Paul Alan Levi’s Mark Twain Suite, for chorus, tenor solo, and orchestra, was commissioned by the New York Choral Society, which premiered it in 1983 in Carnegie Hall conducted by Robert DeCormier. The work is dedicated to DeCormier, who was the composer’s music teacher in high school and the first person to encourage him to become a musician.
The Mark Twain Suite reveals Twain as a remarkably multifaceted man — a native middle-American of the nineteenth century, a medievalist, world traveler, and professional storyteller. These musical settings of his texts have a corresponding diversity of styles. The piece is in four contrasting movements:
I. Sunrise on the Mississippi, described in the poetic words of Huckleberry Finn. Various instruments played by chorus members, including ocarina, empty beer bottle, slide whistle, and recorders, suggest the pre-dawn sounds of the Mississippi River.
II. The Great Joust (L’Homme armé) is a scene from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The main character in the novel is Hank Morgan, a feisty New England factory foreman, who has been bonked on the head in a dispute with another worker and magically transported back into the time of King Arthur. Morgan introduces American technology and values into this medieval English society in order to gain power, eventually destroying the society and himself.
Sir Sagramore, one of King Arthur’s knights, has been inadvertently insulted by the Yankee and challenges him to a joust, each man to choose his own weapons. Sir Sagramore appears in full armor on an armored horse, carrying a long sword. The Yankee shows up in tights on an unarmored horse. The spectators think he is naked and fear for his life. Sir Sagramore charges with his sword, but the Yankee pulls out a revolver and shoots him dead, crowing “The day was mine. The march of civilization was begun.”
The movement uses the medieval folk tune “L’Homme armé” as a cantus firmus, after the fashion of many medieval and Renaissance masses. The original text of “L’Homme armé” (not sung in the Twain) is a complaint by unarmed men about armed men; the drama of The Great Joust turns on the question of which is which.
The Great Joust is in four sections:
A. The Royal Announcement, in fake medieval language, with fake medieval music, accompanied in part by church handbells.
B. The Newspaper Announcement, in racier nineteenth-century American style, with fiddles, banjo and Sousa.
C. The Joust itself, a dramatic scene.
D. The March of Civilization, for orchestra, a parade of musical styles leading down to the twentieth century.
III. The Awful German Language, from the essay of the same name, is also in four sections:
A. A General Complaint, including a fugue on the auxiliary verbs “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein” (“have had been had had was was”).
B. The German Adjective
C. The German Compound Noun
D. At the End, The Verb (reprise of fugue)
Beginning in tempo Andante con Mahler, this movement pays affectionate and sometimes exasperated tribute to various German vocal and choral styles, including Bach, Brahms, and the inevitable descent into the twentieth century.
IV. The Golden Arm, from the essay “How to Tell a Story.” “
Who Got My Golden Arm” is a shaggy-dog ghost story that has terrified the young and gullible for over a century. Twain was fond of telling this story in his humorous lectures, hoping to find a child in the audience to frighten. In this setting, the composer tells the story the way he thinks Twain would have told it had he been a 150-voice chorus and a 50-piece orchestra.
01. SUNRISE ON THE MISSISSIPPI
AUDIO
TEXT
02. the great joust
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TEXT
03. The Awful German Language
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TEXT
04. The Golden Arm
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TEXT
PERFORMANCE HISTORY
New York Choral Society
Robert DeCormier, conductor
David Bender, tenor
Carnegie Hall (1983. 1987)
Chorus and Orchestra
of the Vienna Conservatory
Gerhard Track, conductor
David Bender, tenor
City Hall, Vienna, Austria (1990)
Vocal Arts Ensemble
Earl Rivers, conductor
Michael Hendricks, tenor
Cincinnati, Ohio (1990)
New Amsterdam Singers
Park Avenue Chamber Orchestra
Clara Longstreth, conductor
James Archie Worley, tenor
Church of the Holy Trinity
(2005)