OKC PHIL 2008-2009 Program 2 - 9/27
Reinventing The Past: part I
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
OTTORINO RESPIGHI (1879-1936)
Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 1
Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy, on 9 July 1879 and died in Rome on 18 April 1936. He composed three sets of Ancient Airs and Dances—in 1917, 1923, and 1931, respectively. The first suite calls for two flutes, two oboes and English horn, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, harp, harpsichord, and strings.
Respighi wrote music of extraordinary color and orchestral brilliance, partly, no doubt, a consequence of his having studied orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov during the years he served as principal violist in the orchestra of the St. Petersburg opera. He continued to perform even after returning to Italy and making composition his principal activity. Though his best known works are the three large suites celebrating various facets of life in his native Rome (The Fountains of Rome, The Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals), Respighi also wrote eight operas. Moreover he was interested in early music, and this led to a number of “archaizing” works like the Piano Concerto in the mixolydian mode, and a Concerto gregoriano for violin. Some of his energetic attention to early Italian music was turned to the act of arranging older works in a more modern guise. The best known of these hybrids between musicology and composition are arrangements of Italian Renaissance and Baroque music under the titles Ancient Airs and Dances and The Birds, derived from compositions for lute and harpsichord respectively.
They represented both a cheerful updating of the past and an assertion of nationalist pride, since each set drew upon the large body of Italian solo lute music published in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The first movement of Suite 1, the courtly Balletto de “Il Conte Orlando,” is a dance piece published by Simone Molinaro in 1599; the “Count Orlando” referred to is probably the title character of Ariosto’ s great epic Orlando furioso, which became a source of operas and other musical settings for more than a century. The Gagliarda was a dance in a moderately quick triple meter; this one was composed by Vincenzo Galilei, an amateur lutenist and composer who was also the father of the great astronomer Galileo. For the movement’s gentler middle section, Respighi draws upon an anonymous Italiana. The third movement is based on an anonymous Neapolitan Villanella, composed about 1600. The “villanelle” (“street song”) was a popular song form, often with a somewhat rough humor, more vigorous than the refined madrigal. The pizzicato strings suggest a lute or that accompanies a longing serenade. The final movement combines two different dances, both anonymous, from about 1600: a Passamezzo (literally, a “step and a half,” suggesting the rapid dance figure), interrupted by an energetic Mascherata, a type of villanella sung at a masked ball.
AntonÍn DvoRÁk
Symphonic Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 78
Antonín Dvorák was born at Mühlhausen (Nelahozeves), Bohemia, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He composed his Symphonic Variations between August 6 and September 28, 1877. The piece was premiered in Prague on a benefit concert on December 2 that year. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, and strings. Duration is about 21 minutes.
Throughout the history of music, “variation” has been one of the most fundamental of musical procedures; in the simplest sense, it is how a composer can expand a work from the simplest basic idea (usually quite brief) to a more extensive composition. And in the simplest terms, variation happens when a composer changes something in the original idea, yet keeps enough of the idea the same so that the listener can hear the similarity. For centuries young composers were taught their art by being given a few bars of a tune—perhaps 8 or 16 measures—and asked to create variations on it. This saved them the trouble of having to invent their own ideas until after they had learned some technique.
Eventually composers began writing whole movements as a series of variations (the famous slow movement of Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony is a fine example, though there are hundreds of others) or even linked a series of variations into an independent composition. This happened first with solo instruments, like the harpsichord or piano. Most such pieces were brief and often trivial, designed for the pleasure of amateurs entertaining their families at home. But a few examples come from the hands of the greatest composers, who gradually plumb the depths of every possible treatment of a simple theme. The two most famous such works are Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, which are as monumental for the variation form as, say, Homer’s Iliad is to the epic poem.
Orchestral variations appeared often as a movement in a larger symphony, but it was not until Brahms wrote his Variations on a Theme of Haydn that a composer created a free-standing set of variations for the orchestra. But the innovation took hold, and such orchestral sets began to appear often from that time on. Dvorák had been befriended and helped by Brahms and admired him enormously, so it can hardly be a surprise that he should try his hand at a set of orchestral variations.
What is a set of variations? The whole idea can be summarized by saying that “Something is different, and something stays the same.” The composer takes a musical idea (which may be original, but is often borrowed) and proceeds to show how many ways it can be treated. Normally the earlier stages are most like the original, with, perhaps, some decoration. But as the work progresses, the composer breaks the theme down into essential element and uses those as a scaffolding on which to build something that may sound very different indeed.
Truly great sets of variations are rare. But Dvorák’s Orchestral Variations is certainly ranked extremely high. He begins by inventing an unusual theme with unusual phrase lengths. Normally a theme for a set of variations is built on patterns of 4, 8, or 16 measures; we are so familiar with tunes of this shape that we don’t given them a second thought. But Dvorák builds his theme with two contrasting phrases filled with different musical shapes, and consciously avoiding the “square” patterns of a standard melody.
The first phrase, which has a certain feeling of folk song about it, might come to an end after four measures, but Dvorák adds an unexpected tail of two extra measures, so that it runs six. The contrasting theme, with a little dotted rhythm, runs for six measures as well, before turning back to a repetition of the first phrase. Now, even if you are quite certain that you are not aware of that unusual phrasing, even if you don’t sit and count the bars on your fingers as they go by, you will nonetheless be struck by the fact that the tune simply sounds different—and that difference is preserved in every one of the variations, giving the work one element of its special character.
Following the presentation of the theme in a simple and almost bare harmony, Dvorák begins to offer bright and playful ideas. At first he simply adds additional melodies, or counterpoints, to the lines already heard. But gradually he starts changing the character of the music by doubling the length of the phrases, enriching the harmony, converting it in a lively romp or a meditative dialogue, making it by turns jovial or angry-sounding.
Finally, after 27 variations that have given us a large number of different views of the principal “character” of the piece (that is, of the theme), the violins suddenly take off, gradually drawing the other strings with them, ending in a fugue—a very common way to create a finale to a set of variations. The fugue subject is nothing other than the opening phrase of the theme. It is a rich, free-wheeling theme, not at all “academic,” but solid and vigorous (despite contrasting quieter passages), until it leads to a final glorious outburst in a fast tempo to celebrate victory—here, the victory of a richly imagined composition.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Concerto in C for violin, piano, and cello, Opus 56
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, probably on December 16, 1770 (his baptismal certificate is dated the 17th), and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. The so-called “Triple” Concerto was composed in the winter of 1803-04. The first performance, a private one, took place at an unknown date; it was first performed publicly in May 1808. In addition to the three solo instruments, the score calls for one flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Ludwig van Beethoven began composing his Triple Concerto early in 1803, about the same time he was composing the Eroica Symphony, and continued working on it the following year, while also planning and writing two of his most famous piano sonatas (the Waldstein and the Appassionata) and the first of the Razumovsky quartets. Thus the Triple Concerto falls squarely into the period of Beethoven's most prolific (and popular) work.
The choice of three soloists for his C-major concerto was unusual. Not that there weren’t concertos with more than one soloist before; the Baroque era is full of them, and even the symphonie concertante of the Classical era has many examples. But the particular combination of piano, violin, and cello seems never to have been tried before. The choice of solo instruments may have been dictated by his dedicatee, the young Archduke Rudolph, who wanted it for performance by his private orchestra. He was one of the Emperor’s sons, was no mean pianist himself (he was a pupil of Beethoven’s), and remained for years one of the composer’s most steadfast supporters. The Archduke himself was to play the piano in the performance, and the violin and cello parts were written for the principal players in the orchestra, a violinist named Seidler and the cellist Anton Kraft, who was one of the leading virtuosos of the day. Beethoven apparently admired Kraft especially, because the cello part is notably more difficult than either of the other two solo parts and remains, indeed, one of the hardest works in the cello repertory.
It is not entirely clear when Beethoven finished the concerto. The Archduke presumably kept the manuscript of the finished work (it is now lost) and took part in private performances. The parts were published in 1807 (oddly enough with a dedication to Prince Lobkowitz rather than the Archduke), and the work was publicly performed in Vienna's Augarten in May 1808.
Like many post-Eroica works, the Triple Concerto makes a virtue out of expansive breadth. In this particular case the length is generated in part by the presence of three soloists, each of whom requires a separate statement of the material in the exposition. This format, in turn, means that the concerto as a whole tends more toward lyric elaboration than to dramatic transformation of the material. The first movement is far more leisurely and less heaven-storming than Beethoven's other compositions of the same time, reveling instead in the genial interplay of sonorities. It grows out of the very opening hushed gesture of the orchestral cellos (it is interesting to note that Beethoven liked to start his symphonies with a loud chord, but tended in most cases to begin concertos softly, even mysteriously).
To follow this unusually long first movement Beethoven employed the same procedure that he had already tried in the Waldstein sonata of having a short set of variations that link directly to the final Rondo alla polacca, which uses the polonaise rhythm that even then, long before Chopin, was popular all over Europe for festive music of a particularly ceremonial type in triple meter.
The Triple Concerto has long been the stepchild of Beethoven’s concerto compositions, the work least often played and most severely criticized. To be sure, the demands of three soloists sometimes lead to more repetition than we expect from Beethoven, but at the same time the sheer breadth of the work and the intrinsic beauty of many of the ideas mark it as a fascinating step in Beethoven’s progression; and beyond the Triple Concerto, we can already sense the two broadly lyrical concertos that could not have been written without this preliminary, the Violin Concerto and the Fourth Piano Concerto.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)