Stella Boyle Smith Masterworks / Pops LIVE! / River Rhapsodies Series
ASO Special Events / Group Sales / 2008-2009 Season Preview

Fantastic Symphony Notes

Appalachian Spring: Suite

Aaron Copland

b. Brooklyn, New York, USA / November 14, 1900 d. Peekskill, New York, USA / December 2, 1990

Copland has long been considered the dean of American composers. Although he wrote in a variety of styles, including the moderately avant garde, he won his greatest successes through joyful compositions that celebrate (and directly quote from) the folk culture of America, such as the ballets Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring.

During the 1930s, Copland and the celebrated choreographer Martha Graham developed a mutual sense of admiration, based on their shared interest in simple, natural expression. Their first opportunity to collaborate came when arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned Copland to write a score specifically for Graham’s company.

It remained nameless until Graham announced, shortly before the debut, that she had decided to call it Appalachian Spring. She took this name from The Dance, a poem by American author Hart Crane (1899-1932). She admitted that she had chosen it simply because she liked the sound of it, and that it had no connection with either the location or scenario of the ballet. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Copland. “Over and over again,” he said in 1981, “people come up to me after seeing the ballet on stage and say, ‘Mr. Copland, when I see that ballet and when I hear your music I can just see the Appalachians and I just feel spring.’ Well I’m willing if they are!” The premiere took place on October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., with Graham dancing the part of the bride.

The scenario unfolds during the early nineteenth century, on the site of a Pennsylvania farmhouse which has just been built as a pre wedding gift for a young couple. Here is Copland’s own synopsis: “The bride to be and the young farmer husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, which their new domestic partnership invites. An old neighbor suggests, now and then, the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.” The music climaxes in a set of variations on Simple Gifts, a hymn tune associated with the Shakers, a New England religious sect.

Don Juan, Op. 20

Richard Strauss

b. Munich, Germany / June 11, 1864 d. Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany / September 8, 1949

Don Juan is Strauss’s second tone poem, following immediately after the completion of Macbeth. By the time he put the finishing touches on it, he had taken up the position of assistant conductor at the opera house in Weimar, Germany. Naturally he planned to perform Don Juan there, but his wish nearly came to grief when the members of the orchestra balked at the high technical demands it placed on them. One of them cried out during a rehearsal, “Good God, in what way have we sinned that you should send us this scourge!” Strauss remained calm throughout the preparations. At one point he told them, “I would ask those of you who are married, to play as it you were engaged, and all will be well.” The sensationally successful premiere on November 11, 1889, and the many other performances which quickly followed, catapulted the 25-year-old genius into the world’s musical spotlight.

Inspiration for it lay in dramatic verses written in 1844 by Austrian author Nicolaus Lenau. Reflecting the growing psychological and moral complexity of the time, Lenau depicts Don Juan as more than simply the heartless, high-born rake of earlier treatments. Lenau makes him something of a philosopher, too, seeking through his many conquests the “ideal woman.” Disillusioned and weary of his aimless, unsatisfying life, this Don Juan allows himself to be killed in a duel. Whether one chooses to approach Strauss’s Don Juan as dramatic narrative or absolute music, it has much to commend it. Orchestrated by the hand of a master, it overflows with energy and ardent emotions.

Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14

Hector Berlioz

b. La Côte-Saint-André, France / December 11, 1803; d. Paris, France / March 8, 1869

In 1827, while Berlioz was studying at the Paris Conservatoire, he developed a typically all consuming passion for Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress whom he saw perform a number of works by Shakespeare. His attempts to communicate with her came to nothing. This unhappy experience inspired him to compose Episode in the Life of an Artist – Grand Fantastic Symphony in Five Parts. He did so partly at the call of his brilliant creative imagination, partly for a more practical reason: he hoped it would win him the kind of reputation that would impress Harriet Smithson. In it, he broke new compositional ground by synthesizing events from his life with purely imaginary ones. Smithson’s stage company returned to Paris in 1832; Berlioz made sure she heard the piece he had written for her. One thing led to another, and they were married the following year. Their relationship, alas, proved not to be a happy one.

“A young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair,” the final revision of the Symphony’s published program begins. “The dose of the narcotic, too weak to kill him, plunges him into a slumber accompanied by the strangest visions, during which his sensations, his emotions, his memories are transformed in his sick mind into musical thoughts and images. The loved one herself has become a melody to him, an idée fixe (fixed idea) as it were, that he encounters and hears everywhere.”

After the first movement’s brooding introduction, the violins introduce the beloved’s recurring melody, the idée fixe (fixed idea). Its attractive yet nervous character sets the tone for the balance of this section, a portrait in sound of the hero’s tempestuous emotions. An elegant Waltz follows. At a fancy party, the composer spies his beloved across a crowded ballroom, only to lose her in the crush of swirling dancers.

Next, he retires to the country to rest, but is troubled by doubting thoughts regarding his lady love. Berlioz provides a picturesque rustic idyll, complete with shepherds piping to one another across the fields, an image achieved by placing the oboe soloist behind the stage and having him (or her) engage in a call-and-response dialogue with the on-stage English horn player. At the end of the movement, no fewer than four timpani players are called into action to provide the sounds of distant thunder.

In the fourth movement, to the strains of an alternately sinister and pompous March, the hero is led to the guillotine and beheaded for the murder of his beloved. Finally, at a witches’ Sabbath held at his own funeral, he encounters his beloved for the last time. Transformed into a fiendish spirit (and accompanied by a suitably twisted version of the idée fixe), she leads a mob of demons in a frenzied, mocking round dance. Berlioz makes brilliant use of the medieval Plainchant melody, Dies irae (Day of Wrath), which he introduces through the awe-inspiring sound of two tubas.

Program Notes by Don Anderson (c) 2008

« Back