Program notes:
Franz von Suppé (1819-1895): Overture to Leichte Kavallerie (Light Cavalry)
Born Francesco Ezechieli Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli, von Suppé was a distant relative of Gaetano Donizetti. From an early age he pursued a career in music despite parental opposition. After moving to Vienna, he took a job at the Josephstadt Theater, writing operettas and incidental music to stage plays. From 1845 he worked in a similar capacity at the Theater an der Wien, then at the Carltheater. It was at the latter venue that Light Cavalry was first performed on March 21, 1866.
The original plot concerned an orphan, true love, mistaken identities, and actual Hungarian Hussars. A second plot was later contrived, in which an earl is so besotted with a dancer that her ballet company is sarcastically called “Light Cavalry.”
Whatever the plot, the only music that has survived is the overture, which Mickey Mouse conducted in a 1942 Disney cartoon titled “Symphony Hour.”
Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-1899): Frühlingstimmen (Voices of Spring), Opus 410
Originally composed in 1883 for soprano and orchestra, Voices of Spring was introduced by Bianca Bianchi at an academy at the Theater an der Wien. The critics pronounced it “overloaded with coloratura, not enough melody.” Strauss then made a version for solo piano for Alfred Grünfeld, who popularized it at his concerts. Indeed, after he played it for the composer, Strauss remarked “Do you know, that waltz is not really so beautiful as it seems when you play it.” He dedicated the work to Grünfeld. An orchestral version soon followed. Egon Gartenberg calls it “a creation of elfin grace, a vision of flowing gowns and bare feet whirling through the Vienna Woods.”
Juventino Rosas (1868–1894): Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves)
Rosas started his career at the age of seven as a street musician in Mexico City. At twelve, he wrote a waltz in exchange for a pair of shoes. He enrolled twice at the National Conservatory of Music, but was forced to withdraw both times due to his poverty. He began playing violin with dance bands, touring the United States and performing at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. He died in Cuba of acute spinal myelitis at the age of twenty-six.
His most famous composition is Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves), composed, his biographer says, on his kitchen table with the sounds of a factory and birds outside his window. He sold the piece for 45 Mexican pesos in order to settle a debt. The music was once attributed to Johann Strauss, Jr. Indeed, José Emilio Pacheco calls it the only other waltz besides Strauss’s Blue Danube that is “played around the world every day, every hour.”
Paul Chihara (b. 1938): Aka Tombo Fantasy
Aka Tombo note by Catherine Beeson.
Aka Tombo ("Red Dragonfly") is a children's song composed in 1927 by Kosaku Yamada (1886-1965) with lyrics from a 1921 poem by Rofu Miki (1889-1964). The song, and the lyric, is a nostalgic depiction of a Japanese red dragonfly seen at sunset, the final three lines of which are: Little red dragonfly; Resting, waiting; On the end of a bamboo pole.
During the 1920s Japan became interested in adopting Western cultural influences, including classical music. In Aka Tombo Yamada uses the pentatonic scale, a device widely used in folk music of many cultures including Western Europe. He also intentionally borrowed melodic material from German composer Robert Schumann's Concert Allegro for piano and orchestra. Now the song and its nostalgic imagery are deeply embedded in modern Japanese culture. In a national 1989 survey, "Akatombo" was ranked as the most-loved song in Japan and in 2007, the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs published it to their list of 100 widely beloved Japanese songs. In 2008 the Japan Mint issued six denominations of "Aka Tombo" coins in honor of the song, and in many cities the song is broadcast in public as part of the "5 o-clock chimes", marking the end of the working day.
Japanese-American composer Paul Chihara, notable for his music for concert stage as well as for television and movie scores, is a survivor of the Minidoka Japanese American internment camp of WWII. His memories and lived experience, as an American citizen born to Japanese immigrants yet still with family in Japan during the war, are complex and entangled with his love of Western classical music and popular music of the 1940s and 1950s. Chihara has embedded quotes of the Aka Tombo melody in several of his compositions, and has titled a movement from Concert Piccolo for 4 Violas "Aka Tombo". When asked to adapt Aka Tombo for full orchestra he chose to create a Fantasy on the song rather than a strict arrangement. In this way, Chihara says, "the piece can reflect on the way Japanese culture embraces sadness and beauty".
Mexican Folk Song: La Llorona (arr. Scott O'Neil)
There are many versions of the legend of La Llorona (The Weeping Woman). One story concerns the Nahua princess La Malinche, the chosen consort of the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes. Seeking revenge for his unfaithfulness, she drowns her children and herself, thereby condemned to seek her lost children forever, wailing all the while. In Mexico and elsewhere, the song is associated with the Day of the Dead. It was used in two recent films: Frida (2002), Julie Taymor's biography of Frida Kahlo, and Disney's Coco (2017).
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868): Overture to La Gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie)
The Thieving Magpie was a huge success at its premiere on May 31, 1817 at La Scala in Milan. The novelist Stendahl, who was present on opening night, wrote that the opera “was one of the most glittering, the most single-minded triumphs I have ever witnessed.”
Based on a French melodrama, the plot concerns Ninetta, a servant girl accused of stealing a silver spoon. Unable to defend herself for fear of revealing that her father has deserted the army, she is sentenced to the scaffold. She is finally spared, amidst much rejoicing, when a thieving magpie is spotted with a silver spoon in its beak.
Years after the first performance, Rossini admitted that “I wrote the overture to The Thieving Magpie the day of its opening in the theater itself, where I was imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stage hands who were instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out the window bodily.”
The opening night audience for The Thieving Magpie included a pupil of the orchestra’ concertmaster. The young man was so angry at Rossini for beginning the overture with two rolls of the snare drum that he armed himself with a dagger during the performance, just to let the composer know how he felt. Rossini promised him never to do it again. After the drumrolls and introductory march, the Overture proper begins with a fast theme taken from the accompaniment to the prison scene in the second act, followed by a contrasting oboe melody, which leads to a typical “Rossini crescendo.”
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924): “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi
Introduced at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on December 14, 1918, Gianni Schicchi is the third in a trilogy of one-act operas titled Il Trittico (The Triptych). Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica are the others. The title character is based on an actual historical person in medieval Florence, mentioned by Dante in The Inferno. In the opera, his daughter Lauretta pleads with him to approve of her lover Rinuccio in the aria, “O mio babbino caro” (Oh, my beloved Daddy). Otherwise, she threatens, she will drown herself. The ploy works.
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880): “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” (Doll Song) from Act I of The Tales of Hoffmann
Called an “opera fantastique,” The Tales of Hoffmann was based on stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, as adapted by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. The composer died four months before the premiere at the Opéra-Comique on February 10, 1881.
The plot concerns three tragic loves of the poet Hoffmann. In the first act, he falls for a mechanical doll named Olympia, who repeatedly winds down and must be wound up again by her inventor. She sings of “the birds in the arbor” who “speak to a young girl of love.”
Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-1899): Overture to Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus is not the best operetta," said conductor Felix Weingartner, “it is the operetta.” Based on a French comedy by Meilhac and Halévy, it was first produced in Vienna at the Theater-an-der Wien on April 5, 1874. The plot concerns masquerades, mistaken identities, devious lawyers and an ocean of champagne.
The Overture consists of the main melodies from the operetta: Rosalinda's lament (“So muss allein ich bleiben”), the chorus (“O je, o je, wie ruhrt mich dies”), and the main waltz from the second act finale.
Program notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.