The Program
MAURICE RAVEL
Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) Suite
As an adult, Ravel could and did
penetrate the world of childhood as few
composers before or since. It may be that this empathy came through a
shared passion for toys—especially the mechanical kind—or simply because Ravel,
always painfully sensitive about his small stature, felt more comfortable with
persons smaller than himself. His empathy for a child’s point of view is
especially apparent in his masterly and charming opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (The
Child and the Magic Spells), which deals with the experience of a naughty child whose long-mistreated toys come to life to
teach him a lesson. His sensitivity is also revealed in his response to
a series of illustrations of French fairy tales that he used as the basis for
the suite of charming four-hand piano pieces called Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose)
designed as a gift for Mimi and Jean Godebski, the children of his friends Ida
and Cipa Godebski.
The most famous writer of fairy tales in France was Charles Perrault
(1628–1703), who was responsible for adapting many folk tales to the taste of
the aristocrats in the court of Louis XIV.
It was Perrault’s 1697 book Histoires
ou contes du temps passé avec des moralitez (Stories or Tales of the Olden Times, with Morals) that became known
popularly in France as Mother Goose.
Yet Perrault provided only two of the tales for Ravel’s suite and ballet—“The
Sleeping Beauty” and “Hop o’ My Thumb.” The Countess d’Aulnoy, a contemporary
imitator of Perrault, was the source for “Laideronette (The Ugly Little Girl),
Empress of the Pagodas”; and the familiar tale of “Beauty and the Beast” came
from a later book, Magasin des enfants,
contes moraux (Children’s Treasury of
Moral Tales), published by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1757.
“Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty” is a graceful dance, exceedingly brief and
almost totally diatonic (which is surprising, considering Ravel’s reputation
for chromaticism). “Tom Thumb” finds the main character lost in the forest and
casting out breadcrumbs to leave a trail for himself, only to find that the birds have eaten them all up. This
movement is filled with marvels of ingenious invention: the melody
representing poor Tom proceeding from 2/4 to 3/4 to 4/4 to 5/4 in meter, as he
gets progressively more bewildered and lost; the scattering of crumbs in an
unending sequence of thirds from the violins; and the chirping of the birds
that eat them up in a series of complicated
violin harmonics. “Laideronette, Empress
of the Pagodas” indulges in a bit of orientalism, with repetitive figures in
the percussion lending a genuinely eastern air. In “Conversations of Beauty and
the Beast,” Beauty has a graceful waltz, to which the Beast contributes some
inevitable growling. “The Fairy Garden” concludes the suite with the same kind
of quiet and utter simplicity as characterized the opening.
—Steven Ledbetter
© Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights
reserved.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Concerto for Piano and Winds
By
the time of his Concerto for Piano and Winds (1923–1924), Stravinsky’s
Neoclassical style had taken such hold of his musical philosophy that he no
longer considered himself a composer of his own time. In 1925, during a concert
tour in the United States, he told an interviewer:
I have gone back in the centuries and have
begun over again, on a historic foundation. What I write today has its roots in the style and methods
of Palestrina and Bach. Today, I am not to be taken as a harmonist; I
have become, through and through, a contrapuntist.
This is a very telling statement and one that gives the listener valuable
advice about how to approach this concerto, which can, at times, sound like the
deranged grandchild of a Bach keyboard concerto or a Couperin harpsichord
piece. Viewing it in that context allows one to see the character and humor
contained in the music.
The opening, with its stately tempo and dotted rhythms, evokes the Baroque
French overture; however, the minor mode, the stark sonority caused by the lack
of strings (except for double basses), and the sharp dissonances in the brass
make the music feel like a skeletal, teetering parody of the traditional form.
The opening phrase also nearly matches, in rhythm and harmony, the first phrase
of Chopin’s famous funeral march from his Piano Sonata No. 2; the rhythmic
similarity continues through the end of the second phrase. After this gloomy prelude,
the first movement surges into an Allegro, which swiftly moves through sparsely
accompanied counterpoint for the piano, full of unusual accents, syncopations,
and meter changes. The movement ends with a brief return to the opening Largo
theme, this time supported by pounding triplets in the piano’s low register.
The second movement is based on a theme resembling the one that opened the
piece, but without the dotted rhythm, and supported by comparatively lush
harmonies and orchestration. It is interrupted by two cadenzas for the pianist,
but otherwise continues wistfully on until its collision with the outburst that
begins the final movement. In the third, toccata-like movement, the
juxtaposition of implacably plodding chords in the orchestra against scurrying
16th-notes in the piano gives the impression of prey fleeing predator, and the
final, conclusive return to the funereal opening theme doesn’t suggest a happy
ending.
This concerto is a highly original piece—even by the standards of one of the
most innovative composers in all of music history—and Stravinsky seemed to be
quite proud of it. He conceived it as a vehicle for his own performance as
soloist and played it very frequently during the decade following its
composition—a time when he made much of his living through performance. Even
more than his Baroque pastiche ballet Pulcinella,
the Concerto for Piano and Winds demonstrates what Stravinsky made possible through
the combination of tradition and new ideas.
—Jay Goodwin
© Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights
reserved.
DMITRI
SHOSTAKOVICH
Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47
The most often performed of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies,
his Symphony No. 5 has served as an evocative
canvas upon which countless commentators have projected sharply divergent political ideologies, personal
jealousies, hopes, terrors, and fantasies. Completed during one of the most
terrifying and uncertain periods in Soviet history—when dictator Joseph Stalin
was supervising the arrest, imprisonment, and often execution of thousands of
prominent figures in political and cultural life—the Fifth Symphony literally
saved Shostakovich’s neck. Its very public triumph also established him as the
leading Soviet composer, a position he would occupy—with numerous hair-raising
ups and downs—until his death in 1975.
Given the enormous cultural and political significance of the Fifth Symphony,
its relatively conservative and “classical”
personality is ironic and strange. In most of his earlier music, the
proudly avant-garde Shostakovich had been gleefully “pushing the envelope.” But
just as he was finishing his Symphony No.
4, his existence was turned upside down by the publication on January
28, 1936, in the official Communist Party newspaper Pravda, of a scathing attack (“Muddle Instead of Music”) on his
opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District. First performed in 1934, this had been a huge hit with Soviet audiences
in Leningrad and Moscow, and had already been staged abroad. But Stalin and his
cultural “advisers” belatedly decided that
the opera’s overt sexuality, raw language, slapstick irreverence, and
frequently dissonant musical style were inappropriate
for the Soviet audience. Lady Macbeth
was immediately banned from Soviet theaters, and Shostakovich’s future
suddenly looked terribly uncertain. When he started work on the Fifth in April
1937, Shostakovich was all too aware how much was on the line; yet he abhorred
the thought of cheapening his talent and integrity by creating music that
pandered to the Party’s demands.
The harmonic style and formal structure of
the Fifth Symphony are newly
“accessible” in certain ways. The Fifth adheres relatively closely to Classical
symphonic form, built on a base of diatonic tonal harmony, with a first
movement using relatively straightforward sonata form, followed by a short
scherzo-like movement, a long slow movement, and a finale of decisive
character.
In the first movement, Shostakovich uses the epic motto theme as an organizing
principle, returning to it in its original and altered forms. In sharp contrast
are two more lyrical themes, the first wandering somewhat uncertainly and
trailing off into nervous stepwise movement, the second remarkably serene,
contemplative, and free of conflict. The short second movement shows us the
sarcastic, ironic side of Shostakovich already familiar from the First Symphony
and Piano Concerto No. 1. But the symphony’s prevailing mood is serious and
reflective, as the length and almost unbearable emotional intensity of the
Largo, with its expressionistic writing for strings, make clear.
Writing music to follow such an exquisite
confession of grief and suffering is not easy, and the finale has always
been the most controversial movement. Outwardly, the spirit of celebration and
optimism can seem forced and superficial, but Shostakovich included a hidden
subversive message underneath all those blaring trumpets and rattling drums. It
is a musical quotation from the setting of a poem (“Rebirth”) by Alexander
Pushkin that he had composed a few months earlier, one of the Four Pushkin Romances, Op. 46. The initial march theme
takes its contour from the four notes
setting the first three words of the
poem, dealing with one of Pushkin’s favorite
themes: the struggle between genius and mediocrity in art. Here, the struggle ends with the artist
triumphant over his persecutors. At the time, these romances were unpublished
and unknown, so the reference was intended for Shostakovich alone—and, perhaps,
for future generations.
The public reaction to the star-studded premiere of the Fifth Symphony in
Leningrad on November 21, 1937, was ecstatic, and has gone down as one of the
most important events in the history of Soviet culture. The concert also marked
the beginning of a long and fruitful association between Shostakovich and the
young conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich
resurrected his personal and musical fortunes, narrowly escaping the
catastrophe that would strike down numerous artistic friends and colleagues at
the end of the 1930s. But it was hardly the last time that he would feel like a
hunted man.
—Harlow Robinson
© Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. All rights
reserved.