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Notes on the Program
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May Chair
Overture of Oresteia, Trilogy of Aeschylus, Op. 6
Sergei Taneyev
ergei Taneyev was not quite ten years old
when he enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory. After several interruptions he graduated in May 1875, the first recipient of the
school’s Great Gold Medal. Four months earlier, he had made his official debut as a concert pianist (playing Brahms’s D-minor
Concerto), and seven months later he would
be the soloist for the first Moscow performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
Tchaikovsky had been one of his principal
composition teachers at the Conservatory,
and Taneyev would serve as soloist for the
Russian premieres of every one of Tchaikovsky’s works for piano and orchestra. The
two would remain close friends until
Tchaikovsky’s death, with the student serving as a critical but trusted sounding-board
for the sometimes unconfident teacher.
When Tchaikovsky resigned from the Conservatory’s faculty in 1878, Taneyev replaced
him as teacher of harmony and orchestration.
He later added counterpoint, fugue, musical
form, and piano to his teaching duties and
served as the Conservatory’s director from
1885 to 1889. The list of his pupils reads like a
roster of the future of Russian music, including such up-and-comers as Glière, Grechaninov, Lyapunov, Medtner, Rachmaninoff (the
third recipient of the Great Gold Medal), Scriabin, Siloti, and Weinberg. Taneyev also provided advice and encouragement for the
young Sergei Prokofiev, although he stopped
short of taking him on as a private pupil.
Like Tchaikovsky, Taneyev was drawn to
the Germanic mainstream of music more than
to the overt Russian nationalism of Rimsky-
S
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Korsakov and the other members of the
“Russian Five.” He is widely viewed as a musical conservative, rightly so in many regards.
He was obsessed with early music, and particularly with the counterpoint of the Netherlandish masters of the Renaissance. In his
symphonic works, he usually limited himself
to an orchestra of Mozartian makeup. For
much of his career, his greatest devotion was
to chamber music (very atypical for Russian
composers at that time), and he ended up enriching the chamber catalogue with a dozen
string quartets (counting some incomplete
works) as well as important entries into the
repertoires of the string quintet, piano trio,
piano quartet, and piano quintet.
When Taneyev stepped down from the directorship of the Moscow Conservatory in
1889, it was because his responsibilities were
preventing him from concentrating on the
opera he was trying to write: The Oresteia,
IN SHORT
Born: November 25, 1856, in Vladimir-naKlyaz’me, Russia
Died: June 19, 1915, in Dyud’kovo, near Moscow
Work composed: 1889; dedicated to Anton
Arensky
World premiere: November 9, 1889, at a
concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow, conducted by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
New York Philharmonic premiere:
these performances
Estimated duration: ca. 18 minutes
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which he subtitled a musical trilogy. He had
begun pondering it in 1878, commenced composition in 1882, discarded much of what he
had written before starting again in 1887, and
finally brought it to completion in 1894. At a
time when most Russian operas were either
fairy-tale fantasies or nationalistic epics,
Taneyev developed a work based on episodes
from the classic Oresteia, penned by the
Greek author Aeschylus, from 525 to about
456 B.C.E. The opera’s nine scenes wend
through the tragic tale of King Agamemnon
and his profoundly disturbed family (wife
Clytemnestra, daughter Elektra, son Orestes),
and the retribution and guilt that haunts families when the kids go murdering the parents.
In 1889 Taneyev wrote what he intended to
be the opera’s overture. However, by the time
he finished the stage work, he had come to feel
that the overture revealed too much, musically,
of what was to come. He composed a more concise prelude and spun off the original Overture
of Oresteia, Trilogy of Aeschylus as a standalone concert piece. Its episodic structure is
logical in light of the originally intended usage.
The tone is overwhelmingly dramatic, but toward the end it reaches a plane of transcendent
majesty where the composer indicates that
“here the number of harps should be multiplied.” A report from the premiere suggests
that four harps played together at that point,
adding to an orchestral sound far removed
from Taneyev’s usual Mozart-scaled forces.
Instrumentation: three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two
bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass
drum, triangle, tam-tam, orchestra bells,
piano, two harps, and strings.
Wagnerian Influences
Taneyev’s compositions often display his affection for the music of Tchaikovsky, but there are
places in the Overture of Oresteia that owe a debt to a composer of a very different stripe: Richard
Wagner. He had begun as a Wagner skeptic; when his friend Anton Arensky joined the Wagner Society of Moscow in 1886, Taneyev wrote to him, “When there is Mozart, how is it possible to pay
attention to Wagner?” He changed his tune before long. In 1889 he attended the Russian premiere
of the Ring cycle; in 1890 he included Wagner transcriptions in his piano recitals; and in 1891 he
wrote to Tchaikovsky, “Mozart and Wagner interest me above all else.” The next year he reported
that during his vacation he was dedicating every day to composing Oresteia and reading the
score of Siegfried; in the mid-1890s he hosted soirées devoted to playing through and discussing
Wagner’s operas; in 1896 he attended Siegfried with his friend
Leo Tolstoy, who was not a fan; and in 1903 he was a delegate
to the unveiling of a Wagner statue in Berlin.
Observers had trouble reconciling these Wagnerian propensities with Taneyev’s reputation as a disciplined classicist. In a
review of Overture of Oresteia, the critic Semyon Krugilov wrote:
Mr. Taneyev the Mozartean and the author of Oresteia are
two completely different persons. I cannot say whether temporarily, or forever, but Mr. Taneyev has completely
changed: he is in his new overture already not a Mozartean,
he is a Wagnerian.
Krugilov further found that the work’s ethos had something
in common with “Lohengrin and his swans.”
Taneyev, in an undated photo
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