Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique"
November 14, 2009
Mark Baldin, trumpet

PROGRAM NOTES

BENJAMIN BRITTEN
Four Sea Interludes, Opus 33a, from Peter Grimes

Edward Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, November 22, 1913, and died in Aldeburgh on December 4, 1976. He composed his opera Peter Grimes on a commission from Serge Koussevitzky in 1944 and 1945. Reginald Goodall conducted the premiere at the Sadler’s Wells in London on June 7, 1945. The score of the four orchestral interludes heard here calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet), two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, chimes, xylophone, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, gong, bass drum, harp, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.

During a self-imposed exile from England in the early years of World War II, Benjamin Britten chanced to read an article about the Suffolk poet George Crabbe (1754-1832) and found a copy of Crabbe’s lengthy narrative poem, The Borough, which detailed the lives of the inhabitants of an English seaside village in the region where Britten himself had been born. This poem inspired Britten to compose the work that has been recognized as the cornerstone of modern British opera: Peter Grimes.

The opera would never have been written, though, without the encouragement, in both financial and moral support, of conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the score and promised a performance. Eagerly Britten set to work. The first performance in London in June 1945 was a resounding success.

Britten draws his title character rather differently than the poet on whom his opera is based. To Crabbe, Peter Grimes was an unrelieved villain, a thief, drunkard, and brutal fisherman who brought about the death of three consecutive apprentices. Montagu Slater’s libretto takes a different tack, one that is greatly enriched by Britten’s music. His Grimes is an outsider, a dreamer who longs to escape from the gossiping tongues of the village by marrying the widowed schoolmistress Ellen Orford, but only when he has made enough of a fortune from his fishing so that she will not take him out of pity. All their dreams, hopes, and plans shatter on the rock of Peter’s pride and uncontrollable temper.

Throughout the opera the sea remains a constant, palpable presence, determining the daily rhythms of the villagers’ lives, bringing sustenance and income as well as hard work, danger, and death. The swell of the tides, the ripple of light on the waves, the flights of seagulls, the roar of ocean storms—these things pervade Britten’s score, nowhere more than in the several orchestral interludes that have long since become established as an orchestral suite from the opera.

Dawn functions as the true prelude to the opera (following a brief dramatic courtroom scene inquiring into the death of Peter’s first apprentice). Here is the sea as the constant background to life in the Borough. The long soaring lines of the violins suggest the vast tranquil seascape, with a few sparkling highlights in the woodwinds, undercut by the solemnity of the ocean’s imperturbable swell in the brasses.

Sunday Morning is the prelude to Act II. Church bells ring (in the sustained horn tones) and the sunlight sparkles brilliantly on the waves. It is a smiling day, an effective foil to the dramatic scene that soon unfolds when Ellen realizes that Peter has been beating his new apprentice.

Moonlight, the introduction to Act III, depicts a pleasant summer night. But peace is not to be found here; Peter’s new apprentice has suffered an accidental fall from the cliff behind his hut. Though the audience does not yet know what has happened to him, the stabbing interjections of flute and harp into the serenity of the nocturnal music suggest the worst.

Storm takes us back to Act I, where it is an interlude between the two scenes. A coastal storm overpowers the town. Most of the inhabitants rush for cover, but Peter remains outside in the tempest meditating on his dreams for the future. “What harbour shelters peace?” he asks to a yearning melody. Then the storm breaks out in full strength for the orchestral interlude, with one brief recall of Peter’s longing vision near the end.

© Steven Ledbetter

MARK LATHAN
Concerto for Trumpet in D flat, World Premiere

Mark Lathan prepared the following notes for this premiere. The concerto is scored for three flutes, two oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, two additional percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 21 minutes.

Mark Baldin was the very first person I met upon my arrival as a first year student at Northern Illinois University. We became friends right away. Over the last thirty years we’ve kept in contact, as roommates, friends, and fellow musicians. I’ve come to know Mark not only for his wonderful musicianship on the trumpet, but also for his breadth of knowledge about the instrument itself and its literature.

During a conversation in 2003, after I’d returned to Illinois following my study in California, Mark mentioned to me how he’d been looking for new trumpet music – a concerto would be his first choice – that emphasized richly harmonized melodies. Simply good tunes. Melody and harmony are probably most of what I have to offer to the art of composition, so I took that as an invitation to compose a piece for him. A melody I’d been developing at the time became the starting point for the entire work; it is heard at the very beginning and again toward the end of the last movement. While I will share some thoughts in an attempt to add to your experience hearing it for the first time, please remember that this piece is intended as an expression of music and friendship. Most importantly I hope that you, the audience, enjoy hearing it!

Like many concertos this one begins with a slow introduction and then progresses in a three movement scheme: fast – slow – fast. While the Concerto for Trumpet was not really conceived as a programmatic piece per se, I will admit it was partly inspired by experiences in my own life and reflections upon them….

One might imagine that this music progresses like a life’s journey. The first movement begins with introduction of the soloist via the initial theme, moves into youthful exuberance, then turns to a time of trial and conflict among various experiences. It then closes in doubt, maybe wondering if the spoils of life are indeed worth the cost of the hunt. The second movement, introduced by solo bassoon, reflects on all that has happened so far, as the bassoon and orchestra interject thoughts which the soloist considers. This middle movement is really a nocturne, with music which attempts to explore the depths of the soul in a nighttime atmosphere of solitary reflection. As the trumpet’s brighter finale tune appears after the last echo of the bassoon, resolve builds and exuberance returns in a new guise. We were once adrift; now we are led back toward home. The opening theme returns but the familiar ground we’d hoped to find is not the same. We discover that it has been altered by the passing of time and realize that we must decide, after having come all this way, whether to accept it or to travel on.

I’d like to express a heartfelt thank you to Mark Baldin, and especially to Steve Larsen and the Rockford Symphony for taking on this piece during this very special anniversary season. Bravi tutti and congratulations on 75 years!

PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Pathétique

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Kamsko‑Votkinsk, Vyatka province, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He composed the Sixth Symphony between February 16 and August 31, 1893. The first performance took place in St. Petersburg on October 28 of that year (just a week before the composer’s death). The symphony is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, tam‑tam, and strings. Duration is about 46 minutes.

At the beginning of the 1890s Tchaikovsky, at fifty, feared that he was written out. In 1892 he began a symphony and had even partly orchestrated it when he decided to discard it entirely. But a trip to western Europe in December brought a warm reunion: he visited his old French governess, whom he had not seen for over forty years. The two days he spent with her, reading over many letters from his mother and his brothers and sisters, not to mention some of his earliest musical and literary work, carried him off into a deep nostalgia.

The opportunity to recall his childhood, combined with his fundamental fatalism, may have led to the program for the work that suggested itself to him on the way home. Soon he was hard at work on what was to become his masterpiece. By mid-February 1893 he wrote to a nephew that the new symphony would have “a program that will be a riddle for everyone. Let them try and solve it.” He left only hints: “The program of this symphony is completely saturated with myself and quite often during my journey I cried profusely.” On March 24 he completed the sketch and noted his satisfaction at the bottom of the page: “O Lord, I thank Thee! ...completed preliminary sketch well!!!”

The orchestration was interrupted until July because he made a trip to Cambridge to receive an honorary doctorate. The Latin citation for the degree appropriately singled out the ardor fervidus (“seething heat”) and the languor subtristis (“rather sad languor”) of his music. When he returned home he began the orchestration and noted in one letter, “It will be...no surprise if this symphony is abused and unappreciated—that has happened before. But I definitely find it my very best, and in particular the most sincere of all my compositions. I love it as I have never loved any of my musical children.”

The Sixth Symphony was the last work Tchaikovsky would complete. The premiere on October 28, 1893 went well despite the orchestra’s coolness toward the piece, but the audience was puzzled by the whole—not least by its quiet, somber ending. Five days later Tchaikovsky failed to appear for breakfast, complaining of indigestion during the night. He refused to see a doctor but that evening his brother Modest sent for medical help anyway. For several days Tchaikovsky lingered on, generally in severe pain. He died at three o’clock in the morning on November 6.

In recent years it was speculated that Tchaikovsky’s sudden death was attributed to an “enforced” suicide (a measure suggested by the government) over the fear that a homosexual relationship might be revealed—a theory that for a time dispelled the long-accepted view that he drank a glass of unboiled water during a cholera epidemic and died of the disease. But he was one of the most famous Russians in the world at the time, and his illness and death were documented, almost hour by hour. Most recent scholarship puts accounts of “enforced” suicide in the same category as UFO abductions.

Nonetheless the speculation was fired in part by the extraordinary expressive richness of the Sixth Symphony, and especially by its finale. In the Fourth and Fifth symphonies he had already offered two views of man’s response to Fate—on the one hand finding solace in the life of the peasants, on the other struggling through to some kind of victory. In the Sixth Symphony, Fate leads only to despair. Tchaikovsky never did reveal a formal program to the symphony, though a note found among his papers is probably an early draft for one:

The ultimate essence of the plan of symphony is LIFE. First part—all impulsive passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH—result of collapse.) Second part love; third disappointments; fourth ends dying away (also short).

In the end, the program remained the composer’s secret.

The symphony’s title came the day after the first performance, when Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest suggested Pathétique. Tchaikovsky seized at once on the suggestion and added it to the score. Today the title gives a misimpression in English, where “pathetic” has become a debased slang word, almost totally losing its original sense of “passionate” or “emotional,” with a hint of its original Greek sense of “suffering.” In French it still retains that significance. And the symphony is, without a doubt, the most successful evocation of Tchaikovsky’s deepest emotions, sublimated into music of great power.

The slow introduction begins in the “wrong” key, but works its way around to B minor and the beginning of the Allegro non troppo. It foreshadows the main thematic material (a variant of the bassoon’s opening figure over the dark whispering of the double basses). The climax to which this builds is a splendid preparation for one of Tchaikovsky’s greatest tunes, a falling and soaring melody that is worked to a rich climax and then dies away with a lingering afterthought in the clarinet. An unexpected orchestral crash begins the tense development section, which builds a wonderful sense of energy as the opening thematic material returns in a distant key and only gradually works round again to the tonic. The romantic melody, now in the tonic B major, is especially passionate.

The second movement is simply a scherzo and trio, but it has a wrinkle of its own. Tchaikovsky was one of the great composers of the orchestral waltz; here he chose to write a waltz that happens to be in 5/4 time! According to the conservative Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, “This disagreeable meter upsets both listener and player.” But the rhythmic twist is more than compensated for by the extraordinary grace of the music, and Hanslick’s prediction that the music would soon be forgotten could hardly have been more wrong.

The third movement is a brilliant march, beginning with rushing busy triplets alternating with a crisp march melody that bursts out into a climactic full orchestral version, a momentary triumph. So triumphant is its close that audiences are sometimes fooled into applauding, thinking the work is over. (It is possible that Tchaikovsky intended to fool us in this way.)

The triumph comes to a sudden end with the beginning of the Adagio lamentoso. The first theme is divided between the two violin parts in such a way that neither first nor second violin part alone makes sense, but when played together they result in a simple, expressive, descending melody. The second theme, a more flowing Andante, builds to a great orchestral climax exceeded only by the climax of the opening material that follows. This dies away and a single stroke of the tam-tam, followed by a soft and sustained, dark passage for trombones and tuba, brings in the “dying fall” of the ending, the second theme descending into the lowest depths of cellos and basses.

Tchaikovsky’s farewell vision is a somber one, congruent with his own pessimistic view of life. But it is worth remembering—especially given all the stories that whirl around the composer—that his art, and especially the Pathétique Symphony, was a means of self-transcendence, a way of overcoming the anguish and torment of his life. It has sometimes been assumed in the past that Tchaikovsky chose to revel in his misery; but in the Sixth Symphony, at least, he confronted it, recreated it in sound, and put it firmly behind him.
 
© Steven Ledbetter