by Bill Scanlan Murphy
GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813-1901)
OVERTURE, LA FORZA DEL DESTINO
Composed: 1869
Premiered: Milan, Italy 1869
One of Verdi’s many middle-period masterpieces, La Forza del Destino is based on a play by a Spanish nobleman who fearlessly plagiarized Schiller in a typical everybody-dies Romantic gorefest. “We've got to find some way to avoid all those dead bodies,” wailed Verdi to his librettist after some first-night audience members were unkind enough to laugh as Alvaro, the double-dyed bad guy, pitched himself off a cliff at the end of the mildly hysterical last act. The libretto was not the only thing to be remodeled. The original 3-minute Preludio was replaced with this, easily Verdi’s greatest overture, which sets a nervous, nagging “fate” motif against a series of melodies drawn from the body of the opera. Because it draws on the opera’s “hit tunes,” it is sometimes called a “potpourri overture,” but this scarcely conveys the drama and, in the case of the soaring Pace, mio Dio, lyric riches of this superb music.
RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883)
PRELUDE, Parsifal
Composed: 1877
Premiered: Bayreuth, Germany 1878 (private performance of Prelude alone); 1882 (music drama)
“Has Wagner written anything better?” Thus spoke the philosopher Nietzsche in a letter to an astonished friend in 1883 – astonished, because Nietzsche and Wagner, once close friends, had seriously fallen out by then. However, even while denouncing Wagner as the cultural Antichrist to anyone who would listen, Nietzsche still privately adored this radiant, still meditation on the Dresden Amen; this simple chorale figure appears after we are introduced to motifs from the five-hour music drama that will give us Wagner’s very personal, philosophically very dubious take on the legend of the Holy Grail. As Nietzsche warned so many times, the beauty of the music encourages us not to ask too many questions, so perhaps we shouldn’t. Wagner said to Hermann Levi, who conducted the first performance of Parsifal, “if they’re not listening, you’re not taking it slowly enough.” And that is the achievement of this piece: time becomes irrelevant as Wagner evokes his quasi-Arthurian dream-world. We may not like to live in Wagner’s mind, but it is a wonderful place to visit.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
HUNGARIAN DANCES 5 and 6
Composed: 1852-1864 (piano duet)
Premiered: (orchestral version) 1874
Inspired by the huge success of the “Hungarian” violin concerto he had written for his friend Joseph Joachim, the Hungarian Dances themselves went on to become immensely popular in their original piano duet form, then in various orchestrations and finally, closing the circle, in Joachim’s own violin-and-piano arrangement. Brahms himself is said to have treasured a performance on eight pianos by eight ten-year-old girls. He fiercely defended his music against other arrangers—“I prefer to retain my ears and know what is a piano piece and what is an orchestral piece"—so it is perhaps as well that he never heard Sousa’s marching-band version.
Brahms’ first paying musical job was touring with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remnyi playing gypsy music, so the style came entirely naturally to him. Number 5 is probably the best-known of all, a Czardas mercifully transcribed for the orchestra in G minor rather than the daunting F# minor of the original; the rapidly oscillating minor/major sequence of the main theme actually contains the germ of Brahms’ entire mature style. Number 6 is raised from the even scarier D flat of the piano version to an orchestra-friendly D major. Five generations of pianists have fervently wished he had done the same thing with the original.
If you know any Brahms at all, it will almost certainly be these light but far from inconsequential pieces. They certainly did Brahms a great deal of good: Wagner once bitterly remarked that the Hungarian Dances had earned more for Brahms (Wagner’s worst enemy) than the entire output of the Beast of Bayreuth had earned for him.
JOAQUIN RODRIGO (1901-1999)
CONCIERTO de ARANJUEZ
Composed: 1939
Premiered: Barcelona, Catalonia, 1940
Joaquin Rodrigo’s life almost began in tragedy when diphtheria robbed him of his sight at the age of three, but he went on to become Spain’s most successful 20th-century composer, best known for his wide-ranging and uniquely evocative guitar works. Almost uniquely among composers for the guitar, Rodrigo did not play the instrument himself.
Aranjuez is the site of the Spanish King’s summer palace, and is especially famous for its gardens. Rodrigo was buried as Marquis de los Jardines de Aranjuez, a title bestowed upon him by King Juan Carlos in 1990. He once explained that his love for the place – and the Concierto - was inspired by the flowers, the fountains and the birds – things he didn’t have to be able to see.
This is intensely Spanish music. Rodrigo draws on flamenco playing in the first movement. The terrifyingly difficult part makes much use of such traditional Spanish guitar techniques as punteado (working ornaments into scale passages) and instantly-familiar rasgueados (strumming), echoed back in one unforgettable passage by the strings bowing four-note chords in unmistakable flamenco style. Curiously, the very Spanish-sounding hemiola rhythmic switch between 6/8 and 3/4 that characterizes this movement is also at the heart of the Czardas rhythm we heard in the fifth Hungarian Dance earlier. Unlike Brahms’ stomping cheerfulness, however, this is music that, in the composer’s words, must be played to sound “only as strong as a butterfly.”
For the slow movement, Rodrigo’s wistful thoughts of his homeland (the piece was written in France by a very homesick composer who had fled the Spanish Civil War) are moved into a far darker realm by the memory of the death of his baby son, who died in 1939 - by terrible irony, of diphtheria. The very famous exchange between the guitar and the cor anglais is based on the saeta, an Andalusian Holy Week hymn. A statue of Jesus would be carried through the streets as a group of women intoned the saeta, which would be echoed back to them by the crowds watching the procession. It is hard not to think that Rodrigo had a far more personal cortege in mind; he was known to leave the concert room during the slow movement at performances of the Concierto, returning gray-faced for the finale.
For the finale, we are back to the rhythmic playfulness of the first movement, now contrasting 2/4 with 3/4 in a Bach-tinged world that mirrors the Baroque splendors of the Aranjuez palace. The soloist exchanges elegant pleasantries with solo instruments in the orchestra, building to a noble, impressive climax – but this is not how a composer as courtly as Rodrigo ends a work. The soloist and orchestra make a genteel mutual farewell and slip away.
MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
DAPHNIS ET CHLOË – Suite No. 2
Composed: 1909-1912
Premiered: Paris, France, 1912
Daybreak
Pantomime
Danse générale
Commissioned by Serge Diaghilev on the same day that Diaghilev demanded The Firebird from Stravinsky, Daphnis et Chloë was described by the composer as a “choreographic symphony.” Like so many other composers since Beethoven, Ravel was plagued by a “finale problem” with his symphony: the concluding Danse générale took him a whole year to complete (watching glumly as Stravinsky sped by with the completed Firebird and Petrouchka while Ravel remorsely tinkered with the finale’s orchestration).
Essentially the more-or-less complete third act of the ballet, the second Suite from this glorious work begins with one of the highpoints of all 20th-century music. The music depicts a blazing sunrise and the earth waking—birds, animals, lovers and all. This, surely, was what Ravel had in mind when he described Daphnis as “a vast musical fresco, faithful to the Greece of my dreams.”
Daphnis and Chloe, the two lovers, then perform a “pantomime” telling the story of Syrinx and Pan (note the woodwind solos depicting these two—but listen closely, and see that they are not solos at all; Syrinx is both oboe and clarinet, while Pan is a mixture of flute, piccolo and the dark alto flute). Their dance of homage becomes a love duet (the original Daphnis was Nijinsky, who more or less demanded one love scene per act), morphing into the 5/4 free-for-all of the Danse générale.
Ravel considered Daphnis to be his best work. He was far too fastidious to use a word like “masterpiece,” but we are not so bashful: this is genius at work.
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