Dvorák & Wagner
January 15, 2011, 7:30 p.m.
Coronado Theatre

PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter

JOHN CORIGLIANO
Gazebo Dances
John Paul Corigliano was born on February 16, 1938, in New York, where he lives now. Gazebo Dances is an orchestral version of four pieces for four-hand piano written over time for friends and gathered to form a suite in the orchestral version, which he wrote in 1974. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (three players: bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, snare drum, tenor drum, triangle, tambourine, xylophone, handbell), and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.
           

John Corigliano achieved early recognition as one of the most talented young American composers. He grew up in an intensely musical household (his father, John Corigliano, Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for twenty-three years) and attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. His teachers have included Otto Luening, Vittorio Giannini, and Paul Creston. As this list might suggest, his style is generally conservative, though he has experimented in various eclectic ways with diverse musical traditions, emphasizing tonal harmonies in a style that is often lyrical. As he remarked in a 1980 interview, “The pose of the misunderstood composer has been fashionable for quite a while, and it is tiresome and old-fashioned. I wish to be understood, and I think it is the job of every composer to reach out to his audience with all means at his disposal. Communication should always be a primary goal.”

Corigliano clearly achieved that goal in his opera The Ghosts of Versailles, produced at the Metropolitan Opera with extraordinary popular success. Not long before that, his Symphony No. 1, Of Rage and Remembrance, a memorial to friends and colleagues who had died of AIDS and composed during his term as composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony, was premiered with great acclaim and has been widely performed. It received the 1991 Grawemeyer Award. He went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2, and has been celebrated for several remarkable film scores, including Ken Russell’s Altered States and the 1998 François Girard film The Red Violin. He later returned to that Oscar-winning score to create no fewer than three concerto-like works based on its themes.

Gazebo Dances is one of Corigliano’s earliest large works that is frequently performed. It is an expansion of a group of piano pieces to be played by two pianists at one instrument (“four-hands”), a favorite means of social music-making for at least two centuries. Having written these pieces for various friends, Corigliano decided to orchestrate them, adding the brilliance of his ever-resourceful handling of the orchestra to the already lively and witty pieces.  The opening movement serves double duty as an overture to Molière’s great comedy The Imaginary Invalid, and that fact alone suggests the spirit in which one might to listen to this music.

RICHARD WAGNER
Suite from Act III of Die Meistersinger  
Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, on May 22, 1813, and died in Venice, Italy, on February 13, 1883. He first drafted a scenario for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) in July 1845, but the final score was completed on October 24, 1867. The first performance took place in Munich on June 21, 1868. The score of the Act III suite calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, glockenspiel, cymbals, harp, and strings. Duration is about 13 minutes.

Wagner conceived his one successful comedy, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, as a satyr play, offering a comic pendant to the tragic singing contest that took place in Tannhäuser. Like all of his stage works, Die Meistersinger evolved over an extended period of time. It changed character considerably, into a lengthy but melodious defense of artistic innovation. This is symbolized by the wise old Mastersinger Hans Sachs, who accepts the daring novelty of the “prize song” of young Walther von Stolzing, even though it breaks many of the old “rules” of the Mastersinger’s guild. Sach’s opposite is the crabbed pedantic Beckmesser, who dislikes everything new. He was an obvious caricature of Wagner’s nemesis, the powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick (indeed, in an early draft, Wagner called the character Hans Lick!).

When Wagner began his preliminary work on the opera, Sachs was a relatively minor character. The emphasis was on the young Walther, who was a stand-in for Wagner himself, someone who upsets entrenched arbiters of taste with the novelty of his work. He even wrote the opera’s famous Prelude without any musical references to Sachs. But as he continued, the character of the older Mastersinger, warm, worldly-wise, and willing to consider new trends in song, became more significant. In one sense Sachs became a model for the kind of critic Wagner would have liked to have for his work. Thus, over the course of the piece, themes related to Sachs become more significant.

The Introduction to Act III is essentially a musical portrait of Sachs, a response to the first act’s Prelude, autumnal in tone compared to the youthfulness and energy of the opera’s opening. The opening theme suggests Sachs, with a rueful smile, shaking his head at the world’s follies. The Dance of the Apprentices accompanies the setting up of the arrangements for the climactic song competition that will determine which suitor can wed Eva Pogner—young Walther or the crabbed old Beckmesser. The Procession of the Mastersingers is a grand solemn march intended to do homage to the worthy burghers of Nuremberg who have devoted themselves to art and who gather here to judge the song competition. The suite closes with the celebratory music in honor of Hans Sachs, Nuremberg’s glory.

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Cello Concerto in B minor, opus 104
 Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904.  He composed his B minor Cello Concerto in New York, beginning the first movement on November 8, 1894. He completed the full score on February 9, 1895, but revised the ending in response to the death of his sister‑in‑law Josefina Kaunitzova. The final date on the score is June 11, 1895, and it is dedicated to the cellist Hanus Wihan. The first performance was given by Leo Stern with the London Philharmonic Society at Queen’s Hall under the composer’s direction on March 19, 1896. In addition to the cello soloist, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings, plus triangle in the last movement only. Duration is about 39 minutes.

Dvořák came to America in September 1892, after prolonged urging from Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, who finally persuaded him to serve as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York.  It was Mrs. Thurber’s dream that Dvořák could help to found an American school of composition. Dvořák composed some of his most popular works while he was in this country, including the New World Symphony; the string quartet in F, opus 96; the string quintet in E‑flat, opus 97 (both dubbed “The American”); and, as his last composition written in this country, the Cello Concerto.

Dvořák received the impetus to compose the concerto—the most popular work of its type in the repertory—largely because of the influence of one of his colleagues at the National Conservatory, the chairman of his cello faculty, Victor Herbert. A German-trained Irishman who was the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera, Herbert would soon become America’s most popular and versatile composer for the Broadway stage (his works include Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta). In the early 1890s his attention was almost totally directed to the creation of concert music.  Herbert had already composed a Suite for Cello and Orchestra (opus 3) and a Cello Concerto (opus 8), but it was the first performance of his best‑known serious composition, the Second Cello Concerto, with the New York Philharmonic under Anton Seidl on March 9, 1894, that proved epoch‑making for Dvořák.  Herbert was not only the head of one of his departments, but a close friend of Dvořák’s as well.  After the performance, Dvořák ran up to the composer‑soloist in the green room and shouted enthusiastically, “Terrific, absolutely terrific!”
Dvořák had already drafted one cello concerto, but he had left it unfinished—with the orchestral part in piano score—out of fear that the cello was too delicate and too low in pitch to compete successfully with an orchestra.  Herbert’s concerto persuaded him otherwise. The following year Dvořák began his own Cello Concerto, the final large composition of his American years.  After completing the concerto in New York, he made one substantial change after returning to Prague: when he heard of the death of his sister‑in‑law, Josefina Kaunitzova, whom he had once hoped to marry, Dvořák cut four bars of music just before the end and replaced them with a substantial new section of serious character.
The concerto has always been popular for its warm melodies, the brilliance of Dvořák’s treatment of the solo instrument, and the skillful way in which he manages to employ his substantial orchestra without overpowering the soloist. Moreover, since the development is almost entirely taken up by a magical treatment of the first theme in a distant key, Dvořák begins his recapitulation with the second theme, allowing the final return of the first theme to lead directly to the brilliant fanfares that close the movement.

Next comes a songful Adagio, the mood of which was colored by the serious illness of his beloved sister‑in‑law.  Recalling that she was especially fond of one of the songs, “Kez duch muj sam” (“Leave me alone”), from his Four Songs, opus 82 of 1887‑88, he worked the melody into the slow movement.

The rondo tune of the finale is exuberant, though tempered by the lyricism of the interludes.  Dvořák’s dedicatee, the cellist Hanus Wihan, who worked with the composer on details of the solo part, desired to add an extensive cadenza to the finale, but Dvořák refused.  He wished, rather, to make the closing section something of a memorial to Josefina, who had died a month after his return to Bohemia. The extended slow section that he worked into the close of the movement contains a poignant reference to the main theme of the first movement and another recollection of the song from Opus 82 (high in the solo violin, accompanied by flutes) before it is sung once more by the cello.  The final burst of high spirits brings in (in the words of Dvořák’s biographer Otakar Šourek) “a note of almost incoherent happiness at being home at last in his beloved Bohemia.”

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)