Fate & Folklore
Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, WWV96 – Richard Wagner
Born May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Germany
Died February 13, 1883, in Venice, Italy
This work was first performed on June 21, 1868, at the Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater in Munich, Germany, under the baton of Hans von Bülow. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
Richard Wagner was a revolutionary in both political and musical arenas. Politically, he espoused extreme anti-Semitic views, blaming every unfavorable aspect of music in his day on his stereotypical image of Jewish people. He supported an artistic revolution in which all performing and creative arts would be fused into one expressive entity, presumably without Jewish participation. Despite his despicable political views, Wagner is universally regarded as a musical innovator, primarily for his thirteen operas. While carefully honing his craft, he conceived of an artistic ideal that would eventually evolve into the four music dramas that comprise The Ring of the Nibelungs. In this mammoth masterpiece, lasting just under twenty hours, Wagner not only relates the ancient Germanic story of the greed and lust of the gods. He also lays bare their thoughts and psychological makeup through a series of leitmotifs – short musical snippets that embody characters, emotions, and objects found throughout the operas. By having the orchestra play carefully scored leitmotifs, Wagner was able to reinforce the sung statements of the characters.
Wagner’s first major success as a composer was in 1841 with his supernatural opera The Flying Dutchman. Many masterpieces followed – Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, the four operas of The Ring of the Nibelungs (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung), Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Wagner was attracted to mythological subjects, featuring magic, giants, dragons, and Germanic gods in his works, but he was also drawn to tales of love’s magical powers.
By 1864 Wagner had accumulated a considerable amount of debt and it looked certain that debtor’s prison loomed in his future. Almost like a scene from one of his operas, Wagner received a summons to report to the Munich court of Ludwig II of Bavaria. The eighteen year old Ludwig, who had an avid interest in Germanic legends, found an idol in Wagner. He paid all of the composer’s debts and allowed him to live at court. The only condition was that he would continue to compose operas for which Ludwig would finance production. It was a composer’s dream.
Within a year, however, Wagner lost favor with Ludwig’s advisors and the Munich public. He had recently started an affair, one of many in his life, with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of Wagner’s friend, the conductor Hans von Bülow. She was also the daughter of the pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Even though Hans had no problem with his wife seeing Wagner (and eventually bearing him three children while still married to the conductor), nearly everyone else was scandalized. Ludwig, while remaining so loyal to the composer that he considered abdication, asked him to leave Munich and provided him with a palatial home on Lake Lucerne. It was at Tribschen, as the house was named, that Wagner began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only comedy. The opera was completed in 1867 and premiered the following year in Munich with the cuckolded Hans von Bülow on the podium. At the premiere, Wagner sat next to King Ludwig. In the meantime, Wagner’s wife, Minna, died and Cosima asked von Bülow for a divorce. Wagner married Cosima in August of 1870. Ludwig built the couple a home and opera house in Bayreuth where productions of Wagner’s operas continue to this day.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg tells the story of a mid-sixteenth-century St. John’s Feast Day song contest in Nuremberg for which the prize is the hand of a local goldsmith’s daughter, Eva. The contest is only open to Mastersingers or those who have the ability to become one. This guild of musicians governed themselves by a strict code of musical rules, which had to be met by anyone hoping to join the order. As is expected in a five-hour opera, the plot is rather interwoven, but an over-simplified brief synopsis is possible. A young knight, Walther, hopes to win Eva’s hand, but does not have the experience to become a Mastersinger. His rival, the town clerk Beckmesser, is determined to win Eva, but she is in love with Walther and his musical skills are sorely lacking. The cobbler, Hans Sachs, also in love with Eva, is so moved by Walther’s plight that he helps him craft the winning song of the contest, thereby proving his worthiness to become a Mastersinger.
Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg uses themes from the opera to create a stirring and meaningful curtain-raiser that is performed most often apart from the opera. The work begins with a majestic orchestral tutti built from the “Procession of the Mastersingers.” Noble and majestic, this music gives way to the ardent love theme of Eva and Walther, featuring woodwind solos over an accompaniment by the horns and strings. The rhythmic and brassy music that follows represents the “Banner of the Mastersingers,” which is mixed with fragments of Walther’s “Prize Song.” A scherzo-like section comes next with its quotations from a scene where the apprentices of Nuremberg parody the “Procession.” With its quick and witty writing for woodwinds, this section also lampoons themes representing Eva and Walther, Beckmesser, and the “Banner.” Wagner’s masterful climax combines Walther’s “Prize Song,” the “Procession,” and the “Banner” in a triumphant and grandiose treatment of surpassing majesty
Divertimento from La baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss)– Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia
Died April 6, 1971, in New York
The complete ballet from which this work was drawn was premiered on November 27, 1928, in Paris conducted by the composer. The Divertimento was first heard on November 4, 1934, in Paris, also conducted by the composer. It is scored for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
By 1920 Igor Stravinsky had already exhausted two compositional idioms. The neo-nationalism of his ballets Firebird and Petrouchka had brought his initial fame in the music world by 1911. Deriving from Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s early music is fearless and rude with wonderfully colorful orchestration. In 1913 he combined these traits with a new wildly fragmented approach (generally called primitivism) to unleash his ballet The Rite of Spring – a work that shook the very foundation of orchestral traditions. Always the innovator, he quickly abandoned this style for neoclassicism, a more polite mix of eighteenth century musical elements filtered through twentieth century compositional techniques. Beginning around 1920 with The Soldier’s Tale and Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s neo-classical style would last until 1951, culminating with his opera The Rake’s Progress. His final twenty years, until his death in 1971, consisted of works written in his own adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s austere and experimental twelve-tone technique. Although they are more dissonant and rhythmically complex than Stravinsky’s earlier pieces, these works remain readily identifiable as the work of this undisputed master of twentieth-century music.
Stravinsky’s ballet La baiser de le fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) dates from 1928 and is one of the finest examples of his neo-classical style. The work was a commission from the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who was quite a controversial figure. She scandalized Paris – a city that loved a good scandal – with her nude interpretation of the story of Salome. Formerly a dancer with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Rubinstein used her inheritance to create her own company, Les Ballets des Madame Rubinstein, which operated in direct competition with Diaghilev’s company. Since Diaghilev had staged several of Stravinsky’s early ballets, including The Rite of Spring and Petrushka, Rubinstein’s company was off-limits for the composer if he was ever going to work with Diaghilev again. Nevertheless, Stravinsky accepted her offer.
Mme. Rubinstein wrote to the composer in December of 1927 offering $6,000 for a new ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Ice Maiden, using adaptations of themusic of Tchaikovsky. She had already been working with Alexander Benois, the artist who had created the décor for Petrushka in 1911. The choreographer would be Bronislava Nijinska, the sister of the great dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and fellow former member of the Ballets Russes. She had worked with Stravinsky in 1923 on his great hybrid work Les Noces (The Wedding). It is evident that much of the preliminary work was complete before Rubinstein approached the composer.
After accepting the offer, Stravinsky laid the project aside while he honored a busy schedule of conducting engagements. Shortly after arriving at his summer home in Talloires, Switzerland, on July 11, he began work on the The Fairy’s Kiss. He surrounded himself with scores of Tchaikovsky’s works and selected the excerpts to be included, mostly from early piano pieces, but with a few songs included as well. Stravinsky freely adapted the story to fit his score as it emerged. The result is far more than cut-and-pasted Tchaikovsky, but bears all the hallmarks of Stravinsky, much in the same way he handled the rococo works in his earlier Pulcinella
The story of the ballet is merely a skeletal framework for Nijinska’s choreography. In the first scene, a lost child is kissed by a fairy, after which he is rescued by villagers. The second scene takes place eighteen years later and the child, now a young man, is celebrating at a village festival with his fiancée. After she departs, a gypsy approaches. Really the fairy in disguise, she leads the young man to an old mill, where he sees his fiancée in the third scene. She leaves to change into her wedding dress, but the fairy appears again, this time disguised as the bride in full regalia. She kisses him again and they are magically whisked away to fairyland. The fourth scene includes another kiss, this time with the fairy bride kissing the sole her new husband’s foot.
Although the full ballet was given in 1928 with the music completed barely in time for the premiere, Stravinsky extracted an orchestral Divertimento, essentially a suite of music drawn from the ballet, in 1934. Almost half of the full ballet’s music is included. The opening movement, Sinfonia, is almost a complete version of the first scene. With its wintry feel, the first notes are unmistakably the work of Tchaikovsky, but Stravinsky’s stamp is soon apparent. He reworks textures and harmonies, resulting in a seamless pastiche that is simultaneously Romantic and modern.
Stravinsky’s second movement, Dances Suisses (Swiss Dances), is far more Russian than Swiss. The repeated ostinato patterns that are so associated with Stravinsky are apparent here. Also present is the mixed meter that plays so prominent a role in his music. This movement is drawn from the beginning of the second scene of the complete bal
The third movement, scherzo, is not the typical symphonic third movement, but instead begins with a slow section. Taken from the opening of the ballet’s third scene, this is music of surprising restraint.
Stravinsky’s finale is a Pas de deux taken from the end of the third scene and is the most completely Tchaikovskian of all the Divertimento’s four movements. Stravinsky’s considerable skill as an orchestrator is abundantly apparent here. While he is known as an iconoclast, Stravinsky clearly understood his musical roots, especially when given an opportunity to honor a composer as dear to him as was Tchaikovsky.
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor – Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia
Died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg
This work was first performed on February 22, 1878, in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein. It is scored for piccolo, woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, timpani, and strings.
An overwhelming belief in the power of Fate has influenced some of the most profound works of music. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana celebrates and laments the fickleness of the Wheel of Fortune. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony opens with a theme that is often said to represent Fate knocking at the door. Tchaikovsky, in his many bouts of depression, certainly felt as if Fate was a driving force in his life. Suffering from Bipolar Disorder with its characteristically elevated ‘highs’ and profound ‘lows,’ Tchaikovsky walked a very thin emotional line. When Tchaikovsky married a former student, Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, who had become obsessed with the composer while in his class, he hoped Fate would shine upon him in the guise of domestic bliss. He proposed to Antonina, although he was secretly homosexual and feared professional rejection if he was found out. Instead of bringing happiness, the disastrous marriage lasted all of nine weeks.
The Fourth Symphony, one of his most soul-searching scores, is perhaps most accurately described in a letter Tchaikovsky wrote to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, shortly after the premiere. This description was never meant to serve as a program for the work, but the insight it provides to his mindset at the time is unparalleled. Tchaikovsky wrote:
"The introduction is the kernel, the chief thought of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, the fatal power that hinders one in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not free from clouds -- a might that swings, like the sword of Damocles, constantly over the head, which poisons continuously the soul. This might is overpowering and invincible. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain. The feeling of desperation and loneliness grows stronger and stronger. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one's self in dreams. Deeper and deeper the soul is sunk in dreams. All that was dark and joyless is forgotten . . .
"No -- these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. Thus we see that life is only an everlasting alternation of somber reality and fugitive dreams of happiness. Something like this is the program of the first movement.
"The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! And yet it is a pleasure to think of the early years. One mourns the past and has neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life. One would fain rest awhile, recalling happy hours when young blood pulsed warm through our veins and life brought satisfaction. We remember irreparable loss. But these things are far away. It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one's self in the past.
"There is no determined feeling, no exact expression in the third movement. Here are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly intoxicated. Suddenly there rushes into the imagination the picture of a drunken peasant and a gutter song. Military music is heard passing in the distance. There are disconnected pictures that come and go in the brain of the sleeper. They have nothing to do with reality; they are unintelligible, bizarre.
"As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, look about you. Go to the people. See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk holiday. Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned with us. How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequential, so simple. And do you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still is happiness, simple, naive happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others -- and you can still live.
"There is not a single line in this Symphony that I have not felt in my whole being and that has not been a true echo of the soul."
© 2011 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com
Born May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Germany
Died February 13, 1883, in Venice, Italy
This work was first performed on June 21, 1868, at the Königliches Hof- und Nationaltheater in Munich, Germany, under the baton of Hans von Bülow. It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
Richard Wagner was a revolutionary in both political and musical arenas. Politically, he espoused extreme anti-Semitic views, blaming every unfavorable aspect of music in his day on his stereotypical image of Jewish people. He supported an artistic revolution in which all performing and creative arts would be fused into one expressive entity, presumably without Jewish participation. Despite his despicable political views, Wagner is universally regarded as a musical innovator, primarily for his thirteen operas. While carefully honing his craft, he conceived of an artistic ideal that would eventually evolve into the four music dramas that comprise The Ring of the Nibelungs. In this mammoth masterpiece, lasting just under twenty hours, Wagner not only relates the ancient Germanic story of the greed and lust of the gods. He also lays bare their thoughts and psychological makeup through a series of leitmotifs – short musical snippets that embody characters, emotions, and objects found throughout the operas. By having the orchestra play carefully scored leitmotifs, Wagner was able to reinforce the sung statements of the characters.
Wagner’s first major success as a composer was in 1841 with his supernatural opera The Flying Dutchman. Many masterpieces followed – Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, the four operas of The Ring of the Nibelungs (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung), Tristan and Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. Wagner was attracted to mythological subjects, featuring magic, giants, dragons, and Germanic gods in his works, but he was also drawn to tales of love’s magical powers.
By 1864 Wagner had accumulated a considerable amount of debt and it looked certain that debtor’s prison loomed in his future. Almost like a scene from one of his operas, Wagner received a summons to report to the Munich court of Ludwig II of Bavaria. The eighteen year old Ludwig, who had an avid interest in Germanic legends, found an idol in Wagner. He paid all of the composer’s debts and allowed him to live at court. The only condition was that he would continue to compose operas for which Ludwig would finance production. It was a composer’s dream.
Within a year, however, Wagner lost favor with Ludwig’s advisors and the Munich public. He had recently started an affair, one of many in his life, with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of Wagner’s friend, the conductor Hans von Bülow. She was also the daughter of the pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Even though Hans had no problem with his wife seeing Wagner (and eventually bearing him three children while still married to the conductor), nearly everyone else was scandalized. Ludwig, while remaining so loyal to the composer that he considered abdication, asked him to leave Munich and provided him with a palatial home on Lake Lucerne. It was at Tribschen, as the house was named, that Wagner began work on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, his only comedy. The opera was completed in 1867 and premiered the following year in Munich with the cuckolded Hans von Bülow on the podium. At the premiere, Wagner sat next to King Ludwig. In the meantime, Wagner’s wife, Minna, died and Cosima asked von Bülow for a divorce. Wagner married Cosima in August of 1870. Ludwig built the couple a home and opera house in Bayreuth where productions of Wagner’s operas continue to this day.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg tells the story of a mid-sixteenth-century St. John’s Feast Day song contest in Nuremberg for which the prize is the hand of a local goldsmith’s daughter, Eva. The contest is only open to Mastersingers or those who have the ability to become one. This guild of musicians governed themselves by a strict code of musical rules, which had to be met by anyone hoping to join the order. As is expected in a five-hour opera, the plot is rather interwoven, but an over-simplified brief synopsis is possible. A young knight, Walther, hopes to win Eva’s hand, but does not have the experience to become a Mastersinger. His rival, the town clerk Beckmesser, is determined to win Eva, but she is in love with Walther and his musical skills are sorely lacking. The cobbler, Hans Sachs, also in love with Eva, is so moved by Walther’s plight that he helps him craft the winning song of the contest, thereby proving his worthiness to become a Mastersinger.
Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg uses themes from the opera to create a stirring and meaningful curtain-raiser that is performed most often apart from the opera. The work begins with a majestic orchestral tutti built from the “Procession of the Mastersingers.” Noble and majestic, this music gives way to the ardent love theme of Eva and Walther, featuring woodwind solos over an accompaniment by the horns and strings. The rhythmic and brassy music that follows represents the “Banner of the Mastersingers,” which is mixed with fragments of Walther’s “Prize Song.” A scherzo-like section comes next with its quotations from a scene where the apprentices of Nuremberg parody the “Procession.” With its quick and witty writing for woodwinds, this section also lampoons themes representing Eva and Walther, Beckmesser, and the “Banner.” Wagner’s masterful climax combines Walther’s “Prize Song,” the “Procession,” and the “Banner” in a triumphant and grandiose treatment of surpassing majesty
Divertimento from La baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss)– Igor Stravinsky
Born June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia
Died April 6, 1971, in New York
The complete ballet from which this work was drawn was premiered on November 27, 1928, in Paris conducted by the composer. The Divertimento was first heard on November 4, 1934, in Paris, also conducted by the composer. It is scored for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.
By 1920 Igor Stravinsky had already exhausted two compositional idioms. The neo-nationalism of his ballets Firebird and Petrouchka had brought his initial fame in the music world by 1911. Deriving from Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s early music is fearless and rude with wonderfully colorful orchestration. In 1913 he combined these traits with a new wildly fragmented approach (generally called primitivism) to unleash his ballet The Rite of Spring – a work that shook the very foundation of orchestral traditions. Always the innovator, he quickly abandoned this style for neoclassicism, a more polite mix of eighteenth century musical elements filtered through twentieth century compositional techniques. Beginning around 1920 with The Soldier’s Tale and Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s neo-classical style would last until 1951, culminating with his opera The Rake’s Progress. His final twenty years, until his death in 1971, consisted of works written in his own adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s austere and experimental twelve-tone technique. Although they are more dissonant and rhythmically complex than Stravinsky’s earlier pieces, these works remain readily identifiable as the work of this undisputed master of twentieth-century music.
Stravinsky’s ballet La baiser de le fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) dates from 1928 and is one of the finest examples of his neo-classical style. The work was a commission from the dancer Ida Rubinstein, who was quite a controversial figure. She scandalized Paris – a city that loved a good scandal – with her nude interpretation of the story of Salome. Formerly a dancer with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Rubinstein used her inheritance to create her own company, Les Ballets des Madame Rubinstein, which operated in direct competition with Diaghilev’s company. Since Diaghilev had staged several of Stravinsky’s early ballets, including The Rite of Spring and Petrushka, Rubinstein’s company was off-limits for the composer if he was ever going to work with Diaghilev again. Nevertheless, Stravinsky accepted her offer.
Mme. Rubinstein wrote to the composer in December of 1927 offering $6,000 for a new ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story, The Ice Maiden, using adaptations of themusic of Tchaikovsky. She had already been working with Alexander Benois, the artist who had created the décor for Petrushka in 1911. The choreographer would be Bronislava Nijinska, the sister of the great dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and fellow former member of the Ballets Russes. She had worked with Stravinsky in 1923 on his great hybrid work Les Noces (The Wedding). It is evident that much of the preliminary work was complete before Rubinstein approached the composer.
After accepting the offer, Stravinsky laid the project aside while he honored a busy schedule of conducting engagements. Shortly after arriving at his summer home in Talloires, Switzerland, on July 11, he began work on the The Fairy’s Kiss. He surrounded himself with scores of Tchaikovsky’s works and selected the excerpts to be included, mostly from early piano pieces, but with a few songs included as well. Stravinsky freely adapted the story to fit his score as it emerged. The result is far more than cut-and-pasted Tchaikovsky, but bears all the hallmarks of Stravinsky, much in the same way he handled the rococo works in his earlier Pulcinella
The story of the ballet is merely a skeletal framework for Nijinska’s choreography. In the first scene, a lost child is kissed by a fairy, after which he is rescued by villagers. The second scene takes place eighteen years later and the child, now a young man, is celebrating at a village festival with his fiancée. After she departs, a gypsy approaches. Really the fairy in disguise, she leads the young man to an old mill, where he sees his fiancée in the third scene. She leaves to change into her wedding dress, but the fairy appears again, this time disguised as the bride in full regalia. She kisses him again and they are magically whisked away to fairyland. The fourth scene includes another kiss, this time with the fairy bride kissing the sole her new husband’s foot.
Although the full ballet was given in 1928 with the music completed barely in time for the premiere, Stravinsky extracted an orchestral Divertimento, essentially a suite of music drawn from the ballet, in 1934. Almost half of the full ballet’s music is included. The opening movement, Sinfonia, is almost a complete version of the first scene. With its wintry feel, the first notes are unmistakably the work of Tchaikovsky, but Stravinsky’s stamp is soon apparent. He reworks textures and harmonies, resulting in a seamless pastiche that is simultaneously Romantic and modern.
Stravinsky’s second movement, Dances Suisses (Swiss Dances), is far more Russian than Swiss. The repeated ostinato patterns that are so associated with Stravinsky are apparent here. Also present is the mixed meter that plays so prominent a role in his music. This movement is drawn from the beginning of the second scene of the complete bal
The third movement, scherzo, is not the typical symphonic third movement, but instead begins with a slow section. Taken from the opening of the ballet’s third scene, this is music of surprising restraint.
Stravinsky’s finale is a Pas de deux taken from the end of the third scene and is the most completely Tchaikovskian of all the Divertimento’s four movements. Stravinsky’s considerable skill as an orchestrator is abundantly apparent here. While he is known as an iconoclast, Stravinsky clearly understood his musical roots, especially when given an opportunity to honor a composer as dear to him as was Tchaikovsky.
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor – Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia
Died November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg
This work was first performed on February 22, 1878, in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein. It is scored for piccolo, woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, timpani, and strings.
An overwhelming belief in the power of Fate has influenced some of the most profound works of music. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana celebrates and laments the fickleness of the Wheel of Fortune. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony opens with a theme that is often said to represent Fate knocking at the door. Tchaikovsky, in his many bouts of depression, certainly felt as if Fate was a driving force in his life. Suffering from Bipolar Disorder with its characteristically elevated ‘highs’ and profound ‘lows,’ Tchaikovsky walked a very thin emotional line. When Tchaikovsky married a former student, Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, who had become obsessed with the composer while in his class, he hoped Fate would shine upon him in the guise of domestic bliss. He proposed to Antonina, although he was secretly homosexual and feared professional rejection if he was found out. Instead of bringing happiness, the disastrous marriage lasted all of nine weeks.
The Fourth Symphony, one of his most soul-searching scores, is perhaps most accurately described in a letter Tchaikovsky wrote to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck, shortly after the premiere. This description was never meant to serve as a program for the work, but the insight it provides to his mindset at the time is unparalleled. Tchaikovsky wrote:
"The introduction is the kernel, the chief thought of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, the fatal power that hinders one in the pursuit of happiness from gaining the goal, which jealously provides that peace and comfort do not prevail, that the sky is not free from clouds -- a might that swings, like the sword of Damocles, constantly over the head, which poisons continuously the soul. This might is overpowering and invincible. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain. The feeling of desperation and loneliness grows stronger and stronger. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one's self in dreams. Deeper and deeper the soul is sunk in dreams. All that was dark and joyless is forgotten . . .
"No -- these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. Thus we see that life is only an everlasting alternation of somber reality and fugitive dreams of happiness. Something like this is the program of the first movement.
"The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! And yet it is a pleasure to think of the early years. One mourns the past and has neither the courage nor the will to begin a new life. One is rather tired of life. One would fain rest awhile, recalling happy hours when young blood pulsed warm through our veins and life brought satisfaction. We remember irreparable loss. But these things are far away. It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one's self in the past.
"There is no determined feeling, no exact expression in the third movement. Here are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly intoxicated. Suddenly there rushes into the imagination the picture of a drunken peasant and a gutter song. Military music is heard passing in the distance. There are disconnected pictures that come and go in the brain of the sleeper. They have nothing to do with reality; they are unintelligible, bizarre.
"As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, look about you. Go to the people. See how they can enjoy life and give themselves up entirely to festivity. The picture of a folk holiday. Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. The other children of men are not concerned with us. How merry and glad they all are. All their feelings are so inconsequential, so simple. And do you still say that all the world is immersed in sorrow? There still is happiness, simple, naive happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others -- and you can still live.
"There is not a single line in this Symphony that I have not felt in my whole being and that has not been a true echo of the soul."
© 2011 Orpheus Music Prose & Craig Doolin
www.orpheusnotes.com