Closing the Season: Stuart & Friends with Lots of Songs

Schumann (1839), Berlioz (1845), and Mendelssohn (c.1845)

Join us for the final program of the season with "Stuart & Friends," this Sunday afternoon at 4:00, April 28th, 2024, at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg. Stuart Malina (a.k.a. Music Director of the Harrisburg Symphony) will be at the piano joined by soprano Claire Galloway and baritone Jonathan Hays, for a program with two major works about love and loss (it wouldn't be the Romantic 19th Century if everybody loved happily ever after...) – Schumann's Dichterliebe (Poet's Love) and Berlioz's Les nuits d'Été (Summer Nights) – with a set of Six Duets by Felix Mendelssohn, and another approach to the love song from Broadway shows by giants of the American stage – Rodgers & Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim and Cole Porter.

Rodgers & Hammerstein - Sondheim (1970) - Cole Porter (1949)

These days, when many people not accustomed to Classical Music think every piece, regardless, is a “song,” coming across an actual “song recital” is a rare thing, for some reason. But during much of the 19th Century, audiences, we are told by various writers, demanded singers at every concert. Symphony concerts would frequently mix in some chamber music (perhaps with the maestro as performer or accompanist to a well-known solo violinist or singer) and an instrumental soloist might include a sonata movement in between orchestral works. A solo pianist might offer a set of variations (probably improvised) in which the audience would applaud after each variation [horrors!], and a symphony could be preceded by some songs with a guest vocalist and followed with an operatic aria. “Declamations, instrumental and vocal duos [with piano] were all thrown together like a musical variety show.” Quite the different approach to what we expect today.

But then most “art songs” of the day were intended for the domestic audience, usually amateurs standing around the parlor piano in their living rooms: think of the famous “Schubertiads” held at the homes of Schubert's friends in which he accompanied one or more singers in a whole evening of his songs. And whether it was Robert Schumann and his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann – or, from another viewpoint, given her greater fame and more prestigious, if not always sufficient, fiscal results, the pianist Clara Schumann and her husband, the composer Robert – giving musical evenings at their home in Leipzig, or Felix Mendelssohn and his family with their Sunday musicales when he was growing up the son of a banker in Berlin, these were not public concerts. Schumann – Robert, as composer – intended Dichterliebe as a single work with a dramatic arc from beginning to end, with all the poetry by the same poet (preferably from the same volume of poetry), and though all sixteen songs were composed in 1840, they were not performed complete in public until 1861 by baritone Julius Stockhausen with Johannes Brahms at the piano, and then again the following year with Stockhausen and Clara Schumann.

It was around this time Frau Schumann also performed the first complete public performances of Schubert's two epic song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise (written in the 1820s). Yet her performance of Winterreise, one of the most dramatic of these works, was broken up into three parts: she played selections by Bach and Scarlatti between Parts 1 and 2, and some of Mendelssohn's “Songs without Words” (short character pieces, usually lighter works, for solo piano) between Parts 2 and 3. It's enough to make one wonder if the Historically Informed Performance Practice folks would suggest, therefore, Stuart Malina should play some Beethoven bagatelles, a movement of a Mozart sonata, and maybe a reading from Shakespeare in between Schumann's songs? (However, I would refrain from suggesting some Gershwin and Danny Kaye's “Tchaikovsky!”) Was it to relieve the tension for an audience not used to such intellectual challenges in a recital program, or concern they lacked the attention span the songs' inherent drama required?

Historically accurate as it may have been at the time, it's merely a way of pointing out how attitudes have changed – not to mention an audience's tastes and preferences.

The fact Dichterliebe was written in 1840, and Hector Berlioz composed Les nuits d'Été in 1840-1841, and five of Mendelssohn's Six Duets date from 1844 (the first of them was written in 1836), might excite music geeks like me, but I think, as different as the Berlioz on the second half might sound from the Schumann on the first half, their belonging to such a narrow span of time also might point out the great variety in musical styles we often enjoy without understanding their contexts. It has nothing to do with whether you'd enjoy it any more for knowing that, but that it might expand your appreciation of the wide variety of all these great composers we hear and take for granted: they did not live – and create – in a vacuum.

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The context of Dichterliebe in the life of its composer is fairly simple: after a long and often distressing courtship full of paternal objections (even resorting to the courts), Robert Schumann was finally able to marry the love of his life, Clara Wieck, on September 12th, 1840. Before then, Schumann wrote exclusively for the piano, finishing 26 published works between 1830 and 1839. Then he composed about 147 songs between 1839 and 1841, 138 of them in 1840 alone! Small wonder it's called “The Year of Song.” 

Basically, after the protracted legal battles with Clara's father about the wedding, not to mention the loss of Robert's dreams of becoming a concert pianist himself due to a hand injury, these were busy if not always happy times. This volume of Heinrich Heine's poems was written by 1823 but Schumann apparently became acquainted with them only when they were published in a second edition in 1837. However, being finally and happily married, it's odd, then, Schumann should choose these sixteen poems which would seem to go against his present reality, turning to thoughts of “a lover rejected coming to terms with his painful loss through renunciation and forgiveness.” Heine considered himself a critic of the Romantic ethos, many of his poems taking on a strong sense of irony; yet his legacy makes him one of the leading poets of the movement! Whether Schumann recognized the irony or not, it may also be his avowal of the very Romantic ethos Heine criticized overlooked the possibility: certainly, the music is not ironic. In the final songs, Heine's poet, in bitter disappointment, is going to “put the old bad songs and dreams, all his sorrowful love and suffering, into a huge coffin that will take twelve giants to throw into the sea.” Certainly, Schumann would have wished to take all his and Clara's troubles from the past years and do the same in order to move on.

For the videos, here, I chose a series broken into four segments to make it easier for you to keep track of the songs and their texts (sung in German, the video includes English subtitles, and I've included brief summaries in between the clips). Growing up with the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, it is his voice I usually hear in my head whenever I read through Schubert or Schumann songs, and while tenor Fritz Wunderlich might be a close second for Dichterliebe, in deference to Jonathan Hays on our program, I'll go with the baritone (no pressure...).  This recording was made at the Salzburg Festival in 1956 with pianist Gerald Moore.

#1. Im wunderschönen Monat Mai – In the beautiful month of May, when the buds sprang, love sprang up in my heart: in the beautiful month of May, when the birds all sang, I told you my desire and longing. (Incidentally, in the introduction Schumann quotes a few measures from the piano concerto Clara Wieck (now Schumann) had composed as a teenaged virtuoso, in case anyone would get the reference: certainly, Clara would.)

#2. Aus meinen Tränen sprießen – Many flowers spring up from my tears, and a nightingale choir from my sighs: If you love me, I'll pick them all for you, and the nightingale will sing at your window.

#3. Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne – I used to love the rose, lily, dove and sun, joyfully: now I love only the little, the fine, the pure, the One: you yourself are the source of them all.

#4. Wenn ich in deine Augen seh "When I look in your eyes all my pain and woe fades: when I kiss your mouth I become whole: when I recline on your breast I am filled with heavenly joy: and when you say, 'I love you', I weep bitterly.

#5. Ich will meine Seele tauchen "I want to bathe my soul in the chalice of the lily, and the lily, ringing, will breathe a song of my beloved. The song will tremble and quiver, like the kiss of her mouth which in a wondrous moment she gave me."

#6. Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome – In the Rhine, in the sacred stream, great holy Cologne with its great cathedral is reflected. In it there is a face painted on golden leather, which has shone into the confusion of my life. Flowers and cherubs float about Our Lady: the eyes, lips and cheeks are just like those of my beloved. = = = = = = =

#7. Ich grolle nicht – I do not chide you, though my heart breaks, love ever lost to me! Though you shine in a field of diamonds, no ray falls into your heart's darkness. I have long known it: I saw the night in your heart, I saw the serpent that devours it: I saw, my love, how empty you are."

#8. Und wüßten's die Blumen, die kleinen – If the little flowers only knew how deeply my heart is wounded, they would weep with me to heal my suffering, and the nightingales would sing to cheer me, and even the starlets would drop from the sky to speak consolation to me: but they can't know, for only One knows, and it is she that has torn my heart asunder.

#9. Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen – There is a blaring of flutes and violins and trumpets, for they are dancing the wedding-dance of my best-beloved. There is a thunder and booming of kettle-drums and shawms. In between, you can hear the good cupids sobbing and moaning.

#10. Hör' ich das Liedchen klingen – When I hear that song which my love once sang, my breast bursts with wild affliction. Dark longing drives me to the forest hills, where my too-great woe pours out in tears.

#11. Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen – A youth loved a maiden who chose another: the other loved another girl, and married her. The maiden married, from spite, the first and best man that she met with: the youth was sickened at it. It's the old story, and it's always new: and the one whom she turns aside, she breaks his heart in two. 

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#12. Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen – On a sunny summer morning I went out into the garden: the flowers were talking and whispering, but I was silent. They looked at me with pity, and said, 'Don't be cruel to our sister, you sad, death-pale man.'

#13. Ich hab' im Traum geweinet – I wept in my dream, for I dreamt you were in your grave: I woke, and tears ran down my cheeks. I wept in my dreams, thinking you had abandoned me: I woke, and cried long and bitterly. I wept in my dream, dreaming you were still good to me: I woke, and even then my floods of tears poured forth.

#14. Allnächtlich im Traume – I see you every night in dreams, and see you greet me friendly, and crying out loudly I throw myself at your sweet feet. You look at me sorrowfully and shake your fair head: from your eyes trickle the pearly tear-drops. You say a gentle word to me and give me a sprig of cypress: I awake, and the sprig is gone, and I have forgotten what the word was.") = = = = = = =

#15. Aus alten Märchen winkt es – The old fairy tales tell of a magic land where great flowers shine in the golden evening light, where trees speak and sing like a choir, and springs make music to dance to, and songs of love are sung such as you have never heard, till wondrous sweet longing infatuates you! Oh, could I only go there, and free my heart, and let go of all pain, and be blessed! Ah! I often see that land of joys in dreams: then comes the morning sun, and it vanishes like smoke.

#16. Die alten, bösen Lieder (Heine no 65). The old bad songs, and the angry, bitter dreams, let us now bury them, bring a large coffin. I shall put very much therein, I shall not yet say what: the coffin must be bigger than the great tun at Heidelberg. And bring a bier of stout, thick planks, they must be longer than the Bridge at Mainz. And bring me too twelve giants, who must be mightier than the St. Christopher in the Cologne Cathedral. They must carry away the coffin and throw it in the sea, because a coffin that large needs a large grave to put it in. Do you know why the coffin must be so big and heavy? I will put both my love and my suffering into it.

Technically, Schumann's Dichterliebe is a “song cycle,” not just a collection of songs. With its narrative “arc” and consistent style, all intended to be sung by one singer, in addition to being all one poet's texts and all from one volume of that poet's works, it certainly fits the definition even if the term didn't come into official recognition until 1865. And yet Schumann's first published songs, a setting of nine poems also by Heine, is entitled Liederkreis which literally means “Song Cycle”! This was soon followed by a similar setting of twelve poems by Joseph von Eichendorff, also called Liederkreis.

What distinguishes them from “just a bunch of songs” (would that be Haufenlieder)? Many times, composers would read a poem, find it's something they'd like to set to music and so they compose it. Then, later, they might decide to publish a few (or several) of them in a collection because it would be tedious (and might sell better) than publishing each one separately. The songs have no other relationship and perhaps were even composed years apart. Today, say, Taylor Swift publishes an album of new songs: you can listen to them individually or as a complete album; but for singers covering her songs, it doesn't mean you'd have to sing all of them together.

In that sense, it's possible Berlioz's six songs to poems by his friend (and neighbor) Théophile Gautier is more “a set of songs” than a true song cycle. Despite Schubert and Schumann in Germany, there were no other examples of “song cycles” in France, and we can't blame Berlioz for not following the rules when the rules didn't exist. Besides, even when they did exist, Berlioz rarely followed them anyway...

Gautier published a collection of poems in 1838 he called La comédie de la mort (The Comedy of Death) – if we think in terms of “Comedy” as in Dante's Divine Comedy – which Berlioz might have seen before it went into print. At any rate, he chose six of these poems to form a span about “the progress of love, from youthful innocence to loss and finally renewal” which may be enough to fulfill the “connection” element. Berlioz also chose to call his songs “Summer Nights” (not Gautier's title) despite the fact the opening song is clearly a spring song set in the daytime.

While they were initially composed for mezzo-soprano or tenor, since some of the poems specifically have male narrators, he decided to recast the songs for different singers when he eventually orchestrated them: a baritone and a tenor for two of the songs, and an either/or combination which could mean a quartet of soloists to share the stage. However it was performed in Berlioz's day, today the orchestral songs are more frequently performed than the piano originals and one of the reasons might be the piano parts are not very well written for the instrument, Berlioz being no pianist – but they're usually sung by a mezzo-soprano throughout.

The first song, a Villanelle, is a specific type of lyrical poem inspired by country life, pastoral enjoyment and the rustic pleasures of the fields, replete with shepherds and young lovers: Gautier's poem is “a celebration of spring and love ...telling of the pleasures of wandering together in the woods to gather wild strawberries, then returning home with hands entwined.”

Spectre de la rose (the Ghost of the Rose) tells of “a girl's dreams of the ghost of the rose she had worn to a ball the previous day. Although the rose has died, it has ascended to paradise; to have died on the girl's breast was a fate that kings might envy.”

Sur les lagunes (On the Lagoons: Lament) with its sombre harmonies is imbued with melancholy; the undulating accompaniment suggests the movement of the waves. The poem is the lament of a Venetian boatman at the loss of his beloved, and the pain of sailing out to sea unloved.

Absence – a young lover pleads for the return of his beloved. (Berlioz scholar Julian Rushton suggests that unlike the other five songs, this one may make use of existing music, written for an abandoned cantata, Erigone, and this possibly explains why in this song, to accommodate preexisting music, Berlioz cut and rearranged Gautier's verses.)

Au cimetière: Clair de lune (At the Cemetery: Moonlight) is a further lament, with the bereaved lover now more distant from the memory of his beloved, and perturbed by a ghostly vision of her.

L'île inconnue (The Unknown Island) hints at the unattainable – “a place where love can be eternal.” Rushton describes the song as "cheerfully ironic", set by Berlioz "with a Venetian swing.” Of course, the last of the songs with Sarah Connolly was not posted on YouTube, so if I'm going to be inconsistent and given those few versions with piano are not up to snuff, let's go with mezzo Anne-Sofie van Otter in a 2011 performance with the Orchestra of the Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski:

So, as usual, I'm curious how (and where) Les nuits d'Été fits in with what other music Berlioz was composing around that time. In 1839 his first opera to reach the stage, Benvenuto Cellini, was a massive failure; but his “dramatic symphony,” Romeo and Juliet, was a major success. Richard Wagner, then 26 and starving in Paris trying to get his operas produced – he had not yet written any of his famous operas – heard a performance and was “overwhelmed by its revelation of the possibilities of musical poetry.” In 1840, then, Berlioz premiered his Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale,a work originally scored for a military band requiring 200 players, subsequently adding string parts for a greatly toned-down “indoor” performance which Wagner also attended, writing to Schumann he found passages in the last movement so “magnificent and sublime they can never be surpassed.”

In 1841, the year he completed Les nuits d'Été, Berlioz was commissioned to add recitatives to replace the spoken dialogue in Weber's Der Freischütz and orchestrate Weber's “Introduction to the Dance” for the necessary ballet the Paris Opera required. He began work on a new opera of his own, La Nonne sanglante (The Bloody Nun – one can only imagine...) which, after seven years of creative unproductivity, he finally abandoned. 

In 1842, he also began a series of tours in Belgium and Germany where he found audiences much more receptive to his music. During these tours, he had enjoyable meetings with Mendelssohn and Schumann in Leipzig, and Wagner in Dresden, where he had premiered his recently completed Rienzi and early the next year, his new Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman). Berlioz's legendary marriage to the Shakespearean actress, Harriet (a.k.a. Henrietta) Smithson – his infatuation for her was the subject of his most famous work, the Symphonie fantastique – had long fallen apart: when he left on these foreign tours, he took with him his new mistress, the soprano Marie Recio. In 1843, Berlioz orchestrated the second song from Les nuits d'Été, “The Specter of the Rose” – the rest of them had to wait until 1856.

In the midst of these large-scale works requiring large numbers of performers, it is curious to find something as intimate as Les nuits d'Été coming between the immense sound-force of the “Funereal and Triumphal Symphony” and his starting work on a Gothic-horror opera, “The Bloody Nun” (no doubt inspired by the success of Meyerbeer's Robert le diable, premiered in Paris in 1831, which quickly became one of the most popular operas of the age (especially the ballet of “damned nuns”).

(One wonders what Berlioz, with his incredible gift for the pictorial – think “March to the Scaffold” and the “Witches' Sabbath” from his Symphonie fantastique – might have made of such a scene? Today, I listen to Meyerbeer's cliché-ridden ballet music and wonder how anyone could've considered this frightening...) But I, as usual, digress.

With all their soaring vocal lines and their half-step slips in the harmony (speaking of breaking the rules), hearing these intimate songs of a Summer Night brings to my ear one of his sweetest and simplest “songs” of his entire career, the young homesick sailor's song, Vallon sonore, which opens the fifth and final act of his otherwise grandest and vastest work, Les troyens, written between 1856 and 1858. Typical of Berlioz's luck, it was not performed, and then only in part, until 1863, and never complete until 1890, long after he'd died.

And what was Berlioz writing right before he started work on Les troyens? He had just completed the orchestrations of Les nuits d'Été.

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We usually think of “Romantic” Music as being primarily about “romance” usually of the “boy-meets-girl, girl-rejects-boy, boy-kills-himself” variety. And while books far vaster than my blog posts have been written about what “Romanticism in Music” means, here is one summary by the poet Joseph von Eichendorff, whose texts were set to music by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn as well as Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss (most famously in his Four Last Songs): it “soared like a magnificent rocket sparkling up into the sky, and after shortly and wonderfully lighting up the night, it exploded overhead into a thousand colorful stars.” Rather than be influenced by Greek myths and architectural symmetries, Romanticists – like Carl Maria von Weber in Der Freischütz – found their inspiration in nature's wildness, its supernatural underpinnings, and more “common” folk than the aristocrats of the Ancient World, especially their folk stories and fairy tales.

While many of these stories seem death-obsessed to us today, Mendelssohn himself wrote to a stranger (one assumes a response to fan-mail) that death was a place “where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings.” Five of his six Duets, Op.68, were composed in 1844. Six months after the death of belovéd sister, Fanny Mendelssohn-Henselt, herself a fine composer and considered a better pianist, Felix Mendelssohn died in 1847 at the age of 38 after a protracted illness brought on by grief over the sudden loss of someone who had for so long remained a major part of his life.

Since Mendelssohn's Op. 63 is a collection of six duets, though published in a specifically numbered order, they are not a unified “cycle,” and so singers are free to choose any or all they'd want to perform. Since the recital features a soprano and a baritone, let's start with three of the duets performed by soprano Christiane Libor, baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist Hartmut Höll.

#3. Gruss (Greeting) – Joseph von Eichendorff (Wherever I walk and gaze on valley and woods and field, from hill to mountain top, I greet you a thousand times – this, by the way, is the text Johannes Brahms would write on a Swiss post card to Clara Schumann after he heard an alp-horn play the melody he wrote down for her, which later became the famous horn call in the finale of his First Symphony. Here, Mendelssohn sets only the first three of the four stanzas, leaving out the last in which the lover, though “seemingly full of happy things,” will soon dig his own grave.)

#4. Herbstlied (Autumn Song) – Karl Klingemann, who was Mendelssohn's traveling partner on his visit to Scotland in 1829, and had provided him with an opera libretto; later, he prepared the text for Elijah. (So soon does spring turn to winter and merriment fades; the last songsters will soon be gone. Were you a dream, you thoughts of love? Only one thing will never falter: the yearning which never fades.)

#1. Ich wollt', mein Lieb' ergösse sich – Heinrich Heine (I wish I could pour my love into a single word the merry winds would merrily blow away and bring it to you where, in your slumber, my image would pursue you into your deepest dream.)

For the remaining three songs, I've chosen different recordings. While Mendelssohn writes them for two voices, they can still be performed by different combinations: two sopranos, a soprano and a mezzo, since they're “musical lines,” not specific characters (like a lover and his belovéd) regardless of the nature of the text. I'll continue with another soprano/baritone combination, though, simply because its the great Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, here joining his wife, Julia Várady, toward the end of his career.

#2. Abschiedslied der Zugvögel (Farewell Song of the Migrating Birds) – Hoffman von Fallersleben (How beautiful the fields were, how sad the world is now. Happy in the sun, we sang out into the world. But we poor birds are now sad, we no longer have a home; we must fly far away into distant lands.) 

#5. Volkslied (Folksong) – with soprano Angelika Kirchschlager, mezzo-soprano Barbara Bonney, and pianist Malcolm Martineau – setting a translation of Robert Burns' “O wert thou in the cauldest blast” though I wonder how well the German transcribes the Scots dialect (a lover seeks to protect his love from fierce storms: If I were Monarch of the Globe with thee to reign, the greatest jewel in my crown would be my Queen.) 

​ #6. Maiglöckchen und die Blümelein (The Lily-of-the-Valley and the Little Flowers) – with sopranos Nicola Proksch and Simona Mrázová, with Alexandr Starý at the piano – Hoffman von Fallersleben (The lily-of-the-valley rings out across the valley, calling all the little flowers to the dance, twice as lively after Master Hoar-Frost leaves; and to the dance I go, too!)

The first of these duets (as he published them), Ich wollt', mein Lieb, was composed in 1836, the same year he wrote his oratorio, St. Paul, a successful premiere that sealed his European reputation.

Then, in 1843, he founded the Leipzig Conservatory and also composed his Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream which includes the ubiquitous Wedding March, as a complement to his youthful Overture, written when he was a teenager. He also completed a “secular oratorio,” setting Goethe's First Walpurgis Night about the druids trying to practice their rituals in the face of an army of Christians occupying their lands (many pious Lutherans were shocked to discover those victorious voices in the finale were not the Christians...).

1844, then, saw his eighth visit to England and the commission of a new oratorio: Elijah was given its premiere in England two years later. Meanwhile, in addition to the Op.63 Duets on the program, he also composed his Violin Concerto, Op. 64, which he'd begun working on in 1838 but had difficulty between the necessary inspiration and a far-too-busy schedule to pay much attention to it.

Sometimes, he worked very quickly, but other times he was constantly distracted by thoughts of self-doubt (which seems so contradictory compared to the brilliance of those teenaged masterpieces!). No doubt his short piano pieces like the Songs Without Words and vocal songs and duets like his Op. 63 were more of a diversion. His Italian Symphony, on another hand, was “completed” in 1833 but he was dissatisfied with it, eventually making revisions to the last three movements which weren't published until after his death. Curiously, musicologists tracking down what he had, in fact, revised, came up with an “original” version, recorded in 1999, and found, as one critic noted, “Surprisingly for so perceptive a composer he undermined the original's freshness, smoothing over melodic lines (as in the Pilgrim's March) and extending linking passages. A fascinating comment on the danger of second thoughts after white-hot inspiration.”

It gives one pause...

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The program ends with works not written in the 1840s by Europeans – but then, very little was going on in the American Musical Scene at that time, anyway. Any serious would-be composer wanting to pursue intense study with a master-teacher (other than the occasional musical immigrants who also happened to compose) had to go to Europe, mostly Germany – and usually came back writing like Germans. And then John Knowles Paine, against equally intense opposition from the Brahmins of Harvard, managed to form a music department that could give academic credit not just for simple music appreciation classes but also composition in 1875, initially sharing his classroom with a chemistry lab. When Antonín Dvořák was imported to teach at the National Conservatory in New York City (where he composed his Symphony From the New World in 1894), the question of national identity became a hot topic. Dvořák suggested his students study American Folk Music at a time when no one really knew what that meant since a nation of immigrants brought with it “folk music” from their homelands. So he suggested the “Negro Spiritual” as a source, and other composers, regardless of their racial identity, decided Native American songs and dances should be the True Source. Amy Beach, composing in Boston at the time, thought, since her ancestry was British, she (and collectively “we of the North”) should use English, Scots, and Irish songs, so she called it the Gaelic Symphony.

This crisis of identity continued with the development of the “concert/serious” and “popular” dichotomy. While we don't find Brahms writing a Violin Concerto and then using a Hungarian “Gypsy” dance in the finale as anything out of the ordinary, the inclusion of, say, jazz into our “serious concert” music was cause for the equivalent of a riot and a lot of snarky racist comments (even the 1950 Grove's Dictionary listed Dvořák's American Quartet as the “N-Word” Quartet...!).

Then along came George Gershwin, plugging away as a tune-smith on Tin Pan Alley, writing hit after hit for musical theater reviews, who was asked in 1923 to write a work for piano and orchestra combining elements of Classical Music and American Jazz. You've probably heard of it: Rhapsody in Blue.

Once Gershwin wrote an all-out opera based on the stories and music of the American Negro in Porgy and Bess (which today can open up whole new arguments about cultural appropriation), we became aware of new directions for this musical divide: opera on the “high culture” side and the “Broadway Musical Comedy” on the “popular” side. In Europe, there had always been “serious” opera and the more “popular” Singspiel – in Mozart's day, there was Don Giovanni on the one hand and The Magic Flute on the popular hand with its spoken dialogue and tunes with more popular appeal, especially in Papageno's music – or, in Brahms' day, the operettas and dance music of Johann Strauss Jr. (of whom Brahms was a huge fan).

Out of this “opera/operetta” divide, Americans found the popular side of the American Musical Theater on Broadway, where Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1943 hit Oklahoma! set off a new chapter in American music.

Unlike normal collaborations between composers and librettists where the composer would take a pre-written libretto and set the words to music, in most Musicals, the composer would write the tunes and then the lyricist would be brought in to write the lyrics to fit the melody. But Richard Rodgers and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein became creative collaborators, working together to shape the development of the plot. Originally called Away We Go, once the song “Oklahoma!” in the last scene was turned into a big “show-stopper” number while they were in Boston on out-of-town try-outs, they decided that should be the title of the show. (Whew!)

While the plot is not so different from something that could've made a good old-fashioned European opera – lovers caught up in a mythical kingdom winnings its independence? – the story and its music becomes something so American, one can't imagine it any other way.

In the duet, “People will say we're in love,” the other characters think (correctly, as it turns out) that Laurey, an independent farm girl, and Curly, a newly-hired cowboy, are in love. In what Hammerstein called a "conditional love song," they warn each other what not to do so people won't misinterpret their intentions. Neither wants to admit to the other their true feelings. In this performance, the 1979 revival cast features Christine Andreas as Laurey and Laurence Guittard as Curly.

A composer like Leonard Bernstein could write a symphony or a jazz-inspired piano concerto or an opera based on Voltaire, but his lasting popularity might be based more on West Side Story, opening in 1957, than on any of the orchestral works he'd compose hoping to gain the respect of the “serious” crowd of American composers he championed as a conductor (like writing West Side Story or the Chichester Psalms wasn't good enough?).

West Side Story was, essentially, a story transplanted from The Olde World – Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet but as if they'd grown up in 1950s New York City in Spanish Harlem (ask yourself: would that music be as good if Bernstein had set Shakespeare's tale in Renaissance Italy instead?). But it wasn't the first Shakespearean Musical in Broadway history: in 1948, Cole Porter produced his response to Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, a setting of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew (actually, the mirroring in real life of Shakespeare's plot in the actors putting on Shakespeare's play).

One of the lyricists working with Bernstein on West Side Story was a young composer who would, eventually, grow up to become another Great Composer of the American Musical Theater, Stephen Sondheim. Like Cole Porter, he would write his own lyrics – and didn't Wagner do the same thing? (though I'm trying not to think of a Broadway adaptation called Ring! The Musical) – and is there any more operatic a musical than Sweeny Todd (thinking more of those Grand Guignol plots like Faust or... oh yeah, The Bleeding Nun!)?

In his 1971 musical Follies, he explored the foibles of the passing of time and of popular tastes as well, with the reunion of some actors from back in the day of a theatrical revue (the “follies” of the title), now deep into middle age and looking back nostalgically, speaking of folly, on their past glory days.

In the love duet, “Too Many Mornings,” is it between Ben, whose life feels empty, and Sally Now (who thinks, finally, he's fallen in love with her) or Ben and the memory of Sally Then? In this rather badly filmed video from a 2012 stage production, you'll get the idea how the ghosts from the past intertwine through Ben's inner thoughts: with Ron Raines as Ben, and Vicki Clark as Sally.

While Kiss Me Kate is framed as a play-within-a-play where reality imitates art – remind anyone of that verismo classic, I Pagliacci? – the duet, “Wunderbar,” from the rehearsal-for-the-play's opening scene, is a further “Easter egg” buried within the layers of the plot: Fred, the egotistical director of the play who's also starring as Shakespeare's Petruchio, is constantly arguing with his ex-wife, Lili, a former Hollywood star playing Katherine. On the anniversary of their divorce, Lili shows Fred the engagement ring from her future husband, a Washington insider, so naturally they reminisce about how they first met; in this case, singing in an operetta that included the number “Wunderbar!”, an old-fashioned Viennese waltz, giving them the chance to sing and dance and remember the Good Old Days. From there, of course, the plot thickens quickly, but let's leave it at that. Here is the classic pair of Kathryn Grayson as Lili and Howard Keel as Fred from the 1953 MGM film:

Whether applying “musicological insights” into the development of that American cultural contribution, the Broadway Musical, does anything for your deeper appreciation of these three duets that close the program or not, if nothing else you can watch the videos and think “Damn, that was fun!”

Dick Strawser

The Poulenc Trio Plays Poulenc (no surprise) and Brings a Few Others Along for the Ride

Please note, this Sunday's concert with the Poulenc Trio is being held at the Derry Presbyterian Church in Hershey (PA) at 4pm – click here for directions.

The Poulenc Trio

Since they call themselves The Poulenc Trio and they're an ensemble consisting of an oboist, a bassoonist, and a pianist, it would be obvious Poulenc's Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano should be at the center of their repertoire. To be honest, it's more like “near the end of the program,” but I'll begin with it. Here is the Poulenc Trio playing the Poulenc Trio which Francis Poulenc completed in 1926 when he was 27:

Since I can't find the 3^rd movement with the Poulenc Trio, here it is from a studio recording made in 1957 with oboist Pierre Pierlot, bassoonist Maurice Allard, and pianist, Francis Poulenc, now 58.

It's the usual “fast-slow-fast” combination of movements, but it begins with these very serious sounding chords in the piano, a little off-putting with their dissonances, perhaps, followed by the winds playing with almost operatic seriousness. Imagine hearing this in the mid-1920s as Late-Romanticism's lushness was giving way to a harder edged Neo-Classicism, the “New Classical Style” with what many of its contemporaries called “Wrong-Note Harmony.” It has the same clean lines of Mozart and Haydn's 18th Century, but with something... well... a little different. It's almost as if Poulenc were giving his "serious" listeners, as they say, the bird...

Poulenc at 18 (w/bird)

After this recitative-like introduction, it's “aaaaand they're off!” barging into a rollicking presto that seems anything but serious, something that must have struck its critics like a mash-up of “Handel Meets Offenbach.” The slow movement, lyrical and flowing, shows off Poulenc's melodic gift – he would later become one of the great song composers of his day – before the gigue-like finale frolics along to its delightful end.

Francis Poulenc was a French composer, through and through – more specifically, a Parisian composer, born there in January of 1899 and dying there in 1963. But not just born in Paris: in the 8th arrondissment centered around the Champs-Élysées with the famous Arc de Triomphe at one end, a district known for its theatres, cafés, and luxury shops, if not the “Main Street” of Paris, certainly one of the most famous streets in the world (even if you only think of George Gershwin listening to taxi horns while sitting in a sidewalk café in 1926). No doubt Poulenc's growing up in the heart of this joie de vivre had some influence on his light-hearted musical style.

And because of this, Poulenc is often not “taken seriously” by serious-minded music-lovers. When showed his Rapsodie negre, Poulenc's first “serious” composition (considering the very first piece on his list of works was a "Procession for the Cremation of a Mandarin" from 1914), a professor at the Conservatoire thought the 17-year-old composer was trying to make a fool of him. It hardly got any better as he explored the various possibilities open to a young composer in the Paris of World War I at a time when Debussy was dying and Ravel was at his peak.

Poulenc's family was wealthy – manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, in fact – and his mother was “an excellent pianist” who started giving him lessons when he was 5. Her brother, known to us as “Oncle Papoum,” introduced him to Paris' lively theatrical life. Young Francis could recite Mallarmé from memory at 10 and at 14 was among those amazed at the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. At 16, he began studying piano with the great Ricardo Viñes, a friend of Debussy's and Ravel's, and soon met some other composers named Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Georges Auric (they soon added two more friends including Germaine Tailleferre, to form a group known as Les Six – as if their musical style wasn't daring enough: a group of composers that included a woman!) not to forget Erik Satie, a major influence, who was the front-rank avant-garde composer du jour.

He tried studying with Ravel but that apparently didn't work out: Fauré, then the director of the Conservatoire, had an assistant, Charles Koechlin (much over-looked by American audiences today), who proved more sympathetic. Poulenc studied with him off-and-on between 1921 and 1924. “By mutual consent,” according to Grove's Dictionary, “Poulenc's involvement with counterpoint went no further than Bach chorales,” meaning he never bothered with fugue-writing, one of the cornerstones of the development of ones contrapuntal skills. His ballet Les biches was a huge success with Diaghilev's company in 1924. (The untranslatable title can be loosely translated as “The doe-eyed young ladies” though there was also the underworld slang of “someone, male or female, with 'deviant sexual proclivities'.”) In the meantime, he started several pieces of chamber music – easier for a young beginning composer to get performed than writing orchestral and operatic works. 

Poulenc in 1925

But between 1918 and 1926 there had been seven pieces of chamber music: a sonata for clarinet and bassoon (heavily influenced by Stravinsky's 1918 L'Histoire du soldat) and another for horn, trumpet, and trombone, both from 1922, survived (not counting the piano “arrangements” he made of both works). But his catalog of works also lists two violin sonatas, a string quartet, and a quintet for clarinet and strings which did not (the string quartet was rumored to have been consigned to the famous Paris Sewers). Notice the survivors were works for wind instruments; the ones destroyed or lost were primarily for strings.

Poulenc never was comfortable writing for strings: he considered his one surviving Violin Sonata (his fourth attempt and the only one published, 1943) a failure, and he thought the Cello Sonata (written over a span of eight years in the '40s) would've sounded better on the bassoon. While a string trio and another string quartet would be trashed, one of his happier experiences with chamber music was the Sextet for Piano and... Wind Quintet! 

While it's conceivable this Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano could've been written initially with clarinet and cello in mind, the infectious joy of the first movement and the heart-on-sleeve romance in the slow movement may have struck him later as better suited for the combination he ended up choosing. (Even in these post-Covid days, perhaps I should reconsider using the word “infectious”...) To get away from family distractions, he retreated to a hotel room in Cannes (to avoid distractions??). While there, he met Igor Stravinsky who gave him some helpful insights in how to handle some problematical moments in the first movement. Poulenc dedicated the newly finished work to his friend, Manuel de Falla. At that same time, he met Wanda Landowska who was re-introducing the harpsichord to modern audiences and she commissioned a new concerto from him.

Poulenc (w/Mickey)

Self-taught because his parents intended him for a career in the family company, he described himself as a “Vulgarian” who wrote in his trademark light-hearted style to his final years in the early-1960s, long after such a style had gone out of fashion. However, in the summer of 1936, after an unexpected religious awakening following the death of a close friend and fellow composer in a violent car accident and his visit to a famous religious shrine shortly afterward, he began composing with a new-found and often religious seriousness, writing dramatic choral works during the Nazi occupation setting words of Resistance poets, which culminated in his intensely dramatic opera, The Dialogue of the Carmelites of 1957. Still, there are passages in some of his religious works that remind me of those photographs you might find of nuns playing soccer. 

Poulenc loved to absorb almost anything that caught his imagination. He might evoke the past or the new-fangled sound of jazz. His love of Mozart is evident through many of his works, even this trio: he opens the slow movement of his Concerto for Two Pianos, written in 1932, with a definite bow to Mozart but it quickly moves off into a style that is decidedly his own. There are, as well, tinges of jazz by way of Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, premiered only a few months earlier, not to mention the appearance of the Balinese gamelan which he'd first heard the year before.

Even though his contemporaries might disparage his style, he himself was more open-minded than we might think. In 1921, he traveled to Vienna where he met Arnold Schoenberg and “talked shop” with him and his pupils (Schoenberg at the time was developing what soon became his “Method of Composing with 12-Tones”). A fan of Pierre Boulez, playing recordings of his Marteau sans maître for some friends, Poulenc wrote in 1961 how he was sorry to have to miss a performance of Boulez' recent Pli selon pli “because I am sure it is well worth hearing” (Boulez did not return the sentiment). 

In 1942 he wrote to a friend, “I know perfectly well I am not one of those composers who made harmonic innovations like Igor [Stravinsky], Debussy or Ravel but I think there is room for new music which doesn't mind using other people's chords. Wasn't that the case with Mozart-Schubert?”

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Viet Cuong (photo by Aaron Jay Young)

Born in California in 1990 and growing up in Marietta, GA, Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong – it's pronounced vee-EHT kwawng – “enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical” in his music, “and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying.”

“Audience members are in for a sound that they’ve never heard before,” according to the Trio's website. “Explain Yourself features what must be the most multiphonic oboe notes ever written in a tonal chamber music work. Multiphonics are a special playing technique where oboist Alex Vvedensky” (the oboist at the time it was composed) “will he heard to play multiple notes at once, similar to the ‘double-stop’ effect used by string instrumentalists. The multiphonic effect adds to the wild feeling that infuses the piece.”

“As a clarinetist and admirer of twentieth century French music,” the composer writes, “I’ve always loved the music of Francis Poulenc. I’m particularly drawn to the joyous, witty nature of many of his pieces, and, with this piece being for the Poulenc Trio (plus clarinet!), I wanted to pay homage to Poulenc and his sense of humor. As such, the piece actually begins with a direct quote of his chamber piano concert, Aubade. This quote serves a few purposes: it acts as a marker for when the first section “repeats” itself, and, perhaps more importantly, the main melody of the entire piece uses the same pitches as the opening of Aubade.

“After the Poulenc quote, the piece jolts into a tango-like romp with a baroque flair. The instruments all play an equal role in this music and, all things considered, it’s pretty mild mannered. After a few minutes, the Aubade quote signifies a trip back to the beginning after the first climax concludes— much like a repeat in a classical symphony’s first movement. However, this repeat goes awry as the oboist begins to act out by replacing regular notes with raucous multiphonics. The other wind instruments begin to pick up on this mischievous behavior, and all three of them start to interrupt, mock, and distort the phrases. The pianist notices and isn’t pleased. Much like a frustrated parent or teacher, the pianist hammers out dense chords, essentially scolding the winds to get back on track.

“Things nearly fall apart as the winds continue to misbehave. Eventually it all comes to a head when the pianist and oboist perform an imitative duet. In doing this, the oboist has a chance to explain himself and prove that, while these multiphonics can be funny, they can also be played melodically and provide structure to a phrase. Won over, the pianist joins in on the fun and the piece concludes in a place where functional classical harmonies and multiphonics can coexist.

“This piece was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University for the Poulenc Trio.”

While I couldn't find a recording available of “Explain Yourself!”, I decided to use this one to illustrate Mr. Cuong's musical versatility. After you've read the “humorous description” behind the music in the work you'll hear at Sunday's concert, this one, written in 2023, was inspired by grief and the composer's response to the loss of his father. “I felt as if I had lost my leaves,” he writes. “Many days I feared those leaves would never grow back. After struggling for months to write, I finally found some healing while creating Deciduous. This involved revisiting chord progressions that brought me solace throughout my life and activating them in textures that I have enjoyed exploring in recent years. The piece cycles through these chord progressions, building to a moment where it’s stripped of everything and must find a way to renew itself. While I continue to struggle with this loss, I have come to understand that healing is not as much of a linear process as it is a cyclical journey, where, without fail, every leafless winter is followed by a spring.”

(Deciduous by Viet Cuong, performed by the Texas Tech University Symphonic Wind Ensemble, Dr. Sarah McKoin, Director)

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Mikhail Glinka, painted by Ilya Repin in 1887

Mikhail Glinka's name is most likely familiar to many of you, if not his story. Some of his music is indeed famous – the operas, A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmilla, a few orchestral works, but most specifically, Kamarinskaya – but the “Trio Pathétique” may be unfamiliar territory. Written originally for clarinet, bassoon, and piano, it was published with an alternative ensemble, the traditional piano trio with violin and cello. That was the publisher's doing since he could make more money selling the sheet music to amateur string players than there would be clarinetists and bassoonists looking for things to play (that's the reason violists can thank Brahms for writing two viola sonatas at the end of his life: the publisher saw little chance of any income from stuff for clarinet!). So it's not illogical to find an oboist and a bassoonist appropriating some other combination's repertoire (I refer to the previous concert with all the transcriptions for Cello Quartet!).

It's in four movements with the scherzo in second place, but there's a break between the slow movement and the spirited finale. For Mozart, D Minor was a dramatic key – his demonic D Minor Piano Concerto and the statue music of Don Giovanni (G Minor was, for Mozart, the tragic key); Glinka's finale might seem more despairing, like a heart-broken lover taking leave of an ex-girlfriend perhaps?

Glinka in 1840

If you're thinking there's a connection between Glinka's little-known trio and Tchaikovsky's famous 6th Symphony, the Pathétique, keep in mind Glinka composed his trio in 1832 and Tchaikovsky was born in 1840. In Tchaikovsky's case, so the famous story goes, he'd completed the work with its bleak ending before coming up with the subtitle. He was thinking “Tragic” except it smacked of Brahms and his “Tragic” Overture – and Tchaikovsky detested Brahms' music – when his brother Modeste suggested the French pathétique, not so much in the literal English sense of “pathetic” (as in “man, you're pathetic!”) but from the word pathos, “a quality in a situation, film, or play that makes people feel sadness and pity.”

In Glinka's case, after the first performance, the bassoonist told the composer (in Italian) "Ma questo è disperazione!" Again, this is not so literally desperation as in "feeling desperate" – imagine playing the “Desperation Trio” – as despair. Given the first publication of the piece wasn't until 1878, 21 years after the composer's death, whether it was known (if known at all) in the interim as the Trio Pathétique, I can't say, but the publisher prefaced the score with a quotation in French from the composer himself: «je n’ai connu l’amour qu’à travers le malheur qu’il cause» ("I have only known love through the misfortune it causes") whether the title was his suggestion or not.

Given Glinka's habitual womanizing, however, this might make more sense, as one commentator suggested, “[evoking] the trail of amorous spite”. Other adjectives often attached to the composer are “indolent, self-indulgent, a hypochondriac, and a libertine who wasted years of his life in dissipation, the pursuit of women, or simple idleness,” and we might see the title in a more comic light, given the light-heartedness of most of the piece rather than tragic. But then Tchaikovsky's symphony is not entirely “one of sadness” given the third movement's rousing march, the second movement's nostalgic 5/4 “waltz” or even the drama of the turbulent conflicts throughout the first movement.

Stylistically, given Glinka's future reputation and the fact that, in 1832, he hadn't had a chance to find his voice yet (always an elusive adventure for any young composer), this early work of his sounds more like Spohr or, in parts, Weber, or for that matter any of the hundreds of other once popular composers of the day who are now largely or entirely forgotten. Who listens to someone like Moscheles, Herz, or Kalkbrenner these days without thinking “Chopin did it better”? On the other hand, checking out Kalkbrenner's 4th Piano Concerto from 1835, it's an appealing and delightful piece, thoroughly entertaining: what would be wrong with hearing it once in a while instead of something that's constantly overplayed? Yes, well... moving right along...

Speaking of hindsight, if you're familiar with Glinka's name and a few of the few pieces he left us, you might expect some “really Russian-sounding music” here, comparable to the Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla or his brilliant dance-piece Kamarinskaya, perhaps the last work he completed, which has been called “the acorn from which the mighty oak of Russian music grew” (Stravinsky's usually given credit for that) but Tchaikovsky had said much the same thing much earlier. In fact, if you want to talk about the direct influence of Glinka on the young, developing Tchaikovsky, the finale of his 2nd Symphony (now re-translated as “The Ukrainian Symphony”) with its repetitive folk-song melody, is a direct descendant of Kamarinskaya.

“But,” you'll think while listening to Glinka's trio, “there's nothing remotely Russian-sounding here!” And that's basically because, quite simply, it was written before he discovered himself to be a composer of Russian music. Or for that matter, before any Russian-born composer had made the same discovery!

Unfortunately, that involves reams and reams of historical and cultural background: if you want, I could suggest a few very fat books that would delve into the question, “What Makes the Music Russian?” Suffice it to say that, at the time Glinka was growing up, there were no music schools in “all of Russia.” In fact, there were no music schools in Russia until two years after Glinka died – at the age of 52, btw – when Anton Rubinstein, a Russian pianist and composer who was, he lamented, “too German for the Russians and too Russian for the Germans,” founded a Music Society in Moscow and subsequently a branch in St. Petersburg that became conservatories. Among the first graduates was a young law clerk named Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.

So technically Glinka did not have the resources a conservatory-trained student would have had. Nor did he, like Beethoven, have the support of the immediate past with models comparable to Haydn and Mozart and centuries of Germanic culture. There were no Russian composers, for the most part, and those that were were, like the architects who built St. Petersburg or the choir-masters who trained the singers in the Imperial choirs and theaters, imported from Italy. Yes, they slapped an onion-shaped dome on a church tower and called it “Russian” but that's about the extent of it. Those singers trained by Italian choir-masters (who were often also composers) sang Italian operas and those who began writing their own operas – even the Empress, Catherine the Great, wrote some librettos for them! – wrote in the Italian style.

In his epic novel War and Peace, Tolstoy points out how aristocrats spoke French rather than Russian and it was Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 that sent Russia's nobility scrambling to learn Russian (which they considered a “brutish” language) so as not to appear to be siding with the enemy. If you've read War and Peace, that most Russian of Russian novels, there are great swaths of French, even in the original Russian publications, stretching across the opening scenes as members of the Imperial elite gather to party and discuss the latest news from the Continent as Russia finds itself being dragged into the Napoleonic conflict of 1805.

And Glinka was born in 1804 on the estate of his father, a retired army colonel and member of this landed gentry, whose lands had been part of the family since the mid-1660s. The fact this estate, near Smolensk, was on the route Napoleon's troops took in 1812 during the course of their attack on Moscow and more importantly on their disastrous retreat following the burning of Moscow (“scorched earth” and the Russian Winter were two of the Russian armies most successful secret weapons). Russia was beginning to awaken, culturally, with this generation, but it was a long and very slow process, not an overnight blossoming, following centuries of isolation from Europe, largely begun around 1700 by Tsar Peter I (known as “The Great” to the West; to the Russians, not so much).

Growing up in this hot-house environment of the aristocracy, Glinka was not expected to “work” except as a military officer or a court minister (given the Byzantine bureaucracy that presumed to run this vast country), neither of which appealed to him, hence the idea of his being “indolent.” If you're interested in a Russian novel that won't make you want to slit your wrists, I strongly recommend Goncharov's Oblomov where a “thoroughly superfluous man” of the gentry class spends the entire first part of the novel lying in bed trying to think about the day ahead, “raising slothfulness to an art-form,” yet without making any decisions about what needs to be done (he's basically the patron saint of procrastinators – btw, I've been meaning to reread this novel for years, now...). It was begun during the mid-1840s when Glinka was trying to find his artistic voice, and published in 1859, the year Rubinstein founded his Moscow Music Society and school.

Raised first by his hypochondriac of a grandmother until around the age of 10, he then went to live with his uncle on a nearby estate where there was a small orchestra which played Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (who had written his Eroica in 1803). But in addition to hearing the peasants singing folk-songs with their crude traditional, often dissonant harmonizations, it was a clarinet quartet by Crussel (a Finnish-born composer of German heritage and training) that caught the boy's interest, and so he was then given music lessons on the piano and the violin. When he was sent to the Imperial Capital to attend a school for “aristocratic youth” at 13, he also widened his musical exposure, including all of three lessons with the Irish pianist John Field, the true “inventor” of the Nocturne who, as Clementi's traveling assistant, had been abandoned in Petersburg but stayed on to pursue a career as a concert pianist and teacher (in 1818, he left for Moscow where he stayed until returning to Europe four years later).

But the city was full of wealthy amateurs who amused each other with in-home performances and who wrote their own music imitating the more popular composers, mostly melancholy songs and fancifully titled piano pieces. Glinka, having no recourse to professional music-making otherwise, fell into this culture and wrote a great many such pieces himself – salon music, it's usually called, with the same dismissive air we unfortunately treat the word “amateur” today (sniff...). (In the 19th Century, the term amateur had nothing to do with the quality of the artist, but rather with the fact they were doing it out of love (hence, amo – amateur) rather than for financial gain. As aristocrats – especially as aristocratic ladies – it was also unseemly they should pursue an actual career in it!)

As for his bureaucratic career, young Glinka was appointed as an assistant secretary in the Department of Public Highways (RUSSdot, I guess you could call it), having failed to gain entry into the more prestigious Foreign Office. The rather light demands of his work-life did not impinge on his becoming a leading dilettante in Petersburg. But when in 1830 his physician suggested a trip to Italy for his health, he ended up in Milan (then part of the Austrian Empire) where he attended some classes at the conservatory and was so bored with the academic work – the study counterpoint has nearly killed more than one budding composer – he found a new hobby: hanging out with singers, especially romancing the ladies. With this new crowd, he met composers like Berlioz and Mendelssohn – both were in Rome at the same time, working on their Fantastique and Italian Symphonies respectively – and followed one soprano, a Russian, to Naples and sat in on her voice-lessons where he learned some of the techniques involved in bel canto singing (a vocal style that also greatly influenced Chopin). While in Naples, he also met Donizetti and Bellini who were in town for the premieres of their Anna Bolena and La sonnambula respectively. However, bored with Italy, he traveled by way of Switzerland to Berlin where he met Siegfried Dehn, a well-known theorist, with whom he began serious study of composition.

Dehn, Glinka later wrote, “not only put my musical knowledge into order but also my ideas on art in general, and after his lessons I no longer groped my way along, but worked with the full consciousness of what I was doing.” This was in 1833. The following spring, word arrived that Glinka's father had died: he must return to Russia and the estate he'd now inherited.

So while he'd been in Italy – specifically Milan – hating counterpoint and not taking his music education too seriously, the then 28-year-old Glinka wrote a trio for some friends of his: he played the piano, with Pietro Tassistro, the clarinetist, and Antonio Cantú, the bassoonist. They were not amateurs but members of the orchestra at La Scala.

Whatever the subsequent history of this piece may have been – keeping in mind, the following year Glinka left Italy and decided to pursue the study of composition in earnest – its publication as late as 1878 was due to Glinka's long-suffering younger sister, Ludmilla (she died in 1906!) who had frequently acted as his nurse during his various illnesses. Returning to Berlin and just resuming his studies with Dehn after having heard the Crucifixus from Bach's B Minor Mass, he caught a cold and died at the age of 52 – I can just hear the hypochondriac now: “I told you I was sick!” It was Ludmilla who had him reburied in Petersburg. She had always been urging him to compose whenever he would give up in frustration, especially after the failure of his second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmilla, so it was perfectly natural she spent the decades following his death trying to keep his music alive.

Failing to convince the authorities to stage Ruslan in Petersburg, she sent a young friend of hers to Prague, hoping to mount the opera there and maybe impress the Russian opera houses to take it more seriously. Eventually, it worked, but not until 1872. There was only one copy left of A Life for the Tsar, his first opera – which was a success – so she had this same friend and a couple of his friends make two new copies of the score; and just in time because shortly afterward, there was a fire at the Imperial opera house and the original manuscript was lost in the flames!

By the way, these young friends of Ludmilla's? The one sent to Prague was Mily Balakirev, and one of the copyists was Modeste Mussorgsky. Soon, there were a few more gathering at Ludmilla's home for musical discussions and performances who would become the nucleus of a bunch of composers forever known as The Mighty Handful – or more famously, The Russian Five.

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Shostakovich (front, right) watching a football match

A much better known Russian composer is Dmitri Shostakovich and thanks to Stuart Malina's love of his symphonies, we've heard quite a few of them with the Harrisburg Symphony over the years – most recently the 6th earlier this season. But the music on the Poulenc Trio's program – perhaps in deference to the typical joie-de-vivre of their namesake – is not the Shostakovich of those slowly unwinding, expansive, often gloomy opening movements typical of so many of his symphonies, well-known for their often dark and always intense emotional underpinnings. There is, contrary to what you might assume, a lighter side to Shostakovich – and more than just the tongue-in-cheek naughtiness of the Polka from the ballet, The Age of Gold.

His Moskva Cheryómushki is basically a Soviet equivalent of a Broadway Musical though it's called an operetta (less serious than a real, all-out opera) – just as his “Jazz Suites” are not so much Western jazz as English dance-hall tunes! And when you listen to this, if it's new to you, I defy you to win a “Name That Composer” contest – or even realize this is RRRRussian Music!

Here's the Poulenc Trio in a 2019 performance recorded at Peabody in Baltimore:

Ostensibly, the show's plot focuses on the typical Soviet citizens' never-ending search for livable housing conditions. Cheryómushki is a real place, a subsidized housing development in Moscow full of cheap houses built in 1956. There are seven “good” characters and three villains which include a colleague of the hero's who's conniving to get the apartment first, the corrupt developer (a petty bureaucrat), and an equally corrupt low-ranking estate agent who refuses to give over the key. The scene for "A Spin Around Moscow" describes the delight of the "good characters" as they are driven across town, no doubt careening through winding streets, to see their new home.

And what did the composer think of this step outside his typical symphonic comfort zone?

Before the premiere, Shostakovich wrote to a friend, “I am behaving very properly and attending rehearsals of my operetta. I am burning with shame. If you have any thoughts of coming to the first night, I advise you to think again. It is not worth spending time to feast your eyes and ears on my disgrace. Boring, unimaginative, stupid. This is, in confidence, all I have to tell you.”

Well, yes... enough said... moving right along...

The Poulenc Trio prefaces this with a “Romance” – in Russian, the word for “song” is “romance” just as in German it's Lied – taken from his 1955 film score for the Russian thriller, “The Gadfly,” based on an 1897 novel by Ethel Voynich set in the 1840s during the Italian attempts to dispel the occupying Austrian forces. Again, the plot is not important to enjoying the melody Shostakovich wrote, here – you can read the plot summary if you're curious – but, not being familiar either with the novel or the film or who's involved in this particular scene, I'm curious about the motivic references to Schubert and Schumann I hear in it; not that all Russian music (even Soviet music) needs to sound like a peasant dealing with lost love or a harsher-than-usual winter...

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Handel and Rossini may frame the program, but I'll end this post with them.

The trio sonata as a “form” – more correctly, a genre – was sort of a default setting in the Baroque Era. Typically, it consisted of four players because, in Baroque music, the role of “the continuo” was always played by two instruments, an instrument that could play harmony like a harpsichord or organ, and another to emphasize the all-important bass-line of the harmony with a cello, bass, or bassoon. If the piece was played in a church, they'd use the organ; in some aristocrat's music room, a harpsichord – or, for that matter, even a lute of some kind. The two “melody instruments” playing over this accompaniment were normally violins, but it would be possible to use, say, a violin and a flute or oboe, or a pair of wind instruments, matched or mismatched. It really didn't matter: the music was not specifically composed to suit the violin the way Beethoven or Paganini would later write for them. 

With the Poulenc Trio, their solution was to use a modern day piano, of course – still, a transcription given the difference in technique needed to play a harpsichord or organ – but also to use the bassoon not as a continuo instrument but as one of the "melody" instruments, even if they're not playing in the same octave like a pair of flutes.

There are some 28 trio sonatas listed in the Handel catalogue, a few of them in F Major and some of them available in different editions. This is the one the Poulenc Trio will perform to open their concert:

And now to conclude, finally, with a Fantasy on Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, here recorded by the Poulenc Trio in Baltimore, 2021:

Officially, this last work on the program is one of those “bring-the-house-down” bravura concert fantasies based on themes from other composers' popular works. In this case, oboist Charles Triébert and bassoonist Eugène Jancourt, both famous teachers at the Paris Conservatoire and highly acclaimed performers adapted some of the greatest moments from Rossini's opera, L'Italiana in Algeri (“The Italian Girl in Algiers”), originally written in 18 days in 1813 when Rossini was 21. Incidentally, Triébert also improved the fingering system for the oboe in 1855 and Jancourt brought various improvements to the bassoon to make it a more reliable solo instrument, especially improving the upper register – another reason both men should be remembered fondly by oboists and bassoonists of today. 

While one could argue the music Jancourt and Triébert adapted for their “Fantasie Concertante” was by Rossini, the way it was presented – particularly with its virtuosic cadenzas and technical passages – was entirely their own, transcending the art of arranging and going beyond the original roles assigned to the singers. I don't know if anyone every called Triébert the Paganini of the Oboe or Jancourt the Franz Liszt of the Bassoon, but it would amount to the same thing, given the number of such fantasies that frequently appeared on their concert tours like Paganini's Fantasy on the G String from Rossini's Moses and Liszt on... well, to pick just one, let's say his Concert Paraphrase on Verdi's Rigoletto.

And now, moving right along... enjoy the concert! 

– Dick Strawser