PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
Igor Stravinsky
Scherzo fantastique for Orchestra, Opus 3
Igor Stravinsky was born at Oranienbaum, Russia, on June 17, 1882, and died in New York City on April 6, 1971. He composed the Scherzo fantastique, between June 1907 and March 1908. The dedicatee Alexander Siloti directed the first performance in St. Petersburg on February 6, 1909. The work is scored for four flutes, three oboes, two clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, cymbals, celesta, two harps and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes.
Every great composer—even one so distinctive and original as Stravinsky—begins in a tradition. Stravinsky grew up in a musical family (his father was a leading operatic bass and possibly Tchaikovsky's favorite singer), so he naturally knew a great deal of music through early subconscious absorption. Stravinsky's early Scherzo fantastique contains reflections of much earlier music from Germany, France and Russia. Stravinsky conducted some performances of the work late in his life—a half‑century after he had composed it—and was pleased to discover that the music did not embarrass him. By then, of course, he was able to recognize and identify all of the various influences, citing his teacher Rimsky‑Korsakov, but more especially Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Wagner, and Debussy. Stravinsky always regarded his teacher as musically conservative (though he was a political radical), but Rimsky was certainly able to appreciate the style of this early work.
Today we may hear in this piece particularly an echo of Dukas's wonderful orchestral scherzo The Sorcerer's Apprentice (which, in turn, owed a good deal to Russian models, especially the characteristic augmented triads of its mysterious, hushed introduction, which seems to have particularly impressed Stravinsky). But this early work is still constructed with tight four-bar phrases—an element that was soon to change dramatically. He seems to have thought of this scherzo as a purely abstract instrumental work, but later it was attached to a literary program derived from Maeterlinck's Life of the Bees—and this might, in turn, have been suggested from his teacher’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” in the opera Tsar Saltan. In later life Stravinsky tried to disavow any literary connection, but in July 1907 he wrote to Rimsky explaining the origin of the program and adding to the title “Fantastic Scherzo” the subtitle “Bees.”
The harmonies anticipate modern trends, and in that respect, this early scherzo had drawn closer than even he realized to the revolution that was to come with The Firebird and after that The Rite of Spring.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Concerto No. 2 in F major for Piano and Orchestra, Opus 102
Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on August 25, 1906, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975. He composed his Second Piano Concerto for his son Maxim, who gave the first performance on May 10, 1957. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets and bassoons, four horns, timpani, snare drum and strings. The duration is about 20 minutes.
Dmitri Shostakovich was a fine pianist himself, and his son and daughter both naturally had early music lessons. Periodically the composer would write small pieces for them to play, carefully suited to their current level of ability. As they improved, the pieces became more challenging. Through his teens, his son, Maxim, worked diligently toward a career as a pianist (he later chose instead to become a conductor, a career that he continues to follow today). He had long asked his father for a piano concerto. The elder Shostakovich had composed one such work when he was in his twenties, but that had been nearly three decades earlier. Finally he agreed and wrote what friends joked was a “concerto for Maxim and orchestra.” Maxim Shostakovich gave the world premiere of the concerto on his nineteenth birthday, May 10, 1957.
The work is filled with the joy and love that one would expect from a composer writing for his own young son. There is a wonderful physicality of youth about the score (this was recognized by the choreographer Sir Kenneth Macmillan, who used the score for a ballet entitled Concerto that he created for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin). The first movement is bright and assertive, mostly calling for the piano to be played in a percussive staccato with a saucy orchestral part in competition. The slow movement is as poignant and sweet as the outer movements are outgoing. The strings introduce a thoughtful melody in C minor, while the piano, when it enters, quietly affirms C major in a warm nocturne style. The finale is filled with bright humor. It is essentially a rondo pattern in 2/4, but the regularity of this plan is diverted by some passages in 7/8 time to seem “out of step,” only to recover their balance at just the right time. Here, for once, Shostakovich is able to forget the clouds hanging over his head in so many scores that were analyzed by non-musical government employees for signs of “improper” political views that might have been dangerous to life and limb and could simply celebrate the musicianship of his teenaged son.
PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Opus 64
Piyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He began his Fifth Symphony in May 1888 and completed it on August 26. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St. Petersburg on November 26, 1888. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, three timpani and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes.
By 1888, when Tchaikovsky composed the Fifth Symphony, he was far from being the hypersensitive artist—virtually a neurotic cripple—of popular accounts. To be sure, he had gone through a major emotional crisis ten years earlier, brought on by his ill‑advised, catastrophic marriage (undertaken partly in an attempt to “overcome” his homosexuality) and a series of artistic setbacks. The masterly achievement of the Fourth Symphony (premiered in 1878) had marked the end of the real crisis. In the decade that followed, Tchaikovsky had composed the violin concerto, the three orchestral suites, Manfred, four operas, his piano trio and much else—hardly a sign of inability to deal with life’s pressures!
His decision to write a symphony again after ten years was an overt expression of Tchaikovsky’s willingness to tackle once more the most demanding musical form of his day. He began the symphony in May 1888. By the beginning of July he had started the orchestration, completing the full score on August 17. The premiere, which took place in St. Petersburg that November, was a success, though critics questioned whether it matched the quality of the Fourth.
In March 1889, Tchaikovsky went to Hamburg for the German premiere. There he found Brahms staying in the same hotel and was gratified to learn that the German composer had remained an extra day in Hamburg just to hear the first rehearsal of his new work. The two composers had lunch after the rehearsal “and quite a few drinks,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest. “Neither he nor the players liked the Finale, which I also think rather horrible.” But a week later the composer wrote, “The players by degrees came to appreciate the symphony more and more . . . The concert was also a success. Best of all—I have stopped disliking the symphony.”
Certainly audiences have loved the symphony for nearly a century for its warmth, its color, its rich fund of melody. Tchaikovsky always wrote music with heart, music with an underlying emotional significance, though he was wary of revealing that meaning publicly, preferring to let the listener seek it personally. Still, for his own use, before starting in on the composition, he planned a rough program for the first movement—but, characteristically, he kept these notes entirely private, so that the music might make its own case. Still his first ideas are highly suggestive:
Introduction. Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro (I) Murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against xxx. (II) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith???
We can find here some hint as to the composer’s emotional condition at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony. The mysterious “xxx” probably refers to the same thing usually discussed in his diary as “Z” or “That”—namely his homosexuality (if revealed publicly, this could have been very embarrassing, or worse, for the composer). Still, the program as a whole suggests a somewhat philosophical acceptance of his nature.
The first movement opens with a motto theme that might be identified with “Providence,” if only because it is somewhat less assertive than the “Fate” theme of the Fourth Symphony. It features a dotted rhythmic figure in the clarinet, supported by a plagal harmony suggesting resignation. It recurs in each of the symphony’s four movements. The soft tread of this introduction yields to a syncopated tune in the clarinets and bassoons, answered by variants of the same material and sudden fortissimo outbursts.
At a moment of sudden quiet, a new theme rises expressively in the strings (with a delicate answer in the woodwinds), to be repeated with the instrumentation reversed. Using Tchaikovsky’s preliminary plan as a guide, it might well be possible to identify the murmurs, the reproaches, the embrace of faith in the various sections; but though Tchaikovsky insisted on the expressive character of his work, it is equally misleading to try to read too much beyond a certain emotional quality into a movement or a phrase. After these themes have been developed and restated, the movement dies away in a subdued march, still retaining a degree of tension as it fades away into silence.
The second movement contains one of the most famous instrumental solos ever written, an ardent song for the horn, with an important pendant for oboe. The opening is marked by emotional intensity, calling for subtle adjustments to the tempo every few measures. The contrasting middle section seems more objective at first, but it soon builds to a feverish climax, dramatically interrupted by the motto theme blared out by the full orchestra. The strings softly sing the horn’s melody with the oboe’s gentle countermelody. Gradually this theme builds to another climax and seems to be dying away, when the motto theme bursts in again, pounding all to silence and allowing only a few broken phrases, devoid of energy, to bring the movement to a close. By this point, the motto suggests more precisely “Fate” than “Providence.”
Traditionally, the third movement of a symphony is in some sort of dance meter, usually in triple time, but few composers have written a full‑scale waltz at this point, and even fewer have managed one of such grace and breadth. A gossamer thread of staccato sixteenth‑note figures runs through the middle section deftly supported by the remainder of the orchestra. Its momentum carries it on as an accompanying figure under the first return of the waltz theme in the oboes. The full waltz is heard again (in new scoring), only to be undercut at the end by a hushed reminder of the motto theme in clarinets and bassoons.
The finale is the most problematic movement of the symphony; Tchaikovsky was at best ambivalent about it, and others have pointed out the prime weakness of what has otherwise been a most effective use of the motto theme throughout the symphony: Having just heard a reminder of it, understated and threatening, at the end of the waltz movement, we suddenly encounter the motto at the opening of the finale firmly in E major, as if the earlier minor mode had simply been an accident. There is no hard‑won battle of major over minor here, as in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (the evident model for this symphony). The victory seems too easily won.
Fortunately, the motto and its development soon give way to the main formal structure of the movement (sonata form again, for the first time since the beginning), with a vigorous E-minor chordal theme in the strings and a broader melody in the woodwinds; the motto leads off the development section ever more forcefully.
Following the recapitulation, the rhythm of the motto builds to a massive climax and a grand pause. Now the motto appears in an apotheosis of marching chords and swirling woodwind figures with a rich counterpoint in the brass instruments. The last strain of the coda is a statement, now ringing and heroic, of what had been a nervously syncopated little tune early in the first movement. The doubts and tensions of the earlier movements have been overcome by putting on a bold front, and there is no question that it has all been bravely done. But Brahms, at least, had his doubts, and Tchaikovsky, in certain moods, anyway, did not disagree. He knew at heart that he was whistling in the dark—but it is a brave whistle that provides the courage to go on.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)