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| FORCE OF DESTINY |  | Giuseppe Verdi
Overture to La forza del destino
In 1862, Giuseppe Verdi was at the zenith of his popularity, his name identified with the Risorgimento (unification of Italy) the previous year. The cry “Viva Verdi” not only hailed the composer but was an acronym standing for the new king, Vittorio Emmanuele Rè D’Italia. Verdi was elected as a member of Italy’s first parliament.
While his early and middle period operas were all premiered in Italy, Verdi began to receive important commissions from beyond the borders, especially from the Paris Opera. Two singers on tour in Russia started the ball rolling for the composer’s first and only Russian commission. Based on a contemporary Spanish play, La fuerza del sino by Angel Pérez de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, this Italian melodrama – as operas were called in Italy – fit perfectly into the cosmopolitan court of the liberal Tsar Alexander II. La forza del destino premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862. Verdi revised the entire opera, including the overture, for its Italian premiere in 1869.
The opera’s extremely complicated plot concerns Don Alvaro and Leonora–whose father he has inadvertently shot while trying to elope with her. The lovers separate and attempt to find exculpation and autonomy, only to be hounded and finally defeated by fate. The Overture is replete with themes from the opera itself, outlining the inexorable course of the lovers' destiny. The opening motive, three unison Es for the brasses followed by a repeated agitated figure in the low strings, represents fate and recurs each time destiny deals yet another blow.  The next theme comes from an Act 3 duet between Don Alvaro and Leonora's brother Don Carlo, who have just discovered each other's identity after Alvaro has saved Carlo's life on the battlefield. Note the underlying "Fate" motive. This also accompanies the next melody taken from Leonora's prayer to the Virgin as she prepares to spend the rest of her life as a hermit to atone for her sin.
The Overture goes on to protray the personal conflict and turns of fate that militate against Leonora's peace of mind, but the final theme of the Overture, taken from Act 2 when she fervently dons her hermit's attire to retire to a cave in the forest, suggests the emotional resolution and redemption she will finally experience in death.
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| | | John Corigliano
The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra
In 2000 John Corigliano’s score for the film The Red Violin garnered an Oscar. The movie portrays the career of a strangely varnished violin through three centuries and three continents, an instrument “cursed” by the soul of its maker's deceased wife, Anna (We don’t want to give away the plot of this fascinating film available on DVD.) The film opens in seventeenth-century Cremona and ends in contemporary Montreal. Corigliano’s score has acquired a life of its own, independent of the film.
A native of New York, Corigliano came by his musical talents honestly. His father, John Sr., was for 23 years the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and his mother an accomplished pianist. John, Jr. studied at Columbia University and the Manhattan School of Music and subsequently worked at New York’s WQXR radio station and as an assistant director at CBS-TV.
Corigliano first came to prominence as a composer after winning the chamber music prize at the 1964 Spoleto Festival for his Sonata for Violin and Piano. Since the 1970s he has emerged as a successful and popular classical composer whose works are frequently and widely performed. From 1987 to 1990 he was composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony, a tenure that culminated in his powerful Symphony No. 1, his personal response to the AIDS crisis. Currently he holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York and, in 1991, was named to the faculty of The Juilliard School. In 2001 his Symphony No. 2, an expanded version of his 1995 String Quartet, won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Corigliano’s musical language, while mostly tonal and lyrical, does not shirk dissonance. His early music, especially, is reminiscent of the music of Milhaud and Bartók.
Even before the film premiered, the composer extracted the film’s solo violin melody, “Anna’s Theme,” and composed the independent concert piece, Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra. He writes: “I decided to use “Anna's' theme,” manipulate it through stylistic variations, and adapt 19th-century techniques into the musical language of the 20th century."
The chaconne is a Baroque dance in which a short melody, usually in the lowest voice, is continually repeated while the other contrapuntal lines weave variations around it, maintaining the original harmonic structure throughout.
Corigliano’s Chaconne is somewhat freer in structure than the model. The piece as a whole derives its many moods to the high drama of the film. “Anna’s Theme” belongs exclusively to the solo violin, while the rest of the orchestra maintains its supporting harmonic structure very similar to the theme from the fourth movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 – also a chaconne. The piece also achieves unity by the recurrence of a dotted rhythm that begins the first iterations of the chaconne harmony, later restated in diminution
At times the soloist actually breaks away from the form entirely for flights of intense fancy and drama. Towards the end, there is an extended cadenza for the solo violin, recalling Bach’s great chaconne that concludes the Partita No. 2 in d minor for Unaccompanied Violin.
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| | |  | | | | Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | | | 1840-1893 | | |
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 4 in f Minor, Op.36
Throughout his creative career, Tchaikovsky’s inspiration went through extreme cycles tied to the frequent bouts of deep depression and self-doubt from which he suffered. The composition of this symphony in 1877 was strongly influenced by the events that happened in his life that year.
Things were actually looking up for Tchaikovsky during the early part of 1877. He had his first contact with Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a railroad builder, who fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s music and arranged to pay him a large annual stipend. The only stipulation she attached to her generous help was that they never meet in person, although they corresponded voluminously. In May he started writing the symphony, but then in July came his disastrous marriage to one of his students who had fallen madly in love with him. Tchaikovsky, who was homosexual, hoped the marriage would still the rumors about his sexual preferences. But instead he fled from his wife in horror after two weeks. In total despair, he made a pathetic attempt at suicide (he walked into the Moskva River, hoping to die of pneumonia) and ended up with a complete mental collapse. To recuperate, his brother took him to Switzerland and Italy, where he picked up work on the symphony, finishing it in January 1878.
Tchaikovsky dedicated the work To Mme. von Meck, expressing his confidence in the new work: “I feel in my heart that this work is the best I have ever written.” He himself did not return from abroad for the February 1878 premiere in Moscow, which was only a luke-warm success.
In Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies, motivic unity among the movements was to take an increasingly more prominent role. The symphony opens with a sinister fanfare theme by the brass, which recurs as the movement unfolds. The anxiety-laden main theme, which Tchaikovsky develops on the spot, strives towards a resolution that continually seems to elude it. The relief comes with the second theme, one of Tchaikovsky's inimitable melodies, a waltz for solo clarinet, and a third played in counterpoint with the clarinet theme by the strings and timpani. The development, based exclusively on the main theme and the fanfare, begins quietly, slowly ramping up the emotional tension. After the recapitulation, the fanfare announces a long two-part coda with a new theme set contrapuntally against the main theme to resolve the movement on a more positive note. But just as we are starting to sit back and relax, the fanfare returns to blast us back into Tchaikovsky's stormy reality.
The second movement, by contrast, opens with a plaintive melody on the oboe, accompanied by pizzicato strings. The oboe theme is answered by a more intense second theme in the strings. The pace picks up as the composer adds a dance-like melody. Typical Tchaikovsky anxiety mounts, until he returns to the gentle oboe theme now in the violins, adorned with feathery ornaments in the winds recalling the accompaniment to the clarinet theme in the first movement.
The third movement, Pizzicato ostinato, is a playful diversion. It is a typical scherzo and trio. The Trio consists of a medley of tunes, the first for a pair of oboes, the second, slightly mournful Russian folk tune, also for the upper winds, and a playful brass riff with staccato playing to match the pizzicato strings from the Scherzo. The movement ends with a medley of the various themes and instrumental combinations.
While one hears subtle references to first-movement musical ideas in movements two and three, Tchaikovsky explicitly unifies the Symphony in the Finale. This last movement is the most “Russian” of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic movements and is something of a musical battle between the festive and the melancholic. After a festive opening theme, the oboe and bassoon introduce an authentic Russia folk-song (for which he was roundly condemned by his academic colleagues and the critics). Once again, however, a sprightly mood turns negative, and it is hardly surprising that the movement is brought up short towards the end by the reappearance of the grim fanfare from the opening movement – the spectre at the feast. An energetic coda, however, tips the balance towards positive territory. |
| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008 | |
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