Olga Kern Returns, Program Notes

Haydn, Piano Concerto No. 11 in D Major
Strauss, Death and Transfiguration
Liszt, Totentanz
Rimsky-Korsakov, Capriccio espagnol

Piano Concerto No. 11 in D Major, Hob XVIII:11 (1784)
Joseph Haydn
Born March 31, 1732 in Rohrau-on-Leitha, Lower Austria
Died May 31, 1809 in Vienna, Austria

Vivace
Un Poco Adagio
Rondo All'Ungarese: Allegro Assai

The modern piano was a relatively new instrument in Haydn's time. It was called the "forte piano" (later "pianoforte") because the cutting-edge technology of its hammer-action allowed the performer to play both loud ("forte") and soft ("piano") instead of the single dynamic of the harpsichord's plucked strings. Haydn became familiar with it in the 1760s, but probably didn't own one until the mid-1780s, and all of his keyboard music before 1780 was written for harpsichord. The Piano Concerto in D major, published in 1784, was his first concerto to list both "clavicembalo" (harpsichord) and "forte piano" as options for the solo instrument.

Unlike his younger contemporary Mozart, Haydn wasn't known as a keyboard virtuoso, and didn't need to be one to make his living. For 29 years (from 1761 to 1790) he served as resident composer and orchestra director in the household of the Esterházys, a family of Hungarian nobility. The Esterházy's primary residence was in Eisenstadt, some 25 miles south of Vienna. While the musicians in Haydn's orchestra complained about being stuck in the countryside away from the bustling musical life of Vienna, Haydn felt that their isolation gave him a creative advantage. "My Prince was satisfied with all my music; as Director of an orchestra I could try out any ideas that occurred to me and see what worked and what didn't. I could take risks. I was cut off from the world. There wasn't anyone around to criticize me and weaken my self-confidence—and so I had to become original."

Pianist Glenn Gould felt that Haydn actually wrote better, more inventive music for the piano than Mozart, and the wit, charm and verve of the D major Concerto gives some support to his opinion. It has become a popular "first concerto" for young pianists, who can easily master its moderate technical demands and do full justice to its sunny, happy-go-lucky energy. The work immediately became enormously popular, as evidenced by the large number of copies—both legally published and pirated—that still survive throughout Europe. The lively first movement is blessed with some of Haydn's most ingratiating melodies, and the solo piano's rhapsodic ornamentation in the Adagio gives it a feeling of romantic spontaneity. Haydn pays tribute to his Hungarian employers in the final movement, a Rondo All 'Ungherese ("Rondo in the Hungarian Style") that is based on a dance melody from Dalmatia (modern Bosnia and Croatia). Haydn must surely have heard the drone accompaniments, sharp syncopations and swirling trills and ornamentations that give this movement its exotic flavor at dances and gatherings in the countryside around Eisenstadt.

Death and Transfiguration, op. 24 (1889)
Richard Strauss
Born June 11, 1864 in Munich, Germany
Died Sept. 8, 1949 in Garmisch, Germany

Strauss catered to the 19th century appetite for story-and-picture music and pushed the concept of realism and vivid action and movement in program music to its extreme limits. He went much further than Liszt or Berlioz in allowing the shape and character of the music to be affected by a literary or dramatic program, and his tone poems are a treasury of orchestral sound effects---hoof beats, the bleating of sheep, the gabble of geese, wind, thunder, storm---that he discovered or invented to help him tell his stories as vividly as possible. But how does one describe Death (with a capital D) in music? This was a challenge Richard Strauss could not pass up, and he tackled it in the next tone poem he wrote after his hugely successful Don Juan. Death and Transfiguration is a tone poem which takes as its theme a dying man who recalls the joys and pains of his life and passes through death to a state of transfigured bliss. The music was based on Strauss' own philosophical pondering on the nature of death rather than on an existing literary work. (Let's not forget that the composer was 25 years old when he wrote this, and had hardly been sick a single day in his life!) Strauss' friend, Alexander Ritter did write a rather banal and overblown poem to convey the meaning of the music, but this was written at Strauss' request after the music was completed.

Here is Strauss' own explanation of the music in a letter: "The idea occurred to me to represent the death of a person, possibly an artist, who had striven for the highest ideals. The sick man lies in bed asleep, breathing heavily and irregularly. Agreeable dreams come, bring a smile to his face in spite of his suffering. His sleep becomes lighter, he wakens, and immediately he is wracked again by terrible pain. His limbs shake with fever. As the attack subsides and the pain lessens, he reflects on his past life: his childhood; his youth with its striving, its passions. Then as the pain resumes, the fruit of his living appears to him: the idea, the Ideal which he has tried to represent in his art, but which can never be perfectly realized by any human being. The hour of death approaches. The soul leaves the body to find glorious perfection in the eternal cosmos that it could never find during its earthly existence."

Whether or not Strauss was successful in portraying the rigors of Death in this music, he did succeed in writing some of the most transcendentally beautiful pages he ever composed. The final, "transfiguration" section with its deep tolling notes in the tam-tam and bass instruments of the orchestra, its gradual build-up of layers of sound, all in the quietest pianissimo the players can produce, and its serene statement of the "Theme of the Ideal" that is all the more emotionally overwhelming for being played so softly, is truly magnificent music. Don't be ashamed if tears come—many of the orchestra musicians will be wiping their eyes after this one, too.

Totentanz (Paraphrase on the Dies Irae), S. 126 (1859)
Franz Liszt
Born October 22, 1811 in Raiding, Hungary
Died July 31, 1886 in Bayreuth, Germany

Liszt was unquestionably one of the most brilliant and charismatic musicians who ever lived. A child prodigy who possessed a canny knack for self-promotion, he become an international celebrity, lionized by society, fought over (literally) by women, decorated by kings and governments like a military hero. As a composer, conductor, discoverer of talent and patron of the arts, Liszt was much more than the egotistical poseur and lady-killer that his popular image suggested. He was an extraordinarily original artist who created an entirely new conception of the classical piano concerto and invented new musical forms such as the rhapsody and the orchestral tone poem. Liszt eventually tired of the notoriety that followed him wherever he went, and wrote to the conductor Johann Herbeck: "It seems to me high time that I should be somewhat forgotten, or at least placed very much in the background." He surprised the musical world when, one September evening in 1847, he abruptly terminated his virtuoso career. Liszt lived another fifty years, teaching, writing, conducting and encouraging promising young artists and composers both spiritually and financially.

Totentanz (Dance of the Dead), inspired by a 14th-century fresco by Francesco Traini in the cathedral of Pisa, takes the melody of Dies Irae ("Day of Wrath"), the medieval Gregorian plainchant for the Sequence portion of the Mass for the Dead, and works six adventuresome variations on it. This ominous, striding tune, familiar to everyone in Catholic Europe, enticed many composers to quote it when they needed to evoke terror and dread. Hector Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique), Liszt (Dante Symphony and Totentanz), Camille Saint-Saëns (Danse macabre) and Rachmaninoff (in several works) all used the Dies Irae as a "special effect" in their music. Liszt, retired as a hell-raising virtuoso pianist, had become devoutly religious by the time he began work on the Totentanz in 1849. He revised it in 1864, and, while it is more somber and technically intricate than most of his pieces, it still has enough pyrotechnical explosions of virtuosity to satisfy the most rabid Liszt fan.

Capriccio espagnol, op. 34 (1886-87)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Born March 18, 1844 in Tikhvin, Novgorod, Russia
Died June 21, 1908 near St. Petersburg

Alborada
Variazioni
Alborada
Scena e canto gitano
Fandango austuriano

Although Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov began writing music at the age of 6, his parents were determined that he should pursue a career suited to his aristocratic birth, and sent him off to Naval College to become an officer in the Russian navy. The young naval cadet stubbornly continued to study music in his spare time, and wrote his first symphony while he was on a three-year cruise overseas. Nikolai retired from the navy when he was 29 to devote his life exclusively to music, and became a professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Being largely self-taught and working mainly by ear, he knew very little music theory and had to study secretly in order to keep ahead of his students. He managed to stay far enough ahead to become a respected teacher as well as an admired composer, known for the magical and fantastic colors and effects he could produce from the orchestra.

After forging their way to the concert hall through winter's snow and ice, Russian audiences loved to hear music that transported them for a few blissful moments to the warmer climes of Spain, Italy and the Orient. In the winter of 1886 Rimsky-Korsakov began sketching ideas for a virtuoso fantasy for violin on Spanish themes. The following summer he changed his mind and decided to make the work a showpiece for full orchestra. He writes: "According to my plans the Capriccio was to glitter with dazzling orchestra color…" His execution of these plans was more successful than even Rimsky-Korsakov expected. The piece was premiered in October of 1887 at a concert of the Russian Symphony in St. Petersburg. The composer conducted, and was gratified by the reactions of the orchestra musicians during the rehearsals. "At the first rehearsal, the first movement (A-major, in 2/4) had hardly been finished when the whole orchestra began to applaud. Similar applause followed all the other parts wherever the pauses permitted. I asked the orchestra for the privilege of dedicating the composition to them. General delight was the answer."

The reception for the Capriccio Espagnole ("Spanish Caprice") at the premiere was no less enthusiastic, but Rimsky-Korsakov was disappointed that audiences and critics focused on the superficial glitter of the orchestral sounds. He wrote: "The Capriccio went without difficulties and sounded brilliant. Despite its length the composition called forth an insistent [demand for an] encore. The opinion formed by both critics and the public, that the Capriccio is a magnificently orchestrated piece—is wrong. The Capriccio is a brilliant composition for the orchestra. The change of timbres, the felicitous choice of melodic designs and figuration patterns, exactly suiting each kind of instrument, brief virtuoso cadenzas for solo instruments, the rhythm of the percussion instruments, etc., constitute here the very essence of the composition and not its garb or orchestration. The Spanish themes, of dance character, furnished me with rich material for putting in use multi-form orchestral effects. All in all, the Capriccio is undoubtedly a purely external piece, but vividly brilliant for all that."

The work is in five large sections. First an Alborada, or morning serenade, brings the full band galloping in with all its guns blazing. The music then quiets down for a series of five Variations that display the more delicate and sensual sounds the orchestra has to offer. There is a repeat of the Alborada with a different palette of instrumental colors, then a dramatic snare drum roll introduces the Scene and Gypsy Song. This is a series of virtuoso cadenzas for several solo instruments that alternate with the seductively swaying Gypsy Song. The Capriccio finishes in grand style with a Fandango of the Asturias, an Andalusian dance usually played with guitar and castanets, and the opening Alborada returns as a whirlwind coda.