FVSO November 11, 2023 FULL Program Notes
Notes written by Erik Leveille and Kevin Sütterlin
Festive
Overture: William Grant
Still (1895-1978)
William
Grant Still, who became known as ‘the Dean of African American composers,’ was
born in Mississippi, raised by his mother and grandmother in Little Rock, and initially
pursued a degree in medicine at Wilberforce College in Ohio before embarking on
a career in music. His training and early professional experiences were
eclectic; he studied first at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, spent time in
New York City as both an arranger for bandleader Paul Whiteman and blues master
W.C. Handy as well as an oboist in Broadway pit orchestras. Still returned to
formal studies at the New England Conservatory where he was mentored by the
traditionalist George Whitefield Chadwick and the avant-garde sensation Edgard
Varèse.
Still
went on to a career distinguished by multiple firsts. He was the first African American
to have both a symphony and an opera premiered by professional American orchestras,
and in 1936 he took to the podium as a guest conductor of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic. The Festive Overture was completed in December of 1944,
and was written for a composition contest. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
was celebrating its 50th anniversary by inviting composers across
the country to submit celebratory concert overtures for consideration by their
panel of judges, which consisted of Cincinnati’s music director Eugene Goossens
(himself a composer), renowned conductor Pierre Monteux, and composer, writer,
and critic Deems Taylor. Still’s charming, optimistic work won unanimously, earning
him the CSO’s Jubilee Prize and a $1000 war bond, and was premiered the following
month.
A
fanfare of brass and percussion ushers in the amiable principal theme in which
the violins lope and glide unhurriedly over the bar lines. Playful muted trumpets
and interjections from the glockenspiel and tambourine add color and contrast.
A new theme, begun in the lower strings, is more songful and yearning, and features
a lyrical solo for violin. Still follows classical sonata form by developing
both themes in a terse development, and the delightful recapitulation gives a
star turn to the xylophone before reaching its affirmative, brassy conclusion.
These
Worlds in Us
Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980)
“...it occurred
to me that, as we grow older, we accumulate worlds of intense memory within us,
and that grief is often not far from joy. I like the idea that music can
reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture.”
With that kernel
of thought, composer Missy Mazzoli—one of the most acclaimed and performed
composers of her generation, particularly in the world of opera—created These
Worlds in Us, her first work for orchestra, which won the ASCAP Young
Composers Award and Yale University’s Woods Chandler Prize. It was premiere by
the Yale Philharmonia in March 2006.
The work was
inspired by the poem “The Lost Pilot” by James Tate, and by her father, who was
a soldier in the Vietnam War. An excerpt from the poem that resonates with
Missy Mazzoli especially in the creation of this work follows:
My head cocked
towards the sky,
I cannot get off
the ground,
and you, passing
over again,
fast, perfect and
unwilling
to tell me that
you are doing
well, or that it
was a mistake
that placed you
in that world,
and me in this;
or that misfortune
placed these
worlds in us.
Even in this
early work, Mazzoli’s wide-ranging musical experiences and influences – from classical
training to punk and electronica and Balinese gamelan music – find voice in
unique orchestral colors as diverse as a melancholy yet lovely melody in the
violins (the anchor of the work) which continually dissolves into long, keening
glissandos (slides, produced by continuously sliding a finger up or down on a
single string), as if the tune itself is disintegrating; vibraphone
reverberations blending with the reedy sighs of melodicas, and underneath all,
a percussive pulse that at times consciously invokes military cadences yet
above all conveys a sense of subtle restless urgency.
A
Lincoln Portrait
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Aaron Copland is
so revered as the quintessential voice of traditional American classical music—the
heartland and prairie translated into those wide-spaced, open harmonies, and infectiously
folky-yet-spiky rhythms—that it’s easy to forget how unlikely a figure he was
to assume that role. A star pupil of the legendary Parisian teacher of
composition Nadia Boulanger in the ‘20s, Copland was the son of Jewish
immigrants, a gay man, and after returning to the United States in the 1930s
and witnessing the plight of his fellow Americans during the Great Depression,
a person of considerable socialist political leanings (he supported the
American Communist Party’s presidential candidate in 1936). Copland’s political
sympathies, in fact, informed his change of musical language to one that
included the harmonies, rhythms, and melodic style of the Americas.
Copland is so ensconced
in our national cultural firmament that it is easy to forget his worldview ran
him afoul of Wisconsin’s own notorious red-baiting senator, Joseph McCarthy.
The work featured on tonight’s program was to be performed at the 1953
inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower, until a congressman from Illinois recalled
Copland’s political leanings. The performance was canceled, and Copland found
himself hauled not once, but twice in front of McCarthy’s Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations in May of that year. Copland skillfully parried
the questioning but continued to be hounded for another two years by J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI, until it was finally decided there was insufficient evidence with
which to charge him.
This anecdote
sheds light on the origin of A Lincoln Portrait. In 1942, conductor
Andre Kostelanetz commissioned Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Jerome Kern to all
write patriotic works as America plunged into World War II. Copland originally
wanted to set his work to the words of that great chronicler and poet of the
Civil War, Walt Whitman, but when Kostelanetz suggested a political figure, he
settled on the other great wordsmith of the era, the sixteenth president of the
United States. Viewed in the light of Copland’s beliefs in a society that
focused on the well-being of ‘the common man,’ A Lincoln Portrait is not
only a clarion call against the fascism that engulfed Europe in the 1930s and
1940s, but a summons for this nation to live up to its highest ideals.
As to the piece
itself, Copland’s own admirably direct and succinct notes for a performance by
the Boston Symphony are perhaps the most appropriate: "The first sketches
were made in February, and the portrait finished on 16 April 1942. I worked
with musical materials of my own with the exception of two songs of the period:
the famous 'Camptown Races' which, when used by Lincoln supporters during his Presidential
campaign of 1860, was sung to the words, 'We're bound to work all night, bound
to work all day. I'll bet my money on the Lincoln hoss…,' and a ballad that was
first published in 1840 under the title 'The Pesky Sarpent,' but it is better
known today as 'Springfield Mountain.' In neither case is the treatment a
literal one. The tunes are used freely in the manner of my use of cowboy songs
in Billy the Kid. The composition is roughly divided into three main
sections. In the opening section I wanted to suggest something of the
mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln's personality. Also, near
the end of that section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit.
The quick middle section briefly sketches in the background of the times he
lived. This merges into the concluding section where my sole purpose was to draw
a simple but impressive frame about the words of Lincoln himself."
Symphony #3 in E-flat
Major, “Eroica”, Op. 55
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
“I am far from
satisfied with my past works: from today on I shall take a new way.”
Beethoven’s pupil
Carl Czerny recounted these words of his mentor to his close friend, violinist
and mandolinist Václav Krumpholz in 1802. That was a year of crisis and transformation
for Beethoven; while he had completed his sunny and good-humored Second
Symphony, his ever-worsening hearing drove him to the brink of despair, and he even
contemplated suicide. In his famed “Heiligenstadt Testament” written to his brothers
Karl and Johann in October of that year, Beethoven poured out his grief and desolation
that he, THE composer and piano virtuoso of the moment, the one who was seen in
Vienna as the sole worthy heir to the aged Haydn and the deceased Mozart, dreaded
human interaction because he couldn’t hear a shepherd singing and piping in the
distance, and could scarcely follow along in a spirited discussion, lest his
dread and secret malady be revealed, to his shame and humiliation. Beethoven
confesses that were it not for his art, he would have ended his life. He
emerged from this emotional abyss scarred but determined not to relinquish his
life until he had expressed the entirety of his creative impulse.
Beethoven began
work on his third symphony shortly after he emerged from this trial by fire. He
was a fervent adherent to the French Republican ideals of “Liberté, Fraternité,
Égalite,” and the embodiment of those principals in the dawn of the 19th
century on the Continent was the military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte. Beethoven
no doubt liked to see himself as a peer of Bonaparte—a man of the future who
would transform society. Beethoven called his new symphony “Buonaparte,” but
when the great man (predictably) declared himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven
flew into a rage and scratched out Bonaparte’s name with such fury that one can
see the holes in the paper in the surviving manuscript. His new dedication was
penned “to the memory of a great man.”
The
autobiographical and socio-political aspects of this landmark work, however,
tend to overshadow the true revolutionary character of the “Eroica,” which is
the music itself. Critics and audience members who attended its premiere in
April 1805 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna were left startled, perplexed,
and vexed. The most sympathetic critics acknowledged the sheer audacious genius
of what they had just heard, but fretted that Herr Beethoven was hopelessly
overtaxing the ears and attention spans of his listeners. No wonder—the “Eroica”
is twice the length of most symphonies at the time (one wag in the gallery
seats at the premiere catcalled, “I’ll pay another Kreuzer if only the thing
will stop”), thematically and contrapuntally dense, dissonant, and brash in affect.
Beethoven ushers
in his ‘new way’ from the opening two measures; whereas his first and second
symphonies opened with Haydnesque slow introductions, this work launches into
action with two bracing E-flat major chords before introducing the most
unlikely of heroic themes—the cellos introduce a pleasant but somewhat prosaic
tune that is really nothing more than the outlining of an E-flat major arpeggio
(three or more notes all belonging to the same harmony being played one after
the other) while the upper strings tap out a Classical-era accompaniment … until
the fifth measure. The cellos drop to a ‘wrong’ C#-sharp, and the first violins
respond with an insistent, syncopated rhythm on G. That moment, which is both
harmonically and rhythmically dissonant, opens the wormhole by which Beethoven
expands the proportions of the first movement of a symphony beyond the scope of
anything previously conceived. The titanic development section features a new
melody in the distant key of E minor, rhythmic distortions that nearly fracture
the sense of the triple meter in which the movement is written, and most
famously, the horns recapitulating the primary theme two measures early (you
are welcome to imagine the whole orchestra’s subsequent fortissimo chastisement
of their ‘wayward’ colleagues as No! NO! NOW!!!). The recapitulation resolves
the C#-sharp tension by presenting the theme in the enharmonic (same sounding) key
of D-flat, and the concluding coda is really a new development section, but the
concluding measures end in confident affirmation.
The following
Adagio is marked “Marcia funebre”; contemporaries of Beethoven’s, François-Joseph
Gossec and Luigi Cherubini had written similar movements inspired by the French
Revolution, but Beethoven was the first one to include such a movement as part
of a formal symphony. Over double basses imitating a military drum cadence, the
strings intone a solemn lament in Beethoven’s “fate” key of C minor which is
subsequently taken up by the oboe. Brief attempts towards consolation are
interrupted by anguished and vehement cries. True relief is afforded in a
contrasting section in C major which is alternatively comforting and
ceremonially heroic. The return of the funeral march is interrupted by a
massive, striving fugue (a musical composition in which one or two themes are
repeated or imitated by successively entering voices and contrapuntally developed
in a continuous interweaving of the parts), and the conclusion of the movement
is truly extraordinary. The march theme itself is broken up into fragments and
interrupted by gasping pauses, as if the music itself is dying.
The third
movement is only the second time that Beethoven marks “Scherzo” (joke) instead
of “Minuetto,” the old courtly dance that had been a mainstay of Baroque dance suites
and featured regularly in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart and their contemporaries
(the first time being his Symphony No. 2). Beethoven labeled the third movement
of his symphony as a minuet, although he already changed the character from
stately to frenetic and fleet-footed. As with the rest of the “Eroica,” here he
expands a dance form into proportions previously unimagined. The movement
begins almost inaudibly, with the strings introducing something of a pianissimo
Morse code between two alternating notes. Out of this emerges a melody in the
oboe, first piping persistently on one note, then running down a scale, then
lilting to its end. This odd tune is presented again before suddenly roaring
from pianissimo to fortissimo (in one measure!) in the entire orchestra,
modified with hemiolas (Beethoven shifts the sense of the meter from ONE-two-three
to one-TWO-three). The Classical Menuetto was always contrasted with a Trio
section, and Beethoven adheres to that structure, but here, the Trio is
heralded by a trio of noble hunting horns (the first Beethoven symphony that
uses more than two horns), which are complemented with cantering strings and meanderings
in the woodwinds. The return of the scherzo is interrupted by Beethoven mischievously
breaking into duple meter for four measures, and a final coda ends in fortissimo
triumph.
The character of
the final movement of a symphony changed as the form evolved; at first, it was
barely an afterthought—a light frippery after the more substantive movements
that proceeded it. By the time Mozart penned his final three symphonies, the
finale had accrued significantly more weight, with the last movement of his
Symphony No. 41 concluding in a blaze of glory with the most complex
counterpoint that had ever been written for a symphony orchestra at that time.
For his symphony written in a ‘new way’, Beethoven turned to the theme and
variation form, one that would serve him well for the rest of his artistic
life.
In 1801, he had
written a simple contradance that he featured in the Finale of his ballet music
for The Creatures of Prometheus. He liked that tune well enough to use
it for a set of piano variations and it became the clay out of which Beethoven
shaped the apotheosis of his new symphony. It had the added benefit of an
association with a kind of self-sacrificing heroism- Prometheus, after all, was
the demigod in Greek mythology who took pity on the plight of humanity and
stole fire from heaven to warm and light the way for his fellow creatures.
Quite a contrast from the self-declared hero of the Revolution who revealed
himself to be just another self-aggrandizing tyrant.
Beethoven adds
his own rough, brusque humor into the mix—a rumbustious, querulous introduction
leads to a pregnant pause, and that much ado turns out to be about … not much.
Pizzicato (plucked) strings introduce a comically bare skeleton of a theme,
that then engages in a back-and-forth echoing with the woodwinds before being
punctuated by three crisp notes in the winds, brass, and timpani. In the third
variation, we finally realize the big joke – the theme is in fact just the bass
line for the melody which we now hear, and from there, Beethoven unleashes his
formidable skills with an extended fugato section and then to a gloriously
swaggering march in the Hungarian style, a trick he no doubt learned from his
former mentor Haydn. Another tremendous climax is reached, but then Beethoven
casts aside all joking and bravura. In the next set of variations marked Poco
Andante, the contradance theme is imbued with poignancy, tenderness, and
pathos. In his Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven laments to his brothers that
he is heartbroken that they and others perceive him to be angry and misanthropic,
and that despite his demeanor he wished nothing more than to do good, and these
measures convey this yearning and aspiration perfectly. The final coda erupts in
Beethovenian joy – horns triumphantly call and whoop over a veritable beehive
of exuberant tremolos (the rapid repetition of a musical tone to produce a
trembling, wavering sound) in the strings, and a series of resonant chords that
echo the opening of the symphony brings this symphony’s questing spirit to its
emphatic conclusion.
