Few contemporary composers have established a closer rapport with both audiences and performers than Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Over the past five decades, she has created a large and exceptionally diverse body of music that is thoroughly up to date in sound and spirit, yet at the same time firmly grounded in traditional values of expressivity and form. Trained as a violinist at The Juilliard School, Zwilich found her calling as a composer in the early 1970s, and her distinctive voice soon generated a steady stream of performances and commissions. The astringent modernism of her early works, honed by her studies with Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, gradually gave way to a simpler and more lyrical style. Her catalogue runs the gamut from the knotty Symphony No. 1, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983, to highly accessible works like Peanuts Gallery, written for a Carnegie Hall children’s concert in 1997, when Zwilich held the hall’s first Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair. Among her most recent works are a Cello Concerto and an homage to Ruth Bader Ginsberg for voice, piano, and orchestra.
The Prologue begins slowly (Andante misterioso), accelerates to a faster tempo (un poco più mosso), then returns to the original tempo, ending expectantly, but with a pause separating the Prologue from the Variations. The Variation movement, which is considerably longer than the Prologue, consists of four sections of contrasting speed and character: Allegro, Lento, Presto, Tempo Primo (Andante misterioso), all based on some aspect of the Prologue. Although this movement is constructed by variation and development of material from the Prologue, these are not “variations” in the traditional sense. In the classical variation form, the structure of the initial theme is maintained in all of the variations. In using the world “prologue,” I meant to suggest a dramatic analogy, because, in a way, the function of the Prologue in this work is to introduce “characters” (musical ideas), some of which are drawn rather fully, while others are only suggested. It is in the Variations that the “drama” unfolds. Another important aspect of Prologue and Variations is that it utilizes the special sonorities, character, and expressiveness of the string orchestra.
—Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
As an unabashed Romantic—or rather neo-Romantic—in the modernist era, Samuel Barber stood apart from the mid–20th-century musical mainstream. Yet from an early stage in his career, he enjoyed a reliable stream of commissions from established institutions and artists. It’s largely thanks to the championship of performers like Arturo Toscanini, Leontyne Price, and Vladimir Horowitz that Barber’s music gained a permanent foothold in the standard concert repertoire. His popular fame rests on a handful of mostly early works, such as his hauntingly evocative setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”; the vigorous, incisive overture to Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal; and the searingly intense Adagio for Strings. Conservative by temperament and Europhile by orientation, Barber was neither a committed Americanist like Aaron Copland nor an intrepid innovator like Elliott Carter, but the best of his works have stood the test of time.
In addition to being a highly proficient pianist, Barber had a fine baritone voice—his aunt, Louise Homer, was a renowned contralto—and old-fashioned lyricism was the bedrock of his musical style. Yet he was not impervious to modernist trends, as illustrated by the mildly dissonant harmonies and rhythmic instability that characterize the Violin Concerto’s bravura finale. Barber’s first major commission, the concerto was written for a child prodigy named Iso Briselli at the behest of laundry soap magnate Samuel Fels. (Barber waggishly dubbed it his concerto di sapone, or “soap concerto.”) The marked difference, in tone and technical difficulty, between the first two movements and the last reflect both the circumstances of the work’s genesis and Barber’s split artistic personality. The Allegro and Andante were composed in Switzerland in the summer of 1939, the Presto in the US after Germany’s invasion of Poland that September. Briselli, who reportedly found Barber’s third movement lightweight and insufficiently developed, eventually withdrew from the project. Even the composer himself fretted that the finale was unplayable, but felt vindicated when Albert Spalding—a leading virtuoso of the day—read through the score and “took it on the spot.” Spalding premiered the concerto in Philadelphia in early February 1941, with Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra, immediately followed by a performance at Carnegie Hall.
The program note that Barber supplied for the first performances of the Violin Concerto was short and to the point: “It is lyric and rather intimate in character and a moderate-sized orchestra is used: eight woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings. The first movement begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso characteristics of the violin.” The richly elegiac main themes of the first and second movements are among the most hauntingly beautiful melodies Barber ever wrote; they alone would justify the concerto’s enduring popularity. The sizzlingly virtuosic Presto, a relentless moto perpetuo that demands preternatural agility and stamina on the part of the soloist, anticipates the fiendishly difficult fugal finale that Barber would write (at Horowitz’s request) for his 1949 Piano Sonata.
In a famous magazine article titled “New Paths,” published in 1853, Robert Schumann lauded the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms, whom he had recently welcomed to his home in Düsseldorf, as a genius seemingly sprung forth “like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove.” As Brahms auditioned his works at the piano, the older composer found himself “drawn into ever deeper circles of enchantment … There were sonatas, rather veiled symphonies—songs, whose poetry one could understand without knowing the words … single pianoforte pieces, partly demoniacal, of the most graceful form—then sonatas for violin and piano—quartets for strings—and every one so different from the rest that each seemed to flow from a separate source.” An avid student of music history, Brahms was keenly aware of his place in the Austro-German tradition and for many years shied away from writing string quartets and symphonies for fear of inviting comparisons to Beethoven. By the time he began work on his two Op. 51 Quartets in the mid-1860s, he had by his own count written and destroyed no fewer than 20 such works, none of which measured up to his exacting standards. Not until his mid-40s did he send his first symphony into the world, and the inevitable well-meant allusions to “Beethoven’s Tenth” did little to allay the nagging fear that he was tempting fate.
The Symphony in C Minor had a difficult and protracted genesis. In the summer of 1862, Brahms sent a draft of the opening Allegro to Clara Schumann, his confidante and most trusted musical advisor. She responded enthusiastically, telling a mutual friend that “the movement is full of wonderful beauties, and the themes are treated with a mastery which is becoming more and more characteristic of him.” But Brahms, by nature emotionally volatile, was besieged by doubt. Throughout the next 14 years, he repeatedly returned to his symphony-in-progress, only to set it aside in bouts of self-critical frustration. “I shall never write a symphony!” he declared to the conductor Hermann Levi in the early 1870s. “You have no idea what it feels like, always to hear such a giant as Beethoven marching behind one.” Persevering nevertheless, Brahms finally completed the C-Minor Symphony in the fall of 1876 and arranged to have it premiered a few weeks later in the provincial city of Karlsruhe, where a lackluster reception would be relatively inconspicuous. His fears were borne out when the work debuted in Vienna that December. Eduard Hanslick, the city’s leading critic, opined that “Brahms seems to favor too one-sidedly the great and the serious, the difficult and the complex, at the expense of sensuous beauty.” Even his beloved Clara Schumann was uncharacteristically reserved, writing (in the privacy of her journal) that the symphony “does not seem to me to compare with other works of his … I miss the sweeping melodies.”
It was the conductor Hans von Bülow, however, who voiced the verdict of history. In hailing Brahms’s First Symphony as “The Tenth,” the conductor wasn’t merely drawing a facile comparison; he was calling attention to the essentially dramatic conception of the symphony that Brahms shared with Beethoven. The first movement opens in a kind of sonic maelstrom, dark, tortuous, and harmonically amorphous. This murky prelude was an afterthought, added shortly before the premiere, but it retrospectively sets the stage for the mighty tumult of the ensuing Allegro, and indeed for Brahms’s entire four-act tonal drama. It is counterbalanced by the portentous Adagio introduction to the finale, before the darkness suddenly clears to reveal a majestic C-major melody in the horns. (Brahms had jotted this radiant “alpenhorn” tune down on a postcard he sent to Clara Schumann in 1868, making her cavil about “sweeping melodies” all the more puzzling.) The ominous thrumming of the timpani provides another subliminal link between the symphony’s massive outer movements. In the much shorter middle movements, both in major keys, Brahms explores a sunnier realm characterized respectively by lyrical intimacy and pastoral grace. They, in turn, prefigure the broad, purposeful, chorale-like theme that unexpectedly breaks out in the strings midway through the last movement, a noble apotheosis analogous to the “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth. Brahms responded impatiently when the resemblance was pointed out to him, saying, “Any jackass can see that!”
—Harry Haskell