PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

RESPIGHI, HINDEMITH, DEBUSSY, STRAVINSKY

Timothy Muffitt, conductor

11.05.22

Masterworks Concert Series

PRESENTED BY

Respighi

Ancient Airs and Dances: Suite I

Simone Molinaro (1599): Balletto detto “Il Conte Orlando”

Vincenzo Galilei (1550s): Gagliarda.

Anon (late 16th Century): Villanella

Anon. (late 16th Century): Passo mezzo e Mascherada

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY

Allan & Cathy Claypool

Don & Jan Hines

Hindemith Symphonie Mathis

Der Maler

Engelskonzert (Angelic Concert)

Die Grablegung (Entombment)

Versuchung des heiligen Antonius (Temptation of St. Anthony)

INTERMISSION

Debussy

Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune” (Afternoon of a Faun)

Stravinsky The Firebird Suite (1919 version)

Introduction

L’Oiseau de feu et sa danse & Variation de l’oiseau de feu

Ronde des princesses

Danse infernale du roi Kastcheï

Berceuse

Finale

MASTERWORKS 02 | PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

John & Fran Loose Michigan Arts and Culture Council National Endowment For The Arts

ANCIENT AIRS AND DANCES, SUITE NO. 1

Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936)

Written / 1917

Movements / Four

Style / Contemporary casting of Renaissance and Baroque styles

Duration / Sixteen minutes

In spite of all the crazy things that were happening in the musical world in the early part of the twentieth century, some composers were actually doing very nicely writing beautiful and “unobjectionable” music. Ottorino Respighi was one of ten composers who signed a manifesto advocating the idea that music is communication. “We are against art which cannot and does not have any human content and desires to be merely a mechanical demonstration and a cerebral puzzle,” they wrote. “A logical chain binds the past and the future—the romanticism of yesterday will again be the romanticism of tomorrow.”

Respighi made his first big splash in 1916 with his orchestral tone-poem, The Fountains of Rome. Over the next twelve years, more blockbuster showpieces followed: The Pines of Rome, Church Windows, and Roman Festivals. In each of these, Respighi demonstrated his absolute mastery of writing for the orchestra, a skill he learned from his most influential teacher, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov.

Baroque and Renaissance music

fascinated Respighi. He arranged several lute and keyboard pieces from these periods for orchestra. Keeping the melodies and harmonies intact, he dressed them up in modern orchestral clothing. His Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 1 is his first attempt at this sort of thing. Eventually he wrote three sets of Ancient Airs and a couple of other sets with different titles, such as Gli uccelli (The Birds). As you listen to the four dances in this suite, you will agree with the Italian musicologist Guido Gatti: “Here is an elegant way of writing, in the sense of the rhetoric of another day; a beautiful harmonizing, a splendid method of orchestration; and with this is a desire to be agreeable, well mannered, and respectable at all costs.”

© 2022 John P. Varineau

SYMPHONY:

Mathis Der Maler

Paul Hindemith (1879–1936)

Written / 1933-34

Movements / Three

Style / Contemporary

Duration / Twenty-eight minutes

As the political situation in Europe deteriorated between the two world wars, the American music scene profited. What would Hollywood movies be like without the great film scores by Erich Korngold, Dmitri Tiomkin, and Franz Waxman? All of them immigrated to this country in the 1930’s. The two mega- stars of contemporary music, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, did the same and moved to California.

Paul Hindemith was one of the leading composers in Germany until he ran afoul of the Nazi party. They condemned his music; Goebbels called him an atonal noise maker (“atonaler Geräuschemacher”). In 1937 Hindemith quit his prestigious post at the Berlin Musikhochschule and went to live in Switzerland. Three years later, he came to this country, became an American citizen, and taught at Yale University. Today, Hindemith is remembered not only for his music, but also for the profound influence he had on many of his students who became composers and teachers and who have, in turn, influenced their own students.

Hindemith was a modernist, but he never abandoned tonality the way Schoenberg did, and he didn’t go off the deep end rhythmically and harmonically they way Stravinsky did. “I . . . believe that the reproaches made against most modern music are only too well deserved,” he wrote.

Tonality is a natural force, like gravity. . . . The key and its body of chords is not the natural basis of tonal activity. What Nature provides is the intervals. The juxtaposition of intervals, as of chords, which are the extensions of intervals, give rise to the key. We are no longer the prisoners of the key.

Hindemith started writing an opera based on the life of the Renaissance painter

Matthias Grünewald (c. 1475–1528) in the mid–1930s (before he came to America). The plot wrestles with the age-old question of the role of the artist in society (and echoes Hindemith’s own response to evil and violence through his music). Hindemith has Grünewald forsaking his art to join the Peasant’s War, and later abandoning the war because of its violence. In a vision, Grünewald imagines himself as St. Anthony, who the Saint Paul the Hermit instructs to “bow humbly before your brother and selflessly offer him the holiest creation of your inmost faculties.” Grünewald returns home and “finishes his life in a draining creative burst.”

Well before Hindemith finished the opera, the conductor William Furtwangler asked him to write a new piece for the Berlin Philharmonic to take on tour. Hindemith extracted material from the opera— specifically those parts that were inspired by the majestic panels of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1516)—and shaped it into a three-movement symphony. The first movement, Engelkonzert (Angelic Concert) served as the opera’s overture. It corresponds to Grünewald’s painting of the Nativity of Christ where a band of angels serenade Mary and Jesus. Hindemith incorporates a German folk tune, “Es sungen drei Angel (Three Angels Sang), throughout the movement. The short second movement Grablegung (Entombment) comes from the very end of the opera, during Grünewald’s last creative surge and eventual death. It corresponds to the painting at the base of the altarpiece showing Christ as he is laid into the tomb.

The expansive third movement is based on two paintings from the altarpiece; one showing St. Anthony meeting Saint Paul the Hermit, and the other showing St. Anthony being tormented by demons. At the beginning of the movement Hindemith wrote Grünewald’s words into the score: “Where were you, good Jesus? Why did you not come and heal my wounds?” Towards the end of the movement, Hindemith quotes the 13th century hymn Lauda Sion Salvatorem (written by Thomas Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi): Sion, lift up thy voice and sing/Praise thy Savior and thy King/ Praise with hymns thy shepherd true. The symphony ends with a triumphant Alleluia proclaimed by the brass.

© 2022 John P. Varineau