To the east of City Hall, on the traffic divider that joins Market Street and Penn Square, is a plaque commemorating the founding of Mother’s Day, right here in Philadelphia, in 1908. Anna Jarvis initially envisioned the day as one of religious observance, and in fact, mourning — she was motivated not only by the death of her mother, but that of seven of her 11 children in early childhood.
The movement began at church services in both Philadelphia and Jarvis’s hometown of Grafton, West Virginia, inspiring a letter writing campaign. It caught the attention of John Wanamaker, the department store magnate, who helped her expand her efforts nationwide. In 1914, Congress officially proclaimed the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day. Here’s some music to celebrate this piece of Philadelphia history as you spend time thinking about or hanging out with Mom. Tune in to Sunday Classical this week, from 3 to 6 p.m., to hear our selections for Mother's Day, including some of these.
Clara Schumann — Piano sonata in G Minor
This was the first major work Clara Schumann composed after becoming a mother at 22. She had been an accomplished musician for over half her life by then, one of the greatest pianists of the century as well as a composer. Today we know her husband, Robert Schumann, as the more familiar of the two, but in their time, Clara was the breadwinner of the family (adding “née Wieck” to her concert programs), supporting her husband and children while also being a mother to the standard piano repertoire. Clara had a big family, with seven children and an eighth who did not survive infancy, and this recording also comes from a member of a big family: Isata Kanneh-Mason, the eldest of her many talented siblings.
William Grant Still — Mother and Child
The second and most famous movement of Still’s Suite for Violin and Piano, Mother and Child was inspired by a 1932 chalk drawing by Sargent Johnson, depicting a Black woman looking on as she cradles her young son. Still referred to the tough love he got from his own mother: “I rarely missed passing through a day without a licking. But I needed them.” Perhaps a harsher picture of motherhood than one might expect today, but the music makes beauty out of the dissonant parts of such a relationship. This recording is an orchestral version performed by a mother and child: Zina Schiff is the featured violinist, and her daughter Avlana Eisenberg conducts.
Antonín Dvořák — Songs My Mother Taught Me
Here’s a song that your mother may very well have taught you — it’s quite famous, both sung as well as in transcription for many instruments. We know it in English as “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” but the original Czech text by Adolf Heyduk refers not to the songs themselves, but the mother’s act of teaching them to her child, who would then pass them on to their own children. Passing the songs down moves both singers to tears; I’m sure that’s happened in real life as well. There’s also a setting of the same text by Charles Ives in English that’s worth a listen.
Reena Esmail — Jhula-Jhule
On the subject of musical heirlooms, this piece is based on a melody passed down through family, specifically by American composer Reena Esmail’s grandmother. Her 2013 work Jhula-Jhule incorporates multiple Indian folk songs sung and played by generations of her family, but the title comes from a lullaby her grandmother used to sing for her: Jhula Jhule, Jhula Jhule / Reena Rani Jhula Jhule. (In English translation: “Back and forth, back and forth / Reena the Queen swings back and forth.”)
Amy Beach — From Grandmother’s Garden
Are you buying your mom flowers for Mother’s Day? These musical flowers come from a familiar source — Amy Beach’s From Grandmother’s Garden. The work paints a picture of five flowers one would find in a Victorian garden: Morning Glories, Heartsease, Mignonette, Rosemary and Rue, and Honeysuckle, in a similar musical style to French impressionists. Despite the inspiration from overseas, it’s still reasonable to assume that Beach would have been able to pick those flowers from her American grandmother’s garden, as her grandfather owned a farm.
Johannes Brahms — Ein deutsches Requiem
Brahms’ Requiem was meant to comfort the living more than to mourn the dead — or to paint a picture of post-death punishment. He certainly needed comfort: his mother passed away in 1865, the year he began writing the piece in earnest. He also made use of some material he’d written in 1854, shortly after his good friend and teacher Robert Schumann suffered a mental collapse which would confine him to an asylum for his last two years.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — “Riconosci in questo amplesso” from Le nozze di Figaro
A subplot of Mozart’s comic triumph has our title character owing fellow Sevillian Marcellina for a large loan that, instead of collateral, he promised to marry her if he didn’t pay up. But it turns out that Figaro is Marcellina’s long-lost son. Overjoyed at the reunion, Marcellina immediately forgives his debt and embraces him as his mother in the sextet “Riconosci in questo amplesso una madre” (“Recognize a mother in this embrace”). There’s even a funny bit when Figaro’s soon-to-be wife Susanna comes in and is initially shocked at him having so willingly switched brides, but quickly accepts Marcellina as her mother-in-law.
Pauchi Sasaki — Mother’s Hand, Healing Hand
This is music written by a mother, for an erstwhile mother-to-be, sampling her and her own mother. Composer Pauchi Sasaki notes an impulse she had, when her son was an infant, to constantly tell him she loved him. Seems pretty natural for a mother, right? Well, she deduced that the impulse came from the realization that her son wouldn’t remember his early years, so she wanted to engrave her love for him in a way that all that love would be part of his cellular memory.
She wrote this for pianist Eunbi Kim (who you might remember hearing on WRTI at one point), who is sampled alongside her mother singing the titular melody she sang to Eunbi as a child, which she has passed down to her children.
Cesare Andrea Bixio — Mamma
In the main DJ booth at my college radio station, sitting atop the CD shelves was an assortment of funny-to-the-staff LP covers. One of those featured a smiling Luciano Pavarotti, zoomed in, with his arms outstretched. Above his head: “MAMMA.” It was some time later that I finally listened to the title track, a delightful Italian pop song from the ‘40s, orchestrated by Henry Mancini and featuring a typically ebullient performance from Pavarotti, singing about being happy to live near his mother again. I actually cut a shortened version of this recording for the mother-son dance at my wedding, and now my mother lives in the area after a number of years when going to see her was a much longer drive.
Mason Bates — Mothership
OK, this one doesn’t really have anything to do with motherhood. But don’t you think your mom is out of this world? Jokes aside, this is a fun and interesting piece incorporating many elements of electronic pop music, with Fender Rhodes piano, a drum machine, and spaceship sound effects. There are also solo sections for the Rhodes, electric guitar and guzheng. As Bates said in an interview, improvisation used to be a key part of classical music. It’s also involved in motherhood, right?
