After the success in 1910 of his first ballet, Zhar-ptitsa (known in French as L’oiseau de feu and in English as The Firebird), Igor Stravinsky began to plan his next work, which was to be a ballet taking as its subject the fertility rites of pagan Russia. But he realized that composing such a score would be a “long and difficult task” and so decided “to refresh myself by composing an orchestral piece in which the piano would play the most important part—a sort of Konzertstück.” (Of course, Stravinsky was right: His sketches for Vesna svyashchennaya—better known as The Rite of Spring—testify to the almost superhuman concentration that the composer had to summon within himself in order to complete this transcendent score in 1913.) Searching for a title for his concert piece, whose subject the composer described as a “droll, ugly, sentimental, shifting personage who was always in an explosion of revolt,” Stravinsky suddenly hit upon a solution: “One day I leapt for joy. I had indeed found my title—Petrushka, the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries.”
Who, or what, exactly, is this Petrushka? A venerable comic figure who is called Pulcinella in Italy and Punch in England, a figure of indignation and violence, a trickster whose tricks all too often turn back upon himself. In Stravinsky’s native city of St. Petersburg, the petrushka shows in their colorful booths were played at the fairs put on during Shrovetide, that midwinter period of uninhibited carnival that occurred a week before the austerities of the penitential season of Lent. As music historian Richard Taruskin writes, “The earliest account of what is arguably a petrushka play is found in a book published in 1636 by Adam Olearius, the Dutch Ambassador to the Russian court, who gives both a written description and a drawing of a puppet performance.” By 1830, the period in which Stravinsky’s ballet is set, the influence of Italian commedia dell’arte had considerably modified the ancient petrushka plays.
Once Stravinsky sharpened the focus of his invention by embracing the figure of Petrushka, he quickly completed two sections of the score, including the scintillating Russian Dance. Sergei Diaghilev, the great impresario who founded the Ballets Russes and who had commissioned The Firebird, visited Stravinsky in Switzerland to inquire after the progress of what would become The Rite of Spring. Instead of sketches for that score, however, Stravinsky played to an entranced Diaghilev the completed sections of his Konzertstück about Petrushka. Diaghilev grasped instantly the potential of this music for ballet, forcefully persuading the composer to transform it into a dramatic work.
Diaghilev then brought Stravinsky together with Alexander Benois, the artist and set designer, and the choreographer of The Firebird, Mikhail Fokine. The eldest of this group, Benois remembered well the Shrovetide fairs of his childhood in St. Petersburg, and sketched colorful sets and costumes as well as helped to devise its scenario. Fokine’s innovative choreography violated the traditional suavity of ballet by creating jerky, marionette-like movements for the incandescent Vaslav Nijinsky, the star dancer of the Ballets Russes, who created the title role. The coruscating brilliance of Stravinsky’s orchestration is unparalleled.
Given the strong and conflicting aesthetic opinions of these three collaborators, it is hardly surprising that the scenario they wrote for Petrushka contains a healthy dollop of ambiguity: How, for example, can a puppet have a ghost that, like Till Eulenspiegel in Richard Strauss’s tone poem, returns after death to have the last word? Far from detracting from the dramatic impact of the ballet, however, this ambiguity allows the audience to enter imaginatively into the action themselves.
The first tableau seems to be a realistic recreation of a Shrovetide fair in St. Petersburg, but this expectation is transmogrified once the sinister Magician enters and commands three puppets to dance. At this point the audience is ushered into the fantastic realm of Russian symbolism; as Andrew Wachtel writes, “by combining the realistic and fantastic worlds in the finale, the authors called the very distinction between the stage world and the real world into question.” Audiences were enchanted rather than disconcerted: Petrushka was an immense success at its Paris premiere by the Ballets Russes on June 13, 1911, in the Théâtre du Châtelet. Since then Petrushka has never left the ballet repertory.
The action of Petrushka unfolds over four tableaux. The curtain rises upon a set that evokes Admiralty Square in St. Petersburg, replete with a puppet theater with closed curtain, a carousel, and a boisterous crowd, more than a few of whom are inebriated. The revelry grows wilder until the Magician appears, playing the flute by which he animates his three puppets: a resplendent Moor, a pretty Ballerina, and the awkward Petrushka, who is clearly in love with the indifferent Ballerina, who prefers the virile Moor.
In the Second Tableau, set in Petrushka’s room, Stravinsky illustrates the duality of his protagonist’s frustrated nature by a piercing harmonic amalgam that combines two unrelated chords (F-sharp major and C major)—the famous “Petrushka Chord.” The Ballerina enters, but Petrushka’s anguished gyrations frighten her and she flees.
The Third Tableau takes place in the Moor’s voluptuously Oriental room. The Magician places the Ballerina close to the Moor, who commences to seduce her: A distraught Petrushka discovers them and makes a fuss. Furious at this intrusion, the Moor draws a scimitar and chases Petrushka out of the room.
The Fourth, and final, Tableau returns to Admiralty Square, where the celebration continues with a series of dances interrupted by a trained bear. To the dismay of the crowd, the two puppets suddenly enter into their midst: The Moor kills Petrushka with a single stroke of his blade. Night falls, the revelers are dispersed, and the Magician, carrying the limp body of his puppet, is terrified to see the angry ghost of Petrushka, who thumbs his nose at his erstwhile tormentor to the mocking sound of “his” chord—and at the audience as well.
—Byron Adams
Born in Germany in 1900, Kurt Weill died at age 50 in New York. Not unlike Franz Schubert, another composer who perished prematurely, the prolific Weill excelled in a wide variety of genres and magnificently merged popular and serious styles with an apparent unwillingness to make artificial distinctions between them. His widow, the formidable singing actress Lotte Lenya, once remarked in an interview: “Weill has a lot of Schubert in him—he reminds me of him. In his simplicity.” George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein were likewise kindred spirits.
Over the course of his career, Weill concentrated on dramatic works, from the early masterpieces he wrote in Weimar Germany to successes on Broadway near the end of his life. His collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, including The Threepenny Opera (an updating of the 18th-century The Beggar’s Opera) and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, proved theatrical landmarks.
Yet Weill’s compositional output extended beyond music for the stage (and for radio and film) to include choral and concert works—chamber music, two symphonies, and a Concerto for Violin and Winds. His musical gifts had been evident at an early age, which led to elite training in Berlin with teachers who included Engelbert Humperdinck (composer of the opera Hansel and Gretel) and Ferruccio Busoni. At age 21, Weill composed an impressive First Symphony, which was never performed during his lifetime. He fled Germany in March 1933, soon after the Nazis seized power, and lived first in Paris before settling in America, where he eventually became a citizen.
Weill had begun composing his Symphony No. 2 before fleeing Germany but once in France was sidetracked by a new project, a “ballet with songs” called The Seven Deadly Sins, another joint venture with Brecht. After that piece premiered in June he returned to the Symphony, which was completed by February. The work was commissioned by the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, one of the legendary patrons of the time, who also elicited pieces from Stravinsky, Satie, Poulenc, Falla, and others. A princess through her second marriage, the former Winnaretta Singer (born in America to the family known for sewing machines), she hosted the most celebrated musical salon in Paris, not only commissioning formidable works but also performing them in her home. It was in these circumstances that Weill’s Symphony received its private premiere.
The eminent German conductor Bruno Walter, who had premiered several works by his friend Gustav Mahler, led the first official performance of Weill’s Second Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam on October 11, 1934. While the orchestra enjoyed performing the piece and the audience embraced it, the critical reception was negative and, at least in one case, anti-Semitic. Some complained of a similarity to The Threepenny Opera and charged that the piece was not truly symphonic but rather an assemblage of songs. Weill reported to a friend: “It was a great success with the audience—catastrophic press (‘banal,’ ‘disjointed,’ ‘empty,’ ‘Beethoven in the beer garden,’ etc. Not one friendly word”).
But Walter believed in the Symphony and soon performed it in the Hague and Rotterdam and, by the end of the year, with the New York Philharmonic. For that occasion, he suggested that Weill add the title Three Night Scenes: A Symphonic Fantasy, corresponding to what he felt was “its nocturnal, uncanny, mysterious atmosphere.” The program note for those New York concerts states that the proposal was “adopted with approval” by Weill, although one may well be skeptical about this. The work’s first real critical success came when Walter conducted it in Vienna in 1937, but after that the Symphony vanished from the repertoire for decades and remained unpublished until 1966.
The three-movement Symphony is scored for a modest-sized orchestra and displays an eclecticism and mixture of styles, from Neoclassicism to popular, with nods toward Romanticism reminiscent of Mahler. (Walter’s advocacy of the Symphony is understandable.) The first movement (Sostenuto—Allegro molto) begins with a slow introduction that includes thematic material that forms the basis for the entire Symphony. The second movement (Largo) offers a Mahlerian funeral march. The more optimistic finale (Allegro vivace—Alla marcia—Presto) is a rondo with march that ends with a brilliant coda ingeniously transforming the opening theme of the second movement.
Despite the troubled times in which he composed the Symphony, Weill was reluctant to reveal a “program” for it. Walter persuaded him to provide the following brief note for the Amsterdam premiere (translation by Antony Beaumont):
The first movement is cast in straight sonata form, except that the so-called development section does not expand on the ideas of the first and second subjects but draws instead on fresh material. An appropriate heading for the second movement might be “Cortège.” In 4/4 time throughout, it is based on one rhythmic and one melodic theme. The final movement is a rondo, of which the second interlude is a march for winds alone. The culminating stretto takes the form of a tarantella …
It is impossible for me to comment on the “content” of the work, because it was conceived as a purely musical form. A lady friend of mine in Paris was perhaps right when she said, if one could find a word that signified the opposite of “pastoral,” it would be the title for this music. I cannot tell.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
George Gershwin’s career is a great American success story, tempered (as with Mozart and Schubert) by early death in his 30s that cut it short. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he grew up in a poor household. As Aaron Copland, his slightly younger Brooklyn contemporary, also discovered, music offered opportunities. But while Copland went to study abroad as an American in Paris, Gershwin dropped out of school and started working his way up as a “song-plugger,” playing Tin Pan Alley songs for perspective customers at a music store. Soon he was writing his own songs (his first big hit was “Swanee” in 1919) and enjoying success on Broadway.
The signal event of his early career came at age 25, on Tuesday afternoon, February 12, 1924, at a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall given by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra. Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” it featured a variety of familiar pieces, including popular fare and comedy, as well as pieces by Edward MacDowell and Victor Herbert, and concluding with one of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches.
Whiteman explained that the purpose of the experiment was to highlight “the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant jazz, which sprang into existence about 10 years ago from nowhere in particular, to the really melodious music of today which—for no good reason—is still being called jazz.” The comment that the music came “from nowhere in particular” is striking. As music historian Richard Taruskin keenly observed, this event was “in essence an attempt to sanitize contemporary popular music and elevate it in public esteem by divorcing it from its roots in African American improvised music and securing endorsements from luminaries of the classical music establishment, many of whom were in attendance that evening.” (Among those said to have been there were Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leopold Stokowski, Jascha Heifetz, and Fritz Kreisler.) It was not so much that the music was unusual, but rather the idea of presenting performances by a dance band in a concert hall.
Gershwin had written his piece Rhapsody in Blue in the space of just a few weeks in a two-piano version that was quickly orchestrated by Whiteman’s favored arranger, Ferde Grofé (1892–1972), who is best remembered today for his own composition The Grand Canyon Suite. Grofé was intimately familiar with the marvelous instrumental colors Whiteman’s band could produce; he followed suggestions outlined in Gershwin’s piano score, which were supplemented by almost daily meetings with the composer. The famous opening clarinet glissando was contributed by Ross Gorman, who asked permission to change a written-out scale to something more enticing.
The Rhapsody proved to be the highlight of the concert, an enormous success before a capacity audience, as well as with most of the critics. Deems Taylor said the piece “hinted at something new, something that had not hitherto been said in music.” Gershwin, he believed, provided “a link between the jazz camp and the intellectuals.” Even a grumpy voice from Theatre Magazine acknowledged that the wildly popular concert “was often vulgar, but it was never dull.” Whiteman repeated the program a month later and then again at Carnegie Hall in April, as well as in Philadelphia and Boston. In June he and Gershwin made their first recording of the Rhapsody, which sold over a million copies. Over roughly the next decade performances, recordings, and sheet music earned the composer some $250,000, an almost unimaginable sum at the time.
Gershwin originally titled the work American Rhapsody, perhaps to capitalize on the popularity of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, but his brother Ira suggested using something inspired by paintings of James McNeill Whistler, such as Nocturne in Blue and Silver.
The Rhapsody basically unfolds as a sequence of five Tin Pan Alley–like songs with virtuoso connecting passagework. The piece has been criticized by some as a loose patchwork of relatively interchangeable parts (Gershwin’s own early recordings made cuts so as to fit on one 78-rpm disc), but Howard Pollack has observed that the work might be viewed as a “compressed four-movement symphony or sonata,” along the lines of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy. For his part, Gershwin said that he “wanted to show that jazz is an idiom not to be limited to a mere song and chorus that consumed three minutes in presentation,” which meant putting the blues “in a larger and more serious form.” He commented 12 years after its successful premiere that the piece was “still very much alive,” while if he had “taken the same themes and put them in songs they would have been gone years ago.”
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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