A tribute to Abe Lincoln – Palo Alto Online January 30, 2009
Palo Alto’s Ives Quartet premieres
‘The Fullness of Peace’
By Rebecca Wallace
When Abraham Lincoln was young, he memorized “The Lion and the Four Bulls,” a favorite fable by Aesop. It’s the story of a lion prowling a field, trying to attack a quartet of oxen.
As long as the oxen kept their tails together and “met the lion with a ring of horns,” they were safe. But when the lion got the oxen to quarrel and separate, the big cat picked them off one by one.
The moral, in Aesop’s words: “In Union there is strength / A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.”
Composer Joseph Gregorio had a shiver of recognition when he first heard the story. “This fable that Lincoln learned as a child would influence his thought for his entire career,” he said.
The Redwood City composer decided the fable would make the ideal first movement for “The Fullness of Peace,” his new song cycle for baritone and string quartet. The work, being premiered by Palo Alto’s Ives Quartet this winter, is based on the fable and on other writings penned by, about and to Lincoln.
The project has been in part a family endeavor. Gregorio’s sister Julie found and polished the texts, compiling, adapting and writing. They also include: an excerpt from Lincoln’s second inaugural address; a text based on writings by abolitionist Frederick Douglass about emancipation; and a poem by Julie Gregorio about a dream Lincoln reported having before each Union victory in the Civil War, of being taken on a ship to a mysterious land.
The song cycle is being performed in honor of what would have been Lincoln’s 200th birthday, but it’s also timely for another reason.
“I settled on the title, ‘The Fullness of Peace,’ because I realized that the whole work was more about the ideals that Lincoln championed — equality, liberty, peace — than about Lincoln the man. … And it’s been very meaningful for the quartet and the singers and me to bring this piece to life right around the inauguration of another state senator from Illinois,” Gregorio said. “I feel like his (Barack Obama’s) election to the presidency is in some ways the fullest flowering yet of Abraham Lincoln’s vision of equality for all.”
The Ives Quartet often commissions new works. Its violist, Jodi Levitz, had played another of Gregorio’s pieces and enjoyed it, and the quartet musicians also liked the young composer’s geographical connection to Lincoln: He grew up in Gettysburg, Penn.
Gregorio, 29, said he approached this composition as he would any other vocal piece: “I sit with the text for a while and think about what it’s trying to convey, its emotional tenor.”
The writings are often optimistic and sometimes even humorous. An early letter from an 11-year-old girl urges Lincoln to grow a beard because “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands / To vote for you and then you would be President.”
Gregorio was surprised by another text, a letter from Lincoln to newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Lincoln wrote that he saw saving the Union as his main responsibility, whether that meant freeing the slaves or not:
“This is my office and my duty —
To hold the Union and the law above all else.
My own desire remains unchanged:
That all men, everywhere, could be free.”
“You don’t usually hear about that side of Lincoln,” Gregorio said. “His personal wish was to see all men, everywhere, free. But he viewed that as separate from his official duty. … We really got a more colorful picture of Lincoln from doing this project.”