Iberomania: Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole

by Maureen Buja

We’ve noted many times the fascination the northern Europeans had with southern Europe: musical trips to Greece, Italy, and Spain seemed to be de rigeur in the 19th century if you were Scandinavian, German, or French.

French composer Édouard Lalo (1823-1892) was born in Lille; his father had been a member of Napoleon’s army. His fascination with Spain culminated in his Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21, which really isn’t a symphony, but is now considered a violin concerto. The use of Spanish motifs set the tone for the northern fascination with Spain, with Bizet’s Carmen, which had its premiere at the Opéra-Comique in Paris only a month after Lalo’s work.

Pierre Petit: Édouard Lalo, 1965 (Gallica: btv1b8421663h)

The work was written for the Spanish virtuoso violinist Pablo Sarasate and received its premiere in Paris on 7 December 1875.

Its five-movement structure and its symphony name caused many early 20th-century performers to drop the middle-movement Intermezzo and convert the work to a more standard 4-movement symphonic form. We’ll ignore the fact that most concertos only have 3 movements!

The fascination with Spain was part of a general fascination in Europe (northern Europe in particular) with exoticism – the sounds of India and the Middle East sparked composers’ imagination just as much as the wild Gypsy sound coming from Naples and Madrid. The Moorish occupation of Spain gave it a unique architecture, unique gardens, and access to an outdoor life unknown in the frozen north. Iberomania freed the more conservative northerners to write music full of life and sound, mysterious evening assignations, and to imagine beautiful women hidden behind their veils and mantillas, remaining visible but always inaccessible.

The first movement opens passionately, with strong statements in the orchestra followed by the violin. The singing first theme gives way to a ‘sultrier’ second theme. Sharp changes in dynamics emphasize the emotions of the movement. The violin skitters through unusual melodic passagework, but always with an emphasis on the excessive, be it of scalar movements or of emotion.

Édouard Lalo: Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21 – I. Allegro non troppo

This recording, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under George Szell, was made in 1945 with Ruth Posselt as violin soloist.

Ruth Posselt

American violinist Ruth Posselt (1911–2007) was a frequent performer with the Boston Symphony and performed the premieres of several American violin concertos, including those by Vernon Duke (as Vladimir Dukelsky), Edward Burlingame Hill, Samuel Barber, and Aaron Copland. In 1941, she gave the New York premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Violin Concerto. She appeared with all the major symphony orchestras in the US and, from her debut at Carnegie Hall at age 11 to her last concert in the 1970s, she was a leading violinist of her time. Her career wasn’t just in the US; she also had a substantial European following, first with her recitals in the 1930s and then with her appearances as a concert artist. Her 1934–1935 tour of the Soviet Union was the first by an American woman violinist. The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s long-time conductor Serge Koussevitzky declared her to be one of the ‘greatest violinists of our time’.

Performed by

Ruth Posselt
George Szell
Orchestre Symphonique de Boston

Recorded in 1945

Official Website

In Memory of the Past: Goethe’s ‘Erster Verlust’

by Maureen Buja

Erster Verlust	First Loss
Ach wer bringt die schönen Tage,	Ah, who can bring back the beautiful days,
Jene Tage der ersten Liebe,	Those days of first love,
Ach wer bringt nur eine Stunde	Ah, who can bring back even one hour
Jener holden Zeit zurück!	Of that lovely time!
Einsam nähr’ ich meine Wunde	Lonely, I nurse my wound
Und mit stets erneuter Klage	And with ever-renewed lament
Traur’ ich um’s verlorne Glück.	I mourn for lost happiness.
Ach, wer bringt die schönen Tage,	Ah, who can bring back the beautiful days,
Jene holde Zeit zurück!	That lovely time!

Joseph Karl Stieler: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at age 79, 1828 (Neue Pinakothek)

Johann von Goethe (1749–1832)’s poem entitled ‘Erster Verlust’ (First loss) was first written in 1785 for his Singspiel Die ungleichen Hausgenossen (The Unequal Housemates), intended to be an aria for the Baroness, in Act II. The play was never completed, sidetracked, perhaps, by Goethe’s plans for his upcoming Italy trip. Luckily, he salvaged the poem (and two others) and included them in his Schriften of 1789. For the Schriften printing, Goethe wrote stanzas 2 and 3 anew.

Because of its small size and simple expression, the poems became a favourite of many composers, with some 50 setting it to music. We will look at the song and its setting over the century from 1813 through 1919. In this 8-line poem, Goethe expresses that painful memory of what was lost when one’s first love is no longer your love. There’s no idea of death, but rather hints of decisions made, time lost, and a mourning for the past.

Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) was one of Goethe’s favourite composers and became the poet’s musical advisor. He was a detailed chronicler of musical events of his time, and his letters are a prime source of information about significant events, such as the famed 1812 meeting of Beethoven and Goethe. Organised by Bettina Brentano, the two men met in the Bohemian spa town of Teplitz. As expected, they did not agree with each other’s self-assessment: Beethoven thought the poet too loving of the court atmosphere, and Goethe thought the composer had ‘an absolutely uncontrolled personality’. Goethe was 63 years old and Beethoven a mere 42.

Zelter wrote over 200 lieder, 75 of them to texts by Goethe. He detailed his thoughts on lieder writing in a letter to the composer Carl Loewe: the text must take priority, the strophic song is to be preferred to ‘absolute through-composing’, and the accompaniment must stay in the background.

Goethe, for his part, had his musical demands, the primary of which was that the music should support the poet’s words. This led Zelter to write music that was plain and strophic, even when the textual manner was more emotional. The music serves the poet’s words, and we can understand why Goethe was so taken with him. Famously, Goethe preferred Zelter’s setting of the poem Erlkönig, rather than the more dramatic setting by Schubert that is so well known today.

The song was published in 1813 as part of Zelter’s collection of 48 sämmtliche Lieder, Balladen und Romanzen; the four-volume collection was in its second edition by 1816.

Carl Begas: Carl Friedrich Zelter, 1827 (Sing-Akademie zu Berlin)

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) picked up the text in 1815 and made it part of his Op. 5 collection, setting it in a precise and concise manner, and reserving his emotion for the last word of the 2nd stanza, ‘Wunde’ (wound). The minor-key setting is full of wistful memory and desire.

Wilhelm August Reider: Franz Schubert, 1875 after a 1825 watercolour (Vienna Museum)

Bohemian composer Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek (1774–1850) led the musical world of Prague in the first half of the 19th century. He was the central point of the Mozart cult in Prague, and his fame spread through his lieder and piano compositions. Of his 63 lieder, 41 are settings of Goethe, and Goethe made a point of telling Tomášek in 1822 how much he approved of Tomášek’s work.

Tomášek met the 73-year-old poet in the Bohemian town now called Cheb, and after discussing music, poetry and minerals (Goethe had a famous rock collection), the poet encouraged the composer to play for him. Goethe gave him a book of poetry, and the 48-year-old composer played his music from memory. It was after Mignon’s Sehnsucht that the poet exclaimed, ‘you have understood the poem’, and then went on to say that he could not ‘understand how both Beethoven and Spohr could so entirely misinterpret it and treat it as though it were an aria and not a Lied.’

Tomášek’s setting is full of simple declarations, less full of melancholic regret than we find in other settings. There is still the emphasis on ‘Wunde’, but the setting of the first work of the first and last stanza’s first word, ‘Ach’ (Ah), that seems to carry the sharp despair.

Antonín Machek: Portrait of the Composer V. J. Tomášek, after 1816 (Prague: National Gallery)

Felix Mendelssohn’s setting in 1841, as part of his Op. 99 collection Sechs Gesänge, expands the setting enormously, setting the same lines multiple times. The impression of the setting is somehow of deeper regret. The contrasting music for the second verse again puts emphasis on the word ‘wound’. The song concludes with decoration on the word ‘holde’ (lovely), bringing the beloved back one more time.

Horace Vernet: Felix Mendelssohn, 1831

Austrian composer Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) set the poem in 1876, as part of his Op. 9 collection, which set the poetry of Lenau, Goethe, and V. Zuzner. Wolf started writing music to the texts of Goethe at age 15, starting with 3 songs for male chorus.

When he set Erster Verlust, he was following the model set for him already by Reichardt, Zelter, Tomášek and Mendelssohn. Although this early setting, created in 1875 when he was just 15, shows much skill, we’re still dealing with the composer’s juvenilia. It is nothing compared to the lieder where he would show his genius.

Hugo Wolf

Nicolai Medtner (1879–1951) published his op. 6 collection of 9 Goethe-Lieder between 1901and 1905. The majority of Medtner’s published songs are Russian, but Goethe was one of the most important German poets he set to music. Three of his Goethe collections resulted in him being awarded the Glinka Prize in 1909.

The lied was composed as a wedding present for his brother Emil and his bride Anna; however, the present had more than good wishes behind it. Nicolai had been forbidden marriage with Anna, and so his older brother Emil took his place; the marriage was never consummated. Eventually, Emil and Anna divorced, and then Nicolai and Anna were free to marry.

As a collection, it must be regarded as a wedding gift not to his brother but to his sweetheart, and a text such as Erster Verlust becomes particularly poignant. However, since his first lost love would eventually become his wife, this is one time when the story has a happy ending.

Nicolai Medtner

In his setting, Alban Berg (1885–1935) cuts off the last couplet of the poem, setting only the first two stanzas. The work was written in 1905 when he was just beginning as a composer. He worked with Arnold Schoenberg between 1904 and 1911 and was able to combine Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique with his own late-Romantic lyricism. He started with Schoenberg studying harmony, counterpoint, and music theory, and then, from 1907, composition. Even before studying with Schoenberg, he was a prolific composer, with some 80 lieder to his name. Schoenberg thought he was stuck in song, and over the years of study, made him work on his instrumental compositions.

Of all the Second Viennese School composers, he’s the one who has remained the most listenable. His operas remain in the repertoire.

The simplicity of this early song compared to what we know of his later works gives us true indication of what he learned from Schoenberg. Erster verlust was one of only three songs Berg wrote to a Goethe text, as he gradually started working with texts by more modern poets.

Alban Berg

Justus Hermann Wetzel (1879–1973) set Goethe’s text in 1919, as part of his Op. 3 Liederkreis collection. Over his long life, Wetzel composed over 600 songs of which fewer than 150 are still in the repertoire.

His style of clear melodic lines matched with an intense mood makes this song sound less like 1919 and more like 1819.

Erick Büttner: Justus Hermann Wetzel, 1930 (Berlin: Neue Natioanalgalerie)

Tracking the setting of this song for a century reveals an enormous amount about what composers read into the text and how tastes in lied writing circle around. Goethe’s insistence on the primacy of the text (as befitted him as the poet) could be seen as standing in the way of the composer’s need to create interpretations and filter for the material. Probably one of the most effective settings is Medtner’s, truly written for a lost love and given to the woman herself.

A composer takes his text and then decides what to emphasise (‘wunde’ or ‘Ach’) and how to place that emphasis. Realisation of the meaning of the text can happen in many ways. Not every composer wrote in a minor key, and not every composer read the poem the same way. A survey such as this gives us a deeper appreciation for the way certain composers (including Schubert) were able to find their way through such a seriously emotional path.

Inspired by the Night: Fauré and Szymanowski by Maureen Buja

by Maureen Buja

In a tribute to the places she considers home, violinist Eva Zavaro, joined by pianist Clément Lefebvre, presents works by Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) and Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924). The recording includes both composers’ violin sonatas (Szymanowski No.1 and Fauré No. 2) and other small pieces.

The choice of the two composers is interesting, mainly because of their separation in time, and the addition of the little works rounds out the composers’ repertoire.

Karol Szymanowski

Gabriel Fauré

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski changed his style from the early one that followed the German Romantic school to later Impressionistic and then atonal styles. Folk music was another influence. He attended the State Conservatory in Warsaw from 1901 to 1905 and was its director from 1926 to his retirement in 1930. He didn’t serve in WWI due to his lameness and devoted his time to composition and study, working on Islamic culture, ancient Greek drama, and philosophy. He travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa and much of this came out in his opera Król Roger (King Roger); one critic raved about it: ‘we have a body of work representing a dazzling personal synthesis of cultural references, crossing the boundaries of nation, race and gender to form an affirmative belief in an international society of the future based on the artistic freedom granted by Eros’.

He died in 1937 of tuberculosis while under treatment in Switzerland. He’s buried at Skalka in Kraków, where the most distinguished Poles are interred.

It is not known if Szymanowski ever met Fauré, although we do know that Szymanowski met with Ravel. There is much to connect Fauré and Szymanowski, such as Szymanowski’s activities in the Société Musicale Indépendente, which promoted French music and was under the directorship of Fauré. They both studied early musical styles and counterpoint and, later, both forged individual styles that were linked to classical form and tonality, but which were unique to each composer. Both wrote songs early in their career, and this lyrical link carries through each composer’s music.

Szymanowski’s violin sonata was written when he was 22, and it is quite Romantic in style. Zavaro sees a link to the night theme of the recording through its second movement, which begins ‘with the calm of a starry sky’. Fauré’s more rarely played Second Sonata was written after he’d started to become deaf. It’s inward-looking and has a kind of ‘sonic opacity’, which she calls an ‘acoustic night’. Repeated hearings help you see through the darkness and end in a night-seeing clarity. Composer Charles Koechlin called Fauré’s sonata ‘a magnificent ascent to the summits of joy’ and Zavaro imagines the top of the mountain as a first step to flight.

Eva Zavaro (photo by Olivier Lalane)

Clément Lefebvre (photo by Jean-Baptiste Millot)

Other works on the album include Szymanowski’s La Berceuse d’Aïtacho Enia, Op.52 and Notturno e Tarantella, Op.28; Fauré’s other works include his Berceuse, Op.16 and Après un rêve, Op.7 n°1. By closing with Après un rêve, Zavaro chooses to close with an example of Fauré’s melodic genius. The work is one of his most popular, and she says, ‘ It possesses an expressive intensity unique to its composer, present from his earliest works, whose apparent lightness and deceptive simplicity conceal great depth’.

Fauré, Szymanovski: Notturno
Eva Zavaro violin, Clément Lefebvre, piano
La Dolce Volta LDV 127

Official Website

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The Sounds of Summer

by Maureeen Buja

Summer is here! School’s out, weekends never seem long enough if you’ve been at work all week, and the outdoors becomes the place to be. We’ll look at summer through sound, and a few pieces of music, and see how many different sounds evoke this wonderful season.

The sun has come up, and the birds start to make their statements. The European Robin, the Hooded Crow, and doves all greet the new day.

Dawn at the Acropolis (photo by Maureen Buja)

Your friends are up and about on their bikes because you can hear their bicycle bells in the distance.

The local church sounds the hour with the Westminster Chime. It’s time to get out and go!

Now, where to go? If off to the countryside, then it’s the sounds of animals in the fields that you might hear.

Cows with bells

If you go to the seaside, then it’s the roar of the waves and the equally loud roar of all the beach people.

The Jersey shore

If you go down to the pond, then there will be different water sounds.

Pond

Out in the countryside, the little insects are active: grasshoppers and, as it gets hotter, the katydids come out.

Perhaps it’s time to just lie down and rest your eyes for a bit. Nope, nope, nope, that couldn’t possibly be you making that noise!

William Sydney Mount: Boys Caught Napping in a Field, 1848 (Brooklyn Museum)

In the evening, let’s go to a concert. Down at the park, there’s something fun going on, and the crowd is waiting for it to start!

New York Philharmonic, Concert in the Park

The orchestra tunes.

In our concert, Samuel Barber brings us back to his childhood in Knoxville, in the summer of 1915.

Afterwards, as you step out into the plaza, children are celebrating with some small firecrackers.

But, down in the park, the big fireworks show is on.

After the show, the local band starts with Sousa Marches.

Dekalb, IL Municipal Band, Kirk Lundbeck, dir. – Concert Shell with fireworks

And closes with one of Sousa’s most familiar works. Listen out for those piccolos at the end!

It’s late, and everyone is home, tired after a long day outdoors, and it’s only the owls who patrol to watch through the night.

Tawny Owl at Night

How does your summer day go?

Writing in a Rush: Mozart’s Turkish Violin Concerto No. 5

by Maureen Buja

Written for his time at the Salzburg court, Mozart’s five violin concertos were all produced between 1773 and 1775, probably with himself as the intended conductor. The final three (k. 216, 218, and 219) were all completed in just a few weeks at the end of 1775.

Anonymous: Wolfgang Amadé Mozart with a diamond ring, gift of Maria Theresa, ca 1775 (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum)

Mozart’s concertos are built on dialogues – a constant conversation between the soloist and the orchestra. This is true of his piano concertos as of his violin concertos. Most follow the same pattern: in the first movement, the orchestra presents most (but not all) of the thematic material with an additional theme being left for the soloist to present. The first movements, in sonata-allegro form, also have short development sections, but ones that can be full of surprises in terms of harmonies and themes. Themes may vanish for the development section, only to reemerge in the recapitulation to a greater effect.

Slow movements are built around long, singing, and often complex melodies. The soloist takes the fore, but the orchestra still has a valuable role to play, particularly in the development sections.

The rondo finales are where Mozart lets himself loose. Dance music of the day is used, or perhaps even a traditional melody (Violin Concerto No. 3 introduces a melody called the Straßburger) and in the fifth concerto, an ordinary minuet is disrupted by a Turkish dance scene. One writer referred to these as ‘burlesque inserts’ and saw them as appropriate for the Salzburg scene but not the more refined Parisian music scene. The interjection of the ‘temperamental and gruff’ in a minor key really breaks up the introspection of the minuet.

The Turks had first menaced Vienna in 1529, in their first unsuccessful siege of the city, which was barely defeated by the Viennese. Winter and epidemics helped to defeat the besieging Turks. The Second Turkish Siege of 1683 held Vienna in thrall for 2 months, until the Polish army under King John III Sobieski pushed the Turks out again. The Ottoman wars with southern Europe (Venice and Vienna included) didn’t end until the early 18th century. Although Mozart was writing some 60 years later, the Turks were still a concept to be reconciled with, albeit perhaps only as an uncultured figure of fun, here interrupting a civilised minuet.

These works are Mozart’s last compositions as a violinist. Following this, the new fortepiano caught his attention, and he changed instruments. At one point, in discussing a return to Salzburg, he made it a condition to return as a keyboardist and not a violinist.

This recording was made in 1952, with Marina Kozulupova as soloist, performing with the Soviet State Orchestra under Nikolaï Anossov.

Marina Kozulupova (1918–1978)

Russian violinist Marina Semyonovna Kozolupova studied at the Moscow Conservatory and, in 1937, was awarded fifth prize at the International Ysaÿe Violin Competition in Brussels. She’s noted for her recordings of Beethoven and Bach. She taught at the Moscow Conservatory and became a professor there in 1967.

Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov

Russian conductor Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov (1900–1962) also studied at the Moscow Conservatory, although as an external student in composition. He made his debut as a conductor in 1930 and was active in more remote parts of the Soviet Union, being chief conductor of the Rostov Philharmonic Orchestra (1938–1939) and the Baku Philharmonic (1939–1940). In addition, during these years, he taught at the Azerbaijan Conservatory. Finally, he returned to Moscow in 1940 and taught opera and symphony conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. One of his students was his son, Gennady Rozhdestvensky. He was an active promoter of 20th-century foreign music and Russian music of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Performed by

Marina Kozulupova
Nikolaï Anossov
Soviet State Orchestra

Recorded in 1952

Official Website

From Orchestra to Piano: Debussy’s La Mer

by Maureen Buja

With its full title, La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (The sea, three symphonic sketches for orchestra), we can understand what Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was trying to show in his 1905 orchestral work.

I. De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to midday on the sea)
II. Jeux de vagues (Play of the Waves)
III. Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the wind and the sea)

The three sections let us know that Debussy is capturing different aspects of the sea. The three great influences on his work at the time, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Japonism, all played a role in this work. If we look at the first edition of the work, the cover makes the Japan connection clear as it shows a detail from Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Mount Fuji and all the boats in the water have been removed.

The cover for the full score, published by Durand et Fils in 1905, recoloured the wave from its original blue to ‘various shades of green, blue, tan, and beige.’

First edition cover

The work was given its orchestral premiere in October 1905 by the Orchestre Lamoureux conducted by Camille Chevillard. Early reception of the piece was poor, with audiences expecting rather more of the sea than the ‘agitated water in a saucer’ that the critics reported. It was only later, in 1908, that the work was a success. As conducted by the composer, it was felt that the 1908 concert presented the ‘first real performance of the piece’.

André Caplet, a long standing friend of Debussy’s made a two-piano arrangement of the work, which is used by the duet on this recording. It was published the same year as the premiere.

André Caplet and Debussy

As recorded by the piano duet team of Vaness Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia, the use of the two keyboards to replace the orchestra gives us a different kind of work. We’re on the top of the waves, rather than in the darker waters that the orchestral version can take us into.

Vanessa Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia (Photo by William Beaucardet)

The two performers are well aware of the different ways in which they play the piano and see value in the fact that their ‘respective touches, while not necessarily similar, go together very well (VW)’. They take up the challenge of Debussy’s orchestral timbres and how it requires a certain finesse, fluidity, and shimmer to complete the early 20th-century sound on the piano. Latchoumia quotes Debussy: ‘It was Debussy who encouraged pianists to look for a mellow sound that would make you forget the instrument has hammers. I think that sums up the way we should approach French music’.

The pianists deliberately chose to use André Caplet’s version of La mer for 2 pianos rather than Debussy’s version for 1 piano 4 hands. Even Debussy thought Caplet’s version was better than his!

Wagner and Latchoumia’s recording presents the best of French music at the turn of the century with the trio of Debussy, Satie, and Ravel, but in works that are often more famililar in the orchestra versions. Ravel’s La Valse, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune are given in their piano transcriptions. Works so familiar heard in a new guise can be so rewarding.

Debussy, Ravel, Satie: Piano Twins
Vanessa Wagner and Wilhem Latchoumia
La Dolce Volta LDV 120

Official Website