Richness of ideas, bold originality and fullness of power, which are the particular merits of Beethoven’s muse, were very much in evidence to everyone at these concerts; yet many found fault with lack of a noble simplicity and the all too fruitful accumulation of ideas which on account of their number were not always adequately worked out and blended, thereby creating the effect more often of rough diamonds.

In the playing of the concerto movements [Beethoven] asked me to turn the pages for him; but—heaven help me!—that was easier said than done. I saw almost nothing but empty leaves; at the most on one page or the other a few Egyptian hieroglyphs wholly unintelligible to me scribbled down to serve as clues for him; for he played nearly all of the solo part from memory, since, as was often the case, he had not had time to put it all down on paper. He gave me a secret glance whenever he was at the end of one of the invisible passages and my scarcely concealed anxiety not to miss the decisive moment amused him greatly and he laughed heartily at the jovial supper which we ate afterwards

"I set out to display the musical qualities of the various soloists in the wind and brass groups as well as their virtuosity, and so I made the music brilliant and technically difficult. But I also tried to make the most of the characters of sonority and expression of the seven instruments, which differ so greatly in their manner of producing sound and in their mechanism."

I wrote my symphony in December 1845, and I sometimes fear my semi‑invalid state can be divined from the music. I began to feel more myself when I wrote the last movement, and was certainly much better when I finished the whole work. All the same it reminds me of dark days.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

MASTERWORKS CLASSICAL

JOSEPH HAYDN
Symphony No. 39 in G minor

Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He composed his Symphony No. 39 before 1770, possibly as early as 1765; the date of its first performance, which certainly took place at Esterháza under the composer’s direction, is unknown. The symphony is scored by two oboes, four horns, and strings, with the addition of an unwritten bassoon and harpsichord continuo. Duration is about 16 minutes.

Symphonies in minor keys are relatively rare in the Classical era, and they almost always aim at the expression of somber or even tragic emotions, whereas only a few decades earlier, in the Baroque era, composers routinely chose minor keys for works even of a quite jolly character. At the end of the eighteenth century, string quartets, piano sonatas, and other similar works were often published in groups of six, with a bow to the minor mode in just one of them. But for some reason, Haydn’s output for a decade beginning in the last half of the 1760s reveals a much greater emphasis on the minor. This change was once called a “romantic crisis” and was later labeled “Sturm und Drang.” Both terms reflect the preoccupations of the scholars who use them. “Romantic crisis” hints at the belief that biographical facts are inevitably reflected in the character of the music, so that if the work seems somehow more “expressive,” the explanation must lie in the composer’s private life. Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) is a literary term, borrowed from the subtitle of a play by Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger, and applied to a short period in which various arts saw a sudden outpouring of intensely subjective, egocentric plays and stories (among them the earliest major works of Goethe and Schiller); attaching the term to Haydn’s music, however, suggests a literary inspiration that was simply not present. In fact, most of Haydn’s so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies were composed before the literary Sturm und Drang got fairly under way.

Recently Haydn’s biographer, H.C. Robbins Landon, observing that many Austrian composers contemporary with Haydn (figures once quite famous, but now unknown except to specialists, like Florian Leopold Gassmann, Carlos d’Ordońez, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, and Johann Baptist Vanhal) underwent a similar change at about the same time, has spoken of an “Austrian musical crisis,” a neutral term that avoids the biographical and literary fallacies but fails to explain the sudden surge of interest in minor keys and such accompanying expressive devices as increased use of syncopation, leaping melodies, a wider range of dynamic markings, and the use of contrapuntal forms. There was certainly some influence from the extravagant, even sometimes bizarre works of C.P.E. Bach, whom both Haydn and Mozart ranked as a major master. But whatever the reason for this attention to the minor mode, the so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies of Haydn provided a concentrated opportunity to exploit a certain kind of musical expression and to develop techniques that were passed on to other composers.

In the case of Symphony No. 39 (the numbering does not accurately reflect the order of composition), the first and last movements are high points of the new style; moreover, they introduced a new wrinkle in orchestral scoring that was later adopted by Mozart and others. This was the use of four horns, two each in the keys of G and B-flat. The valveless horns of the day could play only a very limited number of notes closely related to the key in which they were pitched. This meant that the instrument was all but useless in those parts of the movement that modulated away from the home tonic (which was almost always in or very near the key of the horns). By employing sets of horns in the key of the tonic and of the relative major (which would normally be the second key of a work in the minor mode), Haydn was able to use horn sound far more significantly than would have been the case otherwise. His solution to this perpetual problem was taken up by Mozart half a dozen years later when he wrote his “little” G-minor symphony, K.183, Vanhal and J.C. Bach also modeled symphonies on this work of Haydn’s. And even when Mozart came to write his “great” G-minor symphony, K.550, his first impulse was to write for two pairs of horns, in G and B-flat, though he later reduced the complement of horns to a single pair.

The opening of the first movement is masterful in its new projection of tension through the simplest means: Haydn keeps the entire full statement of the principal theme at a hushed, piano dynamic, and he inserts unexpected bars of rest between the phrases to throw the rhythmic parsing out of kilter. His attention is hypnotically fixed on the first subject, using it also in the secondary key of B-flat and in contrapuntal extensions throughout.

The slow movement, for strings only, is still somewhat old-fashioned compared to the rest of the work. The minuet, back in G minor, is stern enough to match the remainder of the symphony, though the Trio is unexpectedly fuller and more lush in its scoring (usually it is the lighter element of such dance movements). The finale returns once again to the energy levels and dynamic drive of the opening movement, with restless leaps, racing scales, and sudden dynamic shifts.

SERGEI PROKOFIEV
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C, Opus 26

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was born at Sontzovka, Government of Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, on April 23, 1891, and died at Nikolina Gora near Moscow on March 5, 1953. He began planning a third piano concerto as early as 1911, but completed the concerto only in 1921. Prokofiev himself played the solo part in the premiere, which was given on October 16 of that year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. Besides the solo piano, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, bass drum, castanets, tambourine, cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 29 minutes.

Prokofiev began composing in his early childhood. Though his talent took him to the St. Petersburg Conservatory in his early teens, his brash arrogance tended to put off the other (older) composition students whom he might have befriended, and for several years he pursued a career primarily as a piano virtuoso. Still, he did not give up composing during this time. Before completing the piano program, he had already finished his first two piano concertos (designed as showpieces for himself) and had even boldly chosen to play the First Concerto as his piece for the final keyboard competition, when it was expected that the participants would choose a work from the established repertory.

The years following Prokofiev’s graduation in 1914 were marked by war and revolution in the world at large and in Russia in particular. Yet in spite of this, Prokofiev began to achieve renown, composing some of his best known works (including the Classical Symphony and the First Violin Concerto). Eventually, though, the unsettled condition of musical life and almost everything else persuaded him to go abroad, at least for a time. He traveled via Vladivostock, Tokyo, and San Francisco and ended in Chicago. While on his journey he had sketched an opera, The Love for Three Oranges and part of a string quartet.

The opera was eventually to become his most successful stage work, but its first production was fraught with difficulties. After signing a contract for a 1919 production in Chicago, Prokofiev finished the score in time for rehearsals. The sudden death of the intended conductor postponed the premiere for one year, then a second. Increasingly disillusioned with the United States, Prokofiev left for Paris in the spring of 1920.

Paris was a good place for a modernist Russian composer. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was open to the newest ideas, especially from Russians, and Serge Koussevitzky had founded his own concert series emphasizing new works. After the premiere of his ballet Chout by the Ballets Russes (Paris loved it, London hated it), Prokofiev adjourned to the coast of Brittany for a summer of composition. There he achieved his long held plan to write a Third Piano Concerto. Much of the material was already in hand, since he had been thinking about such a work since completing the Second Concerto in 1914, and some of the musical ideas go back even before that.

He was still committed to the premiere of his opera in Chicago that fall, so he took the opportunity of introducing the new piano concerto there during the same trip. The Love for Three Oranges was premiered (in French, rather than the Russian in which it had been composed) in Chicago on December 30, 1921; the concerto, though composed later, preceded the opera into the world by two months. Here, too, Prokofiev received diverse reactions: Chicago loved both works, New York hated them. Prokofiev returned to Paris, where he mostly remained until his permanent return to the Soviet Union in 1938. But his two major “American” pieces have remained favorites among Prokofiev’s output.

The Third Concerto, in fact, is the most frequently performed of Prokofiev’s five contributions to that genre. Though it is not a whit less demanding technically than the first two concertos, it opens up a new and appealing vein of lyricism that Prokofiev was to mine successfully in the years to come. At the same time his biting, acerbic humor is never absent for long, especially in the writing for woodwinds and sometimes for percussion. Prokofiev customarily wrote melodic ideas in a notebook as they occurred to him.

The concerto opens with a yearning lyrical theme in the clarinet, immediately echoed in flute and violins; its simplicity makes it memorable, and it will mark several stages of the form later on. Almost at once a bustling of sixteenth-note runs in the strings ushers in the soloist, whose nervous theme grows out of the first three notes of the opening lyrical theme (a major second down and a perfect fifth up) turned backwards (a perfect fifth down and a major second up), then sweeps farther afield harmonically in its headstrong energy. An austere march of pounding chords leads to a faster passage of whirling triplets to conclude the exposition. The basic material is developed and recapitulated in a free sonata form.

The main theme of the second movement is one of those patented Prokofiev tunes, dry and sardonic. But it doesn’t stay that way long. The first variation is a Chopin nocturne with a twist; each ensuing variation has its own special color and character, by turns brilliant, meditative, and vigorously energetic. A climactic restatement of the theme with further pianistic display dies away mysteriously into nothing.

The finale begins with a crisp theme in bassoons and pizzicato lower strings in A minor; the piano argues with thundering chords, clouding the harmony. Despite various contrasting materials, some lyrical, some sarcastic, the opening figure provides the main basis for the musical discussion, ending in a brilliant pounding coda.

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 
Symphony No. 8 in F major, Opus 93

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He composed the Eighth Symphony in 1812; it was first performed, in Vienna, on February 27, 1814. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes.

Beethoven composed his Eighth Symphony in tandem with the Seventh. Some of the sketches for both works appear together in a manuscript known as the Petter sketchbook. He apparently liked the challenge and the change of pace that comes with working on two very different pieces at the same time. Indeed, he had already done the same thing with the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. But though the two new symphonies were finished almost together, the Seventh was premiered on December 8, 1813, about two months before the Eighth, which was not heard until February 27 following.

The premiere of the Seventh had been one of the most successful concerts of Beethoven’s life, establishing him without question as the greatest living composer—though the work that truly ignited the audience’s enthusiasm on that occasion was the potboiler Wellington’s Victory, also being heard for the first time. When Beethoven premiered the Eighth two months later, he sandwiched it between repeats of the Seventh and Wellington’s Victory. Under the circumstances, the Seventh, a far longer work, overwhelmed the new score with its sheer visceral energy. A letter in which Beethoven offered both symphonies to an English publisher seems to patronize the later work somewhat, since he describes them as “a grand symphony in A major (one of my most excellent works) and a smaller symphony in F major.” But size alone is not the central factor here. If Beethoven could call the Eighth a smaller work, he surely meant so only in the objective sense of the number of measures contained within it. When Czerny once remarked that it was much less popular than the Seventh, Beethoven replied gruffly, “That’s because it’s so much better.”

Surprisingly enough this jovial symphony was composed in large part during a period of family strife, when Beethoven went to Linz to interfere in the private life of his thirty five year old brother Johann, who had recently allowed his young housekeeper to move in with him. Beethoven, a complete puritan in matters sexual (and possibly jealous), was outraged by the situation and obtained a police order that the girl return to Vienna by a certain date. (Johann evaded the issue by marrying her, but not before there had been an ugly confrontation between the two brothers.) During this tense period, Beethoven was finishing the jovial Eighth!

The opening movement is small in length compared to its sibling, the Seventh, but it is full of events. The opening phrases form a complete melody (how rare that is for Beethoven!), but immediately after the cadence the next phrases open out and grow in the most astonishing way. False leads cheerfully undermine the tonal solidity that Beethoven had been at such pains to establish in the opening bars, seeming to settle in to the highly unorthodox key of D major (instead of the dominant, C) for the secondary theme. But scarcely has the theme started before it falters, suddenly aware of its faux pas, and swings around to the expected dominant.

The development is one of Beethoven's most masterful demonstrations of musical timing. At first he simply marks time with a rhythmic vamp in the violas, jumping up and down an octave. The basic melodic idea turns out to be the very first measure of the symphony, unheard since its single earlier appearance. Now it dominates the discussion. The development is a long crescendo over its entire length. The volume increases gradually; at the same time phrase lengths become progressively shorter, so that things appear to be moving faster and faster, until the movement culminates in the blazing return to the home key, while the bass instruments proclaim the principal theme. The recapitulation is quite straightforward until the coda, when a bassoon (recalling the leaping octaves heard at the beginning of the development) leads into a new harmonic world, another crescendo, and a new version of the main theme in the wrong key. After a solid return to the tonic, the orchestra fades out delightfully, leaving one final salute to the first measure in the bass at the very last instant.

The second movement is a humorous homage to Beethoven's friend Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, a device that Beethoven found invaluable in giving composers, for the first time, a way to specify precise tempos for their music. The cheerful, jesting movement is filled with humorous touches (including a suggestion at the end that the mechanical marvel has broken down). Its scherzando marking makes it rather faster than a slow movement was expected to be.

Beethoven compensates by making his nest movement—for which we expect a rollicking scherzo—Tempo di Menuetto, a marking he had long since ceased using in his symphonies. This movement particularly is responsible for the symphony's reputation as a Haydnesque “throwback.”

Having held his horses back, so to speak, for three movements, Beethoven lets them have their head in the merry rush of the rondo-like tune that seems about to come to a close on an normal dominant C when it is suddenly jerked up to C-sharp, only to have the unexpected note drop away as quickly as it had arrived, apparently without consequence. The same thing happens at the recapitulation, and though the bubbling high spirits leave us little time to worry about details, the sheer obtrusiveness of that note lingers in the ear, demanding consideration. The questions are answered in the immense coda, where the obtrusive C-sharp note returns with harmonic consequences, generating a new and distant tonal diversion that must be worked out before we can return safely home. At this pace, Beethoven's wit can only leave us breathless with delight at his exhilarating wit.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

MASTERWORKS GALA

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave), Opus 26

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847. He completed the Hebrides Overture in December 1831 and revised it twice; the first performance of the final version was in Berlin on January 10, 1833, the composer conducting. Mendelssohn seems never to have resolved the choice of title; while composing it, he called it “The Hebrides”; at various times he referred to it as “The Lonely Island,” and performed it as “The Isles of Fingal.” The printed parts of the first version are entitled “Hebrides,” but the published score of the revision is “Fingal’s Cave.” The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes.
   
A great letter writer, Felix Mendelssohn sent his family regular reports of his impressions and activities, embellished with charming and skillful drawings. Thus, while visiting Scotland, he wrote of the impression made on him of a visit to Fingal’s Cave, a celebrated sea cave in the basalt lava on the southwestern shore of Staffa, in the island group known as the Inner Hebrides. The roar of the waves, the clear air, the cries of sea birds, and the impressive rock formations were a powerful stimulant. “In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me,” he wrote on August 7, 1829, “the following came into my mind there,” and he wrote out twenty-one measures of music that correspond to the beginning of his overture. Though it took another sixteen months to complete, he perfectly captured the uncanny effect of the Hebridean landscape.

Once he had finished the work, Mendelssohn had to decide what to call it. The term “tone poem,” which we might find most appropriate, had not yet been invented, and it was certainly not a symphony. So instead he called it an overture, because it was a single movement for orchestra cast in sonata form, like the overtures of Mozart or Beethoven, though it does not actually precede and introduce a larger work, as the term “overture” implies. It was thus the very first example of the “concert overture,” a genre that became quite popular in the romantic era.

The wonder of Mendelssohn’s score is the constant freshness and flexibility of his invention. The opening figure of his first theme recurs many times—but almost every time its appearance differs after a single measure. The freedom that he takes in the working out of this idea and its sequels is not the freedom that comes with “rule-breaking” for its own sake, but freedom derived from a firm vision of the end, from attention concentrated on the goal of a specific kind of expression, here of landscape painting via music. And it is thus that the young composer (just twenty-one when he finished the score in Rome) created one of his most original and compelling works.

SAMUEL BARBER
Canzonetta for Oboe and Strings, Op. 48

Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York, on January 23, 1981.  The work known as the Canzonetta was originally intended to be the middle movement of an oboe concerto that Barber was writing for Harold Gomberg and the New York Philharmonic, but his death after completing two short-score versions of the slow movement left it as the whole of the piece, and Barber’s final work. The details of the orchestration were polished by Charles Turner. Gomberg played the solo in the first performance, with Zubin Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic, on December 17, 1981. In addition to the solo oboe, the score calls for orchestral strings. Duration is about eight and a half minutes.
   
Samuel Barber’s last years were filled with illness and also with frequent depression at the feeling that the musical world had passed him by. He had always written in a style that was relatively conservative, general tonal and lyrical in orientation, yet he had been highly honored with two Pulitzer prizes (for his opera Vanessa and his Piano Concerto) and performances by many of the mid-century’s leading conductors from Toscanini to Koussevitzky to Ormandy. But the perceived failure of his second large opera, Antony and Cleopatra, which had been commissioned for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House (where it fell victim to technical breakdowns, the expectations of a gala audience, and a wildly overdone set and staging by Franco Zeffirelli) was a great psychological blow, from which he did not recover for some years.

He began an oboe concerto for the New York Philharmonic’s principal player, Harold Gomberg, with whom he had been a fellow student at the Curtis Institute four decades earlier, in the summer of 1978. But not long after starting the piece, he learned that he had cancer. He was concerned about whether he could finish the piece at all and equally concerned that critics would carp—as they had increasing in his last years—that his music followed the same old lines with nothing new about it. He started working on ideas and scrapped many of them after only a short time.

The one thing he felt comfortable writing was the slow movement, intended to stand between two fast outer movements, the most common pattern for a concerto. He composed two versions of this movement. As he grew more and more ill during the course of 1980, he realized that he would not be able to finish the entire concerto, and he proposed to his publisher that the one movement he had drafted completely in short score should be considered a piece that would stand alone as Canzonetta for Oboe and String Orchestra.

When he died in January 1981, his publisher turned to one of Barber’s few students, and a long-time friend, Charles Turner, to polish up the details of the work from the short-score draft. At the premiere, Harold Gomberg added a cadenza that Barber had composed but not included in the score proper.

The Canzonetta was the last music Barber wrote. It is a fitting ending in its poignant expressiveness and altogether typical of the composer who represented the great power of lyricism among twentieth-century composers.

JEAN SIBELIUS
Spring Song, Opus 16

Jean (Johan Julius Christian) Sibelius was born at Tavastehusmeenlinna), Finland, on December 8, 1865, and died at Järvenpää, at his country home near Helsingfors (Helsinki), on September 20, 1957. He composed Vảrsỏng (“Spring Song”) in 1894 and revised the following year following the premiere in Vaasa on June 21, 1894. The score calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, chimes, and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes.
   
The work that became known as Spring Song was composed on a commission from the Finnish Society for Popular Education with the intention that it be performed in a grand open-air concert on the longest day of the year, June 21. At that time Sibelius simply called it “Impromptu.” A year later, for a performance in Helsinki, he called it by its Finnish title Vảrsỏng with a subtitle in French: “The Sadness of Spring,” but this was already a shortened version that dropped a concluding section that had something of a Spanish flavor, and the key was changed from D major to F major, traditionally a key for “pastoral” compositions (such as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony).

Even without the subtitle, which Sibelius later dropped, it is clear that this is no evocation of burgeoning fresh life, but rather an expression of a kind of melancholy. Sibelius’s major biographer Tawaststjerna considers the work to be an apostrophe to “the qualities of the Nordic spring and in particular its quality of light,” but it is at heart a work of abstract music, not one with a story to tell.

BÉLA BARTÓK
Concerto for Orchestra

Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Transylvania (then part of Hungary but now absorbed into Rumania), on March 25, 1881, and died in New York on September 26, 1945. The Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned in the spring of 1943 by Serge Koussevitzky through the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky. Bartók composed the work between August 15 and October 8, 1943; Koussevitzky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the first performances on December 1 and 2, 1944. The Concerto for Orchestra is scored for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets (with a fourth trumpet marked ad lib.), three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, bass drum, tam-tam, cymbals, triangle, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 36 minutes.

For Bartók, the Anschluss—Hitler’s occupation of Austria on March 11, 1938—was the beginning of the end. He had watched the growth of Nazi power with trepidation for five years, but his ties with Hungary were too strong to allow more than passing thoughts of emigration. But by April, Bartók began to act, first of all to save his life’s work; he asked friends in Switzerland to take care of his manuscripts: “With no obligation to be responsible for them, of course: I would bear all the risk. These things do not take up much room: not more than a small suitcase.” His publishers, Universal-Edition, and his performing rights society, both in Vienna, had been “nazified,” as he put it, with the result that he and all other composers were sent the notorious questionnaire concerning their racial background. Fortunately the English publisher Ralph Hawkes came to Budapest with an offer to publish both Bartók and Kodály in the future.

Bartók was unable to make up his mind to leave Hungary definitively as long as his elderly and ailing mother was still alive. He had just finished the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and with his wife Ditta Pásztory he traveled to London to play it, while also working out the final details of his new publishing arrangement. Back in Budapest during the winter of 1938-39, he managed to complete two new works despite the gathering clouds of war: Contrasts, a trio for piano, violin, and clarinet, written for Joseph Szigeti and Benny Goodman, and the Second Violin Concerto.

Politics became even more ominous in the summer of 1939, but Bartók spent part of the summer in an Alpine chalet put at his disposal by Paul Sacher. There he composed in fifteen days his delightful Divertimento for String Orchestra, for all the world as if there were no war threats outside. He was nonetheless acutely aware of international tensions. He could see for himself that even the “poor, peaceful, honest Swiss” were preparing boulders above the mountain passes to use as a defense against tanks.

Called back to Budapest by the outbreak of war in September, he was still there in December when his mother died. He sailed from Naples in April 1940 for an American tour and an unknown future. He had just finished his Sixth String Quartet. But that was the last music he was to write for more than three years. For a while it appeared he had given up composing altogether. A fund at Columbia University supported him in the work of transcribing and preparing for publication a large collection of Serbo-Croatian folk songs.

Bartók enjoyed his work with the folk materials at Columbia, but he was painfully aware that his position there was only temporary. Worst of all, he had begun to have a series of irregular high fevers that the doctors were unable to diagnose. He and Ditta appeared in the premiere of the orchestral version of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion with the New York Philharmonic directed by the composer’s old friend Fritz Reiner in January 1943, but that proved to be his last concert.

A serious breakdown of his health later in the month forced the interruption of a lecture series at Harvard and brought him to a psychological low point. Doctors couldn’t explain the cause of his ailment, or perhaps they were being discreet in not telling the composer that he was dying of leukemia. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) undertook to provide Bartók’s medical care, even though he was not a member of the society (he was a member of ASCAP’s British affiliate). But the best medicine that spring came not from a doctor, but from a conductor—Serge Koussevitzky.

Throughout his American years, Bartók found no reason to feel that his music had struck any sort of responsive chord here. In December 1941 he had claimed to Kodály that he felt lucky in lacking the inclination to write a new large score since “even if I had a new orchestra work it would be impossible to get it performed.”

Koussevitzky’s visit in April 1943 changed all that, for the conductor commissioned a work and guaranteed a performance. The change in Bartók’s spirit was immediate. He spent the summer resting under medical supervision at a sanatorium at Lake Saranac in upstate New York; here he wrote most of the new work in just eight weeks, between August 15 and October 8. And in working on the score, he recovered much of his former energy and enthusiasm. He told Szigeti early in 1944 that the improvement in his health allowed him to finish the Concerto for Orchestra—or perhaps it was the other way around.

Béla and Ditta Bartók made the trip to Boston late in November 1944 to attend the premiere, as the composer reported to a friend a few weeks later:

We went there for the rehearsals and performances—after having obtained the grudgingly granted permission of my doctor for this trip. It was worth wile [sic], the performance was excellent. Koussevitzky is very enthusiastic about the piece, and says it is “the best orchestra piece of the last 25 years” (including the works of his idol Shostakovich!).

For the first performance Bartók wrote a commentary printed in the orchestra’s program book, something he did only rarely. His summary of the spirit of the work was no doubt a response to his own feeling of recuperation as he composed it:

The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one. The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single instruments or instrumental groups in a concertant or soloistic manner. The “virtuoso” treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments), or in the perpetuum mobile-like passage of the principal theme in the last movement (strings), and, especially, in the second movement, in which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages.

He paired the first and fifth movements, as well as the second and fourth, so that the overall structure is a symmetrical pattern balanced through the middle (this was a favorite design in his multi-movement works).

The Concerto opens with a mysterious introduction laying forth the essential motivic ideas: a theme built up of intervals of the fourth, answered by symmetrical contrary motion in seconds. These ideas become gradually more energetic until they explode in the vigorous principal theme in the strings, a tune that bears the imprint of Bartók’s musical physiognomy all over with its emphatic leaping fourths and its immediate inversion. It is a rich mine of melodic motives for future development. The solo trombone introduces a fanfare-like figure, again built of fourths, that will come to play an important role in the brasses later on. A contrasting theme appears in the form of a gently rocking idea first heard in the oboe. Most of these materials make their first impression as melodies pure and simple, not as the source material for contrapuntal elaboration, but Bartók works out a wondrously rich concoction with all kinds of contrapuntal tricks, and the fact that this was possible is, of course, no accident; the composer planned it from the start in designing his themes.

The “Game of Pairs” that forms the second movement is simple but original in form, a chain-like sequence of folk-oriented melodies presented by five pairs of instruments, each pair playing in parallel motion at a different interval: the bassoons in sixths, then oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, flutes in fifths, and trumpets in seconds. After a brass chorale in the middle of the movement, the entire sequence of tunes is repeated with more elaborate scoring.

The third movement, Elegia, is one of those expressive “night music” movements that Bartók delighted in. He described it as built of three themes appearing successively, framed “by a misty texture of rudimentary motifs.” The thematic ideas are closely related to those of the first movement, but they are treated here in a kind of expressive recitative of the type that Bartók called “parlando rubato,” a style that he found characteristic of much Hungarian music.

The Intermezzo interrotto (“Interrupted Intermezzo”) alternates two very different themes: a rather choppy one first heard in the oboe, then a flowing, lush, romantic one that is Bartók’s gift to the viola section. But after these ideas have been stated in an ABA pattern, there is a sudden interruption in the form of a vulgar, simple-minded tune that descends the scale in stepwise motion. This tune actually comes from the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, which Bartók heard on a radio broadcast while working on the Concerto for Orchestra. According to his son Péter, he was so incensed with the theme’s ludicrous simplicity that he decided to work it into his new piece and burlesque it with nose-thumbing jibes in the form of cackling trills from the woodwinds, raspberries from the tuba and trombones, and chattering commentary from the strings. Soon, however, all settles back to normal with a finale BA statement of the two main tunes.

The last movement begins with characteristic dance rhythms in an equally characteristic Bartókian perpetuo moto that rushes on and on, throwing off various motives that gradually solidify into themes, the most important of which appears in the trumpet and turns into a massive fugue, complicated and richly wrought, but building up naturally to a splendidly sonorous climax.

The overwhelming success of the Concerto for Orchestra marked the real beginning of Bartók’s fame with the broad concert audience. It remains without doubt his best-known and best-loved purely orchestral work, but over the years it has also provided a key by means of which many listeners have learned to love Bartók’s music, including the pieces that were once found to be too “difficult.”

The despair that had caused him to give up composing had been overcome—even more so when the Concerto for Orchestra began its triumphal conquest of concert halls the following year. Bartók began accepting new commissions and undertaking further projects, though it was also clear that his health was not permanently improved. The months remaining to him produced the Sonata for Solo Violin, dedicated to Yehudi Menuhin, and the Third Piano Concerto, finished but for the last seventeen measures, as well as the unfinished Viola Concerto and sketches for a seventh string quartet. For a man who had declared a short time earlier that he never wanted to compose again, that may be miracle enough.

During the early months of 1883, Tchaikovsky was in Paris, urgently attempting to complete the score of his opera Mazeppa, for which the two leading Russian opera companies in Moscow and St. Petersburg were vying. But he had to interrupt himself in March when he received a special commission for two works needed for the coronation of Tsar Alexander III: a grand march and a cantata entitled Moscow. “My first thought was to refuse,” he wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, “but then I decided I had at all costs to try to fulfill both commissions on time. I know from reliable sources that the Tsar is very disposed towards me (that is, to my music), and I would not want it to reach him that I had refused.” So, like the thorough professional that he was, he set to work at once, composing first the march, then the cantata.

The Coronation March was first performed on June 4, at festivities organized in Moscow’s Sokolniky Park to celebrate the coronation. The composer’s favorite student, Sergei Taneev, conducted. Tchaikovsky quite regularly downplayed the importance of small pieces like this, especially when he had composed them on commission, so it is not surprising to find him summarily denigrating the work as “noisy but bad.” Still it did exactly what was wanted, providing a vigorous display of orchestral color and martial rhythm, scored for the open air. During the course of the march he quoted two melodies that would have been familiar to his audience: The Danish national hymn appeared in tribute to the fact that the Empress came from Denmark. The Russian anthem “Bozhe, tsaria khrani” (“God save the tsar”), composed in 1833 by Aleksei L’vov, naturally symbolized the ruler himself (modern listeners will recognize it from its appearance in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture).

SUITE FROM SWAN LAKE, Op. 20a

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Kamsko Votkinsk, Vyatka province, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed Swan Lake between August 1875 and April 22, 1876; it was first performed that Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on February 20 (new style, March 4), 1877. The suite runs about 31 minutes.

With his richly endowed lyrical gift, his masterful orchestration, and his ability to produce inventive rhythms in dance forms, Tchaikovsky was perfectly endowed to be a ballet composer. Oddly enough, his first major ballet, Swan Lake was unfavorably received, partly at least because of a poor performance and heavy cuts. Indeed, Tchaikovsky died believing himself to be an utter failure as a composer for the ballet, since none of his major ballets—Swan Lake (1877), Sleeping Beauty (1889) and The Nutcracker (1892) was regarded as a success by the public in its original production. How surprised he would be to learn that Swan Lake is the cornerstone of the classical ballet repertory, and The Nutcracker is performed so often every Christmas that it is primarily responsible for keeping ballet companies solvent!

The ballet told an extensive story in four acts about a young prince, Siegfried, who is expected to marry, but who is not interested in any of the princesses presented to him as a potential bride. But while hunting near a lake, he sees a flock of swans that land and turn in beautiful maidens; they have been enchanted by an evil wizard named Rotbart. The leader of the swans is the Princess Odette, who explains that only a marriage vow contracted in the face of death can break the spell that forces her to be a swan during the day.

Siegfried urges her to attend his betrothal ball the next night so that he can choose her as his bride. Baron Rotbart arrives at the ball with a woman who looks exactly like Odette, but dressed in black; she is actually Odile, “the black swan,” intended to mislead the prince in his choice. After he selects Odile, a vision of Odette, as a white swan, appears, and Siegfried realizes he has been tricked. Odette returns to the lake and her companions, and when Siegfried pursues her there to beg forgiveness, she dies in his arms. (In some modern productions, the tragic ending is changed, allowing Siegfried to slay Rotbart and recover Odette as his bride.)

Tchaikovsky’s score for this dramatic story is melodious, harmonically rich, and brilliantly scored, at a single stroke elevating ballet music from a hodge-podge of rum-ti-tum tinkling accompaniments dictated at the ballet-master’s insistence to a score that unfolds in dramatic fashion, building to a powerful climax. The suite from the ballet does not attempt to follow the story in detail, but includes some of the favorite waltzes and specialty dances, but it also includes the elaborate dance of the swans that heralds their arrival in Act 2 and closes with the powerful final scene from the end of Act 4.

MAURICE RAVEL

PAVANE POUR UNE INFANTE DEFUNTE

Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure near Saint Jean de Luz, Basses-Pyrénées, in the Basque region of France just a short distance from the Spanish border, on March 7, l875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. He composed the Pavane for a Dead Infanta as a piano work in 1899. In 1910 he orchestrated it for small orchestra; in that version Henry J. Wood led the first performance in Manchester, England, on February 27, 1911. The score calls for two flutes, oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, harps, and strings. Duration is about 6 minutes.

The pavane was a widespread court dance of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; literally hundreds of compositions for solo instrument or ensemble survive from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods to testify to the popularity of the dance first as an element in social life, later as an abstract musical style. The dance was a stately processional (often used as a sort of “grand march” at the beginning of an evening); couples would move with stately grace around the floor, taking such opportunities for flirting or displaying themselves to others as might be offered by the situation. This promenading character of the pavane has led some scholars to suggest that the name derives from the Spanish pavon (peacock), since the dignity of the dance was supposed to suggest the self-satisfied strut of the peacock with tail spread. The dance is now believed to be of Italian origin. Early publications describe it variously as pavana and padoana; these are adjectives meaning “of Padua,” so it must be presumed that that north Italian town lent its name for the dance.

Ravel certainly never danced a pavane in his life. But when he composed this delicate and seductive score, he was clearly evoking an exotic past—and, in this case, a Spanish Renaissance court, where an Infanta was a daughter of the king, and therefore a Spanish princess. Shortly after Ravel’s death, the pianist Charles Oulmont recalled the composer’s witty critique of Oulmont’s performance of the Pavane on some occasion when Ravel found it much too slow. Ravel said to Oulmont afterwards, “Listen, dear boy, remember another time that I wrote a Pavane for a dead princess….not a dead Pavane for a princess.” Despite the somber title, Ravel’s score is wonderfully graceful and gently captivating.

ALBORADA DEL GRACIOSO

Ravel composed Alborada del Gracioso as a piano piece in 1905, orchestrating the work in 1918. The orchestral premiere was given in Paris on May 17, 1919, Rhené Baton conducting. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, crotales, triangle, tambourine, castanets, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, xylophone, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes.

In 1905 Ravel composed a set of five piano pieces under the title Miroirs (Mirrors). Three of the five individual works—Une barque sur l’Océan, Alborada del Gracioso, and La Vallée des cloches—were later orchestrated. The most successful of these re-clothed pieces is certainly the Alborada del Gracioso. In its original keyboard format, the piece is filled with powerful accents and impossibly fast repeated notes that are a challenge to even the most gifted virtuoso. Such overwhelming technical demands almost cried out to be translated to the orchestra, especially for a composer like Ravel, to whom the art of transcribing from piano to orchestra was a welcome challenge, one that he met repeatedly with remarkable success.

The title of the piece is evocative, if a bit mysterious. “Alborada” is the Spanish equivalent of the French “aubade,” the Italian “alba,” and the German “Morgenlied,” all of them “dawn songs,” a characteristic genre from the lyric poetry of the Middle Ages. Generally they are conceived as being sung by a friend watching out for the safety of two illicit lovers. As the night wanes, the friend sings outside the bedroom window that the dawn is approaching and that it is time for the lovers to part. (Wagner employed the same genre of the “dawn song” in Brangaene’s unheeded warning to Tristan and Isolde that the night is drawing to its end.) As such, the poem of a song—and any music that would accompany it—is likely to be of a sentimental cast.

It is the second part of Ravel’s title that is uniquely elusive, for this is the dawn song of the gracioso—a buffoon, a jester, a clown. So this morning song is not the end of a romantic interlude, but rather a vigorous Spanish dance, possibly somewhat comic in character, built up from a typical Iberian rhythm and the frequent opposition of 6/8 and 3/4 meters, often heard simultaneously in different instruments. But the rhythmic pattern here is treated with more variety than in the intentionally hypnotic Boléro, as the meter shifts occasionally from 6/8 to 9/8. The introductory phrase, pizzicato in the strings, suggests a guitar refrain that recurs several times between “verses” of the song, which becomes a brilliant orchestral showpiece, presented with bright splashes of color and virtuosic solo interjections culminating in a glorious racket. As a real “dawn song,” the work would be catastrophic; in addition to waking the lovers, it would arouse the entire neighborhood. But it remains one of Ravel’s most colorful evocations of Iberian dance.

LEROY ANDERSON

A CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL

Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) became a well known composer largely by the chance that he went to Harvard. But it wasn’t his thorough training with Edward Ballantine, Georges Enesco, and Walter Piston that marked the course of his life so much as the fact that, in 1936, as conductor of the Harvard University Band, he was asked by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s general manager, George Judd, to prepare an orchestral arrangement of Harvard songs and to conduct it with the Boston Pops at the orchestra’s annual Harvard Night for the twenty-fifth reunion of Judd’s Harvard class. Arthur Fiedler was favorably impressed with Anderson’s skill in orchestration. Thus emboldened, the young man showed Fiedler a little specialty piece called Jazz Pizzicato, an encore number for orchestral strings. When it was first played, in 1937, it made such a hit that Fiedler promptly named Anderson the chief arranger of the Boston Pops. Thus began a remarkable series of novelty numbers for orchestra, marked by a flair for catchy melody, a lively sense of orchestral effect (including unusual instruments, such the typewriter in The Typewriter or a trumpet played to sound like a neighing horse in Sleigh Ride), and the use of popular dance rhythms. In addition to arrangements of others= music, Anderson created a superb series of original pieces that have become popular light orchestral favorites everywhere, and some of them  including The Syncopated Clock and Blue Tango  even made the Hit Parade.

A Christmas Festival is a brilliant orchestral treatment of a number of the most popular of Christmas carols and songs, sometimes combined for an additional frisson of pleasure (as in the culminating blend of “Jingle Bells” and “O come, all ye faithful”).

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)