Gilbert Varga is the Essman Family Foundation Guest Artist.
Baiba Skride is the Sid and Jean Grossman Guest Artist.
The concert of Saturday, February 18, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Carolyn and Jay Henges.
The concert of Saturday, February 18, is sponsored by Steinway Piano Gallery.
 

From the Heart of Europe
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

The people of Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia (the old kingdoms of Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia) are famously musical. Czech folk song is melodious and expressive; Prague has enjoyed a thriving musical life since the Renaissance, and it welcomed Mozart and cheered his operas at a time when he and his works were meeting with indifference in his own adopted city of Vienna. Hungary also has a strong tradition of folk music, and this eventually proved a fertile source of ideas and inspiration for Hungarian composers.

These countries, which lie at the heart of Europe, were long part of the Hapsburg empire, and their political domination by Austria undoubtedly perpetuated a provincial atmosphere that stunted the development of an internationally significant art music. During the 19th century, however, burgeoning national pride and desire for independence from Austrian domination gave rise to a distinctly Czech school of composition whose greatest members were Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček. Hungary produced its first great composers somewhat later, during the first half of the 20th century, in the persons of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Like their Czech colleagues, they established a style of nationalist music by combining rhythmic and melodic aspects of folk music with well-established compositional procedures.

Our concert presents music by four Czech and Hungarian composers. Our first two pieces have another commonality, each having been engendered by unrequited love.

Antonín Dvořák was born into a poor family in a rural Bohemian village. His decision to leave home and study at the Prague Organ School was a bold one in view of his family’s meager financial resources. Dvořák endured considerable privation during his first years in Prague, sharing a cramped and unheated room and living on very little. His schooling should have prepared him to work as a church organist. But Prague had revealed new possibilities to the young musician from the provinces. In addition to classes at the Organ School, Dvořák attended opera and symphony performances and heard such distinguished performers as Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt.

            Determined to become more than a church musician, Dvořák remained in Prague, eking out a small income as a viola player and by giving occasional lessons. He might have increased his earnings were he not determined to devote as much time as possible to composition. Dvořák had been writing music since his adolescence, but he now cultivated this activity with new diligence. Eventually his compositions were shaped by two influences: Czech nationalism, expressed largely through references to folk music; and classical forms and procedures, especially those used by Beethoven and Brahms.

            But music was not quite the only thing on Dvořák’s mind during his youthful years in Prague. Among his pupils was a young woman named Josefina Čermáková, with whom he fell in love in the summer of 1865. Inspired by his feelings for her, Dvořák set to music a group of romantic poems by one Gustav Pfleger-Moravský. The result was a collection of 18 love songs, to which Dvořák gave the collective title Cypresses.

It would be pleasant to report that this tender composition swayed Josefina Čermáková to return Dvořák’s affections, but her heart remained unmoved. Nor did these songs, Dvořák’s first attempt at vocal composition, prove any more successful musically than they did romantically. Dvořák played them to a trusted friend and advisor, the composer and conductor Karel Bendl, who observed that they poorly conveyed the cadence of Pfleger-Moravský’s verses and were difficult to sing. Dvořák soon came to share his opinion, and he made no effort to have the songs performed or published.

So far, an unhappy story. But matters turned out well both personally and musically. In the first instance, Dvořák eventually married Josefina Čermáková’s younger sister, Anna, with whom he shared a long and happy domestic life. And in 1887, more than two decades after he originally composed them, Dvořák reworked 12 of the 18 Cypresses songs, arranging them for string quartet.

Guest conductor Gilbert Varga has chosen to perform Cypresses with a full string orchestra. Basses have been added with an arrangement by SLSO Associate Principal Double Bass Carolyn White.

Béla Bartók was Hungary’s first great composer and also one of the pioneers of the modernism that transformed music during the first half of the 20th century. During the 1920s, especially, he synthesized modernist developments--angular rhythms, dissonant harmonies, and more--with elements from Hungarian and Balkan folk music. But his early compositions grew out of a late-Romantic idiom. Among those works is the next piece on our program.

In the summer of 1907, at age 26, Bartók began composing a concerto for Stefi Geyer, a young violinist with whom he was in love. Its music was conceived in the rosy light of his infatuation and was intended to convey a glowing portrait of his beloved. Bartók’s ardor for Stefi Geyer is not surprising. An excellent musician, she also was beautiful, witty, and sociable. “It wasn’t surprising that people fell in love with her,” recalled the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck, who also was attracted to Geyer. “She was a pretty, charming girl who had beauty in the way she moved, and who knew how to walk so gracefully.”

Bartók finished his concerto in February 1908. If he hoped it would win Stefi Geyer’s heart, he was mistaken. Scarcely a week after receiving the score, she wrote to the composer, saying that she could not reciprocate his feelings and breaking off their relationship. Bartók was deeply wounded. Largely as a result, the concerto was not performed during his lifetime. No doubt Geyer’s association with the work soured it in Bartók’s mind. He valued the music, however, especially the first of its two movements, which he subsequently recast as one of his Two Portraits for violin and orchestra. But the concerto in its original form was not performed or published until 1956, more than a decade after Bartók’s passing.

Years after her break with the composer, Stefi Geyer described the concerto as a musical portrait of herself in her prime. The first movement, she said, depicted “the young girl he [Bartók] had loved,” while the second portrayed “the violinist whom he had admired.” This characterization accords with the music and with Bartók’s pronouncements. In a letter written to Geyer in September 1907, the composer quoted the theme that opens the first movement and told her: “This is your leitmotif.” He also assured her that the music that followed was “written entirely from the heart.” The initial melodic idea, a gracefully arching phrase for the soloist alone, proves to be the germinal theme for the entire movement, as Bartók varies and develops its melodic components in ingenious ways. But clever invention is not the most conspicuous quality here. Rather, the music achieves quite passionate expression, a romantic outpouring that might surprise those who associate Bartók only with the sometimes severe modernism of his maturity.

The second movement casts the violin strongly in the role of virtuoso soloist. Here the tempo is quicker, the figuration more athletic, with frequent use of double-stopping (bowing across two strings at once to allow the violin to play two notes at once). Stefi Geyer must indeed have been a very capable instrumentalist. The orchestral writing also is more colorful, and the entire character of the movement is bracing and exhilarating.

Born a generation after Dvořák, Leoš Janáček spent much of his career in relative obscurity and did his most important work after he turned sixty. Remarkably, his music became increasingly inventive and daring as he grew older. In his late years, Janáček developed an imaginative, even eccentric, sense of melody, one marked by unusual modes and scales, as well as by the irregular contours and phrase lengths of Moravian speech. (The composer was known to jot down what he called “speech melodies” during conversations with friends.) His harmonies, although generally using traditional elements, no longer followed the rules that had conventionally governed this aspect of composition. And his use of tone color was at times startling in its originality.

In the spring of 1926, Janáček suddenly began composing a violin concerto, something he had never before written. He completed a first and most of a second draft of this piece but then moved on to other projects, principally an opera based on Dostoyevsky’s From the House of the Dead. Hurrying to complete that work, the composer incorporated part of the unfinished violin concerto into the opera’s overture. Though he did not quite finish his second draft of the concerto, and probably would have polished the music in a third draft, he left enough to permit its posthumous completion in 1988.

Janáček cast this concerto in a single movement. He also prefaced it with a mysterious inscription, which translates: “The Wandering of a Little Soul.” At least one biographer has surmised a connection with the play The Soul and the Flesh, by the Swiss writer William Ritter, which Janáček once considered as the subject for an opera. (Ritter’s play depicts a soul wandering outside its body.) But that connection is uncertain, and Janáček wrote another motto on several pages of his score: “In every man is the soul of an eagle.”

Although we can only guess at the meanings of these inscriptions, the notion they suggest of the violin as a soul wandering, or flying, freely is intriguing in light of the music. The concerto begins with the solo instrument rhapsodizing in its ethereal high register. Thereafter, it seems to traverse a varied sonic landscape created by the orchestra, one that includes ominous rumblings, martial fanfares, a hint of church bells, bustling repetitive figures, dance rhythms, snatches of what seem to be folk song, and more. Although the soloist sometimes interacts with this orchestral music--as when, for example, it briefly joins in a rustic waltz--it more often maintains a degree of independence. Only in the final minutes do the violin and orchestra achieve a lasting rapprochement in music, which seems by turns celestial and robustly ecstatic.