Behind The Music

There is, in fact, nothing at all in the music even faintly resembling Native American music. Dvořák once called the Negro Spiritual the “folk songs of America,” but used none of those in his New World Symphony, either. So, why the title? Dvořák actually intended the title to carry the suggestion of a greeting “from the New World” to his much-missed countrymen back home – which is why he used a Bohemian melody in the slow movement. There was no question of trying to sound “American”.

What happened is simple enough. Dvořák, that most European of composers, fell victim to that most American of creatures, the promo man. Arthur Mees had written the program note for the premiere without consulting Dvořák, and it’s all there – the “Negro Spiritual slow movement,” Native American pow-wows in the scherzo and a sobbing Hiawatha just about everywhere. Poor Dvořák fiercely denied it all later, but the story has stuck.

The reality is a Czech masterpiece. That America could inspire such music from the Bohemian master is cause enough for national pride without raiding the music itself for local borrowings. The Symphony is bigger than all of us.

SILVESTRE REVUELTAS (1899-1940)

SENSEMAYÁ: CHANT FOR THE KILLING OF A SNAKE

Composed: 1938

Premiered: Mexico City, 1938

Trivia buffs who look closely at the bar scene in the 1935 Mexican movie ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! will notice that the piano is being played (really played, not mimed) by a young man with stereotypical Latin moustache and glinting eyes, sitting under a sign reading “Se suplica no tirare al pianista” – “Please don’t shoot at the pianist.” A very full glass of (real) Tequila sits on the piano. This is Silvestre Revueltas, a composer who set out under the guidance of the less frantic (and much longer-living) Carlos Chavez to become something like music’s answer to Villa and Zapata; like them, he died young and at the height of his powers, though in his case it was the Tequila rather than anyone shooting at him that brought him down.

Sensemayà is the title of a poem by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén which evokes an Afro-Caribbean ritual centered on the killing of a snake. The refrain “Mayombé-bombé-mayombé” recurs some thirty times, portraying the round-dance surrounding the priest-executioner (the mayombero) and the unfortunate snake. Revueltas set this poem in 1938 for voice and small orchestra, but almost immediately took the intriguing decision to remove the vocal part and rescore for a large orchestra. The result was a huge success, greeted in the Mexican press as the “Mexican Rite of Spring” – and this is not an unfair description. “Mayombé-bombé-mayombé” becomes the asymmetric seven-beat rhythmic motto that pervades the work, conjuring up a primitive religious event every bit as savage as the immolation of the Rite’s finale. In some ways, the music’s obsessive churning exceeds anything in Stravinsky, looking forward into the Minimalism of our own time; this is primeval, visceral music.

The snake-killing ritual may not have been entirely drawn from the composer’s (and the poet’s) imagination. In the 1930s, the strange cults that fused with Christianity into Santeria were still a functioning reality in remoter parts of the Latin world, and rituals like this could still be found by anthropologists whose zeal exceeded their survival instinct. That said, the God to whom the Sensemayà snake is sacrificed, Babalu Ayé, is now mainly remembered for being the subject of Desi Arnaz’ signature tune, Babalu. The ritual, in other words, went from The Rite of Spring to I Love Lucy in a generation.

While Revueltas did not invent the Sensemayà ritual, he did largely invent the music. His mentor Chavez had been disappointed to find that much Aztec and other Mexican Indian music was based on surprisingly European-sounding modes, and so had largely invented the “primitive Mexican sound” that made him famous; Revueltas followed the same path uncompromisingly. For genuine exotic Pan-American music in the 1930s, we have to come further north:. There was a small explosion in exoticist music in the United States in the 1930s: paradoxically, there is more genuine Mexican music in Aaron Copland than in Chavez or Revueltas, though it can certainly be said that the latter two sound more Mexican, if only for the reason that those two composers turned a set of gestures and sonorities into what we would now call a brand. Nationalism can be strange thing in music.

Sensemayà remains a masterpiece of Mexican music, from an era when such things were far from rare. Revueltas and Chavez are only starting to emerge as the titans they undoubtedly were, and their fearless blurring of the line between national self-discovery and self-invention carries a cultural message far more universal than the killing of a snake.

EUGENE GOOSSENS (1893-1962)

CONCERTO for OBOE, Op. 45

COMPOSED: 1927

PREMIERED: London, 1927

These are family concerts, so a discreet veil must be placed over the fantastically strange Sydney scandal that destroyed Eugene Goossens’ career in 1956 and led to an early, lonely death under siege from the tabloids. Suffice it to say that he did nothing that would even raise an eyebrow in most American states now. Well, maybe 48 states. If it had happened in California rather than Australia, he would have died with a freeway named after him.

The Goossens family, originally from Belgium, dominated a large swathe of British and later American music for much of the first half of the twentieth century. The two earlier Eugenes (this one’s father and grandfather) were respected conductors and composers; today’s Eugene conducted the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring outside France in London in 1921 and went on to conduct the Rochester Philharmonic and the Cincinnati Symphony on the recommendation of Fritz Reiner. His sister Sidonie was Britain’s undisputed queen of the harp until her death at the age of 105; his brother, Leon, became the gold standard for oboists, and is still remembered with awe, not least for having restarted his career from scratch after an auto accident destroyed much of his face.

Eugene Goossens wrote the single-movement Oboe Concerto for his brother in 1927. It has often been remarked that the opening has an unmistakably Coplandesque feel; curiously, Goossens went on to commission the Fanfare for the Common Man in 1941. That aside, the music mixes elements of the composer’s unique Anglo-Gallic inheritance, with the unmistakable shades of Ravel and Debussy presiding over an equally unmissable English pastoral scene. Leon Goossens’ lifetime project was to unite the French oboe-playing style, with its elegance and vibrato, with the Germanic full tone. His brother’s music allows this reconciliation to take place in an English meadow, with the faintest hint of America beckoning over the horizon. If only Eugene had stayed here, instead of going to Sydney!

MARK FORD (b. 1958)

AFTA-STUBA!

Composed: 2000

Premiered: Dallas, Texas, 2000

Afta-Stuba! is a sequel to Ford’s 1988 composition, Stubernic, which was dedicated to Stefan and Mary Stuber and their studies in Nicaragua – hence the title with "Stuber" and "nic." The composer writes: "Like Stubernic, Afta-Stuba! is written for three players on one low A marimba. It can be performed after Stubernic or independently. A few Stubernic motives are utilized in Afta-Stuba!, and the main theme at bar 20 is derived from the first three notes of the theme of Stubernic.

"In this piece, each player plays in every register of the instrument at different times in the music. The work calls for the players to alternate positions behind the marimba, and even play the instrument from the front side. My goal for Afta-Stuba! was to combine quality music with a little fun to celebrate the potential of the marimba. It was premiered at the 2000 PASIC in Dallas, Texas with Christopher Deane, Shawn Hart and myself as performers."

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813-1901)

OVERTURE, LA FORZA DEL DESTINO

Composed: 1869

Premiered: Milan, Italy, 1869

La Forza del Destino was first performed in St. Petersburg in 1862 with a short prelude instead of the present overture. Verdi took the admirable precaution of taking with him two railway carriages full of Italian sausage and wine when he went to Russia, and set off for home within days of the supply running out. The overture was not the only revision to the original version of the opera. The plot, weird even by the daunting standards of Italian opera, concerns Don Alvaro, a wandering half-Peruvian Indian nobleman, and his sufferings at the hands of inexorable Destiny in Seville: after much emotional turmoil, mistaken identity and a slightly frightening body-count, Don Alvaro flings himself off a cliff after his beloved’s demise at the hands of her demented brother. In the much-improved La Scala version, Don Alvaro merely enters (or rather, re-enters) a monastery.

The music is far better than the story. As the much-lamented Baltimore Opera used to say, it has to be. It is, in fact, sublime. The Overture is based on a motif associated with the tragic Leonora and the inexorability of Fate which recurs later in the opera as the introduction to Leonora’s aria Pace, mio Dio – one of the truly great moments in opera that transcends any amount of plotline absurdity.

RICHARD WAGNER (1813-1883)

OVERTURE: RIENZI

Composed: 1838-1840

Premiered: Dresden, Germany, 1842

Rienzi is the only Wagnerian music-drama that is not performed at the composer’s Bayreuth shrine. It was written in the stylized “Grand Opera” style made famous by composers like Wagner’s arch-enemy Giacomo Meyerbeer; and sounds nothing like the later Wagner epics; indeed, Wagner eventually came to regard it as an embarrassment – a problem made worse by the curious fact that it made him more money while he was alive than all his other operas put together. Not on the first night, however; Wagner missed the first performance while fleeing from his creditors.

The Overture is by far the most famous passage in Rienzi, and includes one of his most famous melodies as its central feature. Wagner would not thank us for noticing it, but that upward grace-note curl at the end of the melody’s first measure is straight out of Götterdämmerung!

JOSEF SUK (1874-1935)

SERENADE FOR STRINGS in E flat

Composed: 1892

Premiered: Tabor, Czech Republic, 1892 (two movements); Prague, 1895 (complete)

For all the great achievements of the composers we hear today, it can safely be said that Josef Suk was special in one unique sphere: he held an Olympic Silver Medal. It is now mostly forgotten that until 1948, the so-called Art Competitions formed an important part of the Olympic Games; composers, writers and artists competed for medals as fiercely as in any track event – and Josef Suk won the Silver(!) for Music in 1932 with Towards A New Life, a piece he had written twelve years earlier. Strangely, the piece was never actually played at the Games.

Suk’s Serenade is easily his most-performed work, written at the age of 18 after his composition teacher, Antonin Dvořák, told him that his music was altogether too miserable; he should write something cheerful. So cheerful is this serene, charming music, in fact, that Dvořák’s daughter Otilie hugged him after the first performance; they married in 1898 (their grandson is the famous violinist Josef Suk). Also enthralled by it was Johannes Brahms, who secured Suk a publisher on the strength of it.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975)

SPANISH DANCE from THE GADFLY, Op. 97

Composed: 1955

Premiered: movie, The Gadfly, Soviet Union, 1955

Perhaps only Dmitri Shostakovich would give an opus number to a movie score (it is the sole example), and perhaps only he would contradict what looks like the ultimate in pomposity by writing such un-pompous music. The movie was based on the thinly-disguised “true” story of Sidney Reilly, the so-called “Ace of Spies,” who met and seduced the author Ethel Voynich in London in 1895. The tale of romantic revolutionary love which he told her, and which she told the world, became hugely popular in the Soviet Union and the other Communist countries – hence the movie. What neither Ethel, nor the movie makers, nor Shostakovich, knew was that Reilly was actually a Metropolitan Police informer at the time, reporting every move she made. So, this music has a layer of irony that even Shostakovich, that ace of ironists, was unaware of.

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

PAVANE POUR UNE INFANTE DÉFUNTE

Composed: 1899

Premiered: Paris, 1902

If this very famous piece sounds surprisingly unlike Ravel and not at all unlike Fauré, this is because it was written as a student assignment for the great man while Ravel was a student at the Paris Conservatoire. Meant to evoke a long-dead Spanish princess dancing the stately pavane, a dance that had died out by the end of the seventeenth century. The piece had no particular personal significance in Ravel’s life, despite the efforts of biographers to find one. He was slightly embarrassed by its popularity, and always encouraged performers to take a faster tempo than the dirge which had already become near-compulsory by 1910; as he said, it was the princess that was dead, not the pavane!

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