Concert Series II
November 2011
Friday, November 4, SOU Recital Hall, Ashland, 7:30 pm
Saturday, November 5, Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater, Medford, 7:30
pm
Sunday, November 6, GPHS Performing Arts Center, Grants Pass, 3 pm
Season Sponsor
Jim Collier
Wagner: Götterdämmerung:
Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey
Saint-Saens: Cello Concerto No. 1
Chas Barnard, cello
Schumann: Symphony No. 3, "Rhenish"
All are invited to a FREE pre-concert talk one hour before each performance.
Free ticket vouchers for students
Program Notes
Click here for Program Notes Especially for Young People [PDF] by Nancy Golden
Twilight of the Gods (Götterdammerüng):
“Dawn & Siegfried’s Rhine Journey”
(1874)
Richard Wagner -- Germany 1813-1883
Wagner and Schumann were born just two years apart, both in Germany. They led opposite sides of the great Romantic debate, where do we go after Beethoven? Wagner advocated program (pictorial) music, a radical answer at the time. His grandiose visions matched his monumental ego, and his passions were equally large. Until he won the patronage of the “mad king,” Ludwig of Bavaria, he led a nomadic life all over Europe, slipping away from creditors or exiled for his revolutionary activities. His writing and his music stirred political controversy so deep that it is only now beginning to dissipate. Shocking though it was in his day, the extravagant beauty of his sound has kept his work alive in opera houses throughout the world. To quote Sir George Grove, the great arbiter of all things musical: “Wagner did more than any other composer to change music, and indeed to change art and thinking about it ... no-one can deny his greatness.”
He studied piano and viola as a child, but felt more interest in theater and writing. Hearing his first Beethoven symphony transformed his life: “I fell ill of a fever and when I recovered, I was a musician.” He immediately began to study composition and wrote his first opera when he was twenty. The most important event of his life, however, was meeting the philosopher Schopenhauer, who believed that music holds the “supreme role” among the arts and that it is the “direct expression” of the “world essence,” which is “blind, impulsive will.”
Wagner then sought to unite all of the arts--tone (music), poetry, drama, text, design, and movement–into “staged music drama.” He wove together Grundthemen (base themes or leitmotifs) in a continuous, non-stop flow of integrated melodies and harmonies. He called his Grundthemen “guides-to-feeling,” each one identifying an action, character, emotion, even a place or a thing, as a clear code for following the action of the drama. He wrote his own libretti, often based on myth, and managed everything else, including sets and costumes. He called for huge orchestras, lush brass, chromatic harmonies, and expansive melodies. Above all, he was one of the world’s great story tellers.
Wagner adapted Dawn and Siefgried’s Rhine Journey as a stand-alone concert piece from his prologue to Twilight of the Gods, the final music drama of The Ring. It recalls the moment in 1842 when Wagner first saw the Rhine: “...with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland.” The music and its Grundthemen portray Siegfried and Brünnhilde emerging from their cave, surrounded by magic fire; dawn shimmering on the river; the Rhine-maidens; the ring and its powers; Siegfried’s arrival at the beginning of the adventure that will destroy him.
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, A Minor, Op. 33 (1872)
Camille Saint-Saëns -- France, 1835-1921
Born just twenty years after Wagner and Schumann, Saint-Saëns actively promoted both of them. He, too, called Beethoven “the greatest, the only really great artist.” And he, too, attempted to bring the other arts into music. He devoted his life to creating a serious national music in France after decades of frivolous art designed for the pleasures of the court. Although his own works are regarded as “not deep,” he wielded enormous influence through their popularity, his organ and piano performances, his trenchant essays, and the National Music Society which he founded for just this purpose.
He was a sickly, tubercular child who was fascinated by household sounds and rhythms. He was also probably the most awesome child prodigy in the history of music. He could read, write, and pick out tunes on the piano before he was three. He composed his first piece at three and gave his first public performances at five. At seven he could read Latin and dove deep into the sciences, especially botany, lepidoptery, and geology. He became, according to Liszt, the greatest organist in the world, as well as a fine conductor.
He could write music in any style. A 1915 essay reports, “It was his eager, restless spirit that made him rush about the world writing Breton and Auvergnian rhapsodies, Persian songs, Algerian suites, Portuguese barcarolles, Danish, Russian, or Arabian caprices, souvenirs of Italy, African fantasias, and Egyptian concertos ...” He wrote the very first film score, and concertized for more than seventy years. He called himself eclectic, saying “I ran after the chimera of purity of style and perfection of form.” He reserved the right to change his mind and did so, his music growing more conservative as he aged into a bitter reactionary. He was not pleased to be acclaimed for the entertaining wit of pieces like Carnival of the Animals.
Saint-Saëns’ cello concerto endures as one of the great pieces written for the instrument. In it, says Edward Downes, he solved the problem of “making a low-pitched instrument easily audible against the sonorous background of an entire symphony orchestra.” Our soloist, Chas Barnard, says he chose to play it for his debut “because it contains a variety of styles, tempos, colors, dynamics ... and because I personally enjoy playing the piece.”
Symphony No. 3, E-flat Major, Op. 97 “Rhenish” (1850)
Robert Schumann --
Germany, 1810-1856
In the great post-Beethoven debate, Schumann led the conservative side. He favored abstract music, music as a pure expression of its own. As historian Harold Schonberg explains, “Music was the mysterious art, the art that picked up after poetry and, indeed, life itself had ceased. In expressing all this in his music, Schumann approached mysticism, composing in a state of what might be described as ecstasy, a vision always before him. This sounds sentimental, but was not sentimental to Schumann. It was what made him go.” Further, says Schonberg, “He himself often did not know what his music meant. Some of it was written in what amounted to a trance. First he wrote it. Then he looked it over, giving the work a title.”
Schumann himself said, “I am affected by everything that goes on in the world—politics, literature, people—I think it over in my own way, and then I long to express my feelings in music. That is why my compositions are sometimes difficult to understand, because they are connected with distant interests; and sometimes unorthodox, because anything that happens impresses me and compels me to express it in music.”
Schumann and Wagner, with his visions of theatrical drama, could not have been more different. They met in Dresden, where Wagner went to conduct and Schumann hoped to have his only opera, Genoveva, produced. They did not hit it off.. Schumann wrote, “He has an enormous gift of gab and is stuck full of suffocating ideas.” Wagner wrote, “[He] remained mute for almost an hour ... what an impossible man!”
Schumann was indeed socially inept and said of himself, “I possess imagination, but I am not a profound thinker.” Nevertheless, he was a hugely effective critic. Early on he started the New Journal in Music “to help prepare and hasten the coming of a new poetic era.” It was a solid success, successfully fostering the careers of Chopin, Berlioz, Weber, and Brahms.
Schumann first hoped to be a concert pianist, but when he injured a hand, found that composing was more gratifying. Music flowed from him, and his early piano works brought him quick success. His romance with pianist Clara Wieck matured into a legendary marriage that prompted a period of lovely songs. “In my latest songs,” he wrote, “I often hear many things that I can hardly explain. It is most extraordinary how I write almost everything in canon and then only detect the imitation later, and often find inversions, rhythms in contrary motion, etc.” Even then, he wrote of “the melancholy bats swarming around me sometimes; they scare the music away.” Finally came orchestral music. His third symphony is his most frankly descriptive piece of music. It describes the River Rhine as he saw it when he and Clara moved to Düsseldorf, as well as the nearby Cathedral of Cologne and the awe-inspiring pomp of the ceremony that elevated the Archbishop of Cologne to the rank of cardinal.
Wagner died at seventy in Venice, still working, surrounded by his wife and children. Saint-Saëns died at eighty-six in Algiers with his dog and faithful valet for company. Schumann died at forty-six in an insane asylum.
Program notes by Nancy Golden