Rh'Odes to Spring
May 18, 2008 — 3 pm, Sanders Theatre
Kevin Rhodes, Guest Conductor
Koulendros,
Mnemes ke Choroi
Saint Saëns,
Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Opus 22
1. Andante sostenuto
2. Allegro scherzando
3. Presto
Sara Davis Buechner, Pianist
Intermission
Mendelssohn,
Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Opus 56 (Scottish)
1. Andante con moto — Allegro un poco agitato
2. Vivace non troppo
3. Adagio
4. Allegro vivacissimo — Allegro maestoso assai
Christos Koulendros
Mnemes ke Choroi
In composing Mnemes ke Choroi, Koulendros imagined the ancient Festival of Dionysus. This springtime event celebrated rebirth with all its hope, beauty, and the agony of transformation. The elaborate rituals surrounding Dionysus included much music and dance.
"Mnemes ke Chorai" is Greek for "Memories and Dances." The piece also reflects the powerful musical memories of the composer's childhood in Cyprus: from folk music that accompanied warm social gatherings to awe-inspiring liturgical music, especially the dirge-like marching music of the Easter procession through the village streets.
Mnemes ke Choroi is in rondo form. Themes with contrasting moods undergo metamorphosis, blend together, and change roles.
Program notes by the composer.
Camille Saint-Saëns
Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22
For all that a handful of his works are regular favorites, we really know very little about Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the most prolific and longest-lived composers of the nineteenth century. There are several reasons for this. In part, the sheer number of works overwhelms all but specialists; we know, for example, only one of his twelve operas. Few people have heard more than the Third Violin Concerto or the Second Piano Concerto (of five). In fact, his best-known piece of all, the Carnival of the Animals, was written as a private joke and never intended for publication. Another reason for Saint-Saëns' relative obscurity was his careful control of himself; we know next to nothing about the man, as opposed to the musician. There are no diaries to analyze or confessions to be drawn from his voluminous private correspondence. He was educated and remained interested in a wide range of subjects. He published articles on the décor of ancient Roman theaters and communicated with learned bodies on questions of astronomy. He analyzed philosophical questions and wrote poetry and plays, at least one of which was performed with some success.
But most of all he was an astonishingly fluent, gifted musician. He played the keyboard part of a Beethoven violin sonata in a private concert before he was five years old, and at ten he made his formal debut playing concertos by Mozart and Beethoven, then offering to play, as an encore, any Beethoven sonata that the audience might be pleased to request. Berlioz said of him, "He knows everything, but lacks inexperience." If Berlioz was all "nerves," as one writer has expressed it, Saint-Saëns was all intellect.
He was born in the year that Donizetti wrote Lucia di Lammermoor, and, when he died, Alban Berg was in the middle of Wozzeck. Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers when Saint-Saëns was a toddler, and T. S. Eliot was completing The Waste Land as he died. Late in his life he found himself attacked for old-fashioned attitudes; he despised the music of Debussy and was horrified when he attended the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Those who found him a fuddy-duddy claimed he composed "well-written bad music." His style was strongly influenced by such astonishingly diverse composers as Mozart and Liszt. He was a renowned Mozart performer all his life, and he always admired the clarity of thought and melodic line of that master. But he was a close personal friend of Liszt's, and his keyboard technique developed from the virtuosic exercises of that master. It was in imitation of Liszt that Saint-Saëns began composing symphonic poems; we hardly hear them today, alas, except for Danse macabre, which, like so many wonderful and effective pieces, has been relegated to Pops concerts. Liszt returned the favor in a big way by encouraging Saint-Saëns to complete one of his operas and promising to perform it when opera managements were leery of putting it on the stage because of its Biblical subject; the result, of course, was Samson et Dalila also experimented with the introduction of a brand-new theme at the very end of the symphony, actually changing, in retrospect, the listener's recollection of the foregoing moods with a conclusion pregnant with affirmative power.
The Second Piano Concerto owes its existence to the friendship that developed between Saint-Saëns and the Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein. The friendship was cemented at their meeting in 1858 when Saint-Saëns sat down at the piano and sight-read the full score of Rubinstein's gigantic Ocean Symphony, which he was vainly trying to interest the world in hearing. Ten years later the two paired up for a series of concerts in Paris with Saint-Saëns conducting (his first experience in that role) and Rubinstein appearing as concerto soloist. Later Saint-Saëns recalled:
After that magnificent season we happened to be at some concert or other in the Salle Pleyel when he said to me: "I haven't conducted an orchestra in Paris yet. Let's put on a concert that will give me an opportunity of taking the bâton." "With pleasure." We asked when the Salle Pleyel would be free and were told we should have to wait three weeks. "Very well," I said, "in those three weeks I will write a concerto for the occasion." And I wrote the G minor Concerto which accordingly had its first performance under such distinguished patronage.
And he was as good as his word, putting the entire piece on paper in the next seventeen days.
The first movement of the concerto opens, rather surprisingly, with an extended solo section in a free prelude style that is Saint-Saëns' homage to Bach, although before the orchestra enters, the soloist has already reached a level of virtuosity that suggests Liszt—an extraordinary pairing. The orchestra's entry marks the end of the introduction and the main section of the first movement, which is laid out as a sonata-form movement in an unusually moderate tempo (though the pianist's splashes of virtuosity, which scarcely ever abate, somewhat counteract the sense that this is a "slow" movement). The remaining two movements are progressively faster in tempo. The Allegro scherzando is a delicious romp that suggests some familiarity with Mendelssohn's fairy music for A Midsummer Night's Dream (from the first performance it was the most popular part of the score), while the finale, Presto, begins with a roar of triplets that turns into a rondo in the style of a tarantella.
Though the concerto is scarcely "profound," it was an astonishing achievement in French music at a time when few composers bothered with the genres of abstract music, considering them dull and lifeless compared to the splendors of the opera. Saint-Saëns demonstrated just how much life and brio could be poured into the form, providing a hearty good time for all concerned.
Felix Mendelssohn
Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Opus 56 (Scottish)
On July 30, 1829, Felix Mendelssohn and his friend and traveling companion Karl Klingemann, an amateur poet and attaché at the German embassy in London, wrote to his family from Edinburgh about the sightseeing he and Klingemann had done, with a particular account of their visit to the palace of Holyrood, closely associated with the romantic figure of Mary Queen of Scots. Here, it is said, she succumbed to an infatuation for an Italian lutenist named David Rizzio, for which real or imagined affair the king had poor Rizzio murdered. The story has appealed to opera composers over the years—all of them unknown today: Canepa, Capecelatro, Rodrigues, Schliebner, and, most recent of them all, an American woman named Mary Carr Moore, whose David Rizzio was produced in Los Angeles in 1935 (the vocal score has recently been reprinted by Da Capo). Many visitors, including Dr. Samuel Johnson, included Holyrood on their itineraries. Mendelssohn, too, was touched by the romantic tale associated with the spot. He wrote:
We went, in the deep twilight, to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved. There is a little room to be seen there, with a winding staircase leading up to it. That is where they went up and found Rizzio in the little room, dragged him out, and three chambers away is a dark corner where they killed him. The adjoining chapel is now roofless; grass and ivy grow abundantly in it; and before the ruined altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything around is broken and moldering, and the bright sky shines in. I believe I found the beginning of my Scotch Symphony there today.
Indeed, on that day, Mendelssohn wrote down the opening bars of the melody that begins his A-minor symphony. But Holyrood was not the only impressive sight in Scotland. He was much taken, too, with the natural phenomenon known as Fingal's Cave in the Hebrides, and there, too, he wrote down a melody that came into his head on the spot. Later in 1829 he wrote, "The 'Scotch' symphony and all the Hebrides matter is building itself up step by step," implying that he was at work on two compositions inspired by his travels. But both of them were soon pushed aside. In 1830 he had to compose the Reformation Symphony (now known as No. 5) for the 300th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession (which had firmly established Luther's new church), and that event wouldn't wait. Then he undertook his grand tour, extending from May 1830 to June 1832, with months-long stops in Rome, Paris, and London. New impressions crowded in on him and demanded attention, even though he was still working on compositions already underway.
From Rome on December 20, 1830, Felix wrote to his family, "The Hebrides is completed at last, and a strange production it is." After mentioning a few small vocal pieces he was working on, he added: "After the new year I intend to resume instrumental music, and to write several things for the piano, and probably a symphony of some kind, for two have been haunting my brain." The two symphonies in question were the ones we now know as the Scotch (or, better, Scottish) and Italian symphonies.
Just after Christmas Felix complained of absolutely miserable rainy weather, which may have dampened his sightseeing ardor, but surely made it easier for him to settle down to composition instead of running off to visit the villa and gardens at Tivoli. And though the weather became spring-like by mid-January, he was able to write on the 17th that he had completed some small pieces and that "the two symphonies also begin to assume a more definite form, and I particularly wish to finish them here." It is surprising that a composer should try to work on avowedly Scottish and Italian symphonies (the names come from Mendelssohn himself, though he used "Scottish" only informally in his letters, and not on the published score) at the same time. One result is that the two symphonies are, in a sense, tonal shadows of one another: the Scottish is mostly in A minor, but ends in the major, while the Italian is in A major but ends in the minor. He continued for a time to work on both pieces, though the sunny brilliance of Italy seems to have driven out the memory of Scottish mists, for on February 22, 1831, he wrote to his sister Fanny (herself a talented composer):
I have once more begun to compose with fresh vigor, and the Italian symphony makes rapid progress. ... The Scottish symphony alone is not yet quite to my liking; if any brilliant idea occurs to me, I will seize it at once, quickly write it down, and finish it at last.
In the end, though, his attention was directed to the completion of his remarkable (and too-little-known) cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (a setting of a text by Goethe) and the Italian symphony. The Scottish symphony was unfinished at the time of his return home. And Mendelssohn soon became so involved in marriage and a busy professional life, conducting and administering in Leipzig, that the A-minor symphony must have looked to be unfinished forever. Only in 1841, after he had experienced severe disappointment with an attempt to reform the musical life of Berlin, did he return to the long-unfinished score—possibly because his new mood of resignation more precisely matched the character of the musical ideas he had conceived earlier in the blithe period of early manhood. By the time he finished the work, he clearly felt that the expressive character of the music took precedence over any allegedly "Scottish" elements. At any rate, he omitted the adjective "Scottish" from the published score, yet the nickname has stuck in popular usage.
This last of Mendelssohn's symphonies is also the freest, the most romantic. Richard Wagner, a composer usually antipathetic to Mendelssohn's work, conducted the Scottish symphony and admired the poetic qualities of the music. (Is it mere chance that a chromatic figure in the sustained woodwinds over muttering tremolo strings near the end of the first movement suggests the Flying Dutchman overture?)
But just how "Scottish" is it? Here are no skirling bagpipes, no highland flings, no folk tunes borrowed and harmonized (though the pentatonic main tune of the second movement certainly has some characteristics of a Scottish folk melody). Even so sensitive a musician as Robert Schumann found himself tripped up on this point: he reviewed the score of this work in the mistaken assumption that it was the Italian symphony, and wrote that the beauty of the music made him regret that he had never visited Italy!
One most characteristic element of romantic symphonies is the fact that virtually every theme is a complete, closed melody—not a motive or a fragment, but a real tune. In developing such ideas, Mendelssohn characteristically uses only the first few notes as motivic matter; if he used more than that, his developments would turn into little more than a series of restatements of the tunes in different keys.
The opening theme is the only part of the score explicitly inspired by Scotland; it is the melody that Mendelssohn wrote down after his visit to Holyrood, a pensive tune in A minor sung by melancholy violas and oboes. The development of this theme is shrouded in harmonic clouds and mists. A hesitant pause on the dominant leads into the main body of the movement, a 6/8 melody that follows the outline of the introductory theme, but in a more agitated character. A vigorous continuation, based largely on the opening gesture of the main theme, ultimately yields to a meltingly lyrical closing theme in E minor that ends the exposition. The development becomes progressively less energetic, as the texture lightens to a long, gentle cello tune that seems about to die away into silence as the strings and clarinets bring in the recapitulation. A particularly attractive touch here: the cellos continue singing their broad, lyrical melody as a new counterpoint to the main theme. A tutti coda ends, but leaves the woodwinds hanging with a version of the main motive; they die away into a final pensive statement of the introductory phrase.
The Scherzo, which comes next, is of a brilliance unsurpassed even in that most brilliant of Mendelssohn scores, the Italian symphony. The principal theme, first stated in the clarinet over tremolo strings, is supposed to be derived from an actual Scottish bagpipe tune, though it could just as easily be a completely original melody. The secondary theme begins staccato in the strings. Even in the tuttis the movement remains zephyr-light throughout.
The third movement alternates a slow singing melody with rhythmic ideas of a marchlike character. The dotted rhythms that appear in the winds at the outset eventually take over the entire orchestra, but each time the cantilena comes back with ever more delicate elaboration.
The finale begins with a wild flourish in the violins against a steady marching beat in the horns, bassoons, and violas. Mendelssohn characterized this movement, after all, as a "martial Allegro," and the battle is joined at once. A second theme, equally warlike in its determined vitality, is first sounded by the oboe and clarinets over tremolo violins; its shape seems to be related to that of the very opening theme of the symphony. These two themes do battle with one another, but at the end of the recapitulation the second theme gradually dies out in a very beautiful passage that seems about to lead to a quiet conclusion—perhaps yet another, and more definitive statement of the first movement's introductory theme. But Mendelssohn has a surprise: suddenly we move to the major and the presentation of a completely new theme (though it may be possible to demonstrate some connection with the introductory melody, it is not immediately obvious to the listener), described by Mendelssohn as maestoso ("majestic"). Some critics find this new theme to be an unconvincing outburst, an unmotivated capitulation to the major mode for a "heroic" conclusion. The idea is not unique, though. Other composers at about the same time (one thinks of Schumann and his Second Symphony) also experimented with the introduction of a brand-new theme at the very end of the symphony, actually changing, in retrospect, the listener's recollection of the foregoing moods with a conclusion pregnant with affirmative power.
© Copyright 2008. Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)