A Brief Appreciation of Henrique Oswald’s “Ofelia” for Voice and Piano

Background and Analysis. Composed in Florence, Italy, in July 1901, Henrique Oswald’s Ofelia is a five-song setting of poetry in Italian by Solone Monti.¹⁾The titles of the songs are (in order), *******, “Ofelia,” “Il Genio della Foresta,” “L’Angelo del Cimitero,” and “La Morta.”

Except for his association with biographer and writer Dame Iris Margaret Origo—Monti home schooled her for three years—little is known about this Italian writer and poet. In 1906, he published an influential article on women’s suffrage, and was described the following year in a French journal as “un jeune critique italien.” In 1910, he published his most influential work, Il canto XXX del Purgatorio. He died of influenza in 1917.

Henrique Oswald (1852-1931) is considered to be one of the most important transitional figures between Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896) and Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959); indeed, the attention that he has received in Brazil has resulted in at least one biography and multiple academic studies. Among the latter is a 2013 journal article by Susana Cecilia Igayara, in which she discusses Oswald’s catalog of vocal music. To better contextualize Ofelia, she notes that many 19th century composers, such as Héctor Berlioz and Edward MacDowell, as well as many contemporaneous poets, such as Salone Monti, found inspiration in Shakespeare’s character, Ophelia, who in Hamlet is marked by a tragic destiny and unrequited love.²⁾Igayara, Susana Cecilia. “Henrique Oswald e a música vocal.” Revista Glosas. Revista do Movimento Patrimonial pela Música Portuguesa, 9 (September 2013), 9.

In a 2009 master’s thesis, Cássia Paula Fernandez Bernardino notes that Monti’s “poetry connotes Ophelia’s death by alluding to landscapes and mythical images, using mainly euphemisms and expressing the depth of love among the personas portrayed, and not their intensity. The composer then uses this to create rich and colorful sounds, thereby seeking to translate ineffable feelings into music. In the same way that the poet avoids talking about suicide, death and passionate feelings, preferring instead to watch out for conformism and the hope of a brief reunion, Oswald avoids sound contrasts, thus maintaining continuous movement and the feeling of a fresh start.”³⁾Cássia Paula Fernandes Bernardino, “Ofelia, poemeto lírico de Henrique Oswald: Confluencias entre música e texto.” (master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo Department of Music, 2009), 130-131.

In more specific terms, she situates Ofelia in Oswald’s second phase of composition. During this period, his works reveal the influence of the French school of composition, and particularly that of Gabriel Fauré and César Franck. In Fernandez’s estimation, the works of this period “can be considered the most representative of Oswaldian production in the genre of song, both with regard to formal construction, as well as the confluence between accompaniment, melodic line and poetic text.”⁴⁾Fernandes, 46. However, although Ofelia was composed around the same time as Oswald’s one-act opera, Il Neo (1900), and his two-act opera, Le Fate (1902-1903), it is significant to note that this cluster of three works does not share many characteristics, which, according to Igayara demonstrates that “Oswald did not fixate on a specific poetic-vocal style; rather, he experimented with the possibilities between Ofelia’s emotional content, Il Neo’s comical lightness and the romantic fable of Le Fate.”⁵⁾Igayara, 9. Furthermore, the fact that Oswald orchestrated two of the songs from Ofelia, “Il Genio della Foresta” and “L’Angelo del Cimitero,” and also left multiple manuscript versions of its various pieces—some of which are in different keys—suggests that, in a manner akin to that of Beethoven, Oswald labored to find the most effective way to musically reflect the poetry and its underlying themes.

So, what musical techniques and/or practices does Oswald use to achieve his objective? The examples below, in fact, provide a number of clues that may help to clarify this matter.

This notwithstanding, by ignoring the annotations and only looking at the music, one might very well be struck by how this excerpt appears to be completely unremarkable: The entirely syllabic setting of the text, its comfortable range, and relatively short phrases would pose no difficulty for any singer with an adequate amount of vocal training. In addition, not only is the melody entirely diatonic, but its mainly stepwise motion is interrupted by leaps that are resolved by contrary motion. Furthermore, nearly every one of the vocalist’s notes is either anticipated by or directly supported in the piano. Lastly, the arpeggiated figurations in the piano (see Example 2), are comfortably laid out and at a tempo that would be not at all problematic for most reasonably proficient pianists.

However, a closer inspection of this work reveals the extent to which Oswald’s harmonic language was influenced by Fauré. The latter’s music, as Longyear observes, was shaped by his study of Gregorian chant accompaniment and its inherent modality, and for this reason, Fauré “subtly avoids strong emphases on dominant harmonies and delicately blurs the ‘directional pull’ of individual chords.”⁶⁾Rey M. Longyear. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 265. In addition, at times he also uses secondary triads and other devices to create a certain sense of harmonic ambiguity. These procedures are also clearly evident in Ofelia.

For example, in its initial measures Oswald alternates two chords, a second inversion tonic triad and an F minor seventh chord in root position, of which the latter seems to function as a substitute dominant chord, such that the tonic is not definitively established until the work’s eighth measure. At the same time, however, the vocal line does not seem to be fully engaged in this harmonic scheme; rather, its implied harmony is completely unambiguous. In other words, if this was a work for unaccompanied voice those same measures could easily have been harmonized in E flat major.

A similar process takes place in the remaining measures of this example, in which root position chords in C minor alternating with Eb seventh chords in third position lead to a section in F minor.

Performance and Publication History. Although Ofelia may have possibly been performed in Italy by Elena Cumbo-Borgia in 1905, it was performed almost every year in Brazil from 1903 until at least 1918. However, it was not until July 29, 1905, that the work was sung in its entirety in Rio de Janeiro by Carlos de Carvalho.⁷⁾“Instituto de Musica,” A Noticia (Rio de Janeiro), July 31 – August 1, 1905. Although Leontina Kneese had previously sung the work on two separate occasions in São Paulo during November, 1903, on the 13th she only performed the last two songs, while three days later she interpreted only the first. This tendency of picking and choosing continued throughout this period. For example, singing at the São Paulo Conservatory in 1911, Liddy Chiafarelli performed Ofelia’s “interessantes trechos” (interesting parts) “with optimum diction and fine sentiment;”⁸⁾“Vida social,” O Paiz, January 27, 1911. and Beatriz Sherrard, while on a tour of three Brazilian cities in 1918, only sang the first two songs. In 1921, the same fate befell Ofelia while in the United States. On March 21 of that year, Oswald’s son, Alfredo, organized a program of his father’s compositions at the MacDowell Club in New York City, on which the baritone Eneas Ramos sang only three of its songs.⁹⁾“Program of Oswald Music,” Musical America XXIII / No. 23 (April 2, 1921): 35.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Brazilian singers continued to include Ofelia in their recitals and concert programs, though with decreasing frequency. Possibly the last time it was heard in Brazil (until modern times) was in 1938, when on November 19, accompanied by Mario de Azevedo, Edith de Faria sang the fifth and final song, “La Morta,” on a program that was held at the National School of Music in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁰⁾“Música,” Diario de Noticias, November 19, 1938.

Ofelia was published in 1901 in Florence, Italy, by Genesio Venturini, whose firm was absorbed by the Carisch company of publishers and dealers of music and instruments in 1905. In the preparation of our new edition a number of errors and inconsistencies were corrected.

John L. Walker