- A Life for the Tsar - Mikhail Glinka
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For a composer so strongly identified in the story of music as the first writer of distinctly Russian music to be valued in both his homeland and the West, Mikhail Glinka had a strong strain of non-Russian adventures and attunements—three lessons with the early Romantic pianist John Field when he was in his teens, four years of travels in Italy (where acquaintance with Bellini and Donizetti deepened his understanding of the art of singing) and Berlin (where in search of a systematic, disciplined approach to composition, he undertook intensive study of counterpoint and other such "Western" techniques), and a whole episode in later life in which he was fascinated by Spain and Spanish music. Yet all this was overlaid upon the impressions of his first six years of life, in which the only musical sounds he heard were songs of Russian country-folk and the banging of the church-bells near Smolensk. And when in Italy he was momentarily overcome with longing for his home, which inspired him with a wish to compose as a Russian; shortly after his return he threw himself into work on an operatic telling of an episode of Russian history, in which a peasant led astray a group of Polish marauders bent on killing the new tsar, the young Michael Romanov, sacrificing his own life for the sake of his ruler. In the Overture to the opera (Glinka had originally titled it after its peasant-hero, Ivan Susanin, but when the work was in rehearsal the Tsar himself urged a change to its present name), the shapes of native Russian melody assert themselves: a Russian tune does not proceed through tidy repetition of bits of theme, but tends to loop in unpredictable phrase-lengths. Glinka also emphasizes the lower voices of the orchestra, in anticipation of a trio in the opera which is accompanied by male chorus and a cello-section split into four groups. He never gave up hoping his German-acquired counterpoint skills could be reconciled with Russian-style material, but here, as at so many other times, he found that varying his orchestration, rather than imposing rules of fugue on this gently wayward material, left his Russian muse's wings unclipped.
- Adagio from Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra - W. A. Mozart
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The clarinet is the youngest instrument in the standard orchestra—its first documentation is in a list of instruments from 1710. This did not mean that everyone suddenly had clarinets at that time or shortly thereafter: when Mozart was on his first long journey without his father, he was hugely delighted with the orchestra at Mannheim in 1778 and rapturously wrote all the details for his father back in Salzburg, including a sigh—"Alas, if only we too had clarinets!" He had to wait until he'd broken with Salzburg and moved to Vienna to get his clarinets …but then they were in the hands of the wonderful Stadler brothers, Johann and Anton. When they played together, Anton preferred taking the second part, not because of any shrinking from difficulty but because he loved playing in the instrument's bottom register. In fact (and this is a measure of how new and unstandardized the instrument was), he played a particular kind of clarinet whose range went lower than the present-day instrument. It was for Anton Stadler and his basset-clarinet that Mozart wrote the Quintet for clarinet and strings, and the concerto whose middle movement we present this evening. This was composed within a month or so of The Magic Flute, in the last season of Mozart's life, and as this movement's dreamy song draws to an end the clarinet dips into its dusky low range, ending with an only slightly varied version of the phrase with which Sarastro (the Magic Flute character with the lowest voice) finishes his song of consolation.
- "Dance of the Party Guests" from The Tales of Hoffman - Jacques Offenbach
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The next two pieces of the evening show a particularly French talent for charm and pleasing—though Jacques Offenbach was born in Köln, he moved to Paris at fourteen and the image he presented as a man (waxed mustache, monocle, trim waistcoat) is of the complete Parisian boulevardier. His flood of witty, satirical light operas delighted Paris up till the dark days of the Prussian war and ensuing civil strife of 1870-71; sometimes he had to raid earlier shows of his just to keep up with the demand. The last few years of his life were devoted to a more ambitious work of musical theater, The Tales of Hoffmann, a rather French take on the German fantasist (who, incidentally, had had ambitions of his own as an opera composer, fifty years before Offenbach) which cast some of his stories as romantic episodes in the author's own life. The dance we present comes in the first act, as guests arrive at an inventor's house to meet his "daughter," who is actually an automated doll; I believe this music had a previous existence at a similarly festive moment in Offenbach's 1867 La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein.
- Concertino - Cécile Chaminade
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The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which gives a thorough account of Offenbach's career, is rather snippy about Cécile Chaminade, according her a scant paragraph and an abbreviated list of compositions (contenting itself with mentioning that she wrote "over 200" pieces for piano but specifying only three). Yet her Concertino will live as long as there are flutists—in between iterations of its absolutely irresistible rondo theme, the solo instrument displays cascades of agility over interesting harmonic forward motion, and there are moments of sighing chromatic lines that would do credit to such ear-charmers (with multiple pages in the New Grove) as Saint-Saëns or Massenet.
- Allegro from Concerto for French Horn - Richard Strauss
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Richard Strauss lived almost as long as Chaminade (he was eighty-five at his death, she almost eighty-seven), but we present music of his youth—he was eighteen when he wrote his first horn concerto (his second one came sixty years later); its dedication is to the court musician Oscar Franz, but a great deal of its inspiration must have come from the young composer's father. Franz Strauss was the principal horn player of the Munich Court Orchestra, so the sound of that noble instrument was part of the furniture in the Strauss house (apparently when Richard was a baby, he cried at the sound of a violin, but horn notes would make him rock and bubble gleefully); he was also a musical arch-conservative, and would not let his son hear a scrap of Wagner's music till he had reached his teens. (Franz had, in the course of his work, many occasions to play Wagner, which he did gloriously; that old enchanter of a composer said of him that "Franz might be [an old so-and-so], but when he plays the horn it's impossible to be angry with him.") This third movement is a Rondo in 6/8—this must be a tradition: all four of Mozart's horn concertos have final movements in that time-signature. In Mozart's hands these finales have something of the mood of a royal fox-hunt; Strauss's effect is rather more impish (and trickier for the accompanying orchestra), broadening into a very Bavarian ebullience in the full-orchestra statements of the theme. The concerto proceeds without breaks between the movements, one running into the next; in this last one, phrases from the previous two are brought back, the ghost of the second movement being a dark breath of a theme in clarinets and bassoon…which is insouciantly answered by the solo horn's return to the rollick.
- Vivace from Double Concerto in D Minor - J. S. Bach
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J.S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins is often young string players' introduction to the wonders of counterpoint, the first step toward understanding the writing of a fugue. Its place in the story of its composer generally starts with where Bach was living and working at the time, in this case Cöthen, where Bach's professional situation was happiest. He was court musician to a young prince who had a great love of music, and who had made enough of a study of it to appreciate what a genius was writing cantatas to his order. (Bach's previous noble boss, the Duke of Weimar, had had Bach imprisoned for a month because of the terms with which the musician had demanded a release from employment.) When the prince married, though, it was to a princess without a musical ear; she set about reducing her new husband's musical establishment, and Bach knew he would have to look for work elsewhere. The next job was his last, great one, teaching the boys of St. Thomas cathedral school in Leipzig and providing music for four churches. Reading the description of his official duties, it seems that the additional Leipzig job he took on, directing the "Collegium Musicum" (a kind of top-flight coffee-house band), was almost for relaxation—for this ensemble Bach dipped into some of his previous compositions and made new arrangements of them. One of such revisited pieces was this concerto: one hopes that in going over it again, a harried Bach found a reflected glow of more relaxed days.
- Andante from Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra - Franz J. Haydn
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Josef Haydn's trumpet concerto, from 1796, stands almost at the end of the great line of the composer's music for instruments; six grand settings of the Mass (including the "Mass in Time of War" and the "Lord Nelson"), the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, and numerous part-songs were the principal work of the last years of the composer who essentially created the symphony as we know it. For the middle movement of this concerto, Haydn lets the louder instruments of the accompanying orchestra take a break for this quiet interlude between more martial music; the violins and flute supply almost wistful stresses to the theme. There are a few shadows presented when the melody shifts from major to minor—the solo trumpeter intones over this moment almost balefully, but the first violins, in a graceful turn, restore the restful major key.
- "Our Town" (music from the film) - Aaron Copland
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Aaron Copland described standard Hollywood movie scores as "Dvorak-Tchaikovsky generalized music"—I wonder if he included Erich Korngold's ripping Errol Flynn stuff under this dismissive heading, but Korngold was about the last fruit of the old-fashioned middle-European musical tree, and an American art should have room for an American voice. Two years before the release of the film of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," Copland had brought his distinctly American voice to the ballet stage with Billy the Kid, and two years after would come Rodeo; these ballet scores conveyed the snap and swagger (and in Billy the Kid the fury) of the sun-parched West. For the tree-enveloped homescapes of Grover's Corners, Copland's American muse is quieter, though a trumpet's soliloquies carry the intensity of old regret; muted brass look down long corridors of time. The whole ensemble unites in the great confrontation with mortality…and what of that recurring melodic fragment, which starts and ends this music in quietude? This is, in a way, the Stage Manager, who knows the whole story but only lets a trace of melancholy tinge his matter-of-fact serenity.
- Marche Solennelle (1885) - Peter I. Tchaikovsky
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The Tchaikovsky March with which we close was not published until after the composer's death, and is almost never played. It receives glancing notice, if anything at all, in biographies: just a mention in the composer's correspondence of how he spent days at his writing-desk "plugging away" at this assignment for festivities on the fiftieth anniversary of his school. Not a school of music: Tchaikovsky was himself part of the first generation of teachers at the Moscow Conservatory. No, his young years had been spent at a school which had been founded in 1835 to provide operatives for the vast Russian state bureaucracy—the School of Jurisprudence. However laborious Tchaikovsky found the work, the resultant Solemn March partakes of the same spirit as the Royal March that begins the last act of his Sleeping Beauty ballet of three or four years later: exuberant panoply, a good-natured hint of pompousness, and of course his powerful, resonant use of the orchestra…including a very Russian sound of bells answering bells in the brass.
- - V. R. Taylor
- The Wand of Youth, Suite No. 1 -- Edward Elgar
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The summer Edward Elgar turned fifty found him enormously busy--just back
from a tour conducting his music in New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, he
was not only readying a number of compositions for his publisher (church
anthems, a part-song he wrote on his birthday while his wife and daughter
were attending evening church, the splendid Fourth Pomp & Circumstance
march), but presiding at academic ceremonies at Birmingham University--where
he had been lecturing as professor in a music program that had been
especially designed for him--and entertaining a visiting musician who was
writing program-notes for upcoming Elgar performances. He was also under a
personal cloud: an ambitious vision from years ago, of writing a trilogy of
oratorios about the founding of the Church, had failed to grasp what had
been reached for, with only two works written (The Apostles, The Kingdom)
and the rest of the trail gone cold. For Elgar's intense spirit, being a
"successful" composer was in its way as severe a trial as being the
undiscovered one he had been ten years before.
Perhaps it was the landmark birthday, perhaps it was the bit of old family
furniture his brother had sent as a present--at any event, Elgar looked back
that summer to some of the first music he ever wrote that was performed.
This was not the work of a great, ambitious, and harried composer but of a
boy (in late years he was unsure whether this came from the year he was
twelve or fourteen) with four brothers and sisters. Feeling misunderstood at
home, they had decided to put on a play for their parents, in which Two Old
People were so bound up in their own concerns that they did not even know
that just on the other side of the little river that ran through their woods
was the land of magic. This play would have music to underscore the
episodes--tonight we present the Minuet that depicted the very old-fashioned
nature of the Two Old People, the music of Fairy Pipers that was played to
enchant the oldsters into a frame of mind more appreciative of magic, and
one of the visitations that they were then able to see (the Fairies here are
more like dwarves or leprechauns in their jiggety-jog dance; the Giants
eventually seem to learn from the Fairies a heavy version of their steps).
Of course, in that first performance there were no trombones and
contrabassoon to give heft to the Giants' music--Elgar remembers the piano
doing most of the work in the play's score, with perhaps a flute and two or
three stringed instruments (including a homemade double-bass with "about
three pounds of nails" in its construction). But the mature composer kept
the essential nature of the boy's compositions intact, just as the boy, when
faced with the need to produce a quantity of music in a short time, himself
looked back: that jiggety-jog tune which opens the "Fairies and Giants"
movement is, in fact, the earliest musical writing with a date Elgar ever
wrote down--on a leaf of manuscript paper from the summer he was ten.
- La Bal de Beatrice d'Este -- Reynaldo Hahn
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The musical life of Paris on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries was hardly monolithic--flippantly, one could speak of the Earnest
ones (Franck, d'Indy) who still revered Wagner, the Charmers from Massenet
to Messager whose finely-wrought music delighted the comfortable and
unmusical, and the Anomalous, like Debussy who made music breathe
differently. (Some composers lived in more than one camp, like Saint-Saëns
who was both earnest and charming, and Gabriel Fauré who managed to be
something of all three.) Reynaldo Hahn was definitely a Charmer--not only in
his composition but in his life: he was part of the circle of Sarah
Bernhardt (and supplied music for several plays in which she starred), and
an intimate of Marcel Proust. Despite the literary cast of this second group
of friends, one of its members recalled as a highlight of their gatherings
the lively Hahn at the piano--depending on who was present, he might lead
and accompany his way through a whole opera, or improvise
pastiche-impressions of different musical periods and styles. There isn't
much "abstract" music in his output (a violin concerto, a piano concerto, a
couple of string quartets); his muse ran mostly to songs, ballets, and
(mostly lightish) opera.
Le Bal de Béatrice d'Este is a ballet from 1909, in which Hahn evokes the
courtly splendor of a Renaissance celebration--Beatrice was a real person
whose brief moment of grandeur came in the last decade of the fifteenth
century, as the wife of the man who, at first acting as regent for the
mentally unstable Duke of Milan (his nephew), maneuvered into possession of
the title for himself. Beatrice, cultivated and genial since girlhood (when
reading Dante was one of her pastimes), threw a gauze of cloth-of-gold over
such iron-handed dealing; her brilliant dress, warm conversation, and lavish
style of entertaining flooded her hour with charm.
- Violin Concerto -- Peter I. Tchaikovsky
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The Violin Concerto came as part of a healing rush of work after Tchaikovsky
fled his misbegotten marriage--among the compositions immediately preceding
it was the Fourth Symphony and the completion of the most poetic of his
operas, Eugene Onegin (the whole catastrophe of the marriage seemed to
unfold from his work on this opera, in which the young heroine declares her
love to the indifferent Onegin by an ardent letter; in replying to the
advances of a young woman who had first approached him by letter,
Tchaikovsky seemed to be trying to repair the damage done by his heartless
title character). This fleeing was not just metaphoric: as soon as he
realized how impossible his domestic situation had become, Tchaikovsky left
Russia for several months of travel. The visit of one of his former students
at the Moscow Conservatory, a talented but rather wayward violinist, to
Tchaikovsky's country retreat in Switzerland called forth both high spirits
and inspiration--the sketch of the Concerto was done in eleven days.
Rather like the First Piano Concerto (from three years earlier), the first
movement of the Violin Concerto begins with a strand of music which is never
heard again after it introduces the violin's first statement. The structure
of this movement is decidedly trimmer than that of the Piano Concerto; the
free melodic flight, and the alternation of pensive meditation and rhythmic
drive in this piece are comparable to the great narrative passages of
Tchaikovsky's ballets, particularly Swan Lake.
- Capriol Suite -- Peter Warlock
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A "capriole" is a dance-step in which, while executing a leap, one performs
a neat double-kick before landing again--this is just one of dozens of steps
described in the "Orchésographie," first printed in 1589 and written by a
French cleric under the pen-name of Thoinot Arbeau. In 1925 an English
translation of this old treatise was prepared, with a preface by Philip
Heseltine, who in his parallel life as a composer signed his work Peter
Warlock. By far, the writing of songs dominated Warlock's output; though he
set many medieval and Renaissance English texts, he did not write strictly
in doublet-and-hose style, but with the shifting harmonies of one strongly
influenced by Frederick Delius.
But the editor and the composer blended in the work on Arbeau: the old
treatise included illustrative melodies for all the sorts of dances being
discussed (the "Orchésographie," as so many other instructive works from
Plato through the eighteenth century, was laid out as a dialogue between an
old master and a young student, in this case Arbeau and the eager young
Capriol), and Peter Warlock drew on these to create the "Capriol
Suite"--first in the present string-orchestra version in 1926 (a piano-duet
version also in the same year), and a full-orchestra scoring two years
later.
For the most part, the harmonic language is suggestive of the older time;
occasionally the gingery "Warlock" spirit is let out in a vigorous
dissonance, such as the end of the opening "Basse-danse" (so called because
it involved no leaps or kicks). Arbeau gives the "Pavane" as a vocal
quartet, complete with text; the four voices move in the same rhythm, with a
steady long-short-short drumbeat keeping the slow, processional time;
Warlock passes that rhythm around different string sections, while melody
and harmony arise with sustained, melancholy grace. A "Tordion" is described
by Arbeau as a neater, quicker version of a galliard (and the old master
makes some disapproving noises about another related dance, "la volta"--the
favorite dance of Queen Elizabeth at this time--with its lifting of the
woman into the air); Warlock's setting shows two versions of this dance, one
with six steps and (when the players suddenly are plucking the strings
instead of bowing) the other with a leap erasing one of the steps in a quick
breath-caught silence.
Arbeau has much to say about several types of "Bransle," and Warlock strings
together the short melodic figures for the different kinds. Young Capriol
remarks that the vigor of the quicker ones makes them ideal dances for
keeping warm in winter, and Warlock's acceleration of tempo illustrates how
the name of this dance is the source of the word "brawl"! The atmosphere
calms down in the next dance, which Arbeau lists among the bransles, but as
a completely different type, in three beats rather than two--all the steps
in this type are the same ("foot-in-the-air"), so perhaps it was a series of
graceful arabesques and attitudes; a little Delius breathes in the sliding
harmonies Warlock uses here. The final dance, "Mattachins," is called a
sword-dance--it might be a mock battle, or the kind of country-dance
involving sticks struck together; in any event, the music sounds like an
across-the-Channel version of the "Shepherds' Hey" collected by Percy
Grainger in his folk-tune-hunting trips around 1907.
- Music of the Spheres -- Josef Strauss
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Dance was the family business of the Strausses of Vienna--established by the
senior Johann and raised to a glorious institution by his namesake son, with
two younger sons to run the orchestra when Johann, Jr. was on tour.
Interestingly, Johann, Sr. had made nonmusical plans for each of the sons:
Johann, Jr. was supposed to go into banking, Josef was meant for the
military, and Eduard was being groomed for the consulate. But Johann, Jr.
was determined to become a musician and pursued full training; it was he who
persuaded his brothers to join him in leading the Strauss Orchestra and
feeding Vienna's inexhaustible appetite for new dance-music.
Josef was the frailest of the three (Johann, Jr. lived to age 74 and Eduard
to 81; Josef didn't quite reach 43), and suffered almost all of his life
from a disorder of the brain and spinal cord. This likely contributed to
his melancholy temperament, and gave his contributions to the ballroom an
inward, poetic tinge. Tonight's waltz, from 1868, takes its name from an
idea, laughed out of science over two hundred years before the waltz's
composition but still retaining a sort of magic as a fantastic image, that
the stars and planets were all kept in their places and motions because they
were set in vast, nesting spheres of crystal...the turning of these
celestial globes is embodied in the shimmer of the waltz's introduction
(complete with angelic harp), and in the haunting serenity of the first
waltz theme, which recurs at the end to remind the dancers of the empyrean
vision before the last flourish, the last bow.
- Violin Concerto -- Sibelius
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The Violin Concerto of Sibelius had a troubled birth--and perhaps one can
say that, like Dionysus, it was born twice. Originally composed in 1903 in
fits and starts, it is one of the earliest of Sibelius's mature works
without a program: his first successes had been in the realm of legends cast
into tone-poem form, including the group of four Lemminkäinen pieces, but in
1898 he began work on the First Symphony; the Second followed some three
years later. With increasing success and multiplying projects came disorder
in the composer's life, particularly his tendency to heavy drinking and
getting into debt. To alleviate the latter, the concerto was rushed into its
first performance; in so doing, Sibelius snubbed the violinist who had
initially inspired him to create the piece and who had hoped to give its
première--he was booked for other performances at the time of the emergency
fund-raising concert, though if Sibelius could have waited just one more
month, that admiring violinist could have presented the concerto in Berlin.
As it was, a decidedly lesser artist played the première in Helsinki, with
an ensemble around half the size of the Berlin Philharmonic; after a
blistering review (Karl Flodin called the piece "a mistake") Sibelius
withdrew the concerto for revision, not touching it for a year. The new
version was ready for the autumn of 1905, and Richard Strauss agreed to
present it in Berlin. But that violinist who had been balked of the earlier
première was once again scheduled for other performances, and so was passed
over a second time...and never played the concerto in his life.
The changes made were essentially cuts and rethinking; the ones that affect
tonight's finale movement bring the atmosphere of the piece closer to the
stark vigor of Sibelius's later symphonic work. (Listening to the original
version of the movement, I thought sometimes that the thicker scoring, and
the appearance of a theme which was completely cut from the later one,
sounded like a "Finnish Fantasy," if Max Bruch had written one to go with
his "Scottish Fantasy.") Under the dizzying rush of the solo violin, low
strings and timpani predominate, setting up repeating pulses and rhythmic
figures; flutes blow cold breezes, and at the crest of a rising ripple of
strings the brass blaze out a triumph of D major. The solo violin, never
absent for long, leads all in a race that passes exhilaration, almost to the
realm of delirium.
- - V. R. Taylor
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