Program Notes: Midori Plays Brahms

RICHARD WAGNER 
Prelude to Lohengrin 
BORN: 1813, Leipzig, Germany 
DIED: 1883, Venice, Italy 
WORK COMPOSED: 1850 
WORLD PREMIERE:  August 28, 1850, in Weimar, Germany, at the Staatskapelle Weimar under the direction of Franz Liszt. 

What to Listen For:  

• Violins and woodwinds create a feeling of light and shadow through harmonics and luminous chords as the Grail theme appears in the highest register. The music builds into a lustrous climax before softly echoing the opening moments. 

Violins and woodwinds create a feeling of light and shadow through harmonics and luminous chords as the Grail theme appears in the highest register. The music builds into a lustrous climax before softly echoing the opening moments. 

The life of Richard Wagner was, by anyone’s standards, a study in extremes. Founder and master of the German music drama, he dominated the second half of 19th-century European music, not only changing its course, but forcing the most confident of composers to take sides: You were either pro-Wagner or opposed his ideas and joined the rebellion against him. But few, if any, could hypnotize or slay so many with nothing more than a simple chord. 

Wagner composed magnificently for the theater, and most of his operas and music dramas are still with us, constantly being staged and re-imagined at major opera houses: The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and for the more ambitious, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner fully believed in his greatness and wasn’t humble about it. “I am not made like other people,’’ he said. “I must have brilliance and beauty and light. The world owes me what I need.’’ 

Essential to his status is Lohengrin, a high point in the development of Romantic-period opera and arguably the best portal for newcomers to Wagner’s art. First performed in 1850, Lohengrin vaguely follows the pattern of Italian and French opera of the time — aria, recitative, chorus — but here they begin to meld together into the continuous orchestral wash that would define the composer’s music dramas. 

With Lohengrin, Wagner replaced the traditional overture — an elaborate distillation of an opera’s themes — with a mediative Prelude based solely on the Grail theme, a transcendent melody that Wagner effectively weaves throughout the opera. The Prelude is an extended crescendo that reaches its peak and subsides, like a long sigh taken in and then exhaled.  

JOHANNES BRAHMS 
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 
BORN: May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany 
DIED: April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1878 
WORLD PREMIERE: January 1, 1879, in Leipzig, Germany, with violinist Joseph Joachim and the composer conducting. 

What to Listen For:  

• The technical brilliance and emotional range of this work are part of an intense dialogue between solo violin and orchestra, which together take us on a journey that moves from monumental to lyrical to jubilant. 

The technical brilliance and emotional range of this work are part of an intense dialogue between solo violin and orchestra, which together take us on a journey that moves from monumental to lyrical to jubilant. 

The 19th century was the height of the violin concerto, with composers expected to try their hand at the genre while virtuoso soloists raised the technical possibilities of the instrument to stratospheric levels. But only a handful have taken their place among the masterpieces we know today: those by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Johannes Brahms. 

With Brahms, the violin forged a true partnership with the orchestra, and together they form a concerto of symphonic proportions. 

“The violin becomes a heroic protagonist in a vast drama which encompasses ferocity, mystery, tenderness, and pastoral beauty,’’ notes Timothy Judd in his Listeners’ Club blog. “With this weighty music, Brahms seems to be presenting a worthy successor to Beethoven’s concerto, set in the same key of D major.’’ 

After its premiere on New Year’s Day in 1879, the Viennese conductor Josef Hellmesberger called it “a concerto not for, but against the violin.’’ Henryk Wieniawski, a virtuoso violinist capable of any technical contest, deemed it “unplayable.’’ And in his 1997 biography on Brahms, Jan Swafford sardonically said that the composer “committed the cardinal sin of writing a symphonic concerto in which orchestra and soloist carry on the musical dialogue as equals.’’ 

Brahms originally planned a four-movement symphonic scheme but decided on three — aligning it with the traditional concerto form — and transplanted the orphaned section into his Piano Concerto No. 2. Yet, for all its muscularity, the Violin Concerto is essentially lyrical, notably the Adagio, and mirrors the mood of his pastoral Second Symphony in the same key. 

But not the opening movement. This is the most tumultuous start of any violin concerto, with a two-and-a-half-minute introduction by the orchestra before the violin makes its frenetic entrance. Then, the eruption settles, and the violin delivers a cascade of delicacy and sweetness before the drama re-appears, the solo part replete with technical challenges. Most performances include the cadenza written by violinist Joseph Joachim, soloist at the premiere who had advised Brahms to simplify such a daunting work. 

The meditative second movement features one of the composer’s loveliest woodwind melodies, which befuddled the famed violinist Pablo Sarasate: “Does anyone imagine that I’m going to stand on stage, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the Adagio?’’ 

The finale begins with a lively Romani dance — a Hungarian rondo — propelled by off-balance rhythms, double stops and an earthy melody on the fiddle that wraps things up in one of the composer’s most joyous codas. 

SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR 
Ballade in A minor 
BORN: Aug. 15, 1875, Croydon, England 
DIED: Sept. 1, 1912, Surry, England 
WORK COMPOSED: 1898 
WORLD PREMIERE: September 12, 1898, in Gloucester, England, at the Three Choirs Festival.  

What to listen for: 

• This music teems with youthful energy, fueled by a preternatural understanding of orchestral texture and coloring, while the lyrical inner moments lend balance to the whole.  

This music teems with youthful energy, fueled by a preternatural understanding of orchestral texture and coloring, while the lyrical inner moments lend balance to the whole.  

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor will always be remembered as a better composer than businessman. After finishing his soon-to-be-famous cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in 1898, he traded the publishing rights for a one-time fee. The score was a hit and sold more than 200,000 copies, and while it made him famous, the royalties went elsewhere. The frustrated artist gave up a life of relative ease for an exhausting workload that, many believe, led to his death from pneumonia at age 37.  

“If I had retained my rights in the Hiawatha music,’’ he once lamented, “I should have been a rich man.’’ 

Coleridge-Taylor was born in Croydon, England, the illegitimate child of a black doctor from Sierra Leone and a white Englishwoman, who named her son after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His musical gifts were apparent at age 5, when he was given a violin and began singing in the choir of the local Presbyterian church. At 15, he enrolled in London’s Royal College of Music — one of its first black students — putting aside the fiddle to focus on composition.  

Of his more than 100 works, a handful are considered originals: the Petite Suite, the African Dances, the Clarinet Quintet, the warmly lyrical Violin Concerto, and the single movement work you are about to hear. Edward Elgar gave the young man an early boost. When Elgar was asked to compose a new work for the Three Choirs Festival, he responded, “I am sorry, I am too busy to do so. I wish you would ask Coleridge-Taylor to do it. He still wants recognition, and he is far and away the cleverest fellow.’’  

The Ballade jumps off the page with a tornado-like theme and tempo aptly marked allegro energico, ma non troppo presto. This gives way to a lush middle section, a respite from the storm that just passed but is soon to return. Through its 13 minutes, the music moves forward in recurring stanzas, traverses constant key changes, and manages to blend exuberance and lyricism into a tight-fitting scheme worthy of a 19th-century fantasy overture. 

ROBERT SCHUMANN 
Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 120 
BORN: June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany 
DIED: July 29, 1856, Bonn, Germany 
WORK COMPOSED: 1841 (revised 1851) 
WORLD PREMIERES: December 6, 1841, in Leipzig, Germany; revised final version took place December 30, 1852, in Düsseldorf, with the composer conducting. 

What to Listen For:  

• Where are the pauses between movements? Don’t expect them, as Schumann linked all four sections into a seamless whole. 

• Listen for the “Clara’’ theme in the first movement and how it reappears throughout the entire work. 

Robert Schumann was a visionary who helped define musical Romanticism by, in his own words, sending “light into the depths of the human heart.” A superb pianist, literary critic and advocate for such up-and-coming talents as Brahms and Chopin, Schumann enjoyed a busy life, and his marriage to Clara Wieck stands as one of the more poignant love affairs in the history of art. 

Schumann originally composed his Symphonic Fantasy in 1841, but after a poor reception, he shelved the score, revising it a decade later as his Symphony No. 4. The refreshed version was a critical triumph, recognized as a model for the new era of musical Romanticism taking hold in Europe. 

All four movements mold together organically, a leap from the discrete movements in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. To achieve this, Schumann tossed out pauses between these sections and linked them through related themes heard at the beginning. But even strung together as one, each of the four movements shines with its own personality, so listeners have no trouble knowing when one ends and another begins. 

In the first movement, Schumann turns traditional sonata form on its head by focusing on a single melody without exposition or development. This became known as the “Clara’’ theme because the notes correspond to his wife’s name — a descending line of notes C-(B)-A-(G sharp)-A. A palpable tension and release mark this opening section, possibly a reflection of the turbulence — and mental illness — that took hold of Schumann’s life at the time. 

A romanza movement follows as a lyrical relief from the passing storm and shows the composer in a state of reflection. Then comes a powerful scherzo, rich in the rhythmic muscle of a festive country dance. After the dark tension that opens the finale, the light of D-major carries the day in one of the composer’s most clever resolutions — punctuated by excited kettledrums — and a coda that brings the work to a joyful close.  

Kurt Loft © 2024

Kurt Loft is a journalist and music critic who has covered classical music for various publications and arts groups for more than 40 years. A member of the Music Critics Association of North America, he lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.