Grand Opening Night
24 SEP 2011 at 8PM
James Ehnes, violin
Joel Levine, conductor
OKC Philharmonic
WAGNER
Lohengrin: Prelude to Act III
LISZT
Les Preludes
TURINA
Danzas Fantasticas
Exaltación (“Ecstasy”)
Ensueño (“Daydream”)
Orgía (“Orgy”)
TCHAIKOVSKY
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35
Allegro moderato -- Moderato assai
Canzonetta. Andante
Finale. Allegro vivacissimo
WAGNER (1813-83)
Lohengrin: Prelude to Act III (1846-48)
Wilhelm Richard Wagner
Born: May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Saxony
Died: February 13, 1883, in Venice, Italy
Work composed: 1846-48
Work premiered: August 28, 1850, at the Grossherzogliches Hoftheater in Weimar, Germany, with Franz Liszt conducting
Instrumentation: Three flutes, three oboes, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, tambourine, and strings
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Franz Liszt, midwife to Lohengrin
In 1848 Wagner fled his native Germany to escape the wrath of the Dresden police after he had gotten involved with a radical political fringe inspired by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. After a warrant for Wagner’s arrest was issued, Franz Liszt sheltered him briefly at his home in Weimer and then gave him the money to escape across the Swiss border, armed with a fraudulent passport. In May 1848 the Wagner and his wife arrived in Switzerland, where they would remain through the 1860s.
Wagner’s exile essentially isolated him from the possibilities of promoting and conducting his works, which doubtless would have taken up much of his time if he had been in Germany. Fortunately, Liszt took on a much of that responsibility in Wagner’s stead. To this day, if you visit the Hotel Schwanen in Lucerne, someone is bound to point out the corner of the drawing room where, on August 28, 1850, Wagner sat with watch in hand silently imagining his opera Lohengrin, which at that very moment Liszt was conducting for real at its world premiere in Weimar.
When the score to Lohengrin was published, in 1852, it included a long and glowing dedication to “My dear Liszt!” “It was you who awakened the mute lines of this score to bright sounding life,” wrote Wagner. “Without your rare love for me, my work would still be lying in total silence—perhaps forgotten even by me—in some desk drawer at home. …”
—JMK
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Richard Wagner is one of the most-discussed figures of music history and has been ever since he started to put his emphatic stamp on the esthetic world of the mid-19th century and began to provoke extreme reactions. He has been adored and reviled. He was decried as the end of the musical tradition as it was known and loved, and he has been revered as the wellspring of the modern, a visionary whose conceptions continue to fuel the avant-garde. The subject of Wagner tends to invite extreme reactions from informed music-lovers or esthetes of other stripes.
It is marvelous to think that such strongly differing opinions swirl around a composer who is known to modern music-lovers largely through ten compositions, all of them operas: Der fliegende Holländer (premiered in 1843); Tannhäuser (1845); Lohengrin (1850); Tristan und Isolde (1865); Die Meistersinger (1868); Das Rheingold (1869); Die Walküre (1870); Siegfried (1876); Götterdämmerung (1876); and Parsifal (1882). It would not do to refer to this list as a “mere ten compositions,” since there is nothing mere about any of them; they stand, with very few rivals, as the longest and in certain ways the most imposing pieces in the active musical repertoire.
Wagner’s earliest operas grew out of the traditions of German Romantic Opera (as codified in the works of Weber, Marschner, and others) and French Grand Opera (a large-scale enterprise typified by Meyerbeer and his contemporaries in Paris). As his career progressed he moved increasingly toward realizing his ideal of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of artistic expression synthesized from disparate artistic disciplines, including music, literature, the visual arts, ballet, and architecture. The operas of Wagner’s maturity are so distinct in this way that they are often referred to not as operas at all, but rather as “music dramas,” in an attempt to underscore the singularity of his goals. Nonetheless, Wagner himself was not averse to extracting sections from these closely woven works to present apart from their operatic context. During his lifetime he often conducted orchestral extracts from his operas as standalone concert works.
Lohengrin signals the demarcation between the early phase of Wagner’s career and the ultimate realization of his ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his operas of the 1850s and beyond. This opera tells the tale of a mysterious knight who defends the honor of Elsa (who has been wrongly accused of murder) and pledges to marry her so long as she promises never to divine his identity. After they are married she does ask forbidden questions and he reveals that he is Lohengrin, son of Parsifal, Keeper of the Holy Grail; and having revealed that, he bids her adieu and she dies, grief-stricken.
This may be the most sheerly beautiful of Wagner’s operas, and one of its highpoints is the Introduction to Act Three, during which (in staged productions) Elsa prepares for her wedding. This is music of great exhilaration, with triplets enlivening an already brilliant texture that emphasizes high strings and winds. The swaggering main theme qualifies as a “grand tune” of the sort that was de rigueur in the French grand operas that helped give rise to Wagnerian style. A middle section suggests a bucolic march, but it is not Elsa’s Wedding March; that piece follows this Prelude directly in the opera’s score, and it is the wedding march to end all wedding marches, the one that remains the traditional favorite for couples starting down the aisle. This Prelude is the music that precedes that nuptial scene, and shadows have not yet fallen across the scene.
LISZT (1811-86)
Les Préludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3, after Lamartine (1853-54)
Franz (Ferenc) Liszt
Born: October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary
Died: July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany
Work composed: 1853-54, mostly while in France and Spain, drawing on some material penned in the 1840s
Work dedicated: to Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein
Work premiered: February 23, 1854 in Weimar, with the composer conducting the Weimar Court Orchestra
Instrumentation: Three flutes (one doubling picco¬lo), two oboes, two clari¬nets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trom¬bones, tuba, timpani, military drum, cymbals, bass drum, harp, and strings
The genealogy of Les Préludes, the third of Franz Liszt’s 13 symphonic poems, reaches back to a piece titled Les Quatre Élémens: La Terre, Les Aquilons, Les Flots, Les Astres (The Four Elements: Earth, Wind, Waves, Stars), a work for men’s chorus and piano he had written between 1844 and 1848. The antiquated French spelling of its title notwithstanding, the four poems Liszt set in that work were written by another mid-19th-century figure, Joseph Autran, who served as the city librarian of Marseilles. This large-scale work was performed only twice when it was new, both times in Marseilles. Liszt never published it, and it has since faded into obscurity, mentioned only in connection with the famous symphonic poem to which it gave rise.
A few years later, Liszt refashioned the piano introduction and several ensuing themes from Les Quatre Élémens and expanded them into the piece we know as Les Préludes. Liszt introduced the term “symphonic poem” in about 1853, just as he was embarking on his first works in the then-novel genre. He was the first major composer to truly champion such works, large-scale but single-movement orchestral pieces structured to convey a literary program. In this case, the composer faced the challenge of retrofitting existing musical material with some sort of plot. He found the solution in the fifteenth item from the Nouvelles Méditations poétiques published in 1823 by Alphonse de Lamartine, a poem titled “Les Préludes.” The connection between Lamartine’s verse and Liszt’s music is vague, apart from the fact that both juxtapose pastoral and bellicose elements; the Liszt biographer (and composer) Humphrey Searle was quite right in objecting that the piece “is wrongly described [by Liszt] as ‘d’après Lamartine,’ [since] in fact the sequence of moods is Liszt’s own.” That sequence divides into four parts, which focus on love, war, the natural beauty of the countryside, and destiny (at least in Liszt’s ordering, which is different from Lamartine’s).
By their very nature, Liszt’s symphonic poems invite the listener’s imagination to range to extra-musical references or, in this case, even to musical references. The essential musical theme that generates this piece is a three-note motif in the opening bars; music-lovers are likely to recognize it as very close to the “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”) phrase that announces the finale of Beethoven’s last string quartet (in F major, Op. 135). It is true that, at least on the surface, Beethoven penned those words above the theme as a sort of joke to his publisher, but ensuing generations invested profound meaning in the inscription, reading it as a defiant objection to mortality itself. Liszt, arch-Romantic that he was, would have been the last person to diminish the potential significance of such a motto. From these three notes he builds a spiraling phrase that swells up through the entire orchestra, from the low strings to the high woodwinds.
After a grand, C-major response—obviously on the side of immortality—Liszt sweeps the listener into a section of spacious music in three-quarter time. The three-note motif is to be found here, too, opening the gentle melody assigned to the second violins and violas. This is an example of the “thematic transformation” for which Liszt is famous, a technique he learned from studying Schubert. Through this process, basic motivic material is constantly molded into substantially new themes, with one seeming to develop into the next. So it is that the same three notes are embedded in the cello’s theme that launches “Wind,” the second of Les Préludes’ sections. Each of the piece’s four sections flows from what preceded it without a pause, but there is no mistaking that a stormy character inhabits these several minutes, or that the next section, with its solo wind writing, is intended to depict the same bucolic landscape that Beethoven had extolled in his Pastoral Symphony. This leads us to the final concern of Les Préludes, a depiction of heroic “Destiny,” introduced by trumpets playing a fanfare-like transformation of the “Muss es sein?” motif and ending in a spirit of exalted affirmation.
TURINA (1882-1949)
Danzas Fantásticas, Op. 22 (1919)
Joaquín Turina Pérez
Born: December 9, 1882, in Seville, Spain
Died: January 14, 1949, in Madrid
Work composed: August 11-29, 1919, in its original setting for solo piano; the orchestral version followed from September 15 through December 30 of the same year.
Work premiered: February 13, 1920, with Bartolomé Pérez y Casas conducting the Orquesta Filarmónica de Madrid in the Teatro Price in Madrid
Instrumentation: Three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Joaquín Turina Pérez grew up in a culturally inclined family—his father was a painter—and demonstrated clear gifts for music as a child. But there were limitations for composers developing in Spain at the end of the 19th century, and like many Spanish composers of his generation Turina soon headed for Paris. He arrived there in 1905 and quickly caught up with his old friend Manuel de Falla, found a new champion in Isaac Albéniz, studied composition with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, and pursued private study of piano with the eminent virtuoso Moritz Moszkowski. Albéniz and Falla both encouraged Turina to seek inspiration in the folk music of their native Spain, and when he returned home along with Falla, at the outbreak of war in 1914, he did indeed proceed along more nationalistic lines.
He became widely honored in his country, receiving the National Music Prize in 1926 and serving as Professor of Composition at the Madrid Conservatory beginning in 1930, but due to deeply rooted family rivalries he ran into trouble during the years of the Spanish Republic and experienced some persecution during the Spanish Civil War. He emerged unscathed at the end of the Civil War, was elected to the prestigious Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, was named Comisario General de la Música, and ultimately received the Grand Cross of Alfonso el Sabio, one of the most prestigious honors a Spaniard can receive.
By and large Turina’s works travel a lighter course than those of his friend Falla, who was known to plumb the tragic possibilities of his subjects. His art perhaps finds its parallel more in the festive, luminous paintings of the Spanish impressionist Joaquín Sorrolla. Turina’s catalogue, which runs to slightly more than 100 opus numbers, is especially rich in genre pieces and portrait movements for piano, and even his statements in “major” genres tend to be tempered through pictorial or programmatic overtones: his symphony accordingly becomes a Sinfonía sevillana, his string quartets respectively the Cuarteto de la guitarra (its string writing evoking the most characteristic of Spanish instruments, beginning with a theme built on the notes sounded by the open strings of the guitar) and La oración del torero (“The Bullfighter's Prayer”).
His three Danzas fantásticas are entirely characteristic in this regard. Their inspiration derived from his reading of the novel La Orgía by his countryman José Más. But even at that, Turina insisted that the inspiration was general, rather than literal. “The author has desired to translate the sensation of human movement into the composition’s spiritual and expressive content,” he explained, vaguely.
The score to each of the dances is headed by a mysterious epigraph:
I. Exaltación: It appeared as if the figures in that incomparable painting moved within the calyx of a flower.
II. Ensueño: The strings of the guitar, upon sounding, were like laments of a soul that could not bear more than the weight of bitterness.
III. Orgía: The perfume of the flowers was mixed with the odor of the manzanilla, and happiness rose from the depth of the slender cups, filled with incomparable wine, like incense.
Following a brief, slow, richly harmonized introduction, the first movement breaks into a lively Spanish dance (Vivo), quiet at first but working up considerable steam. “It recalls, from very considerable distance, the jota aragonesa,” wrote Turina on his manuscript score. The delicate second movement offers relaxed contrast (mostly at the tempo Moderato or Allegretto tranquillo), but it is elegantly energized through the alternation of sections in 5/8 and 6/8 meter. These contrasts go to the heart of the piece, as Turina clarified in his manuscript jotting: “It mixes rhythms and melodic material from the Basque country and from Andalucía, which complement each other exotically.” The set concludes with “Orgía,” the title of which is an overt nod to the novel by Más. (Fastidious editors have been known to translate it as “Revel,” but really …!) “This is an Andalusian farruca,” wrote Turina, “with flamenco ornaments and filigree, falsetas [interludes] of the guitar, hesitating in Gypsy style and the jipíos [instrumental introductions] of cante jondo [flamenco vocal style].”
TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93)
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1878)
Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35
Born: April 25 (old style)/May 7 (new style), 1840, in Votkinsk Russia
Died: October 25/November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg
Work composed: Mid/late March through March 30/April 11, 1878
Work premiered: December 4, 1881, in Vienna, with violinist Adolf Brodsky and the Vienna Philharmonic, Hans Richter conducting
Dedication: Initially to the violinist Leopold Auer, who expressed reservations about the piece, after which the composer redirected the dedication to Adolf Brodsky
Instrumentation: Two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings, in addition to the solo violin
By 1877 Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky stood at the forefront of his generation of Russian composers thanks to such works as his first three symphonies, his Shakespearean symphonic poems Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, his Dante-inspired tone poem Francesca da Rimini, his Piano Concerto No. 1, his Variations on a Rococo Theme (for cello and orchestra), his ballet Swan Lake, and his three string quartets. That year two things occurred that had a decisive influence on the direction his path would take. Both were fraught with problems.
The First Dedicatee
Leopold Auer, the Hungarian violinist for whom Tchaikovsky had written his Violin Concerto and to whom he initially dedicated it, came to rue the day he had questioned its value. In truth, he admired many things about Tchaikovsky—and Tchaikovsky’s music. In his memoirs, My Long Life in Music (1924), he recalled the composer with unmistakable warmth:
In my mind’s eye I see once more the great figures of those days. There is Tchaikovsky, with the personality and the manners of a French marquis of the eighteenth century; but very modest, with a modesty which could not be mistaken for a pose. He was too intelligent ever to attempt playing a part among his artist comrades, to whom, incidentally, he was always most cordial. … Tchaikovsky was excessively sensitive; modest and unassertive in his dealings with all, he was deeply appreciative of any interest shown in him or in his works.
—JMK |
The first was the consolidation of his relationship with Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck. Musically adept, immensely wealthy (thanks to the commercial success of her recently deceased husband, an engineer from Riga), and maternally productive (with 18 children to her credit), she had positioned herself in Moscow society as a patron of the arts and, specifically, as a collector of musicians. She had recently added to her entourage the alluring young violinist Yosif Yosifovich Kotek, a former pupil and sometime bedmate of Tchaikovsky’s. Using Kotek as an emissary, she made contact with Tchaikovsky and in February 1877 she proposed to support him—insisting, however, that they must never meet in person. For the next 13 years they exchanged a flood of detailed correspondence and she deposited 500 rubles in Tchaikovsky’s bank account every month, an act of benefaction that freed him to pursue his artistic goals without having to undertake “work for hire” to pay the bills.
Then a second bizarre thing happened. Tchaikovsky got married, quite on the spur of the moment. The explanation for this rash act is open to a broad range of speculation and interpretation. Perhaps it had to do with anxiety about his quite overt homosexuality; perhaps it was an exploit of filial devotion to an 81-year-old father who viewed marriage as the principal goal of a man’s life. Whatever the reason, Tchaikovsky fled in panic two weeks after the wedding, had a nervous breakdown, remained unconscious for two weeks, and woke up to a life that would not henceforth include his wife, though they never divorced.
As part of his recovery he took a trip to Switzerland with Kotek at the outset of 1878. They played through a lot of music together, including Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, a violin concerto in all but name; and it was that work which inspired Tchaikovsky to write a violin concerto himself. He composed it in a heat of inspiration at the outset of spring, with Kotek offering technical advice on the solo part. When Tchaikovsky sent the score to von Meck, she wrote back that she didn’t like it; to his credit, the composer (who was often given to self-doubt) defended his piece, although he did decide on his own to replace his original slow movement. (The earlier one lives on as a standalone Méditation for violin and piano, the first movement of the suite titled Souvenir d’un lieu cher.) Further objections came from the violinist Leopold Auer, to whom Tchaikovsky wanted to entrust the premiere: he reportedly declared it unplayable (much as the pianist Nikolai Rubinstein had dismissed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 four years earlier). Too bad for Auer: the honor of the premiere instead went to Adolf Brodsky, who worked on the concerto for more than two years before he dared to play it. Auer later protested that the whole thing had resulted from a misunderstanding, and he went on to perform this concerto (though effecting alterations to the solo part) and teach it to his students, many of whom became leading interpreters of the piece, too: names of legend such as Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Shumsky, and Zimbalist.
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is an overwhelmingly lyrical work that rarely ventures into the stormy outbursts that often characterize his symphonic pieces. The first movement, by turns balletically graceful and comparatively urgent, makes difficult technical demands, but the fireworks generally sparkle as counterpoint to the overall gentility. The slow movement is elegiac but not depressive (Tchaikovsky could easily fall into that trap), and the Finale emerges without a break, serving up a dazzling array of pyrotechnics.