October 2016 Program Notes
By Steven Ledbetter
Benjamin Britten
Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Opus 33a
Edward Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, November 22, 1913, and died in Aldeburgh on December 4, 1976. He composed his opera Peter Grimes on a commission from Serge Koussevitzky in 1944 and 1945. Reginald Goodall conducted the premiere at the Sadler’s Wells in London on June 7, 1945. The score of the four orchestral interludes heard here calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, chimes, xylophone, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, gong, bass drum, harp, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.
During a self-imposed exile from England in the early years of World War II, Benjamin Britten chanced upon a copy of Crabbe’s lengthy narrative poem, The Borough, which detailed the lives of the inhabitants of an English seaside village in the region where Britten himself had been born. This poem inspired Britten to compose the work that has been recognized as the cornerstone of modern British opera: Peter Grimes.
The opera would never have been written, though, without the encouragement, in both financial and moral support, of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the score and promised a performance. Eagerly Britten set to work. The first performance in London in June 1945 was a resounding success.
Britten draws his title character rather differently than the poet on whom his opera is based. To Crabbe, Peter Grimes was an unrelieved villain who brought about the death of three consecutive apprentices. Montagu Slater’s libretto takes a different tack, one that is greatly enriched by Britten’s music. His Grimes is an outsider, a dreamer who longs to escape from the gossiping tongues of the village by marrying the widowed schoolmistress Ellen Orford, but only when he has made enough of a fortune from his fishing so that she will not take him out of pity. All their dreams, hopes, and plans shatter on the rock of Peter’s pride and uncontrollable temper.
Throughout the opera the sea remains a constant, palpable presence, determining the daily rhythms of the villagers’ lives. The swell of the tides, the ripple of light on the waves, the flights of seagulls, the roar of ocean storms—these things pervade Britten’s score, nowhere more than in the several orchestral interludes that have long since become established as an orchestral suite from the opera.
Dawn functions as the prelude to the opera. The long soaring lines of the violins suggest the vast tranquil seascape, with a few sparkling highlights in the woodwinds, undercut by the solemnity of the ocean’s imperturbable swell in the brasses.
Sunday Morning is the prelude to Act II. Church bells ring (in the sustained horn tones) and the sunlight sparkles brilliantly on the waves. It is a smiling day, an effective foil to the dramatic scene that soon unfolds when Ellen realizes that Peter has been beating his new apprentice.
Moonlight, the introduction to Act III, depicts a pleasant summer night. But peace is not to be found here; Peter’s new apprentice has suffered an accidental fall from the cliff behind his hut. Though the audience does not yet know what has happened to him, the stabbing interjections of flute and harp into the serenity of the nocturnal music suggest the worst.
Storm takes us back to Act I, where it is an interlude between the two scenes. A coastal storm overpowers the town. Most of the inhabitants rush for cover, but Peter remains outside in the tempest meditating on his dreams for the future. “What harbour shelters peace?” he asks to a yearning melody. Then the storm breaks out in full strength for the orchestral interlude, with one brief recall of Peter’s longing vision near the end.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
Halil, Nocturne for Flute and Small Orchestra
Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1918, and died in New York on October 14, 1990. He composed Halil in 1981, dedicating it "To the Spirit of Yadin and to his Fallen Brothers," and conducted the premiere in Tel Aviv on May 27, 1981, with the Israel Philharmonic and soloist Jean-Pierre Rampal. In addition to the solo flute, the score calls for piccolo and alto flute (seated within the percussion section), a large complement of percussion (timpani, four snare drums, four tom toms, bass drum, a pair of cymbals, two suspended cymbals, two gongs, tam-tam, two triangles, four wood blocks, whip, glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, and chimes), harp, and strings.
As a composer Leonard Bernstein steadfastly avoided pigeonholing; he would create a symphony at the same time he was working on a Broadway show. In addition to his three symphonies (Jeremiah, The Age of Anxiety, and Kaddish), his ballets (Fancy Free, Facsimile, The Dybbuk), his film score (On the Town), his violin concerto (Serenade [after Plato's Symposium]), the smaller, quieter flute concerto Halil, his theatrical and controversial Mass, his operas (Trouble in Tahiti and its sequel A Quiet Place), his song cycles (including Songfest and Arias and Barcarolles), and many other smaller works, he left an imperishable series of Broadway shows (On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide, and above all, West Side Story), one of the epochal works of our musical theater.
Halil (the title is the Hebrew word for "flute") is a modestly-scaled concerto in a single movement, which, on account of its musical character, Bernstein described as a nocturne. Like virtually all of Bernstein's concert music, there is an implicit program behind the composition that helped shape it, giving a dramatic quality to the music. The inspiration in this was a nineteen-year-old Israeli flutist, Yadin Tanenbaum, who was killed in his tank in the Sinai during the Six-Day War in 1973. He would have been twenty-seven at the time Halil was composed. In the composer's own description:
Halil...is formally unlike any other work I have written, but is like much of my music in its struggle between tonal and non-tonal forces. In this case, I sense that struggle as involving wars and the threat of wars, the overwhelming desire to live, and the consolations of art, love, and the hope for peace. It is a kind of night-music, which, from its opening 12-tone row to its ambiguously diatonic final cadence, is an ongoing conflict of nocturnal images, wish-dreams, nightmares, repose, sleeplessness, night-terrors and sleep itself, Death's twin brother.
I never knew Yadin Tanenbaum, but I know his spirit.
--Leonard Bernstein
One of the "theatrical" elements of this score is the hidden presence in the orchestra of two siblings of the solo instrument--an alto flute and a piccolo. Immediately after the first splash of orchestral sound and the solo flute's setting forth of the tone row, the alto flute subtly joins the soloist in a quiet dialogue, like a concealed echo of the solo player's thoughts, or a hint of the conscious and the subconscious together. The two instruments intertwine in a series of gradually descending introductory phrases, arriving at Andante tranquillo. Here, over a quiet harp figure and sustained strings, the flute sings a gentle lullaby whose principal melodic shape is a variant of the opening figure in the tone row, but now in the key of D-flat. This becomes gradually more passionate, with the orchestra taking fuller part, and turns into a more rhythmic passage in 5/8 time (Bernstein always loved the dancing irregularities of quintuple meter).
A livelier Grazioso in 3/4 time, with a rhythmically active orchestra over flowing three-bar phrases in the flute closes into another section of 5/8 dance, but now the flute is shadowed by its other sibling, the piccolo, also hidden in the orchestra. This grows almost fierce before the soloist cuts off the orchestra on a sustained high note and begins an extended cadenza accompanied by mysterious colors on the percussion instruments, as in a Bartókian "night music."
Through a kaleidoscope of tempos and moods, the flute is by turns fierce and "childlike" (to give a designation in the score). Finally the strings, which have remained silent during this lengthy passage, burst back in at full volume of passionate expression. The soloist is silent, but as the strings moderate their outburst and return to a nocturnal hush, the hidden alto flute takes up its song, joined then by the hidden piccolo, returning to the mood of the opening and a restatement by the orchestra of the warm D-flat melody (now in D)--and still the solo flute remains silent. As the music moves back to D-flat, the alto flute and piccolo reach their climactic moments, and then die away. Only now does the solo flute return, floating over the delicate sounds dying away in the orchestra, with its final long-sustained note seeming to last forever, even as its sounds die away from our conscious hearing.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS Mozart
Concerto No. 1 in G major for Flute and Orchestra, K. 313/285c
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He composed his two flute concertos in Mannheim in early 1778 on commission from a Dutch merchant who played the flute; the dates of first performances are not known. In addition to the solo flute, the score calls for two oboes, two horns, and strings. Duration is about 25 minutes.
Mozart spent the winter of 1777‑1778 in the vigorously musical city of Mannheim while en route to Paris, where Wolfgang hoped (or his father, Leopold, hoped for him!) to find wealthy patrons and audiences as eager to hear him play as they had earlier when he had visited as a genuine prodigy. But Wolfgang dawdled in Mannheim. There he was enjoying himself in more ways than just musical. He fell in love with an opera singer named Aloysia Weber and went so far as to write his father with the suggestion that they should marry and go to Italy, where Wolfgang would manage her career as a singer. This, of course, was not at all what Leopold had in mind for his son. He kept urging him to get on to Paris.
This context is important for understanding Wolfgang’s letters to his father at this time. It must be remembered that he was doing his best to defy paternal authority, though he was not prepared to break off with his father entirely. One of Mozart’s new acquaintances in Mannheim was a wealthy Dutch merchant, DeJong, who played the flute. In December 1777, Mozart wrote to his father that DeJong would pay him 200 florins for composing “three little, easy short concertos.” A composer of Mozart’s extraordinary facility should have been able to dash off a commission like that in a matter of a few weeks at most. But three months later he was writing to his father, making excuses for not having finished the commission (despite the fact that the 200 florins would have been a most welcome addition to his exchequer).
Here I do not have one hour of peace. I can only compose at night, and so cannot get up early. Besides, one is not disposed to work at all times. I could certainly scribble the whole day, but a piece of music goes out into the world, and, after all, I don’t want to feel ashamed for my name to be on it. And, as you know, I am quite inhibited when I have to compose for an instrument which I cannot endure.
This letter has caused some writers to assert that Mozart really disliked the flute—this despite the evidence of brilliantly conceived parts for than instrument in many of his scores—not to mention the beauty of the concerto that he actually composed at this time! But taken in context, it appears far more likely that the letter is a carefully crafted series of excuses, based partly on truth, perhaps, but stretched as far as the writer dared, to explain to Papa why on earth he had not finished the commission and left for Paris. Mozart was not about to explain that he was spending precious time courting Aloysia Weber!
In the end, he composed one concerto (K.313) and adopted the subterfuge of rewriting an earlier work—an oboe concerto—as a second score for flute (K.314), but he never did complete the full commission.
The first flute concerto shows a new richness of orchestral scoring compared to the series of violin concertos Mozart had completed in Salzburg shortly before. He exploits the agility of the solo instrument beautifully but without losing sight of the necessary balance between soloist and orchestra.
The first movement is filled with examples of Mozart’s exuberant melodic invention. The heading Allegro maestoso is quite unusual at this time, and suggests a movement of rather more dignity and power than one expects. There is a wide‑ranging tonal imagination at work here, with a striking passage in D minor in the exposition introduced by a vigorous scale passage that plays an important role in the development.
The Adagio is a movement of extraordinary beauty, the sinuous lines of the solo weaving a magical web in its interplay with the orchestra.
The minuet tempo of the final rondo suggests grace rather than athletic abandon or sparkling humor, though Mozart has one surprise in store right at the end: just as the opening ritornello returns for the last time, hinting at a thoroughly orthodox conclusion, the solo takes off with one last unexpected passage to attract the spotlight in a final arresting moment.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 8 in F major, Opus 93
Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. He composed the Eighth Symphony in 1812; it was first performed, in Vienna, on February 27, 1814. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, plus timpani and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes.
As happens so often in his work, Beethoven composed his Eighth symphony in tandem with another–the much larger Seventh. The premiere of the Seventh in December 1813 had been one of the most successful concerts of Beethoven’s life, overshadowing the premiere of the Eighth two months later. But Beethoven was fully aware of the smaller work’s value. When his pupil Carl Czerny remarked that the Eighth was much less popular than the Seventh, Beethoven replied gruffly, “That’s because it’s so much better.”
Surprisingly, the cheerful F-major symphony was largely composed during a period of family strife. Beethoven (a complete puritan in matters sexual) strongly disapproved of a liaison that his thirty-five year old brother Johann was enjoying with his young housekeeper. Beethoven even traveled to Johann’s home in Linz to obtain a police order that the girl move out. (Johann evaded the issue by marrying her, but not before there had been an ugly confrontation between the two brothers.) With this background, Beethoven was finishing his jovial Eighth!
The opening movement of the Eighth is brief but eventful. The first phrases form a complete melody (how rare that is for Beethoven!), but just as it seems to close in a cadence, the phrases open out and grow in the most astonishing way. False leads cheerfully undermine the tonal solidity that Beethoven had been at such pains to establish in the opening bars, seeming to settle into the highly unorthodox key of D major (instead of the dominant, C) for the secondary theme. Scarcely has the new theme started before it falters, suddenly aware of its faux pas, and swings around to the expected key. The development is one of Beethoven’s most masterful demonstrations of musical timing. Its basic melodic idea is the very first measure of the symphony, unheard since its single earlier appearance. Now it dominates the discussion in a long crescendo over its entire length. As the volume increases, phrase lengths become progressively shorter, so that events arrive faster and faster, with mathematical precision, until the movement culminates in the blazing return to the home key, with the bass instruments proclaiming the principal theme. The coda leads into a new harmonic world, another crescendo, and a new version of the main theme in the “wrong” key. After the eventual return to the tonic, the orchestra fades out delightfully, leaving one final salute to the first measure in the bass at the very last instant.
The second movement is a humorous homage to Beethoven’s friend Mälzel, the inventor of the metronome, a device that Beethoven found invaluable in giving composers, for the first time, a way to specify precise tempos for their music. The movement is filled with humorous touches (including a suggestion at the end that the mechanical marvel has broken down).
Having held his horses back, so to speak, for three movements, Beethoven lets them have their head in the merry rush of the rondo-like tune in the finale; it seems about to come to a close on a normal dominant C when it is suddenly jerked up to a loud C-sharp, only to have the unexpected note drop away as quickly as it had arrived, apparently without consequence. The same thing happens at the recapitulation. The sheer obtrusiveness of that unexpected C-sharp lingers in the ear, demanding an explanation. Finally, in the immense coda, the same bothersome C-sharp returns with harmonic consequences, generating a great new tonal detour before returning safely home. At this pace, which gives us hardly a chance to consider all that is going on, Beethoven’s wit leaves us invigorated but breathless.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)