Notes on the Program by Dr

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Tragic Overture, Op. 81...................................... Johannes Brahms

(1833-1897)

Composed in 1880.

Premiered on December 20, 1880 in Vienna, conducted by Hans Richter.

Many of Brahms’ works were produced in pairs: the Piano Sonatas, Op. 1 and Op. 2; the Piano Quartets, Op. 25 and Op. 26; the String Quartets, Op. 51; the Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120; even the first two Symphonies, the sets of Liebeslieder Waltzes and the Serenades. These twin pieces seem to have been the result of a surfeit of material — as Brahms was working out his ideas for a composition in a particular genre, he produced enough material to spin off a second work of similar type. Though the two orchestral overtures, Academic Festival and Tragic, were also written in tandem, they have about them more the quality of complementary balance than of continuity. Academic Festival is bright in mood and light-hearted in its musical treatment of some favorite German student drinking songs. The Tragic Overture, on the other hand, is somber and darkly heroic. Of them, Brahms wrote to his biographer, Max Kalbeck, “One overture laughs, the other weeps.” And further, to his friend and publisher, Fritz Simrock, “Having composed this jolly Academic Festival Overture, I could not refuse my melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture for a tragedy.”

Brahms never gave any additional clues to the nature of the Tragic Overture. Despite the attempts by many writers to find extra-musical references in this Overture, it was almost certainly not inspired by any specific literary work or personal bereavement. (Extensive sketches which date from nearly a decade earlier were used for a large portion of the exposition and seem to preclude this latter possibility.) Brahms had long been an admirer of classic drama and literature, and he used some of his first earnings as a composer to purchase volumes of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Plutarch and Goethe. This Overture may have been the outcome of a long involvement with the writings of those masters, coupled with the strong influence of the ethos and music of Beethoven’s Overtures for Coriolan and Egmont. Brahms’ intention that the work be general rather than specific in nature is underlined by the provisional title he gave to it during its composition: “A Dramatic Overture.” He settled on Tragic Overture, according to his correspondence, because neither he nor his friends could devise anything more suitable.

Philip Hale regarded this composition as one of Brahms’ greatest works because of “its structure and depth of feeling. There is no hysterical outburst; no shrieking in despair; no peevish or sullen woe; no obtruding suggestion of personal suffering. Commentators have cudgelled their brains to find a hero in the music: Hamlet, Faust, this one, that one. They have labored in vain; the soul of Tragedy speaks in the music.”

The Tragic Overture is comparable in form and expression to the first movement of a symphony. Its sonata structure commences with a stern summons of two chords immediately preceding the austere arching main theme in D minor. Brahms’ characteristically dark orchestral sonority, emphasizing low strings and low woodwinds, does much to supply the solemn mood of the work. The first theme gives way to a hushed transitional section employing the sepulchral sounds of trombones and tuba over a quivering string accompaniment. A contrasting theme is presented in the relatively tranquil tonality of F major by violins, but the stormy disposition of the opening is not kept long at bay. The compact development restores the tempestuous mood. The recapitulation is a considerably altered version of the exposition’s musical events, which here receive further exploration of their expressive potentials. The sense of heroic struggle which forms the dominant emotional world of the Tragic Overture remains undiminished to the end.

Viola Concerto, Opus Posthumous............................... Béla Bartók

(1881-1945)

Composed in 1945; completed by Tibor Serly in 1946-1949.

Premiered on December 2, 1949 in Minneapolis, with William Primrose as soloist and Antal Dorati conducting.

The last months of Bartók’s life were ones of alarmingly deteriorating health and strong, often conflicting emotions. The leukemia that had sapped his strength during his entire residence in the United States, beginning in 1940, finally proved fatal on September 26th; the year 1945 was a disheartening round of hospital stays, rest cures and confinement at home in his tiny 57th Street apartment in New York City. There was, however, some cheering news. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7th, freeing his beloved Hungarian homeland and allowing him to be restored to all the official posts he had resigned when he fled Budapest at the beginning of the War. He was even nominated as a member of the new Hungarian parliament. Following the successful premiere of the Concerto for Orchestra in Boston in December 1944, his music, which had suffered shameful neglect throughout his American residence, was finally being heard with some frequency. He was also receiving important commissions. Ralph Hawkes, of the publishing firm Boosey & Hawkes, ordered from Bartók in December 1944 a seventh string quartet (never realized), and two months later, at the instigation of Hawkes, the eminent Scottish violist William Primrose requested a concerto for his instrument. Another concerto commission, from the duo-pianists Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robinson, presented him with more work than his failing health would allow. The two-piano concerto was not written, but it may have been the catalyst for the Third Piano Concerto, the last work that Bartók completed.

Bartók began the Viola Concerto soon after he received the commission from Primrose in February 1945. He worked deliberately but haltingly on the score, writing much of it in a cryptic notational shorthand that he devised to maximize his effort when he was well enough to compose. Early in the summer, he left the city for the quiet of Saranac Lake, where he had composed the Concerto for Orchestra a year earlier. (Bartók had to refuse Yehudi Menuhin’s offer to spend the summer with him in California when his physician advised against making the long trip to the West Coast). He put aside the Viola Concerto to write the Third Piano Concerto, which, given the difficult financial situation he knew would be the lot of his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, after his imminent death, he viewed as a legacy to help insure her future. Throughout the summer he worked simultaneously on both Concertos, though the one for piano — the one for Ditta — received more attention and was finished in conventional notation, except for the closing page, before he died. The Viola Concerto, however, was left in quite a different state of completion.

Less than a month before his death, back in New York, Bartók wrote to Primrose, “I am very glad to be able to tell you that your Viola Concerto is ready in draft, so that only the score has to be written, which means purely mechanical work, so to speak. If nothing happens, I can be through in 5 or 6 weeks, that is, I can send you a copy of the orchestral score in the second half of October. Many interesting problems arose in composing this work. The orchestration will be rather transparent, more transparent than in the Violin Concerto. Also the somber, more masculine character of your instrument exerted some influence on the general character of the work. The highest note I use is ‘A,’ but I exploit rather frequently the lower registers. It is conceived in a rather virtuoso style. Most probably some passages will prove to be uncomfortable or unplayable. These we will discuss later, according to your observations.”

Bartók’s disciple Tibor Serly continued the story of the Viola Concerto in an article that appeared in The New York Times on December 11, 1949: “On the evening of September 21, 1945, when I last talked with Béla Bartók, he was lying in bed, quite ill. Nevertheless, on and around his bed were sheets of score and sketch manuscript papers. He was working feverishly to complete the scoring of the last few bars of his Third Piano Concerto. While discussing the Concerto with him, my attention was drawn to a night table beside his bed where I noticed, underneath several half-empty medicine bottles, some additional pages in score, seemingly not related to the Piano Concerto. Pointing to these manuscript sheets, I inquired about the Viola Concerto. Bartók nodded wearily toward the night table, saying: ‘Yes, that is the Viola Concerto.’ To my question as to whether it was completed, his reply was, ‘Yes and no.’ He explained that while in the sketches the work was by and large finished, the details and scoring had not yet been worked out. The following day he was taken to the hospital, where he died on September 26th....

“Early in September, Bartók had written a letter to Primrose telling him that the Viola Concerto was ready in draft and that only some details of the scoring had to be written. What for Bartók would have been a matter of working out details and scoring involved for another person a lengthy task that required infinite patience and painstaking labor. First, there were many problems in deciphering the manuscript itself. Bartók wrote his sketches on odd, loose sheets of paper that happened to be at hand, some of which had parts of other sketches on them. Bits of material that came into his mind were jotted down without regard for sequence. The pages were not numbered and the separations of movements were not designated. The greatest difficulty encountered was deciphering his correction of notes, for Bartók, instead of erasing, grafted his improvements onto the original notes. Then there was the delicate task of completing unfinished harmonies and other adornments that he had reduced to a kind of shorthand. Technical passages for the solo viola also had to be worked out. [Primrose edited the solo part.] Finally, there was the orchestration itself to be done, for there were virtually no indications of the instrumentation.”

Serly (pronounced SHARE-lee) later wrote that he “virtually lived for over two years day and night with those thirteen mottled pages” in constructing the finished Viola Concerto from the scraps that his teacher had left at his death. In addition to the great technical skill he brought to his task, Serly also admitted that he was guided by “some inexplicable, intuitive grasp into the inner mind of the departed composer.” The score, a mighty labor of Serly’s dedication, respect and love, was finally ready for performance in 1949, and Primrose gave the premiere with conductor Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra on December 2nd. (An alternate version of the score that Serly prepared for cello was not heard until Janos Starker performed it in 1981.) The extent of Serly’s contribution to the finished Concerto was called into question after the premiere, but Primrose defended him: “I feel quite sure that Serly came very, very close to what Bartók himself had meant to do, and that his scoring and formal smoothing-out was the most sincere and truthful job possible.”

The British critic Mosco Carner found a strong element of pathos in Bartók’s Viola Concerto: “The note of gloomy despondency, defiance and renunciation which marks the first two movements, and the bitter irony of the finale — are they not likely to be a reflection of the state of mind the composer must have been in during the last months of his fatal illness? This strange emphasis on the emotional marks the Viola Concerto as perhaps the least typical of his works. The composer makes little attempt here to objectify his emotions and filter them, as it were, through the cathartic sense of his powerful intellect such as characterizes his general creative process. One has the impression that the Viola Concerto is the direct, spontaneous outpouring of a mind that seems to be working against fearful odds.”

The Concerto’s somber opening movement is in sonata form. The soloist, sparsely accompanied by pizzicato strings, presents the main theme, an autumnal melody that is repeated several times in different guises. A bridge passage with faster rhythmic motion leads to the quiet second theme, a phrase of descending direction and chromatic ambiguity. Both of the exposition’s motives are treated in the development section. A brief solo cadenza serves as the transition to the recapitulation. A section at the movement’s end, marked Lento parlando (i.e., “slow and declamatory”), is a dialogue for soloist and woodwinds that leads without pause to the Adagio religioso, a simple three-part form. The viola presents the theme of the first section above sustained harmonies; the movement’s middle portion, quicker in tempo, supports the gestures of the soloist with string tremolos and flashing interjections from the winds (“like a great outcry, with the viola in its highest register, and all the woodwinds striving upwards as if in desperation,” wrote Primrose of this passage); the principal melody is varied upon its return. An abrupt change of mood and tempo heralds the finale, which recalls the energetic Gypsy style of Liszt and Enesco, but is darker, almost sardonic, in spirit. Formally, the movement resembles a Classical rondo, with the returns of the theme entrusted to the soloist and the intervening episodes initiated by the full orchestra. With its austere texture, harmonic acerbity and distilled Classical forms, Bartók’s Viola Concerto is a testament of the composer’s deeply personal, ineffable feelings, his final realization of the simple philosophy that guided the work of his entire life: “I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.”

Symphony No. 1, Op. 10.................................. Dmitri Shostakovich

(1906-1975)

Composed in 1925-1926.

Premiered on May 12, 1926 in Leningrad, conducted by Nicolai Malko.

Shostakovich entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1919 as a student of piano, composition, counterpoint, harmony and orchestration. He was thirteen. His father died three years later, leaving a widow and children with no means of support, so Dmitri’s mother, a talented amateur musician and an unswerving believer in her son’s talent and the benefits of his training at the Conservatory, took a job as a typist to provide the necessities for the family. She constantly sought help from official sources to sustain Dmitri’s career, but by autumn 1924, it became necessary for the young musician to find work despite the press of his studies and the frail state of his health. (He spent several weeks in 1924 at a sanatorium to treat his tuberculosis.) Victor Seroff described Shostakovich’s new job: as pianist in a movie house. “The little theater was old, drafty, and smelly,” wrote Seroff. “It had not seen fresh paint or a scrubbing for years, the walls were peeling, and the dirt lay thick in every corner. Three times a day a new crowd packed the small house; they carried the snow in with them on their shoes and overcoats. They munched food that they brought with them, apples and sunflower seeds that they spat on the floor. The heat of the packed bodies in their damp clothes, added to the warmth of two small stoves, made the bad air stifling hot by the end of the performance. Then the doors were flung open to let the crowd out and to air the hall before the next show, and cold damp drafts swept through the house. Down in front below the screen sat Dmitri, his back soaked with perspiration, his near-sighted eyes in their horn-rimmed glasses peering upwards to follow the story, his fingers pounding away on the raucous upright piano. Late at night he trudged home in a thin coat and summer cap, with no warm gloves or galoshes, and arrived exhausted around one o’clock in the morning.” The taxing job not only sapped his strength and health, but also made composing virtually impossible — and it was composing that he burned to do. By spring the family decided that he would leave this musical purgatory to devote himself to composition. Shostakovich began the First Symphony immediately, and the hopes of his family were pinned on its eventual success.

By early 1925, Shostakovich had completed his formal studies at the Leningrad Conservatory, and he was seeking to gain a reputation beyond the walls of the school. He chose to write a symphony — a grand, public piece rather than a small-scale chamber work — as his graduation exercise: “the product of my culminating studies at the Conservatory,” as he called it. The new work, his first for orchestra, was grounded in the Russian traditions of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov and Scriabin that his composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg had passed on to him, but also allowed for such modern influences as the music of Hindemith, Prokofiev, Mahler and Stravinsky. Of the Symphony’s progressive traits, Nicolas Slonimsky noted that they show “some definite departures from traditionalism.... The harmony of the Symphony is far more acrid than any academic training would justify and the linear writing is hardly counterpoint conscious. There are such strange interludes as a kettle-drum solo. The melodic structure is angular, dramatic at times, and then again broad, suggesting folksong rather than a subject for a symphony. Yet there is enough academism in this first important work of Shostakovich to connect it with his Conservatory training.”

The Symphony was completed early in 1926, and scheduled for its premiere in May, though his family’s economic hardship was so severe at the time that Shostakovich could not afford to have the parts copied and the score published. The Conservatory, as a gesture of faith in the young composer’s talent, underwrote the expenses, and the Symphony was first displayed to the world on May 12th. It was an immediate success. Shostakovich was proclaimed the leader of the first generation of post-Revolution Soviet composers (Prokofiev had left for the West in 1918), and the twenty-year-old musician became a celebrity at home and abroad in a matter of months. The conductor Bruno Walter performed the First Symphony in Berlin in 1927, and Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in the score’s American premiere a year later. Each year for the rest of his life, Shostakovich set aside May 12th as the day he celebrated his “birthday as a composer.”

“I sensed that music was not merely a combination of sounds, arranged in a particular order, but an art capable of expressing through its own means the most varied ideas and feelings,” wrote Shostakovich. In many later works, those “ideas and feelings” were specifically political in nature, but this Symphony is primarily an aesthetic expression rather than a tonal tract. The first movement follows a form derived from traditional sonata-allegro. The exposition consists of four theme groups, presented almost like large tiles in a mosaic: a melody with long notes presented by the solo trumpet, with a cheeky retort from the bassoon; a scalar theme punctuated by spiky intervals given by the violins alone; a mock-march strutted out by the clarinet; and a cockeyed waltz from the flute. All four themes are whipped together in the development, which reaches a noisy climax before the themes are recapitulated — backwards. First the waltz is heard (flute again), then the mock-march (low strings), followed by the long-note melody (clarinet) and a compressed version of the scalar tune (briefly, in the lower strings). This music exudes the distinctive personality, technical craftsmanship and wry wit that mark the best of Shostakovich’s works.

The second movement is a sardonic scherzo built on a cocky theme initiated by the clarinet. The woodwind-dominated trio, contrasting in mood and meter, is icy and detached in its quiet intensity. The third movement, full of pathos, begins with a lamenting theme for the oboe. A short, rhetorical gesture insinuates itself as accompaniment, and serves as transition to the second theme, a dirge, again entrusted to the oboe. Both themes are recalled, with the rhetorical gesture used as the bridge to the finale. A swell on the snare drum leads directly to the slow introduction of the closing movement. A snappy, chromatic melody from the clarinet is followed at some distance by the movement’s second theme, a broad melody with Tchaikovskian sweep (and Prokofievian “wrong notes”). These two themes, along with the rhetorical gesture (in mirror image — i.e., rising rather than falling) dominate the remainder of the movement, which ends with a stentorian proclamation from the full orchestra.

Of this invigorating work by the nineteen-year-old Shostakovich, Donald N. Ferguson wrote, “The style is perhaps more spontaneous than in any first symphony since Schumann’s. There is no pondering of the elaborate process which is ordinarily supposed to be indispensable in symphonic structure. Indeed, the charm of the work is largely owing to the absence of all recondite devices, in whose place there is a bubbling enthusiasm as infectious as the laughter of a child. Childlike, perhaps, is also the insouciant transition from one theme to another, at any moment when the idea under discussion, whether exhausted or not, has lost its grip on the composer’s attention.”