SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29

 

A Painstaking Craftsman

 

For years, Rachmaninoff—beloved by players and the public—was sneered at by the musical intelligentsia for being a Romantic throwback (as was Korngold, whose Violin Concerto is also presented on this program). Now in the 21st century, it is clear he was not the reactionary or popular panderer he was accused of being, but an original craftsman and a technical perfectionist who rejected both the serialism and neoclassicism of his era, holding on to his Russian heritage while cultivating a modern audience. He replaced the classical principle of sonata form and its balanced contrasts with a rigorous unity of atmosphere even while retaining its outer vestiges.

 

Echoes of Poe

 

Like Debussy and Ravel, Rachmaninoff was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, whose poem “The Bells” he set as a gigantic cantata (his best work, he always thought). Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” paralleled Rachmaninoff’s own principles of composition: “Each piece is built up around a climax: The whole stream of tones must be so calculated, and the content and form of each so clearly graduated, that the climax seems to be completely natural … it must come as a liberation from the last material obstacle …” Rachmaninoff’s emphasis on a “calculated,” “graduated” unity of design is strikingly close to Poe’s advocacy of a single “tone” leading to a “preconceived effect.” Like Poe, Rachmaninoff created a dark emotional world brilliantly contrived and “preconceived” even though it seems Romantically spontaneous.

 

About the Music

 

The Isle of the Dead reflects these principles: The atmosphere is somber throughout, and the work is built around a series of deftly calibrated climaxes. The music incorporates the medieval death-rite chant Dies irae, which Rachmaninoff also used in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and The Bells, among others. First it drifts through the textures in ghostlike fragments; gradually, it becomes more insistent and fully formed until it dominates the piece.

 

A Musical “Dream Image”

 

Rachmaninoff’s hypnotic tone poem was also directly inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s painting Die Toteninsel(The Isle of the Dead), depicting a small boat carrying a coffin and a mysterious figure in white arriving at a sinister island. This painting, which Böcklin called a “dream image,” was enormously popular, with reproductions appearing across Europe. Rachmaninoff saw the painting in Paris in 1907; it was still vividly in his mind when he got around to composing The Isle of the Dead in 1909, conducting the premiere in Moscow himself. What he originally saw was a black-and-white reproduction, but when he viewed the color original, he was dismayed: The spell was broken, so much so that he commented, “If I had seen first the original, I probably would have not written my Isle of the Dead. I like it in black and white.”

 

A Closer Listen

 

The piece begins with a repeating motif in the depths of the orchestra, suggesting oars in the water. The music builds inexorably, occasionally dying down only to rise again, with mournful strings and swirling winds, building to a shattering climax, then thinning down, making way for the tranquillo opening to the second section, which is more lyrical than the first, the strings rising passionately, the brass building toward another massive climax propelled by the Dies irae theme. The work concludes with an exquisitely chilling return of the music from the opening.

 

ERICH KORNGOLD
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35

 

Inventing a New Sound

 

The history of the émigré composers of Hollywood’s Golden Age is fascinating in its complexity and strangeness. It exemplifies the American immigrant experience at its most efficient and inspiring, but it also engendered bitter controversy. Many of Hollywood’s early composers—including Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Ernst Toch, and Franz Waxman—were immigrants who fled Nazi oppression. (A major exception was the prolific Max Steiner, who immigrated earlier.) Indeed, Hollywood music is basically an émigré invention, and Korngold was one of its earliest and most innovative masters.

America provided not only a haven for these composers in flight from fascism, but its most glamorous myth: Hollywood, a make-believe paradise that seemed to offer fame and wealth virtually unheard of (and still rare) in serious concert music. These exiles forged a lasting aesthetic as they dealt with anti-Semitism and intense deadline pressure. They also faced the contempt of a classical music establishment that condemned movie music as shallow and degenerate—ironically, the very terms the Nazis had used to vilify Korngold and his colleagues, though in a far deadlier context. (Today that establishment often survives by programming concerts of film music.)

The case of Korngold—like Mozart, a childhood prodigy who produced teenage masterpieces—is especially poignant. He is now widely regarded as the most successful of the group, producing film and concert music of equal stature, but precisely because he was a major composer—in the judgment of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler the greatest of his generation, and the bearer of their mantles—he was accused most intensely of being a sellout, often by his fellow émigrés. Typical was Austrian Radio’s Heinrich Kralik’s lament to Otto Klemperer that Korngold had “wasted” his talent on Hollywood. Klemperer’s icy response was that Korngold “had always composed for Warner Brothers—he just didn’t realize it.”

 

A Dreamlike Glamor

 

Like his fellow émigré Alfred Hitchcock (who used Korngold’s orchestrations of Strauss family waltzes in his underrated biopic Waltzes from Vienna), Korngold called movies a new form of opera. He believed that at its best, film scores could hold up as concert pieces, and many of his finest concert scores are based on his film music, the most popular today being his sensuous Violin Concerto, which borrows material from Juarez, Anthony Adverse, The Prince and the Pauper, and Another Dawn. Korngold’s melodies retain their dream-like glamor and disciplined opulence while interacting with each other in symphonic structures. (Korngold had few illusions about the films themselves: When a critic complained near the end of his movie career that his film music was declining in quality, he answered that when he first came to America, his English was so sketchy he didn’t understand what the actors were saying on the screen. Now he did.)

 

About the Music

 

Jascha Heifetz premiered the work in 1947 to rapturous applause and played it at Carnegie Hall the same year with the New York Philharmonic. The piece was sniffed at by New York’s classical intelligentsia (“more corn than gold,” “a Hollywood Concerto”), and for years Heifetz was one of the few who would play it. Since the 1980s, however, it has enjoyed a renaissance, championed by Itzhak Perlman, Gil Shaham, Hilary Hahn, Anne-Sophie Mutter, and many others.

It is structured in the traditional three movements, opening with a sonata-form first movement that features a melody that soars over two octaves, drifting into a Romance based on a dream-like three-part melody, and rocketing into a stunningly virtuosic Finale that combines variation and sonata form. Throughout, the orchestra provides the lushness and shimmer that was a Korngold prerequisite, especially the magical percussion section.

 

“Fabulous to Play”

 

Hilary Hahn, the soloist in this performance, views the concerto as “a youthful gesture of a piece, but it has these extremely specific, shimmering details that play to the violinist’s strengths, so it’s fabulous to play. For the orchestra, it’s stimulating but also challenging because the individual parts are difficult.” In the Finale, “the theme has a really rollicking quality. The beat itself isn’t fast, but what happens in the middle of the beat gives it this momentum … and no matter what tempo you take it, it always feels like it’s moving forward … [Korngold] adds these virtuoso parts in and among this steady rhythm, so all of a sudden the violin goes from low to really high … I think it’s kind of rock ‘n’ roll, that movement!”

 

ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK
Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70

 

A Breakthrough Symphony

 

Dvořák’s Seventh is generally ranked as the greatest of the composer’s nine symphonies. This assessment is voiced despite the work being not as ingratiating as the Eighth Symphony or as dramatic as the ever-popular Ninth (“From the New World”). Donald Francis Tovey set the Seventh alongside the C-Major Symphony of Schubert and the four symphonies of Brahms as “among the greatest and purest examples of this art form since Beethoven.”

Dvořák himself regarded the piece as a breakthrough work. It was commissioned by the Philharmonic Society of London (now the Royal Philharmonic Society), which in 1884 invited Dvořák to become an honorary member in return for a new symphony. This was Dvorak’s only symphonic commission, and it clearly inspired him. He set about the composition with great seriousness, determined to create a symphony “capable of moving the world” and conducting the premiere himself in 1885.

 

A Bid for Respectability

 

The piece has developed a reputation as a “tragic” symphony, though the emotional variety does not really justify this label. Certainly, it has tragic elements in the first and last movements, perhaps attributable to Dvořák’s sadness over the recent death of his mother. The formal sophistication and largeness of design were more deliberate, an attempt to move beyond the folkloristic, “Bohemian” perspective of his earlier (and immensely popular) works. As Dvořák himself admitted, the D-Minor Symphony represented his bid to become “respectable” in the European music world.

Dvořák’s apparent model in the symphony was Brahms, whom he deeply admired and whose Third Symphony he had heard Brahms play on the piano. Much has been made of how “Brahmsian” the Seventh is, especially the second theme of the first movement, which is frequently compared to the famous main tune in the slow movement of the Brahms Second Piano Concerto. But Brahms’s influence has probably been overstated: The D-Minor Symphony may be less sunny and jaunty than Dvořák’s usual, but its sound and sensibility are unmistakably his own. Tovey said it best when he commented that despite the work’s unusual formal strength, it offers the supreme specimen of Dvořák’s unique syntax: “The long meandering sentence that ramifies into countless afterthoughts.”

 

About the Music

 

The symphony opens with an idea in the lower strings that immediately establishes a tragic mood. This tense, urgent theme dominates the first movement (despite an expansive second theme group), assuming heroic dimensions in the development and recapitulation; in the coda, as the music appears to be working up to a brilliant conclusion, it returns to drag the movement back down into sadness.

The second movement presents of the kind of delightfully “meandering” ideas admired by Tovey and others. Among the high points are a soaring horn melody, a languid reference to Wagner’s Tristan, and a brief, stirring climax that sums up the movement’s sense of rapture even though it seems to come out of nowhere.

The charming Scherzo is the closest thing in this determinedly “serious” symphony to Dvořák’s popular “Slavonic Dances” genre. It is an ideal foil for the Finale, a movement even more tense than the first, based largely on a funeral march tune, though here too a contrasting pastoral hymn reveals that Dvořák can’t quite suppress his Czech instincts. At the conclusion, the shadows are dispersed by radiant light, in a D-major apotheosis that constitutes one of the most resplendent endings in Dvořák’s nine symphonies.


—Jack Sullivan