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Sunday, December 3, 2017

Program Notes

“Tragic” Overture, Op. 81

Johannes Brahms: (Born in Hamburg in 1833; died in Vienna in 1897)

In 1853 composer Robert Schumann met a young Johannes Brahms and told the world to expect great and amazing things from this “young eagle.”  However, the music world would have to wait decades for Brahms to complete his First Symphony, and those expectations produced a great deal of stress for Brahms.  With the Symphony finally completed (1876) and regarded well, Brahms quickly followed it with a Second Symphony (1877) which was imbued with a completely different character;  where the First was filled with angst, the Second was of a pastoral nature.  So, by the summer of 1880, Brahms could relax and bask briefly in his accomplishments, and while doing so in the Austrian Alps he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Breslau.  As a thank you gift, he composed for them an honorary work, which he titled the Academic Festival Overture, filled with student drinking anthems and overall jollity and good cheer.

But just as with his first two antithetical symphonies, Brahms “… could not refuse [his] melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture to a tragedy.”  So, he simultaneously composed his “Tragic” Overture that same summer as a companion piece, presumably, just for the sake of balance.  Indeed, where the Academic Festival Overture is ripe with ebullience, the Tragic Overture bleeds struggle, defiance, and ultimately, defeat.  As Brahms told a colleague, “One of them weeps, the other laughs.”  Yet, the Tragic Overture is more than just a sobering antidote to the Academic Festival’s jocularity.

With the world no longer looking so expectantly over his shoulder, Brahms seems to have felt the freedom to experiment and be extremely creative.  He began by structuring the Tragic Overture very uniquely, with distinct sections, form and arch rather like a movement to a symphony.  Musically, Brahms created some true magic by bending time with tempo and pacing – although the general feel of the themes tends toward unhurried, the subtle activity below the surface is often agitated, creating a sort of cognitive dissonance.  He also explored some of his deepest musical anguish to date with the rising horn and trumpet calls, where it seems that the world has stopped while a relentless Fate hurls forward.  All of this, of course, is balanced with moments of glowing gold and beautiful melodies, but the work ends, exhilaratingly, with starkly pounding chords – there is no tidy triumph to end this Overture.  Yet for all its unconventionality and pathos, it is one of Brahms’s most satisfying and profound gems, and has been ever since its premiere alongside its laughing Academic Festival companion of 1881.

Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, “St. Anthony Variations,” Op. 56a

  • Theme – Chorale “St. Anthony” – Andante
  • Variation 1 – Poco più animato (Andante con moto)
  • Variation 2 – Più vivace (Vivace)
  • Variation 3 – Con moto
  • Variation 4 – Andante con moto (Andante)
  • Variation 5 – Vivace (Poco presto)
  • Variation 6 – Vivace
  • Variation 7 – Grazioso
  • Variation 8 – Presto non troppo (Poco presto)
  • Finale – Andante

Johannes Brahms: (Born in Hamburg in 1833; died in Vienna in 1897)

Brahms was hesitant to tackle his first symphony, which would take him roughly 22 years to complete from its first notion in 1853, until it premiered at long last in 1876.  In the interim, he tutored himself and tried out his compositional craft in various ways: solo piano works, choral pieces, works for chamber ensemble, lieder, and his magnificent German Requiem, op. 45 for Chorus and Orchestra.   In this vein of self-tutelage he also began studying older music from the Baroque and even earlier, as well as collecting original manuscripts, becoming one of history’s first early music historians.  This led, in 1873, to a colleague giving him part of a score attributed to Joseph Haydn – a second movement to a divertimento (a piece for wind ensemble) subtitled “St. Anthony Chorale.”  Almost a century later,  in the 20th Century, researchers determined that the work was almost certainly not by Haydn, but instead bore his name for any one of several common practices of the day – thus, the work is currently referred to as “St. Anthony Variations” and even now its probable original composer remains anonymous.  Nonetheless, its beautiful tune and odd five-bar phrases were enough to really capture Brahms’s imagination and inspire him to try something bold and clever, as his first attempt at a full, purely orchestral work in a kind of practice run at a symphony.  But first he wrote his variations of “Haydn’s” piece for two pianos, which was eventually published under the same title but numbered as Op. 56b.

One of the most clever aspects to this work is Brahms’s choice to make it a set of variations for an orchestra – historically, such variations on a theme were composed for piano alone or small ensembles.  Brahms’s Variations, however, are considered virtually the first orchestral variations written; it is true that Mozart’s contemporary, Salieri, had created one about 50 years earlier but it remains relatively unknown today and was doubtlessly unknown to Brahms.  To start off this novel work, Brahms uses the St. Anthony Chorale theme outright, keeping its wind ensemble scoring, but underpinning the winds with plucked strings.  It’s a splendid theme, too, with a curious 5-bar phrasing, which Brahms will use as a reason to create many odd-phrased passages throughout the work.

The musical play throughout the 8 variations and finale are filled with originality.  Examples come soon enough – after a tidy bit of gentle wandering of the strings in Variation One, the Second Variation begins with almost an explosion of sound, a loud and quick roll on the timpani along with a brief shout of the first rhythm of the Chorale in the orchestra.  Coming as it does after the stately Chorale theme and tender strings, it’s a delicious jolt.  Variation Three allows the winds to do the same as the strings did in One, before Variation Four brings the theme to its opposite end with some of Brahms’s loveliest writing in a melancholic, almost tragic variation.  Following Four’s darkness comes what feels like Brahms creating a symphonic scherzo in the model of Beethoven – fiery and jaunty, with Brahms’s favorite hemiolas (two beats juxtaposed over three beats) aplenty, and odd-lengthed phrasing that would have made the “Experimenter” Haydn proud (had he actually written the theme).  The theme is brought back in recognizable form in Variation Six, and allows the work to venture off again, first in the lovely charm of Variation Seven, and then into another opposite spectrum of the theme in Variation Eight, where a mysterious and insistent movement wants to break out, complete with piccolo.

The Finale then conjures up something so old it would, in Brahms’s day, have sounded quite innovative, and it’s one of his cleverest inventions in this work, by adapting a “passacaglia,” a form used in the Baroque period which is a set of variations over a repeating bass line.  Brahms uses the bass line of the Chorale which you will hear immediately begin this variation in the basses, but then he mirrors it in canon by the upper strings as the line for the Finale’s passacaglia.  In essence, the Finale is a set of variations in a set of variations.  It also leads us into what seems like it will be a fugue, but then it begins to make its way home with an arching majesty back to the original theme, now in full orchestral regalia and with the joyous brightness of the triangle, closing it all with robust good cheer.

Requiem, for Chorus, Mezzo-soprano and Baritone, Organ and Orchestra, Op. 9

  1. Introit
  2. Kyrie
  3. Domine Jesu Christe
  4. Sanctus
  5. Pie Jesu
  6. Agnus Dei
  7. Lux aeterna
  8. Libera me
  9. In paradisum

Maurice Duruflé: (Born in Louviers, France in 1902; died in Louveciennes, France in 1986)

There are few pieces in 20th Century music that are universally beloved, but Duruflé’s ageless Requiem is surely one of them.  It is one of only 14 works that the composer allowed to be published, and is his first choral piece.  Duruflé was famous in his lifetime for being self-effacing and almost obsessively meticulous.   He would spend months or years composing a piece, only to eventually destroy it for not meeting his high standards.  In fact, his wife, Marie-Madeleine Chevalier-Duruflé, was responsible for saving a number of his few works from destruction.  The Requiem was no doubt dangled over the fire several times before its premiere in 1947, but what saved it were two important factors: it began as an organ suite commissioned in 1944 by the French Vichy government, and then after that regime was dismantled, Duruflé refashioned the suite as a Requiem in memory of his father.

He set out to accomplish two goals in this Requiem, both of them difficult to accomplish in the middle 20th Century: to use mostly Gregorian chant for the main themes, and to reject the then-ubiquitous “dramatic” Requiem – those colossal works that cover the emotional extremes, such as Verdi’s and Berlioz’s Requiems.  Duruflé’s love of Gregorian chant came to him early, having been brought up from the age of 10 as a choir boy in the famous French Cathedral at Rouen, where, as a musically gifted boy, he learned music.  He soon entered the Paris Conservatoire and studied with Notre-Dame’s famous organist, Louis Vierne, and became the lifelong organist himself at St-Étienne-du-Mont (in Paris).  Medieval chant played a weekly role in his life.  Said Duruflé,

“In general, I have attempted to penetrate to the essence of Gregorian style and have tried to reconcile, as far as possible, the very flexible Gregorian rhythms as established by the Benedictines of Solesmes with the exigencies of modern notation”

As for the popular expectation of what a Requiem should be, Duruflé preferred the gentle message of his French forebear Gabriel Fauré.  Fauré’s Requiem fashioned death as a solace.  The result for Duruflé is a floating masterpiece, a Mass for the Dead hued in the 10th Century and resurrected in the 20th, compassionate and modernized harmonically and spiritually.  But whereas Fauré’s Requiem even left out the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) section, Duruflé saved a little of it.

World War II was still haunting the world when this Requiem was written in 1947.  For Duruflé, it necessarily translated into some musical anger and mourning.  Much of the work is bathed in lush harmony surrounding exquisitely chosen Gregorian melody, but some of Duruflé’s harmonies are harsh reminders of a world recently having gone mad – the creepy tone painting of Hell at the beginning of (3) Domine Jesu Christe, and some jarring interludes in the (8) Libera me, where, although not part of the Dies Irae proper, wrath is referenced with anguish and anger. The only part of the Dies Irae that Duruflé saved, however, was the last portion, the Pie Jesu (5), and is cast here with heartrending beauty.  In it, Duruflé often does not come to a complete cadence (a harmonic stop), but instead continues on, as though to represent the enduring supplications to Christ for the sake of the dead.  Ultimately, death provides the final rest for those long-suffered souls, and the last chord in (9) In paradisum lingers on a very long time – Duruflé marked it with a fermata for “trés long” – reaching beyond time and circumstance into the spiritual realm that Duruflé held so dear.  In an unpublished program note that Duruflé wrote for a 1980 performance of his Requiem, he explained:

“… This Requiem is not an ethereal work which sings of detachment from earthly worries. It reflects, in the immutable form of the Christian prayer, the agony of man faced with the mystery of his ultimate end. It is often dramatic, or filled with resignation, or hope, or terror, just as the words of the Scripture themselves which are used in the liturgy. It tends to translate human feelings before their terrifying, unexplainable or consoling destiny. It represents the idea of peace, of Faith, and of Hope.”

Program notes by Max Derrickson