PMF Program Notes - August 20, 2005

Program 9

Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra in G major, Op. 44
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Composed in 1879-1880.
Premiered on November 12, 1881 in New York, conducted by Theodore Thomas with Madeleine Schiller as soloist.

During the last decade of his long life, Richard Strauss kept in compositional practice by undertaking what he called “wrist exercises,” an activity that produced such delightful works as the Second Horn Concerto, the Duet-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon and the Oboe Concerto. Following his first retirement from opera, after Aida, Giuseppe Verdi insisted on writing a few measures every morning, counterpoint exercises mostly, to keep his musical thoughts flowing, and ended up in 1873 composing his only String Quartet. Tchaikovsky, too, during a lull in his creative schedule in 1879 following the completion of the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto, found the need to compose without external cause. “These last few days I’ve begun to observe in myself things which at first I didn’t understand,” he wrote to his brother Modeste from his sister’s country home in Kamenka on October 22, 1879. “I experienced a certain vague dissatisfaction with myself, an over-frequent and almost irresistible desire to sleep, a certain emptiness and ultimately boredom.... Finally yesterday it became fully apparent to me what was the matter. I had to get on with something: I find myself absolutely incapable of living long without work. Today I began to create something, and the boredom vanished as if by magic. I have begun to compose a piano concerto. I will work without hurrying, straining or tiring myself in any way.” Though he admitted to working on the new piece only in the mornings, devoting the rest of the day to reading and long walks, he finished the sketch of the large first movement by November 1st.

On November 5th, Tchaikovsky went to Moscow to transact some business with his publisher, and there heard Nikolai Rubinstein give a splendid performance of his (Tchaikovsky’s) Piano Sonata, which Rubinstein had premiered only a week before. Despite Rubinstein’s searing criticism of the First Piano Concerto five years earlier (of which he had by 1879 recanted to the point of taking the work into his repertory), Tchaikovsky decided to dedicate the score of the new Concerto to him. Following a brief stop in St. Petersburg, he arrived in Paris on November 25th, and immediately resumed work on the piece. The finale was finished first, then the Andante, and on December 15th he wrote to Mme von Meck, “My Concerto is ready in the rough, and I am very pleased with it.” He moved on to Rome soon thereafter, where he made a transcription of the work for two pianos before undertaking the orchestration in February. Back in St. Petersburg in March, with the Concerto nearing completion, he wrote to his publisher, Jurgenson, “I tremble at the thought of the criticisms I may hear from Nikolai Rubinstein, to whom this Concerto is dedicated. Still, even if once more he does criticize yet nevertheless goes on to perform it brilliantly as with the First Concerto, I won’t mind.”

As soon as the orchestration was completed, on May 10th, he sent a copy of the Concerto to Rubinstein, asking for his comments. Rubinstein responded that he thought the solo part was somewhat episodic and probably overwhelmed by the orchestra in certain dialogue passages, but Tchaikovsky decided to wait for a performance before making changes. Jurgenson issued Tchaikovsky’s two-piano transcription in October and the orchestral score and parts in February 1881 in anticipation of the premiere, but on March 23rd Tchaikovsky suffered a bitter loss when Rubinstein died in Paris. The performance was postponed, the solo part entrusted to Sergei Taneyev, Tchaikovsky’s favorite pupil, and not heard until heard the first concert of the Industrial and Cultural Exhibition in Moscow on May 18, 1882; Anton Rubinstein, Nikolai’s brother, conducted. The delay allowed the world premiere of the Second Concerto to take place in New York, where the Philharmonic Society played it under the direction of Theodore Thomas on November 12, 1881 with Madeleine Schiller as soloist. (Remarkably, the First Piano Concerto was also premiered in this country, by Hans von Bülow in Boston on October 25, 1875.)

Tchaikovsky had some misgivings about the work, especially concerning the length of the first two movements, and authorized three short cuts for a performance in 1888. Both Taneyev and Alexander Siloti, a distinguished pianist and conductor and another former student of Tchaikovsky, advocated more radical revisions, which the composer rejected, though this did not stop Jurgenson from reissuing the score in 1897, four years after Tchaikovsky’s death, in Siloti’s edition. The Concerto today, however, is usually performed in the composer’s original complete version.

The opening movement is a vast sonata structure on three subjects: a martial first theme, a lyrical contrasting melody initiated by the clarinet and horn, and a melancholy strain comprising short orchestral fragments heavily decorated by the piano. The movement contains two solo cadenzas, both placed, most unusually, in the development section. The second one, as in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, also serves as the bridge to the recapitulation. The Andante is a large three-part form (A–B–A) which, with its prominent solos for violin and cello, is a virtual triple concerto. The finale is a rousing virtuoso display piece disposed in a loose sonata structure.

Symphony in Three Movements
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Composed in 1942-1945.
Premiered on January 24, 1946 in New York, conducted by the composer.

Stravinsky once said that “every good piece of music is marked by its own characteristic sound.” Certainly this is true of his own work, perhaps more so than with that of any other composer. The Firebird, The Soldier’s Tale, the Symphony of Psalms, Oedipus Rex, Les Noces, The Rake’s Progress, the Movements for Piano and Orchestra: each creates its own unique universe of sound, its own distinctive congeries of orchestration, harmony, texture. The essential “sound world” of the Symphony in Three Movements is one of ferocity — brilliant, steely, forceful, brass-driven — and, extremely rare for Stravinsky in his instrumental works, it seems to have arisen from a programmatic engine that was driving his creativity at the time of the work’s composition.

Stravinsky spoke and wrote a great deal during his lifetime, and one of the threads upon which he consistently hung his thoughts was the philosophy that “music means nothing,” that a musical composition is merely notes and timbres carefully placed one after another by the composer, and that the emotion incited by it originates with the listener and not with the artist. “Rhythm and motion, not the element of feeling, are the foundations of musical art,” he insisted. Such a view inherently precludes music with programmatic reference, but Stravinsky himself admitted that even he sometimes slipped from his Apollonian ideal. A passage of energetic triplet rhythms in the finale of the Symphony of Psalms, he said, represented the flying hooves of the horses pulling Elijah’s chariot to heaven. Of the Symphony in Three Movements, composed during the agonizing and uncertain days of the Second World War, soon after he had settled in California, Stravinsky wrote, “During the process of creation in this, our arduous time of sharp and shifting events, of despair and hope, of continual torments, of tension and, at last, cessation and relief, it may be that all of those repercussions have left traces in the Symphony.... It both does and does not ‘express my feelings’ about them [i.e., the events of the War], but I prefer to say only that, without participation of what I think of as my will, they excited my musical imagination. And the events that thus activated me were not general, or ideological, but specific: each episode in the Symphony is linked in my imagination with a concrete impression, very often cinematic in origin, of the War.”

The Symphony in Three Movements came into existence, as it were, in pieces, and over a considerable period of time. The composer Alexander Tansman, Stravinsky’s close friend and eventual biographer, said that the first movement originated in 1942 as an orchestral piece with a prominent concertante piano part, not dissimilar from the way Petrushka had evolved thirty years before. The piano, however, had largely been subsumed into the orchestral texture by the time the movement was completed before the end of the year. The music for the Andante, composed during the spring of 1943, was first intended for use in the score of a film based on Franz Werfel’s novel The Song of Bernadette. Stravinsky said that the music was to accompany the vision of the Virgin Mary that miraculously appeared to the 19th-century peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in the town of Lourdes, though its icy insouciance seems little related to the mood of that event, except for the prominence of its harp part. At any rate, Stravinsky withdrew from the project for artistic and financial reasons (as he did from every other movie deal proposed to him during the years he lived in Hollywood), and the music, like the eventual first movement of the Symphony, remained an as-yet dissociated fragment. (The Song of Bernadette, incidentally, was made into an enormously successful if rather syrupy film in 1943 by director Henry King. It won four Oscars, including one for Jennifer Jones as Best Actress and one for Alfred Newman, who supplied the music.) The spur to pull these musical orphans together into a finished symphony came with a commission from the New York Philharmonic in 1945. Stravinsky composed a third movement, which brought together the piano and harp featured in the two existing pieces, and completed the Symphony in Three Movements on August 7, 1945, just one week before the Japanese surrender ended the War. He conducted its premiere in New York on January 24, 1946. It was his first new work to be heard after he became a naturalized United States citizen on December 28, 1945.

The first movement, Stravinsky said, “was inspired by a war film, a documentary of scorched-earth tactics in China. The middle part of the movement — the music for clarinet, piano and strings, which mounts in intensity and volume until the explosion of the three chords [from the full orchestra] — was conceived as a series of instrumental conversations to accompany a cinematographic scene showing the Chinese people scratching and digging in their fields.” The movement (whose tempo is indicated by an exact metronome marking rather than by the usual descriptive, but less precise, Italian word, a common practice with this composer) combines the tightly reasoned thematic development and balanced returns of traditional sonata form with Stravinsky’s accustomed mosaic procedure of juxtaposing unrelated blocks of music. It is perhaps the most ingenious, challenging and masterful formal exercise that he ever executed, and yields up its essential matter only with repeated hearings. Three motivic signposts, however, can serve as immediate points of reference: a sweeping scale hurled forth in the opening measure; violent, hammered chords played by the violins above a motoric bass ostinato; and a mechanical, repeated-note figure in the horns. These three musical kernels are separated by much other thematic material, but are clearly recalled in the closing pages to round out the movement, in the manner of sonata form. Midway through the movement, attentive listeners may detect a phrase that Stravinsky may (or may not) have quoted from the “cat” theme of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf of 1936. It is not used as a thematic springboard, but is simply woven into the ongoing texture, a technique that Shostakovich later used to incorporate the trumpet melody from Rossini’s William Tell Overture into the first movement of his Fifteenth Symphony.

The Andante, given its association with The Song of Bernadette and its prominent part for the harp, is a halcyon respite from the intensity of the surrounding movements. It is structured in Classical three-part form: a repeated-note melody in the strings, perhaps sprung from the opening number of the second act of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, informs the first and third sections of the movement; an austere passage, initiated by flute and harp and framed by shimmering chords floating in the high register of strings (before) and woodwinds (after), stands at the center. The movement is connected directly to the finale by a brief, chordal Interlude.

“The third movement actually contains the genesis of a war plot, though I recognized it as such only after completing the composition,” Stravinsky continued. “The beginning of the movement is ... a musical reaction to the newsreels and documentaries that I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march-beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba — these are all related to those repellent pictures. The march music is predominant until the fugue [begun in fragmentary manner by the piano and solo trombone], which is the stasis and the turning point. [It is here that the piano and the harp, each of which has had a movement to itself, are heard together by themselves for the first time.] The immobility at the beginning of the fugue is comic, I think — and so, to me, was the overturned arrogance of the Germans when their machine failed. The exposition of the fugue and the end of the Symphony are associated in my plot with the rise of the Allies, and perhaps the final, albeit rather too commercial, chord tokens my extra exuberance in the Allied triumph.”

1812 Overture, Op. 49
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Composed in 1880.
Premiered on August 20, 1882 in Moscow, conducted by Eduard Nápravník.

The Russian penchant for myth-making extends, of course, to her warfare. It is therefore not surprising that Napoleon’s strategic withdrawal from Moscow in 1812 came to be regarded in Russia as a great military victory achieved through cunning and resourcefulness, conveniently ignoring the French General Ney’s report that “general famine and general winter, rather than Russian bullets, conquered the Grand Army.”
Nearly seventy years later, the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer was erected in Moscow to commemorate the events of 1812. For the Cathedral’s consecration, Nikolai Rubinstein, head of the Moscow Conservatory and director of the Russian Musical Society, planned a celebratory festival of music, and in 1880 he asked Tchaikovsky to write a work for the occasion. Tchaikovsky was never enthusiastic about composing to commission. On October 10th, however, he wrote to Mme. von Meck, “Nothing is more unpleasant to me than the manufacturing of music for such occasions.... But — I have not the courage to refuse [Rubinstein’s proposal].”

The original plans for the work included a grand outdoor performance in Kremlin Square by a large orchestra augmented by brass band, bells and cannon. The cannon shots were notated precisely in the score, and were to be triggered by electrical relay from the conductor’s desk. The 5000 bells of Moscow’s steeples — whose thunderous combined tintinnabulation was said to make conversation impossible — were to chime in at the work’s climax. There is no record, however, that this grandiose performance ever happened. Seemingly never having heard the work, Tchaikovsky wrote to the conductor Eduard Nápravník in 1881, “Last winter, at Nikolai Rubinstein’s request, I composed a Festival Overture for the concerts of the exhibition, entitled 1812. Could you possibly arrange to have this played? It is not of great value, and I shall not be at all surprised or hurt if you consider the style of the music unsuitable to a symphony concert.” Nápravník gave the apparent premiere on August 20, 1882 in Moscow.

The Overture represents the conflict — militarily and musically — of Russia and France, and the eventual Russian “victory” over the invaders. It opens with a dark, brooding setting of the Russian hymn God, Preserve Thy People for violas and cellos. The full orchestra is gradually collected up as the section progresses to make a splendid climax. The French forces appear to the sound of thumping drums and the martial strains of the Marseillaise. The battle is joined with ingenious orchestral interplay, through which are heard fragments of the French marching song. Two Slavic melodies ensue. One Tchaikovsky rescued from his first opera, The Voyevoda; the other is a Novgorod folksong that he first set for piano duet in 1868-1869 as one of his Fifty Russian Folk Songs. The sequence of battle — opera theme — folk song is reiterated. Following a huge rallentando (slowing-down) passage which occupies three full pages in the score, the opening hymn returns in a grand setting for wind and brass choir reinforced with bells. The Marseillaise reappears, but is vanquished by the artillery fusillade and the triumphant rendition of the Russian national hymn, God, Save the Czar by trombones, horns and low strings. (It is a curious historical footnote that neither the French nor Russian melodies Tchaikovsky used in this Overture could have been heard in 1812. The Russian hymn was composed by Alexis Lvov in 1833, and the revolutionary French anthem was banned when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor in 1804.) The 1812 is one of music’s most invigorating experiences — it never fails to rouse the spirits and stir the blood.