For a composer who would be so inexorably drawn to the music of the field, it is unsurprising that Bartók was born surrounded by countryside. His birthplace—the small town of Nagyszentmiklós—was situated in the ethnically diverse province of Torontál in southern Hungary (now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania). Music was a constant presence in the family home: Both his parents were keen amateur musicians. The family’s rather itinerant life during Bartók’s childhood, with his mother seeking teaching positions around the Kingdom of Hungary, may well have unsettled the young composer, but it gave him a broad knowledge of his native land.
As Bartók approached adulthood, the lure of Budapest was understandably strong, and it was at the city’s Music Academy that he began his formal training. Inspired first by the works of Brahms and Robert Schumann, he then encountered Richard Strauss’s awe-inspiring tone poems. Ethnomusicological interests would soon take over, however, thanks to his meeting with fellow composer Zoltán Kodály on March 18, 1905. It was to be the most important event in Bartók’s life.
Together, Bartók and Kodály embarked on creating “a complete collection of folk songs, gathered with scholarly exactitude.” Traveling the Hungarian countryside, they recorded, notated, arranged, and disseminated this music in published form. It also began to pervade Bartók’s own compositions—not only in direct quotations, but sublimated and mixed together with his responses to Debussy (whom Kodály had first encountered in Paris) and Strauss, creating a unique musical voice. The diversity of these ingredients was mirrored in the breadth of Bartók’s vision, as he fashioned works for the stage and the concert hall, as well as writing a host of compositions for educational purposes.
The Concerto for Orchestra is one of Bartók’s final works, composed in the United States in 1943 in answer to a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. Bartók had lived in America since 1940 after fleeing his native Hungary, where he had remained for as long as he could in order to protect his ailing mother. In 1939, following her death, he was free to embark on a tour of the US; after returning briefly to Budapest in May 1940, Bartók left permanently that October. Although he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Columbia and worked with academics at Harvard, where he later became a visiting professor, opportunities for performances of his work were disappointingly sparse. The commission from Koussevitzky therefore provided a lifeline; a spirit of celebration and gratitude informs the score Bartók completed in the Adirondack Mountains and in New York between August 15 and October 8 of that year. A premiere under Koussevitzky’s baton followed in Boston on December 1, 1944.
The Concerto for Orchestra employs the kind of five-part structure featured in many of Bartók’s works from the 1930s. It moves from what the composer described as the “sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.” Placed between these are the more playful second and fourth movements: a “game of pairs” and an Intermezzo. The music of the former provides a contrast with the stern opening of the first movement, sounding low down in the strings before its repeated intervals of seconds and fourths burst into a vivacious dance. The mournful Elegia returns us to the original pensive mood, while the Intermezzo’s quotation from a popular Hungarian song—“Szép vagy, gyönyörű vagy Magyarország” (“You are lovely, you are beautiful, Hungary”)—indicates Bartók’s homesickness. The Presto in the Finale then provides a veritable hoedown as the concerto’s folk-inspired material is put through its fugal and dancing paces.
—Gavin Plumley
Among Mussorgsky’s muddled and uneven catalogue, his songs are a refreshing source of relative completeness and consistency, their brevity perhaps allowing the composer to bring them completely to fruition before becoming distracted by other compositions or obligations, as was his nature. Yet they still display the startling originality and Russian national character that defines all of his work. In addition to some 50 standalone songs, he wrote three larger cycles: The Nursery, Sunless, and the present Songs of Dances and Death, begun in 1875—when he wrote the first three songs while putting off the more daunting task of continuing with his opera Khovanshchina—and completed in 1877.
Set to texts by Count Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov—a poet and distant relative of Mussorgsky’s with whom the composer shared an apartment from 1873 to 1875—the Songs and Dances of Death is a harrowing set of vividly expressionistic scenes, operatic in their drama and musical scale, in which Death, personified and in a guise appropriate for each circumstance, implacably comes to claim what is his. Weaving Russian and other Slavic folk-music styles and quasi-ritualistic modal harmonic structures into a dark and spectral musical tapestry, Mussorgsky’s style here recalls his own Boris Godunov and, at times, could perhaps also reveal the influence of Liszt’s Totentanz and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, two groundbreaking works which deal with similar subject matter and with which Mussorgsky was familiar.
The cycle begins with “Lullaby,” in which a frightened mother attempts to comfort her sick child. Death arrives with the first light of dawn, and, telling the mother that she has failed to soothe the child, offers to “sing him a better song.” With the low, barely audible refrain of “Bayushki bayu”—a soothing, meaningless expression used to lull Russian children to sleep—Death takes the infant away. In “Serenade,” Death assumes the façade of a gallant suitor to a young lady lying sick and sleepless in her bed. Beneath her window, Death begins to sing, his gentle yet threatening tones belying the romantic words. Once she is fully under his spell, his quiet enticements are replaced by an exultant final cry of victory.
Mussorgsky works a particularly clever bit of magic in “Trepak,” which is based on a Cossack folk dance familiar to music lovers from Tchaikovsky’s use of it in The Nutcracker. Here, though, Mussorgsky insinuates the distinctive “Dies irae” medieval plainchant—a Judgment Day hymn used in the traditional Requiem Mass sequence—into the accompaniment and then into the sung melody of Death as he fools a drunken peasant into lying down to sleep in the snow. The trepak becomes a demonic dance of death as the wintry storm buffets the unlucky serf, before whose eyes Death creates a vision of summer before the snow closes around him. Finally, in “The Field Marshal,” Death ups the ante, visiting a battlefield to claim victims on a more industrial scale. Following the cataclysmic battle and massive loss of life, Death proclaims his victory and counts his crop. With his derisive proclamation that “The battle is over, I defeated you all,” this savage, bitter song becomes an indictment of the savagery and pointlessness of human warfare. There is no question, either, as to the ultimate fate of the valiant warriors: “Bury your bones in the ground,” Death sings. “Years will pass; People will forget about you … I will stamp on the damp ground over your graves so that you will never rise again.”
In 1962, almost a century after their composition, Shostakovich orchestrated Mussorgsky’s harrowing songs, imbuing them with the stark, haunting instrumental palette that characterizes his symphonies. The experience profoundly affected Shostakovich, who became so engrossed with the Songs and Dances of Death that he decided to supplement them: His Symphony No. 14, completed in 1969, is really an 11-part orchestral song cycle focused on the subject of death, forming a sequel of sorts to Mussorgsky’s earlier work.
—Jay Goodwin
In 1910, Stravinsky was a relatively unknown 28-year-old with only a couple of modestly successful orchestral pieces (Fireworks and Scherzo fantastique) to distinguish him from myriad other young Russian composers. So when Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of Paris’s Ballets Russes, needed music for The Firebird, a new ballet based on a Russian folk story, he had planned to commission a much more experienced composer. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Diaghilev’s first choice and Stravinsky’s teacher, had died the year before, however, and Anatoly Lyadov, an older ex-pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov’s, couldn’t meet the timetable, so Diaghilev took a chance on the promising and expeditious Stravinsky—a portentous decision that would prove wildly successful for both men and, over the following 13 years, change both music and dance forever.
The ballet tells the story of Prince Ivan, who, in pursuit of the Firebird (a magical creature, half woman, half bird), finds himself in the kingdom of Kashchei, an evil sorcerer who keeps 13 beautiful princesses captive and turns trespassers to stone. After Ivan catches the Firebird, he grants her freedom in exchange for one of her magic feathers and a promise of help in a time of need. Having seen the princesses and fallen in love with the most beautiful one among them, Ivan confronts Kashchei and asks for permission to marry her. Kashchei becomes angry and sends his magical creatures after Ivan, who in desperation calls on the Firebird. With her magical song, the Firebird causes Kashchei to dance wildly and then fall asleep. While he slumbers, she tells Ivan the secret of ending Kashchei’s immortality: Ivan must find and destroy Kashchei’s soul, hidden safely away in a secret chest. Having done so, Ivan sets the princesses and magical creatures free, and they all have a final, celebratory dance.
The score, completed in 1910, is remarkable in its craftsmanship and effectiveness even if, later in his career, Stravinsky often spoke disparagingly about its lack of originality—he notably called it “that audience lollipop.” But it’s difficult not to see this as a revolutionary composer looking back and unfairly comparing a piece composed when he was young and following mostly in his predecessor’s footsteps with his more mature work. Certainly there are identifiable similarities between The Firebird and the music of Rimsky-Korsakov—most notably the strikingly colorful orchestration and the use of diatonic and chromatic motifs to separate human and supernatural themes. There is also a Tchaikovskyan atmosphere about the Princesses’ Khorovod and the Finale, as well as in the sense of dramatic flow throughout the ballet. But The Firebird could never be confused with the work of either of these earlier composers, and the germs of groundbreaking ideas that came to fruition in Stravinsky’s later work are already present here. The cascading violin and viola harmonics in the Introduction, for example, point to a proclivity toward eliciting unusual sounds from familiar instruments that would permeate Stravinsky’s music throughout his long career, and the rhythmic fluctuation in the 7/4 Finale foreshadows the composer’s extraordinary innovation in The Rite of Spring. The entire piece is full of these unmistakable snippets of Stravinskyan ingenuity, and Diaghilev, ballet audiences, and the entire musical world recognized it and took note.
Over the years, Stravinsky arranged music from The Firebird into three separate concert suites, which are now commonly identified by their years of completion: 1911, 1919, and 1945. The 1919 version performed this evening is by far the most popular and most frequently encountered, and at about 22 minutes long, contains roughly half of the original ballet music.
—Jay Goodwin