Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Night on Bald Mountain................................... Modest Mussorgsky

arranged by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)                     (1839-1881)

Composed in 1867; arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886.

Premiered on October 15, 1886 in St. Petersburg, conducted by the arranger.

In the 1860s, Russian music was just beginning to find its distinctive voice. A number of composers — Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky — explored native musical and folkloric sources as the basis of a national art, and became loosely confederated into a group known as “The Mighty Handful” in Russia and “The Five” in the West. Since their works took their chief inspiration from indigenous legends and folk songs, Mussorgsky considered himself lucky to receive a commission in 1861 (when he was just 21) for a dramatic musical composition based on a specifically Russian subject. On January 7th, he wrote to his mentor, Balakirev, “I have received an extremely interesting commission, which I must prepare for next summer. It is this: a whole act to take place on Bald Mountain ... a witches’ sabbath, separate episodes of sorcerers, a solemn march for all this nastiness, a finale — the glorification of the sabbath into which is introduced the commander of the whole festival on the Bald Mountain. The libretto is very good. I already have some material for it; it may turn out to be a very good thing.”

The mountain to which Mussorgsky referred, well known in Russian legend, is Mount Triglav, near Kiev, reputed to be the site of the annual witches’ sabbath which occurs on St. John’s Night, June 23-24, the eve of the feast of St. John the Baptist. The sinister god Chernobog, perhaps the devil himself in disguise, presides over the demonic revelries. (Other European countries observe similar pagan ceremonies — the day is known as Midsummer’s Night in Britain — and Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Boito, Liszt, Gounod and Saint-Saëns have composed musical interpretations of the sinister proceedings.) Mussorgsky’s original conception for a dramatic work based on the legend seems to have come to nothing, though it did serve as the basis for the earliest version of Night on Bald Mountain, a piece for piano and orchestra in the vein of Liszt’s Totentanz (“Dance of Death”). Though this version is now lost, Rimsky-Korsakov apparently used it as one of the sources for his later revision.

Presumably building upon his original piano–orchestra work, Mussorgsky completed a symphonic version of St. John’s Night on Bald Mountain (his original title) in a creative frenzy in 1867. On July 12th, three weeks after finishing the score, he wrote to Balakirev, “I composed St. John’s Night at great speed: right away into full score, in about twelve days.... While at work on The Night I did not sleep, and actually finished it on St. John’s Eve. It simply seethed within me.” Balakirev, however, did not like the piece. Mussorgsky tinkered with the music for a while, and even mined some of its themes for inclusion in two later works: as a chorus for an aborted operatic project titled Mlada, a composite work to which Cui, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov also contributed some material; and as a choral introduction to the opera The Fair at Sorochinsk. However, Night on Bald Mountain, Mussorgsky’s only extended orchestral work, never came to performance during his lifetime. In fact, the original orchestral version of 1867 was not even published until 1968, and first recorded only in 1981.

What is now commonly known as Night on Bald Mountain is as much the work of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov as of Mussorgsky. (This situation is not unlike that involving Ravel’s masterful orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the version in which that work, originally written for solo piano, achieved and maintains its great popularity.) Rimsky was a self-appointed editor for many compositions by his Russian compatriots that he felt could use some polishing before being launched into the world. He thoroughly revised works by Borodin and Dargomyzsky, and prepared almost all of Mussorgsky’s compositions for publication and performance. (It is little known that the familiar piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition is the one thoroughly edited by Rimsky.) In the case of Night on Bald Mountain, Rimsky not only smoothed out the harmonies and augmented the orchestration, but also changed the formal structure of the work. Individual sections are more clearly defined and sharply characterized in Rimsky’s version, and he added an entirely new theme at the end of the work as a peaceful coda — the pastoral woodwind melody denoting the calm of the morning sunrise, a song taken from Mussorgsky’s The Fair at Sorochinsk. What Rimsky’s version gains in suavity, however, it loses in the demonic savagery of Mussorgsky’s original spectral conception.

Rimsky prefaced his score with the following synopsis of the action portrayed by the music: “Subterranean sounds of supernatural voices ... Appearance of the spirits of darkness, followed by that of Satan himself ... Glorification of Satan and celebration of the Black Mass ... The Sabbath Revels ... At the height of the orgies the bell of the village church, sounding in the distance, disperses the spirits of darkness ... Daybreak.” The mood of the music is dark, unearthly and more than a little weird. At the beginning, swirling strings and shrieks from the woodwinds, like great gusts of wind, seem to rise out of the ground itself. The trombones blare forth a savage summons for the demons to assemble; their arrival is portrayed by the clucking and chattering of the woodwinds. A loud brass fanfare marks the appearance of Satan, and the witches join old Beelzebub in a wild and ghoulish dance. The revels go on all night, and only when dawn breaks do the dancers depart and the music return to the plodding world of mere mortals. A distant church bell sounds, and the bizarre ceremony is over. (All of this demonic revelry, incidentally, was cast by Rimsky into the sober old sonata form — the exposition and recapitulation begin with the whirling string figures and the shrieks from the woodwinds.) Night on Bald Mountain is a wonderful work, full of fantastic atmosphere and gorgeous orchestral display.

Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35....... Erich Wolfgang Korngold

                                                                                        (1897-1957)

Composed in 1945.

Premiered on February 15, 1947 in Saint Louis, conducted by Vladimir Golschmann with Jascha Heifetz as soloist.

Gustav Mahler called him “a genius”; Karl Goldmark proclaimed his music to be “a miracle”; Giacomo Puccini said, “That boy’s talent is so great, he could easily give us half and still have enough left for himself”; and Richard Strauss observed, “One’s first reaction, that these compositions are by an adolescent boy, is one of awe and fear: this firmness of style, this sovereignty of form, this individuality of expression, this harmonic structure — it is truly amazing.” The object of this cascade of encomiums was a teenage boy whose prodigality invited comparison with such pre-pubescent Wunderkinder as Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schubert: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (his middle name honored Mozart), born on May 29, 1897 in Brünn, Austria (now Brno, Czech Republic), was the younger son of Julius Korngold, a protégé of Eduard Hanslick and one of Vienna’s most influential music critics at the turn of the century. By age five, Erich was playing piano duets with his father; two years later he began composing; at nine, he produced a cantata (Gold) that convinced his father to enroll him as a student of Robert Fuchs at the Vienna Conservatory. When Mahler heard Erich play his cantata the following year, he proclaimed the boy “a genius” and arranged for him to take lessons with Alexander Zemlinsky. Korngold made remarkable progress under Zemlinsky — his Piano Sonata No. 1 was published in 1908, when he had ripened to the age of eleven. The following year he wrote a ballet, Der Schneemann (“The Snowman”), orchestrated by Zemlinsky, which was staged at the Vienna Royal Opera at the command of Emperor Franz Josef. Next came a piano trio and another piano sonata, both of which Artur Schnabel played all over Europe. For the Gewandhaus concerts, Artur Nikisch commissioned Korngold’s first orchestral work, the Schauspiel Ouvertüre (“Overture to a Play”), and premiered it in Leipzig in 1911. Later that same year the budding composer gave a concert of his works in Berlin, in which he also appeared as piano soloist. Korngold was an international celebrity at thirteen. “It seems that nature amassed all its gifts in music and laid them in the cradle of this extraordinary child,” marveled Felix Weingartner.

In 1915 and 1916, Korngold wrote the first two of his five operas: Der Ring des Polykrates, a comedy, and Violanta, a tragedy. Bruno Walter premiered this complementary pair of one-acters in tandem at the Vienna Opera on March 28, 1916. Following a two-year stint in the Austrian army playing piano for the troops during World War I, Korngold composed some incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Burgtheater in Vienna, and then turned again to opera, producing his dramatic masterpiece, Die Tote Stadt (“The Dead City”), which was premiered simultaneously in Hamburg (where he served as conductor for three years after the War) and Cologne on December 4, 1920. The work appeared on the stages of 83 opera houses around the world during the following months; it was the first German opera performed at the Met after World War I (November 19, 1921, with Maria Jeritza in her American debut). After Korngold returned to Vienna in 1920, he was appointed professor of opera and composition at the Staatsakademie and served as music consultant for revivals of several of Johann Strauss’ operettas, including one pastiche that reached Broadway in 1934 as The Great Waltz. A poll by the Neue Wiener Tagblatt (“New Vienna Daily”) in 1928 showed that that newspaper’s readers thought Korngold and Arnold Schoenberg were the two greatest living Austrian composers.

In 1934, the Austrian director Max Reinhardt was conscripted by the Warner Brothers Studio in Hollywood to film a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Olivia de Haviland, Dick Powell, James Cagney, Joe E. Brown and Mickey Rooney. Reinhardt chose to use Mendelssohn’s incidental music as background, and he took Korngold along to arrange the score. Korngold, who, as a Jew, felt increasingly uneasy in Austria, accepted other offers in Hollywood, and, when the Nazi Anschluss in 1938 prevented him from returning home, he settled permanently in California. (He became a United States citizen in 1943.) For the next seven years, he devoted his talents to creating a body of film music unsurpassed by that of any other composer in the genre, and won two Academy Awards (for Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood). His father’s death in 1945, however, caused him to re-evaluate his career, and he returned to writing concert music with concertos for violin (for Heifetz) and cello, and a large symphony that Dmitri Mitropoulos called “one of the most significant works of the century.” These new pieces caused little stir among critics and public, however, who by and large felt that such music was merely a warmed-over manifestation of an earlier age. (Romanticism was a badly battered notion during those dodecaphony-dominated post-World War II years.) Korngold went to Vienna for an extended visit, but returned to Hollywood, where he suffered a series of heart attacks. He died on November 29, 1957, and his remains were interred in the Hollywood Cemetery, within a few feet of those of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., D.W. Griffith and Rudolf Valentino.

Korngold’s achievement, for both the screen and the concert hall, was sadly undervalued at the time of his death. A reassessment began in 1972, when the composer’s son George produced a recording by Charles Gerhardt and a top-flight London studio orchestra of selections from his father’s film music (The Sea Hawk). The album became a best-seller for RCA, and a sequel (Elizabeth and Essex) appeared the following year. New recordings of the Symphony in F-sharp (by Rudolf Kempe), the Violin Concerto (Ulf Hoelscher) and Die Tote Stadt (Erich Leinsdorf) in the mid-1970s fueled interest in Korngold’s concert and operatic music, just as the great Warner Brothers films of the 1930s and 1940s were starting their transformation from kitsch to classics. Brendan Carroll and Konrad Hopkins founded a Korngold Society in England in 1983, the same year Götz Friedrich revived Die Tote Stadt at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. All of Korngold’s significant compositions have since become available in fine commercial recordings, his works are now given regularly in performance by leading artists, and two biographies of him have recently been published to mark the centenary of his birth: Erich Wolfgang Korngold by Jessica Duchen (Phaidon Press, 1996) and The Last Prodigy by Brendan G. Carroll (Amadeus Press, 1997).

In June 1959, a memorial concert of Korngold’s music was given in Schoenberg Hall at UCLA. Jessica Duchen closed her study of the composer with the following excerpt from a review of that event which appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner: “A memorial concert to Erich Wolfgang Korngold ... brought to our attention a musical voice which may be regarded, when the smog of controversy rolls away, as one of the most civilized and gracious of the 20th century. Thirty years ago Korngold’s idiom seemed advanced. Then came the schools of atonalism, polytonality and general chaos, and Korngold was suddenly placed in the category of the reactionaries. Among those who discarded him, there are few survivors. Korngold spoke forth last night with a richness of melody and a luxuriance of harmony that marked him for survival. There is no defeatism in Korngold’s music. He loved life, he accepted life, and he gave back in music the wonder that he found in it.”

The first work that Korngold undertook upon his return to composing concert music was a concerto written at the urging of the Polish violinist Bronislaw Huberman, who, like the composer, had been driven from Europe to America by the War. The piece was written largely during the summer of 1945, but its premiere was delayed until early 1947, by which time Huberman had returned home. Jascha Heifetz was therefore enlisted as soloist for the first performance, on February 15th in Saint Louis, an event which one local critic reported inspired the greatest ovation in his experience; he predicted the new Concerto would endure as long as that by Mendelssohn. When Heifetz subsequently played the work in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere, audience reaction was uniformly enthusiastic, but critical opinion was sharply divided. It was not until the 1970s, with the revival of interest in Korngold’s film and concert music, that the Concerto secured its place in the violin repertory. Upon its publication in 1950, Korngold dedicated the score to Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler and wife of the writer Franz Werfel, who is best remembered for the novel The Song of Bernadette, the source of the popular 1943 movie. Korngold had befriended the Werfels when they arrived in Los Angeles in 1940, and he made a gift of the Concerto to Alma on her 69th birthday, in 1948.

Korngold’s Violin Concerto has an abundance of two qualities essential in a work of its species — melody and virtuosity. The brilliance and difficulty of the writing for the soloist are evident throughout, while the work’s lyricism is inherent in its thematic material, which the composer borrowed from four of his best film scores. (Korngold’s advantageous contract with Warner Brothers allowed him to retain the rights to his scores.) The haunting first theme of the opening movement is from the 1937 picture Another Dawn, a desert-outpost drama whose most memorable component is Korngold’s music. To provide a contrasting element in this loosely woven sonata form, the composer used the gently yearning love theme from Juarez, the 1939 film biography of the Mexican statesman and hero, which was based in part on Franz Werfel’s play Juarez and Maximilian. The second movement (subtitled Romance) is initiated by a poignant melody from Korngold’s Academy Award-winning score for Anthony Adverse, the 1936 film about an orphan who struggles to overcome the adversities of life in early 19th-century America. The score is one of the most extensive ever composed for a Hollywood movie, containing no fewer than 43 themes and providing almost continuous background music for the film’s 136 minutes. The Concerto’s finale is a sparkling rondo whose witty main theme is a tarantella melody from The Prince and the Pauper, the 1937 screen recreation of Mark Twain’s well-known story.