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The University Symphony Orchestra presents Barber, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich on December 5th, 2015 at 8pm in Mandel Hall. The program features Samuel Barber’s Overture to “The School for Scandal”, Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Julie Suite No. 2, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9. Free, donations requested at the door. Details here.

Samuel Barber:  Overture to “The School for Scandal,” Op. 5  (1931–32)

Tonight’s concert offers a fresh perspective on the music of the first half of the twentieth-century — a perspective different from the one generally afforded by familiar historical narratives.  Instead of focusing, as is often the case, on a few European capitals (such as Vienna, Paris, and Berlin) and on the aesthetic currents that broke with the Romantic tradition (variously labeled as “avant-garde” or as “modernistic”), our program brings together music from Stalinist Russia and the United States, two countries that, for completely different reasons, had a conflicted relationship to contemporary music.  In short, Russia wanted revolutionary music but asked its musicians to obey the rules;  America wanted truly American music, but until the 1930s, proud of its laissez-faire liberalism, was not willing to pay for it.  American composers, if they wanted to succeed, had to cater to a wealthy elite for whom displaying cosmopolitan (and conservative) tastes was a matter of social distinction.  No wonder, then, that American creations commissioned by a temple of European culture like New York’s Metropolitan Opera, for example, ended up sounding unadventurously European.  What we now consider the American sound par excellence, that of Appalachian Springs (1944) and other Aaron Copland works from the same period, is a product of the slightly later New Deal era, when state support for the arts was no longer taboo and left-wing sympathizers like Copland did not have to defend themselves from the accusation of being “un-American.”

Unlike Copland, though, Samuel Barber believed that his mission as an American composer was not to create an original American style, but rather to appeal to America’s public for art music.  He chose to write, in the words of the left-wing critic Ashley Pettis, “for people who listen with ears of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at latest — whose criteria are that ‘new’ music should have the familiar melodic, harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of the past.”  Nonetheless, his music was of the highest quality.  Even the leading modernist composer Virgil Thompson had words of praise for Barber’s music:  “. . . It’s extremely well constructed.  It’s not vulgar . . .  [and] it’s a pleasure to interpret it.”

Like the Russian composers with whom he shares tonight’s program, Barber was precociously talented.  He wrote his Overture to “The School for Scandal” between 1931 and 1932, while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia;  the work was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1933.  Contrary to what its title may suggest, it was not composed for a production of Richard Sheridan’s 1777 comedy of manners.  Instead, it is a concert piece taking the play as an inspiration, like the overtures that Felix Mendelssohn and Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet respectively (even though Mendelssohn would eventually write additional incidental music for Shakespeare’s Dream).  The result is a sparkling, colorful orchestral score with a relentless pace.  A 1938 reviewer compared Barber’s Overture to the music of Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari;  the same parallel had been made a few days earlier for the opera Amelia Goes to the Ball written by Barber’s colleague and life partner Gian Carlo Menotti.  While the comparison to Wolf-Ferrari, a much older Italian composer, could be seen as damning for two young American musicians, in the case of Barber’s “School for Scandal” it can also be seen as complimentary.  In fact, in several of his operas Wolf-Ferrari had tried to capture the spirit of Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth-century Venetian master of comedy.  Being mentioned in the same breath as Wolf-Ferrari, then, could mean to Barber that he had succeeded in his intent to conjure a feeling of eighteenth-century wit.

Sergei Prokofiev:  Romeo and Juliet:  Suite No. 2, Op. 64 ter  (1936–7)

Sergei Prokofiev’s most successful opera, The Love for Three Oranges, is also arguably the most famous opera to have received its world premiere in Chicago.  It opened on December 30, 1921, at the Louis Sullivan-designed Auditorium Theater on Congress Parkway, now owned by Roosevelt University.  (It was only in 1929 that Chicago’s resident opera company would move into the Civic Opera House, the current home of Lyric Opera of Chicago.)  The production had been made possible by Chicago diva — and, in that season, impresaria — Mary Garden, best remembered for creating the female lead in Claude Debussy’s Symbolist masterwork Pelléas et Mélisande (written in 1902).  By the time of Prokofiev’s opera premiere, the Russian composer was already a household name in Chicago, despite his young age (he was born in 1891).  At the time of his musical debut in the Midwestern city three years earlier, though, Prokofiev had had to dispel some suspicion.

In December 1918, barely thirteen months after the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War was raging.  Chicago — the scene of the Haymarket massacre, the setting of Upton Sinclair’s Socialist novel The Jungle, and in many ways the capital of the American labor movement — was not immune from the “red scare” that rippled around the world.  The same day as one of Prokofiev’s Chicago concerts, for example, evangelist Paul Rader was preaching a sermon titled “The Second Coming of Christ:  How Much Bolsheviki?”  In addition to being Russian, Prokofiev was the author of music that sounded aggressively modern, such his Scythian Suite, which was heavily indebted to the primitivism of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  Prokofiev himself noticed that the applause that greeted the Scythian Suite at its first Chicago performance was rather timid.  “This can be explained,” he wrote in his diary, “by the fact that it was a weekday afternoon and so 90 per cent of the audience consisted of women whose gloved hands inhibited the making of a great noise.”  In truth, though, the gloved ladies were probably wondering:  is this Serge Prokofieff (Gallicization of Russian names was de rigueur back then) a revolutionary?  The author of a humor column in the Chicago Tribune voiced and then answered the same concern: “Mr. Prokofieff is the Russian equivalent of a humdinger.  We heard persons refer to his music as bolshevik;  but Mr. Prokofieff is the very and perfect opposite of a bolsh.”

In an ironic twist of history, the image that Prokofiev consigned to posterity is “the very and perfect opposite” of the picture sketched by the Chicago journalist:  instead of a non-Communist composer of radical music, Prokofiev is today remembered as a loyal Soviet citizen who wrote aesthetically conservative music.  In fact, Prokofiev’s present popularity rests largely on works he wrote or completed after his move back to the Soviet Union in 1936:  the ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, the cantata Alexander Nevsky (after his score for the Sergey Eisenstein film), and the educational piece Peter and the Wolf.  It might seem a paradox that Western orchestras habitually champion, from amongst Prokofiev’s extensive catalogue of works, those of his Soviet period.  But the true paradox is another.  While it is fair to say that Prokofiev moved back to Russia expecting recognition and a fresh flow of inspiration but ended up encountering harsh censorship and persecution, it is impossible to deny that he also found that fresh flow of inspiration he was seeking after his return to his homeland.

One of the reasons for Prokofiev’s decision to return to Russia (after fleeing in 1918 following the tumultuous Bolshevik Revolution) was his genuine desire to maintain an intimate connection with his fatherland.  In other words, he did not want to be an exile like Sergey Rachmaninov, nor to renounce his Russianness like Stravinsky.  For almost twenty years he had pulled off a delicate balancing act, keeping connections in Russia while based in the West, but when faced with a clear choice, he chose Russia.  Afraid of being locked out of his country, he eventually (from his repatriation in 1938 to his death in 1953, on the very same day as Stalin’s) found himself locked inside it.  And then there was a practical reason as well for Prokofiev’s return:  the Soviets, for whom his return was a brilliant propaganda coup, would guarantee him commissions, performances, publications, and a comfortable lifestyle.  If it is true that the style of Prokofiev’s Soviet works is more conservative than that of the Scythian Suite, this does not necessarily mean that the composer had to renounce his musical personality in toto.  Perhaps, despite what the gloved ladies of Chicago might have thought, Prokofiev was no iconoclastic enfant terrible in the first place, but merely a Wunderkind with an inexhaustible musical vein and a perennial tendency to eclecticism.  As musicologist Richard Taruskin has argued, “In the antimodernist, doctrinally optimistic Soviet Union, the high-spirited, ‘life-affirming’ music . . . that came effortlessly to the mind of this old conservatory boy would be valued at a premium.”

The two large-scale commissions that weighed on Prokofiev’s decision to resettle to Russia were the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October.  Ominously for Prokofiev’s subsequent career, both projects met considerable opposition.  The Cantata was never performed, and the ballet was shelved after the Bolshoy Theater director who had commissioned it was executed during the Great Purge, and Prokofiev was persuaded to substitute the originally specified happy ending with a tragic one consistent with the Shakespearean source.  Romeo and Juliet reached the stage only in 1938, in the Moravian capital Brno;  it was eventually produced in the Soviet Union, after further revisions, in 1940, at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad (known today, as it was before the Revolution, as the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg).  Prokofiev’s first draft of the complete score was not heard until 2008, in a reconstruction by the Prokofiev scholar Simon Morrison.

Between 1936 and 1937, while he was waiting for Romeo and Juliet to be produced, Prokofiev arranged from the score two orchestral suites and a collection of piano pieces.  He performed the Romeo music during what would be his last tours in the West:  thus Paris and Chicago got to hear the First Suite (in December 1936 and January 1937, respectively), and Boston the Second (in March 1938).  The suites seem designed to arouse interest in the ballet, especially since listeners could be assumed to be familiar with the plot from Shakespeare.  The Second Suite, in particular, has a clear narrative line.  Only two movements out of seven, numbers 4 (“Dance,” in the ballet “Dance of the Five Couples”) and 6 (“Dance of the Girls with Lilies”) are self-contained pieces that do not further the action.  The remaining five movements, densely interwoven with recurring motives, tell in essence the Romeo and Juliet story, making the Suite akin to a symphonic poem on a literary program.

The first movement, “Montagues and Capulets,” introduces Verona’s two feuding families.  The dramatic opening bars correspond to what, in the ballet, is the “Duke’s Command”:  the two strident brass and woodwind explosions translate the Duke of Verona’s powerful indictment of the rival families, while the strings mimic the reaction of the crowd.  Fast-forward to the ball at the Capulets’ house, with the “Dance of the Knights” that follows this slow introduction:  its pompous, angular theme made familiar by countless references in popular culture originally stood for the bellicose pride of the Capulets, and in particular of the young Tybalt, with whom it is associated again later in the ballet.  But in a contrasting internal episode within the first movement, the rising arpeggiation of a minor triad that characterized the theme of the Capulets takes on a completely different guise:  this luminous, soft moment marks the apparition of Juliet (a Capulet herself, hence the motivic relation) dancing with Paris.  Juliet is also the protagonist of the next movement of the Second Suite, “Juliet as a Young Girl”:  quick scales and figurations suggesting the vivacity of the teenage girl alternate with lyrical sections depicting her romantic reveries.  Pay attention in particular at the dreamy theme presented by the flute.  After the third movement, “Friar Laurence” — which stages a conversation between Romeo and his confessor — and the ensuing, lighthearted “Dance,” we reach the emotional heart of the Suite, “Romeo and Juliet Before Parting.”  This central movement opens with the love scene between the two protagonists after Romeo has been banished (Act 3, Scene 4 in the Shakespeare play).  After a flute melody already heard in the scene of Romeo and Juliet’s wedding (a discreet allusion to the fact that they have just consummated their marriage), we hear, in a crescendo of passion, the themes that accompany the lovers’ farewell.  The second, more cantabile melody is particularly memorable:  for its first appearance, Prokofiev asked for a viola d’amore, with its fuller and richer sound.  This archaic instrument had already been used to suggest love in a Renaissance setting by nineteenth-century composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, in his immensely popular opera Les Huguenots (1836).  Prokofiev’s musical fabric then segues into the scene where Juliet stages her death:  a four-note ostinato builds up tension, while low woodwinds and double basses spell out the theme associated in the complete ballet with Friar Laurence’s apparent-death potion.  The potion theme shares the initial arpeggiation of the theme of the Capulets, so Juliet’s family is again casting its sinister shadow.  But we also get a glimpse of Juliet’s more hopeful thoughts, with a recollection of the dream-like theme from “Juliet as a Young Girl.”  The sixth movement, the “Dance of the Girls with Lilies” serves as a temporary diversion, but with “Romeo at Juliet’s Grave,” we reach the emotionally charged epilogue of the story.  Romeo’s despair over discovering Juliet’s body is scored to a gut-wrenching elaboration of the poison theme, where the cantabile theme from the love scene then resurfaces.  We then hear again the theme from “Juliet as a Young Girl,” set pianissimo in the violins, as Juliet wakes up.  And since this is where the masterful Suite ends, you are free to choose what happens next:  will Juliet discover Romeo’s dead body and commit suicide, as in Shakespeare’s original play and in Prokofiev’s ballet as it was performed?  Or will Friar Laurence have stopped Romeo from killing himself, so that the lovers can be reunited, as Prokofiev had first imagined?  The listener is left to interpret the future.

Dmitri Shostakovich:  Symphony No. 9 in E flat Major, Op. 70 (1945)

Unlike Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich — who was just eleven at the time of the October Revolution — spent his whole life in Soviet Russia, and struggled throughout his career to reconcile his often-irreverent musical personality with loyalty to his country.  Although he did suffer stringent official condemnation (in 1936 he was viciously attacked for his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and after World War II he was targeted by the infamous repression campaign led by Andrey Zhdanov), he was not really a secret dissident:  Testimony, the alleged memoir published four years after his death that suggested so, is generally considered to be a fabrication by its editor, Simon Volkov.

World War II, during which the Soviet Union contributed at an enormous human cost to the defeat of the Third Reich, prompted Shostakovich’s most deeply heartfelt patriotic composition, the colossal Seventh Symphony, “Leningrad” (1941), which was written as his hometown was enduring possibly the most deadly siege in military history.  The Eighth Symphony (1943) had a similarly epic tone and proportions.  Between 1944 and 1945, Shostakovich was planning — and also expected — to conclude his wartime trilogy with an equally monumental Ninth celebrating Soviet victory.  To the perplexity and even dismay of some of his contemporaries, the Ninth Symphony he ended up composing (and which was first performed in November 1945) was nothing of the sort.  Instead, it was the diametrical opposite:  concise, understated, and playful.

The opening Allegro of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 9 is a brilliant exercise in classical sonata form.  The exposition, in particular, is pellucid.  Both the first and second themes have incisive, tonally unambiguous incipits.  A trombone, a snare drum, and a piccolo, none of which had been heard before, make the appearance of the second theme stand out:  if the resulting marching-band sound might seem un-Classical, it is also true that the surprise effect it has on the listener is very much in the spirit of Franz Joseph Haydn — the “father of the symphony” who loved this sort of musical joke.  For maximum clarity, the exposition is repeated, as in the most canonical examples of classical form.  After a wonderfully imaginative development comes a recapitulation with a tweak:  the first trombone seems impatient to launch the second theme (which is also in a different key than expected), and tries for five times to interrupt the rest of the orchestra, which is still busy with the first theme.  The slow movement is a Moderato built on the contrast between an eloquent cantilena, first given to a solo clarinet, and the tormented sighs of the string section.  The following Presto movement is a vertiginous scherzo that again uses the full palette of the orchestra to great effect (including trumpets, trombones, tuba, and percussion, all of which were silent during the Moderato).  The fourth movement, an instrumental recitative for solo bassoon marked Largo and framed by powerful incantations by unison trombones, is somewhat puzzling.  It recalls the symphonic tradition of instrumental recitatives that mimic a stentorian voice and set the tone for some rousing peroration of high political or ethical significance:  think, for example, of the recitative for cellos and basses in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the one for trombone in Hector Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, which prepare the “Ode to Joy” and a chorus honoring the dead of France’s July Revolution, respectively.  (In his Third Symphony, “The First of May” (1930), Shostakovich had similarly written a recitative for three unison trombones that had a touch of irony to it, but it was followed by an earnest choral exaltation of Workers’ Day.)  The bassoon recitative of the Ninth seems at first genuinely solemn, even though the bassoon’s timbre is hardly heroic, and one wonders for an instant whether the Symphony is eventually going to pay tribute to the Soviet Union’s victory.  But, instead of some grandiloquent chorus, what ensues — the final Allegretto — is a sort of popular dance that gradually builds up to a jubilant whirlwind.  Ultimately, then, this Ninth Symphony does celebrate the end of the war:  simply and deliberately, though, as it eschews officialdom and captures the spontaneous popular sentiment of joy and relief.