Notes on the Program by Dr

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

St. Paul’s Suite for Strings........................................... Gustav Holst

(1874-1934)

Composed in 1913.

In 1903, Gustav Holst, newly married and forced by arthritis to abandon the trombone playing that had largely provided his income for the preceding decade, took a job teaching at a girls’ school in south London. There he exercised his conviction that the music curriculum should include the best available literature rather than the “reams of twaddle” usually taught, and he plied his students with a steady stream of Bach, Palestrina and Lassus. His method drew the notice of Miss Frances Ralph Gray, headmistress of St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith (west London), and she appointed Holst as Director of Music at her institution in 1905. At St. Paul’s, he raised the standards of both taste and performance, encouraging the girls not only to perfect their playing of strings and piano, the traditional maidenly instruments, but also to brave the uncharted regions of the winds — it is indicative of his success that the first female woodwind player in a major British orchestra, an oboist, attended St. Paul’s. Though he had difficulty finding a suitable place in the building to work privately, he continued to compose during those years as his teaching duties allowed, hoping to expand the modest reputation he was then beginning to enjoy for his vocal music.

It was with considerable excitement that he moved into the new music wing added to the school in 1913, since, as his daughter, Imogen, wrote in her biography of him, “It was a place where he could compose in unbroken silence and solitude. He was given a large sound-proof room for his work. It had double windows, and two pianos, and a writing-desk that was wide enough for the widest full score, and a system of central heating that sent the thermometer shooting up to heights rivalling the deserts of Algeria. On week-days, he would be teaching in it. But on Sundays, when the school was locked up, it would be all his own, and he would write and write and write.” The music room at St. Paul’s was the principal site of Holst’s creativity until his death in 1934. The first piece that he composed in his beloved sanctum was the St. Paul’s Suite, written for and dedicated to his pupils. Though he originally scored it just for string orchestra, Holst also fitted the Suite with added wind parts for any students who wished to join in; those who did not play an instrument were invited to sing along with the folksongs that he quoted in the last movement.

The Suite’s lively opening Jig is based on the popular English dance type of the sixteenth century. The second movement, titled Ostinato after the little repeated figure that murmurs continuously in the second violins, exhibits a delicacy reminiscent of a nineteenth-century parlor waltz in its outer sections and a more animated vigor in the middle. The Intermezzo juxtaposes two musical strains: the first, stately in tempo, owes its exotic gapped-scale melody to Holst’s interest in Oriental music; the second, fast and incisive, Holst borrowed to the depict the Spirits of the Fire in his 1922 ballet, The Perfect Fool. The finale, a slightly expanded transcription of the last movement of the Second Suite for Military Band of 1911, masterfully combines the swiftly moving melody of a morris dance known as the Dargason with the touching lyricism of the ancient tune Greensleeves. “It is difficult to believe that the two tunes were not specially intended for each other,” wrote Imogen. “They live their own lives, each leaning to the other instead of fighting for their independence.”

Concerto for Organ, String Orchestra ................. Francis Poulenc

and Timpani in G minor (1899-1963)

Composed in 1938.

Premiered on June 21, 1939 in Paris, conducted by Roger Désormière with Maurice Duruflé as soloist.

The appearance of Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto in 1938 produced mild surprise among the followers of his music. Since first winning public attention at the age of eighteen with his Rapsodie nègre, Poulenc had been primarily known for works of wit, insouciance and elegance. The French critic Henri Collet made an excellent choice when he included Poulenc among Les Six, the group of six young composers who sought (each in his own very distinct manner) to rid French music of Teutonic heaviness, syrupy Romanticism and wispy Impressionism in favor of clarity, athleticism and emotional reserve. Until the late 1930s, Poulenc’s chamber music, songs, ballets, concertos and piano pieces (these last just right, advised Anatole France, for “the intimate conversations at five o’clock”) were brilliant, refined, even impudent. The Organ Concerto revealed a previously unknown facet of Poulenc’s musical personality, one that his friend the American composer Ned Rorem described as “deeply devout and uncontrollably sensual.”

Poulenc’s depth of feeling was grounded in the Catholicism of his youth, but with which, he admitted, “from 1920 to 1935 I was very little concerned.” In 1936 he underwent a rejuvenation of his religious belief brought about by the death of his colleague Pierre-Octave Ferroud in an automobile accident. Deeply shaken, Poulenc wrote, “The atrocious extinction of this musician so full of vigor left me stupefied. Pondering on the fragility of our human frame, the life of the spirit attracted me anew.” His renewed interest in the faith led to a wonderful series of musical works which reflect a more noble vision than do those of the preceding years: the Gloria, the Sonata for Two Pianos, many sacred vocal pieces, the cathartic opera The Dialogues of the Carmelites and the Organ Concerto.

Since Poulenc came of age during the First World War, and missed the opportunity for extensive formal training as a composer because of his service in the military, his music is more a natural expression, without allegiance to any particular school or compositional system, than a studied one. “My rules are instinctive,” he once said. “I am not concerned with [technical] principles and I am proud of that; I have no system of writing (for me ‘system’ means ‘tricks’); and as for inspiration, it is so mysterious that it is wiser not to try to explain it.” Poulenc’s intuitive art was largely based on his superb sense of melody, which, he freely admitted, was heavily influenced by that incomparable writer of songs, Franz Schubert.

The Organ Concerto is cast in a single movement comprising seven sections differentiated by tempo and texture, a formal concept derived from the Baroque keyboard fantasia. The sections are alternately slow, with chordal scoring, and fast, with a dynamic, moto perpetuo quality. To bring unity to the structure, there are thematic relationships among the various formal parts, most notably a great peal from the solo organ, reminiscent of Sebastian Bach’s Organ Fantasia in G minor (the “Great,” BWV 542), which occurs in both the first and last sections. The scoring is a piece of expert craftsmanship, with the timpani reinforcing and delineating the bass line, while the strings are combined with the careful registrations of the organ to produce sonorities that are, by turn, brilliant and hymnal.

Serenade for Strings in E major, Op. 22................ Antonín Dvorák

(1841-1904)

Composed May 3-14, 1875.

Premiered on December 10, 1876 in Prague, conducted by Adolf Cech.

In the mid-1860s, Emperor Franz Joseph, in a magnanimous burst of generosity, established a State Commission to award grants to aid struggling artists in the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the summer of 1874, less than a year after his marriage and just as the newlyweds were expecting their first child, the young Bohemian composer Antonín Dvorák decided to apply for the prize to supplement his meager income as organist at Prague’s St. Adalbert Church. He first presented himself at the Prague City Hall to obtain official certification of his poverty, and then gathered together a hefty stack of his recent scores — the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the Dvur Kralové Songs, the overtures to the operas Alfred and King and Charcoal Burner, a later-destroyed Romeo and Juliet Overture, a piano quintet and a string quartet — and sent them with his application for assistance to Vienna.

The members of the grants committee were a most distinguished lot — Johann Herbeck, Director of the Court Opera, the renowned critic Eduard Hanslick and the titan of Viennese music himself, Johannes Brahms. Their report noted that Dvorák possessed “genuine and original gifts” and that his works displayed “an undoubted talent, but in a way which as yet remains formless and unbridled.” They deemed his work worthy of encouragement and, on their recommendation, the Minister of Culture, Karl Stremayer, awarded the young musician 400 gulden, the highest stipend bestowed under the program. It represented Dvorák’s first recognition outside his homeland, and his initial contact with Brahms and Hanslick, both of whom would prove to be powerful influences on his career through their example, artistic guidance and professional help. An excited burst of compositional activity followed during the months after Dvorák learned of his award, in February 1875: the G major String Quartet, the Moravian Duets for Soprano and Tenor (it was these delectable pieces which, when he submitted them to support an application for another government grant three years later, caused Brahms to recommend him to the publisher Simrock), the B-flat Piano Trio, the D major Piano Quartet, the E-flat String Quintet, the Fifth Symphony and the lovely Serenade for Strings all appeared with inspired speed.

The Serenade for Strings, Op. 22, written in only eleven days in May 1875, is one of Dvorák’s most popular short compositions. In his classic study of the composer’s music, Otakar Sourek noted that the piece is “mainly cast in a poetic mood, with an overtone of ardent longing, yet not altogether devoid of a certain cheerful gaiety.” As its name implies, this Serenade is lighter in character, simpler in structure and less weighty in argument than the larger orchestral genres. The gentle opening movement is cast in a three-part form whose outer sections grow from a short, songful phrase presented immediately by the second violins. The movement’s central portion is based on a melodic motive that tours up and down the chords of the harmony in tripping rhythms. A sweetly nostalgic waltz is presented as the second movement. The third movement is a fully developed scherzo with a bright, good-natured main theme and intervening lyrical episodes. The deepest emotions of the Serenade are plumbed in the Larghetto, a tenderly romantic song of almost Tchaikovskian introspection. Reminiscences of this music and of the opening movement occur during the vivacious finale, a lively folk dance brimming with bubbling high spirits.