Part 3 of 3: Florence Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, the Trapp Family Singers, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and an Austro-German Lullaby
On June 24, 2024, the Houston Ebony Opera Guild, under the direction of Dr. Jason Oby, will offer a landmark performance of Florence Price’s choral magnum opus, the cantata Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, as part of their annual concert honoring Juneteenth. Because the cantata is seldom heard and has thus far eluded scholarly comment, Part 2 of this post offered basic information concerning the work’s musical sources, date, and position in relationship to crucial societal events of the years of its genesis (1938-41). This final part of the post will focus on two important musical aspects of the cantata to shed more light on that information – and on the ways in which Price used intertextual references to create a stirring musical commentary on the political issues of the late 1930s and early 1940s. That commentary in turn will, I think, illuminate parallels between Price’s world and that of 2024 and reveal another dimension to the significance of the Houston Ebony Opera Guild’s revival of the composer’s long-obscured masterpiece.
We need to start this exploration where Florence Price’s own project began: with the poem that inspired her music. It was written on the eve of World War I by white poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931; his race is not irrelevant, as we’ll see later in this post), and first published in 1918. Decrying war and the moneyed folk who wage it on the shoulders of the workers, it portrays the restless spirit of Abraham Lincoln, walking in darkness because the modern world lacks leaders who can bring peace as he brought peace to the riven United States of his own day:
In late 1938 or early 1939, Florence Price set that poem to music – a timely undertaking, since at that point Europe was descending into the conflict that would become World War II and the U.S. labor movement, fueled in part by the pro-union stance of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal generally, was stronger than ever. Despite employing the advanced and highly fluid harmonic and melodic technique typical of her music from the late 1930s onward, especially in the piano/vocal version, Price largely aligned the form of her setting with the conventions of the cantata or the short oratorio as these were known in the mid-twentieth century – although this generalization requires qualification, as we shall see:
And that brings us to a set of extraordinary features of this remarkable composition that offer a key to Florence Price’s own understanding of her musical creation:
Both the Introduction and Overture and the Finale are disproportionately long. The Introduction and Overture comprises fully 151 bars out of the total 539 in the final (piano/vocal) version – more than 28%; – the Finale, 140 (about 26%). By contrast, the other five movements are only about 48 measures long, on average. This probably means (according to the ways we typically consider the weight composers give to sections or movements of their work) that the cantata’s outer movements were, for Price, especially significant for its meaning.
The Finale is also remarkable for two reasons:
First, after its sorrowful introduction (“It breaks his heart that that kings must murder still”; mm. 399-415), it abruptly turns to a strident, military tune (mm. 416-31) that then collapses into an extended choral fugue, with the altos (mm. 432ff.) introducing a soothing, tranquil version of the martial tune just heard, followed by the sopranos, then the basses, then the tenors. This is the only full-fledged fugue in all Price’s surviving choral music – and one whose style resembles that of Romantic oratorios such as Elijah, composed in 1846 by German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
Second, the melody that appears first in martial guise and then becomes the basis of the Finale’s fugue was in fact an Austro-German lullaby: “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” (the moon is now arisen).[1] (Here’s the German original; and here is Price’s version.) That melody was published in 1790 by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, using a folklike lullaby text that the German theologian Matthias Claudius had adapted in 1779 from a chorale text that German theologian and hymnodist Paul Gerhard had written in 1647 as “Nun ruhen alle Wälder” (Now all forests rest). All three of these German texts are appropriate to the sense of the “white peace” that, once attained, would allow Lincoln’s restless spirit to “sleep” again in the cantata’s text. But this is by far the most complex and multi-layered allusive network anywhere in Price’s oeuvre, and that raises further questions – most pressingly: How did she know the German lullaby? Was her allusion to it a cross-reference that enhanced the meaning of her Finale?[2] Anddid she expect her performers and listeners (if the cantata was performed) to recognize the lullaby, and thus to pick up on that cross-reference?
I’ll come back to those questions. But in the meantime, the Introduction and Overture offer more information that can help us arrive at an answer – for this portion of the cantata is also unusual in that it begins (after a few introductory chords) with a character- and scene setting solo proclamation (the soprano’s description of Lincoln, moved up from ll. 8-9 of the poem to the beginning of the cantata), then follows this with an extended overture that seems to depict strife and struggle, and finally moves without pause into the opening chorus, which picks up where the opening solo left off.
This opening strategy is unusual, but it is not without precedent. In fact, it exactly parallels the opening gambit of Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846). That parallel is probably not coincidental. For Elijah was the great prophet whose people had turned away from God, and who, through strength and unswerving faith, persuaded the Israelites the embrace Yahweh once again – an apt parallel to Lincoln as the great leader whose nation had been torn at the seams and descended into civil war, and who, through strength and vision, restored peace. For the deeply religious Florence Price, Abraham Lincoln represented for the war-torn worlds of the late 1930s and early 1940s what Elijah had represented for the Israelites of the ninth century B.C.E. and for all humanity thereafter: the bringer of peace and harbinger of salvation.
Which brings us back to the questions of how Price knew the Austro-German lullaby that forms the basis of her Finale. Was it an obscure reference to her own top-notch education and her extensive work as organist? Or was it an allusion that would have been meaningful for her own performers and audiences?
It was not obscure. Although we do not yet know exactly where and when Price may have first come into contact with this lullaby (which, after all, had been in circulation since 1790), it had gained renewed prominence in 1938 – on the eve of Price’s composition of the first (orchestral) version of Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, and just months after Hitler’s Nazi Germany had annexed Austria. That renewed prominence came via none other than the Trapp Family Choir (familiar to many readers from The Sound of Music, the biomusical loosely based on their saga). The von Trapp family, along with millions of other peace-loving Europeans, had fled the Nazi juggernaut, leaving their native Austria in March 1938 and in September 1938 coming to the United States, where they toured as the Trapp Family Singers (or Trapp Family Choir) beginning in December of that year. (They would settle permanently in the U.S. in 1939.) Most concretely for our purposes, their program on that tour was titled “Early German Choral Music.”
The Trapp Family Singers brought that program to Elmhurst, Illinois, less than an hour from Chicago, in October, 1939 (just over a month after the Nazi invasion of Poland had officially triggered the European arena of World War II). Whether Price was able to see the group in person I don’t know – but already on December 21, 1938, while in New York, the Trapp Family Singers had recorded “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” for Victor and this was released in March, 1939.[3] The recording was announced in the Chicago Tribune on March 5, 1939, and it may well have been played on the Chicago radio stations – or Price may have gotten hold of it by some other means. At any rate, the recording confirms that the peace-seeking Austrian refugees’ lullaby is indeed the same music that forms the basis of Florence Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight. Here’s the Trapp Family recording of the lullaby, and here is the fugal theme of Price’s finale.
You see the poetry of it: in using an Austro-German lullaby about peace, enjoying renewed renown in the war-torn world of the late 1930s thanks to the artistry of singers who had fled Nazi conquest, as the basis of a choral fugue that stylistically emulates the choral fugues of a German-Jewish composer’s oratorio about the mighty prophet whose work brought peace to his own people, Florence Price created her own musical prayer for peace – one that also voices her sympathy for those persecuted by the rise of fascism and the proletariat who bore the brunt of mass murder waged by the war-lords of her day. The framing moments of Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight use a richly textured allusive intertextual web to deliver Florence Price’s own vision of the imperative of peace, casting Abraham Lincoln as a nineteenth-century American Elijah whose vision was sorely needed as the U.S. lurched ever nearer to involvement in the modern calamity of World War II.
An Epilog: The (White) Elephant in the Room
All the above leaves unaddressed one major issue that could not have been lost on Florence Price, who suffered racism every day of her life: white poet Vachel Lindsay was a racist who used dehumanizing stereotypes of Black folk in his lyrics and was known, in part, for performing his 1914 poem “The Congo” in blackface. So even though the question “who will bring white peace?” (emphasis added) in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight was most likely intended as a religious reference, that telling word white was still shaped by racist thought. How did Florence Price engage with that? Did she ignore it, challenge it, or something else?
It’s an important question – especially since the main body of Price’s cantata (Nos. 1-6) contains no clear allusions to Black vernacular musics (such as spirituals or folksongs). One possibility is that Florence Price, aware of Lindsay’s racism but inspired by his views about the imperative for peace and Lincoln’s great achievement in ending the U.S. Civil War, chose to set his words anyway. The absence of Black vernacular idioms in the main body of cantata would thus be Price’s tacit musical acknowledgment that Black folk were not a part of her poet’s vision of peace.
Another possibility is that Price read Lindsay’s term “white peace” as an acknowledgment that the rapidly unfolding cataclysm of World War II was, like World War I and the U.S. Civil War before it, a white man’s war – one in which many Black soldiers would give their lives, In this scenario, the absence of Black vernacular musics in the main body of the cantata would be a reflection of lack of Black culpability in creating those campaigns of mass murder – and perhaps also an acknowledgment that in the profoundly racist United States, “peace” meant something much different for white folk than it did for Blacks.
But there is also a third possibility – and this is the one that I consider most likely. For while the main body of Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight does not envoice Black vernacular idioms, the instrumental portion of the Introduction and Overture features Black styles prominently: in fact, those are the styles that predominate in the peaceful middle section of the otherwise turbulent opening (mm. 56-87 of the original orchestral version, expanded to mm. 71-123 of the later piano/vocal version):
(From Florence B. Price: Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, ed. John Michael Cooper [Fayetteville, AR: ClarNan Editions, (2024)]).
In this interpretive scenario, Price acknowledges the absence of Black folk from the poet’s vision of peace. She also acknowledges that both the U.S. Civil War and the looming global conflict that had occasioned the Trapp Family Choir’s bringing of “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” to the United States in 1938-39 were not created by Black people. But at the same time, she does not omit Blackness from her own musical appeal for peace, her own vision of what peace looks like. In fact, her celebration of Black vernacular idioms in the conspicuously peaceful middle section of the work’s opening argument might even be read as a lifting up of the nature of the Black peoples who were omitted from Lindsay’s poem, but had been freed from enslavement by Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, some seventy-five years earlier.
And with every note of every bar, Price points out the falsity of the white world’s stereotypes of classical music as the domain of white folk – for from beginning to end, the music of Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight is filled with genius, with an extraordinary command of all the idioms of classical music.
All this underscores the significance of the Houston Ebony Opera’s upcoming performance of the previously obscure final version of Florence Price’s Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight in the context of their boldly conceived narrative of the history, tribulations, and triumphs of freedom in their concert titled “Our Freedom Wasn’t Free” – for this renewed enunciation of Price’s prophetic echo of Lindsay’s appeal for peace is addressed to a world of ascendant warlords, a world in which freedoms are beset from all sides. As noted earlier, the concert will occur on June 24, 2024 in Houston’s historic Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, at 4:00 p.m. It will in all likelihood be the first time that Price’s final word on her choral masterpiece has sounded since 2019. If you’re able to attend, I hope you’ll do so. You will be part of an extraordinary musical moment!
[1] My warmest thanks to Professor Christopher Reynolds, whose 2003 book Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music (Harvard UP) is a veritable sacred text for approaching such matters, for pointing out that this melody is employed in Price’s Finale (personal correspondence).
[2] Although the metrical structure of Gerhard’s original text (“Nun ruhen alle Wälder”) is the same as that of “Der Mond ist aufgegangen,” which it inspired, no settings of the former that use the melody of the lullaby are available in any hymnals that would have been available to Price. Her reference is thus probably to the Claudius/Schulz lullaby, not the original chorale.
[3] The following information about the Trapp Family Singers’ recording of “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” was kindly provided by Professor Peter Mercer-Taylor (personal communications), whose expertise in Anglo-American hymnody and related genres was of invaluable help in piecing together the present hypothetisis concerning Price's use of the Claudius/Schulz Abendlied.