 SMC Music Department Santa Monica College
SYMPHONY
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| The opening of
a new theatre in Pest, (later to become part of Budapest, the Hungarian
capital) planned for October in 1811, but postponed until February 1812,
was celebrated by the performance of two festival plays by August von
Kotzebue: a prologue entitled Konig Stephan, oder Ungarns erster Wohltater,
the subject being Hungary's national hero, who was crowned in 1000 and
converted his people to Christianity (for which he was canonized in 1803);
and an epilogue entitled Die Ruinen von Athen. Both were given
with incidental music by Beethoven. The overture to King Stephan contains
various recognizably Hungarian touches, such as the brief suggestion of
a cimbalom shortly after the opening, the fiery nature of the Presto
which succeeds the slow introduction, and the otherwise unusual alternation
of slow and quick tempi.
During his work as director at the Sternschen Gesangverein in Berlin, Bruch became familiar with a number of Jewish Lieder, including the Hebrew melodies by Isaac Nathan with text by Lord Byron. This old music fascinated him and while still in Berlin, he conceived the idea of adopting several songs and creating two of his own compositions. The pieces were the Adagio for Violoncello and Orchestra, opus 47, with the title "Kol Nidrei," as well as HebrŠische GesŠnge, which appeared without an opus number. The two-part Kol Nidrei is based on two original melodies; the first is that of an ancient Hebrew song of repentance, the second, the middle movement of a moving and truly wonderful song: "Oh weep for those that wept on Babel's stream" (Byron), also very old. The song of repentance, sung on the evening before Yom Kippur, starts with a cello and is accompanied only by strings. The comforting melody of the second part is in a major key, accompanied by a full orchestra. The movement becomes slower and slower toward the end, bringing the piece to a quiet and stately conclusion. Among American composers of this century, Samuel Barber had perhaps the most pronounced gift for lyricism. He was the nephew of a leading singer, the contralto Louise Homer, and (unusually for a composer) he was himself trained in singing, as well as in piano and composition at the Curtis Institute in his native city of Philadelphia. In his purely orchestral music, he combined his gift for attractive, singable melodic lines with a confident handling of large instrumental forces, an ability to devise well-balanced, well-integrated formal structures and - perhaps his most American trait - a penchant for bold, rhetorical statements. His First Essay for Orchestra, composed in 1937, is an attempt to achieve the contrasts and the coherence of the First Symphony on a much smaller time-scale. Its main animating idea is the double turning figure heard on the lower strings at the start of the opening Andante sostenuto. This theme recurs as a counter-melody in the extended scherzo which follows; and it makes a climactic return at the start of the brief Largamente sostenuto coda section. Faure began the composition of his famous Pavane for orchestra in 1886. He added chorus parts in 1887, but the piece is often performed, as it is today, without the chorus. The scoring of the Pavane is delicate and airy, with a more dramatic central section constructed from a series of sequences over bass pedals that descend in Faure's favorite whole tones. The minute changes that imperceptibly take place in the main theme and its subtle reharmonizations are a miracle of Faurean ingenuity, and Debussy so admired the work that he modeled a Pavane of his own on it in 1890, now known as the Passepied from the Suite Bergamasque. Berlioz was only twenty-six when he completed this amazing Symphony - a fitting monument to the flamboyant Romantic world in which he lived. When he was twenty-four he first saw the Irish actress Henrietta Smithson play the roles of Orphelia and Juliet with an English Shakespearean company visiting Paris. Love at first sight struck him like a thunderbolt. He was permanently scarred by the experience. There were moments in the theater when he was almost physically choked by emotion. Out of these turbulent feelings grew his autobiographical Symphony Fantastique. The final version of Berlioz's program for the Symphony is the following: A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of amorous despair. The narcotic dose, too weak to result in death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, sentiments and recollections are translated in his sick brain into musical thoughts and images. The beloved woman herself has become for him a melody, like a fixed idea, which he finds and hears everywhere. By the fourth movement he dreams that he murders his Beloved, that he has been condemned to death and is being led to execution. At last the fixed idea returns, for a moment a last thought of love is revived - which is cut short by the death blow. In the fifth movement he dreams that he is present at a witches' gathering, surrounded by horrible spirits, amidst sorcerers and monsters in many fearful forms, who have come together for his funeral. The Beloved melody is heard again, but it has lost its shy and noble character; it has become a vulgar, trivial, grotesque dance tune! She comes to attend the witches' meeting. Bells toll for the dead - a burlesque parody of the 'Dies irae' . . . the Witches' Round Dance and the 'Dies irae' are heard together.
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