201; 1731), the Birthday Cantata (Schleicht, spielende Wellen, BWV 206; 1733), and the Hunt Cantata (Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd, BWV 208; 1716). The choral writing in Handel’s secular cantatas and odes tends to be as massive and dignified as in the best of his oratorios, yet they are on the whole less frequently performed in the 20th century; as a group they do not fit easily into any single category. Athalia (1733) draws its inspiration and plot from the drama by the 17th-century French playwright Jean Racine; Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (1708; The Triumph of Time and Truth) is an allegory deriving from two of the composer’s youthful Italianate compositions; Alexander’s Feast (1736) and the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (1739) both have texts by the 17th-century English poet Dryden; and the trilogy L’allegro, Il penseroso, ed il moderato (1740) is based on the poetry of another Englishman, John Milton.

Those powerful and opposite poles, church and opera, monopolized choral writing for many years, and apart from isolated works of an occasional nature there is little in the truly secular field until Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia (1808), an unusual work in nine movements, the first seven of which are a set of variations for piano and orchestra. Voices are introduced only in the eighth movement—solo voices at first, singing verses in praise of music by a minor German poet of the early 19th century named Christoph Kuffner, then the choir, so that the previously dominant instrumental texture is gradually and effectively modified to include richly deployed vocal sonorities that assist the work to a climax in the same way as in the later Choral Symphony.

This gigantic work, the ninth and last symphony by Beethoven, is planned in such a way that the choral finale is the only proper and logical way for it to end, although performances have been given where the finale has been omitted (using the scherzo as ending). The choral finale of the Ninth Symphony grows from the fertile soil of its predecessors and becomes a structural, thematic, and aesthetic necessity. It is notoriously difficult to perform, as Beethoven often seems to treat the singers like instruments.

The influence of his Ninth Symphony on later symphonic literature was considerable. Beethoven’s bravura choral writing sent its echoes to the outer limits of the Romantic era, and there were many subsequent essays in the integration of choral and orchestral forces. In La Damnation de Faust, Opus 24 (1846), Berlioz uses the weight of massed voices in an imaginative and dramatic way; in contrast, in his Roméo et Juliette symphony the voices tend to serve as an extra dash of colour to the orchestral palette. Brahms made skillful use of the chorus in his Rhapsodie (1869) and Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny; 1871), and Schumann relied upon it throughout his Das Paradies und die Peri (Paradise and the Peri; 1843), a kind of secular oratorio based on the long poem Lalla Rookh (1817) by the Irish poet Thomas Moore. The best of both composers, chorally speaking, is to be found in their many settings of contemporaneous poems for mixed voices, male voice choir, or female choir. Much of this remains little known outside Germany, to the detriment of choral programs that would gain interest from one of Schumann’s finely constructed double-choir compositions or from one of Brahms’s sensitive settings of the poetry of Ludwig Uhland or Goethe.

The technical demands of the choral sections in Antonín Dvořák’s Svatební košile (The Spectre’s Bride), a cantata written for the Birmingham Festival of 1885, are within the capabilities of the amateur choral societies for which it was intended, and in general his treatment of voices shows consideration as well as ingenuity. The macabre plot of this work is a narrative poem by a learned countryman of the composer’s, the Czech poet Karel Erben, who achieved fame as a collector of folklore. Czech folk songs and tales exercised a powerful attraction for Dvořák throughout his life, and some of his best choral music consists of settings such as V přírodě (Amid Nature, 1882) and Trǐ sborg (Three Slovak Folksongs, 1877). Czech poetry gave rise to many remarkable compositions among the choral works of Janáček, perhaps the most memorable being the three male-voice choruses written between 1906 and 1909 that were based on poems by Petr Bezruč: Kantor Halfar (Teacher Halfar), Maryčka Magdanova, and Sedmdesát tisíc (The Seventy Thousand).

In modern Germany and Austria, the most far-reaching attempt to bring together choral and orchestral forces in symphonic literature was that of Gustav Mahler. Unable for three years to find the solution to the problem of a finale for his second symphony, Mahler heard at the funeral of the eminent conductor-pianist Hans von Bülow the Resurrection Ode by the 18th-century German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. He decided to use this poem as a basis for a choral finale in the Symphony No. 2 in C Minor (1894). The use of massed voices for unaccompanied passages, such as the beginning of the ode, and later on with orchestral accompaniment and the collaboration of soprano and contralto soloists, affords ample evidence of Mahler’s deep understanding of choral effects and techniques. The role of the choir is considerably less in his Symphony No. 3 in D Minor (1896), but it is nonetheless highly artistic and imaginative in the setting of the old popular verses Es sungen drei Engel (“Three angels were singing”). The Eighth Symphony (1906–07) marks the high point of symphonic choral music not only in Mahler’s own output but in the entire history of the symphony as an art form. Instead of saving the chorus for climactic effects in the finale, as in his Second Symphony (and as in Beethoven’s Ninth), Mahler integrates it from the very beginning into the complex and many-hued vocal and instrumental colours—eight soloists, a boys’ choir, two large choirs of mixed voices able to project powerful antiphonal effects with orchestra and organ. This Symphony of a Thousand, as it is generally called, presents two texts of a complementary and opposing nature: the hymn Veni creator spiritus and the closing scene of Goethe’s Faust. Mahler’s inspired use of his colossal forces to enhance, explain, and endow with added meaning the divine and human aspects of the two texts is without parallel. His achievement has not since been matched for sheer virtuosity and impact.

It is true that Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (1900–11) calls for even larger orchestral forces than Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, although it has never enjoyed as much success. Choirs have preferred other early works of Schoenberg or those of Anton von Webern.

At the opposite end of the scale are the robust, tonal, and extrovert compositions of Paul Hindemith and also of Carl Orff, whose particular genius for setting classical and medieval texts may be seen in his Catulli Carmina (1943) and Carmina Burana (1937). Modern American choral music has been much enlivened by the contributions of Charles Ives (An Election composed in 1920), Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, and many other eminent composers. Igor Stravinsky, who spent the latter part of his life in the United States, retained his interest in choral writing and constantly sought new ways of presenting the sonorities of a massed group of voices. To his earlier Les Noces (1923; The Wedding), and Symphony of Psalms (1930) for chorus and orchestra, he added the Cantata on Old English Texts (1952) on anonymous English poems of the 15th and 16th centuries and A Sermon, A Narrative, and a Prayer (1961) which is not a liturgical work, though its text is taken from the New Testament.

Twentieth-century English choral music for secular use finds one of its best advocates in Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose early setting of Toward the Unknown Region (first performed 1907) by the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman was followed by A Sea Symphony (1910) based on material by the same poet. Frederick Delius also drew upon Whitman for his Sea Drift (1903) and upon the poems of the contemporary British poet Arthur Symons for his Songs of Sunset (1907). Britten’s genius for word setting is evident in his Hymn to St. Cecilia (1942) and A Ceremony of Carols (1942) and in the handling of the boys’ choir and mixed chorus in his Spring Symphony (1949), which ends with a choral waltz combining syllabic effects and the Old English lyric Sumer is icumen in. Outstanding among contemporary Polish choral works are three compositions by Krzysztof Penderecki: Dimensions of Time and Silence for chorus and chamber orchestra (published 1961); Stabat Mater for three choirs (1962); and Psalms of David for choir and percussion (1958).