MUSIC, TALES & MAGIC

March 11, 2020 | Bohemian National Hall

Narek Hakhnazaryan, cello
Noreen Polera, piano

Illustrated talk by John Brewer

Beethoven — Seven Variations on a theme from Mozart’s The Magic Flute
Grieg — Solveig’s Song
Chopin — Polonaise brillante in C major, Op.3 
Fauré — Apres un rêve
Popper — Dance of the Elves
Grieg — Cello Sonata

Photographs by Rascal Pictures © 2020

PROGRAM NOTES

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Seven Variations on a theme from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’

Variation form was important to Beethoven throughout his career. The range of what he was able to express in such a tightly controlled form is breathtaking. The Variations on ‘Rule Britannia’ (1803) submits the rousing British patriotic song to a kind of comedic deconstruction. At the other extreme, the colossal Diabelli Variations (1819–23) is a profound extended meditation, in which the inner essence of a seemingly trivial theme is revealed. The Seven Variations on a theme from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1801) is at the lighter end of the scale (on the whole), but it also shows how much Beethoven revered the erotic tenderness and playfulness Mozart created, not only in his operas, but in some of his chamber and instrumental works. 

The theme is taken from Act One of The Magic Flute. It’s the duet ‘Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen’ (‘Men who feel love…’), sung by the would-be lovers Pamina and Papageno. At one level it’s comedy – they’re the ‘wrong’ pair of lovers, both destined to find happiness with somebody else – but their longing is genuine enough and so there’s pathos in the music too. Beethoven brings out both aspects in his variations, at the same time developing the idea of intimate dialogue in the way the cello and the piano respond to each other – this is very much a meeting of equals. It’s possible to see it as a kind of practice run for the three great cello sonatas that followed, and yet it’s such a delightful piece of music in its own right. Listening to this, it’s hard to believe that Beethoven was once taken to task for having no sense of humor.

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907)

Solveig’s Song

The English writer Samuel Johnson once said of the poet John Milton that he was ‘a genius who could carve a colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry stones’. The tendency has been to regard the great Norwegian nationalist Edvard Grieg as the opposite case: a genius who could create exquisite miniatures, but who was much less sure of his feet in large-scale forms. (Bear that in mind when you listen to the Cello Sonata – you may well end up disagreeing!) One of his greatest achievements, the incidental score he wrote for Henrik’s Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, composed in 1875, is really a chain of finely wrought short pieces, but what wonderfully tuneful, atmospheric pieces they are! On one level Peer Gynt is a classic ‘picaresque’ hero: a likeable rogue who travels far and wide and has lots of colorful adventures, but in the process he gains depth and even acquires a kind of insight.  The wonderful ‘Solveig’s Song’ is sung by the woman who loves Peer and who keeps his soul safe in her heart. Does she stand for Peer’s better self, or for the Norway to which he eventually must return? Perhaps the best answer is, both and, at the same time, so much more.

Fryderyk Chopin(1810–1849)

Polonaise brillante in C major, Op. 3

Few composers are identified as deeply with their native country as is Fryderyk Chopin – in Poland he’s venerated as a kind of saint – yet he left his homeland at the age of twenty, never to return. Almost all his great ‘nationalist’ works, the piano polonaises, mazurkas and ballades, were composed in exile, particularly in Paris, where he found a large Polish émigré community ready to hang on his every note. The Polonaise brillante is exceptional in two senses: firstly it was completed in 1830, while Chopin was still living in Warsaw (it was one of the very first of his compositions to be published); secondly it introduces another instrument, the cello. (After Chopin left Poland, virtually everything he wrote was for solo piano.) It is based on one of the most distinctive of all Polish dance-forms, the polonaise (or polacca), dominated by the repeated rhythm Da – de-de – Da – da – da – da. The polonaise was becoming popular in Paris at the time Chopin arrived, partly as an expression of sympathy for his then Russian-occupied homeland. He dedicated the Polonaise brillante to the celebrated Austrian cellist Joseph Merk. Merk may not have been Polish, but his playing had a quality that was vital for Chopin: it was ‘so full of soul’, he observed. ‘He is the only cellist I really respect.’

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)

Après un rêve

Gabriel Fauré was another composer who was most himself when painting on smaller canvases. Even his much-loved Requiem (his only regularly-played work for large concert forces) was originally conceived for chamber forces, and as such it’s much easier to imagine it played in a side chapel, at a small, family and friends funeral than in the vast spaces of a cathedral. His songs are superb – beautiful musical miniatures with a fine feeling for the capabilities of the human voice and the nuances of the French language (nowhere near as easy to set as you might think). Après un rêve (‘After a dream’) was the outstanding success of the collection of three songs, Op. 7, published in 1878. It unfolds in a seamless outpouring of melody, supported by glorious harmonies, capturing the aching sense of a beautiful dream, briefly touched then lost forever – one may be reminded of the heartrending words of Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest: ‘when I waked, I cried to dream again’. The arrangement for cello and piano was made by the great cellist Pablo Casals in 1910. It has been so successful that it has even eclipsed the original song. But then, does such a glorious outpouring really need words?

David Popper (1843–1913)

Dance of the Elves

The Bohemian-born cellist David Popper published his scintillating showpiece Dance of the Elves in 1881. At that time virtuoso cellists were a far rarer breed than they are today, and virtuoso cello recitals were even regarded by some musical sophisticates as kind of freak show – it wasn’t until Dvořák’s great Cello Concerto (1894–5) that people began to recognize the instrument’s heroic potential as a concert soloist. A critic at the time wrote of Popper, ‘his tone is large and full of sentiment; his execution highly finished, and his style is classical’, but for all his brilliance and cultivated artistry, Popper could only support himself by playing chamber music (in which he excelled) and by teaching. Dance of the Elvesgives an idea of just how brilliant and accomplished his playing must have been. It’s a racing perpetuum mobile(‘perpetual motion’) with a torrent of rapid repeated notes suggesting tiny but impossibly agile dancers, with more than a background hint of a devilish smile.

Grieg

Cello Sonata

Allegro agitato

Andante molto tranquillo

Allegro molto e marcato

Grieg’s Cello Sonata didn’t have an easy birth, and for years afterwards it met resistance from some musicians and critics. The widespread notion that Grieg was really a miniaturist clearly prejudiced some ears. But Grieg himself had mixed feelings about it too. He composed it in 1882–3, during the typically long, dark Norwegian winter, and seasonal gloom seems to have affected him more than usual. ‘I am both spiritually and bodily unwell’, he complained, ‘and decide every day not to compose another note, because I satisfy myself less and less.’ Around the same time he started, but gave up on a second piano concerto. For quite a while Grieg was inclined to judge the Cello Sonata a failure, but after hearing a performance of it in London, given by the composer Percy Grainger and the cellist Herman Sandby, he realized he’d been terribly hard on himself. ‘There were things that Grainger got much more out of than I myself did, and on the whole I received a grand lesson.’ Later some of the greatest cellists of the twentieth century took it up, and perhaps more importantly, its value as a true duo composition was recognized: why else would Casals and Arthur Rubinstein have been so keen to take it up – or Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter?

In its central slow movement, the Cello Sonata borrows themes from earlier works, significantly all highly nationalistic in tone: the Funeral March in memory of Rikard Nordraak – Nordraak was the composer of the Norwegian national anthem – and the ‘Homage March’ from the incidental music to the play Sigurd Jorsalfar, about the medieval king and Norwegian national icon ‘Sigurd the Crusader’, by another national treasure, playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Nevertheless, as Grieg himself insisted, ‘Music that counts, however national it may be, is yet lifted high above the national level.’ The Cello Sonata’s enduring international success does seem to prove his point. Here, as in so many of the finest Grieg pieces, cozy charm and driving passion combine with what Grainger called the ‘soaring ecstasy of yearning wistfulness’.

Program notes by Stephen Johnson © 2020