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Cuarteto Latinoamericano (photo, Sergio Yazbek) |
It’s the final concert of the season, Thursday night, April 30th, at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front in uptown Harrisburg (just below Seneca St).
The Cuarteto Latinoamericano will be performing a program of works by American composers – and by that, I mean not only from the United States but composers from South America, too. In addition to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” from its home in his String Quartet Op. 11 and George Gershwin’s “Lullaby,” there the last string quartet of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, “Four for Tango” by Argentine Astor Piazzolla, and, from the busy pen of Czech composer and temporary resident of New York City, Antonín Dvořák, a work written during one pleasant summer spent in Spillville, Iowa, a work forever known as “The American Quartet."
Collectively, they are the Bitrán Brothers and a friend they picked up along the way to play viola: violinists Saúl and Arón, cellist Àlvaro, and violist Javier Montiel who formed the quartet in Mexico City in 1982 when they had to prove to audiences they were not a mariachi band and didn’t (as their official biography puts it) wear ponchos and play guitars (that case is for a cello, not a guitarrón). Since then, they have become internationally renowned, toured world-wide, won two Latin Grammys for Best Classical Recording, and branched out from the traditional Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, the usual core available to string quartets at the time, to premiere over a hundred new works written especially for them, and focused their repertoire on composers from Mexico south to Argentina.
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The program begins in Brazil in 1957 with the last of the seventeen quartets by the most recognizable Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos. It was first performed by the Budapest String Quartet at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on October 16th, 1959, which turned out to be exactly one month before the composer’s death. Initially, Villa-Lobos had given a copy of the score to a violinist-friend while he was in Paris when he was already ill. He had asked her to arrange a reading of it so he could hear it but circumstances always got in the way, so he returned home to Rio de Janeiro without having heard it and then died without knowing it had already been premiered. His state funeral was the last major civic event held in Rio before the capital was transferred to the new, interior city of Brasília.
Like many nations that evolved from colonial roots to independence – something we should be talking about this year, ourselves – many changes affected what defined this new national character. Just as we still discuss “what makes ‘American Art’ American,” the question at the time Villa Lobos was born was “what will make us Brazilian, not Portuguese?” He was born two years before the overthrow of the Empire of Brazil in 1889, ruled by a grandson of a Portuguese king. The primary focus of music in Brazil then had been imported along with the Portuguese immigrants, many of whom arrived in 1808, long after it had been initially colonized in the early-16th Century, after the Napoleonic Wars drove the Portuguese king and his court out of Lisbon.
The conservatory in Rio offered the traditional Classical courses in harmony and counterpoint that would’ve been found in any European capital, but after a few failed harmony lessons, Villa-Lobos decided to give up on any formal training. He learned to play the cello, clarinet and classical guitar, and listened in on his father – an amateur musician – when he invited friends over for musical evenings. After his father’s early death, the 12-year-old boy played in pit orchestras around Rio for movies and theater.
Still a teenager, the young would-be composer not only “branched out,” he chose to explore this vast country of his to discover the different kinds of music he might find beyond the urban capital, gathering up not only influences from Portuguese immigrants and African slaves (slavery had only been abolished the year after his birth) but also the numerous indigenous tribes deep in the “dark interior,” presumably at one point nearly being captured by cannibals and escaping from them (true or a romanticized tale?). His initial compositions became improvisations based on all this material, written for guitar.
He played with street bands in Rio, played cello in the Rio opera orchestra, married a pianist. In 1917, he met Serge Diaghilev who brought his Ballet russe to Rio, along with Darius Milhaud, a secretary at the French legation there, who introduced him to the works of Debussy and Satie, possibly Stravinsky – and in turn Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to a wide array of Brazilian folk and “street” music (which would figure prominently in so many of Milhaud’s works). He also met pianist Artur Rubinstein for whom he composed a number of piano works including, in 1922, a suite called A prolo do bebê (The Baby’s Family) which proved to be a bit too modern for Rio’s tastes. The movement about the doll – O polichinelo – became a favorite encore of Rubinstein’s – in fact I heard him play this after an all-Chopin recital in the early-1970s when the pianist was around 88 years old.
To fast forward a bit, Villa-Lobos, ever his own “melting pot,” wrote a series of pieces inspired by the combination of Bach and various kinds of Brazilian music of which the most famous is the Bachianas Brasileras No. 5 for soprano and cellos written in 1938. After years of political turmoil in Brazil, Villa-Lobos was able to tour Europe, wrote many works – concertos, symphonies, and choral works reflecting his Brazilian roots – that were mostly well received. He wrote most of his string quartets between the 1930s and 1957, leaving sketches for an 18th Quartet incomplete when he died. In 1958, MGM commissioned him to write music for a Hollywood film, Green Mansions, starring Audrey Hepburn, conducting the filmscore himself, but in the end, after some studio turmoil (always with the politics) replaced the original director, the decision was made to use only a portion of the original score, though one assumes Villa-Lobos got to keep the original $25,000 commission. Disillusioned, he incorporated much of the music into a work called “Forest of the Amazon” in 1959 which became his last major work. He had managed to alienate many musicians at home when he complained in an interview in June, 1959, that Brazil was “dominated by mediocrity.” He died at the age of 72.
Here is a video with score of a performance by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano of Villa-Lobos’ String Quartet No. 17 which opens their Market Square Concert’s program.
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Skipping ahead to the work that concludes the first half of the program, there is a famous anecdote that almost sounds apocryphal (given the number of variations on its details) but the end result is the same. The advice speaks volumes of truth for many composers, not just a 33-year-old Argentinian named Astor Piazzolla. In 1954, he had left Buenos Aires – at the urging of Argentina's leading “classical music” composer of the day, Alberto Ginastera – to study with one of the most influential teachers in Paris, Nadia Boulanger. However it happened, many young composers, especially from the United States, were drawn to Paris to study with her, ranging from Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Elliott Carter to Burt Bacharach and Joe Raposo (more famous for the songs he wrote for Sesame Street).
In the early-1940s, Piazzolla – his childhood is complicated, as a boy moving to New York City before returning to his native Argentina – grew up in the world of tango bars and became a bandoneon player in various dance bands in the capital city. He met the pianist Artur Rubinstein, then living in Buenos Aires, who urged him to study with Ginastera, with whom he studied the scores of Stravinsky, Ravel and Bartók, listening to orchestra rehearsals by day and playing the dance clubs by night. By 1950, he gave up his own band to concentrate on composing “serious” music and in 1953 his “Buenos Aires Symphony” won a competition and was given its premiere. Despite a fight breaking out in the audience between those who supported the “newness” of combining classical and popular influences and those who found this insidious and degrading (really, using not one but two bandoneons?), Piazzolla won a scholarship which allowed him to travel to Paris to study with Boulanger.
Piazzolla played through a number of his “classically-inspired” pieces for his new teacher with little response. It wasn't till he started playing one of his tangos – Triunfal – that she reacted: “This,” she said, “is the real Piazzolla!” Dismissing the pile of “serious” works, she said “this” was what he should focus his efforts on. And you could say, he never looked back. (By the way, imagine if Mozart had waited till he was 33 before “finding his voice”?)
Primarily, he studied counterpoint with her – it was, according to Carter, what she was most brilliant at – and it would, in fact, become a major feature in the development of his “New Tango” style. It was the synthesis of the “serious” which he'd started to learn with Ginastera, with the “popular” element he'd grown up with and which was such an important aspect of his environment.
So here we have another great “What If...?” game: if Piazzolla had stayed with his “serious” side, would as many people today know the name and hum his music if he instead wrote symphonies and operas and string quartets like his mentor Alberto Ginastera? Would his “serious” music have had the same sincerity his tangos have?
Following his stay in Paris, Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1955 and formed another band, expanding the traditional tango ensemble of two bandoneóns, two violins, bass and piano, by adding a cello and electric guitar. For his Octeto he composed his “Tango Ballet” in 1956 which was later transcribed for full orchestra as well as for string quartet.
While many of his works translate well to other combinations like the string quartet, his “Four for Tango,” written in 1989 for the Kronos Quartet, is originally for a string quartet. A single movement work – some sources describe it as a six-minute or an eight-minute piece (here, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano play it in five) – it may not seem like a tango you can dance to (but then, Chopin never expected people to dance the waltz to, say, “The Minute” Waltz either). He has, by this time, combined his classical training from Ginastera and Boulanger with his life in the smoky bars of Buenos Aires with his Nuevo Tango to create a synthesis that is both modern and inspired by popular dance, the national sound we automatically identify as the Argentine Tango.
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It might seem odd to find Dvořák on a program of American Music, considering he was born in Bohemia and was a protege of Brahms, but seven years after his first international success with what we know as his 7th Symphony in London, the Czech-born composer Antonin Dvořák found himself Professor Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York City where, in 1894, he completed what became his last symphony, nicknamed “From the New World” and a number of chamber pieces like the “American” String Quartet.
He also began this Cello Concerto. He was not only homesick but also worried the money was going to run out – not his, but the school's. His initial salary at the school was twenty-five times what he was making at the conservatory in Prague. After taking “cuts in pay” each semester, once the school could no longer pay him any salary, he returned to his home on April 25th, 1895, taking with him his recently almost-finished concerto.
After his initial arrival and within days of finishing his “Columbus Cantata” (as he called it) one cold January day, he began a new symphony, the one he called From the New World, which he completed on May 24th, 1893. A week later, the rest of his family arrived from Bohemia for the summer, posed for that group photo on the steps of the Dvořáks' home at 327 E.17th Street, and then in a few days they would leave for Spillville, Iowa.
It was his secretary and translator, Josef Kovařík, an American-born Czech who'd suggested the holiday destination: it was his home town and Kovařík's father was still a prominent businessman there. Given its large Czech population, it seemed a good way to assuage Dvořák's homesickness and his interest in seeing more of America than just noisy and crowded New York City.
Shortly after they arrived, he began sketching a new string quartet, completed in eight days. Three days later, he began a string quintet, adding another viola to the standard quartet, and then finished that on August 1st, a little over a month later. Obviously, the town of Spillville agreed with him.
"I have been on vacation since 3 June here in the Czech village of Spillville and I won't be returning to New York until the latter half of September. The children arrived safely from Europe and we're all happy together. We like it very much here and, thank God, I am working hard and I'm healthy and in good spirits."
For decades he had toiled unsuccessfully to find a balance between his overflowing melodic invention and a clear structure. Finally, in his twelfth quartet, the American Quartet, everything came together.
A characteristic, unifying element throughout the quartet is the use of the pentatonic scale, usually associated with stereotypical Chinese music but also found in the folk music of, say, Scotland and also, not coincidentally, many Slavonic folk songs which Dvořák was already familiar with. This scale, less typical of those harmonic progressions associated with “Art Music” and standard tonality, gives the whole quartet its open, simple character, a character that is frequently identified with American folk music.
The quartet incorporated the song of the scarlet tanager Dvořák heard on his walks in the town's Riverside Park. (As if musicologists can expend lots of warm air about American versus Czech influences in the style of Dvořák’s “American” music, ornithologists have argued that the bird was “probably” a red-eyed vireo). Regardless, he was delighted to have heard birds singing for the first time in eight months – and in the fourth movement one could detect echoes of the organ from the local church which he would play every morning before walking along the Turkey River. In the quintet, listeners claim to hear the sound of the Native American drums accompanying the ritual song of the Iroquois Indians – from the Kickapoo tribe – who visited Spillville that summer to sell their herbal remedies. “Dvořák was enchanted by the performances they gave to promote their wares and, for the duration of their stay in the village, he apparently attended every one.”
Aside from an unexpected disruption to attend the Chicago “World's Fair” in mid-August to celebrate “Czech Day” where he conducted a hastily organized concert of his works, he had only two more weeks of his holiday before Dvořák reluctantly left to return to New York on September 16th.
Unfortunately, he never had a chance to return to Spillville: ten years later, a year before his death, he told a friend he'd thought Spillville “was an ideal spot; that’s when I felt happy, and I should have stayed there.”
In a first private performance of the quartet in Spillville, June 1893, Dvořák played first violin with members of the Kovařík family: father Jan Josef playing second violin, his daughter Cecilie the viola, and son Josef Jan (Dvořák’s secretary) the cello. It was premiered in Boston the following January by the legendary Kneisel Quartet, then shortly afterward in New York City where one critic was disappointed it lacked the “soaring” of “the mighty Beethoven,” but another one heard "the spirit of eternal sunshine" that is "the soul of Mozart's music.”
Here is the Emerson Quartet in this score-video with Dvořák's "American" String Quartet, the Quartet No. 12 in F Major:
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Let's see… Of the two remaining works on the program, George Gershwin wrote his Lullaby for String Quartet as a harmony assignment for his teacher Rubin Goldmark in 1919 when he was 21. Rubin Goldmark, born in New York City in 1872, taught theory at New York’s National Conservatory in the early-1890s but also studied privately with its new director, Antonín Dvořák, during his first year there. And Dvořák, as I mentioned, was a protege of Johannes Brahms – so that's how many connections? Consider that Rubin Goldmark was a nephew of composer Karl Goldmark who was another friend of Brahms'. Goldmark himself studied with Johann Nepomuck Fuchs whose brother Robert was a more well-known composer and teacher who included among his students Mahler, Sibelius (yes), and a fellow named Eusebius Mandyczewski. J.N. Fuchs studied with the famous teacher Simon Sechter who was old enough to have become famous because he gave one counterpoint lesson to Franz Schubert before he died in 1828!
There is, however, something curious here: while Goldmark was credited in numerous sources and biographies as being Gershwin’s teacher at the time – enduring enough Gershwin would later return to him for advice when composing his Concerto in F – he was not Gershwin’s only teacher. There is evidence to suggest that it’s more likely he wrote the Lullaby as an assignment from Edward Kilenyi (Sr.), a Hungarian-born violinist and composer who studied briefly in Rome with Pietro Mascagni and graduated from the Cologne Conservatory before arriving in New York City where he (supposedly) studied at Columbia University, earning his doctorate by 1915. There is evidence to suggest Gershwin came to him for advice about harmony at the same time he was studying with Goldmark (another Goldmark student at one time was Aaron Copland who found him “too pedantic,” so perhaps Gershwin approached Kilenyi for a “second opinion”?). Regardless, this “Lullaby” came about from the imagination of George Gerwshin, Tin Pan Alley song-plugger and future Great American Composer.
Samuel Barber, meanwhile, born and raised in West Chester, PA, was a pianist and singer and composer when he became a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (he was 14 at the time) where his composition teacher was the Italian violinist and composer, Rosario Scalero who, in 1900, went to Vienna and studied with Eusebius Mandyczewski – who was (ahem) a protege of Johannes Brahms.
Basically, Gershwin’s “Lullaby” is a young man on the brink of becoming a serious composer, though he found more joy working in Tin Pan Alley and turning out numerous jazz songs that made him a “hit song-writer.” By the time he was studying with Goldmark, he had already made a name for himself with the song “When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em,” his first published song in 1916, which earned him all of 50 cents. But by 1919, he’d also written “Swannee,” made famous by Al Jolson who’d heard the young composer play it at a party and decided to use it in one of his shows. I don’t think Gershwin approached Goldmark to become a “serious Classical” composer, but it gave him a foundation that the young man was then able to rise to the challenge when band conductor Paul Whiteman suggested he write something for his concert in 1924, a kind of “Jazz Meets Classical” program. At the last minute, having forgotten his commitment, he quickly wrote the work that would change his life – the Rhapsody in Blue. And the rest is history.
Here, members of the New York Philharmonic play Gershwin’s “Lullaby.”
Samuel Barber grew up in a musical household: his aunt was the famous contralto and star of the Metropolitan Opera, Louise Homer. His mother was a pianist, the daughter of a family tracing its roots (and social position) back to the Revolution, and she gave her son his first piano lessons when he was six and wrote his first composition the following year, a short piano piece in C Minor called Sadness. Overlooked in most short biographies of Barber’s childhood is the fact that his uncle Sidney Homer, Louise’s husband, was a respected composer of art songs who then mentored the young boy into the adult composer he would become, over a span on 25 years.
By the time he composed his first string quartet – actually, his only string quartet – he’d already composed the “Overture to The School for Scandal” when he was 21 (it would be premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1933), so by the time he started his String Quartet, later to be published as Op. 11, he’d already built quite a reputation, and a very enviable one for a man in his mid-20s. As I recall the story from Barber’s memoir, he was introduced to Toscanini while in Europe through his teacher Scalero, and Toscanini took an interest in him. Looking over the quartet, he suggested the slow movement, an Adagio, would make a very fine piece for string orchestra, and so Barber arranged it as suggested but Toscanini returned the score without comment, later telling Gian-Carlo Menotti who’d met Barber while they were at Curtis and who’d go on to become Barber’s life-long partner, that he’d already memorized it and scheduled it for a broadcast. It would add to Barber’s early fame and remains to this day his most recognizable work. In 1963, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it became the National Mourning Piece and has since been used (if not overused) in numerous contexts that it’s almost become a cliché. It’s not often heard in its original version, even less so as part of the complete quartet, but it is still a powerful piece on its own that, as one critic wrote, “rarely leaves a dry eye.”
Here is the Dover Quartet playing the original version of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” from his String Quartet, Op. 11:
- Dick Strawser
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