Music for theater and film has strong historical roots, inspiring music of extraordinary character — vividly turning action into sound and creating moods of tenderness, romance, confrontation, and celebration.

       This episode of In Focus begins with music by Edvard Grieg, an ardent champion of Norwegian music, art, and theater.  Perhaps best known for his poignant score for the play Peer Gynt, here he pays homage to the humanist playwright Ludvig Holberg with a sparkling and lively suite based on 18th-century dance forms.

       The program concludes with a rarely heard score by the Viennese-born Erich Korngold.  Forced to flee Nazi Germany, Korngold found a new life in California, writing scores brimming with Romantic opulence and helping shape the musical sound of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

FROM HOLBERG'S TIME: Suite in Olden Style, Opus 40
by Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Composed:  for piano solo in 1884

Scored for:  string orchestra by the composer, 1885

Dedicated:  in honor of playwright Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754)

Premiere:  October 1885 in Bergen, Norway

Duration:  about 20 minutes

________________________________
   

G R I E G   N E V E R   H A D  a very high opinion of his Holberg Suite, a piece he wrote as part of a commission to commemorate the occasion of an anniversary in his hometown of Bergen, Norway.  Nevertheless, after its first performance in in 1885 and its publication in Germany, it quickly became popular and has always remained so.

       The origin of the original version, a suite for piano titled Fra Holbergs Tid [From Holberg’s Time and often simply called “The Holberg Suite”], dates to 1884 and planned celebrations for the bicentennial of the birth of Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), a Norwegian philosopher, historian, and playwright who, like Grieg, was born in Bergen.  Holberg was sometimes known as the "Molière of the North" for his creative stageworks filled with wry commentary and observations about the contradictions inherent in humanity's desires and dreams. 

       Following the premiere, performed by the composer, Grieg arranged his suite for strings the following year to fill out a later concert, also in Bergen.

       The main commemorative commission for Grieg in 1884 was actually a larger work, a cantata for male voices and orchestra.  The solo piano suite, something of an afterthought, allowed Grieg to compose in an imagined Baroque style, with dance movements that conform to the standard suite movements of Bach's (and Holberg's) day.  There was a modest craze for this type of suite in the late 19th century, indulged in by a number of French composers including Delibes and Saint-Saëns, somewhat prophetic of the neo-classicism of Hindemith and Stravinsky several decades later.

       In his set of movements, Grieg correctly recreated the meters and forms of old dances, but also infused the music with a warmth and expressiveness that the Baroque generally lacked.

       The Praeludium is in free form, much as Bach would do it, leading to a splendid climax with all the strings sharing the galloping rhythm of the opening.

       The Sarabande, with its characteristic leaning on the second beat of a three-four bar, is stately and subdued, and both halves are repeated, as in all Baroque suites.  Three solo cellos are featured at one point. 

       The Gavotte, another stately dance, alternates within the third movement with a Musette, whose obligatory feature is the drone bass heard throughout this second dance's first half.  Before the drones return, there is some beautifully wistful music passed up from the cellos to the violins.

       The fourth movement, Air, is a more extended movement, full of expressive warmth, and even asking the cellos and basses to sometimes take the melodic lead.

       For his finale, Grieg picked the French Rigaudon as his model, bright and brisk in character.  Leading parts are given to solo violin and solo viola with string crossings that Vivaldi would have been proud of.  A plaintive middle section moves to the minor and to a slower tempo, but the Rigaudon soon returns for an exhilarating close.

—program note by Hugh Macdonald © 2021
     

SYMPHONIC SERENADE in B-flat major, Opus 39
by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957)

Composed:  1947-48

Premiered:  January 15, 1950, by the Vienna Philharmonic

Scored for:  string orchestra

Duration:  about 30 minutes 

________________________________
   

T H E   M A N T E L   O F  child prodigy — and the expectations associated with it  — weighed heavily on Erich Wolfgang Korngold growing up in an Austrian Jewish family in the opening decade of the 20th century.  Recognized as the “next Mendelssohn,” his dazzlingly vibrant music was embraced by the leading composers, conductors, and critics even before he reached his teens.

       The son of prominent music critic Julius Korngold, young Erich met and exceeded these high expectations with a string of successes that would delight a composer of any age.  At 11, his ballet-pantomime Der Schneemann [The Snowman] was a hit at the Vienna Court Opera; at 12 his Piano Sonato No. 2 was performed across Europe by legendary pianist Artur Schnabel; and by 19, his first two operas, Der Ring des Polykrates and Violanta, debuted in Munich under the baton of Bruno Walter to wildly enthusiastic crowds.  This was all a preface to his operatic masterpiece, Die Tote Stadt [The Dead City], which was a sensation in opera houses across the globe and elevated Korngold, at 23, to one of the premier composers in Europe.

       By the mid-1930s, Korngold joined the stream of famous composers moving to California to try their hands at creating music for Hollywood.  His second American film score, in which he provided a suitably suave and swashbuckling soundtrack for Captain Blood (1935), made both the composer and the film’s star, Errol Flynn, overnight sensations.  Korngold followed up with Anthony Adverse (1936), a period drama starring Olivia de Havilland that won him his first of three Academy Awards for best score.

       After these early successes in Los Angeles, Korngold returned to Austria to work on his opera Die Kathrin.  In the midst of those efforts, he received an offer to score the new Errol Flynn vehicle titled The Adventures of Robin Hood.  He initially declined, but political events intervened and forced him to reconsider.  Hitler strong-armed the Austrian government to capitulate to Nazi Party demands, and Korngold quickly arranged to return to L.A.  A month later, Germany annexed Austria during the Anschluss, effectively severing Korngold’s ties to his native country. 

       The Adventures of Robin Hood won Korngold a second Academy Award, helped create the mold for what a Hollywood score should sound like, and earned him both financial and commercial success.  Yet he yearned to return to the symphonic stage and the critical praise that he enjoyed in his youth.

       By the end of World War II, Korngold was exclusively composing music for the concert hall, though, in doing so, his film scores weren’t left entirely behind.  Both his Cello Concerto (premiered in 1946 by Eleanor Aller Slatkin with the Los Angeles Philharmonic) and the Violin Concerto (premiered in 1947 by Jascha Heifetz with the St. Louis Symphony) borrowed extensively from the music he had originally composed for films.  This fact fueled the argument that his work had become too commercial, while critics and European tastemakers decried his neo-Romantic style as old fashioned.

       Korngold began to write his Symphonic Serenade in 1947 — the same year that the Violin Concerto debuted and after he had suffered a heart attack.  This confrontation with mortality may be evident in his heartfelt dedication for the new score: “to Luzi, my beloved wife, my best friend.”  

       According to biographer Brendan Carroll, Korngold shrewdly reached out to the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler with a mutually convenient proposal: Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic would provide Korngold with a grand premiere of his new work, while Furtwängler, who stayed in Germany during the war and continued to perform despite his disapproval of the Nazi Party, could further distance himself from his past associations with the Third Reich by presenting a work by a Jewish composer. 

       By all accounts, the Symphonic Serenade received a warmer reception at its premiere than Korngold’s other late works, perhaps owing to Furtwängler’s performance and the plush Vienna Philharmonic string section.

       Throughout the work, Korngold masterfully shows off the range of a string orchestra, drawing out textures across the spectrum, from lyrical to percussive, eerie to playful.  The piece begins with a late-Romantic theme that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Korngold’s soaring film scores.  The melody dissolves and fragments, however, before reasserting itself.  The furiously paced second movement calls for the deft execution of a variety of string techniques, while also exploring a wide array of sonorities.  Most obvious are the lengthy plucked pizzicato sections, augmented by ethereal sounds created with bowings close to the bridge or above the fingerboard.

       As with his Violin and Cello concertos, the third and fourth movements of the Serenade borrow directly from Korngold’s film scores:  Anthony Adverse and Captain Blood, respectively.  Mahlerian in scope, the dignified third movement finds aching beauty and an emotional depth often interpreted as Korngold’s yearning for the thriving elegance of pre-war Vienna that had been lost.  The final movement starts with a furious rumbling in the bass section, which rises fugue-like through the strings, and then builds both in intensity and complexity to a rousing ending.

—program note by Amanda Angel
       © The Cleveland Orchestra