Program Notes
Season Finale! Tchaikovsky’s Fourth
June 17 – 19, 2011
Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Overture, The Hebrides (Fingal's Cave), Op. 26 (1829)
Woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings.
Felix Mendelssohn was in England in the summer of 1829 for the first of the nine visits he made to that
country during his brief life, and was receiving great acclaim as composer, conductor and pianist. He had
just turned twenty. Between engagements, Mendelssohn, an avid traveller, undertook a walking tour of
Scotland with a friend, the poet Carl Klingemann. Mendelssohn, who once wrote that "it is in pictures,
ruins and natural surroundings that I find the most music," was fruitfully inspired by his trip -- Mary
Queen of Scots' Holyrood Castle gave rise to the "Scottish" Symphony (No. 3) and the wild Hebrides
Islands off the rugged west coast of the country sparked the atmospheric Hebrides Overture.
The most famous spot in the Hebrides is the awesome, sea-level Fingal's Cave, named for a legendary
Scottish hero, on the tiny island of Staffa. Klingemann described the site: "A greener roar of waves surely
never rushed into a stranger cavern -- its many pillars made it look like the inside of an immense organ,
black and resounding, and absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide grey sea within and
without." Mendelssohn was rowed to the mouth of the cave in a small skiff, and sat spellbound before
the natural wonder. As soon as he got back to land, still inspired by the experience, he rushed to his inn
and wrote down the opening theme for a new piece. He included a copy of the melody in a letter to his
sister, Fanny, in Berlin so that she would know, as he told her, "how extraordinarily the Hebrides
affected me."
The Hebrides Overture does not tell a story. Rather it sets a scene and describes a mood that Charles
O'Connell noted "evokes the mysterious spirit that seems to pervade the place, the feeling of
restlessness and contrary motion, a strange and wild and beautiful atmosphere." Despite the
enthusiasm that accompanied the conception of the Hebrides Overture, it took Mendelssohn almost
three years to finish the piece to his liking. He completed the first version of the score in Rome at the
end of 1830, but he was dissatisfied with it when it was performed by the London Philharmonic
Orchestra on May 14, 1832. He complained particularly about the middle section, which he felt "smells
more of counterpoint than of train-oil, seagulls and salt fish, and must be altered." He revised the work
during the following year, and published it in its finished version late in 1833.
The Hebrides was one of the first of a new genre of composition that arose early in the 19th century -the "concert overture" that was not associated with a stage production, but intended specifically for the
concert hall. The work opens with the famous theme inspired from Mendelssohn as he bobbed about in
the small dinghy at the mouth of Fingal's Cave. Not really a complete melody at all, it is simply a onemeasure motive that recurs over colorful, changing harmonies. The broad complementary theme, "the
greatest melody Mendelssohn ever wrote," according to Sir Donald Tovey, is presented in the rich hues
of bassoons and cellos. A martial closing theme ends the exposition. The development section, built
largely upon the main theme, rises to a ringing climax before a brilliant flash of lightning from the flutes
ushers in the recapitulation. The second theme provides a brief emotional respite before the agitated
mood of the opening returns in the extended coda. The storminess subsides, and the Overture
concludes with a soft, eerie whisper from the flute.
Max Bruch (1838-1920)
Scottish Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 46 (1880)
Woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and
strings.
Max Bruch, widely known and respected in his day as a composer, conductor and teacher, received his
earliest music instruction from his mother, a noted singer and pianist. He began composing at eleven,
and, by fourteen, had produced a symphony and a string quartet, the latter garnering a prize that
allowed him to study with Karl Reinecke and Ferdinand Hiller in Cologne. His opera Die Loreley (1862)
and the choral work Frithjof (1864) brought him his first public acclaim. For the next 25 years, Bruch held
various posts as a choral and orchestral conductor in Cologne, Coblenz, Sondershausen, Berlin, Liverpool
and Breslau; in 1883, he visited the United States to conduct concerts of his own choral compositions.
From 1890 to 1910, he taught composition at the Berlin Academy and received numerous awards for his
work, including an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University. Though Bruch is known mainly for
three famous compositions for string soloist and orchestra (the G minor Concerto and the Scottish
Fantasy for violin, and the Kol Nidrei for cello), he also composed two other violin concertos, three
symphonies, a concerto for two pianos, various chamber pieces, songs, three operas and much choral
music.
Bruch, like many Romantic composers, was interested throughout his life in folk song. In 1863, he
published twelve Scottish folk airs in four-part settings, and incorporated German, British and Hebrew
traditional music into his works. (One of his best known compositions is the Kol Nidrei for Cello and
Orchestra, based on an ancient chant of the Hebrew ritual.) In his article in the Grove Dictionary, Horst
Leuchtmann noted that the assimilation of such traditional melodies came easily to Bruch: "His tuneful
style had affinities with the folk music of various countries and thus stood in sharp contrast to the
progressive tendencies of the ?new German school.'" When Bruch was conductor of the Liverpool
Philharmonic Society from 1878 to 1880, he took the opportunity to gather first-hand knowledge of
Great Britain's indigenous music, and, like Mendelssohn (one of the gods in Bruch's musical pantheon),
he was inspired by the music, lore and land of Scotland to produce one of his finest works -- the Fantasy
with Free Use of Scottish Airs for Violin and Orchestra.
In a letter to the publisher Simrock on July 30, 1880 explaining the work's appellation, Bruch wrote, "The
title ?Fantasy' is very general, and as a rule refers to a short piece rather than to one in several
movements (all of which, moreover, are fully worked-out and developed). However, this work cannot
properly be called a concerto because the form of the whole is so completely free, and because folk-
melodies are used." Abraham Veinus added, "Bruch operates freely with a set of Scottish folk melodies,
distinguished, as such melodies are, by a wholesome simplicity and beauty. Grafted on to this is the kind
of elaborate virtuoso technique which usually brings the house down. Bruch's harmonic idiom and his
orchestration technique run to juicy, well-rounded and solidly set sonorities."
The Fantasy is in four movements rather than the concerto form's traditional three. The opening
movement is divided almost equally between a solemn introduction and an elegant setting of the
tune Auld Rob Morris. The music scholar Wilhelm Altmann, a Berlin friend of Bruch, said that
the Fantasy had been inspired by the books of Sir Walter Scott. The prominence of the harp, with its
bardic and folk associations, prompted Altmann to continue that this opening movement represents "an
old bard who contemplates a ruined castle and laments the glorious times of old." The vigorous second
movement, subtitled Dance, is based on the song Hey, the Dusty Miller. Connecting passages resembling
recitative lead without pause to the next movement, a richly bedecked version of the touching Scottish
love ballad I'm a-doun for lack o' Johnnie. The rousing finale uses the traditional war song Scots wha hae,
which, according to legend, was sounded by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. The
invigorating, tuneful Scottish Fantasy is evidence of Sir Donald Tovey's trenchant summation of the
music of this composer: "It is not easy to write as beautifully as Max Bruch."
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878)
Pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion
and strings.
The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial and turbulent time of Tchaikovsky's life -- 1877,
when he met two women who forced him to evaluate himself as he never had before. The first was the
sensitive, music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck. Mme. von Meck
had been enthralled by Tchaikovsky's music, and she first contacted him at the end of 1876 to
commission a work. She paid him extravagantly, and soon an almost constant stream of notes and
letters passed between them: hers contained money and effusive praise; his, thanks and an increasingly
greater revelation of his thoughts and feelings. She became not only the financial backer who allowed
him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory to devote himself entirely to
composition, but also the sympathetic sounding-board for reports on the whole range of his activities -emotional, musical, personal. Though they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky's life was enormous and
beneficial.
The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky's life in 1877 was Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in
one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself into a passion over her
young professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special attention, and had quite forgotten her when he
received an ardent love letter professing her flaming and unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky
(age 37), who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite,
cool fashion, but did not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been considering
marriage for almost a year in the hope that it would give him both the stable home life that he had not
enjoyed in the twenty years since his mother died, as well as to help dispel the all-too-true rumors of his
homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both these goals with Antonina. He could not see the
situation clearly enough to realize that what he hoped for was impossible -- a pure, platonic marriage
without its physical and emotional realities. Further letters from Antonina implored Tchaikovsky to meet
her, and threatened suicide out of desperation if he refused. What a welter of emotions must have
gripped his heart when, just a few weeks later, he proposed marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage
crumbled within days of the wedding amid Tchaikovsky's searing self-deprecation.
It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony, finishing the first three
movements before Antonina began her siege. The finale was completed by the time he proposed.
Because of this chronology, the program of the Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster.
All that -- the July wedding, the mere eighteen days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations -postdated the actual composition of the Symphony by a few months, though the orchestration took
place during the painful time from September to January when the composer was seeking respite in a
half dozen European cities from St. Petersburg to San Remo. What Tchaikovsky found in his relationship
with this woman (who by 1877 already showed signs of approaching the door of the mental ward in
which, still legally married to him, she died in 1917) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable
workings of Fate in human destiny. He later wrote to Mme. von Meck, "We cannot escape our Fate, and
there was something fatalistic about my meeting with this girl." The relationships with the two women
of 1877, Mme. von Meck and Antonina, occupy important places in the composition of this Symphony:
one made it possible, the other made it inevitable, but the vision and its fulfillment were Tchaikovsky's
alone.
After the premiere, Tchaikovsky wrote to Mme. von Meck, with great trepidation, explaining the
emotional content of the Fourth Symphony:
"The introduction [blaring brasses heard immediately in a motto theme that recurs several times
throughout the Symphony] is the kernel, the chief thought of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, the fatal
power which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that
peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not free from clouds -- a might that swings, like the
sword of Damocles, constantly over the head that poisons continuously the soul. This might is
overpowering and invincible. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy,
syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme, heard in the strings]. The feeling of desperation and
loneliness grows stronger and stronger. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one's
self in dreams? [The jerky second theme is begun by the clarinet, with trailing sighs from the rest of the
woodwinds.] Deeper and deeper the soul is sunk in dreams. All that was dark and joyless is forgotten....
"No -- these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [The blaring brass fanfare over a wave of
timpani begins the development section.] Thus we see that life is only an everlasting alternation of
somber reality and fugitive dreams of happiness. Something like this is the program of the first
movement.
"The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has
already been and gone! And yet it is a pleasure to think of the early years. One mourns the past and has
neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life. One would fain rest
awhile, recalling happy hours when young blood pulsed warm through our veins and life brought
satisfaction. We remember irreparable loss. But these things are far away. It is sad, yet sweet, to lose
one's self in the past.
"There is no determined feeling, no exact expression in the third movement. Here are capricious
arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly
intoxicated. Suddenly there rushes into the imagination the picture of a drunken peasant and a gutter
song. Military music is heard passing in the distance. There are disconnected pictures which come and
go in the brain of the sleeper. They have nothing to do with reality; they are unintelligible, bizarre.
"As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, look about you. Go to the people. See how they can
enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk holiday. [The finale employs
the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow, presented simply by the woodwinds after the noisy flourish
of the opening.] Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when
indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned
with us. How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequential, so simple. And do you
still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still is happiness, simple, naive happiness.
Rejoice in the happiness of others -- and you can still live.
"There is not a single line in this Symphony that I have not felt in my whole being and that has not been
a true echo of the soul."
(c)2010 Dr. Richard E. Rodda