Cello Soul

PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth

Gioachino Rossini
b. Pesaro (Bologna), February 29, 1792
d. Passy (France), November 13, 1868

Overture to L’Italiana in Algeri

Gioachino Rossini composed and produced thirty-nine operas over the seventeen years between 1812 and 1829, many of which are among the most popular operas ever written. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a musician like Rossini earned income by taking a direct role in the mounting of his works and through a hodge-podge of contracts with individual publishers. When we think about the creative output and exhaustive business details involved in Rossini’s life during this period, it is absolutely no surprise that he retired completely from music at the age of thirty-seven. He spent the next twenty-five years overseeing the financial rewards of his continued popularity and teaching, while battling health problems. He moved permanently from Italy to France in 1855 and, in the process, seems to have left many of his ailments and cares behind him. With renewed energy he finally returned to composition, but on a much smaller scale. His later years were filled with private musical performances and continued adulation. His death, at his villa in Passy, was mourned by thousands of opera lovers worldwide.

The Italian Girl in Algiers was Rossini’s first international success. He composed the opera for the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on fairly short notice in 1813. Working from an existing libretto, Rossini strengthened the plot and completed the music in twenty-seven days. After sweeping through Italian theaters for several years, the opera was produced in Germany in 1816 and France in 1817. The opera is set in Algiers circa 1805 (less than a decade before it was written), and the exoticism of the land across the Mediterranean is certainly not scholarly. The plot centers around two Algerians—the royal couple Mustafá and his wife, Elvira—and two Italians—the favored household slave Lindoro and his love, Isabella.

As the opera begins, Mustafá is tired of Elvira. Hoping to marry Elvira off to Lindoro, Mustafá sends the captain of his pirate fleet to capture a nice young Italian girl for him. The pirates sink an Italian vessel and capture Isabella, who has been traveling in an effort to find her long-lost Lindoro. While Isabella is being brought into Mustafá’s palace, Lindoro and Elvira are being sent off to Italy. The young Italian lovers recognize each other but do not speak. Thinking quickly, Isabella demands that Lindoro be appointed as her guard, and he stays in the palace. Beside himself with desire for Isabella, Mustafá is oblivious to the machinations around him as the lovers plot escape, Elvira works to get even, and various hangers-on try to get the best deal they can. When a means of escape becomes available, Isabella tells Mustafá that she is willing to grant him the “Order of Pappataci” as a sign of her regard. Given to understand that the main business of the life of a Pappataci is eating, drinking, and sleeping, Mustafá eagerly enters the completely made-up initiation ceremony. The lovers move to escape, but find such action unnecessary. Mustafá realizes that he has been duped and that Italian girls are much too clever. Begging his wife for forgiveness, he sends the lovers on their way with his blessings and the well-wishes of all assembled.

The music critic Henri Beyle, known to the world as Stendhal, fell in love with L’Italiana in Algeri while touring Italy and used it as one of the prime examples in his book, Life of Rossini, written to win French audiences over to the young Italian’s music. The overture set the tone of the opera that followed, using the musical stereotypes that Rossini’s audiences would have recognized. The overture opens with a quiet pizzicato in the strings. The oboe enters with the first melody, setting an “Oriental” mood with its double-reed timbre. The music soon takes on the rollicking freneticism of many of Rossini’s comic overtures, punctuated in this case with “Turkish” percussion (lots of cymbal and triangle). The musical lines of the individual instruments suggest the interlocking plotting of the operatic characters. The mood is set for a light entertainment in an exotic locale and, of course, Rossini’s audiences wanted nothing more from him. That he actually pushed the limits of drama and characterization to create a masterpiece of the form is the reason his fame shines on, and the reason that this overture — once dismissed as charming but frivolous — maintains its appeal to listeners.

Dmitri Shostakovich
b. St. Petersburg, September 25, 1906
d. Moscow, August 9, 1975

Cello Concerto

Dmitri Shostakovich entered the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied composition with Alexander Glazunov and Maximilian Steinberg (both favorite students of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov). His graduation piece, the Symphony No. 1, was quite successful. After Bruno Walter heard the symphony in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and introduced it in Berlin, Shostakovich’s star began to rise. By 1935, his many successes included three sympho nies, two operas, the Cello Sonata, and film scores. But in January 1936 he was denounced in an anonymous Pravda article. Joseph Stalin had been to a performance of his outstandingly successful opera, Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk, and had not been pleased. The next week, Shostakovich’s ballet The Limpid Stream was attacked, and Shostakovich was labeled an enemy of the people. Rehabilitated in November of 1937 by his Symphony No. 5 (characterized as “a Soviet artist’s creative answer to just criticism”), he became a professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory in 1943. He was denounced again in 1948, forced to resign his professorship at the Conservatory, and made to apologize publicly for his compositions. In the next year he was commanded to visit the United States as an act of atonement, and he delivered a speech in which he criticized American foreign policy, recanted his previous compositions, and attacked Prokofiev and Stravinsky. From that point until Stalin’s death in 1953, Shostakovich wrote mainly patriotic pieces and film scores. He was officially rehabilitated again in 1958.

In a June 6, 1959, article in the Sovetskaya kul’tura, Shostakovich announced that he would be working on a cello concerto. Spurred by his time helping Prokofiev adapt what had been his first cello concerto into the Symphony-Concerto, Shostakovich worked quickly on the project and the full score was complete by the end of July. The concerto’s opening, a “humorous march,” is based on a four-note motive that Shostakovich had used before. With his usual satirical bite, it was taken from the “Procession to Execution” music for the film score The Young Guard. The little march motive is traded around the orchestra as the music proceeds at a break-neck pace through the development. There is a fairly formal recapitulation before the movement comes to a decided halt. The harmonically lush second movement begins with strings and a ravishing introduction by the horn. The horn hands off to the soloist and a statement of the main theme of the movement. Highlights within this beautiful moderato include sections of solo cello against woodwind choir, and the end of the movement that features the solo line played in harmonics over the violin accompaniment. An extended composed cadenza serves as the third movement, although in reality it is a seamless link between the second and final sections. The composer challenges the soloist here with many special techniques—most strikingly strummed chords and accompaniment figures for the soloist to play under the melody line. The quick angular finale returns to duple time. Shostakovich apparently took great pleasure in explaining how its main theme was a distortion of the Russian folk tune “Suliko,” widely understood to be Joseph Stalin’s favorite melody.

Dedicated to the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the First Cello Concerto was an instant success. Rostropovich played the work with the Leningrad and Moscow Philharmonics in October of 1959 and then took the score and its composer with him to concerts in the U.S. The Philadelphia Orchestra performed the concerto with Eugene Ormandy conducting on November 6, 1959. The same group recorded the work within the next few days. Shostakovich was the first Soviet composer to supervise an American recording of one of his pieces. The recording, which is still easily available on CD, is a brilliant performance of this twentieth-century masterpiece.

Johannes Brahms
b. Hamburg, May 7, 1833
d. Vienna, April 3, 1897

Symphony No. 2 in D major, Opus 73

Johannes Brahms began his career as a professional musician while still a teenager. In 1853 Brahms met the violinist Joseph Joachim. Through him, the 19-year-old Brahms was introduced to Robert and Clara Schumann. Brahms played the Schumanns some of his original music and later Robert wrote in his journal: “Brahms to see me — a genius.” Robert Schumann, a respected and powerful critic, immediately began to publicize the young composer, praising him as the successor to Beethoven and the savior of music. Brahms was included as the only living composer in the list by conductor Hans von Bülow of the immortal “Three Bs of Music”: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. These pronouncements were a double-edged sword for Brahms. He was a truly gifted musician, but felt he had to be very diligent about only releasing and publishing material that would not let his supporters down. Brahms lived his life as a confirmed bachelor and his last twenty-five years were spent in Vienna, where he became a fixture in the capital city’s artistic life.

Though he was known to be both frugal and irascible, Brahms managed to maintain a circle of friends, admirers, and supporters. It was through their efforts that he spent his summers in spa towns and at various country estates. The summer of 1877 found the composer in Pörtschach on Lake Worth, where he had finished his First Symphony the summer before. Although he had spent many angst-ridden years composing his first symphony, Brahms completed his second symphony in four months. Beautifully idyllic on the surface, the Second Symphony also plumbs emotional depths. This was by design, as Jan Swafford pointed out in his Brahms biography. Swafford cited an exchange between Brahms and Vincenz Lachner. Lachner wrote Brahms in 1879 expressing his admiration for the symphony but questioning points of orchestration and harmony. Brahms replied:

I would have to confess that I am . . . a severely melancholic person, that black wings are constantly flapping above us, and that in my output — perhaps not entirely by chance — that symphony is followed by a little essay about the great “Why.” If you don’t know this [motet] I will send it to you. It casts the necessary shadow on the serene symphony and perhaps accounts for those timpani and trombones.

The Second Symphony wonderfully balances this Romantic existential melancholy and Brahms’s predilection to the Classical in form and substance. We hear a certain ambiguity right away within the gentle opening figures, particularly as this movement is in triple meter rather than the traditional duple (or quadruple) meter. Several timpani rolls signal the transition to the lyrical first theme, introduced by the first violins and echoed by the first flute. The second theme, presented in a wonderfully warm tone by the violas and cellos, bears a resemblance to the “Brahms Lullaby” melody. Brahms uses the development section of this movement to take his themes on rambling harmonic journeys that end in chromatic briars. This technique builds the drama inherent in the music, and pushes the Classical sonata form into the background as the Romantic excitement intensifies. Even the recapitulation is obscured as Brahms seamlessly transitions from key to key and disguises the downbeat. A horn solo leads to the coda that lightly resolves the tension of the Allegro non troppo.

Brahms moves down a third harmonically for the Adagio non troppo, although the actual key area is well hidden. The meter is hidden as well, as it drifts between duple and triple divisions of the beats, often displacing the downbeats. The overall effect is more lyrical than melancholy, but listen for the dramatic punctuation by the timpani toward the end of this movement. The dancing Allegretto grazioso features the woodwinds (joined by the horns), accompa nied by pizzicato cellos at the beginning and in dialogue with the rest of the strings throughout much of the movement. The finale, Allegro con spirito, is in duple meter, yet Brahms brings back the undulation in threes of the opening movement — primarily with a marked disregard for the first beat of many of the measures. The movement builds through a succession of waves to about the halfway point, where Brahms drops to a quiet triplet figure in the strings and high winds. From here, waves of intensity lead to the crashing final D-major chords, well punctuated by low brass and timpani. Brahms wrote to his publisher, “The new symphony is so melancholy that you can’t stand it. I have never written anything so sad, so minorish: the score must appear with a black border.” The work is so beautifully crafted, however, that we gladly follow Brahms through his darkness to the light at the other side.