The complete idiot's guide to classical music (39 page)

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Mme. von Meck tried to be nice to other musicians too, hiring 19-year-old Claude Debussy to give her children piano lessons. When the composer tried to give one of her daughters bedroom lessons as well, she kicked him out of the house.

For all his inner turmoil, Tchaikovsky’s international career was on track. His music was being performed all over the world, he received an honorary degree from Cambridge, and was invited to conduct his own works in Poland, Germany, and America where, in 1891, he presided at the inaugural concert in Carnegie Hall. Ironically, two of his (now) most popular concertos were heartily denounced by critics and rejected by the soloists for whom they were written: “The First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop,” was one of the kinder comments; another critic called the Violin Concerto “music that stinks to the ear.”

In October 1893, Tchaikovsky was back in St. Petersburg conducting the premiere of his
Pathetique
Symphony, a deeply personal work over which, he admitted, “I often wept bitterly while composing it.” Typhoid was prevalent in the city, and despite public warnings, the composer unthinkingly drank a glass of unboiled water. In less than two weeks, the dreaded epidemic had claimed its most famous victim.

Though beset by personal demons, Tchaikovsky knew well the worth of his music. “My faith in the judgement of the future is immovable,” he wrote to Mme. von Meck. “I have had a foretaste during my lifetime of the fame that will be meted out to me when the history of Russian music comes to be written. I have no right to complain. . . .”

To hear Tchaikovsky in full orchestral glory, start with the last three symphonies (nos. 4, 5, and 6), continue with suites from his three radiant ballets,
Swan Lake, The Nutcracker,
and
Sleeping Beauty
. For the literary-minded, take out Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous symphonic translations of
Romeo and Juliet
,
Francesca da Rimini
, and
Hamlet
; the lush sonorities of his Serenade for Strings came long before Mantovani; and for blatantly patriotic, delectably noisy hi-jinks, you just can’t top the
1812
Overture.

Despite what some of his contemporaries thought, the Violin and the First Piano Concertos are among the most accessible in the entire repertoire, and if you feel adventuresome, take a gamble on the far less familiar, but highly attractive Second Piano Concerto. For cellophiles, there’s the elegant “Variations on a Rococo Theme,” and by all means, enjoy some of the shorter pieces for violin and orchestra, including the exquisite “Serenade Melancolique.”

Eugene Onegin
and
Pique Dame
(Queen of Spades) should head up your operatic ticket, while for quieter moments, curl up with the String Quartet no. 1 (which contains the famous “Andante Cantabile,” such a gorgeous piece that it often ventures into the concert hall on its own). A longer chamber work of single beauty is the A Minor Piano Trio.

Once again we have tried to point out trends and tendencies within the Romantic era and to spotlight some of the composers who made them happen. We couldn’t include them all, though, so forgive us our sins of omission, and try to investigate other giants of 19th century music on your own. Start with Antonin Dvorak, the Czech master who saluted his homeland with the jaunty Slavonic Dances and the ebullient
Carnival
Overture, then came across the Atlantic to set an example for our composers with his
New World
Symphony and the “American” String Quartet. For more Slavonic flavorings, Czech out some of the delightful music of Bedrich Smetana, especially his tonal portrait of a ride down the river Moldau, or the rollicking Overture to
The Bartered Bride.

Want some music with the French touch? You can go to the opera with Jules Massenet and Charles Gounod, the chamber music room with Cesar Franck and Gabriel Faure, the ballet theatre with Adolphe Adam and Leo Delibes. Edvard Grieg in Norway and Alexander Borodin in Russia wrote such gorgeous melodies that—fitted out with lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest—they lit up the Great White Way, respectively in
Song of Norway
and
Kismet
. The list goes on and on, adding up to a never-ending source of delight for the curious music listener.

 

• The 19th century was an age of individualism.
  
 

• During the Romantic period, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, love of humanity or homeland, all found their way into musical expression.
  
 

• Lieder means songs in German.
  
 

• Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann are famous female composers.
  
 

• Schumann and Chopin are best-known for their piano music.
  
 

• Berlioz’s
  Symphonie Fantastique
  caused a riot the night it was first performed.
  
 

• Tchaikovsky is known for his ballets and symphonies.
  

Chapter 17
 
Grooving to the Classics in the 20th Century

 

• The romance is over
  
 

• A change of taste
  
 

• Mighty Mahler
  
 

• The music of Richard Strauss
  
 

• Vaughan Williams, Debussy, and Ives
  
 

• Schoenberg, Cowell, and Stravinsky
  

Many of the composers whose lives crossed the millennium were still romantics at heart. They favored lush melodies, sensuous harmonies, and took sides in the perpetual battle between good and evil. Before long, though, musical chinks appeared in the romantic armor. Debussy, denouncing emotional excesses and preferring to have his music create a mood rather than tell a clear-cut story, led the way to Impressionism. Igor Stravinsky’s plunge into savage rhythms and clashing harmonies caused riots, as did Henry Cowell in America when he attacked the piano with forearms and elbows. Arnold Schoenberg refusing to be bound by the old rules of keys and scales, led hordes of followers down the 12-tone trail. Well before the middle of the 20th century, in other words, the face of classical music was completely changed.

 
Music Word
Impressionism
is a term borrowed from the art world (where it was applied to such painters as Degas, Whistler, Monet, and others), and used to describe music that suggests moods, perceptions, or feelings rather than being specifically descriptive of events or scenes.

Call them baroque romantics. Their music was rich and embellished, their instrumentations bold and expansive, their orchestrations massive. Herr Wagner was a hard act to follow, but they gave it their best shot.

During his own lifetime, Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) was better known as a conductor than a composer—and as a fairly ruthless taskmaster at that. “I have encountered frightful habits in every orchestra,” he said, mincing no further words in whipping the musicians into shape. Players rebelled at his grilling standards of perfection, while theatrical managements resented his iron-willed determination to produce concerts and operas his way: fully researched, thoroughly rehearsed, uncut. The results pleased audiences, but audiences don’t hire conductors: For ten years, Mahler bounced around in posts at Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, and Vienna, where he lasted three seasons before calling it quits.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
In pre-Nazi Austria, it was beyond the pale for an imperial appointment to be given to a Jewish individual, so Mahler had to make a quick conversion to Catholicism before he could accept the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera.

It was in 1880 that Mahler, fresh from the Vienna Conservatory, got a summer job as music director of Bad Hall, a light-opera theatre that lived up to its name: The repertoire was cheesy, the facilities inadequate, the players slovenly. Nonetheless, Mahler caught the conducting bug there, and it became a serious itch that he continued scratching the rest of his life. Indeed, in 1907 he crossed the Atlantic to shake a stick both at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic until he fell seriously ill with a blood infection. He returned to Vienna, where he died in 1911.

Mahler’s perfectionism gave him considerable turmoil in his compositional work, too. He couldn’t leave a piece alone. He would constantly rework details, sometimes engaging in massive rewritings and re-orchestrations, even of scores that had already been successfully performed and circulated. Unlike Puccini’s “small things” attitude, Mahler thought big. His expansive symphonies have mystical and philosophical subtexts, and many of his songs are passionate expressions of despair and longing.

As it happens, Mahler knew sadness all too well. Five of his siblings succumbed to diphtheria in childhood, another died of a brain tumor, and one more committed suicide. It was in music that he found both an escape from real-world tragedies and a burning desire to communicate his insights and outlooks about life and death. The passion in Mahler’s music often suggests a personality on the edge.

Mahler’s songs require a large orchestra, and his symphonies call for rows and rows of winds and brass, a sea of strings, and all sorts of oddball percussion instruments. Mahler also achieved special sounds by unusual instructions: In certain scores, for instance, the oboes and clarinets have to play “bells up,” with the players’ head
s
tilted uncomfortably upward and their instruments aimed toward the top balcony. Other works require offstage brass, on-stage church bells, and such infrequent symphonic visitors as mandolin and organ.

Like most of his symphonies, the Fifth takes well over an hour, but spare ten minutes for the Adagietto movement, a meltingly beautiful elegy for harp and strings that could make a Mahler fan out of anybody. Once you’re hooked, move on to his First Symphony, especially the third movement, with its “Frere Jacques” tune. The Second, or
Resurrection,
Symphony adds vocal soloists and chorus to the musical mix, and the surprisingly gentle Fourth Symphony brings in a soprano to give us a child’s eye view of heaven. Mahler completed nine symphonies, but don’t panic if you see a tenth listed on a concert program: The unfinished one was completed by English musicologist Deryck Cooke.

Other vocal pieces with orchestra include the heartbreaking “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Death of Children); the robust “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen” (Songs of a Wayfarer); the often rollicking settings of lyrics from the collection of folk poetry known as “Das Knaben Wunderhorn” (The Youth’s Magic Horn), which are equally effective as lieder with piano accompaniments; and “Das Lied von der Erde” (Song of the Earth), a richly varied work which Mahler himself admitted was less a song cycle than a symphony for voices and orchestra.

Not to be confused with Johann Strauss (1864–1949), the father of the “Blue Danube” (or Oscar, the double-s-less Straus, who wrote
The Chocolate Soldier
), Richard Strauss was the son of the principal horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra. Daddy Franz had suffered through so many Wagner operas that he was one of the most rabid of the anti-Wagner voices in Germany. Highly protective of the tender ears of his talented son, he allowed Richard to study only the “classics”: Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn. The results were predictable. At the age of ten, when other boys were sneaking out to smoke their first cigarette, the rebellious Richard got hooked on the music of Wagner. He was smitten by its power and drama, and it remained for him only to learn how to write music as big, bold, and brassy as that of his idol.

 
Important Things to Know
Stressed by all the Strausses? Here’s a quick reference guide. The old man of the family was Johann Sr. (1804–1849), known as the Father of the Waltz. Unfortunately, his son was also named Johann Strauss (1825–1899), so make sure you see Jr. if you’re looking for “The Blue Danube” or any of the hundreds of other great dance pieces that earned him the title of The Waltz King. Don’t put away the phone book just yet, though. Johann Jr. had two composer-brothers, Josef (1827–1870) and Eduard (1835–1916), and Eduard had a composer-conductor son whom, in a fit of wild originality, he dubbed Johann Strauss III (1866–1939).

No relation to any of those guys was Franz Josef Strauss (1822–1905), a German composer and horn player whose most important creation was his son, the Richard Strauss under present discussion. Oh yes, one more composer of high repute but one less “s” than usual was Oscar Straus (1870–1954), who wrote the immensely popular operetta
The Chocolate Soldier
.

Growing up in a professional music environment, Strauss had become a fairly capable pianist and a promising young conductor, but while in his teens, he was attracted most strongly to composition. He wrote a Wind Serenade, numerous songs and chamber pieces, a Horn Concerto (which he made as difficult as possible to get back at his father), and even a Symphony that won the esteem of Brahms.

Once into his twenties, however, Strauss’ conservative streak faded quickly. In 1885, he struck up an important friendship with violinist Alexander Ritter, an ardent Wagnerian who just happened to be married to Wagner’s niece. “His influence was in the nature of a stormwind,” Strauss later recalled; “he urged me to the development of the poetic, the expressive in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner.”

With that, Strauss was off. He began with the symphonic fantasy “Aus Italien” (from Italy), modestly proclaiming it “the connecting link between the old and the new.” Critics proclaimed it a few less complimentary things, such as incoherent, noisy, and vulgar, but undaunted, the young composer proceeded to a whole slew of tone poems.
Don Juan
was his first rousing success, after which he tackled Shakespeare (
Macbeth
), Nietzsche (
Thus Spake Zarathustra
), Cervantes (
Don Quixote
) and—no shrinking violet—Richard Strauss himself (
A Hero’s Life
). By adapting Wagner’s leitmotifs to symphonic usage, he earned himself the nickname “Richard the Second.” Unlike Puccini, who cloaked the agonies of real life in musical beauty, Strauss portrayed exotic fantasies with everyday sounds, his music graphically imitating horses’ hoofbeats, the bleating of sheep, claps of thunder, and even the feeding of a baby.