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Dances of Galanta Composers have always loved to integrate folk melodies into their works both for popular appeal and to show their ability to manipulate a simple tune. The practice was already common in the Middle Ages. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they often made the mistake of equating the popular music of the day with authentic traditional folk melodies. The melodies Brahms and Liszt used in their Hungarian dances and rhapsodies, for example, were not indigenous melodies, but were in reality the popular street and café music of their time – often played by Gypsy bands. Zoltán Kodály and his colleague Béla Bartók, both pioneers of modern ethnomusicology, were among the first (in 1907) to use the newfangled invention, the wax cylinder recorder, to collect folk melodies at their source. They traveled extensively to the most rural backwaters to collect their examples and were careful to authenticate their research. Critical to their systematic approach was to seek the variations in music and text from different locales, in the attempt to figure out the origin of the melodies and follow the geographical spread of both music and words. They avoided one of the great pitfalls in authenticating folk music, recognizing the fact that the simpler the melody, the greater the possibility that similar ones arose independently and were not necessarily derived from a common source. Like Bartók, Kodály used many of the collected folk melodies as themes for his compositions. Of the two, Kodály was the more conservative and the more Romantic. While his international reputation is generally overshadowed by that of Bartók, his music has become a national treasure in his native Hungary. Kodály’s ethno-musicological research notwithstanding, the themes for Dances of Galánta, a tone poem first performed in 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society, did indeed originate from street and café music. Galánta, a small town now in Slovakia, was part of Hungary when Kodály lived there in his childhood. In the eighteenth century Galánta had been a center of sophisticated Gypsy musicians who performed from notated scores, rather than from memory, and played in the orchestras of the gentry. Although their fame had waned by Kodály’s time, the composer wanted to revive the old tradition. The themes for Dances of Galánta came from a historical collection, Selected Hungarian National Dances of various Gypsies from Galánta. Kodály selected five different melodies and rhythms in the work, giving them a brilliant orchestral dressing that provided a special showcase for the upper winds. The five dances employ different modes, themes and rhythms, but they are strung together in such a way that the final measures of one dance serve as an introduction to the next. The opening dance begins with a long introduction that has the effect of a warm-up or flexing of musical muscles.  The first three dances feature an orchestral soloist; in the first movement, the clarinet introduces a slow modal theme that will reappear in later movements to unify the set. The second dance features the flute and is faster and more flowing than the first but returns to the theme from the first dance, finally blending seamlessly into the third, which features the oboe and contains a dialogue between the upper winds and strings. The fourth dance picks up in tempo and pits the violins against the upper winds in a kind of contest as the dance becomes wilder and wilder. Suddenly everything shifts gear with a new slower, almost humorous, melody in the lower brass and then in the clarinet, slipping into the final dance. Here again the tempo is fast, with the theme bouncing around the entire orchestra and including quotes from the previous dances. A long pause nostalgically brings back the refrain in the upper winds, ending with a cadenza for clarinet “rudely” interrupted by the rest of the orchestra for a rousing conclusion. | ||||||||||
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Harp Concerto, Op. 25 Throughout most of his career, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera attempted to find a synthesis between the indigenous music of his native country and the techniques of the twentieth century. His works, especially his ballets, often feature the fantastic, mysterious and magical stories and symbolism of native Indian and pre-Columbian cultures. In 1958 he embraced serialism, blending it successfully with the rhythms of native traditions. In September 1971 the Opera Society of Washington staged Ginastera’s opera Beatrix Cenci as the inaugural production of the opera house of the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Born in Buenos Aires to a Catalan father and Italian mother, Ginastera revealed musical ability at an early age. He graduated from the Buenos Aires conservatory in 1938, but even before graduation, a public performance of the orchestral suite from his ballet Panambi brought him to the attention of Lincoln Kierstein who commissioned him to write a ballet with an Argentine setting for the American Ballet Caravan. In 1945 Ginastera received a Guggenheim fellowship to visit the United States, where he studied at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland, with whom he also forged a close friendship. Returning to Argentina, he organized and became director of the Conservatory of Music and Theatre Arts at the National University of La Plata. Ginastera was an avid world traveler. While he spent a considerable number of years teaching in his native country, the unsettled political situation, especially the rise to power of Juan Perón, interfered with his academic duties, requiring him to spend many years abroad, mostly in the USA and Europe. In 1971 he settled permanently in Geneva but continued to travel extensively. Composed over a nine-year period (1956-65), the Harp Concerto sprang from Ginastera’s friendship with Spanish virtuoso harpist Nicanor Zabaleta, who premiered it with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1965. It is a wonderful display of the harp’s variety of sonorities and “voices,” with particular focus on contrasting dynamics. Structured in classic sonata form, the first movement opens with soloist and orchestra in a syncopated primeval dance, consisting of repeated short motives, in which the driving rhythms of Argentine folk music in the orchestra play against the gentle sound of the harp. The contrasting lyrical second theme, introduced by the harp, breaks the mood. The development focuses primarily on the main theme, giving it a more lyrical twist as an extensive oboe solo. A short coda – a quiet mini-cadenza forms a smooth transition into the following movement. The second movement adheres to the classical ABA structure for slow movements. It belongs primarily to the harp, with only minimal and muted accompaniment from varying small orchestral ensembles. It begins with a well-defined theme, presented in imitation by the cellos, basses and violas, each voice entering at a different interval. The harp then enters with its own theme. In the long middle, or B section, the harp begins to speak with a “mysterious” voice – single notes, played pianissimo, irregular phrasing and rests punctuated by tremolos and brief phrases from various sections of the orchestra, creating a particular kind of tension. After the A section is repeated, there is a cadenza several minutes long, that retains the style and mood of the movement, separating it from the brief Finale. The third movement proper, a rondo, opens with a sudden orchestral crash, peppered with a driving drumbeat, and launches into a sharply syncopated rondo theme introduced by the harp and echoed by the orchestra. In this movement, the harp participates fully with the full orchestra, avoiding the contrasts of the first movement. Here, the percussion is the featured section of the orchestra. A coda for the soloist with drums and tambourine accentuates the percussive qualities of the solo instrument. | ||||||||||
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Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61 No other composer symbolized the Romantic movement in music as did Robert Schumann. Talented both in music and literature, he used the latter to promote his romantic ideals about the future of music. He was a true elitist, pitting “us,” the enlightened (the Davidsbündler), against “them,” the masses (whom he termed the Philistines). The latter appellation has, in fact, has remained part of the international elitist vocabulary to this day. Emotionally he was unstable, suffering from repeated severe bipolar episodes as well as neurosyphilis. Together they undermined his health, and at 44 he made an unsuccessful suicide attempt by jumping into the Rhine. He succumbed two years later in an asylum. His beloved wife, Clara, a brilliant concert pianist for whom he felt an underlying professional envy, supported their seven children for the rest of her long life with a relentless series of concert tours. In the summer of 1844, just returning from an arduous concert tour to Russia, Schumann suffered a nervous breakdown that left him barely able to work. By the end of the following year, his pace became frenzied: he managed to finish the Piano Concerto and in a sudden rush of inspiration sketched out his Symphony No. 2 in white heat in a few days in December. It took him however ten more months to flesh out the sketch and orchestrate it, finishing it on October 19, just in time for the premiere in Leipzig on November 5 under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. In a letter to a colleague Schumann wrote: “I wrote my symphony in December 1845, while still in a semi-invalid state; it appears to me that one can hear this from the music. I began to feel more like myself when I wrote the last movement, and was certainly much better when I finished the whole work. All the same it reminds me of dark times.” The slow introduction to the Symphony combines and interweaves two contrasting themes, recalling Schumann’s contrasting state of mind at the time: a slow horn fanfare combined with a dark and uncertain theme on the strings. There follows a brief duet for the oboes in a transformation of the opening horn call that will recur throughout the movement and even later in the Symphony. The Introduction is particularly long, including an unorthodox acceleration in tempo. It's all designed to maximize the musical tension until the audience is on the edge of their seats. One of the most interesting features of this symphony is the way in which Schumann incorporates the motivic material from the Introduction into the Allegro. The tempo and tension of the introduction increase until the aggressive main allegro theme erupts, immediately incorporating the oboe duet from the introduction. That little motive will come to dominate a good chunk of the development. The allegro themes also get a heavy workout, and the movement ends with a coda that incorporates all the themes, including a triumphant statement of the opening horn theme – now blasting out on a trumpet. The following Scherzo continues the battle of the contrasting moods. The scherzo theme is extremely agitated – perhaps reflecting the composer's mania. He then repeats his innovation from his “Spring” Symphony (No.1), in having two contrasting trios: the first lively and staccato, the second legato and dreamy. A reprise of the Scherzo separates the two trios. The runaway coda repeats the horn call from the first movement. The third movement is one of Schumann’s most moving utterances. Marked Adagio espressivo, it is based on a single passionate melody introduced on the violins and immediately picked up by a solo oboe and combined first with the bassoon, then with the other woodwinds and the strings. But it is the motive created by the opening four notes, with their intense unresolved pathos that the composer dwells on, continually returning to it in the course of the movement, often using different pitches but retaining the same languorous sighing shape. Orchestrating this intense movement sapped Schumann’s emotional energy and he had to put the symphony aside for an extended rest. As he wrote to a friend in a letter accompanying the manuscript, “it will tell you of many joys and sorrows.” Schumann spent much of his convalescent time in 1845 intensively studying the music of Bach; musical scholars have noted the similarity between Schumann's Adagio theme and the main theme from the first movement of the Trio Sonata from Bach's A Musical Offering. Since Schumann was fond of musical anagrams symbolism and allusions in many of his works – some have even found Bach's name spelled out musical pitches hidden in the second Trio of the Scherzo – the theory is certainly possible. After the heart-felt Adagio, the Finale bursts forth with a joyous voice, corresponding to Schumann’s statement that he was “feeling himself again.” It is extremely unusual for its time, not corresponding to any of the classical structures for symphonic movements. In sharp contrast to the monothematic Adagio, the Finale consists of a series of themes, the next one a scurrying episode including the return of an old friend, a cameo reappearance, a transformation of the Adagio melody and another one, this time in inversion (upside down) Later on, a new melody appears, which Schumann spends considerable time developing, topping it off with a reprise of the oboe duet from the first movement and then triumphal rendition of the horn call from the first movement. Through this culminating statement of the two motives, we finally receive the clinching evidence that, indeed, they are really transformations of the same musical idea, connected by their rhythm. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009 | ||||||||||
