Program Notes: Celebrating Pride

A SINGULAR LIFE

Born in London in 1856, Smyth had a musical career that, on a surface level, would be typical of an accomplished male classical composer in Europe of the day. Such a path included formal conservatory training—at Germany’s Leipzig Conservatory—encounters with prominent composers and conductors, and the creation of new works in the major forms of operas, orchestral music, chamber music, songs and choral compositions. However, many of her works had a limited reach due to bias against her gender and presumptions about the type of music a woman might be expected to compose at the time: most often, informal parlor works rather than compositions for the concert hall and opera stage.

Smyth’s musical career had a number of peaks—notably, she was the first female composer to have an opera staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York—but her works fell out of favor after her death in 1944 until a revival in recent years. The Minnesota Orchestra, for instance, played Smyth’s music for the first time just six years ago, when the overture to her 1914 opera The Boatswain’s Mate was included at an Inside the Classics concert conducted by Sarah Hicks.

In the early 1910s, when Smyth’s attention turned to the women’s suffrage movement, her composing reflected this shift in focus, most memorably through her suffragette anthem The March of the Women. Although her involvement in the cause resulted in a two-month jail sentence in 1912, her stature shifted dramatically a decade later when, in recognition of her activism and contributions to music, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Late in her career, Smyth became a prolific writer, producing 10 books primarily in the autobiography genre. 

Smyth’s romantic and emotional relationships with men and women in artistic and political circles—including writer Virginia Woolf and suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst—further set Symth apart from social expectations of the day, when most people weren’t supportive of LGBTQ+ individuals and rights. Smyth carried out these relationships relatively openly, which presented her with some personal and professional challenges, but her status as a respected artistic and activist figure inured her from the worst discrimination. (Worth noting is that gay and bisexual men faced a greater degree of persecution in the eyes of the law. Male same-sex relations were illegal in all of Britain until 1967, when they were decriminalized in England and Wales, followed in the early 1980s by legalization in Scotland and Northern Ireland.)

MUSIC FROM THE COAST

Smyth’s opera The Wreckers, which received its premiere in Leipzig in November 1906, is considered by many critics and musicologists to be among her most important works due to its scope and command of musical vocabulary. Set in an 18th-century Cornish community, the opera’s story centers on wrecking—the practice by which villagers interfered with coastal beacons to cause ships to crash on the rocks, then looted the wreckage. Increased attention has been paid to The Wreckers in recent years, including a high-profile performance by the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in a concert at the 2022 BBC Proms in London. 

On the Cliffs of Cornwall is the instrumental interlude that opens the opera’s second act. It paints a vivid picture of the majestic Cornwall coast while also emphasizing the opera’s tragic side. Scored for a mostly standard orchestra—though darkened by lower-toned additions to the woodwind section—the music is characterized by sweeping melodic lines that evoke powerful, relentless waves and stark, imposing cliffs.

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, tamtam, triangle, chimes, harp and strings

Program note by Carl Schroeder.

In his personal life, Poulenc navigated conflicted feelings as a gay man. Although he briefly contemplated marriage with a female friend, his life was enriched by several romantic relationships with men, some brief and others more lengthy. Platonic friends, such as his longtime collaborator, the baritone Pierre Bernac, were also a source of fulfillment.

PROFESSIONAL BEGINNINGS
Composing chamber music and spending a great deal of time with the major musicians, poets and artists in Paris in the 1920s, Poulenc became known as an innovative and imaginative composer. The great Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev heard of him and commissioned the young composer to create a ballet for his company. The success of that work, Les Biches, first performed in 1923, was a turning point for Poulenc. (Minnesota Orchestra audiences can look forward to hearing a suite from that ballet on July 26 and 27 as part of the 1920s-themed Summer at Orchestra Hall festival.)

Moving in those artistic circles, Poulenc inevitably made the acquaintance of a great patron of the arts, Winnaretta Singer—heir to Singer sewing machine fortune and wife of Prince Edmond de Polignac. The princess was a gifted painter, pianist and organist herself, and she generously supported and commissioned such composers as Gabriel Fauré, Emmanuel Chabrier, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Manuel de Falla. Twice she commissioned Poulenc for keyboard works. One was his Concerto for Organ, and the other a Concerto for Two Pianos. Both are dedicated to her.

THE TWO-PIANO CONCERTO

In September 1932, the princess invited Poulenc and many other illustrious guests—including Falla and the pianist Arthur Rubinstein—to her home in Venice, the Palazzo Polignac on the Grand Canal, in order to attend the first performance of Poulenc’s new two-piano concerto. The occasion was the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) Festival, at which Poulenc and the French piano virtuoso Jacques Février performed as soloists with the orchestra of La Scala conducted by Désiré Defauw. Poulenc had written the Concerto for Two Pianos with Février in mind as the second soloist, and the two remarkable pianists swept the audience away with their brilliant performance.

From that moment the concerto has never been out of the public ear, either in concert halls or in the many recordings that have been made over the years. Poulenc himself continued to perform it for the rest of his life. Poulenc’s crystalline writing in this concerto makes analysis superfluous—as the composer himself would have preferred. He once stated: “Above all do not analyze my music—love it!” The many facets and the changeable moods of this concerto are sheer delight.

Instrumentation: solo piano with orchestra comprising flute, piccolo, 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, shallow snare drum, military drum, bass drum, castanets, cymbals, triangle and strings

Program note by Sandra Hyslop.

The Fourth Symphony has all of Tchaikovsky’s considerable virtues—great melodies, primary colors and soaring climaxes—in this case fused with a superheated emotional content. Tchaikovsky said that the model for his Fourth Symphony had been Beethoven’s Fifth, specifically in the way both symphonies are structured around a recurring motif, though perhaps also in the sense that the two symphonies begin in emotional turmoil and eventually win their way to release and triumph in the finale.

THE MUSIC: A DUEL WITH FATE

ANDANTE SOSTENUTO–MODERATO CON ANIMA. The symphony opens with a powerful brass fanfare, which Tchaikovsky described as “Fate, the inexorable power that hampers our search for happiness. This power hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles, leaving us no option but to submit.” The principal subject of this movement, however, is a dark, stumbling waltz in 9/8 introduced by the violins. Like inescapable fate, the opening motto-theme returns at key points in this dramatic music, and it finally drives the movement to a furious close.

ANDANTINO IN MODO CANZONA. The two middle movements bring much-needed relief. The Andantino, in ternary-form, opens with a plaintive oboe solo and features a more animated middle section. Tchaikovsky described it: “Here is the melancholy feeling that overcomes us when we sit weary and alone at the end of the day. The book we pick up slips from our fingers, and a procession of memories passes in review…”

SCHERZO PIZZICATO OSTINATO. The scherzo has deservedly become one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular movements. It is a tour de force for strings, which play pizzicato (plucked) throughout, with crisp interjections first from the woodwinds and then from brass. The composer noted: “Here are only the capricious arabesques and indeterminate shapes that come into one’s mind with a little wine…”

FINALE: ALLEGRO CON FUOCO. Out of the quiet close of the third movement, the finale explodes to life. The composer described this movement as “the picture of a folk holiday” and said, “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.” Marked Allegro con fuoco, this movement simply alternates its volcanic opening
sequence with a gentle tune that is actually the Russian folk tune “In the field there stood a birch tree.”

Given the catastrophic events of his life during this music’s composition, Tchaikovsky may well have come to feel that Fate was inescapable, and the reappearance of the opening motto amid the high spirits of the finale represents the climax—musically and emotionally—of the entire symphony. This spectre duly acknowledged, Tchaikovsky rips the symphony to a close guaranteed to set every heart in the hall racing at the same incandescent pace as his music.

Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle and strings

Program note by Eric Bromberger.