Program Notes Masterpiece Series #3

Print Notes

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for Strings
Ralph Vaughan Williams
(b. Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, 1872; d. London, 1958)

Composed in 1910; revised in 1913 and 1919.
Premiered on September 6, 1910 in Gloucester, conducted by the composer.
Duration: approximately 16 minutes.

The Tallis Fantasia of 1910 was the fruit of an immense musical background that Vaughan Williams had been accumulating since his student days twenty years before. The list of influences on the composer and on this particular work is long: he studied composition with Parry and Stanford, those twin paragons of Victorian musical virtue; he directed a Palestrina Society especially to learn the works of that Italian Renaissance master; he followed closely the revival of early, especially Elizabethan, music by the remarkable performer and scholar Arnold Dolmetsch; he avidly collected British folk songs with Gustav Holst; he spent two years compiling a new edition of the English Hymnal; and he refined his compositional style though study with Ravel in Paris. All of these experiences found their way into this exquisite Fantasia, which, though preceded by a number of songs, chamber pieces and orchestra scores, is the first work in which Vaughan Williams’ unique genius was fully revealed.

The main influence and inspiration for the Fantasia was the great Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585), remembered not only for his excellent music but also for his political acumen. While steadfastly maintaining his Catholicism in the fluid religious landscape of 16th-century England, he wrote sacred music with either Latin or vernacular texts according to the theological preference of the current monarch, and even became such a favorite of the Protestant Elizabeth that he (with William Byrd) was granted the exclusive privilege of printing music and ruled music paper for all of Britain.

During his labors on the English Hymnal (“some of the best — as well as some of the worst — tunes in the world,” he said), Vaughan Williams discovered a set of nine hymns that Tallis had contributed to the English Metrical Psalter published in 1567 by Mathew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. Vaughan Williams was drawn to the third of these, an austere melody in the Phrygian mode to the text now known as “Why do the heathens rage and the people imagine a vain thing?,” but given in those pre-King James I times as “Why fumeth in sight: the Gentiles spite, In fury raging stout?”

Vaughan Williams conceived his Tallis Fantasia for the resonant spaces of Gloucester Cathedral, where it was first heard as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival. Its scoring was carefully arranged to create the aural impression of great depth and reverberation in the Cathedral through the use of three antiphonal groups within the string orchestra — a solo quartet, a small ensemble and the entire orchestra. The Fantasia is in a free variation form which carries some suggestion of its 16th-century namesake. There is a quiet introduction in which the opening phrases of Tallis’ theme, given by pizzicato low strings, alternate with a phrase of Vaughan Williams’ invention, played in parallel harmonies. Tallis’ hymn is then heard in full in the orchestra’s rich middle register supported by pizzicato basses and tremolo violins, after which the high violins take it over for an intensified repetition. The central portion of the Fantasia comprises variants of fragments from the old melody and the parallel-harmony phrase, making sumptuous use of the acoustical possibilities offered by the three string groups. Tallis’ tune is heard again, complete, near the end, floating high in the solo violin over a shimmering orchestral background. A serene coda closes the work, one of the most thoughtful, ecstatic and sonorous in the entire orchestral repertory.

John Fuller Maitland’s words in The Times of London about the 1910 premiere of the Tallis Fantasia still ring true: “Throughout its course one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new. The work is wonderful because it seems to lift one into some unknown region of musical thought and feeling.

Concerto in E Minor for Violin & Orchestra, Opus 64
Felix Mendelssohn
(b. Hamburg, 1809; d. Leipzig, 1847)

Composed in 1844.
Premiered on March 13, 1845 in Leipzig, conducted by Niels Gade with Ferdinand David as soloist.
Instrumentation: woodwinds, horns and trumpets in pairs, timpani and strings.
Duration: approximately 28 minutes.

“I would like to compose a violin concerto for next winter,” Mendelssohn wrote in July 1838 to his friend, the violinist Ferdinand David. “One in E minor keeps running through my head, and the opening gives me no peace.” It was for David that Mendelssohn planned and wrote his only mature Violin Concerto. Their friendship began when the two first met at about the age of fifteen while the young violinist was on a concert tour through Germany and they discovered that they had been born only eleven months apart in the same Hamburg neighborhood. Already well formed even in those early years, David’s playing was said to have combined the serious, classical restraint of Ludwig Spohr, his teacher, the elegance of the French tradition and the technical brilliance of Paganini. Mendelssohn, who admired both the man and his playing, appointed David concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra when he became that organization’s music director in 1835. They remained close friends and musical allies. When Mendelssohn’s health was feeble, David looked after much of the routine activity of the Gewandhaus, where he spent 37 years, and he even stepped in to conduct the premiere of Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul when the composer was stricken during a measles epidemic in 1836. Two years later Mendelssohn expressed his appreciation to David: “I realize that there are not really many musicians who pursue such a straight road in art undeviatingly as you do, or in whose active course I could feel the same intense delight that I do in yours.”

Despite his good intentions and the gentle prodding of David to complete his Violin Concerto, Mendelssohn did not get around to serious work on the score until 1844, after he had fulfilled numerous other composition and conducting commitments, including a particularly troublesome one as director of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The requirements of that position — which included composing the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream — occupied much of his time, and it was not until he resigned from the post in 1844 that he was able to complete the Violin Concerto. He worked closely with David while composing the piece, inviting his suggestions about both the technique of the soloist’s part and the suitability of the music as a vehicle for the violin, not least their shared concern that the violin part “could be executed with the greatest delicacy.” He deferred to David in most of the technical questions, and it seems that David himself was responsible for the work’s single, finely crafted cadenza.

Both men had a contempt for the empty showpiece concerto of the early Romantic era that contained little more than what Mendelssohn called “juggler’s tricks and rope dancer’s feats.” It was therefore probably inevitable that this Concerto should emerge as a serious musical creation. David thought that it would be an excellent companion to Beethoven’s Concerto; the eminent English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey wrote, “I rather envy the enjoyment of anyone who should hear the Mendelssohn Concerto for the first time and find that, like Hamlet, it was full of quotations”; Jascha Heifetz (who recorded the Concerto on a Guarnerius violin that David owned) was once prompted by the work’s undiminished popularity to say that “it is always retired at the end of one season, and revived at the beginning of the next.” Louis Biancolli summarized the character of this work of Mendelssohn’s maturity, completed only two years before his death at the age of 38: “In classical poise, melodic suavity, and refined romantic feeling, it is an epitome of his style.... Finesse, cultivated taste, and an unerring sense of the appropriate were among his chief attributes.”

The Concerto opens with a soaring violin melody whose lyricism exhibits a grand passion tinged with restless, Romantic melancholy. Some glistening passagework for the violinist leads through a transition melody to the second theme, a quiet, sunny strain shared by woodwinds and soloist. More glistening arabesques from the violinist and a quickened rhythm close the exposition. The succinct development section is largely based on the opening theme. In this Concerto, Mendelssohn moved the cadenza forward from its traditional place as an appendage near the end of the first movement to become an integral component of the structure, here separating the development from the recapitulation. It leads seamlessly into the restatement of the movement’s thematic material and the exhilarating closing pages.

The thread of a single note sustained by the bassoon carries the Concerto to the Andante, a song rich in warm sentiment and endearing elegance. This slow movement’s center section is distinguished by its rustling accompaniment and bittersweet minor-mode melody. A dozen measures of chordal writing for strings link the Andante to the finale, an effervescent sonata form that trips along with the distinctive aerial grace of which Mendelssohn was the undisputed master.

In 1906, one of the 19th-century’s greatest violinists and an ardent exponent of Mendelssohn’s Concerto, Joseph Joachim, told the guests at a party in his honor, “The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, the one that makes the fewest concessions, is Beethoven’s. The one by Brahms comes closest to Beethoven’s in its seriousness. Max Bruch wrote the richest and most enchanting of the four. But the dearest of them all, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.”

Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98
Johannes Brahms
(b. Hamburg, 1833; d. 1897, Vienna)

Composed in 1884-1885.
Premiered on October 25, 1885 in Meiningen, conducted by the composer.
Instrumentation: pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo and contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle and strings.
Duration: approximately 42 minutes.

In the popular image of Brahms, he appears as a patriarch: full grey beard, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes. He grew the beard in his late forties as, some say, a compensation for his late physical maturity — he was in his twenties before his voice changed and he needed to shave — and it seemed to be an external admission that Brahms had allowed himself to become an old man. The ideas did not seem to flow so freely as he approached the age of fifty, and he even put his publisher on notice to expect nothing more. Thankfully, the ideas did come, as they would for more than another decade, and he soon completed the superb Third Symphony. The philosophical introspection continued, however, and was reflected in many of his works. The Second Piano Concerto of 1881 is almost autumnal in its mellow ripeness; this Fourth Symphony is music of deep thoughtfulness that leads “into realms where joy and sorrow are hushed, and humanity bows before that which is eternal,” wrote the eminent German musical scholar August Kretzschmar.

One of Brahms’ immediate interests during the composition of the Fourth Symphony was Greek drama. He had been greatly moved by the tragedies of Sophocles in the German translations of his friend Gustav Wendt (1827-1912), director of education in Baden-Baden (Wendt dedicated the volume to Brahms upon its publication in 1884), and many commentators have seen the combination of the epic and the melancholy in this Symphony as a reflection of the works of that ancient playwright. Certainly the choice of E minor as the key of the work is an indication of its tragic nature. This is a rare tonality in the symphonic world, and with so few precedents such a work as Haydn’s in that key (No. 44), a doleful piece subtitled “Mourning Symphony,” was an important influence. That great melancholic among the famous composers, Tchaikovsky, chose E minor as the key for his Fifth Symphony.

Repeatedly accused of being forbiddingly metaphysical or overly serious, the Fourth Symphony was not easily accepted by audiences. The crux of the problem was the stony grandeur of the finale, which undeniably confirms the tragedy of the work. The normal expressive function for a symphonic finale is to be an uplifting affirmation of the continuity of human experience. The classic models are Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, and the esteemed English musicologist Sir Donald Tovey pointed out that in all that master’s works, only three have minor tonality endings. Even that great prophet of Weltschmerz, Gustav Mahler, ended only his Sixth Symphony on a pessimistic note. So, in this last of his symphonies, it would seem that Brahms grappled with his innermost feelings and found a hard-fought acceptance of his own mortality. The outward sign of his perceived great age, his magnificent beard, found its counterpart in tone in this grand Symphony, perhaps the greatest work in the form since those of Schubert and even Beethoven.

It is fitting that the Fourth Symphony was on the program for the final appearance Brahms made before his beloved Vienna. Hans Richter scheduled the piece for the Vienna Philharmonic’s concert of March 7, 1897, and he invited Brahms to attend. Brahms was already mortally ill with the liver cancer that would end his life in less than a month, but he struggled from his bed to a box in the Musikvereinsaal for the concert. Each movement of his Symphony brought a shattering response from the audience. Florence May, Brahms’ loving biographer, described the touching scene: “Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there, shrunken in form, with lined countenance, strained expression, white hair hanging lank, and through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that he was saying farewell. Another outburst of applause and yet another; one more acknowledgment from the master; and Brahms and his Vienna had parted forever.”

Brahms’ Fourth Symphony is large in size and emotional impact while enormously subtle in detail. The first movement begins almost in mid-thought, as though the mood of sad melancholy pervading this opening theme had existed forever and Brahms had simply borrowed a portion of it to present musically. The movement is founded upon the tiny two-note motive (short–long) heard immediately at the beginning. Tracing this little germ cell demonstrates not only Brahms’ enormous compositional skills but also the broad emotional range that he could draw from pure musical expression. To introduce the necessary contrasts into this sonata form, other themes are presented, including a broadly lyrical one for horns and cellos and a fragmented fanfare. The movement grows with a wondrous, dark majesty to its closing pages which, to Tovey, “bear comparison with the greatest climaxes in classical music, not excluding Beethoven.”

“A funeral procession moving across moonlit heights” is how the young Richard Strauss described the second movement. Though the tonality is nominally E major, the movement opens with a stark melody, pregnant with grief, in the ancient Phrygian mode. The mood brightens, but the introspective sorrow of the beginning is never far away. Though in sonatina form (sonata without development), the movement has none of the airy sweetness of so many of Mozart’s andantes cast in that form, but possesses rather an overriding sense of comforting tears washing away great loss. To the noted German musicologist Phillip Spitta, this was the greatest slow movement in all of the symphonic literature.

The third movement is the closest Brahms came to a true scherzo in any of his symphonies. Though such a dance-like movement may appear antithetical to the tragic nature of the Symphony, this scherzo is actually a necessary contrast within the work’s total structure, since it serves to heighten the pathos of the surrounding movements, especially the granitic splendor of the finale. Brahms, as always, took great care with the deployment of his orchestral resources, and he emphasized the singular brightness of this movement by calling for the silvery tingle of the triangle — its only appearance anywhere in his symphonies.

The finale is a passacaglia — a series of variations on a short, recurring melody. The passacaglia was a compositional technique highly favored by Baroque composers that fell into disuse with the changed requirements of the music of the Classical era. It had never been used in a symphony before this one, and it reflects both Brahms’ interest in the music of earlier eras and his faith in the inexorable expressive powers of the old formal types. The theme, to which Brahms added a single chromatic note, was taken from Bach’s Cantata No. 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (“I Long for Thee, Lord”), though John Horton has made a convincing argument that the form was influenced by François Couperin and Georg Muffat. Pedantry was not Brahms’ point here, but it is essential to understanding his style to realize that he was familiar with this old music (from his own study and as an editor for several fledgling musicological series) and could draw whatever resources from it he needed to vivify his works. There are some thirty continuous variations in the finale, though it is less important to follow them individually than to feel the massive strength given to the movement by this technique. The opening chorale-like statement, in which trombones are heard for the first time in the Symphony, recurs twice as a further supporting pillar in the unification of the movement. Yet Brahms never lost sight of the central aesthetic of the Symphony, and his friend Elizabeth von Herzogenberg wrote to him, with no little wonder, “Who can resist an emotion strong enough to penetrate all that skillful elaboration?”

In his biography of the composer, Peter Latham wrote of this stirring work, “Before the end we have risen altogether out of sight of the shady valleys of the Andante and the cheerful merriment of the scherzo, and the wind roars unmercifully over the stony slabs of the mountain-side [of the finale]. It is an awesome heart-searching experience, a mighty assertion of the spirit of man.”