Concert III, 2024-2025 Season

Passionate and Fiery Compositions

Prometheus                                                                                                   

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

The Greek myth of Prometheus has various versions, but the essence is that he, a Titan, stole fire from the gods to give to humankind, thus enabling civilization (warmth and cooking being the beginning of all higher things). The gods punished him by tying him to a rock and sending an eagle (a stand-in for Zeus) to eat his liver, only to have it regrow overnight and be eaten again. For the Romantics, Prometheus signified the strength of the human spirit. Goethe and Shelley among others wrote poems on this myth. Johann Gottfried von Herder, an important early German Romantic writer, wrote his play, The Bound Prometheus, intended as a sequel to the ancient Greek author Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Liszt’s piece is a reworking of the cantata he wrote using the words of the play on the occasion of an unveiling of a statue of Herder in Weimar, Herder’s home town, and Liszt’s place of employment. Liszt writes in his preface to the score that the myth is full of “mysterious ideas, dark traditions, and hope, which live so vividly entangled in our souls that we don’t know which is true.” Liszt’s music actually untangles the dark from the light quite definitively, but both the torturous rock and the solace of hope are powerfully depicted.

Symphony no. 2                                                                                             

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)

Robert Schumann is famous for his concentration on one genre at a time for about a year: 1840 was a year of song, 1842 a year of chamber music, 1843 an oratorio year. 1841 is described as his symphonic year, because it saw the production of his first symphony and an early version of what we now call his fourth. The second symphony was not written until 1845-46. Its first performance, by the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, was conducted by Schumann’s friend Felix Mendelssohn. It did not go over terribly well, perhaps, as Schumann’s biographer John Daverio notes, because Mendelssohn had encored Rossini’s William Tell overture (the one that ends with the Lone Ranger theme) before intermission. (Schumann’s work was in the second half of the concert.) Both the sheer amount of music and the contrast between Rossini’s infectious jollity and Schumann’s more complex emotional presentation may have contributed to this response. The second performance - also conducted by Mendelssohn - was a much greater success.

Schumann knew his Beethoven, his Schubert and his Bach, and all can be detected in this work: Beethoven’s grandeur, especially in the last movement, Schubert’s innocent-seeming melodies, especially evident in the Trios of the Scherzo, and Bach’s counterpoint (which Schumann had been studying intensively in 1845), which is evident at times throughout the work. But regardless of these and other echoes of Schumann’s ancestors, this is a highly original and quintessentially Schumann-like work. Most classical music deploys contrasting ideas to shape the music and keep the listener’s attention, but Schumann’s use of contrast is very much his own. It is sometimes subtle but often bold, and gives the impression of a psychological disposition that cannot truly settle. For example, the very opening of the symphony juxtaposes the smooth movement of the strings with the jumpy fanfare-like motif in the brass. This dialogue between jumpy or twitchy ideas and longer-breathed smoother ones animates the whole first movement. Neither wins out. The very fast main parts of the second movement evoke barely-seen creatures darting around, perhaps reminding us of Romantic literature’s fondness for the supernatural. (Schumann was deeply versed in the literature of his time.) The contrasting sections bring us back to a more grounded world of folk song and then of hymn tunes. The to-die-for slow movement epitomizes Romantic yearning in its stretchy main tune, but close to the end of the movement a section of austere Bach-like counterpoint makes a sudden appearance; it’s not clear why.  The finale starts with a squared-off and militarized version of the first movement’s twitchy rhythm and contrasts that with a chorale-like tune. Neither is absorbed into or defeated by the other; rather they exist as complementary halves of a single entity.

Ballade                                                                                               

Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an African-British composer and conductor. He studied at the Royal College of Music, conducted many choral groups, and latterly taught at the Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music. His most famous work was Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, a cantata set to the words of Bowdoin’s own Nathaniel Hawthorne.  He visited the United States three times, and was profoundly influenced by the works of Harlem Renaissance poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and others. His Ballade for orchestra was commissioned in 1898 by the renowned Three Choirs Festival on the recommendation of Edward Elgar.

In poetry, the ballade is often a narrative form, telling a story that often ends in catastrophe. Musical ballades often follow a comparable path. In this piece, Coleridge Taylor alternates between foreboding, dramatic gestures, and sentimental, lyrical music. You can read any number of oppositions into this - bad vs. good, dark vs. light, pessimistic vs. optimistic, masculine vs. feminine. Whatever you imagine, the good/light/optimistic/feminine part is contained and confined by its opposite, even if not exactly defeated by it.

Firebird Suite (1919 version)                                                                         

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

The Firebird (1909-10) was the first of the three full-scale ballets that Stravinsky composed for Sergei Diaghilev, the great Russian impresario who ran the Ballets Russes in Paris. One of Diaghilev’s goals for this company was that it should present its Parisian audiences with a compelling, if also exoticized, version of Russian culture, but also with works that advertised their modernism. One of the criticisms of his presentations in 1909 was that the music was less innovative and exciting than the staging and dancing. Hence his invitation to Stravinsky to bring something musically new and exciting to the French capital.

There are several Russian legends combined in Diaghilev’s Firebird. The Firebird herself is a force for good in the world, initially captured, then freed by Prince Ivan, who takes one of her magic feathers. He enters the enchanted garden of the evil Koschei, where thirteen captive princesses are playing. Ivan has fallen in love with the youngest one, and they dance a slow dance (Khorovod) based on a Russian folksong also used by Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s main composition teacher. Koschei appears, threatening to turn Ivan into stone. Ivan summons the Firebird by using her magic feather. She appears and draws Koschei and his subjects into a wild ‘infernal dance,” which exhausts them to the point of slumber. The Finale celebrates a new dawn and the defeat of Koschei and the forces of evil.

Stravinsky’s music in this work is less radically modern and more indebted both to Russian folk style and Rimksy-Korsakov than in the ensuing two Diaghilev ballets - Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Nonetheless, it delighted the Parisian audience, leading to Diaghilev’s two next commissions; and Stravinsky’s brilliant deployment of his orchestral forces and compelling rhythms certainly anticipate his later work.

© Mary Hunter 2024