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| SPANNING THE GLOBE |  | Virgil Thomson
Acadian Songs and Dances
The Louisiana Story might strike a somewhat ironic chord for today’s listeners – especially from the Gulf Coast – as Congress grapples again with domestic oil and gas drilling options. Commissioned in 1948 by the Standard Oil Company (now Exxon/Mobil), the film paints a sanitized picture of small-time oil drilling. The plot concerns a Cajun boy and his pet raccoon in the Louisiana bayous. After his elderly father permits the construction of an oilrig in his little bayou, the friendly oil company comes in to build a small rig, leaving behind a newly wealthy family. The question of environmental impact is skirted over or forgotten as the viewer tends to be more anxious about the fate of Chu Chu the raccoon.
Composer and music critic Virgil Thomson grew up in Kansas City, where his first musical training was as organist. He started composing when he entered Harvard in 1919. On a summer trip to France with the Harvard Glee Club, he managed to stay in Paris for a year, studying organ and counterpoint with the doyenne of American composers in the 1920s and 30s, Nadia Boulanger. A couple of years after graduation, he returned to Paris to join the large colony of American intellectual expatriates, remaining there until displaced by the invading German army in 1940.
While in Paris, Thomson had met Gertrude Stein, and together they produced two of the more unconventional but fascinating operas of the first half of the twentieth century: Four Saints in Three Acts in 1933 and The Mother of us All in 1947. During the 1930s Thomson composed music for two highly successful documentary films, The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River , sponsored by the United States Resettlement Administration, an agency formed in 1935 to relocate struggling urban and rural families to communities planned by the federal government.
In October 1940 Thomson was appointed music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, a position he held for fourteen years. He became one of the major critical voices of the era, espousing the short, pithy review, commenting on the quality of the music first, the quality of the performance second.
The score forThe Louisiana Story won a Pulitzer Prize, and Thomson extracted two suites from the music. One, Louisiana Story: Suite, consists of four numbers of the more dramatic episodes of the score related to the drilling operation. The other, Louisiana Story: Acadian Songs and Dances, comprising seven numbers, emphasizes the musical scenery and background. Although the melodies are original, they reflect the style of local Cajun music. Familiar now as Zydeco, from the French: "les haricots," (snap beans), it developed during the late 1800s from the call-and-response vocal music of the black and multiracial French-speaking Creoles of south and southwest Louisiana.
The movements of the suite do not necessarily correspond to the order of the story. Many of the tunes recur throughout the film.
1. Sadness: This melody often accompanies the Boy’s wanderings, suggesting the extreme poverty of the little family. 
2. Papa’s Tune: This melody is associated with the father, who is by no means convinced that the exploratory drilling will amount to anything.
3. A Narrative: Since there is very little dialogue in this film, it is not clear why Thomson labeled this piece as he did. The rhythm, however, has a speech-like flow.
4. The alligator and the ‘coon: Chu Chu gnaws (no pun intended) through his rope tied to the canoe while waiting for the Boy and is pursued by an alligator through the bayou. The cheery music portends an eventually happy outcome – although there’s a little musical cliffhanger at the very end.
5. Super-sadness: Assuming that Chu Chu has become alligator dinner, the Boy mourns his loss wandering aimlessly around the bayou in his canoe.
6. Walking Song: An inveterate wanderer, the Boy explores bayou and oilrig alike.
7. The Squeeze Box: Although Papa doesn’t actually dance with joy over his new-found prosperity, the music, with traditional zydeco accordion, is a dance. The movement also recaps earlier melodies. |
| | |  | | | | Felix Mendelssohn | | | 1809-1847 | | |
Felix Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto e minor, Op.64
If ever there was a composer born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it was Felix Mendelssohn. He was raised in affluence and comfort, his precocious musical talent recognized and nurtured by his culturally sophisticated and highly supportive family. His home was a Mecca for the artistic and intellectual elite of Germany who also encouraged the prodigy and his talented sister Fanny. One of his admirers was the formidable grand old man of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fortunately for the development of Felix's rare abilities, his carefully selected teachers, however impressed they may have been with him, were demanding. His strict training, especially in fugue composition, familiarized him with the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, who at the time was dismissed as a mere pedagogue. In 1829, Mendelssohn was central to a Bach revival with an historic performance of the Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin, virtually rescuing the great composer's music from the counterpoint classroom.
As a mature artist, Mendelssohn was acclaimed throughout Europe as a composer and conductor, especially in his native Germany and in England, where he had a private audience with the young Queen Victoria, who sang for him after he had played for her. His untimely death from unknown causes created a profound shock, and Mendelssohn societies promoting his music and ideas quickly sprang up all over middle and northern Europe.
Unlike Mozart, Mendelssohn was extremely self-critical, constantly requesting feedback and carefully perfecting his compositions. The Concerto in e minor had a long gestation period. Mendelssohn started it in 1838 but did not finish it until six years later. He wrote it for his friend, the famed violinist Ferdinand David (1810-1873), concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig where Mendelssohn served as conductor from 1835 to 1843. The composer sought - and took - David's advice on technical aspects throughout its composition. David finally premiered it in Leipzig in 1845, but Mendelssohn was ill and unable to attend. Now one of the staples of violin repertory, the Concerto was considered daring and innovative at the time of its composition.
From the first bar, the Allegro molto appassionato opening broke new ground. Instead of the usual orchestral exposition of the main themes, the violin enters at once to present the principal theme on which the movement is built. Mendelssohn gives the second part of the theme to the orchestra. For the second theme, the roles are reversed, with the winds introducing the theme. The cadenza, largely the creation of David, is placed unconventionally before the recapitulation. Relocating the cadenza away from its traditional place at the end of the movement stresses the continuity with the second movement, which follows without pause.
The Andante emerges out of a single quiet bassoon tone, emanating from the last chord of the opening movement. It is joined by other instruments for a short transitional passage, after which the solo violin introduces the simple, almost religious theme. The middle section in the minor mode turns slightly darker.
Another transition, based on the opening theme of the Concerto, leads into the Allegro molto vivace. Mendelssohn saved the demonstration of the virtuoso possibilities of the violin for this sparkling Finale. After an orchestral fanfare for the winds, containing a rhythmic motive that the composer reuses for throughout the movement as part of other themes, the soloist enters with a flourish followed by a delicate, dancing theme that dominates the movement and recalls the atmosphere of the teenaged composer's first great hit, the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. The orchestra answers with a development of the opening fanfare. The soloist then plays a new, more lyrical melody – also based on the fanfare - in counterpoint with the first theme, now in the orchestra, Later, their roles are reversed. |
| | | Jean Sibelius
Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43
Sweden relinquished Finland to the Russian Empire in 1809, where it became an autonomous duchy with significant control over its own affairs. Beginning in 1870, however, these privileges and autonomy were gradually taken away under the guise of “Russification” of the many ethnic minorities within the Russian Empire. While Swedish had been the language of the educated and the middle class, Russian repression aroused such strong nationalist feelings that it sparked a revival of the Finnish language. Jean Sibelius was born into this nationalistic environment and in 1876 enrolled in the first grammar school to teach in Finnish.
Sibelius was by no means a child prodigy. He started playing piano at nine, didn't like it and took up the violin at fourteen. His ambition was to become a concert violinist and all his life he regretted not following this dream. He had also toyed with composing as early as ten.
His first success as composer came in 1892 with a nationalistic symphonic poem/cantata titled Kullervo, Op. 7, which met with great success but was never again performed in his lifetime. During the next six years he composed numerous nationalistic pageants, symphonic poems and vocal works, mostly based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. In order to enable him to work undisturbed, the Finnish administrative government gave him a pension for life in 1897. For the next 28 years he composed the symphonies and tone poems that made him famous. But in 1925, at the age of 60, he essentially quit composing probably as the result of the ravages of alcoholism and the bipolar disorder that had plagued him throughout his life. He remained silent until his death 32 years later.
Writing symphonies was for Sibelius a lifelong preoccupation that he described as “confessions of faith from different periods of my life.” Composed in the winter 1901-02, close on the heels of his patriotic Finlandia, the Symphony No. 2, with its blazingly affirmative conclusion and optimism, reflected the nationalistic spirit of the time. His statement that all his music was either consciously or unconsciously programmatic opened up a Pandora’s box for interpretation. The public’s belief that the Symphony contained a fundamental political message made it an instant success despite the fact that Sibelius himself ascribed no program to it. It has remained his most frequently performed symphony.
The first movement opens with a lyrical theme by a pair of oboes in their middle range accompanied by the lower strings and the horns in open fifths, creating a dark, or cold, sound often used by Sibelius, that hints of the stark Finnish climate and landscape. The movement consists of a string of melodic fragments, rather than full themes, woven together into a classic sonata form. & & & Note also the constant recurrence of the trill.
A timpani roll and a long pizzicato passage on the basses opens the second movement, spiraling higher and higher, preparatory to a stark Russian-sounding theme, this time on the bassoons. It creates an even more desolate sound than the chilly oboes of the first movement. It is this grim timbre, building to an outburst in the strings that has been interpreted as symbolizing the Russian oppression. This musical image continues as it builds up the climactic statement by the trumpets, introduced by the strings. A motive from the first movement recurs to introduce a calming almost religious effect. But the respite is short-lived as Sibelius develops the Russian themes.
The scherzo for strings alone has a frantic quality about it, particularly in the irregularity of its phrasing and refusal to settle on a tonic. The pace slows down considerably for the trio, once again, a low oboe solo accompanied by winds. While it begins on an emotionally neutral plane it quickly adopts a plaintive mood that is taken up by the entire orchestra. The reprise of the scherzo employs a different orchestration, slowing down and leading without pause into the final movement.
The finale, that symbolized nationalistic triumph to its first audiences, is indeed both optimistic and grandiose, with heavy use of a trumpet fanfare motive, which grows into a full-fledged theme. Like the first movement, it consists more of motives than full themes, but they are so frequently repeated as to be unforgettable even on a first hearing. & The culmination towards which the entire movement builds begins a brief trumpet motive that recurs in ever more triumphant orchestration.
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| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008 | |
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