Program 5 - Dvorak Fest II

Serenade for Winds in E-flat major, Op. 7

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Composed in 1881.

Premiered on November 27, 1882 in Dresden, conducted by Franz Wüllner.

“No genius, I am convinced, but a run-of-the-mill talent” was the distinguished pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow’s first estimate of Richard Strauss after examining the young composer’s Five Piano Pieces, Op. 3, in 1881. At that same time, Strauss was finishing a one-movement piece modeled in spirit and instrumentation on the Andante from Mozart’s great Serenade for Thirteen Winds, K. 361. Strauss’ Serenade, Op. 7, his earliest work for wind ensemble, was performed late the next year by the Dresden Tonkünstlerverein, and some time thereafter came to the attention of Bülow. In light of this new musical evidence, he radically changed his earlier opinion of Strauss. He offered to perform the Serenade with his fine orchestra at Meiningen, and it was so successful that it became part of that ensemble’s regular repertory at home and on tour. After the composer and conductor first met, in Berlin at a Meiningen concert which included the Serenade, Bülow wrote to the German concert manager Hermann Wolff, “[Strauss is] an uncommonly gifted young man ... by far the most striking personality since Brahms ... versatile, eager to learn, firm and tactful, in short a first-rate force.”

Strauss’ delicious one-movement Serenade, Op. 7, is scored for flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons in pairs, a quartet of horns and a contrabassoon or tuba. Though the composer late in life called it “nothing but the respectable work of a music student,” it is actually a composition displaying inordinate skill and technical polish. The lyrical main theme of the sonata form is presented quietly at the beginning by the oboe accompanied by clarinets and bassoons. The second theme, built from short phrases, is more sprightly in nature than is the preceding melody. The development section maintains the sun-dappled mood of the exposition while shading it with some chromatic harmonies influenced by the music of Schumann and Brahms. The earlier themes are recalled in the recapitulation, and the Serenade comes to rest on a transparent cloud of sweet sonority.

Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 8

Richard Strauss

Composed in 1881-1882.

Premiered on December 5, 1882 in Vienna, with Benno Walter as violinist and the composer playing the orchestral score in a piano reduction.

By the time Strauss undertook his Violin Concerto in 1881, when he was seventeen, he had studied piano for twelve years and violin for nine, had been composing for over a decade, and was already showing considerable promise as a conductor. His first published composition, a Festival March for orchestra, appeared in 1876, when he had ripened to the age of twelve; he wrote an Overture in A in 1879 and a String Quartet the following year; his Symphony in D minor was introduced in March 1881 by the Munich Court Orchestra conducted by the renowned Hermann Levi, who was to lead the premiere of Parsifal sixteen months later. From 1874 to 1882, Strauss was a student at Munich’s highly respected Royal Ludwig Gymnasium (i.e., high school), where he excelled in all of his subjects except mathematics. During his last term at the Gymnasium, he began a violin concerto, his first attempt at a work for solo instrument and orchestra. (It is said that he sketched out some of the themes in his math exercise book.) He completed the score soon after entering Munich University to study philosophy, aesthetics and art history in the fall of 1882 (Strauss never enrolled in a formal degree program in music), and introduced the work in Vienna’s Bösendorfersaal on December 5th of that year. The event was an auspicious one for the young musician. The violinist was Benno Walter, Franz Strauss’ cousin, the concertmaster of the Munich Court Orchestra and Richard’s violin teacher for the preceding ten years; the orchestral parts were played in a piano reduction by the composer himself. The program marked Strauss’ first public appearance in Vienna, upon whose musical life he was to have such a strong influence in later years, and it was sufficiently successful to elicit the observation from the redoubtable critic and adamantine Wagner-hater Eduard Hanslick that the teenager showed “unusual talent.” Hanslick was right. Within a decade, Strauss won a place among the most distinguished conductors of his time, and was universally hailed as one of the world’s greatest composers.

The Violin Concerto opens with a bold, octave-leap motive in the horns and trumpets that recurs throughout the movement and is subtly woven into the thematic material of the Lento and the finale that follow. The violin quickly announces its entry into the unfolding argument with anticipatory double-stopped scales before proclaiming the dramatic main theme above the hammered chords of the orchestra. (Mozart often used a similar technique of introducing the soloist at the end of the introduction by means of some preludial figuration that bridged to the presentation of the principal subject.) The opening octave-leap motive figures prominently in the ensuing measures, and is cast in strong relief as a brief horn solo just before the lyrical and sweetly colored subsidiary subject is presented by the violin. Considerable working-out of this second theme and an orchestral tutti derived from the stormy main subject lead to the central section, which is begun with some unaccompanied violin histrionics borrowed from the opening pages of the movement. What follows is less a true motivic development of the earlier subjects than a brief fantasia on the motto theme. The violin’s rising double stops are heard yet again to mark the arrival of the recapitulation, which returns, in full and appropriately transposed versions, the thematic material of the exposition.

The Lento is a three-part structure based on a simple melody that is at once sad and unpresumptuous, qualities perfectly suited to the music of a precocious seventeen-year-old composer. The closing Rondo is perhaps the most attractive movement that Strauss wrote before undertaking his epochal series of tone poems with Don Juan in 1889. Its main theme has an irresistible Mendelssohnian grace and lightness that is nicely balanced by the movement’s contrasting lyrical subject. As the Concerto glides toward its closing pages, the tempo abruptly slows, and the violin plays a short reminiscence of the second theme of the opening Allegro, a prophetic use of the technique of structural integration in the symphonic epics that Strauss created in following years.

Overture to Donna Diana

Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek (1860-1945)

Composed in 1894.

Premiered on December 16, 1894 in Prague.

The Austrian Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek left the study of law to become a musician at the urging of Busoni and Weingartner. He took up conducting to earn a living while establishing himself as a composer, but went on to hold important podium positions in Mannheim, Berlin and Warsaw, as well as teaching at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Of his considerable creative output — three symphonies, a violin concerto, other orchestral and chamber works, and eleven operas, including Till Eulenspiegel, The Maid of Orleans and Bluebeard — only the vivacious Overture to the comic opera Donna Diana is heard with any frequency today. Donna Diana (1894), Reznicek’s first great success, is set in Barcelona at the close of the 19th century. Don Caesar tries to fan the flames of Princess Diana’s love by feigning indifference. The ruse works, but only after a series of comic complications. Though thoroughly Viennese in its style and charm, the sparkling Donna Diana Overture sets the mood for this Spanish romp by the use of a whirling dance rhythm resembling that of the zapateado. The broadly heroic melody that is used for contrast will be remembered by many as the theme song used in the days of media yore for the program chronicling the exploits of “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.”

Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904)

Composed in 1889.

Premiered on February 2, 1890 in Prague, conducted by the composer.

You would probably have liked Dvorák. He was born a simple (in the best sense) man of the soil who retained a love of country, nature and peasant ways all his life. In his later years he wrote, “In spite of the fact that I have moved about in the great world of music, I shall remain what I have always been — a simple Czech musician.” Few passions ruffled his life — music, of course; the rustic pleasures of country life; the company of old friends; caring for his pigeons; and a child-like fascination with railroads. When he was in Prague during the winters, he took daily walks to the Franz Josef Station to gaze in awe at the great iron wagons. The timetables were as ingrained in his thinking as were the chord progressions of his music, and he knew all the specifications of the engines that puffed through Prague. When his students returned from a journey, he would pester them until they recalled exactly which locomotive had pulled their train. Milton Cross sketched him thus: “To the end of his days he remained shy, uncomfortable in the presence of those he regarded as his social superiors, and frequently remiss in his social behavior. He was happiest when he was close to the soil, raising pigeons, taking long, solitary walks in the hills and forests of the Bohemia he loved so deeply. Yet he was by no means a recluse. In the company of his intimate friends, particularly after a few beers, he was voluble, gregarious, expansive and good-humored.” Harold Schonberg concluded, “He remained throughout his entire creative span the happiest and least neurotic of the late Romantics.... With Handel and Haydn, he is the healthiest of all composers.” The G major Symphony, in its warm emotionalism and pastoral contentment, mirrors its creator.

Dvorák was absolutely profligate with themes in the opening movement. In the exposition, which comprises the first 126 measures of the work, there are no fewer than eight separate melodies which are tossed out with an ease and speed reminiscent of Mozart’s fecundity. The first theme is presented without preamble in the rich hues of trombones, low strings and low woodwinds in the dark coloring of G minor. This tonality soon yields to the chirruping G major of the flute melody, but much of the movement shifts effortlessly between major and minor keys, lending a certain air of nostalgia to the work. The opening melody is recalled to initiate both the development and the recapitulation. In the former, it reappears in its original guise and even, surprisingly, in its original key. The recapitulation begins as this theme is hurled forth by the trumpets in a stentorian setting greatly heightened in emotional weight from its former presentations. The coda is invested with the rhythm and high good spirits of an energetic country dance to bring the movement to its rousing ending.

The second movement contains two kinds of music, one hesitant and somewhat lachrymose, the other stately and smoothly flowing. The first is indefinite in tonality, rhythm and cadence; its theme is a collection of fragments; its texture is sparse. The following section is greatly contrasted: its key is unambiguous; its rhythm and cadence points are clear; its melody is a long, continuous span. These two antitheses alternate, and the form of the movement is created as much by texture and sonority as by the traditional means of melody and tonality. The third movement is a lilting essay in the style of the Austrian folk dance, the Ländler. Like the beginning of the Symphony, the movement opens in G minor with a mood of sweet melancholy, but gives way to a languid melody in G major for the central trio. Following the repeat of the scherzo, a vivacious coda in faster tempo paves the way to the finale. The trumpets herald the start of the finale, a theme and variations with a central section resembling a development in character. The bustling second variation returns as a sort of formal mile-marker — it introduces the “development” and begins the coda. The Symphony ends amid a burst of high spirits and warm-hearted good feelings.

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda