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Les préludes, Symphonic Poem No. 3 Franz Liszt was a man of paradoxes and extremes who could only have flourished in the Romantic period. He was a contemplative artist and superficial showman, mystic and hedonist, genius and poseur, saint and sinner. He broke many a commandment and many a heart, exhibiting incredible flamboyance in his virtuoso piano performances before adoring audiences, yet longed for a life of religious contemplation. He fathered numerous illegitimate offspring but ended up taking minor orders in the Catholic Church with the right to the title Abbé Liszt. He witnessed first-hand the cultural and musical transformation of Europe but unfortunately never wrote his memoirs, being “too busy living it.” Most of Liszt’s compositions underwent numerous revisions and transformations over many years before reaching their final form. Les préludes started life in 1848 as the introduction to a choral work, The Four Elements (The North Winds, The Waves, The Stars, The Earth) ultimately reaching the form we know today in 1853. The title refers to a poem by the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) but, according to the composer himself, any relationship to the text of the poem is tenuous at best. The score is preceded by a long preface, added as an afterthought, which begins: “What is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown song of which death sounds the first and solemn note?” and goes on to describe various events and stages of life. For generation, concert goers and music appreciation students solemnly learned about Liszt’s transformation of transcendental ideas into music, whereas, as Liszt biographer Alan Walker puts it,” …The Symphonic Poem (Les préludes) is not a philosophical meditation but a description of Mediterranean atmosphere.” It’s not unthinkable, however, to recast Lamartine’s idea in terms of the life and adventures of a theme. The melodies of the work all originate from the opening germ motive on the strings, through a process of thematic transformation, a technique in which a musical theme undergoes many changes in mood, rhythm, key and tempo while retaining its basic shape and identity. Liszt favored this technique for achieving musical unity in a work. The process of transforming motives was certainly not original with Liszt; his is an evolution of the development section of Classical sonata form. Liszt presents the germ motive in a slow introductory section in which the opening three notes are frequently repeated, as if to establish them solidly in the listeners' ears.  The first grandiose transformation is a sharp contrast in orchestration and mood. The next statement incorporates the motive into a full-fledged theme, in which it comprises only the first few notes. In a second broad theme, even though the actual intervals are altered, the relationship between the opening interval of this new theme and the germ motive is discernable. The following incarnation emphasizes the motive alone in a harmonically unstable section akin to a Classical development. A quiet passage, featuring the solo horn, clarinet and oboe, represents one of the more distant modifications. And, of course, the motive is used as an accompanying figure throughout and as a transition between the sections of the piece. Like a standard sonata form, Les préludes returns to the two principal themes based on the germ motives at the end of the work, but in a completely new, triumphant mood as befits a Lisztian conclusion. Liszt coined the term “symphonic poem” in 1854 for compositions accompanied by an extra-musical “program” that the audience was supposed to read before listening to the music. Although they did not all use Liszt’s term, symphonic poems became a standard medium for the nineteenth century Romantics, reaching its apex with Richrd Strauss. | ||||||||||
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Guitar Concerto from the Ballet Medea Composer and guitarist Manolo Sanlucár (actual name Manuel Moñoz Alcón) is one of the most important figures in flamenco music today. He has been described as “the engineer who created the bridge between flamenco and symphonic music.” His father, a baker, was his first teacher, and he made his professional debut at age 14. Sanlucár was the first to bring flamenco to Madrid’s famed opera house, Teatro Real. He has composed extensively for guitar and orchestra including Fantasia para guitarra y orquesta, Trebujena, Soleá and in 1987, Medea, for the Ballet Nacional de España. Flamenco is a term applied to a broad stylistic spectrum of song, dance and solo guitar music, probably originating in Andalusia in southern Spain where it is also known as cante andaluz. Its origins hark back to the sixteenth century, but in the nineteenth century it was exploited by professional entertainers who performed in an increasingly stylized way in the cafés and streets of Spanish cities. It became a theatrical entertainment with troupes of musicians, singers, dancers who performing the now familiar castanet-clacking, heel-tapping and hand-clapping. Flamenco-style guitar playing became highly sophisticated through such pioneering virtuosos as Ramón Montoya and Andrés Segovia. Medea, a flamenco dramatic ballet, is based on the Ancient Greek legend of Medea, a prototype of the woman scorned. Without her help Jason and the Argonauts would never have succeeded in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Although he married her and sired two children, he threw her over for a more political marriage to the daughter of the king of Corinth. Medea was not amused. After giving the bride a poisoned dress that clung to the girl’s body and burned her alive, Medea murdered her two sons before their father’s eyes. The most important ancient source of her story comes via the play by Euripides. Sanlucár updated the story to a small Spanish village. Medea has traveled successfully around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera House in 1988. Sanlucár revised the score in 2002, and recently, Cuban-American guitarist Manuel Barrueco (b. 1952) extracted six of the fourteen movements from the ballet to create a “concerto” for guitar and orchestra. Although transformed into absolute music, the six movements follow the plot, with the exception of “Fiesta,” which originally comes from the beginning. Apparently, concluding the Concerto with infanticide just doesn’t fit the concerto genre. 1: Obertura: Overture No recording of the Concerto is as yet available, but you can listen to it at: http://www.barrueco.com/pages/specials/listen/299 | ||||||||||
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Symphony No. 4 in E Flat Major, “Romantic” Great talent does not ensure great self-confidence. Many composers have revised their music after a premiere upon the advice – or interference – of colleagues. But Anton Bruckner’s insecurity as a composer went to extremes. He was forever revising his scores at the demand of conductors, publishers, musicians and music critics, fueled by his own sense of inferiority. As a result, most of his symphonies exist in so many versions that it is often difficult to decide which version to perform. Bruckner was the true image of the country bumpkin, awkward, graceless, with a thick small-town Bavarian accent. A provincial organist by profession, he felt most secure sitting at an organ bench. His social gracelessness was legendary and his clothes a source of jokes and cartoons; it was said that his trousers looked as if built by a carpenter. He was given to bouts of severe depression and was extremely deferential to intellectual and professional authority. His naïve adoration of Richard Wagner – he called him “Meister aller Meister” (master of all masters) and fell to his knees before him at their first meeting – made him the pawn of a musical maelstrom: he became entangled in the great battle between Wagner and his followers, on the one hand, and Brahms and Vienna’s musical establishment, spearheaded by the influential music critic Eduard Hanslick, on the other. The story that Bruckner gave a tip of a Thaler to Wagner after the premiere of Tristan is probably malicious gossip. But he did give one to famed conductor Hans Richter after a successful rehearsal for the premiere of the Fourth Symphony with the comment “Take it and drink a mug of beer to my health.” Richter later recalled, “The Thaler is a memento of a day when I wept. I conducted a Bruckner symphony for the first time.“ Richter kept it as a memento on his watch chain. At first glance, Bruckner’s music seems to owe little to his idol, He never wrote opera, nor any programmatic music. But his expansive use of orchestration, his themes and harmonic language reveals his debts. Paradoxically, in spite of his conservatism and lack of sophistication he was an innovator, particularly in his expansive transitional passages that flesh out his movements in sonata form. His symphonic movements, therefore, take on a slow, some say static, quality. To Bruckner’s admirers, however, the symphonies are regarded as massive granite structures, edifices to his intense and unquestioning belief in God. The Fourth Symphony is the only one of Bruckner’s symphonies with a title, although it is not clear in what sense he intended it. Chances are that the title was a whim or afterthought. Bruckner wrote the first version of the Symphony in 1874, but this version was not performed until 1979! Between 1878 and 1880, he made major revisions, including a new Scherzo and a completely reworked finale, adding further minor changes in 1886. This is one of Bruckner’s most accessible symphonies; its themes are well defined and the movements, while lengthy, have a clear structure. The first movement is a case in point. The opening horn theme frames the movement, which is in an expanded sonata form. The transition to the second theme is a response for full orchestra. It is the rhythm, rather than the melody that is the driving force. The delicate, almost Rococo, second theme in the upper strings represents the kind of extreme contrast typical of Bruckner. Despite a few brief solos, the woodwinds play a minor role, more decorative than structural. Here, however, Flute and oboe illustrate the intrinsic relationship between the horn theme and the transition. The second movement is a quiet march that some critics have likened to a funeral march. In some ways it resembles the melancholy marches of Mahler – with whom Bruckner is so often unjustly lumped – but without Mahler’s bitter musical irony and startling harmonies. The movement maintains a constant pulse that underlies a string of melodies beginning with a section solo for the cellos. & & A very short middle section of this ternary (ABA) form returns to the complete opening chain of themes, but with subtle variations such as a changes in orchestration. Bruckner restates it a third time, now with significant harmonic development. The total effect is one of very gradually increasing emotional tension that builds to a surprising climax before settling back to the plodding march.Bruckner’s pounding Scherzos are one of the composer’s signatures. This one creeps upon you with a gradual crescendo of horn calls as if approaching from a distance. Bruckner does not follow the standard repeat structure, but instead occupies that niche with a development of the theme. Bruckner is said to have likened this movement to a hunt while the Trio is a few moments of respite from the chase. It recalls the mood of the second theme of the first movement in both orchestration and Rococo style. The themes in the Finale recalls themes from all the preceding movements, but in subtle variations. But they are all recognizable, sometimes because of the similarity in melody, but more often because of the rhythmic relationships. The opening is clearly a variant of the beginning of the Symphony. The characteristic rhythm of the first movement recurs here. Bruckner follows it with a variant of the second movement march, and trumpet passage with an accompaniment to the Scherzo rhythm, and finally, a sibling of the string theme from the first movement. Bruckner also matches these revised themes with the orchestration of the originals.While such a unifying device is certainly more common than not in the later nineteenth century, Bruckner scatters the quasi-reprises throughout the movement, creating a momentous summing up of the entire musical essay. Only towards the end, does he repeat exactly the horn theme that began the symphony over an hour earlier to lead into a slow, grand resolution. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009 | ||||||||||
