Our Lives Are the Rivers

Ars Nova Singers opens its 41st season on October 9, 10 and 11 with Rivers & Streams, a program for choir and classical guitar performed in Boulder, Denver and Longmont. Our guest artist is the guitarist Nicolò Spera, who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder. Together we perform two works written sixty-nine years apart. The first is the Romancero Gitano (1951) by the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a setting of poems by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The second is Rivers (2020) by the Italian composer and choral conductor Corrado Margutti, a piece that Spera commissioned and asked to be about immigration.

The idea that holds the program together is far older than either piece. In 1476 the Castilian poet Jorge Manrique wrote an elegy for his father that Spanish schoolchildren still learn by heart:

Nuestras vidas son los ríos
que van a dar en la mar,
que es el morir…
allí los ríos caudales,
allí los otros medianos
y más chicos;
allegados, son iguales
los que viven por sus manos
y los ricos.

Our lives are the rivers that go down to the sea. There go the great rivers, and the middling ones, and the smaller. Once they arrive, those who live by the work of their hands and the rich are equal.

Great rivers and small streams, all arriving at one sea: the title of this concert, in a poem five and a half centuries old. Spera describes the meaning of Rivers in nearly the same terms:

“There are many rivers, but they all go to one sea… a humanity where all the rivers come together to be brothers and sisters, because we are all humans and we all live in the same world.”

Headwaters

Every river starts somewhere particular. Spera’s started late. There were no musicians in his family, and he came to the guitar at nineteen, in a country he calls one of the worst in the world for music education. That road brought him to Colorado, and he speaks plainly about what he left behind: “I miss my mom. I miss my friends. I miss the way people are together. So, I want to go back tomorrow, but I can’t.”

As a performer he also found how small his own stretch of water was:

“I had played with Ars Nova, the Castelnuovo-Tedesco Romancero Gitano, and it used to be the only piece you will ever play with a choir, and I love choirs, I love choral music, and I was kind of sad that there was one piece. How many times you can play always that piece?”

So he began commissioning. The first piece, Nicola Campogrande’s Materna, marked his daughter Julia’s birth. The second carried a subject he felt in his own life:

“I asked him to write a piece about immigration, because I have been very angry and upset by current attitudes toward immigrants.”

He was just as deliberate about whom to ask:

“I realized it was important in commissioning a choral piece with guitar to ask someone who actually knew how to write for choir, not just guitar, because not every composer knows how to write well for choir. I decided to ask Corrado Margutti, who is a great singer and choral conductor. And he’s been living in choir since he was five years old, so he really knows how to write well for a choir.”

Two currents meet

The one piece Spera had played so often has a history of its own. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a Florentine Jew. He left Italy in 1939 after Mussolini’s racial laws, and in Los Angeles in 1951 he set poems by Federico García Lorca, who had been killed outside Granada fifteen years before. The Romancero Gitano begins with “Baladilla de los tres ríos.” The Guadalquivir carries ships to the sea, while Granada’s two rivers seem to go nowhere: one weeping, the other blood.

Margutti’s Rivers, Op. 104, the largest work yet written for choir and guitar, begins after its Prologue with a paraphrase of that very movement. So the concert opens with a confluence: a work from 2020 flowing into one from 1951. Geography completes Lorca’s image. Granada’s Darro runs into the Genil, and the Genil into the Guadalquivir. The waters that seemed stuck in grief do reach the sea, by joining a larger river.

What Margutti did with Spera’s brief is the decisive act of the piece:

“Instead of making it too obvious, he spoke about this idea I gave in a very subtle and poetic way, which maybe is more effective. He just thought, rivers, the idea of rivers, why rivers? Because there are many rivers, but they all go to one sea.”

Tributaries

“Each movement comes from a different place, each movement has a different identity, but they work all together and create this piece, and that’s the idea of humanity we would like our children to live in and work for, a humanity where all the rivers come together to be brothers and sisters, because we are all humans and we all live in the same world.”

Rivers is fed from everywhere. A prologue from Orkney by George Mackay Brown. Fernando Pessoa’s English poem “Rivers” (“Many rivers run / Down to many seas”), which gives the title movement. Rilke’s “Herbsttag” from Paris, Pascoli’s Latin, and Thérèse of Lisieux’s French. In the music, quotations of Hindemith and Darius Milhaud, two composers driven from their countries in the 1930s and 1940s, alongside Tárrega and a hidden figure from Mozart.

Martino Anibaldi and Diego Franciosi of the ITER Research Ensemble describe the figure travelling through the work as “the suspended and precarious one of the emigrant.” We have written separately about the poets inside Rivers.

Toward evening

Like every river, the cycle bends toward its end. Spera’s one non-negotiable request was a poem by David Maria Turoldo, and the poem Margutti set is called “All’ultima sera,” At the last evening. Spera is an atheist and says so; he loves Turoldo anyway, because the priest-poet is “so profoundly human.” Rilke’s “Herbsttag” opens “Herr: es ist Zeit,” “Lord, it is time”: the summer was very great, and now comes the turning of the year. More on Turoldo.

“Because I came to guitar late in life, and much of my high school education was in classics, I’ve always been drawn to words before music, so poetry, writing, it’s always been something I love. And commissioning choral music often means being able to also commission a libretto, and so working with poets.”

The sea

Rivers ends with the Agnus Dei, sung in Spanish: the oldest prayer of the Mass, which closes by asking for peace. The music comes to rest where Manrique said every river does, at the place where great rivers and small streams can no longer be told apart.

That is the argument Spera asked for, made without a slogan. We start from different places and we end in the same one. Whatever separates us along the way, the sea does not keep the distinction.

In the rehearsal room

Hear it this weekend

• Friday, October 9, 7:30 pm: Mountain View United Methodist Church, 355 Ponca Place, Boulder
• Saturday, October 10, 7:30 pm: St. Paul Center for Music and the Arts, 1600 Grant Street, Denver, and by livestream. Free parking at 1625 N. Grant St., half a block away.
• Sunday, October 11, 4:00 pm: United Church of Christ, 1500 9th Avenue, Longmont

The full conversation with Nicolò Spera is here, and the way the two works quote each other is explained here.