Although Bellini’s Norma has long been identified with the celebrated sopranos who have conquered its formidable title role, beginning with Giuditta Pasta at the 1831 premiere, Bellini’s deeply expressive orchestral writing is one of the opera’s great strengths. Bellini was paid an unprecedented sum for the 1830 commission of Norma for Teatro alla scala in Milan, which suggests his preeminence in the operatic world at the time. Although the premiere was only a modest success, beginning with a run of performances in Bergamo the following summer, Norma grew to be revered more than any of the other crowd-pleasing Italian operas of the period, partly for the stately seriousness of its musical style and the elegance of Bellini’s expansive melodies. The overture to Norma, like many at the time, previews music from the opera (the “Guerra, guerra” chorus and Norma’s Act II duet with Pollione, her former lover), but it surpasses them in the way it serves not as a casual curtain-raiser, but as a way of establishing mood and preparing the conflict of the love triangle that lies ahead. The refinement of Bellini’s writing comes as no surprise: He is said to have composed eight versions of Norma’s famous aria, “Casta diva,” and is even thought to have tossed his original overture before writing this one.
There is wonderful dance music in many of the great Verdi operas—the offstage banda in the first scene of Rigoletto, the party scene in La traviata, the ball at the climax of Un ballo in maschera. But Verdi wrote very few separate ballets—independent numbers that bring the action to a halt and serve as an unrelated entertainment within the opera. That was not part of the Italian tradition. Verdi’s first ballet was written in 1847 for Jerusalem, which was composed for the Opéra de Paris, where, following the beloved French custom, a third-act ballet was house policy. Eight years later, Verdi outdid himself with his next Paris commission, Les vêpres siciliennes (The Sicilian Vespers), composing a large and elaborate allegorical ballet on the subject of the four seasons. Although there were more ballets to come from his pen—for French productions of Il trovatore and Macbeth, and for the premiere of Don Carlos, for example—nothing quite matched the size, scope, and sheer festivity of the Four Seasons ballet.
Verdi’s grand opera—it was translated into Italian in 1861 and has since become better known as I vespri siciliani—is set at the time of the French occupation of the island of Sicily in the 13th century and the subsequent uprising by the people of Palermo on Easter Sunday of 1282. (The bells that ring for vespers signal the start of the uprising.) In Act III, Montforte, the French governor of Sicily, and Arrigo, a young Sicilian who is Montforte’s son and sworn enemy, proceed to the great hall, where a ballet is staged for the entertainment of the governor’s guests. The ballet of the Four Seasons has no direct connection, either musically or dramatically, to the opera itself—the composer later said it could be omitted without harm—but Verdi, among the most scrupulous and honest of musicians, nonetheless lavished all his customary thought and care on the composition of this music.
V erdi begins with Winter. A young woman, wrapped in furs and representing Winter, steps out of an ice-covered basket. Three friends, all shivering in the cold, arrive and light a fire, but Winter prefers to dance to keep warm. Soon, the ice melts to reveal bunches of flowers, from which rises the spirit of Spring, who begins to dance. Eventually, the flowers are replaced by ears of corn; Summer and her companions gather the ears. Too hot to dance, they choose to swim instead, until a faun chases them away. The basket is now covered with vine leaves and fruit. Autumn and her companions dance in celebration of Bacchus.
Each of the seasons is treated as a series of varied dances and tuneful episodes. Verdi’s prodigious melodic gift is on ample display throughout. Even such a formidable critic as Hector Berlioz had special praise for Verdi’s dance numbers, “particularly the pieces for Spring and Summer, which give the virtuosi of the opera orchestra a chance to display their talents.” The adagio for Spring is a delightful mini clarinet concerto. The haunting summertime siciliano, with its plaintive oboe solo—it has been compared to “Il vecchio castello” in Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition—to which the dancers gather the corn in the noonday heat, is a marvel of atmospheric mood music. Throughout this ballet music, one hears echoes of moments in Verdi’s operas—a soaring phrase from a tenor aria, the bustle of an ensemble finale, the glitter of a party scene (La traviata was composed just two years earlier). But we also find Verdi obviously enjoying the luxury of writing, for once, for orchestra alone.
Tchaikovsky was at work on his Fourth Symphony when he received a letter from Antonina Milyukova claiming to be a former student of his and declaring that she was madly in love with him. Tchaikovsky had just read Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, hoping to find an opera subject, and he saw fateful parallels between Antonina and Pushkin’s heroine, Tatiana. It is hard to say which letter provoked the stronger response from Tchaikovsky—the despairing letter Tatiana writes to the coldhearted Onegin, or the one he himself received from Antonina, threatening suicide. The first inspired one of the great scenes in opera; the latter precipitated a painful and disastrous marriage.
Tchaikovsky’s marriage lasted less than three months. On October 13, Tchaikovsky’s brother Anatoly took him to Switzerland, then on to Paris and Italy. Tchaikovsky asked that the unfinished manuscript of the Fourth Symphony be sent from Moscow, and he completed the scoring in January 1878. He finished Eugene Onegin the following month. That March, he sketched the Violin Concerto in just 11 days. When he returned to Russia in late April, his problems with Antonina were still unresolved—she first accepted and then rejected the divorce papers, and later extracted her final revenge by moving into the apartment above his—but the worst year of his life was over.
T he temptation to read a program into Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is as old as the work itself. Since his patron Nadezhda von Meck allowed Tchaikovsky to dedicate the symphony to her (without mentioning her name) and was contributing generously to support his career, she demanded to know what the work was about. Tchaikovsky’s response, often quoted, is a detailed account, filled with emotional thoughts and empty phrases—words written after the fact to satisfy an indispensable patron. When Tchaikovsky mentions fate, however, his words ring true; this was a subject that had haunted him since 1876, when he saw Carmen and was struck by the “death of the two principals who, through fate, fatum, ultimately reach the peak of their suffering and their inescapable end.”
Indeed, the icy blast from the horns that opens this symphony returns repeatedly in the first movement (and once in the finale), each time wiping out everything in its path. It’s like the celebrated fate motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—the one the composer himself compared to fate knocking at the door—except that it’s more of a disruption than a compositional device. Later, Tchaikovsky wrote to the composer Sergei Taneyev, a former student, “Of course, my symphony is programmatic, but this program is such that it cannot be formulated in words.”
Taneyev was perhaps the first to question the preponderance of what he called ballet music in the symphony. In fact, the lilting main theme of the opening movement (marked “in movimento di valse”) and the whole of the two inner movements—the slow pas de deux with its mournful oboe solo, and the brilliant and playful pizzicato scherzo—remind us that the best of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores are symphonic in scope and tone. Tchaikovsky was angered by the comment and asked Taneyev if he considered ballet music “every cheerful tune that has a dance rhythm? If that’s the case,” he concluded, “you must also be unable to reconcile yourself to the majority of Beethoven’s symphonies in which you encounter such things at every turn.” The finale is more complex, emotionally and musically, swinging from the dark emotions of the first movement to a more festive mood. “If you cannot discover reasons for happiness in yourself,” Tchaikovsky wrote to Mme von Meck, “look at others. Get out among the people. Look what a good time they have simply surrendering themselves to joy.” There is one final intrusion of the fateful horns from the symphony’s opening, but this time the music quickly recovers, rousing itself to a defiantly triumphant and heroic Beethovenian ending, in intention if not in substance.
—Phillip Huscher