Riccardo Muti is known for championing Italian composers who are well represented in their native country but rarely performed elsewhere. An example is Alfredo Catalani, who was admired by Toscanini and Mahler but is not often programmed in the US. He was mainly a composer of operas, including Dejanice, Edmea, and Loreley. His best-known work in his relatively brief career (he lived to be 39) is La Wally, championed by Mahler, who regarded it as the best Italian opera he had conducted. Also touted during his lifetime was his symphonic poem Hero and Leander, and two symphonies.
One of his most poignant orchestral works is Contemplazione, written in 1878 for the world exposition in Paris in a performance conducted by his fellow composer Franco Faccio. This piece is Italian in sensibility, but has a crystalline orchestration derived from Catalani’s Parisian training. Song-like from beginning to end, Contemplazione is an extended aria for orchestra. Hypnotic repetitions in the lower strings and syncopated rhythms for bassoons and horns introduce a sensuous bel canto melody that droops, rises, meanders, and soars, embellished with trills. Strings carry the main theme, but the rhapsodic middle section gives the woodwinds a chance to shine. The music rises to an impassioned climax boosted by brass and timpani, after which brass chords lead to a reprise of the main idea with new melodic turns. The piece ends with a haunting coda, adding a touch of Schubert in the harmony, fading into stillness. Brief though it is, Contemplazione packs an emotional wallop, making us wonder what Catalani would have done with orchestral music had he enjoyed a longer career.
Where does Tchaikovsky end and Stravinsky begin? That’s the fascinating question raised by the ballet Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss). In this exquisite homage, Stravinsky used several Tchaikovsky songs and piano pieces as the basis of the work, orchestrating these with his own touches, rhythms, and colors to create a “new” Tchaikovsky ballet based on The Ice Maiden, a tale by Hans Christian Andersen. By inventing an unusual chord here, a rhythmic displacement there, reconceived tempos everywhere, Stravinsky created a piece that is neither his nor Tchaikovsky’s but an intriguing new sound where both sensibilities are seamlessly present. Indeed, Stravinsky later said he could no longer remember which composer was which.
The piece had a rocky start. Commissioned by Ida Rubinstein to mark the 35th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death, it premiered in 1928, with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, the younger sister of Vaslav Nijinsky. Sergei Diaghilev, whose Ballet Russes had produced The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, was outraged that Stravinsky wrote the ballet for Rubinstein’s company rather than for his and panned the ballet with memorable nastiness: “It was like a drawing room in which someone had made a bad smell. Everyone pretended not to notice.” The reviews were unkind as well, but productions by George Balanchine in 1937 and 1950 were more successful, and the ballet (which underwent revisions) has since enjoyed many productions. It was also boosted by an authoritative RCA early stereo recording of the concert suite by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Some commentators, unable to fathom Stravinsky’s admiration for Tchaikovsky, could only praise the work by denigrating Tchaikovsky. Lawrence Morton, for example, claimed that “Tchaikovsky’s faults—his banalities and vulgarities and routine procedures—are composed out of the music, and Stravinsky’s virtues are composed into it.” Others saw the whole enterprise as a specimen of Stravinskian irony.
Yet the evidence suggests that Stravinsky was entirely sincere. His admiration for Tchaikovsky, whose works he conducted, went back many years; he accepted the offer to compose Le baiser de la fée because “it would give me an opportunity of paying my heartfelt homage to Tchaikovsky’s wonderful talent.” Stravinsky’s father, a bass who sang in Tchaikovsky’s operas, took his son to Tchaikovsky’s ballets, and when Stravinsky was 11, he saw Tchaikovsky at a concert one week before the composer’s death just after the premiere of the “Pathétique” Symphony. He was haunted forever by the experience: “I looked and saw a man with white hair, large shoulders, a corpulent back, and this image has remained in the retina of my memory all my life.”
Andersen’s cruel fairy tale is part of a “stolen child” tradition that includes Sheridan Le Fanu’s chilling ghost story “The Child that Went with the Fairies” and Yeats’s lyrical poem “The Stolen Child.” In The Ice Maiden, a child is stolen by sprites during a storm and marked by a fairy with a kiss; years later, she returns in disguise and tricks him into declaring his love for her as he is celebrating his upcoming wedding, then kisses him again and takes him away to her world “beyond time and place.” Stravinsky transformed this story of supernatural kidnapping into a fable about art in which the fairy becomes the artist’s muse: “It suggested an allegory of Tchaikovsky himself,” Stravinsky said. “The fairy’s kiss on the heel of the child is also the muse marking Tchaikovsky at his birth, although the muse did not claim Tchaikovsky at his wedding as she did the young man in the ballet, but rather at the height of his powers.” The fairy’s “mysterious imprint manifests itself in every work of this great artist.”
In 1934, Stravinsky created a concert suite (first for violin and piano, then for orchestra) that he called Divertimento, consisting of highlights from the score. Some conductors prefer to create their own version from the various ballet numbers. This concert uses a 1949 revision of the suite. The opening, titled Sinfonia, opens with woodwind writing and melodic turns that sound distinctly Tchaikovskian, but the storm and kidnap drama initiate a rhythmic and harmonic sharpness that are more Stravinskian. So it goes throughout: Romantic and modernist gestures contrast, merge, and constantly interact. The invigorating “Danses suisses” features joyful horns and melodic strings set against trombone interjections in another key, creating a bitonal tension reminiscent of Petrushka and A Soldier’s Tale. The scene at the mill, which includes a Scherzo, is both delicate and sinister. Incorporating Tchaikovsky’s “None but the Lonely Heart,” the Pas de deux, with its enchanting solos for winds and cello caressed by harp, is charged with passion.
Heralded by Robert Schumann as the first Romantic symphony, Schubert’s “Great” C-Major combines Beethoven’s elemental power with Schubertian songfulness to create a new musical universe. In Schumann’s words, more than “merely lovely melody” or “novel intricacies” are offered in this work: “Something beyond sorrow and joy, as these emotions have been portrayed a hundred times in music, lies concealed in this symphony … We are transported to a region where we can never remember to have been before.”
Schumann was not only the most eloquent champion of this music, but he was also its discoverer. Schubert tried to get the work performed at Vienna’s Musikverein, but in the last of the many crushing disappointments of his career, was turned down. In 1838, a decade after Schubert’s death, Schumann found the symphony while rummaging through a heap of musty manuscripts preserved by Schubert’s brother Ferdinand: “The sight of this hoard of riches thrilled me with joy … Who knows how long the symphony might have lain buried in dust and darkness …”
For a while, the symphony got buried again: Felix Mendelssohn conducted the premiere at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1839, but when he tried to program it in London in 1842, the London Philharmonic string players giggled scornfully at the repeating triplets in the finale—so much so that Mendelssohn withdrew the score. In Paris, the reaction was also disastrous, with the orchestra refusing to play more than the first movement. The newly formed Philharmonic Society of New York was daring enough to take on the entire symphony, but not until 1851.
“How direct and simple everything is,” wrote Alfred Einstein much later of this symphony, and indeed the generation of a vast musical cosmos from basic song-like gestures does seem miraculous. The opening melody for horns is a case in point: Much of the huge first movement springs from this tune, yet the melody suggests a simple forest pastorale more than the introduction to a “grand” symphony. The surging transition to the main Allegro is described as “wholly new” by Schumann who explained, “We are landed; we know not how.”
An analysis of the work, writes Schumann, is impossible: “One would necessarily have to transcribe the entire symphony to give the faintest notion of its intense originality throughout.” This may sound like Romantic rhetoric, but more than a few commentators have stumbled in their attempts to explain how Schubert manages to stay essentially in sonata form while spiritually being in another realm altogether.
The slow movement is equally ineffable. A gypsy-like oboe tune alternates with a lyrical section that recalls the sublimity of another of Schubert’s final works, the E-flat–Major Mass. Near the end of this section, in Schumann’s words, “a horn call sounds from a distance that seems to have descended from another world. And every other instrument seems to listen, as if some heavenly messenger were hovering through the orchestra.” This juxtaposition of earthy folk material with otherworldly musings is characteristic of late Schubert. In addition, Schubert contrasts heaven with a moment of hell—a loud outburst of anguish toward the end.
The exuberant Scherzo also features abrupt shifts of mood. Although this movement has been compared to the gargantuan Scherzo of Beethoven’s Ninth, the trio is pure Schubert: Like the middle section of the slow movement in the “Farewell” B-flat–Major Piano Sonata, it sounds like a yearning extension of a Schubert song.
Even more than the first movement, the Allegro vivace finale is an unleashing of elemental rhythm. The opening fanfare contains two rhythmic figures that throb throughout the movement, and the four simple repeated notes in the second subject become, through sheer primal emphasis, an orgiastic climax near the end. Conductor Felix Weingartner once wrote that this “intoxicating” music evoked in him “the effect as of flight through ether … Nature has denied us this joy, but great works of art give it to us.”
It is odd that this symphony, so alive in every note, should have suffered for more than a century from the reputation of being too long. Even Dvořák, who found it “astounding” in its “richness and variety of coloring,” criticized it for the “the fault of diffuseness.” Yet the “Great” C-Major is no longer than Beethoven’s “Eroica” and is shorter than Beethoven’s Ninth—not to mention the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, of which it is the progenitor. Only recently has the work come to be regarded as having an appropriately large scale. Again Schumann, citing in this case the symphony’s “heavenly length,” had the last word.
—Jack Sullivan