Madison Symphony Orchestra
Program Notes
May 1-2-3, 2020
94th Season / Subscription Concert No.8
Michael Allsen
Our final program of the season begins with Weber’s
fine Overture
to
“Euryanthe”—an
enduringly popular overture to a failed opera! The next work
is a showcase for
the members of the Madison Symphony Orchestra—Stravinsky’s
colorful (and
challenging) Petrushka,
one of the great
series of ballet scores he wrote for the Ballets Russe. After
intermission we
welcome back the phenomenal Yefim Bronfman, who makes his
fourth appearance
with the orchestra. His previous visits were in 2003
(Beethoven, Piano
Concerto No.3), 2008 (Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No.3),
and 2014 (where he
played both the second and fifth concertos by Beethoven).
Carl
Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Overture
to
Euryanthe
Weber wrote the opera Euryanthe in 1822-23,
and wrote the overture in September and October of
1823—completing it just a
few days before the opera’s premiere on October 25, 1823,
at the Kärnthnerthor
Theater in Vienna. The Madison Symphony Orchestra has
played the work on six
previous concerts between 1927 and 1991. Duration 9:00.
In
November of 1821, Weber’s
groundbreaking new opera Der Freischütz
was performed at in Vienna. Despite some severe cuts by
local censors, this
performance matched the reaction to the Berlin premiere six
months earlier, and
Weber promptly received a commission from the impresario
Domenico Barbaia for a
new opera to be performed during the 1822 season in Vienna.
Even before he
completed Freischütz,
Weber had been
searching for the subject of a new German “grand opera” and
had made some
initial plans for an opera on the medieval Spanish epic El Cid. On receiving the commission from
Barbaia, he began to
search in earnest for a librettist. His initial hopes of
collaborating with
Friedrich Kind—the librettist for Freischütz—were
crushed after a bitter argument between Weber and Kind,
possibly sparked by
Kind’s jealousy. Weber then made the unhappy choice of
Helmina von Chézy, one
of his associates at the court of Dresden, who suggested
another medieval
legend: that of the princess Euryanthe of Savoy, whose
faithfulness to a
jealous husband is put through many unjust trials until she
triumphs in the end
(essentially, Othello
with a happy
ending!). Chézy’s libretto for Euryanthe
was confusing and improbable at best, and was subjected to
continual revisions
during the opera’s composition. Weber’s duties as Kapellmeister (music director) at Dresden,
problems with the
libretto, and Weber’s increasingly strained relationship
with Chézy delayed the
opera’s premiere until of October of 1823. It was—to put it
mildly—a bomb. Weber
later remarked that: “My Euryanthe
should be called Ennui-anthe.”
(Chézy
would later hand Schubert one of his many theatrical
flops—her play Rosamunde,
Princess of Cyprus, for which
Schubert wrote nearly an hours’ worth of incidental pieces.
The play has not survived,
but thankfully Schubert’s music has!) Despite the dismal
libretto, however, Euryanthe
contains some of Weber’s
finest music, and several attempts have been made to revive
(or resuscitate) Euryanthe
with a revised libretto,
including one by Gustav Mahler in 1904. It has been produced
and recorded a few
times in the last few decades, but despite the best efforts
of Weber’s later
champions, the opera Euryanthe
is
known today primarily for its fine overture.
The
overture begins with a forte passage for
the full orchestra,
and the martial music that follows is from an Act I aria by
Euryanthe’s jealous
husband Adolar. A more melancholy second theme is also drawn
from one of Adolar’s
arias. The spooky music for muted violins that follows is
associated the ghosts
Emma and Udo—a pair of frustrated lovers who had committed
suicide rather than
live apart. (Their main role in the opera is in fact to
explain the tortured
plot to the audience, and to act as a deus
ex machina in the final scenes.) Weber wraps the
overture up with a rather
solemn fugal development and a rousing recapitulation.
Igor Stravinsky
(1882-1971)
Petrushka
Suite (1947
version)
Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka was
written in Switzerland in 1910-11, and was first performed
during a performance
by the Ballets Russe in Paris, on June 13, 1911. In 1947,
Stravinsky published a
suite for concert performance. The suite has appeared twice
previously on these
concerts, in 1971 and 1998. Duration 32:00.
“Only
a straw-stuffed puppet, this modern hero!”
-
Wallace Fowlie
In 1911, the Parisian public expected great
things of young
Igor Stravinsky. There was an ongoing craze for Russian music
and ballet,
fueled by the shrewd impresario Serge Diaghilev, who had
brought Stravinsky to
Paris two years earlier. Stravinsky’s Firebird
(1909)—his first ballet score for Diaghilev’s dance company,
the Ballets
Russe—had been an enormous success, and by 1911, he was
already beginning work
on the revolutionary score for Rite of
Spring. According to his autobiography, his second work
for the Ballet
Russe, Petrushka,
began as a sort of
compositional coffee break between Firebird
and Rite of Spring:
“Before tackling
Rite of Spring,
which would be a long
and difficult task, I wanted to refresh myself by composing an
orchestral piece
in which the piano would play the most important part—a sort
of Konzertstück. In
composing the music, I
had in mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed
with life,
exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical
cascades of arpeggi.
The orchestra in turn
retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts. The outcome is a
terrific noise which
reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous
collapse of the poor
puppet. Having finished this bizarre piece, I struggled for
hours, while
walking beside Lake Geneva, to find a title which would
express in a word the
character of my music and consequently the personality of this
creature.
“One day, I
leapt for joy. I had
indeed found my title—Petrushka,
the
immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries. Soon
afterwards,
Diaghilev came to visit me in Clarens, where I was staying. He
was much
astonished when, instead of sketches of the Rite,
I played him the piece Petrushka.
He
was so much pleased with it that he would not leave it alone
and began
persuading me to develop the theme of the puppet’s sufferings
and make it into
a whole ballet.”
Stravinsky’s hero, Petrushka, is one of the
stock characters
of the puppet shows that were a feature of fairs in Russia. He
is a close
cousin to Harlequin of the Commedia dell’Arte—a
vulgar, low-class clown—but here he takes on a tragic role.
The scenario that
Stravinsky and Diaghilev created is set at a Shrove-tide fair
(Mardi Gras or
Carnival season in our part of the world) in St. Petersburg,
complete with
gypsies, dancing bears, masqueraders, and a puppet show. The
puppets— Petrushka,
the Ballerina, and the Blackamoor—suddenly
come to life. The ballet, which was partly done in pantomime,
is a tragic love
triangle between these three characters, in which Petrushka is
killed. At the
close of the ballet, the Showman reassures everyone at the
fair that Petrushka is
merely a puppet, but when he is alone, Petrushka’s ghost
appears to make fun of
him. The ballet ends as the Showman flees in terror.
Petrushka
was a
hit in Paris, and again a year later in England. Diaghilev
took the Ballets
Russe on an extensive tour of the United States in 1916. This
was the first
exposure to Stravinsky’s music for audiences in New York City,
Chicago,
Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and many other American cities. Though
some audience
members (and many critics) were bewildered by its
“ultramodern” score, Petrushka
awas generally well-received
on this side of the Atlantic. (It’s a sad commentary on our
country at this
time to note that the music was, in fact, much less
controversial in America
that the fact that a black character, the Moor, won out over
the white Petrushka!)
The ballet remained in the company’s repertoire until it was
disbanded in 1929.
The score was published in 1912, and Petrushka was frequently played as a concert
work. However, the
fact that the ballet ended with a long, quiet episode, and the
enormous size of
the orchestra required made this a problematic concert piece.
In 1947,
Stravinsky completely revised Petrushka as
a concert suite, setting it for a much smaller and more
manageable orchestra,
clarifying several problematic passages, and re-ordering the
original four tableaux
into eleven movements, which
are played without pauses. At least part of Stravinsky’s
rationale seems to
have been simply to renew his copyright on the piece. (He had
been furious when
Walt Disney freely adapted the score to Rite
of Spring in the animated Fantasia
in 1940.) In any case, the suite works wonderfully as a
concert work.
The opening and longest movement, The Shrove-tide Fair, shows the whirl of
activity at the fair, as
people gather around to see the Showman bring his puppets to
life with a flute.
Stravinsky’s music is based upon at least one, and possibly
several Russian
folk tunes. This opening section leads directly to the Russian Dance, as the three puppets dance a wild
trepak for the
fairgoers. Petrushka shows
this miserable puppet in
his miserable cell, cursing and mooning over the Ballerina,
who eventually pays
him a visit, and dances briefly with him, before leaving him
alone. The Blackamoor
shows Petrushka’s rival
lounging in his room, which is elegantly furnished. The
Ballerina announces
herself with a cornet fanfare and then dances a little
mechanical solo for the
Moor. The two then dance an insipid Valse
together, to a pair of tunes that Stravinsky borrowed from the
successful
Viennese waltz composer Joseph Lanner. A jealous Petrushka
bursts into the
room, and struggles with the Moor briefly, before the Moor
tosses him out the
door.
At this point in the 1947 suite, Stravinsky
brings together
a reminiscence of the opening music, and the climactic scene
where Petrushka is
chased down and murdered by the Moor—Shrove-tide
Fair and Death of Petrushka. The suite closes with a
series of dances drawn
from the fourth of the ballet’s tableaux.
The Wet Nurses’ Dance
is based on two
Russian tunes, the first introduced by solo oboe, and the
second by oboe,
trumpet, and finally full orchestra. Peasant
with Bear has the peasant characterized by shrill
clarinet, and the bear by
solo tuba. Gypsies and
a Rake-Vendor
has a rather drunken merchant enter with two Gypsy girls—he
tosses banknotes to
the crowd and his girlfriends dance seductively. This is
followed by a robust Dance
of the Coachmen, which is also
based on Russian folk material. The suite’s wild final dance,
Masqueraders, is
actually the music that
leads up to Petrushka’s death in the ballet. The music brings
together a flurry
of images—dancers dressed as a devil, a goat, and a pig taunt
the crowd before
everyone joins in a frenzied final dance.
Johannes Brahms
(1833-1897)
Concerto
No.1 in D
minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op.15
Brahms’s first piano concerto was composed between
1854 and 1859. He
was the soloist in the first performance in Hanover, on
January 22, 1859. Previous
Madison Symphony Orchestra performances have featured Howard
Stein (1939),
Gunnar Johansen (1951), William Masselos (1967), Howard Karp
(1974), Ruth
Laredo (1984), David Buechner (1996), and Peter Serkin
(2009), and Garrick Ohlsson (2016).
Duration 45:00.
In a letter written just after his second
performance of his
first piano concerto, Brahms wrote to his friend Joseph
Joachim: “My concerto
has been a brilliant and decisive...failure.” Joachim had
conducted the
premiere in Hanover, where it met with a polite but
indifferent reaction from
the audience. Five days later, Brahms played the concerto
again in Leipzig, and
heard a “perfectly distinct hissing from all sides” at the
conclusion of the
third movement. Why was this brilliant work such a flop? At
least part of the
reason seems to be Brahms’s place in musical politics of the
day. Just a few
years earlier, in an editorial in his musical journal, Robert
Schumann had
hailed young Brahms as a new standard bearer for the more
conservative party of
Romantic musicians—as an antidote to the music of radicals
like Franz Liszt. This
work, Brahms’s first large orchestral piece, did not match the
expectations of
either clique. The concerto lacked the showy “thrills and
chills” heard in the
works of Liszt, and demanded by most audiences, but its
passionate nature seems
to have been a bit too much for the conservatives.
This virtuosic and fiery piece is a
complete contrast to the
more intellectual and symphonic second concerto he wrote
twenty years later,
but both works now are part of the standard repertoire. A
young Brahms was
clearly wearing his heart on his sleeve in Concerto
No.1. In the aftermath of Schumann’s article, he felt
pressure to compose a
large, symphonic work, and almost immediately began work on a
symphony in D
minor. The opening three movements were finished by 1854, but
Brahms was
dissatisfied with the orchestration, and transformed the
movements into a
large-scale sonata for two pianos, which he performed at
private gathering with
Clara Schumann. Still unsatisfied, he took the advice of his
friend Julius
Grimm, and combined the two conceptions of the work to create
a piano concerto.
(The original second movement was abandoned in favor of the
present Adagio, but
this music would resurface
years later as part of his German Requiem.)
The opening movement (Maestoso)
is a large-scale sonata form, and makes the most of Brahms’s
emotional and
thoroughly Romantic themes. In the orchestral introduction,
there are two contrasting
ideas—one vehement and the other much more calm. The piano
enters with a placid
melody and the music gradually intensifies, eventually
returning to the
passionate mood of the opening. A horn call motive introduces
a long and stormy
development section, and this horn call will pervade much of
the rest of the
movement. In a
letter to Clara Schumann,
Brahms referred to the Adagio
as “a
lovely portrait of you.” This movement opens with a flowing
melody in the
bassoons, setting a quiet mood that is maintained throughout
the movement. The
piano answers this melody, and the rest of the movement
continues a gentle
dialogue between soloist and orchestra. The contrasting middle
section is
announced by the clarinet, and after an almost meditative
cadenza, there is a
return of the opening idea. The last movement (Allegro non troppo) is a rondo, meaning that a
single theme returns
throughout, in alternation with contrasting music. In this
case, the main idea
is a syncopated opening theme that was clearly inspired by
Gypsy music. This
theme serves as a counterweight to several secondary ideas,
two cadenzas, and a
large central fugue that develops the main theme.
________
program
notes ©2019 by J.
Michael Allsen