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Program Notes
Opening Night
October 3, 2015
Don Juan, Op. 20
Richard Strauss
Born 1864 in Munich, Germany
Died 1949 in Garmisch, Germany
Richard Strauss completed his tone poem Don Juan in 1888 and led the first performance
in Weimar the following year. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn,
2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani,
percussion, harp, and strings.
Once Strauss left home and the shadow of his father—a famous horn player with conservative
musical tastes—his newly-found independence and the heady influence of new music
(especially Wagner’s Tristan) combined to unleash an explosive talent. As a fiery youth barely
into his twenties, he composed Macbeth, Don Juan, and Death and Transfiguration, tone poems
that at once repudiated his previous music and pointed the way for modern romanticism.
Don Juan was almost the perfect metaphor for Strauss’ newly radicalized sensibilities.
Unlike the sixteenth century legend that portrayed Don Juan as a cad, Strauss’ Don Juan was
different. His model came from Nicolaus Lenau’s romantic updating of the story, Don Juan:
A Dramatic Poem of 1844. Lenau’s character is less of an aristocratic knave and more of a
seeker. Don Juan’s irresistibility to women is more than an excuse to satiate himself: it drives
him to seek the ideal woman. Since no real woman can survive the test, each is rejected in
turn. To Strauss, there is a noble aspect to this Don Juan—thus title character’s magnificent
portrayal by the big tune in the horns. What’s more, this Don Juan is not dragged down to
Hell by the Stone Guest. Lenau’s hero is despondent in his failure and sinks into an intense
self-loathing. In the end he commits suicide by deliberately letting his guard down in a duel.
One can hear all this and more in Strauss’ brilliant tone poem. There is Don Juan’s rakish
opening theme, the serial love scenes that inevitably fall short of the ideal, the hero’s
compulsion, exultation, and finally, failure. The moment of his death is unmistakable in the
music: after a huge climax the music suddenly stops, and a piercing trumpet becomes the
rapier thrust that kills the hero. Strauss’ ending echoes Lenau’s words: as the hero lies with
the life flowing out of him, “only silence remains.”
Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born 1840 in Votkinsk, Russia
Died 1893 in St. Petersburg, Russia
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed this work in 1876, and it was first performed in Moscow
the following year by the Russian Musical Society under the direction of Nikolai Rubinstein.
The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns,
4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
Tchaikovsky had originally planned an opera based on the love story of Francesca and
Paolo from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. When he could not obtain an adequate
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Program Notes
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libretto, he decided to compose an orchestral fantasy on the subject instead. As the
story goes, Francesca is betrothed to the ugly Giovanni, but she has fallen in love with his
younger brother Paolo. The couple give in to their desires, whereupon Giovanni, who has
caught them in the act, slays them. The lovers’ souls go to hell, joining the souls of others
who had abandoned themselves to the sins of the flesh.
The piece is in three parts. Part one is a description of Hades and the motto over its gate:
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” In the middle section we encounter Francesca,
who relates her story. The music here ought to be rated “R”, for the sound-picture that
she paints of the couple’s act of love could hardly be more explicit. The final section is the
descent into hell and the eternal torment.
How curious that Tchaikovsky surrounded such an impassioned love scene with grotesque
depictions of the torments of hell. How ironic as well, that one of music’s most intense
renderings of heterosexual sex was composed by a homosexual. This, of course, provides
a field day for armchair psychologists, who have pointed to this work, and the composer’s
attempt at marriage, as efforts to either disprove or overcome his sexual proclivities. The
marriage was an utter fiasco; Francesca, on the other hand, is a feast for the senses and for
the imagination.
Concerto for Piano & Orchestra No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Born 1873 in Semyonovo, Russia
Died 1943 in Beverly Hills, California
Sergei Rachmaninoff completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901, and the first complete
performance took place in Moscow the same year with Rachmaninoff at the piano.
The composer dedicated the score to Dr. Nikolai Dahl, his hypnotist. The Piano Concerto
is scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets,
3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.
Rachmaninoff had been a brilliantly successful student at the Moscow Conservatory,
where he honed his pianism and studied composition. Like most composers of his time,
especially those living in a city saturated with Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff wanted to write
a symphony. And so he did.
But when Rachmaninoff’s symphony was performed, it ran into a snag. The players
didn’t like it. The audience didn’t like it. The conductor, who was inebriated during the
performance, didn’t like it. Even Rachmaninoff didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. Composer
César Cui seems to have summed it up for everyone:
“If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students was to
compose a symphony based on the story of the Seven Plagues of Egypt, and if he had
written one similar to Rachmaninoff’s, he would have brilliantly accomplished his task
and would have delighted the inhabitants of Hell.”
Rachmaninoff was devastated, and not just from the reception his piece received. He
knew the piece was awful, and that was the worst part. He fell into a deep depression,
started drinking heavily, and added to his woes with an unhappy love affair. Every morsel
of confidence he had in his compositional ability vanished, and he didn’t compose a note
for three years. Facing up to the dry well, Rachmaninoff concentrated on his piano playing
and concertized with some success. But the creative spark was gone.
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Rachmaninoff’s family and friends tried to help, suggesting all kinds of cures and therapies,
but nothing seemed to work—nothing, that is, until they sent him to a hypnotist. “Although
it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me,” Rachmaninoff wrote. “Already at the
beginning of the summer I began again to compose. The material grew in bulk, and new
musical ideas began to stir within me—far more than I needed for my concerto.”
Program Notes
After a series of particularly successful concerts in London, he was asked to write a piano
concerto and return with it the next season. Rachmaninoff had only written one piano
concerto at the time and he was utterly dissatisfied with it, so he promised to compose a
new work. When he returned from his tour, he realized he couldn’t do it, and all the greater
was his despair.
Rachmaninoff wrote the last two movements first, had them performed with encouraging
results, and soon after composed the first movement. He dedicated the work to his
hypnotist, and it was an instant hit. He would be visited now and again with bouts of
depression but these were never as incapacitating.
What is more, he wrote a terrific piano concerto. To this day it is performed as frequently
as any concerto for any instrument, and more often than most. The bell-like peals of
the first movement, the nocturnal second, the dynamic drive of the Finale, the explosive
piano cadenzas—all testify to Rachmaninoff’s rejuvenation. And, perhaps, to the power
of hypnosis.
©2015 Mark Rohr | Questions or comments? [email protected]
richard steinert
artistic director
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