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RICHARD WAGNER
composer, conductor
(1813, Leipzig — 1883, Venice)
“PRELUDE AND LIEBESTOD” FROM TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
COMPOSED: 1854-1859
PREMIERED: June 10, 1865 in Munich, conducted by Hans von Bülow
DURATION: ca. 17 minutes
SCORING: two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, harp and strings
Overview
Not all revolutions are made with the gun — some of the most important have been inspired by the pen. A pair of such non-violent
salvos were fired off in the year 1859 by two of the greatest intellectual giants of the 19th century — Charles Darwin and Richard
Wagner. In that year, Darwin published his epochal The Origin of Species and Wagner finished his monumental music-drama
Tristan und Isolde. Though a greater contrast in personalities could hardly be imagined than that between the gentle and retiring
English naturalist and the wildly egocentric German composer, their works were related in their examination of the human
condition beyond the bounds previously explored. Darwin set off a controversy about the essential nature of the physical
constitution of man, and of man’s relationship to the world, which continues to generate heated debate to this day. His theory,
however, is a triumph of scientific observation and empirical knowledge which has established the warp through which the weft of
our modern biological understanding is threaded.
Wagner, too, was exploring. His journey of the mind, however, took him not on a trip of innumerable miles in a British trading ship,
but on one of passion, into the deepest recesses of the human soul. Though “Romanticism” in music had been the style for at least
four decades before he launched out into the stormy world of Tristan, no musician had plumbed the depths of swirling emotion and
white-hot eroticism that Wagner exposed in this opera. In the visual arts, some painters had pierced into this twilight domain of the
inner mind at the beginning of the century, most notably in the midnight conjurings of Fuseli and the disquieting visions of Goya,
but it was Wagner who took it upon himself to devise a tonal language that could open these same vistas to music. “Every theory
was quite forgotten,” he wrote. “During the working-out, I myself became aware how far I had outsoared my system.”
Wagner’s new musical speech allowed an unprecedented laying-open of an unfathomed emotional world. “Here,” he wrote, “I
plunged into the inner depths of soul-events and from the innermost center of the world I fearlessly built up to its outer form.... Life
and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul.” It is
wholly appropriate that Sigmund Freud, whose most important work was based on this same belief in subconscious motivations,
should have been born in 1856, the year Wagner wrote the first notes of Tristan. As the opera progressed, Wagner became aware of
the power of his creation. To Mathilde Wesendonck, with whom he was having an extended affair while her husband and children
grew suspicious in the house next door, he admitted, “This Tristan is turning into something terrifying! I’m afraid the opera will be
forbidden — unless it is turned into a parody by bad performances. Only mediocre performances can save me!”
Wagner provided a synopsis of the emotional progression of the action of Tristan whose voluptuous prose is a not only a sketch of
the events of the story, but also a key to understanding the surging sea of passion on which the entire world of this opera floats:
“A primitive old love poem, which, far from having become extinct, is constantly fashioning itself anew, and has been adopted by
every European language of the Middle Ages, tells of Tristan and Isolde. Tristan, the faithful vassal, woos for his king her for whom
he dares not avow his own love, Isolde. Isolde, powerless than to do otherwise than obey the wooer, follows him as bride to his
lord. Jealous of this infringement of her rights, the Goddess of Love takes her revenge. As the result of a happy mistake, she allows
the couple to taste of the love potion which, in accordance with the custom of the times, and by way of precaution, the mother had
prepared for the husband who should marry her daughter from political motives, and which, by the burning desire which suddenly
inflames them after tasting it, opens their eyes to the truth and leads to the avowal that for the future they belong only to each other.
“Henceforth, there is no end to the longings, the demands, the joys and woes of love. The world, power, fame, splendor, honor,
knighthood, fidelity, friendship — all are dissipated like an empty dream. One thing only remains: longing, longing, insatiable
longing, forever springing up anew, pining and thirsting. Death, which means passing away, perishing, never awakening, their only
deliverance.... Powerless, the heart sinks back to languish in longing, in longing without attaining; for each attainment only begets
new longing, until in the last stage of weariness the foreboding of the highest joy of dying, of no longer existing, of the last escape
into that wonderful kingdom from which we are furthest off when we are most strenuously striving to enter therein. Shall we call it
death? Or is it the hidden wonder-world from out of which an ivy and vine, entwined with each other, grew up upon Tristan’s and
Isolde’s grave, as the legend tells us?”
Wagner’s description opens as many questions as it answers. Such ambiguity is one of the most important characteristics of the
opera, which has inspired many learned treatises from historians, philosophers, psychologists and musicians over the years in
attempts to explain its “meaning.” There will never be one single, “correct” explanation of Tristan because of the profoundly
individual manner in which this music affects each listener. In the words of Richard Strauss, the inheritor of Wagner’s mantle as the
pre-eminent composer of German opera, “In Wagner, music reached its greatest capacity for expression.” This capacity grows
chiefly from the harmonic style of Tristan, its building of enormous climaxes through the continuing frustration of expected
resolutions of chord progressions. The lack of fulfillment creates an overwhelming sense of longing until the moment when the
pent-up yearning is finally released in a magnificent, cathartic outpouring, heightened by its long period of expectancy.
What To Listen For
The sense of longing is generated right at the beginning of the opera. Its Prelude is built, in the composer’s words, from “one long
series of linked phrases,” each of which is left hanging, unresolved, in silence. Of the remainder of the Prelude and its progression
to the Liebestod (“Love-Death”), Wagner wrote, it moves from “the first timidest lament of inappeasable longing, the tenderest
shudder, to the most terrible outpouring of an avowal of hopeless love, traversing all phases of the vain struggle against the inner
ardor until this, sinking back upon itself, seems to be extinguished in death.” The Prelude is constructed as a long arch of sound,
beginning faintly and building to a huge climax near its center before dying away to silence. In Wagner’s concert version, the
Liebestod follows without pause, and it, too, generates a magnificent tonal gratification at the point near the end of the opera where
the lovers find their only possible satisfaction in welcome death. Of this sublime moment, Wagner wrote, “What Fate divided in life
now springs into transfigured life in death: the gates of union are thrown open. Over Tristan’s body the dying Isolde receives the
blessed fulfillment of ardent longing, eternal union in measureless space, without barriers, without fetters, inseparable.”
When Wagner conceived the idea of Tristan und Isolde in 1854, at a time when his first marriage was increasingly burdensome to
him, he wrote to his future father-in-law, Franz Liszt, “As never in my life have I tasted the true joy of love, I will erect a monument
to this most beautiful dream of all wherein from beginning to end this love may once drink to its fill.”
JOAQUÍN RODRIGO
composer
(1901, Sagunto, Valencia — 1999, Madrid)
CONCIERTO DE ARANJUEZ FOR GUITAR AND ORCHESTRA
COMPOSED: 1939
PREMIERED: November 9, 1940 in Barcelona, conducted by César Mendoza Lasalle with Regino Sainz de la Maza as soloist
DURATION: ca. 22 minutes
SCORING: woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo and English horn, two horns, two trumpets and strings
Overview
Though Joaquín Rodrigo, born on November 22, 1901 at Sagunto, Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast, lost his sight when he was
three from diphtheria, he early showed a pronounced aptitude for music. His parents enrolled him in a school for blind children in
the nearby city of Valencia, and at age eight, he began formal lessons in harmony, piano and violin; his teachers in composition
included Francisco Antich, Enrique Gomá and Eduardo López Chavarri. During the 1920s, Rodrigo established himself as a pianist
with performances of challenging recent works by Ravel, Stravinsky and other contemporary composers, and he began composing
seriously in 1923 with the Suite para Piano and the Dos Esbozos (“Two Sketches”) for Violin and Piano. His first work for
orchestra, Juglares (written, like all of his scores, on a Braille music typewriter and then dictated to a copyist), was played in both
Valencia and Madrid in 1924; his Cinco Piezas Infantiles, also for orchestra, won a National Prize the following year. In 1927, he
followed the path of his compatriots Albéniz, Granados, Falla and Turina, and moved to Paris, where he enrolled at the Schola
Cantorum as a pupil of Paul Dukas. Rodrigo immersed himself in the musical life of the city, befriending Honegger, Milhaud, Ravel
and other Parisian luminaries, receiving encouragement from Falla, and enjoying success with a performance of his orchestral
Prelude for a Poem to the Alhambra, whose subject matter and distinctly Spanish idiom established the style that consistently
characterized his creations. In 1933, he married the Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi. A Conde de Cartegena Grant the following year
enabled him to remain in Paris to continue his studies at the Conservatoire and the Sorbonne. The outbreak of civil war in Spain in
1936 prevented Rodrigo from returning home, and he spent the next three years traveling in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and
living in the French capital. He returned to Madrid after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, and established his position among
the country’s leading musicians with the premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra the following year. His
prominence in Spanish musical life was recognized with many awards, honorary degrees and memberships, and, in 1947, the
creation for him of the Manuel de Falla Chair at the University of Madrid. In addition to teaching at the University, Rodrigo also
served as Head of Music Broadcasts for Spanish Radio, music critic for several newspapers, and Director of the Artistic Section of
the Spanish National Organization for the Blind. Though best known for his series of concertos for one, two and four guitars
(Concierto de Aranjuez, Fantasía para un Gentilhombre, Concierto para una Fiesta, Concierto Madrigal, Concierto Andaluz),
flute (Concierto Pastoral), cello (Concierto como un Divertimento) and harp (Concierto Serenata), Rodrigo also composed a ballet,
a zarzuela, an opera, numerous orchestral works, music for the cinema, many songs, and solo numbers for piano and guitar. He died
in Madrid on July 6, 1999.
The small town of Aranjuez, thirty miles south of Madrid on the River Tagus, is a green oasis in the barren plateau of central Spain.
In the mid-18th century, a palace, set amid verdant forests and parks, was built at Aranjuez as a summer retreat for the Spanish
court. Generations of Spanish kings thereafter settled into Aranjuez every spring, when the countless nightingales would serenade
them from the cedars and laurels, the court ladies would promenade in the cooling shade, and the men would hone their equestrian
skills with the famous cream-colored Andalusian horses bred nearby. When Rodrigo sought inspiration for a new concerto in the
difficult, war-torn year of 1939, it was to the elegant symbol of by-gone Spain represented by Aranjuez that he turned. “Having
conceived the idea of a guitar concerto,” he recalled, “it was necessary for me to place it in a certain epoch and, still more, in a
definite location — an epoch at the end of which fandangos transform themselves into fandanguillos, and when the cante and the
bulerias vibrate in the Spanish air.” He further stated that he had in mind the early decades of the 19th century when composing this
Concierto de Aranjuez. Of the work’s mood and the character of its solo instrument, the composer wrote, “Throughout the veins of
Spanish music, a profound rhythmic beat seems to be diffused by a strange phantasmagoric, colossal and multiform instrument —
an instrument idealized in the fiery imagination of Albéniz, Granados, Falla and Turina. It is an imaginary instrument that might be
said to possess the wings of the harp, the heart of the grand piano and the soul of the guitar.... It would be unjust to expect strong
sonorities from this Concierto; they would falsify its essence and distort an instrument made for subtle ambiguities. Its strength is to
be found in its very lightness and in the intensity of its contrasts. The Aranjuez Concierto is meant to sound like the hidden breeze
that stirs the tree tops in the parks, and it should be only as strong as a butterfly, and as dainty as a veronica.”
What To Listen For
The Concierto de Aranjuez has enjoyed a great popularity since it was introduced in 1940, having been recorded many times, made
into a ballet, and set in an array of popular, jazz and even commercial arrangements. With few precedents to guide him, Rodrigo
created a work that not only embodies the essential qualities of his musical style and the spiritual ethos of Spain, but also solves the
difficult technical problems inherent in combining an unamplified solo guitar with a full orchestra. Rodrigo adapted the three
traditional movements of the concerto form to reflect different aspects of the soul of Spanish music — the outer movements are fast
in tempo and dance-like, while the middle one is imbued with the bittersweet intensity of classic flamenco cante hondo (“deep
song”). The soloist opens the Concierto with an evocative, typically Spanish rhythmic pattern of ambiguous meter that courses
throughout the movement. The orchestra, in colorful fiesta garb, soon enters while the guitar’s brilliant, virtuoso display continues.
The haunting Adagio, among the most beautiful and beloved pieces ever written for guitar, is based on a theme of Middle Eastern
ancestry, given in the plangent tones of the English horn, around which the soloist weaves delicate arabesques of sound as the music
unfolds. The finale’s lilting simplicity (one commentator noted its similarity to a Spanish children’s song) serves as a foil to the
imposing technical demands placed on the soloist, who is required to negotiate almost the entire range of the instrument’s
possibilities.
Like all of Rodrigo’s best music, the Concierto de Aranjuez bears the unmistakable stamp of his craftsmanship and stylistic
personality, of which the noted Spanish composer Tomás Marco wrote, “His aim has been to create a Spanish ambiance, full of
color and agreeable tunes, where folklore is a picturesque element and references to art music of the past consist of distilled 17th
and 18th-century mannerisms.” This masterful Concierto is glowing evidence of Rodrigo’s ability of capture the spirit of his native
land in music that is both immediate in appeal and lasting in value.
MANUEL DE FALLA
composer
(1876, Cádiz, Spain — 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina)
THE THREE-CORNERED HAT, BALLET IN TWO PARTS
COMPOSED: 1917 and 1919
PREMIERED: July 22, 1919 in London by the Ballet Russe, conducted by Ernest Ansermet
DURATION: ca. 40 minutes
SCORING: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones,
tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, piano and strings
Overview
The dazzling Parisian success of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe that began in 1909 came to a jarring halt when the Guns of August
tore across Belgium and France to begin World War I in 1914. Diaghilev, Leonide Massine and some of the company took refuge in
Switzerland and Spain, while Nijinsky and others fled to America. Diaghilev arranged a season in Spain for 1917, and, always on
the prowl for new talent, took the opportunity to look up a musician Stravinsky had met in Paris in 1910. Stravinsky described his
Spanish colleague as “even smaller than myself, and as modest and withdrawn as an oyster... unpityingly religious, and the shyest
man I have ever met.” His name was Manuel de Falla.
Falla, a meticulous worker who composed slowly, had completed only a small number of works by 1917 — most notably Nights in
the Gardens of Spain, the opera La Vida Breve and the ballet El Amor Brujo — and was little known outside of his homeland. When
Diaghilev and Massine presented themselves to him in Barcelona, he took them to see a one-act farce set in the early 19th century
about the attempted seduction of a miller’s wife by the local governor for which he had provided the music, El corregidor y la
molinera (“The Corregidor and the Miller’s Wife”). The script for this “pantomime” was by Gregorio Martinez Sierra, who based it
on a short novel by Pedro de Alarcon published in 1874 as El sombrero de tres picos. Alarcon was said to have heard the story in
turn from an old goatherd who hired himself out as an entertainer for local weddings and feasts. Of Falla’s score, Massine wrote
that it “seemed to us very exciting, and its blend of violence and passion was similar to much of the music of the local folk-dances.
Both Diaghilev and I felt that the story and the music offered us the potentials of a full-length ballet.” Falla accepted Diaghilev’s
proposal to revise and extend his score for production when the war was over, but gave the provision that he be allowed enough
time to study Spanish folk music and dance styles to assure the correct atmosphere for the finished work. Diaghilev thought this a
capital idea, and he, Massine, Falla and Felix Fernandez Garcia, a locally celebrated dancer who was enlisted to instruct the
company in Spanish dance styles, set off for a leisurely tour of the country.
The four pilgrims visited Saragossa, Salamanca, Toledo, Seville, Cordova, Granada and many small villages, eyes and ears
constantly open for material for the new ballet. Falla and Massine both collected a wealth of ideas, and snippets from several of the
melodies that the composer discovered ended up in the score, including one he heard by chance from a blind man walking the
streets near the Alhambra chanting tunes to the accompaniment of his battered guitar. Falla took up the ballet score again after his
grand Iberian tour, added to it two dance numbers and expanded the instrumentation from the original seventeen-piece chamber
scoring to full orchestra.
It was not until World War I ended that the production of The Three-Cornered Hat could be staged as part of the 1919 London
season of the Ballet Russe. Diaghilev commissioned Pablo Picasso to design the decor; it was the great painter’s first ballet
assignment. Massine choreographed the work with the help of the Spanish dancer Felix, who was brought to London to train the
company for the premiere. (Sadly, the pressures of artistic life in a big city were more than the man could bear, and he lost his
reason soon after he arrived, dying in a British asylum in 1941.) The first performance, on July 22, 1919 at London’s Alhambra
Theater conducted by Ernest Ansermet, was a great success (Spanish dance schools sprang up all around London within weeks),
and The Three-Cornered Hat was an important milestone in establishing Falla’s international reputation.
What To Listen For
The racy story of the ballet has its roots in the folk traditions of Spain. The curtain rises on the sunny esplanade beside a mill. The
miller and his pretty wife are busy about their chores. A stately procession enters carrying the elderly Corregidor (the local
magistrate) and his wife. The Corregidor is attracted to the miller’s wife, and slips back after his retinue has left to make his
advances. The wife tells her husband to hide and watch her spurn the old man’s attempts at love. She dances a brilliant fandango
and further tantalizes him with a bunch of grapes. He chases her, trips, and becomes aware of the teasing intrigue between husband
and wife. The Corregidor departs, and the miller and his wife cheerfully resume the fandango.
Part II of the ballet takes place that evening, St. John’s Night. The miller and his wife are joined in celebration by their neighbors,
and together dance the popular seguidillas. The miller performs a virile farruca. The festivities are interrupted by the local
constabulary, who have come to arrest the miller on a charge trumped up by the Corregidor to get him out of the way. The
Corregidor appears as soon as the miller is led away, but falls into the millstream as he is pursuing the girl. She runs off in search of
her husband, while the Corregidor removes his sodden clothes, including his three-cornered hat — the symbol of his office — hangs
them on a chair outside the mill, and jumps into the absent girl’s bed to ward off a chill. Meanwhile, the miller has escaped from his
captors to return home, sees the Corregidor’s discarded clothes and believes himself betrayed by his wife. Vowing to get even, he
exchanges his garments for those of the official, scribbles on the wall “The wife of the Corregidor is also very pretty,” and runs off
in search of his conquest. The Corregidor emerges from the bedroom to find only the miller’s clothes. He puts them on just in time
for the police, hunting their escaped prisoner, to arrest him by mistake. The miller’s wife returns, followed by the miller, and the
two are happily reconciled in the joyous final dance while the villagers toss a straw effigy of the Corregidor in a blanket.
Falla’s masterful score captures both the dramatic action of the story and the colorful milieu of its setting. Gilbert Chase said of The
Three-Cornered Hat that, like the best of Falla’s music, it is “an unceasing quest for the musical soul of Spain.” There are bits of
many traditional Spanish melodies threaded through the score, but it is far more than a mere quodlibet of traditional tunes. Falla
penetrated to the heart of the music of his homeland — the fiery gypsy cante jondo, the vibrant melodies and rhythms of Andalusia,
the flamenco — and distilled them into a style that marks him as “a poet of Spanish emotion,” according to Georges Jean-Aubrey:
The Neighbor’s Dance is a seguidillas, The Grapes is a fandango, The Miller’s Dance a farruca, and The Final Dance a jota.
Enrique Franco’s summary of Falla’s style applies with special relevance to The Three-Cornered Hat. “Falla was no revolutionary,”
Franco wrote, “but what he created was entirely new. His powerful originality depended not on matters of technique — even if in
this he made startling innovations — but on substance.... It is as if Falla developed and exhausted all the possibilities of Spanish
nationalism.”
MAURICE RAVEL
composer, pianist
(1875, Ciboure, France — 1937, Paris)
LA VALSE, POÈME CHORÉOGRAPHIQUE
COMPOSED: 1919-1920
REMIERED
P
: December 12, 1920 in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard.
DURATION: ca. 12 minutes
SCORING: piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns,
three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings
Overview
Ravel first considered composing a musical homage to Johann Strauss as early as 1906. The idea forced itself upon him again a
decade later, but during the years of the First World War, he could not bring himself to work on a score which he had tentatively
titled “Wien” (“Vienna”). Since the war had sapped a great deal of his energy, causing his health to be precarious for the rest of his
life, it took a proposal from the great ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev in 1918 to convince Ravel to bring the project to fruition.
(Diaghilev hoped to pair Ravel’s new work with Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, but upon its completion, the impresario was dissatisfied
with La Valse — “a masterpiece, but it’s not a ballet,” he said — which then had to wait until 1929 for its stage premiere under Ida
Rubinstein.)
By January 1919, when Ravel was immersed in the composition of his tribute to Vienna, he said that he felt he was “waltzing
frantically.” He saw La Valse both as “a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz” and as a “fantastic and fatefully inescapable
whirlpool.” The “inescapable whirlpool” was the First World War toward which Vienna marched in three-quarter time, salving its
social and political conscience with the luscious strains of Johann Strauss. There is more than a touch of the surreal in La Valse.
Familiar and real things are placed against a background strange and a little threatening in its disorienting effect. This artifice
paralleled the situation that Ravel saw as characteristic of late 19th-century Vienna in particular and Europe in general.
What To Listen For
A surrealistic haze shrouds the opening of La Valse, a vague introduction from which fragments of themes gradually emerge. In the
composer’s words, “At first the scene is dimmed by a kind of swirling mist, through which one discerns, vaguely and intermittently,
the waltzing couples. Little by little the vapors disappear, the illumination grows brighter, revealing an immense ballroom filled
with dancers; the blaze of the chandeliers comes to full splendor. An Imperial court ball about 1855.” In the form typical of the
Viennese waltz, several continuous sections follow, each based on a different melody.
At the half-way point of the score, however, the murmurs of the introduction return, and the melodies heard previously in clear and
complete versions are now fragmented, played against each other, unable to regain the rhythmic flow of their initial appearances.
Persistent rustlings in the low strings and woodwinds, flutter-tongue wails from the flutes, snarling muted brass, abrupt and violent
crescendos challenge the old waltz melodies. The musical panacea of 1855 cannot smother the reality of 1915, however, and the
music becomes consumed by the harsh thrust of the roaring triple meter transformed from a seductive dance into a demonic
juggernaut. The dissonances grind, the rhythms become brutal, the orchestral colors blaze as the world of order is sucked toward the
awaiting cataclysm in what Ravel called “a fantastic and fatal sort of dervish’s dance.” At the almost unbearable peak of tension,
the dance is torn apart by a five-note figure spread through the entire orchestra, a figure so alien to the triple meter that it destroys
the waltz and brings this brilliant, forceful and disturbing work to a shattering close.
©2016 Dr. Richard E. Rodda