PROGRAM NOTES

Written by - Daniel Maki

Ballade in A minor, op. 33 Samuel

Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone. The couple was not married and when the father returned to Africa due to frustration with racial prejudice (he was not aware of the pregnancy), the child was raised by the mother and her family. She named her son after the distinguished poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (without the hyphen, which apparently was added much later due to a printer’s error). There were musicians on the mother’s side of the family, and the boy quickly benefited from the instruction, demonstrating extraordinary ability. At the age of fifteen he entered the Royal College of Music studying with one of England’s prominent composers,

Charles Villiers Stanford.

By his early twenties he was an established composer and in 1898 completed the work which would bring him international fame, a cantata entitled Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on Longfellow’s poem. Deeply fascinated by the poem (he would name his own son Hiawatha), he would add two more cantatas making a trilogy under the overall title, The Song of Hiawatha. This work would become wildly popular in England, rivaling such choral classics as Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Largely on the basis of this work, Coleridge-Taylor made three trips to the United States in the early 1900’s where he conducted many performances. Among his honors was a visit to President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a rare occurrence for a person of color at the time. He was lionized especially by the American black community, with the creation of a 200-voice chorus in Washington, D.C. named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society. Several public schools were named after him in Baltimore and Louisville.

As important as Hiawatha was in his career, it was far from the composer’s only triumph. Just two months before the premiere of Hiawatha, he achieved a major success at one of England’s major musical institutions, the Three Choirs Festival. Founded in 1715 and still very much a part of England’s musical life today, the festival has over the years heard the premieres of countless works from Purcell and Handel to contemporary composers. Coleridge-Taylor had caught the attention of Edward Elgar, then well on his way to becoming England’s leading composer. Elgar recommended the young man to the festival’s leaders saying that he was “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst all the young men.”

The new work was a 13-minute orchestral piece called a ballade, one of three works which Coleridge-Taylor wrote by that title. In instrumental music, the term implies no particular form but a work with a strongly lyrical quality and a feeling of dramatic narrative. Here we are given an opening which is turbulent and strongly rhythmic, eventually giving way to a passage of soaring lyricism. The two moods alternate but the work ends with a return to the stormy opening material. Skillfully orchestrated, the Ballade reveals a strong musical personality with powerful dramatic and lyrical sense.

Rhapsody in Blue

George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Rhapsody in Blue was written for a concert held in New York’s Aeolian Hall on November 12, 1924. That concert, often described in music history books, was in its own way a very American event, part blatantly commercial publicity stunt and yet also part earnest cultural experiment.

On January 3, 1924, George Gershwin was shooting pool in a billiard parlor on 52nd and Broadway, when his brother Ira noticed a newspaper article which stated that George Gershwin was writing a “jazz concerto” that would be performed by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra in February. That was news to George Gershwin.

As it turned out, Whiteman, one of the most popular big-band leaders of the era, had the grand idea of a concert that would bring the new jazz style into the respectable confines of the concert hall. In addition to presenting various types of jazz, he wanted to invite several composers such as Gershwin to write concert pieces that would have a jazz flavor. Furthermore, to place the imprimatur of respectability on the whole affair as well as to drum up more business, he had the brilliant idea of inviting a panel of distinguished figures from classical music who would answer the question, “What is American music?” (The panel included such heavyweights as Rachmaninoff and Heifetz.) When Gershwin asked Whiteman why he had gone ahead with the plan without telling him, Whiteman replied that a rival bandleader had stolen his idea and he had to move quickly to beat him. Carnegie Hall, incidentally, was unavailable so Whiteman had to book the smaller Aeolian Hall.

Although he was busy with commitments on Broadway, Gershwin began the daunting task of writing a concert piece in roughly one month. (Whiteman had actually broached the subject to Gershwin some years earlier but no serious work had been done.) Somehow, in a few weeks he managed to produce a piano score which was then given to Ferde Grofé, Whiteman’s staff arranger, for orchestration. Changes were still being made in rehearsal.

Due to much advance publicity and the panel-ofexperts ploy, the concert attracted many of the country’s musical glitterati such as Igor Stravinsky, Fritz Kreisler, and John Philip Sousa. Unfortunately, Whiteman had selected a program that was repetitive and far too long and members of the audience had already begun to leave when Gershwin, next to last on the program, made his entrance as piano soloist. The mood in the hall changed quickly, as

Gershwin’s virtuosity and the freshness of his musical ideas saved the day. He was called back for five curtain calls.

Most of the press coverage of the event concerned the new Gershwin piece. Opinion was sharply divided, ranging from raves to revulsion. And the question, “What is American music?”, seemed as open as ever. The public, however, soon determined the fate of the new work. Repeat performances in New York as well as a tour and a classic 78 rpm recording (now available on CD) with Gershwin as soloist were huge commercial successes. Today, Rhapsody in Blue is an established American classic. Using the term rhapsody, a genre much employed by romantic composers implying a free form work with an improvisatory character and many sudden mood changes, Gershwin combines techniques of piano giants such as Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff with his infectious jazz rhythms and incomparable melodic inventiveness. The term “crossover” used so often these days to refer to music that appeals to listeners in more than one of the strictly segregated categories such as jazz, rock, classical, etc., can trace its meaning back to the Rhapsody. With one foot on each side of the classical/jazz divide, it is music which still today sounds spontaneous, fresh, and, yes, American.

Symphony No. 7 in A major, op. 92

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony received its first performance in December, 1813, in Vienna at a concert held for the benefit of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded in the Napoleonic Wars. It was the sort of happening which would be a great media event today and would no doubt be covered tastefully by public television.

An all-star orchestra made up of such musical luminaries as Ludwig Spohr, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel was conducted by Beethoven himself, even though he was by then so deaf that he couldn’t hear the soft passages and in general comported himself on the podium in his usual wildly eccentric manner. In keeping with the festively bellicose tone of the occasion (Napoleon’s hated army was finally, after years of devastating warfare, on the verge of defeat), Beethoven also produced a battle piece called Wellington’s Victory, commemorating Napoleon’s defeat on the Iberian Peninsula the previous June. Like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, it is a piece of skilled, highly professional hackwork and made a big noise both figuratively and literally. (Like the 1812 Overture it contains enough gunfire to induce shellshock in even the most hardened concertgoer.)

Lest we underestimate the musical taste of the Viennese public, however, it should be said that the Seventh symphony generated as much enthusiasm as did Wellington’s Victory. Most telling of all is the fact that the second movement, one of Beethoven’s most poignant utterances, was encored, an unusual occurrence for any slow movement.

Despite the grumblings of some professional musicians such as the composer Carl Maria von Weber who pronounced Beethoven “ripe for the madhouse” because of an unusual passage near the end of the first movement and Friedrich Wieck, who implied that the composer had been drinking too much lager, public opinion carried the day and the Seventh Symphony helped to bring Beethoven to a new level of popularity. After his death the Seventh took its place alongside those other odd-numbered masterpieces of the heroic statement, the Symphonies 3,5, and 9, and today remains one of the most popular of all symphonies. The best-known characterization is Richard Wagner’s reference to it as the “apotheosis of the dance.” Wagner, whose prose was nothing if not purple, went on to say that the symphony would cause “tables and benches, cans and cups, the grandmother, the blind and lame, aye the children in the cradle” to dance.

The first movement begins with what was at the time the longest and most complex slow introduction in symphonic history. After a journey through several keys we return to the principal key of A major and the flute announces a theme which, though innocent in character, bears the responsibility of being the primary theme of this impressive movement. The dance-like rhythm of this theme (known to music students as the “Amsterdam” rhythm) dominates the movement. Finally, near the end of the movement we hear the famous passage which so upset Herr von Weber. The low strings state a figure which is derived from the main theme but made to sound rather ominous in the nether regions of the orchestra. It is repeated obsessively time and time again while the top of the orchestra builds to an enormous climax.

Despite its tempo marking of allegretto (rather fast), the second movement performs the expressive function of the traditional slow movement of a symphony the movement which provides the deepest, most reflective and introspective music. Beginning with simple materials consisting of the most basic chords stated over an insistent rhythm, Beethoven constructs a rich set of variations. Set in the somber key of A minor, this movement stands as one of Beethoven’s most moving expressions and has often been used as funeral music.

Finally, after the wit and color of the delightful third movement scherzo, Beethoven releases the whirlwind force of the finale. In the words of the great English critic D.F. Tovey, this movement “remains unapproached in music as a triumph of Bacchic fury.”