Tom's Life Bits

Lara St. John, violin
Grant Llewellyn, Music Director

Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini
Vivaldi: Spring from The Four Seasons
Piazzolla: Summer from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires
Piazzolla: Autumn from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires
Vivaldi: Winter from The Four Seasons
Tchaikovsky: Capriccio italien

We loved this pairing of compositions. Our violinist wore a funky long green tie dyed dress with long hair. She was energetic and quite good, especially on the Piazollo pieces which I heard live for the first timer. I previously was introduced to this composer at ADF in a Paul Taylor performance.

Francesca da Rimini, Fantasy after Dante, Op. 32 (1876)
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Tchaikovsky suffered throughout his life from recurrent illnesses. For the one that afflicted him during the spring of 1876, his physician ordered him to France to take the cure at Vichy, and he set out late in the spring after he had finished his teaching duties at the Moscow Conservatory. The trip was not completely unattractive to Tchaikovsky, however, since it offered him a chance to visit his brother Modest in Lyons before and after his treatment. Modest discovered that Peter was thinking of writing a new opera, and suggested Hamlet, Othello and Francesca da Rimini as possible subjects. Tchaikovsky had already received a libretto by Konstantin Zvanstev based on Dante’s account of Francesca in The Inferno, and was much taken with the story’s pathos and restless energy, though he was wary of the full Wagnerian treatment that Zvanstev’s adaptation demanded. (Tchaikovsky stopped at Bayreuth on the way back to Moscow that summer to file reports on the inaugural Wagner festival in that town for the journal, Russky Viedomosti. The assignment left him with enthusiasm for the German composer’s music but confirmed his distrust of Wagnerian theories and dramaturgy.) Moreover, Tchaikovsky’s theatrical passion at the time was Bizet’s Carmen, whose conciseness, clarity, realism and intensity were for him the operatic ideal. He turned down Zvanstev’s libretto.

The stillborn opera project, however, enticed Tchaikovsky to return to the story’s source, and he wrote to Modest that on the train from Lyons to Paris he “read the Fifth Canto of The Inferno, and was beset by the wish to compose a symphonic poem.” He set to work on the score when he returned to Moscow, and on October 26th announced to Modest, “I have just finished sketching a new work, the symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini. I have worked on it with love (‘con amore’) and believe my love has been successful.” He went on to reveal a supplementary, visual source of inspiration: “With regard to the ‘whirlwind,’ perhaps it might better correspond to Doré’s picture.” The orchestration was completed in November, and on March 9, 1877 Tchaikovsky oversaw the Fantasia’s premiere, given by Nicholas Rubinstein and the Russian Musical Society in Moscow; it was a great success. Exactly one year later, Francesca da Rimini was introduced to St. Petersburg; the composer’s brother Anatol reported that “there was no end to the applause” and that the musicians of the imperial city thought it the best thing Tchaikovsky had done to date. Francesca was one of Tchaikovsky’s particular favorites among his own works — he chose to have the piece played to acknowledge the awarding of an honorary doctorate to him by Cambridge University in 1893.

In the fall of 1876, Tchaikovsky was perhaps emotionally primed to portray Dante’s tale of fate-tossed lovers. He lived then in constant, pathetic fear that his homosexuality would become generally known, and he tried to devise means to protect his public persona. On September 22nd he confided to Modest, “From this day I will seriously consider entering matrimony with any woman. I am convinced that my inclinations are the greatest and insuperable barrier to my well-being, and I must by all means struggle against my nature.” And three weeks later: “What a dreadful thought that people close to me are ashamed of me! In a word, I am determined by means of marriage or public connection with a woman to shut the mouths of sundry despicable creatures whose opinions I despise but who may cause pain to people I love.” The following spring, just as he was beginning to sketch the Fourth Symphony, Antonina Miliukov, a forgotten student in one of his lecture classes, wrote to him professing her love and threatening suicide if he refused to see her. Tchaikovsky’s desperation of the previous fall turned into action, and the two were married on July 18, 1877. They lived together for two terrible, unconsummated weeks, and then separated amid the distraught husband’s searing self-deprecation, convinced that he was a victim of Fate, “the Fate that seeks to crush man’s every happiness,” he lamented. Tchaikovsky remained alone for the rest of his life, though the marriage was never legally annulled.

In Dante’s tale, Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, the 13th-century Duke of Ravenna, who arranged her marriage to Giovanni Malatesta, son of the Duke of Rimini. Malatesta was a man of nobility and distinction, but was crippled and older than his bride. It is perhaps understandable then that Francesca fell in love with Malatesta’s younger and handsome brother Paolo, known as “Il Bello”; her love was requited. Discovering the lovers in embrace, Malatesta drew his dagger and rushed at Paolo. Francesca threw herself between the brothers, and was killed. “He withdrew the dagger,” reported Boccaccio of the tragedy that occurred about 1288, “and again struck at Paolo and slew him; and so, leaving them both dead, he hastily went his way and betook himself to his wonted affairs; and the next morning the two lovers, with many tears, were buried together in one grave.” Dante assigned Francesca and Paolo to the Second Circle of his Inferno, the region given to the eternal punishment of adulterers. There they joined Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Paris, Tristan, Isolde and others who, in life, were driven by storms of passion, and in Hell are forever tossed and tormented by an infernal tempest.

Francesca da Rimini, according to Catherine Drinker Bowen, author of Beloved Friend, the chronicle of the relationship between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, “achieves the very perfection of the Romantic ideal of program music.” Tchaikovsky noted that the first section represents “the gateway to the Inferno (‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’). Tortures and agonies of the condemned.” The chilling portal is conjured by the lugubrious introduction, in slow tempo; the infernal whirlwinds of the woeful Pit are vented in the rushing, swirling music that follows. Next, Tchaikovsky continued, “Francesca tells the story of her tragic love for Paolo.” The Fantasy’s middle portion is a full treatment, virtually an extended set of free variations, on Francesca’s theme, a melody of such appeal and lyricism that it was years later turned into a pop tune by Alec Templeton. Tchaikovsky quoted Dante’s verses on the flyleaf of the score: “There is no greater pain than happiness remembered in time of misery.” Francesca describes how she and Paolo were innocently reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere when their eyes met, “and then,

He who will never be separate from me, Kissed me on the mouth, trembling all over. The book and writer both were love’s purveyors. We read no more in it that day.

The Fantasy’s closing section recalls, said Tchaikovsky, “the turmoil of Hades,” and Francesca da Rimini ends with powerful, thrusting chords spread across the full orchestra.

Of this grand tone poem, Ralph W. Wood wrote, “Tchaikovsky never had achieved, and never did achieve, within certain insurmountable limitations, a more entire mastery of his material and realisation of his intentions.” To which Camille Saint-Saëns added, “The composer’s talent and astounding technique are so great that the critic can only feel pleasure in Francesca da Rimini.”

Spring and Winter from The Four Seasons for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 8, Nos. 1 and 4 (ca. 1720) Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)

The Gazette d’Amsterdam of December 14, 1725 announced the issuance by the local publisher Michele Carlo Le Cène of a collection of twelve concertos for solo violin and orchestra by Antonio Vivaldi — Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione, or “The Contest between Harmony and Invention,” Op. 8. The works were printed with a flowery dedication typical of the time to the Bohemian Count Wenzel von Morzin, a distant cousin of Haydn’s patron before he came into the employ of the Esterházy family in 1761. On the title page, Vivaldi described himself as the “maestro in Italy” to the Count, though there is no record of his having held a formal position with him. Vivaldi probably met Morzin when he worked in Mantua from 1718 to 1720 for the Habsburg governor of that city, Prince Philipp of Hessen-Darmstadt, and apparently provided the Bohemian Count with an occasional composition on demand. (A bassoon concerto, RV 496, is headed with Morzin’s name.)

Vivaldi claimed that Morzin had been enjoying the concertos of the 1725 Op. 8 set “for some years,” implying earlier composition dates and a certain circulation of this music in manuscript copies, and hoped that their appearance in print would please his patron. The first four concertos, those depicting the seasons of the year, seem to have especially excited Morzin’s admiration, so Vivaldi made specific the programmatic implications of the works by heading each of them with an anonymous sonnet, perhaps of his own devising, and then repeating the appropriate verses above the exact measures in the score which they had inspired. The Four Seasons pleased not only Count Morzin, but quickly became one of Vivaldi’s most popular works. A pirated edition appeared in Paris within weeks of the Amsterdam publication, and by 1728, the concertos had become regular items on the programs of the Concert Spirituel in Paris. The Spring Concerto was adapted in 1755 as an unaccompanied flute solo by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher and dilettante composer who was attracted by the work’s musical portrayal of Nature, and as a motet (!) by Michel Corrette to the text “Laudate Dominum de coelis” in 1765. Today, The Four Seasons remains Vivaldi’s best-known work, and one of the most beloved compositions in the orchestral repertory.

Of Vivaldi’s more than 400 concertos, only 28 have titles, many of them referring to the performer who first played the work or to the occasion for which it was written. Of the few composition titles with true programmatic significance, seven are found in the Op. 8 collection: The Four Seasons plus La Tempesta di Mare (“The Storm at Sea”), La Caccia (“The Hunt”) and Il Piacere (“Pleasure”). Concerning the title of the Op. 8 set — “The Contest between Harmony and Invention” — Amelia Haygood wrote, “ ‘Harmony’ represents the formal structure of the compositions; ‘invention’ the unhampered flow of the composer’s creative imagination; and the ‘contest’ implies a dynamic balance between the two, which allows neither ‘harmony’ nor ‘invention’ to gain the upper hand. The perfect balance which results offers a richness in both areas: the outpouring of melody, the variety of instrumental color, the vivid musical imagery are all to be found within a formal framework which is elegant and solid.”

Though specifically programmatic (Lawrence Gilman went so far as to call The Four Seasons “symphonic poems” and harbingers of Romanticism), the fast, outer movements of these works use the ritornello form usually found in Baroque concertos. The opening ritornello theme (Italian for “return”), depicting the general emotional mood of each fast movement, recurs to separate its various descriptive episodes, so that the music fulfills both the demands of creating a logical, abstract form and evoking vivid images from Nature. The slow, middle movements are lyrical, almost aria-like, in style. Though Vivaldi frequently utilized in these pieces the standard concertino, or solo group, of two violins and cello found in the 18th-century concerto grosso, The Four Seasons is truly a work for solo violin and orchestra, and much of the music’s charm comes from the contrasting and interweaving of the soloist, concertino and accompanying orchestra. Of these evergreen concertos, Marc Pincherle, in his classic biography of Vivaldi, wrote, “Their breadth, their clearness of conception, the obvious pleasure with which the composer wrought them, the favorable reception which has been theirs from the first, their reverberations since then — all these unite to make them one of the masterpieces of the descriptive repertory.”

For their publication of The Four Seasons in 1725, Vivaldi prefaced each of the concertos with an explanatory sonnet. These poems are given below with a note describing the music relating to the particular verses:

Spring, Op. 8, No. 1 (R. 269)

The spring has come, joyfully

  (the vivacious opening section for full orchestra — the “ritornello” — that returns between episodes and at the end of the movement)

The birds welcome it with merry song

  (trills and shakes, violins)

And the streams, in the gentle breezes, flow forth with sweet murmurs.

  (undulating violin phrases)

Now the sky is draped in black, Thunder and lightning announce a storm.

  (tremolos and fast scales)

When the storm has passed, the little birds Return to their harmonious songs.

  (gently rising phrases and long trills in the violins)

And in the lovely meadow full of flowers, To the gentle rustling of leaves and branches, The goatherd sleeps, his faithful dog at his side. (Movement II)

To the rustic bagpipe’s merry sound, Nymphs and shepherds dance under the lovely sky When spring appears in all its brilliance. (Movement III)

Winter, Op. 8, No. 4 (R. 297)

Freezing and shivering in the icy darkness

  (the chordal, almost motionless main theme)

In the severe gusts of a terrible wind

  (rushing scales and chords in the solo violin)

Running and stamping one’s feet constantly

  (a brief, repeated note motive alternating with a leaping figure)

So chilled that one’s teeth chatter.

  (tremolo)

Spending quiet and happy days by the fire While outside the rain pours everywhere. (Movement II)

Walking on the ice with slow steps

  (the plaintive main theme, solo violin)

Walking carefully for fear of falling

  (slow, steady chords in the orchestra)

Then stepping out boldly, and falling down.

  (quick scales and then several brief descending flourishes)

Going out once again onto the ice, and running boldly

  (steady motion up and down the scale in the solo violin)

Until the ice cracks and breaks,

  (snapping, separated figures)

Hearing, as they burst forth from their iron gates, the Scirocco,

  (a smooth melody in close-interval harmony)

The North Wind, and all the winds battling. This is winter, but such joy it brings.

  (rushing figurations close the work)

Summer and Autumn from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires for Violin and Orchestra (1968) Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)

The Argentinean tango, like American ragtime and jazz, is music with a shady past. Its deepest roots extend to Africa and the fiery dances of Spain, but it seems to have evolved most directly from a slower Cuban dance, the habanera (whose name honors that nation’s capital), and a faster native Argentinean song form, the milonga, both in duple meter and both sensuously syncopated in rhythm. These influences met at the end of the 19th century in the docklands and seamier neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, where they found fertile ground for gestation as the influx of workers streaming in from Europe to seek their fortunes in the pampas and cities of South America came into contact with the exotic Latin cultures. The tango — its name may have been derived from a word of African origin meaning simply “dance,” or from the old Castilian taño (“to play an instrument”), or from a type of drum used by black slaves, or from none of these — came to embody the longing and hard lives of the lower classes of Buenos Aires, where it was chiefly fostered in bawdy houses and back-alley bars by usually untutored musicians. The texts, where they existed, dealt with such forlorn urban topics as faithless women, social injustice and broken dreams. In the years around World War I, the tango migrated out of the seedier neighborhoods of Argentina, leaped across the Atlantic to be discovered by the French, and then went on to invade the rest of Europe and North America. International repute elevated its social status, and, spurred by the glamorous images of Rudolph Valentino and Vernon and Irene Castle, the tango became the dance craze of the 1930s. Tango bands, comprising four to six players (usually piano, accordion, guitar and strings) with or without a vocalist, flourished during the years between the Wars, and influenced not just the world’s popular music but also that of serious composers: one of Isaac Albéniz’s most famous works is his Tango in D; William Walton inserted a tango into his “Entertainment with Poems” for speaker and instruments, Façade; and Igor Stravinsky had the Devil in The Soldier’s Tale dance a tango and composed a Tango for Piano, which he also arranged for full orchestra and for winds with guitar and bass.

The greatest master of the modern tango was Astor Piazzolla, born in Mar Del Plata, Argentina, a resort town south of Buenos Aires, on March 11, 1921, and raised in New York City, where he lived with his father from 1924 to 1937. Before Astor was ten years old, his musical talents had been discovered by Carlos Gardel, then the most famous of all performers and composers of tangos and a cultural hero in Argentina. At Gardel’s urging, the young Astor moved to Buenos Aires in 1937, and joined the popular tango orchestra of Anibal Troilo as arranger and bandoneón player. Piazzolla studied classical composition with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires, and in 1954, he wrote a symphony for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic that earned him a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the renowned teacher of Copland, Thomson, Carter and many other of the best American composers. Boulanger, as was her method, grounded Piazzolla in the classical European repertory, but then encouraged him to follow his genius for the tango rather than write in the traditional concert genres. When Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he founded his own performing group, and began to create a modern style for the tango that combined elements of traditional tango, Argentinean folk music and contemporary classical, jazz and popular techniques into a “Nuevo Tango” that was as suitable for the concert hall as for the dance floor. He was sharply criticized at first by government officials and advocates of the traditional tango alike for his path-breaking creations. “Traditional tango listeners hated me,” he recalled. “I introduced fugues, counterpoint and other irreverences: people thought I was crazy. All the tango critics and radio stations of Buenos Aires called me a clown, they said my music was ‘paranoiac.’ And they made me popular. The young people who had lost interest in the tango started listening to me. It was a war of one against all, but in ten years, the war was won.” In 1974, Piazzolla settled again in Paris, winning innumerable enthusiasts for both his Nuevo Tango and for the traditional tango with his many appearances, recordings and compositions. By the time that he returned to Buenos Aires in 1985, he was regarded as the musician who had revitalized one of the quintessential genres of Latin music, and he received awards from Down Beat and other international music magazines and from the city of Buenos Aires, as well as a Grammy nomination for his composition Oblivion. Piazzolla continued to tour widely, record frequently and compose incessantly until he suffered a stroke in Paris in August 1990. He died in Buenos Aires on July 5, 1992.

Piazzolla realized his electrifying blend of the fire and passion of the traditional tango with the vast expressive resources of modern harmony, texture and sonority in some 750 widely varied works that explore the genre’s remarkable expressive range, from violent to sensual, from witty to melancholy, from intimate to theatrical. Among his most ambitious concert works is Las Quatro Estaciones Porteñas (“The Four Seasons”), published originally for piano solo in 1968 and later arranged for his own ensemble (he often used one of the movements to open his concerts) and for strings and piano. The four movements, beginning with Spring, are not specifically pictorial, as are Vivaldi’s well-known precedents, but are instead general evocations of the changing seasons in Piazzolla’s native Argentina.

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45 (1880) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky

For nearly a decade after his disastrous marriage in 1877, Tchaikovsky was filled with self-recrimination and doubts about his ability to compose anything more. He managed to finish the Violin Concerto during the spring of 1878, but then had to wait more than three years for someone to perform it, and did not undertake another large composition until the Manfred Symphony of 1885. His frustration was only increased by staying at home in Moscow, and he traveled frequently and far during those years for diversion. In November 1879 he set off for Rome via a circuitous route that took him and his traveling companion, his brother Modeste, through Berlin and Paris, finally arriving in the Eternal City in mid-December. Despite spending the holiday in Rome and taking part in the riotous festivities of Carnival (Tchaikovsky recorded that this “wild folly” did not suit him very well), the sensitive composer still complained in a letter written on February 17, 1880 to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, that “a worm gnaws continually in secret at my heart. I cannot sleep. My God, what an incomprehensible and complicated mechanism the human organism is! We shall never solve the various phenomena of our spiritual and material existence!”

Though Tchaikovsky was never long parted from his residual melancholy, his spirits were temporarily brightened by some of the local tunes he heard in Rome, and he decided to write an orchestral piece that would incorporate several of them. At the beginning of February he wrote to Mme. von Meck, “I have been working, and during the last few days I have sketched the rough draft of an Italian Caprice based on popular melodies. I think it has a bright future; it will be effective because of the wonderful melodies I happened to pick up, partly from published collections and partly out of the streets with my own ears.” As introduction to the work, Tchaikovsky used a bugle call sounded every evening from the barracks of the Royal Italian Cuirassiers, which was adjacent to the Hotel Costanzi where he was staying. He sketched the Capriccio in a week, but then did not return to the score until he was back in Russia in the spring; the orchestration was completed in mid-May at his summer home in Kamenka. The Capriccio Italien enjoyed a fine success at its premiere on December 18, 1880 by Nikolai Rubinstein and the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society, and audiences demanded its repetition on several subsequent concerts.

Tchaikovsky admitted modeling his Capriccio Italien on Mikhail Glinka’s potpourri of Spanish themes, Night in Madrid, a piece Mili Balakirev had suggested more than a decade earlier that he study for its “masterly fusing-together of sections.” The first section of the Capriccio Italien opens with the brazen trumpet fanfare of the Royal Cuirassiers, which gives way to a dolorous melody intoned above an insistent accompanimental motive. There follows a swinging tune given first by the oboes in sweet parallel thirds and later by the full orchestra in tintinnabulous splendor. A brisk folk dance comes next, then a reprise of the dolorous melody and finally a whirling tarantella, perhaps inspired by the finale of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony. This “bundle of Italian folk tunes,” as Edwin Evans called the Capriccio Italien, ends with one of the most rousing displays of orchestral sonority in all of Romantic music.

©2012 Dr. Richard E. Rodda