PMF Program Notes - August 18, 2005

Program 8

Marche Militaire Française, Op. 60, No. 4
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Composed in 1880.
Premiered on December 19, 1880 in Paris, conducted by Edouard Colonne.

In July 1879, Saint-Saëns wrote a Rêverie Orientale for a concert arranged by the pianist Wilhelmina Szavardy to benefit the victims of a flood in the Szégédin district of her native Hungary. The Rêverie was a musical memento of the composer’s moonlight visit to the exotic Algerian town of Blidah five years before, and in July 1880, while on a seaside holiday at Boulogne-sur-mer, he surrounded it with three other orchestral postcards to create the Suite Algérienne; Edouard Colonne conducted the work’s premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet on July 19, 1880. The Suite comprises a swaying Prélude suggesting a boat approaching the port of Algiers, an atmospheric Rapsodie Mauresque that incorporates native melodies, the 1879 charity concert piece (retitled Rêverie du Soir), and a flamboyant Marche Militaire Française that speaks not only of Saint-Saëns’ patriotic pride but also of the colonial domination that France had held in Algeria for the preceding three decades.

Symphony No. 6 in D minor, Op. 104
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)

Composed in 1922-1923.
Premiered on February 19, 1923 in Helsinki, conducted by the composer.

It was in 1918, apparently inspired by a euphoric rush as the end of the Great War neared, that Sibelius first mentioned plans for the successor to his Symphony No. 5: “[The Sixth Symphony will be] wild and impassioned in character ... somber, with pastoral contrasts. Probably in four movements, with the end rising to a somber roaring of the orchestra in which the main theme is drowned.... The plans may be altered according to the development of the musical ideas. As usual, I am a slave to my themes and submit to their demands.” Any immediate progress on the piece was forestalled by the outbreak of civil war in Finland on January 28, 1918. The Finnish Red Guards, seeking to take over the nation for the Russian Communists in the wake of the revolution in that neighboring land, rampaged through the country and even invaded Sibelius’ home in isolated Järvenpää in search of arms (which the composer had hidden cleverly enough to escape their detection). Sibelius’ brother, a physician, was killed in the hostilities. “The Reds behave like wild beasts,” he wrote in his diary. “All educated people are in danger of their lives. Murder upon murder. Soon, no doubt, my hour will come, for I must be especially hateful to them as the composer of patriotic music.” After considerable effort, his friend and champion the conductor Robert Kajanus convinced Sibelius to bring his family to the relative safety of Helsinki. By April, the civil war was over, but Sibelius’ creative activity for the following months consisted solely of revising the Fifth Symphony, which he conducted in its definite version on November 24, 1919 in Helsinki. The next three years saw little composition, only a few small works for strings, though he did remain active as a conductor by directing concerts in Scandinavia and England. It was only in 1922, four years after the Sixth Symphony had first been mooted, that the score began to take shape. The first three movements were completed by New Year’s Day 1923, when Sibelius was guest conducting in Sweden and Norway, the finale was composed soon after he arrived home, and the new Symphony was premiered under his baton on February 19, 1923 in Helsinki. It was the last time that Sibelius appeared as a conductor in Finland.

The finished Sixth Symphony bears little resemblance to the plan that Sibelius drafted in 1918. Though the composition did run to four movements, it was not at all “wild and impassioned in character,” but restrained and almost austere, perhaps the result of his admiration for such Renaissance contrapuntists as Palestrina, Lassus and Byrd. “The final form of one’s work,” he later wrote, “is, indeed, dependent on powers that are stronger than oneself. Later on, one can substantiate this or that, but, on the whole, one is merely a tool. This wonderful logic — let us call it God — that governs a work of art is an irresistible power. It is as if the Almighty had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from Heaven’s floor and asked me to put them together.... These symphonies of mine [i.e., Nos. 5, 6 and 7] are more in the nature of professions of faith than my other works.” The Sixth Symphony is perhaps the most perfect embodiment of the dictum concerning his music that Sibelius once offered to a German publisher: that while other composers were manufacturing cocktails of every hue and description, he offered the public cold, clear water.

The Symphony No. 6 is not easily amenable to traditional formal analysis. Ralph Wood, who considered it the greatest of Sibelius’ symphonies, wrote that the piece is “a dazzling display of a technique so personal and so assured that its very achievements are hidden in its mastery and its entire synthesis with its subject matter.” Olin Downes noted, “Of the Sixth Symphony, the most abstract — as if music ever could be abstract — of Sibelius’ scores, there seems to be no meaning at all but beauty and forms that pursue each other like dreams and re-form constantly into shapes of beauty.” Sibelius himself said, “You may analyze it and explain it theoretically. You may find that there are several interesting things going on. But most people forget that it is, above all, a poem.” The music shows virtually no repetitions or sectional delineations, no obvious recapitulations or clear-cut contrasts. Each of the movements is in a continuous state of thematic evolution, with germinal ideas mutating, phrase by phrase, over large spans until they have been transformed into something completely unlike their original shape. It is perhaps best to listen to this music not in terms of conventional formal models but rather as a succession of broad expressive states. The opening Allegro, for example, begins with a passage of translucent diatonicism that recalls the floating purity of a Renaissance motet, but then acquires a more animated character, which obtains for most of the remainder of the movement. Tempest never touches this music, though dauntless energy, sometimes clouded with darker sentiments, certainly does. Following a climax in the brass and a brief pause, the briefest whisper of the halcyon opening music draws the movement to a close. The first section of the following Allegretto is muscular but flowing, while the second is restless and almost febrile. The third movement, which serves as the Symphony’s scherzo (though, like Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, there is no slow movement in this work), is a sturdy musical essay whose topic is rhythmic dynamism wedded to textural delicacy. The finale refers frequently enough to one motive, a rising scalar figure that snaps quickly to a climax, to borrow some of the structural logic of the old rondo form, though the movement’s working-out, by turns hymnal and dramatic, is highly sophisticated and probably unique. The eloquent coda that closes the movement and the work is simultaneously noble and chaste. “Few symphonies,” wrote Robert Layton, “command such purity of utterance and harmony of spirit.”

Concerto No. 5 for Piano and Orchestra in F major, Op. 103, “Egyptian”
Camille Saint-Saëns

Composed in 1896.
Premiered on June 2, 1896 in Paris, with the composer as soloist.

At the age of two, Camille Saint-Saëns climbed up onto the piano bench and spent a large part of the rest of his life there. At four-and-a-half, he played the piano part of a Beethoven violin sonata, and prodigiously made his formal debut in 1846, at the tender age of ten. As a teenager, he became organist at the Church of Saint-Merry in Paris; five years later, he moved to the prestigious post at the Church of the Madeleine. His artistry (and later his compositions) gained the respect of Liszt, who performed and conducted several of Saint-Saëns’ important scores in Germany. (Liszt oversaw the premiere of Samson et Dalila, in Weimar in 1877.) Berlioz said of him that “he is an absolutely shattering master-pianist.” He impressed even the redoubtable Wagner by playing Tristan und Isolde from memory at the piano. Saint-Saëns was so constantly in demand throughout his life as a pianist in his own and other composers’ works, especially those of Mozart and Beethoven, that he religiously practiced for two hours each morning, an activity he continued, literally, until the day he died.

To perform, of course, meant to tour, and travel became one of Saint-Saëns’ chief pastimes. He went to the corners of the earth, from Singapore to San Francisco, but he tried to spend his winters in the baking sun and relative anonymity of Algiers, away from the drab Parisian weather. His fondness for north Africa carried him on at least two occasions to Egypt, each visit inspiring from him a work for piano and orchestra: Africa, of 1891, was based on native songs; the Fifth Piano Concerto (“Egyptian”) was composed at Luxor in 1896. The composer was the soloist in the premiere of the Concerto on June 2, 1896 in Paris at a concert celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his debut as a pianist.

The F major Piano Concerto, despite its pictorial and atmospheric effects, exhibits the formal clarity and emotional restraint that characterize Saint-Saëns’ music. Of Saint-Saëns’ aesthetic, the French scholar Romain Rolland wrote, “He was not troubled by any sort of passion. Nothing disturbed the clearness of his reason.” In its form, harmony, orchestration and texture, the “Egyptian” Concerto is indebted to the Classical models of Mozart, a composer whom Saint-Saëns revered. The opening movement follows the traditional sonata-concerto structure, with a chordal main theme and a complementary, dance-like subordinate melody. “The second movement,” Saint-Saëns wrote, “takes us on a journey to the East and even, in one section, to the Far East. The G major passage is a Nubian love song which I heard sung by the boatmen on the Nile as I went down the river in a dahabieh.” The finale is a breathtaking tour-de-force of keyboard technique, proof that Saint-Saëns had lost none of his piano facility during the half-century of his performing career. Arthur Hervey, one of the composer’s early biographers, interpreted the incessant rhythmic motion of the finale as Saint-Saëns’ attempt “to describe his experiences on the sea voyage” home from Egypt. “A note of realism,” Hervey continues, “is introduced by the sound of the propeller, while the serenity of the voyage is interrupted by a short storm.” Storms, propellers and voyages there well may be, but the real point of this music is its dazzling display for the soloist in one of Saint-Saëns’ great, unsinkable exercises in virtuosity.

Symphony No. 7 in C major (in One Movement), Op. 105
Jean Sibelius

Composed 1923-1924.
Premiered on March 24, 1924 in Stockholm, conducted by the composer.

One of the most important stylistic trends in the historical development of the symphony was its evolution toward a totally integrated, single span of music. The symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, for all their prodigious technical and expressive brilliance, comprised essentially four separate orchestral essays linked almost exclusively by key and style. It was Beethoven, particularly in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, who showed how the individual symphonic movements could be related one to another to produce a cumulative emotional effect surpassingly greater than any music written by his forebears. The sense of summing-up, of struggle overcome and victory won, of apotheosis achieved in the finales of those symphonies, is one of Beethoven’s most important legacies to 19th-century music.

With Beethoven as exemplar, an important part in the evolution of the symphony during the Romantic century was played by the attempts (and successes) to hew its component movements into a unified, meaningful arch of music. Berlioz, for example, posited a single melody, an idée fixe, that appeared as a unifying structural and emotional device in each of the movements of his Symphonie Fantastique. Schumann transformed a germinal motive in his Fourth Symphony into important thematic material throughout the work, and emphasized the interrelatedness of the movements by leaving their forms incomplete, forcing the music to continue. In the finale of his Third Symphony, Brahms telescoped the movement’s development and recapitulation sections. Liszt, following the lead of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, created the symphonic poem, the single-movement genre integrated as much by the pervasiveness of its motives and the abutting of its movement-like sections as by its programmatic content. In the one-movement Seventh Symphony of Jean Sibelius, this Romantic urge toward structural unification reached its logical goal.

It was in 1918, when he was struggling to bring his Fifth Symphony into its final shape, that Sibelius first mentioned plans for two further such works, apparently conceived simultaneously in the euphoric rush following the end of the Great War: “The VIIth symphony. Joy of life and vitality, with appassionato passages. In three movements — the last a ‘Hellenic rondo.’ ... It looks as if I were to compose three symphonies at the same time.... With regard to VI and VII, the plans may be altered according to the development of musical ideas. As usual, I am a slave to my themes and submit to their demands.” He continued to tinker with the Fifth Symphony until the autumn of the following year, when he proclaimed it done. After the premiere of the Sixth Symphony, in February 1923 in Helsinki, he immediately went to Italy and began serious work on its successor. He completed the score on March 3, 1924. The piece that emerged, however, bore no resemblance to the three-movement work of the 1918 plan. It was instead a closely reasoned, single-movement work, the true end result of the Romantics’ quest for the ultimate symphonic form. For Sibelius, this magnificent, rounded span of music took on nearly mystical significance. “These symphonies of mine [Nos. 5, 6 and 7],” he wrote, “are more in the nature of professions of faith than my other works.” Rumors of an eighth symphony persisted throughout the remaining three decades of Sibelius’ life. He almost certainly did some work on such a score, but nothing ever was issued to the public — perhaps his sketches were destroyed soon after their conception; perhaps, on his instructions, after his death in 1957. Ultimately he came to the realization, as must anyone sensitive to the historical tradition of the symphonic form, that he had accomplished all that he could in the Seventh Symphony, and that no further advances were possible for him.

Sibelius was unsettled for some time about the exact title of his one-movement work. During its composition and even for its premiere he referred to it as Fantasia sinfonica. (Not incidentally, Schumann at first called his Fourth Symphony a “Symphonic Fantasia.”) When Sibelius signed the contract late in 1924 for its publication, he again used that title, but the score appeared in 1925 as “Symphony No. 7.” Of the work’s emotionally reserved style, Neville Cardus wrote in the Manchester Guardian in 1938, “Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in making cocktails he offered the public pure cold water.” The Symphony’s acerbity was due in no small part to Sibelius’ interest during its composition in the polyphony of that musical master of the Counter-Reformation, Giovanni Palestrina, whose influence is clearly discernible in matters of counterpoint, harmonic/melodic modality and voicing of chords.

There have been many attempts to explain the formal substance of the Symphony; some say it is in three movements, some five, some something else. Gerald Abraham’s is the most salient point, however: “The most remarkable aspect of Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony is that it is an organic symphony in one movement; not merely a long movement in which various sections correspond to slow movement, scherzo and so on, but a single indivisible organism.” The essence of this music, as it was for Beethoven in his last years, is in its becoming rather than in its achieving. The climaxes, the points of arrival, are only important as the logical consequence of what has preceded them, and can therefore be left almost as soon as they are reached so that the inexorable movement toward the next point of arrival — the essential function of any art form that exists in and structures time — may start again. Among the composer’s most difficult tasks, then, is the weighting of successive climaxes to produce a sense of motion to drive the work toward its logical conclusion. (Nobody ever surpassed Beethoven in this technique, and it is the primary reason that his music has such overwhelming impact.) The most fruitful way to hear such a work as the Seventh Symphony is to leave aside conventional formal expectations and allow the composer to be the guide through the experience — by building tension, and releasing it; by creating transient obscurity to be resolved into crystalline clarity; by shaping time and emotions.

“It is not merely a consummate masterpiece of formal construction,” wrote Cecil Gray of Sibelius’ last Symphony, “but also a great work of expressive beauty, of lofty grandeur and dignity, of a truly Olympian serenity and repose which are unique in modern music, and, for that matter, in modern art of any kind.”