 Felix Mendelssohn(-Bartholdy) b. Hamburg, Feb. 3, 1809; d. Leipzig, Nov. 4 1847 Die Hebriden (‘Fingalshöhle’) [The Hebrides Overture (“Fingal’s Cave”)] in b minor, Op. 26 Taking a Grand Tour of Europe was still a commonly accepted way for young adults of means to transition into adulthood in the late 1820s. The nineteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, from a wealthy German banking family, was eager for the journey. He was already an accomplished and successful young musician who had been performing in public since the age of nine; early astonishing masterpieces like the String Octet in E-flat Major, the Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even his first major symphony were lauded. He had also, in the months just before setting out on his journey led several groundbreaking performances—for royalty, even—of a forgotten masterpiece by J.S. Bach, the St. Matthew Passion. These successes had made him something of a celebrity when he arrived in London to be introduced to concert life in April of 1829. For the next several months he concertized extensively—though mostly privately—and even more importantly, networked. It was the beginning of what would turn out to be a lifelong devotion of the English for Mendelssohn. So it was with relief after the busy concert season that he set off with his friend Carl Klingermann for a walking tour of Scotland in July. Mendelssohn wrote of being inspired by many vivid experiences: an assemblage of bagpipers he witnessed in Edinburgh; the castle ruins of Holyrood (which were the genesis for the opening of his Symphony No. 3, “The Scottish”); the pair even visited Sir Walter Scott. On August 7 decided to catch a paddle steamer from Fort William south to Oban through the beautiful Loch Linnhe, past the brawny coastlines of the inner Hebrides archipelago and the ruins of Dunollie castle, to the only harbor on the Isle of Mull, Tobermory. Sometime that afternoon he sketched in his notepad the theme from the present work, which would become known as The Hebrides or Fingal’s Cave. A gaping void nearly filling one side of the uninhabited outcropping known as Staffa, the cave is formed from hexagonal columnar basalt of the type seen along the Snake and Boise River gorges in Idaho. Roughly seventy feet tall and more than two hundred and twenty feet deep, lined with organ-pipe-like columns, and filled with the weird echoes of the ceaseless waves, this cave brings ghost pirates and mythological giants to mind in tourists still. It was “discovered” in the late eighteenth century, soon after the exploits of a prehistoric giant named Fingal were fictionalized in The Works of Ossian, a trove of purportedly ancient Gaelic epic poetry published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson in the 1760s. The image of the cave and the fables of the giant fused in the minds of Mendelssohn’s publishers, who, incapable of resisting the marketing potential, changed the composer’s original title from The Lonely Island to Fingal’s Cave — even though, according to the composer’s journal, the theme was composed before the day before he vi ewed the formation. The work occupied Mendelssohn for some years, undergoing many significant revisions before reaching its present form. The principal theme is heard right away at the opening, and with gently surging harmonic motion and undulating accompaniment in the violas and cellos, plainly depicts a nautical episode. Cellos introduce the second theme, a more relaxed and sunny idea that is taken up by violins before a grand buildup brings visions of the craggy coastline looming ahead. In the uncertain strains of the central section, fragmentary signals call out from the brass and woodwinds, alternating with increasingly anxious strains from the strings. We seem to veer alarmingly close to the rocky shore, but disaster is averted. A duet of thanksgiving from the clarinets serves as a point of repose before a final episode of great power. Though this journey for us is at its end, Mendelssohn reminds us, the sea goes on undulating. Igor Stravinsky b. Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, June 17, 1882; d. New York, April 6, 1971 Petrushka Scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, english horn, 3 clarinets in B flat (3rd doubling bass clarinet in B flat), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in B flat and C, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tambourine, triangle, tam-tam, xylophone, piano, celesta, harp and strings. Very near St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre, where he trod the boards for a quarter of a century, the apartment of the eminent operatic bass-baritone Fyodor Stravinsky (Igor’s father) was a veritable tramping-ground for many of the brightest lights in the Russian, even European firmament of the 1880’s and 90’s. Fyodor was admired by leading composers of the day, such as Tchaikovsky, in several of whose opera premieres the elder Stravinsky was to participate. Young Igor was thus felicitously raised among artists, critics, musicians, his father’s vast library, and his mother’s own considerable prowess at the piano. At St. Petersburg University Igor enrolled as a law student—a means to a comfortable career in civil service—but soon gave himself over to his talent when given some encouragement by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who at the time had been a professor of composition at the St Petersburg Conservatory for more than thirty years. It was Sergei Diaghilev (a former pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov’s himself) who, when he invited the young composer to submit something for his Ballets Russes in Paris, gave the undiscovered Stravinsky his first big break. The dance troupe, though wildly popular at first, had faced some criticism in 1909 for a relative lack of musical verve to match its technical and artistic achievements in dance. Though Stravinsky had arranged a few items for the company before, he had done nothing on the scale of a full ballet when he received a telegram from Diaghilev commissioning him for an upcoming project based on the Russian fairy-tale The Firebird. Its astounding artistic success was the first of several important collaborations between these two boldly original and strong-willed artists. In Russian puppetry Petrushka is a stock character, a kind of jester costumed in a red dress and pointed hat, and sharing some aspects of the profane and violent English folk anti-hero Punch. But the puppet in Stravinsky’s second ballet is a sad, Pinocchio-like creature made of straw and sawdust who is mistreated by a malevolent wizard and pines for the love of a ballerina puppet. But there the similarities end, for this is no children’s tale. The ballet opens on a St. Petersburg square at a pre-Lenten festival akin to Mardi Gras, treated by Stravinsky with all the shimmering grandeur a night at the ballet promises. A multitude of voices and themes are heard as crowds swarm the square. Soon, however, and throughout the ballet score, innocent toy-like themes are distended until they become garish; lively dances become menacing. A hush comes over the crowd as the puppets, magically animated by the wizard, perform a grand Russian Dance, the poignant middle section of which is abruptly curtailed by the piano. A drum roll serves to usher us from one scene to the next, and with a tremendous clang Petrushka is kicked by the wizard into his bleak little cell. He mopes, then rages at a portrait of the sorcerer, then gives in to a romantic reverie of the ballerina puppet. The puppet makes an escape and flees to the carnival square, where absurd and disturbing sideshows take place (The Dance of the Wet Nurses, The Dance of the Peasant and the Bear). Here, in front of the crowd, Petrushka is thrashed to pieces by his nemesis, a larger puppet who is having an affair with the ballerina. After his death, Petrushka vengefully haunts the wizard, who runs away in horror. Beethoven, Ludwig van b. Bonn, baptized on Dec. 17, 1770; d. Vienna, March 26, 1827 Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 Legends of Beethoven’s virtuosity at the piano abound from his initial years in Vienna. One observer remembered, “That young fellow was full of the very devil! Never had I head such playing! …He displayed difficulties and effects on the piano beyond anything of which we might have dreamed.” Accordingly, the firebrand composer from Bonn produced five concertos for his own instrument in the early and middle parts of his career (plus the Choral Fantasy, a hybrid work including full orchestra and chorus). And though there is only one violin concerto from him, by 1806 Beethoven had dealt soloistically with the violin before—there are two Romances, (Opp. 40 and 50) and one special violin sonata which he designated as being concertante in style (the Kreuzer sonata, Op. 47). The violinist and conductor Franz Clement, who premiered the concerto at a benefit concert in Vienna in 1806, was also renowned among the Viennese concert public and musical insiders—he even enjoyed the admiration of Beethoven himself. His memory for music was supposedly so detailed that he once drafted a piano reduction of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation with no aid but the libretto—and did the job so well that the composer himself feared the score had been leaked. On another occasion, several weeks after the failed first performances of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio,, a group of friends gathered to read through the opera at the piano; Clement sat in a corner without music and played the first violin part all the way through, adding important vocal lines and orchestral solos in their place. As a violinist he was reputed to have a sensitive, lyrical tone, secure in the upper register, and devoid of bombast. The first movement is almost imperial in scale, offering a luxurious sense of spaciousness for the soloist (in fact, at almost twenty-five minutes, it is among Beethoven’s longest single movements). Five soft timpani strokes begin the piece, and these pulses turn out to be a recurring motive. When the first violins enter ten bars later, it is with a corresponding series of four quarter notes—but the note they play is a half-step raised, setting up a harmonic tension that lasts the entire concerto. (Stravinsky once described these d-sharps to his amanuensis Robert Craft as “ugly.”) Between the timpani and the violin entrances Beethoven gives a sweet and symmetrical woodwind theme. A sequence of scales in all the instruments is followed by a forceful progression of chords underscored again by the timpani. The first violins gracefully step back to the home key, and a new, ascending, conjunct theme emerges once again from the woodwinds. When the violins again take over, it turns minor and gathers intensity before a sudden pianissimo marks Beethoven’s left-hand turn into the closing of the orchestral exposition, a radiant passage for the entire orchestra. After such a long and dramatic wait, and with only the barest accompanying support from the orchestra, the soloist is asked to enter with a series of delicately ascending octave leaps and arabesques that span nearly the compass of the instrument. After the timpani taps the five-note motto again, the soloist is given the principal thematic material for exploration. The real mastery of the concerto lies in Beethoven’s treatment of the solo part, in which the pure melodies of the orchestral exposition are decorated and augmented without hollow technical display but always by means of personal and emotional expression. Where Beethoven leaves a space for the soloist to perform a cadenza, many great violinists — not all of them great composers—have interjected their own. Fritz Kreisler’s is most often performed, but there are contributions available from Joachim, Hennig, Busoni, Hubay, and Spiakovsky, and more recently Robert Levin and Joshua Bell, to name only a few. The next two movements do not make up together the heft of the first, but instead act as foils. A set of variations on a tender, breathy theme occupies the second movement. Halfway through, Beethoven reveals another theme (or a significant extension of the first theme) featuring a dramatic upward leap in the solo violin; soft string chords glow behind it. From here forward both thematic ideas are treated in alternating sequence. Without a pause, a Rondo takes over to form the third and final movement. |
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