Valentine Bon-bons
February 11, 2012

Michele Lekas, violin

PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter

Johann Strauss, the younger

Overture to Die Fledermaus

Johann Strauss the younger was born in Vienna on October 25, 1825, and died there on June 3, 1899. Die Fledermaus (The Bat) premiered in Vienna on April 5, 1874. The score of the overture calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, chime, triangle, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 9 minutes.

The most famous of Strauss's stage works and a highpoint of Vienna's Golden Age of operetta, Die Fledermaus (The Bat) is filled throughout with the same effervescence as the champagne that gets everyone utterly confused at a glorious all‑night party in which things are not quite what they seem. Adele, the chambermaid, has come to the party in a dress borrowed (without permission) from her mistress, only to run into that lady disguised as a mysterious Hungarian countess so that she won't be recognized by her husband, who is having one last fling before starting a week's jail term. It all turns out to be an elaborate practical joke, a mild revenge for a trick that the husband played on his best friend—getting him royally drunk at an earlier party and forcing him to make his way home by daylight in a bat costume, to general ridicule. The married couple decides that it would be simpler to blame everything on the champagne than to get a divorce. Ever since the operetta was first performed, it has remained the quintessential Viennese operetta, a perpetual reminder of a seemingly carefree world of waltzing and romantic intrigue.

The popular overture is largely made up of passages from the show itself, including a weepy, crocodile-tears lament when the husband says farewell to his wife, supposedly to start his eight-day stretch in jail for some misdemeanor, but actually to attend the party, to dance, drink, and flirt before arriving at the jail. The couple sing lamenting figures, but the husband can’t resist slipping into a lively polka (even while singing the words, “Oh God, how moved I am!”) as he anticipates the frolic to come. The other most famous passage in the overture is the “Du und du” waltz, in which everyone at the party toasts their friendship and agrees to embrace and call one another by the familiar form “du,” as they are all now “brothers and sisters.”

FREDERICK DELIUS

La Calinda, from Koanga

Fritz Albert Theodor Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, on January 29, 1862, and died at Grez‑sur‑Loing, France, on June 10,1934. Koanga was his third opera, composed in 1896-97, to a libretto by Charles F. Keary, and his first opera to reach performance, in Elberfeld, Germany, on March 30, 1904. The score calls for flute and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones,tuba, percussion (cymbals, triangle, tambourine), harp, banjo, and strings. Duration is about 4 minutes.

Though born in England, Delius lived most of his life in other places. The composer’s father, a stern wool merchant, would not have wanted a career in music for his children. Though  permitted to learn an instrument, serious study was out of the question. When he joined the family wool company Delius proved an unreliable businessman. In 1884 he persuaded his father to lend him enough money to set up as an orange grower in Florida. The freedom that he gained by being on his own so far from his father gave him the time to begin composing seriously. He found a gifted musician, one Thomas Ward, who gave him an intense course in music theory.

At the same time, Delius was also immersed in the music of the black workers on his plantation, an experience that proved important to his music in the future, particularly in the music to his opera Koanga, which has an American subject set in New Orleans and based on a novel by George Washington Cable (1844-1925), a Southern novelist especially esteemed for his accurate depiction of Creole life. His historical novel The Grandissimes, set in New Orleans shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, deals with a French-American creole family, many of mixed race in various mixtures of white, African, and Native American. 

The second act of the opera contains the only passage that remains well known, an African dance that contains a tune, “La calinda,” apparently an actual melody brought by slaves from Africa, and learned by Delius in Florida. As with many of the miniatures drawn from his works, this one was prepared by the composer’s amanuensis Eric Fenby, who lived with Delius and his wife for several years after the composer had gone completely blind and was restricted to a wheelchair. Fenby took dictation from Delius and prepared many works for performance and helped him get brand new compositions down on paper.

Fenby noted that Delius usually lost interest in a work once it was finished, but that he kept coming back to Koanga,”as though it held some secret bond that bound him to his youth in Florida.”

Daniel Black

Footsteps Upon the Sea

Daniel Black was born in Milwaukee on August 4, 1979. He received his Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Master of Music in orchestral conducting from the Eastman School of Music; Artist Diploma in conducting from the St. Petersburg (Russia) Conservatory; and is completing a doctorate in Orchestral Conducting at Northwestern University. The piece was commissioned in 2010 by long time RSO supporters Drs. Arnold Rosen and Kathleen Kelly for the RSYO and premiered by the orchestra on December 10, 2011.The scoring is for 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 harps, piano, celesta, percussion, and strings. Duration is about 5 minutes.

Daniel Black joined the RSO staff in 2009 as conductor for the Rockford Symphony Youth Orchestra and he leads the RSO this evening in the first professional performance of his composition Footsteps Upon the Sea. The piece is based on a Swedish traditional folk tune: När som jag var på mitt adertonde år  (When I was in my Eighteenth Year). The composer writes, “Although the subject of the folk song is unrequited love, I felt that the melody perfectly captured the feeling of homesickness and melancholy which must have accompanied the great Swedish emigration to Rockford in the late 19th Century. The title is illustrative of the invisible link that connected the Swedish immigrants with their native soil left behind. The music is a simple set of variations on the folk tune, and features an unusual emphasis on the harp.”

One of Black’s grandmothers, Isabel Palmer, was the daughter of a Swedish immigrant who settled in Madison, Wisconsin around the turn of the 20th Century while another branch of the family settled in Rockford. Isabel Palmer Black passed away just two weeks shy of her 100th birthday in November 2011. The composer would like to dedicate tonight's performance of Footsteps Upon the Sea to her memory.

Pablo de Sarasate

Concert Fantasy on Carmen, Opus 25

Pablo de Sarasate was born in Pamplona, Spain, on March 10, 1844, and died in Biarritz on September 20, 1908. He composed the Carmen Fantasy in the early 1880s. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for two flutes (including piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and percussion , harp, and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes.

Pablo de Sarasate was one of the greatest violinists of the 19th century, a musician who received the dedications of an astonishing number of virtuoso showpieces, many of which still remain in the repertory—among them Bruch’s Second Concerto and Scottish Fantasy, Saint-Saëns’s First and Third Concertos and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, Joachim’s Variations for violin and orchestra, and Wieniawski’s Second Concerto. Fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories will remember that the great detective, a competent violinist himself, sometimes took an evening off from the pursuit of criminals to refresh himself at a Sarasate recital. Nine existing recordings of his playing made in 1904 reveal a sweet purity of tone, technically perfect, though not a powerful sound and not one given to much dynamic shading (how much of that was affected by the primitive recording technology of the time we shall never know, but it is wonderful to have what exists in any case).

Though not a great composer of original material, Sarasate could rework other compositions (such as Bizet’s Carmen or a collection of gypsy melodies) into an effective concert piece displaying his extraordinary technique. The opera Carmen was premiered in the spring of 1875, only a few weeks before Bizet’s tragically early death, at the age of thirty-eight. At the time, it may have seemed that his life’s work would quickly be forgotten, but within a year or two Carmen was on the verge of becoming one of the world’s most popular operas, a distinction it has never lost. When an opera becomes that famous, its principal arias become known to an audience far larger than one that frequents the opera house. The tunes of Carmen probably interested Sarasate in particular because the opera’s setting in Spain, and the Spanish tinge to the music, evoked his own background.

At all events the Spanish composer assembled the best-known melodies from the opera in a way that reveals a canny awareness of overall musical effect. Sarasate’s ability to show off the soloist in various guises through the changes of mood and tempo resulted in a virtuoso showpiece that remains indispensable.

Camille Saint-Saëns

Bacchanale, from Samson and Delilah

Charles Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris on October 9, 1835, and died in Algiers on December 16, 1921. He began composing his second opera—Samson et Dalila, to a libretto by Ferdinand Lemaire based on the Biblical story in the Book of Judges, chapter 16—in 1867-68, took it up again in 1873, and completed it in 1876. Franz Liszt arranged for the first performance (unstaged) in Weimar, under the direction of Eduard Lassen, on December 2, 1877. The famous Bacchanale from Act 3 is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpai, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, finger cymbals, castanets, two harps (playing a single part), and strings.

Camille Saint-Saëns, one of the most prolific and longest-lived composers of the nineteenth century, was a very private man, but widely educated and active in many fields. He published articles on the décor of ancient Roman theaters and communicated with learned bodies on questions of astronomy. He analyzed philosophical questions and wrote poetry and plays. But most of all he was an astonishingly fluent and gifted musician. His music was shaped by such astonishingly diverse composers as Mozart and Liszt.

  It was Liszt who encouraged Saint-Saëns to complete an opera that he had almost given up on and who promised to perform it when opera managements were leery of putting it on the stage because its plot was drawn from the Bible. The result, of course, was Samson and Delilah, the only one of his twelve operas that still holds the stage.

The French have always been exceptionally fond of dance, and, from the beginning, French opera has always included a ballet. In Samson and Delilah, the ballet comes in the final act, a bit of pagan eroticism danced in the Temple of Dagon, where the blind Samson has been brought to the butt of rude jokes (and which he will soon bring crashing to the ground). The music of this Bacchanale gives us Saint-Saëns’s idea of what music for an oriental orgy should sound like (and some of it has been used in movies and animated cartoons for the same purpose).

Claude Debussy

Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun

Achille-Claude Debussy was born at St. Germain-en-Laye, Department of Seine-et-Oise, France, on August 22, 1862, and died in Paris on March 25, 1918. He began composing the “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune” in 1892 and completed the full score on October 23, 1894. The work was performed with great success by the Société Nationale de la Musique on December 22 and 23 that year under the direction of the Swiss conductor Gustave Doret. The scoring is for three flutes, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two harps, antique cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 10 minutes.

In 1865 the poet Stéphane Mallarmé produced a “Monologue d’un faune,” with which he hoped to obtain a performance at the Comédie Française. Having been told that his work would be of no interest as a theatrical piece, he put it aside for a decade. In 1875, Mallarmé tried to get his “Improvisation du faune” published in a literary anthology, again without success. Finally, the following year, he brought out his first book, which contained the text of the eclogue entitled “L’Après-midi d’un faune” (“The afternoon of a faun”). As late as 1891 Mallarmé promised in print to produce a new version for the theater. Throughout his life, he was also interested in music; he had even written an essay on Wagner for the “Revue wagnerienne” in 1885. His own poetry, he said, was inspired by “music proper, which we must raid and paraphrase, if our own music [poetry], is struck dumb, is insufficient.”

Debussy had already set a Mallarmé text as early as 1884. We can be sure that poet and composer were personally acquainted by 1892, when they both attended a performance of Maeterlinck’s drama “Pelléas et Mélisande,” and it is certainly likely that they discussed the musical possibilities of Mallarmé’s “Faune.” Debussy began composition of the Prelude that year, along with most of the other compositions that were to occupy him for the next decade: his String Quartet, the opera “Pelléas et Mélisande,” the “Nocturnes” for orchestra, and a number of songs. Years later he recalled that when Mallarmé heard the music for the first time (apparently the composer’s own performance at the piano in his apartment), he commented, “I was not expecting anything of this kind! This music prolongs the emotion of my poem, and sets its scene more vividly than color.” The first performance of the Prelude made Debussy famous overnight; the striking character of this music, which everyone experienced as something quite new, established his personality even in the eyes of those critics who expressed a wish for “an art more neat, more robust, more masculine.”

The freshness comes in part from the delicacy of the instrumentation, which is filled with wonderfully new effects, of which the brilliant splash of the harp glissando over a dissonant chord at the end of the first flute phrase is only the most obvious. The careful bridging of sections, so that nothing ever quite comes to a full close without suggesting continuation, effectively blurs what is, after all, a fairly straightforward ABA form. Debussy’s success in obtaining this fluid, pastel effect can be measured by the fact that musicians still argue about where the various sections begin and end. Most listeners, though, have been content to wallow in this exquisitely wrought play of color, harmony, and misty melody without bothering to consider how much of the future was already implicit in this brief score.

ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK

Overture to Hansel and Gretel

Engelbert Humperdinck was born in Siegburg, Germany, on September 1, 1854, and died in Neustrelitz on September 27, 1921. He composed his most famous opera Hansel and Gretel in several stages (described below) between 1890 and 1893. When Richard Strauss conducted the premiere in Weimar on December 23, 1893, the work was an instant success. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, cymbals, and strings.

Engelbert Humperdinck (no relation to the pop singer Arnold George Dorsey, whose manager renamed him Engelbert Humperdinck, having come across this unusual name in a music dictionary, because he thought it would attract attention) is one of those composers known to the world at large by a single work. His early musical training took the form of piano lessons, but he was captivated by the musical theater when, at the age of fourteen, he saw a performance of Lortzing’s romantic Undine, and he immediately began to compose similar works.

At the age of eighteen, Humperdinck entered the conservatory at Cologne and quickly won major prizes given by the top German conservatories of the day. In 1877, at twenty-three, he moved to Munich, a hotbed of Wagnerianism. During a tour of Italy on a scholarship from the conservatory he had the opportunity to meet Wagner in person, who invited the talented  young man to come visit him in Bayreuth to help with the first production of Parsifal. His own attempts to write an opera fell through owing to the overwhelming weight of Wagner’s example, which looked to become a permanent inhibition to his creativity.

The block was broken when the composer’s sister, Adelheid Wette, asked him in 1890 to set some folksongs for a small private production of the familiar Grimm’s fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. The music required was so simple that there could be no question of Wagnerian influence, and Humperdinck happily complied. They decided to expand the work from a play with a few folksongs to a Singspiel, with more elaborate music, but still with spoken dialogue. And finally they decided to turn it into a full-fledged opera. In doing so, Humperdinck retained the folk-like simplicity of the basic songs, but set them in the framework of a Wagnerian orchestra, with elaborated Leitmotifs and rich scoring. He had qualms about his decision to combine the simplest sort of music with the most complex style of the day, yet from the opening night the opera was a signal success. (Within the first year it had been performed in seventy-two theaters!)

The story of Hansel and Gretel closely follows the story as told by the Brothers Grimm, with the two children lost in the woods and happening upon a gingerbread house inhabited by a wicked witch. Happily the children not only save themselves from this creature, but also release from enchantment many other children that she had previously caught. The most Wagnerian passage in the score is the music of the witch’s wild ride, which could hardly have been conceived without the example of Wagner’s Valkyries. For the rest, the tunes are redolent of German folksong (in the songs and dances for Hansel and Gretel) and of the church chorale (in the famous prayer that the children sing before going to sleep in the dark forest, appealing to fourteen angels to watch over them and bring them safely through the night).  All of these elements appear in Humperdinck’s overture, which thus provides a summary in music of the much-loved story.

Aram Khatchaturian

Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia, from Spartacus

Aram Ilyich Khachaturian was born in Tbilisi on June 6, 1903, and died in Moscow on May 1, 1978. He composed the ballet Spartacus in 1954; the premiere performance took place at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad on December 27, 1956. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani and percussion, harp, piano, and strings. Duration is about 9 minutes.

Aram Khachaturian's career was largely played out under the ups and downs of Stalinist control of the arts. His Violin Concerto of 1941 won the Stalin Prize, but by 1948, when the directorate of the Composers Union came under political attack, Khachaturian was one of the main composers to be censured, along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Following Stalin's death, he was one of the first composers to urge greater creative freedom to artists.

His own work is particularly colored by the folklore of his native Armenia. It is revealed most successfully in compositions with pictorial images—ballets, film scores, and incidental music to plays. There his fondness for intertwining folkloric elements in a richly colored orchestral garb could be used to best advantage.

Spartacus was a great international success. The ballet recounts the historical story of the Roman slave Spartacus, an ex‑gladiator, who led a slave revolt that defied the Roman army successfully for several years. He dominated much of Italy in 72 B.C., but was captured and executed the following year. His name has frequently been used as a symbol of resistance to tyranny. This scenario (freely based on history) could naturally be presented in the Soviet Union as the rise of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, whereas outside the Soviet Union it could equally be well received as a symbol of mankind’s enduring battle for freedom from oppression. 

In the first act, Spartacus and his wife Phrygia are among a group of Thracians who, after the Roman conquest of their country, are being taken to Rome to be sold into slavery. There they are separated, to the anguish of both. But when Spartacus, who has been forced to become a gladiator and fight other slaves to the death, leads a rebellion that temporarily succeeds in defeating the Romans, he is able to find Phrygia again.

Khatchaturian’s “Adagio” is a lyrical interlude for husband and wife in their brief reunion before the Romans attack again, destroying the rebels, Spartacus among them.

EMMANUEL CHABRIER

España, Rhapsody for orchestra

Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier was born in Ambert, Puy-de-Dôme, France, on January 18, 1841, and died in Paris on September 13, 1894. He composed his rhapsody for orchestra, España, in 1883; the first performance was given by the Société des Nouveaux Concerts in Paris on November 4, 1883. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, four bassoons, two chromatic horns in F and two natural horns in C, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, bass drum, and cymbals, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes.

Most people remember Chabrier only by one piece—the scintillating orchestral rhapsody España, which has become so popular that it has been virtually banned from the subscription concerts of symphony orchestras and relegated to the category of “light classical music,” an invidious term that fails to appreciate the craft and sheer imagination that went into it.

Too often dismissed as a purveyor of light music, we forget that many of Chabrier’s harmonic procedures were picked up by Debussy and Ravel, both of whom esteemed him highly, as did d’Indy, Chausson, Fauré, and Duparc. He was friendly with artists as well. Confident of his taste, he purchased modern paintings by artists still under attack from the academy, so that before his death he owned eleven Manets, six Monets, six Renoirs, two Sisleys, and a Cezanne. He was also acquainted with literary people, above all with Mallarmé, Zola, Daudet, and especially the poet Verlaine, with whom he collaborated in the early 1860s on two little comic operas, probably intended only for private performance and now, alas, lost.

Chabrier’s family expected him to pursue a “practical” career, even though his musical talent showed itself early on. He pursued the law, at his father’s insistence, and entered a humdrum job in the civil service. But by his thirties, he began to establish himself as a composer.

España was the product of a long, happy visit to Spain in 1882, in which Chabrier and his wife visited every region, absorbing the music everywhere. In fluent Spanish, he wrote to the conductor Charles Lamoureux, promising him “una fantasia extraordinaria, muy española.” He added, “My rhythms, my tunes will arouse the whole audience to a feverish pitch of excitement; everyone will embrace his neighbor madly—and you, too, will be obliged to hug Dancla [the concertmaster] in your arms, so voluptuous will be my melodies.” España became an instant success.  

There is hardly any point in analyzing music of such verve and energy; it simply carries the listener along with it. Chabrier’s work has proved lastingly captivating: Emil Waldteufel stole its themes soon after its appearance for an España waltz, and one of Perry Como’s biggest hits from 1956 (“Hot Diggity Dog”). Songwriters Al Hoffman and Dick Manning took two of Chabrier’s themes (by then out of copyright) and simplified their rhythm to make a Tin Pan Alley number, drawing on a line uttered by Al Jolson in 1928 for the catch-phrase title. But Chabrier’s own score, frolicsome and intoxicating as it was when first heard a century ago, towers over all imitations.

GEORGE ENESCU

Rumanian Rhapsody in A, Opus 11, No. 1

George Enescu was born in Liveni on August 19, 1881, and died in Paris on May 4, 1955. He composed his Rumanian Rhapsody No. 1 in 1901. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets and two cornets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, snare drum, triangle, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 11 minutes.

Far too frequently the general public knows a gifted composer by a single work. The inevitable result is to underrate his achievement, particularly if the single work happens to fall into a relatively popular mold. George Enescu, who adopted the spelling Georges Enesco during his years in Paris, is a case in point. Certainly his first Rumanian Rhapsody has been world famous almost from the moment of its first performance. Unfortunately it remains almost the only work by Enesco that most people know. Nor do they recall his work as a brilliant violinist and teacher (particularly of Yehudi Menuhin, whose autobiography speaks most warmly of him). His career as a composer was complicated by the conflicting demands made on him as a teacher and organizer.  Many of his larger compositions took years to finish, so difficult was it to find the time to work on them.

Showing extraordinary early talent, Enescu entered the Vienna conservatory at the age of seven, and by thirteen he had graduated with a silver medal in violin. His later career as soloist, teacher, and conductor has tended to cast into the shadow most of his works—including the opera Oedipe, which many regard as a real masterpiece—with the exception of this brilliant early showpiece.

Enesco attained success early with the first Rumanian Rhapsody, and it came to haunt him. He was only twenty when he wrote it and not quite twenty-two when he led the first performance, yet audiences demanded it constantly for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, though the rhapsody is frankly based on the Hungarian rhapsodies of Franz Liszt, bringing together native songs and dances in a colorful potpourri, it is nonetheless effective, from the simplicity of the opening clarinet phrase to the fiery flash of the closing section. For a short time, at least, it makes us all Rumanian.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)