A disciple of Wagner and Liszt, Richard Strauss kept the embers of late Romanticism glowing long into the 20th century. He established his avant-garde credentials in the late 1800s with a series of lushly orchestrated symphonic tone poems, including Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, and Ein Heldenleben, all featuring the sensuous, richly chromatic style with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. By the end of the century, Strauss was renowned both at home and abroad as Germany’s foremost modernist composer, and premieres of his works were eagerly anticipated. Although he rejected the more radical innovations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, he continued to break new musical, dramatic, and psychological ground in the early 1900s in operas such as Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne auf Naxos.
Strauss’s career plateaued during the 1920s, as his music fell increasingly out of step with the progressive spirit of Weimar Germany. Yet he remained active and highly visible to the end of World War II. In February 1945, the venerable octogenarian lamented the Allies’ horrific fire-bombing of Dresden. “I too am in a mood of despair,” he commiserated with a friend. “The Goethehaus, the world’s greatest sanctuary, destroyed! My beautiful Dresden—Weimar—Munich, all gone!” Perhaps subconsciously, Strauss’s use of the possessive pronoun “my” reflected the muddling of public and private roles that had led him to accept the presidency of the Nazi Reichsmusikkammer in 1933, despite his lack of sympathy for Hitler’s regime. As a consequence of his political naiveté, Germany’s greatest living composer was banned from conducting and collecting royalties in his homeland after the war. He died in 1949, leaving as his musical epitaph the voluptuously nostalgic Vier letzte Lieder for soprano and orchestra.
Strauss composed a sizable number of small-scale instrumental works, mostly clustered at the beginning and end of his life. By the time he wrote the Op. 7 Wind Serenade in 1881, shortly before graduating from Gymnasium in his native Munich, the precocious 17-year-old already had his first symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata under his belt. Preternaturally polished and self-assured, the one-movement Serenade reflects Strauss’s debt to the Classical serenades of Mozart and Haydn. At the same time, the warm, burnished harmonies and timbres produced by the 13 instruments evoke the contemporary serenades of Brahms. Hans von Bülow, who conducted the Serenade in Meiningen in 1883, praised Strauss’s music as “well crafted and euphonious,” noting that it showed off the renowned Meiningen wind players “in all their virtuoso splendor.” Recognizing Strauss’s exceptional talent, Bülow undertook to promote both him and his work. When the Meiningen orchestra brought the Serenade to Berlin in February 1884, the maestro invited his young protégé to a rehearsal. “He praised the piece to the hilt and asked the musicians to applaud me afterwards, joining the applause himself,” Strauss proudly reported to his parents.
Mexican composer Santos Cota describes his brief, powerfully expressive Elegía as “a lament on the disappearance of Bertrand, the son of some acquaintances of mine and one of the hundreds of ‘desaparecidos’ that vanish every year in Mexico.” In the opening bars of this unremittingly bleak piece, the contrabass traces a descending chromatic line, a time-honored musical emblem of grief. The bassoon and English horn—representing, the composer tells us, Bertrand’s parents—soon enter in a mournfully rhapsodic dialogue silhouetted against the slower-moving strings. When they are joined, in the Elegía’s fugue-like middle section, by a solo violin, the listener is invited to hear “a remembrance of the lost one” in the measured quarter and eighth notes. Throughout the piece, an almost continuously sounding E-flat serves as both harmonic and emotional anchor. In the decade since Cota composed the Elegía, the number of missing persons in Mexico has risen to more than 110,000.
A self-described “multi-racial Latina,” American composer Gabriela Lena Frank has explored the cross-fertilization of cultures in works like the opera El ultimo sueño de Frida y Diego, about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera (which the Metropolitan Opera has announced plans to stage in the near future). Her 2001 work Leyendas (Legends), the composer tells us, “mixes elements from the Western classical and Andean folk music traditions. “Toyos” depicts one of the most recognizable instruments of the Andes, the panpipe. One of the largest kinds is the breathy toyo, which requires great stamina and lung power, and is often played in parallel fourths or fifths. “Tarqueada” is a forceful and fast number featuring the tarka, a heavy wooden duct flute that is blown harshly in order to split the tone. Tarka ensembles typically also play in fourths and fifths. “Himno de Zampoñas” features a particular type of panpipe ensemble that divides up melodies through a technique known as “hocketing.” The characteristic sound of the zampoña panpipe is that of a fundamental tone blown fatly so that overtones ring out on top, hence the unusual scoring of double stops in this movement.
According to Frank,
“Chasqui” depicts a legendary figure from the Inca period, the chasqui runner, who sprinted great distances to deliver messages between towns separated from one another by the Andean peaks. The chasqui needed to travel light. Hence, 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. “Canto de Velorio” portrays another well-known Andean personality, a professional crying woman known as the llorona. Hired to render funeral rituals even sadder, the llorona is accompanied here by a second llorona and an additional chorus of mourning women (coro de mujeres). The chant “Dies Irae” is quoted as a reflection of the comfortable mix of Quechua Indian religious rites with those from Catholicism. “Coqueteos” is a flirtatious love song sung by gallant men known as romanceros. As such, it is direct in its harmonic expression, bold, and festive. The romanceros sing in harmony with one another against a backdrop of guitars, which I think of as a vendaval de guitarras (“storm of guitars”).
Often called the “dean of American composers,” Copland was at once a folksy nationalist and a sophisticated citizen of the world. His studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger in the early 1920s broadened his cultural horizons (it was there that he developed an appreciation for Black jazz), and from then on, his work embraced a wide spectrum of classical and vernacular elements. Between the wars, Copland made his mark on New York’s new-music scene with works like the bluesy Music for the Theatre, the knotty Piano Variations, and the colorful El Salón México. He won lasting popular acclaim in the late 1930s and early ’40s with the Americanist ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring. As a senior statesman of American music, he continued to plow fresh ground in such challenging works as the 12-tone Piano Quartet and the waltz-inspired Dance Panels.
The impetus for Appalachian Spring originated with Erick Hawkins, a member of Martha Graham’s celebrated modern-dance troupe (and her future husband). It was he who persuaded the philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to commission a score from Copland, but it was Graham who chose the homegrown subject—after the composer rejected her initial idea for a dance about Medea, the murderous princess of Greek mythology. In 1943, she sent Copland a scenario featuring a pioneering newlywed couple in the backcountry of her native Pennsylvania. Graham called it “House of Victory”; Copland’s working title was “Ballet for Martha”; they finally settled on Appalachian Spring, a rubric borrowed from a poem by Hart Crane. Confessing that “once the music comes I never look at the script,” Graham encouraged her collaborator to “let the music take its own life and urge.” Copland’s decision to highlight the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” set the tone for their choreographic idyll, for which Isamu Noguchi would design the suitably spare sets.
Copland’s original scoring for 13 instruments was dictated by the capacity of the pit in the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium, where Appalachian Spring had its premiere on October 30, 1944. With the end of World War II in sight, the program synopsis captured the popular mood of optimism and nostalgia for a simpler time: “Part and parcel of our lives is that moment of Pennsylvania spring when there was ‘a garden eastward in Eden.’ Spring was celebrated by a man and woman building a house with joy and love and prayer; by a revivalist and his followers in their shouts of exaltation; by a pioneering woman with her dreams of the Promised Land.” Copland’s music, with its folklike charm and characteristically spacious harmonies, has achieved iconic status on its own merits. In 1945, he extracted an abridged orchestral suite from the ballet, which served as the basis for the present chamber version 25 years later. In Graham’s words, Appalachian Spring ends with “the feeling of the town settling down for the night, the kind of thing that happens when one hears a call in the twilight, the voices of children in the distance, a dog barking, and then night.”
—Harry Haskell