by Bill Scanlan Murphy
BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976)
FOUR SEA INTERLUDES from PETER GRIMES
Composed: Composed: 1940-45
Premiered: London, 1945
Dawn
Sunday Morning
Moonlight
Storm
First performed after the defeat of Germany but before Hiroshima, Peter Grimes, for all its grim story and dubiously sympathetic non-hero, represented a re-awakening of British (and more specifically, English) musical life after the war, and was a huge success. Very unusually for a modern opera, there has not been a year since the premiere that has not seen a production somewhere in the world.
The opera tells the story of Peter Grimes, a fisherman whose apprentice dies at sea under highly mysterious circumstances. Grimes is cleared of blame by an inquest, but suspicion lingers, turning into a full-blown witch-hunt when another apprentice dies in an accident; Grimes is hounded to his death by the vengeful mob. The sea is so all-pervasive as to be almost a character in the opera, nowhere more explicitly than in the four Sea Interludes, originally made necessary by the long, intricate scene changes of the first production but nonetheless major compositions in their own right. This is not the heroic, bracing sea of Rimsky-Korsakov or even Debussy. In Dawn, the waves lap beneath an eerie chill wind, with the quiet threat of a long swell foreshadowing the storm to come. On Sunday Morning, Ellen Orford, Peter’s irrationally faithful love, chatters with Grimes’ new apprentice just before noticing a suspicious bruise on the (doomed) boy; the horns imitate church bells in blurred overlapping chords. The Moonlight of the third Interlude is a sinister wave-top glint picked out by the xylophone and harp. The Storm is a lot more than mere weather; Grimes’ world, musical and literal, tears itself apart, with glimpses of an aching string phrase that carries the words “What harbor shelters peace?” elsewhere in the opera. Grimes will soon discover that the answer to the question is definitely not The Borough, the paranoid, gossiping emotional wasteland that he is unfortunate enough to call home. The storm causes the death of Grimes’ apprentice and leads inexorably to Grimes’ own lonely death in a sinking boat.
MAX BRUCH (1838-1920)
VIOLIN CONCERTO No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (First movement – Vorspiel, Allegro moderato)
Composed: Composed: 1866
Premiered: Koblenz, Germany 1866
It was famously said once of Max Bruch’s music that it gives little to discuss and nothing to argue about, but this conceals a far more capable composer than is usually thought to be the case. This, after all, was a man who wrote a septet for wind and strings at the age of eleven. The First Violin Concerto was written when he was 28. The first movement opens with a quasi-improvisatory passage in which the soloist introduces several tiny musical figures that will haunt the entire work; Bruch’s strength lay in concealing iron musical structure beneath a velvet layer of romanticism. Even Brahms, supposedly the great Romantic Classicist, is more compositionally diffuse than this little-appreciated (but, paradoxically, much-loved) master.
ERNEST BLOCH (1880-1959)
NIGUN from Baal Shem - Three Episodes from Hassidic Life
Composed: Composed: 1923 (orchestrated 1939)
Premiered: Cleveland, Ohio, 1924
Written in Cleveland and dedicated to the memory of the composer’s mother, Baal Shem, like many of Bloch’s works, digs deep into his Jewish background, both spiritual and musical. The work was originally called simply Jewish Moods until Bloch re-named it after Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the ultra-Orthodox, ecstatic Jewish sect of Hassidism. The second movement, Nigun (Improvisation) is an apotheosis of Hassidic wordless song –a hymn, and more than a hymn, without words to pull it back to earth. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi said: "If words are the pen of the heart, then song is the pen of the soul." Bloch would not have argued, and neither should we.
JAN SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
SYMPHONY No. 2 in D, Op. 43
Composed: Composed: 1901-1902
Premiered: Helsinki, Finland, 1902
1 Allegretto
2 Tempo Andante, ma rubato
3 Vivacissimo
4 Allegro moderato
Sibelius has the odd distinction of being one of only two composers (the other is Handel) to be written into the laws of their country. Rarely sober after noon, he was exempted by name from the stringent Finnish laws regulating alcohol, a strange tribute to his status as the definitive Finnish “national” composer. The Second Symphony was widely interpreted at the time as a hymn to “Finnishness” at a time when Finland was struggling to extricate itself from the influence of Russia, but the music was in fact mostly written in Italy, and includes material originally intended for two tone poems – one derived from Dante’s Divine Comedy and the other based on the life of Don Juan. Indeed, apart from these, the only clue Sibelius ever gave to the work’s inspiration was to point to the melancholy woodwind melody in the finale and declare that it was inspired by the suicide of his wife’s sister.
Sibelius saw his music in essentially craftsmanlike terms, placing great emphasis on the logic of its construction. Describing the first movement of the Second Symphony, he wrote: “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down the pieces of a mosaic for heaven’s floor and asked me to put them together.” The elements of the first movement of the Second Symphony apparently came to Sibelius as a result of perusing Caprice Orientale, a piece composed by an eight-year-old girl, Irene Everi, in his publisher’s office. After playing through Irene’s offering, Sibelius began to improvise around her music; what emerged was the Allegretto’s first subject. The rising three-note figure heard at the outset will be used to bind the entire symphony together. Interestingly, there is no identifiable second subject as such; quizzed on the matter, Sibelius spoke darkly of the “spiritual development” of the music.
The slow movement was once a depiction of Death stalking the castle of Don Juan, and begins with a passage for pizzicato solo strings that caused astonishment in the early performances. The bassoon announces a sinister motif, soon contrasted with a melody that some have said evokes Christ, though the conductor Robert Kejanus (a friend of the composer) preferred a political interpretation: (the music represents) “the most broken-hearted protest against all the injustice that threatens at the present time”. Similarly, the mysterious Scherzo has been subjected to much pictorial and dramatic interpretation. However, what is most remarkable is the oboe melody in the trio, often cited as a pinnacle of melodic invention; it is based on nine repetitions of the same note (shades of the slow movement of the Beethoven Seventh). The rising three-note figure of the symphony’s opening bridges the Scherzo into the finale. Again, personal details flicker in the background; one of the main motives of the finale was originally improvised at the organ by Sibelius at the baptism of a friend’s son. Again, Robert Kejanus sees the Russians confounded in the music: “(the finale reaches a) triumphant conclusion intended to rouse in the listener a picture of lighter and confident prospects for the future.” This, however, is nothing compared with the effect Sibelius achieves by taking his rising three-note figure at the climax of the movement and extending it to – four!
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