Winter Music
Once, in late summer, I was visiting Castine, Maine, and asked one of the natives what was her favorite time of year in that little coastal town. She surprised me by saying, “Oh, winter is the best season, by far!” When I asked why, she explained that in winter there were no outdoor chores to do, and travel outside town was slow or impossible, so there were many days to spend indoors with friends and family, playing games, making music, and of course cooking and enjoying meals together. Our Tennessee winters, of course, are not so confining, but certainly they are good times to concentrate on parts of life that make use of our minds and feelings, with less emphasis on the daily physical routines that are necessary for most of us during those months when lawns and weeds grow, kids are out of school, and vacations are in planning or recovery stages. And what better way to celebrate winter than to join with friends in an evening of wonderful music. So many of those better aspects of ourselves find expression on occasions like this, and we reinforce once again the realization that we are more than just two-legged, tool-using creatures who are scraping out an all-too-brief existence together in a shared narrow band of breathable air on a single planet in the middle of nowhere.
The composers whose works we hear tonight, and those friends and neighbors of ours who perform those compositions, were and are like us, in that their lives, too, have been full of routines, daily drudgery, frustration, and countless distractions. Yet, these composers and musicians have somehow risen above the mundane and found expression for some of the nobler aspects of what it is like to be human. Let this be an inspiration for the rest of us, thereby making us a more attentive and grateful audience. There will be a special magic that will hover around us when we do this, and the whole experience – musical and interpersonal – will swell with meaning and multi-faceted pleasure for all of us. We'll be so warm inside that we may forget to button our coats for the trip home.
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Water Music: Suite No. 1
Handel, the only composer of the times whom history has now placed in the same exalted category with Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was born in Halle, Germany, the son of a barber who later became the surgeon – barbers were the first surgeons! – and valet to the Prince of Saxe-Magdeburg, one of many small German states at the time. It was fortunate that Handel had this early association with powerful and influential families, because he was destined to benefit from royal patronage for much of the rest of his life. This is not to say that Handel “had it made,” because such a category for a musician not in a wealthy family did not exist at the time. He studied law and prepared himself – as do most musicians today – for a “day job,” but his talents were so great and so noticeable that he was able to find musical work and eventually – during his twenties – as a composer of Italian style operas whose reasonable success not only brought him income but a certain amount of growing fame. He traveled throughout Europe and made his first trip to England in 1710. It was there he soon became well established under royal tutelage and was to remain employed for the rest of his life.
On July 17, 1717, The Daily Courant newspaper in London carried a report of a royal barge party on the Thames, which read in part: “Many other barges with persons of quality attended, and so great a number of boats that the whole river in a manner was covered. A City Company's barge was employed for the music, wherein were fifty instruments of all sorts, who played ... the finest symphonies, composed express for this occasion by Mr. Handel, which his majesty liked so well that he caused it to be played over three times in going and returning.” Here is an early account of music which certainly has to be called readily accessible. In layout and format, the twenty pieces that comprise the complete Water Music – of which we hear the first part – consists of a large suite of dance tunes, air, and other movements, introduced by an overture. The musical texture is bright and clear, appropriate for music intended for outdoor performance. In our setting, the special acoustic character of the venue will bring out the brilliance in different, but possibly even a more effective manner. Handel probably didn't intend for the movements to be performed in a particular order; the modern arrangements are consequently designed in an effort to please modern tastes. But whatever the tastes, eighteenth or twenty-first century, or those in between, all hearers have been and will be totally charmed. Simply let it be said that for sheer happy entertainment, the music Handel composed for the king's pleasure on a hot summer evening has few rivals in all the literature.
Johann Baptist Georg Neruda (1707-1780) Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra in E flat Major
The nearly forgotten Bohemian composer, Johann Neruda, was born as Jan KÍtitl JiÍí Neruda, later to have his name more commonly expressed in the German form. Neruda received his education in Prague and for a time played the violin in a theater orchestra. Attaining notice through traveling around to perform in concerts, he was accepted as violinist in the renowned Dresden court orchestra in 1750, later becoming the Konzertmeister, serving through the difficult conditions brought about in Saxony by the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Neruda lived a long, productive life and left a large quantity of music of various kinds, including some fourteen concertos, an opera, and eighteen symphonies. Yet virtually nothing of his vast output is performed, with the sole exception of the Trumpet Concerto. The work began as a solo work for the “clarin horn,” a small instrument used for signals during horseback hunting. The clarin register would best be defined as the extreme upper range of the modern trumpet. Most melodies were not possible in the low or middle range of the horn. Using the hand to modify tones wasn't in general use until shortly before 1800, and valves were not patented until 1818, which made the clarin register more popular in the eighteenth century. As time passed, the horn's bore was widened to produce a deeper, fuller sound; consequently, the highest clarin notes could no longer be played on the new instruments. The late-baroque and early-classical horn works (like Neruda's) were forgotten. Now, with modern players and instruments, some of these old masterpieces have returned.
Neruda's concerto is scored for an orchestra of strings, with continuo harpsichord. It opens with an orchestral introduction, followed by the solo trumpet sounding the principal theme. Neruda, in a beautiful example of the style of the times, used a characteristic sequence in motifs expanded by successive repetition. The principal theme returns in the orchestra before the trumpet entry with new material, a procedure followed in the following ritornello and final return of the principal theme in its original key, leading to a trumpet cadenza and coda. The orchestra presents the main theme of the slow movement for the first time, followed by the solo trumpet elaborating and extending the same material. A cadenza precedes the second orchestral section of the movement and the soloist leads the way back to the original key and to a second cadenza, before the movement comes to a close. The concerto ends with a Vivace in three, its principal theme presented by the orchestra, with returns framing a series of solo episodes, culminating in a final trumpet cadenza.
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Metamorphosen (1945)
One of the greatest music geniuses in the history of music, Richard Strauss was the son of a famous horn player and eventually married a prima donna soprano, both of whom he wrote brilliant and exceedingly difficult works for during moments when he was not concentrating on operas – of which he wrote fourteen – and many other masterpieces. Perhaps he is best known for his symphonic poems, a musical expression in which he has no rival. As an operatic composer Strauss is famed as the natural and equally capable follower of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), with several of his works solidly established and often performed. He was very famous during the terrible years of the second world war, which he endured in Nazi Germany until its final days, which he spent in Switzerland. It was during those last months of the conflict, when great German cultural centers were being reduced to rubble, that he created one of his last masterpieces, Metamorphosen. As we will hear, it is a very personal work for solo strings.
Edward Said (1935-2003), a well known political activist and music critic, called the Metamorphosen a paradigm for an enlightened and ethical musical experience, to be shared by composer and listener. In the perspective afforded by such a work, music becomes an expression of feelings, thoughts, ideas, and sensations that can come into existence in no other way within the human experience. In order to listen to this work appropriately we must prepare ourselves not to be entertained – as we have been with the Water Music – but to be involved, involved with all the other listeners and all the performers in a kind of inquiry of our inner selves and into what it truly means to be a human being living in the midst of tragedy, hardship, and confusion, blended in with nobility of heart, and a determination to find meaning.
Strauss had written the first sketches for the Metamorphosen on the day the Munich Staatstheater was bombed in October 1943, and had given them the name "Mourning for Munich." The final work, completed in a month in March and April of 1945, is a lamentation for German esthetic culture. Strauss scored the work for 23 string instruments – ten violins, five each of violas and cellos and 3 double basses. Each instrument is given an independent melodic line, with occasionally doublings for emphasis. Strauss put in thematic references to the funeral march from Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica, that are throughout the score. Since the title of the work means “transformations,” it is reasonable to ask what is being transformed. Certainly the Beethoven quotation undergoes a transformation, although the composer spoke of it later as “escaping” from his pen before he recognized what he had done. The quotation, in fact, is just a brief, though important, fragment of Beethoven's theme. Strauss attaches a more expansive and lyrical idea that also recurs throughout the work in many variations, and these two components comprise the basic thematic structure of the entire work. In the margin of one of the manuscript pages is a notation, presumably by Strauss, “Trauer um München” (mourning for Munich) and on the last page where Beethoven 's theme appears complete in the cellos and double bass, the words “In Memoriam.” Within all this lament, however, we hear something emotionally uplifting. Some scholars contend that Strauss was affirming the German idealism of Beethoven and Goethe over the despair and tragedy of Germanic character gone mad in the Nazi experience. Whatever the truth Richard Strauss wanted to present to us, the truths that we the listeners and performers will surely gain are those truths that all great music speaks to us, and in ways that we cherish uniquely within ourselves.