The complete idiot's guide to classical music (27 page)

Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977) was classical music’s P. T. Barnum. He delighted in feeding the public (and even writers of major encyclopedias) false information about his age and background; he affected a Polish accent, though he was born and raised in London; after some years using a baton, he dispensed with it so that audiences could more readily watch his graceful hand movements; and he would sometimes turn around on the podium and talk to his audiences, urging them to pay special attention to a new piece, or scolding the Philadelphia ladies who dared to bring their knitting to his performances.

Unlike most other conductors who were concerned first and foremost with matters of musical interpretation, Stokowski was also a master of sound. He changed the usual seating of orchestral players on stage to enhance certain acoustical qualities, and he would tamper with the orchestration of masterpiece scores—doubling the brass parts in certain sections, perhaps, even adding percussion parts if he felt it could add rhythmic detail. He emphasized color in his interpretations, and during his 26-year tenure as music director in Philadelphia, created the glowing string sound that not only made the orchestra famous around the world, but remained in place through the even longer (43-year) reign of his successor, Eugene Ormandy.

Stokowski was always brimming with energy and innovation. He organized the All-American Youth Orchestra in 1940, and 22 years later, at the age of 80, founded the American Symphony Orchestra, making a point of welcoming many women musicians into both ensembles. His Bach and other transcriptions rescued dozens of Baroque pieces from their neglect on dusty archive shelves, but his enthusiasm for new music never dimmed either: He conducted the American premieres of Berg’s
Wozzeck
, Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring
, Ives’ Symphony no. 4, Schoenberg’s
Gurrelieder,
Varese’s
Ameriques,
and a host of other important works. An early champion of hi-fidelity recordings, he experimented with stereophonic sound many years before “stereo” records reached the market, and he even made it to the movies, starring (as himself) in
A Thousand Men and Girl,
a Deanna Durbin flick that still pops up on cable every so often. “Stoki,” as he was known, was also the only conductor in history to have an on-screen chat with Mickey Mouse (in
Fantasia
).

His detractors often dismissed Stokowski as an opportunistic showman, but his magnetic presence, deep personal charm, and undeniable musical gifts gave music a new lift in America, and indeed around the world. Francis Robinson (author, broadcaster, and long-time assistant manager of the Metropolitan Opera) may have summed it up best, when he called Stokowski “the greatest propagandist for music of his time, perhaps of all time.”

 
Music Word
All 78 rpm recordings and many early LPs were
monophonic
: That is, all the sounds came from a single source. Stereophonic recording (stereo for short), enables the distribution of sounds among left, right, and center, and provides a more realistic reproduction of the music. Just as looking at a landscape with both eyes gives us a sense of depth; listening to music with both ears allows us spatial awareness of the sound sources. We can tell, for instance, that the bass drum is booming on the left, while the trumpet is calling from the right side of the orchestra.

Not so long ago, American ballet dancers would Russianize their names in order to be taken seriously, and American conductors had far better luck landing major jobs in Europe than here in their own country. Through the first half of the 20th century and beyond, every one of our top American orchestras was led by European born and trained maestros (Stokowski and Ormandy in Philadelphia; Reiner and later Solti in Chicago; Koussevitzky, Munch, and now Ozawa in Boston; Mahler, Toscanini, Barbirolli, Mitropoulos in New York, and so on).

All that changed with the arrival on the scene of a young man from Lawrence, Massachusetts.

If you leave Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, you’ll see a street sign identifying 65th Street and Broadway as Leonard Bernstein Place, a fitting tribute to the prodigiously gifted artist who gave new impetus to classical music at home and abroad. He was a superb pianist, a galvanizing television personality, a published author and poet, and an incomparable lecturer and teacher. His compositions include symphonies, opera, ballet, film scores, songs, chamber music, and many choral works, including the ecumenical
Mass,
and one of most frequently performed of all 20th century works for chorus, the
Chichester Psalms.
Oh yes, in his spare time, he also wrote such Broadway classics as
On the Town
,
Wonderful Town
,
Candide,
and
West Side Story
.

It was, though, as a conductor that Leonard Bernstein first sprang to national attention. On a Sunday afternoon in 1943, a few hours before he was scheduled to lead a live broadcast concert with the New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter suddenly took ill. The emergency call went out to the orchestra’s recently appointed assistant conductor. There was no time for rehearsal, not even to rustle up the customary white tie and tails.

So, wearing a gray business suit, the 27-year-old Bernstein stepped out onto the Carnegie Hall stage to conduct the same difficult program Walter had originally scheduled. Another of those understudy-makes-good stories, the event made front-page news, and launched what Nicolas Slonimsky (author, composer, conductor, and editor of the most recent edition [1994] of
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians
) quite aptly described as “one of the most extraordinary careers in the annals of American music.”

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Bernstein’s original name was Louis, but at age 16, he officially changed it to Leonard to avoid mixups with another member of the Bernstein family. He later worked for a publisher, earning the munificent sum of $25 per week for arranging pop and novelty tunes under the name of Lenny Amber. (Bernstein being the German word for amber.)

Fifteen years later, the youngest man ever to conduct the New York Philharmonic had became the orchestra’s first—and to date only—native-born music director. Describing Bernstein’s later activities would take a book (and several of them are on the market): They included heading up the conducting department at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood; hosting the celebrated Young People’s Concerts on television; several times presenting the complete cycle of Mahler Symphonies; and making a bit of political history as well, conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on both sides of the Berlin Wall (in 1989).

With good reason, Leonard Bernstein titled one of his books
The Joy of Music.
His inexhaustible energy, enthusiasm and passion for life bubbled through everything he did, but it was as a peerless musical communicator that he will best and longest be remembered.

Bernstein having proved conclusively that a born-and-bred American could indeed join the ranks of the most distinguished, famous, and popular conductors in the world, our native orchestras became less wary of giving opportunities to “local” talent. Today, needless to say, Americans on the podium are familiar and welcome visitors in every part of the country.

Among many other sterling personalities, Leonard Slatkin is at the helm of the Washington National Symphony, while James Levine holds the operatic reins at the Met; Andrew Litton is music director in Dallas, Hugh Wolff heads the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and David Zinman was recently announced as the new musical chief at the Aspen Festival; on the West Coast, James DePreist is the long-time music director of the Oregon Symphony, while Michael Tilson Thomas rules the symphony roost in San Francisco. Lorin Maazel, Robert Shaw and Andre Previn have assumed guest-conducting roles after more permanent stints in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Marin Alsop and Eve Queler are among the women conductors of note who have their own orchestras; and when it comes to the pops, we think immediately of Mitch Miller, Skitch Henderson, John Williams, and many others. It took long enough, but American conductors have—at long last—taken their rightful places on the American scene.

 

• The fabled violins of Stradivari and Amati have never been equaled, even in this day of modern technology.
  
 

• The conductor is the most important person in an orchestra: He or she keeps everyone playing at the right time and in the right way.
  
 

• Arturo Toscanini is the most famous conductor of all time.
  
 

• Leonard Bernstein was more than just a conductor—he was a famous composer and teacher as well.
  

The term “classical” refers to the entire genre of music, and it also means an era of music—the one that spawned Mozart and Beethoven—as well. This section will describe the types of music forms that we hear in classical music, as well as the style and substance of each period from the 17th century to the present.

You’ll learn about the composers who brought each era to life, and find out exactly what makes their music so special. If you can’t tell Vivaldi from Bach upon hearing it, don’t worry. Sometimes it takes an expert to tell one Baroque master from another. But you’ll be able to distinguish Baroque from classical from Romantic, and know why our own century has such a distinctive and varied style.

Chapter 13
 
Understanding Those Scary Music Terms

 

• What is a sonata?
  
 

• What is a symphony?
  
 

• What is a concerto?
  
 

• Kinds of movements
  

By now, you know that a symphony means a lot of instruments. And you heard about concertos (“concerti,” if you want to get fancy about it), and sonatas. But what exactly makes each one what it is? With our jiffy guide, you can get your musical form straight without having to read the tiny print on liner notes, and you can even earn brownie points by explaining everything to your friends.

Moonlight, Appassionata
—what evocative names those Beethoven sonatas have (even though they were bestowed by publishers, not the composer himself). Beethoven’s sonatas, just like the sonatas of contemporaries, predecessors, and descendants, have a few elements in common that make them sonatas. To pinpoint those specifics precisely, though, is not always easy.

The term “sonata” came into being in the late-16th century as a way of distinguishing instrumental from vocal music: If it was played, it was a sonata; if it was sung, it was a cantata. In the days when a handful of instruments was considered a “large” ensemble, a catchall term was probably good enough, but as ensembles grew into orchestras and then symphony orchestras, things got a bit more complicated. Today, the term
sonata
signifies an instrumental piece, usually in several movements, for one or two (sometimes three) players. Less frequently, the term is applied to a somewhat larger group, such as the string sonatas of Rossini and Mendelssohn. In the Baroque era, a very popular type of sonata had a featured string or wind instrument with keyboard accompaniment; in later periods, the two instruments assumed equal importance.

 
Important Things to Know
The typical Baroque sonata might feature a violin or flute, with accompaniment (continuo) on harpsichord and cello. It was usually in four movements, in the scheme of slow-fast-slow-fast. The classical sonata was more a showcase for the symmetry and proportion that symbolized the era of Mozart and Haydn, and usually emerged in three movements. Early romantics wrote sonatas in the classical style, but as composers, in true romantic fashion, became more individualistic, the form became less structured. One radical departure arrived from the progressive Liszt, who cast his B Minor Piano Sonata in one nearly 30-minute long movement.

The rules of sonata form are not quite as immutable as the laws of physics, but they do regulate the musical construction normally used in the first movement of a sonata (or, indeed, a symphony, which is essentially a sonata for orchestra). In simplest terms, it is divided into three parts:
exposition
,
development
, and
recapitulation
.

Haydn and Mozart believed that the two themes of the exposition should be contrasted in style, instrumentation, and, as noted, key. Rather than just stopping the presentation of the first theme and starting up the second in a different key, they made the music flow naturally from one tonality to the next, or to use another fancy phrase, it modulated. The first and second themes, in other words, are linked by a transition or bridge, the second theme often followed by a musical rounding-off and reaffirmation of the new key. These features are the activating forces of the sonata.

 
Music Words
The
exposition
states a primary theme in the home key of the piece, and having established its texture and harmonic setting, moves on to a second theme in a different key.

The
development
expands on those themes in new and interesting ways.

The
recapitulation
restates the original material, but brings the second as well as the first theme back into the main key.

The development section allows the basic musical ideas to be presented in many different ways. Elements of the two main themes may be juxtaposed, for instance, or transformed by rhythmic shifts or unexpected modulations. This is where composers really get to show their stuff, entertaining their audiences with originality, wit, and sometimes, sheer surprise. After all those acrobatics, it’s on to the recapitulation, where the original themes, having wandered far afield, get welcomed home. If the work has a coda, anything goes: It might be a refined farewell or a rip-roaring blastoff; it can be short and sweet or turn into an elaborate, extended finish.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
As a young man, Johannes Brahms paid a call on Franz Liszt, who read through some of his manuscripts and was so impressed that he sat Brahms down in an easy chair and gave him a private performance of his own B Minor Sonata. When the piece ended, Liszt wondered why there was no reaction from his audience. Then he looked over at the easy chair and saw why: Brahms was fast asleep.

This is the big one, the one where all those strings soar, the winds blow, the brasses shine, and the timpanist bangs away at every one of those five kettledrums. In the Baroque era, folks didn’t mind much what they called things, so the term “symphony” was used for overtures, ensemble pieces, short instrumental movements within oratorios, and so on. Starting in the Classical era, though, the word meant an orchestral work of substantial size and import, and that’s still how we think of symphonies today. Interestingly, the first major composers to use this modern symphonic style—namely Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven—still account for a huge percentage of modern symphonic performances.

In the mid-18th century, at about the time that the Mannheim Orchestra grew to its then astounding size of 40 players, the four-movement symphony became the accepted norm. Mozart and Haydn knocked out symphonies by the dozen; Beethoven limited himself to nine, but raised the form to Olympian heights. Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvorak, Schumann, and most other romantic composers adhered to the classical four-movement form, but there’s a joker in every crowd, so the expansive Berlioz added a fifth section to his
Symphonie Fantastique
.

Early in the 20th century, Mahler outdid Berlioz with his passionate, super-romantic symphonies, and most later composers—while realistic enough to realize that demanding huge performing forces would inevitably limit their concert opportunities—filled the old forms with fresh and invigorating new musical wines. Shostakovich, Copland, Bernstein, and Stravinsky all have left us great symphonic legacies, and composers today are continuing where they left off.

Mozart and Haydn did very nicely with their 40-piece orchestras, and so did Beethoven at first, though always on the lookout for coloristic opportunities, he soon added trombones, piccolos, and contrabassoons and gave the timpanist a lot more work to do. As envisioned by romantic composers like Berlioz, though, the ideal symphony would be on a large enough scale to employ more workers than an automobile factory. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is called the “Symphony of a Thousand” because it demands a huge orchestra, with chimes, celesta, glockenspiel, harmonium, organ, and a host of fanfare trumpets, not to mention vocal soloists, and large choruses of both children’s and adult’s voices. As we were saying, a symphony is a work for full orchestra. It’s just that some orchestras are fuller than others.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
As is so often the case, Mahler did not himself give his work its “Symphony of a Thousand” nickname, but he didn’t exactly object to it either. “In this symphony,” he said modestly, “the whole universe begins to sound in musical tones; it is no longer human voices, but planets and suns that are in motion here.”

As the classical symphony took on its characteristic structure, the opening movement was normally in sonata form, as described previously. Then came a slow movement; next a lighter and livelier third movement (often a minuet, or its offspring, the scherzo,); and finally, what else: a finale, normally the most robust and peppiest movement of the bunch. Sometimes composers inverted the order of the slow movement and the minuet or scherzo. Who knows? Maybe they just wanted to see if anybody was paying attention.

The slower pace of the second movement provided a good contrast with the first, and often contained some of the composer’s most beautiful, lyric expressions. It could be in a modification of sonata form (perhaps without the development section), or just conceived as a lovely song, or possibly cast in the form of theme and variations, where a tune is embellished, transformed, and otherwise taken to new heights of melodic or rhythmic glory.