| Classics 10: Entangled in Passion | ||||||||||
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Bacchanale (Venusberg Music) from Tannhäuser In the history of musical style, instrumental music changes; opera is reformed. No musical genre has elicited such passion, polemics and partisanship as opera. In eighteenth-century Paris, the adherents of French opera fought duels with the devotees of the Italian style. The birth of opera itself was midwived by a storm of polemical treatises. The reason behind such intensity goes back to the first operas at the dawn of the seventeenth century. The “inventors” of the genre believed that sung drama, the perfect combination of music and poetry – in imitation of the presumed style of ancient Greek tragedy – would transport the listener to the highest level of aesthetic transcendence. And for this reason, the earliest opera composers chose the myth of Orpheus, whose singing was able to move the gods of the underworld to return to him his dead wife Eurydice. Richard Wagner bought into operatic ideology with a vengeance. He conceived his music dramas as Gesamtkunswerk (nineteenth-century multi-media) that would combine all the arts, in effect rendering him a new Orpheus. Wagner shattered all the rules and conventions of opera, virtually abandoning formal recitatives and arias and replacing them with through-composed vocal lines over sumptuous orchestration containing thematic “commentary” on the action. His revolutionary musical style Balkanized critics and the public into pro- and anti-Wagner camps, with the music of Brahms and Verdi as the principal foils. By the early 1840s, with the success of the early and more conventional Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman, Wagner had become a force in German music. His next – and more doctrinaire – opera, Tannhäuser, is based on medieval legends about an actual Minnesinger, or poet-musician, who died c. 1265. The opera premiered in Dresden in 1845 and quickly became enormously popular throughout Germany. Its protagonist, who has been living it up for a year with Venus, wins a contest with a song extolling profane love. Condemned to clean up his act before he can claim the hand of his pure betrothed, Elisabeth, Tannhäuser makes a pilgrimage to Rome where the pope refuses to grant him absolution. He returns to Germany carrying his withered staff, symbol of his continued state of sin, in time to witness Elisabeth’s funeral. He collapses and dies in remorse as his staff blooms, symbolizing his redemption through love. In 1859 Tannhäuser became the first Wagner opera to be performed in America. In 1861 Wagner was invited by Emperor Napoleon III to produce Tannhäuser for the Opéra in Paris but refused to add the “obligatory” ballet in the second act. Instead, he compromised by adding the Bacchanale to the opening of Act I, but the Paris audience was not mollified. The production was a failure, disrupted by catcalls from the Jockey Club – an elite horse-breeding society who established a convention at the Opéra of never including a ballet in first acts so that members could arrive fashionably late. This time Wagner didn’t concede; neither composer nor Tannhäuser returned to the Paris stage for another 34 years. Nevertheless, Wagner retained the revisions for Paris – although without the ballet – into what is now the standard version. The music comes directly from the opera – Wagner would never have bothered to write something completely new for such a request. Wagner associates the hero’s unholy dalliance with a strident theme, which he used in the well-known Overture.  The ballet adds heavy percussion, crash cymbals and tambourine in particular, over permutations of the basic theme. The second half of the ballet, based on the music from the opening chorus of Venus’s handmaidens, is more intimate and seductive. Wagner essentially rearranged the orchestra part from the scene, hovering over every note – a device that might have saved him from writing more music. | ||||||||||
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Don Juan, Op. 20, Tone Poem after Nikolaus Lenau Richard Strauss came from an extremely conservative family. His father, Franz Joseph, the principal horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra, considered Brahms a radical and Wagner’s music beyond the pale, forbidding his son to listen to it. Richard assimilated the music of the early and middle nineteenth century in his early works, composing as a committed classicist. But he soon discovered that the musical language taught by his father was too confining for his own fertile mind. Strauss quickly found his voice through his own unique development of the tone poem, or symphonic poem, a purely instrumental rendition of a text, usually poetic or narrative in nature. The term “symphonic poem” had been coined by Liszt in 1854 for compositions accompanied by a program that the audience was supposed to read before listening to the music. Although they did not all use Liszt’s term, the concept had become a standard medium for the nineteenth century Romantics, including Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, reaching its apex with Strauss. Moreover, the fusion of the arts was epitomized in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner’s music dramas. Strauss was to create his own version of this fusion, both in his purely instrumental tone poems and operas. Strauss’s musical rendering of specific texts is far more detailed than Liszt’s, although it is often difficult to follow without a “road map.” The anecdotes about Strauss' attempts at narrative music are many: “I want to be able to describe a teaspoon musically,” he is said to have commented. In the ten years between 1888 and 1898 he produced a string of tone poems, beginning with Aus Italien and Macbeth. Don Juan, completed in 1889, was the first to be publicly performed, catapulting him to international recognition. Don Juan represents Strauss’s liberation from the confines of his father’s restrictive world. He completed the score in Bayreuth where he was a coach at the Festspielhaus – the venue Wagner had built to showcase his music dramas – between performances of Tristan und Isolde. At the time, the 24-year-old Strauss was involved in a scandalous love affair with a married woman. He expressed his youthful exuberance and desire with three extracts from Don Juan, an incomplete verse play by Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), which he copied as a preface in the score. Lenau’s play is just one of the incarnations of the Don Juan legend, which first appeared on the literary scene in the seventeenth-century Spanish play El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) by Tirso de Molina, and was immortalized musically in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Lenau's version follows Don Juan through five conquests and a level of debauchery that leaves a wake of misery and death. In response to his brother’s attempt to dissuade him from his dissolute lifestyle, Don Juan expounds on his desire to experience all the diverse and novel joys of sexual gratification, hoping to die of a kiss from the ideal woman. His paramour/victims are: Maria, who follows Don Juan to escape from a forced marriage and is abandoned; Clara, who actually rejects him before he can reject her; Isabella, whom Don Juan seduces, disguised as her fiancé; Anna, who never actually appears but whom Don Juan apostrophizes from afar; and finally, an unnamed woman who dies of a broken heart. Don Juan receives the news of her death at a masked ball. Unlike Tirso's Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Lenau’s hero is not felled by a stone dinner guest meting out divine retribution. Rather, he intentionally lowers his guard during his last duel with his victim's son, because victory, and even life itself, has lost its appeal. All this, Strauss condenses and transforms into a single symphonic movement. While presenting a narrative in music, Strauss' tone poems also conform to the current conventions of musical form. In the case of Don Juan, Strauss adapted the narrative to a modified sonata allegro structure. The principal theme, incorporating an orchestral fanfare and an upward-swooping melody, is a composite musical idea expressing the wild abandon and sexual striving of his hero. There follow three subsidiary themes representing the Don’s conquests. Although it is difficult to identify any of the specific paramours of the source play, Strauss creates a different “character” for each of the secondary themes that reflect their diverse personalities and qualities of love: one theme introduced by a soaring introduction on a solo violin; & a second accompanied by a gasping flute theme and a sultry Spanish oboe melody; all develop alongside the restless motives of the Don.The second half of the tone poem – the development in formalistic terms – begins with the so-called “Carnival Scene” that corresponds to Lenau’s masked ball. Strauss breaks free of the sonata form tradition, however, by redefining the Don's personality with a new heroic theme, which has become the best known signature tune of the piece. it also signals a turning point, the beginning of his downward slide, including the haunting of his conscience by his former lovers, whose themes recur to haunt him. Strauss alludes to further unspecified adventures in the increasingly manic development of the Don's themes. Eventually he turns up in a churchyard where he comes upon the statue of a nobleman whom he has killed and whom, in a final act of bravado, he invites to supper. The recurrence of the Don's original theme is Strauss' abbreviated take on a formal recapitulation – forgotten are all his earlier amours. Instead of the stone guest, the nobleman’s son arrives, seeking revenge. Don Juan puts up a valiant fight, during which all his themes are further developed and contrapuntally combined in a manner the composer certainly learned from Wagner. Suddenly the music halts and a minor chord precedes a blast on the trumpets as Don Juan surrenders to his adversary and his despair – the opposite of Don Giovanni’s defiance. Pianissimo timpani and pizzicato basses conclude the piece. | ||||||||||
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Symphony in D Minor A Belgian by birth who lived and taught most of his life in France, César Franck was one of the most influential music teachers of the period and a famous organist. Although he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire at age 15, his maturation as a composer came late in life – he composed his most lasting compositions while in his 50s and 60s. Franck was an easy-going, unassuming person, who never knew how to promote his works. As a result, much of his music was either ignored during his lifetime or derided by the doctrinaire academicians. He achieved worldwide recognition only in the last century. But his students adored him, calling him “Pater seraphicus,” and his influence on the future of French music was enormous. He was appointed in 1871 as professor of organ at the Conservatoire, but his classes evolved into de facto composition classes for the succeeding generation of major French composers, including Vincent d’Indy, Henri Duparc, Ernest Chausson and Paul Dukas. The Symphony in d minor was a late work. Franck was reluctant to try his hand at a symphony and, ironically, it was the success of his pupil Vincent d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air in 1887 that encouraged him to attempt one as well. He finished it in 1888 and it premiered in the following year. The Symphony was a dismal failure. Critics, music professors and in particular composer Charles Gounod lambasted it as: “...the affirmation of impotence carried to the point of dogma.” A pedantic teacher at the conservatory decided that the work could not be called a symphony at all because of the English horn solo in the second movement. “Who ever heard of writing for an English horn in a symphony?” he asserted (wrongly, by the way; Haydn used two in his Symphony No.22 and Hector Berlioz, another Frenchman no less, opens the slow movement of the Symphonie fantastique with one of the most famous English horn solos in the repertory (FYI, Dvorák composed the Symphony No. 9 in 1893, after Franck’s.) The Symphony digresses from the classical form in other ways as well. It has only three movements and its structure is cyclical – all the themes recur towards the end, a method widely used by Franz Liszt, one of Franck’s models. The opening three-note phrase of the slow introduction is a variant of the famous opening of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s last quartet (Op.135) where he wrote Muss es sein? (Must it be?) above the notes. Liszt had also used the phrase in the opening of the tone poem Les Preludes.Franck opens the Symphony with slow, foreboding statements of the motive, later expanding it into a full-fledged theme in an aggressive, even threatening transformation in the Allegro. The movement vacillates between the two tempi. There are only two themes in this movement, the second a contrasting, but equally strong-willed, lyrical melody. The movement is something of a pitched battle between the two themes; the fact that they resemble each other in rhythm and in their constituent motives makes it easier to make them compete head to head. In the end, the first one wins out, although resolving in D major. The second movement opens with a haunting theme on the harp and pizzicato strings playing pianissimo. The “notorious” English horn takes up the melody, which is completed by the horn. Franck uses the theme as a refrain between a series of new melodies, & which he combines melodically and contrapuntally into the original theme at the end of the movement. The final movement opens with a melody in D major and a contrasting secondary one. Soon, however, the “English horn” theme from the previous movement recurs. This is no example of cyclical tokenism. Rather, Franck incorporates all three themes together, contrasting them in the kind of dappled effect of sunlight and shade one gets on a partly cloudy day. The climax of the movement occurs with the full orchestra playing the “English horn theme” against a counterpoint of violins. Franck then brings in a repeat of the second theme from the first movement. The Symphony concludes with a restatement of the opening three-note motive from the first movement sets up the triumphant conclusion. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009 | ||||||||||
