Tod und Verklärung ( Death and Transfiguration ), Op

Transcription

1 RICHARD STRAUSS ( ) Tod und Verklärung ( Death and Transfiguration ), Op As the 85-year-old Richard Strauss lay dying in September 1949, he turned to his daughter-in-law and said, It's a funny thing, Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Tod und Verklärung. Strauss was a man of the theater, having composed some of the 20th century s most popular operas. Was he being dramatic, or just nostalgic in invoking the tone poem that he had composed as a young man of 25? Either way, it must have been comforting for a man whose artistic legacy was secure, but whose world had been completely altered, not once, but twice by war and destruction, to recall a triumph from his youth. Tod und Verklärung was one of Strauss first mature works and a product of its time. The late 19th century was a hotbed of new, radical ideas including those of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote Without music, life would be a mistake, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, who explored the human mind and sexuality more thoroughly than any other before him, and Richard Wagner, who had broken similar ground with his opera Tristan und Isolde. Wagner s opera had shaken the musical world through its use of chromaticism, orchestral colour and harmonic suspension, in service of a tale of illicit and doomed love enlarged to superhuman proportions. Strauss attended the first Italian production of Wagner s seminal opera in Bologna in June He came from a very conservative, religious family, where Wagner s music and lifestyle were viewed with suspicion, if not downright contempt; the young Strauss was forbidden to even study his music. The fledgling composer was, as to be expected, enthralled by Wagner, much to the disdain of his father, a horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra. Tod und Verklärung, completed in 1889, is the younger Strauss homage to Tristan und Isolde. Strauss had his first international success with his tone poem, Don Juan, Op. 20 composed in The tone, or symphonic poem was a genre championed by Franz Liszt for music that was to be accompanied by a text that the audience should read prior to hearing the music. Tone poems were popular with 19thcentury Romantic composers, including Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky,

2 but it was Strauss who took the form to its highest level. Tod und Verklärung is Strauss synthesis of the tone poem and Wagner s ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms. He even employed leitmotifs in Tod und Verklärung, a device particularly associated with Wagner s operas, to represent each element in the text. Tod und Verklärung describes the last hours of a man presumably an artist who has aimed to achieve the highest ideals in his creations. In the composer s words: The sick man lies in bed, asleep, with heavy, irregular breathing; friendly dreams conjure a smile on the face of the deeply suffering man; he wakes up and is once again racked with horrible pain; his limbs shake with fever. As the attack passes and his pain subsides, his thoughts wander through his past life; his childhood passes before him, the time of his youth with its strivings and passion; then, as the pain begins to return, there appears to him the fruit of his life s journey, the ideal which he strove to realize, to present artistically, but which he has not been able to complete, since it is not for man to accomplish such things. The fatal hour approaches, the soul leaves the body to find in everlasting space those things gloriously achieved which could not be fulfilled here below. Strauss conducted the successful premiere of the tone poem on 21 June 1890 at the Eisenach Festival in Germany. It was a special favourite of the composer Gustav Mahler, who conducted it many times. Strauss friend and mentor Alexander Ritter, an avid Wagnerite, expanded his original text into a 62-line poem that was later printed with the published score. Ritter s poem corresponds to the four sections of the tone poem Largo, Allegro molto agitato, Meno mosso, ma sempre alla breve and Moderato which are played without pause.

3 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ) Violin Concerto in D major, Op I. Allegro moderato II. Canzonetta: Andante III. Finale: Allegro vivacissimo Drama was never in short supply in Tchaikovsky s life. By 1878, the year in which his Violin Concerto was composed, he had just survived his annus horribilis. The prior year he had inexplicably married his former student, Antonina Miliukova, an impulsive act that he would regret in a matter of days. He separated from her, but they never divorced, and she would become an annoying (as if she was to blame) and tragic presence in his life. At that time he had contemplated suicide, but abandoned the thought. To get over his depression he retreated to Clarens, a village in Switzerland on Lake Geneva, in the spring of There he was joined by his brother, Modest, Kolya Konradi, and the young violinist Iosif Kotek. Modest Tchaikovsky was both tutor and guardian to Konradi. Kotek had been Tchaikovsky s favourite student at the Moscow Music Conservatory. Incidentally, Miliukova was also his student there, although Tchaikovsky claimed to have no memory of her from those days. The Violin Concerto is the product of a complex relationship between the composer, the young violinist, and Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck. The two men were very close. Kotek was also the link between Tchaikovsky and von Meck, a very wealthy widow and mother of many children. Employed in her household as a violinist, Kotek, aware of the composer s perilous financial condition, suggested that she commission him to compose new violin works. He also planted the seed that led her to becoming Tchaikovsky s financial patron. Von Meck would later dismiss Kotek from her household due to his dalliances with her servants. His wanton lifestyle would also put a strain on his relationship with Tchaikovsky. Kotek died from tuberculosis at the age of 29. Von Meck would provide Tchaikovsky with significant financial support for 14 years. A precondition of the arrangement was that they would never meet; they never did, although they came tantalizingly close to doing so on a few occasions. It was to von Meck s estate in Switzerland that Tchaikovsky

4 retreated. Tchaikovsky and Kotek played through many works together, including Édouard Lalo s Symphonie espagnole, a work for solo violin and orchestra that would become the French composer s most popular work. Tchaikovsky was inspired to write a violin concerto and so he did, with Kotek playing through it and offering technical advice on the solo part. It is one of the composer s most lyrical works, with the final movement full of thrilling pyrotechnical displays for the solo violin, clearly inspired by the composer s relief in leaving his troubles behind him in Russia, the beauty of a Swiss spring, and the young violinist's talent. Tchaikovsky s enthusiasm for his Concerto was shared by few others. Von Meck did not like it. The intended dedicatee, the violinist Leopold Auer, expressed reservations about the piece, purportedly calling it unplayable and refused to perform it without changes to the solo part. Auer would later revise his opinion to a certain extent, performing it with alterations that he made to the solo line, and teaching it to his students. Tchaikovsky had toyed with dedicating the concerto to Kotek, but refrained from doing so as he was reluctant to invite speculation as to the nature of their relationship. Kotek refused to play the work in Russia. Upon learning that another Russian violinist, Adolf Brodsky, was interested in the concerto, Tchaikovsky dedicated it to him. Brodksy premiered it on 4 December 1881 with the Vienna Philharmonic and Hans Richter conducting. Tchaikovsky s Violin Concerto is one of the most popular works in the repertoire, but the initial critical response to it was harsh. The influential Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick deemed the work pretentious, described it as music that stinks to the ear, wrote that the violin was not played but beaten black and blue, and infamously described the final movement as being odorously Russian and stinking of the vodka bottle. Tchaikovsky would carry that review in his pocket for many years to come and could recite it from memory.

5 MODEST MUSSORGSKY ( ) Orch. by maurice RAVEL ( ) Pictures at an Exhibition I. Gnomus II. The Old Castle III. Tuileries IV. Bydlo V. Ballet of Little Chicks in their Shells VI. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle VII. The Market Place in Limoges VIII. Catacombs - Cum mortuis in lingua mortua IX. The Hut on Fowl s Legs (Baba Yaga) X. The Great Gate of Kiev Mussorgsky never heard the work performed at this concert. The sudden death of his friend, the architect and artist Victor Hartmann from an aneurysm at the age of 39, prompted him to write the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. Hartmann was one of the first Russian artists to include traditional motifs in his work, thus having a natural affinity with Mussorgsky, who strove to achieve an authentic Russian identity in his music. After Hartmann s death, over 400 of his paintings were exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1874, which inspired Mussorgsky to compose the piano suite. Most of Hartmann s works are now lost, and without his friend s musical tribute to him, he would be forgotten as well. Maurice Ravel was not the first to transform Mussorgsky s piano suite into an orchestral work. At least three others did so prior to him, and others have followed suit. The British progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, released a live album in 1971 of a rock adaption of Pictures at an Exhibition

6 that became a major hit; overnight millions of teenagers suddenly were tuned into Mussorgsky s music. The Ravel orchestration was commissioned by the Russian-born conductor, Serge Koussevitzky to be performed at his annual series of Paris concerts, where it premiered on 3 May Koussevitzky had sole conducting rights to the Ravel orchestration, thus the incentive for other composers and conductors to orchestrate their own versions, as its popularity with audiences grew. It is Ravel s version that has delighted the public however, due to its dazzling array of instrumental colour. The two composers could not have been more different, although both came from comfortable, if not wealthy families, who appreciated their musical talents. The urbane, dignified Ravel was regarded as France s greatest living composer in the 1920s and 1930s. In his youth Mussorgsky had advanced in the military, while still pursuing his musical interests. With the early death of his father and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, all family financial support evaporated. He then pursued a career in the civil service, but it was neither stable, nor secure. Photos of the young man showed him in his military uniform, a far cry from the portrait of the 42 year-old composer painted a few days before his death, that showed a disheveled and bloated man, clearly suffering from the acute alcoholism that killed him. Mussorgsky s association with The Five, dedicated to establishing a Russian national school of music, brought him the support of his fellow musicians, as well as admirers during his lifetime, but did not bring financial rewards. The Five were deemed as extremists by the Imperial Court, which limited the performances of Mussorgsky s works and made a honorary pension from the Tsar out of the question. The premiere of his opera, Boris Godunov in 1874, was the peak of his career. It received mixed reactions from the critics, but was popular with the public. He finished the orchestration of Night on Bald Mountain in 1876, which is one of his most popular works, but it was never performed in his lifetime. From that point on, he entered a period of decline marked by poverty, alcoholism, loneliness, and an increased preoccupation with death.

7 In composing Pictures at an Exhibition, Mussorgsky imagined himself roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to get close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times thinking sadly of his departed friend. The scenes that Mussorgsky chose to depict were mostly from paintings that recalled Hartmann s travels abroad to Poland, France and Italy. The suite ends with The Great Gate of Kiev. Hartmann s design for an actual gate for the Ukrainian city won first prize, but it was never constructed due to a lack of funds. Ravel s orchestral realization of it, with its stirring climaxes and pealing bells as a procession enters Kiev through the great gate is undoubtedly grander and more magnificent than either Hartmann or Mussorgsky could have imagined. Programme notes by Rick Perdian