I’ve featured the Romanian Rhapsody #1 by Georges Enescu in this space several times, because it’s just such a lovable showpiece or orchestral magic, with its collection of drinking songs and folk dances creating such a brilliant bit of youthful energy. But obviously the existence of a Romanian Rhapsody #1 implies the existence of a Romanian Rhapsody #2, does it not?
The second of Enescu’s two Romanian Rhapsodies is a more lyrical, songlike work. There is not nearly as much dance energy in this work, but it’s still a gorgeous listen that I honestly find hard to believe I’ve never much engaged before. The work even ends on a quiet, peaceful feel, rather than the final burst of energy that closes out the Rhapsody #1.
Enescu himself was apparently less than enthusiastic about the way his two Rhapsodies became as beloved as they did: they were so popular that they drowned out a great deal of his other work. Enescu deserves to be heard more than for just the two Romanian Rhapsodies, that much is clear. But…sometimes we just have to listen to them anyway!
Here is the Romanian Rhapsody #2 by Georges Enescu.
Late today with this post! Anyway, I have several pieces that I’m in the process of writing about, but none of those are ready, so for now, here’s an overture from one of Richard Wagner’s early operas, Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman). This was Wagner’s first major success, paving the way for everything that came after. I’ve never listened to the entire opera, but the overture is evocative in that great Wagnerian way: thrilling and adventurous, and at times romantically lyrical.
It’s Halloween week, and if you don’t think classical music can do “scary”, well then…you’ve never really listened much. Here are a couple of works that put the darkness of the universe on full display. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both these pieces are by Russian composers. I’m always wary of nationalistic stereotypes, but there’s just something about Russians when it comes to brooding fatalism. I genuinely think they do that better than anyone else.
First up is Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky lived an unusually tortured life as a composer, and when he died in 1881 at just 42 years old, he left behind great piles of manuscripts, his work in such disarray that definitive versions of his pieces have been the object of scholarly work ever since. The versions of his work that ushered his name into musical immortality came via the pen of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose “assistance” with preserving Mussorgsky’s work has come to be seen as almost outright tampering. David Dubal, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music, offers this summation of Mussorgsky:
Mussorgsky was severely self-destructive, and his early death was inevitable. His reliance on instinct was an aspect of his personality, as if technical knowledge would limit his search for “truth”. He was far more than an artist who merely lacked discipline: he was incapable of surviving for long in the real world of naked, shattering truth. Like Tolstoy, he was wracked by the violence and heartbreaking injustice inflicted on millions of Russian serfs. Unlike Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, and Borodin, he could not find refuge in Romantic nationalism. He saw strife and bitterness as few of his class did–he acknowledged and faced it. Nothing in Musorgsky’s art is personal; he dissolved his entire being into the agonized fate of the Russian people, and he saw no hope for the future.
Small wonder that a work so fundamentally terrifying as A Night on Bald Mountain sprang from his pen, then. It is a work of sadistic hedonism, a Bacchanalia of the profane and evil. A Night on Bald Mountain became famous via Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement/orchestration, and its most famous appearance in popular culture was as one of the selections in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, where it was paired with Schubert’s Ave Maria in closing the film’s program.
A different kind of Russian brooding comes from Sergei Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff yields to no one in brooding, a quality which would shine to wondrous effect in some of his greatest music.
Again, David Dubal:
During the war years [World War I], Rachmaninoff, always on the brink of depression, learned to control his black moods. To the poetess Marietta Shaginian, his chief confidante through these years, he wrote, “Here am I, spiritually sick…I am afraid of everything–mice, rats, beetles, oxen, murderers. I am frightened when a strong wind blows and howls…when I hear raindrops on the window pane; I am afraid of the darkness, etc. I don’t like old attics and I’m even willing to admit there are goblins around.”
Where A Night on Bald Mountain depicts a terrifying Witches’ Sabbath, with its demonic orgy, Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead depicts the long, slow, sad trip to the underworld, starting softly with the boat rocking against the current. Rachmaninoff uses a 5/8 time signature to great effect, using the not-quite-familiar 5-beat bar to suggest that there is something vaguely unfamiliar, something not-quite-right, about this slow trek across calm, black water. Through all this Rachmaninoff employs snatches of melody, including the Dies irae chant that haunted him throughout his life, that lead to some of the saddest sounding lyricism in his entire output. There is a section in the middle of this work that is as intensely lyrical as anything Rachmaninoff wrote, complete with the kind of ever-yearning-upward thing that Rachmaninoff was so good at. (If I ever write my Love Letter to Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, this will be a point to which I return frequently.) But here, when we reach the apex of that section a stormy section soon follows, and given the piece’s overall mood, it’s hard not to hear this as someone trying desperately to cling to life, only to be pulled back toward the inevitable long abyss.
This is not scary music in terms of Things That Bump In The Night, but it is unnerving in its depiction of the cold darkness that awaits everyone and how, in the end, all we will have is the slow rocking of that boat as it takes us to the Isle of the Dead.
Jean Sibelius wrote The Bard in 1913, when he was entering the late period of his compositional life. The work has little by the way of orchestral fireworks; while there is power, this is no showpiece. It is instead a work of surprising introspective depth in its short running time (about seven minutes, give or take, depending on the conductor). The mood is hushed and meditative, and somehow manages to stay hushed and meditative, even when it does crescendo toward the end.
The inspiration for this work isn’t easy to tease out. Some think it was perhaps a movement from another larger work that Sibelius decided to hold back; some have suggested a particular poem as an inspiration, which apparently the composer himself denied. There does not seem to be any direct literary inspiration to The Bard, nor does the work suggest a pastoral inspiration from the natural landscapes of Sibelius’s beloved Finland.
Perhaps Sibelius meant the work to be mainly abstract, only giving it a name out of habit…or perhaps he meant it to be more of a work of feeling than to have any particularly strong connection to some extramusical source of meaning. I don’t know, but I do know that The Bard is mystically effective in suggesting the kind of wisdom that one would expect from the itinerant poets of old. It may take a few listens to penetrate into the heart of this work: it’s not a piece that leaves a particular tune or melody lingering in the ear, like Finlandia, but its mood is what lingers. And that is almost precisely Sibelius’s point.
A few weeks ago we finally introduced Richard Strauss to this ongoing feature, and now we continue! When I wrote about Eine Alpensinfonie, I noted that I came to Strauss at the end of his tone-poem career: though he composed a great deal of music after that work in the thirty years or so he had left, he never wrote another tone poem. Now we’re rolling things back to the beginning of Strauss’s tone-poem career, with a work that, like Eine Alpensinfonie, is generally not ranked among his great masterpieces of the genre. But unlike that work, this one is seen as showing the promise of a young composer just entering his prime. The work is Aus Italien, or, From Italy.
Aus Italien is a four-movement work that seems somewhere between a proper abstract traditional symphony and a purely descriptive work. In terms of form, one can sense the influence of Hector Berlioz, but Strauss goes even farther than Berlioz did; Berlioz may have incorporated descriptive elements into his first two symphonies, but they are still primarily symphonies. Strauss, on the other hand, eschews the traditional forms of the classical symphony for a sequence of four movements of descriptive, programmatic music tied together by stated theme. The movements are:
Auf der Campagna (On the Roman Campagna)
In Roms Ruinen (In the Ruins of Rome)
Am Strande von Sorrent (On the Sorrento Beach)
Neapolitanisches Volksleben (Neapolitan Folk Life)
The work is lyrical and colorful throughout, and if it lacks the profound insight that marks Strauss’s finest tone poems, it still abounds with orchestral flash and pictorial color. In the fourth movement one will note the familiar strains of the song “Funiculi, Funicula”, which Strauss used thinking it was a folk song and not a composed work that was under copyright. This ended up costing Strauss a legal judgment, which must have annoyed the composer greatly. Strauss was always aware of his finances, and there is a story, possibly apocryphal, in which Strauss was greeted by his son upon returning home from a conducting engagement. When his son asked, “Did they pay you, Father?” Strauss wrapped his son in an embrace and said, “Now I know you are my son.”
The moral is, make sure your folk material is actually folk material!
I used this piece as part of my 2020 exploration of Beethoven over on Byzantium’s Shores, but it’s a cracking good piece and it even feels appropriate, given my shift to this space as my primary blogging home now. Beethoven wrote this piece on commission for the opening of a new theater in Vienna, a theater that is still operating and is in fact the current oldest operating theater in that city! I would hope that a theater that opened to the strains of a new concert overture by Ludwig van Beethoven would still be a going concern. He was Beethoven, after all!
So here is Beethoven’s Consecration of the House Overture.
Some nifty stuff in the pipeline–I’m not going to keep ignoring Richard Strauss, now that I’ve opened him up on this series–but for now, a favorite potboiler by Tchaikovsky, a man who certainly knew how to compose the kinds of potboilers that kept audiences pleased while he worked on his more serious work.
There’s not a whole lot to say about this work, musically. It’s pretty much a collection of tunes, but orchestrated by a genius. There’s a lot to be said for works in which great composers collect some tunes.
This piece also happens to have be a favorite of my father’s. He particularly loves the dance-like central tune. And as a former trumpet player, I’m eternally sad that my trumpet-playing career never gave me the opportunity to play the part that happens around the 8:00 mark in this recording! Trumpet players LIVE for those brief moments to shine.
Here is Capriccio Italien, by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Daniel Barenboim conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Has anyone noticed that in all the time I’ve been doing Tone Poem Tuesday, I have never once yet discussed any of the works of the composer who is not only best known for his tone poems, but who is actually best known for being the greatest composer of tone poems? I’ve been holding this composer back because aside from a handful of other works (which are also great, such as his operas, his songs, and his horn concertos), this composer is so synonymous with the tone poem that he actually overshadows just about everyone else in this rich, rich form of music.
But, I can’t keep him on the bench forever, so: at long last, let us grapple with Richard Strauss.
Strauss was the last of the line of German Romantics who reached their thundering apotheosis in Richard Wagner. Strauss’s life was long, spanning from 1864 to 1949; he saw the end of German nationalistic Romanticism, the rise of Modernism, and his own reputation falter as musical tastes changed and as he made his own regrettable political choices during his last two decades. Strauss did not actually join the Nazis, but neither did he exactly repudiate them. This might be seen as the sad choice of an old but beloved artist who was reluctant to turn away completely from his homeland, but still…the fact remains.
As an artist, Strauss’s work pushed Wagnerism about as far as it could go without crossing the line that the likes of Arnold Schoenberg would. Strauss’s music, at its best, is profound and evocatively lyrical. He wrote massive orchestral music that still shines with utter clarity in the orchestral writing; his textures are never muddy, never unclear, even when he is clearly indulging himself. Strauss is a great enough artist that his descents into self-indulgence are nevertheless captivating in their enthusiasm. Strauss’s skill at conveying scenes through orchestral tone-painting will be appreciated by anyone with a love of film music, where a lot of his influence can be felt, especially in the work of Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, and Rozsa.
Going back to my high school years, when I was doing my first major explorations of classical music, I entered the world of Richard Strauss not at the beginning of his career, but toward the end. (Some composers I entered through their early works, like Berlioz and the Symphonie fantastique, while others I entered through late works, like Mozart and his 40th Symphony or Beethoven with his 9th.) I knew that Strauss had written a series of works called “tone poems”: not symphonies, not concert overtures, but large scale symphonic works with form determined on an individual basis depending on the composer’s need. The first one of Strauss’s that I heard, via a cassette recording I bought pretty much on a whim (my allowance in those days mostly went to comic books and classical recordings), was a piece called Eine Alpensinfonie. This, I learned, was actually the very last of Strauss’s tone poems. Though he would live another thirty-four years after writing it, and though he would write a great deal of music in that time, never again did he write a tone poem.
Eine Alpensinfonie–“An Alpine Symphony”–is also not generally viewed as one of Strauss’s truly great tone poems, and there is reason for that. It’s almost entirely intended as pictorial music, and the focus is generally on orchestral pyrotechnics. Aside from a few introspective passages, Eine Alpensinfonie is almost entirely a showpiece. There’s a reason why, for a work not generally viewed highly by critics, a recording of Eine Alpensinfonie ended up being the work used on the very first test pressing of a compact disc. (That recording was by Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and by coincidence it ended up being one of the very first compact discs I ever owned. It only had one track, comprising the entire work. All later recordings separate the work into tracks, played without break, comprising the piece’s twenty-some sections.)
Eine Alpensinfonie is wildy Romantic, thrillingly dramatic, and massively orchestral. It also has moments of melodic grandeur that utterly soar, which is almost entirely why I love it: listening to it is an experience, and since despite the critics it has remained steadily performed and recorded for over a hundred years, I think it’s time to finally grant that it is, in any useful sense of the word, a classic.
“That’s great, but what is it about?” You might be asking…and you’re right to ask! Eine Alpensinfonie is simply a 50-minute musical depiction of a journey up an Alpine mountain peak, over the course of an entire day. The work opens with hushed tones and descending minor scales followed by soft churnings in the bass; a minute or so in we hear, in the low brass, the motif that will represent the mountain. As the orchestra slowly begins mustering its strength (in a passage that is spiritually connected with the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and its depiction of the Rhine’s deep dark waters), eventually everything culminates in a magnificent passage that is so gloriously resplendant that one almost doesn’t even realize that all Strauss has done is orchestrated, in grand fashion for full orchestra thundering fortissimo, a descending major scale.
What follows is a sequence of segments depicting various aspects of a climber’s ascent up the mountain: The ascent (note the offstage hunting horns), treks through forests and beside wandering brooks; scrambling over rocks beside a waterfall (the music actually glitters here); passages through flowering meadows and Alpine pastures (note the cowbells, inevitably making one wonder if the conductor asks the orchestra for more–well, you know); tense moments as the climb becomes more difficult; and then an introspective passage before we break through to the work’s grandest moments, depicting the acheivement of the summit. O, to be a brass player in the orchestra during this passage!
After the summit, the music takes on a darker tone as our climbers begin descending. The darkness is gathering, with good reason: the last big bit of musical theatricality that Strauss has in store is the “Thunder and Tempest” segment as a wild storm takes over. Here Strauss goes so far as to supplement the orchestra with a wind machine. After this, calm is restored and the sun returns, but the music grows quieter and quieter and quieter over as night settles. The entire work ends almost exactly as it began: descending soft scales, and the mountain’s motif plays once more before the final chords fade away.
Obviously Eine Alpensinfonie is not a symphony in any traditional sense. Strauss is not the least bit concerned with symphonic development or treatment of musical ideas here; the music is pure show from one of classical music’s great showmen. But really: what a show it is, and surely there’s room in our lives for pure theater, right?
Here are three recordings of Eine Alpensinfonie by Richard Strauss. The first is a magnificent classic performance, released in 1974, by the Staatekapelle Dresden, conducted by Rudolf Kempe (one of the finest Strauss conductors).
This recording, featuring Herbert Blomstedt conducting the San Francisco Symphony, may be the most technically perfect recording of the work I’ve ever heard. (Admittedly, Eine Alpensinfonie gets recorded a lot, because it’s so popular a showpiece; for all the recordings I’ve heard of it, there are many more I haven’t tried yet!)
Finally, here is the recording that got my attention in the first place, way back in, I don’t know, 1988 or so. This is Sir Georg Solti conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Many “Oh, wowwww” moments in this recording. (This is digitized from vinyl, but it’s a pretty high quality record, and it provides a neat demonstration of a particular problem that used to vex recording engineers back in the days of LPs and cassettes: how to accommodate long works on recording media that had two sides, neither of which could support the length of the work in question. The answer is simple: you have to split the recording in two, requiring the listener to flip the record or the cassette somewhere in the middle. Obviously this isn’t ideal, but it simply could not be avoided. In this case, those recording engineers managed to put the side-flip in a very logical place, musically. You can actually hear the brief gap in this recording, but it’s so well done that you have to know it’s there, almost.)
A strange and small subgenre popped up in the middle of the 20th century, called the “Tabloid Concerto”. These were entire classical works composed specifically for use in film. Not film music per se, with individual tracks written specifically to hew to the rhythm and length of specific scenes, but entire works to be used in the films themselves. The first, and probably best known example of this, is Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, written for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight, which is about a concert pianist and composer who must fight in World War II. Needing a classical work to tie the film together musically, but wanting to avoid the specific associations of pre-existing (and well known) classical works, the producers decided to have composer Addinsell write a single movement, which has gone on to be known as the Warsaw Concerto (the composer in the film is a Pole) and has made the leap to the concert repertoire.
I’ll return to the Warsaw Concerto later on (maybe next week!), but this business of writing concert works for use in a film became a small genre in its own right, and a number of the great composers of the “Golden Age” of film music produced works like this, including Miklos Rozsa’s Spellbound Concerto, written for the Hitchcock film Spellbound. Unlike the Addinsell work, the Rozsa Concerto wasn’t written for specific use in Spellbound but was crafted from the film’s themes and cues later on, but it still falls into that same category: a single-movement work of throbbing romanticism in the great Hollywood style.
This performance is a dated one, but it is thrilling and vibrant, featuring the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by the composer, and with great pianist (and native Buffalonian!) Leonard Pennario as soloist. Enjoy!
In honor of Labor Day, and therefore of the labor movement and the fact that the single biggest contributor to the America that exists is the American worker, here’s a piece that pays tribute to one of the fruits of all that labor: the automobile.
Frederick Shepherd Converse was an American composer who lived from 1871 to 1940, spanning the shift from Romanticism to Modernism. As such, he is known for a handful of works, the best known is the tone poem The Mystic Trumpeter.
The piece before us today is Converse’s tone poem Flivver Ten Million. The word “flivver” was a slang term for Ford automobiles back in the days of the Model T and shortly afterward, and Converse gave his piece the subtitle A Joyous Epic Inspired by the Familiar Legend “The Ten Millionth Ford is Now Serving Its Owner. Quite a long title for such a short work (it’s only twelve minutes!), but there it is. The work does seem redolent of the enthusiasm of 1930s America for the coming of the automobile, and as we all know, the shift to being an automobile culture shifted America in ways that we are still grappling with to this day.
Even though the work is a single movement, Converse divided Flivver Ten Million into sections:
1. Dawn in Detroit (sunrise over the city)
2. The Call to Labor (the auto workers report to work)
3. The Din of the Builders (factory workers)
4. The Birth of the Hero – He Tries His Metal (the car wanders off into the great world in
search of an adventure)
5. May Night by the Roadside – America’s Romance (love music via solo violin)
6. The Joy Rider’s – America’s Frolic (happy have a great time music)
7. The Collision – America’s Tragedy (poignant, sad intonations)
8. Phoenix Americans – The hero, righted and shaken, proceeds on his way with
redoubled energy, typical of the indomitable spirit of America (great fun)
As an added bonus of civic pride, this performance is a recording of the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Here is Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Shepherd Converse.
