Download Notes on the Program by DR. RICHARD E. RODDA Invitation to the

Notes on the Program by DR. RICHARD E. RODDA
Invitation to the Dance .......................................Carl Maria von Weber
Orchestrated by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
(1786-1826)
Composed in 1819; orchestrated in 1841.
Orchestral premiere on June 7, 1841 in Paris, conducted by Françoise-Antoine Habeneck.
The mania for the waltz first spread across Europe when the delegates to the Congress of Vienna returned home from
that music-mad city in 1814. A motley of Ländler, German Dances and original waltz melodies was used to accompany
the newly popular dance, and Schubert, Hummel and even Beethoven devised some delightful triple-meter confections
that would not have been out of place in the ballroom. The first important step in elevating the waltz into a concert
vehicle, however, was taken by that pioneer of German musical Romanticism, Carl Maria von Weber, with his infectious
Invitation to the Dance, composed for piano during the summer of 1819, when he was easing his way back into creative
work after a difficult period of ill health and bereavement. (The Polacca Brillante for piano that he wrote at the same time
also proved to be historically significant as the model for later works by Chopin and others.) In its organization, the
Invitation to the Dance is a compact, continuous suite of waltz melodies pleasingly balanced in tempo, character and key
in which the opening strain returns, in the manner of a rondo, to buttress the form (Weber subtitled the piece Rondo
Brillante); thoughtful passages at beginning and end serve as the expressive frame for the principal waltz section. In its
mood, the composition evokes subtleties of emotion that had been little broached in earlier music in dance idioms. The
style and structure of the Invitation to the Dance established the plan which served as the model for the wondrous flood of
waltzes produced by Josef Lanner, the Strauss clan and even Maurice Ravel (La Valse) during the following century.
“Weber was the first founder of the dance-music expressive of deep feeling,” wrote the 19th-century scholar Wilhelm
Riehl. “He showed how profoundly he was imbued with the spirit of the age. This composition has deep historical
significance.”
Despite its historical importance, the Invitation to the Dance is little known in Weber’s original solo piano version.
Adolf Henselt and Carl Tausig made keyboard arrangements to embolden its virtuoso pyrotechnics, and Otto Dresel
transcribed it for two-pianos, eight hands for use at music parties. The incarnation in which the Invitation to the Dance is
best known, however, is the luminous orchestration that Hector Berlioz made for it in 1841. Berlioz had first encountered
the music of Weber when Der Freischütz was given its Paris premiere at the Odéon in a much-edited French version in
December 1824. “There was a wild sweetness in the music that I found intoxicating,” recorded Berlioz in his Memoirs,
probably the most entertaining book ever written by a composer. “Here was a wood-nymph of ravishing freshness and
charm, a creature of instinct and mercurial fancy, naïve, gay, pensive, passionate, melancholy, whose beauty
overwhelmed me with a flood of undiscovered sensations.” Der Freischütz achieved a fine success and many
performances, but was not scheduled for production at that bastion of French culture, the Paris Opéra, until 1841, where
the inviolable conventions of the house required that its spoken dialogue be replaced with sung recitatives and a ballet be
inserted into the second act. Léon Pillet, the Opéra’s director, asked Berlioz to make the changes. “I did not think one
ought to add recitatives to Freischütz,” Berlioz noted, “but if I did not write them, the job would be given to someone
possibly less familiar with Weber and certainly less dedicated to the glorification of this masterpiece, so I accepted the
offer.... For the ballet, I proposed devising a dance scene along the lines indicated by Weber himself in his rondo for
piano, Invitation to the Dance, and I arranged this delightful piece for orchestra.” Berlioz’s transcription was introduced at
the first Opéra performance of Der Freischütz on June 7, 1841, and given its concert premiere in Hanover during the
following year. The Invitation to the Dance has been among Weber’s most familiar and beloved creations ever since.
Though the Invitation to the Dance may be heard simply as a brilliant evocation of the 19th-century’s most popular
dance form, the composer provided the following scenario to elucidate the relationship of the slow introduction and
postlude of the work to its lilting main central section: “First approach of the dancer to whom the lady gives an evasive
answer. His more pressing invitation; her acceptance of his request. Now they converse in greater detail; he begins; she
answers him with heightened expression; she responds more warmly; now for the dance! His remarks concerning it; her
answer; their coming together; their going forward; expectation of the beginning of the dance. The Dance. End: his
thanks, her reply and their parting. Silence.”
Symphonic Dances, Op. 64 ............................................... Edvard Grieg
(1843-1907)
Composed in 1898.
Premiered in July 1898 in Bergen, conductd by the composer.
By 1898, the year he composed the Symphonic Dances, the pattern of Grieg’s life had become well established. After
serving as conductor of the Harmoniske Selskab in his native Bergen from 1880 to 1882, he never again held an official
appointment, freeing him to pursue the things that pleased him the most deeply. Thereafter, he customarily spent the
spring and early summer months in the composition of new works or the revision of older ones. Later in the summer he
made a journey on foot through the beautiful mountains of Norway, often in the company of such friends as Julius
Röntgen or Percy Grainger. The fall and winter were spent in the extensive concert tours as pianist and conductor
throughout Europe that Grieg, despite his fragile health, seemed unable to resist. By the last two decades of the 19th
century, he was recognized as not only the most prominent musician in Scandinavia, but also as one of the world’s master
composers.
Throughout his life, Grieg sought to raise the standards of performance and musical awareness in his native Norway,
organizing concerts, writing criticism, encouraging the country’s composers, and contributing articles to European
journals. These activities culminated in 1898, when he helped to found the Norwegian Music Festival in Bergen. The
preceding year his annual concert tour had taken him to Great Britain, Vienna and Holland, and during his stop in
Amsterdam he performed with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and its Music Director, Willem Mengelberg. He was so
taken with the high level of that ensemble’s performance that he insisted it be invited to participate in the new Festival in
Bergen, despite considerable local criticism for using imported musicians for this national event. The Concertgebouw,
however, proved to be the centerpiece of the Festival, and its concerts provided a high and influential standard of
excellence for all Norwegian music-making. On July 6, 1898, Grieg wrote to Dr. Max Abraham, director of the Leipzig
publishing firm of Peters, “The Festival was in every respect ideal! Everyone applauded. I have never heard better
performances. Everyone is rejoicing and all agree that I was right. Now they are saying in Bergen, as in Christiania
[Oslo], we must have a better orchestra. That is for me the greatest triumph.” A year later, the new National Theater
opened in Oslo with a full symphonic orchestra subsidized by the city.
For the Festival, Grieg was inspired to write for orchestra a set of Symphonic Dances based on Norwegian themes.
(Grieg was essentially a miniaturist, and his orchestral catalog is very small: an early, later disowned Symphony; the
Piano Concerto; In Autumn, a concert overture; the music for Peer Gynt and Sigurd Jorsalfar; the Holberg Suite; five
brief works which are arrangements of keyboard pieces or songs; and the Symphonic Dances, which also exist in the
composer’s version for piano duet. The Norwegian Dances were orchestrated by Hans Sitt.) The melodies for the
Symphonic Dances were borrowed from Ludvig Mathias Lindeman’s 1853 collection of Norwegian Mountain Melodies
Old and New, upon which Grieg had drawn seven years earlier as source material for his Norwegian Dances, Op. 35. The
four movements each follow the same ternary formal model with a strongly contrasting middle section (A-B-A) that
Dvorák employed for his Slavonic Dances, and also share with those popular pieces an ardent nationalistic spirit and the
elevation of indigenous idioms into concert works of international stature. The first two of Grieg’s Dances are symphonic
transformations of the halling, which Willi Apel described in the Harvard Dictionary of Music as “a strenuous solo dance
for men in which one person in the middle of the room holds a man’s hat on a long pole. Several men in turn try to kick
the hat off the pole.” The athletic motions of the halling are perhaps better mirrored in the vigorous opening Dance
(whose center section uses an ingenious minor-mode variation of the first part’s main theme) than in the more pastoral
second movement, notable for some deliciously delicate scoring for woodwinds and triangle. The lilting third movement
is derived from the springdans. The finale, the most symphonic and fully developed of the set, is based on two tunes from
Lindeman’s collection which Grieg had already borrowed to include in his 1870 piano arrangements of 25 Norwegian
Folksongs and Dances: Såg du nokke Kjaeringa and Brulåten, a wedding tune from Valdres, a mountainous, inland region
between Oslo and Bergen. In his study of the composer, John Horton wrote, “The charm of these Dances, apart from the
freshness of the tunes themselves, lies in the scope they give for Grieg to display one of his strongest resources — his
facility in continuously harmonizing and re-harmonizing a simple diatonic phrase, which, as so often in folk-music, is
repeated incessantly, thus giving it a kaleidoscopic background.” Grieg’s Symphonic Dances, added Louis C. Elson, “are
like a whiff of pure air.”
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 ................................... Sergei Rachmaninoff
(1873-1943)
Composed in 1940.
Premiered on January 4, 1941 in Philadelphia, conducted by Eugene Ormandy.
Above the score for the first movement of his Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff wrote the curious indication, “Non
allegro.” Now, virtually all of the music written during the last four centuries bears some similar inscription as an
instruction to the performers about the work’s tempo. What is unusual here is the negative instruction implied by “Non
allegro.” Musically speaking, “Allegro” simply means “fast,” but “not fast” (slow? medium? very fast?) is frustratingly
ambiguous, and it may be that with this unusual heading Rachmaninoff was trying to convey a message greater than
merely the speed of the music.
When tempo markings first came into common use around 1600, they employed the lingua franca of the art — Italian.
Originally, these markings indicated the mood and spirit of a work rather than its precise tempo. (Metronomes to measure
exact speed were not invented until Beethoven’s time, and the method of determining tempo by heart beats suggested by
certain 17th-century theorists was inherently problematic.) “Largo,” for example, means “wide, broad”; “Grave,” “heavy,
stern, serious”; “Adagio,” “at ease”; “Andante,” “walking”; and “Allegro” means “cheerful, merry, happy.” If
Rachmaninoff’s indication is interpreted in this wider sense, it means “not cheerful” or “unhappy,” and this seems to be as
much a guide to the man himself as to his Symphonic Dances.
The word that most easily attaches to Rachmaninoff and his music is “melancholy.” His photographs, invariably
unsmiling, tell of the basic strain of sadness inherent in his personality. It is said that the only time he laughed or showed
any joy was among his family and his most intimate Russian friends, and even then, only rarely. Perhaps he never fully
recovered from the complete failure of his First Symphony in 1897. Of that painful experience he wrote, “The despair that
filled my soul would not leave me. My dreams of a brilliant career lay shattered. My hopes and confidences were
destroyed.... When the indescribable torture of this performance at last came to an end, I was a different man.” He suffered
a nervous collapse as a result of the fiasco, and was treated in Moscow by Dr. Nicholas Dahl, whose technique of
hypnotic auto-suggestion (“I will compose again. I will be successful,” intoned Rachmaninoff for hours on end) proved
effective in reviving the composer’s self-confidence, if not in altering his basic pessimism.
World War I, of course, was a trial for Rachmaninoff and his countrymen, but his most severe personal adversity came
when the 1917 Revolution smashed the aristocratic society of Russia — the only world he had ever known. He was forced
to flee his beloved country, leaving behind family and financial security. He pined for his homeland the rest of his life,
and did his best to keep the old language, food, customs and holidays alive in his own household. “But it was at best
synthetic,” wrote David Ewen. “Away from Russia, which he could never hope to see again, he always felt lonely and sad,
a stranger even in lands that were ready to be hospitable to him. His homesickness assumed the character of a disease as
the years passed, and one symptom of that disease was an unshakable melancholy.” By 1940, when he composed the
Symphonic Dances, he was filled with worry over his daughter Tatiana, who was trapped in France by the German
invasion (he never saw her again), and had been weakened by a minor operation in May. Still, he felt the need to compose
for the first time since the Third Symphony of 1936. The three Symphonic Dances were written quickly at his summer
retreat on Long Island Sound, an idyllic setting for creative work, where he had a studio by the water in which to work in
seclusion, lovely gardens for walking, and easy access to a ride in his new cabin cruiser, one of his favorite amusements.
Still, it was the man and not the setting that was expressed in this music. “I try to make music speak directly and simply
that which is in my heart at the time I am composing,” he once told an interviewer. “If there is love there, or bitterness, or
sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful or bitter or sad or religious.”
It is nostalgic sadness that permeates the works of Rachmaninoff’s later years. Like a grim marker, the ancient chant
Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead courses through the Paganini
Rhapsody (1934), the Second (1908) and Third (1936) Symphonies and the Symphonic Dances (1940). The Symphonic
Dances were his last important creation, coming less than three years before his death from cancer at age 70. After they
were done, he lamented that he no longer had the “strength and fire” to compose. “I don’t know what happened,” he told a
friend about them. “That was probably my last flicker.” Despite all, however, there is nothing morbid about the
Symphonic Dances. They breathe a spirit of dark determination against a world of trial, a hard-fought musical affirmation
of the underlying resiliency of life. Received with little enthusiasm when they were new, these Dances have come to be
regarded as among the finest of Rachmaninoff’s works.
When he was composing them, Rachmaninoff may have had an eye toward producing the Symphonic Dances as a
ballet. Even before the orchestration was completed, he called in the renowned Michael Fokine, who had successfully
choreographed the Paganini Rhapsody. After hearing the composer play his new piece on the piano, Fokine told him he
liked the music very much, but felt it held little balletic promise. It is only the second movement (subtitled “Tempo di
valse”) that bears a clear relationship to a particular dance type, while those flanking it are more symphonic in substance
and form. Once he had been discouraged from a stage presentation of these movements, Rachmaninoff dropped their
temporary titles of “Midday,” “Twilight” and “Midnight” — which may have been philosophical references to the ages of
man — and never said another word about the programmatic intent of the music. He was proud of the Symphonic Dances,
both as music and as accomplishment, and he wrote the appreciative phrase “I thank thee, Lord” on the last page of the
manuscript.
The first of the Symphonic Dances, in a large three-part form (A–B–A), is spun from a tiny three-note descending
motive heard at the beginning that serves as the germ for much of the opening section’s thematic material. The middle
portion is given over to a folk-like melody initiated by the alto saxophone. The return of the opening section, with its
distinctive falling motive, rounds out the first movement. The waltz of the second movement was inspired by the music of
Tchaikovsky rather than by that of the Strauss family. It is more rugged and deeply expressive than the Viennese variety,
and possesses the quality of inconsolable pathos that gives so much of Rachmaninoff’s music its sharply defined
personality. The finale begins with a sighing introduction for the winds, which leads into a section in quicker tempo
whose vital rhythms may have been influenced by the syncopations of American jazz. Soon after this faster section
begins, the chimes play a pattern reminiscent of the opening phrase of the Dies Irae chant. The sighing measures recur
and are considerably extended, acquiring new thematic material but remaining unaltered in mood. When the fast, jazzinspired music returns, its thematic relationship with the Dies Irae is strengthened. The movement accumulates an almost
visceral rhythmic energy as it progresses, virtually exploding into the last pages, a coda based on an ancient Russian
Orthodox chant (which he had earlier used in his All-Night Vigil Service of 1915) whose entry Rachmaninoff noted by
inscribing “Alliluya” in the score. Was a specific message intended here? As the Alliluya succeeds the Dies Irae, did the
composer mean to show that the Church conquers death? Optimism, sadness? Rachmaninoff was silent on the matter,
except to say, “A composer always has his own ideas of his works, but I do not believe he ever should reveal them. Each
listener should find his own meaning in the music.”
©2010 Dr. Richard E. Rodda