Madison Symphony Orchestra Program Notes
September 27-28-29, 2019
94th Season / Subscription Concert No.1
Michael Allsen
This opening program of our 94th season is
titled “Love, Lust, and Redemption,” and begins with a piece
that has plenty of all three! Wagner’s Overture and Venusberg
Music from “Tannhäuser” opens with redemption—the solemn
“pilgrim’s chorus”—but also includes the thoroughly sexy music
of Venus’s grotto from the beginning of the opera. The Madison
Symphony Orchestra has made a tradition in the last several
years of featuring our own players in at least one performance
each season—this year it is principal organist Greg Zelek, who
plays Barber’s brilliant Toccata
Festiva on Overture Hall’s magnificent Klais organ. We
then turn to Debussy’s sensuous Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,”
a languid and colorful portrait of slightly erotic
daydreams. The program ends with one of the finest works by Dvořák, his grand seventh symphony.
Richard Wagner
(1813-1883)
Tannhäuser: Overture
and Venusberg Music (Paris version)
Wagner’s Tannhäuser was completed in 1845, and
the first production took place on October 19, 1845, in
Dresden. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed the Overture
and Venusberg Music twice
previously, in 1960 and 1979. Duration 21:00.
Tannhäuser
is Wagner’s retelling of a medieval German legend of temptation
and redemption: a minstrel-knight, Tannhäuser, is seduced by
Venus and is a virtual prisoner in her grotto in the Venusberg.
He finally calls upon the Virgin Mary and escapes Venus, only to
set off on a long and bitter quest seeking pardon for his sins.
In the end, Tannhäuser is redeemed only by the love and faith of
Elisabeth, whose dying prayer is for his forgiveness and
salvation. By 1845, when he completed three years of work on Tannhäuser, Wagner had
largely abandoned the conventions of Romantic grand opera, and
was well on his way to developing his own distinctive conception
of music-drama. Tannhäuser
was not an immediate hit at its Dresden premiere, but it met
with slightly better success over the next few years with
performances throughout Germany and in England. In 1861, Wagner
made a bid for the Paris audience with a lavish production of Tannhäuser at the
Paris Opéra. Parisian audiences demanded that operas included at
least one ballet sequence, which almost invariably occurred in
Act II. Wagner grudgingly revised the opera, though the only
place it made dramatic sense to insert a ballet was in the
opening Venusberg scene in Act I. He extended the Venusberg
music to include in a wild
bacchanale.
Despite his efforts, Tannhäuser
was a miserable flop in Paris, running for only three
performances. Each performance was disrupted by a noisy and
dedicated clacque of hecklers, led by members of the exclusive
Jockey Club. The club’s wealthy members—who were accustomed to
dining late, and making it to their boxes at the Opéra in time
to watch the usual Act II ballet—were outraged by the fact that
Wagner had placed the ballet at the very beginning of the opera!
The opening music of the opera exists in two
distinctly different versions. In the original, “Dresden”
version, Wagner brings the overture to full and dramatic
conclusion before beginning Act I. In the “Paris” version heard
here, the overture cuts the original music rather short and
leads directly into the erotic spectacle of the Venusberg
ballet. The overture proceeds in the manner of most Romantic
opera overtures, foreshadowing many of the important dramatic
moments of the opera itself. It opens with the stately
“pilgrim’s chorus” from the conclusion of the opera, sung by
clarinets, horns and bassoons. After a more forceful statement
of this theme by unison trombones, and a reprise by the winds,
Wagner turns to the bacchanalian Venusberg music. The next
theme, stated by the woodwinds and upper strings is Tannhäuser’s
Act I song Dir töne Lob!
(“Let praises ring!”), in which he sings Venus’s praises, but
begs her to let him leave her kingdom. In response to this music
there is a seductive melody played by solo clarinet above string
tremolos: Venus’s Geliebter,
komm! (“Come, beloved!”). Tannhäuser’s song returns in
grand form, but where the original overture ends with a stirring
reprise of the “pilgrim’s chorus,” this version launches
directly into the Venusberg bacchanale—wild, almost
frantic music that maintains an unbelievable intensity until it
is finally brought to close by series of brass fanfares. There change in
character, subsiding into calm and quiet music that is no less
sensuous than the opening. Violins and solo clarinet introduce a
new idea, and though Wagner occasionally hints at the music of
the bacchanale, the
scene ends in a hushed string passage.
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Toccata
Festiva for Organ and Orchestra, Op.36
Barber composed the
Toccata Festiva in 1960
and it was premiered in Philadelphia on September 30, 1960, by
organist Paul Calloway, with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the
Philadelphia Orchestra. We have performed it once previously,
in 2007, with organist Thomas Trotter. Duration 16:00.
When the Philadelphia Orchestra installed a
splendid new concert organ in 1960, Samuel Barber was engaged to
write a bravura piece for the dedication concert. The enormous
instrument—at that time one of the world’s largest organs—was
the gift of the philanthropist Marty Curtis Bok, and she
personally commissioned Barber to write the dedication piece.
Bok and Barber had a long history together—as a 14-year-old,
Barber had been one of the first students at the Curtis
Institute in Philadelphia, which Bok had founded. She became his
most important patron, and helped him out at several points in
his career. Among other things, she helped Barber and his
partner Gian Carlo Menotti buy the house in Mount Kisco, NY that
was to be their retreat for three decades. Though he was not
often thought of as an “organ composer” Barber had a lifelong
interest in the organ, and had actually started his professional
career at age 12 as an organist. Though there are a few early
unpublished organ pieces, it was not until 1958 that he
published his first solo organ work, Wondrous Love, Variations on a Shape-Note
Hymn. The Toccata Festiva is a
much more ambitious piece, using the full sound resources of
the orchestra and of a large, powerful concert organ.
The toccata is
among the oldest of keyboard genres. The earliest toccatas
seem to be written-out versions of what were originally
improvisations, but by the Baroque, composers from Frescobaldi
to Bach wrote much more substantial toccatas in several
sections, alternating between several musical textures and
characters. Barber’s toccata is very much in this spirit. He
begins with a forceful passage for full orchestra from which
the organ gradually emerges in a flurry of ornamentation.
There follows a long contrasting section of a more reserved
character. The opening texture returns briefly, and there is
another contrasting episode, with soloists from the orchestra
playing above a shimmering background from the organ. This
builds to peak, and eventually leaves the organ alone to play
an extended solo cadenza. There is brief recapitulation of the
main ideas before the piece ends in the same forceful style as
the opening.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Prelude
to The Afternoon of a
Faun
Debussy composed this work
in 1892-94, and its premiere was in Paris in December 1894.
The Madison Symphony Orchestra has performed it on eight
previous concerts between 1939 and 2005. Duration 18:00.
“Those nymphs, I
want to make them permanent.
So clear, their
light flesh-pink, it hovers on the atmosphere
Oppressed by bushy
sleeps.
Was it a dream I
loved?
My doubt,
accumulated through the night past, branches out
To many a fine
point—no more in fact than twigs—
Proving, alas! that
what I’d claimed for my trophy by myself
Was only my
imagination’s lack of roses.
Let’s think...”
- Mallarmé, The Afternoon of a Faun
(translated by W. Austin)
The composition of this work marks a clear
turning-point in the career of Claude Debussy. He had attended
the Paris Conservatoire as a young man and in 1884 had won the
prestigious Prix du Rome,
the stamp of approval from the French
musical establishment. In the late 1880s—what he later called
his “bohemian years”—he scratched out a living in Paris as an
accompanist and composer, and absorbed all of the musical
influences in the air. In these years he befriended many of
the most forward-thinking musicians in Paris, flirted with the
music of Wagner (even making two pilgrimages to Bayreuth), and
was deeply impressed by a performance of Javanese gamelan music he
heard at the Paris Exposition in 1889. One of the most
important influences from around 1890 onwards was his
association with the Symbolists. Just as Impressionist
painters like Monet and Renoir were rejecting realism in favor
of pure color and light, the Symbolist poets rejected rigid
poetic forms and description in favor of a free and sometimes
kaleidoscopic style, in which fleeting images become symbols
of deeper truths. Symbolism was the avant garde in French
poetry from the 1880s through the turn of the century, and
Debussy associated with many of the movement’s leading poets:
Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valéry, and Mallarmé. The Symbolists
often described their poetry in musical terms—imagery that
expresses what cannot be directly expressed in words—and
Debussy responded by setting many of their poems as art songs,
or, as in the case of his Prelude, using their
works as inspiration for purely instrumental compositions.
Stéphane Mallarmé was a particularly important contact for
Debussy—he hosted weekly salóns at his home,
inviting poets, artists, and musicians to present and argue
over their latest works. Debussy was a regular at Mallarmé’s salóns in the 1890s,
and their association led to the composition of Debussy’s most
famous orchestral piece.
It went through several different versions
from the 1870s onwards, but Mallarmé’s lengthy poem The Afternoon of a Faun
was nearly in its final form in 1890, when he asked Debussy to
provide music for a projected theatrical presentation of the
work. Mallarmé’s poem is vaguely erotic throughout, with a faun
free-associating on his encounters with various nymphs.
Debussy’s Prelude,
written between 1892 and 1894 was all that ever came of the
theatrical presentation, though in 1912, Vaclav Nijinsky
choreographed a ballet on Debussy’s music for the Ballet Russe.
Nijinsky’s ballet went far beyond Debussy’s music and even
Mallarmé’s poem in its frank sexuality—so much so that it
horrified even a Parisian audience! Debussy’s Prelude was a
thoroughly avant garde
work for 1894, and more than any other piece, made Debussy an
internationally-known composer. Rather than setting this as a
conventionally programmatic symphonic poem, Debussy tried to
capture the ambience of Mallarmé’s poetry without really telling
a story. Mallarmé, after hearing Debussy play the score on piano
for the first time, exclaimed: “I didn’t expect anything like
this! The music prolongs the emotion of my poem, and sets its
scene more vividly than color.” Though critics generally—and
quite predictably—disliked a piece as startlingly new and
radical as the Prelude,
audiences and musicians took to it quickly and it was being
performed across Europe and in the United States within just a
few years.
On the surface, the Prelude has a
conventional three-part form: an opening section that is
repeated in varied form at the end, and a contrasting middle
section. However, there is nothing conventional about the way
that Debussy constructed the work. The main idea—perhaps
representing the faun himself—is the familiar flute theme heard
in the opening bars. Mallarmé jotted a brief poem about this
melody on the first page of the manuscript score: “Sylvan of the
first breath: if your flute succeeded in hearing all of the
light, it would exhale Debussy.” This theme reappears some eight
times in the course of the work, but it is never developed in a
traditional way. Each time it shows up it ends—like one of the
faun’s lazy thoughts—by spiraling off into new, unrelated ideas.
The flute theme dominates the two outer sections, and the middle
section presents a succession of contrasting ideas. There are a
few climactic moments in this central section, but the music is
never strident, and the scoring remains transparent and colorful
through the whole work. (As apt as the designation
“Impressionistic” seems for the music of Debussy, it is worth
noting that he disliked the term just as much as “Impressionist”
painters!) The coda presents one final mysterious reference to
the faun in the horns, before the music evaporates into silence.
Antonín Dvořák
(1841-1904)
Symphony
No.7 in D minor, Op.70
Dvořák
composed this symphony in
1884-85 and he conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra in
its premiere, on March 17, 1885. Previous Madison Symphony
Orchestra performances of the symphony were in 1987 and 2008.
Duration: 36:00.
In December 1884, Dvořák
wrote to a friend: “I am now busy with the new symphony (for
London), and wherever I go, I have no thought for anything but
my work, which much be such as to move the world—God grant that
it be so!” He was describing the composition of his seventh
symphony, generally considered to be his finest symphonic work.
Earlier that year, he made the first of eight successful visits
to England. English audiences adored his music, and shortly
after arriving he was named an honorary member of the London
Philharmonic Society. This honor came with a commission for a
new symphony. Though this was his major reason for writing the Symphony No.7, there
were several other factors at work as well. Dvořák had been deeply moved by the
premiere of Brahms’s third symphony in 1883, and it is clear
that he wanted to respond in a musical way to this work by his
mentor and friend; his letters and diaries from this period
speak of wanting to live up to Brahms’s confidence in him and to
produce a work of similar depth. There are even musical clues
that in some sense the Symphony
No.7 is a “symphony about Brahms”—its musical forms, its
intense thematic development, and the rhythmic quirks of the
third and fourth movements all pay tribute to Dvořák’s mentor. What is put in the
background in this work—aside from the third movement—are the
Czech musical styles that had played such an important part in
his Slavonic Dances
and earlier symphonies. It seems that though Dvořák remained a strong Bohemian
patriot, he was trying to break out of the nationalist mold he
had created in so much of his earlier music.
The symphony’s reception in London was
everything Dvořák could have
hoped for, and after a few revisions, he sent it off to his
publisher Simrock. In his long years struggling for recognition
the contract with Simrock, acquired with the help of Brahms, had
been a blessing, though Simrock had also profited enormously by
publishing popular pieces like the Slavonic Dances. Now,
he was finally in a position to bargain: Simrock offered 3000
marks for the symphony, but Dvořák
stood his ground until the publisher doubled his price. The
score was published by Simrock in 1885 as the Symphony No.2. Its
present numbering—No.7—reflects
its
actual place in the composition of Dvořák’s
symphonies.
The first movement (Allegro maestoso)
begins with a brooding melody in the low strings that is the
basis for several later ideas. A horn call and a woodwind
passage announce a contrasting major-key melody played by the
flute and clarinet. After a short, but intense development
section Dvořák recapitulates
the main ideas, though in reverse order: the second theme
returns first in a flowing clarinet solo before he finally
returns to the tragic mood of the opening. A melancholy clarinet
solo above pizzicato
strings opens the second movement (Poco adagio). This is
answered by the strings and other solo woodwinds, building to a
related idea that critic Donald Tovey once called “one of the
profoundest in any symphony since Beethoven.” A final, more
pastoral theme is introduced by the horns. All three melodies
find their way into the development before Dvořák restates them, and ends the
movement with a final statement of the opening idea, now in the
oboe above string tremolos, and a quiet epilogue.
While the second movement probably shows
Dvorák at his most “Brahmsian,” the scherzo (Vivace) looks back to
his Bohemian roots. The opening dance has the feel of a furiant, a fast Czech
folk dance much used by Dvořák.
However, he introduces one of Brahms’s favorite rhythmic
devices, pitting triple-meter melody against a duple-meter
accompaniment. The central trio changes the character briefly,
with solo woodwinds above, before the opening mood returns.
There is one more brief slow episode before he closes with a
furious coda. The finale (Allegro)
begins with a long, moody introduction that builds intensity
until Dvořák introduces a
forceful off-beat main idea. From this point the movement has an
unstoppable rhythmic energy. There are occasional breaks in the
intensity, but the mood remains tempestuous throughout,
culminating in a fierce coda.
________
program
notes ©2019 by J. Michael Allsen