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| Dance Spectacular |  | Johannes Brahms
Hungarian Dances No. 1, 3 & 10
“It is hard to write down what one has been improvising wildly for a long time,” wrote Johannes Brahms to his publisher Simrock. Brahms had become familiar with Hungarian and Gypsy melodies in 1853, while on tour with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remény. He often played them at his concerts and sporadically wrote them down. His challenge now was to cast them in the formal language of classical music without destroying their freshness and folksiness. Attuned to the great demand for music for home entertainment – since a well-used piano in the parlor was the symbol of the cultured family before the phonograph turned people into musical couch potatoes – he set these dances in a piano four-hand versions.
Brahms compiled the dances in four books. Books I and II, containing together 10 dances, were published in 1869, the rest in 1880. According to a list published in Vienna’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1874, the melodies of Books I and II were by Hungarian composers of popular music – except for No. 7, which is a true folk melody. The eleven melodies of Books III and IV are probably mostly by Brahms himself. In naming these pieces “Hungarian Dances,” Brahms may have fallen for the common practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of creating artificial nationalistic cultures by purported “rediscoveries” that were invariably fabrications. Four of the first ten dances, for example, are called czárdás, supposedly a Hungarian peasant dance, but actuality invented – name and all – by a nationalist aristocrat early in the nineteenth century. The peasants had never heard of it.
Brahms himself transcribed the first ten Hungarian Dances for solo piano and Nos.1, 3 and 10 for orchestra. Virtually all information about the original composers of the tunes on which the dances are based has been lost. Each dance is in a standard ABA form with a contrasting melody for the middle (B) section.
No.1 in G minor: The melody, Isteni Csárdás (Sacred Czardas), is by Sárközy Pecsenyanski. 
No.3 in F Major: The melody, Tolnai Lakadalmas (Wedding Dance), is by J. Rizner.
No.10 in E Major: Melody derived from the same popular song as No. 3, Presto. |
| | |  | | | | Aleksander Borodin | | | 1833-1887 | | |
Aleksander Borodin
Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor
Trained both as a chemist and musician, Alexander Borodin spent a lifetime juggling his two loves. He made his living as professor of chemistry at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg and also as the first professor of physiological chemistry in the newly founded medical courses for women. Borodin played the flute, cello and piano; he was fluent enough in German, French, English and Italian to translate scientific books; and when any time was left over, he composed, calling himself a “Sunday composer.”
In 1869 Borodin started working on his opera Prince Igor, based on an old Russian epic from the 12th century. It recounts the story of the heroic Russian warrior, Prince Igor, who goes to war with the Polovtsi, a Tatar warrior tribe. But a sudden eclipse of the sun bodes ill for Igor’s army and it is defeated and he is captured by the Polovtsi’s Khan. After many tribulations, including sensuous dances by the Polovtsian slave maidens offered Prince Igor by the Khan as a temptation to join forces with him, he manages to escape and rejoin his faithful wife.
While Borodin conducted research into the musical culture of the Polovtsian tribes, he settled in the end on the vague orientalism so popular in Russian music at the time. At his death 18 years later he left the score unfinished and mostly unorchestrated. Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov took upon himself to finish the manuscript and in the process “modified” the orchestration to fit his own ideas. Recently a number of attempts have been made to complete the opera in a style more faithful to Borodin.
Borodin’s work on the opera was very protracted and haphazard. To force his hand, his friends put some scenes on a concert program, but still he procrastinated and the Polovtsian Dances scene which ends Act II nearly didn’t make it to the concert. While it was composed entirely by Borodin, it required, according to Rimsky-Korsakov, a rush overnight job by himself, Borodin and Anatoly Lyadov to finish the orchestration. While the original version was for chorus and orchestra, an orchestral version is the one most commonly performed today.
Nearly all of the music of the Polovtsian Dances is familiar to audiences today, not only because of the popularity of Borodin and company’s ballet but also because all of the music – not just the “Stranger in Paradise” theme – was used in the 1953 Broadway hit Kismet. The instrumental version of the Dances without chorus emphasize the upper woodwinds and percussion, the latter always considered exotic and “oriental” by Europeans, and the former traditionally representing the more hedonistic, libidinous emotions. Borodin and his colleagues were intrigued with all aspects of indigenous music from the vast Russian steppe. Whether any of the music of Prince Igor bore any relationship to authentic ethnic music is dubious, but a lot could be accomplished with some modal melodies, a good percussion section – and imagination
The Dances comprise four main melodies, beginning with a whirling, modal melody on the clarinet and oboe, accompanied by plucked strings and finger cymbals Then comes the famous “signature tune” played by the oboe and later the English horn. The speed picks back up with a whirling clarinet solo with attendant tambourines and finger cymbals that introduces the next dance. The final dance, a grand “oriental” waltz, ends the set. All the themes return, however, at the ever more frenzied pace typical of such entertainments.
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| | |  | | | | Sergey Rachmaninov | | | 1873-1943 | | |
Sergey Rachmaninov
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45
In 1901, after the great success of his Piano Concerto No. 2, Sergey Rachmaninov launched a triple career, as pianist, conductor and composer. But in the following years, as his self-confidence grew and his economic situation improved, he cut back on his commitments to performing and conducting in order to concentrate increasingly on composing. This balancing act continued until it was cut short in 1917 by the Russian Revolution. Rachmaninov left the country with his family, never to return, eventually settling in the United States. As his property in Russia was confiscated and his sources of income dried up, he realized that in order to provide for his family he had to become a full-time pianist, since it was as a pianist that he was best known in the West. But these economic constraints consumed him, leaving him little time to compose. “For 17 year, since I lost my country, I have felt unable to compose. When I was on my farm in Russia during the summers, I had joy in my work. Certainly, I still write music – but it does not mean the same to me now,” he said during a 1933 interview.
Composed in 1940 and dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Symphonic Dances are Rachmaninov’s last work and often considered his best orchestral composition. Surprised by its favorable reception, Rachmaninov commented: “I don’t know how it happened. It must have been my last spark.” He had written at the end of the score: “I thank thee God.”
The work is something of a retrospective nostalgic piece that recalls pre-Bolshevik Russia, with its romantic sentimentality and the Russian Orthodox Church. Two of the three movements contain references to previous works: The principal theme from the First Symphony appears in the coda of the first movement and a modified version of the syncopated chant “Blessed be the Lord” from the Vespers in the last.
The first dance, Non allegro, is written in ABA form, the B section providing a sharp and often un-dance-like, contrast. Rachmaninov demonstrates a particular interest in the texture of individual instruments; in the opening, he introduces the principal motive gradually via several solos for English horn, clarinet, bassoon and bass clarinet over a light violin ostinato, each of which gives a different character to the theme. The dance proper has a primeval quality with its pounding ostinato and large percussion section, including piano. The middle section features the oboe and the alto saxophone – Rachmaninov’s only scoring for this instrument. It begins with an introduction of birdcalls for violin, oboe and clarinet, followed by another of the composer’s broad romantic themes on the saxophone, accompanied by the birdcalls on the oboe. The transition back to the first dance theme is a long, gradual build-up of dynamics, speed and instrumental forces. A muted coda – the quote from the First Symphony – with glockenspiel finishes the movement.
The second movement, Andante con moto (Tempo di Valse), introduced by a fanfare on muted trumpets, followed by a mini-cadenza for solo violin that quotes the main theme of the first dance. The second dance is a dreamy serenade, recalling the waltzes of Glazunov and Tchaikovsky but with more of the whirling chromaticism of Ravel’s La valse. Also in ABA form, the second section begins with more wind solos and duets. Much of the movement is lightly orchestrated with solos passed off from one instrument, or section, to another in mid-phrase. It never settles on a key, creating a more uneasy – even, at times, menacing – than festive quality to the dance. As the waltz approaches the end, the tempo becomes increasingly erratic in tempo, ending with a frantic coda.
Following a slow introduction, the dark final movement ensues with the syncopated rhythm of the Vespers theme combined with dance-like allusions to the Dies irae plainchant melody – Rachmaninov’s signature theme from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. In fact, throughout this dance, Rachmaninov plays a clever game with the listener, never quoting exactly either the Vespers theme or the chant melody, but rather, insinuating ever more obvious hints of them into the fabric of the dance.
Like the first dance, this one has a contrasting middle section in which the tempo slows considerably; only instead of featuring the winds, this one focuses on the strings, especially the cellos and violas. After the initial tempo has resumed, the solo trumpet begins hinting more broadly at the Dies irae by extracting it from the Vespers dance rhythm and returning it to the non-metrical rhythm of the original chant. Finally, near the end, Rachmaninov states it openly as part of the climax to the movement with the full battery of percussion instruments accompanying it. Now the character and meaning of the entire movement is revealed as a dance of death.
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| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2009 |
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March 2010
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