Korngold’s Violin Concerto
What to listen for
La Nuit et l’Amour: soaring melodies, lush orchestration, thick textures, epic scope
Violin Concerto: if you think this sounds like a 1930s film score, that’s because it does. Excerpts from several films, including Korngold’s Oscar-winning score for The Adventures of Robin Hood, make an appearance in this swashbuckling virtuoso showcase.
Concerto for Orchestra: each family of instruments is featured in a solo or sectional capacity in this multimovement work. Listen for moments when the spotlight focuses, in turn, on woodwinds, brasses, percussion, and strings
Other works by these composers
Holmès: Ouverture pour une Comedie (Overture to a Comedy); Irlande (Ireland)
Korngold: Concerto for Cello and Orchestra; film scores for Captain Blood, Anthony Adverse, and The Sea Hawk
Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 3; the last movement of the Concerto for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste
Augusta Holmès: “La Nuit et l’Amour” (Night and Love) from Ludus pro Patria (Patriotic Games)
Composer: born December 16, 1847, Paris; died January 28, 1903, Paris
Work composed: 1887-88
World premiere: Jules Augustin Garcin conducted the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire on March 4, 1888, in Paris.
Instrumentation: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, four horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings
Estimated duration: 6 minutes
A French composer born to Irish parents living in Paris, Augusta Holmès (she added an accent to the “e” in her surname when she became a French citizen in 1871, changing the pronunciation to “Hol-MEZ”) enjoyed great renown during her lifetime, and – uncommon for a 19th century female composer – generally positive reception of her work by her French male colleagues, including Camille Saint-Saëns and Holmès’ composition teacher César Franck. The high point in Holmès’ career came when she was chosen over her male colleagues to write a celebratory work to mark the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle.
Mme. Holmès (she never married, although she had a 20-year relationship and five children with poet Catulle Mendès) lived life on her own terms, beginning with her unwavering determination to be a composer at a time when women were not allowed to study composition at the Paris Conservatoire. In many respects, Holmès managed her career as did the male artists of her time. Holmès “manufactured” or at least did not deny rumors about her life and her own origins, which amplified her reputation as an authentic 19th-century Romantic. (One popular story suggested Holmès may have been illegitimate, and that her biological father was actually a renowned French poet, Alfred de Vigny.) Holmès’ physical beauty also added to her allure. Saint-Saëns, who proposed marriage several times, was quoted as claiming, “we all were all of us in love with her;” painters and poets were inspired by her, including Stéphane Mallarmé and the visual artist Georges Clairin, who declared Holmès was “not so much a woman as a goddess.”
Holmès Ludus pro Patria, the work from which “La Nuit et l’Amour” is excerpted, is a symphonic ode featuring a large orchestra, full chorus, and a speaker declaiming Holmès own text. The work was inspired by an eponymous painting by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, which according to a description by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where it hangs, shows young athletes training with pikes (piques in French), the traditional weapon of the Picardy region and reputedly the origin of the province’s name. This work is a replica, reduced in size, of the central panel of a mural that Puvis completed in 1882 and installed in the Musée de Picardie in Amiens. The exhibition and sale of such ‘reductions’ helped publicize the artist’s monumental decorative commissions and boost his income.” Although not often performed today, Holmès’ Ludus pro Patria’s premiere was such a resounding success that a second performance was demanded the following week.
Musically, Holmès’ orchestral writing resembles that of Wagner and Liszt, two composers whose work she admired. She wields the orchestra’s timbres with deft precision, using them to convey both emotion and plot. In her manuscript notes for “La Nuit et L’Amour,” Holmès included her own verses: “Love! Divine word! Creator of worlds!/Love! Inspiration of fruitful ecstasy!/Love! Conqueror of Conquerors!”
Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35
Composer: born May 29, 1897, Vienna; died November 29, 1957, Hollywood, CA
Work composed: 1937-1945. Commissioned by violinist Bronisław Huberman. Dedicated to Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma Mahler-Werfel.
World premiere: February 15, 1947. Vladimir Golschmann led the St. Louis Symphony with Jascha Heifetz as soloist.
Instrumentation: solo violin, 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone, celesta, harp, and strings.
Estimated duration: 24 minutes
Erich Korngold was a man out of time. Had he been born a century earlier, his romantic sensibilities would have aligned perfectly with the musical and artistic aesthetics of the 19th century. Instead, Korngold grew up in the tumult of the early 20th century, when his tonal, lyrical style had been eclipsed by the horrors of WWI and the stark modernist trends promulgated by fellow Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern.
Korngold’s prodigious compositional talent emerged early. At age ten, he performed his cantata Gold for Gustav Mahler, whereupon the older composer called him “a genius.” When Korngold was 13, just after his bar mitzvah, the Austrian Imperial Ballet staged his pantomime The Snowman. In his teens, Korngold received commissions from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; pianist Artur Schnabel performed Korngold’s Op. 2 Piano Sonata on tour, and Korngold also began writing operas, completing two full-scale works by age eighteen. At 23, Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) brought him international renown; it was performed in 83 different opera houses.
By the 1920s, the music of Korngold’s contemporaries reflected the chaotic aftermath of WWI. It bristled with dissonance, unexpected rhythms, and often little that resembled a recognizable melody. Korngold’s music reflected an earlier, bygone era, and his unabashed Romanticism was dismissed as hopelessly out of date. Fortunately for Korngold, around this time a new forum for composition emerged: film scores. In 1934, director Max Reinhardt invited Korngold to write a score for his film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Korngold subsequently moved to Hollywood, where he spent the next dozen years composing scores for 18 films, including his Oscar-winning music for Anthony Adverse (1936), and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Claude Rains.
While many composers and critics regarded film music as less significant than works written for the concert hall, Korngold did not. “I have never drawn a distinction between music for films and for operas or concerts,” he stated, and his violin concerto bears this out. The concerto is a compilation of themes from several Korngold scores, including Another Dawn (1937), Juárez (1939), Anthony Adverse, and The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Korngold’s Violin Concerto has been a favorite of both violinists and audiences everywhere since its premiere, although the New York Sun famously dismissed it as “more corn than gold.”
It was a running joke in the Korngold family that every time their family friend Bronisław Huberman saw Korngold, the Polish violinist would demand, “Erich! Where’s my concerto?” At dinner one evening in Korngold’s house in Los Angeles, Korngold responded to Huberman’s mock-serious question by going to his piano and playing the theme from Another Dawn. Huberman exclaimed, “That’s it! That will be my concerto. Promise me you’ll write it.” Korngold complied, but it was Jascha Heifetz, another child prodigy, who gave the first performance. In the program notes for the premiere, Korngold wrote, “In spite of its demand for virtuosity in the finale, the work with its many melodic and lyric episodes was contemplated rather for a Caruso of the violin than for a Paganini. It is needless to say how delighted I am to have my concerto performed by Caruso and Paganini in one person: Jascha Heifetz.”
Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra
Composer: born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Sînnicolau Mare, Romania); died September 26, 1945, New York City
Work composed: Summer 1943, revised 1945
World premiere: Serge Koussevitzsky led the Boston Symphony Orchestra on December 1, 1944, at Symphony Hall in Boston.
Instrumentation: 3 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (one doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (one doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum without snare, triangle, tam-tam, two harps, and strings.
Estimated duration: 35 minutes
Béla Bartók’s last five years were dominated by political upheaval, financial difficulty, and illness. Bartók’s mother died in December 1939; ten months later Bartók and his wife fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. Grief-stricken over his mother’s death and overwhelmed by the many obstacles confronting a newly arrived immigrant, Bartók fell into a deep depression. Financial hardship caused by lack of interest in and performances of Bartók’s works added further to his despondency. The ultimate blow came in 1942, when Bartók was diagnosed with leukemia. In a letter to his publisher, Bartók wrote, “Artistic creative work generally is the result of outflow of strength, highspiritedness, joy of life, etc.—All these conditions are sadly missing with me at present. Maybe it is a breakdown. Until 60 I could marvellously bear all annoyances and mishaps. But lately, I often wondered how long I will be able to endure all those sad experiences continually exposed to. May be [sic] I reached the limit.”
In the early summer of 1943, conductor Serge Koussevitzky came to visit Bartók in the hospital and offered the composer $1,000 to write an orchestral work for the Koussevitzky Foundation. Bartók agreed, used the money to pay for his medical treatment, and began composing what would become the Concerto for Orchestra in mid-August. In his letters, Bartók noted a parallel between his improving health and his productivity; he completed the Concerto in just seven weeks.
Music reviews noted the general absence of folk influence and the lack of harsh dissonances typical of Bartók’s earlier works. The critic for the Boston Globe wrote, “The style is fairly light, the dissonance is expressive rather than idiomatic, and the five movements are, on the whole, engagingly emotional.” However, many musicians felt Bartók had irretrievably compromised his artistic aesthetic by writing a more “accessible” work clearly tailored for an American audience. Bartók, however, made his position clear: “In order to express our ideas and sentiments through music it is necessary to forsake all that weighs down its flight and to make use of all the means within our reach.”
The Concerto for Orchestra is Bartók’s most performed and most popular composition. The orchestra itself takes on the role of soloist, as each family of instruments takes its turn in the limelight. Bartók described the emotional mood of the movements as a progression: the somber, inescapable theme of the first movement, the joking second, the death lament of the third and the sarcastic, biting wit of the fourth all culminate in a life-affirming finale. The cyclical nature of the music is also commonly interpreted as Bartók’s response to his battle with leukemia. He died in the autumn of 1945, ten months after the Concerto’s premiere.
© Elizabeth Schwartz