Behind The Music
“Behind the Music” is the Greater Baltimore Youth Orchestras chance for you to read the program notes for each concert before you arrive! This allows you a greater understanding of each symphony, concerto, and other work that you are going to hear at the concert, giving you a deeper experience with the music!
by Bill Scanlan Murphy
Find out more about Bill Scanlan Murphy, the GBYO's Historian. Also, join him for a fun and fascinating pre-concert discussion before each concert!
MAX BRUCH (1838-1920)
ROMANCE IN F for Viola and Orchestra, Op.
85
Composed: 1911
Premiered:
Berlin, 1911
To get some idea of just how conservative a composer Max Bruch was, we should remember that he completed this lovely work in the same month that Stravinsky started his first sketches for the Rite of Spring. Bruch considered even such softies as Rimsky-Korsakov and – incredibly – Brahms to be the demon spawn of the Beast of Bayreuth. His idol was Beethoven – or, at least, the Beethoven of the Pathetique Sonata and the Violin Concerto, not the questioning adventurer of the late quartets. The Romance is dedicated to Maurice Vieux, the principal violist of the Paris Opera, but the ferocious anti-French sentiment of the Imperial Berlin of 1911 meant that the first performance had to be given by a German, Willy Hess, who taught with Bruch at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.
GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)
SYMPHONY No. 2 in C Minor, Resurrection
I: Allegro maestoso - Mit durchaus ernstem und feierlichen Ausdruck
Composed: 1888 (as Totenfeier)
Premiered: Berlin, 1895
In 1886, the 26-year old Gustav Mahler was invited to complete Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Die drei Pintos by Weber’s grandson, Baron Carl von Weber. This was a considerable honor, and Mahler set to work with all the enthusiasm of a young composer smelling his Big Break. Less commendably, he also fell into bed with the Baron’s wife, and rapidly became understandably paranoid about the possibility that he might one day have to fight a duel with the Baron (not the first, in the Baron’s case). One of the odder products of this unpleasant state struck him on the night of the opera’s first performance (and after the lavish reception that followed it). He experienced an alcoholic hallucination (or a nightmare – accounts differ) in which he saw himself lying on a bier surrounded with wreaths. Out of this grew a symphonic poem (or “movement” – Mahler himself took nearly five years to make up his mind) entitled Totenfeier (Funeral Rites). After much revision, re-orchestration (each effort huger than the last) and the usual Mahlerian ditherings, Totenfeier finally reached the public as the first movement of the 2nd Symphony.
In 1894, Mahler went to the funeral of the great conductor Hans von Bülow, where a setting of Klopstock’s poem Auferstehung (Resurrection) was sung; Mahler was sufficiently impressed by the poem to decide to build a vast symphony around it. The result was the mighty Second. Not entirely coincidentally, von Bülow’s funeral was de facto the largest musical job fair in the German-speaking world that year; connections that Mahler made there led him first to Vienna and ultimately to New York. In Mahler, the artistic, the transcendental and the downright narcissistic are always impossible to separate.
The movement is in a clear, if unconventional, variation of sonata form. Often referred to as a funeral march, the music is in fact far too slow for anything so sprightly; this is a confrontation with Death itself (or so Mahler wishes us to believe). The first appearance of the second subject in E major is a surprise (as is its early appearance in C major, long before the recapitulation), but in reality, this work is a particularly clear example of purely formal devices being used for “romantic” purposes. Only the Berliozian appearance of the Dies Irae and the usual frantic Mahler dynamics serve to remind us that Mahler the metaphysical mountebank and Mahler the formal technician are actually the same person.
HOWARD HANSON (1896-1991)
SYMPHONY No. 2, Romantic
II: Andante con tenerezza
III: Allegro con brio
Composed: 1929-30
Premiered: Boston, 1930
Hanson’s Second Symphony shares the preposterous distinction of being Least-Likely-Music-To-Be-Heard-In-A-Horror-Movie with Handel’s aria Priva son; both were featured in the Alien series – about as far out of context as music gets, especially music with the emotional and structural straightforwardness of Hanson. John Williams, that doyen of eclecticism, has even openly acknowledged his debt to the Romantic in his music for E.T. Far from being an extraterrestrial symphony, the work was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The Symphony’s title – not a nickname – is the composer’s, but his own notes for the first performance were the driest of formal analyses. Elsewhere, however, he said that he hoped that “ …romanticism will find in this country rich soil for a new, young, and vigorous growth.” Written at a time when Stravinskian neo-classical irony was the ruling dynamic, this was very near to fighting talk, and drove Hanson into the critical outer darkness for many of his more “adventurous” contemporaries. Hanson drew on his own Nordic background and from the musical vocabulary of his hero Sibelius to suggest a new direction for the restless energies of his time. In his own way, the arch-conservative Hanson stood in relation to his contemporaries like Bruch stood to his, though without the often astounding rancor that befell Bruch.
Though we shall not be hearing the first movement of the Symphony today, we shall be hearing much of its material, as Hanson unifies the work by frequent cross-references between movements. After the statement of the yearning main theme of the slow movement, much of what we hear grows from material originally heard in the first movement, all of which will be heard again in the lively third movement. As so often in the music of the most “romantic” composers, Hanson’s music depends on these purely structural elements to make its most lavish emotional points.
MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839-1881)
HOPAK from SOROCHINTSKY FAIR
Composed: 1858-1881
Premiered: Moscow, 1931 (version by Vessarion Shebalin)
The composer Balakirev famously once referred to Mussorgsky as “little short of an idiot,” but posterity insists on thinking otherwise. Sorochintsky Fair was an operatic treatment of a Gogol short story which occupied him on and off for most of his chaotic life, and was still unfinished when Mussorgsky finally succumbed to nearly a gallon of vodka in 1881; it was first performed fifty years after his death. Over the years, he himself plundered the sketches of this perpetual work-in-progress for material to be used in other works, the most famous being the Night on the Bare Mountain. Far less frantic, but just as lively, is this folk-dance, which, through numerous arrangements, has become by far the most famous passage in the opera.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791)
DIVERTIMENTO in F, K.138
Composed: 1772
Premiered: Vienna, 1772
I: Allegro
III: Presto
Mozart was all of sixteen when he composed this charming work, scribbled out while he was on his way to Italy for the premiere of his opera Lucio Sulla. The title – if “Divertimento” warrants the term – is not the composer’s; the original three movements were originally performed under the titles “Serenade” and “Notturno” before Koechel cataloged them as a Divertimento, which normally has more than three movements. To add to the confusion, it has even been performed as “Salzburg Symphony No. 2”.
BEDŘICH SMETANA (1824-1884)
COUNTRY WEDDING from THE MOLDAU ( VLTAVA)
Composed: 1874
Premiered: Prague, 1874
Smetana’s great personal secret was the fact that this great Czech nationalist composer could barely speak Czech or read it without a dictionary, coming as he did from the German-speaking community in Bohemia. Nonetheless, this delightful rustic miniature from the symphonic poem is genuine Slavic music in exactly the way that the melody we all know from Vltava – the surging melody representing the river Moldau itself – is not. That’s a Swedish folksong. The Country Wedding, however, is a genuine Czech Polka.
NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844-1908)
CAPRICCIO ESPAGNOL
Composed: 1887
Premiered: Moscow, 1887
The Capriccio Espagnol dates from Rimsky-Korsakov’s service as a naval officer. On the world cruise of the armed clipper Almaz he visited the United States, Great Britain – and Spain, where he bought a book of folksongs that lay in a drawer in St. Petersburg until he came to write this, the ultimate example of Spanish Tourist Music. With so many foreign composers – Rimsky, Ravel, Debussy, Chausson – writing their musical memoirs of Spain, we must ponder the odd fact that we don’t have de Falla’s, or Granados’, musical evocations of Russia , or indeed anywhere other than their own, musically endlessly fertile, land.
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