< Back to Audio Notes
1812 Overture
January 18, 19, & 20, 2008
Click on the  to hear the musical examples.
Sergey Rachmaninoff
1873-1943 |
Choral Symphony The Bells, Op.35
Sergey Rachmaninoff
Sergey Rachmaninoff grew up in a musical family, middle-class but under strained economic conditions. His gifts as a pianist were recognized early, but he always wanted to compose and considered himself a composer first, pianist second. Until the Russian revolution, he succeeded in establishing for himself a comfortable life, composing and conducting and spending time traveling around Europe. Choosing exile after the 1917 revolution in Russia, however, forced him to become primarily a world-traveling pianist in order to put bread on the table.
One of the last works of his idyllic period was the choral symphony The Bells, a setting of the Russian translation by Konstantin Balmont of Edgar Alan Poe’s poem by that name. Balmont’s translation is so free that it is rather a separate work. It so "out-Poes" Poe in its ghoulish accretions that it requires a re-translation into English for performances sung in English. (please see below the juxtaposition of Poe's original poem with the English translation of Balmont's Russian version.)
Rachmaninoff began composing The Bells in Rome in the spring of 1913 and it premiered in Moscow less than a year later. It was Rachmaninoff’s own favorite work and it is considered among his best. It is however infrequently performed for reasons that have nothing to do with its musical quality. It requires a very large orchestra and chorus, three soloists who appear in just one movement each, and lasts only a little over 30 minutes.
The four types of bells as described by Poe - silver sleigh bells, golden wedding bells, brazen alarum bells and mournful iron bells - span the stages of human existence: childhood innocence; marriage and family; war and devastation; and, finally, death. Rachmaninoff commented that “The sound of church bells dominated all the cities of the Russia I used to know - Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow. They accompanied every Russian from childhood to the grave, and no composer could escape their influence. … All my life I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of happily chiming and mournfully tolling bells. This love for bells is inherent in every Russian. If I have been at all successful in making bells vibrate with human emotion in my works, it is largely due to the fact that most of my life was spent amid vibrations of the bells of Moscow."
Throughout the Symphony, Rachmaninoff uses ingenious orchestrations to imitate the sound of bells of all sizes and functions. The four movements correspond to the four stanzas of Poe’s poem. Just as Poe’s poem uses the repetition of the word “bells” as a kind of textual ostinato, the characteristic sound of the different kinds of bells pervades each movement. Just as each type of bell has its own function in the journey of life, Rachmaninoff give it is own orchestral color in the introduction to each movement.
In the opening movement, Rachmaninoff recreates the timbre of sleigh bells with ingenious combinations of triangle, tambourine and celesta in the opening bars, then flutes, oboes, clarinets, pizzicato strings and muted trumpets, alternating their sounds to create the auditory image.  Although the two opening movements – sleigh bells and wedding bells – are ostensibly joyful, Balmont and Rachmaninoff interrupt the idyllic images with a lugubrious air not even present in Poe's original poem. In the cheerful “Silver Sleigh Ride Bells,” the tenor extols the sound of the innocent sleigh bells, But Balmont's added lines, "And a promise they declare, /
That beyond illusion's cumber, /
Births and lives beyond all number, /
Waits an universal slumber," places a damper on the festivities and the music.
The second movement, “Wedding Bells,” combines an air of idyllic romance with a spookiness that even belies Balmont's over-ripe embellishments. Rachmaninoff's brooding chorus produces an emotive disconnect from the text. The music seems to be a reminder of the shoals and responsibilities of married life, not to mention the transitory nature of happiness and of life itself. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the bell-like introduction to this rendition of conjugal rapture opens with the first four pitches of Dies irae from the Catholic mass for the dead – Rachmaninoff's "signature tune" that crops up in nearly all his compositions. Granted, the composer veers away from the rest of the chant melody to create the tolling ostinato bell theme, but the emotional ambiguity of the music persists throughout the movement.
The third movement scherzo, “Brazen Alarum Bells,” shatters any previously established air of domestic bliss, attenuated or otherwise. It begins innocently enough with the tolling of a diverse collection of bells whose sinister significance the listener only gradually comprehends. When the chorus enters, it is with a terrified scream: "Hear, the howling of the alarum bell, like the groaning of a brazen hell…" In the whirlwind of horrific images – some courtesy of Balmont – the chorus's chromatic sighing halts to linger on the words "Now approaching, now receding /
Rings their message through the night," with the dies irae motive, an unmistakable signal of the ultimate meaning of the "message."
The doom-laden finale, “Mournful Iron Bells,” is the most distant from Poe's original poem, Balmont's accretions overstating Poe's more evocative language. Its funereal Lento lugubre is introduced by the orchestra's traditional harbinger of doom, the English horn. The baritone intones his grim message over the grieving choir. And, of course, Rachmaninoff now brings back the dies irae several times, as here, after the baritone has sung: "...For the sinner and the just /
That their eyes be sealed in a slumber,/ and their hearts be turned to dust ... " Near the end, the music, in spite of the unremittingly pessimistic text, has a note of hope and consolation. Never is a major key more welcome!
The Bells
Edgar Allen Poe
I
Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
II
Hear the mellow wedding bells -
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! -how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!
III
Hear the loud alarum bells -
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now -now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells -
Of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!
IV
Hear the tolling of the bells -
Iron bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people -ah, the people -
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone -
They are neither man nor woman -
They are neither brute nor human -
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells,
Of the bells -
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells. |
The Bells
translation by Konstantin Balmont
I.
THE SILVER. SLEIGH-BELLS
Listen, hear the silver bells!
Silver bells!
Hear the sledges with the bells,
How they charm our weary senses with a sweetness that compels,
In the ringing and the singing that of deep oblivion tells
Hear them calling, calling, calling
Rippling sounds of laughter, falling
On the icy midnight air;
And a promise they declare,
That beyond illusion's cumber,
Births and lives beyond all number,
Waits an universal slumber--deep and sweet past all compare.
Hear the sledges with the bells
Hear the silver-throated bells;
See, the stars bow down to hearken, what their melody foretells,
With a passion that compels,
And their dreaming is a gleaming that a perfumed air exhales,
And their thoughts are but a shining
And a luminous divining
Of the singing and the ringing, that a dreamless peace foretell!
II.
THE MELLOW WEDDING BELLS
Hear the mellow wedding-bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of tender passion their melodious voice foretells!
Through the night their sound entrances,
Like a lover’s yearning glances,
That arise
On a wave of tuneful rapture to the moon within the skies.
From the sounding cells upwinging
Flash the tones of joyous singing
Rising, falling, brightly calling; from a thousand happy throats
Roll the glowing, golden note,
And an amber twilight gloats
While the tender vow is whispered that great happiness foretells,
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells, the golden bells!
III. THE LOUD ALARUM BELLS
Hear them, hear the brazen bells,
Hear the loud alarum bells!
In their sobbing, in their throbbing, what a tale of horror dwells!
How beseeching sounds their cry
'Neath the naked midnight sky,
Through the darkness wildly pleading
In affright,
Now approaching, now receding
Rings their message through the night.
And so fierce is their dismay
And the terror they portray,
That the brazen domes are riven and their tongues can only speak
In a tuneless, jangling, wrangling, as they shriek, and shriek, and shriek, Till their frantic supplication
To the ruthless conflagration
Grows discordant, faint and weak.
But the fire sweeps on unheeding,
And in vain is all their pleading
With the flame!
From each window, roof and spire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
Every lambent tongue proclaims:
I shall soon,
Leaping higher, still aspire, till I reach the crescent moon;
Else I die of my desire in aspiring to the moon!
O despair, despair, despair,
That so feebly ye compare
With the blazing, raging horror, and the panic, and the glare,
That ye cannot turn the flames,
As your unavailing clang and clamor mournfully proclaims.
And in hopeless resignation
Man must yield his habitation
To the warring desolation!
Yet we know
By the booming and the clanging,
By the roaring and the twanging,
How the danger falls and rises like the tides that ebb and flow,
And the progress of the danger every ear distinctly tells
By the sinking and the swelling in the clamor of the bells.
IV. THE MOURNFUL IRON BELLS
Hear the tolling of the bells,
Mournful bells!
Bitter end to fruitless dreaming their stem monody foretells!
What a world of desolation in their own utterance dwells!
And we tremble at our doom,
As we think upon the tomb,
Glad endeavor quenched for ever in the silence and the gloom.
With persistent iteration
They repeat their lamentation,
Till each muffled monotone
Seems a groan,
Heavy, moaning.
Their intoning,
Waxing sorrowful and deep,
Bear the message, that a brother passed away to endless sleep.
Those relentless voices rolling
Seem to take a joy in tolling
For the sinner and the just
That their eyes be sealed in a slumber, and their hearts be turned to dust
Where they lie beneath a stone.
But the spirit of the belfry is a somber fiend that dwells
In the shadow of the bells,
And he gibbers and he yells,
As he knells, and knells, and knells,
Madly round the belfry reeling,
While the giant bells are pealing,
While the bells are fiercely thrilling,
Moaning forth the word of doom.
|
Igor Stravinsky
1882-1971
|
Suite from the Ballet Petrushka
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Stravinsky’s great ballet, Petrushka, went through a fascinating set of metamorphoses. First conceived as a concert piece, it was inspired by the immensely popular Petrushka puppet plays of nineteenth-century Russia, which took their name from their main character. The traditional Petrushka was an obscene clown, whose ancestors and relatives include Pulcinella of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte and Punch, combined with an indigenous Russian folk character. This original orchestral sketch is maddeningly no longer extant, but we know that it contained no organized plot and that the composer had no thought of staging it.
After the stunning success of Firebird In 1909, which Stravinsky composed on commission from Sergey Diaghilev, the great expatriate impresario of the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev commissioned a new ballet from the composer. Stravinsky collaborated with artist and librettist Alexander Benois and choreographer Mikhail Fokine to transform the idea of the original instrumental concert piece into drama and movement.
In the ballet, the collaborators imbued Petrushka with a soul, converting the screeching dupe into a pathetic – if not entirely sympathetic – victim of his own passionate nature. At first he is happy to be a mere puppet; but when he falls in love with a beautiful dancer and tries to win her love, the world turns against him and he loses her, and to the amusement of everyone is killed by his rival the Moor. The ballet concludes as Petrushka’s ghost appears on a rooftop, an eerie and pathetic witness to his own defeat.
Petrushka was premiered with great success in Paris in 1911, but the first performance in Vienna was a disaster: “I have just come from Vienna, where the brilliant Opera House orchestra has sabotaged my Petrushka. Such ugly, nasty music, it was declared, couldn’t be played better,” wrote the composer to a friend.
Within a year, Stravinsky excerpted an orchestral version of eleven numbers from the full ballet. These were not designated as a “Suite” until Stravinsky revised the score in 1946. While the original score called for a large orchestra, the new version greatly reduced and simplified the instrumentation. Stravinsky also provided for an optional alternate ending. Diaghilev was unhappy with the last scene, which starts with a general melee of the crowd celebrating Shrove Tuesday and concludes as Petrushka is mortally wounded by his rival, his ghost cackling and fading hauntingly into the night. Stravinsky substituted the final bars with a fortissimo orchestral flourish.
The Suite captures the essential elements of Stravinsky’s original score: the wealth of Russian folk melodies; the excited ostinato representing the milling crowd and, of course, the famous Petrushka motive, two parallel arpeggios a tritone apart (diminished fifth, known in the Middle ages as "the devil in music") which provides the central dramatic and musical tension of the piece.
The Suite runs out the various numbers in the order in which they appear in the ballet, but it is a suite of dances, not a condensed plotted version of the original. Between the first few movements, Stravinsky added a drumroll of the kind used to attract an audience at street shows.
The central section, "In Petrushka's Room," is a character sketch of the lovesick puppet, his fantasies of the dancer, and his jealous anger.
The remaining sections of the Suite present the colorful sights at the fair: "The Charlatan," whose sleight of hand is brilliantly portrayed in the music; "The Russian Dance;" "The Dance of the Wet Nurses;" "The Dancing Bear; "The Dance of the Gypsy Girls;" "The Dance of the Coachmen;" and "The Mummers' Dance."
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893
|
Festival Overture: 1812, Op.49
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840-1893
It is ironic that one of the most nationalistic – if not jingoistic – classical music compositions, and by a Russian composer, has become a symbol of our 4th of July celebrations.
Composed in 1880 for the consecration of the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the 1812 Overture was first performed in the summer of 1882 at a monster outdoors concert. The piece falls into the small category of musical battle reenactments, which dates from the Renaissance and includes such august composers as Beethoven. The Overture commemorates Russia’s victory over the armies of Napoleon, illustrated musically as a battle between the characteristic music of the two nations. Thunderous episodes imitate the battle musically, with such special effects as church bells and – for outdoor performances – cannon shots to augment the timpani and bass drums.
It is these special effects that most listeners associate and remember about the Overture, but there's quite a bit more to it: it portrays in music not only the Russian victory but also the essence of the Russian people, their religious faith and suffering, as well as their military prowess. They fervently believed that God was on their side, embodied in the persona of the czar.
The standard musical structure for an overture was sonata allegro form, and Tchaikovsky adapts his musical portrayal of the battle accordingly. The Overture opens with a long introduction beginning with a Russian Orthodox hymn played by a string quartet and solo wind choir. A wrenching oboe theme suggests the anxiety and suffering of the general populace, faced with the threat to their homeland. A Russian military song then introduces the Russian forces. The Allegro proper begins with battle (theme 1), the French army represented by the Marseillaise. (The fact that Napoleon had actually banned the anthem because of its association with the French Revolution was of no concern to Tchaikovsky.) A Romantic second theme was obligatory, but is the least representative of any in the Overture. The Russian side answers with a folksong as a third theme. A development section (more battle) and a formal recapitulation (still more battle), in which the French and Russian themes are set against each other contrapuntally. The massive coda – which is what everyone remembers – recaps the Russian military theme from the Introduction, now triumphant with bells and cannons, leading into the czarist anthem “God Save the Czar.” The anthem, however, was composed by Alexis Lvov in 1833, over 20 years after Napoleon’s defeat – this anachronism was also of no concern to Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky did not think much of his own creation. He wrote, “My Overture is loud and noisy, and I composed it without any feeling of affection for the music; it has therefore no artistic value.” To his surprise and chagrin it became one of his most popular works.
After the 1917 revolution, the hymns and the czarist anthem were taboo in Russia as was the Overture. With the Nazi invasion, however, it once again became an icon of patriotism and returned to the Russian repertoire. The commissars, however, decreed one little change: The czarist anthem was taken out, replaced by a tune from the concluding chorus of Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Czar. Fortunately for communist ideology, the substitution worked and the harmonies fit.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007
< Back to Audio Notes |
 |
