One wonderful effect of this series has been my listening to a lot of music by composers I’d never heard of before. Setting aside what you hear on a regular basis in the world’s concert halls, an astonishing number of composers wrote symphonies, and a lot of the ones you don’t hear are really quite wonderful. I did a search on Google a few weeks ago, looking for a list of composers who wrote symphonies, and I found just such a list, which has informed and shaped a lot of my listening. Look at all those names! I’ll bet there are professional musicians who haven’t heard of as many as a third of the names on that list.
I was intrigued by one such name, Felicien David, who was a contemporary of Berlioz and who seems to have been influenced by the great master — or so it seems to me, by listening to a bit of his music. I really haven’t heard much at all of David, beyond two works, but there definitely seems to be something Berliozian in his orchestral writing, his approach to form, and his willingness to employ effects like a spoken-word role in his music. I haven’t found much information on David beyond bare-bones biographical detail, but he seems an interesting figure and I hope to learn more about him.
This particular work isn’t exactly a symphony but what David calls an “ode-symphonie”, or “symphonic ode”. It’s a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus with speaker, called Le desert, in which David composes musical impressions from a journey her undertook to the Middle East. The work is particularly Berliozian in its blurring of the lines between symphony and opera, and from what I’ve learned, there were actually plans at one point in David’s life (which didn’t come to pass) to stage Le desert as an opera.
So, is this a symphony? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it stretches the definition to its breaking point…but it is a very pleasurable listen, and it doesn’t deserve the complete obscurity into which it has fallen. Here is Felicien David’s Le desert.
Next week…I don’t know yet. There’s another work by David that might fit the bill, but it stretches the symphony idea even farther, so we’ll see. Gotta get to Dvorak sometime….
One thing I’m greatly enjoying about doing these Saturday Symphony posts is that in addition to re-exploring music I’ve known and loved for years, I’m exploring music that has been unjustly forgotten as the decades and then the centuries have passed since these composers worked. In some cases, I haven’t even heard of the composers. Such is the case today, with British composer William Sterndale Bennett.
Britain isn’t much known for its classical music during the nineteenth century, for one reason or another. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, but aside from Sir Arthur Sullivan’s work, you don’t much hear the work of British composers between Handel and the arrival of Sir Edward Elgar. I don’t know to what degree William Sterndale Bennett’s work is representative, but if it is a good illustration of where British music was in the mid-1800s, then perhaps Britain’s music culture was too conservative to really blossom into what is considered “greatness”. There’s a commonly held perception, I think, that real greatness can most be found in those artists who move art forward, which seems to me to often result in artists being left behind when their work tends to look more back than forward. Such is the case with Bennett.
Of course, there were likely other forces at work. The development of the “classical canon” during the 19th century certainly reflects national attitudes of the time, and the Germanic dominance of classical music history can’t really be taken as a separate phenomenon, divorced from the politics of the day.
But no matter; what’s up for consideration is Bennett’s music. As I listen to this symphony (G-minor, op. 43, written in 1864), I hear echoes of Mozart and early Beethoven, and Bennett wrote this work seventy years after the former’s death and nearly forty after the latter’s. Bennett’s style apparently never developed beyond his early devotion to Classicism, and in looking up some things, quotes of Bennett’s seem to bear this out. One need only look at what he had to say about Richard Wagner to see it:
I have no intention of treating him disrespectfully; that I entirely misunderstand him and his musical opinions may be my fault and not his. At any rate he possesses an influence at this moment over musical life, which it would be impossible to overlook.
Basically he’s saying, “I dunno, maybe he’s good, but I sure don’t get it.” There isn’t a hint of any idea in this symphony more advanced than anything you might hear in Schubert. This music was considered old-fashioned in its day, so of course it would languish in obscurity. Bennett’s work is apparently enjoying what little resurgence it can (especially with 2016 being his bicentennary), but I suspect that William Sterndale Bennett will always fall into that category of composers who aren’t good enough to be frequently heard, but who are too good to be heard as rarely as they are. Anyway, it’s interesting to me to consider that as the 19th century marched on toward its final decades, as Romanticism was pushing music – incuding the venerable symphony – to larger and larger scales, here was this Britishman still happily writing full, four-movement symphonies that were only about 25 minutes long.
Here is William Sterndale Bennett’s Symphony in G-minor, op. 43.
Next week? I’m not sure. I gotta get to that wonderful Czech one of these weeks, though….
Now a more obscure composer, and a symphony that’s not a traditional symphony! Hooray!
Karl Goldmark was a Hungarian composer whose music was quite popular in its day, but not as much since. He’s one of those composers who isn’t quite good enough to make the “standard repertoire”, but he’s also too good to deserve being heard as infrequently as he is today. He lived a long life (1830-1915), and he wrote a lot of music, and what little I’ve heard of it is genial music in the fine Germanic tradition of his day. I suspect that Goldmark’s obscurity today results from a usual source: he was a very skilled composer who nevertheless never seems to have really pushed the limits of the art of his day. That all sounds very unfair, to be honest, which is why I’m featuring Goldmark today. I myself only encountered him via the local classical radio station on the drive home one day, when the announcer said something like, “If you’re a casual fan of classical music, it’s possible you haven’t heard of this composer, who was very popular in his day!” I suppose Goldmark might be considered a latter-day Salieri.
Anyway, the Rustic Wedding Symphony consists of five movements, the first of which is a theme-and-variations rather than a traditional sonata-allegro movement. The five movements are titled March, Bridal Song, Serenade, In the Garden, and Dance. The structure is reminiscent of Berlioz’s approach to the symphony, but there are no supernatural demonic forces at play here, just good, jovial Hungarian music.
This particular recording is an older one, but it’s vibrant and fun to hear. So go check out some Goldmark! He’s waiting.
UPDATE: Original video replaced, as the video I had used first was removed, for some reason….
Yes, I forgot to post this last week. This whole “two major writing projects in full force at once” thing is working out well for the two projects, but not so much for the poor blog. But anyway!
Here we have Brahms’s fourth, and final, symphony. This one is the most brooding of the four, and I always find that it feels “bigger” than it actually is. There’s an epic scope to this symphony that I think partly outstrips the amazing Symphony No. 1, and a more overall sense of mystery to this work. Brahms plunges us into melody right away, with no introduction whatsoever, and it’s a melody that seems to be always try to catch its breath as it yearns upward and falls back. (We’re in E minor, by the way, which seems to be a favorite key of mine. Lots of folks swear by D minor, and there’s a lot of wonderful music in D minor, but E minor is at the heart of some music that is very near and dear to me.)
The second movement, the slow movement, opens with a “stately brooding” theme, intoned by the horns. In doing a bit of homework for this post I learned that this theme is in what’s called a “hypophrygian” mode, but in all honesty…at this distant remove from my musical education, I honestly can’t say what that means. “Modes” are similar to scales, but they generally pre-date the development of our now-familiar major-minor scale system, so when we hear modal music, it tends to sound somewhat otherworldly in our ears, as if from a far deeper time than music we’re accustomed to.
This symphony’s third movement is one of my favorite things Brahms wrote. It’s the only straight-up scherzo in any of his symphonies (although some of his third movements have scherzo-like sections). Brahms eschews the traditional triple-time for this scherzo, though, choosing instead to use a simple 2/4, and he writes the opening theme so it descends twice onto a portentous chord, which has the effect of stopping whatever momentum we start with. This stop-start feeling that winds through the movement is Brahms at his infrequently-genial best.
Then there’s the fourth movement. Brahms breaks away from the symphonic pack again here, abandoning sonata or rondo forms in favor again of something older: a passacaglia. Now, again, I’m not entirely clear anymore on what a passacaglia is — it involves a series of variations over a repeating pattern in the bass. It’s a demanding movement and not really the easiest of listens, in terms of its form, but it is amazing nonetheless, what with those shimmering opening chords and then the start of the variations, immediately afterward.
Brahms’s symphonies are full of hard moments, but just as many wonderful ones. Years ago, when conductor Semyon Bychkov was finishing his tenure as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, he concluded his final season with all four Brahms symphonies over two programs. I was fortunate to attend both programs, and that deep delving into the symphonic language of Johannes Brahms was one of the more deeply satisfying musical experiences I remember.
Here is Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E minor.
Next week: something a little more obscure…and waiting in the wings, a Czech master….
For some reason that I’m not quite sure of, I’ve never warmed much to Brahms’s Third Symphony (F major, op. 90). I’ve listened to it more in this last week — as I write this, I’m hearing it for the fourth time — than I have in the previous, oh, thirty years. I don’t know why this is, and listening to the work now with older ears, I’m even less sure why this work has never moved me the way the First, Second, or Fourth have. The Third is…well, it’s everything I expect to hear from Brahms, with moments of melancholy directly tucked amidst moments of lyrical charm. The Third is the most meditative of Brahms’s symphonies, with the least amount of sheer bombast, which is saying something because if Brahms is anything at all, he is very careful about how he uses bombast. Bombastic moments in Brahms are usually brief and they’re always well-earned. This particular symphony doesn’t have much bombast at all. Maybe that’s why it took me so long to warm to it; in my music-listening youth, I had that youthful way of gravitating toward bombast. But I don’t think that’s it, really. For every moment of Berliozian fire I’ve ever loved, there’s a moment of Mozartean simplicity that I adore just as much, and to this day, one of my favorite memories of live music is hearing Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, back in the late 80s, and there you have a piece with no bombast at all.
Who knows. I’m probably overthinking it. No work of art speaks to everyone, and some works can’t speak to us when we’re in certain parts of our life. But when we come to another time, years later, perhaps we find something to love in a book, or a movie that we never liked before, or…a symphony.
So anyway! Brahms’s Third. Again, conquering the First over a period of fifteen years seems to have allowed Brahms to make his piece with the symphonic form, as again he managed to write this work in a single summer, revising it a bit after the initial performances. Apparently some partisans of Richard Wagner — with whom Brahms had a long rivalry, as it became clear that Wagner and Brahms were the two towering forces in the Germanic music tradition in the late 1800s — tried to interfere with the performance, and duels were threatened. It may seem quaint, now, to look back on all the times classical music was at the heart of violence (would anyone ever riot at a Buffalo Philharmonic performance?), but only a little more than a century ago, this stuff was a big cultural deal.
Here’s a fascinating article about the Third, which examines the work in the light of Brahms’s friendship with Robert Schumann and his lifelong, unrequited love for his best friend’s wife, Clara.
And here is the symphony itself. I’m glad to be able to hear it with better ears.
Next week, the Fourth and final of Brahms’s symphonies.
Brahms’s reputation as a brooding and introspective composer probably seems hard to justify, if the only work of his with which you are familiar is his second symphony. This work, almost unversally considered to be one of the sunniest of his pieces, has many typically Brahmsian moments of solemnity, but they are almost always deployed in service of a more genial outlook. The feeling is almost of a composer, freed of his self-doubts after finally managing to lay the ghost of Beethoven to rest – that vexing ghost who had partially kept the First Symphony from seeing the light of day for over a decade – and bring his own powers to bear. The facts of the work’s composition bear this out: while the First took him fifteen years to write, the Second poured out of him over the course of a single summer.
I don’t have a whole lot to say, analytically, about Brahms’s Second. It’s been one of my very favorite symphonies for years—hell, decades, even. I remember finding a vinyl record of it in the band room in High School and putting it on the record player out of curiosity, and being entranced by the symphony’s opening, which seems mysterious at first but soon clarifies – almost immediately – to an entry into a world of sonic optimism and light. Those opening horn calls, with their question-and-answer nature, eventually building to a wonderfully ethereal moment when the violins begin to sing – this is amazing stuff.
Of particular interest in this entire work are various things Brahms does with rhythm. There are interesting syncopations throughout the symphony, and many places where Brahms shifts things rhythmically just enough that you sometimes lose the feel for where the bar line is and where the actual beat is falling (especially in the third movement, which alternates between charming minuet and energetic scherzo). And if you’re a brass player of any sort, the last movement is for you. I was always disappointed that I never got the opportunity to play that movement, just for its last two minutes alone.
Next week: Brahms’s Third, which is the one I’ve heard the least. I have some homework to do!
Johannes Brahms is one of the giant figures of late 19th-century music, and his symphonies are of sufficient import that they tend to fall into the “No classical music collection is complete without them” category. I personally consider them as such: they are amazing, tremendous works that look back to Mozart and Beethoven (and earlier) with their skillful handling of form; they combine moments of muscular defiance with heartfelt lyricism; they have moments that want to linger and other moments that propel the listener with such force that it feels as if Nature herself is taking a hand.
Brahms was, at heart, a classicist, and his music stands in high contrast with the other dominant school of thought in Western (and German) music at the time, the fiery Romanticism of Richard Wagner. Brahms and Wagner were rivals, and even though it was Wagner who “won out” by having the greatest influence on the history of music as it unfolded after both men were gone, Brahms has never been forgotten, and indeed, as the pendulum inevitably began to swing back the other way after Wagnerism began to give way, Brahms’s music found even greater acceptance.
Brahms himself was a troubled figure. He never married, and it’s almost certain this is because his lifelong love was actually Clara Schumann, wife of his good friend, composer Robert Schumann. Some of his music is deeply spiritual (particularly his German Requiem), but his known religious beliefs bordered on pure agnosticism. Brahms was musically conservative, and yet there are moments of his that sing with the voice of any of the Romantics, and in his works live the spirit of the Viennese woods that he loved deeply. He had a reputation for being a gruff and introverted man, and yet the friends he made were fiercely loyal and lifelong.
Brahms’s First Symphony, in C-minor, was one of the works he found most vexing in its composition. It took him over twenty years to compose it, from the first sketches to its premiere performance. Why did it take so long? Well, Brahms was a perfectionist (to the point that he personally destroyed some of his own works), and there was social pressure on him as well, applied by his musical contemporaries, for Brahms to basically pick up where Beethoven had left off. Even for a musical genius who would achieve his own place in the pantheon, this was probably too much to ask of the man, and the result was the tortured creation of a First Symphony that saw some material rejected and reused in a piano concerto, other material unused outright, and a twenty-year journey of composition. Did it pay off? Indeed it did, and not just because an over-excited colleague introduced the work, upon its long-awaited first performances, as “Beethoven’s Tenth”.
The symphony begins with a fascinating introduction as the high strings and winds pursue a melodic line that climbs upward, while the lower strings and winds undertake a line that marches downward (both doing this as the timpani pounds a relentless drumbeat in the background). The result is a work that starts with two lines pulling against one another, and a mood of tension from the opening bars. Leonard Bernstein used the opening bars of this symphony in a televised lecture on conducting and the issues that face the modern conductor, many years ago; these bars pose a number of such problems for the conductor to solve. The two lines have to be balanced so as the create the right sense of tension, the tempo must be right, and so on.
The first three movements of this Symphony are amazing, but for me, the real magic comes in the fourth and final movement. Again, an introduction that creates tension and mystery — but this time, suddenly, it’s as if (and I hate using metaphors like this in discussing music, but sometimes it can’t be helped) the clouds part. The horns sound a call that, according to Brahms, is an echo of an Alpine horn call he once heard while walking in the woods, and it certainly sounds like that. Then, after the horn call is finished, the high woodwinds repeat it (listen for the single trumpet in the background here, sounding just four descending notes, in a spot that Chicago Symphony trumpeter, and personal hero of mine, Adolph Herseth once claimed as his favorite spot in all of music). Then the low brass sounds a chorale theme that sounds almost liturgical in nature…and the movement’s main section begins, with a major-key melody whose resemblance to the famous “Ode to Joy” theme in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has inspired much comment over the years.
This last movement is one of the grandest movements of symphonic music that I know. It is a model of power and majesty, perfectly cast with not a single note out of place, and when the payoff finally arrives at the end — with the orchestra’s entire brass section sounding out the Chorale theme in a magnificent fortissimo — the effect is as overwhelming as any I know in music.
Here is the Symphony No. 1 in C-minor, by Johannes Brahms.
Next week: The sunniest of Brahms’s symphonies, the Symphony No. 2.
I know, we missed this feature last week, but fret not! We’re back, with a work I didn’t even know existed until this very morning. It’s the Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Roma”, by Georges Bizet. It’s an interesting piece, with an interesting history. Bizet only lived until he was 36, and he wrote this symphony over an eleven-year period until he was 33, and by all reports, he was still unsatisfied with it and might have done more revision work on it had he not died. The work’s movements were never performed together during his lifetime, and because the symphony is generally viewed as a flawed and incomplete work, it is rarely performed today. But listening this morning, there is music of value here.
Here’s Bizet’s Second Symphony, “Roma”.
Next week we start looking at one of the greatest of all symphonists: Johannes Brahms!
Ooooh, here’s one of my absolute favorites. There’s just something about Russian Romantics that always calls me home. I don’t really know why that is; it’s nothing genetic or ethnic or to do with genealogy. To my knowledge, there’s not a drop of Russian blood in me, anywhere. But this group of composers, along with their post-Romantic brethren, seem to speak to my heart more than most other groups or national schools or whatever you want to call them. I don’t want to indulge too much in sweeping generalities, but there’s just something about the way the Russians can engage in lyrical brooding that appeals to me on an elemental level. Beautiful sadness, I think — or the awareness that there are things in this world that can break your heart simply by being as beautiful as they are. There must be a German word for that feeling, or some lovely phrase in French.
Anyway, up today is the Symphony No. 1 by Vasily Kalinnikov. You have almost certainly not heard of Kalinnikov, because the fates dealt the music world a cruel blow when they afflicted him with tuberculosis. Kalinnikov was a deeply talented composer who was just starting to take flight when he died at the age of 35, becoming yet another “Oh, what if!” artist.
His first symphony is full of everything you would expect from a Russian Romantic symphony. It’s full of amazing melodies (just try getting the first subject of the first movement out of your head after you’ve heard it), singing chromaticism, brooding churn in the lower registers, and cyclic construction that brings themes from the previous movements back for the finale. The delicate opening of the second movement is one of the most magical segments of any symphony I’ve ever heard, and that finale — what an astonishing climax Kalinnikov creates, when he summons that delicate love song tune from the second movement to be the main focus of the symphony’s glorious conclusion!
Maybe I’m being over-the-top in my praise of this work, but don’t take my word for it. Here’s the Symphony No. 1 by Vasily Kalinnikov.
Belgian composer Cesar Franck wrote only one symphony in his life, but it’s a mainstay of the symphonic repertoire for reasons that become obvious upon hearing: it’s a powerful work, lyrical and brooding and, in the end, optimistic. Franck’d reputation is mainly established by works he wrote toward the end of his life, and the Symphony in D minor is one of those. There was not much of a French symphonic tradition to speak of in the 19th century, which partly explains why the work was apparently poorly received at first, but like many great works, its reputation grew over the years where now it is considered, rightfully, a masterpiece.
Of particular interest is Franck’s use of cyclic form, in which melodic material from earlier movements is used in later ones. I’ve always loved cyclic works, which partly explains my own fierce devotion to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and Rachmaninov’s Second Symphonies.
