Marga Richter

6. Culmination: 1990s

6 Culmination 1990s She has a distinctive voice. She thinks musically. There’s something wild and strange in her music that I find compelling. Michael Redmond, interview by Sharon Mirchandani, 2009 during the 1990s, the compositional world was still fragmented with composers working in serial and electronic music, performance art, and numerous other styles. Richter continued to prefer working in traditional mediums and created music for chorus, orchestra, opera, and voice. Her compositions were fewer in number during this decade, but large in scale for the most part. Richter also dealt more explicitly with profound themes in her music during this time. Recovery In February 1990, Richter was finally ready to write music again, inspired by the desire to compose a choral work in Alan’s honor, after she found two poems marked as his favorites in his copy of a Walt Whitman anthology: “As I Watched the Ploughman Ploughing” and “The Last Invocation.” These became the first and sixth movements of the seven-poem cycle, Into My Heart. It is for mixed chorus (SATB) and chamber ensemble (oboe, violin, 2 trumpets, horn, trombone, baritone, tuba, percussion) or piano four-hands. The second movement uses Robert Frost’s “Into My Own,” another of Alan’s favorites.A poem aboutAlan,titled“light fragment,”by his brother’s wife Cathleen Schurr, became movement 3. Movements 4 and 5 use “For Something Which Had 103 Gone Before” written by Maureen (Skelly) and given to her father one Father’s Day and “Beethoven’s Music” by R. Glenn Martin, a Harvard friend of Alan’s. “Into My Heart” by A. E. Housman closed the cycle and provided its title. This poem had been set to music by Alan, unbeknownst to Richter until she discovered it among his papers as she was about to begin writing this work. She immediately decided to use the music as written. In the aggregate, the poems contain images of mountains and ruminations on death and are rather mystical in nature. The cycle is more romantic and tonal than most of Richter’s earlier works, with thematic links among movements, and frequent pedal tones and ostinati in the accompaniment.The tonal scheme emphasizes D minor and its dominant key, A minor.The movements in those keys (movements 1, 2, 4, and 7) are positioned at the beginning, middle, and end of the cycle and their tonality is quite clear. Movements 3 and 6 end in the sharp keys of B major and C# minor, respectively, though the degree of tonality is much weaker and they are freely chromatic throughout. Movement 5, an expression of the profundity and strength found in Beethoven’s music, mixes G minor and Bb major, and ends in Bb minor. “As I Watch’d the Ploughman Ploughing” (mvt. 1) is a simple setting in A natural minor that captures the feeling of treading in the poem (reminiscent of Brahms’s first song in his Vier Ernste Gesänge). In “Into My Own,” (mvt. 2), a wide-ranging motive is imitated and slowly transformed over a rhythmic ostinato and, at the end, a D pedal tone in the accompaniment. A much more dramatic, extended movement, “light fragment” (mvt. 3) has instrumental interludes that quote from Richter’s Concerto for Piano and Violas, Cellos and Basses and the opening theme of the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Op. 111 (two of Alan’s favorite pieces). “For Something Which Had Gone Before” (mvt. 4), in A minor, is a delicate centerpiece for the cycle. Set in the treble range for sopranos and altos only, it is wistful and touching. The voices sing phrases primarily in harmonic thirds that are separated by brief instrumental (or piano) interludes. The accents, forte dynamics, and rich chords of “Beethoven’s Music” (mvt. 5) capture the strength that Alan Skelly admired in Beethoven’s music.The first four notes of “Du Bist der Lenz” from Wagner’s Die Walküre (Skelly’s favorite Wagner opera) are used thematically. The reference to mountains both here and in “For Something Which Had Gone Before” reflects Skelly’s love of the mountain view from their summer home in Vermont (where his ashes are buried). “The Last Invocation” (mvt. 6) begins sotto voce, tellingly painting the words “tenderly,” “wafted,” “noiselessly,” “softness,” and “whisper.” Richter sets the text in close harmonies sung mostly a cappella. 104 In the final movement “Into My Heart,” Richter combined...