Read below for program notes for the Classics Series concert A Hero’s Life on January 11 – 12. Program notes are written by Jeremy Reynolds Copyright © 2024.
Ein Heldenleben
Are musical keys tied to certain emotions? Can D Major sound “sunny” or C Minor “fateful?” Despite plenty of flowery essays by different musicologists, there’s no science to suggest that this is the case. Key signatures are more about utility, as some instruments play more idiomatically in certain keys and composers’ own prior associations with certain keys and songs. That said, there’s certainly a strong historical tradition of associating particular keys with explicit characteristics.
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, for example, the “Eroica,” cemented E-flat as the heroic key. He’d later follow up with his “Emperor” piano concerto and “Grand” sonata, also in the same key. Later composers, including Strauss, would continue this convention. His tone poem A Hero’s Life is actually a response to Beethoven’s “Eroica:” “Since Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ is so unpopular with our conductors today and hence rarely performed, I am filling the void with a tone poem of substantial length on a similar theme,” he wrote. (Already in the late 19th century, the “Eroica” was being programmed frequently enough to irk some composers, a trend that hasn’t abated.)
The tone poem begins with cellos and horns playing an expansive, noble tune that leaps up an E-flat arpeggio. This is the hero’s tune and recurs frequently — Strauss soon contrasts with a more fragmented, lyrical melody in the winds, alternating these elements to establish his protagonist’s duality.
Beethoven initially chose Napoleon as his heroic subject, though he later crossed out the dedication in disgust after Napoleon declared himself emperor. Strauss, the rascal, was a bit more narcissistic and inserted something of himself as his own “hero,” as he found himself “no less interesting than Napoleon,” he told a critic at the time. The “Hero’s Critics,” then, are snide interjections from woodwinds and tubas, mocking and biting. The tubas, in particular, represent an actual Viennese critic, a certain Doktor Dehring. (Not to go too in-depth into musical theory, but Dehring was quite fussy about the rules of harmony and counterpoint, which Strauss gleefully broke with the parallel fifth intervals in the tubas just to mock him. Again: rascal.) And indeed, the critics were not kind to this new work, calling it a “monstrous act of egotism” and “as revolting a picture of this revolting man as one might ever encounter.”
The companion is Strauss’ wife, who he called a “very complex, very much a woman, a little depraved, something of a flirt, never twice alike, every moment different from what she was the moment before.” She can be heard in the violin solo in this movement, which dialogues with the hero’s music. Performance directions for the orchestra in this section include non-musical terms like “hypocritically languishing,” “frivolously,” “tenderly,” “arrogantly,” “amiably,” “naggingly,” and “lovingly.” It’s quite a portrait.
The battle is an extended development of the earlier material as he works to balance his own nature with his critics’ and his companion’s. Strauss employs militant brass and percussion here to symbolize the contest. The “Hero’s Works of Peace” quotes extensively from Strauss’ other tone poems including Don Quixote and Don Juan — he was truly the master of this symphonic genre. It is perhaps the most obviously autobiographical section. The finale features the English horn heavily, and though somber at times, builds to a resolute final choir in the brass that brings the hero’s journey to a satisfying close.
If love will not swing wide the gates
Composer Gabriel Kahane’s best-known work, Craigslistlieder, sets real Craigslist ads to music. Born to a psychologist mother and pianist father, the Brooklyn-based Kahane has developed a unique niche as both composer and singer-songwriter and has collaborated frequently with names like Rufus Wainwright and Sufjan Stevens.
Kahane wrote his concerto If love will not swing wide the gates specifically for clarinetist Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist in the New York Philharmonic. The composer describes the work himself as follows:
When Anthony McGill and I began discussing a clarinet concerto, we settled on a concept around the winding relationship between Black and Jewish communities in the 20th century: in music and civil rights, through moments of allyship and of ugly prejudice. I compiled a reading list and began my research.
Almost at once, I ran headlong into a quandary: There is, of course, no single Jewish community, just as there is no single Black community. One can hardly define a single community, let alone the dynamic between two, without being wildly reductive. Indeed, contemporary politics in the West is poisoned by the tendency among many to reduce large groups of people to cartoonish monoliths, while demonstrating little curiosity about the contradictions that exist not only within a group, but within a single person.
I abandoned the extramusical concept and began writing intuitively, thinking only of the glorious sound that emerges from Anthony’s instrument, which is itself a conduit to his capacious heart and mind. What emerged was a work in three continuous movements, with an intermezzo and cadenza between the second and third, all bookended by a mirrored, languid introduction and coda.
When it came time to give the work a title, I studied the score, looking for clues as to its “theme.” I’m a skeptic as far as fixed meaning in music is concerned, but there seemed to be something openhearted in the piece: no matter its tempo, texture, or character, I thought, love was never far from the surface.
A few days later, I stumbled upon this quotation from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: “The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs — as who has not? — of human love, God’s love alone is left.”
Ours is an era in which love is mostly absent from politics and the public square. So perhaps, in the end, I wrote the piece I’d set out to create in the first place. I had wanted to examine the relationship between two communities as a case study in coalition building whose goal is the creation of a more humane society. While there is little about which we can generalize, I will say confidently, with Baldwin, that if love will not swing wide the gates, nothing will.
Peer Gynt Suites
The Norwegian folk legend Peer Gynt is not the hero of his own tale.
In the writer Henrik Ibsen’s four-hour epic play, Gynt leaves his home and the love of a faithful woman to selfishly seek his fortune. He encounters trolls and princesses and more in faraway lands — or possibly just in his head; it’s quite surreal at times — before returning to his homeland wiser for his trials. His comfort in the arms of his beloved is real; whether his soul is redeemed is ambiguous.
Ibsen asked composer Edvard Grieg, Norway’s brightest and most mature musical star, to compose incidental music for the play in 1874. Grieg struggled for two years with the work as he wove Norwegian folk music into the DNA of the piece, humanizing Gynt and softening some of the more ghastly edges of the play with tuneful, colorful music.
The premiere proved a smash success, but Grieg was unhappy with the theater’s constant interference in his work, as executives demanded certain lengths for different parts based on the needs of the play. All told, Grieg composed 26 individual selections for the play, later extracting two suites of four movements each.
Both suites feature commonly in the orchestral canon today, with the movement “In the Hall of the Mountain King” catching the public’s ear in a special way. That tune in particular has wormed its way into pop culture like few other classical works, though Grieg himself came to loathe the piece: “It absolutely reeks of cow pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism, and trollish self-sufficiency!” It’s a simple tune repeated over and over, building in intensity and speed until a ferocious climax.
The “Morning Mood” begins with a flute solo that blooms and passes off to the oboe, winds adding harmonic color and building in tempo and volume until the strings take over, which Grieg described as “the sun breaking through the clouds at the first forte.”
“Peer Gynt’s Homecoming” is a burst of excitement that accompanies a stormy evening at sea in the play that robs Gynt of all of his earthly possessions as the wind blows through winds percussion thunder. Finally, “Solveig’s Song,” named after Gynt’s faithful love at home, is forlorn but beautiful, an exquisitely melancholy melody for strings that brightens in the middle section.
Born into a musical family, Grieg’s talent for playing the piano carried him quickly to the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany, about which he complained quite loudly, later writing: “I must admit, unlike Svendsen, that I left Leipzig Conservatory just as stupid as I entered it. Naturally, I did learn something there, but my individuality was still a closed book to me.” Later, he began composing works for the piano, demonstrating a rare talent for ear-catching melodies.