CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra

Zankel Hall
Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 8:30 PM

“superb”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Opening a program that explores humor within music, Mozart’s A Musical Joke is a satirical collection of musical errors designed to poke fun at incompetent composers and performers. Cinéma, Satie’s rarely heard score for the 1924 surrealistic film Entr’acte, will be performed along with a screening of the original movie. HK Gruber describes his orchestral suite Frankenstein!! as “a naïve and innocently cheerful atmosphere … a pandemonium after children’s rhymes by H. C. Artman.”

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director, Conductor, and Chansonnier
Ward Stare, Conductor

MOZART A Musical Joke, K. 522
SATIE Cinéma (performed live with René Clair's 1924 film, Entr'acte) and Relâche [excerpts]

HINDEMITH Overture to Neues vom Tage
HK GRUBER Frankenstein!!

Program Notes:

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756–1791)
A Musical Joke, K. 522

Everything we know about Mozart indicates that he possessed a lively sense of humor. He delighted in ribald jokes, invented ludicrous pet names for himself and his friends, and composed songs to humorous verses for the amusement of his acquaintances. Even without such indications of Mozart’s penchant for levity, there is the overwhelming evidence of The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, and others of his operas, which show the composer a keen observer of human comedy. Yet the most remarkable of his humorous works is not theatrical but a concert piece that takes satirical aim at music itself. This is the divertimento known as Ein musikalischer Spass, or A Musical Joke.

Composed in June 1787, the piece is a parody of inept composition. The satire is carried out through the music’s determined banality and occasional resort to slapstick (the blatant wrong notes of the horns in the minuet). Mozart’s method is evident from the opening moments. The initial measures present a melody marked by a conspicuously unimaginative three-note figure, and as the first movement progresses, this motif comes to dominate the music to an obsessive and preposterous degree. The hapless second-rate composer Mozart imitates can do nothing interesting or elegant with it. Moreover, the proportions of the movement are all wrong. The subsidiary theme comes in too soon, the development section (such as it is) is too brief, and the entire movement, which, as the opening, should be the most substantial in a Classical-period instrumental composition, is in fact the shortest of the four that comprise the work.

Similar absurdities are heard throughout the score: uninspired chains of harmonic sequences in the minuet, ill-considered turns of melody, the pointless emergence of inner voices, and a grandiloquent violin cadenza in the slow third movement, and other barbs too numerous to mention but all readily apparent to the ear. Mozart finally demolishes the whole ridiculous construction in the closing measures.


ERIK SATIE (1866–1925)
Relâche (excerpts) and Cinéma (performed with René Clair’s Entr’acte)

During the early decades of the 20th century, Paris saw an explosion of artistic innovation and, not coincidentally, a number of performances that, intentionally or not, provoked heated, even scandalized, reaction. The premiere of The Rite of Spring, which ignited a near-riot in 1913, is one famous example. That of George Antheil’s Ballet mechanique, with its siren, electric bells, and airplane propeller noise, is another. But for sheer audacity, neither these nor any other offering exceeds Relâche, the ballet conceived by the artist Francis Picabia.

Having established himself as an accomplished painter prior to the First World War, Picabia then came under the influence of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and others associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements. Picabia’s embrace of both Dadaism and Surrealism can be traced in his paintings of the war years and early 1920s. But it found its most radical expression in Relâche. His design and scenario for this work—whose title is a term used to indicate “theater closed” or “performance cancelled”—all but defy description. Suffice it to say that they included an abstract metallic backdrop; oddly dressed (and, at times, undressed) men and women who dance, sometimes with a wheelbarrow and other mechanical props; a fireman who wanders aimlessly through each scene; and a free flow of action from the stage into the seating area of the theater.

Picabia planned from the start to enlist the collaboration of Erik Satie, a composer whose rejection of Romantic expressiveness, embrace of discontinuity and non-linear development, referencing of cabaret tunes and other forms of popular music, and penchant for surreal titles (Truly Flabby Preludes (for a dog), and Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear, for example) made him the favorite musician of the Dada and Surrealist artists. Satie was delighted with the proposal for Relâche, and probably even more so when he learned that Picabia had commissioned a young filmmaker, René Clair, to create a short film to serve as a bridge between the ballet’s two acts. Clair’s contribution, titled Entr’acte, was every bit as whimsical as the ballet into which it was interpolated, and just as challenging to describe. Let us note only that the film includes cameo appearances by Man Ray and Duchamp (playing chess), Picabia, and Satie.

Cinéma, the music for Entr’acte, draws on a number of sources. We hear what seem to be fractured bits of music-hall tunes and a circus march (the scoring, which emphasizes winds and percussion, contributes to these allusions), but also a hint of the famous Marche funèbre of Chopin’s B-flat Minor Piano Sonata. With or without these references, the music unfolds as a succession of short phrases, each repeated several times before giving way to another phrase, which also sounds repeatedly. Satie makes no effort at smooth transitions from one phrase to the next, and there seems to be no particular logic to the sequence of their appearances. Or perhaps they have their own logic, one beyond that of mundane rationality, since the music, as so often with Satie, has a “rightness” that becomes apparent when we surrender to it.


PAUL HINDEMITH (1895–1963)
Overture to Neues vom Tage

Unlike the iconoclastic Satie, Paul Hindemith was not a composer from whom we would readily expect a satiric modern farce. When he emigrated to this country in 1940, Hindemith came as a high-minded apostle of German neoclassicism. At Yale University he established himself as America’s most important teacher of composition, imparting to his students rigorous standards of musicianship and compositional craft. He was, moreover, an outspoken critic of Hitler’s regime, and his most famous work, the opera Mathis der Maler, is an earnest investigation of the role of the artist in times of war and political strife.

Yet Hindemith also had a sense of humor, and this served him well in composing his opera Neues vom Tage (“News of the Day”). The plot of this entertainment, which appeared in 1929, presages the screwball comedy genre. A young couple, Laura and Eduard, are not getting along. Indeed, the opera opens to find them throwing plates at each other. Deciding to divorce, they discover that, through comically improbable circumstances, they have become celebrities and their separation is “news of the day.” Theatrical agents descend, and Laura and Eduard soon are appearing nightly on stage to re-enact their quarrels before ravenous audiences. Finding themselves once more attracted to each other, they try to end their theatrical engagement. But the public, unwilling to forego its entertainment, will not allow them to resume their married life.

Hindemith’s overture establishes Neues vom Tage as a “merry opera,” to use the composer’s description. It begins with that tried-and-true musical emblem of antic humor, frenetic moto perpetuo passagework. Although the music relaxes during an extended central episode, and at several other points, it recovers much of its initial energy and plunges into a strange dance that builds in volume and intensity during the work’s final moments.


HK GRUBER (b. 1943)
Frankenstein!!

The Austrian composer HK Gruber has written in a wide range of genres: solo pieces for various instruments, songs and choral works, opera, chamber music, and orchestral compositions, including concertos for such stellar performers as Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, and trumpeter Harkan Hardenberger. But by far his best-known composition is Frankenstein!!, which Gruber calls a “pan-demonium” for baritone and orchestra.

This music-theater piece sets to music verses by H. C. Artmann from the volume Frankenstein!!—Allerleirausch, neue schöne kinderreime (Frankenstein!!—Noises All Around, Lovely New Children’s Rhymes). The title is patently ironic. Artmann himself described the poems as being “covert political statements,” among other things. In keeping with the multiple levels of meaning in the texts, Gruber permitted himself “a broad palette combining traditional musical idioms with newer and more popular ones … thus remaining true to the deceptive simplicity of texts whose forms, at first glance, suggest a naive and innocently cheerful atmosphere.”

Mirroring and augmenting this tension between faux innocence and darker reality is the use of toy instruments, whose sounds undermine, disrupt, and perhaps even mock those of the “adult” orchestral instruments. But Gruber’s use of these toy instruments is not purely ironic or theatrical. “However picturesque or amusing the visual effect of the toys,” the composer states, “their primary role is musical rather than playful. Even howling plastic horses have their motivic/harmonic function.”

Of the larger meaning of the piece, Gruber notes that “the monsters of political life have always tried to hide their true faces, and all too often succeed in doing so.” And he adds: “One of the dubious figures in the pan-demonium is the unfortunate scientist who makes so surprising an entry at mid-point. Frankenstein—or whomever we choose to identify with that name—is not the protagonist, but the figure behind the scenes whom we forget at our peril. Hence the exclamation marks.”

—Paul Schiavo

© 2009 Paul Schiavo

Paul Schiavo writes frequently on music and is the program annotator for the
Seattle Symphony and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson, Music Director, Conductor, and Chansonnier
Founded in 1880, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) is recognized internationally as an ensemble of the highest caliber, performing a broad musical repertoire with skill and spirit. In the 2008–2009 season, the symphony continues to build upon its reputation for musical excellence while maintaining its commitment to local education and community activities.

In December 2003, the SLSO announced the appointment of its 12th, and second American-born, Music Director, David Robertson. He began his inaugural season in September 2005, joining the SLSO after an 18-month international search. Prior to his Saint Louis Symphony appointment Mr. Robertson was music director of the Orchestre National de Lyon and artistic director of that city’s auditorium.

The symphony expanded its audience through frequent tours of the Midwest and the East and West Coasts in the 1980s and ’90s. Tours to Europe in 1985, 1993, and 1998, and to the Far East in 1986, 1990, and 1995, spread the reputation of the Orchestra throughout the world. Appearances at Carnegie Hall continue to garner critical acclaim. Recordings by the symphony have been honored with six Grammy Awards and 56 Grammy nominations.

The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra was founded on the belief that great music should be available to everyone. Through a series of innovative and nationally recognized community-oriented activities, including many education and outreach programs, the musicians of the Symphony have shared their love for music with millions and introduced classical music to those who otherwise might not have been exposed to it. Each year, Symphony musicians participate in more than 250 free performances and events throughout the greater St. Louis area.

As part of this effort, the Symphony participates in the E. Desmond Lee Fine Arts Education Collaborative, a partnership between the Symphony, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Young Audiences of Saint Louis, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, and more than 90 schools in 12 area school districts. The Collaborative enhances the music curricula of member schools through various initiatives, including classroom interaction with musicians, faculty, and artists from the participating institutions.

Ward Stare, Conductor