Loving Oz and the US (thoughts on Australia and America)

Monday, October 21, 2013

Wagner's 'Flying Dutchman' Overture

Another of my program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

The Flying Dutchman: Overture (1860)

Pursued by creditors, the 26 year-old Richard Wagner and his wife Minna fled for London in 1839 from Riga in Latvia, where he’d been music director. Their ship, the Thetis, was battered by storms and took shelter in a Norwegian cove. There, said Wagner in his memoirs, the idea for his fourth opera, The Flying Dutchman, took root. Listening to the overture’s stormy opening you could believe this. The real inspiration for the opera however, may have been Heinrich Heine’s The Recollections of Herr von Schanbelewopski (1834), which contains a version of the Flying Dutchman tale.

The Flying Dutchman concerns the old legend of a ship’s captain (the Dutchman) and his ghostly crew, condemned by a curse to sail the seas unless, and until, the Dutchman can find the redeeming love of a selfless woman. In Wagner’s opera, that woman is Senta, who sacrifices her life to save the Dutchman’s soul. The overture was written in November 1841, after the rest of the opera. Rather like the overtures of Weber whom Wagner admired, it foreshadows the opera’s concerns in its juxtaposition of tempestuous passages, the pacifying effect of ‘Senta’s Ballad’ (cor anglais solo) and the dance-like middle section based on the Scene 7 chorus, ‘Steuermann! Lass die Wacht!’ which Wagner claimed to have been suggested by the calls of the Thetis’s crewmen echoing round the Norwegian cove’s granite walls.

The Flying Dutchman was the earliest work that Wagner later acknowledged as part of his canon. Senta was the first of the ‘redeemer heroines’ he portrayed, and although Wagner was still decades away from the Music Drama with which he changed operatic history, The Flying Dutchman points the way to those operas in its dramatic sweep and insight into human motivation. It still features a stand-alone overture of course, but that overture is a superb example of 19^th century nature portraiture.

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, published 30 August 2013
'Traditional terms' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
Berlioz' Waverley Overture, published 9 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's Fatum, published 17 Sep 2013
Wagner, arr. Henk de Vlieger A Ring Adventure, published 29 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique', published on 29 Sep 2013
Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony, published 13 October 2013

Friday, October 18, 2013

Always take public transport in LA

There are wonderful things to discover in Los Angeles. You might walk past a block of flats that Charlie Chaplin built for his crew or the streets where Chinatown is set. I recently mentioned an article on the remnant stairways in hilly Silver Lake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23724797

You can still find the stairs that Laurel and Hardy tried to take the piano up, or the one that the Three Stooges took the iceblock up only to end up with an ice cube at the top. This article makes the point, though, that most Angelenos don't notice these jewels because they're encapsulated in their cars zooming along the freeway.

I take the bus. And it's fantastic.

Granted, it takes two hours to get a lot of places. But you can sit in a traffic jam in your own car too. Sometimes, I think, public transport (or 'transportation' as they call it here) might be faster. But you certainly learn the layout of the city, and it's definitely interesting.

You get to pick up Spanish, meditate, read. Most of all you're exposed the theater that is America from the moment the bus, or train, pulls in at your stop.

What about the guy in the maroon striped suit playing shells on a flattened newspaper on his knee, and passengers vying to pick which shell the nut was under. 'Lemme have a go at that!' shouts a guy about to get off who just will not allow himself to be left out, and who turns over an empty shell - 'Oh m-a-a-a-a-n!' - and then scoots before the doors close again.

What about the two guys in front of us talking about guitar playing? The conversation - basically a sharing of enthusiasms - was like a seminar: 'I said, "This is 60s music, man. It's got to have bass." He kept playin' it soft. This is not Jazz.' I discovered their names later in the week when I ran into one of them again in Westwood (how does this happen in a city of 12 million??)

And of course, then you get the monologues from bus drivers: 'Good morning again. We are approaching Javier Ave. This is a far side stop but if you'd like to alight at the red light you may do so. Passengers who wish to alight at the regular stop, please stay on board and I'll drop you on the far corner.' Funnily enough, every driver we asked a question of in Sydney responded with a surly grunt. 'Does this bus go to Wynward?' And the driver voices something like a 'yes' with an inflection that suggests you're a bloody idiot. There was one bus driver who was spectacularly bright and affable - who seemed to relish life like an American.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony

Another of my program notes:

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Symphony No.9 in E flat major, Op.70

Allegro

Moderato
Presto -
Largo -
Allegretto – Allegro

Ninth Symphonies have a certain mystique - Beethoven’s Ninth, Dvorák’s ‘Ninth’ (the New World), Bruckner’s Ninth (dedicated to God, and left unfinished on Bruckner’s death). Schoenberg once said ‘it seems that the ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away…’ Mahler tried to sidestep a Ninth by writing a ‘song-symphony’ The Song of the Earth. But then he wrote a Ninth and died shortly after.

Shostakovich broke the jinx, eventually writing 15 symphonies, but his Ninth was supposed to have some of the ‘Ninth’ mystique as well. A Ninth Symphony had come to mean some sort of ultimate statement. Beethoven introduced words and singers into the finale of his Ninth, and, at least according to Wagner, had pushed western art music’s most substantial form beyond its supposed limitations.
A ‘Ninth’ was certainly what Stalin was expecting. It was late 1944; the Nazis were clearly going to be defeated; the Russians sensed victory in the Great Patriotic War, and the foremost composer of symphonies in the Soviet Union, indeed the world, would no doubt provide an appropriate work of celebration.
Shostakovich had become a celebrity during World War II. He had continued composing during the siege of Leningrad and his broadcast message from that besieged city stirred hearts; his Seventh Symphony had been spirited out of war-torn Russia on microfilm via Tehran to the USA, where Stokowski and Toscanini vied for the honour of presenting the US premiere. Shostakovich was depicted on the front cover of Time magazine in his fire warden’s helmet. Shostakovich then composed an Eighth Symphony (premiered in Moscow in 1943) - the second instalment in a trilogy of war symphonies?
As biographer Ian MacDonald describes the run-up to the Ninth:

Shostakovich saw out 1944 with a cluster of minor pieces...none of which took him more than a day or two to finish....He then paused to ponder one of the most difficult and dangerous decisions of his entire career: what to make of his Ninth Symphony.

Why 'dangerous'? What is in this music, premiered in Leningrad under Yevgeny Mravinsky on 3 November 1945?

The first movement is in a recognisably standard sonata form, complete with traditional repeat of the exposition. We have here some of Shostakovich’s most characteristic orchestrational fingerprints – the insouciant opening violin melody, clucking oboe. A trombone call introduces the second theme. The piccolo quick-march will be taken over by a solo violin when this material recurs in the recapitulation. There is some turbulence after the repeat of the exposition. Perhaps if this symphony were subtitled something like ‘Leningrad’, like Symphony No.7, this turbulence could be read as revolutionary alarm. But here it is no more unrest than one would expect in a normal classical development section.
The second movement begins with a mournful clarinet melody which gradually picks up a lilt. MacDonald describes this rhythmic characteristic as ‘heel-dragging’ and sees the ‘two-note’ pattern as depicting the heavy-footed thug Stalin. Certainly the movement builds in intensity. The lilting ends up a glassy, ghost-like dance.
The bracing presto of the third movement with its thrilling Russian woodwind writing subsides into the recitative-like fourth movement. Some hear Wagnerian tones in the brass. Is there homage to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in the lower brass’ stentorian announcements? No arabesquing violin replies, but a bassoon’s chill lament, which however, eventually picks up speed to lead us into the constantly-accelerating finale. Here, as is not uncommon in last movements of Shostakovich symphonies, are effects that would not be out of place in circus music – double-tonguing trumpets and shrill piccolo, Shostakovich pleasing the audience in line with the strictest precepts of Soviet Social Realism. The movement ends neatly, if perfunctorily, as did the first.
MacDonald sees obvious references in this music, even daring caricatures of Stalin. No wonder he uses the word ‘dangerous’. But he stands on one side of a debate that has wracked the music world since the 1970s, when Testimony, Shostakovich’s purported memoirs, was published. Testimony’s authenticity has been questioned, but the picture it conveys of a Shostakovich aware of Soviet evil and encoding subversive messages in his music, was latched onto by western commentators relieved to find that Shostakovich wasn’t a lapdog of the regime after all. The man who cancelled his Fourth Symphony and wrote a less abrasive Fifth as a ‘Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism’ could be embraced as a secret dissident. (Of course none of these disapproving commentators had to physically face Shostakovich’s reality: friends taken in the night, vanished, shot.)
But music’s meaning is reduced when we look too hard for concrete meaning, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out, on the other side of the Shostakovich debate. He mocks the idea of music considered ‘beatifically exempt from [the wider world’s] vicissitudes’; but nevertheless urges a less-programmatic analysis.
Certainly this work is, if anything, as close to music as music and nothing but as anything Shostakovich wrote. There is a rising emergency in the last movement but it merely prepares a musical resolution, not dramatic climax.
But Stalin was expecting a grand celebratory symphony, and here ‘there was no chorus, no soloists. And no apotheosis.’ How could Shostakovich at War’s end have composed something this innocuous? Could it be the ultimate irony? The Shostakovich work in which the music is about nothing but itself, is therefore the most subversive? Perhaps Shostakovich was lucky to have evaded the jinx of ‘Ninths’.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2006

Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013
Aaron Copland's Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson, published 18 July 2013
John Williams' Escapades, published 22 July 2013
Thomas Adès's Violin Concerto Concentric Paths, published 26 July 2013
J.S. Bach's Cantata: "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott", BWV.80, published 28 July 2013
Beethoven's 5th and 6th Symphonies, published 29 July 2013
Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Immolation Scene), published 31 July 2013
Liszt's Tasso, published 2 August 2013
Stravinsky's Les Noces orchestrated by Steven Stucky, published 8 August 2013
Liszt's Hamlet, published 15 August 2013
Scriabin's Piano Concerto, published 18 August 2013
Christopher Rouse's Der gerettete Alberich, published 27 August 2013
Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier selections, published
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, published 30 August 2013
'Traditional terms' - an interview with John Adams, published 5 Sep 2013
Berlioz' Waverley Overture, published 9 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's Fatum, published 17 Sep 2013
Wagner, arr. Henk de Vlieger A Ring Adventure, published 29 Sep 2013
Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique', published on 29 Sep 2013

Monday, October 7, 2013

Gone again

Heading east from Sydney yesterday, back to the USA

Distinguishing details

You know you're in Sydney as opposed to LA when (a provisional list):

- you're woken by raucous birds;
- you burn out the drier on 'high' because of the different voltage;
- you smell grilled fish (and other meat) from Pub Bistros as you pass;
- you come across areas called 'cove', 'bay' or 'point' as opposed to 'pass'...

- of course, you have eucalptus in LA, but not signs like this:

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique'

Another program note:

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1841-1893)

Symphony No.6 in B minor, Op. 74 Pathétique

Adagio – Allegro non troppo

Allegro con grazia
Allegro molto vivace
Finale (Adagio lamentoso – Andante)

In February 1893, Tchaikovsky wrote to tell his brother, Anatoly, that a new symphony had come to him just as he was starting out for Paris in 1892. He said it would have a program, ‘but of the kind which remains an enigma to all’. There would also be much that is novel in the work: ‘For instance, the Finale will not be a great Allegro, but an Adagio of considerable dimensions.’
Responses to this work have sometimes been affected by the fact that it is nicknamed the Pathétique and also the fact that Tchaikovsky died nine days after conducting the St. Petersburg premiere in October 1893.
But such myths collapse against a broader consideration of the facts. Tchaikovsky, in fact, was happy at the time. He told his publisher that ‘I have never felt such self-satisfaction, such pride, such happiness as in the consciousness that I really am the creator of this beautiful work’. And pateticheskaya, the nickname in Russian, does not mean ‘arousing pity’ so much as ‘passionate’ or ‘emotional’. It was a name suggested for the second performance after Tchaikovsky’s original nickname ‘Program Symphony’ had failed to excite listeners adequately at the premiere. Attached to the second performance, after Tchaikovsky’s death, it couldn’t help but look like a harbinger of doom.
Other rumours surround this work. Tchaikovsky is supposed to have been outed as a homosexual just after the first performance, and ordered to kill himself by a jury of peers from his alma mater, the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. Recent evidence by writers such as Alexander Poznansky disputes this. Homosexuality was no big secret in Tsarist Russia, and was not uncommon in Tchaikovsky’s circle. Tchaikovsky’s death was most likely less scandalous: death by cholera after drinking unboiled water.
The ‘Pathétique’ is impressive, however, shorn of all the extra-musical legends. Tchaikovsky conjures a spectacular tapestry and one that can take hold of listeners who are not familiar with the conventions of classical music. (Note: ‘conjures’. As itemised above, there was plenty to suggest that Tchaikovsky was portraying grievous emotions, not venting them.)
After a mournful opening melody played by bassoon, the exposition builds in colour and excitement. Only then does the secondary melody appear, a full-bodied melody tinged with sadness and regret. More than half way through, we hit the development section: not just a technical dividing point in the structure audible to those familiar with sonata form, but an obvious change of scene, denoting crisis. A quote from the Orthodox requiem for the dead would have had significance for Russian listeners. The development is finally bridled in a passage of intense emotion which leads back to the recapitulation. If we are in any doubt that Tchaikovsky intends to depict suffering we need only note the baleful appoggiaturas of the trombones before the nostalgic melody returns and the movement closes with slightly consolatory hymn-like tones.
Critics have often derided Tchaikovsky’s symphonic credentials because his instinct for ballet music was never far away. Here, the second movement feels like a waltz, although it isn’t: it’s in 5 beats to the bar rather than the traditional 3.
A scherzo-like mood introduces the third movement, a vigorous march. Tchaikovsky the dramatist is again at work here, setting the audience up to experience with him the final tragedy. The climax invites exultant applause, but we are then launched all the more tellingly into the lamentoso last movement.
One explanation for Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary popularity is the drama, indeed pageantry, of his music. Few composers speak so immediately to an audience. Listeners can come away from this work with a sense of having lived through a wrenching emotional journey. And why not? Little music prior to Mahler covers as much emotional territory as the ‘Pathétique’.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Henk de Vlieger's 'A Ring Adventure', based on Wagner

Continuing my series of program notes:

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

arr. Henk de Vlieger (born 1953)

The Ring – An Orchestral Adventure

from Das Rheingold (Prelude – The Rhine Gold – Nibelheim: the smithy – Valhalla)

from Die Walküre (The Valkyries – The Magic Fire)
from Siegfried (Forest Murmurs – Siegfried’s Deeds of Heroism – Brünnhilde’s Awakening)
from Götterdämmerung (Siegfried and Brünnhilde – Siegfried’s Rhine Journey – Siegfried’s Death – Funeral Music – Brünnhilde’s Sacrifice)

Considering that Wagner is widely regarded as the towering genius of 19th-century music, it is remarkable that he didn’t write more instrumental music. But Wagner’s overriding aim was to elevate the dramatic integrity of opera. He sought to achieve a new artform using lessons from the symphonic music of Beethoven to inform theatrical works constructed along the lines of classical Greek drama and based on myths which elevated the German consciousness. His crowning achievement is the 15-hour opera, presented over four nights, Der Ring des Nibelungen, drawn from Nordic myths and the Burgundian Nibelungenlied.

Critics have sometimes assumed that Wagner wasn’t interested in symphonic music. He had derided Brahms for concentrating on a musical form that Wagner considered outmoded the moment Beethoven introduced voices (and therefore texts) into his Ninth Symphony. But according to Cosima, Wagner’s wife, Wagner was considering writing a symphony around the time he was composing his final opera, Parsifal.
Over the years there have been numerous attempts to create concert works out of extracts from The Ring. Herman Zumpe in the late 19^th century popularised extractable moments such as The Ride of the Valkyries. More recently there have been attempts to render the Ring as a symphony-length orchestral work. Henk de Vlieger wrote this ‘Adventure’ in 1991 for Edo de Waart and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
What helps these arrangers create a purely orchestral work is a device that Wagner invented to aid the drama - the ‘leitmotif’, a musical phrase or gesture, whose changes plot the development of an associated character, object or concept throughout the drama. Considering the length of the Ring, the system of leitmotifs is an important mnemonic device. But the leitmotifs also play a purely musical function. Their transformation and interweaving, creating variety while positing an underlying unity, allows the development of something like a Liszt-style symphonic poem.
De Vlieger’s ‘Ring Adventure’ follows the broad progress of Wagner’s plot. Three minutes’ play on E flat harmony at the beginning portrays the pure environment of the Rhine where Alberich, the dwarf, denied love by the Rhinemaidens steals the gold that sits on the bottom of the river. In Nibelheim, he forges a ring giving him power over all the world (you’ll hear anvils!). Wotan, king of the gods, needing to pay the giants Fasolt and Fafner for building Valhalla steals the ring, incurring Alberich’s curse. We then follow the course of the ring from doomed owner to doomed owner. One of Wotan’s valkyrie daughters courts Wotan’s anger when she rescues a flawed human who was intended to help Wotan evade the curse. Wotan puts her (Brünnhilde) to sleep surrounded by magic fire which none but a true hero can penetrate (you’ll hear Wagner’s marvellous evocation of flickering flames). That hero is Siegfried, whom we first encounter in the forest. But, after waking Brünnhilde, Siegfried travels up the Rhine where he is murdered by Hagen who wants the ring, now in Siegfried’s possession. Brünnhilde decides to put the world back to rights through self-sacrifice. She rides her horse into Siegfried’s funeral pyre. The fire flares up; Valhalla bursts into flames and the flooding Rhine sweeps away Hagen, restoring the golden ring to the river depths.
De Vlieger’s intention in this arrangement was to achieve something like a four-movement symphony – ‘Siegfried’ is the slow movement, for example. And De Vlieger wanted the piece to come across as if perhaps The Ring was conceived in this form in the first place. He maintains Wagner’s orchestration (except for wind instruments occasionally taking vocal lines) and only occasionally alters a transition to keep Wagner’s music in the original key.
What you get is not Wagner’s detailed depiction of downfall caused by denial of love in the quest for power, but something which reveals why Wagner’s music works in the concert hall and perhaps some indication of what a Wagner symphony might have been like if he’d lived to write one.

This program note was originally written for concerts by orchestras associated with Symphony Australia (www.symphonyinternational.net). Please contact me if you wish to reproduce it in your own program booklets.