Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Concert-goers in today’s world are unaccustomed to imagining a time when there was no access to moving images graced with the power and illusion possessed by contemporary video and celluloid. The cliché that characterizes contemporary culture as dominated by television and film contains, after all, more than a grain of truth. The nineteenth-century audiences for whom the works on this program were written depended on the acts of reading and listening–particularly that of listening–to provide a sense of the imagined landscape and the visual sense of the passage of time along with its various events. The one arena that offered the audience a visual narrative was, of course, the theater. It will come as no surprise that during the nineteenth century, in many of the centers of Europe known to music lovers for their respective musical traditions (e.g. St. Petersburg, Vienna, Munich, Prague, London), the power, lure, and significance of the theater exceeded that of music.

The relationship between theater and music in the nineteenth century was an intimate one well beyond the realm of opera. In part, this was the result of the special affinity between listening to music, the inherent theatricality of performing and experiencing music (visible today less in classical concerts and more so in pop and rock concerts) and the world of the theater. Both writers and musicians have long been fascinated by the differences, the similarities, and the nearly competitive interplay displayed by sound and words as theatrical mediums. In nineteenth-century European culture, the theater was a crucial public forum in which covert and overt political discussion, satire, a sense of cultural tradition, and sheer entertainment and diversion could be found.

During the nineteenth century, it was customary to embellish theatrical performances, particularly of the classics, with incidental music and overtures. The experimental ideas of the 1850s regarding the use of literary programs in orchestral music encouraged composers to use fully the illustrative potential of the array of instruments in the orchestra. An alternative formal strategy, one different from the classical symphony, was argued for. These innovations, most frequently associated with Franz Liszt, inspired composers to use the orchestra to help evoke and depict the poetic and the dramatic in music without the help of words. The ambition was to try to convey in music something about character, events, and landscape within a dramatic and literary context–something evoked by a playwright through words and gesture. The essence and emotional allure of a play could be added to and communicated in a special manner through instrumental music.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in the era historians have become too content to describe with the term romanticism, in the intellectual and cultural life of continental Europe, no single author rivaled the place held by Shakespeare. For German-speaking Europe, Shakespeare had achieved the status of a German classic. The translations of Schlegel and Tieck were so successful that the idea that Shakespeare was actually “better” in German became a view only partially considered a joke. This nineteenth-century German cultural arrogance was not lost on German-speaking Europe’s Slavic neighbors. For Russians and Czechs, the translation of the English-language Shakespeare into their own language and the stage productions of Shakespeare in the Russian and Czech languages during the nineteenth century became overt acts of national self-assertion. It was not only the symbolic content and unmatched greatness of Shakespeare that kept interest in his work so high. By showing that Shakespeare in Czech and Russian was every bit as good as Shakespeare in German, the Czech and the Russian languages-as carriers of truth and beauty-demonstrated their equality with English and German. The presence of the American composer John Knowles Paine on this program (a composer very admiring of the continental European musical tradition) is indirectly a reminder of how important it was to nineteenth-century America to develop its own tradition of Shakespeare performance in order to show the equality of Americans with respect to the British in matters aesthetic, literary, and philosophical.

In the act of writing music to Shakespeare, all the composers on this program engaged three challenges characteristic of the nineteenth century. First, they grappled with the question of how to reconcile the classical expectations of musical logic with the opportunities suggested by the language and the dramatic structure of a play. Second, by setting Shakespeare to music in their own cultural contexts, they participated in a distinctly nationalist political project. Third and perhaps most important, by tackling the emotional power and unrivaled greatness of Shakespeare, they put themselves to the ultimate test with respect to the power of music. Could music, unaided by words, evoke in the listener an experience comparable to what Shakespeare inspired in the hearts and minds of theater audiences and those many nineteenth-century individuals who read Shakespeare in their homes with a close and intense affection? Both the theatergoer and the reader were asked implicitly by these composers to listen to an orchestral tone poem and recognize and remember their Shakespeare; to find in the act of listening some new dimension and experience (equal to the power of the plays) brought forward by the composer who used Shakespeare as a unique source of musical inspiration.

“Hamlet”, Overture-Fantasy, Op. 67a (1888)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Hamlet was the last of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems based on Shakespeare and other literary sources. The idea of doing Hamlet first had been suggested in the early 1870s by the composer’s brother, Modest. At that time Tchaikovsky made effort to write a Hamlet symphonic poem but abandoned the task. He returned to the idea only after he had been asked in 1888 to write incidental music for a benefit performance of the play in St. Petersburg. Tchaikovsky finished the piece at the end of the summer in 1888, even though the scheduled performance of the play had been canceled. In the fall of 1888 the symphonic poem Hamlet received its premiere under the baton of the composer. Although Tchaikovsky had used two other Shakespeare plays as the basis for symphonic poems (Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest), Hamlet presented by far the most psychologically and philosophically daunting challenge. When Tchaikovsky came around to writing Hamlet, he no longer relied on his brother’s literary script. Interestingly, the symphonic poem presents both characters and ideas. One can hear Hamlet, depictions of fate, Ophelia (as many commentators have noted, set in a distinctly Russian manner), the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Fortinbras. Although the symphonic poem possesses the outlines of what we associate with sonata form, there is really no development. One is tempted to hear in the work the evocation of a mix of psychological distress and despair with which Tchaikovsky himself identified. Of all the elements in the work it is perhaps the recurring motive of fate that gives the piece its overarching coherence. The work ends, appropriately, with a death march.

“Macbeth”, Symphonic Poem, Op. 23 (1888)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

During the 1880s the enormously gifted young Richard Strauss underwent a musical transformation that drew him away from the more classical traditions favored by his father, the great French horn player, toward what often has been termed the “New German” movement. This school of composition took its inspiration from Liszt and Wagner. The individual most responsible for Strauss’s new direction was Alexander Ritter, a musician and composer who became a kind of second father to Richard Strauss. The result was that after writing two symphonies, Strauss turned to the medium of the symphonic poem in direct emulation of Franz Liszt. The most famous of the tone poems that date from the late 1880s and early 1890s are, of course, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and Till Eulenspiegel. Strauss’s first foray into this new and different kind of symphonic music was Aus Italian. The second venture was Macbeth. Macbeth gave the composer the most trouble in terms of its composition, and it has remained the least-performed of Strauss’s tone poems. Hans von Bülow criticized the first version because it ended without any musical or dramatic reference to the tragedy of Macbeth. Rather, it celebrated the triumph of MacDuff. But this dispute about the ending was merely a reflection of what Strauss articulated to von Bülow in the summer of 1888, when he wrote that there was “an ever-increasing conflict between the musical poetic content that I want to convey and the three-part sonata form that has come down to us from the classical composers.” This statement, written while Strauss was struggling with the composition of Macbeth, mirrors the contradictions between the demands inherent in Liszt’s vision of music (which called on music to follow poetic and dramatic logic) and the seemingly purely musical structure inherent in the work of Mozart and Brahms. As James Hepokowski has argued in a recent article on Strauss’s Macbeth, Strauss viewed Macbeth as a musical statement of independence– a modernist “manifesto” that asserted the primacy of the literary and dramatic logic aver the formal, classical compositional strategies. However, matching the story line of Macbeth and the musical content of the tone poem has proven difficult. There have been widely divergent claims. Hepokowski finally has found a way to reconcile the musical structure with the dramatic narrative of the play. This program note closely follows his argument. Macbeth opens in a way reminiscent of Wagner and Beethoven. The first sustained musical thought mirrors the idea of power and monarchy. The next section, which is the exposition, presents themes representing Macbeth, prophecy, ambition, Lady Macbeth, and her successful effort to persuade Macbeth to commit murder. The center section is divided into two episodes. In the first, many listeners have located a love motive, but Hepokowski considers this as a continuation of Lady Macbeth’s process of persuasion. In any event, the murder of Duncan is clearly marked in the first episode. The second episode, according to Hepokowski, signals the crowning of Macbeth. In musical terms one can hear in 3/4 time a B-flat-major march. Following these two sections there is a brilliant adaptation of sonata form. A recapitulation ensues, which actually describes the madness that overcomes Macbeth, who fails in his search for redemption. The end of this recapitulation depicts the final battle and the death of Macbeth. The tone poem ends with a coda, which reflects Strauss’s revision. In the original it ended with the music of Macduff’s fanfare, which is heard near the very end of this final version. The sense of triumph contained in Macduff’s music quickly dissolves into a musical reminder of the ambition, madness, and greatness that characterize Macbeth. The work closes with a flourish in D minor. When compared with its rival poems, this Strauss work sounds every bit as convincing It has been unjustly neglected in the concert hall.

“The Tempest,” Symphonic Poem, Op. 31 (1876)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

John Knowles Paine is perhaps best known for being the first incumbent of a professorial chair in music at Harvard University. He studied in Germany and had the privilege of playing for Clara Schumann. By all accounts he became a pivotal member of the Boston and Cambridge community that included Longfellow, William and Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was, among other things, the college organist. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the music building at Harvard is named for him. The early music by John Knowles Paine is truly conservative in its rejection of Wagnerian harmonic practice. In recent years some of Paine’s music has returned to the concert stage. Gunther Schuller recorded the St. Peter Oratorio in 1989. A wonderful Shakespeare overture to As You Like It from 1876, along with the first two symphonies in C minor and A major, were recorded by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic. Another fine work that recently has resurfaced is the overture to Sophocles’ Oedipus the King entitled Oedipus Tyrannus. Paine’s intimate involvement with Harvard led him naturally to participate in the active theatrical life associated with the university. Paine wrote music not only for Sophocles but also for a production of Aristophanes’ The Birds.

This symphonic poem was written at the same time As You Like It was composed. It is in four interconnected movements, some of which contain a variety of characters and events. The first allegro section describes the storm. A transition is made to an F-major adagio section depicting a “calm and happy scene before Prospero’s cell.” That is followed by on elegiac recitative, an adagio entitled “Ariel” that in turn moves gracefully into Prospero’s tale, which constitutes the third section. The last part of the work depicts three events: the love of Ferdinand for Miranda; Caliban, who is represented by the bassoon; and finally the triumph of Prospero.

“Othello,” Concert Overture, Op. 93 (1892)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When Antonin Dvorák came to the United States in 1892, he was hailed as the moral equivalent of Christopher Columbus. The second most distinguished European composer (after Brahms) had come to America to conquer it and establish a tradition of music-making through the vehicle of the National Conservatory in New York, of which Dvorák was the new Director. Shortly after his arrival he conducted a concert that featured a new work consisting of three overtures: In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and Othello, Opp. 91-93 respectively. Of these three, only Carnival has achieved a regular place in the repertoire. Since we are used to hearing only the Carnival overture as a free-standing piece (a circumstance not dissimilar to the way we hove been accustomed to hearing Smetana’s Moldau, which itself is part of a larger work), we have lost sight of Dvorák intent to create a three-step narrative that led the listener from the appreciation of nature and its essence to the joys of life and then to the tragedy created by those emotions that threaten the equanimity of nature and the happy soul of the human being so ably depicted in the Carnival overture. The last part of this three-part work, the one that depicts how human beings ruin what nature and life have given them, is, of course, Othello. It was begun in December 1891 and completed a few months later. As did Tchaikovsky in Hamlet, Dvorák in Othello utilized sonata form as a starting point. Also like Tchaikovsky, Dvorák rapidly encountered the compositional problem of how to respond appropriately to the dramatic essence of Shakespeare’s play. Some commentators have tried to downplay the parallelisms to the play evident in this overture, citing that Dvorák thought about different titles, including Love and The Tragic. But John Clapham argues convincingly that Dvorák made pencil notations to indicate the parallels between the dramatic action in Shakespeare’s drama and the music. In fact, there are eleven such indications. Curiously, they begin to occur a little more than a third of the way into the piece. Jealousy provided the composer with the most obvious musical focus. There are, in addition, allusions to Wagner and a reference to the Requiem Mass, which Dvorák had completed just a year earlier, in 1890. In this overture Dvorák attempts a musical characterization of Othello and Desdemona; of love and the emotions that are central to the drama. A small but remarkable detail deserves mention with respect to the Othello overture. As is well known, Brahms was a great admirer of Dvorák. While in America, Dvorák resumed his business relationship with Simrock, who was also Brahms’s publisher. In order to facilitate the publication of Dvorák’s new music, Brahms offered to do the proof-reading and to correct the galleys. Othello is one of the works for which Brahms did the editing and which he singled out with particular admiration.

Overture from the Music to Shakespeare’s Tragedy, “King Lear” (1859)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

The evolution of concert music in Russia and Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth century can be understood as governed by a continual tension and uneasy symbiosis between Western European influences and the desire by composers to develop a distinctly national musical idiom. At stake in the case of Russia was a struggle among artists and intellectuals over the soul of the nation as essentially either Western or Eastern. Balakirev was perhaps the most formidable and influential of Russia’s unusual group of late nineteenth-century composers. His works range from the relatively obscure Incidental Music for King Lear, originally written in 1858, the overture of which opens this program, to more famous later works such as Islamey, the “oriental fantasy” for piano. Balakirev attempted to utilize the formal procedures of Schumann and Liszt and also integrate so-called “folk” elements, not only from his native Russia, but from Bohemia, Poland and Spain. Other Russian composers, such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, who also struggled to reconcile the Russian with the Western European, were profoundly influenced by Balakirev. His orchestral music, particularly the two symphonies in C and D minor, and his many overtures are all too rarely performed. This work was inspired in part by Vladimir Stasov, the influential critic and composer. The choice of a Shakespeare text was not arbitrary. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in part to demonstrate that the language and culture of the Slavic peoples were in every sense the equals of the German and French, translations and productions of Shakespeare became immensely popular. Since Shakespeare had been appropriated by the French and German in translation, nationalist intellectuals used Shakespeare to demonstrate that Slavic languages (often looked down upon by snobs and aristocrats as culturally inferior) could transmit the English original of the world’s greatest playwright just as well as German or French, whose claims to cultural universalism and cosmopolitanism seemed more secure. Not surprisingly, many nineteenth-century Russian and Czech composers were eager to write symphonic music designed to accompany or evoke popular nationalist productions of Shakespeare’s plays. In this overture, Balakirev uses a distinctly Russian sound but develops the material along conventional, Schumann-like structural lines. The result is a rich, robust, and economically-organized musical drama. The thematic contrasts, the color and pace of the work transmit the grandeur and pathos of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Brahms’s Fourth Symphony

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Focus on a Masterwork: Brahms’s Fourth Symphony performed on April 30, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

This concert brings to the contemporary audience a reminiscence of a time in the history of music when the piano was the primary means of musical communication. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the spread of the piano was extraordinary. In part through the use of novel techniques of manufacture, sturdy pianos that could hold pitch were produced in a variety of sizes at a cost to the consumer that made the piano a nearly ubiquitous domestic object. It was the piano that fueled the enormous growth of the audience during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. It can be argued that the piano was used to some extent the way that radios and gramophones would be used later. It is not surprising, therefore, that the decline in piano sales coincided with the explosion of other means of musical reproduction, particularly the radio and the record player. An intermediary instrument was the player piano.

In the late nineteenth century, all varieties of music, from dance-hall music to opera and popular songs, became known through versions for piano. The piano could be taught (by means of fingering or playing by numbers) without the user having a sophisticated ear. Simplified as well as complex versions of the entire range of musical entertainment became available to households, making the piano the center for domestic entertainment. In this sense, musical literacy in the late nineteenth century was centered on the piano, its technological development–the increasing range, brightness, and power–paralleled the expansion of orchestral range and color during the late nineteenth century. Johannes Brahms, for example, was one of the first composers of international stature whose essential musical education was rooted in the piano. His predecessors, from Bach to Mendelssohn, had training and experience playing stringed instruments. Franz Schubert had been a boy soprano and was steeped in the choral tradition. But Brahms’s early development was essentially pianistic, and for the greater part of his career he felt insecure about matters of orchestration. In his early work he deferred to the advice of his close friend Joseph Joachim, the great violin virtuoso. But it was not Brahms’s predilection for the piano or his habit of thinking about orchestral sound in pianistic terms that led him to make piano versions of his orchestral music. In the 1870s and 1880s in Vienna the relative rarity of live orchestral performances made the performance of orchestral music on the piano an essential part of musical life. Most of the symphonic literature was known to the audience through versions for two hands, four hands, and two pianos. Brahms’s first presentation of the Fourth Symphony in this two-piano version was to a group of his close friends, whose judgment of the merits of the symphony was based on the piano version rather than on the orchestral realization. It therefore comes as no surprise that the symphonies by Brahms’s rival Bruckner were heard in concert form at the Bösendorfer Hall in Vienna also in two-piano versions. In short, piano versions of orchestral music in the late nineteenth century were created not merely for domestic use but also for semi-public, if not public, presentation–for listeners as well as for players.

The idea that the piano was a universal medium of musical communication appealed to the anti-romanticism of early twentieth century modernist rebels. Musicians of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern’s generation grew up in an atmosphere of lush, richly orchestrated concert and operatic music. In this new generation a suspicion developed that color and effect could mask the absence of essential musical content. Therefore, when The Society for Private Performances was created after World War I in Vienna by Alban Berg and other Schoenberg adherents, one of the stipulations was the performance of orchestral works and even chamber works on the piano so that connoisseurs and the public could confront the musical content, stripped of any distracting decoration and ornamentation. This conceit – this separation of coloration and decoration from structure – was crucial to the modernist credo of Arnold Schoenberg. Even though the Opus 16 orchestral version makes considerable, if not explicit, use of the notion of musical color, the need for a piano version was deemed essential since the greatness of the music did not lie in its outward effect but rather in the argument it made in unadorned musical terms. Webern’s version, therefore, not only fulfilled an aspiration to give Schoenberg’s novel work a greater distribution than it could possibly achieve through orchestral performance, but it also proved that the work had an essential merit as an essay on pitch and rhythmic invention. This two-piano version is consistent with Schoenberg’s own musical culture. He relished playing four-hand and two-piano versions of Mahler symphonies. He was from the era in which the knowledge of music history and the canon of musical greatness were based on learning music on the piano and not through either attending live performances or listening to recorded performances.

This concert, therefore, brings back the public and private worlds of music making of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also offers the audience an opportunity to think about the quality of musical imagination at the end of the nineteenth century; about how listeners could imagine orchestral sound without ever having heard it, much the way we hear voices when we read dialogue in a novel or picture landscapes as a result of an author’s use of language. The piano was like the text of a book that permitted the reader to spin a web of sound in her or his mind. This concert also is a test of the modernist proposition: that there are things to be learned from piano versions of the symphonic repertory, and that one can gain understanding of a piece through listening to and studying it in its piano version. These two masterpieces as works for piano are merely two in a great tradition, from Liszt to Zemlinsky, of piano versions of music made by great composers of their own work and of the work of others.

Unjust Obscurity?

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

The influence of history on today’s symphony orchestra concert repertoire is more complicated than might appear at first glance. We are, no doubt, the heirs and beneficiaries of the considered taste and judgment of generations of performers, amateurs, critics and audiences. The span of time of continuous listening and widely disseminated music criticism is about a century and a half; it began in the mid 1840s. A certain degree of stable consensus has emerged, comparable to the consensus with which we are familiar in literature and painting. No matter how historically contingent we admit our tastes in literature and painting to be (as opposed to claiming that our judgments are entirely “objective” and immune to history and culture in some formalist sense), we continue to acknowledge Dante and Shakespeare as doubtlessly great, just as we grant Leonardo and Rembrandt a permanent place in a pantheon of painters.

However, the total history of the forms of symphonic music is much shorter. There was no “classical” era, in the sense of antiquity, which the late eighteenth century could rediscover and assume as a model (as happened in art and architecture). Likewise, because of the advent during the seventeenth century of the orchestra in the modern sense, no “Renaissance” or “Middle Ages” bequeathed a body of work formally continuous in some obvious manner with the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. We are participants in a relatively recent urban ritual, the symphonic concert.

Nevertheless, the Beethoven symphonies and the last Mozart and Haydn symphonies became the starting benchmarks of the concert hall canon (a term used here in its recent fashionable sense, not to indicate the musical form but a body of paradigmatic works) in the mid-nineteenth century. Works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Schubert and Brahms were added, followed by select works by composers from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Amidst the ebb and flow of taste a small group of out-standing orchestral pieces, from Mozart to Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius and Shostakovich has emerged as the standard repertory.

However, in contrast to painting and literature, we have become enthralled by the shadow cast by the perhaps 175 orchestral pieces that make up the standard list. We compare all non-canonic works to them. We persistently invoke masterpieces to denigrate lesser-known works, even by well known composers. It is as if we have lost the joy of listening; of following in our imaginations the invention, insight and skill of most of the fine composers from the past. We seem compelled to comment, immediately after first hearing, “but it is not x” or “it is flawed, unlike y.” We have lost perspective and patience. In painting, we are sufficiently pleased and appreciative of lesser works by masters and fine works by lesser figures to hang them in museums and to spend exorbitant prices to own them. In literature, we read with delight book after book from the past without comparing what we are reading to a handful of classics.

In the concert hall, we have become intolerant of the unfamiliar. We are bored too quickly at first hearing. We have become addicted to endless repetitions of the very same works. A cult of the masterpiece has developed, and we search–often in vain–for nuances in the repeated renditions. It is as if we were film buffs who had memorized every line and frame in Casablanca, awaiting eagerly our favorite moment, only to anticipate savoring it once more. Despite the understandable pleasure we all experience in recognition through memory and repetition, the situation has become so extreme that we are in danger of losing one of the great pleasures enjoyed by audiences in the past: the act of fresh discovery and response.

This concert is dedicated to the revival of the history of music as a living presence. We are performing works that are finely crafted and inspired in their own right, written by outstanding composers who used music to express ideas with power, intensity, authenticity and artistic and emotional commitment: music by leading figures from the musical past. The works, in formal terms, are as good in every sense as most of the paintings in our museums and works of literature in print from the past, with perhaps the exception of the 175 most valued examples. That a single work is not the Beethoven Fifth, the Dvorák Cello concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Debussy’s La Mer or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ought not disqualify it from being listened to, even more than once.

Schmidt, Concerto for Piano Left Hand

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

Franz Schmidt’s music has always been the object of fanatical advocacy by a small group of connoisseurs. His opera Notre-Dame (1904), the oratorio The Book of the Seven Seals (1937), the four symphonies and the various smaller orchestral works have always had a loyal following among highly discerning musicians. Among the most enthusiastic Schmidt adherents was Hans Keller, the eminent Austrian musician and critic who emigrated to England in the 1930s and who left an indelible and brilliant mark on twentieth-century English musical life. More than any other composer on this program, Schmidt earned within his own lifetime the reputation of an unjustly neglected master. There is little doubt that the symphonies deserve to be heard more often. They, in my opinion, are equal to the much better known works of Sibelius. In part what prevented Schmidt from receiving his deserved recognition was his personality. (A similar case was that of Hans Pfitzner.) Schmidt, a loyal child of the Habsburg Empire who lived for most of his life in Vienna, was both a fine cellist and pianist. He served for many years in the Vienna Opera orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. In that role he developed a burning envy and hatred for Gustav Mahler and Mahler’s brother-in-law, the great violinist and concert-master Arnold Rose, whose quartet premiered much of Arnold Schoenberg’s early chamber music. Schmidt later quit the orchestra to teach piano at the Vienna Conservatory; Jealousy, bitterness and arrogance were Schmidt’s distinguishing character traits. He always felt disregarded as a composer and denigrated – unfairly – as a mere player, whose music was a pale pastiche or imitation of the styles of others. As this ambitious Concerto indicates, Schmidt’s musical architecture, thematic impulses, uses of instruments, as well as the sequencing, mode and development of musical materials owe a great deal, curiously enough, to the Viennese tradition as realized by those arch-rivals Brahms and Bruckner. This concerto was commissioned in 1934 by Schmidt’s fellow Viennese, Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the great philosopher Ludwig and scion of one of the city’s most musical and distinguished families. Wittgenstein lost one arm in World War I. He proceeded to commission works for left hand alone from Schmidt, Strauss and Ravel. Schmidt also wrote a magnificent quintet for Wittgenstein, as well as a solo toccata.

Szymanowski, Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 15 (1907)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

Before the mid-twentieth century-the era of Penderecki and Lutoslawski-the two greatest figures in the history of music in Poland were Frederic Chopin and Karol Szymanowski. Like Chopin, Szymanowski was an ardent Polish patriot. But unlike Chopin, Szymanowski lived mostly in Poland (with periods of extended stay in Vienna and Paris) and devoted much of his career, both in the early stages and at the end of his life, to furthering the cause of music in Poland. Like his more famous but comparable contemporaries, the Czech Leos Janacek and the Hungarian Bela Bartók, Szymanowski struggled to confront the powerful influences of the German and French musical traditions and, at the same time, craft a distinct style derived in part from the inspiration offered by his homeland and its linguistic and cultural traditions. However, Szymanowski (particularly after 1918) sought to develop a universal and spiritual but distinctly lyrical modernist musical language of expression. This ambition led him therefore to non-Western and oriental sources for ideas and literary texts. Szymanowski is best remembered for two stunning violin concertos, a magnificent Stabat Mater, the opera King Roger and a host of songs and chamber music.

Szymanowski wrote four works which were to be catalogued as symphonies. No. 4 was a Concertante for piano and orchestra. No. 3 was a work for chorus, soloists and orchestra. Only two works in the purely instrumental format survive. The better known of the early symphonies, No. 2 from 1909-1910 was later edited and revised with the help of the distinguished Warsaw composer/conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, Szymanowski’s friend. The work on this concert, the First Symphony in F minor, Op. 15, although performed in 1909 in Warsaw, was never published, revived or revised. It is therefore obscure in two senses. First, like the rest of the composer’s music, it is too seldomly performed outside of Poland. Second, within Szymanowski’s oeuvre, this work has been given short shrift as a bit “crude”, and not representative of the gifts and achievements characteristic of the mature Szymanowski.

This performance can therefore test the conventional view of this composer’s early work. Only two movements exist. Taken together, they make a powerful musical essay. True, the influence of Richard Strauss and the traditions of Liszt and Wagner are clearly evident. But, as in the case of early Brahms (where the influence of Schumann can be detected easily), there is a compelling immediacy of invention and a wholly original instinct for drama and orchestration less prevalent in Szymanowski’s later works. In this work for example, Szymanowski innovates in the formal structure–in the way the seams within the movements are sewn together by harmonic change and orchestration. He chooses — courageously — to end the work by avoiding the cadential cliches of his time, leaving the listener with a startling mix of finality and ambiguity. Although the composer referred to his first symphony in later years as a “monstrum contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral,” the brash youthful energy that comes through is convincing. Perhaps the work has suffered because of the title. If it were regarded less as a symphonic fragment, and more as a two-part symphonic tone poem, the work might have taken its rightful place alongside the great Strauss tone poems from the same period. This work can be compared to Bartók’s Kossuth from 1903, a fine youthful symphonic essay by another great twentieth century composer written under the spell of Strauss’ example.

Surrealism and Music?: The Musical World Around René Magritte

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

This concert is designed to parallel the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of the work of René Magritte. Two principles of organization are at work: First, the listener will hear works written by Belgian, French and American composers who were contemporaries of René Magritte. Magritte, unlike Giorgio de Chirico, believed that music was an ally of surrealism. He maintained a lifelong interest in music. One of the composers represented here, André Souris, was his friend. Two of the pieces , Poulenc’s Les Biches and Edgar Varése’s Arcana, were written precisely during the years when surrealism emerged from Dadaism in France and Belgium. A third work, by Charles Koechlin,, begun in the mid 1920’s and completed more than a decade later, reflects the wide influence of surrealist aesthetics. The last piece, John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano, pays homage to the twentieth century composer whose conceptual innovations most closely parallel for music the challenge and significance of Magritte’s famous word paintings from the 1920’s and 1930’s and Magritte’s “Les Mots et les Images” (1929). In short, the listener is presented in this concert with a selection of the musical context in which Magritte worked from the mid-19920’s to the mid-1950’s.

Second, using the contemporaneity and geographic proximity of the composers on the program and their works (e.g. Brussels, Paris and New York, three cities where surrealism had a significant following) this concert seeks to explore whether there was in music a development parallel to surrealism during the first half of the twentieth century. Using Magritte as the model, can one describe and understand certain music from the same period as surrealistic in a way comparable to the way we identify surrealist writing and painting?

The irony in the hostility of French surrealism to music and André Breton’s disdain for Schopenhauer is that it would seem that music must have been a natural medium for much of surrealist ideology. Central to surrealism was the notion of an unmediated direct creative outpouring of the imagination, transcending the distinction of the conscious and the unconscious. A nearly mystical sense of unity and the belief in a higher and deeper definition of reality pervaded surrealist discourse. Surrealism sought to explode the distinction between resemblance and illusion, between the visible and the invisible. It was surrealism’s goal to transform the idea of representation and the distinction between the subjective and the objective. Surrealist artists celebrated the transcendence of apparent contradiction and sought to overcome the tyranny of reason, to unleash the atomatic and un-self-conscious dynamic of creativity. Furthermore, inspired by Freud they seized on his investigation of the unconscious within dreamwork to break out of the limitations of what appeared to be the ordinary consciousness of banal reality. The conventions of word usage, of naming perception and symbolic meaning, all underwent critical analyses and challenge.

The tradition of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics should have recommended music as an ideal vehicle for theses aspects of surrealism. As Schopenhauer and Wagner argued, music was the direct unmediated expression of the unconscious, transcending mere representation wheterh as a so-called abstract or absolute aesthetic medium, or as a programmatic vehicle as in opera, one which could accompany words and pictures. Music was alleged naturally to possess the direct creative force sought by surrealism. It surpassed the conventional limitations of speech and illustration; the distinctions between the real and the imaginary.

But it was not until 1946 when André Breton argued in an essay entitled “Silence Is Golden” that music can be a powerful force for the achievement of “incandescence”; that music could reveal an inner music of poetic language. He recognized music as “independent of the social and moral obligations that limit spoken and written language”.

As Breton’s 1946 essay makes clear, John Cage’s writing of the 1950’s possessed close similarities to surrealist rhetoric and strategies. Cage’s approach to the continuity of compositional process and his celebration of indeterminacy are conceptual parallels to the surrealist manifestoes of the 1920’s Cage’s most famous work 4’33” from the 1954 can be regarded as the moral equivalent to Magritte’s 1926 Ceci n’est pas une Pipe. Both Cage and Magritte attempted to penetrate the essence of silence in a revolutionary manner.

The difficulty, of course, is that music, unlike writing and painting–the most familiar surrealist media, was never constructed on an illusion of realism; on the imitation of nature, strictly considered. Even when musical realism became an accepted notion in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, it was clearly an artificial convention.

In the early days of Romanticism, in the writings of Jean Paul, Wackenroder and E.T.A. Hoffmann (despite the surrealist’ open disregard for these writers), music held the power which Max Ernst sought to achieve through surrealism, to turn “topsy-turvy the appearances and relationships” of reality and appearance and address the “crisis of consciousness.” Music became the instrument of the fantastic. Surrealism in painting, as Georges Hugnet argued in 1936, aimed to appeal “to the imagination and fancy” and to take “man out of himself”. Music always had the inherent capacity to link life and the dream. It was traditionally the closest to the “invisible forces” that surrealism sought to capture. Magritte’s recognition of music’s power made him an exception to his fellow surrealists. Musical symbols, particularly as evidence of the hidden, reappear throughout Magritte’s oeuvre.

One reason that surrealism is a more difficult concept in terms of twentieth-century music goes beyond the essential differences between music and the other arts. Music’s inherent non-representational artificiality became exaggerated during the first half of the twentieth century. The dominant forces of musical modernism celebrated the abstract potential of music. Surrealism was a revolutionary movement. It wanted to engender liberation from the political and spiritual evils most powerfully mirrored in the experience of World War I. But it used realist techniques so that the surface of the work could be readily approached. The concurrent musical revolutionary impulse was the embrace of an even more counterintuitive approach to writing music. The attack on the bourgeois conventions and on the status quo in music took the form of atonality, the emancipation of dissonance, the use of “raw” sounds, and the other innovation which made the smug audience uncomfortable.

This trend in modernism struck the surrealists as elitist and as a symptom of a hated art for art’s sake attitude. There were in the 1920’s, however, alternative modernist musical movements which defied the elitist and arrogant tendencies of what eventually became the “orthodox” modernism of Schoenberg and his followers. The composers represented in this concert were chosen because their music 1) suggests contemporary strategies and approaches comparable to the visual and literary surrealism of Magritte; and 2) mirrors a rebellion against the high-handed modernist conceits of musical modernism which claimed the existence of a progressive historical process in the development of musical style and 3) sought to achieve a revolutionary impact on the audience by permitting the listener an immediate access to the work in a manner comparable to the work of the surrealist painters. This required a self-conscious distancing from modern academicism and historical tradition.

Andrew Souris experimented with collage and simplicity to construct a nearly surrealist narrative. Poulenc juxtaposed identifiable fragments and used the history of music much as a painter uses recognizable images to change their significance and penetrate their meanings. Likewise, Koechlin mixed the literary and the musical and poked fun at twentieth-century modernism by constructing a surrealist musical narrative. In Souris, Poulenc and Koechlin bizarre contrasts pierce the surface of so-called reality to level more akin to the experience of dreaming. Varése’s Arcana was inspired, as Varése wrote in 1925 to his wife, by a dream sequence:

I was on a boat that was turning around and around–in the middle of the ocean–spinning around in great circles. In the distance I could see a lighthouse, very high–and on top an angel

–and the angel was you– a trumpet in each hand. 

Alternating projectors of different colors: red, green yellow, blue–and you were playing Fanfare No. 1, trumpet in right hand. Then suddenly the sky became incandescent–blinding– you raised your left hand to your mouth and the Fanfare 2 blared. And the boat kept turning and spinning– and the alternation of projectors and incandescence became more frequent–intensified –and the fanfares more nervous–impatient… and then–merde–I woke up. But anyway they will be in Arcanes. 

(Enclosed with this letter was the short score of Arcana.)

By use of repetition and an unusual sequence of sounds, Varése transformed musical space and obliterated the difference of musical and unmusical sound. Musical space and time became revolutionized in a way that is viscerally evident of the listener. It is as startling and unsettling as the radical canvases that Magritte painted in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Like many surrealists, Varése paid overt homage to Paracelsus and the traditions of alchemy which sought to help humankind pierce through to the ultimate unity of existence. A quote from Paracelsus stands on the head of the score of Arcana.

Last but not least, the sense of time and space and the relationship of performer and listener to the experience of music are entirely transfigured in a surrealist manner by John Cage, one of the towering figures of American Twentieth-century culture. Written when surrealism was perhaps at its peak of popularity in America, Cage’s works from the 1950’s, including the concerto, mirror the revolutionary simplicity inherent in the tradition of surrealism. The performance tonight was intended as an 80th-birthday tribute to the composer; it now must be heard as the ASO’s memorial.

It is hoped that listeners to this concert who have looked at and thought about Magritte’s paintings, can find in their response to these five works of music–spanning the time frame of most of Magritte’s career–parallels which can assist in their reflections not only on surrealism and Magritte but about twentieth-century musical modernism and the nature of music in contemporary life. Magritte and the composers on this program all sought to engender an active critical sensibility through art which ultimately could encourage a craving for unity, peacefulness, freedom, justice and creativity yet unachieved in this century.

Collage

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

Andre Souris (1890-1970) was one of this century’s most eminent Belgian musical figures. For most of his creative life he was attached to the surrealist movement. Souris was a close friend and colleague of Rene Magritte (despite periodic rifts toward the end of their careers). In 1926 Souris and a fellow Belgian, Paul Hooreman, started a quasi-surrealist journal called Musique and experimented with chance music. By 1927 both Souris and Rene Magritte collaborated with the leader of the Belgian surrealists, Paul Nouge, on the surrealist publication Adieu a Marie. As the leadership not only of Magritte and Souris but of one of Magritte’s oldest friends, the founder of the Belgian Dada and Surrealist movements, the musician E.L.T. Mesens, indicated, what distinguished the Belgian surrealists from their Persian contemporaries was a deep interest in music. Magritte’s brother Paul was a musician. The “official” photographic portrait of the Belgian Surrealists fating from 1034 included both Mesens and Souris as well as Magritte. Their main spokesman and theorist Nouge did not share Andre Breton’s more classical surrealist disregard of music which Breton himself later disavowed in 1946.

Souris worked with Nouge in the theater and set many of his poems. At a concert staged by Belgian surrealists in January 1929, Nouge introduced the works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Milhaud, Stravinsky and Honegger (as well as Souris) on the program which Souris had selected. The hall was graced by twenty paintings by Magritte. In 1946, working with the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, Souris began his lone career as a film composer, writing the score for a film on the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux.

Souris’ concept of surrealism in music took the work of Satie as a starting point. He extended Satie’s effort to de-mystify music and simplify it. In 1925 Souris wrote “The coming of a new art hardly concerns us. Art has been demobilized elsewhere—one must rather live”. Souris’ conceptual effort to undermine the distinction between art and life places his work from 1920’s and 1930’s in a continuum which later would include Varese and Cage.

In the work on this program, parody, a Satie-like simplicity and nearly random linkages all can be heard. Like surrealist painters, the technique of collage—using found and banal elements in a radical extension of a practice first perfected by the cubist—is used by Souris to challenge the expectation of temporal art and structured form. In order to debunk the distinction between art and life, the contrast between concrete experience and aesthetic imagination—between intention and randomness—had to be challenged. In this work minimal textured and contrast occur in sequence, as if by spontaneous association. The music is stripped of the pretense of a formal coherence other than an apparently “automatic” association. This work, therefore sounds most like that quintessential surrealist game, the “”exquisite corpse”, in which a composition is made on a piece of folder paper by separate individuals each of whom has no idea of what the preceding person has done. The absurd and naïve (in the use of solo instruments and repetition) can be found in this work. They are cloaked behind a folk-like ordinariness and sparseness.

Souris, apart from his role in Belgian surrealism, was prolific as a theorist in the psychology and phenomenology of music, a historian (of lute tablature), a teacher, and a conductor. Particularly after 1945, despite a career as composer and conductor which took him regularly to London, Souris exerted considerable influence over the musical life of Belgium.

Suite from Les Biches

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

Despite the fact that Andre Breton, the most prominent surrealist writer, despised Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), the great French writer and cultural personality, as a “notorious fake”, during the mid 1920’s the experimentalism of Cocteau, the composer Erik Satie and a group of young French composers who looked to Cocteau and Satie as inspirations—“Les Six” (Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, Durey and Tailleferre)—had much in common with the first wave of surrealist thinking of the 1920’s.

Cocteau admired Satie for his daring and simplicity. “Les Six” and the surrealists both rejected the pretensions of visual and musical impressionism, of Debussy and Renoir. Likewise the complex and mystifying surface of modernism, particularly in music, seemed to Cocteau and the surrealists as a continuation of an artificial, nearly Wagnerian elevation of the aesthetic over the everyday; the perpetuation of a dated dichotomy between experience and ordinary life on the one hand and imagination and art on the other. Furthermore, both groups were driven by a sense of generational revolt, a need to shock and pierce the surface of bourgeois respectability.

In 1920 Cocteau organized a “Spectacle-Concert” in Paris. This even imitated a music-hall evening. It was filled with dancing, clowns, acrobats, and theater. Cocteau sought to infuse the staid concert ritual with aspects of the séance and the circus. Popular and dance music was included alongside works by Poulenc and Milhaud. As Souris’ surrealist concert of 1929 later underscored, what avowed musical surrealists shared with Poulenc and Milhaud was an attraction to prepetition, circularity, spontaneity, playfulness and the rejection of essentially German notions of music development and progression in favor of techniques of abrupt juxtaposition and satire.

Throughout the 1920’s, however, the differences among “Les Six”, the modernist credos of Busoni and Schoenberg and the views of surrealism remained blurred. Despite an aversion to the Wagnerian ambitions of Schoenberg’s musical modernism, the surrealists, even the neo-classicists and the followers of Satie and Cocteau all shared the mantle of revolution and the desire to shock and overturn what was perceived as the tyranny and superficiality of received taste, rationality, convention, morality and consciousness. Underlying these artistic movements was, after all, profoundly critical political sensibility. Art needed to serve the transformation of the political system and cultural values and conceits which had resulted in the senseless carnage of World War I.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) wrote Les Biches in 1923 as a ballet for Serge Diaghilev and his “Ballet Russe”. It was premiered in 1924 with sets by Marie Laurencin. The Choreography was by Nijinska. The ballet scenario was essentially surrealist in the sense that it was, in Milhaud’s words, the result of “full fantasy” unencumbered by the usual conscious effort “to describe, to suggest, to express, to comment upon”. The blurring of the distinctions between reality and imagination and between logic and fantasy was an explicit intention of Les Biches. Even its title mirrored the inextricable unity inherent in language use. The title directly exploded the surface appearance of contradiction. It refers at one and the same time to hind, the female deer, and darling. In line with the surrealists’ defense of “automatic” writing and free association, the title came to Poulenc spontaneously in a taxi. The ballet was decidedly erotic and playful.

Les Bandar-Log

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) was the grand old man of the French avant-garde and the unsung hero of the twentieth century French music. Koechlin’s longevity, extraordinary productivity, eclecticism and reputation as theorist and teacher (Poulenc studied counterpoint and composition with him from 1921-1924) all have failed to rescue his music from oblivion. Few Twentieth-century figures in music, however, present as fascinating and subtle a subject for exploration and rediscovery. In the context of a concert inspired by the work of a Belgian surrealist who spent almost all of his life in Belgium, it is ironic that perhaps Koechlin’s greatest triumph as a composer occurred in Brussels during the 1930’s.

In 1933 Koechlin wrote a ballet L’Errante for the “Ballet Russe,” choreographed by Balanchine with sets by the surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Like the surrealists, Koechlin shared sympathies with communism. In the interwar period he sought to write music for “the people”. Koechlin’s own estimate of his artistic credo revealed further similarities with surrealism. Surface style was of little concern. Rather his art was “dictated” by the interior imagination, by “intuitive power”, and by an “unpremeditated” instinct. At the same time a quite traditional sense of form emerges from his works which might be compared with the compositional and imagistic conservatism of the nearly photographic pictorialism of many surrealist painters.

As Les Bandar-Log illustrates, Koechlin possessed an uneasy relationship to musical modernism comparable to pictorial surrealism’s rejection of many modernist aesthetic strategies. It was the way in which musical elements were organized and formulated rather than the distinct originality of style which concerned Koechlin. Koechlin, like many surrealists also embraced cinema. Among his most interesting works is a work entitled Seven Stars Symphony in seven movements (entitled Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Harvey, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings, and Charlie Chaplin).

Les Bandar-Log is part of Koechlin’s nearly lifelong effort to set Kipling’s The Jungle Book to music. It was first sketched in 1923 and written out in 1939 and orchestrated in 1940. Subtitled “Scherzo of the Monkey’s”, it is based on “Kaals Hunting” from Volume 1 of Kipling’s book. It was premiered in 1946 in Brussels and is perhaps Koechlin’s best known work. It was recorded by Antal Dorati in the mid 1960’s and used for a ballet by Anthony Tudor.

This work shares with surrealism a sharp critical intent toward assumptions of the communication of meaning through sounds, images, and words. Koechlin utilizes nearly all the stylistic elements of twentieth-century musical modernism. Taking the idea of the monkeys making sounds in the forest as his premise, Koechlin attacked the delusions and arrogant claims of twelve-tone writing, neo-classicism, polytonality and atonality. It is as if Koechlin approached this work as a surrealist painter who generates the appearance of a narrative (much in the way Magritte did in the painting entitled The Murderer Threatened from 1927) and who then inverts meanings, time and spatial relations for the viewer. Taking the ironic subject of the “primitive” monkey, Koechlin opens the work with a depiction of the “calm of the luminous morning”. This calm is interrupted by the “procedures of modern harmony”. The monkeys are vain and seek to display their “secrets”. They lurch from romanticism to neo-classicism and “pretend” to return to Back. However within this satire “there is a genuine homage to polytonal language and even to atonality”.

Koechlin, like Magritte, toyed with different styles—photographic realism, impressionism, cubism—but in the end returned to his own virtuosic vocabulary. The orchestration is splendid. Out of distorted juxtapositions and a seemingly disjointed and allusive set of episodes comes a coherent musical reconfiguration. An underlying unity is revealed through disparate parte. Despite themselves, the monkeys manage to make the forest sing. Koechlin mixes illustration with transformation, through a sequence of musical images mediated by reaction of the listener and the plot of the score (e.g., how the monkeys act and finally flee the arrival of the lords of the jungle). Musical illustration and narrative are turned on their heads through the manipulation of the modernist strategies which depict human behavior as if humans were monkeys in a jungle. A dreamlike and almost cinematic effect is achieved.