On a previously unknown composition by Louise Talm

Kendra Leonard

Humanities Commons

LOUISE TALMA’S CHRISTMAS CAROLBy Kendra Preston LeonardIn December 1959, while she was working on the orchestration of heropera, The Alcestiad, American composer Louise Talma (1906–1996) tooka break from her work—something she usually loathed to do—to write ashort musical Christmas card.1 Its recipient was her close friend and thelibrettist of her opera, author and playwright Thornton Wilder. WhileTalma’s correspondence often includes musical settings of short greet-ings or lines from previous letters sketched out in the margins, usuallycomposed in a single line and lasting two or three measures, this work ismore significant. Playfully titled Chorus Angelorum, Piccolassima Fughetta,Molto Tonale, Sopra un Téma, Torentoni Niventis Wilderi, it is—as the titlesuggests—a fugal motet written for three voices without accompaniment,taking as its text the words “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” inseveral translations.2 Talma dates the score as 12–13 December 1959, andit apparently reached Wilder on or around the 23d of that month.Tucked away in a letter from Wilder in the Louise Talma Papers held bythe Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, theChorus Angelorum does not appear in Luann Dragone’s online catalog ofTalma’s works, nor is it listed among her compositions in standard refer-ence works such as Grove Music Online.3 The date of composition places itas being the only work Talma completed while working on the opera,which she formally began on 13 September 1955 and completed inpiano-vocal score on 30 October 1958.4739Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist specializing in women and music in twentieth-centuryAmerica, France, and Britain; and music and film. She is the author of The Conservatoire Américain: AHistory (Scarecrow, 2007), and Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations(Scare crow, 2009).The author is grateful to the outstanding staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library ofYale University for their assistance during her tenure there as the Thornton Wilder Fellow in WilderStudies in September 2009. 1. Thornton Wilder, letter to Louise Talma, 23 December 1959, Louise Talma Papers, Beinecke RareBook and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Uncat. ZA 525 (hereinafter, “Talma Papers”), box 19.2. Louise Talma, Chorus Angelorum, 12 December 1959, Talma Papers, box 19.3. “Compositions,” Louise Talma Society Website, http://www.omnidisc.com/Talma/Compositions.html;Arthur Cohn, Dorothy Regina Holcomb, Sara Jobin/Virginia Davidson, Gregg Smith, “Talma, Louise,”Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public (both accessed 17 February 2010).Dragone’s catalog also omits at least one other work, the vocal piece Revocation, the manuscript for whichis held by the Juilliard School Library. 4. Louise Talma, “The roundabout way a work sometimes comes into existence,” Talma Papers, box10, folder 6.The Chorus Angelorum is notable among Talma’s oeuvre for several rea-sons. It represents a completely tonal work by Talma during a periodwhen she was working in her own distinct nonstrict serial idiom; and isthe only fully tonal work she composed after being inspired to work in aserial style by Irving Fine’s String Quartet of 1952. Further, the swiftnessof its composition opens a window into Talma’s psyche at this point. Shehad just come off the end of a grueling three-year period composing TheAlcestiad and, while still working up to twenty hours a day on the orches-tration, was relieved that the job of creating the piano-vocal score wascomplete. The Chorus Angelorum also comes at a time during which theopera was under consideration by the Metropolitan Opera Company foran American premiere at the new Lincoln Center for the PerformingArts, something that caused Talma both happiness and anxiety at theoutcome. Finally, the work is a very solid—albeit short—representationof the joy Talma took in her friendship with Wilder, who was also thededicatee of the first of her Six Etudes for piano (1954), the ThreeBagatelles (1955), and her Second Piano Sonata (1955).5Talma began composing in a nonstrict serial style in the early 1950s,and The Alcestiad, which she was orchestrating at the time of the ChorusAngelorum’s composition, is constructed of serially-derived motifs used tocreate tonal centers. Although Talma had mostly abandoned the har-monic languages and styles of her training with Nadia Boulanger at theConservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France, which encompassedmastering the compositional approaches of composers from Monteverdito Stravinsky and focused on French neoclassicism, she nevertheless focused much of her serial work on tonal centers. Long parts of TheAlcestiad, her largest serial work, consist of tonally-centered writing, andsome of her sketches for the opera indicate her methods of altering ser-ial elements to fit dramatic moments in which Talma felt that more audience-accessible harmonic language was required.6 The brief lines ofmusic Talma included in other letters and notes were generally atonal,such as the line of birdsong she heard on a trip to Delphi in Greece,which she sent to Wilder on a postcard and later incorporated into theopera.7 For her to write an entirely tonal work, even a short one, in whatshe calls a “Molto Tonale” style at this time is unexpected. The key Talma chose for her work is not, however, so unexpected. TheChorus Angelorum is firmly set in A  major, which Talma associated with740 Notes, June 20105. Louise Talma, letter to Nadia Boulanger, 4 July 1941, Library of Congress, Louise Talma Collection,Boulanger box 1.6. Louise Talma, notes and sketches, Talma Papers. 7. Louise Talma, letter to Thornton Wilder, 19 April 1956, Thornton Wilder Papers, Beinecke RareBook and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 108 (hereinafter, “Wilder Papers”), box 58,folder 1602.happiness and pleasure. In a letter to Wilder dated 2 January 1956,Talma implored Wilder to visit her in Rome, where she was in residenceat the American Academy, writing, “So now you must write and tell me ifyou are going to see me in A flat major—or if not not and if not I shallhave to invent a new key—e triple flat minor or something like that—toexpress my despair.”8 The exuberance of the Chorus Angelorum’s text ofChristmas cheer reflects Talma’s characterization of the key as one repre-senting delight. The tempo is marked “Allegrissimo,” which, like thetitle, is Talma’s own brand of rare playfulness with language and stan-dard musical markings, often seen in her happier letters to Wilder andothers (fig. 1). The Chorus Angelorum was certainly written not just for Wilder alonebut as an entertainment for him, his sister Isobel, with whom he lived,and their guests at Christmas. Wilder was an accomplished musician, buthis friends were not always so capable, and it is probable that Talma hadthis to some extent in mind when she wrote the work. The work beginswith an outlining of the tonic, and the motion of the three lines is pri-marily stepwise for the ease of amateur performers. There is very littlechromaticism: just two modulations in which the harmony moves away toF minor and then returns to A  major. The fugal writing is simple andeasy to follow, and new entrances of the subject and countersubject areconstructed in ways that make the needed entrance pitch easy to findamong the other voices. The subject and countersubject are both four-and-a-half measures long and, like other fugal constructions by Talma,can be employed in several relatively uncomplicated forms to create har-monic and rhythmic interest: as an antecedent-consequent phrase; con-currently in harmony with one another; in inversion and retrograde; andin fragments, which Talma uses to draw elements together at cadentialmoments. The speed with which Talma wrote the Chorus Angelorum is remarkable,even for a brief work. Composition was difficult for Talma, who repeat-edly wrote to Wilder of the agony of writing; she often took several daysto set a single phrase of text, fretting over the placement of each syllable.“I spent the whole of yesterday and today getting the right setting for the one line ‘Admetus . . . ask me again to marry you,’ ” she wrote whileworking on The Alcestiad in 1957. “It’s such a crucial line it has to be justright or it’ll be awful.”9 She made and revised sketches again and againbefore committing a phrase to the full score, a process she compares toLouise Talma’s Christmas Carol 7418. Louise Talma, letter to Thornton Wilder, 2 January 1956, Wilder Papers, box 58, folder 1604.9. Louise Talma, letter to Thornton Wilder, 2 July1954, Thornton Wilder Collection (distinct from the“Wilder Papers”), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 162 (here-inafter, “Wilder Collection”), box 58, folder 1607.Stravinsky’s work habits as described by Robert Craft. “Craft says thatStravinsky makes melodic and motivic jottings and sketches of patternson small scraps of paper. . . . ‘Their pages are erasure-smudged and lit-tered with scaffoldings of serial orders and transpositions of serialgroups.’ Doesn’t that last sentence sound like little me?”10 Indeed itdoes. The documents held in the Louise Talma Papers by the BeineckeLibrary include hundreds of pages of sketches, notes, and rough drafts.Once she was satisfied with a line, she copied it meticulously into hermaster score, carefully drawing every note to match and writing in thetext in a clear print. In contrast to her usual pace, Talma composed the Chorus Angelorumover the course of only two days, and with little or no revision. There ap-pear to be no sketches for the work in Talma’s files, and the score sent toWilder exhibits uncharacteristic roughness in its presentation, includingpoorly spaced measures and text in Talma’s somewhat scrawling cursivewriting. At the end of the third manuscript page, Talma dates the workas “Dec. 12–13 1959” (fig. 2).These aspects of the Chorus Angelorum indicate that it was writtenquickly. Considering that Talma often spent several days working on anindividual line or text or even just a few words, the composition of asixty-five-measure work in just two days is exceptionally rare. Although742 Notes, June 201010. Louise Talma, letter to Thornton Wilder, 2 July 1954, Wilder Collection, box 58, folder 1609.Fig. 1. Louise Talma, Chorus Angelorum: title, dedication, fugue subject, and beginning of countersubject. By permission of the MacDowell Colony.the simplicity of the text and the structured form of the fugue no doubthelped contribute to the speediness of composition, it is likely thatTalma’s good spirits during this period also helped the work along. Talma had reasons to celebrate at the end of 1959. She was relieved tobe finished with the composition of The Alcestiad and was well into the or-chestration phase, and she and Wilder had presented a copy of thepiano score to Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera in May.11 Binghad openly declared his interest in premiering an American opera at theopening of the newly constructed Lincoln Center, and Talma hoped thatit would be hers. In September, New York Post columnist Leonard Lyonswrote that, “On Rudolf Bing’s desk is now the opera whose libretto waswritten by Thornton Wilder and music by Louise Talma. This may be theopera with which the Met would open its new Lincoln Square showhouse. . .” heightening Talma’s excitement for the opera’s prospects. AlthoughBing did not, in the end, select The Alcestiad for the Met, he did notmake his decision until 1960, and so for the Christmas season of 1959,the idea of a Met premiere seemed very much probable to Talma andWilder.12Along with the piano music dedicated to him, the Chorus Angelorum isa testament to Talma’s friendship with Wilder, which began after heheard her Piano Sonata no. 1 and sought her out to learn more abouther music. Wilder was a raconteur and adored hosting guests, attendingparties, and socializing in general, while Talma tended to be solitary, re-treating for long periods to artists’ colonies for uninterrupted work andto avoid the discomfort she felt in social situations. She blamed herselfLouise Talma’s Christmas Carol 74311. Thornton Wilder, letter to Louise Talma, 13 May 1959, Talma Papers, box 21.12. Bing finally indicated in 1960 that he would not program The Alcestiad, after which time theFrankfurt-am-Main opera house expressed interest in producing its premiere, which took place in early1962. Fig. 2. Louise Talma, Chorus Angelorum: final six measures, with Talma’s initials and dates of composition. By permission of the MacDowell Colony.for her sometimes paralyzing social anxiety and inability to relate to oth-ers, describing herself as “pretty aloof”13 and as someone “who has madefor herself an ever-widening desert of solitude—in short, whose every re-lationship, of child to parents, of woman to man, of friend to friend, hasbecome spoiled.”14 Talma overcame her natural resistance to others inher relationship with Wilder, which developed partly through correspon-dence in which she felt free to be open and highly communicative aboutherself and her work. Wilder enjoyed Talma’s constant stream of letters,and for her, his were “always a joy.”15 When Wilder proposed donatingtheir correspondence regarding The Alcestiad to Yale University, Talmareplied that she was happy to do so, but that, “first I must have themphotostated, as I can’t bear not to have them in immediate reach so thatat any moment I can live over again the joy I had on receiving them.”16To date, no other works like the Chorus Angelorum—an unusually ca-sual and quickly-written work dedicated to a close friend with every in-tention of his performing it—have been located in Talma’s oeuvre.Tonal and accessible, it would be ideal for inclusion on a concert of car-ols or other holiday music, and as an artifact of the composer’s life, pro-vides an indication of Talma’s historically thorough musical training, heroutlook following the completion of The Alcestiad, and the love she borefor her collaborator on that work. ABSTRACTDiscovered in 2009 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Libraryof Yale University, Louise Talma’s 1959 Christmas carol, playfully titledChorus Angelorum, Piccolassima Fughetta, Molto Tonale, Sopra un Téma,Torentoni Niventis Wilderi, is a fugal motet for three voices. Written forThornton Wilder, Talma’s collaborator on her opera The Alcestiad, thework is unusual in that it represents a completely tonal work by Talmaduring a period when she was working in her own distinct nonstrict ser-ial idiom, and is the only fully tonal work she composed after being in-spired to work in a serial style by Irving Fine’s String Quartet of 1952. Itis also a glimpse into Talma’s psyche at the time when she was orchestrat-ing The Alcestiad, and into her close friendship with Wilder.744 Notes, June 201013. Louise Talma to Thornton Wilder, “1957/6/27,” 27 June 1957, Wilder Collection, box 58, folder1609.14. Ibid.15. Louise Talma to Thornton Wilder, “1956/2/27,” 27 February 1956, Wilder Papers, box 58, folder1604.16. Louise Talma to Thornton Wilder, “1958/10/18,” 18 October 1958, Wilder Collection, box 59,folder 1615.

“Louise Talma’s Christmas Carol”

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“Louise Talma’s Christmas Carol”

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