Russell Steinberg—Concert and Film Music: Lectures

Boris Brott, conductor 
Andrew von Oeyen, piano

Beethoven Dvorák Schumann

Overture to Fidelio Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Opus 88 Concerto in A Minor for Piano & Orchestra,   Opus 54

Fidelio Overture by Beethoven
In his book The Interior Beethoven, Irving Kolodin noted, “As tended to be the life-long case with Beethoven, the overriding consideration remained: achievement of the objective. How long it might take or how much effort might be required was not merely incidental — such consideration was all but non-existent.”

 

The repeated attempts of Beethoven to write an overture to his one and only opera, yield to us not one but four different works that are each remarkable in their own way.  The third attempt—Leonore Overture No. 3—is so ambitious that it is virtually a symphonic movement rather than a preparation for an opera and it is regularly performed at concerts. The Fidelio overture we hear at this concert is the final overture Beethoven composed and is the one that opens the opera when it is performed today.

 Classical overtures are commonly structured as sonatinas—sonatas without development sections. That is the model to which Beethoven returns in the Fidelio Overture, except that the opening is confusing. It begins with a rousing fanfare that seems to set things afoot. But the music immediately quiets and becomes chordal and moody. We realize we are in the midst of a slow introduction. But after awhile this introduction seamlessly becomes the Allegro beginning of the sonata, with the horn now quietly intoning the fanfare as a theme. That isn’t all that is odd about this overture. Far stranger is the secondary area. It’s supposed to be in the dominant—that’s the whole point of a sonata, to contrast two different tonal areas. We only hear the dominant however at the very end of the exposition, so the secondary area really just consists of a short passage of cadential chords instead of a conventional theme. When all this material is recapitulated, Beethoven continues his pun. Here when the secondary area appears, we get the chords we expect—but in a completely wrong key! Beethoven quickly corrects this restating the chords in the correct tonic key, letting us know he is completely aware of what he is doing.  After this structural joke, it is off to the races with a joyous rambunctious coda that propels the exuberance of the opening fanfare into an expectation for the opera to follow.

Piano Concerto in A Minor by Robert Schumann
At the last New West Symphony concert our jaws dropped open watching and hearing George Gao perform the Ziguenerweisen —usually an eye and ear popping piece for any violin virtuoso using his or her 4 strings—on the Chinese 2 string violin, the erhu. In an earlier concert in the fall we heard violin virtuoso Suzanne Hou perform Saint-Saens, also with incredible bravura and technique. The thrill of hearing a true virtuoso conquer their instrument and audience is akin to the thrill of watching any great athlete. We revel in the sense of the impossible and a headiness in the sheer achievement. The adrenaline trip for us with virtuosos is naturally a big draw for all concert goers. That kind of trip, though, is precisely not what the Schumann Piano Concerto is about or for what Robert Schumann had any interest. He knew all about it of course. His own piano music has plenty for the virtuoso. And he lived during the time of one of the greatest virtuosos in history—Franz Liszt, who apparently slighted the Schumann concerto by calling it a “concerto without piano.”

But Schumann was out for larger game. He knew that virtuoso piano concerti are a dime a dozen and easily forgotten. He wanted to create lasting poetry, to find a way to take the spiritual achievements of Beethoven in his concerti to this new era of Romanticism. That meant wrestling with all kinds of structural questions. What would be the relationship between the piano and the orchestra? How could a cadenza be part of the structure of the piece instead of just a moment of bravura?

Schumann’s answers to these and other problems have produced one of the most original of concerti. It is one that pianists themselves especially adore. As it is piece that is about growth of a single idea, the falling scale of 3 notes, it is remarkable how the piece grows into itself as it continues, and how we listeners become increasingly infatuated as we become familiar with it. The opening itself is not so remarkable, but by the time we hit the development section where the piano goes as deep and attractive as any Chopin Nocturne, we are completely hooked.

The obsession with the falling scale of three notes—C-B-A—informs most of the material in the first movement. Both “themes” share this same idea, as well as the transition. But the mood change between them is poetic and striking. The primary group is reflective, while the secondary group is restless. Schumann also makes an interesting structural innovation by dispensing with separate expositions for the orchestra first and then the piano. Instead the piano introduces the piece with a fanfare, then the orchestra only introduces the first theme. The piano then follows and both orchestra and piano continue the piece. The development is bipolar—first deeply poetic (Schumann’s Eusebius persona), and then energetic and typically developmental (Schumann’s Florestan persona).

The cadenza occurs in the conventional location, but here it is really a coda in itself, the summation of the entire movement, only played by the piano alone. It is full of technical difficulty, yet we listen not for acrobatics, but for the re-energizing of music that already captivates us. That is what Schumann was going for—our focus being on the music rather than the performer.

The second movement is a beautifully constructed bridge between the two outer movements. It begins with the same scale idea, only now going up instead of down, and in quiet tiptoes echoed between the piano and orchestra. The music is lyrical but lighthearted. That’s why the middle section with its romantic cello lines takes us so by surprise. We don’t expect sublimity, but then it is suddenly there. The cellos sing in their richest tone, engaging in a call and response with the piano.

A brief transition recalling the first movement of the concerto in major sets off the finale, a dance movement that unleashes the piano in nearly a perpetual motion of arabesque patterns, concluding with a fast waltz.

Symphony No. 8 in G Major by Antonin Dvorak
The folk themes are so abundant and fabulous in Dvorak’s 8^th Symphony that the music is not only a pleasure to hear, but is rather easy to follow. If all classical music had such direct thematic instruction, apprehending structure would be less problematic. However, this does injustice to Dvorak. His symphony is far more than a bunch of pretty tunes. And in a way, the thematic clarity and abundance belies some very interesting structural experiments. One of these is the question of beginnings. Symphonies usually begin in one of two ways: either they start with a slow introduction, or they start with a main thematic idea in a fast tempo. Dvorak does both and neither. Instead he sets up an interesting duality. The piece begins with a theme in G minor that could be a slow introduction. That gives way to a bird call theme by the flute in G major. That also could be part of a slow introduction. And indeed, the music builds as one would expect to a big statement and we get a third theme in G major. But it is rather short lived to the point that we begin to realize all three of these themes are part of one primary group and that the symphony didn’t really begin with a slow introduction at all.

The secondary group pulls a similar stunt. We hear first a march theme in B minor followed by an exuberant theme in B major. Clear cadences in this new key give way to the music that began the symphony in G minor followed by the G major bird call theme. So are we hearing a repeat of the exposition? That’s something we might expect. But the tonality of G major becomes unstable and we realize we are in the middle of a typically exploratory development section. There is a brief moment in the development section by the way that is orchestrated very unusually—for just woodwinds and French horn. It has the quality of chamber music more than orchestral music, and is a device that would become a hallmark of Mahler’s music just a few years later!

The recapitulation sets things straight as it is supposed to do. The sad G minor theme comes back as a full-blown fast dramatic theme accompanied by strings climbing up and down in scales. Now we are sure that it was never a slow introduction but instead the true beginning of the symphony.

The second movement is even more remarkable. Its first theme presents an ambiguous harmony. It begins in E flat major, then moves to C minor. The second theme has a decidedly East European folk harmony. It starts out in C major but it’s harmonies instead suggest a fourth key, F minor. Why should you care, especially if you don’t have perfect pitch? Well, this harmonic ambiguity helps explain why the themes seem to be fighting one another. For instance, when the first theme returns, the second theme interrupts. The middle of the piece is a gorgeous trio with delicate descending C major scales accompanying a lyrical melody that itself is mostly a scale. A solo violin repeats this theme. But not much later the beautiful trio theme combines and fuses with the first theme itself. So what is fascinating about all of these themes is that they actually all centered around C major, but we only discover this after the fact. This is very unusual structural idea for classical music. Contrast is always achieved by placing different musical sections in different tonal centers. Here Dvorak manages to have all his themes in one tonal center, but he creates contrast by making the first two extremely ambiguous. The extremes of mood also contribute greatly to this effect. The opening chorale is spiritual and gloomy, the second theme is like a sad klezmer tune, and the trio section is delicate, fleet, and soulful.

 The great tunes keep coming in the third movement. This is heavy humming material. An opening waltz in g minor recollects the tonality beginning the symphony. The trio melody in G major with its folk leanings to B and E minor, is among Dvorak’s most lyrical melodies. It too is a waltz. The finale of the movement, though, reformulates the trio into a fast delicate duple theme. The movement ends in delicious quiet.

A trumpet fanfare ushers in the finale. This last movement again is simple to hear, but complex in structure. It is both a rondo and accelerating theme and variations put together. The theme is reminiscent to me of Elgar’s music—it has an English baroque character. But Dvorak “fixes” that especially in a rousing bacchanalian variation in quick time, a virile dose of Czechoslovakian folk music, that thrills with a virtuoso horn ascending scale and trill.  The theme and variation process is interrupted by a minor Turkish sounding theme that constitutes a central trio section. Particularly remarkable is a passage of descending harmonies by half step. This section with a new theme begins to incorporate elements of the main theme of the piece, sounding like a development section. And indeed it is a retransition that culminates in a victorious statement of the opening trumpet fanfare, this time accompanied harmonically. That dies down and the main theme reappears and the accelerated variation process begins again, pushing into a quick coda that ends the symphony with more than proper enthusiasm.

SAN DIEGO SYMPHONY

May 1, 2010

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Overture to Egmont, Op. 84

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37

INTERMISSION

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58

Yefim Bronfman, Pianist

 INTRODUCTION

The three works on tonight’s program are prime examples of Beethoven’s heroic Middle Period of composition. It was this mature style that helped to establish Romanticism, expanding the forms and styles of Mozart and Haydn into larger proportions and, especially, using a more complex structure of harmony to support this architecture. On the surface of Beethoven’s Middle Period music, we often hear military rhythms, percussive banging textures, and even repeated loops that we today call grooves. But underpinning everything is the concern to develop a musical idea and discover all its possibilities.

 One powerful example of a Beethoven musical idea is the repercussions of abrupt shifts of harmony. The fourth piano concerto is a famous example because the piano begins it in one key, G major, but then the orchestra takes it up in a very different key, one quite far away, B major. In a sense the entire piece reels from this rupture of space. Frequent moments in that first movement suddenly find themselves suspended in foreign keys. On a deeper level, the entire second movement—a kind of spoken-sung dialogue between orchestra and piano unique in the literature—takes us abruptly to an inner deep place.

 NOTES

Egmont Overture

This music was part of Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont with its theme of victory of tyranny, here with Dutch Count Egmont trying to free the Netherlands from Spain. The overture begins in minor with a dramatic slow introduction followed by a fast sonata style movement. The overture concludes with a rip-dazzling finale in triumphant major.

Beethoven can tell an entire story with one note. He does so with the opening F played by the entire orchestra. It portends “fate” in its opening strength and dying away. Then the slow introduction is on its way with strong violent string chords that contrast with the most tender woodwind lines.

 The transition to the fast sonata is a famous example of a musical technique called hemiola, which means changing the accents in a musical pattern to give the effect of speeding up. Here Beethoven takes a pattern in two beats and accelerates it over a larger pattern of three beats. By doing this, different notes get the accent each time and kind of throw us “off” the meter. This acceleration propels the theme of the sonata, which is not really a melody, but a plunging arpeggio in the lower strings that creates more tension than tune.\

The acceleration into the fast sonata goes “nuclear” with the transition to the finale that begins in a fast pattern of two beats and explodes in a triumphant major key. This passage features virtuoso writing especially for the strings who have to practice the heck of it. But it’s so much fun to play!

 Piano Concerto #3

There is a great story of someone turning pages for Beethoven at a performance of this concerto where he was the soloist. Apparently, Beethoven did not write out the solo score, but just had notes and scribblings—what the page turner called Egyptian hieroglyphics. He had to wait for Beethoven to vigorously nod and then turn the page, a very stressful situation which Beethoven laughed about at their dinner afterwards.

The third piano concerto is a defining piece for Beethoven’s heroic Middle Period. It is his quintessential “C minor” piece–the same key as his 5^th symphony and many other dramatic works. The opening theme has the military-march feel that characterizes much of his music from this period, and would eventually develop into the Eroica symphony and beyond. It also takes both the role of the orchestra and the pianist to new heights. The opening 3 minute orchestral exposition is more a satisfying opening for a symphony than an introduction for a soloist. But when the piano enters, it does so with a dazzling array of virtuoso techniques—scales, arpeggios, double thirds, trills, etc. There is a new physicality, a new muscularity to the piano part that sets it apart from earlier works by Haydn, Mozart, and even Beethoven’s earlier two concerti. It propels the genre into brand new territory and depth. A favorite moment to many is the orchestral entrance after the piano cadenza. Traditionally this is a barnstorming moment when the orchestra brings everything to a loud close. Instead Beethoven follows the pianos concluding trills with pianissimo chords in the strings decorated with descending arpeggios in the piano that give you goosebumps!

The slow movement imparts this depth. It is an extremely soulful lyric work, but made even more so by its choice of key—E major which is a very remote key from C minor. In this way, Beethoven really puts this heartfelt song in a distant special place using harmonic context. He emphasizes this distance also by having the strings play with their mutes.

This move to the distant keys continues to resonate in the third movement where at one moment Beethoven states his rondo theme in E major—that very distant key of the slow movement, effectively recalling that moment and its distance.

 Piano Concerto #4

In a sense, the fourth piano concerto begins from the slow movement of the third piano concerto. The pace even feels the same. But what really establishes the connection, is that both pieces established a distant relationship with a key 3 steps away (from C minor to E major in the 3^rd concerto and G major to B major in the 4^th concerto). And this distant relationship and its ramifications become an important idea for the entire concerto.

 Pianists love to play this concerto of Beethoven’s more than any other. One reason may be that the piano has a special independence from the orchestra. It begins the piece for the orchestra rather than the other way around—which was certainly innovative at the time. But too, when it does finally begin its own exposition, it starts with new material we haven’t heard and a wonderful sense of expectation as to what new worlds it will open.

 The slow movement is among Beethoven’s most emotional utterances. The orchestra declaims forcefully and fatefully as if speaking, or as if this is recitative in an operatic moment. The piano plays in the simplest and most tender of chorales, eventually taming the strident strings. While this piece is without question abstract music, it’s difficult not to imagine this dialogue occurring in a special spiritual space. Whether between God and man, or between a person’s inner states, it is music that inspires philosophy, and that is a particular triumph of Beethoven’s Middle Period style that became a goal for much of the important music that followed his time, from Brahms and Wagner, to Mahler and Schoenberg.

INTRODUCTION

 NOTES

 Ravel Mother Goose

You can read in your program notes the delightful storytelling in this piece from Mother Goose. There’s the sleeping beauty of the opening pavane, the lost Little Tom Thumb whose breadcrumbs were eaten by birds, the dance of the Pagodas in the bathtub, beauty and the beast, and the fairy garden. But I think that is all less interesting and important than the magical world of sound Ravel has created especially for this work. Many remark that Ravel seems to have tapped into the wonderment of childhood usually lost for adults. That seems true to me, but it doesn’t happen by accident. Stravinsky called Ravel the “Swiss Watchmaker” because of his extreme precision and craftsmanship in orchestration. And that precision and imagination is evident in every page of this score. Ravel has such command of instrumental techniques that it's difficult to realize he originally wrote this piece for two pianos! Yet the two piano version is also absolutely convincing. I think that's because, when you get to the bottom of it, Ravel's harmonic language is where the real magic lies. He moves between chords with a delicacy and imagination that conjures the unique fragrance of the world of fairy tales.

 Pavane
Ravel opens with a sparse piece of only 20 measures! But it’s pure haiku in density. The ingenuity of combining harp and double bass pizzicatos and harmonics as an accompaniment to the flute melody instantly creates an unworldly fragile fuzziness. But the opening 2 part counterpoint is also unique—one flute against a muted horn doubled by muted plucked violas. Weird and wonderful! The use of modal harmony (which he employs in the rest of the work) also conjures an ancient world of magic.

 Tom Thumb
Again, Ravel’s simple but carefully modulating harmonies make a chord progression that just feels perfect on every beat. Here he uses an ancient technique from Renaissance music—fauxbordon—the triple layering of a melody to form a series of parallel chords. Here those rising and falling chords impart lost wandering in the forest.

Empress of the Pagodas
The harmonic language here is appropriately pentatonic to impart Chinese music. But what really catches our ear in this piece is the exquisite combination of instruments—harp, celesta, and xylophone, all colored with muted and plucked strings and accompanying the woodwinds.

 Beauty and the Beast
A supremely beautiful and elegant waltz. Ravel again dazzles us with his command of harmony. But there are other delights, such as the way the melody “kisses” the accompaniment at the end of its phrase (its last note leads to the opening note of the accompaniment) and the imaginative contrabassoon solo that represents the beast.

The Fairy Garden
On one hand, one wants to say little of this piece in case talking about it obliterates it, because it indeed is so beautiful and fragile with its slow chorale procession of chords. It’s as if harmony itself is making a procession. In fact, the fairy garden reveals the secret of Western Harmony. Within C major are the hidden overtones. These frequencies are very high and very soft so we don’t actually hear them. But they are present and Ravel reveals them as magic in this piece when the harmony shifts from C major to E major (actually E mixolydian) in the highest register of the orchestra. In this way, Ravel makes apparent chords that are already there but are “invisible” to us in the conventional world. The emotional effect of laying them bare with the harp, celeste, and high strings uncannily transports us to the world of childhood, that special world invisible to us as adults but that in special moments we recall in which the world is a place of magic, vivid color, and exquisite beauty. Yet also a place that is very fragile and needs protection to endure. All this Ravel communicates abstractly in this exquisite miniature of a finale.

 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 2

It’s called the “Little Russian” because that is the nickname for the Ukraine and Tchaikovsky uses 3 Ukrainian folk songs in the piece.

 The first movement is encased and dominated by the Russian song Down by Mother Volga. An extensive slow introduction introduces this song with first solo horn and bassoon, then other instruments elaborately accompanied in the orchestra. What’s strange is that this opening tune is so central to the work, that after the slow introduction the two new themes that constitute the sonata seem far less important! Even the connecting material so important to sonata form falls by the wayside because the introduction is so extensive. Instead of the conventional transition section between the primary and secondary themes, Tchaikovsky just immediately jumps from one to the other!

 The song reappears in the development and again in the extensive coda that balances the long introduction, ending the movement plaintively again first with the horn, then with the bassoon. In every way, the “symphonic” material of the sonata and its very form is swallowed whole by this song.

The inner movements are straightforward in that they have great tunes but no real surprises. The second movement Tchaikovsky adapted from his opera Undine. The hummable march tune is treated to Tchaikovsky’s usual genius for florid accompaniment. The 3^rd movement scherzo moves forward in an infectious perpetual motion.

 The finale is conventionally admired for its clever continuous variations of the first theme. But far more interesting and inventive is the way he weaves the first and second themes together in the development. The second theme appears there unmoored from a central tone center. It keeps slipping and sliding from key to key. Then elements of the first theme appear and the second theme adapts the rhythm of the first theme. The tussle continues and eventually the first theme takes over but plays spasmodically in the syncopated rhythm of the second theme. This fascinating genetic interplay becomes increasingly involved until we find ourselves spilled out back into the tonic key and the recapitulation. An incredible ride!

UBL January 7, 2010 Brahms Piano Concerto 2, Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 2
Russell Steinberg, composer, conductor and performer; in conversation with Bramwell Tovey. Mr. Steinberg is the Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra, and is on the faculty at UCLA.

Berliner Philharmoniker
Tuesday, November 24
Russell Steinberg, composer, conductor and performer. Mr. Steinberg is the Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra, and is on the faculty at UCLA.

Berliner Philharmoniker
Monday, November 23
Russell Steinberg, composer, conductor and performer. Mr. Steinberg is the Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra.

 

Watts Plays Brahms
FEATURED ARTISTS:Los Angeles Philharmonic Bramwell Tovey, conductor André Watts, piano PROGRAM:Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 2, "London"  Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2

Russell Steinberg Lecture Notes

Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2—The —Piano as a Magical Variation Machine
Despite its length and majesty, the Brahms 2nd piano concerto is in some ways more a chamber work than a concerto. The opening establishes this intimacy with the dialogue between French horn and the piano. But the conversational approach continues with a woodwind phrase answered by the strings. This is a preface, of course, to the symphonic orchestral music that follows, yet it establishes a personal relationship with the piano and the orchestra that blossoms in all kinds of surprises—most notably in the extended cello solo that is such an intrinsic part of the slow movement. Name another concerto where the soloist willingly gives up so much control! ☺
Another important point is that the piano and orchestra are equal partners in this piece, and I don’t just mean that they share the material equally, but that Brahms writes for the piano in a way that makes it sound orchestral, more than “virtuoso solo.” For one thing, his phrases often encompass the entire register of the piano—the opening arpeggio being a prime example. Also, he writes very thickly for the piano—thick chords, thick counterpoint—which also gives the instrument an orchestral sound.
But there is something more to this than just friendly banter between the piano and its orchestral friends. Brahms uses this conversational approach as a compositional idea to evolve the music as a continuous set of variations. There seem to be two structural planes unfolding simultaneously. one is the familiar way we know from other concertos: sonata form with all the trimmings—themes galore in the primary and secondary areas, interesting transition sections, a marvelous development section that combines the themes in fragments like a good sonata is supposed to, ending with a marvelous retransition back to the main theme. All that stuff is there. But at the same time there is a continual unifying process whereby it seems every new section of music is just an embellishment and fantasy of the preceding section. This process is so continuous and involved that we sense the entire work—and I mean all four movements, not just the first—is a web of variations based on the opening kernel of notes that the horn plays in the first two measures.
Maybe that’s why we often hear the comment that while the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto has moments of titanic force, it largely holds this force at bay and in fact tends much more often towards a relaxed state. The reason is that instead of the Beethovenian evolution of one note inexorably leading to the next, this piece grows by phrases that are variations of each other. So while a phrase itself may build in tension, that tension relaxes as the music regroups with a new variation that builds all over again. 
A great example of this process is the transition section in the first movement. We first hear it in the orchestra as a brief passage—just a few wisps of notes in groups of three, rising in half step. But when the piano gets hold of the transition in its own exposition, it expands into a miniature complete piece in itself, not so unlike Brahms’ intermezzi. A simple idea becomes increasingly elaborate as both piano and orchestra circle it and add embellishments, lengthening one part, shortening another, enriching the harmony here, adding rhythmic complexity there. This transition has maybe 5 continuous variations, the last one revisiting the simple ascending notes that began the whole process. 
As we listen to more and more of this piece, we begin to sense that even something as basic as those wispy three notes of the transition section come from something earlier. In fact, they are themselves a compressed variation of the opening three ascending notes of the piece that the horn plays. And that’s how it goes all through this first movement.
The variation process was there from the beginning where I first mentioned the entwined relationship of the piano and orchestra. After the piano serves as a sort of reverberating echo for the horn and the winds answer with the second part of the theme, the piano takes off in a fantasy that again is like a mini-series of variations—the first compressing the opening arpeggios and fragmenting the theme to just two notes, the second a chordal hymn, the third an ostinato of the theme over a dominant pedal point. In a substantial way, these flights of fanasy into a world of variations are the piano’s cadenzas. So instead of the idea of a section to show off piano technique, Brahms spotlights the piano as a kind of magical variation machine.
Brahms clearly prided himself on the seamlessness of his craft. Ideas just seem to melt into each other. One glorious moment in the first movement is the way he prepares the recapitulation. The piano ripples arpeggios, playing with the two note motive that has been its material for most of the piece. Underneath, the bass rumbles a motive from the first theme on a pedal tone. The whole texture is similar to passages Rachmaninoff liked to meditate on in his own piano concerti. But then the piano begins slow trills that climb in register while the strings subtly change harmony to prepare the return of the home key. The horn and strings enter with the theme almost unnoticed as the piano winds down this intricate passagework smoothly into the same arpeggios it used at the beginning of the piece. And we’re back.

2nd Mvt.Brahms plays around with form in the scherzo in such an interesting way. Usually the scherzo is a dance in two parts: the scherzo, which is a speeded-up minuet and a trio. But here, Brahms combines this all into a sonata form, placing the trio inside the development section. Very clever and almost so seamless to be undetectable!
The 3 note Do-Re-Mi motive of the first movement continues in the scherzo—first up in the piano, and then down in the strings. The tune is characterized by an opening trill that gives energy to the whole piece. The second theme is also consumed with this trill played elongated and regular speed, in the foreground and the accompaniment.
This elongation forms the accompaniment of the trio section, itself embedded in the development section. The second part of the trio section is whirling vortex of piano chromatic passagework—all a greatly accelerated variation of the trill motive that dominates the piece.
The relation of piano and orchestra is a completely integrated partnership in this movement. The opening material features the piano in the foreground and the orchestra in accompaniment. In the recapitulation, these roles are reversed and the music fits equally well. One reason is that Brahms writes for the piano in its full register, essentially making it an “orchestra.”
3rd MovementThe luscious cello solo opening this movement is probably the most anticipated moment for lovers of this concerto. Again, it sounds so reminiscent of the themes from the first movement. But its really all about descending scales. [Of course, the accumulation of scales, both ascending (finale) and descending (here) share as common ancestor the Do-Re-Mi opening of the concerto]Underneath the solo cello, the cello section accompanies with a descending scale in the home key of Bb. In the second phrase, the violins sound a beautiful high Bb and then descend over the cello’s second phrase, forming the most gorgeous counterpoint. Then listen how the cello takes over this descent near the end of its solo. And typical of Brahms, the cello doesn’t conclude in a way that calls attention to itself. Instead, it just kind of dissolves back into the orchestra.
The piano entrance sounds from the depths in a slow motion version of its arpeggios with the horn in the first movement. Then it plays alone for an extended time in a fantasy that recalls the beautiful solos in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. As you would guess, it is varying the gorgeous descending lines that the violins and cello played earlier.
In the middle section, the trills from the earlier movements re-enter and the theme undergoes far more dramatic variation. The pianist’s left and right hands play chords in syncopation for much of this section.
The retransition is the golden moment of this concerto. The piano contrasts long slow arpeggios in the bass and center register with isolated fragments in the extreme treble of the instrument—here it is a complete but delicate orchestra in itself, accompanied as quietly as possible first by clarinet, then strings. We are in distant harmonic regions here. And when the cello theme returns, it is in this very distant key of F# major, not the Bb major of the opening. This is a false return. As the first phase concludes, the cello and strings play a subtle, delicious, and ever-so-smooth modulation back to the home key and the cello begins the theme proper. 
The love-fest continues with the coda. The cello’s slow descent is in duet with the piano’s sublime rising arpeggios. The piano breaks out with ascending scale in trills. At its peak, the cello re-enters for one final descent. The piano answers in a rising chordal arpeggio that spans the entire register of the instrument. The movement ends in the tonic chord played by the orchestra.
Mvt. 4By now, the piano and orchestra are so cozy, they are even finishing each other’s phrases (the Hungarian folk-sounding second theme). All the energy of trills and arpeggios that have characterized the concerto come to the fore here not as any dramatic terror, rather as the lightest most scrumptious soufflé. The jaunty opening piano theme is light as it goes, but the magic really happens after the piano finishes the theme. It quiets down on the dominant, and then the surprise—a lightning fast but delicate rising scale of thirds sails right up near the very top of the instrument in a trill which ushers in the full orchestra playing the theme. This unexpected swoosh happens so fast it almost has the effect of tickling our ears. We definitely want to hear it again!
But we are easily and decadently diverted with the second theme, which has the character of a Hungarian folk-tune, with all its chromatic melancholy. The contrasting melodies, first one played by the clarinet, and then another by the piano, quickly lighten the mood again. When the Hungarian tune re-enters, this time it is in a playful manner with the orchestra and piano finishing each other’s phrases! Ralph Vaughan WilliamsA London Symphony (Symphony No. 2)
Is it just me, or is it strange that a wonderful 20th composer who was NOT Shostakovich wrote 9 symphonies that we don’t know that well? And this is gorgeous music.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was an enthusiastic collector of English folk songs and hymns. The extremely lyric nature of his music clearly shows this influence. Later in life he became president of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 
This “London Symphony” was composed in 1912-1913 and premiered in 1914, a year after the infamous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. But Vaughan William’s piece has little interest in revolution. Instead it reveals its composer on as intimate a footing with his country’s folk music as Dvorak was with his. It is difficult to tell Vaughan William’s original tunes from his quotations, so wedded are they in style and melodic beauty. One  interesting and strange thing, though, is that for all its “Englishness,” the second symphony is also very French influenced. Many moments recall Ravel and Debussy—particularly the development section of the first movement and the third movement scherzo—and that’s probably in part because Vaughan Williams studied orchestration with Ravel for a short time.
Shortly after the successful premiere, the score was unfortunately sent to a conductor in Germany just before the outbreak of World War !; the score to the symphony was lost Vaughan Williams reconstructed the score with friends of his from the orchestral parts. Years later while working on his fourth symphony, he worked out a major revision of the piece and that is what is performed today. It is 20 minutes shorter than the original. 
There is a program to this symphony that draws attention to various parks and squares around London as its inspiration. While that was a successful point of entry for his contemporary listeners, Vaughan Williams melodic strains communicate its narrative with sufficient clarity to not really need an intermediary. And that was his preference as well—like many late Romantic composers, he was uncomfortable with audiences relying on a narrative program to follow music.
The opening introduction in the first movement is quite extended—over 3 minutes—and it is especially sublime with the double basses filling a deep canyon of pentatonic sound that gradually unfolds in a string chorale of slow gorgeous harmonies leading to the Big Ben chimes quotation in harp and brass. The first movement is a conventional sonata. It really shines in Vaughan-Williams exuberant invented folk materials in the transition section and second theme. The development fragments all of this as expected, but then dissolves in an expressive passage for strings and harp. Here at the heart of the movement, the texture becomes contrapuntal and very Ravel-like with the addition of winds.The recapitulation begins with the first group material very mysterious. The second theme is treated contrapuntally in a way not dissimilar to the way Aaron Copland does with American folk tunes in many of his pieces. 
Conductor Bramwell Tovey made the interesting point that with this symphony Vaughan Williams, along with Elgar and Holst, initiated a renaissance in English concert music, the likes of which hadn't been heard since Henry Purcell. I note that we Americans don't know this music very well,and I surmise that the commotion from Stavinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok from this time may have been responsible for this wonderful English music not cutting through "the noise." But listen to the slow movement of this Vaughan Williams symphony and you can't help but notice its language of 1913 fits like a glove to the musical language of epic American films circa 2000! Clearly, some composers have taken note!

RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON

Tuesday, November 24, 2009, 7:00 PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Berlin Philharmonic
Simon Rattle, Conductor

Wagner: Meistersinger Overture
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1
Brahms: Symphony No. 2

INTRODUCTION
The Brahms vs. Wagner controversy that dominated the latter 19^th century made for a fierce divide in the musical world. However, Brahms once told Wagner he was actually the greatest Wagnerian. By that, I think he meant that his musical understanding was deeper than other adherents so that he could actually understand the depths of Wagner’s genius. And early music of Brahms leans strongly towards Wagner’s color and thematic devices. In his twenties, he in fact first flirted with joining the futurist school of Liszt and Wagner, but then decidedly refuted it as too superficial for his own path. But that was not a flippant choice. Brahms once said that if he looked at the score of Tristan in the morning, the whole rest of his day was ruined. Any of you who have fallen under the spell of Tristan know what her was talking about—Tristan’s obsessive harmonic sequences and leitmotives are hard to get out of your head. It is music of hedonism and excess. The Brahms aesthetic, on the other hand, is an onion, evolving layer upon layer of motivic development. Beneath its sunny pastoral landscape is a network of roots that go to the center of the earth. Its emotional intensity comes not from the surface of its harmonies and melodies, but from the power of its total narrative.

Schoenberg was the greatest student of both Brahms and Wagner. His command of orchestration, harmony, color, and counterpoint took Wagner’s vision to its next evolutionary step. But his passion for musical structure and developing variation—a passion that consumed him his entire life and led to innovations such as his twelve tone method, among many others—that passion marks him even more as the composer most continuing the legacy of Brahms.

Wagner Meistersinger Overture
Wagner’s opera Meistersinger was much admired by Brahms and Schoenberg. It is a fitting connection between these two composers as well. It has the solid bass lines and command of classical harmony characteristic of Brahms combined with the abundance of leitmotives that so informed Schoenberg’s compositional approach. It begins with two celebratory marches.  Notice the active bass line in the first one.

In the middle section, Wagner employs considerable counterpoint as he depicts the various apprentices practicing their music. There are even modernistic moments such as the climax where many themes occur simultaneously, but controlled and overpowered by the march theme in the brass.This contrapuntal music provides a splendid transition for us to discuss Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony.

Schoenberg Chamber Symphony
My piano teacher Earle Voorhies often told me about attending a lecture where Schoenberg said if people wanted to understand his music, they needed to listen to it at least a hundred times. Mr. Voorhies pointed out that music shouldn’t need 100 listenings to be comprehensible. And folks, that in a nutshell, is our dilemma…

Schoenberg’s music is highly concentrated. To make a ridiculous analogy, the first time you hear a Schoenberg piece it’s a little bit like drinking Coca Cola syrup—not the drink, but the concentrated syrup—straight up! The music is just too rich, there is too much going on, to comprehend it all. And when you try, it’s like spraining your brain.

But for all that, Schoenberg was right. Once you listen repeatedly, all those melodies he presents simultaneously start to sort themselves out and the music not only begins to make marvelous sense, but communicates intense expression. This was why Schoenberg couldn’t understand why his music was so hated during his lifetime. He was writing still in the spirit of Brahms and Richard Strauss, but his content is so thick and quick changing, that people had and still have a hard time digesting it.

 This Chamber Symphony No. 1 with its concentrated musical ideas was part of a breakthrough in Schoenberg’s writing around 1905 and 1906 that led to atonal music. This piece stretches the limits of tonality. It has many different kinds of musics, ranging from lush sounds of Strauss and Mahler, to very futuristic sonorities that for us today recall Hindemith and Bartok.

The opening is itself a challenge to tonality because it defines a new harmonic world—one built on the interval of fourths instead of the interval of thirds that characterize all the major and minor chords we know so well. The very next harmonies are also strange—augmented chords. These are built on thirds all right, but the wrong kind of thirds! They are too big and build an exotic whole tone scale instead of major and minor.

But if we untangle things for a moment, we can recognize an opening not dissimilar to Richard Strauss’s famous orchestral tone poem Don Juan. The opening horn rising fourths has the same swoop as Don Juan—as does the main theme.

 In fact, Schoenberg is really doing the same thing Richard Strauss was doing—creating an instrumental opera narrative using leitmotives. That is, the themes become characters and ideas that interact as they do in Wagner’s operas. Strauss too, incidentally, gets very contrapuntally complex at times for the same reason as Schoenberg: too many characters speaking simultaneously!

There are several moments in the Chamber Symphony where the two ideas we’ve discussed—the rising fourths and the “Don Juan-like” main theme engage in complex conversation. Strauss’s Tone Poems merge this Wagnerian leitmotive style with symphonic sonata structure—the stuff that fuels the music of Beethoven and Brahms. And essentially, Schoenberg is doing the same thing. Only in this piece, he borrows a trick he learned from Franz Liszt’s groundbreaking B minor piano sonata where Liszt bunches all 4 movements together into one continuous movement.

That’s what Schoenberg does here in this chamber symphony. The first movement does the sonata form thing—exposition and development. But then it has an underplayed recap that is truncated with a remarkable passage, one that both recalls the strange fourth harmony from the opening and heralds the new music of the 20^th century.

After this transition, we hear a slow movement. Schoenberg uses the fourths to make a transition again to a quasi scherzo movement, and again to a finale that functions as a recapitulation of the entire piece. The coda is particularly stirring because the heroic main Don Juan-like theme finally rises to the surface and overpowers the texture, asserting first its augmented harmonies, and finally resolving to a tonic E major chord to finish the piece.

Brahms Symphony No. 2
This is a symphony about the evolution of ideas. Everything germinates from the opening bud and the piece develops and grows like a living thing. This aesthetic concept Brahms refined from his deep understanding of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. If we try to understand why he expressed distaste for Tchaikovsky’s music, part of the reason might be that Tchaikovsky made melody the supreme control in his symphonies, rather than the servant for underlying smaller motives. For Brahms, this was to confuse the prime motivator in music. And today, I think we can safely say that Tchaikovsky’s aesthetic won hands down. The music written today, whether pop or classical, is usually not in the least concerned with the germination of a single idea. Today we live in a culture dedicated to distraction and the moment, hoping for something spectacular with little regard to its connection with what preceded.

Those of you here recognize the problem with this, especially listening to great music. What you want is a listening handle to help you connect in this case 40 some odd minutes of unfolding music.

That the Brahms 2^nd is about germination is pretty apparent comparing the beginning, say, of the first and last movement. Both begin with the same D-C#-D motive. It seems that this rocking back and forth idea is an important generator of ideas in this music. Ernst Toch in his wonderful book on form called The Shaping Forces of Music gives a penetrating analysis of the Brahms 2^nd which I heartily recommend reading. He is fascinated by two aspects of Brahms’ craft: the way subterranean elements control the larger form and the way Brahms knits ideas together so intricately that they fuse into a single entity, no longer being separate ideas.

Mvt. 1
Sing the opening melody of the symphony. This melody is what we hang on to and remember. But strangely, it doesn’t appear very often as a complete tune. Instead, something underneath and more subtle calls the shots: the rocking back and forth idea mentioned previously. Let’s trace the germination of this motive. First it is an accompaniment to the main theme. Then Brahms stretches out the motive, and as if stretching out a coil, the motive then rebounds with greater energy and spins out the transition theme. The transition section gains drama as our rocking motive fragments and erupts into the foreground. Now it has all of our attention. But Toch points out something very interesting. If we play the accompaniment to this transition theme rocking motive very slowly, we notice something familiar: this accompaniment is in fact just an accelerated version of the opening Horn theme. Brahms is showing how elastic his ideas can be. He can transform something from being a main character to becoming a subordinate character, or even just part of the landscape.

Perhaps the most beautiful tune in the first movement is the sad minor theme. The way Brahms harmonizes this tune is one reason we adore his music. It is bittersweet: in other words, it fuses major and minor together in a way that combines the chords into one complex feeling.

Notice that again we hear rocking back and forth motion like a lullaby in this theme. But a most fascinating discovery is that the accompaniment to this tune is also an accelerated version of the Horn theme. Again what was foreground is now distant background. 

The closing section transforms the rocking idea into a dramatic jumping character. You get the idea. Brahms has taken a subterranean element and through germination, shown it to be the hidden DNA of the piece, controlling its growth and eventually “taking over” the whole show.

To hear how organically subtle Brahms can get, listen to the recapitulation. At first it seems something is missing—the main theme returns, but without the three rocking bass notes that introduce it—those same notes that have been dominating the entire movement. But listen closer and you can hear those notes hidden, stretched out in one of the trombones harmonizing the chords we hear just before the main theme returns.

Mvt. 2
The intense expression from the outset is due to a melody of extraordinary complexity. To understand what makes this melody so complex, keep in mind that most melodies have two parts. Sometimes this is called question-answer, antecedent-consequent, or sometimes just A and B. That has to do with our intense need for a combination of repetition and contrast. So the design we most often hear is question-question, answer-answer, or question-answer question-answer.

Well, this opening melody of the Brahms 2^nd movement has not two, but 6 different parts, and these six parts are interwoven tightly with such ingenuity, that it is difficult to deconstruct them. Brahms contorts these six parts ingeniously. He begins some of them a beat early or a beat late, he stretches and compresses them, then weaves them together so tightly that the result is one great extended super phrase of high expression.

Mvt. 3
The third movement provides a delightful example of developing variation, where one motive spills into various transformations of itself, so strikingly different that at first we’re not sure how they are related.

The movement begins with bucolic gentle rocking motive. Brahms then makes it a fast dance with repeated notes. Then he turn it upside down, gives it a syncopated rhythm and it becomes a rousing group peasant dance. By this point, it doesn’t sound a bit like the beginning, though it uses precisely the same material.

Mvt. 4
The same turning motive from the first movement introduces both principal themes in the finale—literally it begins the first theme and in inversion in the second theme. By now, we might recognize that this motive is simply a stretched out trill. Brahms makes this obvious later in the movement where the strings first harmonize a slow trill. At the conclusion of the piece, the trill creates a momentum that finishes the work not only with bravura, but with a strong reminiscence of the ending of Beethoven’s 9^th symphony—whose Ode To Joe tune is also structured around a turning-trill figure! As you continue to listen to this symphony, discover for yourself the full evolution of this motive.

RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON
Monday November 23, 2009, 7:00 PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Berlin Philharmonic
Simon Rattle, conductor

BRAHMS: Piano Qt. 1
BRAHMS  Symphony No. 1

BRAHMS: Piano Qt. 1
Schoenberg orchestrated the work in 1937, and it was premiered and commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of then-Music Director Otto Klemperer at one of the Orchestra’s Saturday Evening Concerts. Schoenberg explained the rationale behind his orchestration in a letter to Alfred Frankenstein, the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle:
 

“1. I like the piece
2. It is seldom played
3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.”

One way Schoenberg did this, incidentally, was to give the piano part largely to the woodwinds! Their lighter sound certainly changes the balance of the piece from the kind of titanic piano writing with deep bass chords Brahms used in the piano quartet version.

Schoenberg at this time, having emigrated from Vienna to Los Angeles, was in a period of reflection on the relationship of his music with that of the masters preceding him. His American students were surprised that lessons with him did not include discussion of his twelve tone method, but instead involved intense discussions of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms. Klemperer commented at the premiere about Schoenberg’s arrangement of this Brahms piano quartet: “You can’t even hear the original quartet, so beautiful is the arrangement.” By that he meant Schoenberg had made the work truly symphonic.

DEVELOPING VARIATION
The first movement provides a strong example of Brahms’s famous technique developing variation—a technique that obsessed Schoenberg in his own music. Developing variation is a musical analog to germination in organic evolution, where the essence of a single cell multiplies continuously with incredible diversity to create an entire organism. For Brahms, the opening musical ideas in his music contain these “stem” cells that then multiply and mutate with extraordinary imagination. He still composes in the same sonata style of the classical masters—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, but this developing variation process permeates the music from the very first notes into a continuing saga that transcends the classical structure. This process of course is also evident in Haydn and even more in Beethoven, but Brahms emphasized it to the point that every subsequent idea is a kind of hide-and-seek game to discover the relationship with the original melodic germ. This process extends throughout all the movements of the work. You can hear the opening of all four movements as a variation of a single idea that binds together the whole piano quartet!

 MVT 1
The opening tune:
The opening augmented triad hints at the contrast of major and minor with the F#, F natural shifts

The curling tail of thirds that descends (C-Eb-D; G-Bb-A) becomes a running commentary throughout the piece

The outline of a descending scale with chromatic notes—

The second theme: reverses this process with an ascending scale that uses chromatic notes. The hint of major mode in this minor surfaces at the third statement of this tune, which breaks through into major in a over a quicker expressive texture.

The overall impression of this movement is of a theme that is twisted upside down and backwards and forwards. Its contrapuntal dimension surely delighted Schoenberg, who had taken these ideas and placed them as the organizing foundation for his own musical breakthrough with his twelve tone system.

 MVT 4
The inner movements are a scherzo and Andante, with the delight and depth of expression we associate with Brahms. But I want to cut to the chase with the finale, a fiery Hungarian-style rondo. Here is where Schoenberg’s orchestration brings Brahms to a whole new level of color with a whole battery of percussion that includes a xylophone, glockenspiel, tambourine, triangle, cymbals, and drums. The vigor and virtuosity of this movement vies with Tchaikovsky and all the other 19^th century Russian colorists. And that’s probably something Schoenberg wanted to make apparent with his orchestration. Brahms could outdo them in splash and bling, yet still within his strong structural foundation.

The finale is actually preceded by a cadenza. And here Schoenberg goes to town, not being limited by the 4 instruments of the quartet. The first soloist is a clarinet, perhaps a nod to Brahms’ concentration on the clarinet late in his life. Then a violin takes over, and introduces a string quartet! Winds and the other strings gradually join in and increase the tempo. A huge snake of an ascending scale in the strings brings back the main Hungarian theme and the piece accumulates a blazingly fast pace racing to the end.

 BRAHMS  Symphony No. 1
The expectation that Brahms compose a symphony that would essentially be Beethoven’s 10^th became a burden difficult to imagine today. But it was a very real burden to Brahms. The Schumann’s expected it and fervently hoped Brahms could counter the Wagnerian fever they felt was destroying the legacy of Beethoven and Schubert. Robert Schumann wrote that Brahms was Beethoven’s true successor. And with that gargantuan testimonial, the rest of the musical world too waited to hear Brahms prove it with a symphony.

Brahms got earnestly to work and immediately suffered major crises in trying to measure up to Beethoven. Those “symphonic failures” eventually became some of the greatest chamber music and concerti in the repertoire. One early attempt was recast as the F minor Piano Quintet. Another became the first piano concerto in D minor. Both these works conjure the drama and motivic development of Beethoven, but in Brahms’ original style. Even late into his thirties, Brahms didn’t have the confidence to write a large scale orchestral work. Finally, he came up with the notion of writing a series of variations, a more confined structure that would free him to experiment with orchestration. This work was the Variations on a Theme by Haydn. It’s tremendous success finally persuaded him he was ready for a full symphony and by age 40, he released the Symphony No. 1 for public performance.

This piece has everything in it—everything he thought his audience might demand of a Beethoven “10th.” It’s in the proper Beethoven key of C minor. It has all the darkness and drama of Beethoven’s heroic period. But it also references later Beethoven, particularly the ninth symphony, in that this piece too is a cumulative journey. Where the Beethoven 9^th accumulates into Schiller’s Ode to Joy and the entrance of vocal soloists and full choir, the Brahms 1^st culminates first into an alpine Sheperd hymn (played by the horn) and then into a glorious instrumental melody that clearly references Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Like the Beethoven, the entrance of this melody is felt and is intended as a spiritual moment.

The ideas of the entire symphony are condensed in the opening introduction. The timpani drums incessantly on the tonic—and indeed the timpani will have a larger role in this work than almost any other symphony. One can’t help recalling the famous timpani pedal point before the finale of Beethoven’s 5^th symphony. I’m sure this was intentional.

Above the timpani are two soaring contrapuntal lines—one going up, the other down. The effect is of incredible tension, as if they are stretching the piece apart to some titanic breaking point—harmonically especially, with all kinds of clashing dissonance, but also rhythmically. The rest of the piece wrestles with these ideas.

This powerful introduction, incidentally, was composed after Brahms had already written the rest of the movement. The opening Allegro quickly summarizes the rising-falling tension and then is off with a theme of muscular rising and falling leaps.

Brahms develops music continually. So in a sense, his development “section” begins immediately in his music. This piece has that same feeling. Everything refers back to the opening.  The Second Theme is very similar to the First Theme, only more relaxed and in a major key.

 The beginning of the lyrical second movement always sounds a little awkward with the orchestra to me. I think that’s because it feels so much like a piano piece. But we can experience the depth of Brahms’ imagination with the way he elaborates and orchestrates this tune when it returns later on. Here it is so full, so magnificent and noble with the new opening line the violins play, and so varied in color, that only an orchestra could realize it.

The third movement is a gentle pastoral dance in duple meter that begins with the clarinet. This theme develops in variations. The contrasting trio has a triple “hunting song” feel. Discerning ears will notice that this new tune is also a variation of the opening clarinet theme.

The finale is nearly a 20 minute journey—definitely an ‘E’ ticket. It begins tragically, recalling the stretching apart from the beginning of the symphony. Then something truly strange occurs. The strings continue this tension in an extended passage plucking their strings. This tension accumulates in a passionate outburst of bowed strings and comes to a crashing halt with the rolling timpani. And then….a beam of sunlight! The horn plays this Shepherd tune and dispels the gloom. The strings play luminous tremolos above the horn, very much creating the magic that Wagner conjured in his operas.

When this shepherd tune returns in the recapitulation, it is accompanied by the incessant banging of the timpani—a clear reference to the sound that started the whole symphony. But now it’s sound is not foreboding or funereal. It’s clearly joyful—even though it’s playing the same note and just as loud as before!

With this exquisite preparation, the song of joy unfolds. Note that its second phrase is very similar to the second phrase of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. But because the opening phrase is different, we have a hard time placing just why it’s the same at first. I think the careful construction of this theme displays Brahms’ deviousness, both to us the public, and to the idea of having to measure up to Beethoven.

 

 

Yesterday we lost one of the true greats. Composer Leon Kirchner passed away, peacefully, in his sleep, at his home in New York, cared for by his marvelous companion Sally Wardwell. Kirchner was among the most important American composers of our time. His impressive bio is readily accessible, so you can read about his marvelous accomplishments and accolades in other places. (For instance, here)

For those of you not familiar with his music, I recommend starting with these masterpieces: 
Piano Trio #1 
Music for Orchestra I (from his opera Lily)
and his lush Mahlerian Cello Concerto performed by Yo Yo Ma.

As most of you know, I had the privilege to study with Kirchner at Harvard University in the years just before he retired. I have never known another musician that "heard" music as deeply as Leon. Whether it was the way he conceptualized the entire gestalt of the most complex pieces, or the way he would trace the evolution of a single trill of Schubert into its “colossal ramifications,” he was the real deal. He embodied the full consciousness of the entire tradition of Western music. He came to such clarity through his own rigorous studies, especially with Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Bloch, and Roger Sessions.

To sit in his seminars was to feel like you were tapping into a continuous musical conversation emanating from Bach and welling up through Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, then onward to Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg and beyond. He carried all that awareness of who Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. “really were." Tangents were frequent and we often found ourselves in the worlds of physics, mathematics, visual art, and literature. It was intoxicating stuff, and those of us present never forgot it. Music mattered. Period.

He retired from Harvard rather bitter. After decades of passionate teaching, he had little support from colleagues and lamented the time lost from composition. But in the years that followed, he entered a golden period of writing and received a growing number of world class performances. I particularly remember the triumph he had when Yo Yo Ma performed his cello concerto with the New York Philharmonic. The recording of that work went on to receive a Grammy. But as we walked together in Lincoln Center, what pleased him most was that he was being cheered in the same place that jeered him decades ago at the premiere of his opera Lily, an event that continued to haunt him.

Even in the last wonderful afternoon I spent with him this July, he talked about wanting to have the energy to rewrite the entire opera. We spent that day listening to the recording of his special 90^th birthday concert at Columbia University. I hope this gets published—he coached all the performances and they are transcendent.

That day he talked a great deal about his experiences with Schoenberg and Shostakovich. I particularly loved his phrase for Shostakovich, whom he said “came fully equipped.” By “fully equipped,” Kirchner meant that Shostakovich played piano on a world class level, conducted more than competently, could read the most complex scores in total comprehension possibly faster than anyone, and, oh yeah, write music on a level maybe a few hundred people achieved in Western history. That was what it took in Kirchner’s mind to be “fully equipped.” 

Kirchner inspired and instructed many generations of students. Cellist Yo Yo Ma and Composer John Adams are probably the most famous, but he had an impact on innumerable important artists working today. For instance, Alan Gilbert, the new music director of the New York Philharmonic, was a student in Kirchner’s famous Music 180 class. I still stay in contact and have enormous respect for many of my own “Kirchner” colleagues, such as pianists Lisa Weiss and Joel Fan, bassoonist/violist/music historian Derek Katz, and composers Roger Bourland, Noam Elkies, and Gary Noland.

For his students and friends, Leon was both an inspiring and terrifying figure. His powerful comments could lift you to the heights or send you into deep depression. His ego was formidable and he could be a bully. Yo Yo Ma really got it right when he told me he called Kirchner his “boulder.” You couldn’t resist or fight the boulder; you had to discover a way to go around it, or else get run over!

But that all dissolved when Kirchner talked about music. He became then the most truly humble spirit imaginable. And that was the main thing: whenever he talked about music, nothing else in the universe seemed more important. It brought all of us to a sense of high purpose, to a sense that we were participants in this beautiful musical dialogue across the centuries.

Next year the University of Rochester Press will publish Leon Kirchner’s authorized biography, written by Robert Riggs, another marvelous Kirchner student. Look forward to that. But in the meantime, check out his recordings!

--Russell

 

Mendelssohn Bio Continued
Düsseldorf
At age 20, Mendelssohn conducted the revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Mendelssohn’s strong knowledge of Bach’s music was very unusual for his time because to the general public, J.S. Bach was largely unknown. In fact, after Bach’s death, his music remained eclipsed by the more popular music of Vivaldi, Telemann, and Handel. Even his sons C.P.E. Bach and J.C. Bach remained far more popular. Bach was considered conservative, academic, and not worth much listening.

That all changed
after young Mendelssohn premiered the St. Matthew Passion. He was aided by his actor friend Eduard Devrient, who in his memoirs, recalled Felix telling him: 'To think that it took an actor and a Jew's son (Judensohn) to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!’
The acclaim for this performance made Mendelssohn world famous. He was later appointed music director in Düsseldorf and spearheaded a revival of Handel’s music in Germany. Handel, you’ll remember, was revered in England, where he spent most of his life. In fact, he is buried in Westminster Abbey. But Handel’s music was not as well known in his homeland of Germany. But like Handel, Mendelssohn also became much in demand in England where he performed his own music and performed for Queen Victoria. He edited English editions of Handel’s oratorios and later premiered his own oratorioElijah. On his last visit to England, he himself played the piano solo for Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and conducted his own Scottish Symphony No. 3.
Leipzig
Mendelssohn’s most important appointment was in Leipzig, the town where Bach spent most of his life.  He became the fifth conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and became perhaps the world’s first great artistic director for over ten years, from 1835-1846. Leipzig, of course, was the city where J.S. Bach spent most of his life, and that must have been a strong connection for Mendelssohn. He championed much contemporary music including the premiere of Schubert’s Ninth symphony, given after Schumann himself discovered the manuscript at Schubert’s brother’s house. Mendelssohn also performed Schumann’s music—the first two symphonies and the piano concerto. And he revived Bach’s concerto for 3 keyboards with him and Clara Schumann as two of the pianists. He promoted Mozart’s symphonies and all the works of Beethoven. He began a special series called “historical concerts”—a bit like our music appreciation concerts—in which he introduced people to Handel, Haydn, and many other Baroque and Classical era composers. In short, he did a lot to build the repertoire that is common in our symphony halls today.

He also invited leading soloists around Europe to perform with the orchestra, worked to secure better financial terms for the musicians, and kept a very high level of performance. The orchestra became Mendelssohn’s orchestra! He also performed as soloist himself on piano and organ. All this was a huge innovation and achievement, and all of us are indebted to Mendelssohn for this service.

For all this, he received a large salary and permission to be away from Leipzig for half the year. Doesn’t that sound similar to today’s conductors? Gustavo Dudamel, for instance, will only be conducting our LA Philharmonic for less than 3 months this next year. Mendelssohn spent his summers composing and performing at music festivals such as this one where we gather. Some of his were the Lower Rhein Music Festival and the Cologne Choral Festival.

In an interesting aside, Richard Wagner submitted his first symphony to Mendelssohn for performance, which Mendelssohn apparently mislaid. That anecdote probably bears relevance in Wagner’s later horrible diatribe against Mendelssohn in his infamous essay “Judaism in Music.”

Later in Leipzig, 1839, a lawyer left a large bequest to create an arts institute and Mendelssohn successfully petitioned to have this money go to the creation of a music academy. Thus Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory. He became its first director and included Robert Schumann and Joseph Joachim, among others, on its faculty. His innovations included requirements for students to participate in chamber music and orchestras, regular exams, and student evening recitals—pretty much the hallmarks of our present day conservatories. The Leipzig Conservatory is the oldest continuing music school in Germany, but was renamed the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy School of Music and Theater in 1972. You’ve heard of some of its alumni, I believe—Sir Arthur Sullivan, Edvard Grieg, Isaac Albeniz, Miklos Rosza, Klauss Tennstedt, Kurt Masur, to name a few!

His duties with the Leipzig orchestra and conservatory were only half his work. He also toured regularly. In 1844 he made his eighth visit to England conducting six concerts of his own works and Bach and Beethoven. He was a welcome guest of Queen Victoria. He composed rapidly in the summer and other holidays. The famous violin concerto and the string quintet in B flat major came from these holidays. Many comment that his health failed because he was simply working himself to death. By 1845, his doctors were advising him to cut back, but performance commitments in Germany and England made that difficult.

Mendelssohn married Cecile Jeanrenaud, the daughter of a French Protestant clergyman, when he was 28 and had five children with her. In his mid-thirties, just four years before his death, he reputedly had an affair with the famous Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. The Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation, founded by Lind after his death, reportedly has an affidavit from Lind’s husband that it will not release. It reportedly describes Felix’s request to Lind in 1847 that they elope and travel to America. What is certain is that Mendelssohn and Lind were very close in his last years.

In 1846, he composed the oratorio Elijah  in his “time off” on a spring and summer break . His tenth visit to England was centered around the huge success of Elijah. But on returning home to Germany, he heard about Fanny’s death. He went to several places to recover from the news—Baden-Baden, and later Interlaken where he composed his F minor string quartet as a requiem for his sister. Returning finally to Leipzig, friends commented on how frail he looked. He visited his sister’s grave finally in Berlin and became seriously ill, not being able to conduct his Gewandhaus concerts. In October he suffered a stroke and then had a series of strokes, finally dying in November. He was buried near his sister in Berlin, but memorial concerts were given throughout Germany and England.

Mendelssohn Aesthetics

Mendelssohn’s aesthetic outlook is regularly called conservative; not just conservative in the sense of appreciation for the older music of Bach, but in an aversion to the excesses of Romanticism. He particularly disliked the French composers, such as Berlioz or Meyerbeer (to whom he was distantly related). He was also not a fan of Liszt or Wagner. Wagner lead an army of detractors after Mendelssohn’s death aimed at reducing his achievements. The Nazis banned all performances of his music. And what I notice is that the true remaining champions of Mendelssohn’s music in our time are those of us who love chamber music. Chamber music lovers seem immune to political rhetoric. For them (us), it seems less important that music be important than that it be beautiful. And Mendelssohn never fails us on that account.

Want to know why the wedding march from Midsummer Night’s Dream is played at all weddings? Queen Victoria ordered it played for her daughter’s wedding in 1858.Hark the Herald Angels Sing, one of the most celebrated Christmas carols,  is a tune from Mendelssohn’s secular canata Festgesang adapted and set to words by Charles Wesley.

 ON WINGS OF SONG, Op. 34

This became one of Mendelssohn’s most popular songs. As always, his lyrical gift is unerring. Unlike Schubert and later lied composers, Mendelssohn tends to let the music reign supreme over the words. Most of his songs are strophic-that is, the music stays the same through the different poetic stanzas. This particular piece has inspired arrangements for other instruments.

BERLIOZ LA NUITS D’ETÉ (Summer Nights)

Mendelssohn and Berlioz
Mendelssohn and Berlioz met first in Rome in 1831. They met again after the first performance of Mendelssohn’s revised cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht which Berlioz attended and apparently liked very much. Berlioz was in Germany touring and having difficulty making an impression. Mendelssohn came to his aid and helped prepare his Leipzig performances, bringing Berlioz his first recognition in Germany.

Berlioz’s song cycle “Summer Nights” has the distinction of being the first orchestral set of songs. Tonight we hear them in their original version for voice and piano. That Mendelssohn supported Berlioz is surprising because their aesthetic is so markedly different. This music, unlike Mendelssohn’s, is not “Bach bound.” It is not ruled by a bass line and clearly functional harmonic progression. Instead it takes surprising harmonic leaps and dramatic textural changes. Its figuration is especially fresh and original, sometimes even harsh and abrupt. Whereas Mendelssohn sets his music strophically, Berlioz lets the text waft the music to surprising realms.

 MENDELSSOHN String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 80
If it hasn’t already been written, there is a great doctoral thesis waiting to be created on the differing influence of Beethoven on Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. Both of them were on fire for Beethoven’s dramatic music. Felix absorbed Beethoven’s dramatic harmonies and textures, but he kept them rooted in his Bachian aesthetic of a continuing moving bass line and consistent motoric rhythmic patterns, all over an essentially lyrical framework. Fanny strayed further than Felix, clearly enticed by Beethoven’s experimental harmonies and textural juxtapositions. In her music she hints at letting the bass line go for awhile and letting the musical motives dominate. Fanny died May 1847, and that summer in July Mendelssohn vacationed in Interlaken and composed his last string quartet as a requiem for his sister. I gather that he was celebration Fanny’s adoration of Beethoven and this quartet has all kind of Beethovenian references. It has in fact the feel of Beethoven’s early f minor piano sonata as well as the later Appassionata sonata and his string quartets. The second movement uses the rhythmic games that Beethoven loved to use in his scherzi and the slow movement opens similarly to the great cavatina from Beethoven’s op. 130 quartet.

Mendelssohn’s music is always finely knit, something learned from his careful study of J.S.Bach. The seams where events begin and end are often invisible. The opening of this quartet is a case in point. It opens with dramatic tremolos and stormy scales. But this opening might not really be the beginning! What sticks in our memory is the phrase after these scales with its dramatic dotted rhythms and imitation. That might have us conclude that the opening was an introduction to this other phrase. However, then the process repeats with the tremolos and scales returning. We expect the dotted rhythm to return as well, and it does. But now it is less dramatic and has a true melody. Could this be the real theme of the movement? We only learn the answer at the recapitulation after the development section. The retransition is an extension of those opening tremolos and scales. And the return to the home key only happens with the quieter dotted rhythm theme. Now, finally, we know that this quieter theme is the true “beginning” and the true first theme of the movement.

A similar game, but far more expressive, is the opening of the adagio third movement. The cello plays a solo low turning phrase before the violin begins the theme. But the end of the theme uses those very same turning notes. So in retrospect, we realize that the opening of the piece was the end of the phrase, not its beginning. Mendelssohn focuses increasingly on this turn as the piece unfolds, increasing its length and drama as an extended upbeat to the theme.

The second movement uses a splendid metrical game called hemiola. The lower strings play a fast rhythm in threes while the first violin plays a rhythm in threes twice as slow above it. This push and pull is a often used, but powerful technique from Beethoven’s arsenal. It creates confusion and excitement until the faster rhythm in threes “wins out.”

MENDELSSOHN Concerto in D Minor for Violin, Piano and Strings
In the "olden" days, before widespread publishing, composers learned their craft by literally copying music. There is a legend of young Sebastian Bach’s uncle not allowing the boy to use the organ book, which was stashed in a cabinet under lock and key. Sebastian got hold of the key, took the book late at night, and by candlelight, copied the entire thing. The other tried and true method for learning composition is to model the structure and ideas of a piece of music or a particular composer using original material.

Mendelssohn apparently did that to a considerable degree. One reason he undoubtedly matured so fast, was that he wrote an incredible amount of music that shows him methodically absorbing the music of Bach and Mozart. Just try to imagine yourself writing 12 string symphonies between ages 12 and 14. Doing that, you have to learn a thing or two. At age 14, he composed this concerto for violin and piano. It is evidence of exquisite craftsmanship. Nevertheless, it’s a funny thing.  Let me demonstrate.

Listen to the opening. That could be music from any of a number of baroque composers, the way it begins imitating a short subject in d minor. But now listen to the second theme— it sounds like a student imitating Mozart—a style of music about 50 years later than the opening. And that’s how this piece goes. The second movement has a piano solo very much in the style of early Beethoven. The third movement extends clearly into the Romantic Era with a brisk wild folk music. And of course, many moments in the concerto reveal what will eventually become Mendelssohn’s personal style. But that’s how this concerto goes. It mashes all these different kinds of music and styles together and somehow it all works! The level of virtuosity is also astonishing, especially in the fireworks of the third movement. Young Mendelssohn clearly wrote the piece with his own technical proficiency in mind.

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FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Piano Quartet No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 3
Sheryl Staples, violin; James Dunham, viola
Charles Curtis, cello; John Novacek, piano

FANNY MENDELSSOHN
Piano Trio, Op. 11
Fellowship Artist Trio:
SoJin Kim, violin
Madeline Kabat, cello
Liza Stepanova, piano

FELIX MENDELSSOHN
String Quintet No. 2 in B flat Major, Op. 87
Alexander Kerr, Cho-Liang Lin, violins
James Dunham, Paul Neubauer, violas
Fred Sherry, cello

Fanny Mendelssohn
Fanny Mendelssohn draws obvious parallels with two other great women musicians—Clara Schumann and Nannerl Mozart. Like Clara, she was a supreme pianist and composer. Like Nannerl, she was extraordinarily close to her younger brother who overshadowed her, while she was expected to pursue music only as a hobby.

There is a famous anecdote about Fanny Mendelssohn that when she was born, her mother remarked about her hands “Ah! Perfect Bach fugue fingers!” The prophecy of Fanny’s “Bach” fingers proved remarkably true. By age 13 she could play the first book of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier from memory, Like her younger brother Felix, she became a prodigious pianist and composer as well. They had identical training at the Berlin SingAkademie. Like Felix, she studied with Carl Zelter. But both her father and brother made it clear to her that she should not pursue a musical career, but instead prepare for being a housewife. Her father wrote to her “Perhaps music will be his [Felix’s] profession, whereas for you it can and must be but an ornament and never the fundamental bass-line of your existence and activity. “ She did eventually marry a famous painter, Wilhelm Hensel, who did encourage her to be creative. They had a son whom she named Sebastian Ludwig Felix, after her three favorite composers.

After giving birth to Sebastian, she began to complain to Felix about having difficulties finding time to compose. He wrote back:
“You cannot expect a man of my caliber to wish you musical ideas; you are insatiable to complain of their absence; by Jove, if you really wanted to, you’d be able to compose [...] and if you don’t want to, then why are you complaining so dreadfully? If I had a child to coddle, I wouldn’t want to be writing scores [...] the child is not yet six months old, and you’d already like to be thinking about something other than Sebastian (not Bach). Be glad you have him; music is only absent when it’s not in its right place…”

This harsh competitive statement, though, requires the context that the two siblings were unusually close. Felix relied heavily on his sister’s musical judgment. While her first songs were published under his name, he told Queen Victoria that the song she so loved of his was actually written by his sister. Their correspondence has the ring often of love letters rather than siblings. When Fanny married, she wrote to Felix “I have your portrait before me, and ever repeating your dear name, and thinking of you as if you stood at my side, I weep! ... every morning and every moment of my life I shall love you from the bottom of my heart, and I am sure that in so doing I shall not wrong Hensel.” Interestingly, neither attended the other’s wedding. And as famously noted, Felix was so distraught after Fanny’s death that many believe it hastened his own stroke six months later.

Fanny discovered a creative solution to her writing block, despite her brother’s discouragement. She began to hold salons at her house—Sonntagmusik (Sunday morning concerts). Sometimes attended by a hundred people, these concerts used amateurs and hired musicians. This stimulated her to compose again. She gave her only public performance in 1838, performing her brother’s piano concerto for a benefit to raise money for the poor. But separated from both her brother and the world of first class professional musicians left her depressed. And when she asked Felix about her having her works published in her own name, he never approved.

In 1839, Fanny, who till then had never really traveled, spent a year in Italy where she impressed Berlioz and other composers she met. Upon returning, she composed a piano suite of 12 pieces called “The Year.” Finally in 1846, publishers wooed her and with Felix’s reluctant OK, some of Fanny’s collections of songs and piano pieces went to print. Her success encouraged her to pursue more ambitious composition and her piano trio was born and premiered to great success in her home salon.

Then suddenly, with all this positive momentum, she had a stroke while preparing for one of her salons and died.

Fanny and Felix shared a highly similar musical style and aesthetic—supremely lyrical, tightly structured, contrapuntal, Fanny’s music, though, is perhaps more daring and dramatic than her brother’s, with a touch of the wild abandon in Robert Schumann’s music.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN
Piano Quartet No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 3
Dedicated to Goethe, this is a work by the 16 year old Mendelssohn, written in the same year as the magnificent Octet. It is also the piece that Cherubini heard and assured Mendelssohn’s father that Felix was on his way to become an important composer. This piece shows off the piano, which begins every movement. Yet it is also exquisite chamber music and a highly integrated work—definitely one of Mendelssohn’s most dramatic pieces.
The gothic slide up and down a half step governs this intense piano quartet. The first movement emphasizes this melodic motif with the Neapolitan chord, a favorite color chord that intensifies minor pieces. The motif haunts the entire movement, clearly intruding in the second theme area and dominating the entire development section. The motif joins a new theme in this development section, which is a small remarkably dramatic musical work in itself.
The third movement scherzo is a virtuosic tour de force. Unlike the scherzi we heard last week which were in sonata form, this scherzo is in the traditional dance form using a scherzo and a trio. The scherzo uses the same dramatic chromatic slide motif from the first movement, but accompanied by a dazzling perpetual motion of passagework by the piano. The trio continues this passagework, but changes to a major key and accompanies an exuberant descending scale in the strings.
The intensity continues in the finale. Over dramatic tremolos in the strings, the piano plays a haunting chromatic melody, again playing with the sliding motif from the first movement. From there the piano begins more perpetual motion virtuoso passagework that greatly intensifies towards and through the development section. Mendelssohn introduces a highly complicated contrapuntal section in the strings in the development, all while the piano continues its virtuosic passage work. Things get really exciting when the main theme pokes through near the end of this development and takes over the music. The final measures of this music reiterate the Neapolitan sliding motif that has been the central idea of the whole work.



FANNY MENDELSSOHN
Piano Trio, Op. 11
This is not calm, entertaining salon music, but rather a bold composition original and fresh from the outset and continually surprising. While written stylistically identical to her brother, there is a daring edge to this music that goes beyond. Both Felix and Fanny were virtuoso pianists and they both provide a starring role for the piano in their chamber music. But the whirlwind piano accompaniment that opens this trio is still startling. It is like the ferocious wind from Schubert’s song Erlkönig. The next three movements all open with extended piano solos. Yet for all that this trio seems to aspire to becoming a piano concerto, it is something different—not a concerto, but also not exactly chamber music. It is something else. The strings are hardly accompanimental, but instead full of rich solos and complex writing. That originality is a taste of what the world might have received had Fanny been truly encouraged as a composer.
The first movement teems with energy and romantic passion. Already in the transition section, the harmony is much more chromatic and less conservative than her brother’s, hinting more at the worlds of Schumann or, heaven forbid, Wagner. ☺ The recap is a hyper-exaggerated form of the expo with both themes, pointing to Tchaikovsky in its immense sound.
The inner movements are something new. Instead of a slow movement and a minuet, we get a slow movement and what she marks Lied, essentially a Song Without Words for piano trio, very brief The two are played together and coexist as one slow delicious inner poetic movement. This as far as I know is a unique invention, all Fanny Mendelssohn’s own.
The finale is stranger still, as it struggles to find the right tempo. It can’t decide between an andante or an allegro feel. The piano begins with a deliberate cadenza-like introduction, then plays a slow Hungarian sounding march. Only with difficulty does an allegro assert itself. One technique that she does borrow from her brother is incorporating themes from earlier movements in the finale. Here the lyrical 2nd theme from the first movement appears just before the end of the piece, building momentum to an ending in victorious major.











FELIX MENDELSSOHN
String Quintet No. 2 in B flat Major, Op. 87
Composed after the Violin Concerto.
Movement 1
The heroic opening makes immediate reference to the opening of his earlier octet, both with the breadth of its first violin theme, and the way it sets the first violin off from the rest of the ensemble. Mendelssohn’s harmonic craft glistens in this movement. The piece ventures into quite distant keys—e minor in the development for a piece that’s in B flat major (as far as you can get). However, the modulations are so smooth and carried so convincingly by the engine of triplets that propel the movement, they never really startle.
Movement 2
Instead of the fast scherzo we expect from Mendelssohn, we get a slow one—what Mahler later called a Ländler in his symphonies, but in the form of a sonatina instead of a minuet. Mendelssohn imbues this slow scherzo with a very Bachian flavor, both in its opening dance with plucked strings and in later contrapuntal dances. This is one of his most delightful compositions.
Movement 3
One of the great tricks master composers like Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert pull of in slow movements is to invent ingenious accompaniments that “fill in” the spaces in the slow tempo. In the recaps, sometimes several different rhythms occur in different parts and essentially transform something that moves slowly into something that sounds significantly faster. This expressive slow movement does just that, beginning with a slow baroque feel, but then filling in space with a catchy original accompanimental rhythm already in the transition section. Space gets filled even more closely in the development section, where a rippling accompaniment makes the theme sound much faster. This is why perhaps Mendelssohn marks the movement “Adagio e lento,” or “slow and somewhat slow.” The accompaniment in the coda completely fills the spaces with mysterious tremolos, adding a haunting color to the pathos already essential in the theme.
Movement 4
A tour de force movement with devilishly fast 16th note passagework, set off by the first violin in a tumbling cadenza. Two moments especially memorable in this movement are the chromatic fugato in the development section (a subject with a descending chromatic scale) and a recapitulation missing the second theme. It’s almost as if the music was going to fast and went on without it! Only at the end of the coda does the lovely second theme reappear after the momentum of the other music stops to let it catch up.

Notes for Mendelssohn Concert at La Jolla Aug. 4, 2009
MENDELSSOHN
"Songs Without Words" in E Major, Op.19 No.1
arr. Rachmaninoff
Scherzo from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
arr. Liszt
Variations on "Wedding March"
Orion Weiss, piano

Sextet for Piano and Strings in D Major, Op. 110
Helen Huang, piano; Benjamin Jacobson, violin
Jonathan Moerschel, Andrew Bulbrook, violas
Eric Byers, cello; Chris Hanulik, bass
Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. 20
David Chan, Cho-Liang Lin, J Freivogel, Sae Niwa, violins, Heiichiro Ohyama, Sam Quintal, violas, Carter Brey, Rachel Henderson, cello

NOTES
A particular delight of our La Jolla Music SummerFest to get to know the master composers through their chamber music, because it is this body of work that affords the most intimate sharing of their spirit and musical personalities. Last year we entered the living room of the Schumann’s and immersed ourselves in the music of Brahms. This year we spend time with the Mendelssohn’s and their highly cultured world.

Felix Mendelssohn’s contributions significantly shaped what we think of today as the classical music world.  He was a true musical super hero—a tremendously gifted concert pianist, a great conductor, an educator, and one of the greatest composers of his day. His revival performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at age 20 spearheaded the J.S. Bach cult that continues to this day to dominate our musical aesthetics. I’m reminded of the famous quote by Dr. Lewis Thomas who, when asked which piece of music would be most appropriate to include on the disc in the Voyager Spacecraft headed for the stars, said “"I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but... we can tell the harder truths later."

This nearly universal consensus of the great minds about J.S. Bach was the progeny of Felix Mendelssohn’s efforts. Mendelssohn was also the first modern conductor in the sense of being an artistic director; he was the first to be identified as the special interpreter of the orchestras he lead. He was truly an artistic director. For his Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he initiated a special series to educate his audience about early music. He was a champion of contemporary composers, premiering the works of Schumann and Berlioz.  He was also an important music educator, and founded the Leipzig Music Conservatory.  And for us here tonight, his contribution to chamber music has been enormous, spanning his first early efforts such as the Octet composed at age 16 all the way to the final string quartet. We still very much live in Mendelssohn’s world.

A funny impediment for us in classical music appreciation is the complexity of jargon, and that certainly includes the complexity of composer’s names. Mendelssohn’s full name was Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. He signed his name as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The inclusion of Bartholdy was a nod to his father, while retaining Mendelssohn was a conscious rebellion and identification with his famous grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn. Inside these names is a rather interesting story.

Nineteenth century Germany was not an entirely friendly place for Jews (for that matter, neither were the centuries before and certainly not the century after!). Felix’s father Abraham became a successful banker and made the decision to convert to Lutheranism. He decided his father Moses was wrong. Rabbi Moses Mendelssohn was an important 18^th century philosopher. Among his many achievements was a plea for religious tolerance and understanding, as he strived for equality as a Jew in a Christian society.

Moses engaged in vigorous philosophical debates defending Judaism. Many of his ideas formed a basis for what later became the Reform Jewish movement.

Trying to explain himself later to his son, Abraham wrote to Felix "There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius". That was an obvious reference to his own father Moses, who was hailed as the “German Plato” because of one of his books modeled after Plato’s dialogue on immortality, and the “Jewish Luther” for his defense of Judaism in modern Germany. Abraham had Felix converted at age 7 and at the suggestion of his brother-in-law, changed the family’s last name to Bartholdy. “Bartholdy” was the name of a piece of property the brother-in-law owned! For good measure, the strong German names Jakob and Ludwig were tacked on to Felix as well!

Felix, however, greatly admired his grandfather and insisted on keeping the name Mendelssohn. That help explains why after he conducted the phenomenally successful revival of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, he exclaimed that it took a Jew to bring back to Christians the greatest Christian piece of music. In other words, even though a Lutheran, Mendelssohn at age 20 clearly identified as a Jew.

Felix had a brother Paul and two sisters, Fanny and Rebecca. Felix’s close relationship to his older sister Fanny is well known and it is an eerie echo of Wolfgang Mozart and his older sister Nannerl. Many regarded Fanny’s musical talent equal to Felix. She too became a fine pianist and composer. But as a woman, father Abraham, much like Mozart’s father, saw little hope of her successfully establishing a career, and so placed emphasis on the musical education of son Felix.

Aunt Sarah Levy
Felix was a child prodigy pianist and at age 8 already took composition lessons with Carl Fredrich Zelter, recommended by his Aunt Sarah Levy. Imagine having Aunt Sarah as your aunt. She was a remarkable pianist and played in the Berlin SingAkademie orchestra. Her teacher was Wilhelm Frederich Bach, Sebastian’s oldest son—you know, the one that J.S. thought had all the talent, alcoholism aside. Later she became a patron of C.P. E. Bach whose music essentially established the transition from Baroque to the style of the Classical era. Aunt Sarah owned many original Bach family manuscripts that she donated to the Berlin SingAkademie, a music school that the Mendelssohn family generously patronized. Undoubtedly it was Aunt Sarah’s influence that formed the aesthetic core of Felix around the music of J.S. Bach that would last his lifetime. His composition teacher Carl Zelter was the musical director of the SingAkademie orchestra and also was clearly steeped in the music of the Bachs.

 Goethe
But in addition to Aunt Sarah, the Mendelssohn household was a meeting place for prominent philosophers like Hegel and Goethe. In fact, Zelter introduced Felix to Goethe when he was 12. Goethe’s comments are very interesting:

“Musical prodigies […] are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age." "And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?" said Zelter. "Yes", answered Goethe, "[…] but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time, that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child"[12]

Felix and Goethe developed a close friendship. They shared many common beliefs, except on the subject of Beethoven. Goethe had met Beethoven but never came to enjoy his music. As late as 1830, Mendelssohn tried one last time to interest the aging poet in Beethoven's music, enthusiastically playing the first movement of the Fifth Symphony at the piano. “But that does not move one,” Goethe responded, “it is merely astounding, grandiose.”

Mendelssohn’s education was formidable. He spoke English, Italian, and Latin in addition to German. He was a visual artist as well, excelling in pencil and watercolor. He had a passion for classical literature and studied aesthetics, history, and geography at the University of Berlin

The amount of music that young Felix Mendelssohn composed was staggering. Between ages 12 and 14 he composed 12 string symphonies. At age 15 he composed his first symphony. And at age 16 he composed the famous string Octet, still universally regarded as a masterpiece. Mozart at age 16 had not yet reached his own maturity. But Felix Mendelssohn at age 16 was writing fully in the mature style that he was to continue the rest of his life. The next year he wrote his overture to A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream—another masterpiece that is frequently performed every year.

This early leap to mature composition is regarded both as phenomenal and disappointing. Many listeners despair of hearing any evident evolution in Mendelssohn’s music, unlike that of Beethoven, Haydn, or even Mozart. They ask why the youthful composer of the Octet didn’t mature into great profundity like we hear in late Beethoven. But like his contemporary Chopin and later on Camille Saint-Saens, Mendelssohn had a clear aesthetic conviction and didn’t waver in his writing. Those composers maintained not only their style, but a consistently high quality level in all their music throughout their lives. In other words, they weren’t in angst and desperate search for their identities.
 Performing Mendelssohn
A word about performing Mendelssohn—Mendelssohn’s music is even more fun to play than it is to listen. This is not a denigration of the music, but rather to point out that Mendelssohn writes music that delights the fingers. It fits each instrument in a comfortable yet challenging way. When performing Beethoven or Berlioz, for instance, a performer must, in a sense twist and distort their instrument to recreate the composer’s ideas, all while making it sound natural. That’s the magic that happens in master classes at festivals like these. In other words, for composers like Beethoven and Berlioz, their musical ideas transcend the instruments for which they write, even while capturing and even rediscovering the essence of those instruments. Mendelssohn’s music, on the other hand, just fits right out of the box! His piano music, for instance, can be difficult or virtuosic, but he never asks the hands to do the impossible, as Beethoven or even Bach do without concern. For that reason, there is great pleasure in performing Mendelssohn, and that will be evident in this evening’s performance.

“Songs Without Words” op. 19 #1

Both Felix and Fanny composed lyric pieces for piano titled “Songs Without Words.” Felix published his in sets of six pieces each. All pianists study these gems at one time or another. This first one in E major provides a perfect miniature for understanding Mendelssohn’s style.

1)   He establishes a fluid accompaniment that continues to the end of the piece. Mendelssohn’s accompaniments are both a strength and weakness. They are frequently complex and original, but their omnipresence can tire the ear and make for a monotonous texture

2)      Like Bach’s music, his bass line and harmonies move fairly quickly with a clear function from chord to chord

3)      He knows how to milk gorgeous chords at the right moment. The E major +6 chord in this piece is a youthful luminous moment

4)     Like Schubert, his music is centered around the melodic, rather than the motivic as with Haydn and Beethoven

 

Scherzo from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” arr. Rachmaninoff
Highly regarded for its tone painting of the magic forest in Shakespeare’s comedy, this Scherzo is probably Mendelssohn’s most famous. The lightness and exquisite musical painting became a characteristic of his scherzi. Like Haydn’s witty fourth movements, one tends to always look forward to hearing a Mendelssohn scherzo. One point you don’t often read or hear about is that Mendelssohn tended to compose his Scherzo movements as sonatas, rather than the traditional dance form with a middle Trio section. This more elaborate setup let him run a little more fantastical with his musical motives in a development section.  In the orchestral version, the winds and scurrying strings conjure the world of fairies and pixie dust. There’s also the famous braying of Bottom when he’s turned into an ass. Rachmaninoff translates all the fairy effect beautifully with delicate and virtuosic chromatic chords, especially for the piano’s upper register. There’s so much going on, it’s difficult to believe one player is doing it all! Horowitz frequently used this as an encore piece as well in his recitals.

 

Variations on “Wedding March” (Franz Liszt)

Franz Liszt was a friend of Mendelssohn. These variations are as much about him as that of his friend, with their incredible bravura and titanic conception of the entire instrument.

 PIANO SEXTET, OP. 110

As you listen to the piano sextet, keep in mind it was written by a 15 year old. And that 15 year old’s scrawlings from 200 years ago continue to give pleasure to chamber musicians and audiences. The instrumentation is unusual because the string ensemble includes bass—the instrumentation is piano, violin, two violas, cello, and bass. The relatively high tessitura of the piano writing makes up for the missing second violin. This piece already shows Mendelssohn in command of harmony, instrumentation, and early Romantic development of classical forms along the lines of Schubert. It also gives ample evidence for a strong lyrical gift.

The first movement establishes immediately the chromatic passing tones—
F#-G-G#-A—that become a common device throughout the work. To the ear this piece is very much a piano concerto.

There are few startling moments in this music, but one of them is the second movement, because it is placed in the very distant and unusual key of F# major—a fistful of six sharps in the key signature, making intonation a challenge, but more importantly, lending a special haze and hue to all the harmonies of a lyric tone poem.

The third movement is marked as a minuet, but it’s really a rollicking dance in 6/8 time, almost like a sea-shanty. The trio continues the fun with the piano throwing in good-natured chromatic scales as rousing decoration.

Ebullience continues in the finale with its opening piano solo. The big surprise is a return of the rollicking minuet in the coda, a reference to Beethoven’s trick in the 5^th symphony of bringing back his ghost scherzo in the finale.

OCTET, OP. 20
What a difference a year makes! The piano sextet of 15 year-old Mendelssohn shows a command of instrumentation and the classical forms as interpreted by the early Romantic composers. But the Octet of 16 year-old Mendelssohn displays a leap of imagination far beyond that. The sheer aural power of the work is staggering and surprising to us even today. The Beethovenian scope of the first movement and the contrapuntal control of the fugato in the finale are wondrous. It’s also an absolute blast to play.

The first movement is an extensive sonata in the Beethoven Heroic key of E flat major. Mendelssohn here deliberately conjures Beethoven’s grandiosity (and also foreshadows that of the future Brahms). The opening violin theme also foreshadows the wide register of Richard Strauss’s melodies, such as the opening of Don Juan, with its range of over three octaves.  In fact, the first violin’s emphasis of the upper register in this movement is striking, lending it a concerto feel. The second movement is a brooding lyric piece. The third movement is one of Mendelssohn’s most delightful scherzos, foreshadowing the great scherzo we hear earlier in the program from Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s marked Allegro leggierissimo—lively and extremely quiet and light. Credited with inspiration from Goethe’s Walpurgis Night scene in Faust, this music conjures a fantastical mood. Instead of the conventional scherzo and trio, Mendelssohn composes this in sonata style. The fourth movement raises the ante with an opening fugato in 8 voices! The energy and momentum of this subject is fierce, and never lets up through the entire movement. The elements of the sonata literally play over it. In a continual acknowledgement to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Mendelssohn brings back the Scherzo tune in this finale, binding the two movements together. Because of the continual fast passagework, the recapitulation is seamlessly joined with the previous development section. It is also very truncated: first theme, and bam! Second theme, no transition. Then in a very unusual move, Mendelssohn introduces two NEW lyrical themes in the closing section and follows with a operatic finale section in the coda.

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RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON

Friday May 22 , Saturday May 23, 2009, 7:00 PM and Sunday May 24 1PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Christoph Eschenbach, conductor
PROGRAM:
Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5

INTRODUCTION
Before the cancellation of the Shostakovich Violin concerto, I was prepared to embark on the fascinating contrast between Shostakovich and Prokofiev. I’ve noticed an interesting rivalry in popularity through the years between the two composers, especially in concert programming here in Los Angeles. When I was in high school, Prokofiev was all the rage. Now Shostakovich is going through a period of elevation and reevaluation. I wanted to talk about harmony, because Shostakovich and Prokofiev, while both supremely lyrical, use chords in completely different ways. Prokofiev extends and obscures the patterns and progressions of Romantic music. Shostakovich largely ignores them, using all the familiar chords but jumping around them in unpredictable and novel ways. When he does adopt traditional chord progressions, it is often in the manner of a quotation or reference to “genre” music like a march or a waltz.

Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini
Prokofiev, for all his modernism, actually has more in common with Tchaikovsky. And that’s where we begin with this concert: Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, a tone poem composed in 1876. Tchaikovsky had been considering an opera on the subject of the lovers Francesca and Paolo from Dante’s “Inferno.” In the northern Italian town of Rimini, young Francesca is led to believe she will wed Paolo, when instead she is wed to Paolo’s older brother Giovanni. Giovanni discovers the two lovers in flagrante delicto soon after his marriage and kills them. This was an historical incident. In the Divine Comedy, Dante discovers their souls in the second circle of hell, caught in a violent storm twisted eternally away from each other.

Tchaikovsky abandoned plans for the opera, but his brother persuaded him to compose a tone poem on the subject. This 25 minute work is said to owe much to the music of Franz Liszt, who himself composed a Dante Symphony. This is undoubtedly true. The music has a decidedly gothic tone and is obsessed with diminished 7th chords and other chromatic harmonies, not to mention special effects like the raging winds of storm. But I think the piece has an even earlier precedent: the Witch’s Sabbath from Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. Equally similar in sound is the opening of Death and Transfiguration by Richard Strauss, who clearly knew both the Berlioz and Tchaikovsky! What’s the point of all this? Just that we can trace a direct path and common harmonic aesthetic through 60 years between Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Strauss.

So there is a lot of depression, storm, and fury in this tone poem. Tchaikovsky gets to show off his orchestrational prowess. The howling winds will surely sound spectacular in Disney Hall. But those effects for us are now all pretty cliché. And I think even for Tchaikovsky, all that storm and stress was just an excuse to frame one of his truly great melodies. That’s why the piece is so memorable. But let’s first look at his depiction of hell.

The opening of the piece we heard earlier is continual splashes of diminished 7th chords. Tchaikovsky goes to town with this chord exploiting textural effects, including a creepy wailing texture with rising diminished 7ths. In another passage, tremolo strings alternate with swirling woodwinds to create raging winds.And upping the ante, we get a full mother-of-all-storms with rising and falling chromatic scales, yet another device lifted from Berlioz.

These are all thrilling special effects, to be sure. But like special effects in movies from the 70s, it kind of makes us smile now. They’re dated. This was the kind of writing that I suspect drove Johannes Brahms absolutely bonkers about composers like Tchaikovsky, what he would probably call cheap thrills.

The lyricism in the central portion of the tone poem is another thing entirely. The orchestra dwindles down to a single clarinet, perhaps Francesca’s narration of her tragedy. The clarinet solo introduces this achingly melancholy theme, accompanied simply by plucked strings. Like many of Tchaikovsky’s melodies, this is a complicated affair, built of many phrases and essentially a complete entity in itself. The second half of the theme is a different world entirely. Over a pedal point, the strings sing in yearning phrases over the most gorgeous harmonic progression. These chords are why we fall in love with Tchaikovsky’s music.

After this emotional essay, the music enters the mystical world of Liszt and Wagner, including the augmented chord Liszt made so famous in his Faust symphony.

Tchaikovsky’s compositional brilliance is evident in the imaginative accompaniments and variations he constructs for his gorgeous themes. When the cellos take over the tune, they are beneath a new dancing accompaniment of flutes, simultaneously presenting two entirely contrasting moods.

The climax of this central lyrical section in Francesca da Rimini is classic Tchaikovsky. He prepares a climactic moment with a blunt chromatic ascent in the bass. That’s an old trick for him. When he wants to arrive at some particular harmony, he just climbs up the scale till he hits the right note, in this case E. Once he arrives, the entire orchestra comes alive independently. The brass burst forth with a variation of Francesca’s theme. At the same time, both the strings and woodwinds compete for our attention with extremely active accompaniments. The effect is of an enormous careening tapestry, pulsing with emotion and life.



Prokofiev Symphony No. 5

A fascinating item about Sergei Prokofiev is that while he challenged the Romantic Era aesthetic of cantabile with his percussive piano playing and raw primal rhythms, his true inner nature seemed most inclined to a lyrical gift that rivaled all the past masters like Schubert and Tchaikovsky. In fact he composed some of the most hummable and truly lyric music of the 20th century. Think of his Romeo and Juliet, Lt. Kije, the Classical Symphony, etc. This fifth symphony is a prime example of that lyricism.

But there is quite a bit unusual in this piece from what we normally associate in a symphony. The opening of each movement is quiet and melodic, scored for small forces, belying the full orchestra seated on the stage. Also, the first and last movement begin particularly slow for what we usually associate with outer symphonic movements. And in fact, the beginnings of all the movements except for the second movement scherzo are rather similar in feel.


These engaging themes give us plenty to look forward to, but creeping around all this measured lyricism is some heavyduty orchestral writing that lends a depth and complexity to these relatively simple openings. In other words, the candid simplicity that begins each movement belies the emotional depths of the journey ahead.

MVT. 1
The first movement is actually a conventional sonata in B flat major. Prokofiev is incredibly elastic with his melodies. In the recapitulation, the opening theme becomes a true brass fanfare. The coda summarizes the emotional complexity of this theme. It assumes gargantuan proportion and is rather horrific, but then contracts into intimate expression momentarily, only to explode again to complete the movement:
The second theme has two parts. The first is characteristically lyrical. Not till the second part of the second theme does the piece begin to sound “symphonic.” The closing theme sticks out because it is the only quick rhythmic pattern in the movement. In the development section, Prokofiev manages to combine all these themes and ideas together. It makes for a complex tapestry, but one that mysteriously fits nonetheless.

MVT. 2
The second movement, the dance movement of the symphony, is simply “catchy.” Its ostinato eighth notes get your toes tapping to the syncopated theme.

The trio section begins with a gentle and strongly tonal theme. But then things change and Prokofiev seems to enter simultaneously the worlds of jazz and Aaron Copland. Under an ostinato bass rising up four notes and back down in a loop, a new syncopated theme appears. As it builds, Prokofiev adds the woodblock and other percussion—it seems we’re almost at an American sounding hoedown!

The way the opening scherzo theme returns is just remarkable composing. Prokofiev begins with a fascinating color combination of muted brass punctuated by plucked strings—a Stravinskyian effect to be sure. The tune gradually grows before our ears in a slow tempo. Eventually the music accelerates back to the original tempo and return of the opening catchy theme.

MVT. 3
The third movement is the slow movement in the symphony. It begins disarmingly lyrically with a calm floating accompaniment. But that accompaniment is an ostinato (or repeated figure) that intimates the movement’s darkness to come. For one thing, the first chord we hear is minor, even though the piece is in a major key. The second chord is a tritone distant from the first. That also lends a dark dissonance coloring the otherwise sweet-natured theme. The second phrase morphs into a dramatically different character, almost as if the theme becomes twisted. As the first violins leap to the stratosphere, the second violins follow them up high with a triplet accompaniment. Deep below these two lines the harmony changes to minor and slides down chromatically. This “other side” of the theme is one of dark anguish.

A particularly haunting moment is a duet between oboe and bassoon in parallel fourths. The two instruments together sound hollow and empty, perhaps funereal, especially after the fullness of the orchestra.

The middle section of the movement sounds definitely more elegiac. How far the mood has evolved from the opening! The climax reveals the torture that’s “underneath” this seemingly placid theme. The gates of hell with the full power of the symphonic orchestra are unleashed only to subside into the most delicious return of the opening theme. This contrast makes for the real goosebumps in the symphony!

MVT. 4
As previously noted, the introduction to the finale recalls the opening tune from the symphony, but in a bluesy chordal version played by a divided cello section.

This dreamy opening gives way to the most memorable theme of the symphony, one you might be whistling in the car on your way back from the concert. Just a couple of weeks ago I was conducting John William’s wonderful concert suite to the film E.T. and I was struck by the inventiveness of how he uses French horns in repeated pulsing chords to accompany the soaring E.T. theme. Then here I am looking at the score to this finale to Prokofiev’s 5th symphony and lo and behold: the identical orchestration—horns quickly tonguing repeated chords under an equally inspired theme, here first played by the clarinet, and later by the soaring violins. Also similar is the modal basis for the melody—both E.T. and the Prokofiev finale use the Lydian mode.

At the end of the tune, you notice that the violins play a very fast short tag that sounds like circus music. This motif plays a large role as the piece develops. But back first to the tune itself…

The harmony of this infectious tune is a good example of the “Prokofiev-ization” of harmony. What Prokofiev does—and he does this all the time—is to keep the beginning and ending chords conventional. But in between, he makes all kinds of surprising chord substitutions. The normal realization of this melody would probably be the progression I-ii-V-I. Instead, Prokofiev substitutes the two interior chords with a major VI7 and a flat 7th chord: I-VImajor7-bVII4/3-I. Even if you have no idea about what all this jargon means, you can see that the Prokofiev has made the chord progression more complex in tonal terms.

This movement is in rondo form. The flute introduces the B theme. Notice the laid-back, almost pop-music style of this tune. In contrast, the central C theme has a chorale texture realized contrapuntally in the string section.

The coda of the movement combines everything we’ve heard under an ostinato of pulsing chords all in the tonic key of B flat. The circus music aspect is most prominent. But you’ll hear the main theme, the violin repeated note tag, the chorale theme, and much more. It’s Prokofiev brings bringing all these ideas under one big raucous tent.

INTRODUCTION
Tonight we hear two gems of the symphonic repertoire, the fourth symphonies of both Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler. Both works are renowned for their lyricism, brilliant orchestration, relative symphonic brevity, and exquisite craft. Both composers were Jewish in the peculiarly German-Austrian manner of the 19th century—that is, Jews converted to Christianity. Actually, Mendelssohn was baptized as a child, but that didn’t stop him from referring to himself as a Jew. When he dazzled the world with his revival performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at age 20, he famously said, 'To think that it took…a Jew-boy (Judensohn) to revive the greatest Christian music for the world'. Mahler converted later in life as part of the deal for becoming the conductor of the Vienna Opera.

The music of both these masters is intrinsically woven into the tapestry we call 19th century German romanticism. At the heart of this music is song. Mendelssohn is well known for his piano preludes titled Songs Without Words. This title implies the vocal foundation behind all his music. Mahler shared that tradition. In fact, his own songs to Des Knaben Wunderhorn form the thematic basis of most of his symphonies. A lyric narrative is a tremendous help for us as listeners, because we can easily follow the tunes as they develop.

But Mendelssohn and Mahler have more on their minds than merely melody. Both of these works show a fascination with counterpoint, the combination of many melodies simultaneously. Mendelssohn’s symphony portends an actual fugue—the contrapuntal form of choice for his hero J.S. Bach—and that fugue finally plays out in the lickety-split whirlwind finale. Mahler’s 4th is also chiefly concerned with counterpoint, but it is a new approach taken from Wagner’s operas where multiple melodies mingle at once as if they are different characters, each playing in a different sense of time and rhythm, each retaining its own identity, and yet somehow producing an entirely new gestalt. This innovation of counterpoint was to preoccupy Mahler in all his subsequent work.

Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4
Mendelssohn himself gave the subtitle “Italian” to this symphony. Its inspiration was his 10 month trip to Italy in 1830. He made several revisions of the work and it was never published in his lifetime, despite a successful initial premiere.

MVT. 1
The two things that immediately strike our ear in the opening of this symphony are the brilliance of the woodwinds—with their energetic repeated notes—and the “hook” of the opening theme.But just how easy IS it to sing this memorable tune? It gets a little thornier as it goes, doesn’t it? Also, you have to be a bit of a vocal acrobat to get all the notes, the way it dips up and down. This is clearly instrumental writing. And it becomes more so as the theme develops.But this complexity doesn’t stop us from remembering the vital rhythm of the opening measures. Mendelssohn reinforces this rhythm—short-long— by using it with different notes to create his second theme.

Pitted against all this songfulness is some deliciously intricate counterpoint anxious to be let out in the open. From the beginning, the development section threatens to become a fugue.

MVT 2
We read that Mendelssohn was inspired by a religious procession he heard in Rome for this slow movement. What I hear, though, is Mendelssohn’s lifelong love and fascination with the decidedly non-Italian J.S. Bach. I hear beautifully composed counterpoint between the haunting procession melody and the ever-moving bass line. That haunting melody with its even pulse recalls Protestant German chorale melodies—those very melodies that were the basis for so much of Bach’s music. As in the first movement, we marvel at Mendelssohn’s delicate and colorful use of the woodwinds.

MVT 3
The dance movement is less like a stately minuet and more like one of the gentle peasant dances, those Ländler, that Mahler himself used as dance movements for his symphonies. Note the motoric texture that is typical of Mendelssohn’s writing. This texture does give the piece a composed-with-piano feel. The Trio features the French horns and bassoons in a noble fanfare figure.

MVT 4
The finale takes the exuberance of the first movement and raises it up many notches. In fact, it is the first movement “on steroids.” It is cast as a saltarello—a fast gigue-like Italian dance. It is also frequently compared to a tarantella—the “tarantula” dance of spasms. What we really hear, though, is that Mendelssohn has taken the woodwinds, which already made a strong impression in the first movement, and created a genuine tour de force of tonguing and energy as they spit out the dance tune.

The development really stands out as the contrapuntal fugue at which the 1st movement only hinted. The subject is a whirlwind of notes that perpetuate the saltarello rhythm. Thematic statements from the opening create a middle section that is then subsumed again by the fugue. The recapitulation is tremendously shortened after all this energy. A coda featuring the delicate woodwind colors builds suddenly to a fiery ending for the symphony.


Mahler Symphony No. 4

The fourth symphony is not only the shortest of Mahler’s symphonies, but the lightest in terms of orchestration. Missing are the lower brass—trombones and tubas—with all their power and drama. But don’t let that mislead you. The initial impression of “lightness” in this movement belies a power and darkness that resides in its interior.

The entire symphony is based on a song Mahler wrote called “The Heavenly Life.” The fourth movement in fact is an orchestral setting of the entire song, so that the symphony in effect “discovers” this song. This song was part of a large number of songs he wrote on a collection of pseudo-folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). To know these songs is to know many of the themes in Mahler’s symphonies. In essence, these miniature songs germinate the larger worlds that make up the first four Mahler symphonies.

Mahler's symphonies are revealed mental interiors witnessing the psychological truths behind all human experience. Mahler's music fights the danger of translating music to specifics, but general themes clearly reach out to us: finding purpose, dealing with mortality, appreciating beauty, and in tonight’s piece, the vital yet fragile quality of childhood. And most of all with Mahler, there are the contrasts between the light and darkness of life. Mahler’s music is always a manic-depressive rollercoaster emotionally.

Like Strauss, Mahler wanted to have it both ways--music as a separate truth not needing any translation, and music as a specific tool for referencing our physical and emotional worlds--music that is "about" something larger. This in a sense was the dilemma Beethoven's music presented to the world, and which Stravinsky resolutely fought.

This anguish possibly heightens the emotion of music more because we always struggle to find its "hidden" meanings ("what it's about")
Veering away from this slippery slope is important for really learning the music. Mahler poses the modernistic question: Is music about relationships between sounds, or the sounds themselves?

“The Heavenly Life” is a child’s view of perfection, where killing the animals we eat involves no pain or guilt:
We lead a patient,
an innocent, patient,
dear little lamb to its death.
Saint Luke slaughters the ox
without any thought or concern.
…
If you want roebuck or hare,
on the public streets
they come running right up.
Should a fastday come along,
all the fishes at once come swimming with joy.

Movement 1
Initial criticism of this symphony was that it was too cutely derivative, especially of Haydn. Hear the end of the first movement, which indeed might sound right at home in a Haydn Symphony.

But even the first theme in the beginning is a Haydn-Mozart Viennese confection. What sets it apart are the handful of measures Mahler places as a foil in front of the theme. Ah yes! Those strange and wonderful sleigh bells. They take us to childhood— back in time. In a sense, those measures of woodwinds and sleighbells place the entire symphony in the nostalgia of a black and white movie.

The Haydnesque theme has several parts that become the motivic germs of the entire symphony. First are the rising notes that fall down in a sigh figure. Next is the fast turning figure. Then there is the rising scale in a dotted rhythm and decorated tail that complete the first phrase. The horn plays descending turns in the next phrase that have later import. These tidbits literally become individual characters that play against and out of time with each other as the symphony evolves. But even hear, you’ll notice something awry in the orchestration—sometimes an instrument will abruptly stop in the middle of the tune and another instrument will take over. Color and shades already fragment these themes before Mahler even takes them apart.

For instance, the brief transition section has a joyful little fanfare in the winds. In the development section, those few tiny notes evolve into triumphant trumpet blasts of exuberance.

The secondary group begins with a theme as simple as the first one.
The closing is a marvel of chamber-like orchestration, a lightly humorous conversaton in the winds, eventually descending to low clarinets.

The exposition repeats, but in much shortened form, and highly varied. Now the first theme is already accompanied with different versions of itself—the characters begin to fragment in contrapuntal lines.

The development is signaled again by sleigh bells and we enter a complete fantasy dream state. Now the different parts of the theme are completely individuated, running off in their own separate directions. The horn turn figure becomes a klezmer-like melody in the oboe. Ascending and descending scales appear and disappear like ghosts.

A new delicate section on a pedal tone emerges that is like heaven streaming through the clouds—this sublime material foreshadows the song of the last movement. However, in archetypal Mahlerian fashion, this music transforms into daemonic anguish. The roller coaster gains momentum and after plunging to the depths, we launch upwards suddenly to a dizzying height as the trumpet proclaims a victorious fanfare. This “conquer-all” attitude also drops precipitously. Now the trumpet sounds a low and tragic call to arms—this in fact is the precise solo that will begin Mahler’s 5th symphony! The musical texture gradually disintegrates and then BOOM! Like a jump cut, we are startlingly back to the beginning music and a recapitulation. No finely crafted transition of moods, but again a shock as if we were suddenly woken up instantly from the dream world to the world of daily life.

MVT 2
The second movement is a dance movement that explores the darker nature touched on in the middle of the first movement. A solo violin is tuned a half step high to give it a thinner fiddle sound, like a Devil’s fiddle. The sleigh bells from the first movement are now cackling repeated notes in the woodwinds. Glimpses of heaven shoot down at moments—particularly near the end of the minuet in the muted strings shifting to C major and sharp high harp and wind plucks and the lazy carefree trio section. There is even an extraordinary key shift to D major (the piece is in C minor) after the minuet returns. But the otherwise the piece is a dark Totentanz.

MVT 3
The sublime slow 3rd movement is a journey unto itself. It’s about 20 minutes long. And it is Mahler’s competition with Beethoven’s slow movement from the 9th symphony. Like the Beethoven, it is a set of double variations, that is, variations on two themes. Like the Beethoven, it has a slow, chorale-like pace and seeks the sublime.

But more like Mahler than Beethoven, it is an incredible contrast of heaven and hell as well. And these extreme emotional states become increasingly unstable as the piece develops, one becoming the other at faster rates.

The other-worldly heavenly opening theme really does feel like Beethoven’s Ninth, but with Mahler’s contrapuntal style. The second theme is one of yearning and it leads to dramatic ominous calamity. When the first theme returns, it is far more rapid and carefree in tempo. But that too leads to an even deeper despair—a fragile trio of oboe, English horn, and French horn that many cite as one of Mahler’s most imaginative orchestral achievements. The reduction of the orchestra to a quiet contrapuntal wind trio is a kind of ultimate disintegration. At this point in the symphony, it is hard to recollect the simple Haydnesque opening of the first movement. We are in instead in the clutches of a deep mental interior. The music shifts from light to dark at an increasingly faster pace, as if a film editor is chopping together two scenes ever shorter.

The end of this movement is some wonder to hear. Strings and winds alternate in chords pianississimo. Then the glory of heaven just pushes everything aside and bursts through in a spasm of E major brilliance. The violins split into a million parts of arpeggios, just as in Wagner’s mighty Valhalla music, and the brass and timpani take over the music. Then this quiets down and the violins make one final yearning plea, answered by flutes and harp that initiate the timeless chords that end this movement. Curiously, the end of this journey is harmonically indecisive—the extremely high D major chord that ends it is in fact a dominant waiting for resolution in the fourth movement.

MVT 4
The song of the fourth movement brings everything together, all those different fragmented elements we’ve been hearing. The sleigh bells are in the context of their Christian overtones, though strident and alarming. The fanfares we heard earlier are now the gentle undulation of the opening tune of the song. The leap and turn figures expressing such yearning in the earlier movements are now the unworldly slow chorales Mahler uses to word-paint the actions of the Saints.

Commentators mention that this piece is Mahler’s ode to childhood. But I find the emotional turmoil even of this song to be that of an adult. As adults, the notion of lambs being brought to the slaughter for a feast hangs rather heavy. Mahler even musically paints the sound of the lamb as bleats in the oboes—and it doesn’t sound too delighted. Mahler’s music makes clear that while we may yearn for heaven, our perspective is still that of mortals, not entirely OK with the ox, roe, and fishes that eagerly jump and leap to their place as dishes in the angelic feast.

And that seems to be Mahler’s understanding of the final verses of the song, where the angels explain “There is just no music on earth that can compare to ours.” This level of sublimity is beyond mortal understanding. Mahler sets these verses in a sublime coda in E major, music of muted strings, harp, and gentle winds. Pay particular attention to the repeated two notes of the English horn at the end against the harp. That's about as beautiful as an orchestra can get.
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Heaven's Life
(From Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
We enjoy heavenly pleasures
and therefore avoid earthly ones.
No worldly tumult
is to be heard in heaven.
All live in greatest peace.
We lead angelic lives,
yet have a merry time of it besides.
We dance and we spring,
We skip and we sing.
Saint Peter in heaven looks on.
John lets the lambkin out,
and Herod the Butcher lies in wait for it.
We lead a patient,
an innocent, patient,
dear little lamb to its death.
Saint Luke slaughters the ox
without any thought or concern.
Wine doesn't cost a penny
in the heavenly cellars;
The angels bake the bread.
Good greens of every sort
grow in the heavenly vegetable patch,
good asparagus, string beans,
and whatever we want.
Whole dishfuls are set for us!
Good apples, good pears and good grapes,
and gardeners who allow everything!
If you want roebuck or hare,
on the public streets
they come running right up.
Should a fastday come along,
all the fishes at once come swimming with joy.
There goes Saint Peter running
with his net and his bait
to the heavenly pond.
Saint Martha must be the cook.
There is just no music on earth
that can compare to ours.
Even the eleven thousand virgins
venture to dance,
and Saint Ursula herself has to laugh.
There is just no music on earth
that can compare to ours.
Cecelia and all her relations
make excellent court musicians.
The angelic voices
gladden our senses,
so that all awaken for joy.

RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON

Thursday February 5 and Saturday February 7, 2009, 7:00 PM and 1PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Charles Dutoit, conductor
Yuja Wang, piano


Debussy: Petite suite
Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade

Debussy Petite Suite
Originally a piano duet, this early work of Debussy was later orchestrated by his colleague Henri Büsser. This is the early Debussy of the Arabesque and Clair de Lune, before the great leap in 1895 with the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and the birth of modernism. Here Debussy is just beginning his delightful experiments, bringing back older modal systems into tonal music and reveling in rich 9th, 11th, and 13th chords—the stuff that later American jazz musicians eagerly lifted from his music. And like those earlier works, the tunes are elegant and unforgettable.

We can hear all this in the first movement titled Sailing. When I say Debussy’s tunes are unforgettable, I don’t really mean that the melodies are so hot, but that the harmonies that support them take something ordinary and give it an irresistible perfume.

Those langourous sighs over the harp-like harmonies speak of a modal world, leaning strongly on a minor dominant that weakens the tonic and imparts a nostalgia to the work. Later harmonies suggest the augmented triad that would later obsess Debussy, as well as the rich chords he and Ravel made famous.

I find the third movement Minuet the most elegant piece of the set. It opens with a brief introduction of delicate ornaments that recall the French baroque composer Couperin. Then the music settles into a minuet that sounds both antique and new. It has the rigid rhythm of a dance and a squareness to its phrasing, but its harmonies are again simultaneously modal and modern.

The final movement lives up quintessentially to its title—Ballet. The music has a consistent pulse in two accompanying yet another addictive tune. The middle section is dreamier with more advanced harmonies. The Petite Suite is a piece written to instantly please and so it does.

Prokofiev Piano Concerto #2
Prokofiev wrote: “What would be the ideal way to compose a concerto? It occurred to me today that it would certainly be interesting for a pianist to be presented with a concerto that had its origin in a technically challenging sonata and subsequently been transformed into a concerto. The solo part would be bound to be interesting pianistically, while the sonata itself would benefit by the reinforcement and embellishment of a skillfully added orchestral texture.”

Clearly Prokofiev treated the concerto as a vehicle for experimentation. Last week we talked about the fifth piano concerto, in which Prokofiev expanded the first allegro movement into three separate movements, the third one a tour de force toccata. Only then did we get a slow movement followed by a finale—making five movements in all.

The second concerto is also a “rethinking” of the concerto form. Prokofiev dares to buck the conventional Fast-Slow-Fast psychological dictum. He does so in an opposite manner to the Beethoven tradition of the ninth symphony—namely delaying the slow movement closer to the end of the piece. Instead he BEGINS the concerto with its slow movement and follows this not with two, but three fast tempo movements. It’s a remarkable idea, and one that indicates that Prokofiev, for all his modernisms, was even early on dialoguing with classical traditions rather than truly moving away from them like Igor Stravinsky. We often label both of them “neo-classicists,” but this is misleading because they aren’t the same. Stravinsky with the Rite of Spring created entirely new musical structures and connections, much like Picasso’s cubism dispensing with perspective and realism. Later when Stravinsky returned to classical structures in his Octet and later works, he used the casings without the innards, so to speak. In other words, he used the classical structures without the progression of chords that had produced those structures. Prokofiev is different. In his music he is still actively dealing with those progression of chords. He alters them substantially, adds a lot of dissonance, and continually resolves to the, so to speak, “wrong” places. But he does begin and end in all the “right” places. He is still in conversation with Bach and the tonal lineage.

1st movement
The haunting tune that opens the concerto is a terrific case in point. It starts and ends in the “right” places for a piece in G minor. But good luck finding your way in the middle. And when it comes out all right in the end, we are startled and feel “had.” We know Prokofiev just got away with murder harmonically—in tonal terms-—but we’re not sure how this musical Houdini did it!

All those harmonic twists and turns mark the “Prokofiev-ization” of the harmony. Once you become familiar with the style, your ear kind of rides the changing harmonies like a surfer keeping balance on giant waves. And it is exhilarating.

The first movement is completely original. After beginning with this intensely lyric idea, the music gradually transitions to a march for the middle section.
When the lyrical tune returns, Prokofiev has an astonishing surprise—an extended—extremely extended—piano cadenza that becomes increasingly virtuosic and is possibly the closest Prokofiev comes to sounding like Rachmaninoff. The lopsided forces of this first movement propel the concerto into its next three fast movements.

2nd movement
Crazy octave trills initiate the second movement scherzo in a perpetual motion piece that lasts only about two and a half minutes. It has some of the same out-of-breath quality as the Chopin perpetual motion etudes.

3rd movement
The out-of-breath quality continues directly in the third movement. After ponderous brass octaves, the clarinet enters chortling down in scales. The piano takes up this playfulness with acrobatic scales in what is decidedly a sardonic scherzo. These scales take on a shimmer in a middle section that reminds us a bit of one of the haunting solo dances in his Romeo and Juliet ballet written much later. The piece ends with a fiendish cackling in the woodwinds.

4th movement
Where do you go from 2 fast movements in a row? Incredibly, Prokofiev creates a tempestuous finale that even outdoes the energy of those previous pieces in its opening acrobatics. But this is a complex movement that seeks to bind the entire concerto together. The energetic opening gives way to an extended second area that begins in desolation with chillingly beautiful dissonant piano chords. This is an intimate cadenza that becomes an increasingly lyrical search for the calm of the opening of the concerto. A lush theme emerges that is clearly related to the tune that began the concerto. Later this material returns in an even more extended piano cadenza. Both of these cadenzas clearly refer to the first movement. Just when that place of calm seems firmly established, the piece erupts back to its wild and violent opening.

Prokofiev wrote about the premiere:
 “Following the violent concluding chord there was silence in the hall for a few moments. Then boos and catcalls were answered with loud applause, thumping of sticks and calls for ‘encore.’ I came out twice to acknowledge the reception, hearing cries of approval and boos coming from the hall. I was pleased that the Concerto provoked such strong feelings in the audience.”



Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Rimsky-Korsakov wrote: “The program I had been guided by in composing Scheherazade consisted of separate, unconnected episodes and pictures from The Arabian Nights, scattered through all four movements of my suite: the sea and Sinbad’s ship, the fantastic narrative of the Prince Kalendar, the Prince and the Princess, the Bagdad festival and the ship dashing against the rock with the bronze rider upon it.”

 
“In composing Scheherazade I meant these hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and to leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that this is beyond doubt an oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders and not merely four pieces played one after the other….”

This quote would really speak to my late Aunt. She loved to listen to classical music by closing her eyes and seeing pictures in her imagination. For her, that was what made music beautiful.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s tunes tell the musical narrative of this piece so clearly (and with such sufficient repetition), that a listener needs little guidance to become fully absorbed. And what absorbs us quickly is the mastery this composer has over orchestral texture and color. The solo instruments and their combinations plus imaginative textures greet the ear at every turn. He and Maurice Ravel, by the way, were the two guys everyone else studies to learn to write for orchestra. If a lot of movie music at times sounds like Rimsky-Korsakov, that thievery is not accidental!

The beginning invokes another famous piece of musical magic—Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night Dream. That piece begins with surprising wind chords to initiate the world of magic. Rimsky-Korsakov does the same with the beginning of Sheherezade after its initial brass fanfare. And then the solo violin, the voice of Sheherzade, begins spinning her tales and we’re off on the high seas with Sinbad. Much of Rimsky-Korsakov’s magic is the way he contrasts solo passages with full orchestral tuttis.

The second movement begins with the beguiling violin solo but then the bassoon even outdoes that solo! This is a tenor reedy molto espressivo bassoon, in a high register approaching what Stravinsky’s stratospheric register for the Rite of Spring. And later in the movement, the bassoon becomes a virtuoso. This movement is full of colors, such as the brass fanfare figures and the captivating harp passages near the end of the movement.

The third movement love song is among the most popular classical tunes, rightly so. It is quite long and yet is strongly crafted throughout. The beautiful arabesque scales that float in and around it are particularly wonderful. Exotic percussion and muted brass transport us to foreign lands in the middle section of this movement.

By the fourth movement, Sheherezade is extending her powers, judging by the increased virtuosity of the violin cadenzas. It now feels like a violin concerto.This virtuosity is assumed by the entire orchestra in this movement.
Strings pluck and bow furiously, winds and brass have complicated repeated figures, and the percussion too rattle away on tambourine, cymbals, triangle, and timpani.

Sheherezade also ends just like Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Dream—with magical wind chords drawing the curtain to a close in E major.


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RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON

Tuesday January 27, 2009, 7:00 PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall

Tuesday, January 27, 2009, at 8 PM

San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor

COPLAND Our Town
BERG Three Pieces for Orchestra
BRAHMS Symphony No. 1

COPLAND Our Town
Copland: “It is a quiet satisfaction to know that in the composing of…a film score like Our Town…I have touched off for myself and others a kind of musical naturalness that we have badly needed along with ‘great’ works.”

Last night I spoke about Prokofiev’s urge to find a more simple, natural musical style that would extend tonality without destroying it. That search led eventually to the works of Romeo and Juliet and Peter and the Wolf that we listen to so frequently today. Copland’s path was similar. His remarkable Piano Variations in 1930 was an important American atonal work and its dissonance helped him earn for a time the nickname, “the bad boy of music.” Like Prokofiev, he too felt the need for an expanded tonal world that could connect to audiences and still seem contemporary. His music for Our Town is perhaps the most pared down essence of this language. Using harmonies that emphasize open fifths and simple triads, Copland creates a sound that people speak of as conjuring the wide open spaces of America. Musically, it’s fascinating that with a majority of harmonies that pre-date Mozart, this music still does sound 20th century. One way he does this is to play a triad from one key in the bass and another triad from another key in the treble. He first starts with keys close together so that the resulting chord actually sounds like it’s in one key. But then he will drift the triads farther apart. The resulting dissonance is rather delicious than jarring because he has so clearly prepared our ears with the function of each triad.

This orchestral version of Our Town is a suite Copland adapted from his film score. Thorton Wilder actually wrote the play Our Town while at the MacDowell Colony—the very same place Aaron Copland penned many of his works including Appalachian Spring.






BERG Three Pieces for Orchestra
Berg’s music is DRAMA in capitals. The amazing sonic world of his opera Wozzeck makes that readily apparent and its beginnings can be heard in this early symphonic work in three movements written a year or two after Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring just after the outbreak of World War I.

Atonal music avoids a specific key. Atonal music also strives to expand the vocabulary of acceptable chords by, as Schoenberg stated, “emancipating” dissonance. In other words, once a chord doesn’t have to lead back to the home key, it can be enjoyed for its own sound instead of its function. If we “let go” of that expectation, a whole new world of harmony reveals itself to our ear. If we can’t “let go”—and frankly, many of us can’t—then we are doomed to hear these new harmonies as displeasing and disappointing—precisely because they don’t go to a determined key.

Berg was a student of Schoenberg and, in fact, he worked hard for the master’s approval. This piece was a response to earlier criticisms that his music was not yet fully developed and integrated. Berg has moments that reference particular Debussy, also Mahler, yet his language is astonishingly original, powerful, and in many ways in even more “far out” than the Stravinsky Rite of Spring.

The opening and closing of the Prelude provide a remarkable example of Berg’s originality. The piece is a type of palindrome: it begins in pure noise—percussion of gong and drums—gradually introducing pitch and harmony. It ends reversing that process, reducing harmony first to pitch and then fading pitch back into noise.

The Prelude seems to kind of “discover” melody, first picking out fragments, then repeating them at different levels, finally accumulating into one long spanned gigantic melody: In listening, follow the most prominent melodic line in the violins.

Reigen, or Round Dance, is the second movement. It is far more fragmentary than the first and more difficult to put together in our ear. One way to start listening is to focus on some of the memorable events. Gradually you will make connections and hear similar melodies recurring.

The March finale is a more extended piece, absolutely complex and challenging to hear. For one thing, it is extremely contrapuntal—multiple melodies play simultaneously in different instruments and colors lending a tremendous dimensionality to the overall sound. The dynamics too are extreme, swelling and falling, but not coinciding with recognizable harmonic arrivals, so at first its hard to follow. Berg in this work unleashes a new musical power and freedom, boldly exploring new sonic worlds unfettered by tonal harmonies and tonal textures. The difficulty for us is finding a way to connect events.

To be frank, this is not a work that reveals itself in a first listening. It takes repetition to become familiar with all the mosaics of melodic fragments that Berg freely combines. But with familiarity the piece does seem shorter and far more coherent. When I asked Michael Tilson Thomas for some clues to this piece last night, the first thing he did was to start humming the melodies.

BRAHMS Symphony No. 1

The expectation that Brahms compose a symphony that would essentially be Beethoven’s 10th became a burden difficult to imagine today. But it was a very real burden to Brahms. The Schumann’s expected it and fervently hoped Brahms could counter the Wagnerian fever they felt was destroying the legacy of Beethoven and Schubert. Robert Schumann wrote that Brahms was Beethoven’s true successor. And with that gargantuan testimonial, the rest of the musical world too waited to hear Brahms prove it with a symphony.

Brahms got earnestly to work and immediately suffered major crises in trying to measure up to Beethoven. Those “symphonic failures” eventually became some of the greatest chamber music and concerti in the repertoire. One early attempt was recast as the F minor Piano Quintet. Another became the first piano concerto in D minor. Both these works conjure the drama and motivic development of Beethoven, but in Brahms’ original style. Even late into his thirties, Brahms didn’t have the confidence to write a large scale orchestral work. Finally, he came up with the notion of writing a series of variations, a more confined structure that would free him to experiment with orchestration. This work was the Variations on a Theme by Haydn. It’s tremendous success finally persuaded him he was ready for a full symphony and by age 40, he released the symphony no. 1 for public performance.

This piece has everything in it—everything he thought his audience might demand of a Beethoven “10th.” It’s in the proper Beethoven key of C minor. It has all the darkness and drama of Beethoven’s heroic period. But it also references later Beethoven, particularly the ninth symphony, in that this piece too is a cumulative journey. Where the Beethoven 9th accumulates into Schiller’s Ode to Joy and the entrance of vocal soloists and full choir, the Brahms 1st culminates first into an alpine Sheperd hymn (played by the horn) and then into a glorious instrumental melody that clearly references Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Like the Beethoven, the entrance of this melody is felt and is intended as a spiritual moment.

The ideas of the entire symphony are condensed in the opening introduction. The timpani drums incessantly on the tonic—and indeed the timpani will have a larger role in this work than almost any other symphony. One can’t help recalling the famous timpani pedal point before the finale of Beethoven’s 5th symphony. I’m sure this was intentional.
Above the timpani are two soaring contrapuntal lines—one going up, the other down. The effect is of incredible tension, as if they are stretching the piece apart to some titanic breaking point—harmonically especially, with all kinds of clashing dissonance, but also rhythmically. The rest of the piece wrestles with these ideas.
This powerful introduction, incidentally, was composed after Brahms had already written the rest of the movement.

The opening Allegro quickly summarizes the rising-falling tension and then is off with a theme of muscular rising and falling leaps.
Brahms develops music continually. So in a sense, his development “section” begins immediately in his music. This piece has that same feeling. Everything refers back to the opening. The Second Theme is very similar to the First Theme, only more relaxed and in a major key.
The beginning of the lyrical second movement always sounds a little awkward with the orchestra to me. I think that’s because it feels so much like a piano piece. But we can experience the depth of Brahms’ imagination with the way he elaborates and orchestrates this tune when it returns later on. Here it is so full, so magnificent and noble with the new opening line the violins play, and so varied in color, that only an orchestra could realize it.

The third movement is a gentle pastoral dance in duple meter that begins with the clarinet. This theme develops in variations. The contrasting trio has a triple “hunting song” feel. Discerning ears will notice that this new tune is also a variation of the opening clarinet theme.

The finale is nearly a 20 minute journey—definitely an ‘E’ ticket. It begins tragically, recalling the stretching apart from the beginning of the symphony.
Then something truly strange occurs. The strings continue this tension in an extended passage plucking their strings.
This tension accumulates in a passionate outburst of bowed strings and comes to a crashing halt with the rolling timpani. And then….a beam of sunlight! The horn plays this Shepherd tune and dispels the gloom. The strings play luminous tremolos above the horn, very much creating the magic that Wagner conjured in his operas. When this shepherd tune returns in the recapitulation, it is accompanied by the incessant banging of the timpani—a clear reference to the sound that started the whole symphony. But now it’s sound is not foreboding or funereal. It’s clearly joyful—even though it’s playing the same note and just as loud as before!

With this exquisite preparation, the song of joy unfolds. Note that its second phrase is very similar to the second phrase of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. But because the opening phrase is different, we have a hard time placing just why it’s the same at first. I think the careful construction of this theme displays Brahms’ deviousness, both to us the public, and to the idea of having to measure up to Beethoven.

RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON

Monday January 26, 2009, 7:00 PM
Walt Disney Concert Hall
San Francisco Symphony
Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor

Thomas: Street Song
Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 5
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5

Thomas Street Song
This gorgeous piece in three movements without pause was originally written for the Empire Brass Quintet and later expanded to a larger brass ensemble. It displays a beautiful sense of harmony and counterpoint, and great feel for the American style made so popular by Copland and Bernstein.
Michael Tilson Thomas notes:
“Street Song is in three continuous parts—an interweaving of three "songs." The first song opens with a jagged downward scale suspending in the air a sweetly dissonant harmony that very slowly resolves. This moment of resolution is followed by responses of various kinds. The harmonies move between the world of the Middle Ages and the present, between East and West, and always, of course, from the perspective of twentieth-century America. Overall, the movement is about starting and stopping, the moments of suspension always leading somewhere else.

The second song is introduced by a singsong horn solo. It is followed by a simple trumpet duet, which was first written around 1972. It is folklike in character and also cadences with suspended moments of slowly resolving dissonance.

The third song is really more of a dance. It begins when the trombone slides a step higher, bringing the work into the key of F-sharp and into a jazzier swing. The harmonies here are the stacked-up moments of suspension from the first two parts of the piece. By now, I hope these "dissonant" sounds actually begin to sound "consonant." There is a resolution, but it is the world of a musician who after many after-hour gigs, greets the dawn. Finally, the three songs are brought together and the work moves toward a quiet close.”


PROKOFIEV PIANO CONCERTO #5

Written in 1931-32, the fifth concerto is in five movements, the most ambitious of all his concerti. It’s not what we normally think of as a concerto—a soloist accompanied by an orchestra waiting for an opportunity to perform a cadenza. No, Prokofiev was trying something different. It also isn’t a “disguised” symphony like the Brahms piano concerti. Instead, it is more like a fusion of orchestral suite and concerto. And don’t be put off by the five movements—four of them go pretty fast! The first three movements are short and get increasingly fast. The third is a virtuoso toccata for piano and orchestra. The fourth movement is a genuine slow lyrical expansive movement. And the finale goes back to a quick tempo.

Prokofiev was a modern composer who rejected the idea that tonality was exhausted. He loved adventurous harmonies that expanded the tonal system to the edge of comprehension, but unlike Schoenberg, he felt going over the brink and throwing out the tonal system was a mistake. He was hardly alone in this conclusion, but he came to it many years before his compatriot Igor Stravinsky. I think a great way to grasp Prokofiev’s harmonic language is to hear the theme from Peter and the Wolf first WITHOUT its extended harmonies.
It sounds not so interesting and pretty conventional. This is the tune without having been “Prokofiev-ized.” So what does it mean to “Prokofiev-ize” a tune? It means to make the harmonic motion BACK to the home key an adventure of surprise. He adds chords that have no business in the key and in fact threaten to erase the home key entirely. Then when we think we have lost it, he finds a backdoor that pops us suddenly back to the tonic.
But to be a tonal composer in a world of modernism was to walk a fine edge. The danger of being dated or becoming ensnared in older formulas and conventions was ever-present. And in fact, so many of the marvelous musical languages we adore in 20th century composers—Bartok, Berg, Shostakovich, Copland, and yes Prokofiev’s—were developed not intuitively but after struggle, self-doubt, and conscious working out of aesthetic ideas. The Prokofiev we all know and love—Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Lt. Kije—was an accumulation of experiments to find a simple style of writing that presented tonality in a modern way. The 5th Piano Concerto was a conscious attempt at creating this style and Prokofiev wrote explicitly about how he succeeded and failed in this vein:


“When you become infatuated with the search for a new melodic style and for a new simplicity, you can begin to forget how far you have drifted from shore. If we discount the Fourth Concerto for left hand, more than ten years had passed since I had written a piano concerto. Since then my conception of the treatment of this form had changed somewhat, some new ideas had occurred to me (a passage running across the entire keyboard, with the left hand overtaking the right; chords in the piano and orchestra interrupting one another, etc.) and finally I had accumulated a good number of vigorous major themes in my notebook. I had not intended the concerto to be difficult and at first had even contemplated calling it “Music for Piano and Orchestra,” partly to avoid confusing the concerto numbers. But in the end it turned out to be complicated, as indeed was the case with a good many other compositions of this period. What was the explanation? In my desire for simplicity I was hampered by the fear of repeating old formulas, of reverting to ‘old simplicity,’ which is something all modern composers seek to avoid. I searched for ‘new simplicity’ only to discover that this new simplicity, with its novel forms and, chiefly, new tonal structure, was not understood. The fact that here and there my efforts to write simply were not successful is beside the point. I did not give up, hoping that the bulk of my music would in time prove to be quite simple when the ear grew accustomed to the new melodies, that is, when these melodies became the accepted idiom.”
The opening of the first movement is a fine example of how Prokofiev fuses the old with the new. It’s practically a waltz in G major, but intrusions by chords and scales outside the key (like Ab major) muddy the key. Yet the first and last chords are “textbook” tonality. The brilliant rapid scales and glissandi in the piano also throw us off. These glissandi become a major idea in the concerto.

The second movement scherzo is a comical march. The piano amplifies its harp role, glissandi rampaging up and down the instrument. The march contrasts with a tarantella section.

The third movement toccata is a 2 minute tour de force lasting 2 minutes in breath-taking perpetual motion. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it is the same material as the opening movement! Essentially, Prokofiev has expanded his first movement into three movements—creating a large ABA structure. And THAT is the reason the concerto is 5 instead of 3 movements.

The fourth movement is the first genuinely lyrical moment in the piece with the famous Prokofiev long stretching melodies. It also has the only extended piano cadenza, a sprawling chordal interlude with rolled chords spanning the entire instrument.


The finale is a strange piece. It begins like a toccata and acquires a catchy theme that repeats elusively in different keys throughout the orchestra. But scales have an important role too in this movement. Halfway through the music quiets suddenly and the piano plays an ostinato of two different speeds of ascending scales. This pedal point continues for awhile until the energy of the piece is brought literally to a halt! A lyrical march begins with a syncopated variation of the catchy theme. The remainder of the piece is a gradual acceleration of this tune to a bravura finish with the orchestra ascending by scale.


Tchaikovsky Symphony #5

Tchaikovsky even more than Schubert turned the symphony into songs for orchestra. The profusion of truly great melodies is one reason Tchaikovsky is still the most popular composer for classical audiences. The other reason is that those melodies create a narrative that everyone can follow, even through more than three quarters of an hour of instrumental music.

Tchaikovsky wrote this piece 10 years after the 4th symphony. Indeed, there were rumors that he was “written out” and only after a successful tour of Europe did he feel ready to tackle a major symphonic work again.

Like the 4th, this symphony uses a central motto theme. His notebooks suggest the idea of “resignation before fate,” but other than that, there is no program or story specifically for the piece.

I don’t think it needs one because the melodic ideas are so clear. The motto theme appears in each movement. It has a march quality, but whether that is to ultimately be a funeral march or a heroic march of victory is not clear at first. It seems clear to me that this piece is Tchaikovsky’s reference to Beethoven’s 5th symphony—another piece famous for its motto. And if you pay attention to the last notes of this Tchaikovsky symphony, there can be no mistake about the connection.

But the first movement is more like Mozart in that it has an unbelievable profusion of melodies, all of them great. Unlike classical composers, Tchaikovsky does not build a symphony out of fragments, but instead out of fully conceived themes. And that is what we hear with the opening clarinet theme, playing in its lowest register accompanied by somber strings.
The primary area is another song (or march), again beginning with clarinet.
The transition, secondary area, and closing—another three great tunes.
These four great melodies comprise the narrative of the movement and they intertwine in ways simple to hear. Two wonderful moments I want to point out:
1) in the recapitulation, the march theme has the most exquisite accompaniment of arabesque scales in the winds

2) the very end of the movement is both a surprise and a harbinger of the Pathetique symphony. After seeming to conclude in glorious major mode with full orchestral tutti, the music quiets down in the coda back to its somber beginnings with the clarinet, but now gets downright lugubrious. The basses and celli conclude with low thick E minor chords—foreshadowing the sonic miracle end of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony.


The second movement continues the dark and deep sound of low strings in a chorale introduction to that most famous of horn melodies. As beautiful as is the shape of the melody, the multitude of harmonies makes for the color and emotion that we love so much in Tchaikovsky.
One would expect that the contrasting theme to such an extraordinary melody would be something of different character, certainly not ANOTHER lyrical theme. But that is precisely what Tchaikovsky gives us. Its beauty is partly due to the exquisite harmony resulting from its echoing phrases:

The motto theme makes its appearance now not as a funeral march, but as a dramatic fanfare in the brass
The third movement is a waltz. In his dance movements, Tchaikovsky shows virtuoso skill in handling the woodwinds, and this piece is no exception.
The recurrence of the motto theme appears as a hollow echo at the end of the movement in clarinets and bassoons.

The fourth movement opens with an introduction: the strings play the motto theme as a grand march in major mode. The brass take over and this introduction becomes its own little piece. It lasts 3 minutes—longer than the Toccata movement of the preceding Prokovief concerto.

The allegro that follows is fast and unrelenting. The Transition theme and its consequent phrase are particularly beguiling and lyrical. But the pace continues with a second theme that has a pounding slow trill. Tchaikovsky even tunes the timpani a second apart so they can hammer out the accompaniment too. The motto theme reappears in the brass, bridging into the development section. You’ll notice that the slow trill accompaniment colors the whole section, even at the end where the violins play a slow trill diminuendo.

The coda of this finale is a regal triumph. The motto theme in the brass ends the recapitulation with full force and a cadence on the dominant occurs with such force and lingering that it to the uninitiated the piece might sound over. But then comes the coda, a fully “tricked out” march of Wagnerian pomp like in the March of the Meistersingers. A final operatic presto hurls the piece to a frenzied triumphant conclusion.

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My final UCLA 120C theory lecture addressed to students completing their two year theory sequence, with some comments about our current technological world.
Here we are, we musicians, at the end of our music theory journey together in December, virtually on the eve of year 2009. We started by learning the constraints and complexity of the 17th century tonal system and now end in the post-modern polyglot of the 21st century, having first expanded, then completely destroyed that tonal system, only to have resurrected it as part of a kind of global collage. It’s reasonable to ask, where do we go from here?
All of us swim daily in the vast “triple W.” The world wide web irresistibly occupies an increasing amount our time and thoughts—Amazon, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook compete for every active brain cell we have. The music field is racing to find its place commercially and artistically in this new mental frontier. We ourselves race to stay ahead of obsolescence that occurs now in months instead of generations. Heaven forbid we get dated! So in one way, we go back in time 10,000 years. We are again hunter-gatherers, only now nomads of information. Time for planting and harvest is increasingly rare. Creativity abounds, but it appears in short bursts—what we call of prehistoric times, an “aural” tradition. Now there just isn’t time for depth or complexity, either for artist or audience. We’re always having to keep moving right along.
Awash in data, we have dire need of baskets to store it all. Genius Steve Jobs of Apple Computer came to the rescue with the iPod. It’s interesting that music collections provided the gateway metaphor for easy access to unlimited data. With the iPod, every piece of music is a finger touch away from every other piece. You just scroll down a list and click. No other effort is involved, not reading music on an instrument, nor searching for a record or CD to take it out of its sleeve, read about it, and load it into a machine. Now just touch the iPod and you hear Bob Dylan, touch again and hear Beethoven, touch and hear Tupac, again for Johnny Cash, or music from Bali or a lecture on astrophysics or the movie The Godfather or a picture of your mother. It’s our “brave new world” of instant teleportation to any music, picture, video. It’s so absolutely fantastic and exciting to just have it all and know we can experience it whenever we want. All expression reduces to one link in a never-ending sequence of tracks.
Surely with unlimited access, we can learn more music faster than ever before. But will we? A serious downside, especially for music students still new to absorbing skills and repertoire, is that this new paradigm eliminates a sense of urgency and a sense of the precious. There is no rarity to finding a special recording or stumbling on a particular score. Since it requires no real work or research to hear all of this music, what compels you to get obsessive, to listen to a piece a hundred times, to learn everything you can about it? With everything available, where is the urgency or even the intention to block out, to filter other stuff to concentrate on a single thing and attain some depth of understanding? What we tend to do instead, is listen to one track of music awhile, and then simply click to another as interest flags. Pieces of music no longer have beginnings and ends in themselves; instead they become sound bites in an ever evolving soundtrack we create on the fly when in the act of “listening.” We become casual listening “grazers.” When one patch sounds a little “brown,” we just move on to another that seems more “green.”
I think even the folks at Apple Computer have recognized this problem of abundance. The latest version of iTunes has something actually called “Genius.” What this “genius” does is to be enthusiastic about music for you. Instead of you having to laboriously search for connections between all your data, “genius” does it for you, offering collections that might go well together, a bit like, say, a programmer puts together music for a concert to make interesting comparisons or develop a theme.
While creating urgency and obsession is certainly more difficult with all music available all the time, I don’t mean to say this is a negative innovation. I myself thrill the convenience of having most of the standard repertoire at my fingertips (and it has been a life-saver for several impromptu lecture invitations). But I think the larger problem we all face is one of aesthetic equivalence. We have tremendous breadth, but suffer from a supreme superficiality. On the iPod, everything is equal. A ten second ringtone is a track just as a Mahler symphony is a track. There really aren’t divisions and there certainly aren’t formalities. Just as today’s cyber world has no sense of public and private, or courtesy and familiar, all music just gets blended together equally. In today’s environment you can’t say a Mozart symphony is better music than a Mario Bros. Videogame tune. It just doesn’t make sense, not because saying it is too judgmental or reflects prejudice or bias, but because the equivalence of presentation in today’s media doesn’t provide a context for comparison. It’s all just music. The current colloquial phrase “it’s all good” expresses this equivalence accurately. Many composers also frequently point out that in our time we have the liberty to use anything we want for musical material. This sometimes makes for interesting confusion of creatorship. Songwriters write songs using samples of other songs. I recall the notorious case of pop star Michael Jackson beginning a song with a two minute recording of orchestra he originally titled “Angel Music.” It happened to be from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony recorded by the Cleveland Orchestra.
Was aesthetic equivalence part of Debussy and Schoenberg’s vision of musical freedom when they broke from the tonal system? Doubtful. Their music requires a degree of absorption and musical context that defeats the strategy of aural grazing. As their careers developed and their music matured, they took pains to emphasize the importance of earlier music, if not the Romantic era from which they rebelled. I think they became increasingly aware of the deeper powers of the tonal system. The late works of Debussy (such as the flute, viola, harp trio) and Schoenberg (the string trio) point to a keen connection with older music.
Think of our first exercise this quarter, when I asked you to write a paragraph that used English language without grammar, and then a musical phrase that deliberately avoided tonality. Looking back on your responses, you might realize that for the most part they really didn’t break much either with language comprehension or tonal implication. That’s because the assumptions of both are so rooted deeply in our subconscious. It requires an intense act of will and internal searching to “rid” our work of these biases.
This quarter I have tried to demonstrate this rather heroic process of overthrowing tonal music theory as the Modern Era unfolded. Looking at it in one way, it’s amazing how dramatically the listening audience for new music shrunk in such a short space of time. The millions of Brahms’ contemporaries who enjoyed his music in 1890 became the maybe thousands of listeners who enjoyed Schoenberg in 1915, a generation later.
That was the price for some pretty steep climbing. Think how Schoenberg and Stravinsky “liberated” dissonance in Pierrot Lunaire or Le Sacre. In retrospect, the “ugly sounds” that sparked a riot was much less of an issue than the more far reaching implication that destroying dissonance also meant destroying expectation, the very thing driving the narrative engine of music. Take away the inherent contrast of tonic and dominant in the tonal system and you also take away the structure that provides the impulse for phrases, sections and longer musical forms. Composers had to find new paradigms for every musical element, including the most basic assumption of time flow. Indeed, the entire concept of hierarchy in all its manifestations has been on “defense” since the 1900s.
The challenge in studying Modern Era music is that without a hierarchy of schools or a progression of styles, it can become just a long parade of composers and musical procedures, without any apparent connection or larger context. Often in these types of classes, you don’t make it much past World War II by the final week. There is just so much interesting music to cover. To prevent that, we have taken a psychological approach that revolves around different reactions composers have taken to the collapse of the tonal system. That journey ended last class with a piece not even ten years old by Thomas Adés that reflected a drug enhanced experience to techno music in a dance club.
Let’s reflect how we got there. First we explored the revolutionaries—the composers that deliberately overthrew the constraints of the tonal system and stepped out of the box. We explored Debussy’s piano prelude “The Sunken Cathedral” and his orchestral “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” That took us away from major and minor scales and simultaneously backwards into the ancient modal system and forwards into symmetrical constructions like the whole tone scale. Even in Debussy, rhythm took on a much freer and complex guise than the strict vertical coordination of Brahms. Still, Debussy’s music is tonal—it ultimately centers around a single pitch or chord. Far more radical was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring that avoided a key center entirely with its octatonic scales, pitch cells, overwhelming dissonant chords, and complex layered collages. Even it’s structure went past tonal forms, using modern editing techniques like splicing, stuttering, and superimposition in place of conventional musical transitions. Schoenberg adhered to tonal forms and phrasing, but in his total negation of a tonal center, his music went even further than Stravinsky in defying the hierarchy of pitch that traditionally defined Western music. This tendency already began in the piano piece op. 11#1, but was much more clearly formed with Summer Morning by a Lake and Pierrot Lunaire, both of which organized music around non-tonal collections of pitch cells. All this music was intentionally revolutionary.
But there was a problem. Breaking with tonality opened new sonic horizons, but it also closed off the structure that provided for large musical articulations. The work to compose by pure intuition was enormous. Webern complained at one point that after using all twelve pitches, he didn’t know what to do next! We listened to his extraordinary fourth movement from his Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10, a sensitive sublime work of only a handful of measures. Early revolutionary composers usually relied on other art forms for their structure—poetry, dance, painting, etc. The urge to create new music that stood on its own demanded a response of control. And that need for control produced countless new musical systems. By the time of the piano piece op. 33a, Schoenberg made the break with tonality complete using his new twelve tone method. Of all systems developed since tonality, Schoenberg’s twelve tone method and its offspring, serialism, have been the most successful and widely adopted. His famous students Berg and Webern helped popularize his methods. We studied Webern’s op. 27 Piano Variations with its remarkable pointilistic leaps and modern sense of rhythm. After World War II, far more composers wrote in this system than any other. Boulez, Stockhausen, Babbitt, Sessions, Carter, Dallapiccolo, Moderna, Knussen—the list goes on and on.
Other composers created their own systems of control. We explored the simple but intricately detailed structure Bartok devised for his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, using the conception of a fugue subject expanding simultaneously up and down by fifths until it reached a tritone, and then collapsed back into itself at the unison. Showing equal control, but in an entirely different way, we analyzed the phase-shifted rhythmic structures of minimalist Steve Reich in his Clapping Music and Piano Phase.
We contrasted the urge for total control to explain everything in a piece of music to the urge for total freedom. John Cage’s Williams Mix provided an example of structural decisions determined by chance instead of intention. We were fascinated how this led to the question of what is noise and what is music. We discovered that by just actively listening we could become creators in a composition. The observation was also made that music composed by total control and music composed by total chance shared similar properties. We also questioned whether chance music truly relinquished control since it usually requires extensive instructions that reflect a multitude of decisions.
Certainly one of the most powerful reactions to the collapse of tonality was sonic and structural experimentation. We began with perhaps the most audacious experimentalist, Charles Ives. We listened to Putnam’s Camp where marching band music and folk tunes coexist in collage, sometimes in polymeter. Ive’s song Serenity wafts along peacefully with just two alternating chords in the piano and a central chanted note. I also played his famous Unanswered Question where soft string chords, a lonely trumpet, and strident woodwind bursts all float independently of each other.
The parade of experimental composers is a long one. We studied Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and learned about his novel rhythmic procedures and imitation of birdsongs. We heard original sounds and sonic layering of Stockhausen’s electronic cantata Gesang der Jünglinge. We touched the surface of Berio’s intricate matching of the sounds of parts of words to particular percussive properties in his song cycle Circles, based on poems by e.e.cummings. In Ligeti’s Atmospheres, we heard the concept of static time flow with his vast microtonal sound masses and micropolyphony.
In stark contrast with experimentation, probably the majority of Modern Era composers reacted to somehow reinvent tonality. That is, to use the materials of tonal music, but organize them in a different way. These reinventions are usually called neoclassicism, but in reality they differ widely. The pandiatonicism of American composers like Aaron Copland who used the notes of a major scale in non-tonal patterns was one way to reinvent tonality. We heard the organizing of tonal triads according to their pitch set symmetries in Copland’s Appalachian Spring. In Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, we heard a different neoclassicism, one that freely borrows classical and romantic harmonies, but moves between the chords in unexpected ways, often not related at all to tonic and dominant forces. Stravinsky influenced all of these neoclassicists, especially with his woodwind Octet, a piece that borrows from early classical forms and styles. Stravinsky’s neoclassicism deliberately creates dissonant chords, unexpected resolutions, and modern rhythmic techniques to impart a particular objectivity meant to negate Romanticism and restore music to a purity of meaning derived just from its content, without any exterior representation.
We mentioned that some wonderful composers responded to the collapse of tonality by essentially being in denial. Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, the early film composers, and so many others continued writing music in a late Romantic vein. Audiences loved their music and as time unfolds, their contributions are now being seen as important, no longer being scrutinized negatively through the prism of the avante garde. Concert audiences also resonated to neoclassic music and it still enjoys the most respect and popularity of any contemporary classical genres. That is, until minimalism and post-Modernism hit the scene.
Responding both to the massive audience consumption of pop music and a growing appetite and awareness for world music, post-Modern composers rejected the modern concept of revolution or experimentation for its own sake. Instead they began to think of all music as a palette of possibility for collage and connection with audiences. George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale was an early harbinger of this new trend. Its remarkable textures suggest Arabic chant, Indian classical music, and even Debussy, all while using highly experimental techniques and being electrified like pop music. We discussed how the rhythmic drive of Steve Reich’s phase music and the obsessive triadic harmonies of Philip Glass connected with rock audiences.
In our current trend of post-Modernism, tonality is decidedly back. But it is now used mostly iconically rather than structurally. The chords and textures remain, but the tonic-dominant hierarchy—the guts, so to speak, of the engine—are no longer in control, if even present. Instead, tonal moments are placed as one part of a larger palette that can include any and all of the innovations explored in the Modern Era. We hear this in all the music written today, including composers John Corigliano, Christopher Rouse, Thomas Ades, John Mackey, and more too numerous to list. The obligation for a composer to not only create music, but to establish an original system of constraints and to invent unique sonic attributes—that obligation remains. Otherwise concert music becomes little more than a series of vignettes—events without connection. And implicit in that construction is an obligation that both composer and audience have some awareness of Western music in its thousand year history, the numerous innovations of the Modern Era, the countless pop music genres, and now also all global styles—an obligation less and less possible to fulfill.
As we continue adding tracks to our iPods, it will take even more time to absorb all this music we have acquired. Increasingly, we will listen to music without regard to context (i.e. without knowing the background of its traditions). All music is now part of a vast library of tracks and each track is an equivalent sound bite. When you tire of listening to one, you simply “audition” another, much as a sound effects engineer goes through hundreds of samples to find the right door creak. Like audiences, composers too now draw from music styles without heed to those contexts. The obligation for articulations to “make sense” is only necessary if the composer insists on music commanding a center of attention rather than accompanying another activity.
But this is where you come in. You may never want to hear about a parallel fifth or octave again as long as you live. But after two years of investigation and practice, you understand that avoiding parallel fifths had something to do with the balance and beauty of music between 1600 and 1900—the classical music that most of you still listen to and perform. I imagine that music performance and listening as an activity self-contained, not required to accompany or be accompanied by other media, is something you may regard even more importantly now than you did a year ago.
Well, in a real sense, you are now part of that tradition and become its custodians. Right now, you might not feel that way. You are acutely aware how much you still don’t know about tonality and how many major works you have yet to discover. But this I promise. As you continue studying music—and that does not mean necessarily formally in school, but primarily self-study with scores, recordings, and concerts—what now might seem a jumble of information and inadequate skills will inevitably coalesce. For one thing, you won’t settle as easily for music that isn’t well wrought. It will bore you. For another, the simplistic judgmental reactions “like/don’t like,” or “good/bad” will cease to carry much meaning.
All last year I used the metaphor of a Magic Circle to describe the tonal system. The circle represented a closed system rotating in a clear counter-clockwise direction of descending fifths. But it also proved how tremendous complexity grows from a simple idea. Within that circle of diatonic fifths we observed a large number of inner circles creating all the familiar chord progressions. Our circle was actually a “multicellular” organism. We studied how a single flaw in the circle, the tritone, opened a doorway to connect with any of the other 11 possible “multicellular” circles. The simplicity of the Magic Circle provides a wide spectrum of expression; it can generate a simple Stephen Foster folksong like “Swanee River” or Beethoven’s 9th symphony. We only discovered its true power this last quarter learning how composers of the Modern Era did their utmost to escape its clutches. Gradually they realized that tonality not only defined the harmonies of which they tired (with its dichotomy of consonance and dissonance), but it also created the very essence of time flow the moving forward in symmetrical musical phrases of rhythmic divisions in even multiples. To escape all of that meant on the one hand denying impulses that centuries of tradition had made intuitive, and then entering sonic realms that challenged conventional notions of noise and narrative. Small wonder that pre-compositional structure has been such a necessary and important activity for today’s concert music. Nothing can be taken for granted. The very way music “breathes” must be reconstructed. And for all its surface complexity, today’s music struggles deeply to attain a fraction of the depth of Mozart, because everything must be built “from scratch” without relying on conventions.
Since you know this, you can listen to all music on its own terms, without relying on preconceived expectations. A new piece will not have to sound like what you’ve heard before. Instead of expecting tonal cadences or arrivals, you can listen on a more general order for patterns of change in texture, pitch, tension, and release. You don’t have to depend on a single system to make sense of what you hear. But you have every right to expect music to exercise or at least aspire to the same integrity of purpose in the masterworks we have studied. And as you get to know more works from the standard repertoire, you will become increasingly sensitive to the way composers like Haydn or Schubert play in startling ways with their own conventions.
Such knowledge will change who you are as a musician and a listener. As performers, your theory training will take you far past the technical requirements or even the impulsively expressive aspects of a piece, to instead create interpretations that reveal deeper musical ideas and connections in a way totally your own. As listeners, your theory training will bring you into a closer relationship with both the music and the performers. Complex and meaningful communication then becomes truly possible. And that initial excitement that spawned your first obsession with music can now mature into a joy at the merging of rigor and emotion, an integration that seems at the heart of all important aesthetic experiences.
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I shared special moments with audiences in a series of three pre-concert lectures on Beethoven for the La Jolla MusicFest. Festival Directors Christopher Beach and Jimmy Lin have produced a truly exceptional program.

The final concert centered around op. 130, the great string quartet that originally ended with the Grosse Fuge (Grand Fugue). I've included my notes in the Lecture area, and particularly my thoughts about the Grosse Fuge, because I ran out of time.

Audience participation during the lectures was enthusiastic. I had them all count out the syncopations for the subject of the Grosse Fuge. During the performance, both the piano 4-hands version, and the string quartet, we all together felt the energy in the audience as they inwardly counted and anticipated each successive note of the fugue subejct. At intermission, I was surrounded by people excited to say they were able to HEAR it!

Special thanks to my new friends Sydney and Dorothy Bearman for their charming guesthouse.

Sunday November 11 at 12:00 noon the Los Angeles Youth Orchestra performs at Walt Disney Concert Hall as part of its partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Russell Steinberg will conduct this orchestra made up of students from over 50 secondary schools throughout LA. Works will include Mozart's Jupiter Symphony (#41), Steinberg's Ruby Overture, and a surprise piece.

Auditions are held September 8 and 9 for all music students Grades 3-12 who have studied an instrument at least 2 years and have a private teacher. Call 310-903-5712 to set up an appointment.