Cristina Gómez Godoy & Michail Lifits

Melody, Metamorphosis, and Memory

Music for Oboe and Friends

Thomas May

Serving as a beacon for the entire orchestra during the ritual of tuning before a performance, the oboe as we essentially know it emerged around the time of Jean-Baptiste Lully in the mid-17th century. Further refinements made in the later 19th century by Paris instrument makers led to the Conservatoire oboe that set the modern standard. The oboe’s French associations are preserved in the name itself, derived from hautbois (literally, “high wood”). In his Treatise on Orchestration, Hector Berlioz noted that “the oboe is above all a melodic instrument [possessing] a rustic character, full of tenderness, even of bashfulness.”

That emphasis on cantabile playing betrays the Romantic era’s perspective, and in the 19th century the oboe most frequently figured as an orchestral instrument. Beethoven, for example, makes the oboe a quasi-protagonist in the “Eroica” Symphony. “Because of the difficulties associated with reeds and the patience required to produce an acceptable tone quality,” according to the Grove Dictionary of Music, “the oboe [of the 19th century] never became popular as an amateur instrument and was little used in domestic music-making.”

During the 20th century, the oboe, which played a crucial role in the Romantic orchestral repertoire, came back into its own as a solo instrument—a development, Grove remarks, that was “largely inspired by the playing of a number of fine oboists.” Cristina Gómez Godoy, who has been the Staatskapelle Berlin’s principal oboist since 2013, has chosen a wide range of works demonstrating this new solo prominence for her Pierre Boulez Saal solo debut.

The program begins, appropriately, with music by a French composer written for Louis Bas, student of Georges Gillet, a foundational figure in modern oboe playing. Camille Saint-Saëns’s epic lifespan encompasses the heyday of Romanticism and the birth pangs of Modernism, with the result that an artist who once championed the revolutionary new music of Liszt and Wagner ended up a staunch musical conservative. He outlasted Debussy, whose music made no sense to him, and was still vigorously at work into his 86th year, in 1921, when he wrote the Oboe Sonata.

Even though his output was enormous, Saint-Saëns fell victim to the changing tides of musical fashion, and nowadays only a handful of his works, mostly from the 1870s and ’80s, remain in the repertoire. Saint-Saëns had emerged as a prodigy pianist—he introduced all five of Beethoven’s concertos to skeptical French audiences— yet his understanding of the oboe and its capabilities makes his too-rarely-heard sonata one of the key works in the solo repertoire. Indeed, it stands out during a period of draught when other major composers showed little interest in taking up the oboe’s cause. Debussy, ironically, had intended to do so in his final chamber compositions, but succumbed to cancer in the last year of the First World War.

Saint-Saëns, too, focused on wind instruments at the end of his life in a deliberate effort “to broaden the repertoire of those instruments that are otherwise so neglected.” In 1921, in addition to the Op. 166 Sonata, he completed accompanied sonatas for the clarinet and bassoon and intended to continue with works for the flute and English horn. The Oboe Sonata is the first work from this project. Saint-Saëns designed an unusual trajectory, such that each of its three movements increases in tempo. The graceful cantabile of the opening Andantino readily evokes the pastoral archetype Berlioz had in mind, while the central and longest movement bookends its charming neoclassicism with ad libitum passages. The work closes with a virtuosic finale punctuated by almost martial calls-to-attention on the piano.

Of exceptional importance for the modern oboe literature, these miniatures illustrate the instrument’s expressive capacity without accompaniment and without the use of extended playing techniques. Thematically, too, they draw on Benjamin Britten’s affinity for classical antiquity and poetry. Six Metamorphoses after Ovid is a mature work dating from 1951 and premiered in June of that year as part of the Aldeburgh Festival, which Britten had co-founded. Originally, his vision was for the oboist to perform while standing afloat on a raft. Joy Broughton, daughter of Britten’s composer friend Rutland Broughton and also the work’s dedicatee, felt unsafe doing so and ended up performing while standing on an island. Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC – 17/18 AD), otherwise known as Ovid, has been the catalyst for some of the most beloved figures in Western literature (including Shakespeare). Britten, in what for him was an unusual example of using a literary source as the basis for a purely instrumental composition, chose six figures from this treasury, creating for each of them a readily discernible musical profile that, even in the absence of text setting, reminds us of his acumen as a musical dramatist and indeed psychologist.

The composer inscribed into the score the following descriptions of each piece, which are separated by pauses for breath: “(I) Pan who played upon the reed pipe which was Syrinx, his beloved; (II) Phaeton who rode upon the chariot of the sun for one day and was hurled into the river Padus by a thunderbolt; (III) Niobe, who, lamenting the death of her fourteen children, was turned into a mountain; (IV) Bacchus at whose feasts is heard the noise of gaggling women’s tattling tongues and shouting out of boys; (V) Narcissus who fell in love with his own image and became a flower; and (VI) Arethusa who, flying from the love of Alpheus the river god, was turned into a fountain.”

Nikos Skalkottas: Concertino for Oboe and Piano

During last season’s musical focus on Greece at the Pierre Boulez Saal, several programs presented music by the unjustly neglected Nikos Skalkottas. In 1921, the year in which Saint-Saëns composed his Oboe Sonata, the teenage Skalkottas moved to Berlin to take up a violin scholarship at the Hochschule für Musik. He had been born on the island of Euboea into a musical family and was already a violin student at the Athens Conservatory at the age of ten. In Berlin, Skalkottas soon switched from violin to composition and briefly took lessons from Kurt Weill, but the most consequential influence came when he found a mentor in Arnold Schoenberg (from 1927 to 1932), who recalled later that the young Greek was one of his most talented students. Weimar Berlin was the backdrop against which Skalkottas began developing a challenging atonal style of his own—he composed the first-ever dodecaphonic piano concerto, for example—and he succeeded in getting several works performed there. To make ends meet, he played violin in silent cinema orchestras; later, he found the support of a wealthy young Greek patron until they had a falling out.

Along with the catastrophic political situation, Skalkottas suffered financial and emotional crises that compelled him to return to Greece in 1933, where he faced hostility or indifference from many of his musical peers. Although he intended to return to Berlin, he remained in Athens for the rest of his life, playing violin with the main orchestras to make a living. He became increasingly reclusive yet continued to write music, pursuing his own path with numerous 12-tone compositions as well as some tonal pieces.

The Concertino for Oboe and Piano dates from this final Greek period and was written in 1939 for one of Skalkottas’s peers in the State Orchestra of Athens. The composer later envisioned the Concertino as part of a larger series of solo chamber pieces (including bassoon and trumpet) with piano accompaniment to be performed in a single concert. On its own terms, the compact Concertino, in three movements of highly contrasting characters, synthesizes Skalkottas’s penchant for classicizing forms (very much in the air, however ironically applied, in Weimar Berlin of the 1920s) with his comparatively spontaneous approach to atonality and his admiration for the rhythmic verve of Stravinsky. The Concertino offers the soloist, Skalkottas noted, “the opportunity [to play] rational, virtuosic variations” as well as a bit of “musical dancing, which can please, entertain, and intrigue the interest of the dear listener.”

The most recent work on tonight’s program, Inner Song originated in 1992 as a dual homage from Elliott Carter. First, he wrote it as a memorial piece on the occasion of a festival, in Witten, celebrating the late composer Stefan Wolpe. The performer, the Swiss oboist, conductor, and composer Heinz Holliger, was a close friend of Carter as well, and the work is dedicated to him. Carter in the same year also made Inner Song the inner part of Trilogy, the outer parts of which (Bariolage and Immer neu) are for oboe and harp and were written for Holliger and his late wife Ursula, an eminent harpist. The piece takes shape as an extended solo song, a contemporary perspective on Berlioz’s “cantabile” that also makes use of techniques such as multiphonics. Carter drew inspiration from one of the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke (II.10). He singled out its last two stanzas as providing the music’s “motto”:

But existence is still enchanting for us; in hundreds of places it is still pristine. A play of pure forces, which no one can touch without kneeling and adoring.

Words still peter out into what cannot be expressed… And music, ever new, builds out of the most tremulous stones her divinely consecrated house in unexploitable space.

Charles Martin Loeffler: Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola, and Piano

The composer and violinist Charles Martin Loeffler endured the trauma of his father’s political imprisonment, on account of his beliefs, when he was a boy, and he came to despise the Prussian society into which he had been born—to the point of fabricating his origins and claiming he was not from Schöneberg but Alsace. After studying violin and composition first with Joseph Joachim and later in Paris, he moved to the United States in his 20s, a country he declared was “quick to reward genuine musical merit and to reward it far more generously than Europe.” Loeffler became a concertmaster with the Boston Symphony Orchestra but retired in 1903 to his home in New England to focus on composition and farming. The highly cosmopolitan Loeffler cultivated a wide circle of artistic friends, including John Singer Sargent, who painted his portrait.

Loeffler possessed an omnivorous curiosity that made him open to a wide range of stylistic influences, including, in some pieces, jazz (he maintained a friendship with George Gershwin). This extended as well to his tastes in literature and art, from the ancient classics to Symbolist poetry. His Francophile passions are evident in the Two Rhapsodies, which originated as songs that Loeffler wrote in 1898 to poems by the Baudelaire disciple and decadent Maurice Rollinat, L’Étang (“The Pond”) and La Cornemuse (“The Pipes”). The combination of oboe and viola has a long history from the Baroque, here coopted to a late-Romantic aesthetic with a strong leaning towards French style.

Loeffler’s sensitive, fluid melodic lines are traced by the oboeviola pairing. The piano, which sets the scene for each Rhapsody, provides the backdrop and unsettling aura depicted by the poems: a “death’s head” moon overhanging a pond in the first and the plaintive, ghostly wind that echoes the sounds made by a dead piper in the second. Loeffler harnesses the idiosyncratic and fantasychasing aspects connoted by rhapsody to convincingly dramatic scenarios, making these pieces all the more richly poetic.

Franz Schubert: Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat major

The improvisational dimension that emerges in various other pieces on this program is often linked to the Romantic predilection for fantasy and miniaturism, which in turn seem to be anticipated by those exquisite and beloved late-period works of Schubert known as the Impromptus. The growth of the middle-class market for amateur pianists was another reason that miniature forms began to replace what by this time seemed the old-fashioned genre of the piano sonata. Schubert succeeded in publishing only three of his piano sonatas during his lifetime. Indeed, it was his publisher who imposed the title “impromptus” when he agreed to print the pieces Schubert was working on in 1827.

But what model did the composer have in mind when he composed what we know as D 899 and D 935, each in groups of four? Schubert’s autograph score numbers these works consecutively (I–IV and V–VIII, respectively), which may suggest a two-part anthology or a sequel. And while they share certain formal and stylistic traits, each piece is so distinctive in character that any can be performed as a self-standing piece—as they may well have been at Schubert’s musical gatherings with friends. The G flat–major Impromptu, unusual in its choice of key, radiates an air of nocturnal fantasy that also comes close to the lyrical wholeness and moodsetting of Schubert’s lieder—a song that does not lack words because they are already so implicit, for each listener, in the tones.

Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda: Morceau de Salon

The Prague-born Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda (also known as Jan Kalivoda) presents a fascinating case study of the fluctuations in musical reputation. He achieved fame as both a violinist and a composer, winning a position as court Kapellmeister in Donaueschingen, where he presided over a vast range of musical activities for decades, performing as well as composing.

A key transitional figure, Kalliwoda helped spread the renown of such fellow composers as Robert Schumann, who initially praised his work but later critiqued it as superficial. He was extremely prolific across all the genres, publishing nearly 250 works in his lifetime and leaving many more in manuscript, and widely performed—one of his orchestral pieces even made it onto the very first concert by what would later be known as the New York Philharmonic. But almost nothing of this versatile composer’s legacy remains today. The Morceau de Salon—the single work for oboe from the 19th century heard tonight—represents an alternative outlet for the instrument beyond its appearance as an integral part of the newly consolidated modern Romantic orchestra: in lighter chamber pieces meant to entertain in the salon. Dating from 1859, the work was highly popular during the composer’s life (and still is among oboists). It charmingly highlights the instrument’s potential for tender reverie— the opening section unfolds like a fantasy—but soon expands to give free rein to virtuosity in the sequence of variations at the center. A vertiginous high G—at the time, the limit of the oboe’s range— brings both the piece and tonight’s program to a brilliant close.