The Peninsula Music Festival - Season 2009 Program Notes
Program 2 - Thursday, August 6, 2009 - Beethoven's Piano Concerti & Ballet I
Quiet City for Strings, Trumpet and English Horn
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Composed in 1940.
Premiered on January 28, 1941 in New York, conducted by Daniel Saidenberg.
By 1940, Copland had passed through two compositional styles and was well into his third. The first period, guided by the teaching of the great and influential French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, showed his interest in jazz with such works as the Piano Concerto and Music for the Theater. The second phase was one of abstract, powerful, often dissonant compositions, as exemplified by the Short Symphony and Statements for Orchestra. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Copland espoused a more direct and accessible style, heavily indebted to folklore and nationalism. The epochal ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring are the most famous products of those years, but there are many other works, less well known, that also reflect the concerns of Copland and his colleagues at the time when they were searching for a concert music with a true American identity.
The composer explained his position in an autobiographical sketch in his book The New Music: “By the end of 1939, the artists of America had lived through a very special ten years. In all the arts the Depression had aroused a wave of sympathy for and identification with the common man. In music this was combined with the heady wine of suddenly feeling ourselves — the composers, that is — needed as never before. Previously our works had been self-engendered: no one asked for them; we simply wrote them out of our own need. Now, suddenly, functional music was in demand as never before, certainly as never before in the experience of our serious composers. Motion-picture and ballet companies, radio stations and schools, film and theater producers discovered us. The music appropriate for the different kinds of cooperative ventures undertaken by these people had to be simpler and more direct. There was a ‘market’ especially for music evocative of the American scene. This kind of sale for music, so new then, is now taken for granted by both entrepreneurs and composers. But in the late ’30s and early 40s it was almost without precedent.”
Copland used this style, with its immediate, simple, emotional appeal, in his incidental music for Irwin Shaw’s experimental play Quiet City, which explored the “night thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city.” The principal character was a jazz trumpeter, the spokesman for the author, whose music was intended to “arouse the conscience of his fellow players and of the audience.” The play was withdrawn after only two performances, but friends urged Copland to arrange his music into an independent orchestral piece. The composer explained that he “borrowed the name, the trumpet, and some of the themes from the original play” to create a tone-picture “evocative of the nostalgia and inner distress of a society profoundly aware of its own insecurity.” The trumpet wailing in the night, the husky sound of the English horn, the brooding string harmonies — all create a nostalgic but world-weary mood that is the musical counterpart of the novels of Raymond Chandler and the paintings of Edward Hopper. Wrote one critic after the premiere, “[Quiet City sings of] silent streets, the slogging gait of a dispossessed man, and some of the feeling of mournful beauty that comes from loneliness.”
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Composed in 1797-1803.
Premiered on April 4, 1803, with the composer as soloist.
Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto was last performed at the Peninsula Music Festival on August 13, 1988 with Anton Nel, soloist, and Victor Yampolsky conducting.
By 1803, Emanuel Schickaneder, the colorful character who figured so prominently in the closing pages of Mozart’s life as the librettist and producer of The Magic Flute, had taken over the management of Vienna’s Theater-an-der-Wien. His house was locked in a fierce competitive battle with the court-subsidized Kärntnertortheater, run by Baron Peter von Braun. When von Braun hired the distinguished Luigi Cherubini as resident composer, Schickaneder felt obliged to counter with his own music master, and he approached Beethoven with an offer. Beethoven, who had felt the need to write for the stage for some time, accepted gladly — especially since the job carried free lodgings in the theater as part of the compensation. He and Schickaneder dutifully plowed through a small library of possibilities for an operatic subject, but none inspired Beethoven until he took up work on Fidelio late in 1803.
In the meantime, Beethoven took advantage of his theatrical connection to put some of his instrumental works on display. Since opera was forbidden in Catholic countries during Lent at that time, the Theater-an-der-Wien was available for concerts in the early spring, and Beethoven scheduled such an event during April 1803. It had been fully three years since he last presented a concert entirely of his own music, and he had several scores that were awaiting their first presentations, including the Second Symphony, the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and this Third Piano Concerto. He programmed all of these, and, for good measure, tossed in the First Symphony, which had been premiered at his concert three years earlier. When word of this performance reached Baron von Braun at the Kärntnertortheater, he thought that the same night would be an appropriate one on which to present Haydn’s The Creation, then the most popular composer and music in Europe. He immediately engaged a double orchestra of Vienna’s best performers and printed posters to announce the event. He beat Beethoven and Schickaneder to the punch. When they went to hire orchestral players, they found the ones they wanted were already committed to von Braun, and had to settle for a pick-up ensemble of second-rate musicians.
Beethoven proceeded enthusiastically with plans for the concert, working right up to the last minute putting finishing touches on the new compositions. (His pupil Ferdinand Ries found him in bed writing trombone parts for the oratorio only three hours before the rehearsal began.) He had only a single rehearsal on the concert day for this wealth of unfamiliar music, and, with his less-than-adept players, it is little wonder that it went poorly. The rehearsal began at 8:00 a.m. and, Ries recalled, “It was a terrible one, lasting six and a half hours and leaving Beethoven more or less discontented. [At 2:30, his patron] the Prince Karl Lichnowsky, who had been present from the beginning, ordered large baskets of bread and butter, cold meat and wine to be brought in. He invited in a friendly manner everyone to partake, and all helped themselves with both hands. As a result everybody grew good-humored.” The rehearsal was able to continue, and ended only shortly before the concert began at 6:00. The public and critical response to the concert was lukewarm, undoubtedly due in large part to the inadequate performance. Beethoven, however, was delighted to have played his music for the Viennese public, and he was well on his way to becoming recognized more for his ability as a composer than as a pianist.
Ignaz von Seyfried, composer of light operas and conductor at the Theater-an-der-Wien, participated in the premiere of the Third Concerto as page-turner for Beethoven, who was the soloist in the new Concerto. Von Seyfried reported, “He invited me to turn pages for him during the playing of his concerto, but — heavens! — this was more easily said than done. I saw almost completely empty sheets, at the most on some pages a few Egyptian hieroglyphics scribbled down to serve him as guides, but entirely unintelligible to me; for he played almost the whole solo part from memory since, as usual, he lacked the time to write it down. Thus, he only gave me a furtive sign when he reached the end of an invisible passage. My scarcely concealed anxiety lest I miss this decisive moment amused him a good deal, and during our common, merry supper [after the concert] he split his sides laughing about it.” The piano part was apparently not written down until more than a year after the premiere, when Beethoven finally transcribed it from his head onto paper for its performance by Ries at an Augarten concert in July 1804.
The score of the Third Concerto is inscribed, “Concerto 1800 da L.v. Beethoven.” The year 1800 also saw the composition of the First Symphony, the E-flat Septet, the Op. 18 Quartets, the Op. 22 Piano Sonata and the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives. It is especially in the Concerto, however, that a new, deeper mode of expression in Beethoven’s music became evident. Sir Donald Tovey wrote that it is “one of the works in which we most clearly see the style of Beethoven’s first period preparing to develop into that of his second.” The key of C minor (the same as that of the Fifth Symphony), the complete integration of piano and orchestra, and the enriched texture all point toward the great masterpieces that were soon to come. The C minor Concerto is a work that achieves a nearly perfect balance between the requirements of traditional, Classical forms and the heightened emotional expression of the Romantic era.
The first movement opens with the longest introductory orchestral tutti in Beethoven’s concertos, virtually a full symphonic exposition in itself. The strings in unison present immediately the main theme, “a group of pregnant figures,” assessed Tovey, “which nobody but Beethoven could have invented.” The lyrical second theme is sung by violins and clarinet in a contrasting major mode. After this extended preface, the piano joins the orchestra in elaborating the themes in Beethoven’s inimitable processes of transformation and expansion. The closely reasoned development section grows inexorably from thematic fragments heard in the exposition. The recapitulation begins with a forceful restatement of the main theme by the full orchestra. The second theme and other melodic materials follow, always given a heightened emotional weight over their initial appearances, and lead to a cadenza written by Beethoven that takes on the character of a development section for the soloist. The orchestra re-enters, at first accompanied by quiet, ethereal chords in the piano but soon rising to a stern climax which draws the movement to a close.
The second movement is a nocturne of tender sentiments and quiet moods. Though analysis reveals its form to be a three-part structure, it is in spirit simply an extended song — a marvelous juxtaposition of hymnal tranquility and sensuous operatic love scene. The gossamer filigree from the piano in the wondrous central section, the boundless calm of the harmonic structure and the richness of the orchestral palette make this one of the most Romantic pieces Beethoven ever composed.
The traditional, Classical rondo was a form of simple, high spirits meant to send the audience away in a bubbling mood. Mozart, in his incomparable late concertos, had begun to explore the emotional depth possible with the rondo, and in this Third Concerto Beethoven continued that search. (Mozart’s Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K. 491 was an important model for Beethoven’s work.) Beethoven incorporated elements of sonata design into the finale to lend it additional weight, even inserting a fugal passage in the second episode. Only in the closing pages is the dark world of C minor abandoned for a vivacious romp through C major to the end.
Fanfare for the Common Man for Brass and Percussion
Aaron Copland
Composed in 1942.
Premiered on March 14, 1943 in Cincinnati, conducted by Eugene Goossens.
In the first volume of his autobiography (Copland, 1900 through 1942, St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), the composer recounted the genesis of his popular Fanfare for the Common Man:
“Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, had written to me at the end of August [1942] about an idea he wanted to put into action for the 1942-43 concert season. During World War I, he had asked British composers for a fanfare to begin each orchestral concert. It had been so successful that he thought to repeat the procedure in World War II with American composers. [Goossens’ additional requests inspired a total of ten fanfares from such other notable musicians as Creston, Cowell, Piston, Thomson, Milhaud and Gould.] Goossens wrote: ‘It is my idea to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort, so that I suggest you give your fanfare a title, as for instance, “A Fanfare for Soldiers, or for Airmen or Sailors.” I am asking this favor in a spirit of friendly comradeship, and I ask you to do it for the cause we all have at heart....’ As with Lincoln Portrait, I was gratified to participate in a patriotic activity. Goossens, a composer himself, suggested the instrumentation of brass and percussion and a length of about two minutes. He intended to open the concert season in October with my fanfare, so I had no time to lose.
“The challenge was to compose a traditional fanfare, direct and powerful, yet with a contemporary sound.... The music was not terribly difficult to compose, but working slowly as was my custom, I did not have the fanfare ready to send to Goossens until November. The piece has been Fanfare for the Common Man for so long that it is surprising to see on my sketches that other titles were considered: Fanfare for a Solemn Ceremony, for the Day of Victory, for Our Heroes, for the Rebirth of Lidice, for the Spirit of Democracy, for the Paratroops, for Four Freedoms. After I decided on Fanfare for the Common Man and sent the score to Goossens, I think he was rather puzzled by the title. He wrote, ‘Its title is as original as its music, and I think it is so telling that it deserves a special occasion for its performance. If it is agreeable to you, we will premiere it 14 March [sic] 1943 at income tax time....’ [The income tax deadline was changed to April after the war.] I was all for honoring the common man at income tax time.”
Billy the Kid, Complete Ballet
Aaron Copland
Composed in 1938.
Premiered on October 16, 1938 in Chicago.
Music from Copeland's Billy the Kid was last performed at the Peninsula Music Festival on August 14, 1997 with Victor Yampolsky conducting.
Aaron Copland was among the first Americans to study composition in Paris with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who was to guide many of this country’s finest composers. When he returned home in 1924, Copland was determined to use Boulanger’s training and inspiration to help found a unique style for American concert music, free from the weighty Germanic traditions that had encumbered it for more than a century. He turned first to the obvious indigenous music — jazz — in such works from the late 1920s as the Piano Concerto and Music for the Theater, but soon realized that that particular well of inspiration would quickly run dry for a classical composer. After a short but fruitful excursion through a more abstract style (Piano Variations, Short Symphony), Copland set out in another direction, which he articulated in The New Music in the early 1930s. “I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer,” he wrote. “It seemed that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.”
Around this time Copland met Lincoln Kirstein, director of the American Ballet Caravan, the adventurous predecessor of the New York City Ballet. Kirstein commissioned Copland to write a ballet about Billy the Kid, the notorious outlaw of the Old West famed in ballad and legend. For inspiration, Kirstein gave the composer a book of cowboy tunes, even though Copland admitted a marked antipathy to such music at the time. As he studied the simple, unaffected songs, however, he came to realize that they were not only an excellent source of material for the new ballet, but that they also opened a path to the more straightforward, popular style that he sought. His fondness for these songs grew as he worked with them, and chose to include The Old Chisholm Trail, Git Along, Little Dogies, Great Granddad, Good-bye, Old Paint, and Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie in the score, but omitted Home on the Range because, he said, “I had to draw the line somewhere.” The lean-textured folksiness that Copland devised for Billy the Kid was carried into his other great ballets, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring, works that exerted an impact on the worlds of music and dance rivaling that of Stravinsky and Diaghilev in the 1920s. The popularity of Copland’s ballets was both instantaneous and durable, and with them he became the most respected, famous, and frequently performed of all American composers.
Alfred Frankenstein, a noted critic and the long-time program annotator for the San Francisco Symphony, wrote of the factual Billy the Kid, “His real name was William Bonney. He was born in New York City in 1859, but grew up in Silver City, New Mexico, where his mother kept a boarding house. He murdered his first man in a saloon in Silver City when he was twelve years old, and for the next nineteen years was one of the most industrious and generally admired bandits of the Southwest. Eventually he was captured, tried for murder, and condemned to death. He made a sensational escape from the sheriff’s deputies, but one day he was shot down by Pat Garrett, a sheriff, who was once his friend.”
The score is prefaced by Copland’s synopsis of the ballet’s plot: “The action begins and closes on the open prairie. The central portion of the ballet concerns itself with the significant moments in the life of Billy the Kid. The first scene is a street in a frontier town. Familiar figures amble by. Cowboys saunter into town, some on horseback, others with their lassoes. Some Mexican women do a jarabe which is interrupted by a fight between two drunks. Attracted by the gathering crowd, Billy is seen for the first time as a boy of twelve with his mother. The brawl turns ugly, guns are drawn, and in some unaccountable way, Billy’s mother is killed. Without an instant’s hesitation, in cold fury, Billy draws a knife from his cowhand’s sheath and stabs his mother’s slayers. His famous career has begun. In swift succession we see episodes from Billy’s later life. At night, under the stars, in a quiet card game with his outlaw friends. Hunted by a posse led by his former friend Pat Garrett. Billy is pursued. A running gun battle ensues. Billy is captured. A drunken celebration takes place. Billy in prison is, of course, followed by one of Billy’s legendary escapes. Tired and worn in the desert, Billy rests with his girl. Starting from a deep sleep, he senses movement in the shadows. The posse has finally caught up with him. It is the end.”
©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda