The Inner Voice: A Second Violinist’s Notes, By Jeffrey WallPlease note, these programme notes are copyrighted work for which we have received permission to publish on the web for your reading enjoyment. These programme notes may not be used in any other form without prior permission of the copyright holder. Excerpts from Orchestra London programmes:
Cathedral Concert No.2, December 20, 2006 Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936): Trittico Botticelliano (Botticelli Triptych)(1927) Like his contemporary Ravel, Respighi also developed a reputation as an outstanding orchestrator, with the ballet he arranged from Rossini’s piano pieces, La boutique fantasque (and he too wrote a Sleeping Beauty for children, a puppet show which became an opera). A scholarly interest in early music spurred his popular transcriptions of Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute and the Baroque harpsichord pieces which became his suite The Birds, now more ubiquitous than his original calling cards, the tone poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals.Like the Roman trilogy, the Botticelli Triptych displays Respighi’s considerable powers of musical illustration. Imitating the tripartite hinged altarpieces of the medieval and Renaissance church, each panel decorated with a religious painting, Respighi has assembled musical renderings of three famous paintings of the 15th century Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli: The Allegory of Spring (Primavera); The Adoration of the Magi; and The Birth of Venus. All hang in the Botticelli Room of the Uffizi gallery in Florence (actually, the artist painted several versions of The Adoration of the Magi; others are in the National Galleries of Washington and London, England). Music unfolds over time, and Respighi evidently concerns himself not only with each Botticelli scene, but the implied action preceding and following it. Thus Primavera begins with joyous bird sounds; no birds are visible in the picture, but their presence in the overhanging trees may be inferred. Fanfares and roundelays bring on an assortment of figures from Greek mythology. The Three Graces, a group of diaphanously clad dancing demoiselles, quietly rejoice in a bouncy little tune for wind trio. Amid general revelry, everyone leaves but the birds. The Adoration of the Magi begins with the approach of three instruments, bassoon, oboe and flute, apparently from the East. “O come, Emmanuel” is sung (the Gregorian melody and its modal harmony are historicisms which recall both the Christian world and the Renaissance). After a march and a pastoral episode, everyone, rich and poor, is assembled; a cradle song for the Child (recalling the “Pastoral Symphony” in Handel’s Messiah) follows and a mood of veneration prevails. The Birth of Venus is Botticelli’s masterpiece: the slender nude goddess on her wind-blown scallop is among the most famous images in art. The billowing surface of the sea is first suggested in the quietly undulating strings. A gorgeous, long-lined theme, in bare octaves, forms in the distance; it is blown by little chromatic gusts of winds ever closer, growing ever more powerful, ever sweeter, until the beholder on shore must catch his breath—when it is whisked away, leaving only the lapping waves before the hitherto unsuspecting mortal, who now knows the power of Love. ©2006 Jeffrey Wall.
Ovation Concert No.3, December 13/14, 2006 Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder) Strauss’s wife Pauline (née de Ahna) was sometimes described as a termagant; others, however, said no, she was really more of a virago. But to Strauss, she was a lifelong inspiration. In 1894, after several years as his voice student, the soprano won his heart forever when he cast her as the leading lady in his first opera Guntram; during rehearsals she cast the score at his head and took out the principal second violin desk. They were engaged within the hour and for the rest of his life Strauss preoccupied himself with operas and songs that focused on the soprano voice, even after his wife was no longer able to sing them.In 1948, with Germany and the historic opera houses that had nurtured the composer reduced to rubble, the couple was living in Switzerland, Strauss battling depression and the bladder infection that would eventually kill him, and Pauline battling with every hotel employee she met. On the advice of his son to “stop writing letters and brooding…write a few nice songs instead,” Strauss turned to a poem by the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff that had been haunting him for two years, Im Abendrot (In the Sunset), about an aged couple facing the sunset together and musing on death. Its appropriateness to his and Pauline’s own situation stirred him to a full orchestral setting (with, memorably, a pair of flutes as the ‘larks’ of their departing souls). Completed in May 1948, the song was too short to stand on its own, however—it needed companions. Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) had won the 1946 Nobel Prize for literature, which may explain why Strauss was given a volume of his poetry; there he found several suitable poems, setting three (Frühling; September; Beim Schlafengehen) in the summer of 1948 and leaving a fourth unfinished. All share the symbolism of welcome death, and while Strauss left his intentions unstated, there is little doubt that these songs were intended to supplement Im Abendrot to form a concert cycle. Strauss died September 8, 1949 never having heard them: the premiere did not take place until 1950, with soprano Kirsten Flagstad and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. By this time, Strauss’s publisher had coined the title Four Last Songs to describe the collection, which has turned out to be two-thirds inaccurate. Not only did Strauss produce one more song after completing these (it is an unrelated albumleaf for soprano and piano and was locked in a safe until 1982), but there is some evidence that an orchestration of his early song Ruhe, meine Seele! (Rest my Soul), made immediately after the completion of Im Abendrot, was intended to be part of the cycle: these two songs share both musical material and poetic imagery, making the former an effective introduction to the latter. To date, however, the ‘canonical’ four songs remain the staple performing version (well, the fifth would be an extra rental; besides, Five Next-to-Last Songs doesn’t quite have the same ring). Although Strauss’s observation “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer” is famous, one may well doubt his sincerity of utterance: a few days before his passing he still had the presumption to claim that dying was exactly as he had composed it sixty years earlier in Death and Transfiguration. The solo horn’s quotation of a prominent theme from that tone-poem at the end of Im Abendrot may stem from the same egotism that led him to write the autobiographical A Hero’s Life; but the profound expression of these final orchestral songs effectively refutes those critics who dismiss Strauss as no more than a skilled technician. In the right hands their message is universal, and their impact overwhelming. ©2006 Jeffrey Wall. |
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