Program Notes for Serenades and Dances
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears |
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) arr. by Lucas Drew: Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Serenade for Strings (1875) Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, op. 31 (1943) Béla Bartók (1881-1945): Romanian Folk Dances (1917) Program notes by |
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) arr. by Lucas Drew:
Italian Serenade (1887)
Having written nearly 300 Lieder during his relatively short and turbulent lifetime, Hugo Wolf ranks as one of the most prolific and distinctive composers of the German art song. As inheritor of the Lied tradition, which had been so firmly established by Schubert and Schumann, Wolf continued to refine the limitless possibilities inherent in combining text and tone. Strongly influenced by Wagner, Wolf employed imaginative chromatic coloring and intricate, idiosyncratic lines to capture subtle complexities of the poetry to which he was so finely attuned. For musicologist Eric Sams, Wolf’s songs represented the culmination of an era of the German Romantic Lied by creating “a complete theatre of the mind, a Gesamtkunstwerk for voice and piano.”
Like Schumann, Wolf’s sensitivity to language produced not only a wealth of songs, but also a significant body of music criticism. From 1884-87 Wolf served as music critic for the Salonblatt, a Viennese weekly. While the position earned him a much-needed stable income, his impassioned and often incendiary reviews also earned him an unfavorable reputation as “the wild Wolf.” An ardent Wagnerian working in Vienna, Wolf the music critic undermined Wolf the composer through his merciless attacks on the music of Brahms and numerous others. Such vitriol did not engender goodwill when it came time for his own works to be performed.
Within Wolf’s oeuvre, the Italian Serenade seems to stand out as an anomaly, given the immense outpouring of Lieder that Wolf produced. He was indeed more comfortable and productive working within the private, intimate, and text-driven realm of song. Of the many attempts Wolf made to complete an opera, the only work premiered was Der Corregidor (The Magistrate), a comic work adapted from the Spanish novella The Three Cornered Hat, with a libretto by peace activist and feminist Rosa Mayreder. Wolf also completed the symphonic poem Penthesilea, inspired by Kleist’s play of the same name. From 1879-1884, Wolf completed a string quartet in D minor, which was performed only months before the composer’s death in 1903.
While composing the Serenade, Wolf was setting the poetry of Eichendorff; in fact, echoes from “Der Soldat I,” one of the Eichendorff Lieder, can be heard in the Serenade. Wolf was also immersed in the German Romantic writer’s Italian-themed novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing). In many respects Wolf’s Serenade captures the mood, atmosphere, and to some listeners, even the events depicted in the book. Taugenichts is a book that resounds with music: the “good-for-nothing” protagonist fiddles, sings, and poeticizes his way from his German home to sunny Italy after his father sends him out into the world to earn his keep. One of the novella’s episodes depicts a small ensemble playing a serenade, a scene which some say inspired Wolf’s conception of the piece.
The Serenade was composed in the span of three days in 1887. Originally conceived as a suite for string quartet, the single movement that resulted Wolf referred to as his Serenade in G major, or simply Serenade. Five years later in 1892, Wolf transcribed the piece for string orchestra with the name Italienische Serenade; this is the version that is performed this evening. Although the larger work never materialized, most likely due to Wolf’s failing health, he nonetheless continued to work on the orchestration even while hospitalized during the final stages of syphilis. Published only months after his death in 1903, the expanded version calls for a solo viola, strings, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns.
The Serenade is by far Wolf’s most well known instrumental work, having gained a firm place in the standard performing repertoire. One of Wolf’s earliest biographers Ernest Newman predicted the piece’s eventual success when he wrote in 1907: “the Italienische Serenade should become popular when it is more fully known.” It is featured on the disc Bella Italia, which Ms. Salerno Sonnenberg recorded in 1996 with colleagues from the Aspen Music Festival. Numerous adaptations and arrangements of the work are a further testament to its popularity.
The jovial, carefree Serenade, loosely cast in rondo form, opens with the tempo marking “extremely fast,” and indeed the piece lilts by buoyantly and lightheartedly in a matter of minutes. Wolf’s known penchant for finding musical inspiration in narrative sources has prompted many to hear the Serenade as a programmatic piece; such a reading finds in the opening eight bars the sound of a small band tuning up before actually embarking on a serenade itself, in which a suitor (played by the cello in recitative) proclaims his love for the maiden, who responds flirtatiously.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Serenade for Strings (1875)
Dvořák’s Serenade in E Major was written in 1875, a year of productivity that included a number of chamber works, the Symphony No. 5 in F major, and a five-act grand opera, Vanda. Dvořák was most likely propelled into compositional activity after winning the Austrian State Prize earlier in the year. Certainly the 400 gulden stipend must have provided a welcome relief from financial constraints, yet even more valuable for Dvořák would be gaining the attention of Johannes Brahms, who served on the jury of the prize-granting committee. The ardent support of Brahms helped catapult the career and reputation of the 34-year old Dvořák, ultimately enabling him to expand his musical reach beyond his native Bohemia. By 1878, Dvořák’s music would be published by the renowned Fritz Simrock in Berlin, and soon afterward concerts of Dvořák’s compositions were given in such cities as Dresden, Hamburg, Nice, London, and Riga—and across the Atlantic in New York, Baltimore, and Cincinnati.
However, closer to home in Vienna, the German-speaking capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hostility towards its ethnic and cultural minorities was pervasive. As a “minority” Czech composer, Dvořák was sensitive to such disdainful treatment, and performances of his works at times proved difficult to launch. Anti-minority attitudes in Vienna most likely caused a cancellation of the Serenade’s intended premiere; the first performance took place instead in Prague, where it was performed by members of the Prague Philharmonic. This same political climate likely contributed to the suspension of the 1880 premiere of his Symphony No. 6, a work Dvořák dedicated to the Vienna Philharmonic’s music director Hans Richter. While there is no consensus on the precise reason for the performance’s postponement, some scholars believe the cause was anti-Czech sentiment within the ranks of the Philharmonic itself. The symphony was performed in Vienna several years later, only after the political climate proved less hostile towards minorities.
On the surface, the five-movement Serenade purports to be as serene as its name suggests, and in general, the work exudes an easygoing charm, a graceful simplicity, and a polished beauty. Dvořák’s technical skill and expertise as a performing violist enabled him to create music that is idiomatically tailored to the work’s stringed instruments. The Serenade can be read as Dvořák’s expression of gratitude for his hard-won Austrian prize and as a genuflection before Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven—the Classical masters he so revered. A deep listening may also suggest that Dvořák is on his very best, most well-mannered Viennese behavior, at least in the work’s first four movements, as if to demonstrate that he is no Bohemian bumpkin, but rather a well-tutored composer who can stay “inside the lines” and cater respectfully to the expectations of German-speaking Viennese high culture when appropriate. And when the time is right, Dvořák can assert his own uniquely personal voice.
Each of the first four movements obeys a formalized tripartite design, and it is only in the work’s final movement that Dvořák lets loose, vigorously displaying a more spontaneous side. The opening Moderato begins with an expansive and inspired main theme in E major, introduced by the second violins, echoed by the cellos, and then taken over by the first violins. The middle section modulates to a G major dancelike theme characterized by a dotted rhythm. The initial theme is heard again as the movement returns to E major.
Tempo di Valse, a nostalgic nod to a bygone era of elegant gracefulness, opens with a dreamily opulent yet melancholy waltz in C sharp minor followed by a melodiously buoyant trio. The Scherzo opens with an energetic liveliness reminiscent of Mendelssohn and transitions to a central section that tends toward a broodingly romantic lyricism. The movement’s theme undergoes a variety of permutations in temper and tempo. The tender Larghetto begins with a slow, dreamy and pensive melody. Here, Dvořák shows off luscious harmonies and exquisite melodic lines; there are evocations of the Tempo di Valse themes that induce a yearning for past beauty. The Finale begins with an emphatic pronouncement of sorts, and it is in this movement that we find Dvořák bursting with untamed exuberance. The movement insistently whisks us away, galloping into a rustically idyllic world. Lovely moments from the Larghetto are recalled, and we are also wistfully reminded of the beautiful main theme of the opening movement. A presto coda forms a wild ride that ends decisively with three E major chords.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976):
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, op. 31 (1943)
Click here for the full libretto.
Britten completed the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, the second of his three orchestral song cycles in 1943, in the midst of World War II. Both he and tenor Peter Pears had just returned to England after a three-year sojourn in the United States, where they had traveled at the invitation of friend, poet and fellow British expatriate W.H. Auden. During this time abroad, Britten and Pears began their lifelong partnership and rich musical collaboration. As ardent pacifists and conscientious objectors, both had hoped to find a more progressive environment in which to live and work during the years of war. Indeed, Britten demonstrated an ability to venture “far from home” (compositionally speaking) in his 1939 setting of Rimbaud’s wildly surreal poetry in Les Illuminations for voice and orchestra. In this work, translated as “illuminations,” but also suggestive of “visions,” Britten seemed to have left behind any trace of his provincial origins; his compositional palette broadened to match, and even exceed, the intoxicating, visionary images of the symbolist poet.
The Serenade charted a different course: here was a shift to a song cycle constructed solely of English poems, reflecting the homesick Britten’s return to England. After the impassioned Illuminations, Britten’s Serenade took a rather sobering, but ultimately serene, turn in representing the outer and inner landscape of dusk in the English countryside. Britten followed this nighttime trajectory with his third orchestral song cycle of 1958, his Nocturne for tenor, seven obbligato instruments and strings, also based on poems by British poets.
The story of the Serenade’s origins generally focuses on the tenor and hornist who inspired the piece: Peter Pears and Dennis Brain, the 22-year old virtuoso hornist and principal of the RAF Orchestra who entreated Britten to write a piece for him. Still to be added to the compelling personal dimension of the work’s origins is the story of the Serenade as a response to its historical and cultural moment, specifically as a work written during one of the 20th century’s most horrific periods. Britten himself may have helped to divert closer inspection of the piece by dismissing it as “not important stuff, but quite pleasant, I think.”
The uniquely fresh sonorities produced by Britten’s unusual scoring for this song cycle suggests a renewed perspective on his native Britain, from which he had been separated for three long years and by one vast ocean. Known for being exquisitely well-read and sensitive to poetry, Britten established himself as a powerful vocal composer. After the Serenade, Britten went on to write numerous songs, choral works, and operas.
The reviews of one of the early performances of the Serenade with Pears and Brain were less than favorable: the renowned hornist was unduly faulted for ruining Britten’s music by playing out of tune. In an explanatory letter to the music journal Tempo, Britten wrote: “In the Prologue and Epilogue the horn is directed to play on the natural harmonics of the instrument; this causes the apparent ‘out-of-tuneness’…which is exactly the effect I intend.” This “out-of-tune” sound of the horn most closely resembles the natural sound of a hunting horn, a melancholic signifier of a lost, bygone era, one that signals the rustic simplicity of the English countryside. It is with this sound of the solo horn that the work begins, casting over the work a mood of innocence and simplicity lost.
The six poems that comprise the Serenade are texts by English poets spanning four centuries: Charles Cotton, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Blake, Ben Jonson, John Keats, and an anonymous 15th century poet. “Pastoral” by Charles Cotton describes the setting of the sun in the countryside. Britten biographer Humphrey Carpenter points to the work of 19th century landscape painter John Constable as the visual analogue to this song. “Nocturne,” with a text by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, depicts another sunset scene that harks back to a magical time and place, of “castle walls” and “snowy summits,” where “the horns of Elfland” blow. Notable here is the “dying, dying, dying” of the bugle’s echo.
William Blake’s “Elegy” (“O Rose thou art sick”) serves as the literal centerpiece of the cycle. One of the most familiar poems in English Romanticism, this poem from Blake’s “Songs of Experience” describes a seemingly inevitable loss of purity by a destructive force. The anonymous 15th century “Lyke Wake Dirge,” (literally translated as “corpse watch” dirge) is a traditional English ballad written in an old Yorkshire dialect. Britten sets it as an eerie prayer (“And Christe receive thy saule,” [and Christ receive thy soul”]), ghoulishly intoned by the tenor, creating a terrifying effect. The poor soul addressed in the song makes its journey away from its earthly corpse. While the soul is reminded of possible transgressions to having lived a pure and virtuous Christian life, the threat of being cast into hell looms ever large.
In an abrupt change of mood and tempo, “Hymn,” a setting of Ben Jonson’s “Hymn to Diana” is a bright, lively, Baroque-sounding celebration of the goddess of the hunt, with voice and horn spiritedly engaged. The final song “Sonnet” sets John Keats’s “Sonnet to Sleep.” The horn is conspicuously absent from this section, suggesting that the speaker may already be in an otherworldly realm, having traversed the space between wakefulness and sleep or between life and death. The ethereal serenity created by shimmering strings is interrupted briefly by a guilty, anxious outcry, as expressed in the lines “Save me from curious conscience, that still lords/Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole.” Apprehension yields to tranquility as the song fades into silence. The Epilogue ends the work as it began, with the solitary horn echoing the opening Prologue.
Will Crutchfield has recently written a fitting summing-up of the power of Britten’s Serenade, calling it “one of the most nearly perfect song cycles in existence: its beauties are immediately apparent yet familiarity deepens them; the poems are great ones and faithfully treated, but they do not overshadow the music; the six songs are wonderfully contrasted yet there are unforced links, and the balance among them is perfect, with nothing essential unsaid and nothing superfluously repeated.”
Click here for the full libretto.
Béla Bartók (1881-1945): Romanian Folk Dances (1917)
As composer, pedagogue, pianist, and ethnomusicologist, Béla Bartók stands as one of the most inventive figures in twentieth-century music. Born in a part of Hungary that is now Romania, Bartók brought to his musical occupations a keen sensitivity and intuitive understanding of the uniqueness and authenticity of indigenous music, especially that which originated in the diverse ethnic regions of Eastern Europe. He journeyed to the most remote parts of Central and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Turkey to seek out and collect music produced by local inhabitants.
Bartók’s lifelong commitment to preserving folk music is reported to have begun during a summer stay in Slovakia in 1904 when he overheard a woman singing a traditional peasant tune. Bartók immediately jotted down what he had heard, capturing what he thought was sure to become a lost cultural form. In the following year Bartók met composer and pioneering musical ethnographer Zoltán Kodály, and the two formed an enduring collaboration that resulted in the preservation of several thousand folk songs, many of which they recorded with the recently invented Edison cylinder phonograph. Bartók and Kodaly traveled to isolated, outlying areas of Hungary and Romania, systematically collecting, documenting ,and later analyzing the myriad iterations and variations of the songs and dances they encountered.
The melodies found in Romania held special interest for Bartók, as he thought their insularity from external influence represented folk music in its purest, most authentic form. Recent Bartók scholarship has explored the ways in which Bartok’s own musical compositions combine his twin concerns for authenticity, which he found in folk music, with innovation, which he strived for as a twentieth-century modernist. Bartók’s music represents a distinctive and completely original path through the wilderness of early twentieth-century musical modernism.
Originally composed for piano in 1915, Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances were later arranged for violin and piano, and then for chamber orchestra. Brimming with rhythmic vitality, melodic richness, and harmonic color, the Romanian Folk Dances, are among Bartók’s most popular and approachable works, and they continue to inspire new transcriptions and arrangements. In August, the New Century Chamber Orchestra led by Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg released a recording of this work on the compact disc entitled Together.
The first of the dances, Jocul cu bâta (Bot tánc) [Stick dance] has its origins in Mezoszabad, Transylvania. Bartók reportedly heard this tune played by two Romanian gypsy violinists. Brâul [Sash dance] is a type of chain dance performed by inhabitants of Egres in the Torontál area; the dance makes use of a sash, or cloth belt. Pe loc (topogó) [in one spot], also from the Torontál, is a “stamping dance” performed “in one spot,” or in place. It begins with a simple drone followed by a haunting, mysterious melody.
Buciumeana (buscumi tánc) [horn dance], from the Torda-Aranyos region in central Romania, features an exotic, languorous melody that builds in intensity and then softens as it closes. Poarga românesca (Román “polka”) [Romanian “polka”] hails from the Bihar region. Like life at its most exuberant, the dance is all-too-brief, moving by swiftly and with abandon, only to come to a sudden close. Immediately, though, we are swept into two final dances, from Bihar and Torda-Aranyos respectively; both are entitled Maruntel (Aprózó) [fast dance] and played without pause. These final dances express irrepressible, adrenalized vitality, and it is at this level of fever-pitched intensity and joyful abandon that the dances end.