PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Le roi Lear [King Lear] (grande ouverture) for Orchestra, Opus 4
Louis‑Hector Berlioz was born at La Cote‑St.‑Andre, Isere, France, on December 11, 1803, and died in Paris on March 8, 1869. He composed his concert overture Le Roi Lear in 1831. The first performance took place in December 1833. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani and strings. Duration is 16 minutes.
Berlioz’ passion for Shakespeare was kindled when he saw the actress Harriet Smithson play the roles of Ophelia and Juliet in performances by an English company in Paris in 1827. The dramatic revelation of the power of Shakespeare had been magnified by the presence of the Irish actress—tall, well-proportioned, with expressive deep blue eyes—who was superb in these tragedies. They inspired Berlioz’ first great masterpiece, the Symphonie fantastique and eventually led to a marriage that was, for a time, a happy one. Moreover, Shakespeare became a powerful force in Berlioz’ life, leading not only to such major works as the dramatic symphony Romeo and Juliet and the sparkling comic opera Beatrice and Benedick (based on Much Ado About Nothing), but also a Hamlet march and the overture to King Lear. This was not intended to open a performance of the play (our normal understanding of “overture”). It is, rather, a “concert overture,” intended to suggest a link to a well-known literary or theatrical work in a single movement. The terms “tone poem” and “symphonic poem” had not yet been developed for this kind of orchestral work, so a number of composers simply applied “overture” as a designation.
Berlioz' decision to title the overture after Shakespeare’s great tragedy does not necessarily mean that he is trying to depict the story in the music. It may be that the opening—in which the bass instruments three times state a theme which is “answered” three times by higher instruments—represents the opening of the play, with Lear asking his three daughters which one loves him the most. But it is almost impossible to find any other such links. The great Scottish critic Donald Francis Tovey felt that Berlioz simple wanted to write a score of powerful tragic character and, having done so, simply entitled it with the name of the greatest tragedy he had read recently.
The elaborate melody in the basses that opens the overture was surely inspired by the bass recitatives in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, which Berlioz adored. This bass theme is fundamental to the whole work, balanced with special poignant moments featuring the oboe, which Berlioz uses with special mastery. The overture as a whole is entirely regular in its shaping (which suggests again that it is not so much derived from Shakespeare but aiming at a carefully planned mode of tragedy), and one that shows Berlioz’s inspiration striking, especially when he has an orchestra to play with.
Maurice Ravel
Concerto in G major for Piano and Orchestra
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées, in the Basque region of France just a short distance from the Spanish border, on March 7, l875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. He composed the Concerto in G, along with his other piano concerto, the one for left hand, in 1930 and 1931. The composer conducted the first performance, with pianist Marguerite Long, at a Ravel Festival concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on January 14, 1932, with the Lamoureux Orchestra. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinets in E-flat and B-flat, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, triangle, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, wood block, whip, harp and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.
At about the same time that Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost an arm during World War I, asked Ravel if he would write a concerto for him, Ravel’s long‑time interpreter Marguerite Long asked for a concerto for herself. Thus, although he had written no piano music for a dozen years, he found himself, in 1930, writing two concertos more or less simultaneously. The Concerto for the Left Hand turned out to be one of his most serious compositions, but the G major concerto, dedicated to and first performed by Madame Long, falls into the delightful category of high-quality diversion. Ravel’s favorite term of praise was divertissement de luxe (“high-class entertainment”), and he succeeded in producing just such a piece with this concerto.
Apparently Ravel originally hoped to make the Concerto in G one of the dozen works composed for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which took place in 1931. At any rate the Boston Symphony listed him, at one point, among the composers commissioned for the event.
Given Ravel’s long friendship with Serge Koussevitzky in Paris (a friendship that had led to the commission for Ravel’s famous orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition), the invitation to compose a new work for a festive occasion would have been entirely natural. The idea of writing music for an American orchestra would help explain why he employed jazzy Americanisms in this delightful score.
The motoric high jinks of the first movement are set off by the cracking of a whip, though they occasionally yield to lyric contemplation. Still, for the most part, the movement chugs along with wonderful verve, generally in perpetual motion.
The second movement is a total contrast, hushed and calm, with a tune widely regarded as one of the best melodies Ravel ever wrote. The effort cost him dearly, and it may have been here that he first realized that his powers of composition were failing; they broke down completely in 1932, when the shock of an automobile collision brought on a nervous breakdown and he found himself thereafter incapable of sustained work. For the concerto, he found it necessary to write the Adagio assai one or two measures at a time.
The final Presto brings back the rushing motor rhythms of the opening, and both movements now and then bear witness that Ravel had traveled in America and had become acquainted with jazz and recent popular music. He also met George Gershwin and told him that he thought highly of his Rhapsody in Blue; perhaps it is a reminiscence of that score that can be heard in some of the “blue” passages here and there.
SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
Symphonic Dances for Orchestra, Opus 45
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. He composed his Symphonic Dances at Orchard Point, Long Island, during the summer of 1940, completing the orchestration between August 10 and October 29, during his fall concert tour. The score is dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who gave the first performance on January 3, 1941. It calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, harp, piano, timpani, triangle, tambourine, bass drum, side drum, tam‑tam, cymbals, xylophone, bells, glockenspiel and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes.
Most of Rachmaninoff’s last years were devoted to touring as a concert pianist and committing his works to records. Between 1936 (when he completed the Third Symphony) and his death in 1943, he wrote only one new large composition, the Symphonic Dances, which qualifies as his only “American” piece, composed on Long Island after the outbreak of war made it impossible for him to return to Europe. While sketching the work he intended to entitle the three movements “Morning,” “Midday,” and “Evening”—possibly intended as an analogy with youth, maturity, and death—but in the end he dropped any programmatic references.
Perhaps because he was composing in America, the home of jazz, Rachmaninoff decided to write an extended part for saxophone. Concerned to choose the proper member of that family of instruments, he consulted his friend Robert Russell Bennett, best known as Broadway’s leading orchestrator for four decades, the man who created the “sound” of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, among many others. Bennett’s recollections give us a charming glimpse of the usually dour composer:
...he played over his score for me on the piano and I was delighted to see his approach to the piano was quite the same as that of all of us who try to imitate the sound of the orchestra at the keyboard. He sang, whistled, stamped, rolls his chords, and otherwise conducted himself not as one would expect of so great and impeccable a virtuoso.
Though the premiere was generally successful, critics simply labeled the Symphonic Dances “a rehash of old tricks,” putting a cloud over the work for a number of years. Lately, it has emerged into the repertory, a change that has gone hand‑in‑hand with the general reevaluation of Rachmaninoff’s work as a whole. Until very recently, he was regarded as a reactionary by musical intelligentsia. Times are changing, though, and his star is rising again.
As so often in his music, Rachmaninoff refers to the chants of the Russian Orthodox church and quotes the Roman Catholic Dies irae as well, which must have been his favorite tune as he used it probably more often than any other composer in the history of music. The score also gave him an opportunity to come to terms with the most catastrophic failure of his life. The premiere of his First Symphony in 1897, under the baton of Alexander Glazunov, who was reputedly drunk at the time, must have been indescribably bad, because the manuscript was put aside and then apparently lost in the Russian Revolution. (Only two years after the composer’s death did the orchestral parts turn up in Leningrad, allowing the work to be reconstructed.) The failure so deeply affected the young composer that he gave up composition entirely for several years, and only after extensive therapy and hypnosis did he return with one of his most successful works, the Second Piano Concerto.
Evidently, he still recalled that old failure in 1940, since the first movement coda of the Symphonic Dances quotes the main theme of the First Symphony—music he was sure no one would ever hear again—but turns the darkly somber melody into something more sweetly resigned, as if all that he had produced in the meantime had somehow laid to rest the bogey of that first bitter failure.
A brief introduction hints at the prevalent rhythm leading to the principal material, elaborated through varied harmonies and orchestral colors. The main section dies away in a reversal of the introduction, and the middle section begins wonderfully with woodwinds alone. A gently rocking figure becomes the background to the ravishing melody in the alto saxophone. The return to the opening material comes by way of a developmental passage based on the principal themes. When C minor brightens to C major, the coda converts the dark, minor, chantlike theme from Rachmaninoff’s “lost” First Symphony into something altogether consoling in the major, a broad melody in the strings against brightly kaleidoscopic figures elsewhere in the orchestra.
Though written in 6/8 time, the second movement is a waltz, but not one of those lilting carefree Viennese waltzes that seduces the listener into joie de vivre. It is altogether more melancholy, oddly chromatic, turning strange melodic corners. When the violins take up the theme in parallel thirds (a technique characteristic of the most sugary romantic waltzes), we hear that the sweetness has turned to vinegar. They recall the end of an era, much as Ravel’s La Valse does, and as Stephen Sondheim was later to do in his score to A Little Night Music.
The last movement draws together two of Rachmaninoff’s favorite sources for thematic inspiration: the chant of the Russian liturgy and the “Dies irae” melody—unlikely material to find in a dance! The chant tunes are subjected to rhythmic syncopations that changes their character considerably. The “Dies irae” appears in the outer sections of the movement, sometimes plain, sometimes cleverly disguised. An important new theme first heard in the English horn is a rhythmically disguised version of the Russian chant to the words “Blessed be the Lord”; it forms the basis for an exhilarating dance passage. Shortly before the end of the piece, Rachmaninoff introduces a new chant‑related melody in clarinets and violins over bassoons and trumpets, the remainder of the orchestra being silent. Here he wrote into his score the word “Alliluya,” a reference to his 1915 choral All Night Vigil from which this section is derived. But it is perhaps also the composer’s own hymn of thanks for having the strength to finish this, his last score. He made his thoughts still clearer at the end of the manuscript, which he signed with the words, “I thank thee, Lord.”
CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Clair de lune for Orchestra
Achille‑Claude Debussy was born at St. Germaine‑en‑Laye, Department of Seine‑et‑Oise, France, on August 22, 1862, and died in Paris on March 25, 1918. He composed Clair de lune as an independent piano piece in 1890. The orchestration by André Caplet calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, plus harp, celesta and strings. Duration is about 5 minutes.
Clair de lune (English translation, “Moonlight” and not, as the brilliantly funny pianist Victor Borge once claimed, “Clear the Saloon”!) has always been one of Debussy’s best-known works, largely because so many young musicians played it in their early piano lessons and found it unforgettable. It is the third of four short piano pieces composed in 1890 and revised fifteen years later for publication under the overall title Suite bergamasque.
André Caplet (1878-1925) was an active composer who remains best known for his orchestrations of several piano works by his friend Debussy, including the Children’s Corner Suite and Claire de lune. He was also a successful composer in his own right, winning the Prix de Rome in 1901 and producing a number of innovative works (such as a septet for string quartet and three wordless women’s voices), as well as a tone poem based on a story by one of the favorite authors of turn-of-the-century French composers, Edgar Allen Poe (The Masque of the Red Death).
In its original piano version, Clair de lune shimmers with soft silver of the full moon on a quiet summer night, a coloristic effect that Caplet captures in his orchestration.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)