Program Notes: Spring 2018 Concert

Program Notes for Spring 2018 Concert

Spirits of Spring!
Sunday, April 22, 2018, 3 p.m.
Christ Episcopal Church, 2627 Atlantic Street, NE, Warren
By Steven Ledbetter, program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979-1998.

Ludwig van Beethovan (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A, Opus 92

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He began the Symphony No. 7 in the fall of 1811, completed it in the spring of 1812 and led the first public performance in Vienna on December 8, 1813.

The first performance of the Seventh Symphony, which took place in Vienna on December 8, 1813, at a charity concert that also included the premiere of Wellington's Victory in the Battle of Vittoria, Opus 91, was one of the most splendid successes of Beethoven’s life. The concert was repeated four days later, at the same benefit prices, and raised a large sum of money for the aid of Austrian and Bavarian troops wounded in the Battle of Hanau. More important from the musical point of view, it marked the real arrival of popular recognition that Beethoven was the greatest living composer. To tell the truth, it was probably the potboiler Wellington's Victory, which concluded the program, that spurred the most enthusiasm. Wellington, after all, was allied with the Austrians in opposing Napoleon, and a degree of patriotic fervor infected the proceedings; moreover the piece was simply calculated to appeal to a broad general audience more certainly than the lengthy abstract symphony that had opened the concert. Beethoven, of course, knew that the symphony was the greater piece. He called it, in fact, "one of my most excellent works" when writing to Johann Peter Salomon (for whom Haydn had written his symphonies 93‑101), asking him to use his good offices with a London publisher to sell a group of his works there. And because of the special popularity of Wellington's Victory (a popularity which was even more likely in England than in Vienna), Beethoven adjusted his prices accordingly: a London publisher could have the "grand symphony" (the Seventh) for thirty ducats, but the Battle Symphony would cost eighty! Those fees do not in any way reflect Beethoven's view (or ours) of the relative merits of the two works; he was simply asking what he thought the market would bear.

Beethoven had accustomed himself to indicate expression by all manner of singular body movements. So often as a sforzando occurred, he tore his arms, which he had previously crossed on his breast, with great vehemence asunder. At piano he crouched down lower and lower as he desired the degree of softness. If a crescendo then entered, he gradually rose again and at the entrance of the forte jumped into the air. Sometimes, too, he unconsciously shouted to strengthen the forte.

The new symphony contained difficulties that the violin section declared unperformable during rehearsals; Beethoven persuaded the players to take the music home and practice overnight, a concession almost unheard of! The rehearsal the next day went excellently. The composer Ludwig Spohr, who was playing in the violin section for that performance, has left in his memoirs a description of Beethoven's conducting during the rehearsal — a remarkable enough feat since Beethoven's hearing was by now seriously impaired

Beethoven had accustomed himself to indicate expression by all manner of singular body movements. So often as a sforzando occurred, he tore his arms, which he had previously crossed on his breast, with great vehemence asunder. At piano he crouched down lower and lower as he desired the degree of softness. If a crescendo then entered, he gradually rose again and at the entrance of the forte jumped into the air. Sometimes, too, he unconsciously shouted to strengthen the forte.

Spohr realized that Beethoven could no longer hear the quiet passages in his own music. At one point during the rehearsal, Beethoven conducted through a pianissimo hold and got several measures ahead of the orchestra without knowing it.

[He] jumped into the air at the point where according to his calculation the forte ought to begin. When this did not follow his movement he looked about in a startled way, stared at the orchestra to see it still playing pianissimo and found his bearings only when the long‑expected forte came and was visible to him. Fortunately this comical incident did not take place at the performance.

The extraordinary energy of the Seventh Symphony has generated many interpretations from the critics, among the most famous of which is Wagner's description, "Apotheosis of the Dance." The air of festive jubilation was certainly linked by the first audiences with the victory over Napoleon, but many later writers have spoken of "a bacchic orgy" or "the upsurge of a powerful dionysiac impulse." Even for a composer to whom rhythm is so important a factor in his work, the rhythmic vehemence of this symphony, in all four movements, is striking.

At the same time, Beethoven was beginning to exploit far‑ranging harmonic schemes as the framework for his musical architecture. If the Sixth Symphony had been elaborated from the simplest and most immediate harmonic relations —subdominant and dominant — the Seventh draws on more distant keys, borrowed from the scale of the minor mode. The very opening, the most spacious slow introduction Beethoven ever wrote, moves from the home key of A major through C major and F major (both closely related to A minor), before returning to A for the beginning of the Vivace. That introduction, far more than being simply a neutral foyer serving as entry to the house, summarizes the architecture of the entire building: A, C, and F are the harmonic poles around which the symphony is built.

Nowhere, not even in the opening movement of the Fifth, does Beethoven stick so single‑mindedly to one rhythmic pattern as in the Vivace of the Seventh. It skips along as rhythmic surface or background throughout. The slow movement was a sensation from the beginning; it had to be encored at the first two benefit concerts, and during the nineteenth century it was also frequently used, especially in Paris, as a substitute for the slow movement of the Second Symphony. The dark opening, stating the accompaniment to the entire march theme before the melody itself appears; the hypnotic repetition of a quarter‑note and two eighths; the alternation between major and minor, between strings and winds; the original fusion of march, rondo, and variation forms — all these contribute to the fascination of this movement.

The Presto of the third movement is a headlong rush, broken only slightly by the somewhat slower contrasting Trio. Beethoven brings the Trio around twice and hints that it might come for yet a third time (necessitating still one more round of scherzo) before dispelling our qualms with a few sharp closing chords. The closing Allegro con brio brings the symphony to its last and highest pitch of jubilation.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Opus 24, for soprano and orchestra

Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York on January 23, 1981. He composed Knoxville: Summer of 1915 in 1947, and the score bears the dedication "In Memory of my Father" — a particularly suitable dedication since the text he has set comes from James Agee's memoir of the death of his own father.

Samuel Barber's piece is a setting of an autobiographical fragment by James Agee, used as the prologue to his novel A Death in the Family. Agee's remarkable prose poem depicts a summer evening with the whole family assembled in the back yard, as seen through the eyes of a small child.

The text appears, at first, to be simply the child's methodical cataloguing of all the people and things that form part of its life — a typically childlike way of establishing one's own place in the scheme of things, though in Agee's text, the language is richly evocative and anything but juvenile. The child is the poet's persona, represented in the musical score by the soprano. Like all children — like everyone of all ages, for that matter — the main item on the child's agenda is to establish its identity in the world. The beauty of Agee's poem is that we can sense the "immortal yearnings" of this small child through a concrete listing of objects and of relatives "who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home...but will not ever tell me who I am."

Barber's music, too, seems deceptively simple, yet it grows organically from a handful of ideas: the opening paints the cool summer evening with intertwining woodwinds. The singer begins with a calm phrase that soon introduces a figure of three notes, a cell that serves as the basis for much of the melodic line. First heard at the words "when people sit on their porches," the rotations of the three pitches in this cell form a musical analogy to the methodical poetic "catalogue" of the child's world. Street noises interrupt the calm of the night. As the sound of the streetcar gradually dies away, the stillness of the night settles in and we return to the mood of the opening. The stars in the sky evoke wonder and deeper thoughts concerning these people who are all caught up in the beauty and mystery of existence. The woodwind music from the very opening returns in a much broader guise as the child blesses all the well-loved people who form its universe. The closing phrase, the final summation, as the child is put to bed, magnificently broadens and intensifies the melodic line. Throughout Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Barber's music is far more than mere illustration of a text; he has crafted a masterful score of romantic cast that grows from a handful of musical ideas and soars with rich vocal lyricism.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 Text

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in that time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

...It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt; a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.

A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes....
Parents on porches: rock and rock.
From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there....They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well‑beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

‑‑James Agee
© Copyright 1949 by G. Schirmer, Inc. Used by permission.

Otto Nicolai (1810-1849)
Merry Wives of Windsor Overture

Carl Otto Ehrenfried Nicolai was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) on June 9, 1810, and died in Berlin on May 11, 1849. He composed his "comic‑fantastic opera in three acts" Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor) to a libretto by S.H. Mosenthal after Shakespeare's comedy in late 1848 and early 1849. It was produced at the Berlin Court Opera on March 9, 1849.

Shakespeare created Falstaff, the genial buffoon of immense avoirdupois, in his Henry IV plays. Later, according to legend, he responded to a special request from Queen Elizabeth to show "Falstaff in love" with the comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, which has served as the basis of operas by Nicolai, Verdi, Holst, Vaughan Williams and probably others. Verdi's Falstaff is one of the supreme masterpieces of the operatic literature and is deservedly the best known of these works. But in German-speaking countries, at least, Nicolai's delightful work remains a fairly common part of the repertory; and its overture is known and loved all over the world.

The music of the overture is entirely drawn from the opera, most of it from the magical scene at midnight in Windsor Park. The hushed opening and the first theme of the Allegro are connected to the "fairies" (the children of Windsor that Ann Page has disguised to fool the credulous Falstaff). The lovely second theme, marked "sweetly, with spirit," depicts Mistress Page herself, the merriest of merry wives. Just as the development gets underway we encounter a rather uncouth idea huffing and puffing in F minor: the boorish Falstaff himself. The remainder of the overture plays hide-and-seek with all of these ideas, capturing the vigor and wit of a delightful comic story.

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Dawn on the Moscow River (Prelude to the opera Khovanshchina)

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was born at Karevo, district of Pskov, on March 21, 1839, and died in St. Petersburg on March 28, 1881. He worked on his opera Khovanshchina on and off over the last years of his life, from 1872, and composed the Prelude in September 1874; the work as a whole remained unfinished at his death. It was put into performable shape by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and the premiere took place in St. Petersburg on February 21, 1886.

The greatest musical dramatist of nineteenth-century Russia died at the age of 42, leaving almost as many major works unfinished as finished. Both his early death and the body of projected operas that remained drafts or torsos came about because of his extremely unstable life, largely the result of an addiction to the bottle. Yet Mussorgsky is far and away the most original composer of his age, certainly the greatest in setting to music the Russian language, whether in songs or opera. Though he had a lyrical strain that shines in all his music, his most characteristic work is in the naturalistic vein, capturing the rhythms and the natural melody of spoken Russian in his settings. This was regarded as "unmusical" by many musicians at the time; Tchaikovsky, for example, regarded Mussorgsky's music as little more than amateurish. Yet his songs and operas, more than any vocal works by any Russian composer, have taught later Russian musicians how to approach their own language in music.

The title of his opera Khovanshchina, a mouthful for any non-speaker of Russian, is virtually untranslatable. The story is set in the late 17th century, when the leader of the military police, or Streltsy, is one Prince Ivan Khovansky, who is determined to get the tsar's throne for his son Andrei, wresting it from the three co‑regents, Ivan, Peter, and Sophia. When he heard of this, Peter derisively labeled it Khovanshchina — something like "Khovansky-ism." Perhaps the easiest way to express it in English (taking a stylistic cue from the titles of Robert Ludlum thrillers) would be "The Khovansky Plot."

The notebook that contains Mussorgsky's piano score for the entire first act of Khovanshchina begins with the opera's Prelude. It is dated "2 September 74 in Petrograd." Unlike many operatic preludes of the 19th century, this one does not summarize the plot or principal characters of the opera; it is a genre painting pure and simple, sometimes known as Dawn on the River Moskva. It is imbued with the spirit of folk song, elaborated progressively as if from singer to singer, presented in the wonderfully delicate colors of Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestral dress.

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)
Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was born in Novospasskoye, district of Smolensk, on June 1, 1804, and died in Berlin in February 15, 1857. He composed his "magic" opera, Ruslan and Ludmilla, to a libretto by V. F. Shirkov, based on a narrative poem by Pushkin, during the years 1837-1842. It was produced in St. Petersburg on December 9, 1842.

Glinka is the pioneer explorer, the Columbus, of Russian romantic music. The Russian court in St. Petersburg had long been filled with musical activity, but it had always been imported from Italy or Germany or France, and even the native composers adopted the styles of Western Europe. It was Glinka who showed the way to creating a musical style that took into account native Russian modes of melody and rhythm, derived from folk song and from the very language itself. He thus became the banner-bearer for all native Russian composers. Indeed, Tchaikovsky accorded him a special place in his personal pantheon. In his last home (now a museum), Tchaikovsky kept all of his musical scores in one large bookcase, with two exceptions: separate from all the others, in an honored bookcase of its own, he kept the complete works of his two favorite composers — Mozart and Glinka.

Glinka's two major contributions in this regard are the operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Ludmila. The latter was composed over an extended period (1837-1842), owing to personal and professional difficulties, but when he finally submitted the score to the imperial theaters in March 1842, it was accepted immediately without question. The premiere was troubled by illness among the singers and by the fact that the opera — an ironic fairy tale — is dramatically incoherent, but its music contains much that is glorious. Two of its principal musical ideas form the material on which Glinka based his popular overture.

Even though we rarely hear the entire opera, the overture has been a hit from the beginning, rich with brilliant scoring, energetic tunes, and the evocation of all things Russian.

This page was last revised on February 20, 2018.