ATLANTIC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, 2010-11            Masterworks Opening Night (10/16)

PROGRAM NOTES

By Steven Ledbetter

HECTOR BERLIOZ

Le Carnaval romain, characteristic overture, Opus 9

Hector Berlioz was born in La Côte‑St.‑André, Isčre, on December 11, 1803, and died in Paris on March 8, 1869. He composed the Roman Carnival Overture in the fall of 1843, basing it on music from his opera Benvenuto Cellini. In this form it received its premiere in Paris, under the composer’s baton, on February 3, 1844. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, timpani, two tambourines, cymbals, triangle, and strings. Duration is 8 minutes.

Berlioz conceived this piece as an afterthought to his opera Benvenuto Cellini, a fictionalized treatment of the life of the famous Renaissance sculptor, which reaches its climax in the casting of the great bronze “Perseus.” The opera had been performed in 1838, without much success, owing to the politics of French musical life (wherein Berlioz himself was perpetually on the outside). The performance had been seriously hampered by poor conducting from François-Antoine Habeneck, who was hostile to the work. Though many members of the orchestra came to regard Benvenuto Cellini as one of the most original scores they had ever confronted, a few of them hoped to ingratiate themselves with Habeneck by playing popular tunes instead of Berlioz’s music, while onstage (during a scene played nearly in darkness, the male dancers “amused themselves by pinching the female dancers and, when they screamed, screaming too, to the discomfiture of the chorus, who were attempting to sing.” Berlioz wished to complain to the director of the theater about this “insolent and undisciplined behavior,” only to find that he did not condescend to attend rehearsals. This horrible experience convinced Berlioz that every composer owed it to himself to become a conductor, too, so he could have some control over the treatment given his new pieces. The devastating treatment of Benvenuto Cellini had a sobering effect on Berlioz, who never forgot the humiliation of that opening night.

By the 1840s, partly to preserve some of the wonderful music of Benvenuto Cellini (which he despaired of ever hearing again), Berlioz took his own advice to become active as a conductor, and wrote a series of effective concert pieces that he could use in his own tours in the 1840s. For this purpose he to the lively second-act finale of Benvenuto Cellini, which takes place in Rome during the unbuttoned pre-Lenten period known as carnival time. The finished piece, under the title, “The Roman Carnival,” and described as a “characteristic overture,” became one of Berlioz’s most popular compositions.

The first concert performance of the work gave Berlioz the opportunity to enjoy a little sweet revenge over his old adversary Habeneck, who, he claimed, had always conducted the music far too slowly for the proper effect to be felt. As Berlioz described the incident in his Memoirs:

A few years later, when I wrote the Roman Carnival overture—the main theme of the allegro of which is this same saltarello that he could never get right—Habeneck was in the artists’ room at the Salle Herz on the evening of the first performance. He had heard that at the morning rehearsal [the only rehearsal he got!] we had played it through without the wind instruments (the National Guard having relieved me of my orchestra), and he had come to witness the catastrophe. One sees his point. Indeed, when I arrived in the orchestra, all the wind players crowded around me, appalled at the thought of giving a public performance of an overture that was completely unknown to them.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “The parts are correct and you are all excellent players. Watch my stick as often as you can, count your rests carefully, and everything will be all right.”

Not a single mistake occurred. I started the allegro at the right tempo, the whirlwind tempo of the Roman dancers. The audience encored it; we played it again; it went even better the second time. On my return to the artists’ room, I saw Habeneck standing with a slightly crestfallen air, and said casually as I went past, “That’s how it goes.” He did not reply.

Berlioz begins his concert showpiece with a brief outburst of the main saltarello theme at a devil-may-care speed, followed by an exquisite and utterly characteristic slow, lyrical melody in the English horn (drawn from the duet between Cellini and Teresa in the opera’s first act); this, upon its third statement, is heard in tight canonic imitation. Once into the Allegro, the material comes almost literally from the Act II finale of Cellini for nearly two-hundred measures. The brief fugato that comprises the development keeps the galloping saltarello rhythm constantly present while the lyric melody recurs in sustained notes. The climactic moment involves the combination of all these elements--saltarello, canon, lyric passages and tricky phrase elisions to make a wonderfully invigorating close that leaves the listener--as much as the performers--breathless with its non-stop, headlong rush.

AARON COPLAND

Appalachian Spring, Ballet for Martha

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on November 14, 1900, and died in North Tarrytown, N.Y. on December 2, 1990. He composed Appalachian Spring in 1943‑44 as a ballet score for Martha Graham, composed for an ensemble of thirteen instruments (flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, four violins, two violas, two cellos, and double bass). The work was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation and was first performed in the Coolidge Festival at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1944. The following year Copland prepared a version for full orchestra; it was immediately premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. The orchestral version calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, and trombones, as well as a substantial percussion section consisting of timpani, xylophone, two snare drums, bass drum, cymbals, tabor (long drum), wood block, claves, glockenspiel, and triangle, plus harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.

In the cultural development of the United States, music is often perceived as having lagged far behind the arts of painting and literature. Already by the time of the Revolution we had noted artists like Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley; soon after that we had writers like Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, who were able to create an image of America not only for Americans themselves but for the rest of the world. Yet it took another century for American music to begin to make the same kind of international impact. When it did, the composer most strongly identified with this country, the composer most readily conceded to be our greatest, was Aaron Copland.

It is not that there was no American music before Copland. On the contrary, music arrived here with the first settlers and remained an important part of American life through all the centuries after—but it consisted of hymn tunes and “fuging tunes,” theatrical songs and popular ditties, dances and marches: not the kind of music we usually mean when we talk about

“culture.”

Eventually, beginning in the middle of the last century, permanent symphony orchestras began to spring up all over the country (about the same time, incidentally, that the same development was taking place in Europe). A large number of composers appeared who strove to win artistic laurels for their native land. They produced much attractive music (some of which could easily be revived with great success today), but they did not yet strike most listeners as being “American” composers in the same way that Walt Whitman and Mark Twain were clearly American voices in literature. In fact, they had to do what nationalist composers all over Europe—in Hungary, Bohemia, Russia, Scandinavia, and England—were all doing at about the same time: they had to demonstrate that they could compose serious music as well as any German composer—in the dominant German style—before they would be taken seriously as composers in their own homeland.

The desire to write in a nationalistic, “American” style ran deeply before Aaron Copland created one way of doing so in the 1920s. His desire to become recognizably “American” led at first to an encounter with jazz elements (though never with actual jazz composition) in the Organ Symphony, Music for the Theater, and the Piano Concerto. Though these works marked Copland as a man to watch and hinted at the course of things to come, they were regarded by many as “difficult” scores. And his style became still more complex at the beginning of the 1930s with the Symphonic Ode, the Short Symphony, and the granitic Piano Variations.

But the social changes of the 1930s brought a general interest among the leftist artists and thinkers with whom Copland was friendly in attracting a wider audience than ever before, in addressing the common man and expressing his hopes, dreams, and desires by artistic means. Copland was one of a generation of composers who shared this desire; he accomlished the change of viewpoint with notable success, simplifying his style for greater accessibility, but never ceasing to be utterly individual in sound or approach. The simplicity heightened certain elements that had not been apparent in his music earlier‑‑most notably an extraordinary tenderness that never becomes sentimental. At the same time, Copland’s music retained its energy and verve, its sense of space and color in laying out orchestral lines; thus his music is instantly recognizable as proceeding from the same musical imagination, no matter what its style.

Copland had already had two popular ballet successes (Billy the Kid and Rodeo) based on western themes—a striking achievement in imagination for a composer city-born and city-bred—when Martha Graham asked him to compose a ballet for her. She chose the title from a poem by Hart Crane. The scenario is a simple one, touching on primal issues of marriage and survival, on the eternal regeneration suggested by spring. It is set in the Pennsylvania hills early in the nineteenth century.

The bride‑to‑be and the young farmer‑husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.

The orchestral version contains the substance of the ballet, omitting a few passages that Copland felt were of interest only when accompanying the danced story.

All of Copland’s three major ballet scores make use of old folk melodies, but Appalachian Spring uses the least; the only tune to pre‑date the composition is the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” which serves as the basis of a series of variations near the end of the ballet. But the tune also plays a background role in unifying the entire score; from the introduction on we frequently hear a three‑note motive that is easily recognizable as the first five notes of “Simple Gifts” in outline form.

From this motive comes the entire triadic “sound” of the ballet. From beginning to end, through all its changing moods, Copland’s score calls up a sense of the optimism and courage, the vigor and energy, and the deep wellspring of faith and hope that we like to regard as characteristic of the American experience.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95, From the New World

Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahoževes (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He began sketching themes for the Symphony No. 9 during the last two weeks of 1892; the finished score is dated May 24, 1893. The symphony was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl on December 15, 1893. The score calls for two flutes (one doubling piccolo) two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 40 minutes.

            Antonín Dvořák’s arrival in America on September 26, 1892, was a triumph of persistence for Jeannette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, who hoped that Dvořák’s name would put her institution on a firm footing and eventually produce American composers who could vie with any in the world. She also hoped that, in addition to teaching young American musicians, he would compose new works especially for American consumption. One potential project was an opera based on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which had enjoyed in a Czech translation years before. The opera never materialized, but the subject did have an influence on the first large work Dvořák composed here, his most famous symphony.

A few months after arriving, he wrote to friends in Prague, “The Americans expect me...to show them the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short to create a national music. If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense.”

He began a sketchbook of musical ideas and made his first original sketches in America on December 19. The next day he noted on the second page one of his best known melodic inventions: the melody assigned to the English horn at the beginning of the slow movement in the New World Symphony. In the days that followed, he sketched other ideas, many of them used in the symphony, some reserved for later works, and some ultimately discarded. Finally, on January 10, 1893, Dvořák turned a fresh page and began writing the continuous thread of the melodic discourse for the entire first movement. Composing around his teaching schedule, he completed the symphony on May 24.

No piece of Dvořák’s has been subjected to so much debate as the Symphony From the New World. The composer himself started it all with an interview published in the New York Herald on May 21, just as he was finishing the last movement. He was quoted as having said:

I am now satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States...These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil...There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.

At another time Dvořák complicated the issue by claiming to have studied the music of the American Indians and even to have found it strikingly similar to that of the Negroes. This view was surely mistaken, and it probably has more to do with the composer’s own mental link between this symphony and his unfinished Hiawatha opera than it does with musical style.

Dvořák’s comments attracted much attention. When the new symphony appeared six months later, everyone wanted to know if he had followed his own advice. Claims appeared on all sides that the melodic material of the symphony was borrowed from black music, or from Indian music, or perhaps both. Just before the premiere, Dvořák emphasized that he sought the spirit, not the letter of traditional melodies, developing them “with the aid of all the achievements of modern rhythm, counterpoint, and orchestral coloring.”

Yet there are witnesses who merit credence for some claims of ethnic influence. Victor Herbert, then known as the leading cellist of his generation (he had not yet started composing the operettas that were to make him famous), was head of the cello faculty at the conservatory. He recalled later that the young black composer Harry T. Burleigh, then a student, had given Dvořák some of the tunes for the symphony. He added, “I have seen this denied—but it is true.” Certainly Burleigh sang spirituals for Dvořák and certainly familiarized him with the melodic characteristics of the spiritual.

The work’s title, added almost at the last minute, has also been heavily interpreted. The composer’s assistant, a young Czech musician named Kovařik, wrote that Dvořák merely meant the title as “Impressions and Greetings from the New World.”

One of the most lovable characteristics of Dvořák’s best works is his seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh melodic invention. The apparent ease with which he creates naively folklike tunes conceals the labor that goes into the sketches: refining, sorting and choosing what will actually be used. Dvořák did not agonize over the invention of themes, but he did worry about how to link them together.

After a slow introduction that hints at the main theme, the horns play a soft, syncopated fanfare over a string tremolo. This theme is one of several that will recur throughout the symphony as one of its main unifying elements. The dotted rhythmic pendant to the horn figure leads the harmony to G minor for a theme of narrow compass (introduced in flute and clarinet) over a drone. This in turn brightens to G major and the most memorable moment in the Allegro: a new theme (an unconscious reminiscence of Swing low, sweet chariot?) presented by the solo flute in its lowest register; the first four notes of this tune, too, will recur many times later on.

Dvořák said that the two middle movements were inspired by passages in The Song of Hiawatha. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha in the forest, though Dvořák also instilled a deep strain of his own homesickness for Bohemia. The introduction to the slow movement is one of Dvořák’s most striking ideas, a surprising harmonic modulation echoed, like a frame, at the movement’s end.

Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the Indian dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast. This must refer to the dance of Pau‑Puk‑Keewis, who, after dancing “a solemn measure,” began a much livelier step:

     Whirling, spinning round in circles,

     Leaping o’er the guests assembled,

     Eddying round and round the wigwam,

     Till the leaves went whirling with him...

but it is nearly impossible to find anything that could be considered “Indian” music in this very Czech dance. The whirling opening section has the same rhythmic shifts and ambiguities as the Czech furiant, and the remaining melodic ideas are waltzes, graceful and energetic by turns.

The last movement is basically in sonata form, but Dvořák stays so close to home base, harmonically speaking, and uses surprisingly square thematic ideas. Recently Michael Beckerman has shown that it is possible read Longfellow’s poetic account of the climactic battle between Hiawatha and his arch-foe Pau-Puk-Keewis rhythmically in time to the music of this opening section, and he suggests that this poetry was clearly in the composer’s mind as he wrote. Toward the very end elements of the three earlier movements return in contrapuntal combinations (most stunning of these is the rich chord progression from the opening of the second movement, played fortissimo in the brass and woodwinds over stormy strings). Somehow in these closing pages, we get the Czech Dvořák, the Americanized Dvořák, and even a strong whiff of Wagner (for a moment it sounds as if the Tannhäuser Venus is about to rise from the Venusberg) all stirred into a heady concoction to bring the symphony to its stirring close.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)