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

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.

If you want music that sparkles like a bottle of French champagne, you can always count on the music of Jacques Offenbach! Offenbach’s tunes have been hummed and sung ever since they first appeared in the dance halls and cabarets of the 19th century. Offenbach’s music is so popular that it eventually became the focus of a famous ballet in the early 20th century, titled La gaité parisienne. It was the brain child of the Russian choreographer Leonid Massine, an original member of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe and founding member of the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo. La gaité parisienne was arranged by the French composer Manuel Rosenthal and gave its world premiere performance at the Theatre de Monte Carlo in 1938. The ballet doesn’t follow a traditional narrative, so to speak. Instead, a variety of quirky characters are characterized by several Offenbach themes. Shenanigans and hilarity ensue until the cast gets together and dances to Offenbach’s most well-known tune: the can-can from Orpheus in the Underworld.

Beethoven loved to look back at the music of past masters, especially at works by Bach, Handel and Mozart. In fact, he loved to quote themes or create pieces based on snippets of their music. Over the course of his life, he wrote several sets of themes and variations for various ensembles based on themes from such works as Mozart’s The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, Salieri’s version of Falstaff, and even a set of variations on “God Save the King” and “Rule, Britannia.” This piece, a set of variations on “See the Conquering Hero Comes,” is based on a chorus from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus . This isn’t the only time that Beethoven looked to Handel for inspiration, though. In a very famous passage in his monumental Missa Solemnis, Beethoven quotes the phrase “And he shall reign for ever and ever” from the Messiah ! You can say that Beethoven had a particular love for the music of Handel, even going so far as to call him, at that time, “the greatest composer that ever lived.”