No. 2067 Subscription (Program A)

German Romantic composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) founded Musikdrama (music drama) as represented by his four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). In this operatic genre for which he wrote both libretto and music, the drama and the music are indissolubly united on an unprecedented level, especially by the scrupulous use of the numerous leitmotifs (recurrent melodic or/and harmonic elements associated with certain character, feeling, setting or so).
Premiered in 1868 in Munich, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg) is the only comedy among Wagner’s music dramas, although it far exceeds the genre taking the tradition and innovation of the art as its subject on a heroic scale. It took two decades for him to complete it since he worked on the first draft of the libretto in 1845.
Mastersingers are German craftsmen from the 15th and 16th centuries who were also amateur but masterful poet-composer-singers. Set in the mid-16th century and based in historical facts, the story features Nuremberg’s mastersingers including humane shoemaker Hans Sachs (1494–1576), and reaches its climax with their song-creating contest. Overall the music is diatonic compared to Wagner’s music drama Tristan und Isolde (1859) well-known for its chromatic, tonally ambiguous harmony.
The Prelude of Die Meistersinger reveals several important leitmotifs from the music drama proper. The opening melody in C major is the majestic Motif of the Mastersingers, and soon we hear the brassy and bouncy Motif of the Mastersingers’ March from the scene of their arrival at the contest (Act 3). These motifs will be splendidly restated in a contrapuntal (polyphonic) way towards the end of this optimistic Prelude.

[Kumiko Nishi]

An independent mind, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) blazed a trail for the new lifestyle of musicians when he went freelance in 1781 after serving the Salzburg court. During the last decade of his short life before his death in 1791, he, now based in Vienna, earned his daily bread by composing, performing concerts, giving private lessons and having his works published.
Concerto for piano solo was the most important genre for Mozart to shine in the city’s music scene both as a composer and pianist (since he was a wunderkind, piano was the instrument he excelled at the most). He wrote in Vienna as many as six numbered piano concertos (No. 14 K. 449 – No. 19 K. 459) only in 1784 and six more (No. 20 K. 466 – No. 25 K. 503) in 1785-86 to stylistically perfect the Classical piano concerto. They will be followed sporadically by No. 26 K. 537 Coronation (1788) and No. 27 K. 595 (1791), his last piece of the genre.
Except for No. 4 K. 41, an arrangement of other composers’ pieces, No. 17 K. 453 is Mozart’s only numbered piano concerto written in G major. It was composed as a commission from Barbara Ployer (1765–1811), one of his favorite piano-composition pupils. This teenage talented pianist supposedly first performed it in 1784 at the residence of her uncle Gottfried Ignaz von Ployer, the Salzburg court’s agent in Vienna.
The most frequently mentioned of this concerto is the last movement. Instead of being in rondo form as was customary, this finale is written as the theme and its five variations. Especially, the dim fourth variation and the bright fifth variation make a sharp contrast, prior to an operatic coda. The cheerful staccato theme, given at the beginning of the movement, has repeatedly reminded commentators of the musical character of lovable Papageno the Bird-Catcher from Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) (1791). There is an anecdote that one month after composing No. 17, Mozart got a starling which was able to sing this theme and cherished it for three years.

[Kumiko Nishi]

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) was also an accomplished pianist and a leading ethnomusicologist who collected and analyzed numerous folk melodies mainly of Eastern Europe. He, although not Jewish, left Europe in 1940 to protest the Nazis. On the east coast of America, his new home, he ended up becoming terminally ill and enduring the hardships of poverty. The progressive works he had composed in Europe weren’t in high favor with the American music world, he couldn’t gain piano performance engagements sufficiently, and the war prevented him from receiving royalties from Europe. After a battle with leukemia, he passed away in New York in September 1945.
Despite the difficulties, a handful of his compositions from this period are incredibly inspiring. Among those who rendered a generous help to Bartók was the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Although he was not a member, the ASCAP bore his medical expenses and saw to it that he could recover and compose at Saranac Lake in New York State and Asheville in North Carolina.
Another figure who offered his help was Serge Koussevitzky, then the Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Hearing from Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti about Bartók, Koussevitzky visited the composer in hospital in May 1943 and requested him to write a new work with an exceptionally large amount of commission fees. Driven by creative enthusiasm, Bartók composed the Concerto for Orchestra at Saranac Lake at an inconceivable speed. It had the warmly-received world premiere in December 1944 in Boston with Koussevitzky conducting his orchestra. Attending the event, Bartók found the coda to be abrupt, which would be his main concern at the revision of the piece in 1945.
In the Concerto for Orchestra, each section of the orchestra plays a soloistic role rather than focusing on accompanying a single solo instrument, in the tradition of the works of the same title by Paul Hindemith (1925) and Zoltán Kodály (1940). Bartók’s takes a symmetrical five-movement structure, and according to his program note, the work’s mood gradually progresses from the “sternness” of the first movement Introduzione (Introduction) and the “lugubrious death-song” of the central third movement Elegia (Elegy), to the “life-assertion” of the fifth movement Finale. Opened and closed by a side drum (without snares), the scherzo-like second movement Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Pairs) has different pairs of wind instruments perform one after the other as the title suggests. The fourth movement Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted intermezzo) famously quotes, during the cynical central “interruption” section, the march theme of “invasion” from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 Leningrad. The symphony had a high popularity then in the United States following the broadcasted American premiere given by Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in July 1942.

[Kumiko Nishi]