ALBERTO GINASTERA (1916–1983)

MALAMBO from ESTANCIA, Op. 8
Composed: 1941
Premiered: Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1943

Early in 1941, Aaron Copland was sent on a lengthy tour of South America as a wandering cultural ambassador, funded by the State Department (those were the days!). He met the fire-breathing Chavez in Mexico and the frighteningly prolific one-man musical tradition Villa-Lobos in Brazil; in Buenos Aires, after the Argentine premiere of his ballet Billy the Kid, he was presented with an alarmingly shy 25-year-old who, in a short time, impressed him more than the other two combined. This was Alberto Ginastera, a composer of daunting genius whose reputation is still making its way across the world. While undeniably—and proudly—an Argentine nationalist composer, Ginastera stands out as one of the few composers who would come to merge an open, accessible style with the formal and technical innovations of the post-Schoenberg era. Only Roberto Gerhard, the “12-note de Falla,” occupies anything resembling the same territory—and what a fascinating place it is.

Copland’s first response to hearing some of Ginastera’s music was to harangue Lincoln Kerstein, the director of the American Ballet Caravan who had commissioned Billy the Kid, into commissioning a work from Ginastera—“before someone else does.” Ginastera proposed a ballet based on the epic poem Martin Fierro by José Hernández: this would become, eventually, Estancia. “Eventually,” because Kerstein and his company went luridly bankrupt in 1942, taking the commission (and, alas for Ginastera, the choreographer George Balanchine), with them. By then, the music was almost complete. Ginastera, understandably incensed by being, as he saw it, stiffed, wrenched an orchestral suite from the score and had it performed, to near-hysterical acclaim, in 1943. His career, almost in spite of the Americanos, was launched. His friendship with Copland, incidentally, lasted until his death.

Billy the Kid is often referred to as a “cowboy ballet.” Estancia—a “Ballet in One Act and Five Scenes, based on Argentine country life”—is a gaucho ballet; more or less its direct Argentine equivalent (an estancia is a ranch). Unlike Copland’s work, however, Estancia, like the poem it is based on, is largely about the looming disappearance of the old gaucho way of life; there is an undeniable elegiac feeling at the edges of the sprawling, heroic musical landscapes of Estancia, as the twentieth century and urban sprawl (in 1940!) gnaw at an entire way of life. Like the characters in Lonely Are the Brave, the gauchos are magnificent, macho—and doomed.

The malambo is a ferocious, borderline violent, traditional gaucho dance that has been known to leave genuine casualties in its wake. Ginastera organizes his ballet in the shape of a single day, from dawn to dusk to new dawn, and the malambo becomes the Danza final, a final frenetic burst before life resets itself and the sun rises again. In that time, a gaucho girl has fallen in love with a city boy who proves himself with his horsemanship and gaucho skills—a Romeo and Juliet scenario that scarcely conceals the fact that the city boy represents not merely new blood for the traditional pampas, but its end.

Copland more or less single-handedly invented the music of the mythical West, and from that the music of the Western movie. From a similar starting point (the urbane Argentine was no more of a country boy than Copland), Ginastera conjures up more than a myth; he evokes the vast cultural and spiritual maelstrom that is Latin America.

It is hard to imagine a work now as beloved as this concerto being badly received at its premiere, but the fact is that the soloist was booed off and the conductor was forced to scurry off the platform to avoid incoming coins. The august critic Eduard Hanslick described it as “music that stinks to the ear,” adding that the violin was “not so much played as beaten black and blue.” Brodsky told the composer that the work was “wonderfully beautiful,” but Tchaikovsky was so upset by Hanslick’s review that he could recite it from memory till the day he died.

In the hands of a soloist who can actually play it, the concerto is, indeed, very difficult, but it is the difficulty that reveals new possibilities for the instrument; the multiple stops and difficult stretches of the solo part became staple, if very advanced, features of the instrument’s technique.

The concerto’s finale is an uncompromisingly Russian dance—a Trepak. The composer once damned by arch-Nationalist Balakirev as “hopelessly un-Russian” thus goes out in a blaze of national glory. Hanslick even paid the finale an unintended compliment by describing it as giving off a “stench of Russianness.”

Composed: 1862
Premiered: St. Petersburg, Russia, 1862

A violin virtuoso who more or less played himself to death, dying of exhaustion in Moscow at the early age of 45, Wieniawski composed mainly for himself, though the very popular second Concerto is dedicated to another great nineteenth-century virtuoso, Pablo Sarasate. The passages of rapid staccato notes that are found throughout his works were specifically designed for his own, highly controversial rigid-arm bow grip, which made the music relatively easy for him, but cost him dearly in severe neuralgia in his last years. Nowadays, a different technique is recommended to students!

Mother Goose began as a collection of piano duets, written for Mimi and Jean, the two would-be prodigy children of Ravel’s friend, the artist Cyprian Godebski. Alas, the music was too difficult for them, so the first performance was placed in the hands (literally) of Jeanne Leleu and Geneviève Durony, who were both nine. These must have been two formidable little girls, as the music is no easier than the rest of Ravel’s piano music. Interestingly, the solo piano version is not by Ravel at all; he commissioned the arrangement from one of his students. There are hints throughout the music that an orchestration was already in Ravel’s mind from the beginning; he was delighted to oblige—very quickly indeed—when the impresario Jacques Rouché asked him for a fairy-tale ballet in 1912.

The music is based on five fairy tales, three of them by Charles Perrault, the “French Grimm,” a favorite with Ravel since his own childhood.

Ravel included quotations from the original stories in the score, so the underlying program is easy to follow. The Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane is of that special Ravelian kind, unknown to any other musical tradition but his, and certainly nothing to do with the Elizabethan Pavan; like that other famous Ravel “pavane,” the one for the dead Infanta, it lives in its own world of half-dreamed elegance.

In Tom Thumb, the birds who ruin Tom’s (or rather, the oboe’s) entire day by eating the breadcrumbs he has laid as a trail to get him out of the woods are portrayed by the same woodwind figures and string harmonics that raise the dawn in Daphnis et Chloé.

Conversations of Beauty and the Beast includes another of Ravel’s musical gestures that has become a staple of Hollywood—the combined harp glissando and triangle “ting”—as Beauty accepts the Beast’s hand in marriage, turning him instantaneously into a handsome prince.

In 1889, the 14-year-old Ravel visited the Paris Exhibition, where he saw a Javanese gamelan ensemble making a sound that would come to fascinate composers as diverse as Benjamin Britten, Olivier Messiaen, and (especially) Colin McPhee. That day, however, more eyes were drawn to the extremely rude young music student who berated the performers every time they stopped playing—Claude Debussy. Ravel looks back on this with the gentle pentatonic tinklings for the Princess of the Pagodas—who are not Chinese temples, but dwarves made of jewels. The Princess is a European royal child who has been transformed into a laideronette—an ugly little girl—by a witch. She meets a serpent, himself the bewitched King of the Pagodas, who retains his true form and marries her. This strange little story, redolent of the weirdest possible Jungian symbols, was drastically reworked as a ballet, The Prince of the Pagodas, by Benjamin Britten in 1957.

The Fairy Garden brings us another archetype—the Good Fairy, who applies the happily-ever-after formula to the future Prince and Princess Charming. Note the trademark long Ravel crescendo, which appears in one form or another from his earliest works to its apotheosis in Boléro.