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Best known today for his symphonic music, Tchaikovsky also composed ten operas, two of which, The Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin, see regular productions today. Both operas are based on works by the premier poet of nineteenth-century Russia, Alexander Pushkin. Tchaikovsky, ever on the lookout for suitable operatic material, got the idea for using Pushkin's epic poem from a friend during a casual conversation. The composer wrote that the idea at first seemed far fetched, but after dining alone in a tavern he had made up his mind to use it and, after a sleepless night, had created in his mind the scenario for Eugene Onegin. Eugene Onegin is a story of love, jealousy and missed chance for happiness. Tatiana is madly in love with Onegin who rebuffs her and flirts instead with Olga, the beloved of his friend Lensky, who flirts with him in return. Lensky, appalled, challenges Onegin to a duel and is promptly killed. Onegin goes into exile, returns after six years and tries to talk Tatiana into eloping with him but she, by then older and wiser, rejects his offer. The Polonaise opens Act III, at a ball in the house of a St. Petersburg nobleman. Tchaikovsky described Eugene Onegin as lyrical and wanted his performers to concentrate on subtlety of characterization. He chose students to give the premiere, fearing that seasoned opera singers would think their job was only to make a beautiful sound. The polonaise is a stately Polish national dance in triple meter with a characteristic dotted rhythm. While names like “polonaise” or “polnischer Tanz” hark back to the late sixteenth century, none of these dances bears any similarity to the classical Polonaise, which acquired its current form in Poland only around 1800. An elaborate introductory fanfare opens the dance, whose principal theme is as follows: DON JUAN, Op.20 Richard Strauss came from a musically conservative family. His father, Franz Joseph, was the principal horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra who considered Brahms a radical and Wagner beyond the pale, effectively forbidding his son to listen to contemporary music. Richard assimilated the music of the early and middle nineteenth century in his early works, composing as a committed classicist. But he soon discovered that the musical language taught by his father was too confining for his fertile mind. Strauss quickly found his own voice through his unique development of the tone poem, a purely instrumental rendition of a text, usually poetic or narrative in nature. The term “symphonic poem” had been coined by Liszt in 1854 for compositions accompanied by a program that the audience was supposed to read before listening to the music. Although composers did not all appropriate Liszt’s term, the concept had become a standard medium for the nineteenth-century Romantics, including Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, reaching its apex with Strauss. Moreover, the fusion of the arts was epitomized in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner’s music dramas. Strauss was to create his own version on this fusion, both in his purely instrumental tone poems and his operas. Strauss’s musical rendering of specific texts is far more detailed than Liszt’s, although it is often difficult to follow without a “road map.” The anecdotes about Strauss' attempts at literary music are many: “I want to be able to describe a teaspoon musically,” he is said to have commented. In the ten years between 1888 and 1898 he produced a string of tone poems, beginning with Aus Italien and Macbeth. Don Juan, completed in 1889, was the first to be publicly performed, catapulting him to international recognition. Strauss completed the score in Bayreuth where he was a coach at the Festspielhaus – the venue Wagner built to showcase his music dramas – between performances of Tristan und Isolde. At the time, the 24-year-old Strauss was involved in a scandalous love affair with a married woman. He expressed his youthful exuberance and desire with three extracts from Don Juan, an incomplete verse play by Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), which he copied as a preface in the score. Lenau’s play is just one of the reworkings of the Don Juan legend, which first appeared on the literary scene in the seventeenth-century Spanish play, The Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina, and immortalized musically in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Lenau's version follows Don Juan through five conquests and a level of debauchery that leaves a wake of misery and death. In response to his brother’s attempt to dissuade him from his dissolute lifestyle, Don Juan expounds on his desire to experience all the diverse and ever new joys of sexual gratification, hoping to die of a kiss from the ideal woman. His paramour/victims are: Maria, who follows Don Juan to escape from a forced marriage and is abandoned; Clara, who actually rejects him before he can reject her; Isabella, whom Don Juan seduces, disguised as her fiancé; Anna, who never actually appears but whom Don Juan apostrophizes from afar; and finally, an unnamed woman who dies of a broken heart. Don Juan receives the news of her death at a masked ball. Unlike Tirso's Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Lenau’s hero is not felled by a stone dinner guest meting out divine retribution. Rather, he intentionally lowers his guard at his last duel with his victim's son, because victory, and even life itself, has lost its appeal. All this, Strauss condenses and transforms into a single symphonic movement. While presenting a narrative in music, Strauss' tone poems also conform to the conventions of musical form at the time. In the case of Don Juan, Strauss adapted the narrative to a modified sonata allegro structure. The principal theme, incorporating an orchestral fanfare and an upward-swooping melody, is a composite musical idea expressing the wild abandon sexual striving of his hero. The second half of the tone poem – the development in formalistic terms – begins with the so-called the “Carnival Scene” that corresponds to Lenau’s masked ball. Strauss breaks free of the sonata form tradition, however, by redefining the Don's personality with a new heroic theme, which has become the best known signature tune of the piece. Strauss alludes to further unspecified adventures in the increasingly manic development of the Don's themes. Eventually he turns up in a churchyard where he comes upon the statue of a nobleman whom he has killed and whom, in a final act of bravado, he invites to supper. The recurrence of the Don's original theme is Strauss' abbreviated take on a formal recapitulation – forgotten are all his earlier amours. In his final duel, Don Juan puts up a valiant fight, during which all his themes are further developed and contrapuntally combined in a manner the composer certainly learned from Wagner. CARMINA BURANA, Scenic Cantata “My collected works begin with the Carmina Burana,” declared Carl Orff after the successful premiere in 1937 in Frankfurt, where it was staged with elaborate costumes and scenery. A late bloomer, Orff dismissed most his earlier compositions, including three adaptations of stage works by Monteverdi, as derivative and withdrew many of them. Carmina Burana also turned out to be his most well received by far, and while he subsequently composed over a dozen other stage works in a similar musical style, none achieved the popularity of his “Opus One.” Perhaps it is the physical exuberance and freshness, coupled with a text full of passion – A full translation in programs and record liner notes used to be expurgated – humor and an easily accessible musical language that made Carmina Burana one of the most popular twentieth-century stage productions. In this and in his later stage works Orff aimed at a Gesamtkunstwerk (a concept originally used by Richard Wagner as the foundation of his operas), an artistic synthesis in which text, music, scenery and movement are unified and completely coordinated. Orff is also known for his educational program of music and dance for schoolchildren, called Orff-Schulwerk. Beginning with the 1920s, he and his associate, Gunild Keetman, developed the program whose goal was to teach children the fundamentals of melody, rhythm and movement, using the simplest of means found in any kindergarten or elementary school: the human voice, toy drums – some specially designed by Orff – and xylophones, recorders, bongo drums. Later in works for older children, he added string instruments. The program faltered during the war years, but in 1948 it became for five years an immensely successful educational radio show. So-called “Orff instruments” and his pedagogy are still used in many elementary schools in the United States and Europe. Carmina Burana is the title given in 1847 to an edited collection of mostly secular songs from an early thirteenth-century manuscript discovered in 1803 in a Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria (hence the name “burana”). The manuscript contains about 250 medieval poems and songs, including works in Latin, Middle High German and French, the bulk of which never appear in any other manuscript. They were assigned to sections: clerical poems, love songs, drinking and gaming songs, and two religious dramas. The collection is clearly a songbook, since many of the pieces included musical notation, but in a style of over a century earlier that did not indicate pitches or rhythm. The actual melodies had to be reconstructed from other manuscripts. The poets are mostly anonymous but are believed to have been “goliards,” once thought to be defrocked priests and monks, but the term is now considered to be an ironic designation of poets who wrote satires and parodies for carnivals and festivals. The best known of these was the “feast of fools,” during which mock popes and cardinals satirized the religious life and parodied church services. Although the Benediktbeuern Manuscript contains no musical notation, Orff was certainly acquainted with the theories of medieval secular song, which he often incorporated into his own settings. Like the music of the Middle Ages, Orff's settings have little or no harmonic development, relying instead on terse melodic motives and rhythms derived from the meter of the poems themselves. All of the poetry is strophic, and Orff creates stunning instrumental interludes and accompaniments whose variety and vivid tone color break the monotony of the simple melodies. Orff employs a large orchestra to give him a wide tone color palette but only occasionally uses the entire orchestra for dramatic effect. Although often performed in concert, numerous choreographers have tried their hand at staging Carmina Burana for chorus and dancers as the composer had intended. The focus on rhythm makes all of the choral numbers quite danceable, and even the solo arias are easily adaptable to dance. The selection of poems serves as a symbolic statement on man’s subjugation to fortune. Contrary to popular belief, the symbol of wheel of fortune did not begin as a TV game show but can be traced to ancient Roman civilization and adorns the original thirteenth-century manuscript. Carmina Burana opens and closes with a paean to Fortune, Empress of the World, “changeable as the moon.” Part 1, "In Springtime" begins with an a cappella chorus intoning a welcome to spring. "Veris leta facies," with oriental-sounding interludes, the modern instruments imitating gongs and bells. Part 2, "In the Tavern," conjures the masculine world of the medieval tavern, containing perhaps the most distinctive songs in the collection, notably the lament of the roasting swan, "Olim latus colueram" (Once I lived in the lakes) – the only song in the piece that departs from the diatonic intervals of medieval music; In Part 3, the raucous bar-room ambience shifts to the delicately refined – but not too refined – world of courtly love, as the women and soprano soloist admit that a girl without a man lacks all delight. The baritone returns, now in the guise of a troubadour, the verses of his song, "Dies, nox et omnia" (Day, night and ever) yearning for his absent lover. In the addendum to Part 3, "Blanziflor et Helena," a hymn to the beauty of Helen and Venus, Orff employs the full chorus and orchestra,
Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2006 |
