Franz Liszt was a man of paradoxes and extremes who could only flourish in the Romantic period. He was a contemplative artist and superficial showman, mystic and hedonist, genius and poseur, saint and sinner. He broke many a commandment and many a heart, exhibiting incredible flamboyance in his virtuoso piano performances before adoring audiences, yet longing for a life of religious contemplation. He fathered numerous illegitimate offspring but ended up taking minor orders in the Catholic church with the right to the title Abbé Liszt. He witnessed first-hand the cultural and musical transformation of Europe but unfortunately never wrote his life’s memoirs, being “too busy living it.”

In 1848, tired of his role as traveling pianist and showman, Liszt settled down as Kapellmeister and chief musical factotum in Weimar, one of the smaller German principalities but a known center of culture where Goethe had spent the better part of his adult life. During his 13 years in Weimar, Liszt both composed new works and brought to their final form many of his earlier works that had undergone numerous revisions over the years, including 12 of his 13 symphonic poems.

Liszt coined the term “symphonic poem” in 1854, although the idea of programmatic or descriptive music was by no means new. The term signified an orchestral work, usually in one movement, inspired by a narrative text, poem, painting, sculpture, or even an historical event. The name caught on and was adopted by such diverse composers as Camille Saint-Saëns, Bedrich Smetana, César Franck, Antonín Dvorák and Richard Strauss.

Liszt composed Orpheus in 1853-54 and premiered it as an introduction to Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Eurydice. In a preface to the score, Liszt wrote that he had been inspired by an Etruscan vase in the Louvre, depicting Orpheus with his lyre taming the wild beasts and the brutal instincts of man. He regarded Orpheus as a symbol for the civilizing influence of art – an idea that was already a few thousand years old.

As a prelude to the opera, Liszt’s symphonic poem represents Orphic song in general, while the opera reenacts the well-known legend. An understated but passionate work, Orpheus naturally employs the harp as the principal accompanying instrument. The melodic line is clear and song-like, making use of solos and section solos, as if the various orchestral sonorities comprise the power of the song. Nearly 250 years earlier in 1607, Monteverdi had created a similar effect to make the same point. He accompanied each verse of Orfeo’s plea to Pluto, the central piece in the opera L’Orfeo, with different instruments from the largest and most diverse orchestra that had ever been assembled.

Beethoven composed the Fourth Piano Concerto concurrently with the Fifth Symphony, and the first movement of the Concerto shares with the Symphony the same upbeat rhythmic figure, although in a very different mood. The premiere, at a private subscription concert, took place in March 1807 together with the premiere of the Fourth Symphony and the Overture to Coriolan. It was, however, at the historic Beethoven-Konzert of Dec. 22, 1808 that the general public first heard the G-major Concerto, with Beethoven wearing two hats, as conductor and soloist. This was one of those typical monster concerts of the period at which the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Concert Aria “Ah Perfido” and the Choral Fantasia were also premiered. True to Beethoven’s form, the orchestra was poorly and hastily rehearsed; many of the orchestral parts were not yet ready; Beethoven quarreled with the musicians; and the hall was freezing cold. As deafness descended on him, it was also his last performance as a soloist.

With the composition of this Concerto, Beethoven broke important new ground. The standard concerto form at the time consisted of the so-called double exposition, in which the orchestra plays the dual role of introducing much of the thematic material of the movement as well as building up tension and expectation for the entrance of the soloist. But the Fourth Piano Concerto opens with the soloist – briefly but significantly – stating the main thematic and rhythmic motive that drives the movement. The orchestra then takes up its traditional role but starts off by offering a response to the piano in a distant key. Thus begins a remarkably complex work in which the two forces continually engage in a true musical dialogue.

In the second movement, the conversation between soloist and orchestra of the first movement escalates into an argument. The orchestra’s demanding fortissimo, answered by the piano’s gentle, almost pleading response. Scholars have associated this, although certainly with no documentary evidence, with the legend of Orpheus’s taming of the wild beasts or even his confrontation with the forces of death to recover his dead Eurydice.

By the time the finale opens, the mood has cleared, and soloist and orchestra return to their conversation in a cheery rondo. Again, Beethoven alters the typical structure by beginning this movement with the orchestra, rather than the soloist. The two occasionally interrupt each other. And at times, the orchestra “mumbles” a commentary, reiterating the opening rhythmic pattern, as the piano performs its fanciful elaborations.

Audiences did not take to the Fourth Concerto at first, preferring the more conventional Third or more dramatic Fifth. It fell into neglect until Mendelssohn revived it in 1836, performing it frequently thereafter. It became a favorite of famed pianist Clara Schumann, who played it throughout Europe and also wrote cadenzas for it.

Composer, pianist and educator George Walker achieved an important series of African American “firsts” in his long career: A graduate of Oberlin College Conservatory, the Curtis Institute, Doctor of Musical Arts from Eastman – and the first black composer to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He was the first black instrumentalist to appear with the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, and the first African American composer to receive a Pulitzer Prize (1996). His autobiography, Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist, was published in 2009.

Walker has spent most of his professional life teaching at music departments around the country, including Smith College, Colorado University, Rutgers University and the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University; he also toured extensively as pianist in Europe.

Walker was an unashamed neo-romantic, having lived for nearly a century that saw countless developments in musical style from Schoenberg to Cage – and back. He was a prolific composer whose works are reminiscent of those of Samuel Barber.

Walker composed Orpheus in 1994 for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. It is scored for four speakers and a chamber orchestra. The unseen, amplified speakers are Narrator (baritone), Orpheus (tenor) Hades (bass) & Eurydice (soprano); short statements for “chorus” performed by the 3 male speakers above, or by 3 additional male voices.

The work is in six sections, performed attacca:

1. Orpheus, my son, I give to thee…
2. A Song for Eurydice
3. The Underworld
4. The Ascent from the Underworld
5. Eurydice disappears into the darkness
6. Orpheus pursued by Ciconian women – Orpheus dies

Walker retells the myth of Orpheus not only as the usual drama of his failed attempt to rescue his Eurydice, but adds the drama of Orpheus’ father, Oeagrus, king of Trace, as he sees his son torn to bits by Thracian women in the final scene – a scene usually ignored by musical re-tellers of the story.

Gluck is one of the few composers of note who seems to have been completely self-taught. Raised by his father, a forester who tried to discourage his son’s musical bent, Gluck left home as a teenager to follow a musical career. His fame gradually spread in the course of holding several minor musical posts in central Europe. His first known composition was a full-fledged opera, Artaserse, set to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Metastasio had a kind of stranglehold on libretto writing in early and mid-eighteenth century and his texts were repeatedly set to music by the period’s composers. For decades, the opera seria, as it was called, ruled the boards. It followed a standard and rather monotonous structure consisting of scene after scene of recitative followed by an aria in ABA form. The subject matter was generally about an event–often fictitious–in the lives of some ancient king or queen or a dramatization of a scene from an Italian Renaissance epic poem.

Most of Gluck’s operas are in the opera seria genre, but in 1760 in Vienna, Gluck met the poet Raniero Calzabigi, who introduced him to the issues raging in Paris between adherents of the opera seria and indigenous French operatic tradition. Gluck collaborated with Calzabigi to create a new operatic style more varied musically and directly expressive of the text, in accordance with neo-classical principles of simplicity and humanism espoused during the Enlightenment. Their first foray into new operatic territory was Orfeo ed Euridice (in Italian), which premiered in Vienna in1762. The French version, an actual recomposing of the opera, premiered in Paris in 1774.

Opera in France always included at least one ballet. Gluck provided two, the “Dance of the Furies” and the immediately following “Dance of the Blessed Spirits,” both of which take place in Hades as Orpheus seeks to reclaim his beloved Eurydice. Gluck portrayed the wildness of the Furies in music by denying them a true melody; the dance is all tremolos under disorganized chord progressions. The Blessed Spirits, by contrast, written for solo flute with strings accompaniment, evokes a gentle bucolic image, in line with the period’s idealized picture of ancient Greece.

The son of a German Jewish cantor, Jacques (originally Jacob) Offenbach moved in 1833 to Paris where his father thought Jews were better treated than in Germany. Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, he was a cellist and salon musician for many years until he was appointed conductor of the Théatre Français and began composing one-act operettas, satirizing the vapid social scene of Paris. In 1858 he wrote his first three-act operetta, Orphée aux enfers spoofing the neoclassical vogue of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. La belle Hélène, composed in 1864, was an even more scathing swipe at the none-too-bright-Emperor and his even dimmer empress Eugénie. His operettas influences Gilbert and Sullivan, Franz Lehár and, ultimately, the musical comedies of the twentieth century.

Orphée aux enfers created a scandal at its premiere. The operetta parodies the story of Orpheus, whose bride, Eurydice, dies on their wedding day. By means of his amazing musical talent Orpheus wins her back from the underworld only to lose her again by looking back at her before reaching the surface. Offenbach insulted everyone evenhandedly. He was accused of denigrating classical antiquity, the revered Christoph Willibald Gluck, the Emperor, the government and the prevailing social order. Predictably, the negative publicity made for soaring ticket sales. With the fall of the Emperor and the changing political and social climate, Offenbach had to revise the operetta extensively in 1874.

The overture, however, is not entirely by Offenbach. The version commonly played was compiled for the first performance in Vienna by Carl Binder, a minor Austrian operetta composer. He started with the overture Offenbach wrote and added to it the famous violin solo from Act I and the famous cancan from the end of Act IV.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com