#postromanticism

Strauss - Overture for the Prologue of Ariadne auf Naxos (1912)

Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910)

From Psalm 2, as translated in Archbishop Parker’s 1567 psalter;

Why fumeth in sight: The Gentils spite,    In fury raging stout? Why taketh in hond: The people fond,    Vayne thinges to bring about? The kinges arise: The lordes devise,    In counsayles mett thereto: Agaynst the Lord: With false accord,    Against his Christ they go.

Rachmaninoff – Cello Sonata in g minor (1901)

This was the first major work that Rachmaninoff wrote after overcoming a severe depressive episode. If you haven’t heard the story; when Rachmaninoff was first staring out as a composer, he wrote a symphony to act as his major ‘breakthrough’ piece. But the premiere was terrible [most likely because Glazunov, who conducted at the premiere, was a drunken mess], and the negative reception was so bad that Rachmaninoff internalized it as his own inability to write music. And I think this kind of bleak hopelessness, this feeling that you have nothing in your life that you are good at, or that you aren’t enough, can be felt in the opening bars of the sonata. The cello and the piano echo each other softly, shaping out the harmony, sparse texture compared to what Rachmaninoff is usually known for. The cello drags the melody out, the piano is icy. After the short intro, the piano breaks out in the allegro, the cello playing the main melody over a flurry of notes. The rhythm of the opening, two pulses of three beats, is woven into the entire movement. The softer melody that comes next is very nostalgic. The two instruments work together with the melody, passing it to each other gracefully. After the repeats, the transition section acts as a buildup of suspense, making you wait for an explosion that never comes. Instead, the main beat comes in the piano’s bass like the beginning of a march. The recapitulation has impressive piano work; heavy chords and quick flurries of notes. The nostalgic melody returns for a moment, but the coda races back to drama and ends with a restatement of the three-note pulse. The scherzo movement has the expected pianistic fireworks, and interesting enough the pulse comes back in the cello underplaying the melody. The soft lyrical melody that comes next is heartfelt and yearning. The middle of the movement has a beautiful passage between the instruments where the piano has delicate decorations under the cello’s songlike melody. The slow movement opens darkly, but quickly shifts into light, and it feels like a lullaby, except the minor key nudges its way in every so often. And again, the pulse returns, now a soft motif that opens the phrase. The cello singing with the piano makes this movement one of Rachmaninoff’s great melodies. The last movement opens with the piano in a quick burst of joy, the two play along with the exuberant mood. Even though Rachmaninoff is most well-known for the darkness in his music, I think he is at his best when he writes happy music, because it is unbridled exuberance and joy. There are dramatic interruptions and flourishes, but the mood stays upbeat all the way toward the coda, where we start to die down a bit and it feels like it will be a soft meditative ending, both instruments at their lower registers, but he brings the energy right up again and shoots for the stars. Before, feeling hopeless and void of spirit, now triumphing over sickness to begin the rest of an iconic career.

Movements:

1. Lento - Allegro moderato

2. Allegro scherzando

3. Andante

Rachmaninoff – Morceaux de Fantaisie, op.3 (1892)

I was going to make a post only on THE prelude today, but I remembered that I also adored the elegy, and I thought I may as well talk a bit about the full suite. “Fantasy Pieces”, again following the Romantic tradition of free-form music, was written by Rachmaninoff when he was just 19. Think of that! Usually when we talk about composers who wrote great stuff early on, we think Mozart or maybe Beethoven. But still a teenager, Rachmaninoff wrote a suite of gorgeous music, one of the pieces here would become his most popular and loved [to his chagrin]. He wrote the prelude first, and then the rest of the pieces came after, and he dedicated the suite to his teacher Anton Arensky. They are the accumulation of his studies, and show a shift towards a more mature style with craftsmanship and personality. The suite is not necessarily meant to be played as a group, and so you often hear the prelude as a stand-alone work. The opening Elegy starts off like a very darkened Chopin nocturne, and the main melody is full of the expected mourning and disturbingly tragic. This kind of darkness touches in on a lot of Rachmaninoff’s music. The melody sometimes sings out in one voice, sometimes another joins in harmony. And the music isn’t afraid to take sudden harmonic shifts. The middle section has an uplifting melody in the left hand as the right hand glitters over it. After an energetic transition, we come back to the bleak soundworld of the opening, the melody an octave lower. The coda grows louder with passionate descending thirds, and then the final bars go into the bass. The prelude is the most iconic work, and its popularity transcends the rest of the suite. Rachmaninoff was bothered by it the older he got, thinking that the love for the prelude of his teen years overshadowed ‘better’ music he wrote later. But it’s popularity is understandable. It opens with octaves going deep in the bass, part of the nickname “The Bells of Moscow”. They thunder underneath a main melody made up of thick homophonic chords, that has an almost yearning quality. The middle section is made of broken notes falling over each other chromatically, and eventually grows into a frantic passage of chords before exploding into a restatement of the opening, with dense chords slamming in the bass and then the hands jump to play the melody in full chords higher up. For clarity, the music here is written across four staffs. The intensity fills the room with immense pathos. That sounds like overkill with the adjectives maybe, but it does feel like music for an existential crisis. The music calms down a bit before dying away in softer chords, the bells ring out in the distance. After the angst of the opening, we are finally given a break in the form of the “melody”, which softly plays over gorgeous accompaniment, and as with the other works you hear premonitions of mature Rachmaninoff. Using chromaticism to murk up the harmonies, holding onto a gorgeous melody that seems to exist beyond the rhythm of the music, etc. The melody organically develops into an intense passage of chords that then break out into a pretty flourish, before coming back to the opening. The fourth movement, “Punchinella”, in reference to the same Commedia dell’arte character, is whimsical and full of joy, kind of foreshadowing Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso”, and so with dense chords the music plays around on the keyboard. The middle section again has a main melody in the left hand while the right decorates over it, again keeping in the good mood but more genuine. Then we come back to the opening with its shifting grace notes and fun rhythm. The piece ends with staccato notes across the keyboard. The final work, the Serenade, opens with the melody alone, and comes off as “exotic” music, that is it follows folk writing scales that could be Spanish. It continues the brighter spirit that the second half of the suite has been carrying, while also dazzling with piano technique. Despite being in a minor key and ending with heavy chords, it is still a ‘happy’ piece.

Movements:

1. Elegie

2. Prelude

3. Melody

4. Polichinelle

5. Serenade

Strauss - Symphonic Fantasy on “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (1948)

The Woman without a Shadow is an interesting opera. I’ll admit, I haven’t seen it, I’ve only been listening to it while reading the story. It is written to be like a fairy tale, the librettist using stories by the Brothers Grimm and from the 1001 Arabian Nights for inspiration. The fairy tale is comparable to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but here the fantastical story is given an early 20th century twist, focusing on symbolism and psychology. The story is about a goddess who is the daughter of the King of the Spirit Realm. She had the power to transform into any animal she wanted to. But as a gazelle, she was captured by an Emperor, and he made her his wife. Now she is stuck in human form, and yet she cannot produce a shadow. Her father, the King of the Spirit Realm, promises that, unless she can gain a shadow in three days, he will take her back to the Spirit Realm, and turn the Emperor into stone. But she has fallen in love with the Emperor, and so she wants to gain a shadow to save the both of them. It is a fun story with folktale tropes, but it is also a deeper look into love and desire. The idea is that the shadow represents the ability to bear children, and so the subtext is the desire to solidify the love between a man and a woman through conceiving a child of their own. Strauss struggled with the opera because of the first World War, and its 1919 premiere left audiences indifferent, but it ended up as a personal favorite of his and later in his life he rearranged some of the music into this symphonic fantasy. Immediately we are hit with the main motif, sinister horns blasting three notes. But that shifts into the more velvety orchestra writing that we expect, full of beautiful melodies and dessert like textures.