German Musical Art
Tuesday - August 17, 8:00 pm

Maria Bachmann, Violin
Wagner - Siegfried idyll
Mozart - Violin Concerto no. 5, K.219, A major
Zemlinsky - es war einmal (Once Upon a Time)
Kurt Weill - Symphony no. 2

Program 7

Siegfried Idyll
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Composed in 1870.
Premiered on December 25, 1870 at Triebschen, near Lucerne, conducted by the composer.

Few moments in Richard Wagner’s life were ruled by tenderness — he was almost certainly the meanest and most self-centered of all the great composers, rivaled perhaps only by Jean-Baptiste Lully, who ruthlessly quashed the careers of potential rivals for three decades with the blessing of Louis XIV. The only cell of Wagner’s life that consistently elicited any soft emotions from him was the relationship with his second wife, Cosima, and the family they reared together. The Siegfried Idyll is touching testimony to Wagner’s domestic happiness.

Cosima Liszt, daughter of the redoubtable Franz and the Countess Marie d’Agoult, was born on December 24, 1837 at Bellagio, on Lake Como. She was raised among Europe’s cultural elite, and chose for a husband the brilliant pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow. They were married on August 18, 1857, and settled in Munich, where Bülow became one of Wagner’s most ardent disciples. Wagner, unhappy in a childless marriage to Minna Planer, noticed Cosima, too much, it seems, and they became lovers in the summer of 1864. They conceived a child, born the following August, and brazenly named her Isolde. Bülow, who conducted the premiere of Tristan two months later, acknowledged the child as his own. In 1867, a second daughter, Eva, was born of the liaison. Minna died that same year. Bülow again accepted the baby; in June of the following year, he premiered Die Meistersinger. The local uproar forced Wagner to retreat from Munich, and he took a house in Switzerland at Triebschen (now a Wagner museum) overlooking Lake Lucerne, where Cosima frequently came for extended visits. She left Bülow for good in November 1868, and joined Wagner at Triebschen. (“If it had been anyone but Wagner, I would have shot him,” was Bülow’s resigned comment.) In March 1869, Wagner resumed work on the Ring, dormant for eleven years. A third child, Siegfried, was born at Triebschen on June 6th; Bülow’s divorce was final in July; Cosima and Wagner were married in August. “She has defied every disapprobation and has taken upon herself every condemnation,” Wagner wrote of his new wife. “She has borne me a wonderfully beautiful boy, whom I boldly call Siegfried. Thus we get along without the world, from which we have wholly withdrawn.”

It was Cosima who started the family tradition of celebrating birthdays with a bit of Hausmusik. On Richard’s birthday in 1869 (May 22nd), he was awakened by a musician blasting Siegfried’s horn call outside his bedroom door at dawn. The following year Cosima assembled a military band of 55 players in the grounds of Triebschen to serenade her husband with his own Huldigungsmarsch. To return the kindness, Wagner wrote a chamber orchestra piece during November 1870 as a surprise for Cosima’s birthday, celebrated since her childhood on Christmas, a day after the actual date. He gave the score to the young Hans Richter, who was to be the first music director of Bayreuth, who copied out the parts, traveled to Zurich to engage musicians, and arranged rehearsals for December 11 and 21 in that city. (Cosima was unsettled by her husband’s unexplained absences on those dates, but kept her peace.) The musicians arrived at Lucerne on Christmas Eve, when Wagner held a final rehearsal in the Hôtel du Lac. The next morning, a Sunday, the small band of musicians — four violins, two violas, cello, bass, flute, oboe, bassoon, trumpet and pairs of clarinets and horns — tuned in the kitchen, quietly set up their music stands on the staircase leading to Cosima’s bedroom, with Wagner on the top landing, and began their music at exactly 7:30.

“I can give you no idea, my children, about that day, nor about my feelings,” Cosima wrote in the diary she left for her family. “As I awoke, my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so were all the rest of the household.” Wagner had inscribed the score, “Triebschen Idyll, with Fidi’s Bird-Song and Orange Sunrise, presented as a Symphonic Birthday Greeting to his Cosima by her Richard, 1870.” “Fidi” was Siegfried’s nickname; Wagner heard a bird song — “Fidi’s bird song” — at the moment of the boy’s birth, noted it down, and used it in this piece; the “orange sunrise” was the memory of the dawn light washing the walls on Siegfried’s first morning. The “Triebschen Idyll” remained strictly a family affair until the financial distress caused by Wagner’s extravagant life style forced him to give it a public performance, at Meiningen on March 10, 1877, and sell the score for publication a year later, when it was titled Siegfried Idyll. “My secret treasure has become everybody’s property,” Cosima lamented.

Wagner incorporated into this lullaby the German children’s song Schlaf, mein Kind (“Sleep, my Child”), his son’s “Bird Song,” some newly composed strains and two motives from the opera Siegfried, to which he was applying the finishing touches at the end of 1870. The Siegfried themes were apparently taken from a projected string quartet that Wagner had promised to write for Cosima at the beginning of their relationship, but never finished. (Some truthseekers of small poetic vision have questioned this romantic story by asserting that none of this quartet ever existed as more than part of Wagner’s powerful imagination, and that these motives were originally written for the opera.) At any rate, the Siegfried Idyll, as Sir Donald Tovey observed, is “connected with the opera only by a private undercurrent of poetic allusion.” It is best heard without programmatic associations, instead simply enjoying its still sweetness and its “rainbow-coloured orchestration” (Tovey).

Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219, “Turkish”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Composed in December 1775.

Mozart’s five authentic Violin Concertos were all products of a single year — 1775. At nineteen he was already a veteran of five years experience as concertmaster, for which his duties included not only playing, but also composing, acting as co-conductor with the keyboard player (modern orchestral conducting was not to originate for at least two more decades) and soloing in concertos. It was for this last function that Mozart wrote these concertos. He was, of course, a quick study at everything that he did, and each of these works builds on the knowledge gained from its predecessors. It was with the last three (K. 216, 218, 219) that something more than simple experience emerged, however, because it was with these compositions that Mozart indisputably entered the era of his musical maturity. These are his earliest pieces now regularly heard in the concert hall, and the last one, No. 5 in A major, is the greatest of the set.

The opening movement is in sonata-concerto form, but has some curious structural experiments more usually associated with the music of Haydn than with that of Mozart. After the initial presentation of the thematic material by the orchestra, the soloist is introduced with the surprising device of a brief, stately Adagio. When the Allegro tempo resumes, the soloist plays not the main theme already announced by the ensemble, but a new lyrical melody for which the original main theme becomes the accompaniment. More new material fills the remainder of the exposition. The development section is invested with passages of dark harmonic color which cast expressive shadows across the generally sunny landscape of the movement, and lend it emotional weight. The recapitulation calls for restrained, elegant virtuosity from the soloist.

The second movement is a graceful song in sonatina form (i.e., sonata without development). The final movement is an extended rondo in the style and rhythm of a minuet. It is from one of the episodes separating the returns of the theme that the work acquired its sobriquet, “Turkish.” This passage occurs before the theme is heard for the last time, and stands in surprising contrast to its elegant surroundings by changing its tempo, meter and mood to recreate a vivacious contradance in the style popular at the time in the dance halls of Vienna. A number of short tunes comprise this section. Most are, according to A. Hyatt King, derived from Hungarian folk music (known, vaguely, as “Turkish” in the 18th century), though one was part of a ballet titled “Harem Jealousies” that Mozart borrowed from his own 1773 opera, Lucio Silla. After the wonderful clangor of this episode, which even calls for the basses to strike their strings with the wood of the bow, the return of the minuet theme is guaranteed to bring a smile — as though the dancers had collapsed from exertion and had only enough strength left for something slow and easy. The end of the work is quiet, and wistful, and unforgettable.

Prelude from Es war einmal … (“Once Upon a Time …”)
Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942)

Composed in 1897-1899.
Premiered on January 22, 1900 in Vienna, conducted by Gustav Mahler.

“I’ve always firmly believed that he was a great composer, and I still do,” wrote Arnold Schoenberg about Alexander Zemlinsky in 1949. “I owe almost all of my knowledge of the technique of composing to him.” Zemlinsky and Schoenberg first met in 1895, when Zemlinsky, recently graduated from the Vienna Conservatory, took over the conductorship of an amateur orchestra called Polyhymnia, at whose rehearsals Schoenberg was trying to decipher the mysteries of music by teaching himself to play the cello. The two budding musicians, both born in Vienna (Schoenberg was three years younger), became friends, and Zemlinsky gave Schoenberg lessons in counterpoint for a few months and advised him on some early compositions, Schoenberg’s only formal musical instruction. Zemlinsky deemed himself qualified for this activity by virtue of his having studied composition with the brothers Robert and Johann Fuchs at the Vienna Conservatory and having been awarded a prize for his Piano Trio, Op. 3 by a jury that included none other than the redoubtable doyen of Viennese music, Johannes Brahms, who persuaded his publisher, Fritz Simrock, to issue the score of the work. The relationship between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg deepened when Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, in 1901, and the two co-founded the Vereinigung Schaffender Tonkünstler (“Society for Creative Musicians”) three years later to promote the performance of new music.
Zemlinsky tried to live as a composer for a few years, producing his Second Symphony, Quartet No. 1, several sets of songs and the opera Sarema (premiered at the Munich Court Opera in 1897; Schoenberg made the piano arrangement), but by 1899, he had to take a job conducting at Vienna’s Karlstheater. He thereafter followed parallel careers as conductor and composer. His friend Gustav Mahler, appointed director of the Court Opera in 1897, premiered Zemlinsky’s second opera, Es war einmal … (“Once Upon a Time …”), with that company in 1900, and scheduled the first performance of Die Traumgörge (“Görge the Dreamer”) seven years later, but that production was scrapped when Mahler quit his post after a decade of cabals against him. From 1904 to 1911, Zemlinsky conducted at the Vienna Volksoper, whose traditional fare of operetta he expanded to include both standard repertory works and such novelties as his own Kleider machen Leute (“Clothes Make the Man”), Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (“Ariadne and Blue Beard”) and Strauss’ Salome, which he led in their Viennese premieres. He also nurtured the talent of the breathtaking prodigy Erich Wolfgang Korngold during that time, and orchestrated the eleven-year-old’s ballet, Der Schneemann (“The Snowman”), which was staged at the Court Opera at the command of Emperor Franz Josef.

In 1911, Zemlinsky moved to Prague to become opera conductor at the Deutsches Landestheater, a post he held for the next sixteen years while also teaching composition at the Deutsche Akademie für Musik in that city and establishing the Prague branch of the new music society he had set up in Vienna with Schoenberg. From 1927 to 1933, he worked in Berlin as an assistant conductor to Otto Klemperer at the path-breaking Kroll Opera and professor at the Musikhochschule; he also filled numerous guest conducting engagements in Europe and Russia during those years. When the Nazi takeover in 1933 forced him back to Austria, Zemlinsky hoped to devote himself to composition in order to add to the works he had managed to complete during the two busy preceding decades: a pair of one-act operas, Eine florentinische Tragödie (“A Florentine Tragedy”) and Der Zwerg (“The Dwarf”), both after Oscar Wilde, and a third titled Der Kreidekreis (“The Chalk Circle”), on a play by Klabund; incidental music for a Mannheim production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline; the Lyric Symphony; the second and third (of four) string quartets; and a few songs. However, the increasingly tense political situation in Austria — Zemlinsky had some Jewish blood — allowed him to complete only his final string quartet, write a few songs, and draft the opera Der König Kandaules (“King Candaules,” after André Gide), which was completed by Antony Beaumont many years later and premiered in Hamburg in 1996. By the time of the Nazi Anschluss, in 1938, Zemlinsky was ill and incapable of creative work. He fled first to Prague, and made his way to the United States when hostilities erupted the following year. His death, in Larchmont, New York on March 15, 1942, drew little notice.

Zemlinsky’s music synthesized the dominant strains of musical life in his native Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. The combination of his conservatory training in the Classical masterworks and the influence of Brahms provided the foundation for his early compositions. By the turn of the century, he had integrated the ripe chromaticism and expansive expression of Wagner and Strauss into his musical speech, and then went on to try out some of the avant-garde techniques of Schoenberg and his followers, but he remained more conservative than his colleague and never eschewed traditional tonality with the serialists’ dedicated diligence.

Es war einmal … (“Once Upon a Time …”), Zemlinsky’s second opera, is a delightful princess-and-castle fantasy based on the popular 1884 play-with-music by the Danish painter and poet Holger Drachmann (1846-1908), which blends elements from Nordic fairytales with a plot device from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Gustav Mahler, appointed to head the Vienna Court Opera in autumn 1897, just as Zemlinsky began sketching the work, encouraged the opera’s creation (he may even have commissioned it, though the records are unclear), and he conducted its premiere on January 22, 1900 with soprano Selma Kurz, tenor Eric Schmedes and other of the company’s leading artists (though not without securing several cuts and revisions from its composer). The librettist, the Viennese playwright Maximilian Singer, described the opera’s heroine: “Once upon a time, there lived a Princess who was so beautiful that she enchanted everyone who saw her. Kings’ sons and commoners came from far and wide to win her hand, but all had to withdraw under a torrent of abuse and derision. Therefore she was considered vain and arrogant. But in the depths of her heart she was different. She suffered that no suitor had ever won her love and secretly she wept at her loneliness. And then, once upon a time …” In the prologue, the Prince of Nordland presents himself at court and receives the Princess’ usual haughty treatment, but he refuses to kneel before her and vows to win her hand by guile. In Act I, the Prince disguises himself as a Gypsy and intrigues the Princess with a magic kettle that he says will reveal anyone’s thoughts in its boiling potion. Its price, he tells her, is a kiss. She is caught delivering the stated payment by her father, who declares that propriety demands she must wed the lowly Gypsy. In Act II, the newlyweds are living in a hut in the shadow of the Prince’s castle, where the Princess, greatly reduced in state, overcomes her disappointment and realizes her true love for her still-disguised husband. In Act III, the Prince has a wedding dress from the castle circulated among the village’s maidens to find its exact fit. It matches no one until, Cinderella-like, the Princess slips into it perfectly. The Prince reveals his true identity and the couple reaffirm their love. The villagers rejoice.
The Prelude provides a dreamy musical portal to the opera’s fairytale world.

Symphony No. 2
Kurt Weill (1900-1950)

Composed in 1933-1934.
Premiered in Amsterdam on October 11, 1934, conducted by Bruno Walter.

Kurt Weill first registered in the German musical consciousness with a series of instrumental pieces in traditional forms composed during the early 1920s — a cello sonata, a symphony, a divertimento, a string quartet, a ballet — and he won wide fame with the theater pieces created with Bertold Brecht between 1927 and 1931 that perfectly reflected the taste and tone of the Weimar Republic: The Threepenny Opera, Happy End, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Knowledge of this brash new Jazz Age composer reached Paris through recordings and a 1931 French-language film of The Threepenny Opera (whose title, undoubtedly due to the rampant inflation of the day, became L’Opéra de quat-sous), and the city’s trend-setting music lovers were curious to learn more about him.

A chamber music society called La Sérénade (whose members included Darius Milhaud, a friend of Weill since they met at a contemporary music festival in Baden-Baden in 1927) invited Weill to give a concert of his music on December 11, 1932, and he sent his student Maurice Abravanel (later the highly regarded music director of the Utah Symphony) to oversee the event. Two socially scathing theater pieces by Brecht and Weill were performed — Mahagonny Songspiel (a “style study” for the complete three-act opera, about an imaginary American city whose licentious citizens are condemned to hell by God only to respond that they had already been there) and Der Jasager (“The ‘Yes’-Sayer,” about a boy who becomes ill on a mountain expedition and consents to be thrown off a precipice rather than jeopardize the collective good) — and created a sensation. Stravinsky, Cocteau, Picasso, Honegger, Gide and other of the city’s brightest cultural luminaries attended and expressed their admiration, and Milhaud recorded that “smart society was as carried away as if it had been the first performance of a Bach Passion.”

In January 1933, Weill received a commission for a new symphony from the Princess Edmond de Polignac (née Winnaretta Singer), the American-born heiress to the sewing-machine fortune and a leading Parisian patron of the arts who also ordered works from Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Fauré, Poulenc and other front-rank composers of the day. Weill had not written a concert work since the 1923 Quodlibet for Orchestra, and the request excited a dormant strain of his creativity. He started sketching his Symphony No. 2 in Berlin before the end of the month, but Hitler’s accession to power on January 30th wrenched life in Germany out of its recognized patterns, most immediately for Jews. The caustically radical stage works of Weill and Brecht were declared undesirable, and composer and librettist fled the country. Brecht tramped through Prague, Vienna, Zurich and Lugano before settling in Carona, an isolated village nestled in the Italian Alps; Weill headed straight for Paris, taking with him the manuscript of the gestating Symphony. (Weill’s music was not heard again in Germany until 1945, except as accompaniment for the infamous display of “Decadent Art” that the Nazis mounted in Düsseldorf in 1938 and toured through the country.)

Almost as soon as Weill arrived in Paris, on March 23, 1933, he received a commission (with the help of Abravanel) from Boris Kochno (Diaghilev’s former secretary and collaborator), choreographer George Balanchine and the wealthy English philanthropist Edward James for a “ballet with songs” that would be a modern retelling of the Medieval morality plays depicting the Seven Deadly Sins. The work was premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in June and repeated the following month in London, after which Weill again took up the Second Symphony while vacationing in Switzerland and Italy. The autumn was eventful — finalizing a divorce from Lotte Lenya, his foremost interpreter but impossible marriage companion; signing up with the Parisian publisher Heugel when Universal Edition in Vienna voided his contract; moving into a new apartment in the Parisian suburb of Louveciennes; attending the Italian premieres of Mahagonny and Der Jasager in Rome — and the Symphony No. 2 was not completed until the following February. Abravanel convinced his conducting colleague Bruno Walter, a Mahler protégé and another artistic refugee from Germany, to include the premiere of the work on his concert with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra on October 11, 1934. The new Symphony, with its blending of classical forms and theatrical influences, was applauded by the public but received with disappointment by the critics. When Walter played the work with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in New York City in December, he renamed it Three Night Scenes, but still found critical resistance. The Symphony effectively vanished during the difficult years that followed, and it became available again only when Heugel published the score in 1966.

David Schiff, composer, teacher (at Reed College in Portland, Oregon) and author (of the most important book on Elliott Carter and frequent feature articles in The New York Times), wrote the following perceptive appreciation of Weill’s Symphony No. 2 in an article in the June 2000 Atlantic Monthly observing the centennial of the composer’s birth (and fiftieth anniversary of his death):

“The Second Symphony is the pinnacle of Weill’s career and one of the great works of the [20th] century. In fact, it sums up the musical revolution that Weill had begun as an enfant terrible in the mid-1920s — a revolution that glorified the tunefulness of popular song and the catchy rhythms of the foxtrot and the tango as an alternative to the hyperbolic excesses of music from Wagner to Schoenberg. Over the preceding hundred years, music had become increasingly complex in syntax, form and expression — an evolutionary trend that culminated just before World War I with the dense, atonal counterpoint of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the asymmetric, unpredictable rhythms of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. After the War, with the musical language dismantled like much of the European landscape, young composers — in effect the first post-modernists — had to rebuild the language and re-establish its social function. First under Busoni’s tutelage and then under Brecht’s, Weill returned to simple harmonies and rhythms. He did not go back to Bach, as did the Neo-Baroque Hindemith, or to Pergolesi, as did the Neo-Classical Stravinsky: if Weill had any musical model, it was probably Mahler, but Weill removed all traces of Mahler’s nostalgia, grandiosity and bombast, and also his contrapuntal complexity and elephantine structure. What remained was Mahler’s ironic and tragic sense of life, to which Weill added a sharply bitter aftertaste that captured the contemporary mood.

“The Symphony has three movements, with a funeral-march introduction that anticipates the second movement rather than the first. This Mahlerian ploy soon leads to a fast movement of Mozartean lucidity. Written in triple time, it is not quite a waltz and not quite a march, variously bittersweet, menacing and militant — close in mood to the spiritual exhaustion of The Seven Deadly Sins. The second movement, as leisurely as the first movement was concise, is closer to Bruckner than Mahler, for there is no grotesquerie or irony even when a solo trombone carries the melody. The music makes its mournful way like a procession slowly crossing a ravaged city, becoming sadder with every return of its themes. The third movement juxtaposes jubilation and mockery. The music recovers its rhythmic life and then with two shrieking piccolos takes on the sound of an army band — or is it the sound of militant resistance? Toward the close, the movement turns into a frantic tarantella, a dance of death punctuated by a prophetic chant from the trumpet. It whirls toward triumph or disaster, all the more terrifying because we cannot decide which it will be.”