PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter
JOAN TOWER (b. 1938)
Made in America
In recent years, Joan Tower has emerged as one of our most significant composers. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia had the distinction of being the only American work on the 1982 United Nations Day concert of the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, following performances on their regular subscription series at Lincoln Center, and it quickly entered the repertory. She spent three years (1985-88) as composer-in-residence at the St. Louis Symphony as part of the Meet-the-Composer Residency program, and Silver Ladders, composed during that period, won the 1990 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., Joan Tower grew up in South America, where her father worked as a mining engineer. When she returned to the United States, she attended Bennington College and Columbia University, and founded the Da Capo Players (winner of the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music in 1973), of which she was the pianist for fifteen years, until her composing career took off so brilliantly. (Indeed, she once joked that she used to be known as a pianist who composed; now she is a composer who also plays the piano.)
Her many grants include some from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute & Academy of Arts & Letters, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and the Fromm Foundation. She has also been the subject of a nationally broadcast TV documentary produced by WGBH-TV which won Honorable Mention at the American Film Festival. Joan Tower has taught at Bard College since 1972. She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music there.
The origin of Made in America comes as a result of a special project, jointly sponsored by the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer to support the creation of a new orchestral work that would be performed, within a single year, in all 50 states, a work aimed more at orchestras of the middle rank and at community orchestra rather than at the internationally famous major American orchestra. Joan Tower was the first composer to be selected for this “Made in America” program, and she chose to give her new piece the title of the project. Here she explains its significance for her:
When I was nine, my family moved to South America (La Paz, Bolivia), where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position.
When I returned to the United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility, and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for the cold winters, floors that are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song “America the Beautiful” kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work. The beauty of the song is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea – as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, interjecting, unsettling it, but “America the Beautiful” keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, “I’m still here, ever changing, but holding my own.” A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of, “how do we keep America beautiful?”
— Joan Tower, Spring 2005
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD (1897-1957)
Violin Concerto in D, Opus 35
When Erich Wolfgang Korngold was ten, his father took him to Mahler so that the boy could play over on the piano his recently composed cantata, Gold. As the music unfolded, Mahler stalked up and down the room muttering, "A genius--a genius." By eleven, Korngold wrote a pantomime, Der Schneemann (The Snowman), which, after it was orchestrated by Zemlinsky, was performed at the Vienna Court Opera (on October 4, 1911)--the composer was thirteen years old! There were suspicions that this music had actually been composed by the boy's father, one of the best-known music critics of his day, but Julius Korngold replied ,sensibly and humorously, that if could write music of such quality, he would not spend his life writing articles about other people's music!
First-rate musicians were fascinated with the talented boy. Arthur Nikisch commissioned a work for the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra--the first orchestral work that he himself orchestrated, the Schauspiel-Ouvertüre (Overture to a drama). Korngold began to write operas--two of them at eighteen! When he was twenty-three, Die tote Stadt made him famous all over the world, with productions in eighty-three opera houses. He wrote two more operas after that, and his last, Die Kathrin was scheduled for performance in 1938 when the Nazi Anschluss meant that the same racial attacks on the art of Jewish musicians would take place in Vienna as in Berlin--and the performance was canceled. By the mid- 20s, though, Korngold, still regarded as a prodigious talent, was also considered a representative of the past; his devotion to the romantic style of the turn of the century gave him a retrospective position in the Vienna of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. He arranged operettas (including some of Strauss's (A Night in Vienna and Cagliostro in Vienna); Max Reinhardt invited him to Berlin for productions of Fledermaus and La belle Hélène. By this time Korngold had already found a new métier, one in which he was to become a pre-eminent master--as a composer of scores for films in Hollywood. He visited first in 1933, accompanying the great German director Max Reinhardt, who was set to film A Midsummer Night's Dream, and who wanted Korngold to adapt Mendelssohn's score of incidental music for the film. He began to compose original scores, too, and immediately discovered that he had a special flair for this kind of work. Two of his scores (Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood) received Oscars. When the Nazis overran Austria, Korngold found a welcoming home in California, where, by 1947, he had composed 18 film scores of great distinction.
He vowed not to write any more concert music until "the monster in Europe is removed from the world." After the war he gave up film music writing and returned to the concert hall, with his Violin Concerto in D (written for Jascha Heifetz), his Symphonic Serenade for Strings, and his Symphony in F-sharp.
If you are a devoté of movies from the 30s, you may be surprised to find that you recognize some of the music in this concerto. Korngold, who recognized that most classical musicians did not consider film music to be “serious,” decided to recycle some of the musical ideas that had already appeared in films (much as J.S. Bach would turn a piece for unaccompanied violin into the overture to a festive cantata, or Handel would turn a cheery little Italian duet into one of his most famous choruses in Messiah. And it was not unknown for composer of film music to reuse that: Prokofiev reworked the isolated, sometimes fragmentary musical cues from the film score for Alexander Nevsky into a cantata that is one of his most satisfying large-scale concert works, and just about the time Korngold was writing his violin concerto, Ralph Vaughan Williams was turning his musical score for Scott of the Antarctic into his Sinfonia Antartica.
It was the great violinist Bronislaw Hubermann who first asked Korngold for a concerto, but in the end the piece was written for Jascha Heifetz and premiered by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Vladimir Golschmann in February 1947. Korngold was, naturally, familiar with the great tradition of romantic violin concertos, Heifetz’s core repertory, and he composed a piece that would fit snugly into that world, offering the soloist the opportunity for lyricism, by turns gentle and soaring, and for spectacular virtuosity.
The soloist opens the work with a long solo, rising yearningly, drawn from Korngold’s score for the 1937 film Another Dawn. The second theme of the movement comes from the 1939 film Juárez. His first Academy Award score, Anthony Adverse (1936), provided the material for the delicate emotions of the Romance, and the light-hearted comedy of The Prince and the Pauper (1937) provided the lively material for the racing finale. The Korngold concerto is not a work to puzzle over; it is one, rather, to sit back and simply enjoy.
JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He first mentioned the Fourth Symphony in a letter to his publisher on August 19, 1884; about a year later, in October 1885, he gave a two-piano reading of it with Ignaz Brüll for a small group of friends, and conducted the premiere at Meiningen on October 25. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, and strings. Piccolo and triangle appear only in the third movement, contrabassoon only in the third and fourth movements, and trombones only in the fourth.
Of all the great masters of the nineteenth century, Brahms was the one who most thoroughly absorbed the new study of music history and who understood the music of the past as well as he understood that of the present. So it is hardly surprising—even though a trifle ironic—that his last and most modern symphony, arguably his greatest single symphonic achievement, should also be the one most deeply indebted to the music of the past, even to the point of reviving techniques and forms that most people regarded as long dead, and making them live anew. Brahms is by no means the only composer over the last century or so who has gone “back to the future,” but he may have done it more successfully than anyone else.
It is well known that Brahms waited a long time—until he was forty-three, in 1876—before allowing the world to hear what he was finally willing to let go as his First Symphony (he had planned several others before that, and a few of them actually reached completion, but as something other than a symphony). Once having broken the ice, though, Brahms immediately composed a Second Symphony the following year. Then after a gap of five years, he composed his Third Symphony, and again a sibling immediately followed a year later.
In the summer of 1884, Brahms wrote to his publisher that he needed music paper with more staves on it—a hint from this always-reticent composer that he was writing music for orchestra. Brahms always chose a location of great natural beauty for his summer vacation, rarely choosing same place more than twice. There he would compose feverishly, absorbing the beauties of the surrounding countryside into his music. He began work on the Fourth Symphony late in the summer of 1884 at the tiny village of Mürzzuschlag. When he reported to friends that the cherries in the area were unusually tart, too much so to eat them simply as fruit, he also wondered whether his new symphony might be equally tart. (Certainly early audiences found it challenging and mysterious.)
Hans von Bülow wanted Brahms to write a new piano concerto (he never did), but by the end of the summer of 1885, which Brahms again spent at Mürzzuschlag, he was essentially done with the Fourth Symphony—though, as he reported to Bülow with characteristic modesty, “I do have a couple of entractes; put together they make what is commonly called a symphony.” He suggested that Bülow might lead a private reading of the work with his orchestra at Meiningen, since Brahms always disliked letting a work go out into the world without actually hearing it in something approximating an actual performance. Meiningen had the advantage of being a small court with a fine orchestra that was far away from the international musical capitals; even a public performance there would not attract the European press the way it might in Berlin or Vienna. Even with Bülow’s enthusiasm and the orchestra’s good will, they found the symphony a tough nut to crack. But after the premiere, the Meiningen orchestra toured with the work, giving it the benefit of their experience in an increasing number of performances, and winning many admirers.
Even some of Brahms’s closest friends felt that the symphony begins too abruptly. Yet Brahms clearly wanted the piece to sound as if it has begun somewhere else before we were able to hear: he had composed an introductory passage that would make the beginning quite definite—and then deleted it! What was left was clearly exactly what he wanted.
The opening theme is only the beginning of an astonishing web of closely interlocked ideas, each growing out of something that has come before or foreshadowing something that will follow. Listeners familiar with the classical tradition expect that the composer will repeat the exposition (as Brahms himself had done in his three previous symphonies). Here he chooses to avoid that repetition—but he does so in a way that fools us, for eight measures, into thinking that a repeat has begun. Then a single, subtle change of harmony leads us far afield. The eventual return to the recapitulation has a surprise, too: the very opening theme appears in the woodwinds, but played in notes twice as long as when we first heard them, and sounding therefore like a hint of the approaching return, not the return itself. But then Brahms suddenly leaps back to the original speed and we find ourselves already in the middle of the recapitulation.
The second movement has a key signature for E major, but Brahms instead intones a theme that circles around the note E using the pitches of the scale of C major. This is nothing other than a return to the harmonic style of the sixteenth century, to the old Phrygian mode, about which Brahms read in one of the classic music histories of his time, a book by Winterfeld studying the music of Giovanni Gabrieli. In his copy of this book Brahms had especially marked a passage in which the author declared that the Phrygian mode was the darkest of all the melodic scales for traditional church music, expressing penitence and deep need.
Winterfeld also commented that the “gloomy Phrygian” must perforce yield to the “bright, cheerful Ionian”—C major—and Brahms seems to have followed this as a recommendation in his symphony, for the Scherzo is indeed in C, though there are other reasons for its appropriateness here: that key had already played an important role in the first movement, and the second movement’s Phrygian mode had suggested the key of C. Though most of the symphony was regarded as exceptionally difficult to understand in Brahms’s day, this movement earned from its first audience a request for an encore.
It is in the Finale that Brahms really reveals the depth of his commitment to the old Renaissance and Baroque masters and his power of transforming their techniques into a modern work. This is a passacaglia, a special kind of variation form in which a short melodic passage (and its harmonic implication) is set to repeating over and over again, while the composer finds ways to vary it. Since these variations often take the form of adding new contrapuntal lines—and since Brahms knew that counterpoint and variation were two of his greatest strengths as a composer—it seems natural to us that he should choose this form, but many of his friends were nonplused that he should try to imitate “dead” music. The first eight chords of the movement give the theme straight out (in the melody line). After that it returns, in some form, over and over, thirty times. The first nine variations gradually increase the tension almost to the breaking point, then four variations (which are in the major mode and played at half the speed of the others) function as an interlude to reduce the tension, allowing for another outburst to provide a kind of recapitulation for the final group of statements. A splendid coda, sonorous and glowing, provides the capstone for the work.