All posts by Douglas Meyer

Il barbiere di Siviglia: Overture – Gioachino Rossini

Rossini

To say the fates had thrown down many impediments to the premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s (1792-1868) Barber of Seville at the Teatro Argentina in Rome on 20 February 1816 would be an understatement. Rossini was said to have based the original Overture to The Barber of Seville, appropriately enough, on Spanish themes. That piece, however, was lost in transit somewhere between Bologna and Rome, and Rossini, rather than recreating it or writing another one, simply replaced it with the instrumental overture he had composed for Elisabetta in Naples the year before.

There are well-documented instances of a main character at the premiere tripping over a prop during his entrance and falling flat on his face. Another singer had the misfortune of plummeting through a trap door that had accidentally been left open; a character in the midst of his serenade broke a string on his accompanying instrument; and another poor fellow didn’t find his mark and walked directly into the scenery.

It was also the case that The Barber of Seville had already been set by the senior composer, Giovanni Paisiello.  Paisiello and his allies in the audience did their best to disrupt the performance.  Also, during one of the opera’s most climactic scenes, a cat strode across the stage, eliciting giggles from the audience and the cast as well. Rossini could bear no more and left the theater before the opera’s curtain calls.

Fortunately for Rossini, the second performance went very smoothly, allowing the audience to recognize the genius of The Barber of Seville.  Fearing more disasters Rossini had remained at home worrying about what was happening at the thearer when he heard an uproar in the street.  Peering out of his window, he saw a large group of people shouting and carrying torches as they approached his door.  He feared they were coming to harm him, until he heard the words, “Viva Rossini” (“Long live Rossini”) all in praise of him and his wonderful opera.

Symphony op. 12 no. 4 in D minor (“La casa del diavolo”) (G 506) -Luigi Boccherini

Boccherini

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) was born in Lucca, Italy. He studied music and the cello initially with his father and then in Rome but spent much of his life in Spain. As a cellist, Boccherini wrote extensively for his own instrument: 11 cello concertos, over 100 sonatas, 48 string trios, and more than 200 string quartets and quintets.

The journey to Boccherini’s composition of this D Minor Symphony began in 1757 when along with his father, Luigi traveled to Vienna where they both were employed in the orchestra of the Burgtheater. By chance Luigi was cellist in the orchestra at the premiere of Gluck’s revolutionary ballet, Don Juan (1761) and the experience was burned into his psyche.

In November, 1770, Luigi Boccherini was appointed as court composer to the Spanish infante Don Luis the brother of the Spanish king Carlos III. Among his new work requirements was that of composing symphonies, for him still unfamiliar terrain.

Written in 1771, the symphony “La casa del diavolo” (House of the Devil) is doubtless the best-known of Boccherini’s symphonies. It is more than just a reflection of Boccherini’s early years as an orchestral musician in Vienna or even an homage to Gluck. It is also of music-historical interest as it represents an attempt to transfer the Don Juan myth from the stage to the concert hall. Boccherini’s choice of the Don Juan myth almost guaranteed the favorable reception of his symphony. Familiarity with the myth was a prerequisite to “cultural literacy” in the eighteenth century, and the story was of Spanish origin.

In the printed edition published in Paris around 1776, we find the following heading to the final movement: Chaconne qui représente l’Enfer et qui a été faite à imitation de celle de Mr. Gluck dans le Festin de Pierre (Chaconne representing Hell, which was written in imitation of that by Mr Gluck in his ‘Stone Guest’).

Concierto de Aranjuez Joaquín Rodrigo

Rodrigo

Even though Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999) was blind from the age of three he excelled as a composer, lecturer, and pedagogue and was awarded Spain’s highest award for composition, the Premio Nacional de Música, in 1983. Today, Rodrigo is regarded as one of the most important composers of his country, carrying on the traditions established by Falla, Albéniz, and Turina.

His music, mostly influenced by the works of the Spanish nationalist composers and partly styled by French music (particularly that of his teacher Paul Dukas), has a cosmopolitan quality with melodies, harmonies, and rhythmic patterns following a broad neo-classical style.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Rodrigo moved to Paris, where in the winter of 1939 he composed his most successful work, the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra. The unprecedented success of this work prompted Rodrigo to write concertos for other instruments including piano, violin, cello, and harp.

The Concierto de Aranjuez premiered on November 9, 1940, in Barcelona, and another performance followed the next month in Madrid. It is a mature work of astonishing balance which for its time it explored new fields of harmony and rhythm and opened up new possibilities for the guitar as orchestral solo instrument.

Guitar Concerto in D major, RV 93 Antonio Vivaldi

Vivaldi

Though he composed numerous operas, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678-1741) is best known for his close to 500 concertos. His own instrument was the violin, which he had studied with his father, a violinist at the Basilica San Marco in Venice. Vivaldi trained for the priesthood, taking his Holy Orders in 1703, the same year he became maestro di violino at the Pio Ospedale Pietà, an orphanage and renowned conservatory for girls in Venice. Though his later activities as a composer and impresario occasioned much travel, Vivaldi retained his association with the Pietà throughout his life and many of his instrumental works were composed for his students there.

The D Major Guitar Concerto RV 93 was originally written for two violins, lute, and basso continuo and was dedicated to Bohemian Count Johann Joseph von Wrtby. There was a great difference between Austro-German lutes and Italian lutes and present day performances on the guitar may more authentically represent the sound of its original solo instrument.

All three movements of the concerto follow the “rounded” type of binary form, in which the opening music returns halfway through the second section. The first movement is notable for its energetic three-note melodic elaborations and the propulsive repeated notes in the bass line. The slow movement employs a singing line in dotted rhythms with a “halo” of upper string suspensions and the animated closing movement races along in the rhythm of a gigue.

Los Esclavos Felices: Overture Juan Crisostomo de Arriaga

Arriaga

Juan Crisostomo de Arriaga (1806-1826) was born into a prosperous merchant family in the northern coastal town of Bilbao, Spain, on the fiftieth anniversary of Mozart’s birth (January 27) His music-loving parents gave him the Spanish versions of Mozart’s first two baptismal names: Johannes Chrysostomus. As a child, he was an intuitive musician who began composing at the age of nine and was performing as second violinist with a professional quartet by the following year.

In September 1821, Arriaga’s parents sent him to Paris where was introduced to Cherubini, at that time one of the inspectors of the Paris Conservatoire. He was admitted to study counterpoint and fugue under Fétis and violin with Pierre Baillot. He finished the entire course of study in just two years, and in 1824 was appointed teacher of harmony and counterpoint at the Conservatoire and issued the only music published during his lifetime as well, a set of three string quartets. Arriaga died prematurely from exhaustion and a pulmonary infection in 1826, 10 days before his 20th birthday.

The opera Los esclavos felices (The Happy Slaves) tells of a Spanish nobleman and his loyal wife who are faced with humiliation and death by their Moorish captors before being saved by their own valor and the clemency of the King of Algiers. The music is reminiscent of the vivacity of Rossini and the suavity of Mozart.

Mozart: Symphony No. 31 in D major, K. 297 “Paris”

Mozart

As early as 1773, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) started talking about leaving his hometown Salzburg. He lamented the lowbrow tastes of its citizens and disliked writing music for its “coarse, slovenly, dissolute court musicians.” “Salzburg is no place for me,” he wrote to his father from Munich in 1777, where he openly advertised his availability for a permanent job.

It was Paris that held the greatest allure for the young Mozart. He went there at the age of twenty-two, accompanied by his mother, in March 1778. Except for the symphony he composed, his stay, which lasted just over six months, was a disappointment and a personal tragedy. Throughout their stay, his mother grew increasingly bored and unwell. She died in Paris early in July, shortly after the premiere of the new symphony.

When Mozart began to work on his symphony he had new ideas he had accumulated from his recent travels, particularly in Munich and Mannheim. In addition the resources available in Parisian orchestras, which were bigger than any he had ever heard (and filled with many superb players), prompted him to expand his palette, adding flutes and timpani, and, for the first time in his symphonies, clarinets as well. He scored his new symphony for the largest orchestra he had ever employed.

Like so many things in Mozart’s Paris sojourn, the rehearsals for his new symphony did not go well. “I was really frightened,” Mozart wrote home. “All my life I have heard nothing worse; you can’t imagine how they botched the symphony twice in a row and scratched away at it.” He asked for another rehearsal. There was no time, he was told. He went to bed that night “in a discontented and angry frame of mind,” and when he awoke in the morning he decided not to attend the concert. But then he changed his mind, only to discover that the Paris public was wild about his new music.

“In the middle of the opening allegro,” he wrote to his father, “there is a passage that I knew people would like; the whole audience was carried away by it, and there was tremendous applause”—during the movement, as well as at its conclusion. Having been told that Parisians liked their finales to begin boldly and loudly, using all the instruments on stage, Mozart deliberately began his quietly and with just the violins. When the full ensemble then burst in, after eight measures, the first-night audience started to clap, enjoying not only the music but the joke. “I was so happy,” Mozart said, “as soon as the symphony was over I went off to the Palais Royal and had a large ice.”

Camille Saint-Saëns: Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33

Saint-Saens

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) entered Parisian musical life as a prodigy, a virtuoso pianist who played a significant role in introducing all five of Beethoven’s piano concerti to skeptical French audiences.  He also composed and performed his own cycle of five concerti for the instrument.

Though his output was enormous his best-known compositions date from the 1870s and 1880s, when Saint-Saëns was at the peak of his fame.  Along with the first of his two cello concerti, these include the tone poem Danse Macabre, the opera Samson and Delilah, the Third Symphony (the “Organ” Symphony), and Carnival of the Animals.

It was early in this period that Saint-Saëns wrote the Cello Concerto No. 1 for Auguste Tolbecque (1830-1919), the work’s dedicatee and principal cellist of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra. Tolbecque’s premiere of the Cello Concerto with that orchestra on January 19, 1873, marked an important turning point in establishing Saint-Saëns’ reputation as a composer of substance. The work has secured a spot as one of the best-loved of 19th-century concerti.

In sync with the mood at the time, Saint-Saëns sought to unite the movements of the concerto by condensing its three-movement format into an organically compact single movement. In addition Saint-Saëns subtly transformed the role of the soloist from a hero in conflict with the orchestra to a solo protagonist, at times integrated into the orchestral fabric of the work.

Maurice Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin

Ravel

In 1914 Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) made sketches for a suite of music for piano that would pay homage to the French Baroque keyboard suite from the time of François Couperin. Unfortunately the Great War intervened and Ravel set the project aside.

Ravel had been exempted from military service when he was 20 because of his general physical weakness, and he was 39 when the Great War began. Feeling an obligation to help with the war effort in some way, in 1915 he managed to enlist in an artillery unit as a truck and ambulance driver. It was a dangerous, exhausting, and stressful assignment, and as his health suffered he was discharged from the army in 1917. While recuperating at his godmother’s country house, Ravel returned to writing music, beginning with the French suite for piano.
The little homage to Couperin that Ravel had long envisioned now carried the horrible weight of tragedy. As he completed the work Ravel inscribed each of its six movements to the memory of those friends who had fallen in wartime service. The Prélude he dedicated to Jacques Charlot, the Fugue to Jean Gruppi, the Forlane to Gabriel Deluc, the Rigaudon to the brothers Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, the Menuet to Jean Dreyfus, and the Toccata to the eminent musicologist Joseph de Marliave. The work is thus one of Ravel’s most personal creations.
The piano version of Le tombeau de Couperin was completed in 1917 and in 1919 Ravel orchestrated four of the six movements. The orchestral suite was first performed on February 28, 1920, in Paris.

François Couperin: Five Pieces for Cello and Orchestra (arr. Paul Bazelaire)

Couperin

François Couperin “Le Grand” (1668-1733) was the most celebrated member of a family dynasty of composers which for 173 years provided a continuous line of organists at the Church of St. Gervais, in the Marais section of Paris.

Couperin was among the few French musicians of his time who looked at the music of Italian composers with a kind eye. Knowing that there was a certain hostility among the French musical elite toward the Italian style, Couperin introduced his earliest sonata in Italian style (for two violins and basso continuo) under the Italian sounding pseudonym “Rupercino” an anagram using the letters of his own name. The sonata was received by the French public with great enthusiasm and brought Couperin added confidence to continue his development of this style.

Couperin wrote hundreds of instrumental works, many with evocative titles, of which the current suite is a fine example. The set was adapted for solo cello and chamber strings by the celebrated French cellist Paul Bazelaire (1886-1958), who also served on the faculty of the Paris Conservatoire from 1918 through 1956.

Bezelaire was surely influenced by another famous suite devoted to the music of ‘Le Grand,’ Ravel’s brilliant Le tombeau de Couperin.

Couperin’s suite begins with a stately Prélude, swinging between minor and major. The main theme is like a cantilena, chanted over tender harmonies in the strings. A Siciliène is a plaintive, narrative in the manner of a Baroque arioso. A Tromba is an Italian trumpet and a familiar ‘stop’ on the Baroque organ. The sprightly theme emulates the ‘bugle’ intervals heard on the natural trumpets of the era. The fourth movement Plainte (marked slowly and sadly) often represented poetic heartache in courtly ballet scenes. The final Air du Diable (The Devil’s Song) is full of melodic and rhythmic mischief.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 4

Beethoven

The Fourth Symphony is probably Beethoven’s least well known, probably because it is sandwiched between the Third Symphony, at that time the largest and most complex symphony ever composed, and the powerful and uplifting Fifth Symphony.

In September, 1806, Beethoven was a visitor at the home of Count Franz von Oppersdorff in Upper Silesia (now in Poland), where he was treated to a performance by the court orchestra of his own four-year-old Second Symphony. A great fan of that work Oppersdorff commissioned a new symphony and, despite having already begun the Fifth, Beethoven set it aside in favor of the work that was to become the Fourth.

Haydn’s influence surely lies behind the symphony’s opening, though it is doubtful whether he ever composed a symphonic slow introduction quite so searching and ambiguous. A more likely inspiration might have been the ‘Representation of Chaos’ that begins Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. A bold Allegro vivace follows leaving the dark opening behind.

The second movement is a tender Adagio with some angry and unexpected outbursts. The third movement is in the form of a scherzo in which Beethoven decided for the first time to expand the form so that the bounding first section is heard three times and the second (in this case a lilting tune for the winds) twice. The humorous mood continues into the finale, a movement again in the spirit of Haydn.