PROGRAM NOTES
Jean SIBELIUS
(1865 - 1957)
Finlandia
Born in southern Finland, Jean Sibelius (1865 – 1957) was the second of three children. His father, a physician, left the family bankrupt owing to his financial extravagance (a trait that, along with heavy drinking, he would pass on to his son). The young Sibelius showed talent on the violin and, at age 9, composed his first work. In 1885, Sibelius entered the University of Helsinki to study law but after only a year found himself drawn to music and he began composition studies there instead. In 1889, Sibelius traveled to Berlin to study counterpoint and while there was exposed to the music of Richard Strauss. He also studied in Vienna with Karl Goldmark and Robert Fuchs. Sibelius returned to Finland and premiered his first significant work, Kullervo, in April of1893. In 1897, the Finnish Senate voted to pay Sibelius a short-term pension, which some years later became a lifetime conferral. The honor was in lieu of his loss of an important professorship in composition. In the next decade Sibelius become an international figure in the concert world with invitations Heidelberg and Berlin to conduct his music. After an operation to remove a throat tumor, in 1908, Sibelius was implored to abstain from alcohol and tobacco, a sanction he followed until 1915. In 1926, beset by a combination of bi-polar disorder and alcoholism, Sibelius quit composing, secluding himself in his home bordering the starkly beautiful Finnish forests he had so effectively described in music. For his last 30 years, Sibelius lived a mostly quiet life, working only on revisions and being generally regarded as the greatest living composer of symphonies. In 1955, his 90th birthday was celebrated throughout the world with many performances of his music. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1957. In addition to his 7 symphonies, he is remembered for his Karelia Suite, Pelleas et Melisande, the Violin Concerto in d minor, and Finlandia.
The importance of Jean Sibelius’ music to the people of Finland, especially at the beginning of the 20th century, cannot be overstated. Sibelius was an ardent Finnish Nationalist, and his music became a central rallying cry for the Finnish people in their fight to preserve their linguistic, cultural, and political independence following Czar Nicholas II’s “February Manifesto” which gave Russia nearly absolute authority over Finland.
Sibelius composed Finlandia in 1899 for performance at a political demonstration in Helsinki on December 14 of that year. However, circumstances changed and it did not receive its premiere performance until July 2, 1900 with Robert Kajanus conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic. Its composition marked the turning point in Sibelius’ career. Its popularity surprised no one more than Sibelius, who had simply agreed to contribute some music for the event. The stirring composition, originally titled Finland Awakes, featuring a big “sing-able” tune, resonated with Finns. The following year, Sibelius revised the score and retitled it Finlandia. Like other works of great musical patriotism, although the composition may not represent the pinnacle of the composer’s work, the personal fame, universal popularity, and national pride that were inspired by this music far exceeded the composer’s expectations or dreams. Just as Boléro eventually hounded Ravel, the success of Finlandia came to irritate Sibelius, particularly when it overshadowed greater and more substantial works.
The following decades brought arrangements for military bands, choruses, even marimba orchestras. Once people started writing lyrics for the hymn-like passage, the notoriously grumpy composer became quite annoyed that this piece, which he considered “relatively insignificant,” had eclipsed his more substantial work. “It is not intended to be sung,” he groused. “It is written for an orchestra. But if the world wants to sing it, it can’t be helped.”
​
OF NOTE: Pianist Glenn Gould once described Sibelius’ tonal language as “passionate but anti-sensual.”
Alexander BORODIN
(1833 – 1887)
In the Steppes of Central Asia
​
Alexander Borodin (1833 – 1887) is one of the most colorful characters in Russian musical history. The illegitimate son of an Armenian prince and a doctor's wife, he was a distinguished Professor of Chemistry and devoted his life to pioneering research on the chemistry of phosphoric acid (aldehydes). He also worked tirelessly for students’ rights and founding a School of Medicine for women. Composition was not Borodin's vocation, simply a beloved hobby. He wrote unforgettable music purely as a distraction for himself, unconcerned about ever having it performed in public. As he frequently proclaimed, "Science is my work, and music is my fun." Indeed, Borodin's work kept him so occupied that, in winter, he found time to compose only by staying home from his scheduled chemistry lectures. In his limited spare time, in addition to his composing, he looked after his asthmatic wife and cared for numerous stray cats which he rescued from the streets of St. Petersburg. His death in 1887 was sudden and unexpected when he dropped dead at a party. Borodin left a significant body of works: more than a dozen songs, miscellaneous piano pieces, two string quartets, and the popular tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia.
​
In the Steppes of Central Asia was written in 1880 for an event marking the 25th anniversary of the reign of Tsar Alexander II. Borodin’s fascination with the far reaches of the Russian empire, where European Russia merged with the mysterious world of Asia formed the inspiration for this work. Although not as extensive a work as other symphonic poems, it is certainly a prime example of such a work: a programmatic piece composed in a single, continuous movement marked by mood changes that suggest an associated story.
​
Borodin described the work: “In the silence of the monotonous steppes of Central Asia is heard the unfamiliar sound of a peaceful Russian song. From the distance we hear the approach of horses and camels and the bizarre and melancholy notes of an oriental melody. A caravan approaches, escorted by Russian soldiers, and continues safely on its way through the immense desert. It disappears slowly. The notes of the Russian and Asiatic melodies join in a common harmony, which dies away as the caravan disappears in the distance.”
OF NOTE: Under the influence of Mily Balakirev (1837 - 1910), whom he met in 1862, Borodin became interested in applying elements of Russian folk music to his compositions, joining other like-minded composers (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Mily Balakirev) — the five becoming known variously as "The Five" or "The Mighty Handful."
EDWARD ELGAR
(1857 – 1934)
Serenade for Strings in e minor, opus 20
Although Edward William Elgar (1857 - 1934) is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but, rather, from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically (he was a self-taught composer), but also religiously (he was a Roman Catholic in Protestant England) and socially (he was acutely sensitive to his humble origins). Nevertheless, he married Caroline Alice Roberts, the daughter of a senior British army officer, and she inspired him musically and socially. He continued to struggle to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations became immediately popular in Britain and abroad. In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were also immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto, however, did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertoire.
Elgar was entirely a self-taught composer. His father, a piano tuner and organist, imparted to his son some of the rudiments of music, and as a boy Elgar studied violin for several years. But instinct, imitation, and trial alone guided his early creative efforts. The Serenade for Strings, which Elgar completed in its definitive form in 1892, reveals the high level of compositional craftsmanship he acquired in this fashion. The work has three brief movements, each lyrical and straightforward in style. The outer two movements are brief, compact, and animated, and frame the haunting and lovely Larghetto at the heart of the work.
This was Elgar’s first work for string orchestra and its origins appear to lie in three pieces, dating from 1888, the manuscript of which has long-since disappeared. At that stage, the movements bore the titles: Spring Song, Elegy, and Finale. The first complete performance was given in Antwerp, Belgium in 1896. At first, British audiences greeted the Serenade with indifference. It remained unheard in London until 1906, when Elgar conducted it himself.
OF NOTE: Elgar became the first composer to leave an authoritative recorded archive of his own interpretations of his scores. His recording of the Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin and the London Symphony Orchestra still remains the touchstone version of that score. The Serenade for Strings was one of the scores that he conducted on his last recording session in 1933.
MAURICE RAVEL
(1875-1937)
Pavane pour une infante defunte
Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1927) was among the most significant and influential composers of the early twentieth century. In spite of his link with Claude Debussy as two examples of the French Impressionistic movement, Ravel’s compositions encompassed a broad variety of styles, including the French Baroque, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Spanish folk traditions, and American jazz and blues, and are notable for being meticulously and exquisitely crafted. The offspring of a Basque mother and a Swiss inventor and engineer father, Ravel entered the Conservatoire de Paris at age 14 where his primary composition teacher was Gabriel Fauré. Following his service in the First World War as an ambulance driver, and the death of his mother in 1917, his output was temporarily diminished. American jazz and blues became increasingly intriguing to him and, in 1928, he made a hugely successful tour of North America, where he met George Gershwin and had the opportunity to broaden his exposure to jazz. Ironically, Ravel, who in his youth was rejected by some elements of the French musical establishment for being a modernist, was, in his later years, scorned by Erik Satie and the members of Les Six as being old-fashioned and a symbol of the establishment. In 1932, an injury he sustained in an automobile accident started a physical decline that resulted in memory loss and an inability to communicate. He died on December 28, 1937, following brain surgery.
In spite of leaving one of the richest and most important bodies of work of any early twentieth century composer, one that included virtually every genre except for symphony and liturgical music, Ravel is most often remembered for two musical contributions: his orchestral arrangement of Mussorgsky's piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition and his ever-popular Bolero.
Originally written for solo piano, Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), was composed in 1899 while Ravel was still a student. He published the orchestrated version of the Pavane in 1910 and dedicated it to his patron, the Princesse de Polignac. “Do not attach any importance to the title,” he wrote, “I chose it only for its euphonious qualities. Do not dramatize it. It is not a funeral lament for a dead child, but rather an evocation of the pavane which could have been danced by such a little princess as painted by Velázquez.” The work became popular following the performance by Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes on April 5, 1902. However, Ravel came to think of it as "poor in form" and unduly influenced by the music of Emmanuel Chabrier.
After the premiere performance in Manchester, England on February 27, 1911, the critic Samuel Langford called the work "most beautiful" and added, "The piece is hardly representative of the composer, with whom elusive harmonies woven in rapid figuration are the usual medium of expression. In the Pavane we get normal, almost archaic harmonies, subdued expression, and a somewhat remote beauty of melody."
Franz LISZT
(1822-1886)
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
The Hungarian-born composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is considered to be one of the most prolific and influential composers of the Romantic Era with a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades. His works for piano, in particular, continue to be widely performed and recorded. Born in Raiding, Hungary, his father, Adam, passionately taught Franz how to play piano. By the age of 6, the young Liszt was recognized as a child prodigy and, by the age of 8, he was composing elementary works and appearing in concerts. His father worked as a secretary for Prince Nicholas Esterhazy (who had also employed Franz Josef Haydn), and, after the boy played for a group of wealthy sponsors, he asked the prince for extended leave so he could devote his time to enriching his son's musical education. Father and son traveled to Vienna where Antonio Salieri, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's old rival, quickly became a proponent of Liszt's genius. The young pianist’s most impressive talent was his uncanny ability to improvise an original composition from a melody suggested by an audience member. In 1826, Adam Liszt passed away and the event proved to be so traumatic for the 15- year-old Franz that he lost interest in music to such a degree that he began to question his profession. Turning away from performing, he started to read profusely, delving into books on the subjects of art and religion. In 1833, at the age of 22, Liszt met the Comtesse Marie d'Agoult. Inspired by love and nature, he composed several impressions of the Swiss countryside in the Album d'un voyageur. Strengthened by new works and several public performances, Liszt began to take Europe by storm. His reputation was bolstered even further by the fact that he gave away many of his concert proceeds to charities and humanitarian causes.
By 1848, Liszt began to concentrate on the creation of new musical forms. His most famous achievement during this time was the creation of what would become known as the symphonic poem, a type of orchestral musical piece that illustrates or evokes a poem, story, painting, or other non-musical source. For the next 10 years, Liszt's radical and innovative works found their way into the concert halls of Europe, winning him staunch followers and violent adversaries. In 1860, Johannes Brahms, one of Liszt's rivals, co-published a manifesto against him and the modern composers, fueling an ongoing feud that was to become known as the “War of the Romantics.” Discouraged in both his personal and professional lives, Liszt vowed to live a solitary life and, in 1863, moved to a small, basic apartment in the monastery Madonna del Rosario, just outside of Rome.
In 1865, Liszt received the tonsure, the traditional haircut kept by monks during that period, and was from then on sometimes called "the Abbé Liszt." He continued to work on new compositions and, in later years, established the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest. He died on July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany.
Liszt was a most unusual Hungarian patriot. Though born in Hungary, he was raised in the French language (he never did learn Hungarian very well, despite several attempts) and visited his homeland only infrequently thereafter. Yet, he maintained an interest in Hungarian music throughout his life and wrote numerous works incorporating national melodies. In addition to his original compositions, he published and edited ten volumes of Hungarian Folk Melodies between 1839 and 1847, and followed them with a 450-page thesis on The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary in 1859. Liszt was convinced that he was immortalizing the true folk music of his native country in these compositions, among the earliest works of the “Nationalism” movement that gained such importance during following decades. As the 19th century neared its end, however, it became apparent through systematic research, including those by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, that Liszt’s basic theory had been incorrect.
Another result of Liszt’s research into Hungarian ethnomusicology was his collection of twenty Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano. He wrote the first fifteen between 1847 and 1854, and four more in 1885. Many of these works were built around the performance method of the Hungarian national dance, the Czardas, which alternates between a slow section (“Lassu”) and a fast one (“Friss”). To describe their resultant free structure and quick contrasts, Liszt borrowed the term “Rhapsody” from literature, saying that it was meant to indicate the “fantastic, epic quality” of this music. He may have been the first to use this title in a musical context, just as he had introduced the word “recital” to describe his solo concerts of the 1840s.
During the 1860’s, Liszt and his pupil Franz Döppler transcribed six of the Hungarian Rhapsodies for orchestra. In so doing, however, they also transposed keys and changed the numbering system, thereby causing a great deal of confusion. Of these Rhapsodies, the Second and Twelfth are best known and remain Liszt's most popular compositions. Undoubtedly the most celebrated of these orchestral versions is the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 as it is a dramatic and highly effective piece. The piano version (No. 12) was completed on November 27, 1847, and dedicated to Count László Teleki, one of Liszt’s several aristocratic Hungarian patrons.
As George Bernard Shaw noted after hearing a performance of one of them in London shortly before the turn of the last century, it “sparkled, tinkled, warbled, soared, swooped, and raced along so that it was impossible to resist the itch to get up and dance.”
Modest MUSSORGSKY
(1839 – 1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition
His musical education was erratic, he toiled as a civil servant and wrote music only part-time, influenced few if any of his contemporaries, died early from alcoholism, and left a small body of work. Yet, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was a towering figure in nineteenth century Russian music. His works exhibit a daring, raw individuality and unique sound that well-meaning associates tried to conventionalize and correct. He is best known for Night on Bald Mountain, Pictures at an Exhibition, and the opera Boris Godunov - each one full of arresting harmonies, disturbing colors, and grim celebrations of Russian Nationalism. He had difficulty finishing works in larger formats, but his music circulated widely enough that, by the late 1860s, he was cast with Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin as part of Russia's "Mighty Handful." When he died in 1881, Mussorgsky left it to posterity to sort through and complete his unfinished works of unruly genius.
In 1870, Mussorgsky met artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. Both men were devoted to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art and quickly became friends. When Hartmann died at the age of thirty-nine, little did he know that the paintings that he left behind - the legacy of an undistinguished career as artist and architect - would live on in another artistic form. The idea for an exhibition of Hartmann’s work came from the influential critic Vladimir Stassov, who organized a show in Saint Petersburg in the spring of 1874. But it was Modest Mussorgsky, so shocked at the unexpected death of his dear friend, who set out to make something of this loss. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,” he is said to have asked, paraphrasing King Lear, “and creatures like Hartmann must die?” Stassov’s memorial show gave Mussorgsky the idea for a suite of piano pieces that depicted the composer “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, in order to come closer to a picture that had attracted his attention and, at times, sadly thinking of his departed friend.”
Mussorgsky worked feverishly that spring and, by June 22, 1874, Pictures from an Exhibition was finished. There is no record of a public performance of the work during Mussorgsky’s lifetime, so it was left to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the musical executor of Mussorgsky’s estate, to edit the manuscript and bring the work to the light of day nearly five years after the composer’s death. Unfortunately, the Rimsky-Korsakov edition contained a great deal of editing as well as some outright errors, so it wasn’t until 1931, more than half a century after the work's composition, that Pictures at an Exhibition was published in a scholarly edition in agreement with the composer's manuscript.
The Russian-Georgian opera conductor Mikhail Tushmalov (1861-1896) is mostly known today as the first person to have prepared an orchestral version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Tushmalov's version sets an abridged version of the work (it omits Gnomus, Tuileries and Bydlo together with all of the Promenades except for the fifth) and may have been completed as early as 1886, when Tushmalov was a student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, giving him access to Mussorgsky’s manuscript through his teacher. The first performance of Tushmalov's orchestration was conducted by Rimsky-Korsakov in Saint Petersburg on November 30, 1891.
Tushmalov's score is often described as dark and restrained in color, and thus more authentically 'Russian' in its approach to the score than subsequent orchestrations. Tushmalov was but the first of many orchestrators, including Sir Henry Wood, Leo Funtek, Maurice Ravel, Leonidas Leonardi, Lucien Caillet, Leopold Stokowski, Arturo Toscanini, Nikolai Golovanov, Walter Goehr, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Lawrence Leonard to have taken on the task of orchestrating the work.
Promenade. According to Stassov, this section depicts Mussorgsky "roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and, at times sadly, thinking of his friend."
The Old Castle. A troubadour sings a doleful lament before a foreboding, ruined ancient fortress.
Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks. Hartmann's costume design for the 1871 fantasy ballet Trilby shows dancers enclosed in enormous eggshells, with only their arms, legs and heads protruding.
Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. Mussorgsky originally called this movement "Two Jews: one rich, the other poor." It was inspired by a pair of pictures that Hartmann presented to the composer showing two residents of the Warsaw ghetto, one rich and pompous, the other poor and complaining. Mussorgsky based both themes on incantations he had heard on visits to Jewish synagogues.
The Market at Limoges. A lively sketch of a bustling market, with animated conversations flying among the female vendors.
Catacombs: Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua. Hartmann's drawing shows him being led by a guide with a lantern through cavernous underground tombs. The movement's second section is a mysterious transformation of the Promenade theme.
The Hut on Fowl's Legs (Baba Yaga). Hartmann's sketch is a design for an elaborate clock suggested by Baba Yaga, the fearsome witch of Russian folklore who eats human bones she has ground into paste with her mortar and pestle. She also can fly through the air on her fantastic pestle, and Mussorgsky's music suggests a wild, midnight ride.
The Great Gate of Kiev. Mussorgsky's grand conclusion to his suite was inspired by Hartmann's plan for a gateway for the city of Kiev in the massive old Russian style crowned with a cupola in the shape of a Slavic warrior's helmet. The majestic music suggests both the imposing bulk of the edifice (never built, incidentally) and a brilliant procession passing through its arches. The work ends with a heroic statement of the Promenade theme and a jubilant pealing of the great bells of the city.