Hooray for Hollywood
January 13, 2008 — 3 pm, Sanders Theatre
Susan Davenny Wyner, Guest Conductor
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart,
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525
1. Allegro
2. Romanza: Andante
3. Menuetto: Allegretto
4. Rondo: Allegro
Bernard Herrmann,
Fahrenheit 451
1. Prelude 6. The Nightmare 2. Fire Engine 7. Flowers of Fire 3. The Bedroom 8. Flamethrower 4. The Reading 9. Captain's Death 5. The Garden 10. The Road
Intermission
Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings
John Corigliano,
The Red Violin:
Suite for Violin and Orchestra
Elizabeth Pitcairn, violin
1. Main Title 6. Shanghai 2. Anna's Theme 7. Pope's Betrayal 3. Death of Anna 8. Victoria's Departure 4. Coitus Musicales 9. The Auction 5. Journey to China 10. Gypsy Cadenza
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began calling himself Wolfgang Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadè in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He entered Eine Kleine Nachtmusik into his catalogue on August 10, 1787, but we know nothing about its early performance history. The work is composed for strings.
Mozart hoped and expected that all of his music would entertain. Some of it, though, was composed not for serious attention in the concert hall, but rather as an accompaniment to other activities. Today we are bombarded with sonic mush piped into elevators, supermarkets, and telephone lines "on hold." The difference, aside from the fact that what is supplied electronically was not composed by Mozart, is that his entertainment music served as the background for festive occasions, not as a ubiquitous means of inducing us to spend beyond our means or to relax in an otherwise unpleasant environment.
The most famous such work is the elegant serenade with the evocative title, A Little Night Music (K.525). For Mozart, Nachtmusik ("Night Music") was simply a German equivalent of the Italian serenata, or "evening piece." This one is "little" in that it consists of only four movements (many serenades had more) and is composed only for strings (horns and a few woodwinds were normally part of the ensemble). By 1787, Mozart kept a regular catalog of his works, and the entry for August 10, 1787, offers a mystery. It reads: A Little Night Music, consisting of an Allegro, Minuet and Trio, Romance, Minuet and Trio, and Finale. But in the score as we have it, the opening Allegro is followed directly by the Romance. A page containing the first minuet and its trio was removed from the manuscript — whether by Mozart himself or someone else, we have no idea. One possibility is that Mozart adapted it for another purpose — even though it was entirely normal for a serenade to have two minuets.
Mozart interrupted the composition of Don Giovanni to write Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. This suggests that he had a strong reason to do so, though we don't know for whom or for what occasion he composed the piece. Still, it remains among the most elegant and perfect compositions of a composer who approached perfection closer, perhaps, than any other. The great Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein once suggested purely as a hypothesis (though it revealed a profound understanding of Mozart) that he may have felt an inner need to follow his Musical Joke, K. 522 — a work filled with intentional mistakes and delightfully clumsy compositional ideas — with the most perfect work of which he was capable, as if to clean out his system from having created an artistic vulgarity, even as a joke.
As it stands now, with four movements instead of five, A Little Night Music is closer in structure to a symphony than it is to what we expect of a serenade. The opening movement offers a compact sonata form (almost entirely lacking a development). The slow movement is one of the most delicately elegant of all Mozartean moments. The minuet and trio that survive in the score are gracefully contrasted, the minuet with a firm rhythmic vigor, the trio flowing and lyrical. And the lively finale bubbles with good humor. Whether we think of it as elegant background music (the way it must have been first heard) or as a miniature symphony, there is no question that Mozart has succeeded in his goal of entertaining.
Bernard Herrmann
Suite from Fahrenheit 451
Bernard Herrmann was born in New York on June 29, 1911, and died in Los Angeles on December 24, 1975. He composed the score to François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (based on the famous novel by Ray Bradbury) in 1966. The score calls for strings, harps, and percussion.
Bernard Herrmann, possibly the most distinguished of all composers for film, composed the music to Fahrenheit 451 at a time of personal crisis. He was going through a divorce and, perhaps more important, his long collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock — which had produced the memorable scores to such films as Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho — had come to a devastating end. Herrmann had written a score for Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. At the time, Hollywood film scores had begun to make far more money for the producers if they had a hit "theme song" (regardless of whether it had anything to do with the drama of the film). Hitchcock was under pressure to put "tunes" — that is, pop songs — into his film. That was simply not the kind of work Herrmann could write or wanted to write. Moreover, the film itself was far from Hitchcock's best, and the director probably sensed this. It didn't improve his moods. In the end, Hitchcock fired Herrmann from the score, and the two men never spoke again.
Perhaps the saving grace was the arrival in Hollywood of a talented French director, François Truffaut, who adored Hitchcock's work and decided that he had to have Hitchcock's composer for his first (and only) film project in English, Fahrenheit 451.
Ray Bradbury's novel is set in an indefinite future in which reading is entirely forbidden, because (according to a character who is a spokesman for the government) it "confuses people" and "makes them unhappy." Instead everyone has large television screens mounted on the walls of their homes, where they are fed a non-stop diet of appallingly empty pap and out-and-out lies from the government.
To enforce the ban on reading, firemen are sent to homes where (as informers have notified the authorities) there are books or forbidden reading matter of any kind. They search the premises and burn everything they find that can be read.
The principal character, a fireman named Montag, lives a totally sterile, mindless life with his even more vapid wife, until he happens to encounter an intriguing woman who asks — idly, or so it seems — whether he has ever read the books he burns. Montag is intrigued, and soon secretly saves a book from the pyre. It is David Copperfield. The experience of reading a story is overwhelming, and he begins to build his own stash of forbidden books. Eventually he is discovered, but by then, he had joined the mysterious woman who started him reading, following her to a group of rebels who live in the wilds, apart from normal society, where each one memorizes a single book, to preserve it for the day when reading may be allowed again.
Bernard Herrmann's score masterfully traces the arc of Montag's experience. The film opens without the normal written credits. After all, writing and reading are forbidden. Instead, an announcer gives us the necessary identification of the film's title and the principal people who created it, while the viewer sees only a series of television antennas and hears a series of cold, gray chords in the orchestra. It is a world without warmth or feeling. Next comes the driving, mechanistic music of the firetruck going out on a call, the aim of its drivers to destroy the resources of thought and imagination.
The first moment of real warmth — and the first moment in which the audience actually gets to see an extended text made of word on a page, which comes as a real shock at this point — is when Montage opens his copy of David Copperfield and begins reading in a halting way, as his finger follows the words.
The warmth continues and grows when we see Montag growing more deeply immersed in the life of the mind that he has unexpectedly recovered, and — in a more soaring, romantic way, at the end of the film — with the group of the outcasts, all quietly reciting their books to themselves.
The film version of Fahrenheit 451 was not very successful in the theater when it was first released. But in the intervening years, it has come to be much more highly regarded, and Herrmann's score has certainly grown in general esteem to the point where it is regarded as one of his finest achievements.
Samuel Barber
Adagio for String Orchestra, Opus 11
Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York on January 23, 1981. He composed the Adagio originally as part of his String Quartet, Opus 11, in 1936-37. Barber took the slow movement of the quartet as a separate piece for string orchestra. It became famous overnight when Toscanini conducted it on his nationwide radio broadcast on November 5, 1938.
Musical compositions originally composed for the concert hall seem to change their mood when they are selected by a director to accompany visual images in a film, especially a film as powerful as Oliver Stone's recreation of the horrors of the Vietnam War, Platoon. Music for war films is almost always made up of loud heroic or energetic music for large orchestra, with a great deal of brass and percussion. For the score of Platoon, though, the heart of the score is an extraordinarily quiet, sustained, pensive composition for strings alone by Samuel Barber (and this even though the official credit for the score is given to Georges Delerue, who had been writing French film scores since the middle of the century — including those for Hiroshima mon Amour, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim — and later such English-language films as Silkwood, Steel Magnolias, and Curly Sue).
It was at the most horrendous moments of fighting that Oliver Stone chose to cut out all "live" sound of the fighting and to let Samuel Barber's quietly unfolding Adagio carry the weight of the story, expressing an immense sadness and poignancy while the eye took in scenes of unrestrained violence.
So effective was this opposition of music and image that it hardly matters — at least when watching the film — that Barber had none of these images or emotions in mind when he composed the Adagio.
Samuel Barber grew up in a musical family (his aunt was the great contralto Louise Homer, whose husband, Sidney Homer, was a composer), and he began play the piano at six and compose the following year. Still, it was with some trepidation that he left a note on his mother's dresser when he was about eight to tell her of his self realization: "To begin with, I was not meant to be an athelet [sic] I was meant to be a composer. And I will be, I'm sure... Don't ask me to try to forget this...and go play football." Sam's Uncle Sidney encouraged his composition most with letters full of advice, and by the time the boy was seventeen, his famous aunt had begun including some of his early songs on her recital programs.
Barber's musical technique was formally developed during the eight years he spent as a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he joined its first class in 1924 (when he was just fourteen). There he studied piano, composition (with Rosario Scalero), conducting (with Fritz Reiner), and voice. For a time he contemplated the idea of a career as a professional singer, but it was primarily as a composer that he developed during his Curtis years.
Barber's style was always conservative, emphasizing the long lyrical line and relatively traditional tonal harmonies. His setting of language was felicitous and his ear for color acute. All of these strengths made him for many years one of the most popular of American composers. Though by the time of his death he felt himself to be an outsider in the musical world, his music has been heard more frequently in recent years and appreciated for its craft and expressive directness.
From early on Barber won awards; at first these took him to study in Europe, especially Italy, where he not only composed a great deal of music but made useful connections. In July 1937 Artur Rodzinski conducted Barber's First Symphony at the Salzburg Festival, the first American music ever to be performed in that bastion of European culture. At the time, Arturo Toscanini was planning his programs for the following year and looking for an American work to include. Rodzinski suggested Barber, and when Toscanini expressed an interest in seeing a short piece, Barber quickly composed his Essay for Orchestra and made an arrangement for orchestral strings of the Adagio from his String Quartet. He sent the works to Toscanini, but heard nothing. Eventually the conductor sent back the scores without any message.
When Barber's classmate Gian Carlo Menotti visited Toscanini at Lago Maggiore that summer, Barber refused to go with him. Toscanini understood the reason for the young composer's absence: "He's just angry with me, but he has no reason to be — I'm going to do both of his pieces." The performances on November 5, 1938, were widely heard and remarked, partly because Toscanini had a reputation for a lack of interest in American music. The fact that he played two works by an American composer on the same program brought Barber's name and music before the public more effectively than almost anything else could have done.
Of course, it was the quality of the music that held the public attention. The haunting serenity of the Adagio, in particular, has retained its hold unbroken. The Adagio for Strings is one of those extraordinary works that feels never to have been created but always to have existed just out of hearing. Its shape is a nearly seamless arch from infinite quiet sadness to great intensity and back to silence. (It should be noted that, in Platoon, Oliver Stone allowed the Adagio to build to its moment of greatest intensity, then cut it off without playing the ending. Concert performances in 1986 and for a time afterwards were interrupted by applause at that point from audience members who thought the piece was over.)
John Corigliano
The Red Violin: Suite for Violin and Orchestra
John Paul Corigliano was born on February 16, 1938, in New York, where he lives now. The suite to be performed here is derived from his score for the film The Red Violin. The suite was composed in 1999 and calls for solo violin, timpani, three percussionists, harp, and strings.
Few composers of our have shown greater willingness or skill in transforming music conceived for one purpose to an entirely new use as has John Corigliano, who has done this repeatedly over the course of his career, converting music from a string quartet to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Symphony No. 2 for the Boston Symphony, or adapting music from his opera The Ghosts of Versailles for concert purposes. But none of his scores has gone through so many varied treatments as the extraordinarily rich and varied music he wrote for a remarkable film, The Red Violin, which traced the 300-year history of a magnificent violin from the moment of its fabrication in Italy through centuries of travails—played upon by great masters and wandering gypsies, going through revolution in China, and almost being destroyed, only to have the mystery of its surprising color finally revealed. Corgliano was involved with the score from an early stage, and, even before the movie was released, he had produced a 15-minute Chaconne for violin and large orchestra based on the instrument's essential chaconne-like theme in the film. The 24-four minute suite came next, offering a kind of survey of the film's dramatic arc with the solo violin as leading character. More recently, in 2003, he reworked the material yet again for a full-scale violin concerto for Joshua Bell.
John Corigliano achieved early recognition as one of the most talented younger American composers. He grew up in an intensely musical household (his father, John Corigliano, Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for twenty-three years) and attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. His teachers have included Otto Luening, Vittorio Giannini, and Paul Creston. As this list suggests, his style is generally conservative, although he has experimented in various eclectic ways with diverse musical traditions, emphasizing tonal harmonies in a style that is often markedly lyrical. As he remarked in a 1980 interview, "The pose of the misunderstood composer has been fashionable for quite a while, and it is tiresome and old-fashioned. I wish to be understood, and I think it is the job of every composer to reach out to his audience with all means at his disposal. Communication should always be a primary goal."
The suite presents the film's music in its most clearly narrative form, from the "birth" of the instrument through a series of episodes that suggest different times and places, yet also provide an effective thread of musical narrative throughout, scored with great imagination, and giving the soloist an extraordinary range of challenges to suggest all the ways a violin can function musically.
© Copyright 2007. Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)