All notes are copyright Graeme Steele Johnson; please do not use without permission. A more extensive portfolio is available upon request.
Mahler: Symphony No. 9 in D major
Mahler, in his life as well as his music, represents a study in dichotomies, an unlikely and unsustainable collision of seemingly incompatible poles. First, there is the messy business of his tangled domestic identities. It was Vienna that bore many of the fruits of Mahler’s professional life, as it had for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms before him. There, in that cultural Mecca, he wrote music that bespeaks his humbler roots in provincial Bohemia, the same roots that would undermine his sense of belonging in the cosmopolitan capital, even as it supported his professional activities. There is his dual career as a conductor and composer, alternately complementary and conflicting pursuits. Not least of all, there is his straddling of two embittered religions, a begrudging conversion to Catholicism that clinched his appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but didn’t spare him from the anti-Semitic forces resolved to attack his career.
And in the Ninth Symphony, there is the elegiac farewell that somehow affirms life with its dying breath. Leonard Bernstein called it “a sonic presentation of death itself…which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it,” and the heralds of this dual reading are present from the opening bars of the symphony. Cellos and horn utter the symphony’s first sounds as they trade pedal A’s at odd intervals, often likened to irregular palpitations of a faltering heart. But the skipping heartbeat grows distant as bell tones in the harp and its echoes in the horn awaken other voices (or is this all a dream, an illusion of extra time?). Stirring violas and double basses add to this ethereal nostalgia before the second violins, in a series of wonderful sighs, breathe fragments of lyricism into the woodsy scene. And with this breath, this most fundamental life-force, Mahler celebrates life even as he juxtaposes it against the backdrop of the inevitable death announced in the first measures.
Life begets life, and so Mahler permits his two-note sighing figure to bloom into ever-stretching threads of melody — never the long-spun, lyrical theme we’re waiting for, but intimations of one, a melody shrouded in the gossamer veil of memory, or, perhaps, a tune in its twilight years that strives for a life of its own but lacks the vitality to skirt the warm caress of death. What emerges is a charming and intimate elaboration on the sighing motive that sways gently, like trees in the breeze. A pickup note syncopated over the barline and a leap upward that resolves down in the sigh provide more than a vaguely familiar Viennese lilt; this is Mahler’s counterintuitive quote of a waltz by Johann Strauss, “Freuet Euch des Lebens” (Enjoy Life).
Mahler’s tender, if peculiar, homage to Strauss will serve as a place of repose throughout the movement, a shelter from the storm of the more agitated episodes in between. But for now, Mahler upsets the tranquil scene as the orchestra reels into a violent fanfare led by the horns. The turmoil is short-lived; a brief but turbulent build-up spills over into a luxuriant, resplendent recasting of the sigh motive at fortissimo. This quicksilver movement lacks the comforting organization of strict sonata form; we never know where we’re going next, only that we won’t be there for long. Instead of a formal blueprint to latch onto, we have the guideposts of the opening omens — the tripping heartbeat and the harp’s tolling of the bells, both refracted through different instruments and interval mutations — and the soothing reminder to Enjoy Life along the way, even as we don’t know what’s coming.
After the celestial settling of the first movement, the second introduces an earthbound ländler, made rustic by the hollow composite sound of widely-spaced instrument pairings: bass clarinet doubling oboe, bassoons in conversation with piccolo. This is music of the country, a dead giveaway of Mahler’s Bohemian origins. The cumbersome, provincial dance is left behind as strings take over in a più mosso section, instead suggesting a sort of demented waltz — drunken, maybe, but always good-natured. The movement continues to explore this familiar dichotomy, simple joys amid disfigured, even hostile dance rhythms, until the raucous scene recedes apologetically into the distance.
The sardonic third movement Burleske sees a crass intersection of dissonance with Baroque-style counterpoint. But even here, Mahler creates oases of calm as a solo trumpet, hopeful, but not without a tinge of melancholy, heralds the theme of the coming Finale.
That the Ninth Symphony came on the heels of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde suggests an interesting creative impetus for the symphony, the last he would complete. For all of its grand, symphonic scope, its all-encompassing summation of the past and its prophetic look toward the future, Das Lied von der Erde was still bound to the individual experience by the personal vessel of song. To give voice to the general human condition itself, Mahler had to abandon the voice altogether and take up instead the more universal language of the instrumental cosmos. The symphony is more than autobiographical, and the failing heart of the opening isn’t just Mahler’s. It signifies a farewell to tonality — to music as Mahler knew it — and maybe also an instinctual farewell to society, written on the eve of the political traumas that would plague the 20th century.
To characterize the titanic Adagio that frames the Ninth Symphony, the final chapter of this work of a lifetime, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Leonard Bernstein’s:
"And so we come to the final incredible page. And this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögern (hesitating); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them as they dematerialize; we are holding two—then one. One, and suddenly none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands, one . . . none. We are half in love with easeful death . . . now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything."
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Mahler, in his life as well as his music, represents a study in dichotomies, an unlikely and unsustainable collision of seemingly incompatible poles. First, there is the messy business of his tangled domestic identities. It was Vienna that bore many of the fruits of Mahler’s professional life, as it had for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms before him. There, in that cultural Mecca, he wrote music that bespeaks his humbler roots in provincial Bohemia, the same roots that would undermine his sense of belonging in the cosmopolitan capital, even as it supported his professional activities. There is his dual career as a conductor and composer, alternately complementary and conflicting pursuits. Not least of all, there is his straddling of two embittered religions, a begrudging conversion to Catholicism that clinched his appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but didn’t spare him from the anti-Semitic forces resolved to attack his career.
And in the Ninth Symphony, there is the elegiac farewell that somehow affirms life with its dying breath. Leonard Bernstein called it “a sonic presentation of death itself…which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it,” and the heralds of this dual reading are present from the opening bars of the symphony. Cellos and horn utter the symphony’s first sounds as they trade pedal A’s at odd intervals, often likened to irregular palpitations of a faltering heart. But the skipping heartbeat grows distant as bell tones in the harp and its echoes in the horn awaken other voices (or is this all a dream, an illusion of extra time?). Stirring violas and double basses add to this ethereal nostalgia before the second violins, in a series of wonderful sighs, breathe fragments of lyricism into the woodsy scene. And with this breath, this most fundamental life-force, Mahler celebrates life even as he juxtaposes it against the backdrop of the inevitable death announced in the first measures.
Life begets life, and so Mahler permits his two-note sighing figure to bloom into ever-stretching threads of melody — never the long-spun, lyrical theme we’re waiting for, but intimations of one, a melody shrouded in the gossamer veil of memory, or, perhaps, a tune in its twilight years that strives for a life of its own but lacks the vitality to skirt the warm caress of death. What emerges is a charming and intimate elaboration on the sighing motive that sways gently, like trees in the breeze. A pickup note syncopated over the barline and a leap upward that resolves down in the sigh provide more than a vaguely familiar Viennese lilt; this is Mahler’s counterintuitive quote of a waltz by Johann Strauss, “Freuet Euch des Lebens” (Enjoy Life).
Mahler’s tender, if peculiar, homage to Strauss will serve as a place of repose throughout the movement, a shelter from the storm of the more agitated episodes in between. But for now, Mahler upsets the tranquil scene as the orchestra reels into a violent fanfare led by the horns. The turmoil is short-lived; a brief but turbulent build-up spills over into a luxuriant, resplendent recasting of the sigh motive at fortissimo. This quicksilver movement lacks the comforting organization of strict sonata form; we never know where we’re going next, only that we won’t be there for long. Instead of a formal blueprint to latch onto, we have the guideposts of the opening omens — the tripping heartbeat and the harp’s tolling of the bells, both refracted through different instruments and interval mutations — and the soothing reminder to Enjoy Life along the way, even as we don’t know what’s coming.
After the celestial settling of the first movement, the second introduces an earthbound ländler, made rustic by the hollow composite sound of widely-spaced instrument pairings: bass clarinet doubling oboe, bassoons in conversation with piccolo. This is music of the country, a dead giveaway of Mahler’s Bohemian origins. The cumbersome, provincial dance is left behind as strings take over in a più mosso section, instead suggesting a sort of demented waltz — drunken, maybe, but always good-natured. The movement continues to explore this familiar dichotomy, simple joys amid disfigured, even hostile dance rhythms, until the raucous scene recedes apologetically into the distance.
The sardonic third movement Burleske sees a crass intersection of dissonance with Baroque-style counterpoint. But even here, Mahler creates oases of calm as a solo trumpet, hopeful, but not without a tinge of melancholy, heralds the theme of the coming Finale.
That the Ninth Symphony came on the heels of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde suggests an interesting creative impetus for the symphony, the last he would complete. For all of its grand, symphonic scope, its all-encompassing summation of the past and its prophetic look toward the future, Das Lied von der Erde was still bound to the individual experience by the personal vessel of song. To give voice to the general human condition itself, Mahler had to abandon the voice altogether and take up instead the more universal language of the instrumental cosmos. The symphony is more than autobiographical, and the failing heart of the opening isn’t just Mahler’s. It signifies a farewell to tonality — to music as Mahler knew it — and maybe also an instinctual farewell to society, written on the eve of the political traumas that would plague the 20th century.
To characterize the titanic Adagio that frames the Ninth Symphony, the final chapter of this work of a lifetime, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Leonard Bernstein’s:
"And so we come to the final incredible page. And this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögern (hesitating); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them as they dematerialize; we are holding two—then one. One, and suddenly none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands, one . . . none. We are half in love with easeful death . . . now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain . . . And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything."
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Chamber Music Northwest "Clarinet Celebration": Introductory Essay
That the clarinet has become inextricably linked with such an impressive variety of styles and that it captured the hearts of so many master composers in its relatively short lifespan must be a testament to the instrument’s chameleon versatility, if not also to some universal appeal of its fundamental voice. It was, in fact, the instrument that most closely resembled the human voice according to Mozart, who himself can be said to have invented the soul of the clarinet. With his miraculous Concerto and chamber music, Mozart liberated the clarinet from its early-Classical trumpet-like role, and realized for the first time its lyrical, cantabile potential, its agility, and the vocal, operatic qualities inherent in the contrast between its registers. The uniquely vocal qualities of the clarinet found resonances in successive composers as well, as Schubert, that peerless architect of German art songs, singled out the clarinet to elevate to an equal plane as his soprano in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock). For their part, Mendelssohn and Weber styled more operatic interpretations of the instrument’s persona, but clearly very much in line with the tradition initiated by Mozart. The clarinet would intersect with opera again in the second half of the 19th century, as clarinetist-composers engaged by Verdi and Mascagni milked the pyrotechnic capabilities of the instrument to create dazzling fantasies on beloved opera themes for advertising purposes.
Musicians outside the classical canon also embraced the clarinet for its vocal potential. The clarinet is virtually inseparable from the aesthetic identity of Jewish klezmer music, which uses it as a melodic instrument for its ability to imitate human laughs and sobs. As the Jews and Roma lived side-by-side in Eastern and Central Europe, so did their klezmer and Romani musical traditions rub against each other, and so the clarinet unsurprisingly figures prominently into gypsy music as well. Certain Hungarian classical composers provided notated estimations of the clarinet’s function in their native folk idiom, such as in the gypsy-inspired cadenzas in Zoltán Kodály’s orchestral suite, Dances of Galanta, or in Béla Bartók’s trio, Contrasts, for clarinet, violin and piano. Even Brahms, often judged a musical purist by his contemporaries, referenced the clarinet’s gypsy-klezmer heritage in the folksy, rhapsodic second movement of his Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115.
It is worth pausing to consider Brahms’ intimate, serendipitous relationship with the clarinet. Like Mozart before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Poulenc and Nielsen after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld — in a performance of works by none other than Mozart and Weber — that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years, the glowing embers of his mature genius: not just the four sublime clarinet works (a Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115, and two Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.
One of Brahms’ affectionate nicknames for Mühlfeld was “nightingale of the orchestra,” and he was neither the first nor the last to draw the comparison between the clarinet and birds. Whether channeling perky chirping or honeyed birdsong, composers from Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony) to Mahler (First Symphony) and Respighi (Pines of Rome) to Messiaen (Quartet for the End of Time) looked to the clarinet to play the role.
In France, the clarinet profited from a storied woodwind pedagogical tradition at the Paris Conservatory, and the school’s annual Concours nourished the instrument’s repertoire as composition professors penned new contest pieces each year. Incredibly, it was these rather prosaic conditions that gave birth to Debussy’s otherworldly Première Rhapsodie, a spellbinding work that the composer ultimately declared “one of the most pleasing [he had] ever written.”
Meanwhile, Debussy’s fellow Impressionist Maurice Ravel (who also availed himself of the clarinet in his chamber music: Introduction and Allegro and Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé) became acquainted with George Gershwin and fascinated by jazz, in which the clarinet also found itself at home. Indeed, in the collective conscious, Gershwin and the clarinet are practically synonymous, thanks to the iconic, wailing clarinet glissando that opens his Rhapsody in Blue. In addition to his sensational performances in the jazz idiom, Benny Goodman was also behind several of the most important clarinet commissions of the 20th century; Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, and Bartók’s Contrasts are among some of the works written for the “King of Swing.” It is telling that the clarinet’s robust repertoire also sports such 20th-century landmark works as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire; that the instrument so often finds itself in the hands of such masters surely points to its unique expressive qualities.
The diversity of the clarinet instrumental family also contributes to its versatility, and nowhere is the breadth of the clarinet’s relatives put on display like in the clarinet choir. If Mozart did, in fact, invent the soul of the clarinet, so, too, did his music for clarinet ensembles breathe life into the future genre of the clarinet choir. While still a far cry from the 27-piece clarinet assemblage that sprouted in Brussels 100 years after his death, Mozart’s works for three to five mixed members of the clarinet family seem to respond to the same homogeneity of timbre and extensive range that made the full-sized clarinet choir attractive in later centuries. Indeed, its uniform, reedy texture throughout its formidable range of up to six octaves has prompted some to point to the organ-like qualities of a full-range clarinet choir, an association that Guido Six tests in his arrangement of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor featured on this summer’s “Clarinet Critical Mass” program.
The aforementioned Belgian band of clarinets was created in 1896 by Professor Gustave Poncelet at the Brussels Conservatory, and is generally considered the earliest true clarinet choir. It was after hearing Poncelet’s group — in an arrangement of none other than Mozart’s G minor Symphony — that Richard Strauss was inspired to include the entire instrument family in his orchestras: he did so in his 1909 opera Elektra, which calls for eight players of various clarinets and its derivatives.
In the United States, New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinetist Simeon Bellison spearheaded the most significant clarinet choir of its time, growing the ensemble from its humble beginnings as a quartet of his students in 1927, to a 75-member, mixed-gender choir by 1948. Sponsored by the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, Bellison’s Clarinet Ensemble appears in New York Philharmonic’s program archives as early as 1931 for performances at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, and received financial support from the orchestra for instrument commissions and member scholarships.
The Clarinet Ensemble’s repertoire consisted of works written specifically for it, supplemented by arrangements of music of the great composers done by Bellison himself. One New York Philharmonic program from 1936 asserts that “the clarinet is the only wind instrument which can be assembled as an orchestral unit, owing to its colorful tone approximating the human voice, its technical flexibility and its long range.” Chamber Music Northwest’s Clarinet Celebration was designed to honor and affirm the storied tradition of the clarinet and its repertoire in a similar fashion to Bellison’s programming: an eclectic array of originals and adaptations bookended by Mozart, to whom we owe all of the instrument’s magnificent heritage.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
That the clarinet has become inextricably linked with such an impressive variety of styles and that it captured the hearts of so many master composers in its relatively short lifespan must be a testament to the instrument’s chameleon versatility, if not also to some universal appeal of its fundamental voice. It was, in fact, the instrument that most closely resembled the human voice according to Mozart, who himself can be said to have invented the soul of the clarinet. With his miraculous Concerto and chamber music, Mozart liberated the clarinet from its early-Classical trumpet-like role, and realized for the first time its lyrical, cantabile potential, its agility, and the vocal, operatic qualities inherent in the contrast between its registers. The uniquely vocal qualities of the clarinet found resonances in successive composers as well, as Schubert, that peerless architect of German art songs, singled out the clarinet to elevate to an equal plane as his soprano in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock). For their part, Mendelssohn and Weber styled more operatic interpretations of the instrument’s persona, but clearly very much in line with the tradition initiated by Mozart. The clarinet would intersect with opera again in the second half of the 19th century, as clarinetist-composers engaged by Verdi and Mascagni milked the pyrotechnic capabilities of the instrument to create dazzling fantasies on beloved opera themes for advertising purposes.
Musicians outside the classical canon also embraced the clarinet for its vocal potential. The clarinet is virtually inseparable from the aesthetic identity of Jewish klezmer music, which uses it as a melodic instrument for its ability to imitate human laughs and sobs. As the Jews and Roma lived side-by-side in Eastern and Central Europe, so did their klezmer and Romani musical traditions rub against each other, and so the clarinet unsurprisingly figures prominently into gypsy music as well. Certain Hungarian classical composers provided notated estimations of the clarinet’s function in their native folk idiom, such as in the gypsy-inspired cadenzas in Zoltán Kodály’s orchestral suite, Dances of Galanta, or in Béla Bartók’s trio, Contrasts, for clarinet, violin and piano. Even Brahms, often judged a musical purist by his contemporaries, referenced the clarinet’s gypsy-klezmer heritage in the folksy, rhapsodic second movement of his Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115.
It is worth pausing to consider Brahms’ intimate, serendipitous relationship with the clarinet. Like Mozart before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Poulenc and Nielsen after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld — in a performance of works by none other than Mozart and Weber — that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years, the glowing embers of his mature genius: not just the four sublime clarinet works (a Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115, and two Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.
One of Brahms’ affectionate nicknames for Mühlfeld was “nightingale of the orchestra,” and he was neither the first nor the last to draw the comparison between the clarinet and birds. Whether channeling perky chirping or honeyed birdsong, composers from Beethoven (Pastoral Symphony) to Mahler (First Symphony) and Respighi (Pines of Rome) to Messiaen (Quartet for the End of Time) looked to the clarinet to play the role.
In France, the clarinet profited from a storied woodwind pedagogical tradition at the Paris Conservatory, and the school’s annual Concours nourished the instrument’s repertoire as composition professors penned new contest pieces each year. Incredibly, it was these rather prosaic conditions that gave birth to Debussy’s otherworldly Première Rhapsodie, a spellbinding work that the composer ultimately declared “one of the most pleasing [he had] ever written.”
Meanwhile, Debussy’s fellow Impressionist Maurice Ravel (who also availed himself of the clarinet in his chamber music: Introduction and Allegro and Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé) became acquainted with George Gershwin and fascinated by jazz, in which the clarinet also found itself at home. Indeed, in the collective conscious, Gershwin and the clarinet are practically synonymous, thanks to the iconic, wailing clarinet glissando that opens his Rhapsody in Blue. In addition to his sensational performances in the jazz idiom, Benny Goodman was also behind several of the most important clarinet commissions of the 20th century; Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata, and Bartók’s Contrasts are among some of the works written for the “King of Swing.” It is telling that the clarinet’s robust repertoire also sports such 20th-century landmark works as Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire; that the instrument so often finds itself in the hands of such masters surely points to its unique expressive qualities.
The diversity of the clarinet instrumental family also contributes to its versatility, and nowhere is the breadth of the clarinet’s relatives put on display like in the clarinet choir. If Mozart did, in fact, invent the soul of the clarinet, so, too, did his music for clarinet ensembles breathe life into the future genre of the clarinet choir. While still a far cry from the 27-piece clarinet assemblage that sprouted in Brussels 100 years after his death, Mozart’s works for three to five mixed members of the clarinet family seem to respond to the same homogeneity of timbre and extensive range that made the full-sized clarinet choir attractive in later centuries. Indeed, its uniform, reedy texture throughout its formidable range of up to six octaves has prompted some to point to the organ-like qualities of a full-range clarinet choir, an association that Guido Six tests in his arrangement of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor featured on this summer’s “Clarinet Critical Mass” program.
The aforementioned Belgian band of clarinets was created in 1896 by Professor Gustave Poncelet at the Brussels Conservatory, and is generally considered the earliest true clarinet choir. It was after hearing Poncelet’s group — in an arrangement of none other than Mozart’s G minor Symphony — that Richard Strauss was inspired to include the entire instrument family in his orchestras: he did so in his 1909 opera Elektra, which calls for eight players of various clarinets and its derivatives.
In the United States, New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinetist Simeon Bellison spearheaded the most significant clarinet choir of its time, growing the ensemble from its humble beginnings as a quartet of his students in 1927, to a 75-member, mixed-gender choir by 1948. Sponsored by the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, Bellison’s Clarinet Ensemble appears in New York Philharmonic’s program archives as early as 1931 for performances at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall, and received financial support from the orchestra for instrument commissions and member scholarships.
The Clarinet Ensemble’s repertoire consisted of works written specifically for it, supplemented by arrangements of music of the great composers done by Bellison himself. One New York Philharmonic program from 1936 asserts that “the clarinet is the only wind instrument which can be assembled as an orchestral unit, owing to its colorful tone approximating the human voice, its technical flexibility and its long range.” Chamber Music Northwest’s Clarinet Celebration was designed to honor and affirm the storied tradition of the clarinet and its repertoire in a similar fashion to Bellison’s programming: an eclectic array of originals and adaptations bookended by Mozart, to whom we owe all of the instrument’s magnificent heritage.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Debussy: Première Rhapsodie
As part of his role as conseil supérieur of the Paris Conservatory, Debussy was charged with writing two new pieces for the school’s annual Concours in 1910; the result was the whimsical miniature Petit Pièce for the sight-reading round and the otherworldly Première Rhapsodie for the prepared round. Initially, Debussy was less than enthusiastic about hearing the clarinet students all attempt his demanding new works, but in the end was especially pleased by the way the Rhapsodie turned out and how it was received by his fellow judges. He returned to the piece the following summer when he fashioned the piano part into a lush, vividly colorful orchestration, and ultimately declared the work “one of the most pleasing [he had] ever written.”
Debussy marks the Rhapsodie “rêveusement lent” (dreamily slow), and so the piano paints the opening dreamscape with three sparse droplets of octave F’s and a triplet that drips into the clarinet’s entrance. The clarinet murmurs under its breath three evaporative notes of its own, simple and directionless, politely vanishing in time for the piano to repeat itself. Then, the same: drops of F, the clarinet whispers, but isn’t finished. With a flurry of notes and a crescendo it spills over into a splash of color — sunburst. The clarinet’s faux-improvisatory soliloquy that follows recycles its opening three notes, then raises them by a step before finally yielding to the piano, and the piece seems to begin anew. The piano lays a carpet of luxuriant harmony and gently lapping syncopations so that when the clarinet croons its faraway melody (starting with its seminal three-note motive in reverse order), it emanates from deep within the wash of piano, “soft and penetrating.”
Despite its serene opening, the mercurial Rhapsodie will soon spring to life, and the striking shifts between animated outbursts and time-stopping moments of suspended reality highlight Debussy’s masterful manipulation of texture and mood. It is a testament to Debussy’s imaginative musical language that this piece still sounds as fresh as ever today, 100 years after his death.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
As part of his role as conseil supérieur of the Paris Conservatory, Debussy was charged with writing two new pieces for the school’s annual Concours in 1910; the result was the whimsical miniature Petit Pièce for the sight-reading round and the otherworldly Première Rhapsodie for the prepared round. Initially, Debussy was less than enthusiastic about hearing the clarinet students all attempt his demanding new works, but in the end was especially pleased by the way the Rhapsodie turned out and how it was received by his fellow judges. He returned to the piece the following summer when he fashioned the piano part into a lush, vividly colorful orchestration, and ultimately declared the work “one of the most pleasing [he had] ever written.”
Debussy marks the Rhapsodie “rêveusement lent” (dreamily slow), and so the piano paints the opening dreamscape with three sparse droplets of octave F’s and a triplet that drips into the clarinet’s entrance. The clarinet murmurs under its breath three evaporative notes of its own, simple and directionless, politely vanishing in time for the piano to repeat itself. Then, the same: drops of F, the clarinet whispers, but isn’t finished. With a flurry of notes and a crescendo it spills over into a splash of color — sunburst. The clarinet’s faux-improvisatory soliloquy that follows recycles its opening three notes, then raises them by a step before finally yielding to the piano, and the piece seems to begin anew. The piano lays a carpet of luxuriant harmony and gently lapping syncopations so that when the clarinet croons its faraway melody (starting with its seminal three-note motive in reverse order), it emanates from deep within the wash of piano, “soft and penetrating.”
Despite its serene opening, the mercurial Rhapsodie will soon spring to life, and the striking shifts between animated outbursts and time-stopping moments of suspended reality highlight Debussy’s masterful manipulation of texture and mood. It is a testament to Debussy’s imaginative musical language that this piece still sounds as fresh as ever today, 100 years after his death.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Respighi: Il tramanto
Ottorino Respighi lifted the text from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s morbid 1816 poem “The Sunset” for his eponymously titled work for string quartet (or string orchestra) and mezzo-soprano. Written during the art world’s pivotal post-Wagner years, a century after its source material, Il tramanto reads like a retelling of the fetishistic nocturnal fixation that gripped the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde, a sort of Respighian Liebestod. Shelley’s poem chronicles a tragic romance between a lady and her youth, one that met its mortal end after the youth’s final musing, “‘Is it not strange…I never saw the sun? / We will walk here / To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’” The echoes of Tristan are loud and clear in this image of the day as a destroyer of love, and like Wagner’s ill-fated lovers, Shelley’s pair only achieves their erotic reunion in the eternal night of death.
Respighi’s timely resurrection of Shelley’s poem in a post-Romantic context also had resonances with the contemporary Italian Symbolist movement, and his syllabic vocal line sensitive to the idioms of spoken Italian recalls the innovative direct libretto setting of Debussy’s recent Pelléas et Mélisande. Respighi’s creation is intensely expressive, but bound up in the delicate intimacy of chamber music and perfumed with fleeting chromaticism — in this respect a far cry from the larger-than-life scale and more aggressive brand of harmony of Wagner. A crepuscular tenderness enswathes Il tramanto and seems a faithful realization of its affective essence — chamber music instead of opera, poetry instead of dramatic libretto.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Ottorino Respighi lifted the text from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s morbid 1816 poem “The Sunset” for his eponymously titled work for string quartet (or string orchestra) and mezzo-soprano. Written during the art world’s pivotal post-Wagner years, a century after its source material, Il tramanto reads like a retelling of the fetishistic nocturnal fixation that gripped the star-crossed lovers Tristan and Isolde, a sort of Respighian Liebestod. Shelley’s poem chronicles a tragic romance between a lady and her youth, one that met its mortal end after the youth’s final musing, “‘Is it not strange…I never saw the sun? / We will walk here / To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.’” The echoes of Tristan are loud and clear in this image of the day as a destroyer of love, and like Wagner’s ill-fated lovers, Shelley’s pair only achieves their erotic reunion in the eternal night of death.
Respighi’s timely resurrection of Shelley’s poem in a post-Romantic context also had resonances with the contemporary Italian Symbolist movement, and his syllabic vocal line sensitive to the idioms of spoken Italian recalls the innovative direct libretto setting of Debussy’s recent Pelléas et Mélisande. Respighi’s creation is intensely expressive, but bound up in the delicate intimacy of chamber music and perfumed with fleeting chromaticism — in this respect a far cry from the larger-than-life scale and more aggressive brand of harmony of Wagner. A crepuscular tenderness enswathes Il tramanto and seems a faithful realization of its affective essence — chamber music instead of opera, poetry instead of dramatic libretto.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Mozart: Marriage of Figaro Overture, arr. Czerny for piano six-hands
Rightfully wide-eyed but inevitably futile attempts to pin down Mozart’s genius typically take the form of variations on the theme of “perfection.” The musical canon has readily acknowledged the genius of many master composers, but Mozart’s brilliance somehow stands apart from even the most celebrated voices. Mozart’s music glows with a transcendent otherworldliness that puts to shame attempts to capture it in words, but it is its paradoxical self-evidence — as inevitable and fundamentally part of this world as nature itself — that really makes it elude explanation. Mozart’s grace lies in his music’s effortless, unlikely cohabitation of opposites. It is at once scintillatingly fresh and deeply familiar, simple but not simplistic, and, in the words of Scott Burnham, “somehow both unerring and human…untouchable and touching.”
Alluding to his impeccably conceived musical characters and their rich development over the course of his music, Paul Henry Lang anoints Mozart “the greatest musico-dramatic genius of all times.” Nowhere are these interactions between musical and dramatic revelation more explicit than in Mozart’s operas. The Marriage of Figaro, completed in 1786 during his prolific Vienna period, marked the beginning of Mozart’s working relationship with Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The comic opera weaves a web of illicit seduction, deception and ridiculous contingencies, and the overture opens appropriately with scurrying, Presto eighth notes evocative of chattering gossip flitting about Count Almaviva’s estate. The mercurial overture vacillates between hushed scampering and eruptive tutti outbursts until a delightfully long-breathed theme in A major emerges. Floating atop a bed of constant eighth notes, this refreshingly tuneful melody seems to momentarily suspend time, only to evaporate just as quickly as it came, in true paradoxical Mozartean fashion. Virtuosity, with its inherent self-indulgence and exertion, has no place in the poised elegance of Mozart, but this unrelenting overture is a veritable tour-de-force for orchestras and pianists — here, in Czerny’s six-hand arrangement — alike.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Rightfully wide-eyed but inevitably futile attempts to pin down Mozart’s genius typically take the form of variations on the theme of “perfection.” The musical canon has readily acknowledged the genius of many master composers, but Mozart’s brilliance somehow stands apart from even the most celebrated voices. Mozart’s music glows with a transcendent otherworldliness that puts to shame attempts to capture it in words, but it is its paradoxical self-evidence — as inevitable and fundamentally part of this world as nature itself — that really makes it elude explanation. Mozart’s grace lies in his music’s effortless, unlikely cohabitation of opposites. It is at once scintillatingly fresh and deeply familiar, simple but not simplistic, and, in the words of Scott Burnham, “somehow both unerring and human…untouchable and touching.”
Alluding to his impeccably conceived musical characters and their rich development over the course of his music, Paul Henry Lang anoints Mozart “the greatest musico-dramatic genius of all times.” Nowhere are these interactions between musical and dramatic revelation more explicit than in Mozart’s operas. The Marriage of Figaro, completed in 1786 during his prolific Vienna period, marked the beginning of Mozart’s working relationship with Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The comic opera weaves a web of illicit seduction, deception and ridiculous contingencies, and the overture opens appropriately with scurrying, Presto eighth notes evocative of chattering gossip flitting about Count Almaviva’s estate. The mercurial overture vacillates between hushed scampering and eruptive tutti outbursts until a delightfully long-breathed theme in A major emerges. Floating atop a bed of constant eighth notes, this refreshingly tuneful melody seems to momentarily suspend time, only to evaporate just as quickly as it came, in true paradoxical Mozartean fashion. Virtuosity, with its inherent self-indulgence and exertion, has no place in the poised elegance of Mozart, but this unrelenting overture is a veritable tour-de-force for orchestras and pianists — here, in Czerny’s six-hand arrangement — alike.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major
Trading oboes for clarinets and dispensing with the popular trumpet and timpani fixtures of contemporary orchestras, Mozart designed a darker, mellower orchestration that reflects this concerto’s inward, lyrical quality. Indeed, the 23rd concerto is generous and personal, and seems to sing to itself rather than declaiming from a stage as in Mozart’s hallmark operatic style found in so many of the other concerti.
Piano passagework is florid in the Allegro first movement, more cascading and graceful — though no less demanding — than the fiery acrobatics of the other late concerti. The orchestra’s role in the dialogue is involved but never grandiose, and the soloistic wind writing throughout the piece lends an intimacy closer to chamber music than the typical concerto style. Deceptive resolutions, aptly termed for their jarring intrusion of the minor mode when we expect the home key, and a favorite device of Mozart’s for phrase extension, are an important feature of the harmonic fabric here. But in this setting, they lack the impish irony they add to Mozart’s lighter movements as well as the gravitas of his more breathtaking sequences; rather, these gentle subversions of expectations may prompt the listener to lean forward, drawing him closer to this introspective work.
The sparing, poignant Adagio feels especially poetic, made more so by the fact that it is Mozart’s only work in F-sharp minor, and the last minor key slow movement he would write for an instrumental piece. The spirited rondo finale recovers some of the Mozartean zippiness that laid dormant for the first two movements, but is decidedly tempered by the distinctive reservedness of the concerto as a whole.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Trading oboes for clarinets and dispensing with the popular trumpet and timpani fixtures of contemporary orchestras, Mozart designed a darker, mellower orchestration that reflects this concerto’s inward, lyrical quality. Indeed, the 23rd concerto is generous and personal, and seems to sing to itself rather than declaiming from a stage as in Mozart’s hallmark operatic style found in so many of the other concerti.
Piano passagework is florid in the Allegro first movement, more cascading and graceful — though no less demanding — than the fiery acrobatics of the other late concerti. The orchestra’s role in the dialogue is involved but never grandiose, and the soloistic wind writing throughout the piece lends an intimacy closer to chamber music than the typical concerto style. Deceptive resolutions, aptly termed for their jarring intrusion of the minor mode when we expect the home key, and a favorite device of Mozart’s for phrase extension, are an important feature of the harmonic fabric here. But in this setting, they lack the impish irony they add to Mozart’s lighter movements as well as the gravitas of his more breathtaking sequences; rather, these gentle subversions of expectations may prompt the listener to lean forward, drawing him closer to this introspective work.
The sparing, poignant Adagio feels especially poetic, made more so by the fact that it is Mozart’s only work in F-sharp minor, and the last minor key slow movement he would write for an instrumental piece. The spirited rondo finale recovers some of the Mozartean zippiness that laid dormant for the first two movements, but is decidedly tempered by the distinctive reservedness of the concerto as a whole.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Küffner: Introduction, Theme, and Variations for Clarinet and Strings in B-flat Major
Dvorak: Terzetto for Two Violins and Viola in C major, Op. 74
Mozart: Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G minor, K. 516
The fruits of Carl Maria von Weber’s well-documented relationship with the clarinetist Heinrich Baermann include several operatic, virtuosic works for the instrument in chamber and concerto genres. Thus, it is understandable that the Introduction, Theme, and Variations for Clarinet and Strings in B-flat Major, a work of questionable authorship whose elysian, Mozartian aria prefaces a buoyant theme and its spry elaborations, traditionally has been attributed to Weber. But recent scholarship points instead to Weber’s contemporary and compatriot Joseph Küffner, a composer known mostly for his guitar music, as the work’s architect.
The variations become progressively more acrobatic while remaining faithful to the jocular, if naïve, character of the theme. The rhythmic activity snowballs until a surprisingly sincere G minor Adagio arrests the blissfully ignorant chugging along, and seems a melancholic look at the untroubled aria of the introduction. The clarinet gets lost in a soliloquy before having an abrupt change of heart and diving headlong into the jubilant triplets of the sixth variation. A final Allegro assai interrupts this last variation mid-sentence as the strings egg on the agile clarinet dancing above them.
During the winter of 1887, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák shared his lodgings with a chemistry student and amateur violinist, Josef Kruis. A violist himself, Dvořák would sometimes play with his flatmate and his violin teacher, and in January of that year he spent a few days writing the Terzetto for Two Violins and Viola in C Major, Op. 74 for the threesome to play. Dvořák overestimated the violin student’s technical prowess, and eventually drew up the simpler Miniatures when the Terzetto proved too difficult for Kruis. Nonetheless, the Terzetto remains a valuable addition to the chamber music repertoire, one whose unconventional structure befits its unusual combination of instruments.
Dvořák marks the first movement Introduzione, and while expressive, it does carry the reservedness of a prelude, a sense that the work’s meatier moments are still on the horizon. While he never allows the movement to spill over into a fully-fledged emotional climax, Dvořák does achieve a formidably lush texture for his slim instrumental paintbrush as he pits the spaciousness of the main theme against scampering sixteenth notes in various voices. He slips seamlessly from this introduction into the second movement, a Larghetto that sways gently until the abrupt intrusion of sprightly dotted rhythms in the middle section shakes us out of our reverie. The hemiolic Scherzo proper dances in and out of the written triple meter with Bohemian angularity, but shirks its duple obstinance in the slower, more graceful Trio. Here, the augmentation of the original Scherzo figure to better suit the meter feels like a sleepier recasting of the same character, rather than a contrasting theme as is traditional.
The theme of the variations set that closes the work evokes an operatic overture in its huge range of expression and its orchestral organization — unison rhythms, fortissimo tutti declarations separating hushed, tiptoeing passages. Dvořák acknowledges this operatic connection in the Moderato variation, where he indulges the first violin in a wordless recitative atop quivering orchestral tremolos in the other voices. Afterward, the final two variations rush virtuosically to a frenetic finish.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G Minor, K. 516 in 1786, a trying year for his professional floundering in Vienna, underwhelming creative output, and his father’s serious illness. Letters to his father from this period reveal Mozart’s despondent outlook, and this Viola Quintet seems to reflect his personal despair, set as it is in the same G minor that frames some of Mozart’s other anguished works, including Pamina’s heartbroken aria over her loss of love and joy in The Magic Flute.
The pained Allegro opens with our familiar, proto-Dvořákian texture of two violins paired with viola. But unlike in the Terzetto, Mozart has fashioned a decidedly transparent, weightless voicing, as if to give the violin’s climbing melody a chance to leave the cruel world. Not surprisingly, the illusion of escape is a ruse, and soon enough the lower strings pull the violin back to earth.
Resisting courtly dance traditions, the Menuetto movement shrieks at its opening and continues in a declamatory manner that foreshadows the analogous movement of the later G minor Symphony No. 40, but does concede a heartfelt, weeping Trio at its midpoint.
As in many of Mozart’s late works, the slow movement here seems the emotional anchor of the work as a whole. The velvety, muted tones turn the focus inward as this Adagio ma non troppo explores the intersection of beauty and sorrow, love and pain.
When, on the heels of the previous breathtaking slow movement, throbbing eight-notes reveal another Adagio, the effect is poetic and disorienting. The first violin laments a mournful aria in G minor, its unending phrases ridding us of delusions that a sunnier Allegro will ever chase away these dark clouds — until it does. Somehow, though, the Allegro respite seems contained, less raucous than Mozart’s more celebratory movements, as if tempered by the more sentient reality presented in the rest of the piece.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Dvorak: Terzetto for Two Violins and Viola in C major, Op. 74
Mozart: Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G minor, K. 516
The fruits of Carl Maria von Weber’s well-documented relationship with the clarinetist Heinrich Baermann include several operatic, virtuosic works for the instrument in chamber and concerto genres. Thus, it is understandable that the Introduction, Theme, and Variations for Clarinet and Strings in B-flat Major, a work of questionable authorship whose elysian, Mozartian aria prefaces a buoyant theme and its spry elaborations, traditionally has been attributed to Weber. But recent scholarship points instead to Weber’s contemporary and compatriot Joseph Küffner, a composer known mostly for his guitar music, as the work’s architect.
The variations become progressively more acrobatic while remaining faithful to the jocular, if naïve, character of the theme. The rhythmic activity snowballs until a surprisingly sincere G minor Adagio arrests the blissfully ignorant chugging along, and seems a melancholic look at the untroubled aria of the introduction. The clarinet gets lost in a soliloquy before having an abrupt change of heart and diving headlong into the jubilant triplets of the sixth variation. A final Allegro assai interrupts this last variation mid-sentence as the strings egg on the agile clarinet dancing above them.
During the winter of 1887, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák shared his lodgings with a chemistry student and amateur violinist, Josef Kruis. A violist himself, Dvořák would sometimes play with his flatmate and his violin teacher, and in January of that year he spent a few days writing the Terzetto for Two Violins and Viola in C Major, Op. 74 for the threesome to play. Dvořák overestimated the violin student’s technical prowess, and eventually drew up the simpler Miniatures when the Terzetto proved too difficult for Kruis. Nonetheless, the Terzetto remains a valuable addition to the chamber music repertoire, one whose unconventional structure befits its unusual combination of instruments.
Dvořák marks the first movement Introduzione, and while expressive, it does carry the reservedness of a prelude, a sense that the work’s meatier moments are still on the horizon. While he never allows the movement to spill over into a fully-fledged emotional climax, Dvořák does achieve a formidably lush texture for his slim instrumental paintbrush as he pits the spaciousness of the main theme against scampering sixteenth notes in various voices. He slips seamlessly from this introduction into the second movement, a Larghetto that sways gently until the abrupt intrusion of sprightly dotted rhythms in the middle section shakes us out of our reverie. The hemiolic Scherzo proper dances in and out of the written triple meter with Bohemian angularity, but shirks its duple obstinance in the slower, more graceful Trio. Here, the augmentation of the original Scherzo figure to better suit the meter feels like a sleepier recasting of the same character, rather than a contrasting theme as is traditional.
The theme of the variations set that closes the work evokes an operatic overture in its huge range of expression and its orchestral organization — unison rhythms, fortissimo tutti declarations separating hushed, tiptoeing passages. Dvořák acknowledges this operatic connection in the Moderato variation, where he indulges the first violin in a wordless recitative atop quivering orchestral tremolos in the other voices. Afterward, the final two variations rush virtuosically to a frenetic finish.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello in G Minor, K. 516 in 1786, a trying year for his professional floundering in Vienna, underwhelming creative output, and his father’s serious illness. Letters to his father from this period reveal Mozart’s despondent outlook, and this Viola Quintet seems to reflect his personal despair, set as it is in the same G minor that frames some of Mozart’s other anguished works, including Pamina’s heartbroken aria over her loss of love and joy in The Magic Flute.
The pained Allegro opens with our familiar, proto-Dvořákian texture of two violins paired with viola. But unlike in the Terzetto, Mozart has fashioned a decidedly transparent, weightless voicing, as if to give the violin’s climbing melody a chance to leave the cruel world. Not surprisingly, the illusion of escape is a ruse, and soon enough the lower strings pull the violin back to earth.
Resisting courtly dance traditions, the Menuetto movement shrieks at its opening and continues in a declamatory manner that foreshadows the analogous movement of the later G minor Symphony No. 40, but does concede a heartfelt, weeping Trio at its midpoint.
As in many of Mozart’s late works, the slow movement here seems the emotional anchor of the work as a whole. The velvety, muted tones turn the focus inward as this Adagio ma non troppo explores the intersection of beauty and sorrow, love and pain.
When, on the heels of the previous breathtaking slow movement, throbbing eight-notes reveal another Adagio, the effect is poetic and disorienting. The first violin laments a mournful aria in G minor, its unending phrases ridding us of delusions that a sunnier Allegro will ever chase away these dark clouds — until it does. Somehow, though, the Allegro respite seems contained, less raucous than Mozart’s more celebratory movements, as if tempered by the more sentient reality presented in the rest of the piece.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Debussy: Images, Book One
The first piece from Book One of Debussy’s Images, “Reflets dans l’eau,” returns to a favorite subject of his for his impressionistic musical paintings: water. Rising and falling pianissimo sixteenth notes trace gentle arcs across the opening Andantino, their circular motion perhaps suggesting the rhythmic lapping of tidewater against a bank. A pebble shatters the water’s unstained surface, and Debussy paints the ensuing ripples in a shimmering, quasi cadenza cascade of 32nd notes. The increasingly more agitated swells that follow spill over into a mighty fortissimo climax, a wave that crashes just as quickly as it rose, and subsides in a sinking, faraway coda, marked Lent.
In his austere second movement sarabande, “Hommage à Rameau,” Debussy pays tribute to that French master composer and harpsichordist of the 18th century. Along with Ravel’s later “Le tombeau de Couperin” and Debussy’s longtime avoidance of the traditionally German symphonic and sonata genres, this movement points to Debussy’s emphasis on the storied French musical legacy as a formidable alternative to its “hegemonic” Germanic counterpart.
Aptly titled “Mouvement,” the final piece is an effervescent, scurrying tapestry of unrelenting triplets. This moto perpetuo could also evoke images of water, but this time of a rolling boil character, far from the glassy stillness of the first movement’s scene.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
The first piece from Book One of Debussy’s Images, “Reflets dans l’eau,” returns to a favorite subject of his for his impressionistic musical paintings: water. Rising and falling pianissimo sixteenth notes trace gentle arcs across the opening Andantino, their circular motion perhaps suggesting the rhythmic lapping of tidewater against a bank. A pebble shatters the water’s unstained surface, and Debussy paints the ensuing ripples in a shimmering, quasi cadenza cascade of 32nd notes. The increasingly more agitated swells that follow spill over into a mighty fortissimo climax, a wave that crashes just as quickly as it rose, and subsides in a sinking, faraway coda, marked Lent.
In his austere second movement sarabande, “Hommage à Rameau,” Debussy pays tribute to that French master composer and harpsichordist of the 18th century. Along with Ravel’s later “Le tombeau de Couperin” and Debussy’s longtime avoidance of the traditionally German symphonic and sonata genres, this movement points to Debussy’s emphasis on the storied French musical legacy as a formidable alternative to its “hegemonic” Germanic counterpart.
Aptly titled “Mouvement,” the final piece is an effervescent, scurrying tapestry of unrelenting triplets. This moto perpetuo could also evoke images of water, but this time of a rolling boil character, far from the glassy stillness of the first movement’s scene.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite (1919)
The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev launched his Ballets Russes company in 1908, hoping to capitalize on cosmopolitan Parisians’ appetite for the exotic by engaging other expat artists from his far away homeland. His aim was to synthesize works of art, theater, music and dance by Russian artists into a unified whole, a sort of Franco-Russian reincarnation of the spirit behind Wagner’s 19th century Gesamtkunstwerke.
After the breakdown of agreements with other composers and under pressure from approaching deadlines, Diaghilev took his ballet concept for The Firebird to a fledgling, 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky. The ballet was to fuse two of Russia’s most famous legends, the Firebird and Kaschei the Immortal. Stravinsky responded by concocting a hybrid between the folk influences and orchestration techniques he inherited from his Russian predecessors, and the piquant colors being explored by French modernists. To borrow an apt metaphor from the composer Constant Lambert, Stravinsky “applied the rejuvenating influence of Debussy’s impressionism to the by now somewhat faded Russian fairytale tradition in much the same way that one pours a glass of port into a Stilton.”
Stravinsky’s formidable feats of musical depth and scope in his score, made more impressive by the fact that this was his first large-scale work for orchestra, earned him a fruitful collaborative relationship with Diaghilev and an ecstatic public response to The Firebird — decidedly more favorable than the riotous reception that greeted The Rite of Spring, which the two partners would produce three years later. Newfound fame and further successful collaborations notwithstanding, Stravinsky eventually found himself in unstable financial straits in the wake of the First World War. Having signed an exclusivity agreement with Diaghilev on the rights of the ballet, Stravinsky could only make money off of concert performances of his orchestral suite to The Firebird. But this 1911 suite, scored for the same massive orchestra of quadruple winds and three harps as the original ballet version, was hardly financially feasible for groups in post-war Europe. He thus reorchestrated the work in 1919, paring it down to a more manageable-sized orchestra, and creating the version most often heard today.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
The Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev launched his Ballets Russes company in 1908, hoping to capitalize on cosmopolitan Parisians’ appetite for the exotic by engaging other expat artists from his far away homeland. His aim was to synthesize works of art, theater, music and dance by Russian artists into a unified whole, a sort of Franco-Russian reincarnation of the spirit behind Wagner’s 19th century Gesamtkunstwerke.
After the breakdown of agreements with other composers and under pressure from approaching deadlines, Diaghilev took his ballet concept for The Firebird to a fledgling, 27-year-old Igor Stravinsky. The ballet was to fuse two of Russia’s most famous legends, the Firebird and Kaschei the Immortal. Stravinsky responded by concocting a hybrid between the folk influences and orchestration techniques he inherited from his Russian predecessors, and the piquant colors being explored by French modernists. To borrow an apt metaphor from the composer Constant Lambert, Stravinsky “applied the rejuvenating influence of Debussy’s impressionism to the by now somewhat faded Russian fairytale tradition in much the same way that one pours a glass of port into a Stilton.”
Stravinsky’s formidable feats of musical depth and scope in his score, made more impressive by the fact that this was his first large-scale work for orchestra, earned him a fruitful collaborative relationship with Diaghilev and an ecstatic public response to The Firebird — decidedly more favorable than the riotous reception that greeted The Rite of Spring, which the two partners would produce three years later. Newfound fame and further successful collaborations notwithstanding, Stravinsky eventually found himself in unstable financial straits in the wake of the First World War. Having signed an exclusivity agreement with Diaghilev on the rights of the ballet, Stravinsky could only make money off of concert performances of his orchestral suite to The Firebird. But this 1911 suite, scored for the same massive orchestra of quadruple winds and three harps as the original ballet version, was hardly financially feasible for groups in post-war Europe. He thus reorchestrated the work in 1919, paring it down to a more manageable-sized orchestra, and creating the version most often heard today.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
Franck: Symphony in D minor
It is curious that Franck would turn to the symphony as one of his last works. While a smattering of symphonies did emerge from such 19th century French voices as Saint-Saëns and Lalo, the genre was still decidedly a fixture of Germanic music. Moreover, Franck’s abstract brand of form may have been better described by the looser “symphonic poem” designation; his treatment of the first movement structure seems at once to acknowledge the procedure of sonata form while ignoring some of its core tenets. Franck’s unorthodox double alternation in this movement of the Lento introductory material with the Allegro recasting of that motive offended contemporary critics for its strain on the pace of the movement, in contrast to the structural economy of sonata form. It is ironic, then, that the musicologist Donald Tovey should liken this same device to the B-flat major Quartet, Op. 130 of Beethoven, the master symphonist himself.
Beethoven’s influence infects other areas of this rogue symphony as well. Franck’s resurrection in his finale of themes from earlier movements and his layering them atop a tireless bass ostinato undeniably recalls the ubiquitous Ninth Symphony, also in D minor. But Franck’s musical language in his symphony, with its tertian key relationships and heavy chromaticism, its lush textures and web of recurring motives, points unabashedly to Wagner.
Perhaps it is the symphony’s peculiar positionality in the context of the symphonic tradition of the 19th century that provoked such mixed reactions in its early performances. It occupies an awkward, neither-here-nor-there space between Beethoven and Wagner, two titans of artistic influence who loomed large in the venerable Germanic musical legacy that ostensibly did not include Franck. The symphony’s premiere in February of 1889 was met with with cold condemnation, the purists offended by Franck’s departure from the harmonic and formal processes of Haydn and Beethoven, and other critics bemoaning a dogmatic German style present in the work. This delicate paradox seems to be the symphony’s handicap and its lifeblood. It was only a few years later, when public opinion turned overwhelmingly in the symphony’s favor, that Vincent D’Indy declared Franck, the French proprietor of this contorted symphony, the first worthy heir to Beethoven’s symphonic legacy.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music
It is curious that Franck would turn to the symphony as one of his last works. While a smattering of symphonies did emerge from such 19th century French voices as Saint-Saëns and Lalo, the genre was still decidedly a fixture of Germanic music. Moreover, Franck’s abstract brand of form may have been better described by the looser “symphonic poem” designation; his treatment of the first movement structure seems at once to acknowledge the procedure of sonata form while ignoring some of its core tenets. Franck’s unorthodox double alternation in this movement of the Lento introductory material with the Allegro recasting of that motive offended contemporary critics for its strain on the pace of the movement, in contrast to the structural economy of sonata form. It is ironic, then, that the musicologist Donald Tovey should liken this same device to the B-flat major Quartet, Op. 130 of Beethoven, the master symphonist himself.
Beethoven’s influence infects other areas of this rogue symphony as well. Franck’s resurrection in his finale of themes from earlier movements and his layering them atop a tireless bass ostinato undeniably recalls the ubiquitous Ninth Symphony, also in D minor. But Franck’s musical language in his symphony, with its tertian key relationships and heavy chromaticism, its lush textures and web of recurring motives, points unabashedly to Wagner.
Perhaps it is the symphony’s peculiar positionality in the context of the symphonic tradition of the 19th century that provoked such mixed reactions in its early performances. It occupies an awkward, neither-here-nor-there space between Beethoven and Wagner, two titans of artistic influence who loomed large in the venerable Germanic musical legacy that ostensibly did not include Franck. The symphony’s premiere in February of 1889 was met with with cold condemnation, the purists offended by Franck’s departure from the harmonic and formal processes of Haydn and Beethoven, and other critics bemoaning a dogmatic German style present in the work. This delicate paradox seems to be the symphony’s handicap and its lifeblood. It was only a few years later, when public opinion turned overwhelmingly in the symphony’s favor, that Vincent D’Indy declared Franck, the French proprietor of this contorted symphony, the first worthy heir to Beethoven’s symphonic legacy.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Yale School of Music