From Italy
Thursday, August 17, 2006

Program 8

Overture to William Tell
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

Composed in 1828-1829.
Premiered on August 3, 1829 in Paris.

In 1824, Rossini moved to Paris to become director of the Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political trends that were then gaining popularity. Rossini was too closely attuned to public fashion to ignore the changing audience tastes, and he began to cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his new position in Paris. Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in the 14th century, had recently created much interest when it was introduced to Paris in a French translation. Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at least, a saleable one), and seems to have taken special care to incorporate the emerging Romantic style into this epic work, as evidenced by its subject matter, symphonic scope and attention to dramatic and poetic content. From the summer of 1828, when word of the project first surfaced, through the following spring, when several delays were reportedly caused by prima donna incapacity (actually, Rossini was withholding the work’s premiere to press negotiations with the government over a lucrative contract for future — never realized — operas) until the premiere in August 1829, William Tell kept Parisian society abuzz. Once the opera finally reached the stage, it was hailed by critics and musicians, but disappointed the public, who felt that its six-hour length was more entertainment than a single evening should decently hold. (The score was greatly truncated when it was staged in later years.) Whether the new style of the opera was one that Rossini did not wish to pursue, or whether he was drained by two decades of constant work, or whether he just wanted to enjoy in leisure the fortune he had amassed, William Tell was his last opera. During the remaining 39 years of his life, he did not compose another note for the stage. The four sections of the Overture, virtually a miniature tone poem, represent dawn in the mountains, a thunderstorm, the pastoral countryside and the triumphant return of the Swiss troops.

Cello Concerto, Op. 22
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)

Composed in 1945.
Premiered on April 5, 1946 in Boston, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky with Raya Garbousova as soloist.

Samuel Barber’s success as one of America’s greatest composers was both early and lasting. Born and raised in a small town on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he received a thorough appreciation of music as a boy from his mother, a talented pianist, and from his aunt, the noted Metropolitan Opera contralto Louise Homer. In 1924, at the tender age of fourteen, he entered the first class enrolled at the Curtis Institute, and received instruction in piano, voice and composition, winning the Bearns Prize in composition in 1928. Three years later, he composed the sparkling Overture to “The School for Scandal”, which was premiered by Alexander Smallens and the Philadelphia Orchestra in August 1933, and secured for the young composer an immediate reputation. In 1935, Barber won both the Pulitzer Scholarship and the American Prix de Rome, enabling him to study in Europe. While abroad, he conducted, gave recitals (he had an excellent and well-trained baritone voice), and met some of the most important musicians of the day, including Toscanini, who became a champion of his works. The great Italian conductor premiered both the Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings during the 1938 season of the NBC Symphony, Barber thus becoming the first American composer whose works Toscanini conducted with that ensemble.

When Barber was inducted into the Army Air Force in 1943, the military recognized his abilities by assigning as part of his duties while in the service the composition of two works. One, the Second Symphony, was heard in Boston in 1944. The other, the Commando March of 1943, made an instant success and continues to be among the great American compositions for concert band. Another work of those years, one not written on commission, was the Capricorn Concerto, named after the house in Mt. Kisco, New York that Barber had purchased in 1943. When Barber was mustered out of the military in September 1945, he returned to “Capricorn,” and full-time duties as a composer. The first work that he undertook as a reinstated civilian was the Cello Concerto, commissioned for the virtuoso Raya Garbousova by John Nicholas Brown of Providence, Rhode Island, an amateur cellist. Upon completing the score on November 22, 1945, Barber dedicated it “To John and Anne Brown.” The work was premiered by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 5, 1946 with Miss Garbousova as soloist.

In the Cello Concerto, Barber balanced his characteristic lyricism with a fiendishly difficult solo part filled with wide leaps, double stops, harmonics and other technical challenges. To point up the formidable obstacles to the soloist in this piece, Nathan Broder recounted in his study of the composer an incident that occurred when Barber was in London in 1950 to record the Concerto with cellist Zara Nelsova. “At one of the sessions, the soloist ended with great brilliance,” wrote Broder, “whereupon a cellist from the orchestra leaped up from his chair, ran down to the front of the stage, wildly shouting something about giving up the cello after hearing playing such as Nelsova’s, and smashed his instrument against the side of the platform. Strings and bits of wood flew in all directions. There was a general uproar, and then Barber and Nelsova realized that the whole thing was a joke staged by the cello section as a tribute to the difficulty of the Concerto. Each man had contributed to buying a cello in a pawn shop in order to smash it.”

The opening movement of Barber’s Cello Concerto follows the traditional sonata/concerto form. A brief orchestral introduction presents the thematic materials: a short, angular motive, presented in the first two measures, that returns to punctuate important points of the structure; a broad, lyrical melody, initiated by flute and English horn, enlivened by snapping rhythms; a winding phrase of small intervals heard in the bassoons; and an arching strain given by the violins. The soloist takes up the winding phrase, and builds from it a short cadenza that leads without pause into the full exposition of the themes previewed in the introduction. The orchestra begins the development section, which continues with some pyrotechnical displays from the soloist that lead eventually to another cadenza that serves as the bridge to the recapitulation.

The Andante is a richly textured song of deep expression in three-part form that is based on a chordal theme in a siciliano-like rhythm. The finale is constructed in a sort of telescoped sonata form. After a forceful, jagged introductory gesture, the soloist presents the principal theme, dominated by the interval of a half-step in syncopated rhythm. The slow, contrasting melody, first played by the soloist above an ostinato bass, begins quietly but builds to a full orchestral climax. When the two themes return, they are considerably elaborated, as though the functions of development and recapitulation had been combined. The Concerto comes to a brilliant end with a coda of considerable verve and virtuosity.

Aus Italien (“From Italy”), Symphonic Fantasy
in G major, Op. 16
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Composed in 1886.
Premiered on March 2, 1887 in Munich, conducted by the composer.

In the autumn of 1885, Hans von Bülow, music director of the Meiningen Orchestra, appointed the 21-year-old Richard Strauss as his conducting assistant. Within months, Strauss was asked to become von Bülow’s successor, but he declined the offer in favor of a post as third conductor for the Court Opera in Munich, his hometown. In addition to the experience gained in Meiningen working with one of Europe’s best orchestras, Strauss also met there the violinist and sometime composer Alexander Ritter, who introduced him to the revolutionary works of Wagner and Liszt, music which Strauss’ reactionary father, the most renowned horn player of his day, had forbidden him to hear. Strauss became convinced by Ritter, and the musical examples he provided, that an instrumental piece could spring from the inspiration of what Strauss later called “a poetic idea,” and not need be restricted to the abstract expression of the Classical masterworks that had served as the models for his earlier compositions.

Strauss left his post at Meiningen in April 1886, and did not have to report for his new duties at the Munich Court Opera until August, so, encouraged by Brahms, who shared with the young musician his fond memories of his visits to Italy, he undertook a trip across the Alps during April and May. The journey, financed by his father and by his uncle Georg Pschorr, a wealthy Munich brewer (Pschorr Beer is still a Bavarian favorite and a mainstay of the famous Oktoberfest), took Richard to Verona, Bologna, Rome, Naples, Florence and many smaller cities. Despite losing his leather suitcase in Naples, his laundry in Rome and his Baedeker in a theater, being overcharged by the local merchants, and having to skip a stop in Venice because of an outbreak there of cholera, he thoroughly enjoyed the junket. He was deeply touched by the ruins, the architecture, the countryside, the art (Raphael’s St. Cecilia in Bologna moved him to tears), and even some of the music (Aida he thought to be “Redskin Music,” but Verdi’s Requiem was judged “pretty and original”), and he wrote long letters home describing not just the sights but also the musical thoughts that they ignited in him — he even made a point of noting the specific keys of his inspirations in the margins. When he returned to Munich in late May, Strauss was bubbling with ideas for a new work, and immediately set about creating the set of four tone pictures that became the “Symphonic Fantasy” titled Aus Italien (“From Italy”). The score was completed on September 12, 1886.

In 1889, Strauss provided an analysis of Aus Italien for the Allgemeine Musikzeitung which gives some clues to the relationship of his Italian inspirations and the musical content of the movements:

“1. Auf der Campagna (‘In the Country’). This prelude reproduces the mood experienced by the composer at the sight of the broad extent of the Roman Campagna bathed in sunlight as seen from the Villa d’Este at Tivoli.

“2. In Roms Ruinen (‘Among Rome’s Ruins’). Fantastic images of vanished glory, feelings of melancholy and grief amid the brilliant sunshine of the present. The formal structure of the movement is that of a great symphonic first movement.

“3. Am Strande von Sorrent (‘On the Shore at Sorrento’). This movement represents in tone painting the tender music of nature, which the inner ear hears in the rustling of the wind in the leaves, in bird song and in all the delicate voices of nature, and in the distant murmur of the sea, whence a solitary song reaches the beach. Contrasting with that distant song are the sensations experienced by the human listener. The interplay in the separation and partial union of these contrasts constitutes the spiritual content of this mood-picture.

“4. Neapolitanisches Volksleben (‘Neapolitan Folk Life’). The principal theme is a well-known Neapolitan folk song. [Strauss was incorrect. This melody is actually the familiar Funiculi-Funicula by the Italian composer Luigi Denza, but it was so ubiquitous in Naples that he assumed it to be a traditional tune.] In addition, a tarantella which the composer heard in Sorrento is used in the coda. After a few noisy introductory bars, the statement of the principal theme by the violas and cellos launches this crazy orchestral fantasy, which attempts to depict the colorful bustle of Naples in a hilarious jumble of themes; the tarantella, at first heard only in the distance, gradually asserts itself towards the end of the movement, and provides the conclusion for this humoresque. A few reminiscences of the first movement may express nostalgia for the peace of the Campagna.”

©2006 Dr. Richard E. Rodda