Edward Elgar, who is often considered the embodiment of English music and culture, viewed himself as a kind of outsider in English society. He was not a blue-blooded, well-educated Edwardian, but rather the son of a piano tuner, a self-taught composer in an academically driven field, and a Roman Catholic in a Protestant-dominated country. Nevertheless, his lush and expansive style, inspirational use of melody, and the almost palpable sense of nobility in his music epitomized late-English Romanticism—even though he looked to other parts of Europe for his musical guidance.
He struggled in his early professional life as a violinist, piano teacher, and organist. He even taught at a school for girls where his Serenade for Strings was premiered. This position offered him one of the few early opportunities to hear his compositions performed. He drew great inspiration from these experiences and even played several of Dvořák’s works under the composer’s leadership. It was during these early times that Elgar developed many of the friendships that would inspire the Enigma Variations. Regardless of how one assesses his earlier accomplishments, it was apparent that by the time of composer Arthur Sullivan’s death in 1900, Elgar was to carry the mantle of English music.
In the spring of 1905, the recently knighted Elgar traveled to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate at Yale University’s graduation. During the ceremony, his first Pomp and Circumstance march was performed, thus establishing America’s long and celebratory association with the piece. Yale professor Samuel Sanford, who had arranged for Elgar’s honor, is the dedicatee of tonight’s work.
Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro was written in 1905 for the newly organized London Symphony Orchestra (LSO). The LSO was in its infancy in 1905 when Elgar was encouraged by his friend A. J. Jaeger (the inspiration for the “Nimrod” movement in the Enigma Variations) to compose a work to highlight their virtuoso string section. Enthusiasm for the piece was slow in coming, probably because it was more cerebral and less overtly emotional than his previous works. Performers and listeners now recognize it as a masterpiece of the string literature.
Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro is reminiscent of the Baroque concerto grosso format with its featured string quartet of soloists. Its contrapuntal writing and virtuoso solo passages for both the quartet and the string orchestra reinforce this notion, despite its obvious Romantic style and large form. The Introduction opens with a serious fanfare, followed by a solo violin responding to the fanfare’s call. Later, a solo viola introduces an alluring melody that Elgar claims to have heard while on vacation in Wales. The material for the Allegro is either directly derived from, or reminiscent of, the Introduction. In what Elgar called “a devil of a fugue,” he introduces a new theme and the development of the work. The earlier themes return (or struggle to) throughout, and finally the work surges to its end with the Welsh theme in prominence and an exclamatory pizzicato chord.
—Dr. ToniMarie Marchioni
(2003 NYSO Participant)
The string quartet medium was in its infancy when Mozart wrote his three four-part Divertimenti, K. 136–138, in Salzburg in early 1772. Although the composer already had one bona fide string quartet to his credit (K. 80 in G Major, written in 1770), the idea of dispensing with the traditional continuo foundation and giving each of the four players an independent voice was still a novelty, embraced only by Haydn and a handful of others. It should not surprise us, then, that Mozart did not make it altogether clear whether the string divertimenti were meant to be played as quartets—with one player on a part—or as chamber symphonies. Accustomed as we are to orchestral performances of these beguiling miniatures, certain stylistic features—for example, the first violin’s fast, florid passagework—argue for a soloistic interpretation.
In his study of the young Mozart’s career, Stanley Sadie observes that K. 136 and its sequels are the earliest of the composer’s works that have secured a place in the modern concert repertoire. In genre terms, the three divertimenti mediate between the string symphony of the earlier 18th century and the nascent string quartet of the Classical era. (K. 136–138 are sometimes referred to as the “Salzburg symphonies.”) The set of six quartets that Mozart wrote in late 1772 and early 1773, K. 155–160, exhibit many of the same transitional traits. Whether he labeled them divertimenti, symphonies, or string quartets, however, Mozart was characteristically disinclined to draw a hard-and-fast distinction between “serious” and entertainment music. K. 136 is a work of both charm and substance.
The D-Major Divertimento’s opening Allegro sets a brisk, extroverted mood, with the first violin’s perky melody floating above a stream of steadily pulsing eighth notes. From time to time, the second violin asserts itself by taking a solo turn. The viola part, contrariwise, mainly supplies harmonic “filler,” while the cello (and/or double bass—Mozart’s marking basso is ambiguous) plays a purely supporting role. In the sweetly lyrical Andante, the disposition of thematic material is somewhat more even-handed: Note how the viola is paired sometimes with the violins and sometimes with the cellos. The theme of the Presto echoes that of the first movement, in rhythmically compressed form. Sudden dynamic shifts from piano to forte inject an element of whimsy that is interrupted, if only briefly, by a sober display of “learned” counterpoint in the development section.
The greatest of a large family of German musicians spanning several generations, Johann Sebastian Bach spent most of his life as a hard-working church musician—but his contemporaries knew him best as a consummate virtuoso on the organ and harpsichord. Though it’s less well known, Bach was also a better-than-average violinist and violist. He learned to play the violin as a child—probably under the tutelage of his father, a town piper in Eisenach—and kept it up for the rest of his life. Bach’s proficiency on keyboard and string instruments came in handy when he was appointed director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum—a semiprofessional community orchestra that included musicians from the local university—in 1729, and began presenting regular concerts of secular music to a paying public. Over the years, he had composed a wide range of secular instrumental music, from large-scale suites and concertos to solo works for sundry instruments. Much of this repertoire was featured on the concerts that Bach organized and conducted at Zimmermann’s popular coffeehouse in Leipzig.
As fate would have it, only three of Bach’s numerous violin concertos have come down to us. The dating is uncertain, but all appear to relate to his activities as director of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum. Scored for an orchestra of strings with basso continuo, the A-Minor Violin Concerto is cast in the three-movement format (fast-slow-fast) that Vivaldi had recently helped to popularize. Bach’s admiration for his Italian contemporary is evident in the bravura character of the solo part. In the first movement, the violinist stands both inside and apart from the orchestra. Now one takes the lead, now the other, as they interweave their voices in concertante fashion. The Andante sets the violin’s florid, rhapsodic cantilena against a recurring dactylic figure (long-short-short) in the bass, creating an unresolved conflict that becomes strangely moving as the movement progresses. The finale, in brisk 9/8 meter, is distinguished by its propulsive passagework, acrobatic leaps, and contrapuntal ingenuity.
For all Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-sleeve romanticism and his intimately revealing correspondence with his patron and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, much about the man and his music remains enigmatic. The composer’s characteristically ecstatic effusions masked an inner life racked by anguish and self-doubt. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, he produced a string of sunny and extroverted works, including the brilliant Violin Concerto, the rumbustious 1812 Overture, and the incandescent Serenade for Strings. Yet the same period saw the composition of the Fourth Symphony, with its portentous “fate” motif, and the opera Eugene Onegin, whose tragic overtones mirrored the homosexual Tchaikovsky’s unhappy marriage. Endowed with a sensibility at once poetic and conservative—Mozart was one of his favorite composers—Tchaikovsky sought what he called “the higher artistic truth which springs from the mysterious depths of man’s creative power and pours out into clear, intelligible, conventional forms.”
Tchaikovsky’s predilection for clarity and intelligibility is nowhere better illustrated than in the Serenade for Strings. In late 1880, fretting over the imminent departure of a longtime domestic servant (with whom he had formed a close emotional bond) for military service, the composer told Madame von Meck that he had been immersing himself in work in an effort “to suppress my sad feelings.” That fall he produced—more or less simultaneously—two pieces of diametrically opposing characters. Tchaikovsky recognized the 1812 Overture for what it was: a crowd-pleasing display of patriotic sentiment celebrating Russia’s victory over the invading French army during the Napoleonic Wars. The unpretentious Serenade for Strings, however, was cut from wholly different cloth: “It is a heartfelt piece, and so I dare to think it is not lacking in real qualities,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his confidante. The Serenade quickly took its place among the composer’s most beloved works; even his far-from-uncritical former teacher Anton Rubinstein considered it his “best piece.”
Despite the symphonic aspirations suggested by its four-movement structure, the Serenade for Strings is a work of consummate delicacy and intimacy, more closely related to Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence and other chamber pieces than to his large-scale symphonies. One clue to his intentions is the use of the diminutive “sonatina” in the title of the first movement, which Tchaikovsky described as an “homage to Mozart.” It’s based on two themes—one broad and grandiloquent, the other fleet and mercurial—but lacks a development section, a complication that Tchaikovsky deliberately eschewed. The ensuing waltz highlights Tchaikovsky’s prowess as a dance composer, while the third-movement Élégie is one of many such melancholy effusions throughout his oeuvre. (Significantly, when George Balanchine set the Serenade on students of his fledgling School of American Ballet in 1934, he reversed the order of the last two movements, ending on a characteristically Tchaikovskian note of tender introspection.) The zesty Finale, built around another pair of Russian folk melodies, exemplifies both Tchaikovsky’s cosmopolitan outlook and his deep interest in Russian history and culture.
—Harry Haskell