Ether Game

Rimsky-Korsakov taught orchestration and instrumentation at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1871 until his death in 1908. He taught himself how to play the instruments of the orchestra and read widely on acoustics. He meant to apply this knowledge to a book on orchestration. The book is considered to be the first book on orchestration to take scientific properties of sound into consideration.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration habits are notorious. As a member of the nationalistic “Mighty Five,” he was prone to “improve” the orchestrations of his friends’ works. Most notably, Rimsky-Korsakov re-orchestrated Mussorgsky’s opera, Boris Godunov. While this may have helped catapult Mussorgsky into posthumous fame, today it is often performed with the composer’s original orchestration.

Benjamin Britten had written some music for the Crown Film Unit in the past and wrote his guide to the orchestra for them as well. The film was called The Instruments of the Orchestra, and it carried the subtitle “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell.” The theme comes from incidental music Purcell had written for the play Abdelazar, by Aphra Behn.

Britten introduces a fully orchestrated version of Purcell’s theme, and then proceeds with variations on this theme featuring different families of instruments..The final fugue re-introduces the instruments in the order they appeared. The piece ends almost exactly as it begins, but this time with a more learned audience.

The sea, with its ever-changing texture and colors, was perhaps a perfect source inspiration for Claude Debussy.

For many critics, La Mer solidified the connection between Debussy and the Impressionist movement in visual art.

Such connections are never perfect.

Debussy himself viewed this linkage at first with ambivalence, and later with outright distaste.

Ironically, although his compositional theories had been deeply impacted by the visual arts in his earlier years, La Mer actually represents a turning point in his aesthetic theories.

He increasingly came to view the other arts with more restraint.

They were sources of inspiration, perhaps, but not of artistic modeling.

Perhaps the best way to put this artistic turn is the way it began to be expressed by some journalists around the time: as “Debussyism.”

The sea is one of the most flexible sources of poetic metaphor.

Given the right context, it can mean pretty much anything. Franz Schubert plays on this ambiguity in this song, set to a text by Heinrich Heine (who, as we heard earlier, was also connected to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman).

In “By the Sea,” a couple sits by a tranquil sea at dusk, but this lovely image soon becomes more ominous.

Lovely, hymn-like stanzas intersperse with tumultuous, chromatic stanzas, culminating in a disturbing, almost vampiristic image of the speaker drinking the tears that drip onto his lover’s hands.

Two years after Schubert’s death, these Heine settings were grouped together with several other small collections and published under the title of Schwanengesang, or “Swan Songs.”

Not having foreseen his own death, the title was the work of his publishers.

Up to 1938, Erich Korngold’s career had been divided between Hollywood and Vienna.

Germany’s annexation of Austria forced the composer to stay in the United States.

Korngold’s film career flourished in the States, where he produced masterful scores for films such as The Sea Hawk, a 1940 swashbuckler starring the dynamic Errol Flynn as an English privateer who fights for Queen and country.

Many saw this as a historicized allegory to Britain’s opposition to fascism, which probably pleased Korngold.

Years later, Korngold’s colorful late-Romantic style would posthumously influence a resurgence of symphonic film music.

Seeking to avoid a standard reliance on “modern-sounding” music for science fiction, young director George Lucas stumbled upon the 1970 re-issued vinyl soundtrack to The Sea Hawk, and informed John Williams that this was the sound he wanted in his film Star Wars.

This hymn is taken from Claudio Monteverdi’s exquisite collection of works for the 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin service.

These were originally composed for the court of Mantua, where he served the wealthy Gonzaga family for years.

Tension arose, however, when the Gonzagas came to suspect that Monteverdi may have used the Vespers to try and secure a better job at the Vatican.

Eventually Monteverdi found another, even more prestigious job at the cathedral of St. Mark’s in Venice and left Mantua, taking his Vespers with him.

The hymn we just heard sets the text of a ninth-century hymn whose title translates to “Hail, Star of the Sea.”

It is addressed to the Virgin Mary, who medieval tradition held to be the patroness of sailors.

The title stuck, and became part of the large repertoire of commonly-set “Marian” texts.

Felix Mendelssohn’s programmatic concert overtures are among his most popular works.

Written in 1828, when the precocious composer was only nineteen, this overture followed the even earlier Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, and was followed by the similarly sea-inspired Hebrides Overture.

The sources of the program were two poems by German philosophical luminary and all-around man-of-letters Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

While it may seem that the dovetailing of subjects of the two poems might be a natural conclusion, Mendelssohn may also have been inspired by an earlier treatment of the same two poems by Ludwig van Beethoven.

While Beethoven set the text of the poems in a short cantata for chorus and orchestra, Mendelssohn’s entirely orchestral work leaves the image-making entirely to the effective music.

It’s strange to think that Gounod’s opera Faust, one of the staples of the opera repertory, wasn’t that great of a success at its premiere in 1859.

Thankfully, the work has stood the test of time and is a favorite of opera stages around the world. In fact, it was the work that was performed at the opening of the first Metropolitan Opera House in 1883 and was it’s season-opener for many years afterwards.

Gounod’s opera is a faithful re-telling of Goethe’s epic play of a doctor who sells his soul to the Devil for youth and knowledge.

Faust, once returned to his youthful appearance, falls in love with a girl named Marguerite. At the end of the opera, poor Marguerite is in prison for killing the love child she had with Faust.

Despite Faust’s pleading and the Devil’s taunting, a chorus of angels proclaims that Marguerite’s soul has been saved as she ascends the scaffold for her execution.

Giuseppe Tartini was one of the Baroque era’s greatest musical figures. Not only was he a prolific composer, but he was also one of the era’s greatest performers and teachers of the violin.

Out of his vast output of works during his lifetime, the work that solidified Tartini’s name in musical history was his Sonata in g minor for solo violin and figured bass accompaniment.

The story behind this piece starts with a dream. Legend says Tartini dreamed that the Devil appeared and played the violin with such virtuosity that Tartini felt his breath taken away.

When the composer awoke he immediately jotted down the sonata, desperately trying to recapture what he had heard in the dream.

Hence we get the sonata’s famous nickname, The Devil’s Trill. Even by today’s standards, the work is one of the most difficult pieces for the violin.

Themes from this masterwork and many of Tartini’s other pieces prominently find themselves resurrected in the works the 20th century Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola.

On November 13, 1868, Gioacchino Rossini passed away at the age of sixty six.

Soon after his death, a group of prominent Italian composers, including Giuseppe Verdi, got together and planned to create a Requiem mass in Rossini’s memory.

Each composer would compose his own movement of the work and then those fragments would be combined into one collective piece. The project, however, fell through, but Verdi continued to toy away at the movement he had composed for the occasion, the Libera me, Domine.

Years later, he finally completed his own Requiem in 1873 and dedicated it to the memory of the Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni. The work was an immediate success and is considered by many to be Verdi’s masterpiece.

The Dies irae, a section of the Requiem Mass that depicts Judgment Day in every terrifying detail, is where Verdi truly unleashes his dramatic powers.

The chorus almost screams in hellish terror as trumpets blare in the distance to call the souls of the dead to prepare for the Last Judgment.