Foote, Arthur

Foote, Arthur – 4 Character Pieces after the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Op.48

(b. Salem, Massachusetts, 5 March 1853 – d. Boston, Massachusetts, 8 April 1937)

Preface
Foote’s Opus 48 is the work of an American composer, writing in the German style, responding to a British translation of centuries-old Persian poetry. The cosmopolitan nature of the resulting music at once represents the West’s orientalist fascination with Persian art and culture as well as, conversely, Foote’s own attempt to fit himself into the Western mainstream at a time when American composers were often ignored both at home and abroad. This fin-de-siècle orchestral masterpiece thus looks away from Europe and towards it at the same time.

Born in 1853, Foote was among the very earliest composers of serious art music to be educated fully within the United States. Foote studied with the composer John Knowles Paine at Harvard and subsequently became the first person to earn a master’s degree in music from an American college or university. Alongside his various professional duties as an organist and pedagogue, Foote soon distinguished himself as a composer of chamber music while also writing for keyboard and, on occasion, for orchestra.

Here, Foote’s textual inspiration is a translated collection of 101 quatrains (rubāʿiyāt) attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), the Persian philosopher whose contributions are better documented historically to astronomy and mathematics than to poetry. Englishman Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883) published his translation of the verses in 1859 after having gathered them from a range of posthumous sources. A wide range of musicians, from Umm Kulthum to Woodie Guthrie, have found inspiration in the poetry. Foote likely encountered Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát following the publication of the first American edition in 1878. His creative response came first in the form of a Song from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Op. 40, published in 1898, and then a more substantial suite composed not for orchestra but for piano: Five Poems after Omar Khayyám, Op. 41, published in 1899. …

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