The Program
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622
Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto dates from the last months of his life and stands as
the final purely instrumental work he
produced; only the unfinished Requiem and Laut verkünde unsre Freude, K. 623 (known as the “Little Masonic
Cantata”), received the composer’s attention between the completion of the
concerto in October 1791 and his sudden death on December 5. Like almost all of
his late music for clarinet, Mozart’s concerto was inspired by and written for
the virtuoso Anton Stadler, a slightly seedy character and a close—if
unreliable—friend of Mozart’s, who shared the composer’s love of food, drink,
and (to the dismay of Mozart’s family) gambling. Stadler’s artistry, however,
won universal approval and acclaim, sometimes rhapsodically so: “Never have I
heard the like of what you contrive with your instrument,” wrote critic Johann
Friedrich Schink. “Never should I have imagined that a clarinet might be
capable of imitating the human voice as faithfully as it was imitated by you.
Verily, your instrument has so soft and so lovely a tone that none can resist
it who has a heart, and I have one, dear Virtuoso. Let me thank you!”
To complement his prodigious talents and advance his instrument, Stadler
developed a clarinet with an extended lower register, completing its deepest
octave by adding length and extra keys. Though he didn’t have a special name for it (presumably hoping that it
would simply become the standard clarinet), it is now referred to as a “basset
clarinet.” It was for this extended instrument that Mozart wrote his concerto.
Unfortunately, the original manuscript was lost soon after its completion, and
so the version known to audiences ever since is a slightly adjusted
transcription for standard clarinet made by publishers in the years following
Mozart’s death. In the last 50 years or so, scholars and performers have
attempted to reconstruct the original version, but none of these has gained
much traction. Barring a new manuscript
discovery, the version for standard clarinet will continue its primacy.
Mozart prudently scored his concerto for an orchestra with a full assortment of
strings and a wind section of only two flutes, two bassoons, and two horns,
sparing the solo clarinet any competition from instruments with a similar
timbre. Or perhaps timbres would be more accurate, as the clarinet’s greatest
strength is its wide range, each register of which has a distinct and striking
voice. Mozart took full advantage of this timbral abundance, including extended
sections to showcase each of them—from the
crystalline upper register to the husky resonance of the deepest—as well
as passages that emphasize the contrast by requiring the soloist to quickly
jump between registers. The concerto is also a tribute to the clarinet’s and
Mozart’s lyric abilities. Judging from Schink’s praise of Stadler’s voice-like
playing, this work was perfectly designed for its intended soloist; at times,
its ravishing music sounds like it was written for orchestra and voice—if that
voice somehow had the combined range of a baritone, tenor, mezzo-soprano, and
soprano.
—Jay Goodwin
GUSTAV MAHLER
Rückert-Lieder
Gustav Mahler’s
Rückert-Lieder,
published in a 1910 collection alongside two songs on folk poetry from
Des Knaben Wunderhorn,
do not form a song cycle in the
traditional sense. Though the five songs are commonly performed together,
Mahler did not originally intend for them to be, as is evident from the wide
variation of instrumentation and the lack of
clear musical connections between songs. As such, there is also no
standard order of performance—each artist chooses the progression of songs that
makes the most sense in his or her own mind. What holds the “cycle” together is
the selection of texts and the character of Mahler’s settings.
Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), a college professor and extremely prolific
writer, studied more than 30 languages and
was best known as an outstanding translator
of Oriental poetry as well as original poetry in the style of those foreign works. The texts Mahler chose for these
five songs, however, belong to the rather more traditional style of German
Romantic poetry, so familiar from the lieder of Mahler’s predecessors
(especially Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf), who perfectly captured in music the
verse of the great German lyric poets, such as Goethe and Heine. Just as these five
poems by Rückert are very traditional compared to the texts Mahler tended to
prefer (the folk poetry of
Des Knaben
Wunderhorn and the Orientalist texts upon which the composer based his late
masterpiece
Das Lied von der Erde,
for example), the musical settings here are very traditional compared to most
of Mahler’s work.
“Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” is a lovely pastoral setting that evokes
the fresh, gentle aroma of a twig of linden
left by the person’s lover. (The text plays on the word
lind(
e),
which in German stands for both “gentle” and “linden tree.”) The song becomes
almost a duet between the singer and the winds as they echo one another and
allow their phrases to intertwine. “Liebst
du um Schönheit” is the only one of the five songs not orchestrated by Mahler
himself; its original piano accompaniment was expanded by the first
publisher. Written as a gift to his new wife, Alma, its music is ardent yet
intimate and simple, matching the poem’s four short stanzas of eloquent and heartfelt verse on the futility of loving for
beauty, youth, or money if it is not accompanied by true love.
The song that veers farthest afield of the traditional, “Um Mitternacht” sets a darkly meandering text of
ambiguous philosophical and
existential ruminations. Mahler’s
music here is fascinating and varied, calling for an orchestra without
strings and joining the singer’s almost
desperate strains with a chorale-like, sometimes
contrapuntal, accompaniment that surges and recedes until its final triumphant fanfare. “Blicke mir nicht
in die Lieder,” a charming miniature that ends almost as soon as it has begun,
returns to more grounded territory, addressing the insecurity of the artist, a
topic close to Mahler’s heart. The composer uses Rückert’s analogy of a poet’s
work to that of industrious bees building a honeycomb as the thematic
inspiration for his music, establishing at the outset an insistent buzzing that
continues throughout the song.
“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” represents Mahler’s first clear foray—both in text and in music—into a style
and a theme that would permeate and define his late masterpieces: peaceful
resignation in the face of approaching oblivion. His unique ability to create music in which human melancholy seems
to melt away into a mesmerizing, otherworldly sense of tranquility reached its
pinnacle in the Ninth and unfinished
Tenth symphonies, as well as
Das Liedvon der Erde. Even in 1901, during one of the happiest periods of his
life and before the crushing series of professional setbacks and personal
tragedies that darkened his final years, Mahler recognized that Rückert’s
world-weary poem—whose title translates to “I am lost to the world”—and his own
ethereal musical setting of it, encapsulated his identity as an artist and a
man, saying, “It is I myself.”
—Jay Goodwin
AARON
COPLAND
Clarinet Concerto
Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing,” is
surely the most well-known and commercially successful clarinetist in history. A fearsomely accomplished
and complete musician, he was a
first-rate classical player in
addition to his storied exploits in jazz—including the historic performance
that brought jazz to Carnegie Hall for the very first time and acted as proof
of the genre’s acceptance into the mainstream. Goodman was also a powerful
advocate for his instrument, and using the money from his success as a
band leader, he commissioned works for the clarinet that endure as part of the
standard classical repertoire today, including Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, Malcolm Arnold’s Clarinet Concerto No.
2, and Bartók’s Contrasts for
clarinet, violin, and piano.
By 1947, when Goodman commissioned the concerto, Copland was firmly established as America’s leading composer, having
captured the sound and the hearts of
America with his iconic ballets Rodeo,
Billy the Kid, and Appalachian Spring, and shorter works of
Americana, such as Fanfare for the Common Man and Lincoln Portrait. The music of Copland’s underrated masterpiece of
a concerto is a kind of portrait of the multifaceted Goodman. The opening
movement is yearningly wistful and full of classical lyricism: “I think it will
make everyone weep,” Copland wrote of this music, which was used prominently
and poignantly in Ken Burns’s documentary The
War. Following the opening movement is a dazzlingly inventive cadenza that pushes
the boundaries of what the instrument is capable of, just as Goodman did. This
gives way without pause to a jaunty, angular finale that combines jazz and folk
influences and seems to meld the styles that made both Goodman and Copland
famous.
—Jay Goodwin
SAMUEL
BARBER
“Give Me Some Music,” from Antony and
Cleopatra;
“Do Not Utter a Word,” from Vanessa
BERNARD HERRMANN
“I Have Dreamt,” from Wuthering Heights
This afternoon’s program concludes with three 20th-century arias from two
American composers, one very well known in the classical realm and the other
less so. The first, Samuel Barber, is of course best known for his Adagio for
Strings, but he also composed many other instrumental works, more than 50
songs, and three operas—if you count the 10-minute-long A Hand of Bridge. Today, we hear one aria from each of the
composer’s full-length operas. Antony and Cleopatra, based on
Shakespeare, premiered at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s new
house at Lincoln Center in 1966. In “Give Me Some Music,” an agitated, nervous
Cleopatra alludes to the opening lines of Twelfth
Night, saying “Give me some music; music, moody food / Of us that trade in
love.” Vanessa is Barber’s first
opera, which also premiered at the Met and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1958. It tells the story (loosely based on Isak Dinesen’s gothic tales) of a
middle-aged woman and her daughter who are both seduced by the son of the older
woman’s long-lost lover. “Do Not Utter a Word” comes from the first act and
finds Vanessa in a hysterical state.
Bernard Herrmann’s legacy rests mainly on
his music for the screen, including the scores for Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver,
multiple collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, and the music for The Twilight Zone. His only opera, Wuthering Heights was completed in 1951.
Catherine Earnshaw’s brief, heartbreaking aria “I Have Dreamt” comes from Act
II, as the heroine laments that she is still trapped by the earthly confines of
Wuthering Heights rather than in heaven as she dreamed.
—Jay Goodwin