January's Miraculous Music: Bartok's Mandarin Comes to Town

The first time I heard The Miraculous Mandarin by Bela Bartók was live at a concert and the opening hit me so hard, I practically leaped out of my seat, it was so exciting!

The fact it was the Cleveland Orchestra on the road with George Szell didn't hurt and the fact we were in Davis Gym at Bucknell University and I was sitting in the bleachers at the back of the 1st Violin section (incredible view, btw) was amazing.

This was back when I was a college sophomore at nearby Susquehanna University, fifty years after the music had been composed. I didn't know the piece – in fact I only knew a couple pieces by Bartók like the Concerto for Orchestra – and didn't really know what to expect. It is still one of those “incredible memories” I recall, almost 45 years later, with a sense of excitement and wonder. Miraculous, indeed!

Whether you know it or not, you'll get a chance to hear it live this weekend when Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony – Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3 at the Forum. Markus Groh will be playing Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto (you can read about it, here) and the concert opens with a delightful work by Michael Torke called “Javelin,” written for the 1996 Summer Olympics (and you can read about it, here).

I'll be doing the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance, so drop in early – at least the weather will be warmer (a high of 50° – really?) and besides, parking is easier to find, then!

When I posted this on Facebook, a short excerpt, just the last two minutes of music, I thought this was pretty exciting.



Mariss Jansons is rehearsing the Oslo Philharmonic, here, and I'm convinced his last words are “Ja – yowzá, thank you very much.”

Looking around for live concert videos of the Suite on You-Tube, always a challenge at best, I found several “good” performances (sometimes w/bad recordings) but nothing that “pulled me out of my seat.”

Then I found this. I thought, “yeah, Claudio Abbado should be good.” Good? Yowzá!! And this is a YOUTH orchestra! (Eat your heart out, Gustavo Dudamel.) It was recorded in 1980 with the European Community Youth Orchestra and there are serious issues with the video and, alas, some sound problems on occasion, but, really, this is one of the most exciting (if over-the-top) performances I've heard since that memorable concert in 1969 or early 1970 with Szell and Cleveland.

Bartok composing in 1918

But first, let me give you the story behind this music and then you can follow the scenario while listening to the video clip.

In 1919, someone interviewed Bela Bartók and he said this about the piece he was still composing:

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So, in the meantime, I am writing music for a play by Menyhért Lengyel, its title is: The Miraculous Mandarin. And just listen to how miraculously beautiful its story is. In a ruffians’ den three rogues force a beautiful young girl to entice men up to her place, so that they then rob them.— The first one is a poor lad, the second one is no better, but the third one is a rich Chinaman. It is a good catch, the girl entertains him with dancing and the mandarin’s desire is awakened, passionate love blazes within him, but the girl is repulsed by him.— The ruffians attack him, rob him, suffocate him with [blankets], run him through with a sword, but all in vain, they are no match for the mandarin, who looks at the girl with loving and longing eyes.— Female intuition helps, the girl fulfills the mandarin’s desire at which point he falls lifeless to the floor.
– Bela Bartók, interviewed in 1919
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Though we'd call it a ballet, he referred to it as a “dance pantomime.” Shortly after finishing it and realizing it would be a while till he could get the work staged, he adapted part of it for a concert work, the suite you most often hear.

Now, the story is quite sordid – “crime, sex and murder,” after all, but then the same could be said of a lot of opera as far as back as the 1600s and certainly a good deal of what passes for entertainment today in movies and on television.

It's just this level of crime, sex and murder seemed a little excessive to the popular taste in the 1920s.

When it was first staged in Cologne, Germany, it was met with fierce outrage in the audience (both pro and con) but the mayor of the city stepped in and closed the theater, banning all future performances of the work. (The mayor, Konrad Adenauer, went on to become Chancellor of West Germany in 1949 at the age of 63.)

Bartók explained the opening of the piece in a letter to his wife, shortly after he began composing it:

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But I’m already thinking about the mandarin, as well; if it works out it will be a devilish piece. Its beginning—a very short introduction before the curtain opens—a terrible din, clattering, rattling, hooting: I lead the Hon[orable] listener into the apache den from the bustle of a metropolitan street.
– Bela Bartók, Sept. 15th, 1918
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Keep in mind, World War I would not officially end for another two months. He's using the term “apache” here in the sense of those bohemian thugs famous in Paris since the early 1900s, the equivalent of modern street gangs. They are cold and hungry (just as Bartók often was at this time, still an unknown quantity as a composer, when he was writing this).

And so the story begins: here is Claudio Abbado and the European Community Youth Orchestra.

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0:00 – on the streets of the Big City, the hustle and bustle of night life
1:09 – we enter the 2nd floor room where three thugs are holding a young girl
2:07 – they force her to stand at the window and entice a man into the room so they can rob him
2:57 – her first “siren call” (clarinet solo)
4:28 – the first person to respond starts walking up the steps: the thugs hide themselves to wait for the right moment to attack him
5:08 – the first victim turns out to be a well-dressed but care-worn old man who's a bit pompous and clearly down on his luck but still tries to impress the girl, but she is repulsed by him – then he admits he has no money
6:29 – the thugs rush out at him, tossing him (and his battered top hat) down the steps
6:42 – her second “siren call” (clarinet solo)
7:53 – the second victim enters hesitantly, a young student, shy and embarrassed
8:26 – she likes him better, tries to get him to dance with her, but he's shy and also, he has no money
9:24 – the thugs rush him and push him down the stairs as well
9:37 – her third “siren call” (begins with clarinet solo)
10:36 – the thugs anticipate the arrival of the new victim who comes up the steps accompanied by strange oriental music
11:06 – the Mandarin appears in the doorway, frightening and awesome (if not yet miraculous)
12:00 – but he just stands there, staring at the girl who is afraid of him
13:08 – she tries to get him to respond but he just stands there, watching her
14:15 – she begins a slow, seductive dance, awkwardly at first; again, no response from the strange mandarin
16:34 – he gradually begins to show interest in her
17:02 – she resumes her dance
17:36 – suddenly he begins to pursue her around the room, chasing her; she is terrified

sketches for the Miraculous Mandarin (p. 2 = 17:36 of video)

Now, at this point, Bartók ends the suite but the ballet continues for another ten minutes or so. The thugs, realizing he may harm the girl, rush out to attack the Mandarin but they cannot control him. First they smother him on the bed, but he comes back to consciousness and continues to pursue the girl. This time, the thugs stab him and he falls but doesn't bleed. Just as they think he's dead, he comes to life again and continues his pursuit. Ultimately, the thugs catch him and tie him up, hanging him from the overhead light fixture. Again, he appears to die. But he isn't dead yet – in fact, when they cut him down, they realize he is still alive. This time, the girl takes pity on him and caresses him. Only then do his wounds begin to bleed and he dies.

Now, with a story like that, you can imagine why this would create a scandal – it wasn't just the music alone. In fact, a later production, trying to get around the censors, eliminated the suggestive bed and another reset it outside in the countryside, none of which softened the music's impact, you would think.

After that initial stage production in Cologne – the one that closed after one night in 1926, seven years after the music was completed – Bartók wrote this to his mother:

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...in Cologne after Mandarin there was a noisy demonstration against the text and a counter-demonstration in my support. The riot lasted a good ten minutes and they lowered the safety curtain, too, but the people still didn’t leave, so the fire-door was twice opened, too. Well, I can tell you that there was frantic applause (and frantic hissing)! You really should have been there, at such a big disturbance! ...The [Buda]Pest newspapers report that the piece was officially banned; this is very likely, and my people in Cologne were on the one hand also afraid of this, and on the other, Szenkár says there’s no finer publicity than a ban like this. Well, we shall see.
– Bartók to his mother, December 2, 1926
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Keep in mind, the story and the music it inspired were written during the final, devastating years of World War I. The economy had collapsed and after the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, Hungary found itself a finally independent country (rather than a politically but not culturally autonomous part of the Austrian Empire) in a political and economic vacuum. (Think Iraq after the war officially ended there, recently.)

But it had lost a large part of its ethnic territory, large minorities of Hungarians now living in what had been ceded to Romania, to what eventually became Yugoslavia, to Austria and to the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. There was considerable concern about Hungarians' national and ethnic identity as a result of these sudden and difficult changes. Then, between the end of the war and the time Bartók finished this score, there were three political revolutions in Budapest in less than two years!

So if you think the story and the music are violent, the turmoil of those times might explain a little of that.

My pre-concert talk before each performance went into more of this historical background to the works on the program: you can read the text of it, posted on my blog Thoughts on a Train, here.

– Dick Strawser

Miraculous Music, Part 2: Michael Torke's Javelin

Five days after the Invasion of the Dreaded Polar Vortex comes the January Thaw – below zero on Tuesday, possibly near 50° on Saturday – and with it, this weekend's Masterworks Concert, “Miraculous Music.”

The program this Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm includes one of the great 19th Century Piano Concertos, another of those dramatic early-20th Century ballets, and opens with a delightfully celebratory work by an American composer intended to reflect the Atlanta Olympics of 1996.

Music stuck in his head

As we get ready to watch the Winter Olympics in Sochi in a few weeks, it's nice to hear a piece of music that owes its existence to some previous Olympic games. After all, we don't often mix the idea of sports in this country with classical music, do we?

The Atlanta Symphony was celebrating its 50th Anniversary at the same time, so they commissioned Michael Torke, then in his early-30s (see a more recent photo, right), asking him to write something for them that would reflect both. The piece, entitled “Javelin,” has a propulsive drive appropriate for an athletic event and a great tune that keeps on spinning, up-lifting the spirit – exhilarating, as one critic wrote the year “Javelin” was premiered: Torke writes “some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years.”

It's always tough finding a good performance with a good recording of a piece of music on You-Tube and though this performance may not be as exhilarating as some I've heard (as much for the recording), it's the best one I can find for orchestra. In this case, it's the Texas Medical Center Orchestra made up of doctors, scientists, dentists, nurses, and med students from the Houston area.

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A blogger in Columbus, OH, just posted this interview with Michael Torke on her blog yesterday, so I'll include the link here for you to read the whole thing.

When she asks him “What do you hope is gained from your music,” he says,

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I hope that they gain what art is supposed to do. Why do we have art? It fills our souls, lifts us up. It’s this amazing, transformative thing that can do good for people. When I listen to Bach, my brain cells regroup. I feel this peace and well-being. Isn’t it amazing that art can do that? I hope I can write something that’s transformative to others.

...One of the great things about art is that it’s supposed to last over time. Dickens is still read today. There are probably a lot of authors though from his time that we’ve since forgotten about. My goal is to write music that’s still interesting and listened to when I’m dead and gone. I got a lot of attention in my 20s, 30s, so what now in my 50s? I’m grateful that orchestras still play my music. There’s something that maybe transcends the immediate time and if that’s true, then I’ve accomplished my goal.
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Growing up in an age when composers heard rock music and film scores as well as Beethoven and Bach, they realized anything you experienced could influence your art. If Leonard Bernstein would've been a very different composer without jazz, Michael Torke might take some ideas from his contemporary classical colleagues like Philip Glass, Steve Reich or John Adams as well as the pop world of the Beach Boys, rock and rap music or John Williams.

For that matter, just as Dvorak absorbed the Bohemian folk music he grew up in or as Brahms sat in the smoky taverns of Vienna tapping his foot to the gypsy bands he heard there (the 1880s equivalent of New York City's jazz clubs).

And it wasn't just folk music that influenced Bela Bartok, as you can read in the next post in this series about his ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin.

- Dick Strawser

January's Miraculous Music: Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto

Markus Groh will play Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto this week

While people around here may question whether there's such a thing as “Farm Show Weather,” it seems we're going to be getting some of the coldest temperatures we've had in two decades this week: who knows what to expect with this yo-yo winter we've been having so far?

At least the forecast for this weekend is calling for temperatures in the upper-30s to mid-40s, maybe even 50s, perhaps the legendary “January Thaw.” That in itself sounds like a miracle.

The good news is, the January Masterworks Concert, billed as “Miraculous Music,” with Stuart Malina and the Harrisburg Symphony is this weekend. And joining us will be German pianist Markus Groh who last appeared here in the 2006-2007 season to play Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto. This time, he'll be playing Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto.

The concerts are Saturday the 11th at 8pm and again Sunday at 3pm at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg.

I'll be doing the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance, talking about the times in their composers' lives when these pieces were composed.

Here is our soloist playing two solo piano pieces: the first is an encore following a concert with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra – Franz Liszt's La Campanella, a solo piano version of a Paganini solo violin caprice,



and here's the E-flat Major Impromptu by Franz Schubert:



There are a few clips of interviews from German television available on-line, but this one at least has English subtitles:



For those of you who speak German, you can view two other interviews here where's he's playing some Brahms – and this one, recorded “at home” and includes some refrigerator art by his children, here. Even if you don't speak German, I think you can get the gist of it to enjoy a casual moment with an artist at home.

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It might seem odd that Brahms would only write two piano concertos since he was an acclaimed concert pianist himself, even if he performed only rarely compared to the typical traveling virtuoso. If he hated touring, he hated practicing more.

It's a huge concerto as one might expect, given the size and scope of the first piano concerto and the violin concerto he'd premiered only two years before. Not only is it a “combination of symphony and concerto,” it even includes an additional movement than was standard in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

One of the complaints (if one can imagine them) with the Violin Concerto had been the opening orchestral “introduction” before the soloist is first heard: this annoyed many soloists of the day. Even Pablo de Sarasate refused to play it because, in addition to that, he wasn't going to stand on stage at the beginning of the second movement doing nothing while the oboist played the melody!

So perhaps that's why his next concerto opens almost immediately with the soloist. Even then, it was still called “a symphony with piano obbligato.” Believe me, there's nothing optional about this piano part!

This performance of the complete concerto, clocking in at 48 minutes, is a 1977 concert recorded with the Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Claudio Abbado and pianist Maurizio Pollini.
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Brahms was fairly tight-lipped about his new concerto: no one knows when he began work on it – he'd started sketching it during a vacation in Italy in 1878 but put it aside to write the Violin Concerto instead. From then until he completed it in the summer of 1881, he apparently never mentioned it.

That summer, he wrote to a friend of his, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, how he'd finished “a tiny little concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.”

Now, we know from previous letters to her, Brahms liked to joke around about his music, though he was rarely ever modest (in fact, he was probably as much a jerk about it as his rival Wagner was an egomaniac in his own right). Consider the concerto's length – performances between 48 and 54 minutes? – it's hardly “tiny” even if you don't consider the demands on the soloist. I've heard too many pianists try to play Brahms' concertos who just don't have the strength or stamina to cut through his orchestral writing. It's more than just being able to play lots of notes very fast!

And then there's the scherzo.

This is the additional movement, placed second in the scheme of things. At about 10 minutes' length itself, one thing a listener (or a performer) would not call it is “wispy.” Scherzo in Italian means “joke,” but this is far from light-hearted music, much less “funny.”

Beethoven's scherzos were often the populist equivalent of his teacher Haydn's upper-crust minuets: think, if you want, that the traditional 18th Century minuet would be, say, a dance upstairs at Downton Abbey while Beethoven was writing something the downstairs staff might feel more at home with.

But Brahms often wrote fairly demonic scherzos – even some of his last piano pieces which were called “capriccios” are hardly capricious, but out-and-out mini-dramas. The “scherzo” of his C Minor Piano Quartet would make your hair stand on end.

This scherzo may be more robust – though the middle bit is certainly a breath of sunshine – and definitely dramatic. It's also in D Minor which, for Brahms, is a tonality he associates with tragedy. The Tragic Overture, in fact, written at the same time he was working on this concerto, is also in D Minor. But then, he wrote perhaps his most unbuttoned piece, the Academic Festival Overture that same summer!

When asked about the “change in tone” between the lofty, almost philosophical detachment of the first and the second movement's turmoil, Brahms supposedly explained he felt the first movement was too “harmless” and needed some passionate contrast!

Curiously, he had originally planned to add a scherzo to the Violin Concerto but then deleted it. We assume that's the movement that ended up in the 2nd Piano Concerto.

That said, the slow movement then returns to the loftier plane of the first movement, opening with a gorgeous cello solo – almost like chamber music embedded within the orchestra and, later, with the soloist.

The finale is yet another mood swing. It wasn't uncommon for concertos to have light-hearted dance-like finales – the Violin Concerto ended with a vast Hungarian Dance, not an uncommon way for Brahms to wrap things up. In an earlier generation, Ludwig Spohr ended some of his concertos with a polonaise or a Spanish bolero!

Taormina, Sicily

Here, though, you can definitely hear how the work was inspired not by one but by two vacations to Italy during the course of its composition. This is probably Brahms at his most human, enjoying himself. Traveling with friends who had trouble keeping up with him, Brahms loved Venice (and its wine) but especially Taormina on the coast of Sicily, where he loved to stand on the cliffs above the town overlooking the sea.

Brahms was 45 when he began sketching the concerto and was 48 when he gave it its premiere in 1881. Unlike the 1st Piano Concerto, premiered when he was 25 and when, he said, “three pairs of hands tried slowly to clap” before the hissing began, the 2nd Concerto was an immediate success. His friend, conductor Hans von Bülow, was also a highly regarded pianist who, if he wasn't conducting Brahms' music, might be playing it. And since Brahms was also a conductor of his own works, the two of them took the new concerto around Germany, sometimes switching roles as soloist or conductor. One program where they'd performed both concertos, Brahms would be the soloist in one, then von Bülow would be the soloist in the other.

Here's another performance of the first movement of the concerto with Rudolf Buchbinder the pianist and Nicholas Harnoncourt conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. The score is the standard “study” version with the orchestra part reduced for a second piano.

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You can read more about the 20th Century works on the program – Michael Torke's “Javelin” and the suite from the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin by Bela Bartók shortly. The complete text of my pre-concert talk is available on my blog, Thoughts on a Train, which you can read here.

Dick Strawser

Why I Am Thankful Jacques Jolas Had Coffee in Harrisburg One Day

Jacques Jolas, 1931

A couple weeks ago, I ran into friend and frequent symphony board member Bill Murray at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore (we were there to hear HSO concertmaster Peter Sirotin and principal cellist Fiona Thompson perform fairy tales set to music with narrator Cary Burkett, part of a Little Scholar program with Market Square Concerts).

We were standing in an alcove where I was looking at books by and about James Joyce, particularly his Ulysses, when Bill expressed the not uncommon view that Joyce was (as I think he put it) “not my cup of tea.” Ulysses may be one of the most significant books of the 20th Century but it is also probably one of the least read (and even less understood) “great books” in the repertoire.

Now, for fans of literature, this expression (“my cup of tea”) resonates with a famous episode from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (usually mistranslated into Remembrance of Things Past), when the narrator dips a madeleine, a small breakfast cake, into a cup of tea. The scent and flavor unleash an episode of “involuntary memory,” taking him back to his childhood and his great-aunt's kitchen. From there, basically, this whole enormous seven-volume novel unfolds.

It wasn't until later that I figured out why this stuck with me throughout the next few days until I recalled a number of seemingly isolated facts.

Cornelius Rogers, in his 75th Anniversary history of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, mentions this little-known fact, an anecdote I had not heard when I had been looking into some of the early history of the orchestra myself when I was its assistant conductor and orchestra manager back in the 1980s. I recently came across it in passing.

Now, I knew Jacques Jolas was the piano soloist at the first concert the orchestra gave in 1931, playing Robert Schumann's piano concerto, and I knew he was (so to speak) instrumental in how the orchestra came about. But I wasn't aware exactly how:

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One evening, after Jolas had returned to Harrisburg, he and Alice Decevee Mitchell [a pianist and former Juilliard student of his who would also be greatly involved in organizing the orchestra] were visiting the Emerald Street home of the well-known Harrisburg piano teacher, Mary Barnum Bush Hauck. While sitting around the kitchen table having coffee [not tea, as I remembered], Jolas, who had numerous contacts with Harrisburg musicians, said to Mitchell, “why can't we start an orchestra in this town?” to which she replied, “Oh, and who will we get to direct the orchestra?” Jolas said, “I know of a talented young individual in New York, George King Raudenbush.”
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And that is how and where the orchestra was born and how that first concert under Raudenbush (who remained the conductor until 1950) came to pass!

This kitchen conversation occurred before 1929, when Jolas and Ms. Mitchell began raising the necessary funds to start an orchestra. Keep in mind, this was during the Depression. In November of 1929, Jolas played Beethoven's G Major Piano Concerto and some Chopin solo pieces on a concert in the 17th Season with the Reading Symphony.

Jacques Jolas, despite his French name, was an American-born musician, born in New Jersey but grew up in the ancestral Alsace-Lorraine region of France, returning to the United States when he was 15. He earned a living playing the piano for silent films in movie theaters in New York City (shades of Shostakovich). Later, as an American private in World War I, he played the piano at a reception honoring Gen. Pershing.

He was the younger brother of Eugene Jolas. And here our story digresses from Harrisburg.

Eugene & Marie Jolas, 1927

In 1926, Eugene married Marie MacDonald from Louisville, KY, and their daughter Betsy was born later that year in Paris. Eugene became a writer, poet and editor, and Marie taught at l'Écôle Bilingue in Neuilly.

Together, they founded a famous literary magazine called transition, “an International Quarterly for Creative Experiment.” One of their contributors was the Irish-born writer, James Joyce, also living in Paris, whom they met that same year, 1926. Joyce sent them the early chapters of a seemingly inscrutable novel called, uncreatively, Work in Progress.

Joyce & Eugene Jolas, 1938

According to one of the many on-line Joyce biographies, “the Jolases showed Joyce nothing but kindness, generosity, sympathy, and understanding. Were it not for their support, there's a good chance [Joyce's] book might never have seen the light of day.”

Eventually, it became Finnegans Wake.

So, here is where these seemingly unrelated confluences of time and space came together when Bill Murray and I met over James Joyce's books at the Midtown Scholar on November 18th, 2013.

James Joyce had completed Finnegans Wake on November 13th, 1938, five days and 75 years earlier.

Eugene Jolas and his wife's significant support for Joyce (whom they'd met in 1926) and for his last novel helped make possible one of the most significant (if even less understood) novels of the 20th Century.

And Eugene Jolas's brother, Jacques Jolas was, in 1928 or so, in Harrisburg, sitting in a home on Emerald Street, asking why we couldn't have an orchestra in this town!

This is a string of coincidences - degrees of separation, if you will - that perhaps even Joyce would have smiled at.

Marie Jolas, 1977

You can read an account of Marie Jolas attending a concert of songs familiar to James Joyce which took place on June 16th, 1977 (the story of Ulysses takes place on June 16th, 1904, and since the Ulysses-figure of the novel is Leopold Bloom, June 16th is, to literary fans, known as Bloomsday).

She said the last time she had heard many of these songs was when James Joyce sang them to her himself.

Marie Jolas was 84 at the time of that concert and died almost ten years later.

Here is a recording I stumbled upon quite by accident while doing what I euphemistically call “research” while writing a novel of my own.

It is a piano roll of Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (like Finnegans Wake, a nighttime fantasy that many of its first hearers considered almost as bizarre as Joyce's book) recorded by Jacques Jolas in 1927 – the year before he was having coffee and wondering about the future Harrisburg Symphony!

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And that is something all music-lovers in Harrisburg can be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving,
Dick Strawser

P.S. Incidentally, while I had known of Betsy Jolas, one of the leading French composers of the late 20th Century, and have heard some of her music before, I had never associated her with the Jolas behind the Harrisburg Symphony. She is, in fact, his niece - the daughter of Eugene and Marie Jolas!

Suite Sounds: Richard Strauss and the Would-Be Gentleman

In September, Stuart Malina talked about this month's Masterworks Concert during a pre-season preview at the Midtown Scholar, describing (briefly) the phenomenon that is John Cage's 4'33'' which opens a concert called “Suite Sounds” (you can read more about the Cage, here) which includes a suite from Richard Strauss' music for a 17th Century French play, Le boursgeois gentilhomme, a suite of lute pieces from around 1600 revived by Ottorino Respighi in his Ancient Airs and Dances and the 5th of the “Brandenburg” Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach which features soloists the now officially full-time [no longer acting] concertmaster, Peter Sirotin, principal flutist David diGiacobbe and guest harpsichordist Arthur Haas.

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Well, that concert is this weekend, already, Saturday at 8:00 and Sunday at 3:00 at the Forum with Dr. Timothy Dixon offering the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance. Tickets start at $12 and you can buy tickets at the door if you don't already have a Masterworks subscription.

Students & children receive a 50% discount off single ticket prices. (Students should present a valid student ID card.) Student Rush tickets are available on a limited basis 30 minutes before each Masterworks performance at a cost of $10.00 per student with a valid student ID card.

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The Would-Be Gentleman

The story behind Richard Strauss's music for Moliere's play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, is a long and complicated one. It was part of a large project that combined an adaptation of a play originally produced in 1670 (complete with incidental music and choreography) and a half-hour chamber opera that was the evening's culminating entertainment.

Unfortunately, it proved too long for the audience (a 45-minute reception between the play and the opera didn't help) which consisted primarily of people who were there either for the play or for the opera but who didn't seem to be interested in both. Rather than have the opera performed to a half-empty house, Strauss and his collaborator Hugo von Hoffmansthal broke it up into two separate pieces: one, an orchestral suite from the play; and, secondly, an opera that could be produced on its own.

The opera is Ariadne auf Naxos, based on a classic Greek myth (with humorous touches courtesy of Moliere's plot).

The incidental music for the play is not so well known and may not sound too much like the Strauss you're familiar with from the great tone poems of his youth – Ein Heldenleben or Also sprach Zarathustra – the blood-curdling operas of the first decade of the 20th Century, Salome and Elektra, or the lush beauty of Der Rosenkavalier's final trio (from 1910) or the “Four Last Songs” (from 1948) you might have heard last month with the Harrisburg Symphony and Janice Chandler-Eteme (you can read about - and hear them - here).

The play is a comedy about a man named Monsieur Jourdain whose father made a fortune as a cloth merchant: his own goal in life is to be accepted as an aristocrat, overcoming his middle-class background. The original French title is difficult to translate (so it usually isn't) since a gentleman cannot be bourgeois: to the class-oriented society of 17th Century France, the two are mutually exclusive. The best English translation would be “The Would-Be Gentleman.”

We follow M. Jourdain through his preparation for a great dinner complete with a fencing lesson, a fitting with his tailor (trying out the aristocrat's new clothes), the entrance of a middle-class young man whom his daughter is (unfortunately) in love with (disguised as the son of the Turkish sultan, Cleonte will later trick Jourdain into allowing her marriage), all interspersed with courtly dances suitable for a noble entertainment fit for a king.

(In fact, in Moliere's original, King Louis XIV would not have been just a member of the audience: he loved to dance and would have participated in the performance himself.)

The concluding dinner is replete with the bleating of sheep (quoting the appropriate moment from his earlier tone-poem, Don Quixote) when the lamb course is served (at 3:30 in the last clip, below), and bird-calls for some of the other dishes Jourdain's cook presents to impress his guests.

Here is a performance of Strauss' suite with Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe:

The Overture:


M. Jourdain's Minuet:


The Fencing Master:


The Dance of the Tailors (in which M. Jourdain models his elegant new clothes):

M. Jourdain tries on his new clothes

Lully's Minuet:


The Courante:


Cleonte's Entrance (after Lully):


Intermezzo:


The Dinner:


You'll notice a number of things about this music. First of all, it's written for quite a small orchestra by comparison to the huge orchestras normally used by Strauss and his contemporary Gustav Mahler only years earlier, often exceeding 100 in number. This work is scored for pairs of winds, only three brass instruments, a few percussionists, and a relatively small string section plus a very prominent part for the piano. There are virtuosic solos for many of the instrumentalists, especially the concertmaster in the Tailors' Dance (which represents Jourdain trying out his new clothes), the trumpet and trombone in the previous movement's joust with the fencing master along with many other spotlights throughout the piece.

Another thing you might notice is the style. And the name of Lully, the leading French composer of the 17th Century who wrote the original music for Moliere's play in 1670. Strauss incorporates some of Lully's music directly or imitates its style.

This evocation of a past and largely forgotten era is something fairly new, particularly considering the other direction modern music was taking at the time with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and works by Schoenberg breaking down the traditional tonal language of the 19th Century.

We tend to place anything that sounds old under the banner of the “neo-classic” school whether it sounds Classical or Baroque or Renaissance, evoking the clarity of Mozart and Haydn, the counterpoint of Bach and Handel or – as in the case of Respighi's “Ancient Airs and Dances” also on this program – even earlier music from around 1600.

But there's one thing to mention.

While the “first neo-classic piece” is usually said to be Stravinsky's resetting of music presumably by Pergolesi in his ballet Pulcinella in 1917, Strauss' score for Le bourgeois gentilhomme is originally from six years earlier. It's often dated 1917 because that was when he published the two separate pieces – suite and opera – but the original production of the play with its operatic finale was given in October of 1912, the music completed the year before!

So Richard Strauss, by being old-fashioned, created something completely new by delving back into the distant past for his inspiration whether he was aware it was “revolutionary” or not.

Eventually, the idea of trotting out old music in new ways became so common-place, one critic dismissed it as the “Grave-Robber School of Music.” Stravinsky had his Back-to-Bach moment with the “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto (the opening sounds so much like Bach's 3rd “Brandenburg” Concerto), a Back-to-Handel moment with his opera, The Rake's Progress, and even a Back-to-Tchaikovsky moment with his ballet, The Fairy's Kiss.

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It's interesting to realize that once Strauss and von Hoffmansthal agreed to work on this original project in 1910, Strauss was impatient to begin on the opera. He was very busy with several new productions of his recently premiered opera, Der Rosenkavalier, which, compared to the biblical and Greek stories of his earlier operas, was Strauss's “take” on Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

To keep himself occupied while Hoffmansthal worked on the opera's libretto, Strauss wrote his “Alpine Symphony,” a vast tone-poem (and only a symphony in name) complete with one of the great thunder-storms of music, written for a huge orchestra of over 100 players (not counting 12 offstage brass). He'd been thinking of this for years and had already begun writing it when he received the news that Gustav Mahler had just died in May, 1911. More or less complete, it wasn't ready for its premiere until after Le bourgeois gentilhomme had been completed, premiered and withdrawn.

It is difficult to imagine these two works occupying the same composer at the same time! (Check out the last five minutes of this video-clip – with a Venezuelan Youth Orchestra, no less!)

Richard & Pauline Strauss and their son, Franz: 1910

Also, this portrait of the composer at home: Strauss may have been an irascible man to deal with in rehearsals, but he was infamously meek in front of his wife, Pauline, a former opera singer. His life was dominated by her idea of domesticity: nothing was done without her direct supervision, from the cooking to the cleaning (guests were required to wash their hands and comb their hair before dinner) to the protection of her husband's schedule.

He would wake at 9am and be in his study to start composing at 10 following breakfast. Then, taking a break at mid-day, he would take a walk around their villa's grounds followed by lunch, then a half-hour nap, another shorter walk and then three more hours' work at his desk before dinner. However, this didn't stop Pauline from interrupting him one afternoon, while he'd been in the midst of his opera, Elektra, to tell him to walk into town "to fetch the milk as the maid was busy."

One time, in a cab, while Pauline was "systematically reproaching" her husband in her usual fashion, the cabby turned to him and asked, "Are you going to stand for that?" Strauss meekly shrugged his shoulders. The cabby recommended instead he should "throw the cow out." (There is no mention of the cabby's tip.)

To a friend, the composer wrote,

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I work in the summer, very coolly, without hurrying, without emotion, and slowly. Invention takes time, if it is to lead to something new and exciting. The greatest art in the inventive process is the art of waiting... I compose everywhere, taking a walk, driving [actually, the chauffeur is driving; he is riding...], during meals, at home or in noisy hotels, in my garden, in railway carriages. My sketchbook never leaves me.
= = = =

Shortly after writing this, his friend Hugo von Hoffmansthal, who had written the libretto for Der Rosenkavalier, suggested two new works - one, based on the myth of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on the Isle of Naxos; the other, a fairy-tale that would eventually become the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow). Eventually, as Ariadne took shape, he suggested prefacing it with a comedy, something perhaps by Moliere...


- Dick Strawser

Suite Sounds: I Hear What the Caged Bird Doesn't Sing

The Harrisburg Symphony's next concert is called "Suite Sounds" and Stuart Malina will conduct two Suites - one, Richard Strauss' throw-back tribute to the 18th Century with music for Moliere's play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-Be Gentleman) completed in 1917;the other, Ottorino Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances" (Suite No. 1) - in addition to the 5th of Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. But I'll be posting more about these works in the near future.

The concert is Saturday, November 9th at 8pm and Sunday, November 10th at 3pm at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg. There's a pre-concert talk with Dr. Timothy Dixon of Messiah College an hour before each performance.

The program opens with a short work by American composer John Cage that is all about sounds. It's one of his most important works - 4'33'' (which is pronounced "Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds").

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John Cage at the Piano

Years ago, when I was a crass graduate student, I was having dinner with a guest composer at a fancy restaurant where they had on display one of those odd musicians who made something of a living by playing the piano and singing requests.

It was not that I didn't like her selections even if I didn't particularly care for the way she was performing them, but the volume was too loud and so I decided to make a request, since the waiter ignored me when I asked if they could turn the sound system down.

“Would you sing John Cage's 4'33'', please?”

Other musicians who were there that evening got the joke and laughed. Our songstress was somewhat confused and chose to ignore me as well.

The piece by John Cage, however, is not a joke.

Because it seems simplistic in its premise – a musician (or several musicians) sit there, playing nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds – most people describe it as four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

But they're missing the point: what the musicians reveal by not playing is what other sounds might be going on around us (or inside us) that we would otherwise miss.

Silence, philosophically, does not exist in our concert halls (or in our daily lives). I am sitting at my desk thinking about what to write next and I hear the faint hum of my computer, the distant (but not distant enough) dull (but not dull enough) white-noise of passing cars and trucks on the highway a ¼ mile away, the mail truck which has just driven past my house (again? that's the second time in a half-hour) and, oddly enough, one of my cats sleeping on the chair beside me who is snoring. And just as I type that, a neighbor across the street has started using a leaf-blower on her front yard. My stomach just growled (time for lunch).

But is that music?

"This is not a pipe"

This illustration of a famous (or infamous) painting from 1929 by the Belgian painter René Magritte, La trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) or “The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)” is a visual approach to the challenges behind Cage's idea.

Of course, the average person is going to look at it and say “but it is a pipe.”

No, technically, it is a representation of a pipe, not a pipe itself.

Well, that's treading it pretty fine, isn't it?

But that's the idea behind the “treachery” of the image Magritte is warning us about: knowing the difference between a pipe and an image of a pipe.

“Just try filling it with tobacco” was Magritte's response to the inevitable argument, the artistic equivalent of “put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Which brings us back to Cage who, in the 1940s, after having studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles (I know, doesn't that just blow your mind?), was stretching definitions much the way the surrealists of Europe had been doing already for decades, stretching the definition of what could be considered art.

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What is music?

Normally, a definition of music would include statements like these:

(1) – sounds that are sung by voices or played on musical instruments
(2) – the art or skill of organizing sounds into something that contains melody, harmony and rhythm
(3) – an agreeable sound

Most music that we think of will naturally fall into one of these definitions. But, like Magritte's pipe, adhering to these definitions limits us to the possibilities of other... well, possibilities.

It also leads us into the temptation of viewing anything we don't like as “not music.” And yet what was music to one generation might not have been music (by this argument) to a previous generation. We forget that a lot of people thought Bach's music terrible in his day and that Beethoven, in his 7th Symphony, was considered “ripe for the madhouse.”

Times change, tastes change: all you have to do is look in your parents' yearbooks. Or if you're old enough, your own...

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John Cage and Cat

As for John Cage's still controversial work, what brought this about? What made him think of it?

There had been other pieces in which “silence” had a rather significant role long before Cage wrote his 4'33'' in 1951.

One of Erwin Schulhoff's “Five Picturesques” for piano, the one called In futurum, was notated entirely in rests – while the pianist sat there and played nothing, the pianist also has to count like crazy. That was in 1919.

In 1897, Alphonse Allais, a friend of Erik Satie, himself known for his culture-tweaking sense of humor, composed a funeral march for a deaf man that consisted of 23 blank measures. (Cage admitted at the time he was not aware of this piece, despite his great fondness for Satie.)

Perhaps Cage's first ideas were more humorous: in two of his songs, he directs the pianist to play the instrument with the keyboard cover closed. He told an audience in the late-40s he wanted to compose a piece that would be 3½ to 4½ minutes long (the standard length for a piece of “canned” music) and then he'd sell it to Muzak, the purveyors of elevator music. He'd call it something like “Silent Prayer.”

But then, in 1951, Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Have you ever been in one of these? Technically, they are more than sound-proofed which merely keeps (or at least is supposed to keep) outside sounds outside. But this room is constructed so the floor, walls and ceiling absorb any sound that could echo around inside it, sounds you might create while sitting there.

Presumably, there are no sounds to be heard in such a room.

But Cage heard two distinct sounds, one high and one low.

The engineer explained to him that the high sound was his nervous system in operation and the low sound was his blood circulating through his body. He could hear them internally and because all other sounds externally were masked, it increased his awareness of sounds that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Even in a place where there should be no sound, Cage heard sounds.

In his 1961 book, “Silence,” Cage writes, "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."

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What will you hear when you listen to the entire Harrisburg Symphony play John Cage's 4'33'' in the fine acoustics of the Forum?

Oh, that's right: because it was premiered by pianist David Tudor in 1952, it's usually considered a piano piece, but Cage said it was for “any instrument or combination of instruments.” That way, it doesn't need to have credit given to an orchestrator.

It's also in three movements of different lengths, if it's going to be done correctly.

The question still remains, “is it music?” Or is it a philosophical work that challenges us to reconsider what is the nature of music?

I think I'll leave that as a rhetorical question.


Dick Strawser

Who's Afraid of the Rite of Spring?

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony, conducted by Stuart Malina, opens the new season with their first concert  – Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg (with a highly-recommended pre-concert talk with Truman Bullard free to ticket-holders an hour before each performance).

Tickets are available starting at $12 at the door and student tickets are 50% off before the concert.

The program opens with one ballet, premiered in 1912, and closes with another, premiered in 1913 - not a large time-frame - but music that may seem (at first hearing) a world apart. Ravel's Daphnis & Chloe is lush, gorgeous and evocative with an exciting finale – while Stravinsky's Rite of Spring may seem chaotic, harsh and provocative with an exciting finale.

In between are some of the most gorgeous songs ever composed – and yet, as lush and emotional as they are, they were composed in 1948 – the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss with soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme (who has sung Mahler's 2nd and Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with us in past seasons).

You can read more about Strauss' last songs in this earlier post, here.

While we might joke about “seeing” a concert, this is one to “see.” It will involve one of the largest orchestras you're likely to see shoe-horned onto the stage of the Forum: 105 players with a larger than usual contingent of woodwinds and some additional instruments rarely encountered live – like the gentle sounds of an alto (sometimes called a “bass”) flute, or the added depth of a bass trumpet – which will leave no room for dancers. These are “concert performances” of music originally heard in ballet theaters but considering most of the orchestra pits I've ever played in, it amazes me there'd be one large enough to hold 105 players, some wielding pretty large instruments!

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Igor Stravinsky

One hundred years ago, the world first heard Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and it surprises me that, a century later, the title itself is still enough to cause fear in the hearts of some concert-goers. It has that kind of reputation.

Yet, as often happens with unfamiliar music that may appear “formidable” to some – a single Mahler symphony on a program can likewise seem daunting – invariably the general audience response is extremely enthusiastic.

There is no doubt The Rite of Spring is a powerful work. I think an adjective that best describes it would be “visceral.” It may not be a “pretty” work but it is a dramatic and exciting work.

When the Harrisburg Symphony first performed this music in 1989, under the direction of music director Larry Newland – it was the boldest challenge the orchestra had yet taken on – I remember talking to the parents of a friend of mine (they were probably the age I am now) and asked if they “liked” it and they both said “no, I had no idea what was going on.” To them, it lacked the melodies they enjoy in Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, the beautiful harmonies they expect from most classical music whether it's Mozart or Wagner – and “really, wasn't the rhythm a bit much?” “Couldn't tap your foot to it?” “Well, no, could you...?”

It's a challenge to take in for the first time if you're listening to a recording and know nothing about the story of the ballet, what is “motivating” the music you're hearing.

Basically, unlike your typical love-story plot involving a princess or a flock of swans, this is about a community in pagan times celebrating the arrival of spring, choosing a virgin who will then be sacrificed to propitiate the gods who, if they look favorably on this ritual, will grant them a bountiful harvest in the fall.

What's “pretty” about that?

(And if someone wonders about programming spring music in an autumn concert, don't forget the weather this week is being described as “summer-like.”)

Before the curtain would go up (the opening several minutes of music is like an “overture” or “prelude”), we hear sounds of the awakening of the earth – a primeval song arising from the ground beneath our feet, perhaps, in that famous bassoon solo: so unearthly sounding even today, it must strike listeners as “what kind of instrument is that?”

Have you ever watched those stop-action time-elapsed films that show the germination of a seed and the resulting seedling that emerges from it? In a sense, that's how I hear the opening of this music: a bit of an image which perhaps quivers a bit in anticipation then gradually unfolds and proceeds to reveal itself, ever-changing, ever-similar but rarely the same.

To this are added other lines of sound, seemingly unrelated: an English horn fragment, deep clarinets supporting the texture, a clarinet cry, a rapid morse-code like call from an oboe, some quaking from two bass clarinets, a chorale of flutes, twittering piccolos, rhythmic pulses that seem to have no relationship to what's going on around them.

It's not unlike waking up on a spring morning and hearing the sounds of birds which are rarely known to sing in four-part harmony in ¾ time. As with the arrival of spring, it sounds like a whole new world.

And I'm not sure the audience in Paris, on May 29th, 1913, was quite ready for it, either.

In Russia – where Stravinsky grew up, born on a country estate where he would spend part of his childhood – spring arrives suddenly, unlike the way we're used to in our region of the world where it seems to creep endlessly out of the frozen wastes and snows of winter and may occasionally slip back and forth until eventually we're aware things are becoming green again.

In Russia, spring can also arrive with a kind of violence – the frost covering the ground breaks open (we might be more used to this when dealing with pot-holes in our roads) and the ice covering ponds and streams may crack and heave upwards with a resounding noise that can be heard for miles in the middle of the night, a phenomenon the locals call “the ice-break.”

This is what I hear as the first part of the ballet concludes with the “Adoration of the Earth” – the ending which isn't really an ending comes to a sudden stop. And the anticipation can be frightening. “What will the future yield after this?”

The first half of the ballet is all fun-and-games – teams of boys compete, girls dance, the Old Sage (the village's high priest) is ushered in to remind us there is a serious side to these festivities, and he calls upon the gods as he blesses the ground.

The second half of the ballet is now the serious side of the story, the reason for the festival – the propitiating of the gods with a human sacrifice.

It is night. Where frenzy was the focus in the first part, concentration of purpose is now the focus of the second.

The selection of the “Chosen One” may be a little atypical from your usual ancient culture – the village's virgins dance slowly in a mysterious circle. One girl stumbles – not once, not twice – and this is taken as a sign. She has been chosen.

With that, the villagers then begin to celebrate the coming sacrifice. We return to a sense of frenzy but where the first part was chaotic and seemingly disorganized, musically, now it is like communal frenzy.

The girl stands in the center, immobile, shaking with fear, as everyone whirls around her, pounding the earth and gesturing wildly.

If you imagine this music from the viewpoint of the sacrificial victim, it can be some of the most frightening music you can imagine.

Hardly likely to be full of romantic melodies and soaring harmonies. This is brutal music – and it matches the violence of the story.

This being a ballet – instead of being torn open by knives and her blood strewn all over the ground, her heart held aloft as an offering to the gods (as might have happened to a sacrificial victim in the Aztec civilization in the 1500s) – she dances herself to death to a series of violently repetitive rhythmic patterns that never seem to repeat themselves, building to a horrific climax.

Then, at the end, a sudden deafening silence, a wisp of smoke in the flutes and then a crashing chord. She is dead. The gods have their sacrifice. The world can now continue for another year.

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So, keeping that story in mind, listen to this concert performance of the ballet with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

Part One, “A Kiss of the Earth” (in the composer's original Russian):


The Awakening of the Earth – at 3:30, “The Augurs of Spring, Dances of the Young Girls” – at 6:38, the steady repeated rhythms and the joyful folk-song-like fragments abruptly turn into the “Ritual of Abduction” – at 7:57, this now becomes the “Spring Rounds” which continues into the next clip.



The “Round Dances of Spring” continues, beginning almost caressingly then builds to a climax – at 2:55, the dance is disrupted by war games in “The Ritual of the Two Rival Tribes” – at 4:40, a slow procession builds up with the arrival of “The Oldest and Wisest One,” the high priest – interrupted by a mysterious chord (at 5:20), where the Old Sage bends down to kiss the earth – at 5:41, this then erupts into “The Dancing Out of the Earth” in which the community responds to the priest's blessing with a religious ecstasy building to the musical equivalent of the “ice-break” heralding the arrival of spring.
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Part Two, “The Exalted Sacrifice”:

It is night. The curtain goes up to reveal (at 4:32) the “Mystic Circle of Young Girls” as they walk endlessly in their circle – at 7:04, one of them stumbles; and again (at 7:25), she stumbles – then at 7:42 she is taken from the circle: she becomes The Chosen One and is honored by the villagers...


At 0:37, the mysterious “Ritual of the Ancestors” begins as the men of the village circle the Chosen One who at 4:14 begins her Sacrificial Dance, the famous “danse sacrale,” dancing herself to death by the final chord.

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So yes, following an evening of delightful romantic ballets with music by Carl Maria von Weber, for instance, the audience that night in Paris a century ago was not prepared for this.

And yes, let's get it out of the way – there was a riot.

I was joking about – having seen the celebrations around the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg – if we would have “re-enactors” to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Rite of Spring's historic premiere.

The trouble is, there is so much mythology woven into this event, it's hard to tell which if fiction and which were simply the results of different factions in the audience. The stalls (the cheap seats) were filled with people who were there to be entertained. They probably knew nothing about what to expect and the sounds they heard were nothing like anything they'd heard before.

Let's face it, even if you've never heard the Rite of Spring before, you've heard more dissonant music simply by watching movies and television – but there it's in the background and – oh, guess what? – it supports the visual element you're primarily focused on, the foreground.

But a hundred years ago? Not a chance!

I can't imagine, sitting in that theater, not being confused at the beginning of the music – if the curtain didn't go up until 3½ minutes into this seemingly unorganized, chaotic disturbance that was being called music. And then, once the curtain did go up, to be seeing dancers dressed like that, dancing like that!?

Keep in mind, most people's image of ballet (then as now, probably) is young women in tutus wearing pointe-shoes where the extension of bare arms and legs was about as close to erotic art as many men in the audience could get and remain respectful (as great paintings often celebrated the nude body as art), this in an age where a woman in public showing a bit of ankle was considered scandalous.

The Original Dancing Virgins from The Rite of Spring, 1913

Then to see this – dancers draped head to foot in primitive costumes – their bodies completely hidden from view (I mean, aren't they supposed to be virgins? Shouldn't this be at least a little salacious?) And, in the foreground, an old woman hunched over, carrying a bundle of sticks, who suddenly leaps in the air, gesturing wildly as if struck by an electric spark who then begins hobbling around the stage?

From 1987 reconstruction

Who wouldn't have laughed?

And we're only a few minutes into a ballet that will be a little over a half-hour long.

The cat-calls and whistles – and those who wanted to listen or who were excited about something so amazingly new shouting back at them – were supposed to have been so loud, the dancers on the stage could not hear the orchestra in the pit in front and below them. Nijinksy, who had choreographed the ballet – many were disappointed this great star of the day was not dancing in it (that's what many thought) – stood in the wings, shouting out the count so his dancers could keep together.

And yes, Stravinsky recalls his growing mortification when all this began, shortly to get up from his seat, work his way out to the aisle (and telling someone who was booing “Go to hell!”) to witness the debacle from backstage.

It is said that the cat-calls began when the Grand Old Man of French Music, the conservative Camille Saint-Saens (born eight years after Beethoven died and who was now in his late-70s), got up and stomped up the aisle, muttering something about “that's no way to treat a bassoon.” The truth is, Saint-Saens wasn't even at the premiere of the ballet: he attended a later performance.

Some argue that Diaghilev himself – the man whose ballet company was presenting this performance – had arranged a clacque to start the riot (once begun, it would take on a life of its own) simply to create a success de scandale. And if that were the case, he succeeded – because ever since, the first thing anybody says about the music is “it started a riot.”

(By the way, Truman Bullard, professor emeritus from Dickinson College, did his doctoral dissertation on this very riot and is often quoted in discussions and other writings about this historic events. He will be giving the pre-concert talk an hour before each of the HSO's performances, so you can find out what research has proven to sift fact from myth.)

Well, actually, a lot of new music provoked often vociferous reactions from the first-night audiences. Schoenberg organized several concerts in Vienna or Berlin where booing during the performance led to fist-fights and the calling of police. Another seminal work of the 20th Century – Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire premiered in 1912 – was met with a similar riot.

In fact, if you read the accounts, Claude Debussy's Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” started a riot at its premiere in 1894, only nine years earlier than Stravinsky's premiere.

What?? That gentle, gorgeous diaphanous music???

Yes – but it was because of the choreography.

The story of the ballet itself was controversial: the erotic dreams of a faun (part animal, part human) who, by the end of the nine-minute scene, was pantomiming the act of... well, masturbating to his fantasies! (To this gentle, gorgeous diaphanous music???) And that's what caused the riot, not the music.

But the way people talk about, you'd think it was the music people were reacting to.

We forget that the piece of music itself is only part of the experience in both cases: music to accompany the dance, in this case, and to hear people natter on about the “Riot of Spring” is to ignore the fact that, the newness of the music aside, the choreography and the costumes as well as the disappointed expectations of the audience might have had something to do with it.

Yes, people were and continue to be startled by this music. It has a power to astound listeners to the point its reputation frightens them. And while it might not be to everybody's liking (especially those seeking light entertainment), there's no denying its power and the impact it had on 20th Century music.

Elliott Carter, a composer used to having people walk out of his concerts, attended the American premiere at Carnegie Hall in January, 1924, when he was 15 with a vague interest in music, listening to a piece of music given its world premiere only 10 years earlier.

Here, Carter reminisces about his experiences hearing new music as a student in New York City, recorded shortly before he turned 100 himself – he died a year ago a few weeks before his 104th birthday and was still composing, by the way:



He loved it for any number of reasons but he's often quoted as saying he wanted to write music like that, music that was powerful enough to drive people out of the hall not because he wanted to annoy them (which he and many other contemporary composers were accused of doing), but because the music was so visceral that it could create such a strong reaction that people would respond that way.

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But it wasn't just a one-night stand: there were five further performances of the ballet over the next two weeks – relatively peaceful but always a bit on the edge. Puccini, the composer of such lyrical masterpieces as Tosca and La Boheme, attended the second performance three days later and described the choreography as “ridiculous” and the music “cacophanous” – “the work of a madman. The public hissed, laughed – and applauded.”

When the Ballet Russes took the production to London (considering Paris was the center of “what's it,” London was a cultural backwater for new art), the Times' critic was “impressed how different elements of the work came together to form a coherent whole,” though not as enthusiastic about the music itself: complaining that the composer had sacrificed melody and harmony for rhythm he wrote, “If M. Stravinsky had wished to be really primitive, he would have been wise to... score his ballet for nothing but drums.” A ballet historian described the "slow, uncouth movements" of the dancers, which he thought were “in complete opposition to the traditions of classical ballet.”

A concert performance in Paris less than a year later – without the dancers – was met with considerable enthusiasm.

Here is a scene from a BBC dramatization of the Paris premiere that, like any kind of account must rely on fiction as much as fact to fill in the details. But it will give you an idea what “might” have happened – and it incorporates a recreation of the original choreography and costumes to give it at least some semblance of historical accuracy.



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And what about that original production?

Here is a performance by the Joffrey Ballet of the historic reconstruction of the original sets and costumes but most importantly (and the most difficult to recreate) Nijinsky's original choreography from a 1987 broadcast:



Many in my generation were first introduced to this music through Fantasia, one of the most magical films Walt Disney ever created, but though he chose to end with The Rite of Spring, instead of “pictures of pagan Russia” as Stravinsky imagined it, we see dinosaurs – from the famous battle between the T-Rex and the stegosaurus to the cataclysmic earthquakes that brought their age to an end.

Disney's Dinosaurs

Curiously, when Disney informed Stravinsky of his plans to incorporate his ballet into his film, assuming he would be honored to have his music made available to a wider mass audience, the composer was immediately opposed to the trivialization of his music. Disney (or agents from his studio) reportedly then informed him it didn't matter whether he approved or not because there was no copyright treaty with Russia and so therefore they could use it if they wanted to without his permission.

More curiously, then, when I went to search on-line for scenes from this movie, many of them came up as “withdrawn” because the Disney Studio was defending its use of copyright material (its images). Did they not see the irony, here?

I had to admit, as a kid of 7 or 8 when I first saw this movie, I was in love with dinosaurs and thought this was incredible! Now, looking back on it, I dislike what Disney did to the music – at the end, going back to reprise the opening bassoon solo? – and after seeing several productions of the ballet (which you can read about here, included in this post from 2009 on my other blog) – it seems quite tame (though I still tear up at the death of the Stegosaurus) but for several years, I found thinking of dinosaurs made it easier for me to come to terms with the challenges of this music. Now, I no longer need the visual crutch to appreciate the music alone.

Another way of "seeing" the piece, especially for those who cannot read musical notation much less follow a very complex score, is to follow one of those fascinating "animated graphical" scores: here's a complete performance of the ballet score:



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If this music is new to you, I think if you see the images of this production – as the music “looked” to its first audience – or this "animated score," it may help you listen to and appreciate the music as a more total experience. It has a specific structure, dramatically, though it's not like a Beethoven symphony: like most dramatic, theatrical music, the music exists on the skeleton of its drama but contains all the elements of music we expect in Western art, even abstract art (music that is purely music).

There is tension (a good deal of it, created in various ways) which is then released (in various ways) or which explodes (as the end of the first half) into non-resolution, creating further anticipation. Only at the end is this tension resolved – in one of the most astounding final chords ever written!

By now, The Rite of Spring has become standard repertoire, a war-horse, that can be performed in concert halls and ballet theaters around the world, whether it needs to be trotted out to celebrate its birthday anniversary or not.

But it still has the power to frighten people and I can understand that. But I could also say that, if a hundred years after Beethoven wrote his Eroica Symphony, a work that is often given credit for turning the 18th Century into the 19th, imagine if people still were afraid to go into a concert it was programmed on in 1903 - given everything that happened in between?

If you can turn on your TV and watch, say, NCIS with its car bombs and physical violence (ooh, look, he just got slugged with a tire-iron, cool!) or go to the movies for the latest action-thriller, chances are there's little in The Rite of Spring that could frighten you, musically or dramatically.

It is amazing how violent our entertainment has become – not to mention how our children amuse themselves with computer games. I'm not saying listening to The Rite of Spring is going to be the same experience but it can certainly relate – and if you accept that it doesn't have to be the musical equivalent of Last Man Standing (or at least Last Virgin Standing), it can really be a very amazing thing to experience.

Really – there's nothing to be frightened of. And if you don't like it after you've experienced it the first time, perhaps another attempt at familiarity will help make it easier the next time, if you accept it according to its own terms.

Dick Strawser