PROGRAM NOTES
Written by Bill Hemminger
Louise Farrenc
Overture No. 1 in E minor, Op. 23
Louise Farrenc (1804-75) was a remarkable musical force in 19th-century France. A prolific composer, she wrote three symphonies in addition to shorter orchestral works (like tonight’s Overture), many vocal and choral works, an impressive catalog of chamber music (including her most well-known work, Nonet), and many well-constructed works for solo piano. She was born into a family of sculptors and grew up in the rarefied world of an artist colony resident at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was thus able to get the best musical (and aesthetic) instruction, beginning piano and theory at age six, and she became a well-known performer and teacher. Her fame as a performing musician in addition to the host of serious musical compositions that she had written early in her life provided credentials for her to become the first woman permitted to teach at the prestigious Paris Conservatory, garnering a position there in 1842. In fact, she was the ONLY woman to attain that position in the 19th century. The success of her Nonet in 1850 encouraged her to demand pay equal to that of her male colleagues, which, astonishingly, she got. Lest you imagine that the French were at the time unequivocally open-minded, Farrenc was nonetheless NOT permitted to teach composition (a male bastion for no good reason, musical or otherwise) and limited in her piano studio to young women students. Nonetheless, many of her students went on to win the biggest prizes for piano performance, including her own daughter Victorine. At age 17 Louise had married flutist Aristide Farrenc; the couple enjoyed an unusually felicitous marriage. Together they founded Editions Farrenc, a successful music publishing house that lasted for about 50 years. \
Louise herself oversaw the publication of Le Trésor des pianistes, a compendium of piano music, and her set of piano studies—30 Etudes—has recently been recorded, those piano studies rivalling the contemporaneous works of Chopin for their craft and musicality.
The Overture No. 1 in E minor was composed in 1834. It is a work full of contrast and appealing textural variety, beginning with a slow declamatory section, then opening into a lively development section. Only recently (at least in the US) has much of Farrenc’s music been performed, but the Philadelphia Orchestra has recently performed her Symphony No. 2 and will premier the Symphony No. 3 this summer.
Richard Strauss
Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24
[Death & Transfiguration]
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was a German Romantic composer. From his great tone poems of the 1890s to his operas and vocal music of later years, he has had an indelible impact on the standard musical repertoire.
Richard grew up in a musical milieu: his father was principal horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra. Though he had a traditional education, Richard nonetheless devoted much time to music and had accumulated a catalog of more than 100 compositions by the time he left school. Already in 1884—thanks to his father’s influence and connections—Richard had important conducting posts; his musical life would be split between composing and conducting thereafter.
Though his father detested Wagner and his music, Richard secretly developed his interest in the grandiose orchestral style and bold narrative forms of Wagner’s works. Young Strauss was also influenced by the works of Franz Liszt, particularly that composer’s wide-ranging and experimental tone poems. These musical influences helped form Strauss’ compositional voice, with its dependence on lush orchestration, soaring melody, and controlled though expressive drama. Many of these symphonic poems remain in the orchestral literature—for example, Don Juan (1889), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895), and Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), which is more of a concerto for orchestra. In later years, he turned his attention to opera, in which he also excelled, from the chilling and harmonically daring Salome of 1905 to the tuneful and immensely popular Der Rosenkavalier in later years.
Strauss wed Pauline de Ahna, an operatic soprano, in 1894. Though her outspoken, temperamental personality was not aligned with his aloof intellectual nature, their marriage lasted 55 good, loving years.
In the 1930s Strauss, by now a world celebrity, was no fan of the Nazis and eventually fell out of favor with the ruling fascists. For a time during World War II he lived in Vienna, then in Switzerland. At the war’s end, his name was cleared of any complicity with the Nazis by the Allied denazification tribunals, and he returned to his beloved Garmisch, in Bavaria, in 1949, just before his death.
Death and Transfiguration was written when the composer was a mere 25 years old. Strauss himself wrote: “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist.”
The first section of the work is Largo, and “in a small bare room. . .a sick man lies on his bed.” The strings enter quietly in a halting, syncopated rhythm—is this the musical suggestion of an irregular heartbeat? The section continues sotto voce.
The following section—Allegro molto agitato—surely makes struggle a musical phenomenon as Strauss juxtaposes lyrical phrases and jarring motifs (often expressed in rapid triplets), employing the entire range of the orchestral palette. Just as it appears that death has won the contest, the transfiguration theme appears, a beautiful, slow, extended phrase. The movement slows, becomes still, in time for the following section, Meno mosso. In the composer’s words: “Exhausted from the battle, sleepless. . .the sick man sees his life pass before him.” The fourth section, Moderato, bears this description: “But from the endless realms of heavenly space, a mighty resonance returns to him bearing what he longed for here below. . .redemption, transfiguration.” The halting, syncopated triplet figures fade, the transfiguration theme is reintroduced, and the texture and tension build throughout the section until reaching a thunderous resolution in the triumphant key of C major. Interestingly, this same transfiguration theme recurs in the very last of Strauss’ works, the wonderful Vier letzte lieder (Four Last Songs) of 1949, written just before the composer’s death. The fourth song quotes that theme while the soprano sings “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this possibly death?”).
The composer realizes perhaps that his youthful understanding may not have been callow or wrong: after a life lived well, death can be beautiful.
Antonin Dvořák
Cello Concerto in B minor,
Op. 104, B. 191
Antonin Dvořák was born in Bohemia (now part of Czech Republic) in 1841 and died there in 1904. The eldest of nine children, he grew up hearing and then later playing fiddle tunes popular in his father’s inn. Though his musical aptitude was obvious and he was able to get violin lessons, it was assumed that he would take over his father’s work. Fortunately, that career path changed when, as a teenager, Dvořák moved to a relative’s home nearby and was able to take up serious study of the violin and of composition. His life in Prague in the 1860s was penurious: Dvořák augmented his small income playing violin in local bands with music lessons, all the while composing. His big break came in 1874, when he won the Austrian State Prize for Composition, a significant international award. Johannes Brahms was a member of the jury and took a special interest in Dvořák; the two remained life-long friends.
The next decades brought great public attention to the Bohemian, who always strove to incorporate folk elements in his music. The 1878 Slavonic Dances, which became wildly popular world-wide, represent his life-long effort to instill a nationalistic spirit in his music. At the time, Dvořák’s works were much admired in England, and he made at least 10 trips there. In 1891 Cambridge University awarded him an honorary doctor of music. By 1890 he had made two successful trips to Moscow and became friends with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
His next stop was the United States, where he accepted a post as director of the newly-minted National Conservatory of Music in America (located in New York) in 1892. Though well-paid and much-fȇted in the United States, Dvořák grew increasingly homesick. Discovering a community of transplanted Czechs in Iowa, Dvořák moved to Spillville, Iowa for a time. His sojourn in the United States allowed the composer to write some of his most famous music—the Symphony from the New World, the American Quartet, and the Cello Concerto. He returned to Bohemia in 1895, where he continued to compose—particularly opera—until his death in 1904.
The Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 has taken a preeminent place among cello works performed today. Dvořák wrote the concerto while he was Director at the National Conservatory; the concerto was completed in 1895 and had its premiere performance in London, with Dvořák conducting, the following year.
The work begins quietly, clarinets intoning the theme. Then the entire orchestra enters (the score reads grandioso), loudly proclaiming the main theme until a secondary theme is introduced with a lovely horn solo. Then—after more than four minutes of music—the orchestra goes tacet, and the soloist enters quietly, the calm quickly giving way to a cadenza-like section that makes great technical demands of the soloist. The second movement is a long Adagio, one of whose sections is a beautiful musical conversation between solo cello and flutes. The movement ends as the soloist plays harmonics that fade away pianissimo. The final movement is fast, dramatic, and marked risoluto at the beginning. Material from the first two movements makes its way into the conclusion of this movement as the soloist playing alone winds down to a muted conclusion. But the hush is short-lived: the orchestra swells to a grand climax with reiterations of the main themes.
