Explosive Music

Program Notes
By Steven Ledbetter

LEONARD BERNSTEIN
On the Waterfront, symphonic suite

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990.  He composed the score for the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront , which opened on July 28, 1954. Bernstein himself conducted the first performance of the symphonic suite that he created from the film score a year later, at Tanglewood, on August 11, 1955. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, alto saxophone, 2 timpanists and three percussionists (xylophone, vibraphone, glockenspiel, snare drum, bass drum, suspended cymbal, triangle, wood block, chimes, three tuned drums, two tamtams, plus harp, piano, and strings.

            Leonard Bernstein’s only venture into the scoring of films was for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, a story of violence and heroism, of racketeers and longshoremen. A young Marlon Brando played Terry, an ex-prizefighter and longshoreman who, though at first a tool of the racketeers, develops the courage to withstand them, largely through the love and support of his girl Edie (played by Eva Marie Saint), whose brother has been killed by the mobsters, a hit that Terry unknowingly helped set up. The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards (including for best score) and won eight of them, including Best Picture.

            The orchestral suite begins with the film’s opening music presenting, in the solo horn, Terry’s theme, which , in a much grander version, will conclude the score. A rapid, nervous section, Presto barbaro, presents the music connected with scenes of violence in the film. Its septuple meter creates unsettling, even frightening, effects. A complete change of character, to a fresh lyrical melody in solo flute accompanied by harp and clarinets, marks the beginning of an extended love scene, building to great intensity.

            Another version of Terry’s theme leads to a new section of violence, the music that accompanies Terry’s fight with the racketeer John Friendly (played by Lee J. Cobb). Its conclusion leads to the dénouement of the film and the score. The other longshoremen have agreed to work only if Terry works. Though he has been severely beaten in the fight, he drags himself to the docks and begins working in an act of heroic defiance of the crooked union leaders. His music builds gradually to a powerful climax with recollections of the bitterness of his story.

Carl Orff
Carmina burana--Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus
instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis

Carl Orff was born on July 10, 1895, in Munich, Germany, where he died on March 29, 1982. He composed Carmina burana in 1935-36. The work was first presented in a staged production at the Frankfurt Opera on June 8, 1937, Bertil Wetzelsberger conducting. The score calls for soprano, tenor, and baritone solos, with brief assignments also for two tenors, baritone, and two basses, a large mixed chorus, a small mixed chorus, a boys’ chorus, and an orchestra constituted as follows: three flutes (two doubling piccolos), three oboes (one doubling English horn), three clarinets (one doubling E-flat clarinet and one doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, three glockenspiels, xylophone, castanets, ratchet, small bells, triangle, antique cymbals, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, tubular bells, tambourine, snare drum, bass drum, celesta, two pianos, and strings. Duration is about 65 minutes.

            Carl Orff composed Carmina burana at just about the midpoint of his life, and it divided that life into two entirely different periods—not simply because its enormous success made him a well-known personage with healthy performance royalties flowing in, but because it induced him to destroy everything he had composed up to that point and to begin his creative life over again in an entirely new way: an unlikely outcome for what might have been a work of purely academic interest, setting to music a bouquet of old poems in Medieval Latin (plus a few tidbits in Medieval German).

            Orff was an intensely private man. He was willing to talk about his music, but rarely about his personal or intellectual life, and, with so many early works destroyed, it is difficult to say much about it before Carmina burana. But two things are clear: from childhood he adored the theater and began writing music for puppet plays. And, though he was largely self-taught as a composer, his early idols included Arnold Schoenberg, whose Chamber Symphony he transcribed for piano duet. But at the same time he studied Renaissance polyphony and early Baroque music (he prepared performing editions of several works by Monteverdi). And he looked into African music, and followed with great interest the developments of modern dance. Working with Dorothee Günther he founded a school for the education of children that combined music, gymnastics, and dance. His contributions to music education would have made him renowned even if he had not composed one of the most popular scores of the century.

            The impetus for the composition of Carmina burana was Orff’s discovery of an 1847 volume containing a series of fascinating poems, mostly in Latin, and a few in Medieval German and French, found in a manuscript that had been assembled and richly illuminated in the monastery of Benediktbeuern (the name indicates that it was a Benedictine monastery, while “Beuern” is a variant of Bayern, the German name for Bavaria). The eighth-century monastery was secularized in 1803 and its library was transferred to Munich. There the splendid medieval manuscript came to public notice when the Court Librarian, Johann Andreas Schmeller, published his edition of the text, to which he gave the Latin title Carmina burana (“Songs of Beuern”—the word carmina, by the way, is accented on the first syllable).

            A century later, when Orff encountered the book, he was struck by the immediacy, vividness, and humanity of these lively poems. With the help of the poet Michel Hofmann, he organized twenty-four of them into a libretto.

            In setting these poems to music, Orff aimed at the most direct kind of music-making: simple, memorable tunes, richly colorful orchestration, and driving rhythms. There are hints of Stravinsky—particularly of Les noces. Indeed, Richard Taruskin has pointed out several passages that are simple plagiarisms, though Orff keeps his rhythms far simpler, squarer, more immediately catchy. The result was hypnotic—and thus open to the frequently repeated criticism that his music is essentially propaganda, though not necessarily Nazi propaganda.  (O Fortuna  has been used in television commercials for any number of products, and it is often used for background music in trailers of forthcoming action films when the actual soundtrack of the film has not yet been composed).

            After the premiere in June 1937, he wrote to his publisher, B.Schott, “Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina burana my collected works begin.”

            From that time on he worked almost exclusively for the stage, creating two further large chorus-and-orchestra pieces (Catulli carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite) which make up an evening-length trilogy called Trionfi; four charming operas based on German folk tales Der Mond (The Moon), Die Kluge (The Wise Woman), Die Bernauerin (The Bernauer Woman), and Astutuli; settings in a rhythmic, chanted style (with little music in the sense of tuneful melodies) of plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus; a setting A Midsummer Night’s Dream, combining speech and music; and a series of three sacred mystery plays.

            Schmeller’s edition of Carmina burana opened with a great paean to the goddess Fortuna (Fortune), who rules all things, making life unpredictable. Orff was greatly struck by this poem, and he chose to make O Fortuna the beginning and end of his work, a huge pair of bookends with a driving rhythm and the virtually unchanging tonic chord of D. Between these outer pillars, he created three scenes:

 I. In Springtime and On the Green (pastoral and genre poems)

 II. In the Tavern (drinking songs)