Steeped from childhood in New York’s rich Jewish diaspora culture, Gershwin bridged the worlds of popular and classical music more successfully than any other composer of his day. Thanks in part to his early training as a song plugger on Tin Pan Alley, he acquired a dazzling and versatile piano technique, which he displayed both on the concert stage and in the more intimate, impromptu settings of private house parties. Alongside his many jazz-based popular songs and musicals, he made significant contributions to the classical repertoire in works like Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F, the Three Preludes for solo piano, and the opera Porgy and Bess.
Based on a novel by DuBose Heyward about an African American community in Charleston, South Carolina, Gershwin’s “folk opera” opened on Broadway on October 10, 1935, following tryouts at Carnegie Hall and in Boston. Porgy and Bess finally reached the stage of the Metropolitan Opera 50 years later, by which time it had achieved the status of a modern classic. Reviewing the original production, composer-critic Virgil Thomson criticized Gershwin’s prose declamation as “vocally uneasy and dramatically cumbersome,” but confessed to being won over by the opera’s “lack of respectability, the way it can be popular and vulgar and go its way as a professional piece without bothering about the taste-boys.”
Gershwin met Jascha Heifetz in New York not long after the violinist’s fabled Carnegie Hall debut in 1917. With his lyricist brother Ira, the composer penned a tongue-in-cheek tribute to his new friend and three other Russian émigré virtuosos called “Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha.” Although the concerto that Heifetz hoped Gershwin would write for him never materialized, he arranged a number of the composer’s works as encore pieces, including five excerpts from Porgy and Bess. Heifetz let Clara’s languorously lyrical “Summertime” speak for itself, seldom straying far from Gershwin’s original lullaby, but he took greater liberties with Sportin’ Life’s sassy “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” embellishing the vocal line with schmaltzy slides, harmonics, and double-stops.
Ernő (or Ernst von, the German form that appears on most of his published works) Dohnányi is recognized today as a seminal figure in 20th-century Hungarian music, a link between Liszt’s outsized Romanticism and the edgy modernism of Bartók. At the outset of his career, however, he was widely seen as being in the direct line of succession to Brahms. When the German master heard Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet, Op. 1, in 1895, he famously declared, “I could not have written it better myself.” Brahms subsequently arranged a private performance of the quintet in Vienna, with the 18-year-old Hungarian at the keyboard. Dohnányi was already a celebrated concert pianist by the time he attended Brahms’s funeral in 1897 as an official representative of his country, and he was acknowledged to have few peers as an interpreter of Brahms’s music. Inevitably, it took Dohnányi some time to emerge from the older composer’s shadow, especially in light of his close friendships with violinist Joseph Joachim, composer Karl Goldmark, critic Eduard Hanslick, and other members of Brahms’s circle.
The conservatism of Dohnányi’s musical language made him a tempting target for composers and critics of a more avant-garde persuasion. By the time he wrote his Sextet in C Major for piano, strings, and winds in 1935, however, he had long since become a major figure in his own right. As a prolific composer and virtuoso pianist with an international career, chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic, music director of Hungarian Radio, and director of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, he was, in Bartók’s words, “the alpha and omega” of Hungary’s musical life. From the opening bars of the sextet—Dohnányi’s final large-scale chamber work—it’s clear that the “Hungarian Brahms” was no mere throwback to the 19th century. Although his sound world is a far cry from that of Bartók and other leading modernists of the interwar years, his Romanticism is neither nostalgic nor of the superficial, heart-on-sleeve variety. Rather, his music has an incisive, unsentimental vitality, combining warm-blooded lyricism and rhythmic vigor with freely episodic structures.
The Op. 37 Sextet plunges the listener straight into a maelstrom, with roiling arpeggios in the cello set against a soaring melody in the French horn that’s picked up in turn by the clarinet, violin, and viola. The work’s unconventional scoring accentuates its plush, quasi-orchestral sonorities. Dohnányi’s harmonies are as turbulent and unsettled as his textures and rhythms: Not until the final bars of the Allegro appassionato does the nominal home key of C major unequivocally assert itself. Dohnányi further destabilizes the tonality by thematicizing the slippery intervals of a half-step and its near cousin, an ominous descending tritone. At the same time, he creates a strong sense of organic unity by recycling the same thematic material in the other three movements. The Intermezzo is built around a vigorous march of a distinctly Brahmsian character, while the genial Allegro con sentimento segues seamlessly into the playful, faintly jazzy Finale by way of a Lisztian reminiscence of the work’s opening section.
For all of Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-sleeve emotionalism and intimately revealing correspondence with his patron and confidante, Nadezhda von Meck, much about the man and his music remains shrouded in a fog of enigma. 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 extraverted works, including the brilliant Violin Concerto, the tub-thumping 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 conflict at the heart of the homosexual Tchaikovsky’s unhappy marriage. By the time he traveled to the United States in the spring of 1891—among other engagements, he appeared at the opening of Carnegie Hall—he was one of the most celebrated musicians in the world. Two years later, shortly after conducting the premiere of his “Pathétique” Symphony, he died in St. Petersburg under mysterious circumstances.
Although chamber music doesn’t figure prominently in Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre, his comparatively few mature works for small ensembles are of exceptionally high quality. In addition to three string quartets written between 1871 and 1876, they include the elegiac Piano Trio of 1882 and the string sextet entitled Souvenir de Florence. The latter was composed in the summer of 1890, hard on the heels of his opera The Queen of Spades and some six months after the St. Petersburg premiere of The Sleeping Beauty. Whereas the ballet had a somewhat difficult gestation, Tchaikovsky dashed off the sketches for The Queen of Spades in a mere six weeks during a working vacation in Florence. This flood of creative energy evidently buoyed his troubled spirits, for Souvenir de Florence is suffused with a hot-blooded passion singularly free of the angst that bedeviled the composer for much of his adult life. What prompted him to write for the rather unusual combination of six strings (violins, violas, and cellos in pairs) is unclear. He may have been inspired by the sextets of his friends Brahms, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Or perhaps he simply wanted to flex his creative muscles with a small-scale work before applying himself to the arduous task of orchestrating his new opera.
Notwithstanding its descriptive title, Souvenir de Florence is programmatic only in the sense that it, like virtually all of Tchaikovsky’s music, has an implicit emotional storyline. However restorative his holiday in the city of Dante and Michelangelo may have been, the composer made no apparent effort to evoke Italian music or atmosphere. Even the punchy folk dance that serves as the principal theme of the concluding Allegro vivace sounds decidedly Slavic rather than Mediterranean. Both the full-bodied sonorities and the intricate motivic construction of Souvenir de Florence bespeak a fundamentally symphonic conception. The opening Allegro con spirito, by turns urgent and dreamy, blends drama and lyricism in the grand manner. And the second movement, marked Adagio cantabile e con moto (Songlike and with movement), features a quasi-operatic aria for the first violin (later taken up by the first cello) with pizzicato accompaniment. The lilting, sharply accented theme of the ensuing Allegretto moderato paves the way for the exuberant finale.
—Harry Haskell