SERENADE AND FRIENDS



Natural Trumpets

Johann Baptist Georg Neruda
Trumpet Concerto in E Flat Major

Bohemian composer, violinist and cellist Johann Baptist Georg Neruda spent most of his professional life as a violinist in the court orchestra of Dresden, eventually becoming the Konzertmeister. Since very little is known about Neruda’s life, the tiniest scrap of information becomes important. For example, when Charles Burney, the famous English chronicler of musical life in eighteenth-century Europe, visited Dresden in 1772, he reported that Neruda was still playing in the orchestra, together with two of his sons.

Neruda composed at least 97 works, including various sacred works, 36 symphonies, 14 concertos, and some trio sonatas, mostly in the style that emerged after Baroque music fell out of favor.

A standard of the modern trumpet repertory, this concerto was originally composed for corno da caccia (hunting horn) in E-flat, a natural (without valves) horn that would have sounded exactly an octave below the modern transcription. All brass instruments of this period were valveless and, therefore, unable to play in tune the entire chromatic scale. Instrument makers compensated by crafting instruments in specific keys so that all the pitches in that particular scale would sound properly. The practice continues to this day, for although the valves permit the full chromatic scale to sound in tune in its lowest range, The higher ranges are produced by natural harmonics, many of whose pitches are out of tune by contemporary tuning systems. Adapting the size of a trumpet to a particular key ensures that it achieves the optimal quality of sound in any range.

Classical music aficionados who enjoy drop-the-needle, name-the-composer and other such guessing games can have a field day with this Concerto. Although we do not know when the Trumpet Concerto was composed, it corresponds in style to the music of the generation right after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. The basso continuo and long meandering ritornello in the first movement are somewhat retro, recalling Vivaldi.

The opening of the second movement, another ritornello for the orchestra, adheres to the balanced phrasing and block-chord accompaniment that characterizes the early Classical period.

The regular phrase structure and clearly defined cadence structure of the final movement also corresponds to pre-classical rather than Baroque models, but its lengthy ritornello with Vivaldi-like sequences again looks backward.

Although the cadenzas would probably have been improvised, the way in which they are set up becomes a prominent feature of the Classical concerto.

In a word, this is a “transition” piece.



Antonin Dvorák
1841-1904

Antonin Dvorák
Serenade, Op. 22 in E major

Given his current stature as one of the foremost composers of the nineteenth century, Antonín Dvorák was something of a late bloomer, but not for want of musical talent and industry. Dvorák’s father was a butcher and had expected his son to go into the family trade. Only after his uncle had agreed to finance the boy’s musical education was he able to follow his passion for music. Although trained as a church organist, Dvorák took his first job as principal viola in Prague’s new Provincial Theatre Orchestra. During this time, he practiced composition, producing songs, symphonies and entire operas but without recognition – much less appreciation – until he was in his 30s.

Already influenced by the national Bohemian style of Bedrich Smetana, Dvorák met and became a disciple of Brahms in 1875. Vienna’s famous curmudgeon music critic, Eduard Hanslick, also encouraged Dvorák and gave him prominent billing in his reviews. In the same year Brahms and Hanslick also supported him when he entered – and won – the competition for the Austrian State Prize in music for young, poor and talented musicians (Dvorák won the competition twice more in 1877.) The committee report stated that “...the applicant, who has never yet been able to acquire a piano of his own, deserves a grant to ease his strained circumstances and free him from anxiety in his creative work.” Brahms and Hanslick also urged Dvorák to move to Vienna, but his love for his native Bohemia kept him in Prague. Like Smetana, Dvorák freely incorporated folk elements into his music, utilizing characteristic peasant rhythms and melodic motives although seldom actually quoting entire folk melodies.

Dvorák sensed condescension in the support and encouragement of the Austrian musical establishment and was resentful at being forced by economic necessity to accept government stipends. He nevertheless responded to this encouragement with a creative outpouring that included, in the course of a few months, the Symphony No. 5, the Piano Trio Op. 21, the Piano Quartet Op. 23, the Moravian Duets Op. 20 and the Serenade for Strings.

The nineteenth-century serenade, true to its eighteenth-century origins, is less intense than a formal symphony, but this one rides the fence between the two genres. Three of the five movements are expanded ABA structures, including the first, which one would have expected to be in sonata allegro form. Nevertheless, the Serenade does contain elements characteristic of more formal symphonic practices of the period.

The opening prefigures the generally relaxed mood of the work as a whole.

The middle section, which is often darker in a ternary form, is almost childlike in its cheerfulness.

The waltz of the second movement contributes a dance element to the ambiance and acts as a refrain between two contrasting dance melodies.

The rhythm of the first is an energetic echo of the first movement,

while the second resembles the whirling legato of the refrain.

The lively Scherzo combines elements of the sonata allegro form with a true development and a coda.

It contains two more lyrical secondary themes instead of trio sections with the customary repeats.

By the time one arrives at movement four, the dancing is over and a little romance is in order. Dvorák intensifies the dreamlike larghetto theme

in an almost pleading middle section.

Given everything that has gone before, the Finale, marked Allegro vivace injects a note of agitation, and is, surprisingly in the minor mode,

but the second theme brings back the dance.

Toward the end Dvorák quotes from both the Larghetto theme

and the opening of the Serenade, a unifying device common in many more weighty symphonies and chamber works of the period.