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Bolero!
October 27 & 28, 2007
Click on the  to hear the musical examples.
Franz Schubert
1797-1828 |
Symphony No.4 IN c minor, D. 41 “Tragic”
Franz Schubert
Of all the great classical Viennese composers, Franz Schubert was the only one to have actually been born in Vienna. Yet the city was less accepting of the music of its native son than to the music of outsiders who settled there. In the half century after his death, Schubert’s reputation rested almost exclusively on his wonderful Lieder while the rest of his music was mostly neglected. None of his orchestral music was published during his lifetime, the first six symphonies waiting until 1884-85 in the Gesamtausgabe, the first complete edition of his works.
Schubert later gave the Symphony No.4 the subtitle “Tragic” as an afterthought. At the time of its composition in 1816, he was a full-time, year-round teacher at his father's school, a job of drudgery that he hated – which may explain the sad mood of the Symphony. He was also at the time taking composition lessons twice weekly with Antonio Salieri – who had also taught Beethoven upon his arrival in Vienna – attending numerous concerts and operas, doing some private teaching, and socializing with his friends. There is very little biographical material available for this period in the composer’s life. After all, he was only a schoolmaster and a student composer with no backstage father like Leopold Mozart to promote him all over Europe.
Despite his youth, Schubert was an extremely fluent composer, capable of turning out Lieder in a steady flow. He had composed music for his family’s string quartet, as well as some church music, but his two earliest ambitions were to compose symphonies and opera. Although at the time of composition of his Symphony No.4 Schubert was clearly familiar with Beethoven’s first eight symphonies, his own early symphonies show little influence of the intimidating master. Rather, their language harks back to Mozart and Haydn, especially the latter. While Beethoven’s symphonies – especially from No.3 on – were the fruit of a mature composer, Schubert’s first five were youthful, student attempts. Even his Symphony No. 9 “The Great” in C major, was written when he was only 28.
Since Schubert and Beethoven died a year apart, they are usually regarded as contemporaries, but by a nasty combination of bad luck and bad habits, Schubert died before he could completely mature as a composer, while Beethoven lived to a reasonable – if uncomfortable – age for his time. Except for the compositions of his final years, the C major Symphony, the final string quartets, the C major String Quintet, Die Winterreise and the last piano sonatas, we have been denied the fruits of Schubert’s maturity and can only guess what he might have become had he, too, lived into his 50s.
For a young man yet to reach his 20th birthday, the Symphony No.4 is quite a hefty work. It falls into the unusual class of symphonies in minor keys, which, for the time, were quite rare and often suggested a “program” – or at least a tragic affect of some sort. There was no precedent for writing a symphony with four minor movements, Mozart’s 40th being one of the rare examples with three, but Schubert was not far behind with his heavy first and final movements and the anguished middle section of the second movement Andante.
The Symphony opens with a lugubrious introduction, which in the hands of Haydn might have been used to set the listener up for a rousing, jolly allegro. But Schubert meant it, as witnessed by the nervous, almost angry opening theme. Of course, during this period, symphonies in minor keys had to have second theme group in the relative major, but Schubert seems only to pay lip service to this convention, maintaining the nervous drive throughout the movement.
The second movement, an expansion of the conventional ABA song form, repeats both A and B sections with new and more poignant harmonies, plus a coda. It opens with a gentle cantabile that almost washes away the tension from the opening movement. Then Schubert hits us with the B section, a reminder that all is not entirely serene. Of particular interest in this movement are the sighing motives Schubert uses throughout, sometimes a descending major second, at others a more plangent minor second.
Schubert called his third movement "Menuetto;" it falls more into the style of Haydn with his heavy peasant dances than Mozart's more elegant court dances, but it also suggests the new scherzo that Beethoven had substituted for the dance. Note also the slight ambiguity about where the downbeat is because of the heavy stress on the final beats of the measures. The Trio is clearly a peasant dance.
The Finale returns to the anxiety of the Symphony's opening movement. Written in sonata form, instead of the conventional rondo, it opens with another nervous theme. As in the earlier movement, compelled to end in a major key, Schubert retains the tense mood by lacing his secondary themes with dark harmonies and the major/minor ambiguity that characterizes so much of his more emotional writing.
John Adams
b.1947 |
VIOLIN CONCERTO
John Adams
John Adams is generally associated with minimalism, a style of composition pioneered by Terry Riley, Phillip Glass and Steve Reich in which short musical motives are repeated, although gradually and slowly changing in melody, harmony or rhythm one note at a time. While repetition in the works of Riley, Glass and Reich can seem interminable, Adams adds more drama and harmonic direction and a more accessible tonal and melodic language to his scores. He is one of the most frequently performed American composers.
Born in Worcester, MA, Adams studied at Harvard University with Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici, and Roger Sessions. In 1971 he moved west to settle in California, teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory. From 1978 to 1985, during his tenure as composer-in-residence with the San Francisco Symphony, he established a reputation with the success of such works as Harmonium, settings of three poems by Emily Dickenson.
In 1987, Adams’s collaboration with stage director Peter Sellars catapulted him into international fame with the Grammy-winning opera Nixon in China, based on Richard Nixon’s breakthrough trip in 1972. In 1991, Adams composed The Death of Klinghoffer, also based on an historical event, the terrorist murder of a passenger aboard a cruise ship. Not only did both works become the most performed contemporary operas in recent history, but they were also televised by PBS. Klinghoffer was filmed in 2003 on location in the Mediterranean aboard a cruise liner, the most authentic venue for the presentation of opera on film. In September of 2003 Adams succeeded Pierre Boulez as Composer in Residence at Carnegie Hall. The same year his On the Transmigration of Souls, a choral work commemorating the victims of the September 11 attacks, won the Pulitzer Prize for music.
Adams’ Violin Concerto, composed in 1993 on an unusual commission from the Minnesota Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Ballet, was premiered first in concert in Minneapolis in January 1994. The third movement of the Violin Concerto was choreographed by Peter Martins, receiving its New York premiere at New York City Ballet's Opening Night Gala on November 22, 1994. He writes about the work:
“In the early 1990’s, during the composition of The Death of Klinghoffer, I began to think more about melody. This was perhaps a result of being partially liberated by a new chromatic richness that was creeping into my sound, but it was more likely due to the need to find a melodic means to set Alice Goodman’s psychologically complex libretto.
“As if to compensate for years of neglecting the “singing line,” the Violin Concerto emerged as an almost implacably melodic piece – an example of ‘hypermelody.’ The violin spins one long phrase after another without stop for nearly the full thirty-five minutes of the piece. I adopted the classic form of the concerto as a kind of Platonic model, even to the point of placing a brief cadenza for the soloist at the traditional locus near the end of the first movement.
“The concerto opens with a long extended rhapsody for the violin, a free, fantastical ‘endless melody’ over the regularly pulsing staircase of upwardly rising figures in the orchestra. The second movement takes a received form, the chaconne, and gently stretches, compresses, and transfigures its contours and modalities while the violin floats like a disembodied spirit around and about the orchestral tissue." 
The music of the first movement is punctuated by changes of musical texture, highlighted by variations in the accompanying ensemble and the articulation of the soloist . For much of the movement, Adams uses an eerie ostinato under the singing violin. The violin becomes increasingly passionate, with the tempo picking up steadily. While its voice in the first part of the movement consisted of an endless stream of ever changing music, a few minutes into the movement the violin suddenly becomes fixated on brief motives, frequently repeating them like a musical stammer, accompanied by a change in the ostinato pattern as well. The cadenza, the place where most concertos give the most difficult technical passagework, is in this concerto the slowest and softest. It sets the tone for the gentle conclusion.
Adams' Chaconne was a common form throughout the Baroque period, in which a constantly repeating ground bass underlies a florid and ever changing melody in the upper voice or voices. Probably the most famous Baroque chaconne is the final movement of the Partita in d minor for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. Adams, however, pays homage in this movement to another chaconne by one of the early musical innovators of the period, Claudio Monteverdi. Adams ground is a very slow rendition in the double basses of the ground from Monteverdi's duet "Zefiro torna" (The West Wind Returns) from the collection Scherzi musicali. One important difference between Adams' use of the chaconne concept, however, is that in earlier periods, the harmonic progression of the ground bass dictated the harmony of the entire piece, while in the Violin Concerto, constantly changing sonorities emerge from the free counterpoint over the constant ground, in this example shared with other instruments.
Adams writes: "The chaconne’s title, ‘Body through which the dream flows,’ is a phrase from a poem by Robert Haas, words that suggested to me the duality of flesh and spirit that permeates the movement. It is as if the violin is the “dream” that flows through the slow, regular heartbeat of the orchestral ‘body.‘” At the center point of the movement, the violin at last falls silent for a few moments, as the principal flute and upper winds take over the arabesques over the ground.
Adams takes the concept of the third movement from another Baroque model, the toccata. Composed originally for keyboard as a way of showing off the manual dexterity of the musician, this toccata for the violin achieves an analogous goal. The movement is a rondo, in which the soloist takes a running start into the jazzy refrain. The subsequent episodes, while principally for the soloist, are also demonic showpiece for the orchestra – including electronic keyboards.
It is probably no accident that Adams, one of the most important of the minimalist composers, laces all three movements with ostinato patterns of all types. The Concerto, among other things, stands as representing the dialectic between stasis and change.
Maurice Ravel
1875-1937 |
BOLERO
Maurice Ravel 1875-1937
“I have written only one masterpiece,” remarked Maurice Ravel to fellow composer Arthur Honegger, “.. that is Bolero. Unfortunately, it contains no music.” His self-irony notwithstanding, it is one of the most popular musical compositions of all time. It was created for the dancer Ida Rubinstein, a protégé of Sergey Diaghilev and pupil of Michel Fokine, who was the inspiration for numerous artists of the 1910s and ‘20s, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, André Gide, Darius Milhaud and others. She asked Ravel in 1927 to orchestrate for her some of Isaac Albéniz’s dances from Iberia, but the composer found out that someone else was already working on those.
Bolero was born out of this confusion. Its premiere on November 22, 1928, with Rubinstein as the solo female dancer and 20 male dancers mostly standing around ogling her, created a sensation. The whole piece consists of the insistent repetition of a single melody of slightly irregular phrasing, accompanied by an ostinato rhythm on the snare drum. Its magic is almost childishly simple: to repeat the melody, changing the instrumentation, gradually increasing the volume, and adding more instruments.  But the true genius of the piece is in its “punch-line,” a sudden unexpected and drastic change of key, at which point the whole meticulous structure explodes.
The Spanish Bolero is usually a couples dance of moderate tempo in triple meter, different from the Cuban dance by the same name, which is in duple meter. According to tradition it was invented by the dancer Sebastian Cerezo in 1780. In the 19th century it became popular with classical composers, including Beethoven, Chopin von Weber and Berlioz.
It is said that the best Spanish music has been written by Frenchmen, and Maurice Ravel was a prime example. His first “Spanish” composition was the “Habañera” for two pianos in 1895, which was followed by many others, including Alborada del gracioso, the opera L’Heure espagnole, Tzigane, Rapsodie espagnole and, in 1928 Bolero.
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007
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