PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Aaron Copland b. Brooklyn, New York, November 14, 1900 Appalachian Spring Aaron Copland pursued private piano and composition lessons while completing high school in New York. At the age of twenty he traveled to Paris to study at the newly-organized American Conservatory under Nadia Boulanger. He returned to New York four years later as a cosmopolitan with a portfolio of complex, dissonant music. Fortunately, that was exactly what the New York arts community was looking for at the time and he gained support and patrons. In coming home he also began a search for an “American” sound in music. This quest was realized, primarily, in a series of ballet scores—notably the “Ballet for Martha,” Appalachian Spring. Choreographer Martha Graham commissioned Aaron Copland to write music for her at the suggestion of arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Graham suggested a rough scenario based on her family history and her grandmother’s life on a farm in Pennsylvania. She borrowed the title from a line in a poem by Hart Crane, but did not tell Copland until right before the first performance. Interestingly, the poem (titled “The Dance” and part of a larger piece titled “Powhatan’s Daughter”) has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the ballet. The work premiered on October 30, 1944, in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. The description published with the score says the ballet concerns “a pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-build farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbour suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.” Graham’s program notes said, “Spring was celebrated by a man and a woman building a house with joy and love and prayer; by a revivalist and his followers in their shouts of exultation; by a pioneering woman with her dreams of the promised land.” Copland, however, would always contend that there was nothing seasonal about his music. He stated, “Two things were in my mind as I worked on this commission: my own knowledge of rural America in the nineteenth century and my knowledge of Martha Graham. I put her personality to music.” Copland’s score received the New York Music Critics award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. The music is a triumph of pastoral beauty reflecting the personalities of both Graham and Copland, famously hard-working American artists who did not have lavish lifestyles. Copland composed the piece for thirteen instruments because the premiere was part of a chamber music festival and the stage space in the auditorium was limited. He had discovered the song “Simple Gifts” in a collection of Shaker folklore called The Gift to Be Simple. His setting of that melody in very open harmonies, suggesting not only Shaker music but also American hymns by Billings and the shape-note tradition, is expanded into the rest of the score. The critic Virgil Thomson wrote, “The instrumentation is plain, clean-colored, deeply imaginative.” He also praised “those special Copland moments when the whole musical texture reaches an ultimate of thinness and translucency.” All of these captivating qualities can be heard in the larger concert version, which Copland arranged for Artur Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic in 1945.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart b. Salzburg, January 27, 1756 Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart left his father’s household in Salzburg and moved to Vienna in March of 1781. He supported himself and his young family as an independent performer and composer, although he would have gladly accepted a suitable salaried position. Unfortunately, the only position he really found suitable was Kapellmeister to the Emperor. From Vienna, he made journeys to Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, and Frankfurt, performing and making professional contacts. His piano concertos were a very good measure of the success he enjoyed. As he wrote in a letter to his father in 1782, “There are passages here and there from which the connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction; but these passages are written in such a way that the less learned cannot fail to be pleased, though without knowing why.” The veracity of their communication adds to the appeal of the works. Mozart’s piano concertos also illustrate broad stylistic developments of his time. The rise of the instrumental soloist within an ever-expanding orchestral setting and the abstract drama inherent in the form helped to lay the groundwork for the music of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of February, 1785, Leopold Mozart visited Vienna to check up on his son. It was the season of Lent and the theaters, by law, were closed. Wolfgang was taking advantage of the situation with subscription concerts every Friday at the Mehlgrube Casino. Leopold records that the February 11 concert on which the D-minor Concerto had its premiere “was magnificent and the orchestra played splendidly.” Wolfgang had just finished writing out the concerto the day before and the copyists were so busy finishing parts that he did not have time to play through the final movement before taking the stage. The D-minor Concerto starts quietly and darkly in the strings, with a sense of foreboding and a great deal of drama. The piano’s first theme, however, is soft and gentle, giving the orchestral exposition the effect of an overture that foreshadows dramatic developments to come. As the movement unfolds we hear the soloist present a light melody in the right hand while the left hand draws from the darkness of the orchestra. Mozart develops his themes in some very engaging ways. He enjoys the harmonic play of major and minor to its fullest extent, occasionally letting himself drift into distant key areas from which the listener might (mistakenly) believe there is no return, before coming back to the home key for resolution. The second movement, “Romance,” is a gorgeous aria for piano. The opening and closing of the movement are strikingly lyrical, while the interior boasts both drama and technical display. The finale of the concerto is a saucy rondo. True to form, Mozart’s themes return with frequent regularity and are quite memorable—including a little section that sounds like a well stomped-out polka. The orchestra has quite a bit to say in response to the solo line, and Mozart throws trumpets and timpani in just at the very end for a brilliant conclusion. With hindsight we can see the drama in this concerto feeding into Mozart’s most effective pieces for the stage. There are narrative techniques here that will reach fruition within the next few years in operas like Don Giovanni (1787) and Die Zauberflöte (1791). In itself, the play of light against dark in the D-minor concerto is as captivating as the turn of the seasons.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky b. Oranienbaum (now Lomorosov), June 17, 1882 The Rite of Spring One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L’Oiseau de Feu in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring. Such was the theme of the Sacre du Printemps.—Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography From the opening measures of The Rite of Spring, in which a solo bassoonist plays a wistful melody at the top of the bassoon range, we are transported into the paganistic world of Igor Stravinsky’s imagination. Controversy has swirled around this piece from its very beginning—from the hostile reception given by its first Parisian audience, through Stravinsky’s critical attacks on the circumstances surrounding the work’s original choreography, to the discovery that Stravinsky’s letters and musical sketches of the time tell a much different story of the work’s creation from the one related in his autobiography. Nevertheless, the music remains fresh and even astonishing as we near the centennial of the piece. The Rite of Spring represents the pinnacle of Stravinsky’s work with Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes dance company in Paris. Diaghilev had given Stravinsky one of his earliest commissions when he asked the composer to create music for The Firebird for the 1910 season. Stravinsky later recalled that he was “alarmed by the fact that this was a commission for a fixed date, and afraid lest I should fail to complete the work in time.” But he was also flattered by the commission, coming soon after his earlier job orchestrating Chopin pieces for Diaghilev. The success of The Firebird was followed in 1911 by Petrushka. The Rite of Spring was originally planned for 1912, but circumstances led to the ballet being rescheduled for the following year. The premiere took place on May 29, 1913. Stravinsky had two main collaborators on The Rite of Spring. The first was Nikolai Roerich, an expert on Russia’s early history, as well as a talented artist. Roerich helped to develop the overall scenario for the ballet, and he designed the costumes and set. The second collaborator was Diaghilev’s famed dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, who choreographed the ballet. An additional participant in the work was conductor Pierre Monteux. During the winter preceding the premiere of The Rite, Monteux had studied the music daily at the piano with Stravinsky. And after the audience at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées had broken out into such an uproar during the premiere that they could no longer hear the music, it was Monteux who impeccably continued directing the orchestra. Stravinsky commented that Monteux seemed “impervious and nerveless as a crocodile,” while Monteux wrote in 1966 that he never looked at the stage during the performance but just kept conducting at “the exact tempo Igor had given me and which, I must say, I have never forgotten.” When we realize that the two main works of the 1912 Ballets Russes season had been Debussy’s Daphnis and Chloe and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, it becomes easier to understand the furor that erupted on that May night in Paris. Surely some of the disturbance was caused by artistic-political rivalries now buried in the past. But fundamentally the music Stravinsky composed remains a stark contrast to Debussy’s languorous music used the previous season. The piece was perceived as a musical revolution and the audience reacted accordingly, with hissing and insults eventually turning to physical violence. The audience may not have liked or understood the music, but they clearly felt the power Stravinsky’s score contained. The Rite of Spring is made up of two parts: “Adoration of the Earth” and “The Sacrifice.” The sections of each part have descriptive subtitles that can help to give an overall impression of the drama intended by the piece, but the transitions between the sections are in many cases seamless. “Part I: Adoration of the Earth” begins with the introduction featuring the famous bassoon solo, answered by other wind instruments. (Stravinsky later acknowledged that this solo was based on a folk tune, and recent research has shown that the composer actually embedded many folk tunes into the structure of the piece, just as folk arts had been an inspiration to Roerich’s visual designs for the ballet.) The delayed entrance of the second violins and violas calls attention to Stravinsky’s enhancement of the woodwind and brass sections in this piece. It is still unusual for an orchestral work to include an alto flute, two bass clarinets, and two contrabassoons. Both the highest and lowest extremes of the woodwinds and brass are represented, from the piccolo to the two bass tubas. Stravinsky’s irregular meters are another strong feature of this piece. The second section, “The Augurs of Spring” (also known as the “Dance of the Adolescents”), uses accents to displace the notated duple meter and builds to a frenetic pace. The horns and trumpets introduce the “Ritual of Abduction,” while the flutes, E-flat soprano clarinet, and bass clarinet signal the opening of “Spring Rounds.” “Ritual of the Rival Tribes” uses blocks of instruments in musical opposition. “Procession of the Sage” ends with a pause, followed by three measures that portray the Sage himself in the sound of three bassoons, two contrabassoons, timpani, and double bass. The “Dance of the Earth” completes the first section. “Part II: The Sacrifice” builds from the “Mystic Circles of the Young Girls” through the choosing of the victim and the calling of the ancestors. Listen for the evocative English horn solo at the beginning of the “Ritual Action of the Ancestors.” The “Sacrificial Dance” that serves as the climax of the ballet begins with an insistent rhythm in the strings and commentary by the winds; the intensity increases until the very end, when the music suddenly dissolves into an upward sweep in the flutes and upper strings punctuated by a final chord in the brass, percussion, and low strings. This abrupt ending symbolizes the collapse of the dancer, but it also leaves the listener wanting more. And there is more to be heard each time you listen to The Rite of Spring. The music is too complex to give up all its secrets at once. Stravinsky convincingly portrayed the mysteries of Russia’s unwritten pagan past in an enigmatic piece that still contains puzzles to decode. 2006 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth |