by Bill Scanlan Murphy
CHARLES IVES (1874-1954)
SYMPHONY No. 2
I Andante moderato
II Allegro
III Adagio cantabile
IV Lento maestoso
V Allegro molto vivace
Composed: 1900-1910
Premiered: New York, 1951
For all its obvious Americanisms – the folk tunes, the hymns, the Stephen Foster melodies – Ives’ Second Symphony has far more in common with the Brahms piano concerto that we shall also be hearing this evening than with his last two symphonies, which reach far into the future. Just as Pierre Boulez once called Schönberg’s music “Kokoschka-ized Brahms,” this symphony is essentially a nineteenth-century musical landscape drawn by Grandma Moses.
Why did the work wait so long for its first performance? Much has been made over the years of Ives’ stoic independence and patience in the face of a musical world that habitually misunderstood him or rejected him as an amateur, but the fact is that he made surprisingly little effort to get his work performed for much of his life; his considerable personal wealth, piled high from a successful career in the insurance industry, insulated him from the financial pressures endured by most composers. While it is certainly true to say that he was musically far ahead of his time, it is also true to say that for much of that time, he simply couldn’t be bothered with the professional side of being a composer.
There is certainly little in this symphony that would have frightened off an audience accustomed to Charles Griffes or Henry Hadley in the first years of the twentieth century, or (especially) Ives’ friend Ruggles in the 1930s. It tells us much that nothing on earth would coax Ives to the concert hall to hear Leonard Bernstein’s premiere of the work at Carnegie Hall in 1951; he even had to be almost dragged to a neighbor’s radio to listen to it. He didn’t even seem to be too disturbed by what we now know to be the outrageous liberties that Bernstein took with his score, hacking out huge cuts and re-orchestrating tens of measures at a time, revealing a deep-seated ambiguity about the composer that Bernstein would never have admitted to in his own lifetime.
But there was nothing for Bernstein to be ambiguous about: this work is an American – very American – masterpiece. The majestic fugal subject that opens the work soon shows itself to be derived from Fosters’ Massa’s in de Cold Ground, and before long we catch our first glimpse of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, a tune made famous (after a fashion) by Popeye in spinach-guzzling mode. Before long, as the Allegro gets under way, Henry Clay Work (he of the Old Grandfather Clock) makes an appearance with Wake Nicodemus, which forms the first element of a Brahmsian multi-element first subject. Turkey In The Straw (one of the Nickelodeon hits of Ives’ youth) flits by, and that minor-key melody that confronts Nicodemus is actually a variant of Bringing In The Sheaves. But it is vital to remember that the average German concert-goer, knowing none of these melodies in their original settings or their cultural associations, would hear what amounts to a more-or-less conventional Brahmsian symphonic movement. Ives has grafted wholesale quotation, a technique now associated with far later music (Berio, Schnittke), onto a compositional method much closer to Bruckner than to Ruggles. In this work, the American listener undergoes the same experience as a Czech listening to Smetana, and largely the same level of challenge. Indeed, the third movement was originally written for Ives’s First Symphony while Ives was under the tutelage of Horace Parker, who was no kind of revolutionary. The only difference is that where Parker writes hymn-like melodies, Ives writes (or rather, appropriates) real hymns.
The fourth movement largely recapitulates – recasts – the first movement, a technique Ives consciously adopted from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (heard at the last Columbia Orchestra concert). The finale, after its folk-fiddling opening, throws Camptown Races into the mix as the movement’s main subject before recapping Wake Nicodemus and the by-now inevitable Columbia the Gem of the Ocean from the first movement. The work ends, after a frantic pot-pourri of many of the tunes that have haunted the whole piece, with a famous “wrong’ chord, often referred to as the movement’s “Bronx Cheer.” This was added by Ives many years after the composition of the rest of the symphony, and ludicrously extended and exaggerated by Bernstein and many conductors who came after him. It is now normal to play simply what is in the score, which is easily outrageous enough for most listeners – and is it really that much more extravagant than Haydn’s “Surprise”?
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
PIANO CONCERTO No. 1, Op. 15
I Maestoso
II Adagio
III Rondo – Allegro non troppo
Composed: 1854-9
Premiered: Hanover, Germany, 1859
Brahms’ lifelong difficulty with completing large-scale pieces began with this titanic work, which started life as a sonata for two pianos; this was then orchestrated as a symphony, before being run through the compositional shredder to become the present Concerto, which has often been described, with good reason, as a symphony with piano obbligato Brahms’ actual First Symphony was still nearly twenty years away.
Looming over the work is the death of Brahms’ close friend Robert Schumann, who threw himself into the Rhine just before the concerto was begun, and died (insane and in agony, from a grim mixture of syphilis and the toxic effects of its treatment) just as it was completed. As if this were not bad enough, Brahms also had to contend with the fact of his growing guilty desire for Schumann’s wife, then widow, Clara. They never married; the cause of Robert’s death is probably the more prosaic, sad reason for this than anything more romantic.
In an intriguing mirror image of the Ives Second Symphony, this work is a great deal more “modern” than it seems. Indeed, such sages as Arnold Schönberg, Ernst Bloch and – yes – Milton Babbitt have proclaimed Brahms to be the first saint of modernism, pointing to the concerto-grosso textures as the piano interweaves with the orchestra rather than riding its accompaniment (neo-classicism, anyone?) and the frequent lurches into something not at all unlike chamber-music as solo instruments join the piano in an unlikely (but real) foreshadowing of much of the “expressionist” output of the early atonalists. The only difference – and this is not entirely a joke – is the actual notes.
The first movement is in the clearest, most orthodox sonata form that Brahms ever constructed, untroubled by the subject groups that later became his constructional trademark. The first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (in the same key, note) is an unmistakable ancestor here. The huge orchestral gestures of the opening are balanced by the delicacy of the piano’s entry – a demonstration, it has been said, that the concerto is Brahms’ theater of the mind, in contrast to the hated Wagner’s demonic on-stage pantomime. Certainly, the innate theatricality of sonata form (after all, boy-meets-girl, war and most of the human condition can be explained by the AB - development - AB matrix, can they not?) has never been more overt than here.
It has been alleged (not least by the composer) that the slow movement is a portrait of Clara Schumann, though this is a little hard to reconcile with the gender of the Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini (“blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’) which Brahms inscribes over the piece. Certainly, the unmistakable hymn-like passage that opens the movement has clear ecclesiastical overtones. It has been suggested that it is Brahms himself who is “benedictus,” robed in Lutheran rectitude as he seeks fair Clara’s hand, which suggests a slightly weird parallel with Wagner in Parsifal mode; in some ways, the two composers were more similar than either would have liked to admit.
The closing rondo places us unarguably before the altar of Brahms’ twin Classical deities, Mozart and Beethoven, with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 as our guardian angel. The piano introduces the rondo theme, answered by the orchestra in the sonata-rondo form that Mozart patented and Beethoven supercharged. In another pre-echo of the Ives Second Symphony, material from the first movement makes a comeback to close the circle on this work, and open up a world of structural and expressive possibilities for other composers – Tchaikovsky, Ives – who would ride in its magisterial wake.
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