Classics 8: From the Golden City



Georges Bizet
1838-1875

Georges Bizet
L'arlésienne Suite No. 1

Georges Bizet was yet another of those composers who showed precocious brilliance as a child but never lived long enough to completely fulfill the promise. The difference, however, between Bizet and Mozart, who died at about the same age, is that Mozart left over 600 completed compositions, many of them masterpieces, while Bizet is known primarily for a single work, the opera Carmen.

In 1872 Bizet, hard up for money, composed incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet called L’arlésienne (The Girl from Arles). The plot concerns a girl who has been unfaithful to her fiancé who, unable to forget her, jumps to his death from a bridge. Embroiled in a war between the proponents of “high” art and “low” art, the critics refused to come and the play closed after 21 performances to an empty house. But Bizet did not let his incidental music, containing 27 numbers, go to waste. He extracted an orchestral suite that has remained popular in the repertory. After the composer’s death, his friend Ernest Guiraud arranged a second suite that has become equally popular. Both suites entail considerably revisions of the original incidental music, which was scored for only 26 musicians, including a saxophone. While we do not know exactly how the incidental music fit into the plot, it conjures up the folk dances of the lovely setting in Provence, coupled with the atmosphere of doom of the play.

Suite No.1 opens with the Prelude of the play, a set of variations, featuring the different sections of the orchestra.

A second theme is a lovely saxophone melody

leading into a final melancholic, almost threatening, theme that suggests the tension of the drama to follow.

The second movement, Minuetto, was the intermezzo to Act I. It retains the classic symphonic form with repeated strains

and a contrasting trio that features a different orchestration than the minuet itself.

The Adagietto is a lovely romance for strings alone.

A majestic finale, Carillon, imitates the sound of church bells

, followed by a beautiful contrasting melody featuring some beautiful writing for high winds.



Camille Saint-Saëns
1835-1921

Camille Saint-Saëns
Cello Concerto in a Minor, Op. 33

Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy, writing his first piano compositions at age three. At age ten he made his formal debut at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, playing Mozart and Beethoven piano concertos. In his youth he was considered an innovator, but by the time he reached maturity he had become a conservative pillar of the establishment, trying to maintain the classical musical tradition in France and expressing open disdain for the new trends in music, including the “malaise” of Wagnerism. As an accomplished organist and pianist– he premiered his five piano concertos – his technique was elegant, effortless and graceful. But neither his compositions nor his pianism were ever pinnacles of passion or emotion. Berlioz noted that Saint-Saëns “...knows everything but lacks inexperience.”

The defeat of France at the hands of Prussia in 1871 shocked the country’s pride and spurred a revival of French arts and letters. One of the results was the founding by Saint-Saëns and his colleagues of the Société Nationale de Musique, whose motto and purpose was “Ars gallica” (French art). One of its results was the establishment of three newly energized competing symphony orchestras in Paris by three great conductors - Édouard Colonne, Jules-Étienne Pasdeloup and Charles Lamoureux - who urgently looked for new works by French composers.

Saint-Saëns composed the Cello Concerto in a minor in 1872 in response to this demand. It is in three continuous movements with no pauses, similar to the Cello Concerto by Robert Schumann. Unlike the standard classical concerto, Saint-Saëns's Concerto opens with only a single orchestral chord and the soloist introducing the principal themes. The first one is an assertive and virtuosic melody that will be used throughout the Concerto as a unifying device.

The cello also introduces the standard contrasting second theme in the relative major mode.

(Note how the flute sneaks in with the Concerto's motto.) The exposition concludes with an energetic closing motive.

There is virtually no development section in this movement, merely a varied restatement of the themes in order. The second theme gradually softens the mood and the music glides into the second movement, an understated minuet in the orchestra.

When the cello enters, it plays a counter-melody over the minuet

and then a little waltz on its own.

Again, the end of the Minuet blends without pause into the Finale.

While many nineteenth century works bring back the opening theme at the very end as a way of providing closure and an arch-like structure, Saint-Saëns expands greatly on this architectural concept. The Finale, the longest of the movements, continues the development of the opening theme of the concerto but also includes a new more expansive second theme,

as well as a burst of new thematic material, including a little orchestral refrain, and, of course, rapid scales, arpeggios and high harmonics that permit the soloist to indulge in virtuoso brilliance.

The Concerto concludes with a restatement of the opening theme and the closing motive from the first movement plus a coda that accelerates the tempo for a dramatic finish.



Antonin Dvorák
1841-1904

Antonin Dvorák
Symphony No. 9 in e Minor, Op. 95,

Antonín Dvorák’s sojourn in the United States from 1892 to 1895 came about through the efforts of Mrs. Jeanette B. Thurber. A dedicated and idealistic proponent of an American national musical style, she underwrote and administered the first American music conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Because of Dvorák’s popularity throughout Europe, he was Thurber’s first choice for a director. He, in turn, was probably lured to the big city so far from home by both a large salary and convictions regarding musical nationalism that paralleled Mrs. Thurber’s own.

Thirty years before his arrival in New York Dvorák had read Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation and was eager to learn more about the Native American and African American music, which he believed should be the basis of the American style of composition. He also shared with Mrs. Thurber the conviction that the National Conservatory should admit Negro students. One of them, Henry Burleigh, who became an important African American composer in his own right, is credited with exposing his teacher to African American spirituals.

While his knowledge of authentic Native American music is questionable – his exposure came through samples transcribed for him by American friends and through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – he became familiar with Negro spirituals through one of his students, as well as indirectly via the songs of Stephen Foster. He incorporated both of these styles into the Symphony No. 9, composed while he was in New York.

Just as Dvorák never quoted Bohemian folk music directly in his own nationalistic music, he did not use American themes in their entirety. Rather, he incorporated characteristic motives into his own unsurpassed gift for melody. Nevertheless, any listener with half an ear can discern fragments of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” in the second theme of the first movement,

as well as “Massa Dear” (also known as “Goin’ Home”) in the famous English horn solo in the second movement.

We can deduce the importance of these musical motives from the fact that they appear as reminiscences in more than one movement, especially in the finale.

The symphony, however, is hardly an American pastiche; the second motive in the largo movement is a phrase of wrenching musical longing that many listeners interpret as the composer’s nostalgia for his native Bohemia.

Other melodies, such as the principal theme of the first movement, seem to have no particular origin beyond the composer's inspiration.

It is curious that Dvorák seemed to make no distinction between the folk music of American slaves and American Indians. While the second movement uses a theme from African America spirituals, the composer also claimed that it had been inspired by Longfellow’s epic, perhaps by Minnehaha’s forest funeral. The third movement as well, in its rhythmic thumping, its use of the pentatonic scale and the orchestration dominated by winds and percussion is meant to portray an Indian ceremonial dance described in Longfellow’s poem.

Incidentally, Dvorák had also intended to compose an opera on Hiawatha, which never even approached completion. But his symphonic use of what he believed to be an authentic Native American musical idiom may have represented his initial ideas for the opera.

One of the most important features of the Symphony is its thematic coherence. Whatever the origin of the melodies, they all have a modular characteristic in that they can be mixed and matched in many different ways. In the finale Dvorák brings nearly all of the Symphony's themes together, sometimes as one long combined melody,

sometimes in contrapuntal relationship to each other.