What could be more harmless than a nice waltz? Well, it depends on the circumstances. Maurice Ravel composed La valse in the wake of the First World War, after a period of military service, poor health, compositional inactivity, and the death of his beloved mother. Ideas for the work dated back to 1906, when he initially planned to call it Wien (Vienna), an homage to the music of the “Waltz King,” Johann Strauss II.
In 1919, the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev, for whom he had composed Daphnis et Chloé (1909–1912), expressed interest in a new piece for his legendary Ballets Russes. Ravel played through La valse for him in a keyboard version. Igor Stravinsky and Francis Poulenc were present and, according to the latter, Diaghilev responded, “Ravel, it is a masterpiece … but it’s not a ballet. It’s a portrait of a ballet … a painting of a ballet.” The composer was deeply offended, and the incident caused a permanent breach.
As with some of his earlier orchestral works, Ravel composed versions of La valse for solo piano as well as for two pianos. In October 1920, together with Italian composer Alfredo Casella, Ravel presented the premiere of the work in the two-piano version in Vienna at a special concert given by Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances. The first orchestral performance took place in Paris seven weeks later. As a work originally planned as a ballet, and that carries the subtitle “choreographic poem,” Ravel was eager to have it staged, especially after Diaghilev’s rejection. The first choreographed version was presented in Antwerp with the Royal Flemish Ballet in 1926, and two years later Ida Rubinstein danced it in Paris. Noted choreographers, including George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton, have used the music as well.
In an autobiographical sketch Ravel stated what he had in mind when he wrote La valse: “Eddying clouds allow glimpses of waltzing couples. The clouds gradually disperse, revealing a vast hall filled with a whirling throng. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of chandeliers blazes out: an imperial court around 1855.” Elsewhere he remarked that he “conceived this work as a sort of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, mingled with, in my mind, the impression of a fantastic, fatal whirling.” Others have heard the piece more as apocalypse than apotheosis, such as the distinguished historian Carl Schorske, who called it a celebration of “the destruction of the world of the waltz.”
The mysterious opening (in the tempo of a “Viennese waltz”) unfolds as if one is entering a party already in progress, with fragments of melodies gradually coalescing. The piece unfolds, as many of Strauss’s did, as a series of waltzes, but with an unusually wide range of moods, including the charming, sinister, and ecstatic.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Many 19th-century composers writing in the wake of Beethoven sought to extend his innovations in unifying large-scale compositions. The idea was to construct cyclic connections whereby different parts and movements relate one to another. The prevalence, for example, of the three shorts and a long rhythm at the start of the Fifth Symphony provided a particularly influential and inspiring model. Central to the procedure is the transformation or metamorphosis of a theme through the course of a piece, so that the musical material evolves, emerging in a fresh form at each new stage of its development. Such unifying transformations eventually allowed composers to write continuous large-scale works containing what would traditionally have been separate movements.
Liszt probably had Beethoven and Schubert (the “Wanderer Fantasy”) in mind when he first began to conceive his own piano concertos during the late 1830s. His early attempts remained unfinished for many years as Liszt, the foremost keyboard virtuoso of the day, toured Europe and beyond.
For 10 years, beginning in 1838, Liszt led what was essentially the 19th-century version of the life of a touring rock star. (Ken Russell’s 1975 movie Lisztomania shrewdly cast the Who’s Roger Daltrey in the title role.) But by the late 1840s he decided to settle down and prove himself as a composer by writing more substantial pieces. He took a prominent position in Weimar, something of a musical backwater, but historically the city of Goethe and Schiller, and a place where he was given virtual carte blanche to program what he wanted and to experiment with his own compositions.
Liszt’s responsibilities in Weimar as conductor of the orchestra made continual demands for fresh orchestral music, and this must have prompted him to look back to his concerto sketches once again. Progress was slow. Having composed chiefly virtuosic solo piano music up to this time, he at first lacked confidence in writing for orchestra. Liszt employed the assistance of Joachim Raff (1822–1882), a composer and excellent orchestrator, with whose help he completed a first version of the E-flat–Major Concerto in 1849. Shortly after this he began composing a series of symphonic poems in which he quickly mastered a delicate but rich orchestral palette. With renewed confidence he revised the First Concerto again in 1853. The successful premiere took place in Weimar in February 1855, with the composer at the piano and no less than his friend Hector Berlioz conducting.
Despite the admiring reception accorded these two celebrated musicians at the first performance, the concerto faced a much less sympathetic response when heard in Vienna the following season. Eduard Hanslick, the powerful anti-Wagnerian critic, called the piece a “triangle concerto” because of the prominent role the instrument plays in the second half of the piece. His views were enough to banish the work from Vienna for some years to come.
Liszt defended what he had done in an amusing letter:
As regards the triangle, I do not deny that it may give offense, especially if it is struck too strongly and not precisely. A preconceived disinclination and objection to percussion instruments prevails, somewhat justified by the frequent misuse of them ... Of Berlioz, Wagner, and my humble self it is no wonder that ‘like is drawn to like,’ and, as we are all three treated as impotent canaille [rabble] among musicians, it is quite natural that we should be on good terms with the canaille among the instruments … In the face of the most wise proscription of the learned critics I shall, however, continue to employ instruments of percussion and think I shall yet win for them some effects little known.
The concerto is cast in several fluidly interwoven movements that are played in a seamlessly continuous gesture. Allegedly, Liszt fitted the loud opening motif (Allegro maestoso), scored for full strings to which the woodwinds and brass respond, with these humorous words: Das versteht ihr alle nicht, ha-ha! (This none of you understand, ha-ha!). Just after comes an extended virtuoso passage for the soloist; the first movement builds to a furious climax before giving way to a tranquil second movement (Quasi adagio), with a theme in low muted strings. Into this is interpolated an animated scherzo-like section (Allegro animato), as well as the infamous emergence of the triangle. The finale begins with a lively Allegro marziale animato and gradually draws the themes together into an organic synthesis.
In this concerto, one of his first large-scale orchestral compositions, Liszt tried to achieve the kind of unity he so admired in Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy.” As he remarked in a letter concerning the last movement, it “is only an urgent recapitulation of the earlier material with quickened, livelier rhythm, and it contains no new motifs, as will be clear to you from a glance through the score. This kind of binding together and rounding off a piece at its close is somewhat my own, but it is quite organic and justified from the standpoint of musical form.”
—Christopher H. Gibbs / Paul J. Horsley
American composer Gabriela Lena Frank comes from a richly cosmopolitan background: Her father was born in the United States from Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian, of Chinese and indigenous indio descent. Consequently, many of Frank’s musical works explore multicultural intersections in new, unexpected, and vivid ways. In celebrating explicitly this mestiza quality, she describes it as her “mission … something deeply American.”
Frank studied composition at Rice University and earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan. She has received numerous commissions from leading ensembles that include The Cleveland Orchestra, the King’s Singers, Kronos Quartet, and Brentano Quartet, and has participated with cellist Yo-Yo Ma in his Silk Road Project. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009, the same year she won a Latin Grammy Award. The following year she was named a United States Artist Fellow. Frank is currently composer-in-residence with The Philadelphia Orchestra, having previously served in that capacity with both the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Houston Symphony. Next month, San Diego Opera is scheduled to premiere her first opera, The Last Dream of Frida and Diego.
Regarding the influence of multiple cultural heritages on her compositions, Frank observes, “I think the music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am.” On another occasion she declared, “I firmly believe that only in the United States could a Peruvian-Chinese-Jewish-Lithuanian girl born with significant hearing loss in a hippie town [Berkeley, California] successfully create a life writing string quartets and symphonies.”
That philosophy is revealed lucidly in Frank’s Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout, composed as a string quartet in 2001 and then arranged for string orchestra in 2003. The work emerged partly from an early first-hand experience with unexpected culture shock in South America. Frank started travelling to Peru (her mother’s homeland) in 2000, connecting with members of her extended family there. With her multiracial upbringing, she expected to feel somewhat “at home.” Instead (she later recalled wryly), she got sick, was disoriented, didn’t know how things worked, and “felt rejected by the land.” “Yet there were enough moments,” she countered, “where I felt so connected and I was so happy that I kept going back. And as I kept going back, I realized more through familiarity, but it also felt like remembering.” That juxtaposition of cultures, and the process of becoming familiar with the occasionally surprising interactions between them, directly influenced Frank’s approach to writing this work.
Leyendas (Legends) draws inspiration from the notion of a cultural mestizaje, as outlined by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where Western and indigenous cultures can coexist without the conquest or subjugation of one by the other. “As such,” Frank explains, “this piece mixes elements from the Western classical and Andean folk traditions” in a manner that would come to characterize her compositions in general.
Several critics have noted similarities between these objectives and Béla Bartók’s goal of incorporating folk idioms within Western contexts. Some have described Leyendas as sounding like “Bartók goes to Peru,” although “quite attractively so.” Frank doesn’t mind the comparisons—Bartók and Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera have served as inspirational models throughout her career.
Leyendas is a six-movement work, of which the fourth, “Chasqui,” will be performed in this concert. Chasqui refers to the chasqui runners of the Inca empire, agile and intelligent messenger-carriers who sprinted between towns separated by the high Andean peaks. Frank notes, “I take artistic license to imagine his choice of instruments to be the charango, a high-pitched cousin of the guitar, and the lightweight bamboo quena flute, both of which are featured in this movement.”
—Luke Howard
Antonín Dvořák is justly hailed as the quintessential Czech composer, and undoubtedly proud nationalist sentiment was central to his self-definition, music, and success. Yet he was far from provincial: He actively sought an international reputation and brilliantly achieved one. In 1874, the young composer applied for an Austrian state stipend to benefit needy young artists. He was awarded a grant and the next year, when Johannes Brahms joined the jury, won again, as he did in later years. Early success gradually led to international fame, especially after Brahms recommended him to his own German publisher, Fritz Simrock, who published his Moravian Duets and Slavonic Dances. While these small pieces proved a “gold mine,” Dvořák wanted to move on to bigger works—symphonies, concertos, and operas—that would be judged as part of the great Western tradition, not merely as a colorful local phenomenon.
Dvořák succeeded best in this regard with his symphonies, but the confusion surrounding their numbering points to the fitful progress of his career. He initiated some of the problems himself because he thought his First Symphony, which he wrote in a matter of weeks at age 24, had been forever lost after he sent it off to a competition in Germany. (It was only discovered 20 years after his death.) In 1882, Simrock released what is known today as the effervescent Sixth Symphony in D Major as No. 1, and four years later the brooding Seventh Symphony in D Minor as No. 2. The success of these and other pieces led the publisher to request ever more music from Dvořák, who responded with unpublished compositions written years earlier, including his Fifth Symphony from 1875 that was released as No. 3 in 1888.
The circumstances around the publication of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony marked the turning point in his relationship with Simrock. The German publisher, who had undoubtedly helped build the Czech’s career, was understandably much more interested in releasing the small gold-mine pieces aimed for domestic consumption than he was in big, costly symphonies. It was what we now know as the Eighth Symphony in G Major, Op. 88, that caused a permanent break and was in the end released as Symphony No. 4 by Vincent Novello in England. There is a good bit of poetic justice in this because England was increasingly embracing Dvořák’s music. He travelled there frequently and in 1891 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge, on which occasion the Eighth Symphony was performed. America extended this fame even further when Dvořák was recruited to run the National Conservatory. His next and final Ninth Symphony (“From the New World”) dates from the three years Dvořák lived and taught in New York City during the early 1890s.
Dvořák composed the Eighth Symphony in just over two months in the late summer of 1889 at his country home in Vysoká, some 40 miles south of Prague. The dedication explains a recent honor bestowed on the composer: “To the Bohemian Academy of Emperor Franz Joseph for the Encouragement of Arts and Literature, in thanks for my election.” Dvořák toyed with the idea of premiering the work in Russia for a tour Tchaikovsky had arranged (he opted for the Sixth Symphony instead) and conducted the first performance himself in Prague’s Rudolfinum in February 1890. The next success came when one of his great advocates, the celebrated conductor Hans Richter, led the piece in London and Vienna. About the latter performance, he informed Dvořák: “You would certainly have been pleased with his performance. All of us felt that it is a magnificent work, and so were all enthusiastic. Brahms dined with me after the performance and we drank to the health of the unfortunately absent ‘father’ of the [the symphony] … The success was warm and heartfelt.”
The G-Major Symphony is one of Dvořák’s freshest works, often projecting a pastoral character appropriate to the radiant Bohemian countryside in which he wrote it. The piece begins with a solemn and noble theme stated by clarinets, bassoons, horns, and cellos that will return at key moments in the movement (Allegro con brio). Without a change in tempo, this introductory section turns to the tonic major key as a solo flute presents the principal folk-like theme that the full orchestra soon joyously declaims. The Adagio is particularly pastoral and traverses many moods, from a passionate beginning to the sound of bird calls, the happy music making of village bands, and grandly triumphant passages.
While Dvořák often wrote fast scherzo-like third movements, this symphony offers a more leisurely Allegretto grazioso with a waltz character in G minor. In the middle is a rustic major-key trio featuring music that will return in an accelerated duple-meter version for the movement’s coda. Trumpets proclaim a festive fanfare to open the finale (Allegro ma non troppo), which then unfolds as a set of variations on a theme stated by the cellos. The theme looks back to the flute melody of the first movement and undergoes a variety of variations with wonderful effects along the way, including raucous trills from the French horns and virtuoso flute decorations.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program notes © 2022. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association and/or Luke Howard.