Program Notes

CLASSICS II: Tragedy & Triumph

ERNST BACON: Ford’s Theatre: a few glimpses of Easter Week, 1865

Ernst Bacon was born in Chicago on May 26, 1898, and died in Orinda, California, on March 16, 1990. Bacon composed incidental music (for two pianos) for the play Death Mr President, about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, by Paul Horgan. It was premiered at the Spartanburg Festival, South Carolina, on April 18, 1940, the 75th anniversary of the tragic event. He later turned the incidental music into an orchestral score as Ford’s Theatre. This had its premiere with the Southern Symphony conducted by Carl Bamberger on April 4, 1946. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, E-flat baritone saxophone, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (triangle, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, snare drum, bass drum, glockenspiel, chimes), harp, celesta, and strings. Duration of this performance (nine of the twelve movements) is about 21 minutes.

Ernst Bacon, born in the Midwest to an Austrian mother and an American father, was devoted to the history and the literature of America, reflected in some 250 songs, setting the words of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson especially. Though best known for these songs, he was also a successful composer of many other kinds of music—symphonies and other orchestral works, band music, chamber music in many varied instrumental combinations, choral works large and small, and piano music. He studied composition at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago and later, at the University of California, with Ernest Bloch, who directed his work toward the master’s degree. Eugene Goossens was his conducting teacher.

Bacon taught at the Eastman School from 1925 to 1928 and then at the San Francisco Conservatory until 1930. In 1935 he founded the Carmel Bach Festival, and during the early years of the Depression he directed the San Francisco branch of the Federal Music Program of the WPA. He became the dean of Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1938 and remained there until 1945; it was there that he worked with author Paul Horgan, creating the incidental music to Horgan’s play about the death of Abraham Lincoln that he later orchestrated as the suite Ford’s Theatre. In 1945 he was named director of the school of music of Syracuse University, where he remained until his retirement in 1963.

As may be expected from a suite made up of music composed for a play, Ford’s Theatre consists of a series of brief movements (twelve in the full score, of which nine are to be performed here) that serve various functions in the play: most often as transitional music between scenes, but sometimes as accompaniment to the scenes themselves, providing an emotional framework in which the tragic events play out. The Preamble sets up a military dotted rhythm as a reminder of the very recent conclusion of the long, draining war. A flowing, unison passage in the strings evokes the intensity and sadness of the period. The next movement, Walt Whitman and the Dying Soldier, projects the warmth and tenderness of the poet, who spent much of the war serving as a nurse, comforting the wounded and the dying, writing letters for them to their loved ones and empathizing with their pain. The Theatre is a lively number suggesting the main form of entertainment in wartime Washington—one that Lincoln loved but rarely had time to enjoy until the fighting stopped. After an interruption the lively music returns “as if the show must go on,” the score reads. Soon after it turns into a bit of waltz “with sultry nostalgia.” The River Queen depicts that great paddle-wheelers that transported travelers up and down the great rivers of the country, especially the Mississippi. The composer tells the harp to make the off-the-beat chords sound “like paddle-wheels.” Premonitions, subtitled “a duet with a hall clock,” keeps the constant passage of time—always moving toward a fatal conclusion—in the listener’s ear with a constant “ticking” like a grandfather’s clock, one unchanging beat every second from beginning to end, while the muted strings play “with the unreality of evil dreams.” Pennsylvania Avenue, April 9, 1865, is a military march—a parade in review coming from the distance, marching jubilantly past, featuring a tune that became exceptionally popular during the war: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” This was composed by the bandleader Patrick S. Gilmore (under the pseudonym Louis Lambert) and published in 1863; two years later it celebrated the end of the war. Good Friday, 1865, is a dirge for the President, assassinated the evening before as he enjoyed a popular comedy in Ford’s Theatre. The remaining movements, The Long Rain projects both the weather and the national mood, followed by a funeral march as the President’s body is borne away to his funeral.


SERGEI PROKOVIEV: Piano Concerto No. 1, in D flat major, Op. 10

Sergei Sergeyevitch Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka, Russia, on April 23, 1891, and died near Moscow on March 4, 1953. His score for the First Piano Concerto is dated 1911. It was first performed at Moscow on July 25, 1912, the composer playing the piano part. The score bears a dedication to Nikolai Tcherepnin. In addition to the solo piano, the instrumentation includes two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contra bassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, glocken¬spiel, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.

During his ten years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the young Prokofiev discovered that his music grated on the ears of most of his teachers, and he quickly began to revel in the image of the “bad boy” of the place. No one doubted his musicianship. He got his best marks in piano, at which he was clearly brilliant, but his interest in composition grew, despite the disfavor with which his composition teacher Glazunov looked upon everything he turned out. Indeed, his only real supporter, by the time he had finished his degree, was Nikolai Tcherepnin, a composer who had taught his orchestration class. Fittingly, then, Prokofiev dedicated his first piano concerto to this enthusiastic and helpful teacher.

During these years Prokofiev developed his own piano playing to a remarkable degree of brilliance and turned out in quick succession his first two piano concertos. The premiere of his First Concerto had given him a taste of what it was like to be somewhat controversial, to be discussed by the leading critics in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Moreover, the French critic M. D. Calvocoressi was highly complimentary and promised to report on Prokofiev in Paris. Enough of the audience expressed its approval of the young man for him to play three encores (he had to repeat one of them, because he had only prepared two pieces against such an eventuality). Cheers and catcalls at the performance, and at a repetition a few weeks later in St. Petersburg, put the young composer’s name on everyone’s lips. Prokofiev astutely used the excitement when, in his final year at the conservatory (1913 14), he aimed for the Rubinstein Prize, the top piano award offered by the institution, choosing as his competition piece not a classical concerto (as was expected) but his own work—even going to the extent of having the score printed for the occasion! (He won the prize, though the judges were not unanimous.)

What impressed the first audience was the explosive rhythm and assertively percussive qualities of the piano part. The concerto is brief—a single movement lasting just a quarter of an hour—yet it contains most of the elements of a traditional three-movement concerto, including a middle Andante section and an Allegro scherzando that develops material from the opening. This energetic, driving music was a far cry from the current standard of “modern” Russian concertos, which had been set by Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. When the work was first heard at the Pasdeloup concerts in Paris, the program annotator described it as an allegro movement in sonata form, a description with which the composer concurred. Already Prokofiev reveals the twin trademark aspects of his style: on the one hand, glittering showmanship with sassy turns and surprising chromatic twists, and, on the other, a ready vein of lyricism in the long, rounded melody (heard on the clarinet) in the contrasting slow section.


PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Opus 64

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893. He began his Fifth Symphony in May 1888 and completed it on August 26. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St. Petersburg on November 26, 1888. Theodore Thomas introduced it to America at a concert in New York on March 5, 1889 (Edward MacDowell’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, with the composer as soloist, had its premiere on the same program). The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, three timpani, and strings. Duration is about 50 minutes.

By 1888, when Tchaikovsky composed the Fifth Symphony, he was far from being the hypersensitive artist—virtually a neurotic cripple—of popular accounts. To be sure, he had gone through a major emotional crisis ten years earlier, brought on by his ill advised, catastrophic marriage (undertaken partly in an attempt to “overcome” his homosexuality) and a series of artistic setbacks. His own brother Modest described the Tchaikovsky of 1878 as “nervous and misanthropic,” but declared that he “seemed a new man” by 1885. The masterly achievement of the Fourth Symphony, premiered in 1878, had marked the end of the real crisis. In the decade that followed, Tchaikovsky had composed the violin concerto, the three orchestral suites, Manfred, four operas, his piano trio, and much else—hardly a sign of inability to deal with life’s pressures! With the consolidation of his reputation as a composer, he had even managed to overcome, to a degree, his earlier panic at the thought of having to conduct. Indeed, his confidence was such that, when demands were made for changes in his opera The Sorceress, he was able to write, “I find The Sorceress an opera that has been properly and seriously written, and if the public does not like it, so much the worse for the public.”

His decision to write a symphony again after ten years was an overt expression of Tchaikovsky’s willingness to tackle once more the largest and most demanding musical form of his day. He began the symphony in May 1888, shortly after returning from a successful European tour. By the beginning of July he had finished the draft and started the orchestration, completing the full score on August 17. The premiere, which took place in St. Petersburg that November, was a success, though critics questioned whether the Fifth Symphony was of the same caliber as the Second and Fourth.

In March 1889 Tchaikovsky went to Hamburg for the German premiere. There he found Brahms staying in the same hotel and was gratified to learn that the German composer had remained an extra day in Hamburg just to hear the first rehearsal of his new work. The two composers had lunch after the rehearsal “and quite a few drinks,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest. “Neither he nor the players liked the Finale, which I also think rather horrible.” But this negative mood was soon dispelled. A week later the composer wrote, “The players by degrees came to appreciate the symphony more and more, and at the last rehearsal they gave me an ovation. The concert was also a success. Best of all—I have stopped disliking the symphony.” Later he wrote even more positively, “I have started to love it again.”

Certainly audiences have loved the symphony for nearly a century for its warmth, its color, its rich fund of melody. Tchaikovsky always wrote music with “heart,” music with an underlying emotional significance, though he was wary of revealing that meaning publicly, preferring to let the listener seek it personally. Still, for his own use, before starting in on the composition, he planned a rough program for the first movement—but, characteristically, he kept these notes entirely private, so that the music might make its own case. Still his first ideas are highly suggestive:

Introduction. Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro (I) Murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against xxx. (II) Shall I throw myself in the embraces of faith???

We can find here some hint as to the composer’s ideas, his emotional condition, at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony. The mysterious “xxx” probably refers to the same thing usually discussed in his diary as “Z” or “That”—namely his homosexuality (if revealed publicly, this could have been very embarrassing for the composer, though it is unlikely to have led to any more serious problems, despite the fact that homosexual behavior was still regarded as a crime; it was an open secret that many prominent figures in the court and the artistic life in Russia were also homosexual). The program for the first movement and the music of the symphony as a whole suggest a somewhat philosophical acceptance of his nature, coming by the finale to the realization of some peace of mind.

The first movement opens with a motto theme that might be identified with “Providence,” if only because it is somewhat less assertive than the “Fate” theme of the Fourth Symphony. The motto features a dotted rhythmic figure in the clarinet, supported by a plagal harmony suggesting resignation. This idea recurs, in some form or other, in each of the symphony’s four movements.

The soft, somber tread of this introduction yields to a syncopated little tune in the clarinets and bassoons, answered by variants of the same material and sudden fortissimo outbursts. At a moment of sudden quiet, a new theme rises expressively in the strings (with a delicate answer in the woodwinds), to be repeated with the instrumentation reversed. Using Tchaikovsky’s preliminary plan as a guide, it might well be possible to identify the murmurs, the reproaches, the embrace of faith in the various sections; but though Tchaikovsky insisted on the expressive character of his work, it is equally misleading to try to read too much beyond a certain emotional quality into a movement or a phrase. What, for instance, of the intense soaring theme that is yet to come? After these themes have been developed and restated, the movement dies away in a subdued march, still retaining a degree of tension as it fades away into silence.

The second movement contains one of the most famous instrumental solos ever written, an ardent song for the horn, with an important pendant for oboe. The opening is marked by emotional intensity, calling for subtle adjustments to the tempo every few measures. The contrasting middle section seems more objective at first, but it soon builds to a feverish climax dramatically interrupted by the motto theme blared out by the full orchestra. The strings softly sing the horn’s melody with a gentle countermelody in the oboe. Gradually this theme builds to another climax and seems to be dying away, when the motto theme bursts in again, pounding all to silence and allowing only a few broken phrases, devoid of energy, to bring the movement to a close. By this point, the motto suggests more precisely “Fate” than “Providence.”

Traditionally the third movement of a symphony is in some sort of dance meter, usually in triple time, but few composers have written a full-scale waltz at this point, and even fewer have managed one of such grace and breadth, so evocative of the ballet. A gossamer thread of staccato sixteenth-note figures runs through the middle section deftly supported by the remainder of the orchestra. Its momentum carries it on as an accompanying figure under the first return of the waltz theme in the oboes. The full waltz is heard again (in new scoring), only to be undercut at the end by a hushed reminder of the motto theme in clarinets and bassoons.

The finale is perhaps the most problematic movement of the symphony; Tchaikovsky was at best ambivalent about it, and others have pointed out the prime weakness of what has otherwise been a most effective use of the motto theme throughout the symphony: having just heard a reminder of it, understated and threatening, at the end of the waltz movement, we suddenly encounter the motto at the opening of the finale firmly in E major, as if the earlier minor mode had simply been an accident. There is no hard-won battle of major over minor here, as in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (one evident model for this symphony), or even in Tchaikovsky’s own Fourth Symphony of a decade earlier. The victory seems, at the beginning, too easily won.

Fortunately, the motto and its development soon give way to the main formal structure of the movement (sonata form again, for the first time since the beginning), with a vigorous E-minor chordal theme in the strings and a broader melody in the woodwinds; the motto leads off the development section ever more forcefully (in C major), though the development thereafter continues working out the other themes. Following the recapitulation, the rhythm of the motto builds a massive climax and a grand pause.

Now the motto appears in a grand apotheosis of marching chords and swirling woodwind figures with a rich counterpoint in the brass instruments. A presto section is built of thematic materials from earlier in the last movement, while the final strain of the coda is a new statement of what had been a nervously syncopated little tune early in the first movement, now ringing out with the most glorious assurance as a majestic trumpet fanfare in the major key—a triumph of sorts, if only by overstatement. The doubts and tensions of the earlier movements have been overcome by putting on a bold front, and there is no question that it has all been bravely done. But Brahms, at least, had his doubts, and Tchaikovsky, in certain moods, anyway, did not disagree. He knew at heart that he was whistling in the dark—but it is a brave whistle for all that.

© Steven Ledbetter

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