Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
In 1941, the Koussevitzky Foundation commissioned a full-length opera from Benjamin Britten. For his subject, Britten chose The Borough by George Crabbe, composing the opera as Peter Grimes to a libretto adapted by Montagu Slater. The June 1945 premiere in London was an overwhelming success. It was the first new opera heard in London in many years, and it was the first production mounted at Sadler’s Wells in five years, due to the Blitz of World War II. Following the final curtain, the audience gave Britten a five-minute standing ovation.
The story of the opera deals with a cantankerous man misunderstood and persecuted by the masses. Though he is innocent, he is doomed to an inevitable disaster. Accused of murdering his apprentice, Grimes must face an angry mob. Instead, he puts out to sea in a small boat, never to return.
The sea itself is like a character in the drama, and Britten included atmospheric orchestral interludes to draw on that character. From Peter Grimes, Britten assembled a group of four Sea Interludes playable in the concert hall.
“Dawn” (between the Prologue and Act I) describes, in Ernest Newman’s words, the “gray atmosphere of the hard-bitten little fishing town.” Its three themes suggest the bleak seascape, the sound of sea gulls, and the rise of dawn over the water. “Sunday Morning” (leading into Act II) pictures the village on a Sunday morning, still except the sound of church bells. “Moonlight” (leading into Act III) is a nocturnal portrait, an impressionistic street scene. “The Storm” (Act I, between Scenes 1 and 2) portrays a tempest as it rises and gathers force. Britten’s orchestration is particularly colorful and original here.
Piano Concerto No. 3
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
It was the last work by Bartók, and he kept it a secret from his wife Ditta, as a gift he would leave to her to perform after his death, for whatever income it might produce. In New York during the fall of 1944, Bartók worked intensely on both the Third Piano Concerto and the Viola Concerto, but he knew he had to finish the piano work. By late September the scoring was done except for the final 17 empty measures, which Bartók’s son, Péter, had marked off. But the composer was growing increasingly weaker, and his doctors ordered him into the hospital. He asked for one more day at home, so that he could complete the concerto, but the request was denied. On September 26, Bartók died, and his colleague Tibor Serly subsequently filled in the scoring of the final few bars of the concerto from Bartók’s sketches.
What to listen for: The ornamental, singing melody with which the piano opens the concerto’s first movement is prototypical Bartók, reminiscent of Rumanian folk song style. Listen for a new theme soon introduced, which is more playful. The composer then works with both of these themes. Listen for a fade-out at the end of the movement.
The Adagio religioso was well named. The piano’s music in the opening section is reminiscent of phrases from a church hymn. After this, listen for something very different. Here is a choice example of Bartók’s “night music” style, a latter-day impressionism combining the sounds of night (chirping, twittering, etc.) and elegant short melodies. The hymn then returns to round out the movement.
The vigorous finale proceeds without a pause. Final movements are often dance-like, and this one is no exception. Listen for Bartók’s Hungarian flavor here, which he contrasts with various episodes. Two of the episodes are playful, follow-the-leader type music, which nonetheless become rather complex at times.
In the manuscript, following the last empty measure, Bartók had prematurely written the Hungarian word, vége, meaning “end.” For this wonderful concerto and for Bartók himself it was indeed the end.
Lincoln Portrait
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
It was early 1942, and the U.S. had recently plunged into World War II. Morale was low, and to help improve that situation, conductor Andre Kostelanetz commissioned three “musical portraits” of prominent Americans from composers Jerome Kern, Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland. Since Kern was doing Mark Twain, and Thomson had chosen Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, it remained for Copland to portray a great statesman. He chose Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln Portrait for speaker and orchestra is in three sections. Copland states, “In the opening I hoped to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality, and near the end of the first section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit.” Besides Copland’s own original main theme, the composer quotes a humorous old folk song, Springfield Mountain. Copland’s description continues, “The second section is an attempt to sketch in the background of the colorful times in which Lincoln lived. Sleigh bells suggest a horse and carriage of nineteenth-century New England, and the lively tune that sounds like a folk song is derived in part from Camptown Races.”
Only in the third section does Copland call for the speaker’s part, which is a series of quotations from Lincoln’s speeches and letters introduced by short narratives about the president’s life and appearance. The orchestra is unobtrusive through this portion, but following the final quotation from the end of the Gettysburg Address, “. . . shall not perish from the earth,” the orchestra “blazes out in triple forte with a strong and positive C-major statement of the first theme.” Copland sums up the thrust of his work by stating, “My purpose was to draw a simple but impressive frame around the words of Lincoln himself — in my opinion among the best this nation has ever heard to express patriotism and humanity.”
Symphony No. 9, Op. 70
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Shostakovich : “Musicians will love to play it and critics will delight in blasting it.”
Soviet Critics: “Shostakovich, the profound thinker-humanist, has not yet mastered within himself the ironic skeptic and stylist. . . . A tragic satirical pamphlet aimed against the benign complacency and rosy illusions that supposedly spread after the war. . . . The carefree joy of the Ninth Symphony is not burdened with deep thoughts.”
The work was written in 1945, during the first months following the end of WW II, and everyone was expecting something quite different from what they got. The critics and the government felt that the symphony should have been nothing short of monumental, a “National Ninth” celebrating “the heroic victory of the Soviet people” with choruses praising the glorious leader, Joseph Stalin — in short, a triumphal apotheosis. Instead, as analyst Roy Blokker has written,
Shostakovich turned his orchestra into a troupe of clowns, as had many an 18 th-century composer whose scale and forms he borrowed. It is easy to understand why the Soviet political machine, anxious to launch into a program of rebuilding the state for the future, found little time to laugh. . . .
In his memoirs, Shostakovich reflected on the effect the work exerted on his later official censure: “It was very unfortunate, the business with the Ninth. I mean, I know that the blow was inevitable, but perhaps it would have landed later, or less harshly, if not for the Ninth.”
The Ninth Symphony was Shostakovich’s personal celebration of the war’s ending. It is his own frothy “Classical” symphony, complete with 18th-century forms, a mischievous Prokofiev-like scherzo, and a brooding slow movement reminiscent of Mahler’s meditations. It holds a vast range of emotion and philosophy from the dance of life to the grief of death. The work is a complete humanistic portrait.
