| Side by Seaside |  |  | | | | Ludwig van Beethoven | | | 1770-1827 | | |
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”
How and why did this symphonic tone poem come from the pen of a composer of primarily “absolute music?” To answer that question one must realize that Beethoven and his audience were more readily able to attach literary, specific emotional or extra-musical concepts to music. Beethoven himself had conjured the image of Napoleon, and then when the little emperor let him down, simply a hero in his Third Symphony. His Wellington’s Victory was the latest in a centuries’-long tradition of musical battles. And of course, there were musical models for many of the images in the Pastorale Symphony – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, bucolic Christmas pastorals with bagpipe drones, such as those from Handel’s Messiah or Corelli’s Christmas Concerto – not to mention an extensive vocabulary of rhetorical musical figures from the Baroque, bird calls and other perennial tone painting devices.
But Beethoven seemed to be searching for something different, an ideal way to portray and “express” nature. "Any painting, if it is carried too far in instrumental music, loses expressive quality...The overall content, consisting of more feelings than of tone paintings, will be recognized even without further description," he wrote in his sketchbook while working on the Sixth Symphony. This and other comments to himself as he worked reveal the Symphony as more than a sentimental outpouring. The Pastorale Symphony was another of the composer’s projects, another creative challenge to be met in the context of the trajectory of his self-fulfillment as an artist. As Beethoven’s biographer Barry Cooper puts it: “He was faced with two main problems in writing a symphony in the pastoral style: the first was to prevent the music from degenerating into scene-painting or story-telling; the second was to combine the pastoral style, leisurely and undramatic, with the thrust and dynamism of the symphonic style.”
Nevertheless, Beethoven wrote more words about this symphony than about any of his other compositions. He provided descriptive titles to each of the five movements, while at the same time commenting that the music was self-explanatory and needed no titles. The first movement, “Cheerful feelings awakened on arriving in the country,” builds up none of the intense tension so common in Beethoven's first movements, being instead an unhurried study in tranquility.  The second movement, “Scene by the brook,” is full of soft, murmuring accompaniment, which captures the sound of a flowing brook, interspersed with the birdcalls and chirping insects – all within a tradition in tone painting common since the renaissance.
In a break with the classical symphonic structure, the last three movements run together as a continuous whole. The third movement, “Merry gathering of country folk,” suggests a village band with the lower strings imitating the drone of a bagpipe. The dance is interrupted by the “Thunderstorm,” a superb impressionistic evocation of lightning, thunder and howling winds. As the storm approaches, the thunderclaps come faster and faster and then slow down as the storm passes. After the final rumbles, a solo clarinet, followed by a solo horn, lead into the “Shepherd's song: Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.” The developing peaceful and bucolic scene ends in the final chords with the shepherd's pipe figure fading away into the distance.
Beethoven started the Symphony in the summer of 1807 and finished it in June 1808. It was premiered at a concert (Musikalische Akademie) of his recent compositions in the Imperial Theater in Vienna on December 22, 1808. The program, which was over four hours long, also included the premieres of the Fifth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the concert aria “Ah Perfido,” some improvisations by the composer, three movements from the Mass in C major and, to top it all off, the Choral Fantasia, which Beethoven composed as a grand finale to the occasion. Such monster concerts were the norm in the early nineteenth century, with people coming and going in the middle as they pleased. Not surprisingly, few stayed for the duration.
The gentle atmosphere of the Sixth Symphony is in sharp contrast to the high voltage and intensity of the Fifth, completed only a few weeks earlier. With his cantankerous nature, Beethoven fought, quarreled and argued with everyone, friend, foe or patron. But with nature he was at peace. |
| | |  | | | | Benjamin Britten | | | 1913-1976 | | |
Benjamin Britten
Four Sea Interludes, Op. 33a, From the Opera Peter Grimes
Composer, pianist and conductor Benjamin Britten was one of the musical giants of the last century. While still a toddler, he showed exceptional musical promise, starting to compose and improvise at the piano at a very early age. By age twelve he had already composed six string quartets, ten piano sonatas, numerous suites of piano pieces and many songs. Britten’s mother was his first teacher and supporter, contrary to the wishes of his more conventional dentist father. From age 13 he spent his summer vacations as a composition student of composer and pianist Frank Bridge. At 16 he was accepted as a student at the Royal College of Music in London.
Britten was an excellent conductor, especially of his own works, as well as those of Bach and Mozart, and was well known as a piano accompanist. As composer, his fame rests mostly on his vocal works. His output included over a dozen each of operas, cantatas and song cycles, most of which were written with specific performers or venues in mind.
By the late 1930s Britten’s music became a familiar fixture on the British musical scene and began making inroads across the Atlantic. Having spent his childhood during and immediately after the carnage of World War I, Britten was a committed and lifelong pacifist. As World War II loomed, he followed poet W. H. Auden and other pacifists of his group to Canada and the United States, where he remained until 1942. He returned home in the midst of war to do his share for the country’s morale, composing scores for concerts, radio dramatizations and films. In the dreary post-war atmosphere of 1945, the premiere in June of his most successful opera, Peter Grimes, was a resounding success and gave a morale boost to an impoverished nation.
One of the themes that dominates all the considerations of Britten’s life is his homosexuality. Its gradual emergence as an issue in the composer’s life, his ambivalence about it and his final acceptance of his own nature now seem dated. The fact that the anti-hero Grimes, a fisherman and taskmaster, indirectly causes the death of two of his apprentices, he has been taken as a symbol of the homosexual outcast.
Based on an even more barbarous character from The Borough by poet George Crabbe (1754-1832), Grimes is reclusive and driven to achieve economic success in a dangerous trade, shunning the close-knit and interdependent community in which he lives. In the opera, he is first seen on trial for the death of his apprentice whom he claims died of dehydration as they drifted for days without food or water after a storm. Although he is acquitted, the villagers continue to suspect him of abuse, and the court refuses to allow him to take on another apprentice. The schoolteacher Ellen Orford, however, tries to soften both Grimes’s harsh nature and the townspeople’s resentment by taking responsibility for the care and safety of a new apprentice. Despite her efforts, Grimes beats the new boy – a marvelous silent part for a boy actor. As his hut is surrounded by a mob of indignant villagers, Grimes forces the boy to escape with him to his boat, but the boy stumbles and falls down the cliff to his death. Grimes himself escapes out to sea, sinks his boat and drowns.
Britten composed six interludes to facilitate scenery changes between scenes and acts. The Interludes act as orchestral mirrors of the stage drama, crystallizing in pure sound the unfolding disaster. He assembled the Four Sea Interludes shortly after finishing the opera; their order, however, does not follow that of the opera but its own musical logic.
Dawn: Coming between the Prologue and Act I, this is a much bleaker view of the ocean at dawn than Debussy ever imagined in La mer. The initial calm overlies an ominous swelling of the waves.
Sunday Morning: The opening Act II, depicting a Sunday morning in Grimes’s village. A brass choir imitates the church bells and later an high woodwind choir portrays the faster bells. Included in this interlude is an orchestral version of Ellen’s aria that opens the act.
Moonlight: The pulsing, brooding theme that opens Act III foreshadows the defeat of Grimes's plans and dreams.
Storm: This interlude occurs between the two scenes of Act I. It begins with the furious physical storm, then morphing into Grimes’s psychological turmoil, where violence becomes a way of lashing out against loneliness and hopelessness. His brooding is drowned by the increasing fury of the storm.
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| | | Claude Debussy
La mer
“Perhaps you do not know that I was destined for the fine life of a sailor and that it was only by chance that I was led away from it. But I still have a great passion for it,” Claude Debussy wrote to a friend as he began work on La mer in 1903. Shortly before the premiere in 1905 he commented to his publisher: “The sea has been very good to me. She has shown me all her moods.” Ironically, Debussy composed most of La mer far from the sea in the hills of Burgundy, believing that countless recollections were worth more than “…a reality whose charm generally weighs too heavily.”
The sea itself was not the only inspiration. Together with many late-nineteenth century painters, Debussy greatly admired Japanese art, especially the prints and drawings of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). One print in particular, The Hollow Wave off Kanagawa, appealed to Debussy. It portrays three boats with their terrified crews almost swallowed by a giant wave, the curve of the wave breaking into spray and foam. Debussy chose the detail of the wave as a cover for the score of La mer.
During the period Debussy was working on La mer, his life was in turmoil. He was in the process of leaving his wife Lilly to move in with his lover of many years, Emma Bardac, a wealthy married woman. Lilly threatened suicide, creating a scandal that alienated many of Debussy's friends of long standing, including the composer Gabriel Fauré (The fact that Bardac was once his mistress as well may have played some part in the rift.) Finally divorced in 1908, Debussy married Emma, but the episode put him in financial straights for the rest of his life.
The three movements of La mer are entitled Symphonic Sketches, although they approach the symphonic structures of César Franck's Symphony in D minor as well as the symphonies of Vincent d'Indy. There are numerous memorable melodic motives that appear in more than one movement, but like the sea itself, there is an unpredictable quality in how Debussy uses them.
The first sketch, "From Dawn till Noon on the Sea," opens with a gentle murmur on the strings and harp, eventually adding the the oboe and then the English horn with two of the principal themes of the movement - the last a motto of the entire work. Parallel to the interplay of sunlight and waves, fragments of melody are tossed around with constant shifts of rhythm and orchestral color, reflecting the irregularity of the water's surface. & The second half of the sketch portrays the sleeping sea gradually awakening and flexing its immense power in a motive with a Japanese cast, perhaps in reference to the inspirational Hokusai drawing. Towards the end a chorale evokes the splendor of the midday sun as the brass presents work's melodic motto that will reappear at the end.
The second sketch, "Play of the Waves," opens with the upper wooodwinds playfully tossing musical fragments around until, hesitantly, the wind and the action of the waves picks up, becoming quite choppy, before subsiding again into the calm playfulness then gradually fading away. This section involves many solos, illustrating the infinite variety of the waves. Its principal musical theme is a trilling motive in the violins and woodwinds and a lyrical melody introduced on the English horn. &
"Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea," by far the most turbulent of the three sketches, was composed during the worst period of the composer's personal troubles. The approaching storm growls ominously growing in strength with the beginning of a motive that will be the principal theme for this sketch, a surging motive in the flute and oboes. The storm then subsides as if the sea is in the eye of the storm. Slowly the violence picks up again, but Debussy's storm while powerful, is never a force five gale. The movement repeats and transforms melodies from the first movement as well, including the motto and the chorale that now conclude the piece, now in an energetic metamorphosis.
La mer initiated a change in Debussy's style from the shimmering, melodically and structurally amorphous "symbolist" style epitomized in his opera Péléas and Melisande to the more conventional one that seemed to its critics less immediately evocative of nature. And, indeed, La mer, while retaining the rhythms of the sea, definitely has more defined melodies than many of the compsoer's earlier compositions. There erupted around the composer a rash of polemical articles, and even a book published in 1910 entitled Le cas Debussy (The Debussy Case). Today, the arguments are of only minor interest, but the fact that the critics and the public could get so exercised over a matter of musical style continued a centuries-long tradition in French aesthetics. |
| | | | Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2010 |
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