Opening Night

PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth

Ottorino Respighi
b. Bologna, July 9, 1879
d. Rome, April 18, 1936

Ancient Airs and Dances

Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna and entered that city’s Liceo Musicale at the age of 12. He finished his formal studies and began a career as a professional musician in 1901. Taking a position as a violist with the St. Petersburg Opera gave him the opportunity to study with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. One account of their meeting says that Rimsky-Korsakov glanced briefly at one of Respighi’s scores and cancelled all other appointments to spend the afternoon with the younger composer. Respighi also worked in Berlin for a season, which allowed him to attend lectures on composition given by Max Bruch. This time spent out of Italy allowed him to completely absorb the musical elements swirling around Europe in the first decades of the last century. Respighi joined the faculty of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome in 1913 and made that city his new home. He served as the conservatory’s director for two years, but had turned to composition as a vocation by 1926. In the last decade of his life he also conducted his music with orchestras around the world and served as an accompanist for singers.

Respighi’s sparkling, picturesque compositions gained international popularity fairly easily. In the United States, for example, his music was championed by Arturo Toscanini and regularly presented to the nation through radio broadcasts. Respighi composed two “sets” of pieces that have become part of the standard orchestral repertoire: his three suites of Ancient Airs and Dances and his three “Roman” works—Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1926), and Roman Festivals (1928).

The airs and dances are “ancient” in that Respighi drew his melodic material from collected pieces (published by Oscar Chilesotti) that were already over three hundred years old when he began to set them for orchestra in 1917. Respighi arranged his second suite in 1924 and the third in 1932. The music was originally written for lute, and a great deal of the music’s success comes from Respighi’s careful choices in putting the melodies together. He was able to recognize which ones would shine brightest when elevated from solo to ensemble presentation. Although he used the purer sonority of a string orchestra for the last suite, the first two suites require a modern orchestra with harp and harpsichord (but no percussion). In these suites, Respighi shows himself to be a master at using the different voices of the orchestra in kaleidoscopic presentations.

The light and pleasing music Respighi used in the first and thrid movements of his Suite No. 3 comes from two anonymous popular songs dating from around 1600. The final Passacaglia, using music by Lodovico Roncalli, was composed nearly a century later; it was published for the guitar in 1692. These three short movements are balanced by the longer Arie di corte (Airs of the Court), in which Respighi wove together six songs (airs) by Jean-Baptiste Besard for dramatic purpose. The wistful solo line that opens this movement of episodic contrasts returns at the end, as if to represent a character moving through several scenes before returning to solitude. Perhaps it is no surprise that Besard’s six songs all dealt with aspects of love — some happy, some sad. The source music for Suite No. 3 is even more “ancient” now than when Respighi arranged it, but truly conveys a timeless effect.

Joaquín Rodrigo
b. Sagunto (Spain), November 22, 1901
d. Madrid, July 6, 1999

Concierto Andaluz

The Concierto Andaluz was commissioned by the Spanish guitarist Celedonio Romero for the quartet he had formed with his three sons: Celin, Pepe, and Angel. It was performed for the first time on November 18, 1967, in San Antonio, Texas, and recorded the next day by the Mercury Living Presence label. Rodrigo provided the notes for the record jacket:

This concerto is composed of themes inspired by Andalusia, but they are the author’s own and not taken from popular music. It is written in three movements, and its harmonies are straight-forward for the audience, as is the orchestration. At times the four guitars carry on a dialog together and at other times they dialog with the orchestra. It is a concerto written to feature the performers, although the orchestra is given its opportunities to shine.

The three movements, “Bolero,” “Adagio” and “Allegretto,” vary in tempo, and are quite different, and they each contain distinct themes of clear importance. The music of this Concierto is within the music that Joaquín Rodrigo has dubbed “Neocasticismo” and the entire work, due to the four solo guitars and the orchestration, acquires a great deal of colour, and great evocative power.

Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo is best known for two works—his Concierto de Aranjuez and the Fantasia para un Gentilhombre. The strength of this music, however, made him one of the last century’s most-beloved composers. Blinded by diphtheria at the age of three, Rodrigo composed in braille and dictated his music to a copyist. He studied in Valencia before entering the Ècole Normale de Musique in Paris in 1927 to study with Paul Dukas. His compositions of the 1920s and 1930s won him prizes and scholarships, but it was the first performance of the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1940 that won him lasting international fame. Rodrigo was also a gifted pianist and musicologist who toured and lectured extensively throughout his long career. The University of Madrid created the Manuel de Falla Chair for Rodrigo in 1947. Rodrigo received six honorary doctorates, and the governments of both France and Spain honored him with their highest commendations for the arts. Joaquín Rodrigo married the Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi in 1933. Her delightful memoirs, Hand in Hand with Joaquín Rodrigo: My Life at the Maestro’s Side (translated by Ellen Wilkerson) provide a loving portrait of this composer who worked in darkness but brightened concert halls around the world with his music.

Ludwig van Beethoven
b. Bonn, baptized December 17, 1770
d. Vienna, March 26, 1827

Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67

Ludwig van Beethoven was born into a family of court musicians who served the Elector of Cologne at Bonn. He moved to Vienna in 1792 at the insistence of his patrons and friends to study with Haydn, and soon began to build his own career as a performer and composer working within the aristocratic circles of the capital. He performed at private concerts and charity events, gaining a reputation as a keyboard virtuoso with a gift for improvisation. Beethoven organized the first concert for his own benefit in April of 1800. Publishers began vying for his new works, and he was extremely popular as a performer. The decade between 1802 and 1812 saw the creation of great works like the Symphonies Nos. 3–6 and the opera Fidelio. By 1814 Beethoven was in a sound financial situation and praised as the greatest composer in Austria. While the next several years saw few major compositions, from 1818 the composer found a measure of transcendence in his work and there followed a flood of beautiful, complex, and completely original music. This summary of Beethoven’s career reflects the way he presented himself to the public, rather than the many physical and social challenges in the composer’s life that have been the focus for many of his biographers. We should remember that Beethoven, a firm believer in meritocracy, saw himself as a successful artist and a self-made man who felt he was the equal of those who held their positions in society through inheritance. Clearly he overcame the circumstances of his birth and health problems to rise to the top of his profession and society.

It can be argued that the triumph of the individual (as seen in Beethoven’s own life) seems to be a main factor in the Symphony No. 5. Of the instantly recognizable opening motto, Beethoven legendarily said, “Thus Fate knocks at the door.” This motto becomes an integral part of each movement. It serves less as a thematic building block than as a musical “hook,” recognizable even in its variants, and bringing the listener back to the forceful opening of the symphony. E.T.A. Hoffman wrote in his review of the Fifth Symphony in 1810 in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung:

There is no simpler motive than that on which the master based the entire Allegro. With great admiration, one becomes aware that Beethoven knew how to relate all secondary ideas and all transition passages through the rhythm of that simple motive so as gradually to unfold the character of the whole work — a character which the principal motive could only suggest.

Working within the symphonic framework of his predecessors, Beethoven created enough of a narrative to engage the imaginations of the Romantics in his audience, including Hoffman and Hector Berlioz. In commenting on the work for their public, these writers found little gain in dissecting the music and commenting on why it was perfectly formed; instead, they gave the sounds context. This extra-musical Romantic spin gained an additional layer of meaning in the twentieth century, when the symphony became a part of the Allied war effort.

Following the darkness of the first movement, where fate is the main motivator, Beethoven takes his audience into the second movement, where the rhythm of the motive is changed slightly and a noble dance ensues. From this pleasant music we could infer that allowing fate to take its course might be the best alternative. Beethoven breaks into this reverie, though, with the third movement, in the form of a scherzo with trio. The martial attributes of this music bring us back to the dark forces held in the opening. The orchestra grows quiet at the end of the third movement and transitions immediately into the finale—now in a blazing C major. In the finale, Beethoven augments his already strong orchestral sonorities with piccolo on the top and trombones and contrabassoon on the bottom. In the Symphony No. 3, Beethoven blatantly celebrated the concept of the “hero” (Napoleon, for a time), someone whose attributes seem beyond the scope of mere mortals. With his Fifth Symphony he celebrates something that is more universal. Here, we are given the invitation to grasp our potential (as Beethoven certainly did) and work past any adversity fate deals us. If we broaden the analogy, we can recognize the power human beings hold over their own lives. We get a glimpse of this radiant power through this particular masterpiece by Ludwig van Beethoven.