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Classical Christmas
December 14, 15, & 16 2007
Click on the  to hear the musical examples.
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov
1844-1908 |
Polonaise from Christmas Eve
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov
In the development of the tradition of Russian national music, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov fulfills a place of honor. Starting in 1871 when he joined the faculty of the St. Petersburg Conservatory until his death, he taught and encouraged nearly every young Russian composer from Glazunov and Arensky to Stravinsky and Prokofiev. After Borodin and Mussorgsky’s deaths, Rimsky-Korsakov edited and completed their manuscripts – especially their operas – and had them published. He also helped publish the works of many other Russian composers.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s inspiration was the operas of Glinka, whose combination of Russian melodies with oriental modes appealed to him. The opera Christmas Eve is based on a story of Gogol, to which the composer added elements of Slavic mythology. He described it as “a carol come to life.”
As the name implies, the polonaise originated in Poland as a folk dance with calls for the steps. It was a festive, processional, couple dance in triple meter and moderate tempo. Originally a peasant dance, it gradually shifted to the landed gentry and subsequently to the aristocracy and became purely instrumental. In the eighteenth century it became a stylized instrumental dance of ternary structure, usually part of a suite, as in J.S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No.2. In Chopin’s hand it became a musical symbol of Polish nationalism.
The Polonaise in Christmas Eve takes place in the royal palace just before Christmas morning and the return of the hero, the blacksmith Vakula, who has escaped from the clutches of the devil. The dance opens with a stately theme,  followed by a more lyrical and subdued middle section. The dance concludes with a rousing coda based on a fanfare theme that bridges the two main sections of the dance.
Astor Piazzolla
(1921-1992) |
Invierno from Cuatro estaciones porteñas (Winter from Four Seasons of Buenos Aires)
Astor Piazzolla 1921-1992
Everyone knows that it takes two to tango, but no one can agree on where the dance originated: African-Argentinean slave percussion instruments? Andalusia? Gypsy? Cuba? Cataluña? For 150 years the characteristic Latin rhythm has been shaped and adapted to nearly every Spanish-speaking national culture.
The arrabal, the squalid immigrant slum of the late 19th century outside Buenos Aires, bred its own version of the tango. This was a popular song, laced with bitter urban protest, which by the 1930s had developed into a pessimistic expression of a fatalistic, melodramatic outlook on love and life. It was into this world that the parents of Astor Piazzolla arrived from Italy. And it was the music of the arrabal that shaped Piazzolla’s entire career.
During the Depression, Piazzolla’s family moved to New York, where he learned piano and the bandoneón, a type of concertina with 38 pitches that had become the central instrument in the tango ensembles of his native Argentina. After a stint in Paris, studying composition with no less an eminence that Nadia Boulanger, Piazzolla returned to Argentina to form his first Tango Octet and later his renowned Tango Quintet that featured the bandoneón, violin, piano, electric guitar and bass.
Influenced by his studies in Paris and by classical forms, the style of Piazzolla’s compositions – which he called nuovo tango – were a cut above the traditional tangos. No longer dance music, they became concert music, although for the nightclub rather than the concert hall. And over the decades, his name has been inseparably associated with the tango. While the standard tangos popular here in the 1920 to 50s have a certain sameness, Piazzolla’s tango-based compositions, by contrast, achieve infinite variety through his use of complex syncopation and abrupt tempo shifts. The psychological intensity and sophistication of his music so infuriated the traditionalists that he was repeatedly physically assaulted and even threatened with a gun to his head during a radio broadcast.
Piazzolla has not only taken his influences from classical, folk and jazz music but has also himself been an inspiration to such jazz artists as Jerry Mulligan and Chick Corea. His tangos have been arranged, among others, for classical violinist Gidon Kramer and for the eclectic Kronos Quartet.
Written as four distinct works between 1964-1970, the Piazzolla Four Seasons were not originally intended to be performed as a suite, although in later years Piazzolla put them together occasionally to perform with his quintet. They were originally scored for violin, electric guitar, piano, bass, and bandoneón, but have been transcribed for many instruments and instrument combinations. Finally, in the late 1990's, Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov arranged for Gidon Kramer the classical chamber orchestra version for full string orchestra with solo violin.
While Piazzolla occasionally quotes Vivaldi (in Summer and especially in Winter) Buenos Aires’s climate is mild without the drastic seasonal fluctuations of Venice. The four movements of Piazzolla’s suite describe more the vagaries of human emotions rather than those of the weather.
Each of Piazzolla’s Seasons is a single movement work, featuring a violin soloist. In the improvisatory spirit of Piazzolla’s original band, soloists sometimes add their own cadenzas.
Invierno sports a sultry theme – naturally, a tango –  which the composer repeats in different tempi and moods. A second theme grows out of the main theme but is definitely subsidiary to it. A quote from Vivaldi's "Winter" surreptitiously inserts itself into the violin part later in the piece. There are two cadenzas, and the piece concludes with a coda in the style of Vivaldi, although it is not a direct quote.
Antonio Vivaldi
(1678-1741) |
Concerto in f minor, Op.8, No.4, "Winter" from
The Four Seasons
Antonio Vivaldi
Beginning in 1703 and intermittently for many decades, Antonio Vivaldi served as music factotum at the Pio Ospedale della Pietá in Venice, an institution devoted to the care and education of abandoned, orphaned and indigent girls, with a special emphasis on musical training (no Dickensian work house or Dotheboys Hall this). In addition to his duties as virtuoso violinist, violin teacher, orchestra director and instrument purchaser, Vivaldi served as resident composer, producing hundreds of works for various instruments and ensembles, including nearly 450 concerti, usually at a rate of more than two per month. The resident girls were trained in both string and wind instruments, including the organ, and as part of their training Vivaldi composed concertos for every instrument and instrument combination. Many of them were apparently written with specific girl soloists in mind.
Vivaldi saw to it that his music reached far beyond the boundaries of Venice. Around 1711 an Amsterdam firm issued his first published concertos as Opus 3, entitled L’estro armonico (The Harmonic Fancy), a set of 12 concertos, four each for one, two or four violins, and four with added cello. They are at the boundary between the old tradition of the Sonata da chiesa (church sonata) with its stately slow-fast-slow-fast movements, and the newer three- movement concerto form (fast-slow-fast). L’estro armonico was a sensation, becoming the most influential music publication of the first half of the 18th century. J.S. Bach admired these works and transcribed some of them as harpsichord concerti.
The four concerti known as The Four Seasons are part of a group of eight violin concerti published in Amsterdam in 1725 as Op.8. Vivaldi provided sonnets, probably his own, to head each of the four concerti. It is clear from the detailed notes Vivaldi made on the score that he enjoyed composing these concertos as well as performing them.
Vivaldi attempted to make the music as programmatic as possible, marking with capital letters sections of the sonnets and their corresponding music:
Frozen and shivering amid the chilly snow
Our breathing hampered by the horrid wind
As we run, we continually stamp our feet
Our teeth chatter with the awful cold
We move to the fire and contented peace
While the rain outside comes down in sheets.
We walk on the ice with slow steps
Careful how we walk, for fear of falling
If we move too fast, we slip and fall to the ground
Again treading heavily on the ice
Until the ice breaks up and dissolves
We hear from behind closed doors
Boreal winds and all the winds of war.
This is winter, but one that brings joy.
The strings, with trills in the violins, describe the shivering in the winter cold. Swift arpeggios and scales by the solo violin describe the whipping of the wind, while a series of abrupt chords suggest stamping feet and running to get warm. But rapid tremolos show that all this activity is useless, since the teeth continue to chatter.
Violin pizzicati depict the falling raindrops, after which a warm melody on the solo violin describes the pleasant indoors with its roaring fire.
The Finale opens with sliding phrases by the violin - walking and slipping on thin ice. The orchestra joins with a slower rhythm to indicate the hesitant steps and fear of falling. But then we are back indoors, enjoying the warmth while the winds howl outside.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840 - 1893 |
Suite from The Nutcracker, Op.71a
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 - 1893
One of the most beloved ballets of all time, The Nutcracker, was nothing but a thorn in the side of its ever self-critical composer. In early 1891 Tchaikovsky was commissioned by the great French choreographer, Marius Petipa, to compose the music for a ballet based on a French adaptation of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale. The two had collaborated the previous year on The Sleeping Beauty, a work the composer rated as among his best.
Tchaikovsky had a great deal of difficulty with the composition of the music and complained bitterly about the assignment and the quality of his own creative ideas. The result – at first universally scorned by the musical elite, which overlooked the fact that it was really great music – is the musical equivalent of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which the sentimentality of the subject matter and its appeal to children has over the years totally captured the popular imagination.
In the course of the two years it took the composer to write the work, he found a way to incorporate a new musical instrument into the ballet. The famous dance of the Sugarplum Fairy is the first use of the celesta (invented in 1886) in an orchestral composition, in an equally unusual pairing with the bass clarinet. The ballet was finally premiered in St. Petersburg on December 18, 1893.
The Suite, which Tchaikovsky extracted from the score, consists of eight numbers. Except for the first two numbers, the Overture and the Children’s March from Act I, these numbers do not follow the story plot but are arranged to be musically most effective.
- “Miniature Overture:” Using only the high strings, woodwinds and three piccolos, Tchaikovsky creates music of sparkle and lightness of texture.
- “March:” Cymbals and pizzicato cellos and basses create a playful and bouncy march.
- “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy:” The combination of the celesta and the bass clarinet was a stroke of orchestral genius.
- “Trepak:” An energetic Russian folk dance, moving faster and faster to a prestissimo climax.
- “Arab Dance:” Muted strings and soft woodwinds create a softly sensuous melody.
- “Chinese Dance:” With two bassoons playing the accompaniment, the flutes and piccolo create a shrill and exotic melody embellished with many trills.
- “Dance of the Reed Pipes:” A graceful dance for three flutes.
- “Waltz of the Flowers:” This extended number, which features a musical-visual pun by scoring the French horns as flowers, pays homage to the "Waltz King," Johann Strauss II, whom Tchaikovsky greatly admired.
Georges Bizet
(1838-1875) |
“Farandole”
from L’Arlesiènne Suite No.2
Georges Bizet 1838-1875
Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance as a child but never lived long enough to completely fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left over 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the opera Carmen.
Hard up for money, Bizet composed in 1872 incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet called L’arlèsienne (The Woman from Arles). Embroiled in a war between the proponents of “high” art and “low” art, the critics refused to come and the play closed after 21 performances to an empty house. Bizet, however, did not let his incidental music, containing 27 numbers, go to waste. He extracted an orchestral suite that has remained popular in the repertory. After Bizet’s death, his friend Ernest Guiraud extracted a second suite that has become equally accepted. Both suites are considerably revised versions of the original incidental music, which was scored for only 26 musicians, including a saxophone. The Suite conjures both images of the folk dances of Provence, coupled with the ominous atmosphere of the play.
The suite ends with the “Farandole,” a vigorous Provençal dance, which begins with the traditional “Marcho dei Rei,” known in this country as the Christmas carol of the Three Kings.  The tune alternates with the farandole proper. The piece, which becomes increasingly frenetic, concludes with both melodies played in counterpoint against each other.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007
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