The Peninsula Music Festival - 59th Season 2011 - Program Notes
Program 2 - Thursday, August 4, 2011 - Liszt-Berlioz Fest I
Rákóczy March from The Damnation of Faust, Op. 24
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Composed in 1845-1846.
Premiered on December 6, 1846 in Paris.
This is the first performance of the Berlioz Rákóczy March at the Peninsula Music Festival.
Berlioz was 24, and consumed by the fit of raging passion for the English actress Harriet Smithson that flared into the Symphonie Fantastique, when Gérard de Nerval published his French translation of Goethe’s Faust, Part I in 1827. “This marvelous book fascinated me from the very first moment,” he wrote. “I could not put it down. I read it incessantly, at meals, in the theater, in the street, everywhere. This translation in prose contained some versified fragments, songs, hymns, etc. I yielded to the temptation of setting them to music.” The result was the Eight Scenes from “Faust” for voices and orchestra of 1829, which Berlioz had printed (“foolishly,” he later admitted) at his own expense — actually, financed by a loan from one of his students — and sent off to Goethe for the great man’s opinion. (“Berlioz shrank from nothing. Had Virgil been alive, a copy of Les Troyens would have undoubtedly been mailed to Rome promptly upon publication,” chided Louis Biancolli.) Goethe, whose musical taste was both untrained and conservative, sought advice on the score from his friend Carl Zelter, the distinguished Berlin composer, choir master and teacher of Mendelssohn. They concluded that Berlioz’s music merited unstinted vilification, and in a letter to him compared it to “a fragment of an abortion resulting from a hideous incest.” Berlioz did not bother to reply.
Berlioz’s Faust then lay fallow until 1845, when he was on an extended concert tour of Austria, Hungary and Germany. He collected some scraps from the earlier Eight Scenes, largely concocted his own text on the Faust tales, and set to work on his “dramatic legend” while bouncing along in a coach between Eastern European cities. (He left a detailed account of the work’s genesis in his fascinating Memoirs.) The piece, titled The Damnation of Faust, was completed in Paris the following year, and first heard at the Opéra-Comique in December. The premiere was a disaster. Hardly half of the seats were filled, and Berlioz acquired some 10,000 francs in debt. “Nothing in my career as an artist has wounded me more deeply,” he admitted. It was not until 1876, seven years after his death, that The Damnation of Faust achieved success, and then immediately, almost ironically, became his most popular work in Paris — it had to be repeated constantly for six weeks, and was given an average of a half dozen times annually by the prestigious Colonne Orchestra for the next 25 years.
The set of three excerpts from The Damnation of Faust — Minuet of the Will-o’-the-Wisps, Dance of the Sylphs and Rákóczy March — has figured on symphonic concerts since at least the 1870s, when the Theodore Thomas Orchestra introduced the music to America at a concert in Boston. Berlioz related the background of the Rákóczy March in his Memoirs: “The night before my departure from Vienna for Hungary, a Viennese amateur well up on the ways of the country I was to visit came to see me, bringing a volume of old airs. ‘If you want the Hungarians to like you,’ he said, ‘write a piece on one of their national tunes.’” Berlioz chose the song written in 1809 by the Gypsy violinist and conductor János Bihari to honor the Rákóczys, a noble family active in the Hungarian struggle for independence from Austria since the early 18th century. The piece that Berlioz erected on Bihari’s theme was received tumultuously by the Hungarian patriots when the composer premiered it in Pesth on February 15, 1846. More than simply a stirring March (George Bernard Shaw wrote that he would “charge out and capture Trafalgar Square single-handed” if it lasted one minute more), the Rákóczy March seemed to the Hungarians to distill the essence of their fiery calls for independence that were to erupt in violence only two years later. Such was the success of this piece that Berlioz made room for it in the finished Damnation of Faust by incongruously transporting his German hero to a Hungarian plain to witness a charge of the national cavalry. “I should not have hesitated to bring him in any other direction if it would have benefited the piece,” explained the pragmatic composer.
Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Composed in 1872.
Premiered on January 19, 1873 in Paris, with Auguste Tolbecque as soloist.
First performed at the PMF in 1953 with John Ehrlich as soloist and Thor Johnson conducting. Most recently performed at the PMF in 2003 with Mark Kosower as soloist and Victor Yampolsky conducting.
Much of the history of 19th-century music could be written in the terms of Beethoven’s influence. Beside exploding the emotional and expressive boundaries of earlier music, he also bequeathed the composers who followed a whole arsenal of technical weapons with which to do battle against those devilishly recalcitrant musical notes: rich harmonies, complex textures, expanded instrumental resources, vibrant rhythmic constructions. Not the least of his compositional legacies was the process of total musical structure. His symphonies, for example, were created as great single spans of tightly integrated music rather than as four separate movements, as were the models he inherited. He accomplished this structural unity in two ways. One was by connecting movements directly together, as in the closing two movements of the Fifth Symphony and the last three of the Sixth. The other was by recalling themes from earlier movements during the unfolding of the piece. The towering example of this device is the finale of the Ninth Symphony, which brings back fragments from each of the preceding movements. This technique of formal integration, of creating an inexorable logic that drives the music from first movement to finale, became one of the touchstones of Romantic music.
Most of the important Romantic composers followed the lead of Beethoven in finding such integrated structures for at least some of their large, symphonic works. Berlioz in his Symphonie Fantastique (written only three years after Beethoven’s death) adopted the so-called “cyclical” procedure of the Ninth Symphony by inserting into each of his work’s five movements an “idée fixe,” a musical phrase representing his beloved. Not only are the four movements of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony directed to be played without pause, but they also share melodic material, as do the movements of his Piano Concerto. One movement is joined directly to the next in Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony and Violin Concerto. In Bruckner’s Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, themes from earlier movements are forged into triumphant apotheoses when they are brought back in the grand closing pages of those scores. It was Franz Liszt who found the logical conclusion to this formal process of structural integration in his tone poems, splendid works which simultaneously embody characteristics of single- and multiple-movement compositions. Camille Saint-Saëns, too, a staunch defender of both Liszt and Berlioz, was another who chose this formal path toward enriching the musical experience of his art.
Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto, First Violin Concerto and this A minor Cello Concerto are among his compositions which exhibit carefully integrated formal structures. The Cello Concerto is in a single movement. It begins with an impetuous theme in rushing triplets for the soloist that recurs throughout the piece like a supporting pillar. A contrasting, lyrical second theme for the cello is accompanied by a sedate, chordal accompaniment for the string choir. The vibrant motion of the opening theme soon returns and encourages the entire ensemble to join in a developmental discussion. The lyrical theme is heard again, this time as a transition to the Concerto’s central portion, a slow movement with the sweet spirit of a delicate minuet embroidered with a simple, flowing descant from the soloist. The mood of this quiet, little dance is broken by a resumption of the rushing triplet theme acting as a link to the Concerto’s last large division. After a brief pause, the finale-like section begins with the cellist’s introduction of a gently syncopated theme. The music builds on this theme, and adds another in the cello’s sonorous, low register as it calls forth increasingly brilliant pyrotechnics from the soloist. One final time, the rushing triplet theme returns, to mark the beginning of the coda and launch the Concerto on its invigorating dash to the end.
A Faust Symphony (after Goethe), Three Character Pictures for Orchestra
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Composed in 1854 and 1857.
Premiered on September 7, 1857 in Weimar, conducted by the composer.
This is the first PMF performance of Liszt's Faust Symphony.
There was a historical Faust. The Doctor Faustus who provided one of the most enduring figures in Western folklore and literature lived in Germany in the early 16th century, gaining a wide reputation as a necromancer, astrologer, alchemist and sorcerer. So extraordinary were his powers, so tangled the path of his life, so evil his reputation, that the popular belief sprang up that he was in league with the devil himself; Faustus more than once referred to that unearthly force as his “crony.” Though many scholars accused him of being nothing more than a brazen charlatan, he threw enough of a fright into the fledgling Protestant clergy that he was denounced by Luther and Melanchthon. Soon after his death, around 1540, Faust came to symbolize the man endowed with special powers during his earthly life at the cost of his own eternal damnation. The tales about Faust first found their way into literature when they were woven through the Faustbuch, published by a now-unknown author in 1587, in which Faust was made to give accounts of legendary, ancient and medieval sorcerers and occultists from his own merciless point of view. The incarnation of the lord of the underworld, Mephistopheles — savage, ironical, scheming, wicked — and his hellish domain were made chillingly vivid in that telling. Translations quickly spread the Faustbuch across Europe, and by 1604, the English dramatist Christopher Marlowe had produced his History of Dr. Faustus, which retained some of the coarse humor and sensational images of the original work but added to them a certain dignity and tragedy. Plays and puppet shows on the Faust theme were popular for the next two centuries, as were manuals of magic bearing Faust’s name explaining how to avoid a pact with the devil, or, if it came to that, how to break one. In 1784, the German rationalist writer Gotthold Lessing tried to redeem Faust in an unfinished play by depicting him as a noble man in pursuit of knowledge at any cost. This redemptive thread was taken up by Goethe in his renowned transfiguration of the Faust legend into a cosmic treatise on man’s relation to the universe. (Part I was published in 1808; Part II in 1832, shortly after the author’s death.)
Franz Liszt came to know Goethe’s Faust, in the French translation by Gérard de Nerval, through Hector Berlioz, whom he met for the first time in Paris in December 1830, just before the premiere of the Symphonie Fantastique. Berlioz admitted, “This marvelous book fascinated me from the very first moment” (he completed his evening-length “dramatic legend” The Damnation of Faust in 1846), but Liszt warmed to it more slowly, saying that “in my youth, Faust seemed to me a decidedly bourgeois character … [who] takes no action and lets himself be driven, hesitates, experiments, loses his way, considers, bargains and is only interested in his own little happiness.” (Liszt was not yet twenty when he first read the book.) As Liszt matured, however, his opinion of Goethe’s masterwork grew, and he came to carry a copy of Faust with him constantly, along with Dante’s Divine Comedy.
By the early 1840s, Liszt was considering basing a composition on Goethe’s Faust, but his continual touring as the day’s leading piano virtuoso kept him from progressing beyond a few unconnected sketches. In 1848, he abandoned the European concert circuit to become court music director at Weimar, Goethe’s home for many years before his death in 1832. Liszt became imbued with the spirit of Goethe after settling in Weimar, and for the city’s celebration of the centenary of the writer’s birth, on August 28, 1849, he conducted an excerpt from Robert Schumann’s gestating Scenes from Goethe’s “Faust” as part of the festivities. (Schumann did not complete the work until 1853.) The following year Liszt tried (unsuccessfully) to establish a “Goethe Foundation” to award prizes in the arts, and he also entertained the visiting translator Gérard de Nerval at his home; in 1852, he invited Berlioz to Weimar to conduct The Damnation of Faust. Liszt must have been accumulating ideas for his own composition based on Faust during those years, but the catalyst to begin serious work on the score seems to have been the discussions that he had with the English philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes when he descended upon Weimar in August 1854 to do research for his pioneering biography of Goethe. Despite the ambitious scale of the Faust Symphony, most of the score was completed at lightning speed during the following two months. (Liszt added an optional epilogue for tenor and male chorus, which took the closing lines of Goethe’s poem as its text, in 1857. This performance uses the original orchestra-only version.) Liszt conducted the work’s premiere on September 7, 1857 at the unveiling of Ernst Reitschel’s joint monument to Goethe and Schiller that still stands in front of Weimar’s National Theater.
Barry Millington, the English musicologist and authority on Liszt and Wagner, summarized Goethe’s version of the tale, which sees Faust as an aged academic willing to trade his soul for love, riches and renewed youth: “Faust, impatient with the limits imposed by academic knowledge, longs to transcend them and live life to the full. He strikes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, by which diabolic magical powers are put at his disposal so long as he continues to strive. If, however, he should once express satisfaction with his lot, his soul can be claimed by Mephistopheles. Faust is presented to the innocent Gretchen, whom he seduces and destroys. He reforms somewhat and at the end of a long, rich life, he at last expresses satisfaction. Mephistopheles claims his soul, but he is borne aloft by angels, saved by Gretchen’s redeeming love.”
A Faust Symphony comprises three movements — “character pictures,” Liszt called them — that capture the emotional essences of the main protagonists rather than portray any of the story’s specific events. The opening movement depicts Faust in his varied moods: pensive and mysterious (a slow-tempo, harmonically ambiguous motive of short, separated phrases that defies a clear tonality by using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale); longing, uncertainty and sadness (a motive, presented by the oboe in the fourth measure, that begins with a wide falling seventh, one of music’s most expressive intervals); passion and ambition (a fast, agitated strain initiated by the violins after a doleful bassoon solo based on the “longing” motive); love (a tender, lyrical idea, the movement’s formal second theme, first given by clarinet and horn); and pride or, perhaps, heroism (a bold, swaggering subject led by the brass). The movement is a tour-de-force of mid-19th-century symphonic formal practices, combining traditional sonata form with the sectional structure that Liszt had developed for his tone poems by presenting, returning and balancing the themes according to classical practice but developing them throughout rather than just in the central section, and by separating them with related or contrasting episodes.
Gretchen, the subject of the second movement, is evoked by a melody of celestial purity first heard as a duet for oboe and viola following a sweet, chaste introduction from the flutes and clarinets. The intensity rises when several of Faust’s themes from the first movement are entwined with those of Gretchen as the movement unfolds. The recall of Gretchen’s themes brings the movement to a halcyon close. In addition to its expressive effect, this luminous movement is also one of the finest examples of Liszt’s orchestral craftsmanship. “Across its sonic surface,” wrote Alan Walker in his authoritative study of the composer, “Liszt unfurls a kaleidoscopic array of chamber-music textures in which every player is a soloist.”
Mephistopheles, as is his wont, works his will upon what he finds, so the finale is spun from diabolical transformations of Faust’s motives; the devil gets only one new theme, a motive (an expectant harmony followed by two staccato points of punctuation) that Liszt borrowed from his Malédiction (“Curse”) Concerto of the mid-1830s, where he labeled it “Pride.” The renowned English music critic Ernest Newman wrote that the finale “consists, for the most part, of a kind of burlesque upon the subjects of the Faust movement which are here passed, as it were, through a continuous fire of irony and ridicule.” The finale’s form, like that of the opening movement, is a hybrid of sonata, developmental and episodic practices, and often takes on the character of a demonic scherzo.
“The Faust Symphony,” wrote the noted English critic and poet Sacheverell Sitwell, “represents Liszt at the summit of his powers, in the acme of his achievement. The Romantic Revival — such shades as those of Ossian, Byron, Hoffmann, Delacroix, Berlioz, Paganini — attains its culmination in this work.”
©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda