Caution to the Wind
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

Orchestral music has a reputation, especially among those not very familiar with it, as being staid and tradition-bound. It’s true that the orchestral literature embodies deep and longstanding traditions, these being one source of the abiding interest and pleasure such music holds for those who know and love it. It is also true that the usual orchestral concert experience can seem somewhat tame by the standard of raves and rock shows. But within its own context and traditions, composers of every generation have found ways to break loose, to rebel against received notions about how music should sound, and to renew their art in radical ways. In nearly all cases, this requires an act of daring, a willingness to throw caution and convention to the wind and, in present-day parlance, “just go for it.”

To be sure, not all great composers have been of such rebellious temperament, and audacious originality is hardly a prerequisite for genius. Mozart, for example, was quite content to work within the prevailing style and musical genres of his day and simply use them more profoundly and beautifully than anyone else. Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Samuel Barber also were musicians of relatively conservative inclination who nevertheless created much beautiful work. On the other hand, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, Debussy, Stravinsky, Ives, and many other of the composers we now place in the pantheon of “classical” masters were, in their day, musical revolutionaries and, as such, regarded with dismay by many of their contemporaries.

Of course, one generation’s revolution becomes another’s orthodoxy. One of our challenges, as listeners, is to understand the new ideas embodied in certain compositions, to hear them in some historical perspective and thereby recapture the excitement that a path-breaking piece always creates. Each of the three composers represented on our program is one who, in his own way, broke with tradition and explored new musical byways. And each of the works performed in these concerts reveals its author taking a decisive step on his path to originality.

Richard Strauss became an accomplished composer during his adolescence. Having achieved much at a relatively early age, he was still a young man when he encountered his first creative crisis. Significantly, it was this crisis and its bold resolution that enabled Strauss to establish himself as an important and distinctive composer.   

Strauss was immersed in music from childhood. He received his earliest training from his father, a professional horn player, and quickly showed exceptional promise. By the time he turned 18 he had produced several sonatas, a string quartet, a serenade, some admirable songs, and a number of orchestral pieces. Had he continued to compose in the style of those youthful works, however, Strauss would be unknown today, an artist who had failed to transcend the achievements of the preceding generation. He had acquired from his father a thorough musical education but also the relatively conservative palette apparent throughout his early music. The elder Strauss vehemently opposed the innovations of Wagner and Liszt, and he tried to forbid his son even to hear their music.

Eventually, however, the son rebelled against this prohibition. The turning point came when he left Munich in 1885 to accept a position as assistant conductor in Meiningen, whose orchestra was then famously accomplished. There Strauss became familiar with Liszt’s theories of Zukunftsmusik (“Music of the Future”). In his memoirs, the composer recalled becoming convinced “new ideas must search for new forms -- this basic principle of Liszt’s symphonic works, in which the poetic idea was really the formative element, became henceforth the guiding principle of my own symphonic work.”

The notion that “poetic ideas” rather than received musical formats, such as sonata or rondo forms, could determine the course of a composition represented a radical departure from Strauss’s classical training and pointed clearly to the tone poem, a genre pioneered by Liszt. And in a verse fragment by the melancholic Austrian writer Nikolaus Lenau, Strauss found a “poetic idea” that inspired a bold and original flight of musical fantasy. Lenau’s work, left unfinished at his death in 1851, presented the Don Juan legend as the story of an archetypal Romantic hero. Instead of a cruel seducer, Lenau’s Don is a dreamer driven on an impossible pursuit of ideal beauty. “That magical circle,” Lenau has him declare, “immeasurably wide, of beautiful femininity… I want to traverse in a storm of pleasure and die of a kiss upon the lips of the last woman.” 

Strauss’s musical rendering of this idea proved his most imaginative work thus far and the first now generally accepted as a masterpiece. The composer offered no detailed program for Don Juan, and it is doubtful that any verbal explication could enhance the experience of the music, whose suggestions of sensuality, bravado, and delirious flight are impossible to miss. Don Juan is a great showpiece, a chance for any orchestra to show its virtuosity, but Strauss can be lyrical also, as in the poetic oboe solo that forms the focal point of the tone poem’s central episode.

Like Strauss, Ludwig van Beethoven began his career by mastering the compositional forms and procedures of his day. His early work shows the influence of Mozart and Haydn, the leading composers of the preceding generation. But shortly after 1800, Beethoven spoke of pursuing a “new path” in his music. In time he would do just that, achieving a dynamic expansion of virtually all aspects of his musical language: weightier sonorities, bolder gestures, more thorough development of thematic ideas, and a greatly enlarged palette of harmonic relationships. He would also bring something less technical but equally significant to his work: a heightened sense of musical drama.

As in politics, few revolutions in music happen suddenly and completely, and several years elapsed between Beethoven’s first mention of the “new path” and the full realization of what we now recognize as his “heroic” middle-period style. This period, which spanned the first few years of the 19th century, was hardly fallow. On the contrary, Beethoven was composing energetically, and clearly moving towards larger, more potent means of expression. Each major work proved larger in scale than any 18th‑century model, and their harmonic excursions were daring enough to bewilder some of Beethoven’s contemporaries.

The most important composition work of this time is the Piano Concerto No. 3, op. 37, composed probably in 1800. (The precise chronology of its writing is uncertain. In any event, Beethoven probably made final changes to the work at the time of its first performance, at a concert in Vienna in 1803.) In its formal outline, this work resembles the Classical-period models the composer followed so closely in his First and Second Piano Concertos. The opening movement, for instance, begins straight off with an orchestral exposition of the themes, as Mozart or Haydn would have prescribed, without resort to the novel introductions by the soloist we find in Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos (as well as in the concertos of Schumann, Grieg, and many other 19th-century composers, who took their cue from Beethoven in this and so much else). Yet there are also unmistakable signs of the bold departures that would mark those succeeding works. The scale here is larger and the sonorities fuller than in any 18th-century concerto, including Beethoven’s own two earlier efforts. And the development of the thematic material is accomplished with a thoroughness typical of the composer’s mature style.

The long first movement unfolds under the pervasive influence of C minor, a key Beethoven associated with pathos and a sense of dramatic, even desperate, struggle. (Consider his most famous composition in that tonality, the turbulent Fifth Symphony.) The principal theme actually fuses two dramatically opposed ideas: in the first four measures, the strings present a rather brusque and ominous motif which, after echoing a step higher in the winds, gives way at once to a more lyrical and impassioned phrase. The coexistence of such diverse and powerful elements, which occurs throughout the opening movement, accounts for much of the energy and tension Beethoven achieves here. Additional thematic material presented by the orchestra and the soloist enriches the drama.

The ensuing Largo is in the remote and traditionally “serene” key of E major. Following the stormy outbursts of the first movement, its almost religious tranquility is all the more effective. With the concluding Rondo, Beethoven returns us to C minor, but not to the dramatic crisis of the first movement. The opening theme sounds, rather, lively and somewhat alla turca. (Its rhythmic and tonal character is not unlike that of Mozart’s famous “Turkish rondo” from the Piano Sonata in A, K. 331.) Alternating with episodes of more sunny music, this melody develops with an inventive flair characteristic of Beethoven’s best music.

In Silvestre Revueltas, we encounter a composer who did not pass through a breakthrough phase to a more original idiom. Rather, his entire career was about nonconformity and originality. Revueltas was born literally on the eve of the 20th century, on December 31, 1899, in the Mexican state of Durango. He learned to play the violin as a boy, and later worked as a violinist and conductor in both Mexico and the United States. During his spare time, he composed music unlike any then being produced in Latin America. In 1937 Revueltas went to Spain, where he was an ardent partisan on behalf of the Republican cause in that country’s civil war. Following the fascist victory he returned to Mexico, but he could not put his career back on track. Dejected by the political developments in Spain and elsewhere, and plagued increasingly by alcoholism, he died in Mexico City in the autumn of 1940.

Throughout his career, Revueltas remained a musical outsider. Even more than his lack of advanced compositional training, his somewhat wild and chaotic life conspired against him ever achieving conventional success, and he died penniless. But by all reports he lived passionately, and his music makes up in originality and boldness what it may lack in refined compositional technique. In his work, Revueltas avoided the picturesque use of folk tunes that lends the music of his compatriot Carlos Chávez its folkloric color. (Likewise Aaron Copland’s familiar south-of-the-border musical postcard El salón México, with its brightly scored dance tunes.) “Why should I put on my boots and climb mountains for Mexican folklore,” he famously asked, “if I have the spirit of Mexico deep within me?”

That spirit found expression in powerful sonorities, pounding rhythms, and vibrant instrumental colors. At its best, Revueltas’s music exhibits a roughness and daring that has drawn comparison with American experimenters such as Charles Ives and Edgard Varèse, as well as a freshness and immediacy that has been likened to the work of the modern Mexican muralists and the painter Frida Kahlo.