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| FORCES OF GOOD AND EVIL |  | | The history of civilization abounds with the stories of the rise and fall of powerful empires. Most have been built on the incorporation of small states and a series of military land grabs, as was the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hapsburg emperors. Others, like the Soviet Union, were founded on idealistic principles but went badly awry in large part through the murderous megalomania of Joseph Stalin. Only in fantasy has a civilization ever been constructed and maintained on purely moral grounds, as in Sarastro's mythical kingdom in Mozart's The Magic Flute. | |  | | | | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | | | 1756-1791 | | |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Overture to Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K. 620
Public taste is fickle.
By the late 1780s, Mozart’s star in Vienna was dimming rapidly. The change in popular musical taste, the economic decline and his own inability to manage his finances combined to make him emotionally frantic and scrambling for commissions.
Since there was no more demand for Mozart’s Akademien (self-promoting subscription concerts) and his most successful librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, had left Vienna, he turned for a joint operatic venture to one of the most colorful (and successful) dramatists and theater directors of the era, Emanuel Schikaneder. Mozart and Schikaneder knew each other both professionally and as fellow Freemasons. Schikaneder’s libretto for Die Zauberflöte contained many elements of the Freemason philosophy and ritual in its emphasis on human enlightenment.
Die Zauberflöte is a dramatization of the battle between the forces of good (light) and evil (darkness), symbolized by the high priest of Isis, Sarastro, and the Queen of the Night. In order to win the hand of the Queen’s daughter Pamina, who is being detained for her own good by Sarastro, Prince Tamino must undergo trials by fire and water. He succeeds with the aid of a magic flute, while his companion, the comic bird-catcher Papageno, bungles through lower-level trials to win himself a wife, Papagena.
Most operatic overtures of this period contain no themes from the opera itself. The important exception here is the three solemn chords with which the overture opens.  These chords reappear later as the fanfare before Tamino’s trial and purification by fire and water to gain the hand of Pamina. The slow, dignified opening is followed by a sprightly fugal allegro.
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| | | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto for Two Pianos in E-flat Major, K. 365
Although the actual date of composition of this concerto is uncertain, this is one of the first known to be completely composed by Mozart. His first piano concerti were transcriptions and arrangements of works by other composers, including C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach and others. This is Mozart’s only concerto for two keyboards and is clearly reminiscent of his childhood and adolescence when he and his sister Maria Anna (“Nannerl”) were carted all over Europe as performing prodigies. Although the siblings’ prodigy days were long over, they continued to perform together and probably performed the E-flat concerto in 1780 at court for one of Mozart’s final concerts in Salzburg, along with the Sonata for Piano Four Hands, K 381. A two-piano transcription of the Concerto No. 7 for Three Pianos also dates from this period, as does a group of piano sonatas for piano four-hands (a medium “invented” by the brother-sister team) and for two pianos.
That same year Mozart left his hometown forever to pursue his dream, first going to Munich, where he had been commissioned to compose an opera, Idomeneo, and then on to Vienna where he lived for the rest of his life as music history’s first true freelance composer.
In the Concerto for Two Pianos, the tasks are evenly divided. The soloists mostly play in dialogue, echoing or answering each other. In contrast to compositions for piano four hands, where per force one of the players takes the lower range and the other the higher, both soloists here cover the entire range of the piano, which at the time was limited to five octaves.
The Concerto anticipates the structure typical of the composer’s later great piano concerti. The first movement, Allegro, is in classic sonata form; the fanfare-like opening theme plus all the exposition material introduced by the orchestra is then repeated and expanded by the pianos. Because this is a work for two solo instruments, Mozart utilizes a certain parallelism by having the first soloist present a motive with the second soloist repeating the material in slightly varied form, as in this second theme. At other times, one piano will begin a phrase, to have it completed by the second.
The second movement, Andante, again prefigures the later concerti opening with a deceptively simple theme. But Mozart goes on to pile one beautiful melody onto another into a poignant statement whose intensity is enhanced by the orchestra’s two oboes. Like nearly all his slow movements, this one is basically a ternary or ABA form. The middle section features a new theme and a trio between the two soloists and the first oboe.
The ethereal spell is broken by the sprightly finale, Rondeau: Allegro. The rondo theme is interspersed with episodes in which the two pianos chase each other all over the movement.
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| | |  | | | | Dmitry Shostakovich | | | 1906-1975 | | |
Dmitry Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 in d Minor, Op. 47
Volumes have been written about Dmitry Shostakovich and his ambivalent relationship with the Soviet regime. Much of this writing is based on after-the-fact statements whose authenticity and veracity is often difficult to verify. What is clear is that the composer was a true son of the Russian Revolution and, as teenager, a true believer. But in his late 20s he became caught up in the Stalinist nightmare.
Shostakovich’s roller coaster ride from Soviet adulation to denunciation began in January 1936 when an article appeared in the Soviet newspaper Pravda severely criticizing his successful new opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtzensk District. The result was that, upon the order of the government, the opera – as well as the rest of the composer’s music – was withdrawn from the stage and the concert hall. For the first of many times Shostakovich was cast into Soviet limbo, his music unperformed, his livelihood withdrawn and his life in jeopardy. In later years he recalled that he was so certain of being arrested that he would sleep with his suitcase packed near the front door so that if the secret police were to pick him up they would not disturb the rest of the family.
Shostakovich's response was to go in two directions: Because of his fame both at home and abroad, the government was willing to give him the chance to earn his bread, butter and brownie points by composing music for propaganda films and politically correct spectacles; and he composed works “for the drawer.” Some of his greatest and most personal works did not see the light of day until after Stalin's death in 1953.
The Fifth Symphony was the composer’s attempt to rehabilitate himself as a serious artist in the eyes of the authorities after the Lady Macbeth debacle. Why it did so, however, is something of a mystery. The Symphony, with its chromaticism and dissonance, was certainly not in line with the cultural commissars’ desire for cheerful, uplifting music. According to Mikhail Chulaki, then director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the wild audience enthusiasm at the 1937 premieres – both in Moscow and in Leningrad – made the Soviet bureaucracy suspicious. They were convinced that the enthusiastic reception had been organized by Shostakovich’s friends and colleagues; they grilled the conductors and musicians looking for evidence for a conspiracy. It took a special performance for the apparatchiks alone to finally convince them to give the Symphony the official seal of approval.
The Symphony opens with a broad theme, a constant presence underlying a melancholy counter-theme in the upper strings. These two themes, already brooding at the outset, pass through a violent transformation during the course of the movement. They ultimately do battle with a new haunting melody also in the upper strings, a response to the harsh opening statement. The composer slowly ratchets up the hushed tension, gradually adding other instruments, a calm before the storm. More than halfway through the movement, clouds appear on the horizon with the trombones blaring out the first string theme with an increase in tempo and dynamics until the shrieking violins introduce it as a violent march with full brass and snare drums. The opening theme also reappears, transformed in ever more threatening terms. And then the storm suddenly passes. Solos based on the lyrical string theme, first in a duet for solo flute and horn, then the rest of the upper winds establish a tentative tranquility. The movement concludes with a gentle glockenspiel solo.
The short Scherzo is a waltz, but one with the kind of irregular phrasing that would trip up any dancer. Along with the irregular rhythm come melodies evoking everything from Viennese ballrooms to music boxes. The scherzo proper gradually evolves from a spiky unsingable introduction into a more cohesive melody answered by outbursts from the brass. The Trio includes gentle solos for violin, flute, clarinet and bassoon. Each repeat features a different orchestration. The erratic shifts in dynamics suggest a kind of musical satire that emerged more overtly and with greater bitterness in the composer’s later works. According to Solomon Volkov in his controversial biography Testimony, the composer told him that the movement depicts the brutality of the regime and, in the later works, Stalin himself. Given the Viennese overtones and the many lightly orchestrated pianissimo passages, it is one of those statements that raise more questions than answers.
The Largo is a somber outpouring that probably best reflects the composer’s mood during those terrible years – a gentle melody reminiscent of Bach. Beautiful melancholy solos for flute and especially the oboe punctuate the long lament. As in the first movement, the tension slowly builds, until it reaches a climax beginning with a xylophone and violin theme accompanied by a loud tremolo in the rest of the strings. The remainder of the movement is a varied reprise of the opening, a gradual emotional cooling down, but ever somber. The solo harp closes the movement with a repeat of the oboe solo melody – but resolves its inherent tension.
The Finale is a military quick march, blaring in the approved “Socialist Realism” style. There are two principal themes, which both undergo significant transformations in mood, from strident militarism to pensive melancholy. & The moments of shrieking ostinato passages in the violins and rising chromaticism, as well as the somber middle section belie the triumphal themes. It is as if Shostakovich is surveying his environment (symbolized by the two themes) at the beginning of the movement, grimly pondering it in the slow middle section & and, in the final measures, fatalistically accepting it. Later, he put an unflattering interpretation on this movement, equating it with a forced march, the coerced and highly organized Soviet “spontaneous outpouring” in mass demonstrations.
For the following ten years Shostakovich was able to compose relatively undisturbed. But in 1948 the official axe fell again; it was only with the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent temporary cultural thaw that his music was heard again and his “good name” restored in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Shostakovich’s periodic bending to the official Soviet will did not sit well with the academic serialist composers of the West, who denigrated his work until a parallel “cultural thaw” in the West relaxed the stranglehold of rigid atonal music.
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| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008 |
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July 2010
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