FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809–1847)

OVERTURE, THE HEBRIDES, Op. 26
Composed: 1830
Premiered: London, 1832

Barely fifty years after Dr. Johnson’s celebrated visit, the Hebrides were very much the western European equivalent of Siberia when Mendelssohn went there in 1830—bleak, windswept, and almost uninhabited save the occasionally crofter and weirdly numerous sheep. Mendelssohn was probably unaware of it, but this was not due to the intrinsic hostility of the landscape; well over two-thirds of the islands’ population had been systematically evicted and exiled (largely to Canada) in the Clearances. Staffa, the home of Fingal’s Cave and the inspiration (allegedly) of tonight’s Overture, had been finally stripped of people in 1826. The Gaels were dispossessed with a ruthlessness that would have been entirely familiar to the composer’s Jewish family. There is nothing to show that Mendelssohn noticed anything amiss while he was in the Highlands; the irony is heartbreaking.

Ernest Bloch, arguably the most fervently Jewish of all twentieth-century composers, was born in Switzerland and spent most of his life in the United States, spending his last twenty years in Oregon, quite possibly the least Jewish state in the Union. Regardless of his physical location, however, his creative heart remained forever in the Eastern Europe of his ancestors; yet, the composer who did most to evoke the ecstasy and near-ferocity of the spiritual life of the shtetl never actually saw one. While teaching in Cleveland, he wrote three of the pillars of modern Jewish music—the Méditation hébraïque, the Sacred Service—and this work.

The music is unmistakably, unarguably Jewish—but how, exactly? There are no authentic Jewish melodies, no references to sacred music. The folk-based musical strategies of the other twentieth-century nationalist composers played no part in Bloch’s musical world. As he himself said: “it is neither my purpose nor desire to attempt a reconstruction of Jewish music, nor to base my work on more or less authentic melodies…I am not an archaeologist; for me the most important thing is to write good and sincere music.” Even titling the middle section Nigun—“improvisation”—is misleading, as it is by far the most systematically composed part of the whole work; and that, perhaps, is the key to this wonderful music. The Rabbinic scholar Hyam Maccoby once described the Talmud as “a monument to the sheer ecstasy of logic followed to transcendent conclusions,” and this could well sum up the music of Bloch. This is music that dances, in Simchas Torah, to the arrival of the Law; even contrition (vidui) is argued with the precision that found Bloch such a secure place in the hierarchy of neo-Classicists.

Any mention of “Rimsky-Korsakov’s most famous composition student” usually refers to Stravinsky. Few now remember that Rimsky also taught Ottorino Respighi, albeit not for long (he preferred the less strenuous Max Bruch). The influence of Rimsky is unmistakable in Respighi’s dazzling displays of orchestral color, but his musical material is very much his own, with its highly personal mixture of the new and the old—peering back occasionally, indeed, into the ancient world.

Pines of Rome forms one third of an informal trilogy celebrating the Eternal City, along with Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals. All combine muscular images of modern Italy with ghosts of the grandeur of ancient Rome, a feature which has led some to detect at least the shadow of Fascism in the music. When Respighi died, his most prominent obituary was written by Mussolini’s speechwriter Alceo Toni, and ended “You, Ottorino, mark the steps of our legions!’ However, the composer’s relations with the Fascist regime were always poor while he was alive, and it is important to recall that all three of these works were premiered under arch-anti-Fascist Arturo Toscanini, who was once saved from an angry Fascist mob by Respighi, at great personal risk.

In a sense, Respighi’s world is the opposite of Mussolini’s. While the Fascisti dreamed of a resurgent Rome, Respighi saw only ghosts; where Benito is possessed, Ottorino is haunted. He left very specific descriptions of what he intended the music to evoke:

“Children are playing in the pine groves of the Villa Borghese. They dance a kind of ring-a-roses, mimicking marching soldiers and battles, shrieking cruelly like swallows at eventide, then they swarm away.” Respighi’s widow was not alone in detecting an anti-Fascist fable here.

“Suddenly the scene changes and we see the shadow of pines framing the entrance to a catacomb. From the depths rises a sorrowful chant [actually a Gregorian antiphon], like a solemn hymn which re-echoes, then mysteriously fades away.”

“In the light of the serene full moon the pines on the Janiculum ridge stand out in bold relief. A nightingale sings.”

“The poet’s imagination conjures up a vision of ancient glories: Roman trumpets blare…the army of the Consul marches proudly towards the Sacred Way and then mounts the Capitoline Hill in triumph.”

The Consul’s army, note, not the Emperor’s. Respighi’s dream-Rome is the Roman Republic, not the nightmare Empire that was beginning—or trying—to re-form around him. The score calls for a real, recorded nightingale to sing over the Janiculum, anticipating Rautavaara’s famous Concerto for Birds by half a century.

Deep down, this music is the travelogue of a soul caught in what must have seen a grim parody of its own dreams. Fortunately for us, the music gives us the dreams themselves—and, perhaps, just the subtlest of warnings.