Program Notes

“King Lear" Overture, Op. 4   

Shakespeare’s dark tragedy was the inspiration for Hector Berlioz’s King Lear Overture, composed in the spring of 1831. Encompassing the atmosphere of the play and filled with leitmotifs, the piece unfolds as a compact tone poem.

It begins with an operatic recitative in the low strings which is reminiscent of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. On one level, we hear the bold, authoritative proclamation of a king. Yet there is also something unsettling about this statement. It wanders with a demented restlessness. The plaintive voice of the oboe introduces a second theme filled with aching lament. This new theme emerges over hushed pizzicato and is met by wispy, angelic strands in the violins. When the opening motif returns, it is accompanied by a strange five-beat rhythm in the timpani—an allusion to the ancient drumbeat which announced the arrival of French monarchs.

As the Overture unfolds, the darkness of Lear comes into conflict with the shimmering light of Cordelia. As with Symphonie fantastique, which Berlioz completed a year earlier, it’s a battle between redemption and destruction. At one terrifying moment, the tonal center seems to disintegrate completely and the instrumental voices seem unsure how to proceed. Wrenching dissonances and a turbulent, demonic “desecration” of Cordelia’s previously youthful theme in the final moments evoke King Lear’s ultimate mental and emotional breakdown.

THE ECSTASY OF ST. TERESA

When Salvador Brotons offered me the possibility to compose a new symphonic work for the 2024 Festival de Pasqua de Cervera, the religious background of the festival inspired me to write a piece about The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. The homonymous sculpture by Bernini evokes an ambiguous ecstatic state where the famous Spanish Saint’s expression of spiritual enlightenment could be mistaken for one of a more “sinful” nature, rooted in carnal desires. I was irresistibly seduced by this idea and therefore decided to translate Bernini’s masterpiece into the musical realm. This idea made the process even more alluring since the time dimension that music possesses and which sculpture lacks, allowed for a stimulating search of ecstatic processes. This was accomplished through mantras, repetitions, buildups, and dynamic swells, in combination with sacred music idioms such as chorales, canons, and plainsong.

- Marc Migó, February 2024

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 IN D MINOR, OP. 15

Brahms wrote two piano concertos, separated by the passage of some twenty-two years.  This first one is the product of his relative youth, having been completed in 1859, when he was twenty-five.   A youthful work it is not, however.  Brahms had labored over it for most of the decade of the 1850s, and during that time it underwent several substantial transformations.   Originally, Brahms had conceived of the work as a sonata for two pianos—he was a fine pianist, and that medium naturally fell easily to him.  But, as he worked, he came to understand that the imposing nature of his ideas for this composition suggested the full powers of the symphony orchestra.   Ultimately, his difficulties in casting it into the form of a symphony, not to speak of his incomplete mastery of the skill of orchestration, led him finally to cast the work in the form of a piano concerto.   During that process, the last two movements were discarded, and new replacements were crafted.

 During the last half of the nineteenth century Brahms was, of course, the standard bearer for those who believed that the future of music lay in continuing the disciplined classically oriented musical style of Beethoven.   They held that the traditional forms of sonata, concerto, and symphony had not nearly exhausted their viability, and that music should continue to speak in an integrated language that referred to it, alone, and certainly not to extra-musical ideas.   The music of those of the opposite view, Liszt, Wagner, et al, while respecting the music of the past, saw no future in continuing that tradition.  Today, most of those who compose, perform, and listen to art music see no contradiction in valuing both aesthetics.

 With that as background, Brahms’ first concerto honors those traditions of the past in its form and the nature of its musical ideas and their manipulation, but it is not conventional in any sense.   This powerful work betrays its own genesis in the pronounced importance given to the orchestra—in fact; critics of the time (and some of today) snidely called it a symphony with “piano obbligato.”  But, of course, that matters not; great works of art take their own way.   The massive first movement (inspired by the beginning of Beethoven’s ninth symphony) starts conventionally, for the times, with a long exposition by the orchestra alone, before the entrance of the piano.   While the part of the piano is quite difficult, and demands a virtuoso, it cannot be characterized as based in empty virtuosic bombast like so many other concertos of the time.   The demands of the part simply grow out of Brahms’ musical style and the task of the piano in the ample orchestral context.   Many have posited a connection between the suicide attempt by Robert Schumann and the tone of this movement—but that is not clear.   What is clear, however, is that Brahms, himself, characterized the remarkable beauty of the Adagio second movement as a “gentle portrait” of his beloved Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife.   He wrote in the score under the opening melody, “Benedictus, qui venit, in nomine Domini!”  Not surprisingly, the third movement is clearly based upon the like movement of Beethoven’s third piano concerto.  It—typically—is a rondo, that is, a fast, spirited movement with an easily recognized theme that returns several times, with contrasting ideas interspersed.

 Early performances of this masterpiece were not successful—in Leipzig the audience was not receptive and hissed the work with great enthusiasm.   One critic averred that it offered nothing but “waste” and “barren dreariness.”   Brahms was not deterred, however.   He wrote to his friend, Joachim, “In spite of all this, the concerto will please some day . . . .“   And so it has.

 – William E. Runyan

 © 2015 William E. Runyan