Beethoven & Shostakovich | PROGRAM NOTES
PROGRAM NOTES
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
The White Peacock
Born:
Sept. 17, 1884 in Elmira, NY
Died:
Apr. 8, 1920 in NYC
Composed:
1915 (piano version), orchestrated in 1919
Premiered:
June 22, 1919 in NYC
Most recent Pacific Symphony performance:
This is a Pacific Symphony premiere
Instrumentation:
two flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, three trumpets, two trombones, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, and strings
Approximate duration:
6 minutes
The Great Influenza pandemic of 1918 came in three waves, adding perhaps as many as 50 million deaths to the horrors of World War I. The American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes was among their number, a victim of empyema resulting from the flu. What might he have accomplished if he had not died in 1920 at age 35? Born in Elmira, New York, he received his first piano lessons from his oldest sister, Katharine, who studied with Mary Selena Broughton, a noted piano pedagogue at Elmira College. At age 15, Griffes began formal musical training with Miss Broughton, who financed his further studies at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin in 1903. After two years there, Griffes studied briefly with the composer Engelbert Humperdinck, whose influence—along with that of Wagner and Liszt—is evident in his early works.
Considered an exemplar of American Impressionism, Griffes played an important role in U.S. classical music, particularly in the development of the American art song. His music combines sensitivity and sensuality, and his song catalog, while moderate in size, demonstrates a remarkable fusion of music and text. We also hear this knack in The White Peacock, which—though wordless—is a musical setting of a poem that is almost hallucinatory in its lush, vivid sensuality.
Griffes had already begun a musical rendering of Coleridge’s drug-induced vision of Kublai Khan’s Xanadu when he turned to another poem of equally fevered intensity: The White Peacock, which the Scottish poet William Sharp had published under his occasional pseudonym Fiona Macleod.
As with his Pleasure Dome of Kublai Khan, Griffes composed The White Peacock for solo piano and orchestrated it later. In a letter, he notes that it was prompted by a visit to the Berlin zoo: "Among the peacocks, was a pure white one—very curious. [The piece] pictures a wonderful garden filled with gorgeous color, where a white peacock moves about slowly, as the soul, as the breath of all this beauty.” This casual description can’t prepare us for the light, color, and almost palpable humidity of both the poem and the music, which casts a spell with it intense, meandering chromaticism.
Though Sharp’s poem is too long to append here, it helps to know that it is a single sentence, 56 lines long, in which the word ‘peacock’ occurs only once— the last word of the poem. Here are the beginning and end:
Here where the sunlight
Floodeth the garden,
Where the pomegranate
Reareth its glory
Of gorgeous blossom;
Where the oleanders
Dream through the noontides...
... White as a cloud through the heats of the
noontide
Moves the White Peacock.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto No. 3 in C minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 37
Born:
Dec. 17, 1770 in Bonn, Germany
Died:
Mar. 26, 1827 in Vienna
Composed:
1800
Premiered:
Apr. 6, 1803 in Vienna, with the composer as soloist
Most recent Pacific Symphony performance:
Jun. 10, 2022, with Carl St.Clair conducting, and Alexander Romanovsky as soloist
Instrumentation:
two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings and solo piano
Approximate duration:
34 minutes
Critics generally divide Beethoven’s stylistic periods into early, middle, and late; they identify his Piano Concerto No. 2 as the earliest of the early concertos, most clearly showing the influence of Mozart and Haydn. (It actually predates the one we now know as No. 1; though published later, it was composed earlier.) To many listeners, including the musicologist and Beethoven specialist Hans-Werner Küthen, No. 3 is Beethoven's "breakout" concerto. Küthen has described this concerto as a gateway between the Classical concerto tradition and the revolution that began with Beethoven's fourth and fifth concertos, and that continued in the Romantic era.
Beethoven completed most of his work on the Piano Concerto No. 3 in 1799 and 1800, just two years after finishing his [current] Concerto No. 1, though he continued refining No. 3 until performing the premiere in April 1803. Still, it represents a cautious departure from his earlier concertos. Küthen observes that “The four versions of the B-flat concerto [No. 2], the three of the C major [No. 1], and a single one of the C minor concerto show that the time span between draft and final form becomes increasingly short, that the composer wins the upper hand over the virtuoso, and in [the Third Concerto] Op. 37 a first perfection of the genre is reached, which was the object of the greatest emulation in the 19th century.”
There was only one orchestral rehearsal, and it was a messy affair, which did not bode well for the premiere. But if the composer was worried, he needn't have been. His reputation was growing, as was public acceptance of his highly individualistic style, and this concerto was understood to be a more personal statement than Nos. 1 and 2. The opening movement, marked allegro con brio, exposes a powerful, solemn theme in the orchestra, allowing it to modulate from minor to major and then introducing a second, more lyrical theme before settling back into minor. Thus the stakes are high before the piano even makes its entrance; and throughout the movement, it is left to the piano soloist to reconcile the emotions contested in the development of these two themes.
The second movement, a meditative largo, is poetic and contemplative, with the piano at times so deeply embedded in the ensemble that the orchestra takes the melodic line for extended periods. The gorgeous, zesty closing rondo is often described as joyful or jubilant despite its minor key—despite modulations into major, it remains at home in the key of C minor. The movement’s energy and exuberance come not only from the beauty of melody, but also from the sense of the concerto’s successful reconciliation of contending melodic forces. The movement’s conclusion brings a sense of drama and completion that is almost operatic.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
Born:
Sept. 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died:
Aug. 9, 1975 in Moscow, USSR
Composed:
Apr. – July 1937
Premiered:
Nov. 21, 1937 with Yevgeny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
Most recent Pacific Symphony performance:
Feb. 1, 2014, with Carl St.Clair conducting
Instrumentation:
three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, three clarinets including bass clarinet and e-flat clarinet, three bassoons including contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, piano, celesta, and strings
Approximate duration:
44 minutes
In January 1936, when Joseph Stalin’s scathing condemnation of Shostakovich’s musical style appeared in Pravda, the larger message was clear: In Stalin's Soviet Union, where every public expression of art was deemed an instrumentality of the state, Shostakovich had gone from celebrity to pariah. Pravda's devastating pronouncement could mean the end not only of his career, but of his life. It put his family and his friends at risk of exile. Yet as those closest to him knew—including friends who sought his secret support for artists similarly endangered—Shostakovich subordinated everything, including politics, to his music. He just wanted to compose.
If Shostakovich, his art, and his family were to survive, there was only one option: "rehabilitation." But would that mean compromising his aesthetic principles? Tabling his powerful Fourth symphony, he wrote his Symphony No. 5 with the express intention of pleasing his proctors in the Politburo. It is a passionate, stentorian work whose program is ostensibly the heroism of the Soviet citizenry. (Today, this symphony is often misinterpreted as an account of the Nazis' brutal Siege of Leningrad, which was still four years in the offing when Shostakovich composed it.) Bureaucrats interpreted the symphony as an apology and heard the "constructive" music they wanted to hear, and Shostakovich was reprieved—at least for a while.
Later, in his post-Stalin memoir Testimony, Shostakovich asserts that audiences heard something far different: an account of the devastation that Leningrad's population endured under 11 years of Stalinist rule. Reports of the symphony's premiere depict the audience weeping en masse, overcome by emotion. According to Shostakovich, they understood the musical subtext that eluded the politicians—not only deep understanding of their suffering, but also the hope of endurance and eventual triumph.
Can we believe Shostakovich’s after-the-fact program for this symphony? Does it matter? In Testimony, Shostakovich depicts his life and art after 1936 as devoted to covert resistance and subversion of Soviet repression. Whether his recollections were accurate or idealized is the subject of a fascinating debate that can probably never be resolved. But their existence demonstrates that memories of his life as an artist were of paramount importance to Shostakovich. These memories would form a bulwark for composing his later symphonies. But for Shostakovich and his contemporaries, his Symphony No. 5 was rooted in the horrific now. The sense of anguish and the hope of redemption are real.
Aesthetically, Shostakovich's manipulation of his music is thrillingly right. It is also extremely graphic in its rendering of Russian stoicism in the face of suffering. This is the symphony that confirmed sonic effects that we now hear as Shostakovich trademarks: snarling brasses and a sense of acid- tinged irony in the notes. But if there are double- meanings to decode here, it is up to us listeners— not the critics or the musicologists—to decode them. Shostakovich composed for the people, not the Politburo. Was his subject the horrors of World War II, or the siege of Soviet communism, or both?
Michael Clive is a cultural reporter living in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. He is program annotator for Pacific Symphony and has written numerous articles for magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and U.K. and hundreds of program notes for orchestras and opera companies. Operahound.com