Triumph over Adversity / Ode to Joy
An American Composer’s Perspective on Ravel & Beethoven
© Robert Xavier Rodríguez
Tonight’s Plano Symphony Orchestra concert presents two musical opposites created a century apart. Maestro Guzman opens his program with Ravel’s somber Concerto for the Left Hand and closes with the joyful outburst of Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony. Appropriately for these troubled times, both works represent the triumph of the human spirit. The Ravel shows how a pianist who lost his right arm in WW I can collaborate with a composer who fought on the opposite side in the same war. The Beethoven celebrates an ideal world where “All men shall be brothers.”
I.
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was one of France’s greatest composers. Like his older compatriot Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Ravel studied at the Paris Conservatory, where his principal teacher was Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924). He was also a classmate of Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). Ravel’s output was relatively small, but his range was wide; his catalogue includes piano solos, chamber music, concertos, orchestral works and operas. His few pieces, nevertheless, particularly the famous Boléro, are performed so often that the royalties from his compositions continue to be greater than those of any other French composer. Ravel’s music is characterized by formal and stylistic elegance and by a sensuous gift for sound, executed with meticulous craftsmanship. Ravel steeped himself in the study of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian methods of orchestration, and his masterly scoring is a supreme example of how to use a symphony orchestra to create opulent and powerful colors with maximum clarity.
Ravel composed his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major and his Piano Concerto in G simultaneously between 1929 and 1930. During that year, Ravel was able to turn on a centime back and forth from one concerto to the other, and he created two completely different works, each with its own distinctive personality. The G-Major is jazzy and ebullient, while the D-Major is dark and full of fierce, driving determination.
Left-handed people only constitute 10% of the world’s population, and they live in a world designed for the other 90%. In Italian, the word for “left” is “sinistra,” which has connotations of bad intent. In French, “gauche” means “awkward” or “rude,” and, in English, we use the term “left-handed compliment.” Composers had occasionally written for the left hand, most notably Johannes Brahms’ piano transcription of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for solo violin, and there had been a few transcriptions of two-handed works for the left hand. It was pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961), however, who brought works for the left hand to center stage.
Wittgenstein came from a wealthy and intellectually distinguished Austrian family; his younger brother was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. When he lost his right arm in World War I, Wittgenstein had the will and the financial means to seek out composers who could write him concertos that would restart his concert career. He turned to Maurice Ravel, who, ironically, had served in the French army against which Wittgenstein had fought. Wittgenstein also commissioned concertos from Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, Richard Strauss and other composers.
Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand remains the masterpiece in this genre, and it is one of the finest concertos of the twentieth century. We can hear the composer taking to heart the horrors of war and the agonizing personal adversity of a pianist’s losing an arm. In one, short, concentrated movement, Ravel creates a long, dramatic arc, starting with low, “sinister” rumblings in the basses, bass clarinet and contra bassoon, adding horns and building to a mighty fortissimo orchestral outburst, from which the piano emerges with a proudly defiant cadenza full of forward-moving energy. The music gradually unwinds to a more tranquil and uplifting middle section, in which Ravel gives the soloist one long, ingeniously constructed solo line that creates the miraculous effect of three-voice counterpoint. He keeps the orchestral scoring light, sometimes including references to Basque folk music, often featuring solo winds and the delicate harp, with the piano sound always in the foreground. A quiet, march later develops, with triplets within the beats. The march seems playful at first, but when it returns, it becomes more and more determined. The music builds to one final extended and powerful piano cadenza. Again, Ravel creates astounding contrapuntal complexity within the compass of one hand, after which piano and orchestra complete the journey with a triumphant coda.
Under the inspirational surface of the story, however, lurks another irony. As it turned out, Wittgenstein did not especially like Ravel’s concerto. Perhaps, he was looking for a traditionally flamboyant showpiece which would dazzle the audience in the grand manner. Ravel was incensed that Wittgenstein took considerable liberties with the score, even rewriting some passages. The pianist wrote to the composer saying, “Performers must not be slaves,” to which Ravel replied, “Performers are slaves.” With other commissioned works, Wittgenstein showed the same disregard for the composers’ original intentions, and his commissioning contracts with the composers gave the pianist exclusive performing rights for an extended period. Still, if Wittgenstein had kept both of his hands, history would have forgotten him. With only one hand, he made himself immortal. Wittgenstein spawned a whole new musical legacy, culminating in Ravel’s masterwork and continuing with many more concertos for the left hand which have been and are yet to be written.
II.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was one of the most important and influential of all composers. Like his Spanish contemporary the painter Francisco Goya, Beethoven began his career in the days of the powdered wigs and Classical style of Mozart and Haydn and became a stylistic bridge to the larger, freer forms of the revolutionary Romantic era. Composers of succeeding generations who wrote in widely differing styles –- from symphonic “Classical Romantics” such as Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Mendelssohn to more theatrical “Romantic Romantics” such as Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz –- all acknowledged Beethoven as their musical inspiration.
Beethoven’s audiences and critics did not always appreciate his powerful and innovative music. (Nicholas Slonimsky’s rogues’ gallery for critics, the Lexicon of Musical Invective, shows pages of scathing reviews.) Also, Beethoven’s cantankerous personality and the deafness of the last eleven years of his life increased his isolation from the world around him. Beethoven, thus, became the prototype for the 19th-century image of the “misunderstood artist”: not a regular member of society, but living on the fringes.
It must be noted, however, that Beethoven was also a highly successful professional who said, “Know that you are dealing with a true artist, who likes to be well paid for his work.” Beethoven performed internationally as a pianist, he produced concerts of his music, and he was the first composer to support himself entirely from his commissions, publications and public appearances without a day job at a church, a court or a school. At his death in Vienna, he was so well known that 30,000 people came to his funeral, including Schubert, who was a pallbearer and died the following year.
In the minds of many concert goers, the musical creative process is simple and godlike, as in the play and film Amadeus’s depiction of Mozart, who wrote masterpiece after masterpiece quickly and easily, as if taking dictation directly from heaven. Beethoven, on the other hand, provides a more human (and more realistic) model of the artist at work. Beethoven labored long and hard over every note. His sketchbooks are full of multiple alternate versions and pages of furiously crossed-out attempts. As Leonard Bernstein put it, Beethoven had “an inner road map of what the next note had to be, a sense that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant…Imagine a lifetime of this struggle, movement after movement -- always this constant dedication to perfection, to the concept of inevitability.”
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (1824) is regarded as one of the monuments of Western Civilization. In the symphony, Beethoven wrestles with two musical problems. The first is the then-unheard-of idea of a work that begins with purely instrumental forces and then bursts forth with vocal soloists and chorus at the end. Up to Beethoven’s time, choral works had had instrumental introductions, most notably Haydn’s unsettling evocation of “Chaos” at the beginning of his oratorio The Creation, but, if voices were involved, then voices were the focus throughout the composition. To add voices to an extended instrumental work, the voices need to have a text. And the music that precedes the vocal setting of the text needs, somehow, to work the listener up to the point that the instrumental forces seem to be at their limit and that the only logical next step is to break out of one timbral sphere into another.
Sixteen years before creating his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven composed a choral Fantasy
(Op. 80) as a study for the symphony. For the Fantasy, Beethoven chose a text which follows Beethoven’s grand idealistic vision by depicting a Utopian world in which music and all of the arts are united to receive the grace of a Higher Being. The vocal portion of the Ninth Symphony comes from Friedrich Schiller’s similarly idealistic "Ode to Joy" (1885), which celebrates a vision of world peace through the arts where “alle Menschen werden Brüdern” (“all men shall be brothers”). Beethoven uses the same harmonic progression (I followed by Flat VI) for the climactic choral utterance in both works: in the Choral Fantasy it is "Lieb und Kraft" ("love and strength"); in the symphony, the words are “vor Gott” (“before God”).
The second musical problem that Beethoven gives himself in both works is whether the rhythmic and melodic material should change with the addition of voices and, if so, how. The Fantasy has a solo piano introduction, and the symphony begins with three mighty orchestral movements. In both cases, the Finale introduces a joyous, new hymn-like tune in major key, suitable for group singing. The two melodies even bear a family resemblance. They have the same chord changes and the same limerick-like phrase lengths (AABBA), and they could easily be played together if transposed to the same key.
The first movement of the Ninth is a stormy sonata-allegro, which begins softly and mysteriously with hints of the opening theme before the theme’s explosive full statement. Beethoven conceived it on a grand scale, lasting longer than many whole symphonies by Haydn and Mozart. Strangely, for such a large movement, there is no repeat of the exposition, as was the norm in Beethoven’s time. Instead, after a turbulent development, the composer provides two statements of the recapitulation. The first is a fortissimo version of the exposition with the main theme in major key. As a coda, Beethoven follows his own model in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony by providing a second recapitulation which reworks the original themes and adds new material.
A symphonic second movement was traditionally slow, but Beethoven surprises here with a furious moto perpetuo scherzo written in the same key as the first movement, as if to continue the previous argument by musically saying, “and furthermore…” The tempo is so fast that each bar, in triple meter, seems like only one beat in a larger 4/4 pulse. After a contrasting middle section in major key and duple meter, the vigorous scherzo returns, with just a hint of the gentler trio before the end. The trombones first play in this movement, and the timpani parts are famous for their unprecedented prominence and power.
Beethoven saves the slow movement for after the scherzo. In the contrasting key of B flat, the opening theme serenely unfolds in a long series of transcendently beautiful variations that, like the first movement, flow to last the length of another Classical symphony. Listeners familiar with the music of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) will recognize Beethoven’s towering influence in Mahler’s soulful and extended symphonic adagios.
In the final movement, vocal soloists and chorus join the orchestra (another compositional feature that Mahler emulated). Like the Fantasy, it begins with a rousing and purposely disjointed introduction. The music recalls bits of the previous movements to create a cyclical unity that Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner continued in their music. Throughout the introduction, the orchestra makes hints, teasingly, of the “Ode to Joy” to come; then, again as in the Fantasy, the united forces present the final hymn with variations, interspersed with contrasting episodes. At the end, there is a majestic restatement of the theme, followed by a breathless coda that bubbles over with joyous, cosmic universality. At the premiere performance, Beethoven, by then completely deaf, followed his score at the side of the stage. He continued to conduct to himself when the music ended, and one of the performers had to tap the composer on the shoulder and turn him around to face the screaming audience to show him that it was time to acknowledge the applause.
Robert Xavier Rodríguez has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Dallas Symphony and the San Antonio Symphony. His music is published by G. Schirmer. He holds an Endowed Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and is University Professor and Director of the Musica Nova ensemble at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Friedrich Schiller
An die Freude / Ode to Joy
English Translation
Oh friends, no more of these sounds!
Let us sing more cheerful songs, more full of joy!
Joy, bright spark of divinity, Daughter of Elysium,
Fire-inspired, we tread Thy sanctuary!
Thy magic power reunites all that custom has divided.
All men shall become brothers under the sway of thy gentle wings.
Whoever has created an abiding friendship
Or has won a true and loving wife,
All who can call at least one soul theirs, join in our song of praise!
But any who do not must creep tearfully away from our circle.
All creatures drink of joy at nature’s breast;
Just and unjust alike taste of her gift.
She gave us kisses and the fruit of the vine, a true friend to the end.
Even the worm can feel contentment, and the cherub stands before God!
Gladly, the heavenly bodies run their courses through the splendor of the firmament;
Thus, brothers, you should run your race, as a hero going to conquest.
You millions, I embrace you. This kiss is for all the world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy there must dwell a loving Father.
Do you fall in worship, you millions? World, do you know your Creator?
Seek Him in the heavens! Above the stars He must dwell.