Repetition or Redundancy: Introductions by Mendelssohn and Mussorgsky
The beginning of Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang” symphony is completely inert, and therefore alarmingly dull, if I am permitted the oxymoron. As I’ve been studying this score recently for classroom presentation, I started from the assumption that the piece’s dullness was due to my own limited perception, probably related to the generic problems connected with this “symphony-cantata” as well as the stupefyingly poor text that Medelssohn employed in the work. Salvatore Cammarano’s book for Verdi’s Il Trovatore is a literary masterpiece compared to the shambles that Mendelssohn set in the cantata portion of his piece.
I adore Mendelssohn, and confess to being intimidated as well by the advocacy for this score by R. Larry Todd in his book on Mendelssohn that I’m using in the class. Todd is really careful to avoid personal enthusiasms and censures in his book, but the fact that he draws a structural diagram for “Lobgesang” and has several music examples constitutes advocacy. I also hope that I’m man enough to admit my limitations. But I think I’ve discovered something that lends credence to my negative assessment of the piece.
The first phrase of “Lobgesang” and the first phrase of Modest Mussorgsky’s (admittedly totally different and unrelated work conceptually and stylistically) Pictures at an Exhibition are similar. It’s not an uncanny similarity, but similar they are, and not because they share the same key signature and roughly the same thematic shape, which they do, but which is certainly coincidental, but similar in their rhetoric. Both are statement and response formulations, rather like a mass celebrant chanting something and being answered by a congregation. This is common in classical music. Brahms’ first piano sonata, Beethoven’s last symphony, Bach’s great mass, Rimsky’s Russian Easter Overture and most likely thousands of other works use this device. It is common, to say the very least. But Mendelssohn’s passage flops and Mussorgsky’s is immortal. Why?
It is because in Mendelssohn the responsorial harmonization of the original single note phrase merely confirms the harmonies that are obviously implied in the former. And then he adds new strophes to his passage, and each time the subsequent harmonization confirms the totally obvious. In Mussorsgsky, the harmonization, or at least the spacing is different each time, and even presents certain modal ambiguities; his opening promenade is definitely in B-flat, yes indeedy, but it is tinged by a lurking modal g minor, and sports as well the feeling of a premature move to the dominant, F major. If this seems technical, well, it is-but remember, music is a craft with its own procedural protocols. I can put it this way, non-technically: each time the listener hears the “celebrant” intone a phrase in Pictures, the listener is curious as to how the “responsorial” is formulated, and by the way, this interest does not diminish over repeated hearings. The “Promenade” is a unique thing. In Mendelssohn’s opening, you get exactly what is stongly implied each time. It’s boring the first time, and it approaches unendurable on subsequent listenings.
This should not sound immodest, because it is only basic musicianship, but I think I proved my contention in class yesterday. I improvised Mendessohnian sounding harmonizations of the responsorials at the piano , but used different spacings each time and employed proxy chords which were rational but less obvious then the chords in the actual piece. The passage was somewhat improved, but because I didn’t have an overarching conception of where I was going, it was still pretty bad. In other words, I improved the passage tactically but not strategically. If this seems like lese majestie, let me suggest that the alternative is that we all shut up, stop thinking and experimenting, and eat everything that is put on our plate. We shouldn’t eat everything that even a great master puts on our plate; we’ll get fat and complacent, and lose our powers of crititical discrimination. The Italian and Scottish symphonies are masterpieces, “Lobgesang is an also-ran, that’s the way it is, whether I am personally impertinent or not. I return to my profound rejection of the phrase, “You like it, I don’t, end of discussion” which an exceptionally intelligent friend of mine formulated during our conservatory days. We need standards and discrimination.
Finally, you may ask: “Isn’t repetition an often important unifying device, and therefore okey-dokey?” Oh my, yes. But repetition and redundancy are different things. If you don’t believe me, consult a reliable dictionary.
In Defense of "Cavalleria Rusticana"
Recently, after receiving distressing news delivered by the bathroom scale, I determined to increase the exercise I take. For a 90-minute bicycle ride, I chose to divert myself to the strains of Pietro Mascagni’s 1890 opera, Cavalleria Rusticana; my choice being dictated by the perceived energy and inanity of this opus, which in my all too carefully considered opinion (if one dithers sufficiently on the music one directs the ipod to play, with any luck it might be too late to afford the time to take the exercise at all) would provide the right sort of distraction to accompany a boring, but regrettably necessary task.
Maybe I thought that exercise accompaniment was all this work is good for; who knows? To my chagrin, some Mascagni lunatics got wind of my less than flattering perception of this hoary score, and requested the “right of rebuttal”; I quote this odious phrase, as an example of their impenetrable legalese.
Consequently, as the most refreshingly impartial referee in blogdom, I invited the Mascagni clique’s foremost consigliere (the opera takes place in a Sicilian village), who must hide under the incognito, “per Mascagni Sempre” (PMS) for an interview.
Mr. Gibbons: How many times is the word, “bada” (I warn you) used in this piece? More than fifty?
PMS: I believe just once. When Turridu sings, “Bada, Santuzza” in their duet; warning her that he’s not her slave (schiavo).
Mr. Gibbons: O.K. Tell me then, how many times does one character wish another an unhappy Easter?- (mala Pasqua)-fifty times? Or more?
PMS: Shut up.
Mr. Gibbons: Thanks for the elegantly delivered rebuke, I certainly was out of line.
PMS: Thank you for acknowledging your unconscionable flippancy. To my certain knowledge, you yourself have recordings featuring Jussi Bjoerling (your favorite, just as with everyone else, you lackey), Franco Corelli, Victoria De Los Angeles, Pavarotti, and even that mediocre record with Domingo and Scotto, conducted by Muti. If you can’t make a case for this opera, maybe I can make a case for your being a fool, acquiring record after record of an opera for which you (snobbishly) feel only distaste.
Mr. Gibbons: (evasively) Somebody gave me those records.
PMS: Yeah right, I just buy the magazine for the articles, genius.
Mr. Gibbons: Is the wine from Francofonte any good?
PMS: Ask that fancy retired publisher in your classes, he knows wine.
Mr. Gibbons: Doesn’t this “Madonna” and “Whore” thing bother you in Italian opera? I am neither a post-modernist nor a deconstructionist, but I’m bothered by this pervasive dismissal of women as human beings in certain Italian operas, including the verismo classics, such as Pagliacci and Tosca in addition to Cavalleria. How come Mozart and Wagner have real women in their operas, and, excepting the works of Verdi’s maturity, Italian opera has so few?
PMS: (mumbles inaudibly)
Mr. Gibbons: And is it true that a transcription of Cavalleria for solo banjo would do eminent justice to the work from at least the harmonic, rhythmic, and structural standpoints?
PMS: This interview is terminated
Mr. Gibbons: Will I find a horse’s head in my bed?
PMS: Bada!
Berlioz and his "Fantastique"; Revenge May Be Best Served Cold, But Hector Ordered a Side Dish of Panache With His Meal
Holde-Quiz
Here’s a quiz:
What is the best way to exact revenge on a woman whose very existence torments you with pangs of jealous obsession?
a) Be a creep and put compromising pictures of her on the internet.
b) Pull an “O.J.”
c) Keep a stiff upper lip and show that you can handle yourself with dignity; show her who’s the adult.
d) Compose one of the greatest and most original symphonies in history.
Made your choice?
If you happen to be Hector Berlioz, the answer you choose is “d”. By the way, the option least likely to be chosen if you’re Berlioz is “C”, not withstanding that internet access was quite rare in 1830.
Here is a second quiz:
What is the best way to exact revenge on your professors, those pompous nincompoops who are so blind as to not recognize your genius, and instead choose to bore you with dull admonitions about your faulty counterpoint?
a) Slash the tires of their cars in the teacher’s lot.
b) Scrawl scatological insults on their blackboards.
c) Vow to work harder to improve your counterpoint, and subsequently become recognized as a greater contrapuntal expert than they are.
d) Write one of the greatest and most original symphonies in history, and portray your profs as slobbering demons in Hell dancing orgasmically to the notes of their beloved counterpoint.
Don’t give up — you can do it! Take a deep breath…
If you happen to be “You Know Who”, the answer again is “d”. And by the way, the least likely option to be exercised if you are in the habit of putting “H.B.” monograms on your pistol cases is “c”, not withstanding the fact that very few professors of music at the Paris Conservatory in the 1820s drove their cars to work.
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique;
Excerpts from Lélio
“The Tilson Thomas
Symphonie fantastique is the
cream of a very, very good crop
of recordings.” (John Gibbons)
It is also a potentially tenable notion that Berlioz was turning Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony upside down in a similar vein to that in which he turned Beethoven’s Ninth upside down in Harold en Italie; like the Big Man’s 5th, the Fantastique travels from c minor to C major, ends in cathartic triumph (albeit for the ghouls, just as it was the brigand’s triumph in “Harold”), has a scherzo that is yoked to the finale, even to the point of representing a transitional state emerging into the finale, as in Beethoven’s 5th, and has passages (a descending minor passage in the low strings in the “March to the Scaffold”, and an optimistic C major scaler horn call figure in the Witch’s Sabbath) that are suspiciously similar to passages in the Beethoven work, at equivalent structural junctures.
Extra Credit!
Here’s a third little quiz. Which photo below is of Hector Berlioz — and which one is of Jefferson Davis?
Hope you earned your motarboard!
By Bach Or Not By Bach: That's (Not) The Question
The first session of my fall Bach class will feature three works whose authorship has been disputed. The “Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother”, the Toccata and Fugue in d minor, BWV 565, and Cantata Nr. 150, “For You, O Lord, I Long” have all provoked questions of authenticity. I personally think all three are by Bach, and it appears there is now a consensus in the case of the capriccio.
All three are excellent pieces-the capriccio is full of playful charm, the toccata is superbly dramatic (although the fugue is relatively mediocre), and the cantata was good enough to inspire the passacaglia bass of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.
Lovers of classical music anecdotes want all the pieces to be by Bach, because of the fun of speculating on the “stranger maiden”; a soprano who may have sung the soprano solo and subsequently became Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, as well as the presence of the “nanny-goat bassoonist”; the cantata features a downright virtuoso bassoon part. And how about Bach’s weepy sadness at his brother’s departure (the piece is part of a sonata-story telling tradition that includes Kuhnau’s “Biblical” sonatas as well as Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” sonata). And how about the Phantom of the Opera? His scary music can’t be by some unknown predecessor or colleague of the great Bach!
I don’t think internal musical evidence will resolve these pieces’s authorship. Bach wrote, performed, and transcribed so much music that proprietory authorship wasn’t considered in the same way back then as it is today. Some scholars doubt Bach’s BWV 565 and 150, because there are some apparent technical lapses. But there are technical lapses in works we are sure are by Bach, as well. And Bach was a great assimilator of diverse styles in his youth. He was insatiably interested in just about all serious styles.
Scholars know relatively little for sure about Bach’s life. But the interesting thing about the many pieces of disputed authorship in Bach’s oeuvre is the light it sheds on how personal authorship was perceived in Bach’s time. How different from the Romantic and Modern eras, where there is a veritable cult of the “individual genius”. It is refreshing to read of the collegial relationships that existed between musicians in Bach’s time; Buxtehude, Reinken, Handel, Telemann all played roles in Bach’s development, and Bach’s own extended family provides a musical culture of its own.
A New (Old) Approach to Bach
The last time I taught a Bach class there were raised eyebrows when I used recordings of the major choral works conducted by Furtwangler (Matthew Passion), Klemperer (Matthew Passion as well) and Karajan (b minor mass). There may even have been a few smirks. Why did I use these recordings? Am I so out of touch?
I used them because they are better than the recordings by Harnoncourt and Gardiner.
I’m not saying that the original instruments and an informed scholarly attitude toward this repertory hasn’t done a great deal for Bach, if it has done less for Berlioz or Brahms. I keep a library of both old and new Bach recordings, and I carefully read the books and essays written by Harnoncourt and Norrington, for instance, and have profitted a great deal from their ideas. And although there is some truth to the notion that the period instrument boom was a gimmick to sell new cds of old works for commercial purposes, on the whole it was a sincere and possibly necessary attempt at a corrective of old performance modes. But the romantic and subjective interpretations mentioned above do greater justice to Bach’s intent, which was to make spiritually sublime music.
Like an obedient little boy I used recordings of these works by Harnoncourt and Jon Eliot Gardiner in all my previous Bach classes. This fall I’ll probably use a mixture of different recordings (both big romantic approaches as well as period instrument versions) for the orchestral and choral works (the keyboard works I’ll attempt to play myself, for the most part).
I refuse to be intimidated by the early music crowd. Harnoncourt, et al. reveal more about the late twentieth century than they do about the eighteenth century. And old instruments don’t need to be used…they are simply not as good as modern instruments. And play Bach’s keyboard music on the piano, for heaven’s sake, where the player can control articulation and dynamics, and by all means use the pedal!
Cruel and Sad News-Our Greatest Tenor is Dead
These pages are not intended to be a general news source for what is going on in classical music, but the desperately cruel death of Luciano Pavarotti from a most implacable illness requires a comment from here. Pavarotti was our greatest tenor, the closest thing to Bjoerling or Caruso in our time, with a similarly beautiful ache in his voice as well as staggering, sensational talent and musicality.
Forget stuff like “King of the High C’s” and “He Brought Opera to the Masses” and “Three Tenors Star is Dead”. He means much, much more to opera, and even music, generally.
Contrary to myth, he was a splendid actor (just look at his late-in-life Canio on the Met’s DVD) who profoundly understood the nature of the operatic roles he assumed. In playing the Duke of Mantua, Manrico, and Riccardo from Verdi, Rodolfo, Cavaradossi and Calaf from Puccini, he had few peers (from any era) and no superiors.
I advise you to listen to classical radio today. You’ll hear something beautiful, I promise you that.
Pilgrim's Music By Berlioz and Wagner
There are at least two moments of indisputable greatness in Wagner’s Tannhauser: The act 2 intervention by Elizabeth to save Tannhauser’s life from the likes of Biterolf and his cruel and cowardly cohorts, and Tannhauser’s act 1 epiphany in the valley of the Wartburg, with the unforgettable, immortal counterpoint of the shepherd boy’s lovely melody, fresh as May: “Der Mai! Der Mai!”- (Wagner pretended that he was quoting an authentic tune but this is not so. He made his own melody. Can you even conceive of some folk ditty being anywhere near as beautiful as what Wagner could contrive?) and the dolorous, guilt-laden strains of the pilgrims.
Only Henry Tannhauser doesn’t know who he is. The pilgrims know who they are, the shepherd boy knows who he is, but Tannhauser is lost. This stunning passage is the existential heart of this profound opera (a much deeper work, by the way, than Lohengrin, which aside from its incredible prelude is merely the greatest German Romantic opera).
Wagner created some of history’s greatest music for his pilgrims. This music’s chromaticism is a perfectly calculated expedient for representing the pressures of guilt, the opening rising octave is the very epitome of yearning, and the orchestration, essentially restricted to a “walking bass” in pizzicato violas and cellos proves that less can be more. Wagner, one of the most disciplined artists in history, frequently finds simple and elegant devices like this splendid pizzicato.
I had to retrieve the score of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie to recall his pilgrim tune, for the purpose of humming it while writing this essay. I couldn’t forget Wagner’s tune if I tried. And I sure ain’t gonna try.
Some points about Berlioz’s score:
1. Rey Longyear, in his mediocre survey, “Nineteenth Century Romanticism in Music” says that Harold is neither a symphony nor a concerto, but a little bit of both. He further claims that Berlioz has only one symphony really deserving the title. He’s wrong, I think. My immediately previous entry deals, albeit superficially, with this issue. David Cairns has it right. Harold is not a concerto. No way. It’s not even close to being a concerto, especially when you consider what a concerto was in 1834 (consider works by Mendelssohn, Paganini, Liszt, and Chopin). Want a viola concerto? Hindemith wrote a great one (I mean the Schwanendreher), and Bartok and Walton wrote good ones. Berlioz composed a work that is obviously a symphony, with a viola obbligato that simply represents the voice of Byron’s Harold in propria persona.
2. Berlioz copies the scheme of recollections of previous movements coined in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But Beethoven’s finale leads to an affirmation of universal brotherhood, and Berlioz introduces a riotous orgy. Both Harold and the Fantastique end with orgies, by the way. My feeling is that if you’re gonna ironically turn Beethoven on his head, you better have better music up your sleeve than Berlioz had for his noisy finale.
3. The middle movements are salon pieces for orchestra, if there can be said to be such a thing. The pilgrim’s march and the Abbruzian serenade are every bit as relevant and necessary as the flute and harp serenade to the Christ child in L’Enfance Du Christ or the Rakoczi march in Damnation of Faust, if you take my meaning.
4. The idee fixe is a remarkable and expressive melody, the best part of this flawed score; melancholy, haunting, lyrical…but it only superficially unifies the piece, it doesn’t function in a symphonically developmental manner. In other words, Berlioz just throws it the heck in there when he wants Harold to comment on the action.
5. Just about every page of the Fantastique has some creative, surprising, or emotionally stimulating passage or at least detail; Harold frequently offers tired cliches, even in the orchestration.
I’m surprised at the critical and public sympathy for this piece. I revere the Requiem and Les Troyens and really want to like this piece as well, but perhaps just don’t get it. Oh, well, vive le differance!
Ernest Newman said that this piece is “Perhaps the best orchestral work through which to approach the study of Berlioz, for it reveals everywhere the individual nature of his musical mind…Harold himself is not a character undergoing psychological or circumstantial mutations like the Don Quixote of Strauss or the Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles of Liszt and Wagner, but simply a mood, a melancholy mood and nothing more.” Maybe so. Not every piece can be “fantastique”!
Mea Culpa: Berlioz and His Four Symphonies
Berlioz has four symphonies.
1. Symphonie Fantastique (1830)
2. Harold in Italy (with obbligato viola) (1834)
3. “Dramatic Symphony” Romeo et Juliette (with chorus) (1839)
4. Symphonie Funebre et Triumphale (giant wind band) (1840)
The Romeo et Juliette has moments of searching profundity that makes Tchaikovsky’s, Gounod’s, and Prokofiev’s settings of the story seem trivial. (Maybe not Leonard Bernstein’s, however: West Side Story is justifiably iconic. The greatest “musical”. Bernstein discusses the Berlioz opus with great sensitivity, by the way, in his Norton lectures, The Unanswered Question).
So why in the world would I be preparing a session in my upcoming symphony class on Berlioz’s three symphonies?
I’ll let David Cairns, the grand pooh-bah of Berlioz scholars (along with Hugh McDonald) explain:
“In Berlioz’s third symphony, Romeo and Juliet (1839), the drama has become more explicit and more openly reflected in the form, but the form remains symphonic, for all its bold extension of the genre. It can be argued that the recent failure of his opera Benvenuto Cellini (which ended the hopes of an entree to the Paris Opera by which he had set so much store) forced him against his will to cast the next dramatic work in concert form, from which confusion a hybrid resulted, fascinating and beautiful in its parts, incoherent and unsatisfactory as a whole. This is a possible argument; but it is rather the argument of one who looks at the work from without, from a somewhat nice (my italics-JG) notion of symphonic proprieties and, seeing the unusual attempt to absorb techniques properly belonging to opera or oratorio into the symphony, expects it to fail. Berlioz did, much later, contemplate writing an opera-a totally new work-on the play, and it was age and ill health that stopped him, not the existence of a “dramatic symphony” on the same subject.” This is taken from “The Symphony: 1. Haydn to Dvorak” publ. by Penguin, 1966.
Mea maxima culpa. The last thing I want to do is to be nice, believe me. (for those who know me this will not stretch their credulity). This great work will be included in the lesson plan, of course…when I hear of music teachers excluding it, I can only snort with derision…those benighted reactionaries with their prim-and-proper symphonic proprieties!
Schumann's Second Symphony: What Did Twentieth Century Critics Allow Schumann to Learn From Beethoven?
Mendelssohn, Schumann
A friend lent me Anthony Newcomb’s 1984 article, “Once More ‘Between Absolute and Program Music’: Schumann’s Second Symphony”. The best part of the article is the exhaustive summary of critical reception to the work in the 19th and 20th centuries, and commentaries on the radically different critical climate for Schumann’s work in those centuries.
Although the article is full of very useful information, it is written in academic-eeze, and therefore is not a literary pleasure. I confess that I prefer style as much as content even in academic papers. I can’t help it. That’s why I like Charles Rosen so much…in fact, it is quite amusing to me to hear occasionally exasperated or condescending remarks about Rosen from jealous critics and musicologists. It reminds me forcefully of a passage in William Shirer’s (3-volume, I’m referring to vol. 3) autobiography where he comments on the hostility of the official academic historian lobby to his best-selling “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, which they decry as the irresponsible work of an amateur. What they are really objecting to is the fact that it was chosen for Book-of-the-Month Club. Jealous, Jealous, Jealous.
This post does not attempt to analyze the Schumann 2nd. Maybe I’ll do that in a subsequent post. For now, suffice it to say that the work clearly follows the paradigm of Beethoven’s 5th, with the famous “knocking at the door” unifying device replaced by a motive taken from Haydn’s 104th symphony, and the function of the scherzo in Beethoven is usurped by the (third movement) slow movement in the Schumann, and Schumann establishes C Major at the outset, and changes the nature of C Major between the troubled first movement and triumphant finale, reserving c minor for the slow movement, where, like Beethoven’s scherzo, it goes from minor to major as a device of transition to the finale; this is opposed to Beethoven’s plan of going from c minor to C Major over the course of four movements. Whew! That passage wasn’t very literary!
I should mention that the scherzo in this work is a tour-de-force. Its vitality and technical prowess rivals Mendelssohn. How did Schumann manage to rise above his orchestral limitations for this impressive movement?
The question that concerns me currently is this: What use does the twentieth century allow Schumann to make of Beethoven? Newcomb points out that the Second Symphony enjoyed wide esteem in the nineteenth century, presumably because the 19th century exalted Beethoven’s 5th, as opposed to the twentieth, which decried it as bombastic pretension (at least among hoity-toity critics). Consider the case of a Beethoven inspired piano work, the Fantasy, op. 17. This is allowed, because here Schumann is appropriating one of the most personal, even sentimental and autobiographical themes in Beethoven: An die ferne Geliebte, which may be understood as a typically Schumannian pun, referring both to Beethoven (the work was composed partly to raise funds for the Beethoven monument in Bonn) and to Schumann’s own distant beloved, Clara, whom he was attempting to marry at the time against the strenuous and exceptionally cruel opposition of that villain of the Schumann biography, Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck. Maybe we should just call Old Man Wieck “Leopold”.
I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating. Wieck was indeed a cruel man. Maybe Leopold was only selfish and insecure, but terrific damage was done by both flawed men; but you do need to credit Leopold (unlike Wieck) for creating the right environment for Mozart to develop artistically. What if Leopold was an unambitious clerk, let’s say…would we still have Mozart? And are we missing potential Mozarts?
Many critics in the twentieth century wanted to put Schumann in a box. It’s easier, that way. Schumann is personal, poetic, neurotic, secretive… but not the symphonic heir to Beethoven! We’ve already decided that only Brahms, and, for some, Bruckner can be that! Not Schumann, he’s our miniaturist, our fabulist, our aphorism maker. If we admit the 2nd Symphony, we have to throw out our hasty generalizations! Much better to ignore or deride the work. Remember: Schumann could only create aphorisms.
Schumann's "Spring" Symphony: A Great Symphony that Could Have Been Greater
Mendelssohn, Schumann
This is a fairly technical post.
Schumann’s symphonies have traditionally been criticized for their amateurish orchestration. This criticism is valid. Schumann attempted to transfer the mechanics, techniques, and acoustical character of the piano to the orchestra, which works poorly. Transferring orchestral style sonority to the piano, on the other hand, paradoxically works reasonably well; consider Brahms’ First Sonata or Shostakovich’s op. 34 preludes, or Stravinsky’s “Serenade in A” for example.
The “Spring” symphony, composed in 1841 and published as Schumann’s op. 38, has many virtues. It is a lengthy work but one absolutely without “longeurs”, it abounds in contrast, it is by turns exuberant and lyrical, the melodic writing is consistently superior without compromising the sense of symphonic narrative and drive, and its organization and structure is flat out brilliant; consider the beautiful masterstrokes that frame the piece, the evocation of Schubert’s “Great” C Major symphony (whose manuscript was discovered by Schumann in Vienna) in the horns and trumpets fanfare at the beginning, which summons spring, and then is reiterated with perfect calculation at the beginning of the recapitulation in the first movement, and the lovely and unexpected birdsong cadenza that elegantly and touchingly launches the recapitulation in the finale. This warm, youthful, and luminous work is a treasure.
But the orchestration is problematical.
This may come as a shock to the uninitiated, but conductors alter orchestration all the time, and not just in Schumann. Yes, in Beethoven and Schubert as well, if not usually in Mozart and Mendelssohn. Just go to a rehearsal. In no time you’ll see a conductor ask a clarinet to double a passage for bassoons and horns, or divide the double basses so only half play a scampering figure, or tell the flute to play something an octave lower, or tell the disengaged last member of the second violins to take his finger out of his nose, pack up his fiddle, and go home. Just kidding about that last one! But seriously, this stuff happens all the time, and needs to happen. Only idiots and children think you can serve the music by slavish devotion to the printed text. And composers who are also conductors probably make the most changes. Look at Mahler, for example, who changed so much in the Schumann symphonies that he has his own version of the works. Mahler also made changes again and again in his own works.
Here is an example of Schumann’s bad orchestration. The beginning of the second movement features a lovely melody in octaves for the first violins, a sustained, syncopated accompanimental texture for the second violins and violas, and a bass line in contrary motion to the melody in the cellos and basses. Here are the problems:
1. Octave doubling of melodies is great on the piano, but ineffective in the violins, especially in the relatively less expressive middle of the violin register, where this melody lies. The octave doubling adds little weight and makes the melody a tiny bit out of tune, which is sometimes welcome, as it warms up the sound, but not here, where it is essential that the first violins, who are all on their divisi lonesome, hold their own against all of the second violins, violas, cellos, and basses.
2. The second violins and violas are trying to duplicate the effect created by a pianist’s right foot on the sustain pedal. Maybe Schumann congratulated himself on finding such a subtle rythmic expedient to represent the piano’s pedal, but he shouldn’t have been trying to represent the piano’s pedal at all, the orchestra has plenty of ways of its own to create sympathetic vibrations. Also, and most damaging, the ensemble is gonna be a huge problem. Even the finest players in the best orchestras are going to be tentative here, they are not going to be as comfortable finding the beat and coming in properly, with well co-ordinated ensemble as they could be. And all for nothing. Plus, this passage is likely to consume valuable rehearsal time.
3. All the cellos and basses playing a kind of mirror image of the first violins (who are not in a brilliant register, or in a great violin key [the key here is E-flat Major]) are more than a match for the first violin section; there is a danger of a bottom heavy sound, and in any case, the melody should predominate, as this is a homophonic texture.
Okay, Tough Guy, your solution?
1. Have all the first violins play the top octave of the melody, and half of the second violins and half of the violas play the bottom octave of the melody.
2. Have the syncopated accompaniment played by the left over second violins and violas, and re-notate their parts so you don’t have two sixteenth notes tied together commencing on off-beats. Use overlaps rather than rythmic unisons, so you get the sustain, but don’t have ensemble problems. You might consider putting mutes on the players executing this passage. That depends, it’s hard to know if it’s necessary or desirable before trying it out in the hall.
3. Keep the cellos as is, but make the basses (who double the cellos an octave lower) punctuate rather than double the cello line. In the first measure they could play an eighth note E-flat, in the second an eighth note A-flat, in the third they could take the whole value of the D, as the melody is now in a more exposed register, etc.
Conductors have to mess with stuff like this all the time, it’s a tough job, I promise you. When done right. Some conductors might skate past the whole problem. I have not heard Mahler’s solution to this passage, but I understand that his versions have been recorded. Perhaps someone who has heard what he does can enlighten me…I’m sure his solution to the passage discussed is better than mine.