Musorgsky:

Pictures at an Exhibition

Modest Musorgsky (1839-1881)

Born little more than a generation before Sergei Rachmaninov, Modest Musorgsky made his way as a musician during a period in which Russian musical culture was still taking shape, when many of the most gifted composers were actually amateurs, writing music in their free time. It is hard to imagine that Alexander Borodin was employed as a professor of chemistry, and Rimsky-Korsakov began a career as a naval officer, only later becoming a professional composer and teacher. Even Tchaikovsky put in a few years as a government employee before being freed to compose full-time, in great part due to the generosity of his patron, Mme. Von Meck.

Musorgsky’s career followed a similar course. Born in a well-to-do land-owning family, he was educated at a military academy (with casual musical instruction from his mother and private teachers), and became a civil servant---the future composer of BORIS GODUNOV soon employed as “Assistant Head Clerk in the Third Section of the Forestry Department of the Ministry of State Property”! (Please note that this was fifty years before the Soviet era!) It was not quite as Kafkaesque as one might imagine. When time permitted music was composed, and Musorgsky was fortunate in having superiors who recognized his gifts and gave him considerable leeway in pursuing his creative activities. He was quite successful as a government functionary, dapper in appearance, cultivated and possessing a lively intellect. He also was subject to mental instability, fits of depression, and an increasing alcoholism which would eventually bring his short life to an end. The history books tend to overlook the more positive aspects of Musorgsky’s life, usually stressing his “unstable, disorderly temperament,” and sadly the composer is forever associated in the minds of most people with the heart-breaking portrait by I. E. Repin, painted only a few weeks before his early death. By fits and starts Musorgsky had won recognition as a gifted, if rather “eccentric” composer, closely associated with others of his generation (especially the “Mighty Five,” which included Rimsky, Borodin, Cesar Cui and Balakirev.) In the early 1870s came performances of his masterpiece, BORIS GODUNOV, soon followed by work on KHOVANSHCHINA (left incomplete at his death), a host of remarkable songs, and a number of larger compositions, many of them unfinished. The criticism of Musorgsky’s “eccentricity” usually referred to aspects of his harmonic and melodic style, as well as his idiosyncratic approach to instrumentation. Rimsky-Korsakov’s affectionate, if misguided, “revisions” and “corrections” in BORIS GUDONOV and other works left unpublished at the time of Musorgsky’s death are a clear indication of the general attitude of the composer’s contemporaries to what nowadays is considered to be remarkable originality and boldness of musical vision.

That Maurice Ravel should come to prepare an orchestration of the epic piano suite, “Pictures at an Exhibition” is an interesting aspect of the curious history of Musorgsky’s work and its emergence into the general repertoire in the 20^th century. The Russians had a traditional affinity for French culture, and not surprisingly some of the first western European musicians to take an interest in Musorgsky were French. Camille Saint-Saens, of all people, was one of the first to encounter the work of Musorgsky, followed by Debussy (who as a young man had spent time in Russia as a music instructor to the children of Tchaikovsky’s patron, Mme. Von Meck.) By the time Ravel was making his name as a composer Igor Stravinsky had burst on the scene, soon taking up residence in France. Himself a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s presence in Paris further strengthened the long-standing cultural bond between Russian and French culture. A further flood of Russian artists and intellectuals following the 1917 revolution added to this, with figures such as Serge Koussevitsky and Prokofiev becoming prominent in the musical life of Paris.

Ravel’s first serious involvement with the music of Musorgsky came in 1913, when he joined Stravinsky in preparing a new orchestration of the incomplete KHOVANSHCHINA, a project which was never completed. In 1922 he was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky to transform Musorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” into a full-scale orchestral composition. This imposing fourteen-movement suite for piano was written in 1874, inspired by a memorial exhibition of works by the composer’s friend Victor Hartmann, an artist who had died the previous year. Seldom performed, often dismissed as awkwardly conceived for the piano, even today this composition is infrequently heard, and is often tinkered with by pianists, as was notably the case with Vladimir Horowitz, a lifelong champion of the work. Many musicians had suspected that “Pictures” would be better served by an orchestral transcription, and Ravel, with his feeling for orchestral color and love of Russian music, was certainly the ideal man for the job, although Ravel’s orchestral textures were closer to those of Rimsky-Korsakov than to Musorgsky’s own orchestral colours, with their bold, spare “earth tones.” First performed in Paris by Koussevitsky on 19 October, 1922, Ravel’s “Tableaux d’une Exposition” was a sensational success, and ironically has all but eclipsed Musorgsky’s rude and bluntly Russian original.

Pictures at an Exhibition is a musical depiction of paintings and drawings on display in a gallery, with the casual strolling of onlookers from one artwork to the next suggested by four short movements, each bearing the title “Promenade.”

The opening PROMENADE, marked “nel modo russico,” forms an introduction to the suite.

This is very “Russian” indeed, opening with a solo trumpet, taking on a sturdy peasant character.

The paintings are as follows:

1. GNOMUS. A design for a toy nutcracker prepared as a Christmas tree ornament. The “nutcracker” element is vividly illustrated by the use of a rattle, together with whip, side drum, cymbals and xylophone.

PROMENADE – now heard as a quiet contemplation of the paintings.

2. THE OLD CASTLE. Based upon a watercolor done by the artist on a visit to Italy in which a troubadour sings a melancholy song outside a medieval castle (here in the voice of an alto saxophone.)

PROMENADE. Now returning with fuller orchestration, fading away to prepare for the next picture.

3. TUILERIES. A painting depicting lively children’s games in the gardens in central Paris. An apt example of Ravel’s ability to bring together the distinctive Russian essence of the music, together with a Gallic elegance most appropriate for the subject of the painting.

4. BYDLO. In a foreshadowing of Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” Musorgsky depicts a Polish cart with enormous wheels, drawn by oxen, with heavy grinding rhythms and the dark colors of the Russian countryside.

PROMENADE. This ambling musical element is now heard in a lighter, more transparent texture.

5. BALLET OF THE CHICKS IN THEIR SHELLS. This is based on costumes which Hartman designed for a Bolshoi Ballet production in 1871.

6. SAMUEL GOLDENBERG AND SCHMUYLE. This musical dialogue, was inspired by a pair of portraits of two Jews: one rich, wearing a fur hat (depicted by solid, rather prideful music for strings and winds in unison), the other a poor Sandomir Jew (heard in pleading music played by muted trumpet.)

7. LIMOGES, THE MARKET PLACE. A scene of animated gossip among market women vividly mirrored in a flurry of instrumental activity, plowing head-on into the following movement.

8. CATACOMBS. Set out in two sections, the first subtitled “Sepulchrum Romanum” [“Roman Sepulchre], a stark, nearly immobile impression of the eternity of death, the second , “Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua” [“With the Dead in a Dead Language”] in which the Promenade theme reappears in an eerie atmosphere of muted tremolo strings.

9. THE HUT ON FOWL’S LEGS. This painting represents the famous home of Baba Yaga, a witch well known in Russian folklore, who flew through the skies in a pestle and mortar.

Here Ravel came closest to the spirit of Musorgsky with orchestral colors which create a memorable and evocation of this haunted fairy-tale world. Returning to the thumping energy of the opening section, the music hurtles on to plunge directly into the final movement.

10. THE GREAT GATE OF KIEV. Hartman’s drawing was a design for a massive memorial gate, with columns supporting an arch crowned by a huge carved war helmet. Here Ravel, seems to outstrip even such Russian masters of orchestration as Rimsky in creating an outpouring of incomparable majesty. The powerful, choral-like main theme recurs several times, contrasted by a quiet, chant-like episode rooted in the world of Russian Orthodox choral music, and a bell-like episode built upon tritone figures, with powerful echoes of the Coronation Scene from BORIS GODUNOV. The work concludes with the orchestra playing at maximum capacity, in an unparalleled display of rich sonority.

Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini , Op. 43

Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini , Op. 43

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

Like Richard Strauss, Sergei Rachmaninov lived a life which stretched from an imperial late 19^th century world to the momentous cultural and political upheaval of the first half of the 20^th century. It was a life which moved from the world of Tchaikovsky and Mother Russia to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, Riverside Drive, and Beverly Hills.

In another parallel with Strauss, Rachmaninov’s works have always been well-loved by the wider musical public, despite the strictures of critics and academics. Unlike Strauss, who attempted to ignore political storms, Rachmaninov suffered the wrenching impact of a loss of his cultural roots in leaving Russia behind after the Bolshevik Revolution. Although, like Strauss, a celebrated conductor, and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the age, Rachmaninov’s 25 years of exile severely limited his output as a composer, with but a scant half-dozen large-scale compositions written after 1918. While these include several splendid works, including the Fourth Piano Concerto, Third Symphony, and Symphonic Dances, only the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) would gain popularity comparable with the early concertos and orchestral works.

Written in his summer home in Switzerland, the Rhapsody, which could well be regarded as a virtual “Fifth Concerto,” represents Rachmaninov at the height of his powers, still faithful to his late19t^h century Russian roots, yet venturing into a more tautly-constructed musical idiom, occasionally revealing some links with a more “contemporary” musical language that had been heard previously.. The basis for the work is the well-known 24^th Caprice for solo violin of Nicolo Paganini (itself actually a set of variations), which had been inspired sets of variations by a host of noted composers, among them Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and in the 20^th century Boris Blacher and Witold Lutoslawski.

The rhapsody comprises twenty-four variations, some following the theme quite strictly, others with relative freedom. And, in another time-honoured Romantic tradition, Rachmaninov makes occasional references to the medieval Gregorian Chant sequence, DIES IRAE, following in the footsteps of Berlioz and Liszt. (He had already made use of that melody in his First Symphony and the tone poem, ISLE OF THE DEAD, and it would reappear in his last work, the Symphonic Dances.)

There is a brief introduction built upon a distinctive five-note figure which runs through the Paganini theme, four sixteenth-notes linked to an eighth-note), but where one would expect to hear Paganini’s melody, Rachmaninov, in an eccentric departure from tradition, writes a skeletal “First Variation” BEFORE the theme is introduced. The Paganini’s original melody is heard in the violins in the tonality of A Minor.

Variations 2-6 form an unbroken group, performed without change of tempo, all in the home key. The five-note figure is much in evidence, only in Variation 5 moving away from a literal repetition of the theme’s melodic contours. A more reflective mood is heard in Var. 6, with greater rhythmic freedom and decorative filigree in the solo piano. The music’s momentum is slowed somewhat in Var. 7, the five-note figure now heard in an augmented form in the bassoon, the piano playing simple block chords as harmonic background. Following the toccata-like Variations 8-10, Var. 11 serves as a reflective, rhapsodic interlude, richly decorated with decorative writing in the piano against a sustained orchestral background.

Shifting to D Minor, now in triple metre, Var. 12 is marked “tempo di menuetto.” Hints of the DIES IRASE theme are heard in the piano, with elegant rhythmic figuration heard against swooning melodic figures in the orchestra. Still in D minor, the mood in Var. 13 now becomes heavy and assertive, with the piano slamming out chords, while the strings play a stripped-down version of the theme, with embellishment in the winds.

In a renewal of energy Var. 14 is set in the related key of F Major, the orchestra stepping off with a fanfare-like variant of the theme, soon joined by the piano, hammering out heavy chordal patterns.

In Var. 15 the piano sails off by itself, with richly-textured passagework which at first suggests a cadenza, joined by the orchestra to come to a quiet conclusion. Shifting to the remote, dark key of B-flat minor, the orchestra now takes the lead, with the piano heard as ornamentation over stretches of the theme heard in solo oboe, later solo violin and horn. Remaining in B-flat minor, Var. 17 forms a bridge to its successor, the piano confined to murmuring arpeggio figuration heard against the barest suggestion of the theme in the winds, with hushed tremolo in the strings.

Until now most of the variations have been tightly woven, and fairly removed from the characteristic gestures of Rachmaninov’s earlier style. But in Var. 18, at last the listener is rewarded with the celebrated D-flat major variation, revealing Rachmaninov in his most lushly Romantic guise, as through reverting to the seductive warmth of his earlier compositions. And, in a delightful instance of musical craftsmanship, this glamorous new melody turns out to be the result not of inspiration, but calculation: Rachmaninov INVERTS the Paganini theme (literally tipping the melody upside-down), a time-honored musical gimmick, with Paganini’s rather “classical” tune now taking on the distinctive lusciousness of old Russian Romanticism. First heard in the piano alone, in a easy flowing ANDANTE, the orchestra enters in full flood, producing the sort of textures which have been imitated in Hollywood soundtracks for the last seventy years. (Anyone suspicious of such “heart-on-sleeve” sentiments would do well to listen to the composer’s own recorded performance, which is both warmly tender and utterly free of sentimentality.)

In a renewal of energy, Variations 19-22 return to the home key of A Minor, each succeeding variation quickening in tempo. The soloist moves from springy triplets to buzzing sixteenth-notes (bringing back the five-note figure), followed by even more furious triplet passagework. In the march-like Var. 22 the rhythm of the five-note figure presses forward, the piano hammering out crisp chords with increasing power. Sustained lines in the strings form a background to racing patterns in the piano, the five-note figure takes the lead, building to a massive climax. A short cadenza in thundering octaves leads to Var. 23, in which the theme returns very much in its original form, with another short cadenza forming a link with the 24^th, final variation. Here the Dies Irae theme comes very much to the fore, as the music pushes on to a conclusion which, at the very last moment, suddenly pulls back to end quietly, with a final snap of the five-note figure.

Strauss: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

Suite from DER ROSENKAVALIER Richard Strauss

(1864-1949)

For many music lovers Richard Strauss represents the very essence of 19^th century Romanticism, with his sumptuous orchestral tone poems, lavish operatic works and expressive lieder. But while his most popular works appeared before the First World War, Strauss would live the greater part of his life in the 20^th century---the precocious teenager who began his career in the age of Wagner’s PARSIFAL and the Brahms symphonies, would live to be a contemporary of such figures as Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter! But then the career of Richard Strauss is filled with paradox. By the time he reached the age of thirty he had become the most celebrated living composer, acclaimed by many as the hoped-for successor to Richard Wagner, while many musical conservatives considered him to be a dangerous “revolutionary.” It is interesting that Johannes Brahms himself dismissed such talk, singling out Gustav Mahler as the REAL “revolutionary,” although the true importance of Mahler’s works would only be recognized fifty years after his death, as he himself had prophesied.

For all his precocious brilliance, Richard Strauss was nearly thirty years of age when he composed his first stage work, GUNTRAM (1894) , a galumphing Wagnerian epic which sank like a stone, followed in 1901 by a rather sour comic opera, FEUERSNOT, which was only a modest success. Could it be that the composer of “Don Juan” and “Zarathustra” was ill-suited for the musical stage? But the sensational premiere of SALOME in 1905 turned everything around, transforming the career of Strauss overnight. With ELEKTRA (1909), an exploration of human depravity almost exceeding the grisly power of SALOME, Strauss was at the height of his powers, hailed as the most significant figure in German opera since Wagner, as well as joining such figures as Schoenberg, Scriabin and Debussy in leading the way in new world of early 20^th century “modernism.” Strauss seemed to have made a daring leap forward not only in the striking psychological elements in these new operas, but also with regard to his basic musical language, particularly with regard to tonality and harmony. From this point forward Strauss would make opera his primary focus, ELEKTRA being the first of a half-dozen works with texts by the great Austrian poet and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a remarkable partnership which lasted until the poet’s death in 1929.

Strauss’ had won international notoriety as a composer of operatic horror---even New York audiences were so stunned by SALOME in 1907 that the Met waited until the 1930s to mount another production! Thus it was not surprising that news of yet another Strauss/Hoffmansthal collaboration caused sensitive souls to quake at the thought of even greater operatic shocks in store. But when DER ROSENKAVALIER was first heard in 1911 it “shocked” only by its unexpected sweetness and tuneful expressiveness. (True, there was some moralist murmuring about the opera’s first scene, which finds a married woman in bed with a strapping young eighteen year-old, but that seemed to be a problem only in London---Sir Thomas Beecham has described a “typically English compromise” with the censors, which allowed the scene to be played if NO bed appeared on the stage, leaving the text unchanged, with several references to a bed!) On the threshold of the European catastrophe of the First World War, ROSENKAVALIER was a wistful look back to the 18^th century Vienna of Mozart’s MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, complete with a poignant central female figure, and a pair of young people falling in love at first sight. Now it was the turn of musical “moralists” to take offense, attacking (as some still do to this day) Strauss’ “cowardly” turning back from the bold “modernism” of SALOME and ELEKTRA, taking “refuge” in cozy musical nostalgia. Opera lovers, on the other hand were only too happy to hear in the new work echoes of FIGARO. ROSENKAVALIER’s Marschallin seemed to be a counterpart to Mozart’s Countess, and the decision to cast the young Oktavian as a “trouser role” for mezzo-soprano was surely a glance back to Cherubino, with links with Susanna as well. And forming a nostalgic (if anachronistic) link with “Old Vienna” was Strauss’ daring decision to thread a series of luscious waltzes through the course of the work, which has helped to make ROSENKAVALIER Strauss’ most popular opera It was such an overnight success in 1911 that special trains were run to take opera-lovers to Dresden to attend the first performances.

First published in 1945, the orchestral suite from DER ROSENKAVALIER seems not to be the work of Strauss himself, but may have been prepared by the conductor Artur Rodzinski. It comprises four extended sections heard without pause, laying out key scenes spanning the entire opera, with each of the principal characters represented in turn. Chief among these is a beautiful married woman on the verge of middle age, the Marschallin (Field-Marshal’s wife), whose clandestine affair with Oktavian, a boy still in his teens, soon comes to an abrupt end over the course of the action. The Marschallin’s cousin, the boorish, impoverished Baron Ochs is the comic focus of the work, with his hopes for an arranged marriage with Sophie, an innocent young woman from a wealthy family, coming to grief when the girl falls in love at first sight with Oktavian.

The introduction to Act I of DER ROSENKAVALIER forms the opening of the suite, with a swaggering figure in the solo horn setting in motion a swirl of orchestral activity which is intended to depict a night of tempestuous love-making. When the music gives way to a mood of tenderness, the curtain rises to reveal the Marschallin and Oktavian awakening in the first light of morning. This

richly-textured tonal picture glides on to the second section, the “Presentation of the Rose” music which opens Act Two, one of the most best-loved scenes in all of opera. Here the innocent young Sophie is excitedly awaiting the arrival of the “Rose Cavalier” (who turns out to be Oktavian), who is to present her with a silver rose, the symbol of Baron Ochs’ proposal of marriage. The horncall from the first section recurs, and with ever-mounting waves of excitement the music shifts into the ripe key of F-sharp major. In a dramatic harmonic gesture Oktavian’s entrance is portrayed with music capturing the glitter of the silver rose itself, with a magical combination of high shifting harmonies for 3 flutes, 3 violins, celeste and two harps. The first tentative phrases sung by Oktavian and Sophie, here heard in instrumental guise, become a rapturous duet. Rounded out by a return of the sounds of the silver rose, the third section follows, with the boisterous and mischievous introduction to Act III, which quickly gives way to an offstage waltz-tune which in the opera forms the background to an uproarious scene in which Baron Ochs makes a bungling attempt to seduce one of the Marschallin’s “maidservants,” Mariandel---actually Oktavian, dressed in woman’s clothing! In the course of this episode is heard music famously sung by a weepy, tipsy “Mariandel” to the memorable words, “Nein, nein, ich trink’ kein Wein”…. After a second waltz the orchestra swells into a majestically expansive version of the first,which is perhaps the finest waltz not composed by Johann Strauss! (For those with a musical sweet tooth this is probably the closest musical approximation of those unforgettable Viennese pastries heaped high with “Schlagobers” [whipped cream], which ten years later would be Strauss’ title for a ballet set in Vienna!) This wonderful waltz is associated with the clownish Baron Ochs (a role written for a deep bass voice), and in a delightful instrumental touch, the Baron’s low E with which he which concludes an earlier scene, is here given to a solo tuba. The fourth and final section encapsulates the most memorable music in ROSENKAVALIER: the concluding trio sung by Oktavian, Sophie and the Marschallin, in which the older woman regretfully (if without tears) “lets go” of her young lover, giving her blessing to the union of Sophie and Oktavian. This is followed by an artless little duet sung by the young lovers when they are at last alone together. Unlike the hushed final moment of the opera, which tiptoes away in a moment of witty pantomime, the suite concludes with a noisy waltz from earlier in Act III, which had been heard over the din of Ochs being chased from the scene by creditors and small children screaming “Papa! Papa!”