The Peninsula Music Festival - Season 2009 Program Notes
Program 7 - Tuesday, August 18, 2009 - Russian Jubilee
Excerpts from the Incidental Music to Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden, Op. 12
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Composed in 1873.
Premiered on May 23, 1873 in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein.
Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886) was Russia’s leading playwright of the mid 19th century, the first important writer to represent merchants and bureaucrats and the workers and peasants he saw as their victims realistically on the stage. It was therefore a considerable change-of-pace for him to accept a commission early in 1873 from Vladimir Begichev, repertory director of the Imperial Theaters in Moscow, for a stage spectacle based on Russian folklore. Ostrovsky responded enthusiastically, and he settled on a traditional fairy tale, The Snow Maiden, as the subject for the undertaking. This enterprise was occasioned by the renovation of the Maly [Small] Theater and the move of its drama company to the Bolshoi [Great] Theater, which it would share with that house’s resident ballet and opera troupes for the season. To take advantage of having his theater, ballet and opera companies in the same house (and to help defuse any potential animosities among them), Begichev announced this spectacular, multi-media Snow Maiden for presentation in May 1873. In March, Peter Tchaikovsky, then teaching at the Moscow Conservatory and greatly buoyed by the acclaimed premiere of his Second Symphony the month before, was engaged to provide the music for the production. Encouraged by the generous fee (nearly 20% of his annual salary at the Conservatory) and the chance to collaborate with Russia’s most popular playwright (whose tragedy The Storm had inspired a concert overture from him seven years before), Tchaikovsky completed seventy minutes of music — songs, choral numbers, dance pieces, accompaniment to spoken dialogue, orchestral movements — in a mere three weeks, reworking for it one song and the introduction from his unsuccessful opera Undine of 1869 and taking as thematic material for several movements melodies from the 50 Russian Folksongs he had arranged for two pianos in 1868-1869 and the collection of 65 Russian Folksongs he had helped his student Vasilii Prokunin edit in 1872. The Snow Maiden was premiered at the Bolshoi on May 23, 1873, and met with little success except for Tchaikovsky’s music — Nikolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky’s boss at the Conservatory and the conductor of the premiere, liked the score well enough that he performed it uncut at one of his Russian Music Society concerts later that year; Tchaikovsky himself thought enough of the subject and his music that for several years he considered working them into a full-length opera, but that plan was forestalled when Rimsky-Korsakov premiered his Snow Maiden based on Ostrovsky’s play in 1882.
In his four-volume study of Tchaikovsky, British musicologist David Brown summarized the story of The Snow Maiden, the daughter of Spring Beauty and Grandfather Frost: “The Snow Maiden can survive only so long as her heart is unwarmed by love. Drawn by a wish to live as mortal girls do, she enters the human world, unwittingly disrupts the wedding of Kupava and Mizgir when the latter falls in love with her on sight, is accused by Kupava and brought before Tsar Berendy for judgment, is told she must marry, and is finally destroyed when the warmth of love that grows in her heart for Mizgir makes her vulnerable to the rays of Yarilo, the sun god.”
The fantasy world of The Snow Maiden is evoked by the Introduction, which Tchaikovsky borrowed from his failed 1869 opera about the water nymph Undine, whose title character is also a mythical damsel who gives up her life for the love of a mortal. The gentle Melodrama in Act II (Andantino quasi Allegretto), accompanies the appearance of the beautiful Snow Maiden at the Tsar’s court. The exhilarating Dance of the Tumblers provides a diversion for the villagers in Act III.
Symphony No. 2 in B minor
Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
Composed 1869-1877.
Premiered on March 10, 1877 in St. Petersburg, conducted by Eduard Napravnik.
When the Soviet government finally got around to erecting a monument to Alexander Borodin, it was not to honor his contributions to music but rather those that he made to science and medicine. During his lifetime, Borodin was known less as a musician than as an eminent chemist who invented the nitrometer and as the distinguished physician who helped to found the School of Medicine for Women in St. Petersburg. His busy schedule left him little time for writing music, and he dubbed himself a “Sunday composer.” Other than vacations and an occasional weekend, Borodin could only compose when he was too ill to leave home. Given the often frail state of his constitution, those days were quite frequent and not unwelcome, and his musical friends actually wished him sickness rather than health so that could devote himself to his creative work. The Second Symphony was completed while Borodin was confined to bed with an inflamed leg.
Borodin had taken up the cudgel of forging a national musical identity for his native land in 1862, when he became associated with his friend Modeste Mussorgsky and three others in the group of Russian composers known as “The Five.” Folk song and Russian history were among the studies they undertook in search of musical and dramatic subjects for their works. In 1869, Borodin told Vladimir Stasov, a musicologist and the chief journalistic champion of the Russia nationalist composers, that he was interested in composing an opera on a Russian historical topic, and the writer drew up a scenario based on the ancient tales about Prince Igor. Borodin worked intermittently on this project for several months, and then considered abandoning it. Some of the early sketches for Prince Igor, to which Borodin returned throughout his life but never completed, were borrowed for the Second Symphony. Indeed, so much of the mood and matter of the opera found their way into the Symphony that Stasov wrote, “Borodin was haunted when he wrote this Symphony by the picture of feudal Russia, and he tried to paint it in his music.” Stasov reported that Borodin had specific images in mind when composing this work: the first movement was purportedly inspired by a vision of a gathering of 11th-century warriors; the third by a legendary Slavic minstrel; the finale, featuring approximations of the sounds of ancient instruments, by a hero’s banquet.
The first movement of the Symphony creates a characteristically Russian quality through several techniques: its melodic and harmonic modalism, which evokes a certain oriental or even primitive mood; the vivid brilliance of its scoring, often dominated by the brasses (Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov had undertaken extensive studies of the military band, and believed that the brass instruments were capable of more virtuosity than had hitherto been required of them); and the elemental rhythmic energy that accumulates around the many repetitions of its craggy opening motive. There are several lyrical episodes in this sonata-form movement, but the music’s dominant impression is one of ferocious and enduring strength. The second movement is a winged Scherzo that, according to Gerald Abraham, “suggests the gleam of sunlight upon the helmets of Slavic warriors.” The limpid central trio employs an arched melody that resembles an Italian barcarolle in its warm lyricism. The slow third movement recalls an ancient bardic strain, perhaps an epic about fearsome struggles against sinister enemies. The finale is a festival of blazing orchestral color that combines vigorous dance themes, striding melodies and forceful dramatic gestures. In comparing Borodin’s work with Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, Mussorgsky wrote, “The strength of a lion is in this Symphony ... it should be called the ‘Slavonic Heroic Symphony.’”
Violin Concerto
Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978)
Composed in 1940.
Premiered on November 16, 1940 in Moscow, with David Oistrakh as soloist.
Khachaturian's Violin Concerto was last performed at the Peninsula Music Festival on August 13, 1994 with Valentin Zhuk, soloist, and Victor Yampolsky conducting.
Aram Khachaturian was one of the leading composers of the Soviet Union and the most celebrated musician of his native state of Armenia. When he arrived in Moscow in 1921 from his home town of Tbilisi, he had had virtually no formal training in music, but his talent was soon recognized, and he was admitted to the academy of Mikhail Gnessin, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. Khachaturian’s first published works date from 1926; three years later he entered the Moscow Conservatory. His international reputation was established with the success of the Piano Concerto in 1936, composed at the same time that he became active in the newly founded Union of Soviet Composers, of which he was elected Deputy Chairman of the Moscow branch in 1937 and Deputy President of the National Organizing Committee two years later. In 1939, he returned to live for six months in Armenia, where he immersed himself in the folk music of his boyhood home in preparation for composing the ballet Happiness. Boris Schwarz noted that the composer’s synthesis of vernacular and cultivated musical styles in that work “represents the fulfillment of a basic Soviet arts policy: the interpenetration of regional folklorism and the great Russian tradition.”
Khachaturian’s compositional colleague Dmitri Kabalevsky wrote, “The especially attractive features of Khachaturian’s music are in its roots in national folk fountainheads. The captivating rhythmic diversity of dances of the peoples of Transcaucasia and the inspired improvisations of the ashugs [Armenia’s native bards] — such are the sources from which have sprung the composer’s creative endeavors. From the interlocking of these two principles there grew Khachaturian’s symphonism — vivid and dynamic, with keen contrasts, now enchanting in their mellow lyricism, now stirring in their tension and drama.” Khachaturian remained a proud and supportive Armenian throughout his life, serving in 1958 as the state’s delegate to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. “My whole life, everything that I have created, belongs to the Armenian people,” he once said. The Violin Concerto of 1940 is imbued with the music of Khachaturian’s Armenian homeland.
One of the achievements of the Union of Soviet Composers was the founding in 1939 of an enclave on the Moscow River near the town of Staraya Ruza set aside for creative work and rest. Khachaturian spent the summer of 1940 there, in one of the cottages in the dense pine forest, composing a violin concerto for David Oistrakh. Khachaturian had largely prepared the formal plan for the piece in his head in advance, and recalled, “I worked without effort. Sometimes my thoughts and imagination outraced the hand that was covering the staff with notes. The themes came to me in such abundance that I had a hard time putting them in some order.” He succeeded, however, and the Concerto was a great success when it was premiered on November 16, 1940 in Moscow by Oistrakh. The new Concerto solidified Khachaturian’s popularity at home and abroad; he was awarded the Stalin Prize for it in 1941.
The Concerto’s opening movement is disposed in traditional sonata form, with two contrasting themes and a full development section. After a brief introductory outburst by the orchestra, the soloist presents an animated motif that soon evolves into a bounding, close-interval folk dance. This theme, punctuated once by the strong orchestral chords from the introduction, continues for some time before it gives way to a lyrical complementary strain of nostalgic emotional character. As the movement unfolds, the soloist is required to display one dazzling technical feat after another, culminating in a huge cadenza that serves as the bridge to the recapitulation. Both of the earlier themes are returned in elaborated settings to round out the movement.
The Andante is in a broad three-part design prefaced by a bassoon solo that Grigory Shneerson, in his study of Khachaturian, said imitated the improvisations of the Armenian ashugs, or bards. A melancholy tune occupies the movement’s outer sections while the central portion is more animated and rhapsodic in nature. The finale is an irresistible rondo, filled with festive brilliance, blazing orchestral color and sparkling virtuosity.
©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda