Samuel Barber wrote some of his most impressive music when he was young, including numerous songs (which he began writing at age seven) and his String Quartet, the slow movement of which became the Adagio for Strings, one of the most beloved slow pieces in the symphonic repertoire. He wrote his Symphony No. 1 when he was 25, beginning it when he was vacationing with his life partner Gian Carlo Menotti in Camden, Maine. Though it is his first international hit, it already has his distinctive voice, combining song-like lyricism with spiky dissonance, epic gestures with a concise form.
Bernardino Molinari conducted the premiere in 1936 with the Augusteo Orchestra (now called the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) in Rome, a huge success and an important event in the history of American symphonic music, which was often dismissed or ignored. The symphony was the first American work to appear at the Salzburg Festival and went on to be performed by the New York Philharmonic and The Cleveland Orchestra. Barber revised the symphony in 1942–1943; Bruno Walter conducted this version in 1944, offering to conduct any new Barber piece and giving him a signed photograph that read “to Samuel Barber, the Pioneer of the American Symphony.”
Barber provided the following program note for the New York premiere:
“The form of my Symphony in One Movement is a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony. It is based on three themes of the initial Allegro non troppo, which retain throughout the work their fundamental character. The Allegro opens with the usual exposition of a main theme, a more lyrical second theme, and a closing theme. After a brief development of the three themes, instead of the customary recapitulation, the first theme in diminution forms the basis of a scherzo section (Vivace). The second theme (oboe over muted strings) then appears in augmentation, in an extended Andante tranquillo. An intense crescendo introduces the finale, which is a short passacaglia based on the first theme (introduced by the violoncelli and contrabassi), over which, together with figures from other themes, the closing theme is woven, thus serving as a recapitulation for the entire symphony.”
As this note suggests, the symphony is full of subtle interconnections: It offers the four-movement structure of a symphony, including a dancing Scherzo and a noble passacaglia finale, in a single tightly written movement. The harmonies, as with Barber’s later pieces, are tonal, sometimes meltingly lyrical, but the piece is full of brash dissonance that often explodes like a volcano when we least expect it, lending a potent underlying suspense and tension. The slow section, marked Andante tranquillo, is one of the most gorgeous things Barber ever wrote, its soaring oboe solo rivalling the one in the slow movement of his Violin Concerto. In the finale, Barber brings together previous themes layered on top of each other in a satisfying tapestry, ending on a note of grandeur.
The sexy clarinet glissando that opens Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue introduced a new sound into American symphonic music. TheRhapsody, which turns 100 this year, is now so beloved and symphonic jazz now so commonplace that we forget how controversial and novel the piece was at the time. Gershwin managed to bring down the wrath of two kinds of purists—the disciples of The True Jazz, who criticized Gershwin for trying to codify an improvisatory form, and conservative music critics who, as Edward Jablonski puts it, excoriated him for introducing “all that bawdy-house music into the sacred precincts of Carnegie Hall.”
Audiences, who are often way ahead of the critics, loved the Rhapsody from the beginning, and Gershwin made handsome money from the piece, especially when the residuals began to roll in. At various points in his career, Gershwin enjoyed the admiration of European composers, including Stravinsky, Schoenberg (!), and Ravel. (When Gershwin asked Ravel for composition lessons, Ravel drolly replied, “Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?”)
Gershwin didn’t know he was writing Rhapsody in Blue until he read about it in the paper. The New York Tribune proclaimed that Gershwin was composing a jazz concerto for an “Experiment in Modern Music” organized by the popular Paul Whiteman dance band. Although he had not agreed to anything of the kind (though he vaguely recalled speaking with Whiteman about a concerto), Gershwin decided to compose the work anyway, despite having basically a month to write it. He banged the piece out on an upright piano in his upper west side apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where he lived with his parents, brothers, and sister. We thus have Paul Whiteman—sneaky but smart—to thank for a game-changing masterpiece.
“I tried to express our manner of living,” Gershwin said of the Rhapsody, “the tempo of our modern life with its speed and chaos and vitality.” Europeans who were drawn to jazz made similar statements, seeing jazz as a marker of modern living. When he wrote his jazz opera Jonny spielt auf in 1925, the year after Gershwin’s Rhapsody, Ernst Krenek proclaimed jazz to be not just the music of Black America but “the note of the times.” Kurt Weill went further, stating that “the rhythm of our time is jazz, the Americanization of the entire way we live.”
The first performance of the Rhapsody, in February 1924, rocketed Gershwin to international fame. Rachmaninoff, Stokowski, Ernest Bloch, and Fritz Kreisler were in the audience, which gave the Rhapsody a loud ovation. Gershwin had not had time to put the piano part on paper, so he played it from memory, improvising parts on the spot. He went on to perform it at Carnegie Hall and in five other cities. He was used to having an arranger for his Broadway shows and entrusted the orchestration to Ferde Grofé (who worked for Whiteman and later wrote the popular Grand Canyon Suite). Grofé contributed an initial “jazz band” orchestration, then followed up with a larger orchestra, a kind of big band on steroids (used in this performance). Following the success of the Rhapsody, Gershwin wrote more symphonic jazz pieces, such as the Concerto in F and An American in Paris while continuing to turn out Broadway shows, Hollywood movies, and songs, often in collaboration with his brother Ira, his career culminating in the revolutionary opera Porgy and Bess before his tragic death of a brain tumor at age 38.
Unlike Gershwin’s Concerto in F, which largely follows classical structures, Rhapsody in Blue is not a proper concerto, but as Gershwin put it, “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” The opening piano cadenza, a “kaleidoscope” in itself, announces the main tune and other motifs, rising to a crescendo before the orchestra charges in with the main melody. Another exuberant theme follows with piano and orchestra combined, and a second piano cadenza leads to the famous, wistful slow melody, first sung by strings, rising and falling back on itself with melancholy ecstasy before it is taken over by the pianist, who then speeds into a brilliant toccata-like section. A frenetic fragmentation of the slow theme builds to a swaggering coda, grandly restating the opening theme before sweeping breathlessly upward.
More than just a crowd-pleasing anthology of musical fairy tales, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is a landmark in both classical and popular culture. Its mystery and magic resonate in the harmonies and colors of numerous modern composers, notably Ravel, who wrote his own Shéhérazade, and Stravinsky, whose Firebird pushed his mentor’s effects in daring new directions. Since first being played at Carnegie Hall in 1900, Scheherazade has provided tropes for everything from Broadway musicals to such Hollywood scores as Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia and John Williams’s music for the Indiana Jones films.
The sound of the modern orchestra owes a great deal to this 1888 work and the miniatures in its immediate orbit: Capriccio espagnol and the Russian Easter Festival Overture. (Important earlier pieces, such as the haunting Antar, were rarely performed in the West and thus made little impact.) Rimsky-Korsakov repealed the thick, square sound of the standard 19th-century orchestra, liberating the brass and percussion, inaugurating a new shimmer and transparency in the strings, and creating coloristic effects often inseparable from the themes. As with Debussy and Ravel, one can’t imagine the ideas without the orchestration, the music without the atmosphere.
Not surprisingly, Rimsky-Korsakov admired Berlioz, another largely self-taught innovator. It is possible to see Scheherazade as a Russian Symphonie fantastique, another work with fantastical references that is really about the wonders of a symphony orchestra. Like Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov was ambivalent about the piece’s “program,” though he certainly had a good one: Arabian Nights, which tells of a Sultan whose idea of keeping his women faithful was to marry them in the evening and behead them in the morning—until Scheherazade outlasted him by telling a fabulous story with a cliffhanger for 1,001 nights. Rimsky-Korsakov conceived of his piece as a riff on the tale—each movement is one of Scheherazade’s stories, and the finale recaps the themes from each one in a blazing apotheosis—but he never meant for the work to be a literal narrative.
He insisted that the musical “design” was the point of the piece, and that the basic motifs—the Sultan’s growling trombone, Scheherazade’s sensual violin, and the Kalendar Prince’s woodwind cadenzas—were not Wagnerian markers “linked unbrokenly” to specific characters. The Sultan’s sinister theme, for example, soon becomes associated with a heaving sea in the first movement’s tale of Sinbad the sailor, and the Kalendar Prince’s motif in the second becomes the shipwreck idea in the finale. (Before becoming a composer, Rimsky-Korsakov was a naval officer, and the sea haunts many of his works.) The movement titles, according to the composer, were meant as “hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy,” leaving an impression of “numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders.”
Recent commentators view Scheherazade as a mosaic in which themes repeat, contrast, and collide rather than develop in conventional sonata form. Rimsky-Korsakov himself regarded the work as a “kaleidoscope” of “virtuosity,” and indeed, the soaring strings in the opening movement, the Eastern-tinted bassoon and clarinet cadenzas in the second, the spine-tingling percussion in the third, and the massed fireworks in the finale created a new standard for brilliant color. This is a “concerto for orchestra” long before Bartók, in which practically everyone gets a difficult solo, and small chamber ensembles shine against massive tutti. What most rivets our attention are Scheherazade’s seductive violin solos—the “unifying thread” as the composer put it—introducing all movements but the third, and concluding the piece on a rapturous high over the Sultan’s now-subdued rumblings. Scheherazade sings some of the sexiest music ever conceived: No wonder the Sultan can’t bear to kill her.
Based on a free variation form, the piece often sounds spontaneous and improvised (it was written in less than a month) but is cunningly calculated. The sensuous melody for the Young Prince in the third movement, for example, is deftly balanced between the freewheeling cadenzas in the previous movement and the fragmented violence in the finale. Many composers would be tempted to showcase such a luscious tune early on, but Rimsky-Korsakov waits until the perfect moment.
The piece gradually accumulates more percussion as each movement unfolds, so there is always somewhere to go in the next crashing climax. Yet otherwise, the orchestra is not especially large—not much bigger than Brahms’s. Rimsky-Korsakov knew how to use each instrument to maximum effect, individually and in idiosyncratic combinations, and didn’t need to pile on extra players. Some of the best touches are astonishingly simple, such as the three harp chords that caress the violin solo, seductively setting up each narrative. The enchanter in the narrative is Scheherazade, but the real wizard is Rimsky-Korsakov.
—Jack Sullivan