The last opera of Shostakovich

“We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read”, thus the great and fictitious restaurant critic Anton Ego in the movie Ratatouille. Every artist, whether a performer or a creator, is acquainted with the sinking feeling of opening the morning newspaper or the website, skimming through the content (the eyes stop on their own at key words), and then the growing realisation that the show, the book, the movie, the exhibition were slaughtered by the critic. But in our everyday experience, whether the artist was offended or not, the entire thing stays within the inter-personal field: as a dialogue between the critic and the artist (with the readers´ crowd for audience). But imagine a cardinally different situation – living under a dictatorship, where art is carefully monitored by the regime, and woe to the artist who treads a path frowned upon by the powers above! In such a case the ramifications of a bad review, especially one that reflects the regime´s opinion, might go much further than just a bruised ego.

 Such was the situation in Soviet Russia in 1936, when Dmitry Shostakovich, the young and well-known composer, bought the Pravda from the 28th of January. Almost at once he stumbled upon an editorial titled Chaos instead of music. The subtitle explained: “about the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” – an opera which Shostakovich finished composing in 1930 and which was at that time being staged at the Bolshoi, the main opera house of Moscow. And under those titles came the most slaughtering of slaughtering reviews:

 “From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase, are drowned, emerge again, and disappear in a grinding and squealing roar. To follow this “music” is most difficult; to remember it, impossible…

Here is music turned deliberately inside out in order that nothing will be reminiscent of classical opera, or have anything in common with symphonic music or with simple and popular musical language accessible to all…

 While our critics, including music critics, swear by the name of socialist realism, the stage serves us, in Shostakovich’s creation, the coarsest kind of naturalism…

 And all this is coarse, primitive and vulgar. The music quacks, grunts, and growls, and suffocates itself in order to express the love scenes as naturalistically as possible. And “love” is smeared all over the opera in the most vulgar manner…” (trans. Victor Seroff)

 And it goes on and on – “shrieks”, “cacophony”, “noise”, “nervous, convulsive, and spasmodic music” – the critic didn´t like, to put it mildly (we will return later to the question of that anonymous critic´s identity). But while the quotes above could have – theoretically – appeared in a review dated from our time (with the exception of the “socialist realism”, to which we will also come back), the following lines would have caused greater bewilderment:

 “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music. As though deliberately, he scribbles down his music, confusing all the sounds in such a way that his music would reach only the effete “formalists” who had lost all their wholesome taste. He ignored the demands of Soviet culture…

 

…[this] carries into the theatre and into music the most negative features of “Meyerholdism” infinitely multiplied…

 

The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching, and science.

 

Here we have “leftist” confusion instead of natural human music. The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacrificed to a petty-bourgeois, “formalist” attempt to create originality through cheap clowning…

 

These paragraphs read as a political, rather than an aesthetic accusation, and were more dangerous by far. This is hard for us to grasp – why was the music expected to be… anything at all? Shouldn´t every artist create whatever stems from his own talent and his own inner world? And shouldn´t Art be judged only upon its own artistic faults and virtues?

To understand this, one must explain the official stand on art in the Soviet Union. “Art belongs to the people”, proclaimed Lenin, and as such art was bound to serve the people to whom it belonged (this, of course, was only a slogan; in reality, art “belonged”to those who had the power to permit or to prohibit the publication of a written text, the staging of a play or the filming of a movie – the Communist Party and those leading it). Art had to be catchy, simple, clear and accessible to all. In the 20´s there was still place in the Soviet Union for a multi-voiced artistic discourse, including, among others, avant-guard theatre, abstract painting, symbolist and nonsense poetry. But since the early 30´s, together with the ongoing struggle against the “enemies” within the Party (i.e. opposition, real or staged), the regime started severely censuring every art movement which strayed from the artistic ideology proscribed by the state – that selfsame socialist realism, by the name of which the music critics swore.

 What was this strange beast? The official definition was given in 1934 at the first congress of the USSR Writers´ Union. An artist creating according to the principles of the socialist realism was expected to offer a “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.” Couldn´t be clearer, could it? What it meant was that the artist was expected to stick to the truth, but only to that truth which suited the “ideological transformation” led by the Party. In addition, the demands for simplicity, clarity, accessibility were preserved – they were all united under the affable word narodnost´ – which can be loosely translated as “folksiness”. 

 Formalism, of which the opera was accused, was the embodiment of all things contrary to those demands. The historical roots of the definition relate to an artistic concept according to which form supersedes content in importance. But in the Soviet Union of the 30´s the term became an ideological cliche, and was applied to every work of art which was perceived as being “elitist”, and as such distanced from the people and from the demands of the socialist realism.

 Shostakovich himself had been previously accused of being a formalist, including for Lady Macbeth, but had heretofore always defended himself bravely. In April 1935 he wrote in the newspaper Izvestia: “In the past I was harshly condemned by the critics, first and foremost for formalism. I categorically refused to accept those accusations and will not accept them. I never was and never will be a formalist. Slandering a work as formalist only because its language is complex, or because it is not immediately apparent, is an impermissible recklessness.” Responding in such a way at those times was an admirable feat of bravery and artistic integrity.

 But now there was no one to respond to. The review was published anonymously – as an editorial – at the official Party newspaper. Herein lied the danger: such accusations, in particular when they came from such a source, were reason enough for artistic blacklisting, public persecution, and in extreme cases for arrest, exile and even death. One needn´t look far to find an example: Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was mentioned by the critic (Shostakovich, according to him, brought “Meyerholdian” traits into the opera), was one of the greatest theatre directors of Russia. After the October Revolution he applied himself excitedly to the Socialist cause, and in the 20´s even enjoyed the regime´s plaudits. But towards the 30´s, a change in his artistic attitude led his plays to become increasingly abstract, grotesque and bitterly satirical. Those changes distanced him from the party´s line, and caused an unending stream of accusations of formalism. His art was denounced as foreign to the people and hostile to the realities of Soviet life. His end was tragic. In 1938 his theatre was shut down. A year later he was arrested, interrogated, and under harsh torture  made to “confess” to betraying his motherland and spying for the “capitalist enemy”: the British and the Japanese. In 1940 he was executed by firing squad. Prior to that, near the time of his arrest, his wife, the actress Zinaida Reich, was murdered in their apartment by multiple knife stabs.

 They were not the only ones – in those years (and in fact, all through the existence of the Soviet regime), there was not a single person in the Soviet Union who could vouch for his own safety, the safety of his family or at least for his working place. Nothing granted protection from the regime – neither one´s position in the Party, nor one´s previous achievements, and certainly not one´s artistic talent. Therefore, the following sentence from the review reads especially dark and threatening: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.”

 ***

 Some of you might now be curious to know what happened in the opera, and what this formalistic monstrosity sounded like. To start with, a few words about the plot: Katerina, a young woman, is married since five years to the merchant Zinovij Izmailov. Loveless and without children, Katerina is ready to claw walls out of endless boredom and sexual yearning:

 “…but no one will come to me,
no one will put his hand round my waist,
no one will press his lips to mine.
No one will stroke my white breast,
no one will tire me out with his passionate embraces.”

 Her husband lacks a backbone, and his old father, Boris, rules over house and trade with an iron fist. The merchant Zinovij departs the house – a dam has been breached, and his presence is necessary – and before leaving presents a new labourer, Sergey, handsome and arrogant, of whom the rumours whisper: was thrown out of his previous master´s house for getting involved in an affair with the mistress herself. Katerina encounters him chasing the cook in the head of a group of trade workers (today this scene is often staged as a gang rape), and their quarrel, which includes a bit of manhandling, excites him so strongly that he sneaks up to her room that night, to “borrow a book”. Books she has none: she herself is illiterate, and her husband doesn´t read books – but their conversation, which at first concerns Katerina´s bitter fate and Sergey´s “sensitive” soul, soon slides onto other rails. Sergey overcomes Katerina´s resistance (she is torn between her yearning for Sergey and the vow of chastity she had sworn to her husband) and carries her to the marital bed, accompanied by some very graphical music indeed (in 1935, the New York Sun critic dubbed it “pornophony”, which, one must admit, is pretty close to the truth).

 Sergey is not the only one wishing for Katerina´s company. Her father-in-law, Boris, walks around the courtyard with a lantern, lurking for thieves, and upon seeing the light in Katerina´s window, decides to visit her too:

 “Seems she can’t sleep;
of course, she’s a young woman;
hot‑blooded too
and there’s no one to console her.
Ah!
Now if I were younger,
just ten years or so,
what I’d do!
She’d have it hot from me;
hot, yes, by God, so hot,
it’d even be good enough for her!
A healthy woman like that
and no man around, no man,
no man, no man ,
no man, no man around;
no man, no man at all.
No man, no man,
no man, no man;
it’s dull for a woman without a man,
I’ll go and see her, yes I will!”

 

But too late – he hears the lovers part, realises right away what was going on (“You´re too late, Boris Timofeyevich!”), and rushes to catch Sergey as he climbs down the drainpipe. The punishment: 500 lashes given by his own hand, and all the while Katerina cries in supplication and hate and struggles against the labourers who hold her. When Sergey faints and the rest of the punishment is postponed to the following day (“We can´t do too much at once, or he´ll peg out.”), Boris, hungry and tired, orders Katerina to bring him food. She brings some mushroom – leftovers from dinner – which please him a great deal (“They’re delicious mushrooms, you’re really an expert, Katerina, at preparing mushrooms”). But they soon seem to accord with him less: Katerina had put rat poison in his dish. Suffering terribly Boris Timofeyevich dies, and is buried.

 Katerina´s husband hasn´t returned yet, the father-in-law is done away with, and she enjoys a short spell of happiness (“Kiss me!…Not like that, not like that; kiss me so it hurts my lips and the blood rushes to my head and the icons fall from their shelves”). But Sergey refuses to cooperate. He is “not like other men, who don’t care about anything, so long as they’ve got a woman’s soft body to caress.” How can he, with his “sensitive soul”, see Katerina go to bed with her lawful husband? She calms him – “that won´t happen”. And indeed it doesn´t. One night her husband returns, accuses Katerina of cheating (“Everything, everything we´ve heard about your affairs, everything, everything), struggles with her, she calls Sergey to protect her, and together they overpower Zinovij and strangle him. “Get a priest…”, gurgles Zinovij, as Sergey lets go for a moment.  “I´ll give you a priest all right!” answers Sergey, and hits Zinovij over the head with a heavy candlestick. After the deed, Sergey drags the body into the basement  by the light of Katerina´s candle, and hides it there. “Now you are my husband”, says Katerina.

 But their joy doesn´t last for long. On their wedding day, a “shabby little man”, as he is called in the libretto, sneaks into the basement, looking for a bottle or two of vodka, and discovers the body. Terrified, he runs to the police. The accompanying music, however, radiates pure schadenfreude and even a kind of grotesque happiness derived from the entire affair. The singer Galina Vishnevskaya, one of the greatest interpreters of Katerina´s role, recalls in her memoir “Galina: the story of a life” (1991), that Shostakovich used to say about this scene: “to the police he runs, the bastard –  delighted he is going to inform… a hymn to the informers… it´s a hymn to all the informers!”

 At home, during the wedding feast, Katerina notices the open basement door, and full of real terror, entreats Sergey to leave everything and run away. But too late – the polices already knocks at the gate (“You didn´t invite us, but here we are anyway! A little matter has arisen!…. There´s a little matter of a certain kind, to put it bluntly, a matter!”). Katerina gives herself up, Sergey tries to resist arrest but in vain. They are sentenced to a public flogging and exile to Siberia.

 On the long and hard road to Siberia, Sergey´s “sensitive” soul tires of Katerina and he begins to woo another beautiful and young woman – Sonetka. She, on the other hand, feels no rush to oblige by granting him “his heart´s desire”, and demands a proof of his love. And what proof? Her stocking are torn, and she is cold. Let him get her another pair. Sergey exploits Katerina´s unwavering love for him and obtains the stockings, seemingly for himself. When Katerina sees her stocking on Sonetka´s legs, all becomes clear to her. And Sonetka even mocks her:

“Thank you, Katerina Lvovna,
thank you, Katerina Lvovna,
thank you for the stockings!
Look how fine they look
on my legs.
Seryozha put them on for me
and kissed my legs to make them warm!
Oh, Seryozha, my Seryozha,
Katerina’s a fool,
she couldn’t keep Sergey.
Ha, what a fool! Ha, what a fool!
And you won’t see your stockings again.
They’re mine now, look!
I’m warm now!”

 

Katerina doesn´t say a word. After a few moments, when she sees Sonetka standing on the edge of a cliff and looking down, she slowly approaches her, grabs her in her arms and together with her jumps into the foaming waters. End.

 Indeed, this is no pleasant or easy entertainment. But what those paragraphs cannot convey is the boundless emotional power of the music that accompanies those rather horrible events. Like a mighty river flow, the tension doesn´t ease up from Katerina´s entry aria till the last knock of the timpani and the shouting chord that ends the opera. And all that time the music reflects not only the transpiring events, but first and foremost the feelings of the participants. Shostakovich distills the most basic feelings: fear, desperation, hate – but also passion, love, hope for happiness – and pours them into an aural picture projected to us, the listeners.

 It is as if he broke the unspoken theatrical conventions, and instead of presenting us with theatrical feelings, penetrated deep into the tangible life with a might which permits no indifference on the listener´s part: under the music´s sway the listener is bound to feel. The effect is almost scary in its strength, and therein lies, in my opinion, a large part of the opera´s psychological power. 

***

 Luckily one can find online the Soviet musical film which was based on the opera, made in 1966, in its entirety:

This is based on a shortened and edited version of the score, but among the existing recordings, I feel it´s hard to find another one so true to the spirit of the work, and which can boast of such a musical cast. (Moreover, it seems to me that the opera benefits from its very being filmed: the acting and the editing enhance the music a lot). Galina Vishnevskaya, whom I mentioned above, is the only one to both sing and act in the movie – the rest of the participants are movie actors, who “sing” in lip-sync with the singers.

 I can warmly recommend watching the entire movie, but here´s a shortlist of the strongest moments: Sergey´s being flogged by Boris (41:25), the poisoning of Boris (44:53); Zinovij return and death (1:05:04); the scene with the shabby little man (1:11:06, and especially the orchestral interlude at 1:14:00); the song of the exiled to Siberia (1:22:49 – “O, you, road ploughed by chains, / the road to Siberia, sown with bones, / this road has been watered with blood and sweat, / death groans arise from it…”); the purest, most lyrical moment of the opera – Katerina´s words to Sergey as they meet after a day´s march (1:29:12 – “Seryozha, my dearest! At last! I´ve gone the whole day without seeing you, Seryozha! Even the pain in my legs has gone, and the tiredness, and the grief, now you are with me…”). And finally, her final monologue, terrible in its disconnectedness, after Sergey´s betrayal, as for the first time since the opera began she understands what she´d done, and we see the dark chasm yawning before her (1:38:10):

 “In the wood, right in a grove, there is a lake,
almost round and very deep
and the water in it is black,
black like my conscience.
And when the wind blows in the wood,
on the lake waves rise up,
huge waves and then it’s frightening,
in autumn there are always waves on the lake
and the water’s black and the waves huge.
Huge, black waves…”

 

***

Who then wrote the review in the Pravda? And why did it only appear two years after the opera´s premiere – when the opera had already seen more than 170 performances in Moscow and Leningrad (to say nothing about premieres in London, New York, Zurich, Stockholm, Buenos Aires et al)? And what of all the previous reviews in the Soviet press, which were nothing but stellar: “the first classical Soviet opera”, “a great victory of the Soviet music”…?

 The archive information points to David Zaslavsky as being the review´s author. Zaslavsky (1879-1965) was a talented yet unscrupulous journalist, who changed political sides whenever it was worth his while. A Menshevik during the revolution, he joined forces with the Bolsheviks thereafter, and took part, among others, in the persecutions of the poets Ossip Mandelshtam and Boris Pasternak (two stories that ended badly: Mandelshtam was exiled to Siberia in 1938, but died of illness before reaching it – even though one did not walk that way anymore, it still remained “sown with bones”. Pasternak died of lung cancer in 1960, two years after the prolonged persecutions in the media and the heavy social pressure made him decline the Nobel Prize in literature).

 But the question is, did Zaslavky write the review on his own, or was he acting upon orders from above? Here we enter an area of speculations, but it´s hard not to connect the review´s appearance with Stalin and his entourage visiting the Bolshoi and seeing the opera two days before that, on the 26th of January 1936. Stalin loved opera, frequented the Bolshoi and even had favourites among the singers. But all evidence agrees that he loved melodic, easy to follow tunes, loved the Russian operas of the 19th century – Prince Igor, The Queen of Spades, Ivan Susanin – as well as folk music.

 Moreover – he did not tolerate any kind of unbecoming behaviour or attire. Vishnevskaya, the singer, recalls in her book how disgusted Stalin became seeing Tatyana in a light morning gown in the last scene of Tchaikovsky´s Eugene Onegin – a scene, in which according to Pushkin she is “sitting peaked and wan, / alone, with no adornment on;” (trans. C. Johnston).

 Seeing her thus unadorned, with Onegin before her, Stalin cried: “how can a woman appear before a man like this?!” And since that day, writes Vishnevskaya, Tatyana always wore a heavy velvet dress in that scene, her hair arranged for an evening ball – and to the devil with Pushkin.

 And now Stalin was presented with Lady Macbeth, with its piercing, strident musical language, light years away from Tchaikovsky´s nobility or Borodin´s colourful folk-like melodies – Shostakovich´s music was soaked with passion and lust, full of explicitly sexual scenes. It´s not surprising to discover that Stalin left the theatre before the final act, infuriated.

 In juxtaposition to Stalin´s personal tastes, Solomon Volkov, author of Shostakovich and Stalin: the artist and the Tsar (2004), presents a line of political reasoning to explain Stalin´s reaction to the opera. Stalin, writes Volkov, was at the time leading a wide anti-formalistic campaign in all the arts; the Pravda was publishing one anti-formalistic article after the other – against formalism in cinematography (13th of February, 1936), in architecture (Feb 20th), in painting (March 1st), in the theatre (March 9th). The review of Lady Macbeth becomes in such an analysis a single link of a bigger chain: the regime needed an appropriate negative example in the field of music, and Lady Macbeth fit the bill. From the ethical point of view as well, continues Volkov, the opera did not agree with the line led by the Party at that time – the agenda was strengthening the institute of the Soviet family: obstacles were being put before those who wanted to divorce; abortions were outlawed, and photographs of Stalin with young kids were often published in newspapers. And here came an opera lauding “free love” (or as the critic put it, “a glorification of the merchants’ lust”), in which the divorce problem is solved simply and brutally – by killing the hated husband.

 The combination of those two reasons can possibly explain the double-edged nature of the review´s accusations: aesthetic on one side (“a confused stream of sound”), and political on the other (Shostakovich “ignored the demands of Soviet culture”). But whether the hit came from here or from there, after the review was published, the days of Lady Macbeth on the stage of the Bolshoi were counted – the run was closed down after just three more performances. Within less than a month the composers of Moscow and Leningrad published condemning resolutions, and the opera was stricken out of the repertoire of the Soviet theatres till 1962, when it was staged again in a second, shortened and edited version, created by Shostakovich in 1955 (this is the version upon which the movie mentioned above was made).

 

***

Shostakovich, as opposed to many other in that era, was not arrested, was not exiled, was not executed, his immediate family remained unharmed. In the creative field, we, as observers from the future, can too say that he came out victorious – his next large-scale symphonic work, which was called “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism” (i.e, one which was seen by the regime as Shostakovich´s agreement to compose within the limits set by the Party), was his Fifth Symphony – one of the pinnacles of the symphonic composition of the 20th century, and perhaps Shostakovich´s most popular work in concert halls today.

 His following relationship with the Soviet government followed the carrot and stick approach – though one must admit that in Shostakovich´s case the number of carrots exceeded the norm – five Stalin prizes, five orders of Lenin and one Lenin prize, Hero of Socialist Labour, order of the October Revolution, USSR State prize and many others. The stick, when it came, was just one but very heavy. In 1948, Shostakovich topped the list of the composers accused of formalism and of distancing themselves from the people. The vast majority of his works were blacklisted, he was fired from the Moscow Conservatory, all his privileges and those of his family were rescinded, and till Stalin´s death in 1953 he was forced make a living out of writing film music (work which he hated) and a few pro-Party pieces. The public condemnation and the persecutions in the media need not be mentioned – those were self-evident.

 The cynics will say – so what, even then he wasn´t arrested, he wasn´t exiled, he wasn´t executed. He survived in a place where millions perished. But it seems to me that there was a price to pay for the ongoing fear for himself and for his family, for the public insults, for the need to constantly lie and pretend, both in his outward appearance and sayings and in his “state” compositions: all of those left their mark in his “real”, sincere music – starting with the Fifth Symphony, that “creative response to justified criticism”, through his Second Trio, his Eighth and Tenth Symphonies, the Eighth Quartet (which, according to his children, he composed in memory of himself); and till his last works – the 14th Symphony (a symphonic cycle of death-related songs), the 15th Quartet (a string of six Adagio movements, including a funeral march and an elegy); the cycle of songs to the Sonnets of Michelangelo, and his very last composition, the Viola and Piano sonata. I think one need not be a student of history of music or even be acquainted with the circumstances of his life to hear the boundless pain in these works, the brokenness and the blazing anger. And at the same time – the freezing, the static blankness of having no choice and no escape. And since Lady Macbeth, despite numerous proclamations regarding his future creative plans, he never wrote another opera. 

The music of war: a listening guide to Prokofiev’s 6th Sonata, 1st movement (part 2 of 2)

Picking right where the first part ended, let’s go on to the development:

03:14 – above the long held chord quiet activity ensues, full of energy which is held in check for the moment. Believe it or not, but these are the first three notes of our dreamy second subject, played sharply and with each note repeated twice. It’s a two voice affair, with a second voice entering at a dissonant interval just as the first voice finishes at 03:15 (such a device is called ‘stretto’, meaning ‘narrow, tight’ in Italian, and, I’m guessing, related to ‘straits’). This second voice scurries up and down from 03:16 on, and the left hand makes its appearance with two quiet but tense chords at 03:19. This is followed by a quick exchange of repeated notes between the two voices at 03:20-03:23 (one could imagine two mechanical constructions communicating with each other).

This exchange leads directly into another stretto entrance at 03:23, this time higher in pitch and a bit louder (the second stage of what is to be a very long buildup). This time the scurrying up-and-down runs (from 03:25 on) are spread over a bigger area of the keyboard, and are accompanied/accentuated by slaps as they reach their highest points (03:26, 03:29, 03:31) and by the same two quiet but tense chords we had at 03:19 at their lowest points (03:28, 03:30, 03:32). Yet another exchanges of repeated notes takes place 03:32, more complicated this time, as at 03:35 it shifts half a tone higher and goes on for a bit longer (a more complex communication, if you wish). This leads into –

03:38 – the third stage of the buildup. The right hand continues with yet another stretto entrance, but this time it’s just the backdrop to a melody in the middle voice (which makes us suddenly realize we had no proper melody in the development prior to this; I really love the way Prokofiev does it – moving aside what previously was more than enough material to occupy center stage and making it but the accompanying layer to a new voice; it’s as if the focus has shifted and we understand the true proportions of things – or so we think). This melody, heard clearly from 03:39, is a fuller version of our second subject melody – the one which the repeating-notes stretti in the right hand are based upon – and it’s constantly accompanied by a motoric right hand, filling the gaps between the notes. After it’s finished, at 03:43, the right hand plays one more stretto entrance, to which an old acquaintance is suddenly and forcibly added at 03:45 – the main motif of the sonata. Just to sum up the levels of complexity at this point: a harmonic chord in the bass, a melody in the lower middle voice, two voices with repeating notes above it, and at the apex the opening motif of the movement (cool, isn’t it?).

03:46-04:00 – this entire section is a chaotic mess mixture of the various motifs: repeated notes in the middle voice, forcible notes in the bass, two appearances of the stretto motif (03:48, 03:52) and numerous appearances of the opening motif, both in the four-note and the shorter three-note version and also in an expanded five-note version, with the first note repeated one extra time (03:49, 03:51, 03:54, 03:59 for a few examples). All of this over a very big crescendo, which finally leads us to –

04:00-04:10 – and we thought our focus had shifted at 03:38 with the introduction of the melody in the middle voice… The second subject now appears in its full horrible splendor in the right hand, high above the rest of the proceedings and twice as slow (a device called ‘augmentation’), while all around it the rest of the motifs battle among themselves – I find the effect terrifying. You’ll recognize the various motifs by now, but note the augmented main motif at 04:00 and 04:04 (left hand) beside the usual shorter versions which abound. At 04:10 there’s a lull at the melody and the lower voices take over, going first up then down, followed by two quick upward arpeggios at 04:12-04:13 (snarls to me) and a final shriek by the main motif high above, at 04:13.

This leads us to 04:14-04:36 – the biggest climax so far. The full second subject (04:00 had just the first part of it) appear in the middle voice (played by the thumbs of the two hands in unison), gaining even more in weight and presence, while all around them chaos reigns. Note the quick upward runs at 04:15-04:16 and 04:20-04:21, each followed by a crashing chord at 04:16 and 04:22. These chords are marked by Prokofiev col pugno, meaning ‘with the fist’ in Italian, and they are literally to be smashed with your right-hand fist on the keyboard as a cluster of notes (and I find that they startlingly resemble the sound of dropping bombs or shells, especially after the whistle of the runs preceding them). Also worth noting is the barrage of repeating octaves in the left hand (04:24-04:26) hammered out for extra aggression, and the keyboard-crossing upward run at 04:31-04:34, capped with yet another shriek of the opening motif – which then closes the section with one last appearance deep below, at 04:35-04:36.

04:36-05:01 – a heavy-plodding section based on two motifs: the second subject melody appears once again, but this time it’s coupled with the bridge section motif – remember that quietly slithering line from 00:49? Well, it’s the same one at 04:38-04:41 and from 04:46 onward, just much louder, heavier and badder. This is all incredibly aggressive (just listen to the angry twirl at 04:45 or to the thuds at 04:54), and while performing it makes me feel like as if I were playing heavy metal – you really vent all your anger in a place such as this (something we rarely get to do as classical musicians; it’s a lot of fun). It gets even louder toward the end of the section, and then we get to –

05:02-05:11 – a shrieking section, based on the four-note descending motif of the closing section of the exposition (02:26), with bits of the second subject woven in (05:05, 05:08, 05:10). As aggressive as the one before (though it’s all sharp and biting here), there are even two glissandi (quick slides over the keys) at 05:06 and 05:09 for extra effect. There’s an obsessive, repeating quality to those shrieks, as if coming from an animal trapped in a cage and unable to break out.

Things start to calm down (though real calmness is still far away) at 05:12, with three repeats of the four-note descending motif embellished with trills (05:12-05:15), which then continue into a descending chromatic line surrounded by several repeats of the opening motif (05:15-05:20). The chromatic line then takes over, becoming calmer yet and getting accompanied by a softer series of chords (05:21-05:25). But then things explode one last time at 05:26. We hear a new motif, which is one very typical to Prokofiev – the ticking clock. Loud at first, it soon subsides and makes place to several melodic appearances of the opening motif (05:28, 05:33, and more slowly and cautiously at 05:41). Note the change of harmony at 05:38: becoming slightly inquisitive, as if questioning that these horrors could really have just happened. From 05:44 things begin to fall apart – the clock motif becoming fragmented and slowing down. And then, at 05:53 appears our old malicious friend, that last motif of the exposition (02:59), framing the development on both ends – whatever meaning we attribute to it, I find this idea wonderful as a storytelling technique. At 06:00 the right hand joins in, doubling the left, and together they slow down completely by 06:03.

And at 06:05, after two seconds of silence, all of the aggression of the opening is once again unleashed onto our ears – we’ve arrived at the recapitulation. 06:05-06:28 is a full repeat of the first 15 seconds of the movement, with two changes: the more obvious one is that the first sentence (06:05-06:13) is played one octave lower than in the opening, a darker, more condensed sound, which makes the return to the normal pitch at 06:20 seem all the more triumphant (even radiant, in an ugly way). The less obvious change is that at 06:05-06:13 Prokofiev swaps the first two beats in the left hand, the downbeat now being a harsh dissonance, and the second beat becoming a pure consonance. This leads to a skewed feel, as if the marching soldiers were now limping along lopsidedly (though things right themselves at 06:20).

06:29-06:54 corresponds to the Mordor horns section of the exposition (00:25-00:41), but with quite a change of mood. The melody is in the upper voice, and the marching feel is gone completely; the melody is accompanied instead by what was a calmly flowing line in the second subject section (02:02). Melodically this section consists once again of two short sentences (06:29-06:37, 06:42-06:49), but the buffer parts between those two become much more interesting – both sentences grow in volume and end up with an explosive chord (06:37, 06:49; relatives of those bomb-like ones from the development, though not played with the fist this time). After these chords there’s a gradual climb up back to the melody, first hardly discernible, then becoming clearer, as if dust were settling down after an explosion.

06:55-07:14 – this section is based at first on the second subject melody (you’re probably recognizing it by now), with the same flowing line for accompaniment we’ve had in the previous section, but already by 06:59 things start to go sour in the middle voices, and starting from 07:02 Prokofiev abandons his melody completely and embarks instead on one last buildup, towards one last climax. The hands grow more and more apart, as the right hand keeps climbing higher and the left hand keeps crawling down chromatically. Tension steadily rises, there is a slight slowing down in tempo as we get to the extremes of the keyboard (07:11-07:14), and then here it is –

07:15 – the final climax of the work. Prokofiev completely breaks away from the sonata from structure by this point and instead of making the recapitulation a simple repeat of the exposition, he lets it bear what is probably the heaviest, most ponderous moment of the entire movement. Those heavy chords are based on the clock motif from the end of the development (05:26), with bits from the second subject melody thrown in (in its loud and high-pitched version from the development). Things seem to quieten down at 07:21, only to return with full vengeance at 07:28. The sequence is repeated then: a semblance of a calming down at 07:31 (with a haunting, pale specter appearing at 07:34: a ghost-like reminiscence of 05:21), but the war is not to be done away with, and it returns yet again in full force at 07:43, followed by what seems once again to be a calming down (07:45-07:51). You’ll probably doubt its truthfulness by now, and you’ll be right: at the very end of the movement the opening motif returns for one last, triumphant appearance (07:52), and this highly dissonant movement ends with on a highly dissonant chord (07:55), which is left to fade away, unresolved.

*****

Well! That’s it :-). I hope you’ve enjoyed, though perhaps this is not the right word here – but I do hope that this guide managed to make this really complex and sometimes opaque music clearer. And if you’re then able to listen to this movement once again and get some enjoyment from it, then I’ve totally done my job.

I’ll end with a plug – should you like to get the CD, it’s on sale on all Amazon websites (both in a physical and a downloadable copy) among others, as well as on iTunes and other music distribution networks. And it’s not all aggression – though harsh sounds do appear throughout the three sonatas, the movement we’ve just discussed is probably the most dissonant of them all. In some of the others, plenty of softer, even lyrical music is to be found. And taken together these three sonatas have likely not been surpassed in Prokofiev’s piano output in terms of depth, colors, imagination and some incredible writing for the piano, all combined for a very strong effect..

See you next time! BG.

The music of war: a listening guide to Prokofiev’s 6th Sonata, 1st movement (part 1 of 2)

Hello everybody!

Today’s post marks a somewhat special occasion, as my new CD has been recently  released worldwide. I recorded the 6th, 7th, and 8th piano sonatas by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), which are commonly grouped together as ‘the War Sonatas’, having been composed between 1940 and 1944. To tie-in with the release, I decided to publish a listening guide to the opening movement of the CD – the first movement of the 6th sonata. And to really tie-in with the release, the YouTube clip below comes from the newly released CD (thanks to Orchid Classics for arranging this).

Since we’re once again discussing a sonata form movement (and in rather more depth than in the recent guide to Ravel’s Concerto in G), I thought I’ll do a quick recap of what a sonata form is and how it works before we delve into the music (you can also find an in-depth discussion here). The sonata form is a musical mold or a blueprint which could be used to construct a musical movement of almost any length – it’s highly flexible and modular, while at the same time being structured enough to provide the skeleton for even the longest movements. It’s also one of the most popular and longest-enduring musical forms with hundreds of works ranging from the mid-18th century to our days. The basic division of a sonata form movement is into three parts:

• Exposition
• Development
• Recapitulation (often shortened to recap)

In the exposition the main themes/subjects/motifs are presented (more on it in a second), they are then developed, combined and clashed in the development, and reprised in the recapitulation, which is often a complete repeat of the exposition. The exposition itself is normally divided into four sections:

• The first subject section (subject being just another word for a musical theme)
• A connection section (a.k.a. a bridge or a transition, which leads into ->)
• The second subject section
• A closing section (formally called the ‘codetta’, meaning ‘little coda’ – which is Italian for tail)

The first and second subjects are the defining melodic elements of the movement (those are usually the tunes one could sing – though they’re not always singable, as we’ll see), and since some point in the 19th century, it became common practice to have two contrasting subjects in your movement – so if the first was energetic and quick, the second would be lyrical and slow (e.g.). The other two sections need not present new melodic material (though they may), and their function is more of a structural one – connecting, moving from one key to another, etc. Once again, please refer to the Mozart post linked above if you’d like a more thorough explanation.

The development is a free-form section, without rules – it’s quite often the least stable area of the sonata form movement: the subjects are combined and juxtaposed, buildups are built up, big climaxes are reached – exciting stuff. The recap would normally contain the same sections as the exposition, and would sometimes be followed by a coda – a closing section.

So, as you see, it’s a very organized way of writing music. But there’s also much freedom to be had – sections can be as short or as long as the composer wants them to, they can be expanded to include more material, or even be done away with completely. This is all rather theoretical at the moment, but will hopefully become clearer as we progress with the music. And so, without further ado, here’s the recording:

00:02 – now how’s that for a melody to sing? This is angular, aggressive, angry, persistent – and basically not a melody at all. It’s a sharply defined rhythmic motif – one longer note, followed by three quick descending ones, and immediately repeated, with the first longer note shortened (00:02-00:04); this group of eight notes (they are actually sixteen, as each note is doubled by an interval, like two voices moving in parallel paths) is repeated in full (00:05-00:07), and then repeated once again, shortened even more and with an extra helping of the three descending notes (00:07-00:08); and to end the sentence, we have a new four-note rising motif, with a snappy dotted rhythm (00:08-00:10), like a series of angrily barked words.

I would like to dwell on this short sentence some more, as it’s fascinating to see how much can occur in such a small stretch of time, and on how many different levels. (For me it’s one of the greatest hallmarks of classical music – things are happening all the time, no second is wasted, and the perception of time is often stretched to accommodate the amount of stuff packed into every bar.) We’ve spoken about the melody, but what happens in the left hand?

(note: this paragraph and the next are slightly more complicated and technical, so feel completely free to skip them.) You have probably noticed that the the music resembles a march more than anything else (I imagine endless lines of blank-eyed soldiers, marching past or towards you) – but what a weird march it is! You would normally expect a march to have a very steady, constant beat, to help with the marching. But not here – the third beat out of every four is empty, missing, giving us instead of a regular ‘one-two-three-four’ an oddly syncopated ‘one-two-…..-four. And not just in the left hand, but in the right hand as well, as the third beat falls on the shortened long note of the main motif – which is shortened precisely to leave the third downbeat empty (I mean the very beginning of 00:04 and 00:06 – there’s just an emptiness there, no right hand, no left hand – as if the soldiers all stopped on the Right! and froze on one leg for a beat before continuing to Left! Could be quite scary, if you imagine it). Later, in 00:07-00:08, the left hand finally plays all four beats, but instead of sounding normal as it should, it now sounds shortened, condensed (as the empty beat has been dispensed with) – this to coincide with the shortening of the motif in the right hand. 00:08-00:10 is nothing special, with the left hand steadily accompanying the right. (But do notice the abrupt ending in 00:10 – in the beginning we first had ‘one-two-…..-four’ for two bars, then one bar of ‘one-two-three-four’, and then, at 00:10, it’s suddenly ‘one-two-three!’, like a cut-off, categorical statement – very effective. And it’s quite a variety of rhythmical configurations for such a short sentence.)

Lastly I’d like to talk about the harmony – the very first chord we hear in 00:02 is a pure major triad – a clean, perfectly consonant sound. But immediately thereafter, at 00:03, we get the harshest dissonant one could create from four notes (that’s how many we’ve got there), which is further exacerbated by Prokofiev ‘freezing’ on that harmony (the empty third beat) – this serves as a virtual accent, as there’s nothing after that chord, letting us continue hearing it in our ears. Prokofiev also repeats the same harmony on the fourth beat (00:04), so on balance our first bars are one fourth pure consonance to three fourths harsh dissonance – a sweet mix, isn’t it? The first chord of the closing four-note motif (00:08) is a hard dissonance as well, though the very last chord (00:10) is a clean one – consonances make better ‘full-stop’ chords, or, as in this case, ‘semicolon’ chords – as we’re not nearly done yet.

If you listen to this first sentence again, you can now probably hear and feel how those elements – the melody, the rhythm and the harmony – combine to create the militant, triumphant mood (triumphant in an ugly way). Moreover, the sentence is perfectly balanced – first, two identical full bars, each one with a skipped beat in the left hand and the main motif in the right hand played twice per bar, once in full, once in a rhythmically shortened version. This is followed by a general condensing of the material (no skipped beats in the left hand, only the shortened version of the motif in the right hand), the tension is building up, and finally the snappy four-notes motif finishes things off for the moment – and we’re just 8 seconds in.

And here I’d like to add that for me in no other movement of these three sonatas – ten movements altogether – are the horrors of war as blatantly apparent as here. There’s nothing subtle here, nothing is hinted – you’re staring war in the face, and it’s ugly.

Let’s go on (finally). 00:10-00:17 – We have some new material. This is a kind of an appendix to the first sentence, not a new one. 00:10-00:12 gives us a rowdy motif (possibly with an element of laughter to it – of the mocking, malicious kind) which is answered at 00:12-00:14 by a booming, dissonant fanfare in a lower region of the keyboard (rhythmically, it’s ‘one-two-three!’, like at 00:10 – once again, a semicolon chord). And then, in 00:14-00:17 there is a sweeping upward passage in the right hand, accompanied by dotted rhythms in the left hand (dotted rhythms are – well, it’s easier to show: this is what they are, 05:55-06:03. They are called so because of the way they are notated in a musical score. Here’s an example, the first dot is circled in red):

Dynamically, the run starts out somewhat softer with an immediate crescendo afterwards (crescendo is the musical term for the volume getting louder), there’s another tension buildup, and it gets released into –

00:17-00:25 – a full repeat of the opening phrase (00:02-00:10), sounding even more triumphant then before. The only difference is the ending, at 00:23-00:25 – instead of the snappy four-notes motif from 00:09-00:10, we get the booming fanfare one from 00:12-00:14 (musical interchangeability :-)) – and this time it serves as a full-stop, bringing the entire section to a close. And yet, at the very last moment, the bass line in the left hand slides down – that single note between 00:25 and 00:26 – and brings us to the next section –

00:25-00:41. If you have been keeping the sonata form structure in mind, you might be wondering if this is the bridge – the connecting section between the first and the second subject. The truthful answer is that one cannot know for sure at this point – we’ll have to wait and see what happens afterwards: if this brings us to the second subject, then yes, if it brings us somewhere else, then no. As it is, this section is based on just two motifs – first, the descending three-note motif which we encountered right at the beginning of the movement (without the first long note); but whereas before it has been the melody (sort of), now it has become the accompaniment to the other line – a series of long, loud notes, sustained in the middle of the keyboard, while the three-note motif encompasses them from above and from below like snarls and shrieks. The effect is absolutely barbaric – a terrible force is on the march to the sound of horns (I immediately think about the armies of Mordor from the Lord of the Rings; and realizing that Prokofiev meant no imaginary creatures, but rather some very real human beings, makes it all the more chilling).

Melodically the sentence is divided into two short parts, 00:25-00:30 and 00:32-00:36, with the areas between and after serving as buffer or filler – no melodic notes there, just repetitions of our descending three-note motif. And then, after one last angry snarl in the basses at 00:38, we get the same upward run as at 00:14, complete with the dotted notes in the left hand. And, like at 00:18, it once again brings us to a full repeat of the opening phrase (00:41-00:48), and we can now know for sure that those barbaric horns at 00:25 were not the bridge section, but rather the expansion of the first subject section. This is a prime example of the flexibility of the sonata form – Prokofiev has constructed a complicated, multi-segmented section with quite a bit of different material, and yet, it’s all snugly encapsulated inside a clearly delineated structural block. Nice! But let’s move on.

00:49-01:21 – our bridge section. In the beginning (00:49-00:56) we’ve got a creeping, slithering chromatic line (chromatic means covering all the tones and semi-tones on the piano; basically advancing in the smallest increments possible from point A to point B. Chromatic scales got a distinct sound, and among other things they’re very good for crawling lines such as this). The two hands alternate note by note, and the melody is just in the thumbs of both hands, the other fingers providing dampened harmonic chords. The last four notes of the line get repeated three times (00:53-00:56), each time a bit louder (with a hint of a growing menace), then the phrase is repeated again at a higher pitch (00:56-01:00), this time ending with a bigger crescendo and even a tiny bit of triumph as the hands split and separate from each other (01:00-01:02). Our chromatic line is then repeated one last time, higher and louder still (01:02-01:05) and after a single octave in the bass (01:06), we get to the climax of this section: we’re showered with a cascade of highly dissonant descending chords (01:06-01:12) – like a carillon gone mad. There’s no melody to speak of, just harsh intervals. The line slows and quietens down gradually (01:11 onward), coming to a near-standstill at 01:16-01:20.

And then at 01:22, above the held interval in the bass, the second subject appears – a distant melody, sad and forlorn and beautiful, played by both hands in unison. I cannot but think of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Pity of war’ in this place – for me this is the musical embodiment of that idea. The unison line splits into three voices at 01:30, the middle voice adding a counterpoint to the upper voice melody and the bass line appearing down below, reminding us that all is not well. Then at 01:38, the first half of our melody is repeated with more presence in the middle voice, the upper voice accompanying it with a few separated notes, this half-line ending uncertainly at 01:45-01:47.

At 01:47-02:02 the full line is repeated with several variations, in the same three-voice configuration we had at 01:30. The middle voice is becoming more prominent (note the long up-and-down line at  01:48-01:54) and there’s an unexpected dotted-rhythm interplay between it and the upper voice at 01:56-01:58, bringing a note of urgency and nervousness into the previously calm line. This is joined by the lower voice with a short but noticeable upward arpeggio (broken chord) at 01:59.

At 02:02 a new, calmly flowing line appears, passing into the lower voice at 02:06, as the right hand plays three prominent bell-like notes (02:06, 02:08, 02:10). Immediately after the third note our main melody re-appears above, making the flowing line below its accompaniment. A small additional quirkiness is in the fact that the melody is offset by one note, entering as it were just a bit too late, and making it ever-so-slightly out of sync with the bass, and adding to the flow (the two hands are then re-synced at 02:13).

02:17 – calmness is over. This is the closing section to the exposition; a quick upward line made of sharp notes alternated between the two hands snaps us out of the slightly dreamy mood that preceded it. This is further emphasized by the relative harshness of 02:20-02:24, which contains a preparation of what is to come – in its middle voice we can hear a line of four descending notes which will serve as the backbone of the forthcoming climax. The quick upward line is repeated at 02:26-02:27, followed by a short buildup at 02:27-02:31 which contains the same four-note motif, repeated twice (02:27-02:29, 02:29-02:31). And finally things erupt in an explosive manner at 02:31. Something bad is upon us, and the outer chords sound the alarm, like low and high heavy bells, while the middle voice hammers out incessantly the descending four-note motif. 02:38-02:41 – still more harshness and clamor, the four-note motif especially insisting at 02:42-02:45, where it’s isolated and for all to hear. Things slow down at 02:45, as if the motor propelling the four-note motif had run out of fuel, and the section ends with a few slow notes in the bass at 02:51-02:55.

But then Prokofiev adds one final touch before moving on to the development. Just as things seem to have calmed down, a dark, somewhat scary motif of repeated notes appears in the bass at 02:59 (not to detract from the seriousness of the music, I’m reminded a bit of a Hollywood technique – showing us one last giant ant queen or man-eating locust creeping out of the dark, just as we thought they were all annihilated. Though of course the place we’re at in the sonata form structure – just before the beginning of the development – suggests in itself that the big events are yet to come. And however we look at it, it’s a very effective and highly atmospheric place). At 03:05 the single voice splits into two, with quite a scary effect as the lowest voice enters at a higher volume, before gradually slowing and dying away through several repeats of a three-note ascending chromatic motif. At 03:09 this motif is repeated one last time, slowly, in the middle of the keyboard, and now we’re truly ready for the development.

(I’ve split the post in two due to its length; the second part follows right away.)

A Frenchman in New York: a listening guide to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (part 3 of 3)

Hello everybody!

Following upon the previous post here’s the third and final part of this listening guide. We’ve got one short movement left, about 4 minutes of fast, fun music. This is the most straightforward movement of the three in terms of composition, which is counterbalanced by a brilliant and imaginative orchestration and such a dose of energy, virtuosity and overall excitement as to make the most ardent adherent of the ‘classical music is boring’ view to swallow their words.

So, here’s the movement, in Martha Argerich’s interpretation once again (she’s just unbeatable):

44:26 – We start with a series of four loud chords played by the brass (horns, trumpet and trombone) with a bit of help from the bassoons and the lower string, all above a trill on the snare drum – that’s what is responsible for that constant noise. Those chords are a declaration of intent: remember, we’ve just come out of the magical world of the second movement, and Ravel wants us to snap out of it, immediately. So we’re forcible told: no more melancholy, no soft colors, no starry nights, it’s all bright sunlight from now on, so come and join the fun (and as we’ll see, this section will become a recurrent motif throughout the movement). These chords are followed by a thump on the bass drum for good measure (at 44:29), and the piano is ushered in.

44:29-44:38 – well, folks, that’s what we get for a melody! There is a line there, actually, which one could sing (like, four times slower), but it’s so fast as to become just a fantastical swirl of notes which are hardly discernible to the listener. The pianist alternates the hands note after note, so that the line is evenly split between the two hands. More than that, the melody itself is just in the thumbs of each hand, while the outer fingers double it with various intervals. The resulting sound is vaguely oriental (say, at 44:34-44:36), and if you listen to this section a few times you’ll be able to feel the shape of the line – the places where it goes up, or down again, and then leads to the final short buildup and the cadence (44:36-44:38). The orchestra accompanies with pizzicati on the strings (you might remember, that’s the way of playing whereby the players pluck the strings), which add a bit of harmony and a rhythmic frame.

44:39-44:53 – the piano continues with more of the same, but now it’s just a backdrop to the utter funkiness that goes on in the orchestra. First the shrill E-flat clarinet (44:39) and later the piccolo (44:44) play something that sounds completely out of tune with what everybody else is playing – and it is! Even on its own their melody would sound eccentric and/or slightly crazy, but being played, as it is, in a different key, the effect is just doubled. I don’t know how to characterize the stuff they are playing – it’s not really jazzy and not really French, and not quite Klezmer-like – a mixture of everything and a bit more, to give an overall impression that somewhere, someone has gone bananas (in a jolly way).

The trombone gives a connecting pwwwam between the E-flat clarinet and the piccolo (44:42), and the piccolo is followed by a buildup made by the trombone, horn and trumpet (44:44-44:47), who together with the piano bring us to the climax of this section – which is a full repeat of the opening chords: brass, snare drum, bass drum and all (44:49-44:52).

44:54-45:06 – our bridge section melody (if we follow the sonata form structure), played first by the piano (44:54-44:58) and then bravely, but at first not really audibly plucked by the strings, while the piano is hammering away barrages of repeating notes (44:59-45:06). The melody itself is a pseudo-serious one, even with a small pretense to pompousness, which traits are belied by the springing syncopated accents strewn all over the place (but do note the two seconds of a more hesitant mood at 44:56 – probably the only [slight] touch of melancholy in this movement, and an invention of Martha :-), which I personally like quite a lot).

45:06-45:22 – a section based on the main theme of the movement. First, there is a dialogue between the woodwinds and the piano, both aided by plucks – the woodwinds by the harp, the piano by pizzicati in the strings. After two blocks of five bars (45:06-45:10 – piccolo+flute and piano, 45:10-45:14 – two different clarinets and piano), the piano takes over and continues the line on its own, gradually climbing up both in pitch and in volume. The horn adds its sound at 45:17, and jointly they reach yet another block of four chords, similar rhythmically to the opening ones (though offset by one beat triangle, and the thump on the bass drum is replaced by a crack of the whip (45:22).

45:22-45:34  – the orchestra is playing our second subject motif; once again, not a proper melody but rather a collection of military fanfares alternating between the horns and the trumpet, with the rest of the orchestra helping a bit (you’ll notice the snare drum at 45:24-45:25, adding to the military feel; also note how the bit at 45:27-45:30 has more of a French flavor). At 45:30 the horns’ sound gets a bit softer and is followed by a downward slide played by the trombone – a distinctly jazzy sound, which, like a strong spice, is able to change the mood instantly. It is followed by the same slide played twice as slowly (a device known as ‘augmentation’) by the clarinet (45:32-45:33). The piano then enters with upward arpeggios (45:33-45:34), bringing us back to the initial mood of the section.

45:35-45:50 – a repeat of the previous section with slight variations, and with the fanfares played now by the piano, accompanied by the other orchestral instruments in various combinations. The downward slide, once we get to 45:46, is played by repeated notes on the piano (once again with a dose of softer, dreamier harmony in the orchestra), and the section is once again ended by upward arpeggios on the piano (45:49-45:50), they, too, becoming softer this time.

41:50-46:09 – a two-part sequence, each part consisting of three smaller sections:

• 41:51, 46:00 – quick downward runs in the piano, accompanied by steady, march-like beats in the orchestra. (As for those runs, let me introduce a new term here: they are chromatic. A chromatic scale is one that includes every single note on the piano – all of the whites and all of the blacks. As such it doesn’t have a key – you can start at any place and end at any place, and it will still sound the same [like what you hear at 45:51; for an upward chromatic scale, check out 48:00]. The word is derived from Chroma, meaning ‘color’ in Greek, as the chromatic notes were understood to add color to the normal, blander scale. Of course one could play chromatic scales on any instrument, it’s just easier to explain on the piano, as the twelve semi-tones of the scale correspond exactly to the twelve keys there are within each octave of the piano – here’s a picture of the keyboard for easier visualization, just count every key from any one ‘A’ to the one above it (don’t forget the blacks!):
  
• 45:54, 46:03 – upward arpeggios on the piano, accompanied by the same beating pulse in the orchestra;
• 45:57, 46:06 – an upward scale (not a chromatic one) in the strings, while the piano plays our recurrent motif of four chords + low thump, taken from the opening.

46:06-46:19 – the closing section of the exposition. My teacher once wrote a comment in one my scores: ‘Shostakovich-Mickey Mouse’. Well, if this isn’t ‘Ravel-Mickey Mouse’, I don’t know what is. 🙂 Very quick passage-work in the right hand, accompanied by ‘um-pah, um-pah’ in the left hand – a completely cartoonish place, especially if played at such a breakneck speed as Martha does. Structurally, we’ve got once again a two-part sequence (46:09, 46:12), followed by a chromatic buildup aided by the orchestra (inaudible in this recording, except for the trill on the cymbals at 46:16-46:17). At the end of this buildup there’s a loud and bright chord from the orchestra (46:18), and then everything plummets down, and we’re done with the exposition. (And we’re halfway through!)

46:19-47:05 – the development. Largely divided into two sections, each with a subdivision. The first section is 46:18-46:40. It begins with a low murmur in the celli (46:20-46:22), whereupon the bassoons enter and play the entire main ‘melody’ of the movement. I’m not a bassoon player, but somehow, listening to this passage, I get a feeling this is a hard place 🙂 (and do give a short listen to this – it’s even faster). Since we’re in the development, some combination or clash of various motifs is due, and we get it: at 46:26, the harp enters doubled by the celli, playing the motif from the bridge section; and at 46:30 we hear a quiet fanfare played by the horn – a short reminder of the second subject section.

The piano enters at 46:32, marking the second part of our first section (of the development) – the piano also plays the melody in full, accompanied by runs by the (poor?) bassoonists. The harp and celli once again add their counterpoint (46:35), and the horns with the fanfare (two of them this time) enter around 46:38.

46:41-47:05 – the second large section of the development. The piano will only play simple runs throughout this section, accompanying the orchestra, so we’ll leave it for now – the orchestra is where the interesting stuff happens. Structurally, there are five sections here, each a bit higher in pitch and volume than the one before, like steps one climbs in order to advance. The entry points are 46:41, 46:47, 46:53, 46:59, 47:02, with the last two being twice as short as the first three – as usual, getting impatient towards the end, which helps increase the tension and make the point of arrival (the recapitulation at 47:05) feel more satisfying.

From the motivic point of view, these five short sections bring together almost every bit of melodic material we had in the movement – the bridge section theme, the fanfares (two different motifs taken from there), and of course the main melody, running underneath it all (Mickey Mouse is absent – that one is a pure piano piece). It would be too cumbersome to list every single entry, and part of the fun is in their slightly chaotic juxtaposition, but here are a few to note: 46:43 – clarinet, bridge section, 46:45 – horns, second subject fanfare, 46:47 – trumpet, another bit from the second subject (the French flavor bit), 46:54 – same motif played by the shrill E-flat clarinet, 46:56 – harp and piccolo adding yet another layer of the bridge section motif, and it’s a free-for-all from there.

47:05 – hah, we’ve arrived. It’s the recapitulation, a repeat of almost all the sections we’ve had in the exposition, some of them in full, some in a shortened version, all of them with slight variations. The drive is almost incessant from here, with barely a moment of relief, so in some ways the entire recapitulation is a huge buildup towards the end of the movement (and the entire concerto with it).

47:05-47:17 – the main motif section, taken from the funky part (44:39). The motif itself is played by the strings, while the piano takes over the funkiness, once again in a totally unrelated key (though I feel this place is more effective in the exposition; the E-flat clarinet just seems to be the right instrument for the job). 47:13- – a chromatic climb in the piano (again, totally unrelated to what the orchestra is playing), leading towards

47:17-47:29 – the bridge section motif, played in broken chords by the piano and doubled by the woodwinds; quite a change of mood in comparison to the near-stateliness of 44:54! (I’ve got a sense of a quick clock ticking in the background here). There’s another climb at 47:26 (not a chromatic one), a cadence of three happy chords (47:28) and we get into

47:29-47:46 – the second subject section, played by the piano alternating with the trumpet (the snare drum keeping it company). All of the woodwinds join in at 47:35, and then suddenly there’s a respite from the relentless drive at 47:37 – it’s a variation on the jazzy downward slide bit we had at 45:30. A two-part sequence – a downward run on the piano followed by the chromatic downward slide played by the clarinet + some repeated notes on the piano (47:37-47:41); then once again a downward run on the piano, followed by a more energetic slide played by the trombone + more repeated notes on the piano (47:42-47:46). Then there’s a short upward run in the woodwinds (03:29), and we arrive at

47:47-47:57 – our Ravel-Mickey Mouse section. As quirky and cartoonish as it was in the exposition, and here it even gets an expanded ending, as the chromatic climb is twice as long (47:52-47:54, and then four bars more: 47:55-47:56). A trill on the cymbal once again accompanies the last stages of the climb.

47:57 – the orchestra play the beginning of the bridge section motif one last time, and then there’s a keyboard-spanning chromatic scale on the piano (48:00-48:05), doubled by the woodwinds: first the bassoons, then the clarinets and finally the flute and piccolo – everybody rushing up; a really effective place.

48:05 – a final buildup, starting with the piano on its own, but it’s soon joined by the woodwinds, and then by the rest of the orchestra – there’s a big crescendo (increase of volume), tension is rising, and, finally, at 48:11, the movement ends with one last, rejoicing repeat of the opening chords, the piano adding its lowest notes to the the final thump of the bass drum.

****

Well, that’s it! We’ve done it, quite a journey! Hope you’ve enjoyed, and I’ll see you at some point next month. Cheers for now. BG

A Frenchman in New York: a listening guide to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (part 2 of 3)

Hello! Following upon yesterday’s post, let’s continue with the second movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.

Remember I said (in secret) that the outer movements were not terribly difficult to play? Well, two things – I evaluated that saying today, and found I was in disagreement with myself, or rather that it was still too early for me to make that statement – one should really perform the piece in a concert at least once to be able to say such a thing truthfully. The second thing is, however we judge the difficulty of the first and third movement, the second movement is a first-rate pianistic and musical challenge. It’s easily the best known movement of the concerto, and possibly one of the best known musical works by Ravel – it’s easy to understand why, as the music is of such beauty, nobility and expressiveness – but it also requires a masterful hand (better two) to unlock its full potential.

The second movement might seem to be out of place in this concerto – there’s no trace of jazz here, no exotic motifs, not a shred of a connection, whether in melody or mood, between it and the outer movements – and yet I feel that the three movements not only complement but enhance each other, together creating a kind of a total, highly satisfying work (a bit like the second concerto by Shostakovich – which I will cover at some point – and there’s more resemblance between the two than we could suppose just by looking at the two names; but I’ll leave it for later).

So, without further ado, here it is (I chose a different version by Martha Argerich, which in my opinion is the best currently on YouTube):

The piano starts at 09:06 with two bars of accompaniment in the left hand, above which the melody appears at 09:11. We don’t suspect it yet but this simple left hand accompaniment – one-two-three, one-two-three, like a slow waltz – will stay with us for the entire movement, never changing its flow once – and that’s for above 9 minutes! I can’t think of any other movement or piece where the accompaniment does that (might be worth checking).

The melody, when it appears, is a single voice, one-note-at-a-time one, but before we discuss it further, you might notice something strange – it sounds as if it were played at a different time signature than the left hand. This requires more explanation – compare, for example with this: the melody is in total agreement with the bass line – every downbeat coincides, which is the way music is normally written. But something is awry with our waltz (hm, I’m not actually sure this is a waltz – far too slow – so please take this word with a grain of salt) – the first note of the right hand coincides with the ‘one’ of the ‘one-two-three’ in the left hand – everything fine till here – but then, the next note comes on the ‘three’, followed by three beats of silence – and then, when the right hand line starts moving again at 09:16, it’s one melody note per two accompaniment notes:

one  ——-   two  ———  three——-
one – two – three – one – two – three

… and the simple explanation for this is that the left hand is not playing ‘one-two-three-one-two-three’ as we were thinking but rather ‘one-two-three-four-five-six’, above which the right hand is playing the ‘one-two-three’ – Ravel plays a trick on us, leading us to believe that the opening is two bars in the left hand, whereas it’s actually just one – just a very slow one. But this lack of agreement between the two hands – the bar of the right hand is divided into three, the bar of the left hand into two (which are further divided into three each – but still, there are two groups per bar) – is one of the basic characteristics of this movement. It is a source of much harmonic tension (the left hand might change the harmony in the middle of the bar, on its second ‘one’, at which point the right hand still hasn’t moved from its ‘two’), but also a generator of flow – just imagine has static it would be in such a slow tempo if everything was just ‘one-two-three’ in both hands.

Hm, this is very technical stuff, so let’s emerge from it and return to the music. The only information you may want to retain from this is that each hand occupies its own world, with its own separate time flow; like two layers which sometimes coincide, sometimes not.

There is not much I can write till 11:57 – it’s all one melody in the right hand, and a single type of accompaniment in the left. And herein the great challenge lies – within this sparsity of material, constant interest must be generated by the pianist by squeezing every ounce of interpretative potential from both hands. And if squeezing sounds bad, well, yes, it should also be done in the most natural and inconspicous way – so that we don’t think ‘oh, man, when is it going to end already, why isn’t the orchestra playing?’ but instead lose ourselves in that slow flow.

This challenge is further compounded by the fact that the piano isn’t naturally suited to very slowly flowing melodies of this kind. There are large gaps in time between many of the notes, and what’s the pianist to do? A singer, a string player, a woodwind player – they would all have the ability to influence the sound after it was produced. You can check that easily – sing a single note; you’ll see right away that you are able make it louder, make it quieter, open you mouth, close your mouth, all without changing the pitch – there’s much you can do, and you could use all these devices if needed, to keep the listeners’ interest in such a melody. But on a piano, once a note is struck there’s absolutely nothing you can do – you can hold it or release it, that’s it. (You could also modify the volume of the left hand during the long notes in the right – if the left hand is quieter, those held notes in the right will be more audible. On the other hand, trying to do a vibrato on the key, like a string player would, is, well, just for show – once the hummer has struck the strings, there’s no physical connection between them till you release the key and strike it once again.) All of which makes the sound production skills of the performer all the more important – they must be able to draw out the colors and nuances of each note right away, not being able to rely on later changes while the note is sounding.

A few small points of interest:

• generally throughout the section – notice how Martha’s two hands often do not play together; normally it’s a bad habit and to be avoided, but in this case it helps separate the melody from the accompaniment (free melody / constant and steady accompaniment), and also increase the number of audible notes (as two notes struck not-together will sound like two notes rather than one interval), perceptually generating more material.
• 09:22 – a beautiful change of color and dynamics
• 10:37 – the change to minor. Up to that point it was basically one very long musical sentence, albeit divided into smaller phrases. Those phrases are all of different and irregular length, the regular being 2+2 = 4 bars, 4+4 = 8, and 8+8 = 16. Here I’d say we had 4+3+3+4+3 = 17 (a prime!). Not something you would notice while listening, but I believe that this too helps deprive the music of a static, symmetrical feel, which would be ruinous in such a slow tempo. As it is, the melody just seems to flow naturally, uninterrupted, seemingly without end and without desiring to reach any specific point. Incredibly beautiful, but as I said, very challenging for the soloist, who needs to hold his or her musical breath for very long stretches, and do so effortlessly.
• 10:58 – a sudden shift in dynamics, and the melody descends quite a bit – the chest voice of a singer, as it were. This is the beginning of the build-up towards the climax of our melody (a long way to go still, so don’t hold your breath)
• 11:32 and here it is, the climax. Not much, really (though some pianists make more of a show out of it), but this is the highest note this melody reaches, and the loudest dynamic too. From here on it will subside. (Interestingly, the notion that the highest note should only appear once, at the climax of the melody, is a very old one, and goes back to the vocal writing of the 16th century, where it was very strictly observed – together with hundreds of other rules [studying it is a full academic course – 16th century counterpoint]).
• 11:54 – it seems, seems as if we finally got to a cadence (the harmony is right, and the trill too) and the line will end. But Ravel has other plans in store – at 11:56 the orchestra comes in most beautifully, with a soft, warm chord in the strings and high above it – the flute. And then – a subtle change of harmony at 11:58, the violins play just a single half a tone lower (but it’s a tangible change – try to catch it, it’s a cool moment), and he has successfully evaded the cadence and continues with the line.

12:00-12:56 – the last section of the melody. The piano now only plays the accompaniment, the strings envelope it softly, and the melody passes to the woodwinds: first the flute, then at 12:09 the oboe, at 12:15 the clarinet, and from 12:31 the flute again (its entrance overlapping with the last notes of the clarinet). It soars up, descends, and then – finally – we get our cadence at 12:47-12:54. And what a beautiful one it is – for three reasons: a) it’s finally arrived, so simply because of a sense of deserved completion. b) the leading note – the penultimate note of the line, at 12:51, is half a tone lower than is should be, giving the ending a very special color and sound (the succinctly correct adjective is ‘modal’, but it’s a dangerous succinctness, as a discussion of modal music would take us into such technical depths as we may not emerge from, so I won’t use it) and c) – when the final chord finally arrives at 12:53 it’s a major key chord, and such a combination (minor key beforehand, lowered leading tone and a major key resolution) is a sure recipe for a sense of wonder, and Ravel uses it here masterly. It’s one of my favorite moments of the movement.

First section is over! Four minutes, one melody.

12:57 – the middle section begins. The melody returns to the piano, and it gains a bit more of a flow, aided by a syncopated left hand (if you think of our usual ‘one-two-three’ being ‘low-high-high’ in terms of pitch, now we have ‘low-high-high-low-low-high’) which is doubled by the bassoon for extra emphasis. It’s a two part sequence (12:57-13:14 and then the same phrase repeated a tone lower at 13:15-13:33 with a small variation towards end, at 13:28-13:32). You might notice that the piano is not alone – beside the bassoon who doubles the lowest line of the left hand, there is a counterpoint to the right hand melody – the cor anglais at 12:57 and another bassoon at 13:15

13:33-13:55 – a closing phrase in the piano, accompanied by the strings. At 13:35-13:40 there is yet another variation of the left hand – “low-high-high-low-high-low”, coinciding with the change of harmony and the shift into major, in which the phrase ends, and the section with it.

13:55:14:35 – a variation on the previous section (two part sequence + closing phrase). The two part sequence undergoes quite a change – we have figurations in the right hand, and creeping ascending chords in the orchestra – first bassoons and horns (13:55) then the rest of the woodwinds (14:00) and repeated (14:05 and 14:10 respectively). At 14:15 the closing phrase is repeated, and it’s more recognizable – the melody is played by the violins and it’s nearly the same, with just a change of rhythm in the first bar (the piano at 13:33 had four and a half bars for the phrase, the violin at 14:15 have just four, so the first bar gets condensed – it’s not terribly important, but you can probably hear it if you compare the two places directly). And once again we end in a major key.

14:36 – the beginning of a build-up towards the climax of the movement. Ravel uses the right hand figurations from 13:55 as well as the ascending chords in the orchestra and builds sequences upon sequences of those, each time a bit higher in pitch and in volume. The length of the figuration groups gradually shortens – first it’s two groups of three beats (14:37 and 14:41), then two groups of two beats (14:46 and 14:49) and then, from 14:53 it’s just one-beat long groups – quite a common device for increasing tension and transmitting a feeling of impatience. This also clashes with the left hand rhythm which steadily continues with its ‘one-two-three’ – but we’re used to those clashes by now 🙂

15:00 – nearly there, the piano plays very quick figurations, with an extra note between each of one the previous six (so 12-note groups; you can see them at 15:01 – well, a blur of fingers, basically; but it’s not a difficult place at all, just effectively written) – and 15:04 is the big chord, with the entire orchestra joining in for a few moments. It all quickly subsides though, and the piano at 15:10-15:15 leads us back to calm waters.

15:15-17:27 – the recapitulation. The full melody is now played by the cor anglais (English horn) – remember it from yesterday? ‘haunting and beautiful’ I said, and I stand by these words. I really love its sound (the next entry of the Youtube Person’s Guide to the Orchestra will cover it and the Oboe d’amore). The right hand of the piano plays a beautiful counterpoint, loosely based upon the figurations from the middle section, but with many variations and scales woven in. The strings add warmth, and the left hand of the piano continues its inexhaustible beat. The right hand at times becomes nearly melodic (15:27, 15:37, 15:50, 16:45, 16:54, 17:05) and at other times is just a shimmering companion to the main melody – it’s all utterly beautiful (I keep repeating that, I know, but I mean, it is, isn’t it?). And then at 17:20 appears the trill which signified that fake cadence at 11:54, but this time it’s not a fake – the piano rises up and up and then, with a big sigh of satisfaction we are there –

17:27 – the most magical moment of all, for me. This resolution into the major key, the right hand playing in the stratosphere together with a quiet chord from muted brass (horns and trumpet) is that sudden shaft of moonlight I spoke about yesterday. The right hand descends slowly, while in the orchestra the flute enters at 17:33 (what a difference in sound in comparison with the cor anglais! It’s all lightness and air) and soars up. It then descends, passing the melody to the oboe at 17:47 and back to the cor anglais at 17:50, which together with the piano slowly brings the phrase to a close.

18:04 – the ending. The trill is now in the right hand (you know what the left hand is playing, I don’t need to tell you), while the strings play slowly moving chords (note the extraneous note at 18:12 – extraneous to the harmony; just an extra bit of color – followed by a tiny bit of counterpoint in the left hand [till 18:20]). In the penultimate bar (18:29) the left hand finally slows its beat and play just one long ‘one  –   two  –  three’, followed by a last ‘one’.

That’s it :-). Hope you enjoyed it (if yes, spread the word!). Third movement to follow later this week – see you soon.

A Frenchman in New York: a brief listening guide to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (part 1 of 3)

Hello everybody!

Ravel in 1928

Today’s post, as the titles suggests, will be a brief listening guide to Maurice Ravel’s (1875-1937) Piano Concerto in G. Ravel wrote the concerto in 1929-1931 following an in- and ex-tensive tour of the States in January-April 1928. The tour was a big success, and he felt invigorated rather than exhausted by the experience (saying “it’s incredible how rejuvenated I am”). His fascination with jazz (“Personally I find jazz most interesting: the rhythms, the way the melodies are handled, the melodies themselves”) received a further boost during the tour, as he visited New Orleans with its jazz scene, and while in New York went to hear jazz in Harlem together with George Gershwin. Whether any of this had a direct influence on the concerto is a guess of course, but the concerto is very jazzy at times – rhythm and texture mostly, though there are a few conspicuous melodies too. But as with all great composers, the personal musical stamp is always present – even when it’s jazz, it’s jazz Ravel-style. 

From a performer’s point of view, the concerto is a sheer joy to play – the first and third movements are exuberant, energetic, fun and quirky, light fingered, and at the same time have those moments of melancholy which are Ravel’s trademark (and – it’s a secret, don’t tell – these two movements are not terribly difficult). And then there’s the second movement… but we’ll get there tomorrow.

I didn’t like to listen to the concerto as a child – it seemed a total mess, I could never figure out what was going on there, I didn’t connect with any of the melodies, and the second movement was impossibly long-winded and boring (though even then I felt that magic of that wonderful moment towards the end of the 2nd movement when, like a sudden ray of moonlight, the major key appears), But working on it now I was (and am) enjoying myself so much, that it seemed to me prime material for a listening guide – a work which one could enjoy more if one was acquainted with its structure and inner mechanism. So, here we are. I won’t go into such a level of detail as I did with the Mozart or the Bach – we won’t finish it this year otherwise! – but I will try to outline the structure – melodies, sections, etc – as well as comment on the orchestration and piano technique. (edit: nonsense. See the length of the post below.)

There is a whole lot of good recordings of the concerto on YouTube, but as Martha Argerich’s live recording with Temirkanov from Stockholm in 2009 was taken down (this would have been my first choice), I’ll go with her recording with Claudio Abbado on DG, which is currently online.

Here’s the first movement:

27:14 – to let us know we’re in fun/quirky/unusual territories, the concerto begins with a single whip-crack (nothing like a whip to catch your attention – where’s the mosquito?)

27:15-27:29 – the main theme of the concerto, played on the piccolo and accompanied by the piano and the strings (and a bit of snare drum and triangle). All the adjectives I used to describe the outer movements above – energetic, light fingered, fun, etc – apply to this melody, and in addition, it’s nearly pentatonic (meaning it mostly uses only five out of the seven notes of the scale – like Chinese music; I say ‘nearly’ as the melody does include a few occurrences of the sixth note – but still, Ravel creates a specific, slightly exotic sound-scape right from the beginning). The piano is playing figurations, and a very cool thing is going on there: the two hands are both playing simple arpeggios – but in different keys! This, too, contributes to the quirky sound. The strings help with syncopated pizzicatos (a technique of playing whereby the musicians pluck the strings with their fingers – a bit like playing the guitar – instead of using the bow).

27:29-27:38 – a transition passage. A new, syncopated rhythm is added and repeated several times, each time with more instruments and more volume. The piano is playing glissandos – slides up and down the keyboard. A nice idiosyncratic touch – the transition section is 9 bars long (8 is the most common length of a simple musical phrase), so instead of the predictable 2+2+2+2, we get 2+2+3+2 – and as a consequence the piano player has to drag out one of the glissandi (that’s the correct way of saying glissandos) for an extra bar – nothing important, just a small behind-the-scenes thing. As we progress with the transition, the tension keeps and keeps mounting, by the end of it the whole orchestra is playing and we finally arrive into –

27:38-27:57 – a full repeat of the main theme, played by the trumpet and accompanied by honk-like sounds from the horns and trombones and by pizzicati from the strings (and the harp, but it’s not really audible behind the much harsher sound of the brass; I do wonder though if the sound would be different were the harp not playing – might well be). The whistles at 27:46-27:49 are done by the piccolo together with the triangle. The strings take over at 27:50, adding much body to the sound (the brass was loud, but not earthy – and in this case the strings are, aided by the timpani); there’s a big crescendo (an increase of sound) at 27:53–27:55 – and then, rather suddenly, the sound dies away, and the last two bars of the melody are played by a lone cor anglais – a relative of the oboe, with a unique timbre, haunting and beautiful – accompanied by pizzicati in the strings.

27:58-28:13 – a piano solo. New material, quite Spanish-sounding with its guitar-like strums. I hesitate to call this a melody, as it ain’t quite one; but it’s a new section for sure, with new texture, mood and sound.

28:13-28:17 – aahh, that‘s pure Gershwin. A short 5-note motif is repeated twice, first played by the E-flat clarinet (a relative of the ‘standard’ clarinet, but with a higher pitch and a shriller, more piercing sound – and with a more strongly marked personality too, which I guess is why Ravel chose it for this spot) and then by a muted trumpet – a jazz instrument par excellence. Add to this a few syncopated cymbal notes and a repeated two-note motif played on the wood-block, inject a ‘blue note’ into that 5-note motif, stir a little bit – and you get the most wonderfully exotic jazz sound you could imagine. A total contrast with the Spanish character of the previous section.

28:18-28:32 – piano solo again. This time we do have a melody – a new one, and one which defies easy characterization – only by its end (28:29-28:32) does it acquire a clearer jazz character; we’ll return to it later, when it gets repeated by the orchestra towards the end of the movement. The left hand imitates the wood-block with its repeated two-note motif.

28:32-28:39 – the jazzy motif again – this time repeated three times – first played by the piccolo, and then once again by the E-flat clarinet and the muted trumpet. Wood-block and cymbals are back, but this time we get the addition of a harp playing glissandi – and it is audible this time, certainly adding to the ‘mix’.

28:39-28:55 – the melody from 28:18 once again, repeated a fourth higher, and in dialogue with a muted horn, which fills the empty spaces in the piano’s line quite beautifully (perhaps not the best word; but notice 28:44-28:46 especially, as well as the end of the section). The ending is different now, with repeated notes on the piano dying away, as it leads into a new theme –

28:56-29:14 – a new theme played by the piano, and it’s a new mood once again – that’s a lot of different material for such a short amount of time; its organization is unclear at this point, just one thing seemingly coming after another; let’s see if things get clearer later in the movement. But either way this theme with its singing quality is the first serious candidate for a second subject ( Mozart post). The theme is punctuated twice – at 29:01 and 29:08 – with some of the mood of the previous sections coming back in – the piano’s imitation of the wood-block is almost uncanny, I find; and the strings add a lush background.

29:15-29:29 – a continuation of the theme; and if before we had a moment of pure Gershwin, this whole section is pure Ravel – not a trace of jazz, but instead much melancholy or sadness perhaps, and those gentle pastel colors. Really beautiful.

29:30-29:46 – a repeat of the second subject – the theme is played by the bassoon, and the  punctuation places (29:34 and 29:40) include the wood-block, cymbals, triangle and dry rolling passages on the piano besides the entire woodwind section. At 29:42 the trumpet suddenly takes over, there’s a big crescendo, a sweeping upwards passage on the piano (29:45) and –

29:47-30:01 – some action at last! Very fast passage-work with repeated notes on the piano, with the strings and the woodwinds helping a bit (you can hear the woodwinds doubling the piano each time the melody goes up). You’ll probably have noticed that this section basically consists of a short phrase (4 bars) which is repeated four times at slightly different pitches – at 29:47, 29:51, 29:54 and 29:58 – this is called a sequence, and is a very common device.

30:01-30:19 – more action. Good! Now, this entire section is a three-part sequence with two punctuating places in between:

1. 30:01-30:04 – repeated notes and syncopated rhythms in the piano; the motif is taken from the main theme (you can hear that bit at 27:23) so we may safely assume we’re in the development section of the movement (again, referring to the Mozart post for explanations on the sonata form). The orchestra provides rhythmic support. A very satisfying place to play – you can really hammer out all those notes.
2. 30:05-30:08 – first punctuating passage – our beloved 5-note motif repeated three times on the piano, surrounded by a long, held chord in the orchestra. (Something I forgot to mention while discussing the 5-note motif above: this music is in double meter (2 or 4 depending on whether it’s a fast or a slow section) – so by its nature a 5-note motif will skew the perceived meter, adding to the jazzy feeling. The interesting thing is, if you repeat a 5-note motif three times, you get 15 notes – but as we’re in normal 4-note bars, Ravel needs an extra note to balance things – and we get it, at 30:08, just after the end of the third repeat of the motif.)
3. 30:09-30:12 – as in No. 1, just a bit higher in pitch and louder.
4. 30:12-30:16 – as in No. 2
5. 30:16-30:19 – as in No. 3 and louder still, but truncated in the middle, as if impatiently, and taken over by the brass for a second before moving onto the next section.

30:19-30:36 – sounds like a rhythm jam session to me (one of those ‘man, let’s get crazy’ type); not an easy place to play, either technically or rhythmically (the rhythm shifts every 2-3 bars). A short interlude at 30:26-30:28, with the horns quickly running through a part of the motif we had at 29:47.

30:37-30:45 – a descending 3-note motif establishes itself out of the chaos, and is repeated again, and again, and again (working itself into a frenzy) – first in full bar lengths (leaving the 4th note as a rest), and then, condensed, without any breaks – and joined in the end by the trumpets for extra whoomph.

30:46-30:54 – a virtuoso passage in the piano, played unisono (the two hands playing the same line, just an octave apart) – I wonder how difficult or not it is for the conductor to catch the pianist in the end (I wonder indeed, as I have to play it in three weeks; the seemingly shapeless passage is in fact studiously shaped – it’s 12 notes repeated twice, then 8 notes repeated twice, and finally 4 notes repeated twice).

30:54-31:14 – we’re back! It’s the main theme, and this section is a full repeat of 27:38-27:57, played by the orchestra together with the piano (so, the recapitulation, if you’re following the sonata form). The ending is played by the oboe rather than the cor anglais this time.

31:14-31:31 – a repeat of the Spanish theme, with more elaborate strumming in the right hand and the Tam-Tam and cymbals keeping the piano company on the downbeats.

31:32-31:39 – the jazzy 5-note motif, played this time by the piano solo, intrudes very loudly. It’s played once in normal rhythm, and then several times twice as fast (a compositional device called ‘diminution’). It dies away in the lower areas of the keyboard and connects to –

31:39-32:22 – a weird place. Remember that strange melody from 28:18? Well, this is it, just played by the harp. I say weird, because having a 30-seconds long harp solo in the middle of an 8-minutes long movement is, well, weird (but I have a feeling that weirdness is exactly what this place is about; see below at 32:29). It’s punctuated by an angelic chord in the strings at 32:06-32:10 and then continues at 32:12 as if it had all the time in the world.

32:23-32:28 – 5-note motif again, played by most everybody (the motif itself is played by the piccolo, E-flat clarinet and trumpet like before, just with a tremolo added – that’s this fluttering sound you’re hearing – the rest of the orchestra accompanies. The pwwwam in the end is produced by the trombone.)

32:29-32:59 – the horn repeats the strange theme from 31:39 – and it’s outright eerie. The horn part is written in the highest reaches of the instrument, giving it a constricted, slightly strangled sound, and it is accompanied by very fast passages in the woodwinds and lush chords in the strings – an exceptional moment in terms of orchestration, really memorable. (And I could imagine the previous occurrences of this theme being just build-up for this moment.) In the end everything dies away, and the piano starts its cadenza –

33:00-33:49 – a cadenza is a part of a concerto when the solo instrument is left alone (so, technically 27:58 is a mini-cadenza as well), usually after the recapitulation and before the coda. Ravel does something unusual here – a cadenza is usually a free treatment of various themes from the movement, combined and juxtaposed for good effect, but here the piano basically plays the second subject of the concerto in full (compare with 28:56) – just with a different texture: figurations in the left hand and trills in the right. A very beautiful texture it is, and it definitely shows off the piano (which a cadenza should do) – but structurally, we’re still in the recapitulation. Like a double function. (In truth, I find it cool, like every non-standard thing in this concerto). The melody is firstly in the middle voice (played by the left hand thumb) and then passes to the right hand after a beautiful glissando at 33:23 (that’s the pure Ravel section from 29:15).

33:49-34:13 – the orchestra joins in and doubles the piano in a repeat of the second subject – a lush, romantic, very 19th-century moment. Both orchestra and piano gradually pick up pitch, speed and volume, getting to a small climax around 34:06; from there the piano takes over with a quick downwards passage, and the coda begins.

34:13-35:02 – The build-up part of the coda is a repeat of all the material we had in the development, just in truncated form:

1. 34:13-34:25 – the first part, based on the section from 29:47. There’s much tension – it starts down below, not too loudly, though full of energy which seems to be just waiting to burst. The drive is huge.
2. 34:25-34:29 – the next part is based on the section at 30:01, just without the punctuating passages (we had enough of those already)
3. 34:30-34:42 – this is based on 30:19 (the crazy rhythm jam session). The trumpets begin with the interlude from 30:26 (where it was played by the horns), and the piano picks up from there for even more shifting rhythms craziness.
4. 34:42-34:48 – based on the 3-note descending motif section from 30:37.
5. 34:48-34:56 – the piano continues with the 3-note descending motif, while the trumpet and the woodwinds alternately play bits and pieces from the main theme of the movement (in condensed rhythms, so it might not sound like it right away).

34:57-35:03 – final build-up – rising arpeggios in the piano while first the horns and then the woodwinds continue to play a short part of the main theme.

35:03-35:10 – sheer madness 🙂 you’ll keep hearing that short part of the main theme above everything, but everyone’s just trying to make as much noise here as possible (a very happy type of noise, but still).

35:10-35:12 – a descending scale to finish things off. Even there, at the very last moment, Ravel finds an opportunity for the idiosyncratic – the first four notes seem to imply a standard major scale – but the last four are from the phrygian mode (can’t explain it quickly – basically, another scale, vastly different from a major one – if anything it’s a variation on the minor one, with the second note of the scale being half-a-tone lower. It’s not important to understand that, but I’m sure you’ll notice the very strange sound of the last four notes – so this is where it comes from.).

And if we go back and look at the structure, we’ll realize there are two ways of looking at it – on the one hand, we had a long exposition, a short but distinct development, a recap with a cadenza and a coda – so, all is fine, But, on the other hand, you could say that from 27:14 to 30:54 we had a bunch of themes, motifs and sections, and then from 30:54 till the last part of the coda all of those get repeated. So, not even a binary form (which is a-b – so two different sections), but rather a-a’ (a’ meaning ‘a with variations’). Now, I’m not saying this is it (I certainly never read anything like that about this movement), but it is kinda there if you care to look at it this way. So, food for thought.

***

And we’re done! The first movement that is. 2nd and 3rd to follow later this week. And please kindly disregard the word ‘brief’ from this post’s title – we’re at just under 3,000 words, so brief it ain’t.

But isn’t it wonderful music?

Quick fun: Mozart’s Sonata K280, 3rd movement

Hello everybody!

Last time we saw one way of putting a piece together – namely by stitching different sections one after another, with each section having its own tempo ( = speed, for those who are joining us now), meter and character. This is sometimes called “Through-composed”, and is in fact not the most common way of constructing works, though you can encounter through-composed works ranging from the 15th to the 21st century.

Today I’d like to show you another way of building a musical composition, and this one will serve us for many guides to come. Please let me introduce the Sonata form. She’s Italian, about 250 years old*, but is very well preserved and has made numerous public appearances well into her 230s (and is still called upon today in times of need). Though she may appear slightly intimidating to those unacquainted with her (which adds to her air of mystery), she’s actually really nice, and a true and loyal companion to those who know her well.

Now, seriously, the Sonata form is a structure – a blueprint or a mold of a musical piece, into which the actual music (melodies, harmonies, rhythms) is poured. One would not necessarily be aware of its existence solely by listening (a bit like not being immediately aware of the skeleton of a human or an animal), but it is what holds together the many pieces written in Sonata form, and over the years it has proven itself to be one of the most reliably successful types of musical architecture.

So, what is it like? I’ll first do a dry breakdown (you don’t need to process all this information right now – it will be much easier when we apply it to an actual piece of music):

Outer structure:
A movement written in Sonata form will almost certainly** contain three basic sections:

1. Exposition
2. Development
3. Recapitulation

The exposition, as its name suggests, will introduce the main themes of the work (usually two), those will be developed in the development (like, duh) and the recapitulation (often shortened by musicians and/or lazy bloggers to ‘recap’) will be a more-or-less straightforward repetition of the exposition. And that’s it. (There are two optional sections – an Introduction, to come before the exposition, and a Coda (‘tail’ in Italian), to come after the recap – but those are not obligatory and need not appear in every Sonata-form movement.)

Inner structure:
The exposition has an inner sub-division as well. Normally it will contain:

1. A first subject section
2. A connecting section (a.k.a. as a bridge or a transition, which leads into the ->)
3. Second subject section
4. Codetta (meaning ‘little coda’, acting as a closure to the exposition).

The first and the second subject are basically two melodies that will form most of the melodic material of the movement (the term melody might be misleading, as some of those ‘subjects’ are not melodies one could sing, really [though some of them are, certainly], so the more neutral ‘subject’ is usually used). The transition and the codetta might contain new melodic material as well, though they need not, and if they do, it will usually be less ‘melodic’ than that of the main subjects. 

The development has no prescribed structure, and can vary a lot between each work. With some composers/works it will contain the most interesting music in the movement, whereas with others it will be short and bear less musical weight. It’s something best approached on a per-development basis.

The recap is an altered repeat of the exposition. There is one inherent alteration that is almost always present (see 01:52 in the guide), and for the rest, the composer might include as many variations and deviations from the original material as he’d like – though usually all four sections of the exposition will be present.

So that’s the basic outline (of course, many many variations are possible, but this is a good place to start). Before we dig into the Mozart, I’d like to offer an additional way of looking into the structure of the sonata form – it doesn’t replace the one above, but rather co-exists with it, while possibly providing a better explanation of the driving force behind the form – and it requires looking at the relationship of the various keys inside the movement. This is a slightly more tricky concept to explain (we’ll need first to define what a musical key is), so feel free to jump from here to the guide itself – but it’s also quite a basic one, and I think might prove useful to us in the future (and I did end up using the key concept in the guide).

So, keys. If you imagine a piano keyboard (here’s a picture: )

…you will see that it is built from groups of seven white and five black keys which are repeated again and again (so for instance, one group could be all the notes from A to A, and no matter from which note you start, the interval (= distance) between it and its next occurrence is called an ‘octave’ [from ‘octava’, Latin for eighth – meaning that the upper A is the eighth white note one encounters starting from the lower A***])

In tonal music, which is most of the music written between 1600 and 1900 and a significant part of the music written after 1900, not all the notes inside any single octave are equally important. Instead there is a stable hierarchy of sounds, including one most important note (which is like a musical home base/center of gravity), two notes that are nearly as important (the fourth note and the fifth note above the base note – so D and E respectively, if one starts with A – each one with a different function), with the rest having their own places too. I won’t go too deeply into this, as it would then become long enough for a separate post (which would be quite boring, as it’s rather technical stuff), and the small details don’t matter so much to us. The one thing that is of interest is that within each key we have one supremely important ‘home’ note (called the Tonic – though there’s no gin anywhere), which defines the ‘sound’ of the key, and also its name – a key based on, say, C would be called C major or C minor.

Knowing this, one could look at the Sonata form the point of view of keys:

• Exposition:
• The first subject is (almost) always in the main key – the subject announces the key to the listeners, establishing the home base.
• The transition, which wouldn’t be of much interest if we looked at it from a purely melodic point of view, suddenly becomes much more important, as it now has a crucial mission – to get us out of the home key as quickly as possible (like Gandalf having to get Bilbo out of his house by the second chapter of ‘The Hobbit’, otherwise we wouldn’t be having all the interesting and dangerous adventures). It moves (the musical term is ‘modulates’) to a new key and establishes it as the new home base. Generally, the new key will be based on the second most-important note of the scale – the fifth above the tonic (called the Dominant, as a noun).
• The second subject will be then in the new key, establishing it even more,
• as will be the codetta.
• The development will usually be an area where one leaves the safe harbor of either key and goes exploring. Not necessarily – but most key-related drama will usually take place in the development (where it joins the melodic perturbations – so the development is quite often the area of least stability in a sonata movement). Towards the end of the development the composer would usually start to gravitate towards the first home key, stopping just one step short of getting there (a cliffhanger) —- and we go on to
• The recapitulation
• which would then start with a return both of the first subject and the main key (to give us as much as possible a feeling of a homecoming).
• The transition in the recap is a curious thing. If the composer would just copy it from the exposition (something he may well do with the first subject), he would once again arrive at the key of the dominant – something which he really doesn’t want to do now. It is the main key of the work that is our area of interest in the recap (slightly like Bilbo who, after getting back to the Shire, had to deal with his furniture being sold at an auction and other such domestic affairs, but wouldn’t go adventuring again; at least no till the Lord of the Rings :P). So, the composer now has to write new music, in order to make the transition modulate from the home key into the… home key (which is sometimes more of a feat than it sounds).
• The second subject would now appear in the home key (so, transposed from the exposition),
• as would the codetta, firmly finishing the movement in the home key.

So there we are. We have two different looks at the sonata form, one from the melodic / structural point of view, one from the underlining point of view of keys. And in order to put this in practice (it’s high time, as the post is getting rather long), I’ve chosen the shortest, cleanest sonata-form movement I know of – the third movement of Mozart’s Sonata in F major, K.280 (ah, I forgot about this little conundrum – the word sonata has a double meaning – it is both the structure we just discussed, and a name for a work of several movements (= parts), at least one of which is written in sonata form. A standard sonata (as a work) would have three movements – fast, slow, fast – the first usually being in sonata form, the second and/or third only sometimes so).

***

Here it is, performed by Sviatoslav Richter in Prague,  in 1966:

00:00-00:41 is our exposition. The inner division would be:

00:00-00:08 – the first subject. It consist of two elements – a pointy, jumpy one, with a repeated-notes motif in the beginning (00:00-00:02) followed by a virtuoso passage (00:03-00:04) – these two forming the first half of the section; the first element is then repeated one octave lower (00:04-00:06) (this might demonstrate what I meant at the footnote below regarding octaves), and there’s another brilliant passage, upwards this time (00:06-00:07) with quick three chords forming the cadence (00:08). You could think of the two halves of the phrase as a question and an answer (the answer repeating the first half of the question, like we all sometimes do). All this is in our main key of F major, and as you see, fairly microscopic :]

00:08-00:19 – the transition. We have a new texture here – the left hand playing repeated notes, the right hand a slightly longer melodic element (the writing reminds very much of writing for woodwinds – the left hand imitating a bassoon and the right hand being two oboes). This element is played twice – 00:08-00:10, and then 00:10-00:12 an octave higher. We’re still in F major, but now comes the modulation: it is so light-footed and quick it’s really hard to catch, but the main part of it is the four short upward passages at 00:12-00:14, with the longer twirling passage at 00:15 already starting the cadence in the new key – C major (the dominant, or fifth note above the tonic, as expected). The cadence is then underlined by three repeats of the last two chords at 00:16-00:19, each one echoed by two imitating notes in the left hand (I find this sort of noteplay wonderful – as if the voices were calling to each other: “You’re there?” “I’m here!” “We’re here!” “You’re there?” “We’re here!” “I’m here!”)

00:20-00:35 – the second subject section. We’re now in the new key of C major, though the first, very rhythmical, element starts slightly off-key (00:20-00:22) lending a somewhat uncertain, questioning character to the otherwise very brave and energetic (and slightly woodpecker-ish) motif (note the same motif of three repeated notes we had in the beginning, here with an added rhythmical spice). But we’re getting into C major proper right away at 00:22, with a wonderful sense of resolution and stability (the very active left hand compensating for its 2 seconds of silence, and giving a solid support to the jumpy right hand). This lasts precisely 4 seconds, and at 00:26 the first motif of the second subject returns, now in both hands (you can just hear the second woodpecker joining in), but still with its slightly questioning character – and the resolution, when it comes now, is even fuller (and louder), the left hand playing in the lowest region of the keyboard (Mozart’s keyboard, this being 1774, was quite a bit shorter than that of the modern piano). Note the small variation in the right hand between 00:24 and 00:29. To close off the second subject section, we have yet another virtuoso passage going downward, repeated twice, at 00:31 and 00:33.

00:35-00:41 – the codetta. Note the complete change of texture between the mischievous fast runs of the last seconds and the relatively well-behaved first seconds of the codetta (00:35-00:38, where the texture again reminds of woodwinds, and we have the same sort of call-and-answer game between the two hands). This obviously cannot last for long, and at 00:38 he bursts again into short passages, finishing the exposition with a last, happy repeat of the repeated-notes motif we had both in the first and the second subjects.

00:41-01:22 – is a full repeat of the entire exposition. Those repeats are quite common in sonata form movements, and modern opinions divide – some say it’s an inherent part of the structure and not playing them is a blasphemy, while others take a more relaxed approach and say it should be left to the discretion of the performer (Brahms, who once conducting his first symphony in Germany (I think it was Hamburg, but I’m not certain), omitted the repeat of the exposition, was asked why, and calmly replied: “well, they have heard it this season already.” So there you go.) In a movement that lasts about a minute and forty-five seconds, repeating makes a lot of sense.

01:22-01:37 – is the development. I’m serious, it’s fifteen seconds long. And yet Mozart manages to pack a lot of various stuff into it. We begin with the second subject, which is now in minor (hear the change in mood?). The woodpecker motif is answered at 01:24 with quite a vehemence in the left hand passages. It is then repeated at 01:26, being even further off-key (more uncertainty), and at 01:28 Mozart bursts into a longer section of passages. He takes the fist half of what the left hand had just played (01:24), and repeats it four times, switching hands: r.h (02:28), l.h. (01:29), r.h. (01:30), l.h. (01:31). Harmonically, these four repeats form two groups (or sequences, again like a call and an answer, repeated twice, and passing though various keys on the way, without stopping in any). It is followed by more sequences – a short, imploring motif at the right hand, repeated four times (01:33-01:35), which is then repeated by the left hand (01:35-01:37). We have come a long way from the lightness and wit of the exposition, and the change in mood is almost palpable – we have righteous anger, supplication, defiance and whatnot.

Which all evaporate without a trace at 01:38, as we’re back at the first subject and back to F major- meaning we’re already at the recap! Wait, but wasn’t he supposed to prepare the return or something, make a smoother transition and so on? Well, yes, he was supposed to, I guess, but, you know, he probably just wasn’t in the mood! – and him being the composer he can basically do whatever his muse/genius/intuition/sense of humor suggests him to do. And, as we said, the movement is really tiny, so many things can be done away with.

The recap is really really simple. We have a full repeat of the first subject section (01:38-01:46) and then just a small change in the transition (if you remember, that’s the one required alteration, as he doesn’t want to modulate into C major now, but rather stay in F major, the home key). The change comes at 01:52, when he takes the four short passages in the right hand (01:50-01:52) and repeats them again, only higher (but not an octave higher – that wouldn’t help – just a fourth higher, a fourth being an interval encompassing four notes, which is exactly what he needs in order to get from the fifth note of the scale (C), where he arrived at after the first four passages, to the eighth (F). [That’s a very technical point, so you needn’t spend too much thought on it, but if you’d like, just go to the keyboard picture above and count the notes – from F to C and from C upwards to F – including every time the C and the F in your calculations]).

The rest of the movement is a repeat of the exposition, just transposed to the home key of F major. Second subject is at 01:59 and the codetta at 02:14 (but wait, there’s one interesting thing there – when the woodpecker motif is repeated in both hands at 02:06, he moves to a lower region of the keyboard instead of moving to an even higher one, like he did in the exposition. The reason is purely technical/mechanical – you might remember me saying his keyboard was shorter than ours. Well, he simply didn’t have any higher! so by necessity he had to jump down – which gives that entire sections a darker color (especially at 02:13-02:14, when he goes really low). He then recoups the lost altitude by jumping up an octave and a half in the transition to the codetta at 02:14, as opposed to just a half-octave jump at the exposition, at 00:35). The movement ends at 02:21 (the last bar being a slightly prolonged version of the last bar of the exposition, which was really quite abrupt, and would probably not do for a proper ending; compare 00:39-00:40 with 02:19-02:21).

The rest is a full repeat of the development and the recap – those were less common than repeats of the exposition, but not rare by any means in Mozart’s or Haydn’s sonatas (much rarer in Beethoven’s, as Beethoven often added mighty codas after the recap, which would not work well combined with a repeat),

And that’s it! It’s a wonderful, quirky movement, full of energy, joy-of-life and humor (and a small portion of drama), and to think that it is firmly rooted in a nearly perfect example of the sonata-form blueprint makes it, to me, even more marvelous. But that could just be me, dunno :]

Till next week. And if you liked it and think any of your non-musicians friends might enjoy it – please feel very free to forward the link (this is half a blatant solicitation, half a very earnest wish to spread this very cool music).

***

*Lest I be accused of serious ignorance in all things History-of-Music-al, I’ll add that the Sonata existed in the Baroque period as well (so we should be adding about 100-120 years to her already venerable age), but back then it meant several different types of compositions, none of which could truly be considered an ancestor of the Sonata form we discussed today (which emerged in the Classical period, formally counted from 1750), so for our needs we might safely say she’s 250, and not make her blush even more.

** In truth, I don’t know of any sonata-form movements that don’t contain these three sections, but then again, there’s a huge lot of music out there and a I don’t know a very large part of it, so I’m leaving myself an escape path just in case.

*** The upper A and the lower A (and all the A’s on the keyboard) are to our ears one sound, just repeated at different pitches (higher/lower). This relationship between the various notes on the keyboard is based on a physical phenomenon, without which, I would wager a guess, music as we know it would not exist. The phenomenon is that if you take two strings, one exactly twice as long (or as short) as the other, and make them vibrate, they would produce what to our ears would seem as the same sound, a perfect consonance, just with the shorter string sounding higher than the longer one. You can produce other musical intervals with different lengths of strings: the one between A and E (the middle of the octave +1 note) is based on a 2:3 length ratio, for example. It’s a fascinating and/but huge subject; so I’ll leave it here for now. Let me know if you’d like me to write more about this.

The letters, by the way, (A, B and so on) are not arbitrary designations, but are the actual names of the different notes in English; the black ones are called ‘flats’, if below the white note, or ‘sharps’ if above (those are also the terms used by musicians to describe notes that are out-of-tune – a flat note is too low, a sharp one is too high) – so the black note above D would be D-sharp, and the one below G would be G-flat, and as you might guess, a D-sharp can also be defined as E-flat and a G-flat as F-sharp – depending on the key we’re in. Slightly mind-warping at first, but one gets used to it fairly quickly :]

Bach for starters: “Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot” from Cantata No. 39

Hello everybody,

It took me longer than I hoped, but the first guide is finally here. I decided to start with the one that has seen some success in the past, and translated it from its original Hebrew to English. I have Grand Plans for the next ones, so if you enjoy this guide, stay tuned. And now without further ado –

(The recording is by the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, one of the greatest Bach conductors of our time, and a big musical hero of mine.)

The piece is from a larger work by Bach, a Cantata – those were liturgical works, performed each Sunday in the church, before and after the sermon. The Kapellmeister – the composer-on-duty/head-of-music at the local court – was in charge of composing or procuring one for each Sunday. The text (those are works for singers and/or a chorus accompanied by an orchestra) had to relate to the text of the sermon, and the text of the sermon would fit the time of the liturgical year.

We do not know for sure how many cantatas Bach wrote, but more than 200 survive (and we’re quite certain there were more than 300). Each one is at least 20 minutes long (and there are longer ones, up to 35 minutes), and Bach, as opposed to most other Kapellmeisters who would usually write one cantata a month and use other composers’ works for the rest of the time (18th century outsourcing), at least during two years wrote all of them himself. That would mean 3-4 days to write a masterpiece (and those are masterpieces), another day to copy the musicians’ parts, two days to rehearse, and then the performance – and repeat, week after week. Genius alone would never suffice – we’re speaking of an incredible work ethic.

A note on the text: it’s Isaiah 58:7-8, which in the King James Version reads as follows:

 – (7) Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

– (8) Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.

Bach used the Martin Luther translation which differs from the above in several points (of importance to us, for as we shall see, Bach treated the text with utmost attention, and the music often references the words). A literal translation of the German text would read:

Break to the hungry your bread, and those who are in misery lead into the house; when you see one naked, so clothe him, and do not avoid your own flesh. (Verse 8 is nearly identical between the two.)

***

So, here we go. (By the way, feel free either to read the following first and listen afterwards, or read while listening, to go back if something is unclear, or to do it in any other way that feels right to you. My only suggestion would be, after you have gone through this with the guide, to listen to the music once again, without the notes – I’m going to break this down into small pieces and details, and a second listening would help put the work back together).

00:00–01:13 – the orchestral opening. There is a very short motif here, consisting of two repeated notes, that gets passed between three groups of instruments (one could imagine them playing Catch): two notes in the flutes, two notes in the oboes, two notes in the violins, and repeat. A sort of a steady, unending dribble. Beneath them is the harmony – the basso continuo; celli and a chamber organ. The harmony changes from bar to bar – but this entire section is one musical phrase. The rules of harmony don’t matter so much to us; you will feel, I think, the directionality of the phrase, the sense that it’s going somewhere; there are harsher, more dissonant harmonies that want to resolve into calmer, less tense ones, and from a series of these small progressions the larger line is created. One noteworthy change will come at 00:44: the two-note motif disappears, replaced by a longer, more elaborate one, and a new, metallic color is added to the orchestra. The metallic color is the cembalo and the motif does not disappear – rather, it passes to the bass line: to the cello and the organ. Listen to this – how the bass that was just the back rest for the flutes, oboes and violins now becomes melodic and would itself repeat the main motif. There is a mounting tension starting from 0:56 and at 01:06–01:13 comes the cadence. In musical language the harmonies say – we’re nearly done, here comes the full stop. And on we go.

01:14 – the entrance of the chorus. The standard chorus consists of four groups: Soprano (high female voice), Alto (low female voices), Tenor (high male voices) and Bass (low male voices) (sorry if that’s self-evident). Here, in the beginning, the division is into two larger groups – the women and the men. The women open with a single word: “Break”, and immediately, as an echo, the men answer: “Break”; the women continue: “to the hungry”, but the men would not wait until they finish but enter in the middle: “to the hungry”, and then the two unite: “thy bread”. Beautiful polyphony.

Break……………..to the hu ————-ngry……………….thy bread.
…………..Break……………..to the hu————-ngry……thy bread.

Here we can see right away why it was important that Bach’s text said “break” rather than “deal” – Bach interprets the text literally, or rather lets the text manifest itself in the musical composition – and to correspond to the “break” in the text, Bach made two breaks here: breaking the chorus into two distinct groups and breaking the sentence into short pieces. In musical terminology this kind of text illustration via the music is called word-painting, and Bach was a great master of it.

Following that, at 01:29, is the same bit, only reversed – the men start and the women answer. And then, at 01:34, all come together: “and those who are in misery…”, a long, winding phrase, nearly 30 seconds long. Again and again, when one of the voices would finish, the rest would immediately pick up the line. And only at 02:03 comes the end of the phrase: “… lead into the house”. Again, word-painting: after the short, split “breaking of the bread”, we have the long, never-ending distress of misery that comes and goes in waves, and when you’d think it’s over, there comes yet another voice and carries it forward.

02:03-02:13: “…lead into the house”. Bach illustrates the text once again with the big prolongation of the word “lead” (führe) that can seem to demonstrate the walk home, followed just at the very end by the two short words “ins Haus”.

02:14-02:31: it’s a repeat of the last portion of the text (“and those… “), but there is a wonderful moment there, a short one, just 4 seconds long (short?), at 02:14, when the voices enter one straight after another in descending order.

And those—
…………….And those—
……………………………And those—
…………………………………………..And those—

This is called ‘stretto’, meaning narrow, tight. It’s a musical means of increasing the tension and it’s used here to do so before the cadence that follows (that’s standard phrase construction in Bach’s music – and not only Bach’s – building the phrase from the bottom up, with the climax arriving just a few notes before the end, immediately followed by a cadence, repose).

And what is the orchestra doing all that time? Go back to 01:13 and try listening just to the orchestral accompaniment behind the voices. Do you recognize it? That’s the section that came before it, 00:00-01:13, and it gets repeated here in its entirety. What previously was all the music there was and lacked nothing, becomes a backdrop, a counterpoint to the chorus – like two strata uniting to form something bigger.

02:31-03:45: in the beginning we are only left with the tenors, who sing the same text, from “and those…” to “… the house.” It’s a new motif, but with same principle of text illustration – prolongations of “misery” and “lead”:

Und die, so in E-e-e-e-e-le-end sind… fü-ü-ühre ins Haus.

The altos join in at 02:43, repeating the same motif the tenors just sang. Later they will be joined by the sopranos (03:04) and the basses (03:20). Each time a new voice joins in it becomes the main melodic voice, and the rest continue accompanying it with a counterpoint. This sort of writing – voices joining-in one by one, with a gradual thickening of the musical texture – is called ‘fugal writing’, from ‘fugue’ (which comes itself from ‘fugare’ in Latin, meaning ‘to chase’, as if the voices were chasing each other, but not quite catching). When a fugue is just a part of the work and not the work itself, it’s called ‘fugato’. Very effective (I remember my counterpoint textbook stating that “whatever beauty can be achieved by a single voice [this comes after endless single-voice drills – BG], its effect can be doubled by a second voice and further enhanced by every additional one. – Well, it can, definitely).

There is a rather strange thing here – all voices except the tenors (the first ones to enter the chase) start their lines not from “and those…” but rather from before that: “Break to the hungry…”. How so? Normally, in a fugue or a fugato the voices are supposed to repeat each other faithfully, at least in the beginning. The trick Bach’s using here is really neat: at the end of the previous section, 02:25-02:31, when the rest of the chorus was singing “lead into the house”, the tenors were already starting with “Break to the hungry…”. That’s quite incredible – four voices singing together, in full harmony, but one voice is singing a completely different text! In this recording JE Gardiner chose not only not to show this but to hide it away completely, so much that even knowing it’s there, I can hardly hear it. If you’re interested, you can hear it very clearly here, 01:50-01:55 (a rather less exciting recording overall, but very clear in this spot.)

During all that time the orchestra goes on with the same two-note motif, accompanying the chorus – though the harmonic progression is different from the one at the beginning, as the harmonies follow whatever direction the voices take (and the voices follow whatever direction in which the fugal writing leads them – it’s a rather strictly regulated form of composition, and the seeming ease with which Bach can handle four [and at times five, six or eight voices], is, well, seeming; it’s rather the result of years-long experience and a complete mastery). Another small difference – the cembalo, which was mostly absent up to here, now strikes a short chord on every beat with hypnotic clock-like regularity, giving the entire section a measured, slightly relentless feel – and all this contrasts nicely with the very smooth singing in the voices.

03:45-05:01: after all the voices unite in one last “lead into the house” (where the ticking of the clock in the orchestra stops, and we heave an internal sigh of relief, as the music finally lets go of the steady tension it maintained during the last minute – it will return in a few seconds, but without the cembalo – and what a difference this makes) we have a full repeat of the section from 01:13 till 02:31, but with the voices reversed. Thus, in the initial “Break”, the men will start first and the women will answer, and in the short stretto, 04:44-04:49, the voices will enter in ascending order, from bass to soprano (“and those—, and those—, and those—, and those—”). Bach truly squeezes whatever polyphonic potential and variety there is (a common trait for him – he is very economic in his use of melodic material, and can often write a rich and varied movement of some 10 minutes based on a short phrase. The counterweight to this is his incredible overall output – more than 1100 works, and also, I would say, the richness of inspiration of so many of his melodies).

We are also in a different key here than the one we were in at the beginning, but that really doesn’t matter so much (it’s a technical issue, related to the construction of the whole movement, and while crucial for composition, it’s not crucial at all for listening; especially as various researches have shown that those of us who don’t have absolute pitch cannot know whether a musical work started and ended in the same key. If you would like to hear it, just jump from 03:45 to 00:00, and you’ll hear the difference right away).

05:02-05:36 – a new section, on the text of clothing the naked and not avoiding your flesh. There is a new, slightly faster tempo (‘tempo’ = speed) and a new meter – we had three beats in a bar and now we have two (all the musical changes are to underline the changes in the text). Bach divides the section into two connected phrases:

05:02-05:19 – the clothing. First the motif appears in the basses only (05:02), and then it’s answered in the full chorus (05:04); then for the second time it comes in the altos accompanied by the sopranos (05:07), answered by the full chorus (05:10), and for the third time in the tenors accompanied by the altos and the sopranos (05:13), again answered by the full chorus (05:16). (Three times is the standard number of repetitions of a phrase in any section, both for theological and aesthetic reasons – a fourth repeat was considered superfluous and bad taste [one can find it sometimes in Beethoven’s works, mostly because of harmonic constraints, and then some people would say triumphantly that Schubert wouldn’t have had those constraints. Musicians.]). Notice the variety of voice combinations in such a short section – basses only, full chorus, soprano and alto, full chorus, soprano alto and tenor, full chorus. We could also possibly see word-painting here – the gradual “clothing” of the bare motif that was first found in one voice only, later appeared in two voices (S+A) and then in three (S+A+T). (<– that’s a cool way of looking at it. I haven’t thought of this when I first wrote the guide.)

05:19-05:36: the non-avoidance. It’s a free polyphonic section – all the voices participate, there are a few motifs jumping from voice to voice, but no particular points of interest or word-painting.

05:36 to the end: that’s my favorite part. The text is the whole of verse 8, but we’ll once again have a division into sections. The meter has changed again and we’re back to triple, though the length of the base beat is now twice as short as in the beginning, resulting in a lighter, more dance-like feeling, as befits the much brighter text of this verse.

05:36-06:08 – a beautiful fugato on “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning”. The entries are as follows: the tenors start, then the altos (05:43), the sopranos (05:52) and the basses (05:59). If the order sounds familiar to you, that’s because this is the same one we had in the first fugato (02:31-03:45). Bach does this often – holds the basses back until all the other voices have entered, as the bass entry is usually the most effective (in this case the entire orchestra – the flutes, the oboes and the violins [prior to 05:59 we only had the basso continuo] – enters together with the basses, which only intensifies the effect).

06:08-06:14 – “and thine health shall spring forth speedily”. A homophonic section (meaning the chorus works as a single unit, all four voices singing together). Two points of interest: the quick, impatient repetition of “schnell” (‘quickly’) at 06:11-06:13 and the ending. This is slightly tricky to hear, but in 06:14 one of the voices, the tenors, finishes just a tiny bit after the rest. This has no textual meaning – it’s just one of the many available polyphonic devices, and quite common. (You might hear this through the double ‘ks’ sound at 06:14, coming from the superimposition of the differently timed “wachsen”s (“grow”):

Wach—–sen.
Wach—–sen.
Wach——-sen.
Wach—–sen.)

06:14-06:18 – a short orchestral interlude.

06:19-06:33 – “and thy righteousness shall go before thee”. Another free polyphonic section (meaning the voices work independently – as opposed to homophony – but not in a fugato or anything else with strict rules). The many “Eh” sounds you will hear come from a prolongation of the word “herge-e-e-e-hen” (to go) in all voices. Again, word-painting, not unlike “fü-ü-ü-hre” (lead) which we had before. It’s interesting to note that Bach does not choose to illustrate the much more significant word “righteousness”, but rather the word that he can illustrate – “go”. One can also illustrate “righteousness”, and Bach does it a few times in chorales by certain harmonic progression that lack dissonances. But not in a section like this – the harmonies here change too quickly for that.

06:34-06:36 – another short orchestral interlude. These serve as musical buffers/breaths of air, separating the various sections.

06:36 to the end – one last fugato, on “the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.” It uses the same motif (the official term in a fugue or a fugato is ‘subject’, but I think motif is clearer) as the fugato at 05:36, with just the first entry being slightly different, in order to make the transition from major to minor smoother. The second entry – the tenors at 06:43 – is already identical to the original motif. Then comes the alto entry at 06:50, and then suddenly something cool – instead of a last entry in the sopranos and there we are, Bach expands the section – he adds a fourth entry in the flute at 07:01 – then a short interlude in major, and only then the fifth entry in the sopranos (07:07) – the flute now functioning as a fully independent fifth voice.

07:15-07:19 – one last orchestral interlude. The music is already making cadence sounds, as my late counterpoint teacher used to say; there is a sense of a mounting tension, and then in the very end, the climax – one last glorious entry in the sopranos at 07:19, with all the other voices joining in right away, and that’s it, the end. Fugues and fugatos should always end in a spectacular last entry of the motif.

***

So, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed it, and I will post again soon(er).