Opening Weekend Celebration program notes

MIKHAIL GLINKA

Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila

(late 1830s - 1842)

Mikhail Glinka was the father of Russian concert music. When his first opera, A Life for the Czar (also known as Ivan Susanin), appeared in 1836, it was hailed as a breakthrough in the use of native folk music as the basis of a serious musical work. The opera, whose plot was based on an incident from Russian history in which the people played a vital role, was an immediate popular success and had a profound influence on such later nationalistic composers as Mussorgsky, Borodin, RimskyKorsakov, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. Important not only in his own country, Glinka was the first Russian composer whose works received widespread attention beyond his native land.

Glinka was born into a noble family in Smolensk and educated for a life in government service. His real interest, however, was music, which he studied informally from childhood. On a recuperative visit to the Caucasus in 1823, he discovered the treasures of Russian folk song from the local peasants and determined to become a professional musician. During four tedious years of service in the Ministry of Roads and Communications (1824-1828), he wrote a number of songs and studied composition and performance with several eminent teachers, among whom the British pianist John Field is the best remembered. While on a visit to Italy in 1830, Glinka met the celebrated opera composers Bellini and Donizetti. He learned from them much about the techniques of writing for the musical stage, and began to visualize a distinctly Russian musical style that would combine the melodies, harmonies and rhythms of the folk and church styles of his native land with the form and drama of Italian opera. He returned home at his father’s death and began work on the epochal A Life for the Czar.

Ruslan and Ludmila of 1842, the second of Glinka’s two operas, was less well received than the earlier A Life for the Czar because it moved somewhat away from the folksy style of the first opera toward a more elevated idiom. It was not until after the composer’s death that Ruslan and Ludmila acquired its popular success. Glinka spent most of his final years in travel; in Spain, he collected folk songs that he employed in two orchestral works. In Paris in 1844, he met Berlioz, who had high praise for the orchestral concerts the Russian composer gave in the French capital. Glinka lived for three years in Warsaw and died in Berlin while on a visit in 1857 to Siegfried Dehn, one of his composition teachers.

The libretto of Ruslan and Ludmila is based on Pushkin’s fairy tale. Just prior to her betrothal to Ruslan, Ludmila has been spirited away from her father, the Grand Duke of Kiev, by the evil dwarf Tchernomor. Ruslan perseveres through many fantastic adventures to regain his beloved and they are united in marriage in the final scene. The exuberant Overture is based on themes from the opera. The opening section uses melodies from the marriage scene; the lyrical second theme (played by bassoons, violas and cellos) is from Ruslan’s second-act aria in which he sings of his love for Ludmila. The development employs all three themes. The recapitulation begins with the rushing scales of the opening and continues with an abbreviated version of the second theme before the Overture to this fantastic tale closes with a rousing coda.

MAURICE RAVEL

Concerto in G major for Piano and Orchestra

(1929 - 1931)

Ravel’s tour of the United States in 1928 was such a success that he began to plan for a second one as soon as he returned to France. With a view toward having a vehicle for himself as a pianist on his return visit, he started work on a concerto in 1929, perhaps encouraged by the good fortune that Stravinsky had enjoyed concertizing with his Concerto for Piano and Winds and Piano Capriccio earlier in the decade. Both to polish his keyboard technique and to extend his repertory — he seems to have harbored a desire to be a concert virtuoso into his last years — Ravel spent much time and effort in those months practicing the works of Liszt and Chopin. Many other projects pressed upon him, however, not the least of which was a commission from the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the First World War, to compose a piano concerto for left hand alone. Ravel set aside the tour concerto for some nine months to work on Wittgenstein’s commission and the Concerto in G was not completed until 1931.

Ravel was so excited by the fine reception given to the Concerto at its first performance, in January 1932, that he wanted to take it on an around-the-world tour with Marguerite Long, the soloist at the premiere. They did not get quite that far, but they did have a four-month tour that spring that went to several cities in central Europe and England. Despite Ravel’s initial enthusiasm for traveling with the Concerto, however, the rigors of the trip seem to have taken a heavy toll on his always-delicate health, and later that summer he started suffering from a number of medical setbacks that culminated the following year in the discovery of a brain tumor. His health never returned, and the Concerto in G was the last major score he completed.

The sparkling first movement of the Concerto in G opens with a bright melody in the piccolo that may derive from an old folk dance of the Basque region of southern France, where Ravel was born. There are several themes in this exposition: the lively opening group is balanced by another set that is more nostalgic and bluesy in character. The development section is an elaboration of the lively opening themes, ending with a brief cadenza in octaves as a link to the recapitulation. The lively themes are passed over quickly, but the nostalgic melodies are treated at some length. The jaunty vivacity of the beginning returns for a dazzling coda.

When Ravel first showed the manuscript of the Adagio to Marguerite Long, she commented on the music’s effortless grace. The composer sighed, and told her that he had struggled to write the movement “bar by bar,” that it had cost him more anxiety than any of his other scores. The movement begins with a long-breathed melody for solo piano over a rocking accompaniment. The central section does not differ from the opening as much in melody as it does in texture — a gradual thickening occurs as the music proceeds. The texture then becomes again translucent, and the opening melody is heard on its return in the plaintive tones of the English horn.

The finale is a showpiece for soloist and orchestra that evokes the energetic world of jazz. Trombone slides, muted trumpet interjections, shrieking exclamations from the woodwinds abound. The episodes of the form tumble continuously one after another on their way to the work’s abrupt conclusion.

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Opus 36

(1877-1878)

The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial and turbulent time of Tchaikovsky’s life — 1877, when he met two women who forced him into a period of intense introspection. The first was the sensitive, music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck, who became not only the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory to devote himself entirely to composition, but also the sympathetic soundingboard for reports on the whole range of his activities — emotional, musical, personal. Though they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky’s life was enormous and beneficial.

The second woman to enter Tchaikovsky’s life in 1877 was Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Conservatory who had worked herself into a passion over her professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special attention, and had quite forgotten her when he received an ardent love letter professing her flaming and unquenchable desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37), who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite, cool fashion, but did not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been considering marriage for almost a year in the hope that it would give him both the stable home life that he had not enjoyed in the twenty years since his mother died, as well as to help dispel the all-too-true rumors of his homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both those goals with Antonina. He could not see the situation clearly enough to realize that what he hoped for was impossible — a pure, platonic marriage without its physical and emotional realities. Further letters from Antonina implored Tchaikovsky to meet her, and threatened suicide out of desperation if he refused. What a welter of emotions must have gripped his heart when, just a few weeks later, he proposed marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding amid Tchaikovsky’s searing self-deprecation.

It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony, finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her siege. The finale was completed by the time he proposed. Because of this chronology, the program of the Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster. All that — the July wedding, the mere eighteen days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations — postdated the actual composition of the Symphony by a few months. What Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who by 1877 already showed signs of approaching the door of the mental ward in which, still legally married to him, she died in 1917) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable workings of Fate in human destiny.

After the premiere, Tchaikovsky explained to Mme. von Meck the emotional content of the Fourth Symphony: “The introduction [blaring brasses heard immediately in a motto theme that recurs throughout the Symphony] is the kernel of the whole Symphony. This is Fate, which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy, syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme, heard in the strings]. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one’s self in dreams? [The second theme is begun by the clarinet.] But no — these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [The blaring brass fanfare over a wave of timpani begins the development section.] Thus we see that life is only an everlasting alternation of somber reality and fugitive dreams of happiness. The second movement shows another phase of sadness. How sad it is that so much has already been and gone! And yet it is a pleasure to think of the early years. It is sad, yet sweet, to lose one’s self in the past. In the third movement are capricious arabesques, vague figures which slip into the imagination when one has taken wine and is slightly

intoxicated. Military music is heard in the distance. As to the finale, if you find no pleasure in yourself, go to the people. The picture of a folk holiday. [The finale employs the folk song A Birch Stood in the Meadow.] Hardly have we had time to forget ourselves in the happiness of others when indefatigable Fate reminds us once more of its presence. Yet there still is happiness, simple, naive happiness. Rejoice in the happiness of others — and you can still live.”

Carnegie Museum of Art is delighted to bring you this artwork from our collection that connects to the sounds of the Pittsburgh Symphony that you will hear today – a partnership born from our shared 125th anniversaries in 2020.

“The only way you can really achieve something is if you’re not working so much from a pattern. That’s also the essence of good

jazz.” Thaddeus Mosley, from Thaddeus Mosley, published by Karma, New York,2020

A deep interest in jazz connects Pittsburgh-born artist, Thad Mosley, with French composer, Maurice Ravel. Mosley, who knew some of the jazz greats including Miles Davis and John Coltrane, approaches his wood carvings with the same spontaneity heard in jazz. Ravel wrote the Concerto in G Major after hearing jazz on a 1928 concert tour of the United States. See Mosley’s sculpture on view in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Lobby through March 2022.

Come visit Carnegie Museum of Art this season to connect with artworks like this and more. Learn more at

cmoa.org/PSO

THADDEUS G. MOSLEY (AMERICAN, B. 1926) SPATIAL OCCUPATION, 2018 CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART GIFT OF THE ALEX KATZ FOUNDATION, 2020.69.A-E