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Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
November 9-10-11, 2018
93rd Season / Subscription Concert No.3
Michael Allsen
Leonard Bernstein
was arguably the single most important American in the
world of Classical music in the 20th century. He could have
had a career as a composer (either on Broadway or in Classical
composition), conductor, concert pianist, or writer. What is
remarkable about Bernstein is that he chose to do all of these things,
and to do all of them phenomenally well! Born in
Massachusetts, he did not begin his musical training until his
family acquired a piano when he was ten. He was already active
as a composer and performer when he attended Harvard, and he
continued his musical training at Philadelphia’s Curtis
Institut By the time he was in his late twenties, Bernstein
was an international star: a popular guest conductor and a
composer respected both for his Broadway work and for
“serious” concert pieces. Bernstein was conductor of the New
York Philharmonic from 1958-1969, and later was closely
associated with the Vienna Philharmonic. Throughout his life
he struggled to maintain a balance between the various facets
of his career, but was astonishingly prolific in all of them.
Maestro DeMain has assembled this program
titled “Remembering Lenny” as a tribute to his mentor—the
program includes three works by Bernstein and the joyous
seventh symphony of Beethoven, one of the signature pieces of
Bernstein the conductor. We begin with the wonderfully snarky
overture to Bernstein’s operetta Candide, and excerpts
from his first great Broadway hit, On the Town. We also
present the first Madison Symphony Orchestra performance of
Bernstein’s edgy second symphony, based upon W.H. Auden’s poem
The Age of Anxiety.
Christopher Taylor performs the symphony’s challenging piano
part.
Leonard
Bernstein (1918-1991)
Overture to Candide
Bernstein’s operetta Candide was completed in 1956.
Its overture has been performed more times by the Madison
Symphony than any other than any other orchestral work:
over twenty performances since 1961, most recently in
2014. Duration 5:00.
In 1759, the
French playwright and satirist Voltaire published his Candide, a stinging
indictment of the then-fashionable “philosophical optimism”
of Leibnitz. Inspired in part by a horrible earthquake that
had destroyed much of the Portuguese city of Lisbon in 1755,
the play describes the philosophical awakening of Candide, a
young student of the savant Dr. Pangloss. After interminable
(and hilarious) tribulations, Candide sheds his optimism and
concludes that “to grow one’s own garden” should the primary
aim of life. Candide
‘s satirical rejection of boundless optimism and
philosophical approaches to world problems—beloved ideals of
the Age of Enlightenment—caused an understandable stir at
the French court and elsewhere in Europe, and it was
promptly placed in the Vatican Index of banned books.
(Despite this prohibition, Candide was popular
enough to warrant at least thirteen editions prior to
Voltaire’s death in 1778!)
The early history
of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide dates from
1950, when playwright Lillian Hellman suggested the Voltaire
play as a possible subject for collaboration. Bernstein’s
setting of Hellman’s libretto, completed six years later,
had a double purpose. The broad parody of the quartet finale
to Act I, and arias such as “Oh Happy We” mocks the
conventions of opera and operetta. In a broader sense,
however, Candide was
a satire of the parochialism of America in the 1950s—more
specifically the political paranoia that had threatened
Hellman and many of Bernstein’s acquaintances with
blacklisting and worse. Candide was not
completed until 1956, four years after Hellman had been
called to testify at the McCarthy hearings, and two years
after the humiliation of Senator McCarthy himself. Shortly after its
premiere Bernstein described Candide as a
“...political comment in the aftermath of Joe McCarthy,” and
political figures are indeed the most bitterly lampooned
characters in the operetta.
The overture to Candide is a
brilliant and showy piece that sets up the sarcastic tone of
the drama. It sets several musical themes and motives from
the operetta, including music from the battle scene and from
the arias “Oh Happy We” and “Glitter and be Gay.” The
operetta Candide
is only rarely performed today, but its overture is one of
Bernstein’s most popular pieces of concert music.
Leonard Bernstein
Three Dance Episodes
from On the Town
Bernstein’s Broadway
show On the Town was
composed in 1944. The suite, Three Dance Episodes, was created by Bernstein
in 1945, and he conducted the premiere in San Francisco on
February 15, 1946. This is our first performance of the work
at a subscription concert, Duration 11:00.
By 1943, Bernstein had already caught the
attention of America. At age 25, he was named Assistant
Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and his legendary “big
break” came on November 14, 1943, when with just a few hours’
notice he substituted for Bruno Walter in a
nationally-broadcast New York Philharmonic concert from
Carnegie Hall. Shortly before this he had been approached by a
dancer named Jerome Robbins. Unlike Bernstein, who was already
a star, Robbins was still up-and-coming, but he was every bit
as ambitious. He
wanted Bernstein to write a score for his Fancy Free—a new
ballet about three sailors on a shore leave in New York—to be
performed by the Ballet Theater of New York. The two hit it
off immediately, and Bernstein immediately began work on the
ballet’s Jazz-inspired score. It was performed on the stage of
the Metropolitan Opera on April 18 and was an immediate
success. Producer Oliver Smith encouraged Bernstein and
Robbins to expand their work into a full-fledged Broadway
musical, and by June, they were at work on the new show.
Bernstein brought in his friends Betty Comden and Adolphe
Green to write a book and lyrics. The show was finished
in time for its preview performances in Boston on December 13.
When it opened on Broadway a couple of weeks later it was a
hit, running for 463 performances. The 1949 movie version,
starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, won an Oscar for best
picture that year.
None of Fancy Free’s music
was replicated in On
the Town, which expands on the story of sailors on a
24-hour pass. Like Gershwin before him, Bernstein was
interested in blending symphonic music with Jazz and the
Broadway stage, but Bernstein channeled a much broader range
of influences: Jazz and popular songs are certainly there, but
also the clear influence of Copland. This is particularly true
of the music Bernstein wrote for Robbins’s innovative dance
sequences—much of which was collected into his 1945 orchestral
suite Three Dance
Episodes from “On the Town.” In discussing the central
role of dancing in the show, Bernstein boasted “I believe this is the first Broadway
show ever to have as many as seven or eight dance episodes
in the space of two acts; and, as a result, the essence of
the whole production is contained in these dances.”
The Dance Episodes are
all drawn from Act I of the show. Dance of the Great
Lover is a rather frenetic jazzy number—originally the
song “She’s a Home Lovin’ Girl”—with the sound of a
clattering subway train always in background. Bernstein
describes the action: “Gaby, the romantic sailor in search
of the glamorous Miss Turnstiles, falls asleep in the subway
and dreams of his prowess in sweeping Miss Turnstiles off
her feet.” Lonely
Town (pas de deux) is much slower, with bluesy solos
for the trumpet and solo woodwinds. Here, “Gaby watches a
scene, both tender and sinister, in which a sensitive
high-school girl in Central Park is lured and then cast off
by a worldly sailor.” Bernstein describes the third
movement, Times
Square: 1944, as “a more panoramic sequence in which
all the sailors in New York congregate in Times Square for
their night of fun. There is communal dancing, a scene in a
souvenir arcade, and a scene in the Roseland Dance Palace.”
The music that dominates this episode is the show’s
irrepressible opening song “New York, New York,” whether in
a big show dance or a sexy saxophone solo. There is a
humorous interlude as several sailors—small town boys in the
big city—bargain for souvenirs, and the final sequence of
frantic dances.
Leonard Bernstein
Symphony No.2 (“The Age
of Anxiety”)
Bernstein’s second
symphony was composed in 1947-49. Serge Koussevitsky
conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the premiere on
April 18, 1949 with Bernstein playing the prominent piano
part. He revised the score in 1965. This is our first
performance of the work. Duration 35:00.
Bernstein had already made his mark in the
field of Classical composition with the 1944 premiere of his Symphony No.1
(“Jeremiah”) when his mentor Serge Koussevitsky
commissioned a new work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But
the direct inspiration for his second symphony was W.H.
Auden’s book-length poem The Age of Anxiety.
Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for the poem in 1948 but it was
and remains a difficult work. Its four characters—Quant,
Malin, Rosetta, and Emble—meet in a bar in wartime New York,
and drink and talk their way through well over 100 pages, in
six episodes organized into two parts. The characters speak in
an imitation of ancient Anglo-Saxon verse forms, and the whole
is set in a Classical form inherited from Virgil, the eclogue.
For his part, though, Bernstein was overwhelmed by Auden’s
poem. In a later essay about the symphony (liberally quoted
here) he wrote that he first encountered it in the summer of
1947 and “from that moment the composition of a symphony based
on The Age of Anxiety acquired an almost compulsive
quality; and I worked on it steadily in Taos, in Philadelphia,
in Richmond, Mass., in Tel-Aviv, in planes, in hotel lobbies,
and finally (the week preceding the premiere) in Boston.” On
what the poem and symphony meant to him, he said: “The
essential line of the poem (and of the music) is the record of
our difficult and problematical search for faith. In the end,
two of the characters enunciate the recognition of this faith
– even a passive submission to it – at the same time revealing
an inability to relate to it personally in their daily lives,
except through blind acceptance.”
Bernstein mirrored the organization of The
Age of Anxiety
in his symphony, which is divided into two parts, each of
which is further divided into three sections, played without
pauses. It is also programmatic, following the action of
Auden’s characters in musical form. A prominent solo piano
part (to be played by him) was part of Bernstein’s plan from
the start—in essence, this was Bernstein inserting himself
into the narrative as “an almost autobiographical
protagonist.” Part One
opens with The
Prologue, in which the four characters meet in a bar. In
this short section, Bernstein creates a quiet melancholy
atmosphere with a pensive clarinet duet. The first entry of
the piano signals the beginning of The Seven Ages, where
the boozy interchanges between Auden’s characters are shown in
a set of seven variations, carried largely by the piano.
However this is a unique form: the variations are not on a
single theme, but each is essentially a variation on some
element of the preceding one. The variations continue in The Seven Stages,
though now in a more fragmented and increasingly frantic way.
According to Bernstein, in this section “the characters go on
an inner and highly symbolic journey according to a
geographical plan leading back to a point of comfort and
security. The four try every means, going singly and in pairs,
exchanging partners, and always missing the objective. When
they awaken from this dream-odyssey, they are closely united
through a common experience (and through alcohol), and begin
to function as one organism. This set of variations begins to
show activity and drive and leads to a hectic, though
indecisive, close.”
In Part
Two, Rosetta has invited the three men up to her
apartment to continue the party. While the two older men
eventually leave, Emble is determined to seduce Rosetta, but
in the end, only passes out in her bed. The opening section, The Dirge, sung as
the characters stumble towards Rosetta’s place, mourns the
loss of “the great leader who can always give the right
orders, find the right solution, shoulder the mass
responsibility, and satisfy the universal need for a
father-symbol.” The plodding main theme leads to a moment of
crisis before a quieter, more romantic middle section. The Masque is the
scene in Rosetta’s apartment, beginning with an insistent
groove from the percussion and frantic, disjointed piano jazz.
This is the symphony’s scherzo movement, complete with a
contrasting trio section: a delicate duet between celesta and
piano. The Epilogue
is the longest section of the symphony, and continues directly
from the last bit of agitated solo piano. Bernstein describes
this conclusion as follows: “What is left, it turns out, is
faith. The trumpet intrudes its statement of ‘something pure’
upon the dying piano: the strings answer in a melancholy
reminiscent of the Prologue: again and again the winds
reiterate ‘something pure’ against the mounting tension of the
strings’ loneliness. All at once the strings accept the
situation, in a sudden radiant pianissimo, and begin
to build, with the rest of the orchestra, to a positive
statement of the newly-recognized faith.”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No.7 in A
Major, Op.92
Beethoven’s seventh
symphony was completed in 1812, and performed for the first
time in December 1813. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has
played the Symphony No.7 on seven previous occasions, beginning in 1940, and
most recently in 2009. Duration 38:00.
Beethoven’s
seventh and eight symphonies, which were composed at roughly
the same time during 1811-1812, are among the last products of
what is come to be known as his “heroic decade”—the remarkable
period of creativity between 1802 and 1812. The sublime
optimism and joy of these symphonies are truly their most
“heroic” qualities—these were works written when the composer
had become almost entirely deaf, when his ill health and
loneliness could have dried up his inspiration. The seventh, which
Richard Wagner called “the apotheosis of the dance,” is
particularly exuberant, and there is evidence that it was one
of the Beethoven’s own favorite works.
The Symphony No.7 was
first performed on December 8, 1813, at a benefit concert for
Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau.
Beethoven also included his “battle symphony” Wellington’s Victory
on this program. The Symphony
No.7 was warmly applauded, but Wellington’s Victory
caused a greater outpouring of praise than any of Beethoven’s
earlier works. Beethoven’s own opinion was at odds with this
approval—he was disgusted with the public’s rapture over what
he considered to be a shoddy piece of work, and more than a
little disgusted with himself for writing it. Since that time,
however, Wellington’s
Victory has lapsed into well-deserved obscurity, and the
Symphony No.7 has
been recognized for what it truly is, one of Beethoven’s most
joyful and subtle works. Despite its lightness of feeling,
however, the seventh is the longest and most complex of the
symphonies, save the ninth, and displays a confident
compositional virtuosity in matters of form and thematic
development.
The long
introduction to the first movement (Poco sostenuto) is
almost a movement unto itself, with two themes exposed and
fully developed in the course of its 64 measures. However, at
the point we would expect to hear a recapitulation, the
texture begins to thin, finally leaving only violins and upper
woodwinds to echo one another. The rhythmic fragment that is
passed between them blends seamlessly into the beginning of
the Vivace.
Immediately, we hear a distinctive three-note rhythm that will
dominate this movement. The opening theme, played by the
flute, emerges from this rhythmic figure and is gradually
taken up by other sections of the orchestra. There is a brief
hold, and a sweeping string figure leads back into a statement
of the theme by full orchestra. A second theme is also
built from the same rhythmic material. In the extended
development section, Beethoven shows his mastery of
contrapuntal writing. A grand crescendo and a forceful passage
by full orchestra leads to a recapitulation of the opening
theme. Even at this point, Beethoven is able to pry further
surprises from his thematic material, before bringing the
movement to a close with a lengthy coda.
The second
movement (Allegretto)
begins as a solemn theme and variations. The theme is first
heard in the low strings, and the color of the sound becomes
brighter as the first three variations proceed: first the
second violins are added, then the firsts, and finally, the
entire orchestra is added to the mix. After the third
variation, Beethoven abandons the theme briefly in favor of a
new pastoral melody. The movement then moves on in the manner
of a rondo: introducing new material, but always returning to
elaborate variations on the original theme.
The scherzo is
one of Beethoven’s most charming symphonic movements Here he
expands the traditional three-part form of symphonic third
movements to a five-part structure with elements of sonata
form. The opening section is a good-natured scherzo theme (Presto), and the trio
is contains somewhat slower and sweeter music (Assai meno presto).
Following the trio, the scherzo theme is stated again and
developed. Another statement of the trio and a return to the
scherzo round out the form. As a parting joke, Beethoven
begins the trio melody yet again, now in a mournful D minor,
but after only four measures, brings the movement to an abrupt
end in the original key.
One writer has
described the Finale (Allegro
con brio) “…a triumph of Bacchic fury.” This movement is
filled with good humor and incessant energy. The opening theme
is clearly dancelike in nature, recalling some of the pastoral
ideal of the sixth symphony. The second theme is softer in
nature, with mincing dotted figures in upper woodwinds and
strings. As if to counterbalance the massive introduction of
the first movement, Beethoven provides the final movement with
a grand coda extending for well over 100 measures. This
extensive closing section serves almost as a second
development, providing further musical space in which to
exhaust the possibilities of thematic material.
“I am Bacchus
incarnate, to give humanity wine to drown its sorrow... one
who divines the secret of my music is delivered from the
misery that haunts the world.” - Beethoven
________
program
notes ©2018 by J. Michael Allsen