2009-2010 Classics Concert

Classics Concert II
PROGRAM NOTES
By Steven Ledbetter

HENRYK WIENIAWSKI
Violin Concerto No. 2, in D minor, Opus 22, First Movement
Henry Wieniawski was born in Lublin, Poland, on July 10, 1835, and died in Moscow on March 31, 1880. He composed the D minor Violin Concerto in 1862 and gave the first performance that year on November 27 in St. Petersburg, with Anton Rubinstein conducting. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration of the first movement is about 11 minutes.

The most celebrated member of his musical family, Henryk Wieniawski was perhaps the greatest violin virtuoso of the generation following Paganini. His earliest teachers in Poland discovered his exceptional talent for the violin; after playing a brilliant audition for the Paris Conservatory at the age of eight, he was admitted to a violin class, and by the age of eleven had won the first prize in violin. Almost at once he began the career of a traveling virtuoso, giving some two hundred concerts in the years 1851 1853 with his younger brother. At the same time he composed and published no fewer than fourteen opus numbers-and in 1853 he turned eighteen! Most of the works written in this period, naturally, were virtuoso showpieces designed to astonish audiences with his brilliance, but they also included the first of his two violin concertos, a work with which he conquered Germany after a successful concert at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1853.

In the 1860, at the urging of Anton Rubinstein, who was working to improve musical conditions in Russia, Wieniawski settled in St. Petersburg, where he became solo violinist to the tsar, concertmaster of the orchestra and leader of a string quartet; he was also named professor of violin at the conservatory that had just been established there.

It was in St. Petersburg that Wieniawski composed and first performed his finest work, the Second Violin Concerto, which has been a staple of the virtuoso repertory since its premiere. That first performance affected Cesar Cui, one of the five Russian nationalist composers, and one of the least forgiving of music critics, so strongly that he wrote two days later to his friend Balakirev: "I still haven't recovered from the impact of that first Allegro." In 1872 Wieniawski resumed world touring, despite an increasingly serious heart condition that led to deteriorating health. On November 11, 1878, during a performance of the concerto in Berlin, he broke down onstage and was carried off the platform. His colleague, Joseph Joachim, who was present, hurried backstage and soon appeared with Wieniawski's violin in hand and announced, "Although I cannot play my friend's wonderful concerto, I shall play Bach's chaconne." As he finished his performance, Wieniawski, who had somewhat recovered, came onstage to embrace his friend.

His health was shattered, but Wieniawski continued playing-when he felt well enough to do so-in order to support his family. When the end seemed near, his friends arranged a benefit concert to raise money for his life insurance policy, which was about to run out and leave his family in need. His death, a few months before his forty fifth birthday, ended the career of one of the greatest of romantic virtuosi, a musician who could toss off brilliant fireworks with consummate ease and in the next bowstroke move his listeners to tears with his expressive playing, the tone of which was intensified by a heightened vibrato. His motto was "Il faut risquer" ("You have to take chances"), and he was willing to do just that. Sam Franko, a young violinist playing in the Paris orchestra with which Wieniawski performed in 1878 recalled, a half century and two generations of violinists later, "I was electrified by his playing. I have never heard anyone play the violin as he did, either before or since. His wonderfully warm, rich tone, his glowing temperament, his perfect technique, his captivating élan-all this threw me into a kind of hypnotic trance."

Naturally Wieniawski composed his two concertos precisely to emphasize the characteristics of his own playing, and the second has long been established as a minor masterpiece of the romantic literature. The orchestral introduction to the first movement suggests the first theme at once in the strings followed by a hint of the second theme in the horn a few bars later. Both themes are extensively treated with elaborate virtuosity and varied scoring throughout.

ANTONÍN DVORÁK
Cello Concerto in B minor, Opus 104, First Movement
Antonín Dvorák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He composed his B minor Cello Concerto in New York, beginning the first movement on November 8, 1894. He completed the full score on February 9, 1895, but revised the ending, following his return home. The final date on the score is June 11, 1895. The score is dedicated to the cellist Hanus Wihan; the first performance was given by Leo Stern with the London Philharmonic Society at Queen's Hall under the composer's direction on March 19, 1896. In addition to the cello soloist, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, hree trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings, plus triangle in the last movement only. Duration of the first movement is about 16 minutes.

Dvorák came to America in September 1892, after prolonged urging from Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, who finally persuaded him to serve as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. It was Mrs. Thurber's dream that Dvorák could help to found an American school of composition (she was evidently unaware that a genuine school of composers was already quite well established in Boston, where they had begun to turn out a stream of symphonies and other works premiered by the Boston Symphony). In any case, Dvorák composed some of his most popular works while he was in this country, including the New World Symphony, the string quartet in F, Opus 96, and the string quintet in E flat, Opus 97 (both dubbed "The American"), and, as his last composition written in this country, the Cello Concerto.

Dvorák received the impetus to compose the concerto-the most popular work of its type in the repertory-largely because of the influence of one of his colleagues at the National Conservatory, the chairman of his cello faculty, Victor Herbert. Herbert, a German-trained Irishman who was the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera and would soon become America's most popular and versatile composer for the Broadway stage (his works include Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta), but in the early 1890s his attention was almost totally directed to the creation of concert music. Herbert had already composed a Suite for Cello and Orchestra (Opus 3) and a Cello Concerto (Opus 8), but it was the first performance of his best-known serious composition, the Second Cello Concerto, with the New York Philharmonic under Anton Seidl on March 9, 1894, that proved epoch-making for Dvorák . Naturally Dvorák attended the premiere of this major work by a man who was not only the head of one of his departments, but a close friend as well. After the performance, Dvorák ran up to the composer-soloist in the green room and shouted enthusiastically, "Terrific, absolutely terrific!"

The following year Dvorák began his own Cello Concerto, the final large composition of his American years. He completed it on February 9, 1895. The concerto has always been popular for its warm melodies, the brilliance of Dvorák's treatment of the solo instrument, and the skillful way in which he manages to employ his substantial orchestra without overpowering the soloist. The themes all have their own character, yet sound well whether played by the orchestra or the soloist. Moreover, since the development is almost entirely taken up by a magical treatment of the first theme in a distant key, Dvorák begins his recapitulation with the second theme, allowing the final return of the first theme to lead directly to the brilliant fanfares that close the movement.

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Opus 98
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He first mentioned the Fourth Symphony in a letter to his publisher on August 19, 1884; about a year later, in October 1885, he gave a two-piano reading of it with Ignaz Brüll for a small group of friends, and conducted the premiere at Meiningen on October 25. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle, and strings. Piccolo and triangle appear only in the third movement, contrabassoon only in the third and fourth movements, and trombones only in the fourth. Duration is about 39 minutes.

Of all the great masters of the nineteenth century, Brahms was the one who most thoroughly absorbed the new study of music history and who understood the music of the past as well as he understood that of the present. So it is hardly surprising-even though a trifle ironic-that his last and most modern symphony, arguably his greatest single symphonic achievement, should also be the one most deeply indebted to the music of the past, even to the point of reviving techniques and forms that most people regarded as long dead, and making them live anew. Brahms is by no means the only composer over the last century or so who has gone "back to the future," but he may have done it more successfully than anyone else.

It is well known that Brahms waited a long time-until he was forty-three, in 1876-before allowing the world to hear what he was finally willing to let go as his First Symphony (he had planned several others before that, and a few of them actually reached completion, but as something other than a symphony). Once having broken the ice, though, Brahms immediately composed a Second Symphony the following year. Then after a gap of five years, he composed his Third Symphony, and again a sibling immediately followed a year later.

In the summer of 1884, Brahms wrote to his publisher that he needed music paper with more staves on it-a hint from this always-reticent composer that he was writing music for orchestra. Brahms always chose a location of great natural beauty for his summer vacation, rarely choosing same place more than twice. There he would compose feverishly, absorbing the beauties of the surrounding countryside into his music. He began work on the Fourth Symphony late in the summer of 1884 at the tiny village of Mürzzuschlag. When he reported to friends that the cherries in the area were unusually tart, too much so to eat them simply as fruit, he also wondered whether his new symphony might be equally tart. (Certainly early audiences found it challenging and mysterious.)

Hans von Bülow wanted Brahms to write a new piano concerto (he never did), but by the end of the summer of 1885, which Brahms again spent at Mürzzuschlag, he was essentially done with the Fourth Symphony-though, as he reported to Bülow with characteristic modesty, "I do have a couple of entractes; put together they make what is commonly called a symphony." He suggested that Bülow might lead a private reading of the work with his orchestra at Meiningen, since Brahms always disliked letting a work go out into the world without actually hearing it in something approximating an actual performance. Meiningen had the advantage of being a small court with a fine orchestra that was far away from the international musical capitals; even a public performance there would not attract the European press the way it might in Berlin or Vienna. Even with Bülow's enthusiasm and the orchestra's good will, they found the symphony a tough nut to crack. But after the premiere, the Meiningen orchestra toured with the work, giving it the benefit of their experience in an increasing number of performances, and winning many admirers.

Even some of Brahms's closest friends felt that the symphony begins too abruptly. Yet Brahms clearly wanted the piece to sound as if it has begun somewhere else before we were able to hear: he had composed an introductory passage that would make the beginning quite definite-and then deleted it! What was left was clearly exactly what he wanted.

The opening theme is only the beginning of an astonishing web of closely interlocked ideas, each growing out of something that has come before or foreshadowing something that will follow after. Listeners familiar with the classical tradition expect that the composer will repeat the exposition (as Brahms himself had done in his three previous symphonies). Here he chooses to avoid that repetition-but he does so in a way that fools us, for eight measures, into thinking that a repeat has begun. Then a single, subtle change of harmony leads us far afield. The eventual return to the recapitulation has a surprise, too: the very opening theme appears in the woodwinds, but played in notes twice as long as when we first heard them, and sounding therefore like a hint of the approaching return, not the return itself. But then Brahms suddenly leaps back to the original speed and we find ourselves already in the middle of the recapitulation.

The second movement has a key signature for E major, but Brahms instead intones a theme that circles around the note E using the pitches of the scale of C major. This is nothing other than a return to the harmonic style of the sixteenth century, to the old Phrygian mode, about which Brahms read in one of the classic music histories of his time, a book by Winterfeld studying the music of Giovanni Gabrieli. In his copy of this book Brahms had especially marked a passage in which the author declared that the Phrygian mode was the darkest of all the melodic scales for traditional church music, expressing penitence and deep need.

Winterfeld also commented that the "gloomy Phrygian" must perforce yield to the "bright, cheerful Ionian"-C major-and Brahms seems to have followed this as a recommendation in his symphony, for the Scherzo is indeed in C, though there are other reasons for its appropriateness here: that key had already played an important role in the first movement, and the second movement's Phrygian mode had suggested the key of C. Though most of the symphony was regarded as exceptionally difficult to understand in Brahms's day, this movement earned from its first audience a request for an encore.

It is in the Finale that Brahms really reveals the depth of his commitment to the old Renaissance and Baroque masters and his power of transforming their techniques into a modern work. This is a passacaglia, a special kind of variation form in which a short melodic passage (and its harmonic implication) is set to repeating over and over again, while the composer finds ways to vary it. Since these variations often take the form of adding new contrapuntal lines-and since Brahms knew that counterpoint and variation were two of his greatest strengths as a composer-it seems natural to us that he should choose this form, but many of his friends were nonplused that he should try to imitate "dead" music. The first eight chords of the movement give the theme straight out (in the melody line). After that it returns, in some form, over and over, thirty times. The first nine variations gradually increase the tension almost to the breaking point, then four variations (which are in the major mode and played at half the speed of the others) function as an interlude to reduce the tension, allowing for another outburst to provide a kind of recapitulation for the final group of statements. A splendid coda, sonorous and glowing, provides the capstone for the work.

© Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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