PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront
Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990. He composed the score for the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront, which opened on July 28, 1954. Bernstein himself conducted the first performance of the symphonic suite that he created from the film score a year later, at Tanglewood, on August 11, 1955. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, alto saxophone, 2 timpanists and three percussionists (xylophone, vibraphone, glockenspiel, snare drum, bass drum, suspended cymbal, triangle, wood block, chimes, three tuned drums, two tam-tams, plus harp, piano and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.
Leonard Bernstein’s only venture into the scoring of films was for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, a story of violence and heroism, of racketeers and longshoremen. Marlon Brando played Terry, an ex-prizefighter and longshoreman who, though at first a tool of the racketeers, develops the courage to withstand them, largely through the love and support of his girl Edie (played by Eva Marie Saint), whose brother has been killed by the mobsters, a hit that Terry unknowingly helped set up. The film was nominated for eleven Academy Awards (including for best score) and won eight of them, including Best Picture.
The orchestral suite begins with the film’s opening music presenting, in the solo horn, Terry’s theme. A rapid, nervous section, Presto barbaro, presents the music connected with scenes of violence in the film. Its septuple meter creates unsettling, even frightening, effects. A complete change of character, to a fresh lyrical melody in solo flute accompanied by harp and clarinets, marks the beginning of an extended love scene, building to great intensity.
Another version of Terry’s emerges as Terry’s fight with the racketeer. Its conclusion leads to the dénouement of the film and score. The other longshoremen have agreed to work only if Terry works. Severely beaten in the fight, he drags himself to the docks and begins working in an act of heroic defiance of the crooked union leaders. His music builds gradually to a powerful climax with recollections of bitterness.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Concerto No. 3 in C major for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 26
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was born at Sontzovka, Government of Ekaterinoslav, Ukraine, on April 23, 1891, and died at Nikolina Gora near Moscow on March 5, 1953. He began planning a third piano concerto as early as 1911, but completed the concerto only in 1921. Prokofiev himself played the solo part in the premiere, which was given on October 16 of that year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Frederick Stock. Besides the solo piano, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, bass drum, castanets, tambourine, cymbals and strings. Duration is about 29 minutes.
Prokofiev began composing in childhood. Though his talent took him to the St. Petersburg Conservatory in his early teens, his brash arrogance tended to put off the other (older) composition students, and for several years he pursued a career primarily as a piano virtuoso. However, before completing the piano program, he had already finished his first two piano concertos, as showpieces for himself.
The years following Prokofiev’s graduation in 1914 were marked by war and revolution. In spite of this, Prokofiev began to achieve renown, composing some of his best‑known works (including the Classical Symphony and the First Violin Concerto). Eventually, though, the unsettled condition of musical life and almost everything else persuaded him to go abroad, at least for a time. He traveled via Vladivostock, Tokyo, and San Francisco and ended in Chicago. While on his journey he had sketched an opera, The Love for Three Oranges and part of a string quartet.
Various difficulties, including the death of the intended conductor, delayed the production. Increasingly disillusioned with the United States, Prokofiev left for Paris in the spring of 1920.
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was open to the newest ideas, especially from Russians, and Serge Koussevitzky had founded his own concert series emphasizing new works. After the premiere of his ballet Chout by the Ballets Russes (Paris loved it, London hated it), Prokofiev adjourned to the coast of Brittany for a summer of composition. There he completed his long‑planned Third Piano Concerto, much of which he had sketched as far back as 1914 or even earlier.
Still committed to the premiere of his opera in Chicago that fall, he introduced the new piano concerto there during the same trip. The Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago on December 30, 1921; the concerto, though composed later, preceded the opera by two months. Here, too, Prokofiev received diverse reactions: Chicago loved both works, New York hated them. Prokofiev returned to Paris, where he mostly remained until his permanent return to the Soviet Union in 1938.
The Third Concerto, in fact, is the most frequently performed of Prokofiev’s five contributions to that genre. Though it is no less demanding technically than the first two concertos, it opens up a new and appealing vein of lyricism that Prokofiev was to mine successfully in the years to come. At the same time his acerbic humor is never absent for long, especially in the writing for woodwinds and sometimes for percussion.
The concerto opens with a yearning lyrical theme in the clarinet, immediately echoed in flute and violins; its simplicity makes it memorable, and it will mark several stages of the form later on. Almost at once a bustling of sixteenth‑note runs in the strings ushers in the soloist, whose nervous theme grows out of the first three notes of the opening lyrical theme (a major second down and a perfect fifth up) turned backwards (a perfect fifth down and a major second up), then sweeps farther afield harmonically in its headstrong energy. An austere march of pounding chords leads to a faster passage of whirling triplets to conclude the exposition. The basic material is developed and recapitulated in a free sonata form.
The main theme of the second movement is one of those patented Prokofiev tunes, dry and sardonic. But it doesn’t stay that way long. The first variation is a Chopinesque nocturne with a twist; each ensuing variation has its own special color and character, by turns brilliant, meditative and vigorously energetic. A climactic restatement of the theme with further pianistic display dies away mysteriously into nothing.
The finale begins with a crisp theme in bassoons and pizzicato lower strings in A minor; the piano argues with thundering chords, clouding the harmony. Despite various contrasting materials, some lyrical, some sarcastic, the opening figure provides the main basis for the musical discussion, ending in a brilliant pounding coda.
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Opus 95, From the New World
Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahoževes (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He began sketching themes for the Symphony No. 9 during the last two weeks of 1892; the finished score is dated May 24, 1893. The symphony was first performed by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl on December 15, 1893. Duration is about 40 minutes.
Antonín Dvořák was lured to America by promises from Jeannette Thurber, founder of New York’s National Conservatory of Music; she hoped that with Dvořák at the head of the faculty, the United States would produce American composers who could vie with any in the world. She also hoped that he would compose new works especially for American consumption. One potential project was an opera based on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which he had enjoyed in a Czech translation years before. The opera never materialized, but the subject did have an influence on Dvořák’s most famous symphony.
Dvořák began a sketchbook of musical ideas and made his first original sketches in America on December 19, 1892. The next day he noted on the second page one of his best known melodic inventions: a version of the melody assigned to the English horn at the beginning of the slow movement in the New World Symphony. In the days that followed, he sketched other ideas, many of them used in the symphony. Finally, on January 10, 1893, Dvořák turned a fresh page and began writing the continuous thread of the melodic discourse for the entire first movement. Composing around his teaching schedule, he completed the symphony on May 24.
No piece of Dvořák’s has been subjected to so much debate as the Symphony From the New World. The composer himself started it all with an interview published in the New York Herald on May 21, just as he was finishing the last movement. He was quoted as having said:
I am now satisfied that the future of music in this country must be founded upon what are called Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States...These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil...There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.
When the new symphony appeared six months later, everyone wanted to know if Dvořák had followed his own advice. Claims appeared on all sides that the melodic material of the symphony was borrowed from black music, or from Indian music, or perhaps both. Just before the premiere, Dvořák emphasized that he sought the spirit, not the letter of traditional melodies, developing them “with the aid of all the achievements of modern rhythm, counterpoint, and orchestral coloring.”
Yet we also know that the young African-American composer Harry T. Burleigh, then a student at the Conservatory, had sung many spirituals for Dvořák, familiarizing him with the melodic characteristics of that strain of American music.
The work’s title, added almost at the last minute, has also been heavily interpreted. The composer’s assistant, a young Czech musician named Kovařik, wrote that Dvořák merely meant the title as “Impressions and Greetings from the New World.”
The apparent ease with which Dvořák creates naively folk-like tunes conceals the labor that goes into the sketches: refining, sorting and choosing what will actually be used. Dvořák did not agonize over the invention of themes, but he did worry about how to link them together.
After a slow introduction that hints at the main theme, the horns play a soft, syncopated fanfare over a string tremolo. This theme is one of several that will recur throughout the symphony as one of its main unifying elements. The dotted rhythmic pendant to the horn figure leads the harmony to G minor for a theme of narrow compass (introduced in flute and clarinet) over a drone. This in turn brightens to G major and the most memorable moment in the Allegro: a new theme (an unconscious reminiscence of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot?) presented by the solo flute in its lowest register; the first four notes of this tune, too, will recur many times later on.
Dvořák said that the two middle movements were inspired by passages in The Song of Hiawatha. The slow movement was suggested by the funeral of Minnehaha in the forest, though Dvořák also instilled a deep strain of his own homesickness for Bohemia. The introduction to the slow movement is one of Dvořák’s most striking ideas, a surprising harmonic modulation echoed, like a frame, at the movement’s end.
Dvořák’s image for the third movement was the Indian dance in the scene of Hiawatha’s wedding feast. This must refer to the dance of Pau‑Puk‑Keewis, who, after dancing “a solemn measure,” began a much livelier step. But it is nearly impossible to find anything that could be considered “Indian” music in this very Czech dance. The whirling opening section has the same rhythmic shifts and ambiguities as the Czech furiant, and the remaining melodic ideas are waltzes, graceful and energetic by turns.
The last movement is basically in sonata form, but Dvořák stays close to home base, harmonically speaking, and uses surprisingly square thematic ideas. Toward the very end, elements of the three earlier movements return in contrapuntal combinations (most stunning of these is the rich chord progression from the opening of the second movement, played fortissimo in the brass and woodwinds over stormy strings). Somehow in these closing pages, we get the Czech Dvořák, the Americanized Dvořák, and even a strong whiff of Wagner (for a moment it sounds as if the Tannhäuser Venus is about to rise from the Venusberg) all stirred into a heady concoction to bring the symphony to its stirring close.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)