Capriccio Italien , Op. 45 Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840 ...

Masterworks 4: Song of Norway – Saturday, January 24, 2009 – Program Notes
Capriccio Italien, Op. 45
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Written: 1880
Movements: One
Style: 19th Century Russian Romanticism
Duration: 15 minutes

After the breakup of his disastrous and short-lived marriage to Antonina Milyukova,

Tchaikovsky was somehow able to complete the opera Eugene Onegin, his Violin Concerto, and the

Fourth Symphony. He spent the next several years flitting about Europe and Russia, unable to write

any music that reflected his personal emotions. Very little of the music of this period reflects the

pathos and power of his recently completed symphony.

During his wanderings, Tchaikovsky stopped in Rome. It was while he was there that he had

the idea to compose an orchestral setting of some Italian folk melodies. Tchaikovsky wrote down

some melodies by ear, and he gleaned others from published collections of folk music. The result

was Capriccio Italien – really a series of loosely linked melodies.

It begins with a trumpet fanfare, said to be the bugle call from an Italian military post. This

leads into a melancholy melody, played by the strings. The fanfare blares again, and a jaunty little

tune, first played by the oboes, follows. The trumpet and violins then play a melody over a vigorous

dance rhythm. The melancholy string theme returns, and then there is a vivacious tarantella – a type

of folk-dance the southern Italian town of Taranto. The oboe theme returns, but this time as a much

slower and pompous melody played by the whole orchestra. The piece ends with a second tarantella

and a brilliant flourish.

© 2008 John P. Varineau

Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16
Edvard Grieg (1843– 1907)
Written: 1868–69
Movements: Three
Style: Romantic
Duration: 30 minutes

Have you noticed how big pronouncements often begin with a drum-roll? How many big,
kitschy medleys of popular hits begin with a timpani roll? Can it be that the genesis of that idea came
from the opening of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto, a piece so popular that no caricature of a
concert pianist would be complete with quoting it? And can it be that such an extroverted opening
could come from the pen of a twenty-five-year-old composer who grew up wanting to be a pastor?

As a child, Grieg took piano lessons from his mother. When he was fifteen, the Norwegian
violinist Ole Bull heard him play. He insisted that he be sent straightaway to the Leipzig
conservatory. He hated the dry piano exercises and repertoire – Czerny and Clementi – that he
studied there. (What teenager doesn’t have these problems?) A change of teachers seemed to help,
but apparently the best part of the conservatory for Grieg was being able to hear so many concerts.
He was back in Norway by the time he turned nineteen. In spite of his success as a pianist back
home, he was unable to make a living at it, so he moved to Denmark. It was there, about five years
later, that Edmund Neupert performed Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor. He wrote to Grieg
about its reception:

“The triumph . . . was tremendous. Even as early as the cadenza in the first
movement the public broke into a real storm. The three dangerous critics, Gade,
Rubinstein, and Hartmann, sat in the stalls and applauded with all their might. I am
to send you greetings from Rubinstein and to say that he is astounded to have heard
a composition of such genius.”
So much for polite audiences and neutral critics!
Grieg didn’t break any new ground with the form of the first movement. It follows the

standard sonata-allegro form with an orderly presentation of various themes in the exposition, a
development primarily on the first theme and the same orderly recapitulation. A mighty cadenza
leads to a short coda.

The second movement is remarkable for the sound produced by the muted string section
and the way Grieg transforms such a hushed beginning melody into a powerful statement by the
piano. The last movement is a rondo where the dance-like main theme alternates with cadenzas and
lyrical and slower melodies. One of those, first played by the flute, appears at the end of the
concerto, played full blast by the orchestra.

About a year after he wrote the concerto, Grieg had the opportunity to visit the greatest
pianist of the nineteenth century, Franz Liszt. Liszt sight-read the concerto and was duly impressed.
“Persevere,” he exclaimed. “I tell you, you have the gifts – do not let them intimidate you!”

© 2008 John P. Varineau

Concerto for Orchestra
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Written: 1943
Movements: Five
Style: Contemporary
Duration: 36 minutes

Béla Bartók was safe in America after fleeing the horrors of World War II Europe, but he
was not a happy or well man. He was poor, desperately homesick and, although he didn’t know it
yet, dying from a form of leukemia. One bright spot during his American sojourn was that he was
able to carry on his life-long passion, the study of folk music. As a visiting assistant at Harvard, he
researched some 2600 as yet unclassified recordings of Yugoslav – as it was called then – Folk
music. But he wasn’t writing any new music. Finally, two Hungarian compatriots, Joseph Szigeti and
Fritz Reiner, approached Serge Koussevitsky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony, and asked

him to commission a work from Bartók. Even though Koussevitsky wasn’t particularly fond of
Bartók’s music, he agreed and personally delivered the first check to Bartók.

Bartók wrote the Concerto for Orchestra in less than two months. Bartók provided a short
outline of it: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a
gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death song of the
third, to the life assertion of the last one.”

Is this piece really a concerto, or is it a symphony? Actually, it is almost both. Bartók
explained:

“The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat of
single instruments or instruments groups in a soloistic manner. The “virtuoso” treatment
appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement
(among the brass instruments), or in the ‘perpetual motion- like’ passage of the main theme
in the last movement (played by the strings) and, especially, in the second movement, in
which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages.”
Bartók got virtually all of the important material for the various movements from his studies
of folk music. For example, the first two themes in the first movement resemble Hungarian folk
song. The bassoons play a melody in the second movement resembling a Yugoslav round dance, and
the clarinets play in the style of a Dalmatian folk song. But this is not obvious to the listener.
Bartók’s genius is the way he abstracts those elements and then uses them within “traditional”
classical music.
The first and last movements of the Concerto for Orchestra are in a standard “sonata” form
with an exposition area introducing the main themes, a development section and then a restatement
of those main themes. A chain of short sections, each played by a pair of wind instruments, makes
up the second movement. The brass interrupt with a short chorale, and then the five pairs of winds

return. The fourth movement features two folk-like melodies. Bartók interrupts that movement with
a quotation from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and then restores the peace with a return
of the two themes. The central movement, what Bartók calls the “death song,” is a nocturnal setting
of one of the themes from the first movement.

Bartók’s health was good enough for him to hear the premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra
in December of 1944. However, he was still desperately homesick: “. . . I would like to go Home –
forever.” The war had ended, but his wish could not be granted. In September of 1945, his health
took a turn for the worse. He died in New York.

© 2008 John P. Varineau