Program Notes
Tchaikovsky FOURTH
Program Notes By Steven Ledbetter
Gustav Mahler
Blumine, movement removed from Symphony No. 1 in D
Gustav Mahler was
born at Kalische (Kaliste) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on
July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on
May 18, 1911. He did most of the work on this symphony in
February and March 1888, but he revised it extensively on several occasions,
eventually choosing to cut it from five movements to four by eliminating the
movement to be heard here. Mahler himself conducted the premiere of the original
version with the Budapest
Philharmonic on November 20, 1889,
but he dropped “Blumine” after 1894 and revised the rest of the work. Duration
is about 8 minutes.
Mahler’s notion of the symphony was all-inclusive. On more
than one occasion he remarked that, for him, the word “symphony” meant “to build
a world.” His first essay at the symphonic form poured out of him in the wake of
a troubling affair in which he had nearly run off with the wife of a German
military man who was the grandson of the composer of
Der Freischütz, but got cold feet and
never went to the appointed meeting rendezvous.
He poured the emotional energies thus released into
compositional activity, completing the work that we now call the First Symphony
and writing the first movement of what we now call the Second Symphony. But in
his mind, both works were symphonic poems, that is, program music with some kind
of story to tell (whether made explicit or not). Only gradually did he come to
the recognition that he was in fact creating—on a grand scale!—new contributions
to the most prestigious of all orchestral forms, the symphony.
His First Symphony originally had five movements, and so it
was presented at its premiere in
Budapest—but arranged in two large sections (three
movements in the first half, two in the last), and labeled “symphonic poem.” Yet
he gave no hint as to its nature or subject matter. Moreover, even when he did
offer some clue to the music, audiences found the music was ironic in ways that
undercut the ideas that his program hinted at.
This first version of the work is now lost; the earliest
surviving manuscript of the symphony (now at Yale) already incorporates
significant revisions that Mahler made for the second performance four years
later. But it was still in five movements, and remained in that form through
performances in 1893 and 1894. For
those, he wrote an elaborate, lengthy program describing the ideas behind the
music. Deciding this was overkill, he cut the original second movement and after
1896 presented the work as a standard four-movement symphony.
The movement that Mahler removed was only discovered when
the original manuscript found its way to the Yale library. It was an Adagio
entitled “Blumine.” A few conductors have included it in performances of the
First Symphony, but it really does not belong there, because Mahler made many
changes in getting to the final version of his symphony, and the “Blumine”
movement was only part of his first vision.
Still, it is always fascinating to hear what composers
choose to omit, and to try to figure out why. In the case of this Andante, it is
easy enough to figure out: About 1884 Mahler had composed some incidental music
for scenes from a play called “The Trumpeter of Säkkingen” by Scheffel. The
music we know as “Blumine” comes from that score. Mahler evidently was very fond
of this music. Feeling that it would never be heard again in its original form,
he simply inserted it into the new symphony. But increasingly he felt that it
did not fit. It was scored for a much smaller orchestra, and it simply came from
a different sound-world. He chose to cut it before publishing the symphony and
never had second thoughts.
We can, however, enjoy the music for its own sake,
especially for the dreamy trumpet melody that opens it and for hints of the
mature Mahler to come in the spare, but imaginative scoring.
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD
Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35
Erich Wolfgang
Korngold was born in Vienna
on May 29, 1897,
and died in Hollywood
on November 29, 1957.
He composed the Violin Concerto in 1946. It was premiered by Jascha Heifetz with
the St. Louis
Symphony Orchestra under the direction of
Vladimir
Golschmann on February 15, 1947. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls
for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English
horn), two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons (second doubling
contrabassoon for just two notes!), four horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani,
glockenspiel, sylophone, vibraphone, cymbals, bass drum, harp, celesta, and
strings. Duration is about 24 minutes.
When Erich Wolfgang Korngold was
ten, his father took him to Mahler so that the boy could play over on the piano
his recently composed cantata, Gold. As the music unfolded, Mahler
stalked up and down the room muttering, "A genius‑‑a genius." By eleven,
Korngold wrote a pantomime, Der Schneemann (The Snowman), which, after it
was orchestrated by Zemlinsky, was performed at the Vienna Court Opera (on
October 4, 1911)‑‑the composer was thirteen years old! There were suspicions
that this music had actually been composed by the boy's father, one of the
best‑known music critics of his day, but Julius Korngold replied, sensibly and
humorously, that if could write music of such quality, he would not spend his
life writing articles about other people's music!
First-rate musicians were
fascinated with the talented boy. Arthur Nikisch commissioned a work for the
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra—the first orchestral work that he himself
orchestrated, the Schauspiel‑Ouvertüre (Overture to a drama). Korngold
began to write operas—two of them at eighteen! When he was twenty-three, Die
tote Stadt made him famous all over the world, with productions in
eighty-three opera houses. He wrote two more operas after that, and his last,
Die Kathrin was scheduled for performance in 1938 when the Nazi Anschluss
meant that the same racial attacks on the art of Jewish musicians would take
place in Vienna as in Berlin—and the performance was canceled.
By the mid‑1920s, though,
Korngold, still regarded as a prodigious talent, was also considered a
representative of the past; his devotion to the romantic style of the turn of
the century gave him a retrospective position in the Vienna of Schoenberg, Berg,
and Webern. He arranged operettas, including some of Strauss' (A Night in
Vienna and Cagliostro in Vienna); the great German director Max
Reinhardt invited him to Berlin for productions of
Fledermaus and La belle Hélène. By this time Korngold had already
found a new métier, one in which he was to become a pre‑eminent master—as a
composer of scores for films in Hollywood. He visited first in 1933,
accompanying Reinhardt, who was to film A Midsummer Night's Dream, and
who wanted Korngold to adapt Mendelssohn's score of incidental music for the
film. He began to compose original scores, too, and immediately discovered that
he had a special flair for this kind of work. Two of his scores (Anthony
Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood) received Oscars. When the
Nazis overran Austria,
Korngold found a welcoming home in
California, where, by 1947, he had composed 18 film
scores of great distinction.
He vowed not to write any more
concert music until “the monster in Europe is
removed from the world.” But after
the war he gave up film music writing and returned to the concert hall, with his
Violin Concerto in D. For some thirty years, the great violinist Bronislaw
Huberman used to ask, whenever he visited the Korngolds, “Erich, where’s my
concerto?” When writing the film score for
Another Dawn in 1937, it struck Korngold that one of the themes would be
provide excellent material for a concerto, and it was with this that he began
soon after the war ended.
If you are a devoté of movies
from the 1930s, you may be surprised to find that you recognize some of the
music in this concerto. Korngold, who recognized that most classical musicians
did not consider film music to be serious, decided to recycle some of the
musical ideas that had already appeared in films (much as J.S. Bach would turn a
piece for unaccompanied violin into the overture to a festive cantata, or Handel
would turn a cheery little Italian duet into one of his most famous choruses in
Messiah). And it was not unknown for a
composer of film music to do the same thing: Prokofiev reworked the
isolated, sometimes fragmentary musical cues from the film score for
Alexander Nevsky into a cantata that is one of his most satisfying
large-scale concert works, and just about the time Korngold was writing his
violin concerto, Ralph Vaughan Williams was turning his musical score for
Scott of the Antarctic into his Sinfonia Antartica.
Korngold was, naturally, familiar
with the great tradition of romantic violin concertos, and he composed a piece
that would fit snugly into that world, offering the soloist the opportunity for
lyricism, by turns gentle and soaring, and for spectacular virtuosity. After
completing two movements, he asked a violinist friend to play through it; The
result was disastrous; the friend made many false starts and made the piece
sound horribly cacophonous. Korngold was on the verge of dumping the piece, but
a friend of his was the manager of Jascha Heifetz, whose breathtaking virtuosity
and assurance was world famous. When he looked at the work, Heifetz urged
Korngold to make the finale even more demanding technically.
Huberman never got around to
playing “his” concerto; in the end the piece was premiered by Jascha Heifetz.
The concerto was a great success in St.
Louis, but Korngold was worried about the response of the New York critics, who sniffed at film music
and were unlikely to be generous. Indeed they were not. Though audiences loved
the work, the critic of the New York Sun
famously called it “more corn than gold.” For some years it was only the Heifetz
recording that made it possible to hear the concerto. But times have changed.
Korngold’s star has risen, and many
violinists have found the concerto very much worth putting in their repertory.
The soloist opens the work with a
long passage, rising yearningly, drawn from Korngold’s score for the 1937 film
Another Dawn. The second theme of the movement comes from the 1939 film
Juárez. His first Academy Award score, Anthony Adverse (1936),
provided the material for the delicate emotions of the Romance, and the
light-hearted comedy of The Prince and the Pauper (1937) provided the
lively material for the racing finale. The Korngold concerto is not a work to
puzzle over; it is one, rather, to sit back and simply enjoy.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Kamsko-Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg
on November 6, 1893.
He began the Symphony No. 4 in May
1877 and completed the score on January
19, 1878. Nikolai Rubinstein conducted the first performance in Moscow on March 4 that
year. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle,
cymbals, bass drum, and strings. Duration is about 44 minutes.
Tchaikovsky composed his Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus
36, between May 1877 and January
19, 1878. It has long been regarded as the first of his truly mature
symphonies, and perhaps his finest achievement in the genre. The expressive
power of the symphony may bear some trace of the preceding winter, when the
composer passed through a crisis that included an attempt at suicide.
Two women were involved, in very different ways, with very
different effects on Tchaikovsky’s work. The first was Nadezhda von Meck, the
recently widowed mother of eleven children, passionately devoted to music,
especially that of Tchaikovsky, which she had first heard a few years earlier.
Upon learning from a friend of the composer’s that he was continually
hard-pressed for money, she offered him, in December 1876, a modest commission.
It was the beginning of fourteen years of support, carried out with the
extraordinary stipulation that they were never to meet in person. The
long-distance relationship, which produced over 700 letters, turned out to be
the most intense and emotional relationship either of them ever experienced.
At precisely this time Tchaikovsky was wrestling with the
personal torment of coming to terms with his homosexuality (still illegal in Russia), which
left him open to possible discovery and blackmail. His life became immensely
complicated when he received a letter in May 1877 from Antonina Milyukova, a
young pupil at his conservatory expressing her passionate and undying devotion
to him. Tchaikovsky had just become obsessed with the hope of turning Pushkin’s
poetic novel Eugene Onegin into an opera. In the poem, a young girl
writes a similar letter to the title character; his callous response to it
triggers the ultimate tragedy. Life seemed to be imitating art. Tchaikovsky had
no desire to be cast in the role of the unfeeling Onegin, so he put Antonina off
as gently as possible. But she refused to leave him alone, even after he had
darkly hinted at the true state of his emotional makeup. Tchaikovsky felt
forced, against his will, into marriage, fearing the consequences if he refused
and hoping that a marriage would at least stifle gossip about him.
The marriage took place in midsummer; within two days,
Tchaikovsky knew that he had committed a grave folly. When the couple returned
to Moscow from a honeymoon visit to St. Petersburg,
with the marriage still unconsummated, the composer implored Mme. von Meck to
supply money for a temporary escape. In early August he fled to the Caucasus and spent the rest of the summer at his sister’s
home. There he orchestrated the Fourth Symphony, which he had fully sketched
during the torments of the late spring.
When he finally had to return to
Moscow
in late September, he found it impossible to face his bride. One night he
walked, fully clothed, into the icy waters of the Moscow River,
hoping to contract a fatal case of pneumonia. The suicide attempt failed, and
Tchaikovsky in despair had his brother send him a faked telegram required his
immediate presence in St. Petersburg. From there he
ran off to Switzerland,
Vienna, and Italy, where he
spent the winter finishing the Fourth Symphony.
Naturally, the symphony was dedicated to Nadezhda von Meck.
In his letters to her Tchaikovsky always referred to it as “our” symphony.
Composed during an extended period of emotional upheaval, the Fourth is arguably
his finest symphony, a work of rich expressive force and a more effective
architecture than he ever achieved in any other symphony. Like its evident
inspiration, Beethoven’s Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth progresses from a mood
fateful combat to eventual triumph. To Nadezhda von Meck he wrote an explanation
of its secret program:
The introduction contains the germ, the central idea...this is
Fate, the inevitable force that jealously watches to see that felicity and peace
shall not be complete... that hangs over the head like a sword of Damocles and
constantly, unswervingly, poisons the soul....
Tchaikovsky’s fatalism takes him through moods of despair
and longing before finally finding that life can be made bearable by taking
happiness from the joys of the people around us. But he kept this program a
secret between himself and his patron; in performance he preferred to let the
music speak for itself. Certainly the strength of the Fourth projects
Tchaikovsky’s musical ideas even without the explanation sent to his “beloved
friend,” the one who really made the symphony possible.