Program 2 - Dvorak Fest I

Dances of Galánta

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)

Composed in 1933.

Premiered on October 10, 1933 in Budapest, conducted by Ernst von Dohnányi.

In 1905, when Kodály was working toward his doctoral degree at Budapest University, he found it necessary to leave town to do some research for his thesis — he needed information on the stanzaic structure of Hungarian folksong — and he returned to his childhood home to collect it. Between 1885 and 1892 (ages three to ten), Kodály lived in Galánta, a small market town near the Austrian border, where his father was the local stationmaster for the national railway and where he had first heard the folksongs and Gypsy bands which were among his most lasting and influential musical impressions. When he returned there in 1905 on what proved to be the first of many folk music hunts throughout eastern Europe, he went to old friends, servants and neighbors and asked them to sing again the songs he had so loved as a boy. He accumulated over 150 examples, more than enough material to complete his thesis, and he returned to Budapest.

During the next thirty years, Kodály not only continued to collect indigenous music, but he also devised a system of music education based on Hungarian folk song and consistently utilized its stylistic components in his compositions. When the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned him to write a work for its 80th anniversary, Kodály dipped once again into his inexhaustible folk treasury for melodic material, turning specifically to some books of Hungarian dances published in Vienna around 1800 which contained music “after several Gypsies of Galánta.” These dances were in the verbunkos or Gypsy style that had been assimilated into the concert works of, among many others, Liszt, Bartók and Enesco. The verbunkos, a Hungarian dance of alternating fast and slow sections, became something of a national institution when it was used by local military recruiters during the 18th-century imperial wars as a tactic to entice young men into joining the armed forces. While no modern young man would consider enlisting just because he saw a nice dance, it must be remembered that the soldiers of that era were equally proficient at wine, wenches and waltzing as at war, and a spirited verbunkos was more a promise of pleasures to come than a mere temporary diversion. The verbunkos withered away after conscription was begun in 1849, but its progeny still resound in concert halls throughout the world.

The Dances of Galánta follow the structure of the alternating slow and fast sections of their verbunkos model. The work’s slow introduction consists of a series of instrumental solos (played in turn by cello, horn, oboe and clarinet) separated by rushing string figures. The first dance, a slow one begun by the solo clarinet, displays a restrained Gypsy pathos in its snapping rhythmic figures. The quicker second dance, initiated by the solo flute, is based on a melody circling around a single pitch in halting rhythms. The first dance returns in the full orchestra as a bridge to the next number in the series, a spirited tune with engaging syncopations heard first in the oboe. Another brief recall of the opening dance leads to the finale, a brilliant whirlwind of music that is twice broken off in its headlong rush. The first interruption is for a cheeky little tune insouciantly paraded by the clarinet and the other woodwinds. The second interruption is for a final reminiscence of the opening dance, which dissolves into a short clarinet cadenza. The closing section of the Dances of Galánta, electric in its rhythmic intensity and gleaming orchestration, is music of stomping feet, whirling bodies and abundant, youthful enthusiasm.

Violin Concerto No. 2

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Composed in 1937-1938.

Premiered on April 23, 1939 in Amsterdam, conducted by Willem Mengelberg with Zoltán Székely as soloist.

Certain composers throughout history have taken special delight in providing their creations with a many-layered and carefully balanced musical structure. The great 15th-century Flemish master Johannes Ockeghem wrote some of the most hauntingly beautiful and solemnly inspirational music of the Renaissance. His listeners probably never suspected that in one particular Mass, all four voices were derived from a single melody sung simultaneously in four different meters and four different modes. In his monumental The Art of Fugue, J.S. Bach produced eighteen fugues of great variety all based on a single theme. Beethoven’s best music shows an integration from its smallest detail to its largest formal level. To this line of the foremost masters of musical structure must be added the name of Hungary’s greatest composer, Béla Bartók.

With the exceptions of only Brahms and Webern, no composer after Beethoven wrote works of more profound formal integrity than Bartók. His compositions seem to be monumentally unified, even on first hearing, by the way in which each grows from measure to measure, an organic process that gives unity and cohesion to a work. (The first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is the archetypal example of such organic growth.) The opening movement of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, for example, is a fugue in which not only the theme itself but also the pitches of successive entries, the range, the instrumentation, and the dynamics all exhibit interlocking arch structures. His Fifth Quartet is symmetrical around the third of its five movements. Other of his works show relationships to the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series. Does all of this intellectual abstraction, then, mean that the music of Bartók (and Beethoven and Bach and Ockeghem) is nothing more than a mathematical game, the solution to some sonic puzzle? The answer is a resounding, unshakably humanistic “NO!” In Bartók’s own words, “I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.”

The Violin Concerto (1938) fulfills Bartók’s twin demands for formal logic and emotional expression. When originally asked by Zoltán Székely to write a concerto, Bartók conceived a single-movement work in variation form. The violinist, however, insisted on a traditional three-movement concerto, so the composer revised his scheme — in part. Székely got his three movements, but Bartók still got his way. In a marvelous structural plan, he constructed the second movement as six variations on a plaintive theme influenced by the Eastern European folk songs to which he devoted so many years of study and collection. Bartók’s variation technique was not just limited to the second movement, however. He actually made the finale, section by section, a variation of the opening movement, thereby giving the effect of something apparently new to close the Concerto but with a distinct sense of déjà vu. The first movement themes are therefore heard a total of four times, each one subtly transformed from the one before: once each in the exposition and recapitulation of the first movement, and once each in the similar places in the finale. Yet for all of its careful and involved structure, this Concerto possesses great emotional expression, beautiful sonorities and memorable folk-inspired themes. It is music that satisfies both our spiritual and intellectual needs.

Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904)

Composed in 1884-1885.

Premiered on April 22, 1885 in London, conducted by the composer.

When Dvorák attended the premiere of the Third Symphony of his friend and colleague Johannes Brahms on December 2, 1883, he was already familiar with the work from a preview Brahms had given him at the piano shortly before. The effect on Dvorák of Brahms’ magnificent creation, with its inexorable formal logic and its powerful shifting moods, was profound. Dvorák considered it, quite simply, the greatest symphony of the time, and it served as one of the two emotional seeds from which his D minor Symphony grew. The other, which followed less than two weeks after the first presentation of the Third Symphony, was the death of his mother.

Brahms not only encouraged Dvorák in his work, but also convinced his publisher, Simrock, to take on the music of the once little-known Czech composer. Dvorák always respected and was grateful to his benefactor, and when Brahms’ Third Symphony appeared, he looked upon it as a challenge presented to him to put forth a surpassing effort in his next work in the form. With Brahms’ Symphony as the inspiration, and his grief at his mother’s passing as the soul, the idea of a new symphony grew within him. He poured some of his sadness into the Piano Trio in F minor, Op. 65, composed early in 1884, but the spark that ignited the actual composition of the Seventh Symphony was not struck until the following summer. Dvorák had been garnering an international success with his music during the preceding years, and his popularity was especially strong in England. As one of the stops on his busy conducting tours through northern Europe, he visited Britain for the first time in the spring of 1884, and on June 13th, he was elected an honorary member of the Philharmonic Society and simultaneously requested to provide a new symphony for that organization. It gave him the reason to put the gestating symphony to paper. Following another English foray in the fall that was more successful than the earlier one, he set to work on the symphony in December.

With thoughts of his mother still fresh in his mind, and with the example of Brahms always before him (“It must be something respectable for I don’t want to let Brahms down,” he wrote to Simrock), Dvorák determined to compose a work that would solidify his international reputation and be worthy of those who inspired it. The work’s orchestration was undertaken during the winter, and the score finished in March 1885, only a month before its premiere in London.

The Seventh Symphony begins with an ominous rumble deep in the basses. The haunting main theme is introduced by the violas and cellos, then echoed by the clarinets. Almost immediately, the possibilities for development built into the theme are explored, and the music rapidly grows in intensity until a climax is achieved when the main theme bursts forth in dark splendor from the full orchestra. The tension subsides to allow the flute and clarinet to present the lyrical second theme. The development, woven from the thematic components of the exposition, is compact and concentrated. The recapitulation is swept in on an enormous wave of sound that is capped by the re-entry of the timpani. The main theme is abandoned quickly, and the repeat of the flowing second theme is entrusted to two clarinets in a rich setting. The main theme returns, at times with considerable vehemence, to form the coda to this magnificent movement.

The second movement opens with a chorale of an almost otherworldly serenity. A complementary thematic idea with wide leaps is heard from the strings. The unusual form of the movement, part variations, part sonata, is perhaps best heard as the struggle between the beatific grace of the opening and the various states of musical and emotional tension that militate against it. It is likely that Dvorák intended this expressive music as the heart of the Symphony, as a cathartic portrayal of the feelings that had troubled him since the death of his mother. The Scherzo is at once graceful and compelling, airy and forceful. Its bounding syncopations give it an irresistible vivacity set in a glowing, burnished orchestral sonority. Though the central trio is more lyrical, it has an incessant rhythmic background in the strings that lends it an unsettled quality. The finale continues the brooding mood of the preceding movements. Unlike many minor-mode symphonies of the 19th century, this one does not end in a blazing apotheosis of optimism, but, wrote Otakar Sourek, “rises to a glorious climax of manly, honorable and triumphant resolve.” The finale is large in scale and assured in expression, and carries an emotional weight equal to that of the earlier movements. It is a moving climax to one of Dvorák’s greatest creations.

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda