SUPPORT YOUR SYMPHONY

Kahchun Wong (pictured at Celebrate Asia last season) conducts Pictures at an Exhibition, among a few other symphonies, on October 6 & 8. Photo by Brandon Patoc.

Paul Dukas
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 
BORN: October 1, 1865, in Paris, France 
DIED: May 17, 1935, in Paris, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 1897 
WORLD PREMIERE: May 18, 1897, in Paris, France 

 What to listen for:  

• The main theme, which first appears just after the opening chords  
• A long moment of suspenseful silence before the reintroduction of the theme 

For many listeners, Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice will inevitably conjure a wizard-hatted Mickey Mouse from the 1940 Disney animated medley in Fantasia. Dukas, a relentless perfectionist, might have lamented that his claim to posterity lies mainly in this piece, whose popularity reportedly irked him in life. But there is no denying the wit of this inventive narrative scherzo, based on J.W. von Goethe’s 1797 poem, “Der Zauberlehring.”  

In the poem, an apprentice takes advantage of his magical master’s absence to transform a broomstick into a servant. He commands the broomstick to fetch water for a bath but forgets the word to stop the enchantment. Panicking as the water spills over the basin, the apprentice chops the broom in two, only for both fragments to rise and return to inundating the house. Luckily, the master returns and orders the broom back to its corner.  

Dukas’ piece follows this narrative closely; the music is so wedded to its thematic material that the poem’s French translation was routinely reprinted in copies of the score. The ambiguous opening chords over droning strings already summon the uncanny, while the main theme creeps in almost immediately.  

After this slow introduction, we have an unusually long silence interrupted by a few fitful, staccato notes. The bassoons reintroduce the main theme in a cantering rhythm. We’re pulled into the apprentice’s triumph-turned-nightmare until, with a blast of high notes, the apprentice bisects his unnerving servitor.  

But the main theme resurrects implacably as the two halves of the broom rise. The music builds to a great thunderclap of a chord as, presumably, the master reappears and restores order. The same strange, quiet chords from the opening re-emerge. The piece ends on four sudden, vigorous notes that suggest a punchline, or a lesson well learned.  
 

Richard Strauss 
Duett-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon with String Orchestra and Harp 
BORN: June 11, 1864, in Munich, Germany 
DIED: September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany 
WORK COMPOSED: 1947 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 4, 1948, in Lugano, Switzerland 
 
What to listen for:  

• The pastoral clarinet “princess” solo in the first movement, and its gruff bassoon counterpart. 

The pastoral clarinet “princess” solo in the first movement, and its gruff bassoon counterpart. 

In 1947, at the age of 85, Richard Strauss could look back on a successful yet tumultuous musical career. He had directed some of Germany’s finest orchestras, composed several hundred works, and toured Europe and the United States. He had also spent two years in the 1930s as the director of the Reich Music Chamber before being ousted for his collaboration with a Jewish writer. Privately, Strauss detested the Nazis and he used his influence to protect his Jewish relatives, but his cooperation had still left a heavy question mark over his years in the Third Reich. Cleared by the postwar denazification trials, an impoverished Strauss had moved to Switzerland, where he composed several classically structured works, among his last musical outpouring.  

Strauss averred at one point that the Duett-Concertino was inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen tale called “The Princess and the Swineherd”; another time, he described a vaguely Beauty and the Beast-like story involving a princess (represented by the clarinet) and a dancing bear (depicted by the bassoon) who at first imitates her, then gains her affection and turns into a prince. Whatever its origin, the Duett-Concertino — commissioned for the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana — gleams with Mozartian brightness, its mood as far away as possible from the darkness of the Reich years. 

The clarinet solo of the first movement, marked Allegro moderato, lilts over serene strings; the bassoon interrupts, setting off a flight of indignation or alarm. The two instruments settle into a more congenial dialogue in the middle Andante movement before culminating in a courtly Rondo that reprises the idyllic themes from the first movement. The piece ends with clarinet and bassoon in cheerful unison.
 

Modest Mussorgsky 
Pictures at an Exhibition 
Orch. Maurice Ravel 
BORN: March 21, 1839, in Karevo, Russia 
DIED: March 28, 1881 
WORK COMPOSED: 1874 (orch. 1922) 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 19, 1922, in Paris 

What to listen for:

• The recurring Promenade theme, a straightforward melody with a surprisingly complex meter 
• The famous last two movements (The Hut on Hen’s Legs (Baba-Yaga) and The Great Gate of Kiev), one chaotic and witchy, the other triumphant and dazzling 

Modest Mussorgsky, who died the penniless scion of a noble family, came of age during a period of intellectual tension that pitted Slavophilia (an attitude that revered Eastern European folk culture) against Western artistic conventions. Mussorgsky and four other composers who embraced the Slavophilic mission — among them Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who would later publish the Pictures at an Exhibition score — became known as the Mighty Handful. Together, they pushed against Western music’s dominance of the concert hall, turning to Slavic popular melody, legends and fairy tales for thematic inspiration. 

Mussorgsky became an exemplar of this movement. Michael Russ calls him “the only true musical Populist” of his era, not only for his ideology but for his fascination with Slavic people’s everyday concerns and earthy imagination: Pictures at an Exhibition in particular evokes scenes of “work, fantasy, love, comedy, tragedy and death,” from the jostling of an oxcart to the frenzied capering of the witch Baba Yaga’s hut.  

Mussorgsky was inspired by artists in other domains who shared his preoccupation with Russianness. Mussorgsky’s friend, painter and architect Victor Hartmann, was feted for his use of Russian subjects and motifs. He died young of an aneurysm in 1873. Distraught, Mussorgsky praised his deceased comrade’s adherence to the “Russian style,” lamenting, “Poor orphaned Russian art!”  

The influential Slavophile critic Vladimir Stasov, a mentor to both Hartmann and Mussorgsky, organized a commemorative display of more than 400 of the deceased artist’s paintings and drawings at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Moved to creative fervor by the exhibition, Mussorgsky composed a ferociously difficult piano suite in three weeks. He dedicated the piece to Stasov — no doubt in recognition of his mentor’s role in the Academy exhibition, but also making the suite a monument to the Russian avant-garde aesthetic.  

Pictures at an Exhibition mostly eschews Western form to follow its own logic: 10 movements separated by Promenades, brief interludes meant to depict the composer walking from painting to painting. During Mussorgsky’s lifetime, the piano suite went underappreciated by his colleagues, according to Stasov. A score was published by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1886, five years after Mussorgsky’s early death, with Stasov providing notes on the art that inspired each movement.  

It was this version — with its smattering of errors and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “corrections” — that the French composer Maurice Ravel orchestrated in 1922 at the request of the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Though other composers have since orchestrated the original suite, Ravel’s remains the most popular adaptation for its inventive textures: shivery strings, majestic brass, chirping woodwinds. 

Pictures at an Exhibition opens with an oddly metered Promenade; with its regular rhythm and alternating 5/4- and 6/4-time signatures, it is both stately and off-kilter. In a letter to Stasov, Mussorgsky explained that he was mimicking the movement of his own ponderous gait. Abruptly, the music rushes into Gnomus, based on a design for a gnome-shaped nutcracker. Wild bursts of eighth notes and slower, staggering phrases emphasize the figure’s grotesquerie.  

A second, more subdued Promenade brings us with little fanfare to The Old Castle, whose original title was given in Italian, Il vecchio castello. Stasov describes the corresponding art briefly: “A medieval castle, in front of which a troubadour sings his song.” The mood is melancholic — and, one might say, not markedly Italian. A brassy Promenade moves us to Tuileries, a brief, playful scherzo evoking children’s squabbles in the famous Parisian garden.  

From here, without a transition section, Mussorgsky gives us a radical change in mood: Bydlo (“cattle” in Polish) depicts the rumble of a massive oxcart. A low, lumbering rhythm contrasts with a sad folk tune, which Ravel’s lush strings imbue with tragic depth. Perhaps a nod to the transience and drudgery of peasant life?  

The next Promenade is in a minor key and feels more equivocal than the previous, yet its slightly sinister build-up is interrupted by chaotic rhythms in the woodwinds. The basis for Ballet of Chicks in their Shells was a costume design for the ballet Trilby of children dressed as eggs. Another abrupt transition takes us directly to Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle. This movement is based on two paintings of Polish Jews — one wealthy, one poor — from the town of Sandomir. Mussorgsky evokes Jewish melodies with two contrasting themes: one imposing, the other quiet and plaintively trilling. 

The next movement, The Marketplace at Limoges, swerves back to urban France for some bustle and gossip. Then, Mussorgsky moves us underground with yet another wild mood swing: crashing, doom-laden horns take us to the land of the dead, the Catacombæ (Sepulcrum romanum). The following movement, Cum mortis in lingua mortua (“with the dead, in a dead language”) is a sinister return to the Promenade theme.  

Toward the end of this dark Promenade, the music seems to be resolving into peaceful resignation. Yet the celebrated next movement opens with an exhilarating, rushing section marked Allegro con brio, feroce, summoning the forest witch Baba Yaga. The corresponding Hartmann artwork was actually a design for an ornate clock styled after Baba Yaga’s magical hut on chicken legs. Ingeniously, the movement’s A-B-A structure depicts both the fearsome witch and the rhythmic screech of a cuckoo clock.  

The Hut on Hen’s Legs ends on a rising chromatic scale that bursts into the final movement, The Great Gates of Kiev, based on Hartmann’s architectural design for a monument to Tsar Alexander II. Mussorgsky exalts an altered Promenade theme into a depiction of pomp and glory. Though Hartmann’s monument was never built, The Great Gates of Kiev memorializes the painter’s vision — and his devotion to Slavic folk culture — in a mood of elated grandeur.  

Joule K. Zelman © 2022