Download Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68, “Pastoral” Ludwig van

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68, “Pastoral” Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-­‐1827) Written: 1803-­‐08 Movements: Five Style: Romantic Duration: 40 minutes “When you wander through the silent pine woods, remember that I have often made poetry, or, as they say, composed there,” Ludwig van Beethoven wrote to a friend. Anticipating arriving in the country, he wrote to another, “How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.” Beethoven’s workday usually included several long walks in the country; he boasted of walking around the city of Vienna twice daily. Like most Viennese, Beethoven spent his summers in the country. Initially he was the guest of nobility at their country estates, but when he was finally able to afford it, he rented his own summer lodgings. It was there he did his most productive work. Beethoven composed most of his Symphony No. 6, what he himself called his Pastoral Symphony, in the “delicious wooded environs of Heiligenstadt.” Unlike later composers such as Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt, who would give detailed descriptions of what their music was “about,” Beethoven loathed giving a blow-­‐by-­‐blow description of his Pastoral Symphony. Early on he wrote, “The hearer should be permitted to discover the situations for himself. He who has ever conceived an idea of country life ought to be able, without many indications, to think of the author’s meaning.” At the first performance he included on the printed program, “More an expression of feeling than of painting.” If you were in the audience for that first performance at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on December 22, 1808, you would have heard quite a concert. Along with the Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven also premiered his incomparably great Fifth Symphony, his Fourth Piano Concerto, the Choral Fantasy for piano, choir and orchestra (which prefigures his Ninth Symphony,) some movements from his Mass in C and the aria “Ah! Perfido.” Even though the concert was nearly four hours long (and the heater broke down), the audience still expected Beethoven to improvise alone at the piano as well. Think of it – an entire concert of “new” music! Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is entirely unlike his Fifth. While the Fifth Symphony is an epic musical journey, a powerful statement of man’s triumph over fate, the Sixth is just happy music. The first movement (“Cheerful impressions awakened by arrival in the country”) is void of the drama and tension that we so often hear in Beethoven. The second (“Scene by the brook”)—complete with orchestral bird calls—is about as lazy and serene as orchestral music gets. The third movement (“Merry gathering of country folk”) is a joyous folk dance which is suddenly interrupted by a fierce thunderstorm—the fourth movement. This is the only place in the entire symphony that reflects Beethoven’s tempestuous personality. And what a storm it is! Like all thunderstorms, it dies away. The country-­‐folk of the third movement rejoice with a return to happy music in the last movement (“Shepherd’s Song; glad and grateful feelings after the storm). After an entire symphony of such unmitigated joy, we have to agree with a friend of Beethoven who said that he had “never met anyone who so delighted in Nature, or so thoroughly enjoyed flowers or clouds or other natural objects. Nature was almost meat and drink to him; he seemed positively to exist upon it.” ©2015 John P. Varineau Fantasía para un gentilhombre Joaquín Rodrigo (1902–1999) Written: 1954 Movements: Four Style: 20th century Spanish Nationalism Duration: 22 minutes The gentleman in Joaquín Rodrigo’s Fantasia para un gentilhombre is the seventeenth-­‐century Spanish guitar master Gaspar Sanz (1640 – 1710). Rodrigo has taken various melodies from the first method book written for guitar – the Instrucion de música sobre la guitarra española written by Sanz in 1694 – and arranged and expanded upon them for orchestra and guitar. Although Joaquín Rodrigo was a twentieth century composer, his music won’t seem that contemporary to you, because Rodrigo’s musical language is really very conservative. The final result is a charming concerto for guitar that mixes the nobility of Sanz’ melodies with intimate and colorful orchestrations. The concerto as a whole is very straightforward. Essentially, the soloist and the orchestra take turns playing the same melody repeatedly with different accompaniment figures. Several movements of the concerto are in the form of Spanish dances popular during the seventeenth century. However, the ricercare is a type of composition in which the soloist plays several melodic lines simultaneously in the manner of a round or fugue. The orchestra imitates this style. The fanfare comes in-­‐between two tender statements of the slow dance españoleta. A canario is a folk dance from the Canary Islands with a fast lilting rhythm like a gigue. As a result of an epidemic of diphtheria, Rodrigo lost his sight at the age of three. So, Rodrigo had to write all of his music in Braille, then later dictate it to a copyist—a slow and laborious process. He started studying piano and violin when he was eight years old and turned to harmony and composition when he was sixteen. In 1927 he went to Paris to study, just as many older Spanish composers (notably Manuel de Falla) had done. There he studied with Paul Dukas (composer of the orchestral showpiece The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). In 1939 he composed his most famous guitar concerto, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Ever since then, he has stuck to the same instantly recognizable style, something he calls “neocasticismo” which combines traditional tonality, classical forms and Spanish traditions. ©2015 John P. Varineau Danzón No. 2 Arturo Marquez (b. 1950) Written: 1993 Style: Contemporary Duration: 10 minutes The son of a mariachi musician and grandson of a Mexican folksinger, Arturo Marquez came to the United States from Mexico as a young teenager with his family and settled in a suburb of Los Angeles. He played trombone in the high school band, took private piano lessons, and started composing when he was sixteen. He attended the Mexican Music Conservatory and later received a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. Marquez began to achieve international fame with a series of compositions—called Danzóns—based on the music of Cuba and the Veracruz region of Mexico. The danzón is a popular dance form, starting out as a European implant in Cuba and then making its way to Mexico via Veracruz. One writer associates the danzón to the Argentinean tango: “Both are urban dances with nostalgic, even sad melodies and a smoldering sensuality.” Of his Danzón No. 2, Arturo Marquez writes: The idea of writing the Danzón No.2 originated in 1993 during a trip to Malinalco with the painter Andrés Fonseca and the dancer Irene Martínez, both of whom are experts in salon dances with a special passion for the danzón, which they were able to transmit to me from the beginning, and also during later trips to Veracruz and visits to the Colonia Salon in Mexico City. From these experiences onward, I started to learn the danzón’s rhythms, its form, its melodic outline, and to listen to the old recordings by Acerina and his Danzonera Orchestra. I was fascinated and I started to understand that the apparent lightness of the danzón is only like a visiting card for a type of music full of sensuality and qualitative seriousness, a genre which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape towards their own emotional world; we can fortunately still see this in the embrace between music and dance that occurs in the State of Veracruz and in the dance parlors of Mexico City. The Danzón No.2 is a tribute to the environment that nourishes the genre. It endeavors to get as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it violates its intimacy, its form and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music. Danzón No.2 was written on a commission by the Department of Musical Activities at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and is dedicated to my daughter Lily. ©2015 John P. Varineau