Finding Foote: A Surprising Piano Quintet ... Thoughts On a Train Arthur Foote Tonight, the conductor of the Harrisburg Symphony, Stuart Malina, joins with four of his principal string players to perform chamber music in the annual concert of Stuart & Friends, at the Rose Lehrman Center of Harrisburg Area Community College, at 7:30. You can read about the concert at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog, here. With Ernest Bloch's "From Jewish Life" and Mozart's Piano Quartet K.493 on the first half, the program concludes, not surprisingly, with a Quintet for Piano and Strings. But this one is by Arthur Foote. Arthur Who? Most American concert-goers would be hard-pressed to say they’re “familiar” with music by any American composer before 1900 – or at least, one way or another, before Charles Ives, that innovator of American music better known than heard. Yet you’d think, considering our history technically goes back before 1776, there’d at least be something comparable to what was going on in Europe: Mozart and Haydn during the early years of the Republic, Beethoven around the time of our War of 1812, or Brahms and Wagner in the decade or so after the Civil War. The truth is, there was very little market for classical music in the New World. The popular mood was for dance music and hymns – feeding the secular and spiritual needs of a hard-working population – while the wealthier Americans imported what they needed from their distant ancestral homelands and would have considered anything by American artists too plebian to decorate their cultural lives with. European Art was considered edifying and appreciating it (and certainly owning it) was a sign of intelligence as well as wealth. American culture, such as it was, couldn't compete on an intellectual or even an aesthetic level with European culture and its long and brilliant history. This attitude can be found in many American literary works but especially in the novels of Henry James with their constant friction between established European culture and the rough-around-the-edges newly minted Americans looking for acceptance in the world, especially in A Portrait of a Lady and his last major novel, The Golden Bowl. Besides, painters may have painted American scenes but they did so in English or German fashion; poets may have written about American subjects but – with one glaring exception – they wrote in English or German styles (the exception was and always will be Walt Whitman). The same could be said for literature at least on the surface but here there were more distinct and distinctly American voices despite their cultural roots. The written word, at least, had deeper roots in American society. America was viewed as an economic possibility for touring musicians and we, in our early centuries, would no doubt have benefited from visiting figures had transatlantic travel been easier. It was the amount of time cooped up on a ship that deterred Robert and Clara Schumann from following through on plans for an American tour. But, like Anton Rubinstein or Camille Saint-Saëns afterward, these visits were primarily to make as much money as quickly as possible and then return to the comforts and familiarity of home. Much of the basis of what became our musical life here was founded or assisted by those fleeing history: the French Revolution or the decades of Napoleonic wars that followed; the series of mostly failed revolutions of 1848-1849 across much of Europe. Even though he may have had little impact on the musical life of his adopted country, Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, the collaborator on such masterpieces as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, fled creditors more than history and opened the first academic course in Italian literature in this country, introducing us to the likes of Dante. In addition, he also would run a country store in Sunbury PA, of all places, driving his supply wagons through Harrisburg on his way to and from Philadelphia. If nothing else, his conversations with a young man who worked for him named Simon Cameron helped instill in the boy an interest in cultural things unknown in this land. It would be amusing to imagine Cameron ever having discussions with Abraham Lincoln about the finer points of Mozart operas, but it may have only been one more reason Lincoln referred to his erstwhile Secretary of War (and former Ambassador to Russia) as “The Tsar of Pennsylvania.” Anyone who wanted to become a composer in this country went to Europe to study. There were no conservatories here, not even university music departments. In fact, when John Knowles Paine offered lectures in music at Harvard where he was chapel organist and choirmaster, the faculty wondered why. In the early-1860s, he was allowed to give lectures but there were no credits available toward a degree – consequently, there were few students. It was only later in 1870 that his lectures were given official recognition: a course in harmony was successful enough to warrant setting up a course in counterpoint and with it, eventually, course credit. In 1875, Paine – a composer already recognized in Europe, most likely the first American (after Louis Moreau Gottschalk) to achieve international fame – finally became the first official Professor of Music in America. His plan for Harvard became the accepted model for music departments across the United States. I mention all this because Arthur Foote was 21 when he graduated from Harvard in 1873, having taken Paine’s music classes, even though his plan was to go into the practice of law. It wasn’t until he started taking organ lessons to pass that first summer he decided music should be his career. In two years, he began a career as a music teacher in Boston, a profession he enjoyed for over sixty years. In addition to being organist at Boston’s First Unitarian Church until 1910, he also helped found the American Guild of Organists. Technically, he is the first of that generation of composers who did not go to Europe to study. He is an entirely home-grown American composer. His style, for the most part, bears all the hallmarks of European standards, conservative and Victorian which itself was largely Germanic and often derivative of Brahms. But like many of his generation, he has been forgotten, largely overshadowed by the innovative composers who came with the New Century, particularly Charles Ives (Yale, Class of 1898) and later Aaron Copland (who, ironically, went to Paris to become the first American pupil of the French teacher, Nadia Boulanger in 1921). = = = = = Here is a recording of Foote’s Piano Quintet with pianist Mary Louise Boehm, violinists Kees Kooper and Alvin Rogers, violist Richard Maximoff, and cellist Fred Sherry, a recording currently available on the Albany label but which I’d owned years ago on the Vox label. It’s in four movements which was posted on YouTube in three clips: 1st Mvmt 2nd Mvmt 3rd & 4th Mvmts = = = = = So, where does this Piano Quintet fit into the world of Arthur Foote? It’s tempting to compare it to Brahms’ Piano Quintet especially when there are so few well-known works in the genre to begin with (imagine if there were only four string quartets that got any regular performance-time?). It certainly sounds like Brahms, at least on the surface, but Foote is more interested in the harmonic world of Brahms’ romanticism, not its underlying structure and counterpoint. In Boston in the 1890s, Brahms was certainly not a “conservative” force. Today, we tend to lump Brahms and Wagner together as “two leading German Romanticists,” unaware how vibrantly (and often violently) different they were from each other to their contemporaries: if Wagner had started by creating “Music of the Future,” a term borrowed from his future father-in-law Franz Liszt, Brahms was looking back at the legacy of Beethoven and Bach (the conductor Hans von Bülow coined the idea of the Three B’s more as a marketing gimmick than a reflection of Brahms’ perceived placement in the musical firmament). But Brahms’ love of contrapuntal writing turned most of his American listeners off (the famous comment “Exit in case of Brahms” originated in Boston). Dvorák, on the other hand, was a kind of “Poor Man’s Brahms” – the best elements of Brahms with his tunefulness and ability to switch between drama and lyricism combined with a populist folk-like style and lively dance rhythms that animated so much of Dvorák’s music whether it was written in Bohemia, Vienna or New York City (or, like his American chamber music, Spillville, IA). And it was in 1892 that Dvorák arrived in New York to chair Mrs. Thurber’s National Conservatory – the following year, he would compose his newest symphony there, subtitled “From the New World.” She’d already hired the likes of Victor Herbert, but snagging Dvorák was a wealthy patron’s attempt to bring in some famous European superstar to guide and inspire young American talent. At least, that was the plan. Now, it’s unfortunate that her money ran out in 1895 and Dvorák returned to Prague when it did. No great composer came out of his class – but one could say the same of many great composers who had numerous students: not every student went on to achieve greatness and Dvorák’s three academic years in America would certainly have created a small sampling to expect greatness from. The only student who went on to have any impact on future students was the New York-born Rubin Goldmark whose uncle was the Austrian composer Carl Goldmark. He could count among his students names like Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, though it would be fair to say that he was also the reason Copland decided to go to Paris to study instead (finding Goldmark too pedantic). While Gershwin wrote his charming “Lullaby” as a harmony assignment for Goldmark, there was too little association to consider his future fame as anything but an indirect result of their brief intersection in time. Even so, we think his idea about building an American Voice out of the use of American Folk-Songs – especially the spirituals of the American Negro – was a huge influence on the national scene. In fact, though he says he never quoted folk songs himself but only “wrote in the spirit” of these tunes, it wasn’t until later that composers took him literally, still arguing about exactly what an “American folk song” was. There were the “Indianists” who found inspiration in the songs and rhythms of the Native Americans, including Goldmark who wrote a Hiawatha Overture as well as a “Negro Rhapsody” or Philadelphia-born Preston Ware Orem whose “Indian Rhapsody” for piano sounds more like one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies superimposed on a few meager Native American ideas. But most of America’s already established composers in the 1890s – especially those in Boston, the conservative antipode to America’s futuristic New York City – rejected Dvorák’s idea. Amy Beach (then known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) went so far as to write a symphony based on actual themes and folk songs from her British heritage which in 1896 became her Gaelic Symphony. That doesn’t mean there aren’t “American elements” in Arthur Foote’s quintet aside from the homage to Brahms. He was, after all, a thoroughly American composer, born and trained here, but his Americanisms are no less American than Dvorák’s were – the essence of the idea rather than the substance of it – and I think unless he wrote specifically somewhere that he was in fact incorporating American themes into his music, we might probably be making assumptions of what it sounds like to us today rather than how it might have been perceived by his contemporaries over a century ago as well as by the composer himself. Does that lessen the quality of the piece? No, not at all. The Quintet as well as his most frequently performed piece (if the term is applicable at all), the Suite in E for Strings, and other works like his tone poems In the Mountains and Francesca da Rimini deserve to be heard if only in the context of a culture trying to find its voice. There is, for instance, a Cello Concerto that was performed in 1894 by the recently formed Chicago Symphony: consider that Victor Herbert’s 2nd Cello Concerto was premiered in March 1894 and Dvorák began composing his that November, what could Foote’s Cello Concerto add to the fairly limited cello repertoire? Will Arthur Foote’s Piano Quintet replace the Brahms Quintet on chamber music programs throughout America? Not very likely. It’s not sufficiently “substantial” (given our preference for the Masterpiece Quotient) to be the main work on any program – even here, the musical substance is on the first half of the concert with Mozart’s E-flat Piano Quartet, K.493 – nor is its composer recognizable enough to attract big crowds (in as much as chamber music ever does). Could it stand being heard once in a while instead of one of the Big Four Quintets – those masterpieces by Schumann, Brahms, Dvorák and Shostakovich? Yes, please. - Dick Strawser 29 days ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Music from the Home of the Sun King and th... Thoughts On a Train Last week, I posted this at the Market Square Concerts Blog when The Four Nations Ensemble and a group calling itself "Music from China" came to town to perform music from the French Baroque, mostly from the time of Louis XIV and the Palace of Versailles interspersed with music of the "classical tradition" from China, using the Imperial Palace of The Forbidden City as its metaphor. Since it took me several days to research and write the post, I thought I would add it here, as well. Here’s a short clip to introduce you to The Four Nations Ensemble: = = = = = = = = = = Though they’re playing Handel, here, rather than, say, Couperin, it’s a chance to dip your toe – or, better, your ear – into the sound world of the Baroque. Here are members of "Music from China," a short clip recorded recently at William & Mary College: = = = = = = = = = = Their program here was called “Plum Blossom and Fluer-de-Lys: Music of War and Peace in the Forbidden City and Versailles.” And while I might have wished for more prefatory detail about the unfamiliar Chinese music and perhaps some translations for the picturesque titles of the various French pieces for those of us not fluent in the langauge, the thing I missed most was a chance to find out a little bit more about the instruments, whether French or Chinese. For the audience, most of the time the Chinese instruments were partially hidden behind music stands. While a lecture recital wasn't the object, here, I felt an opportunity was missed to communicate with an audience experiencing this for the first time. It’s not really an odd combination at all, if you think about it - this combination of French and Chinese music - the difference in the sound-world aside. If the Language of Music is truly international, it’s only the surface “dialect” that changes. Beneath that surface lies a varied world of commonalities rather than differences. One thing, if nothing else, is the love French composers of the Baroque era had for picturesque titles. Descriptive, evocative or merely suggestive of mood, Couperin and Rameau wrote tons of keyboard pieces with titles like La Poule (The Hen) or Les regrets by Couperin (here, performed by Andrew Appel of the Four Nations Ensemble) Though most of the French works on the program have “abstract” names – suites and things like that – individual movements may have descriptive titles. However, all you have to do is look at the offerings on the Chinese side of the program to see titles like “Quietude” or “The General’s Command” and, of course, “Ambush on Ten Sides” which will probably bring to mind (dramatically, at least) any number of fight scenes in classical Chinese martial arts films. The event describes dates back to a historical event in 202 BC but the music became a virtuoso piece for the pipa or Chinese lute sometime in the 17th Century; a famous version of it dates from 1818 with several other arrangements and versions of it available. Here is an hour-long program “Music from China” presented recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which includes introductions to the instruments and the instrumentalists as well as a good bit of music: = = = = = *** ***** ******** ***** *** With all the talk about personality types and the psychological tests that exist to evaluate them and ways of determining who is a Left-Brained person and who’s a Right-Brained person, I’m reminded that composer Ned Rorem used to describe everything in terms of being either German or French. As national stereotypes go, it seems fairly accurate: the Germans are traditionally tradition-bound and precise (I used to joke about a Berlin-born friend who would become frantic is we were a few seconds late) where the French are typically more laissez-faire about life in general. Things that might be described more recently in pop-psych terms as being Left-Brained (logical and objective) would be, to Rorem, “German.” Things that were Right-Brained (irrational and subjective) would be, then, “French.” Having lived in Paris much of his life, he quite possibly had enough experience to make this generalization. It amused me to see him write somewhere – probably in one of his numerous published diaries – that “The Japanese are German and the Chinese are French.” Think about it. It may or may not be an accurate stereotype, dealing with the two major cultural and political nationalities in Asia, but it has something to say for the Japanese love of technology (logic) and, if nothing else, a more picturesque and impressionistic (subjective) approach to art and music in China that is very akin to what we in the West are more familiar with in French art and music. The argument, I think, falls apart when discussing Japanese art which is, after all, its own adaptation of what were originally Chinese influences, and has many of the same traits. It’s true than many Japanese composers – Toru Takemitsu, perhaps, the most familiar to Western audiences – are stylistically full of impressionistic titles and hazy Debussy-like harmonies. But in their pursuit of performing mostly Western music in their concert halls and the training required at the conservatory level, it might seem a more rigid, rule- and goal-oriented society. Political systems and the attitudes toward Western Art differ as well, but the Chinese training of classical musicians, I gather, would be more comparable to the French conservatoires, where the end (seeing the big picture) is more important than the means (seeing the details), though anyone who ever studied with Nadia Boulanger in early-20th Century Paris would never consider her a laissez-faire teacher… Anyway, keeping the possibility of these contrasts and similarities in mind, a journey to Paris and Beijing might at first seem an odd pairing for a classical music concert, at least as we normally think of them. But when you look at the Big Picture – in this case, music as an International Language – perhaps it’s not so unusual, after all? That’s where this Thursday night’s program will be taking us, leaving from Whitaker Center at 8pm – with a program by two ensembles joining forces for “Music of the Court: Versailles and the Forbidden City.” One – the Four Nations Ensemble – offers music from the French Baroque associated with the French royal court of the first half of the 18th Century and life at the palace of the “Sun King.” The other ensemble presents music inspired by the ancient traditions of the rarified world behind the Imperial Court of the “Son of Heaven.” While it would be easy to call this week’s concert – the last one of the official subscription season, believe it or not – “East Meets West” or something stereotypically bland, it’s more than just a collection of pieces from Western Europe and pieces from China. Since music was a fundamental part of aristocratic life – more so in 17th and 18th Century Europe as we’re used to with music of the French and German Baroque and the musical life of Mozart and Haydn’s day – it wouldn’t be a big stretch of the imagination to realize music was a very important aspect of the aristocratic life in China as well. The only problem is, most of us in the West are unfamiliar with even the basic details of Chinese history. If we’re familiar with the names of a few dynasties – the traditional way of describing its historical eras – it’s more likely the dynasty’s name will be followed by “vase” or “poet” rather than approximate dates or the equivalent to whatever era was happening in Western Europe. To many audiences today, used to Beethoven and large orchestras in vast halls (not to mention amplification in popular music), instruments like viols and harpsichords may seem quaint, the bailiwick of the historically informed “Period Instrument” world. So, imagine being confronted by the variety of instruments played in China. We might think of the er-hu as “The Chinese Violin” but there are numerous types of such violin-like (or more specifically, viol-like) instruments. Yes, they are divided into the equivalents of string, wind and percussion instruments just like their Western counterparts - flutes, oboes, lutes, zithers and dulcimers - but they have different sounds, tunings and playing techniques that create, on the surface, a different world of experience from the Western instruments we might be reminded of. But then, for many in the modern day audiences, sometimes the sound of a viol or a harpsichord or a recorder will sound just as different from the traditional violin, piano or flute. Here’s another ensemble (Jordi Savall and Les Concerts des Nations) playing the second half of a work The Four Nations Ensemble has included on their Market Square Concerts program: from the fourth of the “Concerts royeaux” (Royal Concerts) which were composed for the Sunday concerts King Louis XIV requested – no, “commanded” – for entertaining his court living at the Palace of Versailles. = = = = = = = = = = (The final movement, beginning at 5:01 in this clip, is the famous Forlane, a lively dance movement in Rondo-form, one of those chestnuts of the Baroque Era to achieve pop status. In their performance in Harrisburg, the Chinese instruments joined in on the refrain with the Four Nations Ensemble for a jovial conclusion.) Louis XIV, Patron of the Arts Louis XIV is the epitome of the 18th Century absolute monarch with its whole concept of the Divine Right of Kings. Called “the Sun King,” a nickname which didn’t need to originate with sycophantic courtiers, Louis le Grande, the center of France's royal universe, ruled for 71 years, the longest reign in French and, for that matter, European history. He died days shy of his 77th birthday and had outlived so many of his heirs that his great-grandson become his direct heir, a boy of 5 who became Louis XV. It may have been, to borrow a phrase from the English author Charles Dickens writing about a slightly later time in the history that affected another resident at Versailles, “the best of times, the worst of times,” with periods of great cultural achievements in the arts and frequent periods of warfare, but above all it was an age defined by the king’s palace. Not just any palace, but one where he required many of his aristocrats to live with him – all the better to keep them under control (especially the ones who had participated in the rebellion known as The Fronde during his childhood). Through an elaborate court ritual, the king was aware which of the nobility was there to attend him (or wait on him) and who was absent, which he was then able to use to distribute favors. Whether “Sun King” referred to Louis’ brilliance, his life-giving benevolence or the fact he was the center of the courtly universe revolving around him, this helped to weaken the power of the aristocracy and, among other things, to coalesce the unwieldy and still largely feudal society into a strong central state which made France one of the leading powers in Europe during his reign. Versailles in 1722 This place was called Versailles, and quite a place, even today. It’s now a museum for a Golden Age in French civilization. It hallways and rooms as well as the art that adorns them evoke a time we can only imagine. Louis XIV’s father, Louis XIII, had turned a former hunting lodge into a royal residence around 1624. Louis XIV, then, turned it into one of the most magnificent royal palaces in Europe and the home of French kings until 1789 when Louis XVI – the grandson of Louis XV who himself ruled 58 years – was overthrown in the French Revolution and guillotined in 1793. Since then, the palace was rarely lived in: Napoleon’s second wife lived in some apartments in the main building, but the Emperor preferred the Grand Trianon, a smaller retreat in a corner of the Versailles grounds with its own park. When the monarchy was restored, French kings did little more than visit the palace and eventually it became a museum and, in modern times, a major tourist attraction. It may still be used for state occasions and grand congresses but for little else, at least as it was originally intended. Panoramic View of Versailles today For instance, it has over 720,000 square feet of floor space, 2,300 rooms (of which the famous Hall of Mirrors is only one) and 2,153 windows. The collection is home to over 6,000 paintings, 2,100 sculptures, 1,500 drawings and 15,000 engravings, over 5,000 pieces of furniture and objets d’art. Royal Shuttle... One item may look curious (see left): this was a single-occupancy "taxi" that would be carried on poles like a palanquin so the royal feet did not need to tire themselves out when traveling from one end of the palace to the other. The music associated with the age of the French kings living at Versailles can only be imagined, however. Many of the greatest musicians living in France at the time worked or performed there. There were numerous ensembles for various occasions, from the king’s private orchestra called of Les 24 Violons du Roi (which was actually a string orchestra founded in 1626 by Louis XIII) that was later supplemented by an additional 16 players. There was a grand band for ceremonial purposes with winds and brass – and orchestras for the opera or the Royal Chapel could be created by combining members of the string and wind ensembles. These were largely disbanded or reduced in 1761 due to budget cuts – even at Versailles – but then, Louis XV was more interested in math and science, less so in music compared to the two previous kings. *** ***** ******** ***** *** And now, a world away – to China. We remember important facts about ancient Empires – Alexander the Great and the expansion of Rome across the “known world” – how things fell apart with the barbarians and maybe how Charlemagne created the Holy Roman Empire out of the medieval rubble (though the most we remember of it was “it was neither Holy nor Roman”). So if Alexander’s empire is dated to the 300s BC and that Rome flourished around the rise of the Christian Era (since we divide time into BC=Before Christ and AD=Anno Domini, in the year of Our Lord) and Charlemagne lived around 800 AD, it might come as a surprise to realize “written history” in China dates back to the Shang Dynasty before 1,000 BC or that the first truly united centralized state we now think of as China originated with Emperor Shi Huang-ti (literally “The First Emperor” in Chinese) in 221 BC, initiating a state generically considered Imperial China that lasted until the Revolution that established the Republic of China in 1912 AD – a total of some 2,100 years of more or less direct continuity. Compare that, for instance, to the Roman Empire which lasted only some 500 years, much of which was spent in political free-fall and social chaos after which the surviving Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire) continued to shrink until 1453, almost 1,000 years later, when it fell to the rising Ottoman Empire. And compare that longevity to our own history – a government that has been in existence some 237 years. Chinese history is divided (like Egypt was) into its various dynasties. Curiously, the dynasty Shi Huang-ti founded barely outlived him. On the program, you’ll find references to the Han Dynasty (between 206 BC and 220 AD) as well as the Qing, the last official dynasty of the Empire which ruled from 1644 to 1912. Alas, it seems the music marked on the program as “Han Dynasty” is not from such an ancient age as that – the Red Herring I referred to earlier – but to a style that developed during that time period: this particular piece was inspired by a poem of Li Bao (or, in a previous transliterating of Chinese names, Li Po) who lived in the 8th Century during the Tang Dynasty, considered a Golden Age of poetry if not Chinese culture in general. If I read the Music from China website correctly, a piece with the title “The Moon Over Fortified Pass” was actually written in 1995 (AD) by Huang Qiuyuan, then a composition student at Beijing’s Central Conservatory. Though in actuality, it is based on a “type of military music known as Gujiao Hengchui (Music of Drums, Horns and Transverse Flutes)” that has existed since the days of the Han Dynasty. “These tunes, numbering fifteen in all, were sung and played by soldiers on horseback patrolling the frontiers. Noted Tang dynasty poet Li Bai [a.k.a. Li Po] (in the 8th Century AD) wrote lyrics for some of this music, the most famous being The Moon Over Fortified Pass." So while the tradition might be very old and the music written down sometime before the 8th Century, it forms the basis of a more modern setting which helps preserve an ancient tradition. The later Qing Dynasty, meanwhile, would be roughly parallel to the time of the French Kings at Versailles – as well as the rest of the 18th and 19th Centuries in European history. *** ***** ******** ***** *** We know a refined musical culture existed in China even before The First Emperor in 220 BC: the earlier Zhou Dynasty (1122 to 256 BC). The debate about “popular” and “art” music was raised in a question by a powerful ruler to his advisor, Mencius, around 300 BC, whether it was “moral” to prefer popular music to the classics (Mencius diplomatically answered it didn’t matter so long as the ruler loved his subjects). The First Emperor of China Shi Huang-ti established, among so many other things in his centralizing bureaucracy, an Imperial Music Bureau to “regulate” various aspects of court and military music and determine which folk songs, for instance, would be officially recognized. (Incidentally, the subject of Tan Dun’s opera, “The First Emperor,” premiered at the Met in 2006 with Placido Domingo as Shi huang-ti, concerned the creation of an imperial anthem during a time of warfare and the building of the initial Great Wall of China.) While musicians were generally lower in status than poets, rulers even before the empire would send out scholars to collect folk songs to “check the will of the people,” many of them dating between 800 and 400 BC. The earliest surviving written music is a song, “The Solitary Orchid,” attributed to Confucius who died in 479 BC. This collection of songs, incidentally, was one of the books banned and burned by Shi Huang-ti (he buried hundreds of scholars alive for hiding some of these banned books) and it had to be reconstructed from memory in the years following the overthrow of his not-so-powerful son. (Incidentally, while Shi Huang-ti built the Great Wall, or rather connected several already existing but not very practical walls, little of the original wall exists: what we see today was largely rebuilt in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The First Emperor was reluctant to discuss his own death and didn't leave a will concerning his successor, but yet he managed to build a sizeable tomb only recently discovered with its 6,000 terra cotta warriors to guard him in the after-life.) While much of the performance details of this music would have been passed on orally from teacher to student, the first great flowering of written instrumental music for the ch’in (or qin) of the zither family (which originally dated back to 2500 BC) was in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). 1425 Chinese music manuscript Here, for instance, is a musical manuscript for the ch’in dating from 1425 (see left). It is a kind of notation familiar to lutenists studying Renaissance and Baroque music who have to master complex forms of tablature that many, in exasperation, joke must have been invented by a blind person. This kind of notation still exists today, though greatly simplified, in popular sheet music that may include “guitar chords” representing the basic strings and frets of the guitar neck and where the fingers would be placed to play the correct pitches. Earlier systems of notation in China might use a series of markings given picturesque names to indicate types of attack or groupings of notes that might be comparable to the neumes of Gregorian chant or the ecphonetic notation you might find in Hebrew Bibles prior to Christianity. Later notations used numbers to designate pitches, just as we use letters – A, C, G and so on. Marco Polo aside, incidentally, the first known account of East meeting West – at least, musically speaking – would be the arrival of an Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci who presented the Emperor with a harpsichord in 1601. He trained four eunuchs to play the instrument. While Chinese instruments might be the equivalent of bowed instruments like violins or plucked instruments like lutes and zithers or those played with hammers like dulcimers, the idea of playing something like a ch’in with a keyboard must have seemed a novelty to the Chinese, then. One wonders what the Imperial Court must have thought of this “strange music.” *** ***** ******** ***** *** View of the Forbidden City today The Chinese equivalent of Versailles is a series of palaces enclosed behind walls and gates in the center of Beijing which had served as an occasional dynastic capital before it became the Imperial Capital during the Ming Dynasty around 1400. The old Tianning Pagoda may date from the 1120s but the city underwent many transformations, having been captured, burned to the ground, rebuilt and then abandoned between then and 1406 when the Imperial Palace was begun, completed in 1420. It became known as “The Forbidden City.” Beijing then remained the Imperial Capital ever since.  The entire complex consisted of numerous buildings – palaces and temples, mostly, and ceremonial gates – all within a walled complex covering some 7,800,000 square feet. Its “Outer Court” was used for ceremonial purposes and the Emperor and his family lived within the “Inner Court.” There was a rigid hierarchy regulating everyone in relationship to the Emperor who, whatever his name or reputation, was called “The Son of Heaven.” The bureaucracy and ritual of the Forbidden City would make Louis XIV’s Versailles look simplistic by comparison. One of the great emperors of this dynasty was Qianlong who ruled for 60 years before he abdicated in 1796. He was a great patron of the arts, both “a preserver and a restorer of Chinese culture.” While he himself wrote some 40,000 poems, he still engaged in periodic book-burnings, banning books deemed to be subversive, a list that included some 2,300 titles. Hall of Supreme Harmony Today, following the demise of its Empire, the rise of the Republic and the revolution that brought about the current Communist state, the Forbidden City remains a museum of Chinese culture, and like Versailles today is a major tourist attraction. Even though the pageantry of the Imperial Age has passed, the square in front of the City is a major part of Beijing’s public life. At 109 acres, it is the largest public square in the world, spreading out before the Gate of Heavenly Peace or, in Chinese, Tienanmen. For many Westerners, Tienanmen Square will forever be remembered for the 1989 protest and its ensuing massacre, especially with its iconic image of the young man facing down a line of government tanks. One need only think back to a time when riots in a Paris square in front of the Bastille Prison in 1789 eventually ended the long and illustrious world of many of the kings who’d lived in the rarified world of Versailles. - Dick Strawser 1 month ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Mahler & the Premiere of his 5th Symphony:... Thoughts On a Train This is a re-blog of a post I'd originally written for the Harrisburg Symphony blog, a follow-up after their performance of Mahler's 5th Symphony looking into the "continuing biography" of the piece between the time Mahler completed its first draft and then conducted its first performance.  You can read my earlier post about Mahler's 5th - what was going on in his life when he composed it - here. = = = = = Harrisburg Symphony plays Mahler's 5th Hopefully, you got a chance to hear the Harrisburg Symphony’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 this weekend – a remarkable performance, I thought (though I’m biased, I can be very picky about certain things, especially Mahler), especially considered the stamina required after a grueling schedule with three rehearsals on Thursday and Friday, a dress rehearsal on Saturday straddling the noon hour, an all-out performance Saturday night and another one on Sunday afternoon. The rest of the Harrisburg Symphony Obsessed as I am with Mahler – which one rarely gets to hear live (and played well, at that) outside the major cities of the world – I sat in at the rehearsals and found myself wondering, “what did musicians do in 1904 when they were faced with such difficult music for the first time?" They would have never heard the piece before or played what today we could consider standard repertoire from the 20th Century like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (still TBA in Mahler’s day). What did the audience think? Though me might have fewer "facts" about audience reaction, that leaves us with the critics: what kind of reviews did it get? (I apologize for the title's reference to what would actually be Mahler's Third Symphony where he originally entitled the different movements "What the Flowers Tell Me" and so on...) So once again, I dipped into Henri-Louis de la Grange’s massive Mahler biography – this time, Volume III which, in its 1,000 pages, covers the years 1904 to 1907 (subtitled “Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion”) – to see what I could find out about those early performances. First of all, just because Mahler’s first four symphonies had already been completed, published and premiered didn’t mean they had entered the repertoire – or that every performance was a good performance to help further the composer’s cause. Works like the 2nd and 3rd Symphonies were epic in scope and size which, even without getting into their technical demands, made for limited opportunities. For instance, though the 3rd had been completed in 1896, it wasn’t heard in its entirety until it was premiered in the small German city of Krefeld in 1902 (by which time Mahler was ready to resume work on the last two movements of his 5th Symphony. (You can read about the 3rd’s premiere, here.) Subsequent performances were rare but one performance in 1903 in Cologne – presumably well performed and more importantly well received by both orchestra and audience – prompted Mahler to consider that city and its orchestra for the premiere of his newest and most difficult symphony yet. Typically, Mahler would read through a new symphony of his with the Vienna Philharmonic where, at the time, he’d been music director. But since his resignation for reasons of health in 1901 following his near-death experience with a massive hemorrhage [see the end of Part I], things had not been going well between him and the orchestra. His resignation had been met with considerable relief on the part of many musicians who considered him too challenging a task-master (they chose as his successor the one least likely to challenge them as much) and there were other managerial issues as well, not the least of which he still conducted the same orchestra when it served as the “pit orchestra” for the Vienna Court Opera (the Imperial equivalent of what is now usually called the Vienna State Opera). Still, his brother-in-law, recently married to his sister Justine, was the orchestra’s concertmaster and he proposed to the committee for such things that Mahler be given two – not one, but two – rehearsals to try out his new 5th Symphony in 1904. The musicians agreed to this – and surprisingly to doing it without a fee – and so Mahler prepared to take the 5th out for a test-run. His new publisher, Peters (managed by Henri Hinrichsen at the time), had offered Mahler generous terms for his 5th following the impressive premiere of his 4th and 3rd symphonies (in that order), and they produced a “miniature score” or study score of the piece to help musicians and critics (and potential conductors) become familiar with the piece. Another standard procedure in such publications was creating a piano reduction – usually for piano duet with two people (four-hands) sharing the bench – which enabled anyone to play through the work, especially helpful given that recording technology did not exist then. One of the people who’d gotten such a score was the composer Josef Förster who had stopped by Mahler’s office at the Opera and, since Mahler was not in at the moment, who sat down to while away the wait by improvising at the piano. He had worked in some bits he remembered from Mahler’s new score when Mahler himself came back and was quite surprised to hear this: after all, it hadn’t been played, yet, not even rehearsed! “What do you think you’re playing!? That’s the opening of my new symphony!” When Förster explained, they both had a good laugh about it. When the read-through was later scheduled, Mahler sent him an invitation to attend the closed session. La Grange also includes an anecdote about another attendee at that session, the critic Ludwig Karpath (at the time, one of the Viennese critics likely to be in Mahler’s camp: later, they would have a nasty falling-out) who sneaked into the hall and hid himself within the organ console (sitting on a freshly painted step and ruining his jacket in the process). Karpath wrote to a friend, describing the experience, that = = = = = “The symphony lasted exactly an hour and a half. That is actual playing time, without any pauses. It is clear; without any artifice. Of course, that applies only to modern ears but even the ‘older ones’ will hardly be able to complain of extravagances. I haven’t time to go into detail… but there is an Adagio… for strings only and it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard in my life. It is not only the beauty of the sound that captivates but more the tender intimacy of a great melody that has no end and simply overwhelms you. So full of sweetness, exaltation, and nostalgia that tears poured from my eyes. I’ve no reason to be ashamed of them, especially as no one saw them. Please keep this to yourself, too.” = = = = = There was another listener in the hall, the young woman whom Mahler had met and married during the months between those two summers spent composing the symphony [see Part III]. Alma Mahler was herself a composer, having studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky (technically, she did more than study with him, but we needn’t go into that, here), and even though she had promised to give up composing when she married Mahler – we needn’t go into that, here, either – she was enough of a musician to be able to assist her husband in copying his draft into the final manuscript to be sent to the publisher. And while she might complain about her lot as a housekeeper and copyist – and, subsequently, as a mother, after their first daughter was born a few months after Mahler finished the symphony – Alma insisted that her primary role was to love and support the genius who could write such music. But she left this one read-through in tears, apparently distraught about the impact of the percussion writing during the opening movement, the funeral procession that is frequently accompanied by bass drum, cymbal, side drum and gong which Alma thought was far too loud and overpowering. She writes that for some time she was sobbing so much she couldn’t explain the problem to her husband: “You have written a symphony for percussion!” But, she continued, he laughed, picked up the score and crossed out most of the side-drum part and half the percussion with a red pencil. Curiously, there’s no indication Mahler ever suggested such changes to the publisher when he revised the score in preparation for its publication, but that’s another story. But yes, even though Mahler was an expert conductor and an experienced performer of his own music – not just an isolated composer writing in the ivory tower of his studio somewhere – he still had reservations about his orchestration skills – in other words, how he wrote for the orchestra. (Having survived a few courses in orchestration over the years, myself, it is more than just making sure you’ve written things within the range-limits of a given instrument – not writing a violin part that would take it below the tuning of the lowest string or taking the English horn too uncomfortably high for its upper register (use a regular oboe, instead, they would advise) – or even written things that are comfortably playable on the instruments in terms of passages that “lie well” for the fingerings of a clarinet or viola, but balancing different instruments so that a background line in the brass doesn’t drown out the woodwinds in the foreground (understanding how dynamics play a role in the way instruments will sound in the hall). Since Mahler’s symphony is full of contrapuntal textures – especially in the scherzo and finale – dynamic markings play a key part in clarifying the dense textures he writes. When the musicians were reading through the individual movements at our recent rehearsals, the texture often sounded muddy and ponderous. But Stuart would go back and fix things, usually saying things like “when Mahler writes piano [soft], play it really piano or even softer: somebody else may have a forte here, but you have to stay down” so as not to cover (or swamp) the other parts. Playing the passage over again, it’s amazing how, suddenly, everything becomes clear and lighter and tends to drag less if it’s a fast passage, especially in all those “scrubbing” passages where the strings play endless eighth-notes under the themes, particularly in the fugal sections in the Finale. Mahler would make corrections to his dynamic markings in particular from concert to concert, it turned out, and often these might be indications for a particular orchestra in a particular hall. Some place more resonant might require a different approach to dynamics than a drier hall. This can prove maddening to conductors who sometimes wonder what to do with their orchestra in their hall, but that also in a story for another time… Suffice it to say, from the reading session and the impending premiere performance, Mahler was well on his way to constantly making numerous revisions in such details – not just dynamics but also doublings between instruments, sometimes made to strengthen a line that, maybe, doesn’t need strengthening after all – making almost every subsequent performance a “new edition.” He continued to make such revisions to his 5th Symphony until the time he died in 1911, hoping to find a solution to his “orchestration problem,” and as recently as a decade ago, conductors were still trying to come up with a “definitive edition” of the 5th, if such a thing is even possible. Anyway, back to the 5th’s premiere. The question of where the first performance would be given was a big question for the composer and his publisher. It wasn’t a question of doing it in Vienna with his own orchestra because, technically, he didn’t have his own orchestra: he conducted the Opera which only gave symphonic concerts as the Vienna Philharmonic with which he was no longer officially associated. Plus, he had too many enemies, speaking of office politics, between the orchestra’s management and its players to feel he’d get a good performance from them. Then there were the critics, most of whom were quite open about their animosity toward him – some of its anti-Semitism having nothing to do with the artistic qualities – not just as an often controversial conductor and director of the Opera but especially as a composer. However, perhaps there was a thaw that Mahler felt during the summer of 1904 while he was finishing up his newest symphony, the 6th. The possibility of a Vienna premiere was encouraging: they had agreed to perform the 3rd in Vienna, so that might bode well for the 5th’s reception. On that account, Peters prepared the miniature score and Mahler had the proofs returned to the publisher at the end of July. Interestingly, Mahler tells the publisher he does not want the symphony’s tonality to appear on the title page: it is not to be the “Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor” but just the “Symphony No. 5.” Mahler’s concept of a “progressive tonality” that might begin in one key and resolve, ultimately, to another, was not the issue. He said, “normally the key of the main movement” is the key of the symphony, but here “the main movement (A minor) is preceded by another.” Which means the first movement’s Funeral March in C-sharp Minor is structurally an introduction to the 2nd movement which is in A Minor. I find that fascinating, because we normally think the beginning of a piece is its primary tonal statement – Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, for instance – but here, he must view the beginning as more like a prelude, perhaps, a curtain-raiser of sorts: is the second movement really the main argument of the piece? In the past, considering how similar the first two movements are, I had always assumed the Funeral March was like a sonata-form’s exposition and that the second movement was more of an extension of it or a slightly different view of it (both are certainly full of tension and outright anxiety, even though the 2nd is marked “violently agitated with the greatest vehemence” which is not, technically speaking, a tempo indication), perhaps even the equivalent of a development section. We know that when Mahler finished his work that first summer, he had completed the Scherzo first and that what were the first two movements was still one unbroken movement: later, for some reason (and however he chose to do it, we don’t know) he would turn this opening movement into two separate movements. Another reason I think this happened after that first summer’s work is that his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who acted as a kind of companion and house-guest (without the prurient innuendos that might suggest) as well as musical confidant, wrote nothing about the reason he did that – at least, not as far as I can tell. He told Natalie maybe not everything but a lot about his creative process – we owe much of what we know about the birth of his three earlier symphonies to her jotting down practically everything Mahler said or did. Whether he told them to Alma as well – who, like Natalie, a violinist, was musically knowledgeable and intelligent as well - but Alma didn’t seem to make note of these statements: and many of the things she notes in her diaries often conflict with what she later wrote in her memoirs or seem to go against versions of stories that other people tell. And, if you read some of her diary entries from the first summer in 1902 living with Mahler as his wife, she seems more interested in focusing on her thoughts, her problems and her issues than on Mahler’s – unless they’re in relationship to hers. But that also is a story for another time… Anyway, back to the premiere of the 5th (sorry, I keep saying that…). Mahler considered certain potential cities for the premiere and generally dismissed each for various reasons: first of all, the orchestra had to have a history of performing his earlier symphonies and the audiences and critics ought to have at least some positive responses to his music. For instance, Leipzig, a major German music center, knew nothing of his music and the one orchestra that had been suggested was not up to the challenge, he said. But Prague, Amsterdam, Mannheim-Heidelberg and Cologne had all been proposed as potential sites and the Berlin Philharmonic “wants the premiere at any price.” Given he would conduct his 3rd in Cologne over Easter, it was decided the honor of the premiere should go there but not for its summer music festival as suggested (too soon). It was agreed, ultimately, the world premiere of his 5th Symphony would take place in October at the Gürzenich Orchestra’s opening concert of the 1904-1905 Season. The Gürzenich, btw, is the city’s main orchestra, named (like the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam or the Gewandhaus in Leizpig) after its concert hall. Now, in 1902, Germany had passed a new copyright law that ensured a composer’s works were under copyright protection for 30 years after the composer’s death and was also to include all previous works as well. With this in mind, Richard Strauss was instrumental in creating the the Association of German Composers whose subsidiary branch, the Agency for Performing Rights, kept records of works that were performed, collected royalties and charged “a small commission” to cover their expenses from any orchestra or opera house performing copyrighted works. Many composers rebelled at this since such additional fees would discourage many organizations from scheduling their works. But there was also some bureaucratic conflict with a comparable Austrian society to which Mahler already belonged, so he allowed that membership to expire, urged on by his friend Strauss (who was an astute businessman as well) to join the Berlin society. Mahler, always lacking such business acumen, let a friend of his represent him in this matter which became more complicated than it’s worth going into here. Suffice it to say, this conflict had an impact on where in Germany Mahler could get his premiere scheduled! Meanwhile, in early July, the arranger assigned the responsibility of creating the piano reduction of Mahler’s 5th complained to the publisher about the changes Mahler insisted on making. Transcribing such a dense orchestral texture to a single piano, especially for an arranger unaware of the musical overview, was challenging enough and Mahler found many instances where major foreground material was being overshadowed or even overlooked by the background textures the arranger assumed were more significant (or perhaps fun to play). “Once before,” the arranger continued, “I had to withdraw my name from a transcription because I did not wish it to be used to cover up for clumsy bowdlerizations a young composer had foisted onto my work. Is it really going to be necessary to do that again?” To us, this would sound like so much dog-wagging by a tail who’s had its feelings hurt. But it is just another of the nit-picking details Mahler the composer had to contend with in the process of preparing his own work so Mahler the conductor could perform it! And so October and the impending Cologne premiere drew near. In September, Mahler had already heard from the orchestra’s regular conductor who was running some preparatory rehearsals in anticipation of Mahler’s arrival. The first two movements were difficult to play, a hard nut to crack, but the last two seem to catch on even with the “unprepared listener”. Mahler, relaying this to his publisher, warned that “works of this sort need time to win over the public and are certainly unlikely to have immediate success.” Worried about the press reactions, Mahler urged friendly critics he knew in Vienna and elsewhere in Germany to attend his premiere so that universal reaction did not entirely rest on some “catch-phrase” by “an incomprehending [local] hack.” As late as September 28th, Mahler was still sending corrections to Peters regarding changes in the score and the orchestral parts. He was also lobbying to replace the regular conductor for a subsequent performance of the 5th in Munich, a conductor Mahler felt had given bad performances of other works of his (particularly the 3rd only a few months earlier), with his own young assistant, Bruno Walter (who, in later years, would become one of the major conductors of his generation and who performed and recorded much of Mahler’s music during his own lifetime). Walter had even agreed to conduct the performance for only his travelling expenses, but this performance was eventually cancelled due to the on-going conflict with the Association of German Composers. In preparation for the actual performance, Mahler was scheduled to leave with Alma accompanying him – after all, she had helped him copy the score – but she had recently given birth to their second daughter Anna (“Gücki” by nickname) who was still nursing. If that weren’t enough, Alma herself had fallen ill and had to stay in bed, arranging to meet Mahler in Cologne by later train in time for the dress rehearsal. Though bad news for the happy couple, now married for a little over two years and parents of two girls, it gives us some of Mahler’s insights into the rehearsals in the letters he wrote home, joking about how preferable it would be to be a cobbler (quoting an aria from Lortzing’s then well-known opera “Tsar and Carpenter”) which he proceeded to vary in the course of his distressing reports, to be, say, an inn-keeper who became a baritone (referring to a singer on the Opera’s roster) instead of a composer and so on. He complained that the “Scherzo is a devil” to perform and wished he could give the premiere of this work fifty years after his death instead when, hopefully, orchestras might be more up to the challenge of playing it. He looked forward to her arrival in a few days so there would be at least one person there who would understand his music. Unfortunately, her cold was only worse and she might not be able to make it until the performance. The second rehearsal, he reported, went better and that, importantly, the orchestra was growing in enthusiasm for it. But now it turned Alma would not be able to make it at all. Still, the dress rehearsal went well except for a few cat-calls from the audience after the devilish Scherzo, but in general and ultimately the audience was enthusiastic. Hinrichsen, his publisher, was confident enough to ask to publish his newly completed 6th Symphony – a good sign! *** ***** ******** ***** *** Finally, the premiere arrived. Curiously, at least as we think of concert programing today, the concert opened with Mahler’s 5th and then was followed by Schubert’s Serenade for Alto and women’s chorus (D.920) and three Schubert songs (I’m assuming with piano as was often the case in 19th Century concerts) before ending with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. Otto Neitzel was the only critic who greeted the 5th as enthusiastically as the 3rd which he’d reviewed earlier that year. He enjoyed a composer who “goes his own way and delights in surprises.” The Hero implicit in the initial program of the 3rd Symphony (buried, apparently, at the 5th’s outset) returns here as the “Caesar of instrumentation and the art of building up movements, whose motto seems to be sic volo, sic jubeo” (“This I will, thus I ordain”). At times, he “loses himself as if overcome by a desire to fling himself into an abyss” (a lot of that, one might assume, in the first two movements) before, in the finale, “rediscover[ing] terra firma.” Not a “program composer,” Mahler’s “art comes from his innermost being[:] his mastery of form and structure compensates for what he lacks in force and originality of invention,” making him “one of the greatest men of our time.” On the other hand, he was disappointed not to find the same logic in the first movement of the 3rd Symphony in the opening of the 5th, and “deplored” the return of the funereal atmosphere in the second movement. While there were “dead” moments in the Scherzo, the Finale was a “pearl of the new literature” after which the concert-goers of Cologne “applauded warmly.” True, he noted, one needed to hear the work again to give the whole work a fair judgment (it contained “thorns” among the “fragrant roses”), but he ended by saying a composer like this “is worth meeting halfway.” In another Cologne newspaper, another critic, Hermann Kipper, didn’t bother hiding his disappointment, quoting Mahler from the dress rehearsal (no doubt about the first two movements), “Think of a man whose ideals have been destroyed.” He felt Mahler’s style was as “incongruous as ever,” his orchestral colors even harsher. The first movement was “too long,” the second had much that sounded “unmusical,” declaring that Mahler belonged to a “hypernervous and pessimistic age, that his brain seemed to be in perpetual turmoil” and that only he and “his atrocious cacophonies” were to blame for the misunderstanding his music generated. His work, Kipper continued, would gain from being explained (by use of a program), “softened,” or abridged. He also mentioned listeners were asking themselves, after the Adagietto, “why he didn’t always write such beautiful music.” Brief but generally hostile reviews would appear in the Berlin and Leipzig papers. But from Munich came a review that, while admitting there was much that might make an “absurd and bizarre first impression,” he cautioned, “however, the bizarre should never deter one from judging the whole work: look at Berlioz.” He continues that, for some people, what might be considered “disconcerting” is what he might find “the composer’s most delightful characteristic,” that “with a little more objectivity and good will,” it was impossible not to see that Mahler was writing “not only for his own time but for the future, …an essentially sound musician of vigorous imagination and brilliant insight,” his creativity rising from a “pure, pristine and genuine feeling of truth that emanated from an innermost conviction.” The Funeral March, this writer continued, was “written with his heart’s blood” and the Adagietto reminded him of a painting of a “sunset landscape at harvest time,” with “a supreme logic” reigning in the Finale. Mentioning Mahler’s “inexhaustible skill at variation” and “the eminent refinement of the orchestration,” it was clear to him this work could only have been composed by “one of the great masters of his art.” But such a view was atypical. Paul Hiller wrote for a number of music periodicals including the once famous Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (founded by Robert Schumann in 1834) – Hiller, by the way, was the son a composer who as a young man, had been present at Beethoven’s death and who obtained a lock of the Master’s hair (you can read the amazing story in Russell Martin’s Beethoven’s Hair) which apparently was still in Paul Hiller’s possession at this time. He writes that Mahler’s latest symphony contained “no genuine musical ideas” and that he was a “clever but not convincing composer” who used his craft “to create sensations” which he described as a “jumble of sounds lacking any kind of musical logic.” The symphony was an “accumulation of absurdities and revels in utterly bizarre oddities.” Only the Adagietto “belonged to the realm of music.” In general, it was “more disconcerting and repellant than pleasurable,” a “triumph of technique.” Yet another critic, obviously disconcerted by Mahler’s apparent youth (he was in his mid-40s at the time of the premiere), complained of the “dissonances, harshness [that seemed] doubly wounding,” and that by developing themes through long “crescendos deafeningly scored… leading to catastrophes,” he determined that Mahler “must now stand alone, often as the enemy of the culture of our time.” Despite that, the same critic ended, after describing the first movement not as the funeral for a single man but for a whole generation, by comparing Mahler to a = = = = = “… fanatical preacher who casts the faithful to the ground with all his searing condemnations but then raises them up again [in the finale] with comforting words… He arouses the audience’s… antagonism and disagreement, and then effects a reconciliation…. Masterly in form, structure, content, and decorative instrumentation, the Finale celebrates the triumphs of man’s tireless activity over the miseries of earthly existence.” = = = = = The next afternoon, Mahler was on the train for Amsterdam where he was to conduct the 2nd Symphony as the guest of Mengelberg with the Concertgebouw. He had also suggested programming the 5th but Mengelberg felt perhaps the Dutch audience wasn’t ready for this one yet, and suggested doing the 4th instead (still new) which they ended up performing twice on the same program. In March the following year, Mahler conducted the 5th in Hamburg where he’d spent six years as a conductor at the opera. Again, writing home to Alma (who was unable to make this journey as well), he wrote, “the 5th is an accursed work. Nobody understands it! Fortunately, everything began to improve at the end [of the rehearsal].” Later, he wrote how the first two rehearsals had been so difficult – not through any fault of the conductor who’d prepared them for his arrival but simply for “the mediocrity of the orchestra” – and how “yesterday, the orchestra was still disturbed” but “today they were perfectly at ease and showed real enthusiasm. The seats [for the concert] are sold out.” By the end of the last rehearsal, he was delighted that “the orchestra has behaved superbly and is already completely won over to my work.” Perhaps the same could not be said for the critics who, if not negative, were at least courteous. Some were admiring and one who had been so opposed to Mahler the Conductor eight years earlier was now wholly in support of Mahler the Composer, ranking him with Richard Strauss (whose Salome would be premiered in December) as a leader of the “extreme avant-garde of contemporary artistic creation.” Another critic, Ferdinand Pfohl, a former friend of Mahler’s, however, had now become bitterly negative: complaining about the quotations of various melodies or motives that would be unrecognized today, he described the symphony as “second- and third-hand music, ugly and barren… a desecration of the sacred spirit of music.” (When invited to attend a dinner in the composer’s honor, Pfohl declined “to be in the same room with Mahler, breathing the same pestilential atmosphere.” One of the friends he spent some with, then, was the poet Richard Dehmels – best known to music lovers for having written the poem, Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) set to music by Arnold Schoenberg in 1899. At a dinner, one night, Mahler complained of the stress touring had on him but which he needed to do in order to earn some money after his salary had been reduced at the Opera (though much of that would seem to be the result of a reduced performing schedule rather than a cut in pay). “I am really curious to know if the performance of my works will ever bring me a penny.” But another reason he took on guest conducting “gigs” was to present to the world a reliable performance legacy since he had to find out – especially with the 5th – if the problem with its acceptance was the work or the conductor. Recent performances in Berlin and Prague had made only negative impressions – critics aside – and only he could correct that. Curiously, Mahler received some encouragement from America where his 5th Symphony became the first of his works to be performed in the United States. The Cincinnati Symphony presented it in May, 1905, not quite a year after its premiere, and it was well received by most of the critics. For the Cincinnati Enquirer’s critic, the work was not difficult to understand: “despite all this expansion, there is no complexity and the intentions of the composer are clear.” The Commercial Tribune pronounced it “the most impressive and meritorious novelty” the orchestra had yet presented. In the city's German-speaking community which also published two newspapers of its own, critics seemed to copy much of what the European German critics were already saying about it, complaining of its “almost unbearable dissonances and cacophony.” The Boston Symphony would perform it the following year and even take it on tour for well-received performances in New York and Philadelphia. At least the American critics seemed to be listening with open minds and “fresh ears.” *** ***** ******** ***** *** Of course, it might be difficult, over a century later, to imagine what this music would have sounded like to people who’d never heard Pierrot Lunaire or the Rite of Spring or for that matter even some of the film scores that go barely noticed today despite how they could be perceived independently of the film. Still, there are people today who find Mahler “not my cup of tea,” as one listener explained to a friend at Saturday’s concert, or those who may be uncomfortable with his over-the-top expression like a chaotic jumble of untold anxieties – the left-brained individual at ease with order and predictability would not be at home in Mahler’s right-brained world – and after all it did take a long time for Mahler to “find” his audience. It is interesting to note, considering the constant revisions Mahler was making with each new performance, that he was still making slight changes and adjustments (mostly to dynamics and other markings) to the 5th Symphony's score even at the time of his death in 1911. His publisher, annoyed at all this and complaining how the work had cost him enough money already, had told Arnold Schoenberg whose Five Pieces for Orchestra he was preparing to publish in 1912, he was "planning to melt down the plates of the Fifth Symphony since it was falling into obscurity." The comment he’d made to Alma about wishing he could premiere his symphonies fifty years after his death proved telling. It was during his centennial anniversary in 1960 – almost 50 years after his death – that Leonard Bernstein played all of Mahler’s symphonies with the New York Philharmonic, introducing much of the world to a composer whose time may finally have come. These days, it's hard to imagine a figure like Mahler with these epic symphonies were ever "neglected." I had to remind myself that most of the audience - not just the young people - for his 1960 Young People’s Concert “Who Is Mahler?” would have ever heard a complete Mahler symphony in concert. This program was all part of the plan to bring Mahler’s music to a wider audience. Now, most orchestras will program the first two, more readily accessible symphonies often enough and any concert with the later works becomes something of an “event” – as did the performances of Mahler’s 9th and 3rd here in Harrisburg in previous seasons and the 5th (which was better attended than I would have thought) and cheered soundly by an enthusiastic audience at its conclusion. It all takes familiarity and a willingness to engage oneself actively – not to mention a certain kind of stamina, admittedly – but in the end, I think many people are discovering that Mahler speaks to us or our time today. Even in our day of 140-character tweets and Facebook likes… - Dick Strawser = = = = = The photograph of the Harrisburg Symphony playing Mahler's 5th was taken on Sunday afternoon by Kim Isenhour, the orchestra's marketing director and photographer extraordinaire, originally posted on Facebook. 2 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony: A Bit of Bio... Thoughts On a Train This series of posts on Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony was originally posted on the blog I maintain for the Harrisburg Symphony where I often go "behind the scenes" about the music on up-coming programs.  Being one of my favorites and one of those epic symphonies that one could write so much about, I chose to write primarily a "biography" of the work: what was going on in the composer's life at the time he was writing it. So I'm re-posting it here, slightly edited, on my original blog to keep it part of the on-going series, here, which I tag "Up Close and Personal." === ===== ======== ===== === One day, a leading critic in Vienna complained over lunch to conductor Gustav Mahler, director of the Imperial Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic, about not only his obsession with the music of Richard Wagner but his unbounded enthusiasm for it which, he thought, was like the foie gras they were dining on at the Café Imperial. Asked what he meant by that, the critic explained “because geese are force-fed until they develop a liver disease which produces the succulent foie gras. You, when you prepare a new production [of a challenging opera], stuff yourself with enthusiasm and this results in a marvelous performance.” Mahler rather enjoyed this and so began announcing an impending new production by saying “the foie gras will soon be ready.” When faced with bad reviews, he might respond, “the Big Bosses [the major critics in town] once again consider it a liver disease… but we think the foie gras will be excellent!” Equally enthusiastic about Mahler's music, the Harrisburg Symphony's conductor, Stuart Malina, told an audience at a pre-season preview about this concert, “When you listen to Mahler, it’s like taking a musical journey, you never know which direction he’s going to take you but at the end of the evening you feel like you been through not just a concert, not just a performance, but an experience...a life experience.” To anyone thinking Mahler is obsessed with death – and certainly his last two symphonies were written when he knew he was dying – the fact the 5th Symphony opens with a funeral march may seem daunting. On the other hand, considering where this token of death leads us, it is not something we haven't experienced before: there are famous funeral marches in earlier works like Beethoven’s Eroica or Chopin’s B-flat Minor Piano Sonata, much less Mahler’s own 1st Symphony with its odd minor-mode version of Frere Jacques. However, it seems odd to start a heroic symphony – which in essence it seems to be – with the death of the hero. Where do you go from there? Before he began work on this new symphony in the summer of 1901, perhaps before he had even planned anything about the new symphony he would no doubt write next, there was an experience that no doubt had a profound impact on a composer who’d turned 40 the previous summer. It was over Christmas, 1900, that he was preparing the final copy of his 4th Symphony to send to his publisher. There was an idea that he changed in the scherzo which has this violin solo he now felt should be played on an instrument with its strings tuned a step higher than normal, so that “it will have a harsh, shrill sound, as though Death were playing it.” This, in the middle of a symphony that ends with a rapturous and child-like evocation of a Heavenly Banquet! After the holidays, back to business as usual, Mahler was preparing for a new production of Wagner’s first successful and rarely performed opera, Rienzi when a recurring throat infection was diagnosed as tonsillitis. He monitored the dress rehearsal from his bed via telephone, but felt well enough to conduct the opening night performance. A few days later, on January 27th, and not yet recovered, he conducted Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Shortly afterward, he received word of the death of Giuseppe Verdi who’d died on the 27th at the age of 89. Verdi was a composer for whom Mahler felt an “almost affectionate veneration.” Friends remarked he seemed very affected by this news. February began with the belated premiere of a work he had written when he was 20, half his life ago, Das klagende Lied, this “Sorrowful Song” which he’d referred to even then as his “child of sorrow.” He was surprised by how well it had stood up, considering his musical style had developed considerably over the time in between. The general response from the audience was genuinely enthusiastic, though the critics (as ever with Mahler) were often derogatory. Many of them were conflicted, trying to separate Mahler the Conductor from Mahler the Composer. Next came a concert which included a rare performance of Anton Bruckner’s 5th Symphony, a vast work that Mahler thought was uneven – though he had never officially studied with Bruckner, he attended many of his lectures and the older composer became something of a mentor to him – and so he made many cuts which enraged Bruckner’s fans. He had chosen not to support a recent memorial to Bruckner because he didn’t want to see his name next to those who had never bothered to support the composer during his lifetime when he had very little professional much less popular support, but his lack of “interest” in the monument was taken for arrogance and disloyalty. Plus he had already declared that there was “nothing to be done for Bruckner without a scalpel.” On February 24th, he conducted the Bruckner at a 12:30 concert and then conducted Mozart’s Magic Flute at the opera that evening. That same night, Mahler suffered a hemorrhage – not the first he’d had, but the most violent – in which, he later told Richard Strauss, he’d lost 2.5 liters of blood. His sister found him lying in a pool of blood, called the doctor who felt obliged to call a surgeon. Had they arrived a half hour later, the doctor told him, it would’ve been too late. = = = = = “You know,” [he told a friend of his], “last night I nearly passed away. When I saw the doctors… I thought my last hour had come. While they were putting in the tube, which was frightfully painful but quick, they kept checking my pulse and my heart. Fortunately it was solidly installed in my breast and [I] determined not to give up so soon… While I was hovering between life and death, I wondered whether it would not be better to have done with it at once, since everyone must come to this in the end. Besides, the prospect of dying did not frighten me in the least, provided my affairs are in order, and to return to life seemed almost a nuisance.” (quoted in Henry-Louis de la Grange, Gustav Mahler: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904) vol. II of his vast four-volume biography) = = = = = That same day, he was examining the proofs of his 4th Symphony which the publisher had ready for him and was horrified to realize the copyist had marked the slow movement (which acts as a transition into the finale) in second place, followed by the Scherzo with its Death’s Fiddle solo. “If I had died last night, the entire structure and significance of the work would have been destroyed!” Then, between that and dwelling on his usual spate of bad reviews, he drafted an obituary notice: “Gustav Mahler had finally met the fate he deserved for his many misdeeds.” And that, you might assume, is why Mahler began his next symphony with a Funeral March. You’d think… *** ***** ******** ***** *** At the end of the opera season in June, 1901, Gustav Mahler – no longer conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic but still director and chief conductor of the Court Opera in the Imperial capital – was able to leave the busy schedule and the constant in-fighting (not just office politics but dealing with opera singers’ egos) and head out to his new dream-home, built with the money he was finally making as a busy conductor, both in Vienna and across Europe. Today, we think of Mahler as a famous composer but in his day he was a famous (if not always respected) conductor and as a result, the schedule of overseeing the business of running the opera house, planning its new productions, handling singers’ schedules not to mention dealing with an imperial bureaucracy that would put Washington to shame as well as conducting many of the performances – and don’t forget the occasional guest conducting opportunities outside Vienna – left him very little time for composing. He became, in self-defense, a “summer composer.” This was not uncommon: even Brahms, who had no such professional demands on his time, found himself only ever able to compose during the summers, spending time in Vienna with all its distractions working on final drafts and orchestrations or proofing manuscripts and printer’s galleys. Then when summer arrived, like Brahms, Mahler would take off for some place in the Austrian mountains – occasionally Northern Italy – where he would find the solitude to work on new compositions. And like Brahms, he would rent rooms or houses where he could (hopefully) enjoy the peace and quiet around him – walks in nature or pleasant places to hang out without being himself a tourist attraction. He might have favorite places to go until something happened or he simply sought new locations. Some were more successful than others. View of Meiernigg on theWörthersee  Unlike Brahms, Mahler eventually decided to buy a property – this one on a lake near the Carinthian town of Meiernigg – where he built a house which friends would later call “Villa Mahler.” This lake – the Wörthersee, a rather sizeable one for land-locked Austria – had a climate that made it the equivalent of a Mediterranean vacation destination and in the summer of 1899 he, his sister Justine (whom everybody called Justi) and his friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner toured the place looking for a place to stay when Mahler found a rocky promontory overlooking the lake where he thought he could build a house. Mahler's Composing Hut First, however, the architect agreed to build a small house – a composing hut – for the composer, a place off in the woods not far from where the house was to be built: the hut would be ready for the following summer. That summer, he rented a villa that was a 20-minute walk from his hut where he “savored peace, security and Dionysic wonder, keeping the windows open to breathe the pure forest air” rather than, as usual, keeping them closed against noise (as he had to do in Vienna and several other summer properties he’d rented). It was here, that summer, that he completed his Symphony No. 4. Mahler's Summer House in Meiernigg June 1901 would be his first arrival there as a property-owner. The house had been finished – an old-fashioned cross between a lakeside villa and mountain chalet with three floors and a basement that opened onto the lake-shore – with a steep foot-path that linked the main house to the all-important composing shed where Mahler would spend several hours a day. To the Composing Hut But Mahler, despite having given up his duties at the Philharmonic following his near-death experience in February (see previous post), could not concentrate on composing – at least, not at first. He set about studying scores, primarily the polyphonic motets by Bach and songs by Schumann. In the course of the summer, he would write several songs for voice with orchestra: several poems by Rückert – he composed, appropriately, “Ich atmet’ einen Lindenduft” (“I breathe a sweet scent”) in the first days after his arrival – and one from the collection of folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”). The fact he could not get a “larger project” underway bothered him. So he decided he would just put aside two weeks and rest. Naturally, he immediately began jotting down new ideas. Even when he went for walks, he would take small notebooks with him to scribble down a few pitches here and there that would generate a theme. But for a while, he told no one what he was working on. It’s possible he might not be sure what it was himself, at least to begin: he was always reluctant to play through anything for his friends that he was still composing until the first draft was finished. It was on August 5th he told Natalie about the symphonic scherzo he was working on, how it was giving him so much trouble; how it was so contrapuntal with all these different lines that would require soloists to be able to play them well; how he had composed nothing like it before; how nothing would be repeated (a major feature of most symphonic music with themes and restatements, their development and recapitulations) and how everything “had to develop from within.” He told her that it had “unparalleled power [like] that of a man in the full light of day who has reached the climax of his life.” More importantly, everything would be “expressed in terms of pure music. It will be a proper symphony in four movements, each of them independent, complete in itself, and linked to the others solely by affinity of mood.” Five days later, he invited Natalie to the Composing Hut and played for her this collection of songs he had been working on (one more would be finished the next day, the famous “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I have become lost in the world”) usually collected in a set of Rückert-Lieder that includes “Um Mitternacht,” also composed that same summer. Before he left for Vienna, he gave her the songs’ original manuscripts. Whatever he had planned – he also said it would contain “no harp or English horn” nor a human voice as his last two symphonies had – it was not yet finalized: though lacking voices, it did include both harp and English horn; and while it may originally have been four movements, at some point he decided to break the first movement into two – the opening Funeral March followed by an allegro marked “strürmisch bewegt” (highly agitated) and “mit grosser Vehemenz” (with great vehemence). But this life-affirming scherzo is the first music he began composing – or, whether he’d sketched anything beyond an idea of the opening movement, at least the first movement he completed – for his new 5th Symphony. = = = = = Osmo Vänskä conducts the Minnesota Orchestra at the London Proms: = = = = = Though it's difficult to say when Mahler sketched what or composed which movements during this particular summer, he had, apparently, written what would become the first two movements of the symphony as it now stands. Presumably, they were conceived as one single movement which at some point (ostensibly the following summer) he broke in two. There seems to be no indication that I can find concerning how he did this, perhaps the opposite of what Sibelius did in his own 5th Symphony in 1915 when he decided to combine his opening movement with its ensuing scherzo to create one single but not necessarily unified movement. This would explain, of course, the amount of shared material - particularly the rhythmic cell from the opening trumpet fanfare that pervades both movements in one form or another - almost as if the second movement was commentary on the first or perhaps the deferred development section to the opening's exposition (speaking, of course, only conjecturally). It stands outside the standard convention of Sonata Form Opening, Slow Movement, Scherzo and Finale format of the 19th Century Symphony, to become the "added fifth" movement the way Beethoven's thunderstorm was inserted between the Scherzo and the Finale of his 6th Symphony, the Pastorale. = = = = = Alan Gilbert conducts the National German Radio Symphony: 1st Movement (in two clips) = = = = = Not a great recording, but it’s Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony on tour in Tokyo with the 2nd Movement: = = = = = The summer was not without its occasional interruptions: tourists gliding past on their boats (Mahler himself owned two boats) might either shout at him how they hated his music (“what has he ever done to you,” one shouted at the friend who then responded, “he wrote a terrible symphony and then another one!”); or glimpsing him on his balcony, cheering him with bravos. Characteristically, he found both of these distasteful and rushed inside to avoid acknowledging either. One night, after a long walk and a late-night conversation on the balcony with Natalie, Mahler was disturbed by the sound of a man falling in the water. Rushing barefoot down the steps, Mahler was able to reach the man in time and drag him to shore, though the man, clearly drunk, was so frantic he nearly drowned Mahler along with him! Cries for help brought others and eventually the man was rescued and given blankets and dry clothes before he left without ever giving them his name. Otherwise, it was an idyllic time – serene was the way he described it – and very productive despite its slow start. In all, he composed eight songs (with orchestral accompaniment) and what became three movements of his new symphony. Yet, despite the mood of the scherzo, everything else was “funereal,” meditations on death and dying or on saying farewell to the world. Three of the songs later became part of the cycle known under the gruesome title Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). He had expressed to Natalie – perhaps on the night of the near-drowning man – his desire to have children of his own, that he was tired of being lonely and that having children would be his way of “staking claim to immortality.” In writing these songs, it is important to realize Mahler was not yet married nor had any children of his own, but he had lost several brothers and sisters and so, while composing them, he imagined his father grieving for the death of so many of his own children – by 1895, Mahler had lost 10 of his 13 brothers and sisters, 8 of them while they were still children. Mahler’s “entourage,” such as it was, consisted of his sister Justi and occasionally her fiancé, the violinist Arnold Rosé (they would be married the following summer – incidentally, another sister, Emma, had married Arnold’s younger brother, the cellist Eduard Rosé); and their friend Natalie Bauer-Lechner who was a violinist and a member of an all-female string quartet (quite rare in those days). She accompanied Mahler on many of these summer excursions and though some people did not care for her or her morals – particularly one friend of Mahler’s whose husband had been an ex-lover of Natalie’s – she was that rare intellectual, musically knowledgeable friend that Mahler could confide in, musically. Regardless of what the future would bring, her journals (some published; others, not) became important sources for future biographers of Mahler, especially concerning his creative insights into the works he composed during the summer she spent in his proximity. It is also important to realize – our modern morality aside – that she and Mahler were never lovers. Mahler had his affairs and one of them was an unfortunately convoluted relationship with one of his opera singers, Anna von Mildenburg, which he had tried to break off several times (a native of the region, she had helped him locate the land where he built his villa, but she was not a guest at the house). Natalie Bauer-Lechner Natalie, by her own account, only ever loved two men in her life – the poet Siegfried Lipiner (who, a friend of Mahler’s, had written the poem that formed the initial basis of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony and who, incidentally, was now having an affair with Mildenburg himself) and Gustav Mahler who, at least romantically, seemed totally unaware of Natalie’s feelings, despite some of the confidences he made to her, especially the one about wanting to get married and have children. At any rate, the summer came to an end and on August 26th Mahler packed up and left for Vienna, Justi and Natalie staying behind to close up the villa. Mahler had just written to Henrietta Mankiewicz, a mutual friend of his and Natalie’s, “What a good thing it is for mothers that they do not have to interrupt the process of giving birth – for the babies, too, perhaps.” His new symphony would have to wait until the following summer to be completed. Meanwhile, Natalie arranged for someone to send her a telegram from Vienna urging her to return quickly, leaving Justi behind. Instead, she went to Mahler, apparently begged him to marry her and even tried to embrace him but he repulsed her, saying “I cannot love you, I can only love a beautiful woman.” “But I am beautiful,” she insisted, “ask Henriette Mankiewicz!” The details of this sad and clearly uncomfortable confrontation, so soon after this serene summer, may not be totally reliable, Mahler’s biographer Henry-Louis de la Grange adds, because it was included years later in the memoirs of a woman who would later have a vested interest in the life of Gustav Mahler. *** ***** ******** ***** *** Gustav Mahler in 1902 When Mahler returned to Vienna after that busy summer of 1901, arriving back at the "quagmire" (as he called it) of the opera house's constant in-fighting, he had finished what would be the first three movements of his new symphony, his Fifth. Initially, the idea had been it would be a “normal” symphony in four movements without the human voice and, presumably, without a “program” or story behind it. Mahler had supplied fairly detailed stories for the first three symphonies – either what had inspired the music or what the music meant in terms of a story. He had chosen texts for vocal soloists or chorus that implied a layer of meaning as well and had even incorporated songs he had written even if he, here, omitted the voice and text (for instance the song about St. Anthony’s sermon to the fishes for the scherzo of his 2nd Symphony). In his 3rd Symphony, which underwent frequent changes from the initial sketches to its final format when he completed it in 1896, he had supplied numerous possibilities, given each movement descriptive subtitles and then removed them. Having dinner with friends in October 1900, he declared “Down with programmes which are always misinterpreted!” Yet in December 1901 he sent the orchestra in Dresden a detailed program for a performance of his 2nd Symphony (the “Resurrection,” which incidentally has nothing to do with Easter) merely as a means to help the audience contend with something new and challenging as well as unusually long. Given that his 4th Symphony grew directly out of his 3rd – the 4th’s last movement was originally intended for the 3rd – and the text of the last movement implies a story (observing a heavenly banquet with child-like awe) where music would be quoted in the purely orchestral first movement questioning the implications of tying them together in some way (in what way, though?) – Mahler never gave us any kind of program or descriptive titles for his Symphony No. 4. Though he had told his friend and musical confidant Natalie Bauer-Lechner that the 4th was like the “uniform blue of the sky… [b]ut sometimes the atmosphere darkens and grows strangely terrifying… just as on a brilliant day in the sun-dappled forest one is overcome by a panic terror.” There is a “gaiety coming from another sphere… terrifying for adults: only a child can understand and explain it, and a child does explain it in the end: a child who, if only at the chrysalis stage, already belongs to this superior world.” There were, apparently, beautiful titles for each of the 4th Symphony’s movements as there had been for the 3rd (with its “What the flowers tell me” and “What love tells me” movements) but, in August 1900, he tells Natalie he decided not to disclose them (even to her) “so as to avoid giving rise to further absurd misunderstandings.” Mahler had conceived the 4th originally as a suite of songs (vocal or not), six movements in all, and the whole would be called “Symphony No. 4 (Humoresque).” The ultimate scherzo for the 4th – with its image of fiddling Death (and what’s that about, people would ask) – didn’t exist in that initial version but the D Major scherzo that did, in the best waste-not/want-not manner many composers (even Beethoven) would not think twice about, found its way into the 5th, where it became the germ of his third movement. Whatever programmatic implications it might have had there were no doubt officially shed. Certainly the 5th’s scherzo continues the kind of joie de vivre that marks so much of the 4th Symphony. By the time he’d begun the 5th in the summer of 1901, months after his near-fatal hemorrhage – though it opened with its Funeral March and subsequent emotional storm, he completed the Scherzo first – Mahler was quite reticent about the “meaning” behind the music beyond what he’d already told Natalie about the scherzo – the man in  “the full light of day who had reached the climax of his life.” More often, he talked about its contrapuntal complexity – he became obsessed with polyphony after studying Bach, especially the motets, and was now criticizing Tchaikovsky, for instance, for not using it in his symphonies. (When, in April 1901, a friend praised the “orchestral palette” of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Mahler dismissed this as “humbug, sand in the eyes,” how all those rising and falling arpeggios and scales, “those meaningless sequence of chords,” were like having a colored dot which, when you “swing it round an axis, it looks like a shimmering circle. But when it comes to rest again, it’s still the same old dot and even the cat won’t play with it.” Ironically, after Mahler become conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1909, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique would be the work he would conduct the most. I can almost hear Sigmund Freud saying, "so, how does that make you feel, Herr Maestro?") Mahler working on scores Interrupted by his return to Vienna at the end of August and resuming his duties as director of the Vienna Opera, he put aside work on the new 5th Symphony and prepared for the premiere of his 4th, set to take place in mid-November in Munich. It was his first premiere since the 2nd was first heard in 1895. The 3rd, which he’d completed in 1896, had yet to be performed: its difficulties were too considerable for it to be taken lightly and he found no opportunities to schedule its premiere. That, too, would take up some of his busy schedule at the Opera: the premiere of the 3rd would finally take place in June of 1902, just before he would return to Meiernigg and his little Composing Hut to resume work on the so-far incomplete 5th. *** ***** ******** ***** *** Alma Schindler at 19 Barely ten weeks after that unfortunate scene with Natalie Bauer-Lechner which ended their long (and for us, informative) friendship, Mahler attended a friend's dinner party where sitting across from him was a young woman whose name, he learned, was Alma Schindler. The daughter and step-daughter of artists, she was young – 22 to his 41 – intelligent and beautiful, had a mind of her own and he was immediately fascinated by her. On December 23rd, they became engaged and planned their wedding for mid-February, though it eventually didn’t take place until March 9th, four months after they’d met. When she and Mahler first met, Alma was still in love with her composition teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky – a composer Mahler already had mixed feelings about professionally as it was – and with whom, she confided to her diary, she planned on living with and bearing his children. She also found herself the object of other would-be suitors during these months: in one week, she had received two proposals of marriage from men who didn’t interest her in the least. Alma at 16 Her mother and step-father, the artist Carl Moll, thought Mahler a bad match – Moll had heard rumors about Mahler’s “womanizing,” apparently seducing every young woman in the opera company – given his age, his debts and ill-health and his “precarious” position at the Opera. A close friend of hers considered Mahler “a degenerate Jew” (despite his necessary conversion to the state’s official Catholicism) who was “not good-looking and his music is apparently not worth much.” What, he asked her, would she do if Mahler proposed to her? “I would accept!” she replied at once. There were times of separation during this courtship and a vast amount of letters passed between them as Mahler went to Munich to conduct the premiere of the 4th and later for another performance in Berlin. Alma at 20 There was also much soul-searching. Mahler was concerned not only about their age-difference, but the fact he was from humble origins and she was “born to joy and plenty” with no dark past. She was brought up to discuss the philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and she couldn’t share his enthusiasm for the Russian novelist, Dostoyevsky. Alma writes in her diary that “Zemlinsky …is a wonderfully gifted fellow. But Gustav is so poor, so frightfully poor. If only he knew how poor he is, he would hide his face in shame. And I’ll always have to lie… to lie constantly throughout my life – with him, that’s just possible – but with Justi [Mahler’s sister], that female! I have the feeling she’s checking up on me the whole time… But I must be free, completely free.” Mahler, she realized, was a man of genius, ardent and over-flowing with love, but an authoritarian (not just as a conductor), very demanding but a prisoner of himself and his ideals. Alma was described as a “coquette” by some friends, with a “capricious temperament,” conceited and flighty, frivolous but attractive, witty, spontaneous – and, importantly for a composer like Mahler, musical. Zemlinsky in 1898 Alma was herself a composer, having studied with Zemlinsky and written several songs and, of course, had her own ideas about music. Yet Mahler forced her to give up composing which she promised to do, intending instead to devote herself to his music. (This decision would haunt her later, especially when Zemlinsky would once again become a part of Mahler’s professional circle of friends.) While Mahler was in Berlin conducting his new 4th Symphony, Alma wrote to Zemlinsky to break off their relationship, not without protest on her former teacher’s part. In her diary, she wrote, “a beautiful feeling was buried that day,” after Zemlinsky visited her, begging her to reconsider. “Gustav,” she continued, “you’ll have to do a lot to make up for it.” Her mother was determined to convince Alma to break up with Mahler, but given Alma’s complete dislike of her mother (her father’s death had devastated her and she only grew colder toward her disapproving mother) this only strengthened her resolve. When Mahler returned from Berlin and Dresden, writing immensely long letters about his love and happiness, he came to visit the family and, on December 23rd, he asked for Alma’s hand in marriage. She accepted. *** ***** ******** ***** *** By the time the New Year began – and with it, the rehearsals for the Vienna Philharmonic’s performance of the 4th Symphony – Alma was constantly at his side. The inevitable scrutiny from a curious (and often hostile) public annoyed her. Glances and waves to old friends in the audiences were reported to Mahler as evidence of her flirting behind his back. Mahler had described his symphony with its old-fashioned and child-like themes as a “primitive painting on a gold background” (while Gustav Klimt had used gold backgrounds in a couple of his paintings before 1900, his official “Golden Phase” with its famous painting, The Kiss, didn’t begin until 1907). But she admitted to being baffled by its naivety and archaic details which she considered more ‘childish’ than ‘child-like.’ Rehearsals with the Philharmonic were going badly. It was the first time Mahler conducted them as the Philharmonic since his well-received resignation the previous year, but it was the same orchestra he conducted regularly at the opera: personnel decisions he had made there rankled the Philharmonic, where he didn’t have the director’s authority – he was a guest conductor, and they treated him with hostility. Mahler stamped his feet, glowered and raged at the players, finding fault with nearly everyone (this was in the day when maestros were considered tyrants and presumably expected to get away with such behavior: this would never work, today). For their part, the players threatened to walk out of rehearsals. And Alma was there to help calm him down. Though the crowd cheered as Mahler returned to the podium he had long been absent from, his new symphony was meet with occasional boos between movements and cries of “Shame!” at the end. Bruno Walter, his newly-arrived young assistant, shouted back at two men sitting near him who disapproved of “this horrible, unmusical music” that “Mahler and his immortal work will still be alive long after you are dead and buried.” The 1st Symphony was scheduled for a performance a week later but Mahler decided to schedule the 4th again instead, along with his earlier work, Das klagende Lied. The soprano soloist in the latter was Mahler’s ex-mistress, Anna von Mildenburg, which, given the attention Alma was receiving in the audience, must have been fraught with melodramatic potential! Mahler also received a letter from Richard Strauss with whom he had an on-again/off-again friendship, congratulating him (ironically) on the “St. Vitus Dance” the Berlin critics pulled in their attacks on his 4th Symphony, there, as he prepared to be in Vienna for the local premiere of his own latest opera. “Congratulations, and also from my wife, on your engagement: anyway it will put you in your best mood for [my] rehearsals so I can congratulate myself as well. Although I do not yet know her, best wishes to the lovely bride, and all the best to you, Your ever faithful Richard Strauss.” Initially postponed from February because Justi wanted it to coincide with her own wedding to the orchestra’s concertmaster, Arnold Rosé, Gustav and Alma’s wedding was eventually held on March 9th – having been scheduled for the 8th, it was discovered the wrong date had been engraved on the ring, so it was moved back a day. These delays no doubt caused concern on the happy couple if for no other reason than Alma was already pregnant and dealing with frequent bouts of sickness. The ceremony was, in keeping with Mahler’s celebrity status, to be a “private” affair but word had leaked out and the church was packed with mostly curious women. When it was announced the wedding had taken place earlier in a side chapel, the crowd left. Then Alma arrived by cab and Mahler, dressed in a gray suit, walked in the rain to arrive a little later. Misjudging the position of the prie-dieu, Mahler fell to his knees. “Because he was so short, he had to stand up again before he could kneel down properly, much to the sympathetic amusement of the officiating priest.” The wedding meal with the two families was calm with long periods of silence. Then Gustav and Alma got on a train for St. Petersburg, Russia, for their honeymoon. The next day, Mahler’s sister and Rosé were married. In Petersburg, the happy couple visited the Hermitage Museum and hoped to attend the opera, but it was closed for Lent. They took a sleigh-ride on the frozen River Neva during which they both caught cold. It was not, however, simply a honeymoon. It had been added to a pre-arranged concert tour: he led three concerts there (none of his music had been programed) and Alma watched the first from backstage, noticing the intensity of her husband’s face which she thought “divinely beautiful.” The final concert was to include Bruckner’s 4th but when told that Bruckner did not go over well with Russian audiences, he substituted Haydn’s “Drumroll” Symphony instead – played with 102 musicians on stage! As soon as the concert was over, the Mahlers were on the train back to Vienna, tired of Russia, its weather and its food, but with enough money in his pocket to help with his outstanding debts. But it did not erase them – there was still the expense of having built his summer home in Meiernigg – and so Alma had to set up house on a thrifty budget. Their apartment was small so when Mahler’s meddlesome neighbor moved out (the one who hated Mahler’s music and always ordered his servant to play the gramophone quite loudly whenever he’d hear Mahler begin to work at the piano), he took over these rooms as well. Then came performances of Wagner operas, the famous (or infamous) Beethoven Exhibit by the group of artists known as The Secession (Alma’s step-father was a member, as were Klimt and the sculptor Max Klinger whose statue of Beethoven caused such a controversy though today the name is more likely to be confused with a character from the TV series “M*A*S*H”) with Mahler conducting Beethoven’s 9th at its opening – and, in June, the long-delayed premiere of his 3rd Symphony. (You can read more about the premiere of the 3rd Symphony in an earlier post, here.) Considering the complexity of the 3rd compared to the simplicity of the 4th which was so universally criticized, the 3rd proved to be a triumph. In fact, the publishing firm Peters was so interested in this symphony, they signed a generous contract with him for his next symphony with far more favorable terms than any Mahler had previously received. After a couple weeks of business at the Opera, Mahler and his wife took off for “Villa Mahler.” Inspired by this most recent triumph – not to mention his new bride and the impending child already on its way – Mahler looked forward to concentrating all his creative energy on completing his 5th Symphony. They soon settled into a routine: Mahler would get up at 6, have breakfast (café au lait, diet bread with butter and jam) which he would eat in his Composing Hut. It was Alma’s job to see that no sound disturbed him at the hut – she even had to stop playing the piano in the house because he could hear it from his hide-out in the nearby woods. She promised opera tickets to their neighbors to entice them to lock up their dogs during the morning hours. the piano in Mahler's Composing Hut Interior Shot of Mahler's Composing Hut, now a museum Built on a natural terrace some 200 feet above the house, the hut had no foundation and was very damp which worried Alma, especially the steep path often covered with mud or wet leaves after a rain (the servant certainly complained about it, hauling his breakfast and lunch up to the hut every day). The hut contained a piano, a large work-table, two or three other pieces of furniture and a few books – a complete edition of Goethe, for one. The only musical scores there were by Johann Sebastian Bach. Around midday, Mahler would finish his work, go down to the lake for a swim. Alma would join him, sitting beside him while he sunbathed before taking another dip to cool off (Alma considered this a barbaric custom). He preferred taking walks to napping and walks quickly exhausted Alma who was now five months pregnant. Sometimes, he would stop, jot something down in a notebook, Alma hoping to find a tree-trunk she could sit on so as not to distract him if she became tired. Despite the tourists from Pörtschach across the lake – a favorite summer resort for Brahms who wrote his 2nd Symphony there – Mahler found it a “splendid isolation,” as if, Alma wrote in her diary, “we were protected by a glass dome.” It’s interesting, knowing this, to listen to the absolute serenity of the famous Adagietto of his 5th Symphony, which he was writing at this time. = = = = = Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the Adagietto: = = = = = Mahler's original MS of Adagietto End of the Adagietto & Start of the Finale But while he composed these remaining two movements, Alma had little to do. She hated the interior of the house which was dark, pedestrian and, she thought, gloomy, though she enjoyed the garden and the view of the lake. She couldn’t even play the piano and it began to annoy her she had promised to give up composing herself in order not to disturb (or compete) with her husband. Alma Mahler in 1902 She confided in her diary, “There’s such a struggle going on in me! And a miserable longing for someone who thinks of ME, who helps me to find MYSELF! I’ve sunk to the level of a housekeeper!” She had found a heavy volume of philosophy in his study but yet it wasn’t anything that he would discuss with her. The next day, they had a “bitter discussion” and she told him “everything. And he – with infinite kindness – pondered over how he could help me! And I do understand… he can’t just now! He lives entirely for his composing. I will use this summer to improve myself in every way. I will try to learn… to fulfill, to realize myself! Gustav was happy yesterday – because of the peace of mind I’ve given him.” But the next day, while he was “wrapped up in his happiness,” she writes she couldn’t share it and “burst into tears again.” Anna von Mildenburg, soprano As if this period of adjustment, this realization of what the future might be like for her, Alma had to deal with the appearance of Anna von Mildenburg, the famous soprano from the Opera who, in years past, had been Mahler’s mistress. A native of Carinthia, she was staying in Meiernigg that summer and dropped by frequently to visit Mahler and his new bride, bringing with her a “wretched mongrel” dog she’d rescued from some beggar (Mahler hated the dog). Out of gentlemanly deference, Mahler would walk her back to her friends’ place but once he tired of this and gave his servant this particular chore, Mildenburg visited less often. One time, while Mahler was working, Mildenburg entertained Alma with several stories from Mahler’s past which, of course, implied there was an intimacy there for who but an intimate would know such things? When she told Mahler about this, he was intent on banning Mildenburg from the house, but Alma suggested a more diplomatic course. At the next visit, perhaps over dinner, he steered the topic toward Wagner and she ended up singing the final scene from Siegfried with Mahler at the piano – and better, apparently, than she’d ever done on stage. The sound of her voice carried across the lake and by the end, there was applause from the crowd that had gathered in their boats along the shore. But in the end, Mildenburg gave up trying to win Mahler back – or at least trying to affect his marriage. Later, Alma admitted that she “never stopped being afraid of her and her intrigues.” It was around this time that Mahler wrote a song especially for her, well aware of the conflict going on in his young wife’s heart. Mahler slipped the manuscript of “Liebst Du um Schönheit” (“If you love for beauty’s sake”) – another poem by Rückert – into her score of Wagner’s Siegfried which she always had by the piano and often played from, but for about a week it lay there undiscovered. So on August 10th, he finally handed the score to her and, when she opened it, the manuscript fell to the floor. With its last line – “Love me always, I’ll love you always and forever” – she played through it several times that day. “I almost wept. The tenderness of such a man!” she wrote in her diary, “and my lack of sensibility! I often realize how little I am and possess – compared to his infinite riches!” = = = = = Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Daniel Barenboim: Liebst Du um Schönheit: = = = = = In her memoirs, Alma would recall this story differently: then, she placed the event in the following summer. There are other statements that confuse the issue of when the Adagietto was written: some assume it must have been written the previous summer since it bears a strong resemblance to that summer’s song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (“I am lost in the world”) but which has an entirely different mood (one could say, “meaning”); another statement she makes indicates it might have been written shortly after they met, sometime between November and Christmas, but with everything Mahler was busy with at the time – and he never wrote during the opera season at any other time – it seems unlikely no mention of it would have survived in their voluminous correspondence during those weeks prior to their engagement. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg says he had heard a story “several times” from both Mahler and Alma, how he had finished the Adagietto at Meiernigg their first summer together and sent it to her up at the house with a message about it being a love-token, but there is no mention of this in any of Alma’s diaries, either. While she kept the manuscript of “Liebst Du um Schönheit” framed on her wall in her New York City apartment toward the end of her long life (she died there in 1964), there was never any sign that the original manuscript of the Adagietto was ever one of her “trophies.” Two weeks later – on August 23rd, 1902 – Mahler writes to a friend, “At last I have finished! The Fifth is with us!” He mentioned that he was feeling very “fit” despite the prolonged exertion – writing the last two movements of the symphony in two months’ time – and was now facing Vienna again: “Now back into the harness!” = = = = = Leonard Bernstein conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in the Finale of Mahler's 5th: = = = = = When Mahler had finished the work, he took Alma "almost solemnly" up to the hut to play through it for her. She seemed to like it better than she did the 4th until they got to the big Chorale theme in the finale (at 12:17 in the above clip) which, to her mind, was "too ecclesiastical and boring." She got the conflict between Mahler's Jewish roots and his "strong attraction to Catholic mysticism" (he was more of a pantheist than anything, anyway) but still felt her husband's statement that Bruckner had used chorales in his symphonies also was moot: he was very different from the older composer. On August 27th, Mahler returned to Vienna with the draft score of the 5th Symphony under his arm. All that remained to do, now, was copy the score (a “clean score” to be sent to the publisher). This was winter’s work. *** ***** ******** ***** *** There was another life-changing event yet to come: Alma had been pregnant during the summer and she was easily tired out by Mahler’s love of walking. The fact this exertion might have complicated her pregnancy was kept from Mahler who, worried about the imminent birth, tended to go walking even more. (Remember his own family history and how his parents had lost seven of their fourteen children, five of them by or before their 1st birthday, all within a span of 22 years.) Maria Anna (named after both Gustav’s and Alma’s mothers but referred to as “Putzi”) was born on November 3rd, 1902, in their apartment in Vienna. It was a “breech birth” (the result, the doctor theorized, of Alma’s walking too much over mountain paths and through city parks) and a difficult one. And it seems, judging from her diary, Alma’s “maternal instincts seemed dormant,” with no satisfaction in her new-found duties, comparing herself to a bird whose wings have been clipped, “this splendid bird so happy in flight” and now “there are so many heavy ducks and geese who cannot fly at all!” A few weeks later, the baby became seriously ill and Mahler carried her around the apartment, cooing endearments in her ear as if that alone would help cure her. Alma, meanwhile, complained “how hard it is to be deprived so mercilessly of everything, to be mocked about things closest to one’s heart. Gustav lives his life. My child has no need of me. I cannot occupy myself only with her! Now I’m learning Greek. But my God, what has become of my goal, my magnificent goal! My bitterness is intense.” The following month, reacting to the sight of a happy Mahler dancing like a young man around Mildenburg at the opera rehearsals, she writes, “He disgusts me so much, I dread his coming home… If only he never came home again. Not to live with him any more…. The thought of him nauseates me…” But this is a story for another time – especially considering the symphony he would begin next summer, his 6th, which contained a theme he told Alma represented her. He had come down from the hut full of this lyrical theme in the first movement, a theme that was full of his love for her. But what to make of the rest of the symphony, with its three “Hammerblows of Fate,” the third of which “fells the hero,” the one he kept taking out and putting back in? At times, he called this symphony the “Tragic” Symphony – a dark contrast to the 5th even despite its having begun with a funeral march. The 5th Symphony was premiered after Mahler had already begun the 6th – what was it like for the composer to face the remembrances of the one summer with the music he was writing now? As for Natalie Bauer-Lechner, she never mentioned Mahler in her journals again and, in fact, ended up a sad case, dying in poverty in 1921, almost exactly ten years after Mahler. From her journals, her nephew published a condensed volume called Mahleriana in 1923. The original copies, several bound copybooks, passed through many hands over the years before ending up in a Mahler library in Paris, and several pages are missing. If nothing else, Natalie recorded Mahler’s thoughts about what he was writing and what engaged his mind when he was writing it, even down to the details, for instance, how a laxative had not only helped his constipation but had unblocked his creativity so he could suddenly compose a song in one afternoon. With Natalie gone, our insights into Mahler’s creativity have been replaced by Alma’s observation of her own situation, as if (at least during these first months of marriage) her husband didn’t confide in her about the music that was so central to his life or that she chose not to record it. *** ***** ******** ***** *** There can be much more I could tell you about Mahler’s symphony from a technical standpoint – why it’s probably not accurate to refer to it as a “Symphony in C-sharp Minor” because, while it begins in that key, it spends very little time in that key (D Major is the main tonality of the Scherzo and the finale) and how Mahler used what we call a “progressive tonality,” moving from its starting tonality to its final one through some inner logic of its own – or even from a “program notes” standpoint – that it is divided into three parts, the first two movements before the central Scherzo, the last two movements afterward, like a vast arch – but the purpose of these essays was primarily to give the reader (and hopefully, the listener) some idea of Mahler’s life at the time he composed this work. There’s always an argument how valuable this awareness might be. We can certainly enjoy the music without needing to know about Mahler’s hemorrhoids (which was, unfortunately, an on-going health issue) or what he had for breakfast while he was writing, but I think it’s interesting (if not important) to realize that, first of all, the composers who write these masterpieces we are in awe of, were not marble busts operating in a reality vacuum but had to contend with balancing their creativity against the intrusions of a complex world which, in turn, makes them more complex as people. True, Beethoven, writing the tragic Heiligenstadt Testament at the time he was near suicidal about his impending deafness, was composing the boisterous finale of his 2nd Symphony that same month. But Mahler (and indeed most other composers) were not Beethoven: everyone, like the rest of us more normal people, are affected by what happens to us in different ways. If this reality affected the life of Mahler the Man, why couldn’t it affect the creativity of Mahler the musician? Of course, planning out the details of a work as vast as an hour-long symphony doesn’t mean the ups and downs of reality affected the daily work. No doubt a symphony starting with a funeral march and ending in triumphant celebration could be a general plan and had certainly been done before (Beethoven’s Fifth, the obvious inspiration: even the persistent rhythm of the opening trumpet call, which then permeates the first two movements, brings to mind Beethoven's Fate Knocks at the Door motive) – and no doubt such a plan might have been subtly tweaked along the way without straying from whatever initial idea he may have had. After all, the trumpet call that opens the symphony is a quotation from a list of signals and drumbeats used by the Austrian Army when Mahler was a child, growing up in a Bohemian town not far from the local barracks; the often startling contrasts of sad with vulgar music presumably stems from an often quoted and much dismissed incident in his youth when he apparently ran out of the house while his parents were fighting and heard the music of either a military band or a dance band playing something in a popular vein (it’s a story he told, but one wonders if it’s an actual incident or a fabrication of memory). So, there you have the incidents of a life at a time a particular work is composed. Draw your own conclusions. CODA Gustav Mahler died in 1911, four years after their daughter "Putzi" died. Another daughter, Anna, would grow up to become a famous sculptor. Alma Mahler would go on to marry the architect Walter Gropius (their daughter Manon, who died of polio at the age of 18, inspired Alban Berg's Violin Concerto) and then the novelist Franz Werfel. In 1946, Alma became an American citizen and died in 1964. This photograph (above) from Life Magazine was taken of her (I believe in 1960) listening to a New York Philharmonic performance of a Mahler symphony. = = = = = Most of the material and all the quotes included in these posts are from Henri-Louis de La Grange’s biography, Gustav Mahler, particularly Volume 2, “Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897-1904), Oxford University Press, 1995 edition. You would need to consult this to reference the accounts of Natalie Bauer-Lechner and Alma Mahler, or Mahler’s own letters to his other correspondents. For this post, I've chosen the Bernstein videos with the Vienna Philharmonic mostly out of respect for Bernstein who almost single-handedly brought Mahler's symphonies to American audiences. 2 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Music & Painting: On the Road to Impressio... Thoughts On a Train Admittedly, I don’t remember much about 1816. It was the year Rossini premiered an opera that was such a disaster, it first seemed destined for the pile of flops produced by many opera composers of the day in the highly competitive box-office environment that was Italian opera (despite opening to bad reviews, The Barber of Seville quickly became one of the most popular operas ever!) It was rough year for Beethoven, now 45, becoming mired in the legal proceedings over the guardianship of his late brother’s son, a process that would involve much time as well as creative energy, not to mention over a year of constant illness referred to as “inflammatory fever.” He wrote very little between 1816 and 1818, a two-year fallow period very unusual for a composer who’d been intensely active, constantly producing mature masterpieces for the previous 15 years or so – giving rise to rumors that the Great Beethoven had written himself out.” Things were looking bleak. It was a busy year for Franz Schubert, too. He turned 19 that year and, that fall, turned down for a decent teaching job in what is now modern Slovenia (then part of the Austrian Empire), he moved out of his family’s home to live with a friend which set him on a track for independent living (though rarely successful). The following year, he would meet a singer who would make his songs well known to a larger audience in Vienna. Things were looking good. The year before, Napoleon, having escaped from exile on the Italian island of Elba and regained his throne as Emperor of the French, was finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. From there, the victorious English sent him off to exile on a more distant island – St. Helena – located over 1,000 miles from the coast of Africa in the South Atlantic, a volcanic rock about 5 miles by 10 miles. Things were looking... well, over... There was another volcanic rock that would’ve been in the news in 1815 if Europeans had access to the kind of news reporting we’re used to today: dateline, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). On April 10th, 1815, after several days of increasingly violent eruptions, the long-dormant volcano Mt. Tambora erupted: the whole mountain turned into “a flowing mass of liquid fire” which would later be described as “the Vesuvius of the East.” The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is often described as the most dramatic volcanic eruption in modern history, its impact felt around the world, but Tambora in 1815 released four times the energy associated with Krakatoa. It is referred to as the “largest observed eruption in human history.” While we talk of “global warming” (or more correctly, “climate change”) today, the ash spewed by Tambora spread across the northern hemisphere and caused what is referred to as “The Year Without Summer.” The biggest impact was in the Northeast and in Western Europe. Temperatures went below freezing in New England throughout May and there were significant snowfalls during June (Quebec had a foot of snow in June). Lakes and rivers in Pennsylvania froze over in August. Crop failures in New England helped spur a migration to find better farmland in the American Midwest. It was not all “wintry,” however: it could be 95° the next day, then dip to near-freezing a few hours later. The winter of 1816-1817 was also bitterly cold with low temperatures of –27° recorded in New York City. Similar weather-related problems were recorded across China (in addition to increased flooding) with an outbreak of cholera (the result of serious flooding) that spread from India to Moscow. In Western Europe, there was an increase in rainfall which, in addition to the cooler than usual temperatures, led to considerable crop failures from Ireland and Spain to Central Europe. That year, between 10,000 and 15,000 people left Vermont, for example, hoping to find a more suitable climate for farming, creating population issues across New England. Many farms there were also abandoned because more people were now migrating to newly industrialized cities in search of factory jobs. Given the scarcity of oats to feed horses in Europe, Karl Drais, a German inventor, began working on alternate modes of transportation, resulting in 1817 with the unveiling of what later became known as a “velocipede,” the forerunner of the bicycle. Originally a “running machine,” it had two wheels that were propelled by the rider “pushing along the ground as in regular walking or running” (pedals were added later). Justus von Liebig, a chemist who grew up during this time and whose family had been greatly affected by the summer’s resulting famine in Central Germany, later did research in plant nutrition and introduced chemical fertilizers. In July, 1816, a miserably cold and wet holiday in Switzerland resulted in three vacationing writers deciding to amuse themselves by seeing who could write the best Gothic horror story (then the rage). The result was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lord Byron’s fragmentary tale was later appropriated by fellow traveler John Polidori who wrote The Vampire in 1819, a precursor of “Dracula.” One thing associated with this volcanic eruption – the ash-cloud – spread a dry, sulfurous fog that tinged the air red and created rather odd and sometimes brilliant light effects at sunrise and sunset. It’s interesting to note that the English painter, J.M.W. Turner, then 40, began painting “atmospheric” nature scenes which featured brilliant lighting effects like his “Eruption of Vesuvius” in 1817. These swirls of light and dark (often heightened by brilliant reds and yellows) would become a feature of his mature style. Turner: Eruption of Vesuvius (1817) The first time I saw a painting by Turner – it was cover art for a British recording – I assumed it was by some modern 20th Century painter. So it rather surprised me when I saw he was born in 1775, when Mozart was 19 and Beethoven, not yet 5. It’s difficult, sometimes, for people to compare musical styles to artistic styles: while we think of Classical Music giving way in 1800 for Romantic Music as I was taught, I’m now seeing textbooks that say Romantic Music begins anywhere from 1820 to 1825. J.M.W. Turner This makes more sense, if you consider who – other than Beethoven – was composing then and what their music sounded like. We think of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony starting the new era with a bang but really, it had little impact on most other composers who continued to write in a more Classical style familiar to lovers of Haydn (moreso than Mozart who was, by and large, overlooked except for a handful of pieces). But I’ll get into that in a later post. The thing is, very often stylistic developments in music are not concurrent with stylistic developments in art or literature. There are “romantic” paintings from the late-18th Century just as there are “classical” paintings still being painted well into the 19th. But then this overlap is familiar to music lovers who sometimes are confused that Schoenberg and Stravinsky, at the forefront of the New Music Bandwagon in the early 1900s, were competing, in a sense, with composers like Richard Strauss or Puccini or Rachmaninoff or Sibelius who were writing melodic, emotional music – compared to the abstractions and atonal works of what is still considered “contemporary music” almost a century later. And the emergence of a style like Turner’s didn’t mean he was embraced by other painters or became a leader with a huge following of admirers and imitators. In this way, he might be comparable to Beethoven (accepting the fact Turner never earned the kind of posthumous reputation Beethoven would). One of the hallmarks of the Romantic style was a love of nature and landscape paintings – often with humanity reduced to almost nothing or completely absent, and often featuring the ruins of the past to point out the contrast between man’s achievements versus nature’s longevity. Others painted beautiful scenes full of farms, cows, fields and ponds. John Constable: Wivenhoe Park (1816) We hear this in music that challenged the symphonic, architectural concepts of Classical Music with the wildness and unexpectedness of Nature – a work like Carl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz with its “Gothic” setting in a dark wood full of black magic – but also just the forest environment reflected in the sounds of hunting horns or choruses of peasants and hunters that proved so new and refreshing. It was premiered in 1821 and became a big hit – the foreboding “Wolf’s Glen Scene” had an impact on its audience comparable to special effects in modern-day horror movies. Francis Danby: Romantic Woodland (1824) This is a different kind of woodland world – less a refuge than a psychological confrontation with our fears of the unknown – different from what we experienced in the nature setting inspiring Beethoven’s 6th Symphony in 1806, his “Pastoral” Symphony with its “pleasant impressions upon arriving in the countryside,” bird-calls and merrymakings of the peasants followed by a thunderstorm and a song of thanksgiving after the storm. Here, it seems more ominous, two small children lost in a dark wood, perhaps reminding us of our worst fears and childhood nightmares. Turner was described by fellow painter John Constable (whose famous “Haywain,” speaking of famous landscapes, was painted in 1821), sitting next to him at a Royal Academy dinner, as being “uncouth but [he] has a wonderful range of mind.” Another great painter of the day, Eugene Delacroix, described him as "silent, even taciturn, morose at times, close in money matters, shrewd, tasteless, and slovenly in dress." When I asked my students if that last description of Turner reminded them of anyone we’d talked about, one said, “Beethoven!” Whether Turner's painting of Vesuvius was inspired by delayed news of the eruption of Mt. Tambora or not, I can’t say. He had already been fascinated by light even before 1816: his famous “Hannibal Crossing the Alps” with its barely visible elephant dwarfed by storm clouds and either a blizzard or an avalanche was painted in 1812, the year of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia (remember, like Hannibal, Napoleon had crossed the Alps to invade Italy in the 1790s: there’s a likely allegorical reference to Hannibal’s fate and the long-for demise of Napoleon’s grip on Europe and the constant warfare with England). Another historical event also influenced Turner’s style: the Industrial Revolution. Just as the invention of the printing press had a major impact on literature and music and just as the Internet has influenced our own lives today, the Industrial Revolution which began in England in the 1760s transformed life in the 19th Century. We’re still dealing with its impact today, both in terms of its social and personal influences as well as in environmental issues. In 1839, Turner presented his painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last birth to be broken up which is clearly more than an image of a glorious old ship. Almost a ghost ship, it represents, allegorically speaking, the Past, being hauled to its destruction by the Future, the dark steam-powered tug-boat. And then there’s the railroad – initially intended to take coal from the mines to the factories for processing – which had become a form of public transportation in the 1820s (perhaps this too had something to do with the impact of crop failures and the necessary feed to fuel horses, the standard form of transportation at the time?). England had its first intercity railway in 1830 between the industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester and by the 1850s, England had over 7,000 miles of railroads. The Great Western Railroad (in England) opened its first line in 1838 and J. M. W. Turner painted one of his most famous paintings, Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western Railway in 1844: Considering the almost unintelligible aspects of Turner’s scenes in his later paintings, as far as his contemporaries would be concerned – people used to art being “representational” rather than ambiguous and indecipherable – it’s also easy to understand how he fits in with the development of what became known in France as “Impressionism” which began to develop only a couple decades after Turner’s last paintings. Whether he was a direct influence or not, I’m not sure, but quite often new stylistic ideas – creative artists trying to find new ways of expressing themselves – evolve independently or along parallel paths. If, to put it differently by misapplying Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion (1686), “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” we could say that for every stylistic concept an artist may have, substituting “concept” for “action,” there will always be someone trying to figure out a different way of achieving the same thing or a different thing or, more importantly for the development of new artistic ideas, of achieving the opposite. If you look at Constable’s landscapes, for instance, and look at his exact contemporary Turner’s landscapes, you have two opposing viewpoints of what a landscape could be. One is “representational” or realistic, the other is “impressionistic” or only vaguely representational, if representational at all. The one is comparable to a photograph – we may think it very pretty – and the other requires the viewer to “interpret” what the artist himself interprets from what he sees, a suggestion of something rather than a specific something. In a sense, this non-representational style is more interactive, engaging the viewer in the re-creative process. One is “passive” – we look at it and enjoy it; the other may be “active” – we become involved in trying to figure out “what it means.” *** ***** ******** ***** *** The French poet Stephen Mallarmé once said that naming an object takes away its power: “to suggest is to dream.” Poets and painters – and later, musicians – broke down the boundaries of reality (or at least, standard images of reality) by suggesting an image, whether through some kind of ambiguity or other implications. In a sense, this has been in poetry and literature for a long time – from the days of biblical parables to poetic allegories and use of symbols of the 19th Century (the image of a black crow implying impending death, for instance; of black being evil against good’s pure white). 1902 Illustration for "Moby-Dick" As an example, take Herman Melville’s novel (published in 1851) Moby-Dick, the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of a white whale. On the surface, it is simply an exciting story about a whaling expedition gone wrong. On the interactive, interpretive level (engaging the right brain), readers might see it as something deeper. Usually, we think “the eternal struggle between good and evil,” especially considering all the Bible-thumping rhetoric included within the tale – and considering Captain Ahab’s name is that of an idol-worshipping biblical king who opposed the prophet Elijah and whose wife was the ignominious queen, Jezebel. On the surface, it would seem Ahab’s search for revenge against the whale pits a wounded man against a destructive beast but then the usual symbols for good and evil are reversed: Ahab is always dressed in black, the whale is atypically white. So therefore we tend to re-interpret this as man against nature, nature being good and the general whaling industry (Ahab) is evil. (Of course, I also remember reading in college how one commentator saw it as an allegory about the railroad and the destruction of the American West – wait, what…? – despite the fact the Federal land grant program to westward rail expansion didn’t actually begin until 1855, four years after Melville published his novel, but hey… Perhaps a little too much ‘right brain,’ there…) So, given this interpretive involvement between artist and audience, consider some of these other paintings as the 19th Century progressed: Turner: Seascape with Sea Monsters (1845) If this painting by J. M. W. Turner, one of his last, was a beach scene called “Seascape with Sea-Monsters” painted in 1845, six years before his death, consider these two more “representational” nature paintings: Thomas Cole: "The Picnic" (1846) Eduard Manet: "Luncheon on the Grass" (1863) In these two paintings, we see two different approaches to the same apparent subject: a picnic (though Manet’s was originally called “The Bather”). Cole’s focus is more on nature and the smaller human figures encompassed by it; Manet’s is more on the people in the center with nature being reduced to a setting. It’s interesting that we hear so much about how controversial Manet’s painting was: because of the nude woman sitting with two fully clothed men? No, actually: because it “glorified” the wooded park on the edge of Paris where young men went to meet prostitutes. Art in past centuries were full of naked or scantily clad people, but if he had called this “Picking up hookers in the park on Saturday,” it might have been, if nothing else, more honest. Edgar Degas: L’Absynthe (1873) In this portrait, we don’t see aristocrats or rich bourgeois people but common everyday people that you might find in the tavern down the street. The title refers to a popular distilled alcoholic drink that was described as an “addictive psychoactive drug” and its addicts as “sodden and benumbed.” There could be a deeper story behind these two if he had just called it "In a tavern" – but the title implies a specific viewpoint. During this decade, Degas went from being a “historical painter” to one employing common people – milliners, laborers as well as dancers – another stylistic change-of-focus. While landscapes – or cityscapes, for the urban life – became hazier with painters like Claude Monet (not to be confused with Eduard Manet), giving rise to the term “Impressionism,” Claude Monet: “Impression: Sunrise” (1872) there was an almost “immediate reaction” from painters who disliked the ambiguity of this style and sought “other ways” of stepping away from the exact replication of reality, distinguishable from the photograph: Gustave Caillebotte: "Paris Street, Rainy Day" (1877) Caillebotte considered himself an Impressionist even if his style is often “less impressionistic” than many paintings by his colleagues. He was also interest in early photography as a form of artistic expression. On the other hand, Georges Seurat developed a “pointillistic” style where, rather than using brush strokes, he created colors out of combinations of dots (points) in various colors. His most famous painting is the “Sunday in the Park on the Isle Le Grande Jatte” painted in the mid-1880s. For example, the woman with the parasol (and the monkey) is wearing a hat with a purple flower. If you would closely at the hat, you see it is comprised of red, blue, purple and lavender dabs. Seurat: "Sunday in the park..." His style was also controversial – I suppose most people couldn’t see why bother with such a minuscule painting technique, though it’s interesting to point out, seeing it from a distance, you’re not aware of the dots as you are when you look at it closely. On the other hand, we see this technique in the colored comic strips of newspapers in the late-20th Century. This is the foot of the man wearing a top hat and holding a cane in the lower left corner of the painting. A few years after Georges Seurat painted this, Claude Debussy was composing this: = = = = = = = = = = His “Claire de lune” (Moonlight) may be one of his most famous pieces. It is not as musically “ambiguous” as we might expect with the term “impressionism” in painting – it is still tonal and still has harmonic motion similar to what listeners would’ve expected at the time of Brahms and those following the legacy of Beethoven (remember, his “Moonlight” Sonata was given that nickname not by the composer but by a German poet in 1836, nine years after the composer's death). However, things began to change – evolve, we might say: a few years later, he composed this, inspired by the lazy summer afternoon day-dreams of a faun (that Greek figure, half-man, half-goat). = = = = = = = = = = Here, Debussy stretches the phrases with cadences that never seem to resolve and though it’s tonal, it doesn’t sound as distinct as a “classical” composer would have used the concept of tonality and the harmonic motion of traditional chords. Everything here is for the imagery, washes of color that suggest a mood and the image’s essence rather than its form and structure or melodic development (though there are recognizable recurring elements and melodic contrasts with variety provided by dynamics and the expectations of frequent fragmentary repetitions – for example, 1:55 to 2:17). In the next decade, with his short miniature “Preludes” for piano, Debussy composed on entitled “Voiles” or “Sails,” inspired by boats with their sails wafting in the breeze. = = = = = = = = = = In this piece, Debussy avoids using traditional chords in traditional ways. In fact, he’s not even using a traditional major or minor scale. Instead of the standard patterns of whole-steps and half-steps that composers have been using for centuries, he’s using one built entire of whole tones which, unlike traditional scales, has no dominant chord available (like a C Chord moving to a G Chord, the most obvious tonal relationship defining C Major). This tonal ambiguity gives the music a sense of “suspended animation” if animated at all, a kind of static quality suggested more by different layers of sound and grounded especially by the constantly repeated single note in the lowest register, as if everything above it is moving in different layers of time as well. When it ends, it doesn’t really seem to ‘end’ in the sense of resolving any tension. In fact, there’s hardly any real tension at all – just as we might not feel any tension, lying in the grass on a sunny day watching boats on the river, their sails wafting in the breeze (unless you think maybe that low repeated pitch is kind of ominous) – rather than resolving and ‘ending,’ it merely stops. We have closed our eyes, perhaps fallen asleep, or gotten up and wandered off to receive our next impression… - Dick Strawser 2 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Romantic Music and the Conflict of Duality... Thoughts On a Train This post is a work-in-progress for my Intro to Music class – there will be more text posted a little later, but I wanted to post the musical examples we’d covered as we made the transition from Classical to the Romantic era. Beethoven was essentially a fork in the road – his music led to two different paths that both became very important to the rest of the 19th Century, to put it simply. It’s ironic that the two “warring” camps of music between 1830 and 1900 could say they found their roots in Beethoven! Berlioz c.1830 The first major example beyond Beethoven and Schubert would be the French composer, Hector Berlioz and his epic Symphonie fantastique -- so-called because of its “fantastic” nature as in “inspired by fantasy” (though it’s a pretty fantastic piece, in the modern sense of the word, too). Here is a performance of the complete, nearly hour-long symphony conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. It’s in five movements (the standard symphony would’ve been 4 but Beethoven, in his “Pastoral” Symphony which suggested “pleasant feelings upon arriving in the countryside” as well as “merry gathering of country folk” (celebrating the harvest) and a finale that was a celebration of thanksgiving after the storm – he inserted an additional movement before the finale that depicted the thunderstorm) and tells a story about a young artist (presumably Berlioz himself) falling in love with a beautiful woman (presumably Henrietta (or Harriet) Smithson) whom he sees through the fog of an opium-induced dream, then sees at a fancy-dress ball; then dreams of a country scene where a shepherd serenades his shepherdess who then disappears after the intervening rolls of thunder… then things get really weird when he imagines he’s now sentenced to death for killing his Belovéd and is then beheaded at the scaffold (guillotine!) before ending up in Hell where he imagines she is now the leader of the witches’ Sabbath he witnesses. Yeah… 1st Mvmt (Dreams, Passions – meet the Belovéd with her “idee fixe” or fixed idea, her main theme, first introduced at 5:40 in the violins as the First Theme after the slow introduction) 2nd Mvmt (Scene at the Ball) begins at 16:10 3rd Mvmt begins at 23:05 (w/English Horn – answered by oboe played from off-stage) 4th Mvmvt (March to the Scaffold) at 41:25 (at 47:47 – memory of Her Theme, then the axe falls!) 5th Mvmt (Witches’ Sabbath) at 48:26 – at 50:08, the jaunty theme is a perversion of The Belovéd’s Theme as the leader of the Witches’ Dance (introducing the Gregorian Chant for the “Day of Wrath,” Dies Irae, at 51:42 after the churchbell chimes) Here is a link to PBS’s “Keeping Score” with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, an episode about Berlioz's symphony. You can read the text but if you have time, the program itself (an internal embed) would give you lots of additional information about the work itself. Compare that to Felix Mendelssohn’s "Italian" Symphony (initially written around the same time Berlioz had completed his “Fantastique.” They actually met in Rome not long after Berlioz’s premiere and while Mendelssohn was composing his own symphonic impressions of his visit to sunny Italy. Here, Dudamel conducts a different orchestra – but notice the difference in his conducting style, too – the way-out “over-the-top” highly dramatic music of Berlioz requires a more extroverted style to get the interpretation across to the musicians; the Mendelssohn is more “stable,” more straight-forward, not far removed from Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and requires less “showmanship” to get is essence across. Though it is “picturesque,” it is not necessarily a story being told in music – more a mood, impressions, memories, but certainly not the “blood-and-thunder” of Berlioz’s symphony. The sound on this recording is too metallic and nasty for my taste (at least on my computer) so here’s a different conductor with Venezuela’s “Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra” with just the first movement of the symphony: = = = = = = = = = = (These are students in the program “La Systema” that takes kids from poor neighborhoods and often from potential lives of crime, hands them an instrument and gives them lessons and an opportunity to get out of their environment… like Dudamel) These two composers are almost the opposite of each other though they were contemporaries and, actually, friends – and open-minded enough to realize what the other had achieved in his music, even if they didn’t agree with it themselves (Mendelssohn joked he felt he needed to wash his hands after just handling the score – the whole idea, not just musically, was antithetical to his world-view). *** ***** ********* ***** *** PROGRAM MUSIC One of the hallmarks of the Romantic Period (if not of small-R romantic music in other periods) is an interest in Nature as a source of inspiration. We had seen it in paintings much earlier but most of the music from the 18th Century (with rare exceptions) would be considered “ABSTRACT music” – music that is primarily about form and content, perhaps dramatic or maybe dealing with contrasts but not specifically “about” anything – not, in other words, telling a story. Granted, there are pieces like Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” four violin concerto each one depicting the different seasons of the year complete with bird-song or rustling winds or hunting-parties or dogs barking or people slipping on the ice; and there are short harpsichord pieces by French composers that might depict an event or create an image or suggest a specific mood, but these are more the exception to the Baroque and Classical eras. The idea of “PROGRAM music” was to suggest a scene (like a painting) or imply a story (like a literary work). Today, it might be more like a “soundtrack” for a film, music that underpins the action, perhaps, helps set the mood or place the setting. Though a “program” piece like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (written around 1830) told a very explicit story supplied by the composer, many times a composer might give it a title and, if it’s a well-known story, the listener could supply the details that the title suggests. When Felix Mendelssohn was a young man, he visited Scotland and visited a famous cave on the Atlantic Coast of Scotland – sending home a drawing of the cave with a fragment of music underneath it, he later turned his memories and this scrap of music into a piece he called “Fingal’s Cave” or “The Hebrides.” The Entrance to Fingal's Cave in Scotland The music suggests the rising and falling of waves, the immensity of the cave, the growing awe of seeing the cave coming into view and so on. But in spite of the “program” behind the music, the music is still firmly structured as a “sonata form” just like the 1st movement of a Haydn or Beethoven symphony would have been – complete with contrasting themes, the proper digressions and returns from the tonal center and so on. It could be appreciated as both PROGRAM music AND ABSTRACT music! Here’s the Hebrides Overture overlaying a video travelogue of a visit the Cave the music describes: Even without knowing the title, it’s possible a listener could figure out what’s “behind” the music. Someone listening to the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique and knowing it only as the Symphony No. 1 in C Major would be lost because the “classical structure” of a traditional symphony is so subsumed by the programmatic element as to be unnoticeable beyond the division into movements and contrasting moods and tempos: Berlioz doesn’t care about traditional structure – he’s only interested in the emotional impact of his music and the story it is meant to convey. = = = = = = = We had also listened to two works that were inspired by “riding horses” – and the supernatural. The first was Franz Schubert’s song “The Erlking” in which a father rides through a night-time storm to take his son who is ill and hallucinating, imagining he’s being pursued by the Erlking and his daughters, nasty sprites who entice and then kill children: = = = = = = = = = = Notice how Schubert arranges the three different characters: The Father (Narrator) until 1:04 when the Son answers him with the voice now in a slightly higher register (and sung more softly by the singer) returning to the Father (deeper voice & register) at 1:20 (“My son, you’re imagining this”). At 1:29, we hear a slight change in the accompaniment, the voice becomes more insinuating – this is the Erlking (“You lovely child, come play with me”). Schubert then alternates between these three voices. When the father arrives home, he looks down and realizes his son – is dead. *** ***** ******** ***** *** The next example was Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from “The Ring of the Nibelung” – the current Met production in which 24 planks form a “machine” that can change shape, form steps, walls, platform and – as here – even horses riding through the air. = = = = = (the basic “Ride” is the first 2:30 or so but the “Ride” continues, once they’ve landed, till about 5:20). = = = = = = In addition to the production – how the director realizes the idea of the Valkyries flying through the air on their horses (impossible to depict on stage in Wagner’s initial production in 1876) – feel the constant pounding of hooves and the rushing of wind suggested in the music itself. In one sense, you don’t need the visual element because your imagination can supply it from hearing the music. *** ***** ******** ***** *** There were two paths that essentially ran parallel (or crossed back-and-forth) throughout the bulk of the 19th Century. Though both have “Romantic” elements, one is more right-brained “romantic” (Dionysian) than the other, which could be described as more left-brained “classical” (Apollonian). The right-brained path (more subjective) would lead from Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (the “Pastoral”) and his later music like the 9th Symphony to the Romantic Music of Berlioz, of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. This left-brained branch (more objective, more “abstract”) became the music of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann and Schumann’s protégé, Johannes Brahms. Though technically “Romantic” composers of the 19th Century, their stylistic attitudes are essentially different (sometimes almost the opposite) of those following the Right-Brained Path – they are more “classical” in their style but could at times be very “romantic” in mood: Schumann’s miniature piano pieces that tell stories, for instance, are certainly Romantic in spirit, but overall he might be a more objective composer. The line is very fine and easily crossed: like a traditional DIALECTICAL synthesis, Robert Schumann could be part-Romantic and part-Classical (compared to Berlioz, Wagner and Liszt) but one who might score slightly higher on the one side or the other depending on the piece of music or the particular moment. Certainly his “multiple personality” issues – one of his characters in his writings about music he called Master Raro (after an old philosopher) who would examine things according to certain left-brain, logical patterns, while two others he called Florestan who would see things from a certain right-brain, passionate and emotional viewpoint, or Eusebius who, also right-brained, was more contemplative and introspective. At times, any of these would dominate over the others, or at times they’d be in conflict with each other, both in his reaching a conclusion in his writings as well as in the music he composed. Schumann’s inner struggles – both in terms of his music and his life (whether we view it as “insanity” or not) reminds me of the comment by Native Americans who tell us, inside each of us there are two wolves: one, the white wolf, represents good; the black wolf represents evil – and they are constantly fighting for control of your spirit. The student asks “which one wins?” The teacher says “the one you feed.” - Dick Strawser 2 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Three Posts, a Novel and the Rites of Spri... Thoughts On a Train It's been a busy week at Dr. Dick Central - aside from dealing with an occasionally comatose computer barely surviving the 2nd anniversary of its purchase. In the meantime, I have been blogging about Beethoven's last piano sonata and a recent Market Square Concerts performance with pianist Jeremy Denk which you can read here. There is also a new post at the Harrisburg Symphony blog about their up-coming performances of Verdi's opera, La Traviata, this weekend. You can read that one here and another one about the orchestra's 82nd birthday here. On the other hand, I've also been working out details to get started on yet a third novel, turning The Doomsday Symphony and The Lost Chord into a trilogy - or perhaps a classical music-appreciation thrillogy - with The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben. In addition to characters like Vexilla Regis and her husband Bognar ("Bugsy") Regis who live in an old English castle, Phlaumix House, there's something of a dowager countess named Frieda F. Erden, a butler named Vector, a bureaucrat from the National Trust named Gordon Nott and a rather lackadaisical manager, Lacey Fayer. The plot centers around the further adventures of Beethoven's Immortal Beloved and the manifestation of the Beethoven Bloodline, not to give too much away... So yes, there's dirty work afoot - just in time for Spring Cleaning. And since it's spring - or at least should be, according to the calendar - might I remind you of this previous post about a certain ballet by Igor Stravinsky? Dr. Dick 2 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Beethoven and his 9th Symphony Thoughts On a Train Beethoven (foreground) in 1812 It’s possible to teach a complete course on Beethoven by himself; even to teach a course on his nine symphonies alone. Recently, music critic and fellow blogger Matthew Guerrieri wrote an excellent book on the influence of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony called The First Four Notes, 363 pages about what might have influenced him to write it in the first place and the impact it’s had on future imaginations. If his 5th Symphony weren’t enough, it was Beethoven’s 9th – like the composer himself, a megalith in the world of classical music – that placed him squarely in the pantheon with the likes of Shakespeare and (at least in Europe) the German poet Goethe. It regularly appears on lists of favorite works of classical music in those Top 40 lists beloved of a box-office-oriented pop culture – and usually as No. 1. Considering it’s over an hour long, this seems a bit odd, and though its great “Ode to Joy” theme in its last movement may be easily accessible to the average listener, one would hope there’s more to its popularity than just a hummable tune. Even though by now, it’s outdated technology, do you know why the CD holds around 70 minutes of music? The story goes that when Philips and SONY were developing this technology in the 1970s, they were looking for that could hold all of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in a single-disc format. That may or may not be entirely true – even Snopes calls it “undetermined” – but it’s a story that, true or not, might be one more example of the importance of Beethoven’s art in the general world around us or another example of the mythology that’s grown up around him. So, what about this 9th Symphony? First of all, by any standard, it’s a huge piece and not just because of its 70-minute playing time. The last movement alone is unprecedented. In Mozart and Haydn’s day, only a generation earlier, the finale was a kind of “happy ending” afterthought to the importance of the first movement with its tonal drama told in Sonata Form (whether the music sounded “dramatic” in our sense of the word or not). But Beethoven had been changing that in the course of his career, not just in the symphonies. The last movement of the 3rd Symphony (the “Eroica”) is a large-scale set of variations and the weighty equal to its first movement. The finale of the 5th Symphony is the dramatic resolution of the tension of its opening movement with its famous “fate knocks at the door” motive: for the first time, there was unresolved tension at the end of the 1st movement that, eventually, needed to be resolved. Beethoven, painted in 1823 This led to the standard “conflict-resolution” symphonies of the Romantic Era, later in the 19th Century, where the “conflict with fate” (just one such potential conflict) is triumphantly overcome in the finale – we hear this same “program” [*] in the 1st Symphony of Johannes Brahms, completed in 1876, as well as the 4th Symphony of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky written a year later (and since it was such a success, he used it again in his 5th Symphony), plus Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony (completed in 1902) and Dmitri Shostakovich (inspired by his experience with Stalin’s disapproval and the possibility of being arrested for his bourgeois artistic attitudes which we might call “crimes against the proletariat”) written during the height of Stalin’s purges in 1937 (the question, depending on how you view the tempo of the last movement, is whether the finale is triumphant or numbly following orders – it’s a long story but… of course… more on that later). = = = = = [*] “program” in this sense means an underlying story whether directly described in the music or implied in its emotional appeal. “Music that tells a story” is often called simply “program music.” In this case, it’s not an actual story but one that is inferred by critics and most listeners. = = = = = The very opening of the symphony is almost “anti-classical.” If the whole purpose of classical logic was to allow the listener to place himself on the “you-are-here” map in the sense of the clarity of its form and the sense of its tonal scheme (which is, basically, an aspect of defining that form), the vague sonority and ambiguous harmonic motion of the opening is more like an invitation to enter a dream-like state with a treasure map to find out where you are. We know it is D Minor but beyond that, what might lie ahead? The closest thing in music before this (the symphony was written in the early-1820s) was the opening of Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, which at the time was regarded as one of the greatest works ever written (Beethoven studied with Haydn in the early-1790s and had attended The Creation’s premiere in 1798). Its opening, called “The Representation of Chaos” might not be chaos as we imagine it today – helter-skelter energy without any purpose or direction (as in “chaotic”) – but more the vague ambiguity of obscuring mists that only later is resolved – ta-daaah! – to a brilliant C Major Chord as out of this void, God created Light (about 2:20 into this clip). Curiously, as harmonically ambiguous as Haydn’s chaos may sound, it is still in Sonata Form! That’s Classical Logic for you. Though Beethoven’s sense of “chaos” is less murky and not the lengthy harmonic labyrinth Haydn sets up, it is still a striking opening. It begins (at 0:06) with the interval of an open 5th – neither major nor minor – which expands into a rhythmic falling-motive (notice how it gets fuller in texture and how the statement of the motive begins to pick up speed and volume) that turns out to be a dominant chord leading up to the first appearance of the tonic at 0:32. This falling-motive now expands into the full range of the orchestra by itself (no harmony for five measures) which then continues to unfold in short fragments: a new idea at 0:48 which then leads directly to what sounds like a restatement of the opening vague hollow-sounding 5th but now on the tonic of D (minor) at 1:02. Are we still in the Introduction or is this really the first theme? Doesn’t sound very tuneful, does it? Then, this open 5th resolves again but not to tonic D Minor but to a new key – B-flat Major at 1:26. Unexpected – and it keeps on going, spinning along (notice the reminder of the first “theme” churning away at 1:43) until it seems to reach a kind of melodic resolution (if not harmonic) at 2:00 before we hear another “theme” (or thematic fragment that also continues to spin) until 4:25 when we suddenly (unexpectedly?) return to the opening empty interval, the same pitches we heard at the very beginning. The 1st Movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor: = = = = = = = = = = This is what you could call an ”open-ended” theme – as opposed to a self-contained tune that ends with a clearly marked cadence. But it’s not so much a melody as a collection of fragments that can be taken apart and expanded. And harmonically, while it’s very active, we’ve spent most of our time in the unexpected key of B-flat Major (if you were listening to a symphony in 1790, you would say “it should be in F Major, that’s the rule” – or that was the standard operating procedure). Suddenly we’re back setting up D Minor all over again. “Ah,” the astute listener from the 1820s would say, “we’re repeating the exposition.” But instead of doing what he did the first time around, at 4:40, Beethoven quietly switches gears. The careful listener would probably catch this and go, “ah hah! Maybe we’re into the Development Section already instead?” And from there on, it’s definitely harmonically more active like you’d expect a Development section to be. Only… uhm, haven’t we been doing something like that already? As we continue through the on-going Development, the tension, after dropping back a bit, continues to mount around 8:00 till it sounds like it should reach a cadence at 8:08 – but, no, he keeps pulling you along with an unexpected chord – though it’s really a D Major Chord (going to G Minor?) which (after a dissonant chord at 8:27) finally resolves to the expected “main theme” (without the introductory open 5th) at 8:30 but it doesn’t sound like it did at the opening. In fact, it sounds like it’s still – despite all the expected pitch “D” you hear in it – developing! Then, at 9:09 there’s a sudden change of mood – “oh wait,” you think, “isn’t that one of the secondary theme fragments?” It is and it’s in D Major, like it’s supposed to be in a Recapitulation. But by 9:30 we’re on the move (harmonically) again – in fact, while all of this material sounds familiar, we’re never quite sure where we are harmonically. He brings in sudden – and brief – changes of mood and stretches out some of these chords (and vague tonal areas) and with it stretching the tension until we reach 11:33 where we hear the “main theme” in D Minor as it ought to be. But no sooner started than he’s off again – “where are we,” the listener used to nicely balanced, predictable classical form would be thinking. Well, at 12:41, that sounds like something from the Main Theme, in the horn? Right? And it does resolve to a D Minor chord at 12:55 but not for long – again, he’s off… and where to now? It takes us till 13:55 – another minute – to arrive at a D Minor cadence that feels like tonic. But wait… this isn’t the Recapitulation, is it? It sounds like it’s wrapping up – is this going to be the end? It’s not the “theme” but sounds like part of it. The tension continues to build (dynamics as much as the push-and-pull of the harmonic expectations) until – at 14:37 – there it is, the Main Theme. But wait… is that the end? At 14:50 – yes, that’s the end of the movement! So what happened to the Development and the Recapitulation? This is one of the Big Changes leading into the Romantic Period. Say good-bye to the nice “you-are-here” kind of logic from Haydn’s symphony. The Style Pendulum has swung (again) from Simplicity to Complexity – the components are all there but the boundaries are vague and in fact can be so “smeared” (a Haydn-loving listener would say “messy, indeed”) as to be unintelligible even to the astute listener. We are now all on an adventure – and the structural form has become a map we have to figure out in order to find our way. The principles still exist – statement / digression / restatement – but sometimes they may over-lap so that we’re not sure, even before we’ve figured out the “exposition” part of it, what’s exposition and what’s development. And later, what’s development and what’s recapitulation. There’s not much “contrast” between themes – if we can even think of them as the kind of melodies people were expecting just a couple decades ago – and part of what we might overlook is how all of this, some 15 minutes of music, grows out of that opening thirty seconds that just keeps spinning along almost as if it doesn’t really seem to know where it’s going. However, once you examine it, you would realize it knows exactly where it’s going but the form just isn’t the same as it used to be. To paraphrase an advertising campaign about the progress being made in generations of technology (I think it was used originally for cars): “This ain’t your Grandfather’s Symphony!” Beethoven worked on this first movement for a long time. We’re not sure exactly how long, but at some point in 1817, he wrote down some ideas in a sketchbook that would later become these thematic molecules. What eventually became the longer “theme” at the opening was originally for a Symphony in B-flat Major though it later became a Symphony in D Minor – which, ironically, spends a lot of time in B-flat Major, not the old-fashioned expected key of F Major. So even before he technically began working on his 9th Symphony, he was jotting down ideas probably five years earlier. *** ***** ******** ***** *** The S.O.P for the inner movements was a slow movement in second place and a fast movement in third (originally a minuet but later a lively dance-like, often rustic movement called a scherzo which in Italian means “joke”). Usually, people say Beethoven reversed the order for the 2nd and 3rd Movements because the finale was so grand, it needed the contrast of coming out of the slow movement, not the scherzo. But that’s not true. You see, Beethoven had already planned on a 2nd Movement scherzo and a 3rd Movement Adagio before he’d even figured out what he would do for his finale! The reason, then, was because the 1st movement was so weighty and not that fast, that a contrast with a long slow movement which might also be very intense (as it turned out to be) was not that much contrast. So to give his audience a break, he planned on going right from this first movement to the scherzo. Even so, it’s not much of a joke: it’s actually very dramatic. Does the opening motive remind you of something? The opening theme of the 1st Movement, once it got started, was based on falling 5th. This time, it’s falling octaves. But on only two notes: the same pitches we hear in that open intervals that sounds so unstable and vague at the very beginning of the symphony. And those first seven seconds generate the scherzo’s main theme – which, far from being a joke, is actually a fugue! Usually, fugues in the Age of Mozart and Haydn were very academic sounding and associated with showing off the composer’s intelligence, being able to handle this old-fashioned skill from the Baroque Era of 50 to 100 years before. But maybe that’s the joke, here: Beethoven shows he can write a fugue – kind of – but it’s kind of a hurly-burly scurrying fugue and ready to take off in any direction it pleases with sudden changes of mood and sudden interruptions, especially from the timpani (or kettledrums) around 5:03. The “Scherzo” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9: = = = = = = = = = = There’s also a very contrasting section that begins at 6:56 – the energy-level changes, the lines are more step-wise and, well, more linear. Then it’s back to the opening again at 9:40. This contrasting or “B section,” as we’d call it, is – especially after that puzzling first movement – almost mind-numbingly simple: lots of repetition, almost obsessively repetitive (but so is the fugue) and by comparison almost static with its long sustained tones behind the bubbling foreground. Then we repeat the “A Section” at 9:40 and continue (leaving out the ordinarily repeated segments) until 13:14 when it sounds like we’re going to repeat the “B Section” also but it’s only a brief reminiscence until the octaves pound us to that final D. *** ***** ******** ***** *** I’m not going to spend much time with the slow movement which is unfortunate, because it’s an incredibly beautiful Adagio and despite the greatness of the other three, always one of my favorites in all of Beethoven’s output. In this case, where the themes before were “modular” – based on thematic molecules or cells – the themes in this movement are long, linear, song-like and constantly varied. The opening theme (starting at 0:24) is almost prayer-like with its dialogue between strings and winds, and its contrasting theme (starting at 2:19) is built with a constant rising then falling of its components. He then builds on these two ideas, alternating and varying them, to create a long, almost seamless respite from all the ambiguity of the first movement and the dynamic rhythmic drive of the second movement. The 3rd Movement, Adagio, of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor: = = = = = = = = = = But then Beethoven hit a brick wall: what to do after all this? He’s now got three movements, each about 15 minutes long which would still make this longer than a typical Haydn Symphony and about as long as his entire 3rd Symphony written twenty years earlier. Did he need another movement at all? Wasn’t that long enough? One of the things we know from the sketchbooks was that Beethoven had tried several ideas for an orchestral finale and none of them seemed to please him. Now, he had always wanted to set Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” ever since he was a young man. The poem had been written in 1785 (when Beethoven was 14) and became the equivalent of a popular hit in the world of German poetry. While it’s essentially a Classical Era poem, the inspiration was initially that sense of excitement generated by what led to the French Revolution a few years later, that fermenting agitation for more freedom. In fact, the initial sketches, so the story goes, indicate the idea of “Joy” was more “Freedom” but Schiller knew that would get him into trouble with the secret police, so he changed it. Now, throughout his life, Beethoven was an admirer of the sense of Freedom for the Common Man that the French Revolution promised and which fell flat on its face when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and turned the whole idea of a French Republic into just another tyrannical government. It’s interesting to remind ourselves of this since Beethoven lived in Imperial Vienna, was a friend of the Imperial family (and a teacher of the Emperor’s little brother) and associated with many of the city’s finest (and richest) aristocrats. Whatever his political sense, he knew his livelihood depended on aristocratic support and so, whether consciously being dialectical or not – the “thesis/antithesis = synthesis” formula – Beethoven still managed to proclaim his universal love for the Brotherhood of Man which might have sounded suspicious in 1820s Vienna when the Masonic Brotherhood had been driven underground and anything about “freedom” smacked of revolution against the state or, given the constant state of warfare during Napoleon’s reign till he was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, pro-French or pro-Republican sympathies. (Incidentally, these same sympathies would erupt later in a series of revolutions across Europe in 1848-1849, but… more on that, later.) So, going against all expectations, Beethoven decided to take Schiller’s poem and set it to music with chorus and four vocal soloists in addition to what was then already a large orchestra. And, considering the length of the poem, eventually adding an additional 20 minutes or so to the symphony’s full length – unheard of, at the time, and still uncommon for another sixty years (with a few exceptions). You can read Schiller’s poem here. http://www.raptusassociation.org/ode1785.html Whatever it may sound like to a German in the early-1800s, it sounds quite often silly in English to modern listeners today. I know of no performance that ever tried to sing Beethoven’s 9th in English. So, after these first three movements and especially the long calm slow movement, Beethoven wakes everybody up with a most surprising chord that’s almost like a thunderbolt to get his listener’s attention. This is a true “dissonance” – both something needs to be resolved and an “ugly sound.” It clatters through what could be a frenzied and chaotic counterpart to the first movement’s opening (the very opposite of its ambiguity) before breaking out in something else unexpected: the cellos and basses play this long declamatory passage beginning at 0:13. Now, this is technically an operatic convention – it’s called a “recitative,” something non-melodic in which a singer would declaim a text in a passage that would resemble the speech-pattern, accompanied by occasional punctuation-like chords. But we have no idea what the implied text might be – yet. The Finale to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor: = = = = = = = = = = At 0:24, the opening blast returns until it’s interrupted and pushed aside by the bass “recitative” at 0:33. Then, at 0:42 we hear something familiar – wait, that’s the opening of the First Movement! But at 0:55, it’s also pushed aside by the basses. After this seems to shrug itself off, at 1:13 we hear the opening of the Second Movement which then is also set aside by the “recitative” before, at 1:33, it’s the Third Movement’s turn. Ah, this time, it’s a gentler reaction from the “recitative” before it becomes more aggressive as it had been earlier (1:55). Now, at 2:04, we have a new idea hinted at which, if you’ve never heard it before, might sound like a ray of hope. In fact, the “recitative” seems to think very highly of this new idea and cadences authoritatively in the key of D Major at 2:26. Whew! Now we know where we’re supposed to be. Then he starts what will become the Main Theme of this last movement. It sounds like a hymn and in fact it is so simple and direct it could easily be sung by a congregation with little musical background. After the complexities of the earlier movements, this is beginning to sound very simple – and so therefore, reassuring. This is, by the way, an example of a "self-contained" or "closed" theme, complete it itself and one that is less easy to spin off into ever-evolving continuity. Instead, he accomplishes length by repeating and varying it. Between 2:29 and 5:32, Beethoven creates several variations on this hymn-like tune which repeat the melody as you’ve already heard it (initially, all by itself without harmony) and gradually adding other layers and textures, including, at 4:52, a variation with a martial flare. Then at 5:33, he begins to expand the theme by closing it off with a little “coda” or extension (coda in Italian means “tail,” literally). He starts moving further afield and it’s almost like he’s thinking out loud – where to next? Here? No… maybe… Then at 6:09, back comes the opening furor – but when you’d expect this instrumental “recitative” to start up again, it’s actually being sung by a singer – a bass (and that’s pronounced, in music, “base”) with the words “O friends, not these tones… Let’s find more pleasing, joyful sounds.” And with shouts of “Joy!” answered by the chorus, now, the last movement officially begins: the introduction over, here is the Main Theme, now sung to the words “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” or “Joy, beautiful spark of the Gods.” This is the theme known universally as “The Ode to Joy.” At 7:48, he begins another series of variations on the theme, bringing in the other solo voices. Around 8:30, another variation but now that we’re familiar with the tune, he can be a little less literal in repeating it: we hear more it’s shape and essence rather than a literal restatement of the theme itself. By 9:33, we’ve now moved away from all this D Major tonality and something new starts: by 9:47, we’ve now started a march-like treatment of the theme complete with bass drum and cymbals (a cliché that would’ve been called “Turkish Music” in a city that only about 140 years earlier when the Turkish Empire (the Moslem’s Ottoman Empire) brought its border within view of Vienna’s walls). It then continues with the solo tenor and the men’s voices of the choir. The very sound of this would’ve had Viennese listeners tapping their toes and nodding their heads in rhythm. Considering the drama of the 1st Movement, we are now in a “populist” vein – something that today would seem to be contradictory. But in Beethoven’s day, “High Art” and “Popular Art” could exist side by side. At 11:10, we’re off, developing ideas from the theme by way of the march and the tonal scheme gets very active. It’s almost as if, the way things are tossed back and forth between the winds and the strings that we’re fighting the battle after we’ve already celebrated the victory! Then at 12:30, we hear all this octave intervals sweeping back and forth like the theme from the First Movement or the opening of the Scherzo but in a very remote key from the one we’d normally expect for a symphony in D. With a great rush, then, after two suggestions of starting the Ode to Joy Theme almost, at 12:56 Beethoven sweeps us solidly back into D Major with the return of the Main Theme, now, almost shouted by the full chorus: a Triumphal March! After all this, we’ve gone about 14 minutes basically on one theme. But at 13:47 it abruptly stops. What next, you ask? A new theme! Sung to the words “Be embraced, oh ye millions,” again a melodic idea (not much of a tune, by comparison to the Ode to Joy Theme) by itself as if proclaimed by angels accompanied by – ta da! – trombones! Notice how the statements alternate between the stentorian declamation and the gentler full choir, harmonized continuation. Now, if this is going to be our “second theme,” how hellaciously long do you think this “sonata form” movement is going to be if we’re only at the 2nd Theme after 15 minutes??? Then, after some spiritual questing – “look for God beyond the stars!” – at 17:19, something unexpected happens, resolving this quest for God. Beethoven combines the Ode to Joy Theme with an almost joyful skipping rhythm against this new “B Theme,” the song of Universal Brotherhood. And then turns it into – a fugue! Though not a technically strict one, but definitely fugal! And despite the academic, intellectual reactions to the very idea of a fugue, this is the most joyful moment in a whole movement all about joy. In fact, it’s so joyful, at 18:37 begins a passage where the sopranos hang on to a high A – and that’s pretty high for a choir-ful of sopranos – for the next thirteen measures (try holding your breath that long, much less singing a high note that’s hard to control!). But this suddenly breaks off in a contrasting section at 18:54 – “do you bow down, ye millions?” Then at 19:40, back in D Major after a brief digression, we resume variations on the Main “Ode to Joy” Theme – but less strictly, only suggesting the theme and its text. To a well-experienced listener of Classical Symphonies, this would sound like the start of the “wrapping up,” the beginning of the “Coda” and the final reinforcement of the key and its themes. However, there are stops and starts along the way. The tension isn’t quite ready to be completely resolved, yet. At 21:04, yet one more digression. We swing off suddenly to another key (ordinarily it wouldn’t be expected but several times he’s already landed in B Major so by now, maybe it’s not so unexpected) where the four soloists have what is called a “cadenza.” Like the “recitative” was an operatic convention, this is a convention from the concerto – a work for solo instrument and orchestra – where the orchestra would stop playing and the soloist has a long extended solo passage usually of a virtuosic (“technically showy”) nature that might sound like it’s being improvised (“made up on the spot”) – which actually is what soloists were expected to do in Mozart and Beethoven’s day. So, this time, Beethoven gives his solo quartet of singers a chance to show off before it ends, leading us back to D Major by 21:54 and from there, it’s a joyous celebration all the way to the end, complete with bass drum and cymbal again. But just when you think it’s over, a sudden “mis-resolution,” a change at 22:54 – nooooo! Not another prolonging passage – which slows down, but never loses its sense of majesty (perhaps that sense of slow-motion just before you break through the finish line) until, having done so at 23:09, it’s now a final jubilant shout, perhaps a victory lap! And those are, very definitely, final chords!! *** ***** ******** ***** *** People often say that Mozart may write music that is sublime or divine, but by comparison Beethoven is more human and, often, more universal as he certainly is in his setting of texts about the Universal Brotherhood of Man. Small wonder that the “Ode to Joy” theme itself has gone on to become a popular hymn tune and eventually the (Inter)National Anthem of the European Union. Beethoven’s 9th has become a universal favorite – it’s a New Year’s Tradition in Japan, surprisingly enough, where community orchestras and choruses will perform it every year. It’s a major undertaking and always an event when it appears on an orchestra’s concert program. In many radio polls, whether in this country or Europe, Beethoven’s 9th (even if it’s only because of this last movement’s theme) is usually No. 1 on the list of favorite works. How was it received at its premiere in 1825? Beethoven was by now stone deaf but he wanted to conduct it. The official conductor allowed him to stand on stage and conduct while telling the orchestra not to watch him. He sat to the side of the stage, beating time for the orchestra he could not hear. This was the first time Beethoven had appeared in public as a “performer” in some 12 years and the hall was packed – word had gotten out that this was going to be an amazing work. Two of the singers were among the best known in Vienna. When it was over, Beethoven was still conducting. The alto singer came forward, took him by the arm and turned him around to see the audience. They had erupted in applause between movements and sometimes after certain sections of the piece (it was considered okay, then) but Beethoven only saw this at the end. He received five standing ovations and even if he couldn’t hear the applause, he could see the audiences jubilant response. He was given a hero’s welcome. Earlier symphonies – his major works – had often been well-received but there were often those, especially among the critics, who thought he was mad or if he weren’t deaf, he wouldn’t have written it that way (as in “so badly”). Even a colleague, the composer Carl Maria von Weber (himself a leading contemporary composer of the day) thought, after his 7th Symphony in 1813, that Beethoven was “ripe for the mad-house.” His one opera, Fidelio, had been a disaster – not once, but twice. His great Violin Concerto, today regarded as perhaps the greatest violin concerto ever written, was so dismally received, it was never performed in his lifetime and in fact never entered the repertoire until 1844, 17 years after Beethoven’s death, when it was played by a brilliant young violinist named Joseph Joachim who was 12 at the time. But this time everyone seemed to be in universal agreement: this was Beethoven’s greatest work. The dissenting voices – and some of them are significant – aren’t about the musical values, but the technical ones. True, it’s not a great symphony because it’s hardly typical. And, also true, sometimes it’s quite badly written for some of the instruments: I know several bass players who hate playing this piece because it’s so difficult for them to play, making unrealistic demands on what the instrument can do; several players on the contrabassoon say Beethoven had no idea what the instrument could or could not do – he just doubled the string basses which are already having trouble! The choral writing is also not very good at times – and as exciting as it might sound, that 13-bar High A in the sopranos is most unkind, especially so far into the piece when they’re already going to be tired. When the solo soprano has to sing a note one step higher than that, she’s singing it on a weird vowel that is almost impossible to control on that pitch – even if she does it well, it still sounds uncomfortable. But as Beethoven, deaf or not, once said to a violinist complaining about how difficult his part was in his latest string quartet, “What do I care about you and your damned fiddle!?” Beethoven was Beethoven – even as a young man, he was always who he was and never what other people wanted him or wished him to be. Perhaps that has something to do with why his music still, 186 years after his death, continues to inspire us today, just as it has every generation since then. Before, society didn’t pay much attention to composers: they were craftsmen, employed by the church or by an aristocrat and they did their job, turning out music as expected or required. Beethoven presents us with the first time a composer became a hero – and with it, an almost mythological reverence that has been difficult to ignore. For a man who had to deal with deafness at the height of his career, who complained about constant stomach trouble, who had a miserably unhappy personal life with his friends and family, with all the difficulties reality kept pushing in his way, it is amazing to compare the music we know with the man we sometimes overlook. Sometimes, his music is what it is despite his reality – especially his deafness – but it’s quite possible his music and the interior world he created for it was also because of it. - Dick Strawser 3 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

A Brief Introduction to Beethoven and a co... Thoughts On a Train Coming face to face with Beethoven can be a daunting experience. First of all, since he seems to be regarded as the Greatest of the Great Composers by so many lovers of classical music, you may find him either so thoroughly intimidating or you might think he must be over-rated. Again, different people will always react differently – and how we feel about him today doesn’t mean he was always regarded this way, or that he won’t be regarded differently in the future. Many people might consider the greatest composers in the classical music world to include Bach and Mozart, though there was a time when Bach was almost completely forgotten and largely unknown to a wider audience until some seventy years after his death. And don’t forget Mozart couldn’t find a decent job during his lifetime and also wasn’t that well known not long after his death except for a few pieces and even that to a relatively small group of enthusiasts. It was in 1877, not long after conducting the first performance of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 (which he called “Beethoven’s 10th), the conductor Hans von Bülow came up with “The Three Bs – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms!” which was essentially a marketing phrase rather than an honest historical assessment. However, somebody else had already come up with a 3-B tribute for Beethoven’s “logical successor,” the French composer, Hector Berlioz – and that was back in 1854. But by 1877, most people (especially Germans) would no longer consider Berlioz the equal of Beethoven. But Beethoven’s star, once ascended, never really faltered though he became more god-like and titanic and less of a mere mortal. In fact, one of the problems with classical music is that we forget these composers ever were human: they’ve become marble busts and their lives either bearing little impact on how we consider their music or becoming so mythologized, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction (or at least glorification). We tend to overlook that Beethoven had a rough childhood, hated his father, his mother dying when he was not yet 20, and spending more time quarreling with his brothers throughout his life than having any kind of familial relationships with them; that he never had any kind of loving relationship with a woman throughout his life, as well – at least a fulfilling, two-sided relationship (he was often in love but often with women who, whether married or part of the wealthy society who looked down on Beethoven’s kind as mere tradesmen, unattainable); he was frequently ill – and not just his deafness – which would have stifled any man’s creativity; and had a personality that often alienated him from the society of the people he needed for his artistic support. There was another major distinction between Beethoven as a composer and composers of previous generations: Mozart and Haydn, for all their brilliance and originality, were still basically servants employed by the upper class aristocracy. Beethoven was the first great composer who didn’t have what we might call a “steady gig.” He was never an aristocrat’s court composer or resident pianist, nor did he ever hold a job as a music director for a church or the equivalent of a “university professor” (which in itself was something new). He made his living primarily as a teacher of piano lessons to private students – mostly the young ladies of middle-class families who were expected to play the piano and sing as the family’s entertainment center in the days before television and sound systems (later, they would be expected to be good cooks but in those days, you hired people to do your cooking; you made your own music unless you were rich enough to hire some musicians, too). For a while, he was also a concert pianist, playing primarily what we would call “solo recitals” but also appearing occasionally with orchestras and chamber ensembles (unlike other concert artists of the next generation, he never toured all over Europe). In fact, the whole idea of the “public concert” was something that was fairly new. It had only been during the days of Mozart’s childhood that such a thing started happening in London – originated by one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons who settled there – so that musicians (both performers and composers) could make a living by performing for ordinary people who would actually pay money to hear their music. Before, the general public never got a chance to hear the performances that were held in aristocratic homes or the castles of the crowned heads of Europe (including all those little German city-states). J. S. Bach had given some public concerts as the director of Leipzig’s “Collegium Musicum” where, without a public concert hall to hold them in, people went to Zimmerman’s Coffee House to listen to programs featuring concertos and sonatas and suites of dances. In Beethoven’s time, then, while he also played in the homes of the wealthy, he also gave public concerts. In addition to playing specific pieces – which could involve a number of performers playing in a variety of combinations – pianists often would improvise. This was something Beethoven, as a composer as well as a performer, excelled at and often there were competitions at some of these programs – imagine a kind of reality-TV approach to dueling pianists – and of course rivalries within the musical community. It was one way that Beethoven began to become well known in the late-1790s after he’d arrived in Vienna to study with Franz Josef Haydn. Beethoven, unlike Mozart, was not a “fast” composer, capable of writing a symphony in a few days, if need be. Nor was he the craftsman like Haydn who needed to turn out a certain amount of music in a short amount of time. He was often pains-taking, spending months working out his themes and then figuring out some of the possibilities of what he could do with them. This makes sense when you figure Mozart, during his 35-year life-span, wrote more than the 41 published symphonies we know (several of the early ones are quite short and rather meager in comparison to the later ones), or that Haydn, over a period of 36 years, composed at least 104 symphonies – but during Beethoven’s symphony-writing career, between 1800 and 1825, he completed only 9. Well, “only”… Granted, those nine symphonies are all considered masterpieces where Mozart or Haydn would likely be remembered for maybe a dozen or so symphonies - actually, for Mozart, perhaps a half-dozen - in the standard repertoire today, but their idea of what a symphony is changed over the course of their own lifetimes: it began as a functional, orchestral multi-movement piece for an evening's entertainment that was more craft than potential masterpiece, possibly written for an occasion and, quite likely, not intended for future performances. Later, the symphony became more of a “significant effort” and even if they weren’t intended to be future masterpieces, they had more of a sense of posterity about them. We don’t know why Mozart wrote his last three symphonies – he had no performance lined up for them and there seemed to be no commission to bring them about and this was a time when few artists set about writing something that didn't have a reason to be written (unlike later when a composer might think "hmm, perhaps I'll write a symphony") – but they are each a masterpiece and, considering they were all three written between June and August of 1788 (along with several other works), each different from the other. Haydn wrote his last twelve symphonies for concert series in London, primarily to sell tickets, so there was a sense of writing for “popular” appeal, here, that the others may have lacked, another problem to consider when trying to figure out how to write a symphony. Beethoven wrote his symphonies all for public consumption – not for aristocratic music-lovers though some of them were first heard in private concerts in aristocratic homes – and while there was an eye toward popular appeal, there was also a sense of universality about them that Haydn or Mozart would probably have never considered at the time they were writing symphonies. Would Beethoven’s symphonies have been different if he had lived 10-20 years earlier? Most likely. Would Haydn have written symphonies differently if he had continued writing symphonies had he lived longer? One of the favorite “what-if” games for classical music lovers is what Mozart would have sounded like if he had lived as long as Beethoven – that means, he would’ve died in 1813, around the time Beethoven was finishing his 7th and 8th Symphonies. Or as long as Haydn: then, Mozart would’ve died in 1833, outliving Beethoven by 6 years… Well, that’s all conjecture of course, but musicians are always developing: since they didn’t live in a vacuum, it’s quite likely they would have been greatly influenced by events of their time as well as artistic trends and attitudes in the musical world around them, adapting and “perfecting” their own creative styles in response to some new stimulus. *** ***** ******** ***** *** It’s not always wise to put too much stock in what a composer was doing at the time he was composing something, because art exists independently of the artist. Still, it’s interesting to realize what was going on in a composer’s life when he was working on a particular piece. For instance, I recently heard a string quartet by Franz Schubert. If nobody told me anything about it and I had no idea when it was written, it would have been a very enjoyable piece of music just as it was. But knowing he was 16 when he wrote (and wondering what I was doing when I was 16…) and also that he’d recently decided to quit school because he’d gotten less than acceptable grades in Latin and had failed Math – his scholarship, which he thought he might lose, was reduced with the admonition to do better in his class work, that “singing and music are but a subsidiary matter… good morals and diligence in study are of prime importance and an indispensable duty for all those who wish to enjoy the advantages” of this scholarship. So clearly this delightful piece came at a time when he felt strongly enough about becoming a composer that he probably put a little more thought and effort into it, perhaps, consciously or not. Incidentally, it was not written for “public consumption.” Like much chamber music of the time, it was intended to be performed and listened to “at home.” Schubert’s father, a school-teacher, was the cellist and his two older brothers played the violin; Schubert himself played the viola. There’s a big difference in the scope of this string quartet and those he would write at the end of his short life. So, let’s think about Beethoven having just had considerable success in Vienna as a pianist and as a composer with his first set of string quartets, his first symphony, a ballet that was at the moment quite popular, and some piano sonatas he had been performing around town. Then, on the verge of his mature career – he is now 32 – he is aware the problems he’d been having off and on with his hearing were becoming more serious, in fact could even mean he was going deaf. It’s one thing to go deaf in your old age or to contend with life having been deaf from an early age, but the sudden possibility that, so close to professional success as he was, he had to face it now must have been devastating – certainly as a performer but also as a composer. While he did not go “totally deaf” until the mid-1810s, in 1802 it was serious enough the letter he wrote to tell his brothers about it – known as the Heiligenstadt Testament – reads as much like a last will and testament as it might indicate thoughts of suicide. He wrote this in October while staying in what was then a rural suburb of Vienna called Heiligenstadt (it’s now been absorbed into the city limits), despairing of hearing the birds singing, the shepherd playing his pipes, of not being able to hear people talk to him, of wondering how to explain to people “I am deaf.” At the same time, he was working on the last movement of his 2nd Symphony. How would you expect it to sound, given the circumstances going on in his life at the time? = = = = = = = = = = Not exactly what you’d expect, is it? No gnashing of high drama, no sense of tragedy or loss – certainly nothing suicidal. If anything, the opening theme sounds a bit like a yelp – one critic described as a hiccup followed by a growling stomach – and it’s fairly high-powered and lively all the way to the end. Now, Beethoven felt his symphony didn’t need a big tragic ending – downer or not. There was nothing in what he had planned previously to indicate that turn of emotional events. Even though he swore he would overcome this handicap – and seize Fate by the throat – he knew this symphony did not need a fist-shaking “curse-you,-Fate” ending, either. The fact that it’s as boisterous as it is might lead modern listeners (perhaps over-analyzing it) to think it “over-compensating.” Regardless, Beethoven was able to compartmentalize reality and art and deal with such striking and presumably life-changing contrasts. While the 3rd Symphony, the famous “Eroica,” which was presumably inspired by Napoleon directly or by the image of a “great man,” a world hero, marks a decided change in the course of the symphony – it’s usually credited with being the first great masterpiece of the Romantic Era when it was completed in 1804 – it does include “a grand funeral march for a hero” in the slow movement even though there was no indication Napoleon was going to die anytime soon. Perhaps this idea of “seizing Fate by the throat” was behind the 5th Symphony (which he actually began after the 3rd, but ending up completing what became his 4th Symphony beforehand) with its famous “Fate Knocks at the Door” motive, the intense drama of the opening movement, the disturbing nature of the interruption in the third movement (based on the rhythms of that opening “Fate” motive) that leads directly into a dance of triumph in the finale. Though he never gave it a title or mentioned there was a story behind the music, it is too easy for us to think that here, Beethoven is grappling with the whole idea of his deafness, determined to overcome it. However, since he never mentioned anything about that, rather than making it a personal story, it becomes a universal one. It can now become – by inference – anybody’s story, anybody’s ordeal with a catastrophe that must be overcome and, in the end, is successfully overcome. That may explain why, aside from some initial reactions about its new-fangled drama being a little over the top, this symphony – or at least its first movement – has gone on to become one of the most popular works in the classical musical repertoire, familiar to people who’ve never even set foot in a concert hall before. Here’s the complete symphony in one of those “color-coded” analyses that will help you follow the formal design of each movement. = = = = = = = = = = *** ***** ******** ***** *** I don’t at the moment have much time to write about his 9th Symphony, but here’s a performance of the last movement, the setting of the “Ode to Joy,” which I’ll get back to later tonight… Well, actually, it became a post of its own: you can read it here and listen to clips of each movement of the symphony. = = = = = = = = = = This is one of those graphic representations that simplifies the score for those who can’t read musical notation but might be allow you to follow the textures and sonorities of the score. More to come, Dick Strawser 3 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story

Welcome to the Sonata Form (or "How I Lear... Thoughts On a Train The other day, there was a study reported at NPR’s blogsite, ominously called “The Deceptive Cadence,” about learning to like music you… well, they used the term “hate” (you can read it here) but it’s more like “learn to appreciate music that’s unfamiliar to you.” Here’s the original article:I like that they title it “hearing music as beautiful is a learned trait.” But yes, basically it says that the human ear (or that part of the brain that processes musical sounds) does not always process sounds the same way for everybody and that, for someone who hears something and doesn’t like it at first, it’s probably because they lack some intuitive understanding. And familiarity. Western music – as we know it – began as a series of mathematical ratios from the days of Pythagoras which would mean his ideas about how music – individual tones, their overtones and what leads to the organization of scales and chords (which eventually led to the concept of “tonality”) – goes back to about 500 BC. In other words, we’ve had some 2500 years of conditioning to these sounds. When something doesn’t “jibe” with that conditioned response, it sounds like so much “jive” – which may explain why an intelligent young woman from Nepal (the daughter of this Himalayan country’s prime minister) sat in a Harrisburg concert hall listening to the orchestra play Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Symphony (a long, luxurious, highly romantic-sounding war-horse of the Western concert repertoire) and couldn’t figure out why we would all sit there silently in the dark, listening to such noise (she quickly got out her knitting and started click-clacking away because, essentially, this is what women did when they had nothing to do but listen to Nepalese musicians perform). Of course, if I transported that Harrisburg audience to Katmandu to listen to some popular Nepali music – like this classic old Nepali love-song which still sounds like it’s based on something similar to a Western scale though it lacks what we call “harmony” – they would probably all cover their ears and run for the nearest radio to listen to their favorite pop singers or some Beethoven and Mozart for relief. So, researchers in Australia did a study and found that “the more participants understood about the music's structure — even down to individual chords — the more they enjoyed what they were hearing. To prove that point, the Australians took on a second experiment. They selected 19 participants without musical training and gave them some music theory instruction, particularly in identifying the pitches of certain chords. After 10 such experiences, those participants were not just better at pitch identification but also found those chords to be less dissonant, even when they were technically ‘dissonant’ according to traditional music theory. That is: The more you hear, the more you'll love.” *** ***** ******** ***** *** When I talk to students about the different aspects of music, I often use the analogy of the human body. Like other people, usually the first thing we react to is what we see – the surface of the visible person: depending on the order you might see them in, a person’s skin or hair or eye color, what a person’s wearing – and how many times do “first impressions” lead to judging a book by its cover? So, since the first thing most people respond to in a piece of music is probably the melody, this could be the equivalent of a person’s outward physical appearance: the skin, the hair and eye-color, different aspects of the face that we might respond to, what (essentially) makes one person look different from someone else. But underneath this surface, there is more to that body or that person: and this is where some other aspects of music come into play: after talking about harmony, rhythm and form, it’s not difficult to realize that rhythm is like the blood flowing through a person’s body; or that harmony – which moves the music forward by creating elements of tension and release, by creating variety, by the way chords work together to support the melody – is like the muscles in the body; or that form – the general organization of short phrases into longer and longer units – becomes the framework over which a composer stretches the melody and helps define by its harmonies (or their tonality) and is therefore like the skeleton that supports the muscles and the skin. The way painters in the late-Renaissance learned about human anatomy and the sense of perspective, composers in the baroque, essentially, began learning how harmony and form created similar kinds of artistic details in their art, bringing new or at least a different sense of life and awareness to what music can be. In summary: Melody = skin (surface) Rhythm = blood (flowing life force) Harmony = muscles (what allows the body to move) Form (or, according to SHMRG, Growth) = skeleton (what supports the body so it’s not a shapeless mass of skin and muscle lying on your floor) Looking beneath the skin – the surface sound of the music – we might discover, listening to any kind of Western music since 1600, roughly, that what lies beneath the surface is not very different from one generation to the next: though a composer from 1720 will sound very different from a composer in 1876 or one in 1924, but underneath these same principles somehow are (probably) still operating: it’s the “surface language” that’s different. (I equivocate (probably) because there are always exceptions. But... more on that, later.) *** ***** ******** ***** *** Talking about “form” usually implies the way a piece of music is organized over a longer span. Going back to our ‘note - melody’ or ‘note - chord’ analogy (like letters, words and sentences in language) we might group these phrases, these cadences and their melodies and come up with a bit of added contrast. One of the first basic forms – aside from just the primitive one-part form which might be a self-contained melody without contrast – would be a simple two-part form, which we can label A | B “A” reaches a cadence, then there’s some contrast which we’ll label “B.” This is usually called “binary form,” the prefix bi- referring to two. Now, because composers in the early-1700s like to round things off with something that sounded familiar, they decided to go back to remind you of “A” but not completely re-stating it… So now our “B”-section became a little two-part section itself which we might label with lower case letters as “b-a” – the diagram now looking like A | b-a The eventual idea was that that “A” section would move from the initial tonic key area to a different key area (C Major could go to G Major; A Minor could go to C Major). The “B” section – which is not necessarily a contrasting melody, now – would usually start in this “new” key but almost immediately start moving around uncertainly from one key to another, creating a kind of “tonal tension.” It also might sound like fragments of the opening theme and maybe the secondary theme rather than a whole new theme. We’ve moved away from our Home Key and the goal is now to get back to that Home Key by the time it’s over – to resolve that tension, to fulfill our expectations. During the classical period, this simple form was expanded. The “A”-section now had two tonal areas – the Home Key Tonic and the New Key. This new key might be given a contrasting melody which would become a second theme, but the defining point is not the melody but its tonality. (You can read the post about Tonality, here.) The opening of the second section would now be harmonically “active” to continue the digression from this new key to – eventually – get back to our original key. This could be a simple process or a more complicated one. The contrast is now in the harmonic activity of moving from one tonal area to another, usually in quick succession. This creates a sense of uncertainty – “where are we,” a listener might feel: “it doesn’t feel settled,” and they would expect eventually to make it back to the initial key. And that is more importantly reinforced with the re-appearance of the opening melody or theme. Then, we feel the tension is released and expectations have been met. Now, we still have to get in both themes from the opening “A”-section, but this time, they’re all in the same key – our initial Home Tonic. So it looks more complicated when we add the key-scheme to the diagram: This is the foundation of the major FORM that was introduced in the Classical Era (c.1750-c.1800) but became one of the principal forms of the Romantic Era which followed (c.1800-c.1900). It’s called the “Sonata Form” and the typical 1st movement form for works called “sonatas” or “symphonies” (but also usable at other times, too). Because these movements are usually in a lively tempo - allegro - it’s also referred to as the “Sonata-Allegro form.” And each part of this now gets a new term: this opening “A-Section” is called the EXPOSITION which introduces the thematic material The “B-Section” – broken down to a (b)+(a) substructure – is now a “two-part” sub-form of its own: the initial (b)-part is called the DEVELOPMENT which is melodically and harmonically unstable, creating (or building) tension And the secondary (a)-part is now called the RECAPITULATION which is the restatement of the thematic material from the Exposition, the harmonic tension leading back to the initial Home Key Tonic, resolving the tension of the Development. Here is a complete piano sonata by Franz Josef Haydn written in 1783. The first movement is in Sonata Form from the beginning to 5:53. = = = = = = = = = = With the first theme (in A-flat, the Home Tonic), the second theme (not that different) comes in in E-flat (the dominant, technically) at 0:53 or so (my computer is giving me fits, stopping and starting and needing constant rebooting today so I'm hoping these are accurate timings.... talk about increased tension...). The Development Section begins at 2:00 and becomes increasingly unstable until we return to the Home Tonic of A-flat around 4:00. Now, there are (of course) several variations on this idea: composers can begin a Sonata-form movement with a SLOW INTRODUCTION. Haydn did this a lot (Mozart, less often; Beethoven, not so much) and it was mostly to… well, let the audience know it was getting ready to start (even though the music was already playing). Audiences in the 1780s might be less formal than they are now, but it was a way of letting the audience know it was time to get ready to listen – actively. A composer could also tag on a little ending after all the material has been re-stated in the Recapitulation (usually abbreviated as RECAP) for whatever reason – this would be called a CODA which means literally, in Italian, a “tail.” Later on (especially in Beethoven), these codas started to expand into pretty long tails, actually… Beethoven in 1801 Here is the Sonata Form movement that opens Beethoven's 1st Symphony (completed in 1800). He uses a slow introduction that plays on one's expectations: the whole set-up actually does the opposite of what a listener in 1800 would've expected - rather than establish the tonic key at the start, he pulls you away from it and you never really feel where it's going to be until the Exposition officially begins. Technically, he reaches an actual C Major tonic chord at 0:45 into the clip, but it's not very forcefully set up, so... are you sure? No, not until the actual exposition begins where the tempo picks up and is now marked allegro. The first movement is only the first 8:20 of the clip: the whole symphony is about 28 minutes long in this performance. The graphics, here, will help you follow where in the scheme of things you are: = = = = = = = = = = Note the additions to Haydn's use of the form in the piano sonata (above): in addition to the introduction, there's also a "coda" which starts off seeming like it's going to be another development section but instead it quickly becomes just a reinforcement of the tonic key at the end ("and those sound like final chord... yes, I believe we've reached... the end!") And then there are three more movements for the whole symphony. By the way, the identification of "closing theme group" refers to a musical idea (or ideas) that may not be complete melodies or themes - but have the function of giving the second theme and the exposition a sense of "closing," firming up the key we've ended up in. Later, as symphonies became longer - and not much later: Beethoven's 3rd Symphony a few years later has a first movement that's about 18 minutes long by itself, compared to 8 minutes, here - composers would expand the material around these first and second themes (maybe even add a third theme) and start a "development-like" process as they expand each theme; the closing theme group might also be expanded with additional developmental ideas. And the development section might become much more involved. With the 19th-Century Symphony, many composers began breaking down the clarity of the classical form: rather than allowing the listener to know exactly where in the scheme of things he is, the composer now wants to increase this tension of uncertainty, especially regarding the sense of tonality. The classical form is clear and discernible; the romantic form is less clear (maybe even unclear) and tonally more ambiguous. But more of that, later... *** ***** ******** ***** *** The initial idea behind such a structure and the use of often contrasting themes was to reinforce the idea of the REAL drama in the music: it’s tonal conflict – the idea of STATEMENT of a key DIGRESSION from that key and eventually RESTATEMENT of that key Whether people sensed “Ah, we’ve modulated to the dominant” or not is not important: they would have sensed “Ah, we’re not in our original key.” To reinforce this, composers directed performers to REPEAT the exposition (in the early classical era symphony, the whole development/recapitulation might be repeated as well). This was marked with “repeat signs” that look like this ||: Repeat This:|| They did this so the listener had a chance to hear how the drama is being set up – what the themes are and what the keys are. Why do you think they did this? Because in those days, the only way you’d hear a symphony would be by going to a concert. You didn’t have recordings you could buy and listen to any time you wanted. You didn’t have YouTube to download a performance to watch. You wouldn’t have had a radio station that might play classical music where you might hear it perhaps quite often. It was their way of getting to know the “characters” in this drama. Today, with the question of familiarity less of an issue, performers often skip the repeat. *** ***** ******** ***** *** So there’s one of the basic FORMS of classical music – the Sonata Form. It can be found in a Sonata which is an instrumental work in three or four movements usually for a piano or another instrument along with a piano. It’s also the standard first movement form for a Symphony which is essentially a “sonata for orchestra,” also most likely in three or four movements. After things became standardized, symphonies traditionally had four movements and these would be 1st Movement: Sonata Form 2nd Movement: usually a slow movement most likely in a different form (variations were popular) 3rd Movement: usually a dance like a Minuet, usually a stately aristocratic kind of dance which Beethoven later replaced with a more down-to-earth dance-like movement called a Scherzo ("scare'-tzoh," literally in Italian, a “joke”) since after the French Revolution and audiences were now more likely middle-class folks, courtly dances like the minuet were kind of pointless. And then comes the 4th Movement: was a finale which could be a sonata form or variations or a dance but was often like a happy-ending to the whole piece, often a lively or very fast tempo. Mozart wrote several symphonies with only three movements, ending with a minuet. Sometimes he skipped the minuet and wrote a fast finale (that wouldn’t be mistaken for a minuet). In most cases, the first movement was the most significant part of a sonata or symphony. The other movements were for contrast and generally less taxing to listen to. Beethoven would later turn the finale into another significant movement. In the late-19th Century, the finale is often the goal of the entire symphony. But… More on that, later… - Dick Strawser 3 months ago | Comment | Tag | Read Full Story