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| Pictures at an Exhibition |  | Giuseppe Verdi
Overture to Nabucco
Giuseppe Verdi achieved astounding success as a musical dramatist with his ability to capture in music the psychological depth of his characters. He was the king of Italian opera through much of the nineteenth century and premiered works in all the major cities of Italy, as well as in Paris, St. Petersburg and Cairo. So in demand was he that he referred to the long period in which he produced a constant stream of operas as his years as a galley slave. He composed his first great success, Nabucco, as he mourned the untimely death of his first wife and two young children, and he expressed all his poignant longings in the chorus, Va, pensiero, of the exiled Israelites.
Born of stolid peasant and rural tradesman stock, Verdi was always unconventional without being openly rebellious. Although some of his most emotionally charged music involves religious characters and scenes, not to mention his great Requiem, he was not religious himself. After the death of his first wife, he lived for many years out of wedlock with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, marrying her only later in life. His sympathy for this unconventional lifestyle is reflected in his portrayal of Violetta and Alfredo’s relationship in La traviata.
Verdi’s streak of independence and attraction to politically compromising plots was often blocked by the Italian censors who passed on all stage representations. Un ballo in maschera, originally written about a true incident in the life of the playboy King Gustav III of Sweden, had to be reset in Boston about a fictitious colonial governor; and Rigoletto, based on a play by the French playwright Victor Hugo about King François I, had to be reset in Mantua about a fictitious duke.
Verdi was a staunch supporter of a united Italy. In 1861 as Garibaldi’s militias stormed their way north through the peninsula, “Viva Verdi (Vittorio Emmanuele Re d’Italia),” became a rallying cry for the patriots in support of the king of the new nation. Verdi himself served as a deputy in the country’s first parliament but found active politics disillusioning. Nevertheless, his operas are full of his social and political idealism, sometimes hidden, at others flamboyantly overt as in his brutal attacks on the Church and religious intolerance in Don Carlos. Personally, he liked nothing better than a life of quiet intimacy with Giuseppina and a group of close friends and associates in his beautiful rural villa at Sant’Agata in the Parma region of Italy.
In Nabucco, we get a glimpse of the composer at the unpromising beginning of his career. The year was 1842. His first two operas had been dismal failures and he had vowed never to write another note. The impresario Bartolomeo Merelli, however, presented the young Verdi with the libretto for Nabucco, which the composer patently ignored. When he casually looked through it five months later, he was hooked.
The plot of Nabucco, from the Book of Daniel – with significant non-biblical accretions – concerns the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. by King Nebuchadnezzar (Nabucco), his Divine punishment of madness and repentance. Verdi encapsulates the essentials of the plot characterizing both the oppression of the Babylonians  with the homesick lament of the enslaved Hebrews from Act III, “Va, pensiero sull’ali dorate” (Fly, thoughts, on golden wings). This chorus not only became an instant sensation, but also became the “theme song” for the Risorgimento (the uprising for the unification of Italy).
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| | |  | | | | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | | | 1756-1791 | | |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488
During the period between 1782 and 1786, Mozart completed no fewer than twelve piano concerti, many of them exploring new structural and harmonic territory. The A Major Concerto, one of his most popular, is not only a powerfully emotional work – especially the second movement – but is also of historical and biographical interest. One of three he was to perform in Vienna during the Lenten season of 1786, it was finished in March and was among the first of his works to make use of clarinets.
Preliminary sketches for this work exist, demonstrating – contrary to legend – that Mozart wasn’t always composing on the fly. In fact, he kept notebooks containing musical ideas to be used at a later time, works in progress and even some brief sketches eventually abandoned altogether. About 320 fragments and sketches survived, although clearly many were discarded by Mozart himself and still more by his widow Constanze. Sketches for part of the first movement, a discarded second movement in D major and the Finale, reveal that this work was already under way in 1784, two years before its completion. This evidence also demonstrates that Mozart sometimes devoted great care in revising and polishing his music.
This Concerto belongs to a group of five that Mozart dedicated to his early patron Prince Joseph Wenzeslaus von Fürstenberg. In a letter to the Prince, Mozart reveals that these were works “for my own use and for a small group of music-loving friends...had never seen the light of day.”
The opening movement in the modified sonata form used for the classical concerto, comprises two lyrical principal themes & – rather than the usual contrasting themes – separated by a more energetic bridge, plus a syncopated closing theme. The bulk of the movement involves the interplay of brief fragments of the themes presented during the exposition. The fairly simple cadenza is the only surviving solo cadenza Mozart wrote into a score. Usually, he either wrote cadenzas out separately or improvised them in performance. Generations of composers and pianists have taken advantage of the creative freedom allowed in the cadenza to supply their own.
The Adagio is the only piece Mozart ever composed in f-sharp minor, and that in a concerto in a major key. While the mood is extremely intense, the orchestration is quite light; and it is probable that the piano part was originally embellished with improvised ornamentation. The piano opens the movement with a long melody that is answered by the orchestra in a new theme that becomes the focus of the movement. Those interested in the nature of such improvised embellishments should consult his earlier Concerto No. 9 “Jeunehomme,” K.271, in which he wrote out elaborate ornamentation for the piano in the second movement. The embellishments already written into the Concerto No. 23 clearly indicate that Mozart was not interested in merely musical decorating, but rather in using ornamentation to enhance the emotional tone of the piece.
The sprightly Finale, in a hybrid of rondo and sonata form, is a sharp contrast to the pathos of the preceding movement. It suggests a happy release from a dark night of the soul. This movement simply gushes with thematic material, illustrating how the greatest composers did not feel constrained by slavish adherence to traditional musical forms. Whereas a formal rondo would involve a refrain alternating with a number of freely composed episodes, Mozart pays only casual attention to the formal constraints, interjecting the rondo theme only when it suits him.
Once again, the piano starts off, but in this movement, the orchestra and soloist tend to echo each rather than engaging in dialogue as in the Adagio. After the piano introduces the rondo theme, the orchestra proceeds in a formal exposition with a set of themes not heard again until the end of the piece that includes a wicked bassoon part. Clearly in this movement, the piano has its own musical ideas. Its many themes are short and to the point, although there is a fair amount of pianistic noodling as well. When the soloist enters after the conclusion of the orchestra's exposition, it is with new music, a separate exposition, in fact, with its own secondary theme in the minor mode and a closing theme. Before it's all over, Mozart introduces new music in two further episodes. &
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| | |  | | | | Modest Petrovich Musorgsky | | | 1839-1881 | | |
Modest Petrovich Musorgsky
Pictures at an Exhibition (Orch. Maurice Ravel)
Modest Musorgsky, one of the wild cards of nineteenth century Russian music, left very few completed scores by the time of his early death from alcoholism. Of his meager output, the opera Boris Godunov, some of his songs, the short orchestral score St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, have stood the test of time. Although Boris and St. John’s Night are most often heard in Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov’s “corrected” form, they now are considered among the highlights of Russian music. Musorgsky was a member of the “Mighty Five” – together with Mily Balakirev, Aleksander Borodin, Cesar Cui and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov – whose goal was to further the pan-Slavic movement and Russian nationalist music.
In July 1873 Musorgsky’s close friend, the young architect and painter Victor Gartman, died suddenly. The following year a posthumous showing of his drawings, paintings and designs was presented in St. Petersburg. Much of Gartman’s work was fantastic and bizarre in nature, elements which held a special fascination for Musorgsky, who set out to create a musical memorial to his friend in the form of a suite of piano pieces. He depicted his impressions of ten of the pictures, portraying himself as the observer in the Promenade that introduces the work and serves as connector between the tableaux.
A striking aspect of the suite is the nearly complete absence of any subjective emotion in a work directly inspired by a great personal loss. Musorgsky gives us his personal impressions of Gartman’s art, but rarely of his feelings about Gartman’s death. Even in the Promenade, strolling from picture to picture, he portrays a cool, objective viewer rather than a grieving friend.
There is no evidence that Musorgsky ever planned to orchestrate the suite, although many of the pieces cry out for orchestration. The score was not published until five years after the composer’s death, at which point other composers started its long history of orchestrated versions. The first was Mikhail Tushmalov in 1890, followed by Sir Henry Wood, Lucien Cailliet, Leopold Stokowski, Vladimir Ashkenazy and many others. But the most popular and by far the most successful “recomposition” is the one by Maurice Ravel, done in 1922 under a commission from the conductor Sergey Koussevitzky.
One of the most striking features of Musorgsky’s piano version, further enhanced by Ravel’s orchestration, is the vivid tone painting that enables the listener to sharply visualize the painting. And it’s a good thing too since the originals of most of Gartman’s works upon which the suite is based are either lost or inaccessible.
In addition to the Promenade the pictures that inspired the ten tableaux of the suite are:
1. "Gnomus" – a sketch of a little gnome on crooked legs, said to be a design for a nutcracker.
2. "Il vecchio castello" – A medieval castle before which a troubadour sings a love song. The mournful sound of the alto saxophone was Ravel’s stroke of genius.
3. "Tuileries" – children quarreling and nurses shouting in an avenue in the Tuileries garden in Paris.
4. "Bydlo" – A Polish oxcart with enormous wheels, plowing through the mud, gradually approaching, passing by and disappearing again.
5. "Ballet of the chickens in their shells" – a design for a scene from the ballet Trilby.
6. "Two Polish Jews" – one rich, the other poor – No picture by Gartman corresponding to this tableau has ever been found. The subtitle “Samuel Goldenburg and Schmuyle” is a late addition, not by Mussorgsky. Ravel uses the basses and a solo muted trumpet to represent the two characters.
7. "The market place of Limoges" – French women quarreling violently in the market.
8. "Catacombs" – the interior of the catacombs in Paris illuminated by lantern light with the figure of Gartman himself in the shadows.
8a.“Cum mortuis in lingua mortua” (“With the dead in a dead language”) – the promenade, in the minor mode and like plainchant, constitutes the second part of the Catacombs.
9. "The Hut on Fowl’s Legs" – Baba-Yaga, the hideous old crone of Russian folklore, who lives in a hut supported on fowl legs and flies around in an iron mortar was Gartman’s design for the face of a clock.
10. "The Great Gate of Kiev" – Gartman’s design for a memorial gate in Kiev in honor of Tsar Alexander II. The design is in the massive old Russian style, topped by a cupola in the shape of the helmet of the old Slavonic warriors. While Musorgsky was only able to approximate the sound of the devout congregations singing old Church Slovanic chant, Ravel's sound is much closer. But pianists simply run out of fingers imitating the deep sustained sound of the Russian churchbells, while orchestra has infinitely more flexibility in its ability to sustain notes and create the most subtle textures and colors. in other passages he used not only the obvious bells, but also tuba and violins to capture the combined sound of large and small bells.
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| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009 |
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March 2010
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