Ether Game: Your Daily Dose of Musical Fun and Frustration (A Production of WFIU Public Radio)

In “Girl Crazy,” a philandering New York playboy is sent to mend his ways in a small western town. The misunderstandings, confusions, and love affairs that follow are set to some of George and Ira Gershwin very best songs, including standards such as “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” and “But Not For Me.” In 1930, when the musical opened, the Great Depression was being felt in the streets, but not yet on the stage. The lavish production also introduced some legendary talent, including the Broadway debuts of Ethel Merman and Ginger Rodgers as the romantic lead. Within a few years, the talented, vivacious Rodgers would go on to film stardom as Fred Astaire’s on-screen partner.

The cantata “Rejoice in the Lamb” was written “to order” for the fiftieth anniversary of St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton, one of Britten’s many community-oriented commissions, which he always took very seriously. The text, by late-eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, is unusual in several ways. Smart’s ecstatic celebration of his cat Geoffrey as a vessel of the Lord is rather eccentric, to say the least. Things get even stranger as Smart offers a homily on the spiritual values of Geoffrey’s hereditary enemy, the mouse. Eventually, Smart starts blessing everything in sight, including letters of the alphabet. Later in his life, Smart was plagued with mental illness and institutionalized. Britten, however, takes Smart’s bizarre, pantheistic ramblings at face-value, perhaps finding a bit of beauty in the madness.

Ludovico Ariosto’s sixteenth-century epic “Orlando Furioso” is one of the longest poetic works ever written. One of its most unusual passages is when the Carolingian knight Orlando, seriously bent out of shape by unhappy love, loses his wits and goes on a violent rampage spanning several continents. Eventually, a close friend is able to restore Orlando’s sanity by travelling to the moon, where he finds Orlando’s lost wits in a jar! Ariosto’s epic became a rich source for opera plots, but composers almost always treated the story very liberally, taking what they needed and often ignoring the theme of madness entirely! While Handel includes a stunning “mad scene” in his version, he (perhaps wisely) leaves out the bit about the moon. Orlando is saved instead by a timely intervention by the magician Zoroastre.

Until the final two years of his life, things were going quite well for the Schumanns. In 1850, they had moved to Düsseldorf, where Robert became municipal music director. This incredibly productive produced the cello concerto of 1850. A progressive work for its genre, the concerto limited flashy showiness in favor of complex dialogue between solo and orchestra. Schumann went so far as to write his own cadenza, lest it be mauled by unimaginative improvisers! It was in this period that the Schumanns met young Johannes Brahms. Schumann was deeply impressed by the young man, and actively promoted Brahms’s career. Unfortunately, this happiness was not to last—in early 1854, plagued by auditory hallucinations, Schumann checked into the asylum where he would die in 1846.

Strauss wrote program music across his entire life. It was in the 1880s and 90s, however, that he composed a steady stream of his best-known tone poems. “Don Quixote” was one of the last of these. Based on the early seventeenth-century novel by Cervantes, Strauss’s tone poem tells the tale of the elderly gentleman of La Mancha whose immersion in chivalric romances causes him to lose his mind and believe himself a knight. Strauss frequently gives the “voice” of Don Quixote to the solo cello, and that of his squire Sancho Panza to the solo viola. Some of Strauss’s most flamboyant use of color shows up in this work, with the orchestra depicting, among other things, bleating sheep!

International tensions were high in 1938 when Sergei Prokofiev composed a musical score for Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark film Alexander Nevsky. The film tells the story of St. Alexander Nevsky, the Medieval Russian general who led Russian troops against an invasion of German crusaders in 1242. In a classic example of “socialist realism”, Josef Stalin commissioned Eisenstein to create a film that would warn the Russian people of aggression from their then-contemporary enemy – Nazi Germany. What resulted was one of the most celebrated Russian films of all time accompanied by a score that has lasted as one of Prokofiev’s greatest works. Prokofiev would later re-work his movie score into a cantata for chorus, mezzo-soprano soloist and orchestra, and this selection is from that arrangement. In the scene we just heard, the invading Germans force their way into the city of Pskov and strike fear in the hearts of the Russian peasants who live there.