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“Les Toréadors from Carmen Suite No. 1 Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance as a child but never lived long enough to fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left over 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the operas Carmen. Only a few other works, the opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers), a youthful symphony and a couple of suites from his incidental music to the now forgotten play L’arlesienne are still played today. Carmen, based on a contemporary novel by Prosper Merimée, is the story of a fickle seductress who ensnares the naïve soldier Don José into a passion that leads inexorably to desertion, degradation and finally a jealous murder on stage. Audiences and critics alike considered Carmen scandalous and immoral (although that didn’t stop it from enjoying the longest run of any of Bizet’s previous works). But when the critics panned it Bizet was crushed and succumbed to a chronic throat ailment. Within three months of the premiere, he was dead. Carmen, however, was much admired by the young Giacomo Puccini, whose own verismo (true-to- life) operas were among Carmen’s direct descendents. Its fame rose gradually and it is now in the permanent repertory of virtually every opera company. Two orchestral suites from Carmen were compiled by Fritz Hoffmann after Bizet's death. Suite No.1 includes primarily instrumental music from the opera. The Suite concludes with the Prelude to Act IV, which also incorporates the famous Act II aria by the toreador Escamillo, whose masculine bravado lures Carmen away from her lover Don José.  | ||||||||||
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Faust, Ballet Music “A feeble French travesty of a German literary monument” – this was Richard Wagner’s pronouncement on Charles Gounod’s opera based on Part I of Goethe’s epic/dramatic poem Faust. Travesty or not, Faust remains the most popular of Gounod’s 14 operas. It became so popular in New York that for decades in the nineteenth century its performance annually opened the opera season. One of the banes of nineteenth century opera composers was the insistence that every opera performed at the prestigious Paris Opéra include at least one ballet scene. Some resisted: Giuseppe Verdi repeatedly balked and only gave in after long battles; Richard Wagner just said no and stuck with it. French composers did not have that option. When Faust moved in 1869 from the less prestigious Théatre-Lyrique to the Opéra, Gounod was obliged to add seven ballet scenes. The opera is based on Part 1 of Goethe’s work, which tells a coherent dramatic story. Part 2 was another creature altogether, intermingling Faust’s continuing – and ultimately fruitless – quest for the perfect woman with fantastic adventures and long passages of enlightened – and not so enlightened – philosophy. In the course of his journey, Faust encounters Helen of Troy (with whom he has a son!) There was obviously nothing more to be extracted from Part I for the ballet, so Gounod went after Part 2, adding the fantasy dances for Cleopatra and her Nubian maidens, and the Trojans and Phryne, an historical Greek courtesan who adjusted her rates depending on her feelings about her customers. Before the blockbuster Faust premiered in 1859, Gounod took considerable time to sort out his artistic talents and personal proclivities, finally emerging as one of Paris’s major opera composers. A winner of the Paris Conservatory’s prestigious Prix de Rome, which provided the winners with a three-year all expenses paid sojourn in Italy to develop their musical creative genius, Gounod got religion instead. He had a brief stint studying for the priesthood, devoting his musical abilities to sacred compositions and rekindling religious music in France. An introduction to the singer Pauline Viardot and her impresario husband turned his head and launched him into the world of opera – although not always successfully. Among his stillborn creations was the opera Ivan the Terrible, which got in trouble with the ever-vigilant censors. Not one to waste good ideas, Gounod recycled some of Ivan into Faust. Of the seven movements, four bear names more or less loosely connected with Faust Part 2. The other three are generic. Les nubiennes: the Nubian maidens | ||||||||||
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Allegro appassionato in c sharp minor, Op. 70 It is said that at his first public concert in May 1846 the ten-year-old Camille Saint-Saëns, after playing Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos, as well as some solo works by Bach and Handel, offered to play any one of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas as an encore – from memory. A child prodigy who grew to become a phenomenal polymath, Saint-Saëns wrote articles and books on diverse scientific topics, including astronomy, biology and archaeology, in addition to composing and writing about music. In his youth Saint-Saëns was considered an innovator, but by the time he reached maturity he became a conservative pillar of the establishment, trying to maintain the classical musical tradition in France. As an accomplished organist and pianist – he premiered his five piano concertos – he sported an elegant, effortless technique. But seldom were his compositions or his pianism pinnacles of passion or emotion. Berlioz noted that Saint-Saëns “...knows everything but lacks inexperience.” He was supportive and helpful to some younger composers, but his visceral dislike of Debussy made endless headlines in the tabloid press. In an ancient Left-Bank music store molder stacks of Paris Conservatory competition pieces for every instrument, the state of the crumbling paper reflecting the endurance of the composers’ reputations. Every so often, however, first-rank composers, including Ravel and Debussy, contributed competition pieces that have remained in the repertory. Saint-Saëns composed the Allegro appassionato in 1884 for the solo piano competition, subsequently adding an orchestral accompaniment. The Allegro appassionato offers some insight into the expectations of first-rank piano students, although certainly no surprises. The work resembles Chopin in style, testing a combination of flashy technique – some of it later relegated to the orchestra – and the ability to express both intense passion and tenderness with control of dynamics. The passion is contained within the main theme. Saint-Saëns uses both the opening three orchestral chords and the characteristic rhythm of the first four notes of the piano theme to unify the piece. & The tenderness is expressed in a Schumann-like slower section. To round out and conclude the main theme returns. | ||||||||||
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Chasing Light: Music Made for 50 States (Attention: The audio examples are from a MIDI file provided by the composer and are thus only approximations of the actual sound of the instruments.) Not so long ago world previews of symphonic compositions went exclusively to world-class orchestras. Orchestras in smaller cities with smaller budgets and players with “day jobs” frequently found contemporary music dauntingly difficult as well. Ford Made in America and Meet the composer have sought to bring to smaller communities and their orchestras new music of the highest quality accessible to both players and audiences alike – although accessible doesn’t mean easy. Chasing Light received its world premiere with the Reno Chamber Orchestra in September 2008. The work, inspired by a poem written by Schwantner himself, “…draws its spirit, energy and inspiration from the celebration of vibrant colors and light that penetrate the morning mist as it wafts through the trees in the high New England hills. Like a delicate dance, those images intersected with a brief original poem that helped fire my musical imagination." Chasing Light… Beneath the sickle moon, sunrise ignites daybreak's veil Calliope's rainbowed song cradles heaven's arc piercing shadowy pines, a kaleidoscope blooms morning's embrace confronts the dawn. Central to Schwantner’s musical imagery is the arch, which is easily audible in the arching phrases in the upper woodwinds, as well as in the architecture of the movements and the piece as a whole. The poem also evokes the image of a rainbow, an arch of reflected light. As a musical metaphor of the idea of “chasing light,” the composer includes numerous canons (called ricercar, or “chase, “during the Renaissance and Baroque). The four movements of Chasing Light are played without pause – there’s no time to pause when chasing light. They are joined by long unaccompanied notes. The titles for the movements are taken from individual lines of the poem. While Chasing Light should not be regarded as program music, the poem and movement titles offer specific visual images that both listeners and players can draw on to enrich the musical experience. The thematic elements are repeated frequently throughout the piece and become familiar enough for the listener to follow the structure. There are four distinct musical elements in the first movement: a three-note motive, which will become central to the entire piece; rapid arched-shaped phrases in the high woodwinds; a cascade of triplets based on the three-note motive in the brass announced by a fanfare; and a pounding ostinato rhythm in the strings, also based on the three-note motive. Shifts in the accent of the ostinato create a musical effect analogous to an optical illusion. The movement brings back all the thematic elements at the end like the recapitulation of sonata form. The second movement, titled “Calliope’s Rainbowed Song: (palindrome-moto perpetuo)”, is an arch, as the title states. Schwantner thins the texture, for the first time introducing the piano and individual percussion solos, all contributing to the initial shimmering effect. It begins with the three-note motive from Movement I. The rest of the voices enter in a canonic version of the cascading brass theme from the first movement in augmentation, punctuated by the three-note motive. The arch is clearly audible as more and more instruments are added until it reaches its apex, at which point they are subtracted in reverse order. Movement III, “A Kaleidoscope Blooms,” features a haunting oboe solo based on a variant of the three-note motive, which the composer wrote for Andrea Lenz, principal oboe of the Reno Chamber Orchestra. The accompaniment begins with rapid woodwind arches, and interjections by piano and vibraphone. Soon, a side drum accompanies the oboe melody with a steady heartbeat. The oboe theme remains a constant throughout although it is repeated in other instruments to provide a change in orchestral color. With each restatement, the climax is signaled as the heartbeat becomes louder and the trumpets blast out the fanfare from Movement I. Just as the title of Movement IV, “Morning’s Embrace Confronts the Dawn,” returns to the image of “daybreak” from the first movement, the music too reviews the familiar motives. Schwantner writes: “The rapid and aggressive woodwind phrases in the first movement now emerge in delicate and shimmering string textures. & These earlier elements prepare for a stately but urgent chorale theme that builds forcefully to the palindromic music of the third movement, the introductory materials of the first, and a final climatic conclusion. | ||||||||||
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Symphony in D Minor A Belgian by birth who lived and taught most of his life in France, César Franck was one of the most influential music teachers of the period and a famous organist. Although he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at age 15, his maturation as a composer came late in life – he composed his most lasting compositions while in his 50s and 60s. Franck was an easy-going, unassuming person, who never knew how to promote his works. As a result, much of his music was either ignored during his lifetime or derided by the doctrinaire academicians. He achieved worldwide recognition only in the last century. But his students adored him, calling him “Pater seraphicus,” and his influence on the future of French music was enormous. He was appointed in 1871 as professor of organ at the Conservatoire, but his classes evolved into de facto composition classes for the succeeding generation of major French composers, including Vincent d’Indy, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson and Paul Dukas. The Symphony in d minor was a late work. Franck was reluctant to try his hand at a symphony and, ironically, it was the success of his pupil Vincent d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air in 1887 that encouraged him to try his hand at one as well. He finished it in 1888 and it premiered in the following year. The Symphony was a dismal failure. Critics, music professors and in particular composer Charles Gounod lambasted it as: “...the affirmation of impotence carried to the point of dogma.” A pedantic teacher at the conservatory decided that the work could not be called a symphony at all because of the English horn solo in the second movement. “Who ever heard of writing for an English horn in a symphony?” he asserted (wrongly, by the way; Haydn used two in his Symphony No.22 and Hector Berlioz, another Frenchman no less, opens the slow movement of the Symphonie fantastique with one of the most famous English horn solos in the repertory (FYI, Dvorák composed the Symphony No. 9 in 1893, after Franck’s.) The Symphony digresses from the classical form in other ways as well. It has only three movements and its structure is cyclical – all the themes recur towards the end, a method widely used by Franz Liszt, one of Franck’s models. The opening three-note phrase of the slow introduction is a variant of the famous opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s last quartet (Op.135) where he wrote Muss es sein? (Must it be?) above the notes. Liszt had also used the phrase in the opening of the tone poem Les Preludes.Franck opens the Symphony with slow, foreboding statements of the motive, later expanding it into a full-fledged theme in an aggressive, even threatening transformation in the Allegro. The movement vacillates between the two tempi. There are only two themes in this movement, the second a contrasting, but equally strong-willed, lyrical melody. The movement is something of a pitched battle between the two themes; the fact that they resemble each other in rhythm and in their constituent motives makes it easier to make them compete head to head. In the end, the first one wins out, although resolving in D major. The second movement opens with a haunting theme on the harp and pizzicato strings playing pianissimo. The “notorious” English horn takes up the melody, which is completed by the horn. Franck uses the theme as a refrain between a series of new melodies, & which he combines melodically and contrapuntally into the original theme at the end of the movement. The final movement opens with a melody in D major and a contrasting secondary one. Soon, however, the “English horn” theme from the previous movement recurs. This is no example of cyclical tokenism. Rather, Franck incorporates all three themes together, contrasting them in the kind of dappled effect of sunlight and shade one gets on a partly cloudy day. The climax of the movement occurs with the full orchestra playing the “English horn theme” against a counterpoint of violins. Franck then brings in a repeat of the second theme from the first movement. The Symphony concludes with a restatement of the opening three-note motive from the first movement sets up the triumphant conclusion. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009 | ||||||||||
