Masterworks Opening Night
Saturday, October 22, 2011 @ 7:30 pm
Aaron Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 14, 1900, and died in new York on December 2, 1990. he composed the Fafanre for the Common Man in 1942 for Eugene Goossens and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which gave the first performance the following March. The score calls for four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum and tam-tam. Duration is about 3 minutes
Between 1941 and 1945, many American composers contributed works large and small to the war effort as a way of building morale. In 1942 Eugene Goossens, who was then conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conceived the idea of opening each concert of his season with a stirring fanfare specially composed for the event. Ten composers responded to his invitation, and the resulting works were played and published, but most of them have remained largely unheard since the end of the war.
Copland’s contribution to the series, to which he gave the brilliant title Fanfare for the Common Man, has become perhaps the best-known composition of its type by an American composer. A brief, crashing introduction in the percussion instruments prepares the noble, soaring theme in the horns and trumpets, later emulated by the trombones and tuba. In its brief span, the fanfare captures the determination and idealism of those everyday American men and women who went to war in the early ‘40s. Three years later, Copland used the same music, virtually note-for-note, to introduce the finale of his Third Symphony.
Samuel Barber: Adagio for String Orchestra, Op. 11
Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York on January 23, 1981. He composed the Adagio originally as part of his String Quartet, Opus 11, in 1936-37. Barber took the slow movement of the quartet as a separate piece for string orchestra. It became famous overnight when Toscanini conducted it on his nationwide radio broadcast on November 5, 1938. Duration is about 8 minutes.
Samuel Barber grew up in a musical family (his aunt was the great contralto Louise Homer, whose husband, Sidney Homer, was a composer), and he began play the piano at six and compose the following year. Still, it was with some trepidation that he left a note on his mother’s dresser when he was about eight to tell her of his self-realization: “To begin with, I was not meant to be an athelet [sic] I was meant to be a composer. and I will be, I’m sure...Don’t ask me to try to forget this...and go play foot‑ball.” It was Sam’s uncle Sidney who encouraged his composition most with letters full of advice, and by the time the boy was seventeen, his famous aunt had begun including some of his early songs on her recital program.
Barber’s musical technique was formally developed during eight years he spent as a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he joined its first class in 1924 (when he was just fourteen). There he studied piano, composition (with Rosario Scalero), conducting (with Fritz Reiner), and voice. For a time he contemplated the idea of a career as a professional singer, but it was primarily as a composer that he developed during his Curtis years.
Barber’s style was always conservative, emphasizing the long lyrical line and relatively traditional tonal harmonies. His setting of language was felicitous, and his ear for color acute. All of these strengths made him for many years one of the most popular of American composers. Though by the time of his death he felt himself to be an outsider in the musical world, his music has been heard more frequently in recent years and appreciated for its craft and expressive directness.
From early on Barber won awards; at first these took him for study in Europe, especially Italy, where he not only composed a great deal of music but made useful connections. In July 1937 Artur Rodzinski conducted Barber’s First Symphony at the Salzburg Festival, the first American music ever to be performed in that bastion of European culture. At the time, Arturo Toscanini was planning his programs for the following year and looking for an American work to include. Rodzinski suggested Barber, and when Toscanini expressed an interest in seeing a short piece, Barber quickly composed his Essay for Orchestra and made an arrangement for orchestral strings of the Adagio from his String Quartet. He sent the works to Toscanini, but heard nothing. Eventually the conductor sent back the scores with no message from the conductor.
When Barber’s classmate Gian Carlo Menotti visited Toscanini at Lago Maggiore that summer, Barber refused to go with him. Toscanini understood the reason for the young composer’s absence: “He’s just angry with me, but he has no reason to be—I’m going to do both of his pieces.” The performances on November 5, 1938, were widely heard and remarked, partly because Toscanini had a reputation for musical conservatism and for a lack of interest in American music. The fact that he played two works by an American composer on the same program brought Barber’s name and music before the public more effectively than almost anything else could have done.
Of course, it was the quality of the music that held the public attention. The haunting serenity of the Adagio, in particular, has retained its hold unbroken. The Adagio for strings is one of those extraordinary works that feels never to have been created but always to have existed just out of hearing. Its shape is a nearly seamless arch from infinite quiet sadness to great intensity and back to silence.
George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on July 11, 1937. He composed Rhapsody in Blue between January 7 and 25, 1924; Ferde Grofé arranged the orchestral part for the dance band of Paul Whiteman, slightly enlarged with extra strings. Gershwin played the solo piano part in the premiere in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12; Whiteman conducted his orchestra. In 1926 Grofé enlarged the orchestration for symphony orchestra, the version to be heard here. In addition to the solo piano, it calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet), two bassoons, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, three optional saxophones (two altos, one tenor), optional banjo, timpani, snare drum, suspended cymbal, glockenspiel, triangle, bass drum, tamtam, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.
A perpetual debate of the 1920s revolved around the question of whether jazz was good music—or even music at all! Most established musicians, with their European training, were blind to the merits or possibilities of jazz, their views certainly tainted by racism, conscious or subliminal. The man most responsible for making jazz respectable to white audiences was Paul Whiteman, who was not really a jazz musician himself but rather one who wanted to use whatever was new in the world of popular music. His encouragement of “symphonic jazz” produced the first concert success by George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue. And that success in turn began to set Gershwin thinking of working in larger forms and led to such works as the Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess.
Whiteman planned a concert for New York’s Aeolian Hall to celebrate the rapprochement between symphonic music and jazz. He had spoken in general terms with Gershwin about wanting a new piece for that concert, and the composer had vaguely agreed, but no date had been set, and Gershwin forgot about it only to be reminded suddenly on January 3, 1924. George was playing pool with Buddy DeSylva (of the songwriting team DeSylva, Brown and Henderson) while his brother Ira was reading the Herald Tribune when he suddenly came across an announcement of Whiteman’s concert, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” to be given in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12.
Whiteman’s concert, so the announcement ran, would involve a committee of judges whose task it would be to pass on the question, “What is American music?” (Ironically—but typically for the time—not one of the judges was American! They included pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist, and singer Alma Gluck.) Given the shortness of time, and Gershwin’s limited experience in scoring his works, Whiteman offered the services of his arranger, Ferde Grofé, to orchestrate the new work as it was being composed.
At the time, Gershwin was busily putting the finishing touches on a show called Sweet Little Devil, due to open on January 21. What became the Rhapsody in Blue took shape in his mind as he was traveling to Boston for the show’s out-of-town tryout.
It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang that is often so stimulating to a composer....And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.
Later, at a party in New York, Gershwin was improvising on the piano—he always spent parties at the piano, playing non-stop, and almost always his own music—when, as he later said, “I heard myself playing a theme that must have been haunting me inside, seeking outlet. [It] oozed out of my fingers.” Ira, who was becoming not only Gershwin’s closest collaborator on the lyrics, but also his best listener, encouraged him to use this theme as the lyrical climax of the work, a powerful contrast to the jazziness of the opening.
The famous opening clarinet glissando actually predated the rest of the composition. Whiteman’s clarinetist Ross Gorman had developed the trick of playing a two-octave upward glissando, something that had been believed impossible before. Gershwin had already been captivated by this sound, which was familiar from the Jewish klezmer tradition. He had attempted to notate it in one of his sketchbooks, and early on he thought of it as the perfect opening for the work.
Time was so short that Gershwin left a number of the solo piano spots blank, to be improvised in the performance (Whiteman’s score simply said, “wait for nod.”) And Victor Herbert, who had a piece of his own on the concert (his last work to be performed publicly, since he died suddenly just three months later), was present at the rehearsals and made a suggestion that Gershwin accepted. Just before the appearance of the big tune, the romantic E-major melody that is the heart of the rhapsody, which Gershwin had improvised at the party, there was a transition in which the piano simply repeated a rising passage in contrary motion. Herbert suggested that, instead of a sterile repetition, it would be much more effective to have a climactic rise to a grand pause, then launch the new theme. Gershwin accepted the suggestion, and the passage was changed to the version we know today. (There is something particularly touching in this incident: Victor Herbert, the last great figure of an earlier generation of American popular music—his career had begun when he played for Liszt in the 1880s and spent a year in the Strauss orchestra in Vienna—was a greatly generous man who recognized and welcomed Gershwin’s talent. He even offered him free lessons in orchestration, which the younger man was not yet ready to accept, and by the time was interested in pursuing that skill, Herbert had died.)
Though Whiteman had announced a “concerto,” Gershwin decided that it would be better to follow the freer form of the rhapsody. The score plays with the ambivalence between major and minor, with choices of the “bent” notes called “blue” from their use in the traditional singing style of the blues, which hover between major and minor and sometimes sit right in the middle. The prevalence of “blue” notes and the rhapsodic ground plan of the work suggested to Ira the title that George gratefully accepted: Rhapsody in Blue. It was a perfect title indeed: the first word was redolent of the European tradition, the remainder instantly evoked modern America.
Gershwin began the manuscript on January 7 and finished it about the 25th; Ferde Grofé orchestrated directly from the manuscript and finished on February 4. At the concert, eight days later, the glittering audience included just about every musical dignitary in New York that week. But the event was overlong, and as it dragged on and on, it looked as if it would be a flop. Rhapsody in Blue came next-to-last on the program, and the audience was restive. Gershwin strode out to the piano and nodded to Whiteman; the performance began with Ross Gorman’s clarinet “wail.” The effect was electrifying. This was something really new, and everyone recognized it at once. The rapturous audience response at the end elevated Rhapsody in Blue immediately to the position it has never left, as one of the top favorites in American music for listeners and performers of every type.
There were a few criticisms of the score’s loose structure. But when critic Irving Kolodin asked Gershwin a decade later whether he didn’t think he could improve the piece, he replied, “I don’t know; people seemed to like it the way it was, so I left it that way.”
Peter I. Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He began his Fifth Symphony in May 1888 and completed it on August 26. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St. Petersburg on November 26, 1888. Theodore Thomas introduced it to America at a concert in New York on March 5, 1889 (Edward MacDowell’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, with the composer as soloist, had its premiere on the same program). The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, three timpani, and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes.
By 1888, when Tchaikovsky composed the Fifth Symphony, he was far from being the hypersensitive artist—virtually a neurotic cripple—of popular accounts. To be sure, he had gone through a major emotional crisis ten years earlier, brought on by his ill-advised, catastrophic marriage (undertaken partly in an attempt to stop rumors about his homosexuality) and a series of artistic setbacks. His own brother Modest described the Tchaikovsky of 1878 as “nervous and misanthropic,” but declared that he “seemed a new man” by 1885. The masterly achievement of the Fourth Symphony (premiered in 1878) had marked the end of the real crisis. In the decade that followed, Tchaikovsky had composed the violin concerto, the three orchestral suites, Manfred, four operas, his piano trio, and much else—hardly a sign of inability to deal with life’s pressures!
With the consolidation of his reputation as a composer, he had even managed to overcome, to a degree, his earlier panic at the thought of having to conduct. Indeed, his confidence was such that, when demands were made for changes in his opera The Sorceress, he was able to write, “I find The Sorceress an opera that has been properly and seriously written, and if the public does not like it, so much the worse for the public.”
His decision to write a symphony again after ten years was an overt expression of Tchaikovsky’s willingness to tackle once more the largest and most demanding musical form of his day. He began the symphony in May 1888, shortly after returning from a successful European tour. By the beginning of July he had finished the draft and started the orchestration, completing the full score on August 17. The premiere, which took place in St. Petersburg that November, was a success, though critics questioned whether the Fifth Symphony was of the same caliber as the Second and Fourth.
In March 1889 Tchaikovsky went to Hamburg for the German premiere. There he found Brahms staying in the same hotel and was gratified to learn that the German composer had remained an extra day in Hamburg just to hear the first rehearsal of his new work. The two composers had lunch after the rehearsal “and quite a few drinks,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest. “Neither he nor the players liked the Finale, which I also think rather horrible.” But this negative mood was soon dispelled. A week later the composer wrote, “The players by degrees came to appreciate the symphony more and more, and at the last rehearsal they gave me an ovation. The concert was also a success. Best of all—I have stopped disliking the symphony.” Later he wrote even more positively, “I have started to love it again.”
Certainly audiences have loved the symphony for nearly a century for its warmth, its color, its rich fund of melody. Tchaikovsky always wrote music with “heart,” music with an underlying emotional significance, though he was wary of revealing that meaning publicly, preferring to let the listener seek it personally. Still, for his own use, before starting in on the composition, he planned a rough program for the first movement—but, characteristically, he kept these notes entirely private, so that the music might make its own case. Still his first ideas are highly suggestive:
Introduction. Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro (I) Murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against xxx. (II) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith???
We can find here some hint as to the composer’s ideas, his emotional condition, at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony. The mysterious “xxx” probably refers to the same thing usually discussed in his diary as “Z” or “That”—namely his homosexuality (if revealed publicly, this could have been very embarrassing, or worse, for the composer). The program for the first movement and the music of the symphony as a whole suggest a somewhat philosophical acceptance of his nature, coming by the finale to the realization of some peace of mind.
The first movement opens with a motto theme that might be identified with “Providence,” if only because it is somewhat less assertive than the “Fate” theme of the Fourth Symphony. The motto features a dotted rhythmic figure in the clarinet, supported by a plagal harmony suggesting resignation. This idea recurs, in some form or other, in each of the symphony’s four movements. The soft, somber tread of this introduction yields to a syncopated little tune in the clarinets and bassoons, answered by variants of the same material and sudden fortissimo outbursts. At a moment of sudden quiet, a new theme rises expressively in the strings (with a delicate answer in the woodwinds), to be repeated with the instrumentation reversed. Using Tchaikovsky’s preliminary plan as a guide, it might well be possible to identify the murmurs, the reproaches, the embrace of faith in the various sections; but though Tchaikovsky insisted on the expressive character of his work, it is equally misleading to try to read too much beyond a certain emotional quality into a movement or a phrase. What, for instance, of the intense soaring theme that is yet to come? After these themes have been developed and restated, the movement dies away in a subdued march, still retaining a degree of tension as it fades away into silence.
The second movement contains one of the most famous instrumental solos ever written, an ardent song for the horn, with an important pendant for oboe. The opening is marked by emotional intensity, calling for subtle adjustments to the tempo every few measures. The contrasting middle section seems more objective at first, but it soon builds to a feverish climax dramatically interrupted by the motto theme blared out by the full orchestra. The strings softly sing the horn’s melody with the oboe’s gentle countermelody. Gradually this theme builds to another climax and seems to be dying away, when the motto theme bursts in again, pounding all to silence and allowing only a few broken phrases, devoid of energy, to bring the movement to a close. By this point, the motto suggests more precisely “Fate” than “Providence.”
Traditionally the third movement of a symphony is in some sort of dance meter, usually in triple time, but few composers have written a full-scale waltz at this point, and even fewer have managed one of such grace and breadth, so evocative of the ballet. A gossamer thread of staccato sixteenth-note figures runs through the middle section deftly supported by the remainder of the orchestra. Its momentum carries it on as an accompanying figure under the first return of the waltz theme in the oboes. The full waltz is heard again (in new scoring), only to be undercut at the end by a hushed reminder of the motto theme in clarinets and bassoons.
The finale is perhaps the most problematic movement of the symphony; Tchaikovsky was at best ambivalent about it, and others have pointed out the prime weakness of what has otherwise been a most effective use of the motto theme throughout the symphony: Having just heard a reminder of it, understated and threatening, at the end of the waltz movement, we suddenly encounter the motto at the opening of the finale firmly in E major, as if the earlier minor mode had simply been an accident. There is no hard-won battle of major over minor here, as in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (the evident model for this symphony), or even in Tchaikovsky’s own Fourth Symphony of a decade earlier. The victory seems, at the beginning, too easily won. Fortunately, the motto and its development soon give way to the main formal structure of the movement (sonata form again, for the first time since the beginning), with a vigorous E-minor chordal theme in the strings and a broader melody in the woodwinds; the motto leads off the development section ever more forcefully (in C major), though the development thereafter continues working out the other themes. Following the recapitulation, the rhythm of the motto builds a massive climax and a grand pause. Now the motto appears in a grand apotheosis of marching chords and swirling woodwind figures with a rich counterpoint in the brass instruments. A presto section is built of thematic materials from earlier in the finale, while the last strain of the coda is a new statement of what had been a nervously syncopated little tune early in the first movement, now ringing out with the most glorious assurance as a majestic trumpet fanfare in the major key—a triumph of sorts, if only by overstatement. The doubts and tensions of the earlier movements have been overcome by putting on a bold front, and there is no question that it has all been bravely done. But Brahms, at least, had his doubts, and Tchaikovsky, in certain moods, anyway, did not disagree. He knew at heart that he was whistling in the dark—but it is a brave whistle that provides the courage to go on.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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