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What’s more Italian than opera, and more operatic than Verdi? Be dazzled by the stunning virtuosity of Dmitri Berlinsky, who takes on the demanding concerto by “devil of the violin” Paganini. Enjoy the intelligent, endlessly entertaining piece by Luciano Berio, and be transported to Rome by Respighi’s tone poem. In all, this program is lush and vibrant—just like Italy itself.

 

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Giuseppe Verdi: Overture to La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny)

Giuseppe Verdi was born at Le Roncole, near Bussetto, in the province of Parma, Italy, on October 9 or 10, 1813, and died in Milan on January 27, 1901. He composed La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny) to a libretto by Francesco Piave in 1862 on a commission from the Imperial Theater of St. Petersburg, where it was first performed on November 10, 1862. The current overture was composed for a revised version in 1869. The score calls for flute and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and bass trombone, tuba, timpani, bass drum, two harps, and strings. Duration is about 8 minutes.

La forza del destino is based on a Spanish play so full of unlikely coincidence that it is hard to summarize the plot with a straight face. Still, Verdi’s music makes it a powerful and vivid theatrical experience. The opera is dominated by the workings of fate or destiny. In the opening scene the tenor, Alvaro, who has come to elope with Leonora, inadvertently kills her father when he tosses down his gun in a gesture of reconciliation and it goes off, sending a bullet through the father’s heart. From this point to Leonora’s final peace in death, one fateful encounter after another keeps the story moving over a vast panorama.

Seven years after the premiere, Verdi rewrote the ending of the opera and added the overture, which offers a musical summary of its music. The working of fate is marked by a melodic figure heard in the overture immediately after the opening summons to attention: a triplet upbeat and a sighing motif. This is heard throughout much of the overture, even in combination with the gently soaring phrases taken from Leonora’s great prayer to the Virgin to find peace in death, “Madre, pietosa vergine,” where it is sung to the words “Deh, non m’abbandonar” (“Ah, do not abandon me.”)

Niccolò Paganini: Concerto No. 1 in D major for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 6

Niccolò Paganini was born in Genoa on October 27, 1782, and died in Nice on May 27, 1840. The date of composition of the D-major concerto is not known, but there is a record of a performance at La Scala, in Milan, on March 7, 1816. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bassoon and contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, and strings. Duration is about 35 minutes.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the traveling virtuoso was frequently also a composer of concertos and smaller pieces for his own instrument, designed to show off his strengths to astonish audiences. The virtuoso thrived on publicity. Then, as now, people were willing to shell out hard-earned cash to hear someone perform faster or higher than anyone else.

Paganini carefully refrained from publishing his concertos. Thus he was able to keep up the illusion that he, alone, could play them. They are of surpassing technical difficulty, making demands hitherto unknown. Yet the history of music has clearly shown that composers need only make “impossible” demands and somehow performers conquer them. Paganini wished to remain in the forefront, and he did so partly by keeping his secrets to himself. Not until 1851, eleven years after his death, were two of his concertos published, the present No. 1 in D major and No. 2 in B minor (with the famous Campanella finale).

Stories spread about him similar to those printed about present-day celebrities in the tabloid press. At his birth, an angel is supposed to have appeared to his pious mother, offering to grant her any wish for her son, and she is supposed to have prayed, “I should like him to become the greatest violinist the world has ever seen.” Numerous love affairs gave rise to extraordinary legends, such as one that he had stabbed one of his mistresses or her lover—accounts differed—and had been thrown into prison for eight years, where he learned the violin for lack of other amusement.

Most extraordinary of all are the accounts of deals made with the devil in return for his incredible virtuosity. Paganini’s appearance did little to belie such rumors. Tall, gaunt, sunken-cheeked and sallow-faced, he could easily whet public appetite for the macabre, such as the rumor (which he also denied publicly, knowing it would increase his audiences) that when he played his phenomenal variations on Le streghe (The Witches) in Vienna, a devil with horns and tail had been plainly seen “directing his arm and guiding his bow.”

Though he was surely the greatest violinist the world had yet produced, Paganini was not above subterfuge to increase his audience’s amazement. For example, when he played the present D major concerto, he announced that it was in the key of E-flat, and the orchestra played from parts in that key. Violinists were astonished at the ease with which Paganini played virtually impossible passages. In fact, he secretly tuned his violin up a half-step, so that he could play the entire concerto as if written in D, which made the reaches, the string crossings, and the double-stops far more grateful.

For all his showy qualities, Paganini was nonetheless a powerfully expressive player as well. Other composers were astonished. Schumann, the outspoken opponent of musical philistinism, declared that Paganini was “the turning point in the history of virtuosity” and promptly tried to work his violinistic effects into his Symphonic Etudes for solo piano. Berlioz called him “a comet,” and spoke favorably of his compositional work in the usually sarcastic Evenings in the Orchestra. And Franz Liszt was quite overwhelmed: “What a man, what a fiddler, what an artist! Heavens! What suffering and misery, what tortures dwell in those four strings!” Liszt was so impressed that he modeled himself rather consciously on Paganini during the early years of his career, with the same emphasis on bravura, the same susceptibility to amours, and the same willingness to fabulate about his own life. In short, a case could be made for considering Paganini to be, after Beethoven, the most influential musician of the nineteenth century.

Given Paganini’s determination to keep his works private, we know all too little about their composition and first performance. There is, in any case, no doubt that Paganini is a composer thoroughly Italianate in his approach. The melody dominates, whether it is a solo violin (as here) or the voice in an opera by Paganini’s younger contemporary Rossini. The accompaniment, while full of delicate touches, exists largely as a setting for the jewel, which is the solo part. Using the traditional fast-slow-fast sequence of movements inherited from the Baroque and newly expanded by classical concerto composers, Paganini created a work in which his performance was to dominate from the electrifying first entrance, after the orchestral ritornello, to the final bar.

Franz Schubert/Luciano Berio: Rendering for Orchestra

Franz Peter Schubert was born in Liechtental, a suburb of Vienna, on January 31, 1797, and died in Vienna on November 19, 1828. Shortly before his death he began to sketch a symphony in D major, D.936A, but left the work far from completion; Rendering is a composition by Luciano Berio based on Schubert’s sketches and composed between 1988 and 1990. Luciano Berio was born in Oneglia, near Imperia, on the Ligurian coast in northern Italy, on October 24, 1925; he died in Rome on May 27, 2003. He composed Rendering in 1989. It received its first performance in Amsterdam on June 14, 1989, by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting. The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, horns and trumpets in pairs, three trombones, timpani, celesta, and strings; this is a Schubertian orchestra with the exception of the celesta, an instrument that did not exist in his day, and used here for a special purpose. Duration is about 35 minutes.

Schubert left far more music unfinished than the famous Symphony in B minor (which, at least in an artistic sense, is wonderfully “finished,” even it if lacks two of the normal movements). During his short lifetime, Schubert’s musical language and technique grew dramatically—perhaps more than any other composer in a comparable time-span. His earliest symphonies are epigones of Haydn and Mozart. Some of the sketches for a symphony that he was working on shortly before his death already seem to anticipate the sensibility and even the sound of Mahler, who wasn’t born until Schubert had been in the grave thirty-two years.

Often enough we can be confident that Schubert’s unfinished works represent artistic decisions, the composer’s realization that the work was simply not turning out as he hoped it would. But in the case of the “Tenth Symphony,” we can be equally sure that it was only his tragically early death that prevented the creation of a work that might well have changed the course of romantic music. In the last couple of decades, Schubert research has brought growing interest in the many sketches and fragments that Schubert left behind, both as an indication of what might have been and as a way of understanding what he considered worth keeping and what could be thrown away.

There have been attempts to “finish” many of Schubert’s incomplete works; several hands have been so rash as to “complete” the Unfinished Symphony, and some have tried to write the “last symphony” that Schubert didn’t live to finish. (One of these, by Brian Newbould, has even been recorded.) Luciano Berio (who showed a lifelong interest in music of all kinds—his output includes transcriptions of music by Monteverdi, Kurt Weill, Lennon and McCartney, Falla, Brahms and Mahler, as well as a recomposition of music by Boccherini) takes a different path with the same material, as he explains in the introduction to the published score:
During the last few weeks of his life, Franz Schubert created many sketches in preparation for a Tenth Symphony in D major (D.936A). These sketches are fairly complex and of great beauty; they add a further indication to the new paths that were taking Schubert away from Beethoven’s influence. Rendering with its dual authorship is intended as a restoration of these sketches, it is not a completion or a reconstruction. This restoration is made along the lines of the modern reconstruction of frescoes that aims at reviving the old colors without trying to disguise the damage that time has caused, often leaving inevitable empty patches in the composition (for instance as in the case of Giotto in Assisi).

[T]he sketches left by Schubert almost in a pianistic form bear occasional instrumental indications, but…had to be completed above all in the internal and bass parts. The orchestration follows that of the “Unfinished,” and while the obvious Schubert color has been preserved, there are brief episodes in the musical development which seem to lean towards Mendelssohn and the orchestration naturally reflects this. Furthermore, the expressive climate of the second movement is stunning; it seems inhabited by Mahler’s spirit.

In the empty places between one sketch and the next there is a kind of connective tissue which is constantly different and changing, always “pianissimo” and “distant,” intermingled with reminiscences of the late Schubert (the Piano Sonata in B-flat, the Piano Trio in B-flat, etc.) and crossed by polyphonic textures based on fragments of the same sketches. This musical “cement” comments on the discontinuities and gaps that exist between one sketch and another and is always announced by the sound of a celesta, and must be performed “quasi senza suono” [“almost without sound”] and without expression.

During his last days Schubert took lessons in counterpoint, manuscript paper was expensive, and it was perhaps for this reason that amongst the sketches for the Tenth Symphony there is a brief and elementary counterpoint exercise (a canon in contrary motion). This too has been orchestrated and integrated into the Andante.

The final Allegro is equally impressive and certainly the most polyphonic orchestral movement Schubert ever wrote. These last sketches, although very fragmentary, are of great homogeneity and they show Schubert in the process of testing different contrapuntal possibilities for one and the same thematic material. These sketches alternatively present the character of a Scherzo and a Finale. This ambiguity (which Schubert would have solved or exasperated in some new way) was of particular interest and the “cement-work” here aims amongst other things at making that ambiguity structurally expressive.
—Luciano Berio

Thus, rather than trying to conceal the gaps (as Newbould did in creating his own “faux-Schubert” for the missing spaces), Berio has instead filled the corresponding space with music of a more modern sensibility—his own—signaled every time by the entrance of the celesta, to lift us out of the early nineteenth century and clearly into our own time, as the “plaster” that fills the spaces where the fresco has fallen away. The result is a fascinating mixture of old and new or, in the words of Lukas Foss (another composer who occasionally rethinks older compositions), a “handshake across the centuries.”

Ottorino Respighi: Le fontane di Roma (The Fountains of Rome)

Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy, on July 9, 1879, and died in Rome on April 18, 1936. He composed his Fontane di Roma (Fountains of Rome) in 1916. The first performance took place in March 1917 at the Augusteo (Mausoleum of Augustus) in Rome, conducted by Antonio Guarnieri. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, chimes, keyboard glockenspiel, two harps, celesta, piano, optional organ, and strings. Duration is about 15 minutes.

Respighi wrote music of extraordinary color and orchestral brilliance, partly, no doubt, a consequence of his having studied orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov during the years he served as principal violist in the orchestra of the St. Petersburg Opera. After returning, he made composition his principal activity. Respighi wrote eight operas as well as other stage works. He was interested in early music, and this led to a number of “archaizing” works including the arrangements of Ancient Airs and Dances and The Birds, both derived from older lute and keyboard compositions.

But the works that remain far and away the best known of Respighi’s entire output are the three orchestral suites depicting aspects of his adopted city, Rome. He composed The Fountains of Rome in 1916, The Pines of Rome (the most popular of them all) in 1924, and the Festivals in 1928‑29. In the course of the dozen images presented musically in these three scores, Respighi draws inspiration from the Rome of classical antiquity, of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the modern day. Some movements depict natural beauties, others paint the customs and life of the Roman streets and plazas.

From the days of the ancient Romans, the provision of water into a city the size of Rome has been one of the civil engineering wonders of the world. Different regions of the city received their water via aqueducts coming from mountains in various directions from the city, often dozens of miles away, and to this day Romans argue cheerfully among themselves about the advantages of their various “waters,” which surge forth from a series of exquisite fountains. Respighi’s musical tribute to this aspect of Roman life is also a character piece tracing the Roman day from dawn to sunset, the composer having chosen to present each linked with “the hour in which their character is most in harmony with the surrounding landscape, or in which their beauty appears most impressive to the observer.”

The four “scenes” run directly from one to another. The Fountain of the Valle Giulia at dawn, or Julia Valley, is pastoral. The breezes cause the leaves in the trees to rustle as a herd of cattle passes slowly by. A sudden summons on the horns immediately conjures up The Fountain of Triton in the morning. The triton, in Bernini’s great seventeenth-century statue, is seated on an open scallop shell, his head far back as he drinks from a conch shell. The sheer virility of the figure is celebrated in the horn calls, while the fantasy that envelops it figures in the lively main theme in the woodwinds. The Trevi fountain in the afternoon evokes the most famous of all the Roman fountains, the one into which visitors throw coins with the wish to return to Rome. Respighi’s music takes us to a site which, even when Nathaniel Hawthorne visited well over a century ago, was one of the liveliest daytime scenes in Rome:
…for the piazza is then filled with stalls of vegetable and fruit dealers, chestnut-roasters, cigar-venders, and other people whose patter and wandering traffic is transacted in the open air. It is likewise thronged with idlers, lounging over the iron railing, and with forestieri [foreigners], who come hither to see the famous fountain.

The music grows quieter as evening falls, and we end the day strolling to the Fountain of the Villa Medici at sunset. The fountain in front of the Villa Medici is a modest broad basin, spurting a single jet of water upwards, but it rests high above the city (not far from the Spanish Steps and the Piazza del Popolo with a spectacular view to the west). At sunset the water in the fountain will mirror Michelangelo’s great cupola on St. Peter’s in the Vatican, across the Tiber. Oboe and English horn recall the pastoral mood of the opening, a tranquility that seems unlikely in one of the world’s great capitals, yet one attainable here, where the sunset view has changed surprisingly little in four centuries. Birdsong dies away, and the stillness of the dark closes the day.

 

 

 

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