Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

“Well, he must be too busy for a real post today, since he’s sharing something by Franz von Suppe!”

And that, Dearest Reader, is where you’re wrong! Because even though I am posting something by Franz von Suppe, it is not because his overtures are my go-to for when I’m too busy to actually say something about the work in question. Suppe is, of course, best known as the composer of a number of scintillating overtures (which have remained in the standard repertoire, especially for performances of “light” music) to operettas (which have almost entirely not). But those operettas and their overtures only represent the very surface of his output; Suppe was a prolific composer who worked in many genres, which leads me to hope more of his music may resurface and gain new attention…as did the current work.

Apparently conductor Ola Rudner found Suppe’s Fantasia symphonica languishing in an archive somewhere in Vienna, and now, after some musicological work to restore it, the work has been recorded, led by Rudner himself. The piece is, for all intents and purposes, a symphony; one wonders why Suppe didn’t just call it a symphony, and I wonder if it’s a combination of expectations for a composer of light theater music and the fact that the work is rather on the short side for a symphony of the Romantic era (didn’t stop Borodin, but he was Russian, and the rules were a little different in Imperial Russia), and it ends with some bombast that is decidedly unsymphonic. No matter; this is a delightful work that I am deeply glad has been found and brought forward. Hopefully there are more wonderful works by Franz von Suppe awaiting rediscovery!

Here is Fantasia Symphonica by Franz von Suppe…and not because I’m too busy!

 

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This is a kind of roundabout way to arrive at a work: a comic ballet called Pineapple Poll was created in the mid-20th century, using music from the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Later, the music from the ballet was itself reduced into a suite, which was then later arranged for wind ensemble. So, by the time we get to the present work, we’re something like…what? Three levels removed from the original composers?

And yet, the delight remains.

Here is Pineapple Poll for wind ensemble.

 

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One of those days, folks. Busy at work and then my annual eye-dilation exam right after. So, you know the drill: Franz von Suppe to the rescue!!!

 

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When you get to the point of having blogged for over 20 years (sheesh!), you start to worry about repeating yourself. At least, I certainly do! I find myself looking for pieces to share here, and then I think, “Nah, I’ve surely shared that before.” Such as this one, which I have indeed featured before on this site (well, not this site, but the previous version of it), but it turns out it was twelve years ago! So, here we go: the “March of the Belgian Paratroopers” by Pierre Leemans.

This is the rare march that is almost devoid of martial bombast; instead it opens and closes in relative softness.

Belgian composer Pierre Leemans began composing the “March of the Belgian Paratroopers” while serving in the army during World Wars I. Left incomplete, he returned to it decades later during World War II at the request of a group of paratroopers. His most famous composition is meant to portray a military patrol, approaching from a distance, passing by, and then leaving.

That structure calls to mind the great In the Steppes of Central Asia, by Alexander Borodin. This march, like the Borodin, is curiously optimistic in tone.

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A composer with whom I am very unfamiliar: Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), who is often considered Spain’s greatest composer. In truth, I’m not sure I ever listened to any of his music until the other day when I listened to his ballet El amor brujo. The title translates to “Love, the Sorcerer”, and the ballet tells the story of an Andalusian Romani  girl who is haunted by the ghost of her dead husband even as she tries to move on to another love.

From the outside looking in, the classical music of Spain never seems to get a lot of love. There’s a stereotype of Spain’s music basically being a lot of classical guitar and not a whole lot else. I honestly don’t know if that’s the least bit fair or not, but it does seem that the Germanic symphonic tradition doesn’t seem to have really taken strong root in Spain, for whatever reason. Geographic? Cultural? Both? I honestly don’t know.

This ballet is deeply colorful and dramatic, as a ballet should be; I was surprised to hear voices in it, and of course, the dance rhythms are present throughout.

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Erich Wolfgang Korngold is an interesting case study in being born at the wrong time, but still making a good run of it.

Born May 29, 1897 in Austria, Korngold was an enormously gifted musician to the point of being a child prodigy; he was performing complex piano music and writing his own works before he was even ten years old. But his tastes as a composer kept him from embracing the actual trends in music; modernism and atonality were not for him. Korngold was forever at home in the late Romantic language of Mahler and Strauss, which meant that a lot of his music, while not rejected at the time, never really took hold while he was alive. In order to make ends meet, Korngold ended up writing music for movies, which at that time were moving beyond the silent era. In 1938 he traveled to Hollywood to write the score for the Errol Flynn adventure film The Adventures of Robin Hood, and while he was there, Germany annexed Austria and brought Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies along. Korngold was a Jew, so he stayed in America after he was done scoring that film. He never returned home, becoming an American citizen and living out the remainder of his life composing for film and then trying to re-establish himself as a composer for the operatic stage and the concert hall.

Korngold was prolific, but his music languished for many years, owing to what was seen as his rather dated style, and his reputation as a “movie composer” in a time when film music was not taken seriously much at all. It’s only in relatively recent years that Korngold’s work has seen a re-appraisal in the musical community at large, but he was always known in the film community. John Williams cited Korngold as an influence in the sound he adopted for his score to Star Wars, and listening to Korngold’s movie music certainly points the way to a lot of movie music that followed decades later when symphonic scoring returned to prominence.

Another interesting thing about Korngold was his willingness to repurpose material. He was one to revisit earlier works and mine them for ideas in newer ones, which makes for some interesting listening when you hear the ideas recurring. (Berlioz was another composer who had no compunctions about re-using his own catalog.) One good example of this is that very score to The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which Korngold won an Oscar. Here’s a suite from that score, and you can see here the degree to which Korngold’s music has risen in estimation: the orchestra is the Bavarian Radio Symphony, one of Europe’s finest ensembles, and the conductor is Sir Simon Rattle, one of the world’s finest conductors.

It must have been particularly rewarding for Korngold to win an Oscar for this score, not just on its own merits, but because Korngold reused material from an earlier tone poem he had written called Sursum corda. This piece doesn’t seem to have made much impression at all upon Korngold’s composing of it; it languished for nearly 20 years before Korngold lifted one of its themes for the Errol Flynn classic. Here is Surum corda, and listening to it now I can’t help thinking of what Korngold’s career might have been had he been born a couple decades earlier.

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Johann Strauss II’s music is always featured heavily at the New Year’s From Vienna concerts, and this overture shows up on that concert’s program fairly often. Die Fledermaus is an operetta by Strauss that I’ve never seen, though on the basis of this description, I think I’d like to. Who wouldn’t want to see a show that is “a sparkling confection of mistaken identities, illicit liaisons, and champagne-fueled merriment”? Not I!

Strauss was known as “the Waltz King”, since he wrote such legendary and immortal waltzes as On the Beautiful Blue Danube and Tales from the Vienna Woods. So it stands to reason that this effervescent overture contains, among other things, a waltz.

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The Maker, a.k.a. Uncle George, a.k.a. George Lucas, turns 80 years old today.

My life without George Lucas’s influence would be very, very different.

Some music, then!

Nope, nothing from Star Wars today. Why not look elsewhere just this once?

 

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French composer Charles Gounod is probably the closest thing Hector Berlioz had to a successor in the musical world; Berlioz was too much the iconoclast to really found a “school” of composition reflective of his own thought. Gounod, however, counted Berlioz among his influences. Gounod was prolific and wrote a great deal of fine music, especially his operas–but for the most part, except for his operas Faust and Romeo et Juliette, Gounod is not much heard anymore. The apotheosis of French music was to come not in late Romanticism but in Impressionism.

When I was in high school, our band briefly toyed with the Grand March from Gounod’s opera The Queen of Sheba. Operatic grand marches are a particular delight, and this one is as grand as any. If memory serves we ended up putting this piece aside when the band director, Mr. Roosa, resigned suddenly mid-year and we ended up being rudderless as a band until a fresh face out of college, Mr. Fancher, arrived to take over in the last few months of my high school career. I remember that this Grand March was not much to his liking, and out it went. Pity, that…the trumpets have some really fun things to do in this piece.

Here’s the Grand March from The Queen of Sheba.

 

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