Concert 5: Tchaikovsky



Michael Daugherty
b. 1954

Michael Daugherty
Le tombeau de Liberace

Daugherty composed Le tombeau de Liberace in 1996 on commission from the London Sinfonietta. It is one in a series of mock-serious compositions in honor of American icons, including Elvis, Jackie O, James Cagney, Motown, cheerleading, and the pink plastic flamingos that once decorated so many southern gardens. The “tombeau” is a French term meaning remembrance or elegy. Since the Renaissance, it has been a tradition for French composers to immortalized important predecessors in music; the best known is Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin.

Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1993) was an American icon of the 1950s. A pianist and entertainer, he was known for his pompadour hair style, his constant grin, and his outrageous costumes – anything from a sequined tuxedo to spectacular furs and rhinestone costumes – he was famous for performing polkas, Broadway tunes, and arrangements of the classical piano repertoire accompanied by a Las Vegas show band. Daugherty writes: “In my tribute to Liberace, I do not treat popular music as a foreign intrusion into the abstract idiom of contemporary classical composition. Starting from the vernacular idiom, I have composed Le tombeau de Liberace (1996) as a meditation on the American sublime: a lexicon of forbidden music.

“The first movement, Rhinestone Kickstep, conveys the feeling of strutting down the glittering cement streets of Las Vegas, in boogie-woogie rhythms.

The second movement, How Do I Love Thee?, comes from the well-known sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, frequently recited by Liberace during his performances.

“In Sequin Music, the arpeggiated piano riffs are based on a sequence of musical notes which I noticed on the wall of Liberace's famous piano-shaped swimming pool.

The effect of the cadenza is dodecaphonic [twelve-tone]: after all, Liberace's Los Angeles mansion was not so far from Schoenberg's neighborhood.

The composition concludes with Candelabra Rhumba, a pianistic tour de force that recreates the excitement of a Vegas showband, keeping the candles on Liberace's candelabra lit.”

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Michael Daugherty is the son of a dance-band drummer and the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. He was educated at North Texas State University and the Manhattan School of Music, where he trained originally as a jazz pianist. He then spent a year at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris. Daugherty received his doctorate in composition from Yale University in 1986. After teaching music composition for five years at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he joined the School of Music at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1991, where he is currently Professor of Composition.



Jean Sibelius
1865-1957

Jean Sibelius
Symphony No. 7, Op. 105

When Sweden relinquished Finland to the Russian Empire in 1809, it became an autonomous duchy with significant control over its own affairs. Beginning in 1870, however, the Tsar gradually whittled away at the Finns’ privileges and autonomy. While Swedish had continued to be the language of the educated and of the middle class, Russian repression aroused strong nationalist feelings and initiated a revival of the Finnish language. Jean Sibelius was born into this nationalistic environment and in 1876 enrolled in the first grammar school to teach in the Finnish language.

Sibelius was by no means a child prodigy. He began playing piano at nine, starting to compose at age 10. After abandoning the piano, he took up the violin at 14 with the ambition of becoming a concert violinist. Unfortunately he did not have the manual dexterity – nor the driving personality – to become a virtuoso. Additionally, from early in his life, Sibelius suffered from bouts of depression coupled with alcoholism, developing a tremor in his right hand. In 1891 he abandoned performing altogether, but for the rest of his long life he regretted not having followed this dream. At numerous times in his life he went on the wagon, only to backslide repeatedly when the black mood struck.

Sibelius’s first success as a composer came in 1892 with Kullervo, Op. 7, a nationalistic symphonic poem/cantata that premiered to great acclaim but was never again performed in his lifetime. For the next six years he composed numerous nationalistic pageants, symphonic poems and vocal works, mostly based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. In 1897, in order to enable him to compose undisturbed, the Finnish government gave him a pension for life. For 29 years he composed the symphonies and other orchestral works that made him world-famous. But in 1926, at the age of 61, he essentially quit composing, for reasons he never made clear, remaining silent until his death 31 years later.

In October 1907, Gustav Mahler – who had just resigned as Director of the opera at the Imperial Court in Vienna and was about to take up his post as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York – visited Helsinki and met Sibelius. Nothing can demonstrate better the vast chasm between the two symphonists as this exchange about the nature of the symphony, reported by Sibelius:

“I said that I admired its style and severity of form, and the profound logic that created an inner connection between all the motives…Mahler's opinion was just the opposite. 'No." he said, 'the symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing.’”

Symphony No. 7, completed in March 1924 and premiered two weeks later, is the culmination of Sibelius’s concept of the symphony, a synthesis and culmination of what has become known as the “Sibelius sound” of the cold expanses, forests and lakes of Finland. In one movement, it was originally titled Fantasia sinfonica and only named Symphony No. 7 at publication a year later.

For an understanding of this Symphony, one should look to the composer’s numerous tone poems based on the stories and legends of his native Finland. While not a re-creation in music of any specific story, the Symphony is a musical narrative. The subject is the fanfare-like melody for solo trombone that emerges like a clarion call only several minutes into the work. Sibelius states this main theme three times during the course of the Symphony. When it recurs it emerges out of very different musical contexts as if it were on an adventure.

The Symphony’s single movement includes three distinct sections: An Adagio, two faster sections (regarded as actual movements by some scholars) and a coda that recalls the Adagio. The faster sections are designated by two important tempo changes: Vivacissimo and Allegro moderato, as well as several minor internal tempo changes. Each section develops its own thematic material, as well as short motives that carry over from section to section.

The Adagio opens with a slow C major scale that suddenly turns grim and mournful.

It also immediately sets up the dialogue between the colder winds and warm strings, so pervasive in the composer’s works.

One of the musical ideas that pervades the work is a descending six-note motive introduced first by the strings.

It recurs like a sigh at the end of many phrases.

The climax of the Adagio section is the first appearance of the trombone protagonist.

Although there are faster sections within the Adagio, the second major section, or movement, begins Vivacissimo and acts as the Symphony’s scherzo.

It also contains within it the little six-note motive now transformed into the new staccato texture. The section contains several moments of stormy tone painting suggesting the Nordic climate, braved by echoes of the trombone theme.

The Allegro moderato section begins with another repartee between strings and winds that brings to life a new almost dance-like melody.

In its full form, it is the most optimistic moment of the work.

Later in the section, Sibelius inserts another voice of nature, the sound of the wild geese and swans that he often admitted were great inspiration to him.

The movement culminates with a reprise of the Symphony’s opening scale leading into the second full appearance of the trombone subject, accompanied by the upper strings.

The trombone appearance leads back to a restatement of the opening themes of the Adagio, including the final development of the descending six-note motive.

and the third and final recurrence of the trombone theme in a “warmer” harmonic environment, as if returning home.

The coda and last measures of the Symphony, however, which incorporate part of the trombone theme, contain within them a disturbing dissonance that casts an unresolved shadow.



Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, Pathétique

This Symphony was Tchaikovsky’s final completed work, premiered to a lukewarm reception on October 28, 1893 only nine days before the composer’s death from cholera. Although its emotional intensity and title, Pathétique, suggest that this was yet another manifestation of the composer’s periodic depression, or even a foreshadowing of his own death, the fact remains that Tchaikovsky was extremely pleased with this work from the moment he set to work on it. At the symphony’s second performance, as part of a memorial service for the composer, the audience seems to have suddenly perceived its significance, and it has remained a favorite ever since.

Tchaikovsky’s original conception was that the symphony should have a program, much like Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, but he refused to specify what the program was, wanting the listener to guess it. His early, and by now well-known, scenario for the program reads: “The ultimate essence of the plan…is LIFE. First movement–all impulsive passion, confidence, thirst for activity. Must be short. (Finale DEATH – result of collapse). Second movement, love, third, disappointment, fourth ends dying away (also short).” The final version can be understood to conform to this program only in part, and then only in the first and fourth movements. That it bears little resemblance to the final version of the music is clear even at a first hearing.

Still intending to call his work a “program” symphony, Tchaikovsky accepted his brother Modest’s suggestion of the Russian patetichesky, which the publisher insisted on translating into French, still the language of the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia. The English reader, however, should be aware that the adjective pathétique actually means “highly emotional” and does not have the derogatory connotation of “pathetic.”

The Symphony opens with a low bassoon solo introducing the first theme in a ponderous and pessimistic adagio.

The melody is then taken up in a nervous allegro and repeated by the successive sections of the orchestra.

The emotional turmoil, however, is resolved in the second theme, among the most famous in the canon of memorable Tchaikovsky melodies.

The theme was specifically meant to be a transformation of Don José’s “flower aria” from Carmen – giving a hint as to the composer’s emotional take on love.

The second movement is a “waltz” in 5/4 time, giving the impression of alternating bars of 3/4 and 2/4.

Strangely enough, this meter works as a waltz, for despite its limping quality, one can imagine the alternating foreshortened 2/4 bars used for a lift or emotive pause, if the movement were actually to be used for dancing. It is a hybrid of a classical minuet and trio, or scherzo – with two themes and a series of repeats – and a ternary (ABA) song form customary for slow movements. The Trio (or B section), which proceeds with a constant timpani ostinato in the background, darkens the ballroom atmosphere.

Like the first movement, the third is best known for its second theme, a sprightly march,

which follows a scurrying opening theme in rapid triplets, out of which one can already hear hints of the march theme.

As in the second movement, however, the composer utilizes an unusual metrical structure, creating an ambiguity between duple and triple time by composing the march in 12/8 time. The movement, in G major, seems almost to begin backwards with a series of themes in the relative e minor that gradually lead into the march theme in the principal key.

The Finale can be interpreted as taking up the symphony’s original program. The opening theme, a series of short breathless, sighing motives, is a variation of the first theme of the opening movement and has the identical underlying harmony.

A programmatic interpretation of the movement suggests anxious struggle – in the rising sequences – and resignation upon the approach of the nothingness of death. It is particularly noteworthy in the history of symphonic finales in both its lugubrious tempo and fatalistic pessimism.