Program Notes Scheherazade

• Composed: 1821
• Duration: about 10 minutes

Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

Weber was a man of the theater through and through. His career took him from opera houses in one German city to another while composing 10 operas and a stream of incidental music for stage plays. He believed firmly in the importance of German-language opera, especially in the face of the craze for Rossini, which swept through Austria and Germany just at the time that Weber was busy composing and conducting as Royal Saxon Kapellmeister in the city of Dresden.

The opera that completely fulfilled his ideal of the new German Romantic opera was Der Freischütz, and it was an immediate world-wide success after its premiere in 1821. Anxious to bring it to a more progressive audience than the stolid citizens of Dresden, he took it to a newly rebuilt theater in Berlin. Within a few years it had conquered all the major stages of Europe. At one point there were half a dozen different productions of it running simultaneously in London's theaters.

Its popularity rested on the opera's classic confrontation between good and evil, good embodied in healthy peasant heroics and love, and evil represented by the spooky forces of darkness. The Enlightenment had taught Europeans not to take ghosts too seriously, so they were now regarded more as entertainment and less as a menace to life and limb. Samiel, the evil "Black Huntsman," uses the peasant Caspar as his tool in luring the tenor hero Max to the Wolf's Glen. There, Max casts one of seven magic bullets with which he is promised to win the hand of his beloved Agathe in a shooting contest. The deceit is exposed and overturned by a Hermit, who intervenes just in time to destroy both Samiel and Caspar, and to save both Max and Agathe.

Weber uses the keys of C major and C minor to illustrate the respective zones of good and evil, most obviously at the end of the overture, when C major is triumphant. Elsewhere in the overture, hunting horns evoke country life while the threatening sound of low clarinets and timpani stands for the forces of darkness. Melodies sung in turn in the opera by Max and Agathe make up the main Allegro into a kind of symphonic movement of great brilliance and energy.

— Hugh Macdonald

• Composed: sketched 1839, first version 1849, revised in 1853 and 1855
• Duration: about 20 minutes

Movements

1. Allegro maestoso
2. Quasi adagio
3. Allegretto vivace
4. Allegro marziale animato

Orchestration: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbals, and strings, plus solo piano

Liszt's two piano concertos are standard works in the virtuoso's repertoire, yet they are not at all what one might have expected of the world's greatest pianist. ('Greatest' is arguable, of course, but with no recordings of his playing to prove or disprove the point, he occupies that throne unchallenged.) He lived a long, full life; gave innumerable concerts all over Europe, from Aberdeen to Istanbul; and composed an immense body of music. He was centrally involved in the great surge of music-making that marked his lifetime and in the heated debates that surrounded himself, his pupils, his friends, and particularly his son-in-law, Richard Wagner. Yet he left only two concertos, both short and compact, and he was reluctant to perform either of them himself. Both works gave him endless trouble and were constantly revised; both works have generated adverse criticism from those who wish his music was more like this and less like that; both works have won passionate admirers and been promoted by world-class performers. Why didn't he compose at least five full-scale, three-movement piano concertos like Beethoven or Saint-Saëns?

Liszt liked the glamor of a solo appearance, undoubtedly, and often replaced the solo vocalist with whom other pianists would share the stage by performing operatic fantasies for piano alone. His solo performances were more frequently of transcriptions and elaborations of familiar music by other composers (Mozart, Weber, Rossini, Verdi, etc.) than of true piano solos by himself or by others.

Such pieces could equally call for orchestral support, so we find among his works a handful of arrangements for piano solo and orchestra: fantasies on Beethoven's Ruins of Athens, on Berlioz's Lélio, on Hungarian folk melodies, and arrangements of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy and Weber's Polonaise brillante. One of his favorite works was Weber's Konzertstück for piano and orchestra. In this context, a traditional piano concerto in three movements had less appeal for him, in fact, it was almost unthinkable. Since he wrote both a Malédiction and a Totentanz (notice the demonic titles) for piano and orchestra, we should perhaps think of his two piano concertos, in similar continuous single movements, as tone-poems without titles, concert-pieces, or fantasies, rather than concertos in the traditional sense.

Liszt's overriding purpose is to integrate the concerto into a single movement, as he did in his masterly B-minor sonata for solo piano. The First Piano Concerto, like the Second, unfolds in a series of episodes using recurrent themes that are adapted to different speeds and different surroundings to provide variety and contrast. Sections of a dreamy, amorous character thus rub shoulders with energetic or martial music and passages of swashbuckling virtuosity, all sharing the same handful of melodic shapes and giving the impression of free improvisation, the art at which Liszt excelled.

The very striking gesture with which the First Concerto opens (unison strings) is to be heard throughout in various forms, more often intervening in cadenza-like passages, or in lyrical sections as a reminder of the main rhythmic pulse. An adagio section feels like part of a slow movement; a lighter part (with prominent triangle) suggests a scherzo; and a martial character marks a finale. But the opening gesture is never far out of sight, and the continuity of the music in a single movement is never really threatened. The end is overtaken by the sweep of virtuosity from the soloist.

This First Concerto was drafted in 1839, when Liszt was living in Italy and about to embark on a decade of frantic touring and concertizing, laying the ground for the legendary reputation that followed him for the rest of his life. But for a man so formidably confident in his stage appearances, Liszt was rarely satisfied with his own compositions. He was an obsessive reviser, subjecting most of his major works to years of rethinking and alteration. In view of the huge number of compositions and arrangements that he left, he must have found time amid the touring, teaching and conducting to patiently work refining music that had been in his mind for many years.

The two concertos reappeared on his desk in the 1850s, when he was settled in Weimar and no longer constantly on the road. The First Concerto reached completion in 1855 and was first performed then, with Liszt himself as soloist and Berlioz as conductor. The Second was premiered two years later, not by Liszt himself, but by his brilliant pupil Hans von Bronsart, to whom it was dedicated. He was still not satisfied, and so they were not published until many more hours of work had been devoted to them. In Liszt’s last years, the concertos appeared in his concerts several times but never with himself playing the solo part.

A Third Piano Concerto was reconstructed from scattered Liszt manuscripts by the scholar Jay Rosenblatt and first performed in Chicago in 1990. It too dates from 1839, but it seems that unlike its two brothers it never emerged from draft — indeed, its manuscripts may have already been dispersed when Liszt returned to the other two — and was simply forgotten. In a single continuous movement, it belongs snugly with the other two but has yet to be accepted as a standard weapon in the virtuoso pianist's abundant arsenal.

— Hugh Macdonald

• Composed: 1888
• Duration: about 45–50 minutes

Movements

1. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ships
2. The Story of the Kalendar Prince
3. The Young Prince and the Young Princess
4. Festival at Baghdad — The Sea — The Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior — Conclusion

Orchestration piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, tamtam, harp and strings.

The ideology of the "Mighty Handful," the group of five forward-looking Russian composers of which Rimsky-Korsakov was the youngest member, included a scorn of traditional music teaching. They were particularly suspicious of such techniques as fugue and counterpoint, as taught in Germany, and they argued that it was more instructive to listen to peasants singing than to professors teaching. So it is ironic that without ever losing his interest in folk music, Rimsky-Korsakov became one of the great teachers of his generation, in charge of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1871 until 1905. His students included Glazunov and Stravinsky, and his own works display a comprehensive command of musical technique — not perhaps on the Mozartian model — but in the fields of orchestration, melodic management, and much else.

Scheherazade, his largest orchestral work, is carefully constructed, full of melody and brilliantly orchestrated. In addition, it evokes the exotic world of sultans and harems whose popularity spread widely with the Arabian 1001 Nights. These tales were known in Europe since the 18th-century, but were most enthusiastically read during Rimsky-Korsakov's time when they were adapted for all forms of entertainment. Both Pushkin and Tolstoy had dipped in the well. Rimsky-Korsakov explained his approach in a preface to the score:

The Sultan Shahriar, convinced that women are faithless, had sworn to put to death each one of his concubines after their first night together.

But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by interesting him in the tales she told him throughout the 1001 nights. Driven by curiosity, the Sultan put off his mistress's execution from one day to the next and finally abandoned his bloodthirsty resolution altogether.

Many wonders were told to Shahriar by the Sultana Scheherazade. She borrowed the words, both poems and popular songs, from older poets, and she mixed both into her stories and adventures.

— Rimsky-Korsakov

Although the suite's four movements give it some resemblance to a symphony, Rimsky-Korsakov wanted a freer intermingling of speeds and themes than would have been normal in a symphony, so he brings back his tunes at will. Most obviously, he assigns the voice of Scheherazade herself to a solo violin, whose obsessive doodling on a group of shapely themes recurs throughout, often signalling a change of tempo and mood that transitions into a new story. There are images of Sinbad's ship tossing on the waves, an echo of Rimsky-Korsakov's years as an officer in the Imperial Russian navy. The stern resolution of the Sultan is heard at the beginning in an angular unison theme that prominently features the trombones. Although Rimsky-Korsakov mentioned in his autobiography certain episodes illustrated in the music, he ultimately preferred his listeners to think of the work as a more general evocation of the stories, since characters from different stories appear across movements.

"The motives thread and spread over all the movements," he wrote, "alternating and intertwining with each other. Appearing as they do each time under different illumination, depicting each time different traits and expressing different moods, the same motives and themes correspond each time to different images, actions and pictures."

The first movement is largely taken up by a gentle rocking theme, with some of the slippery key changes of which Rimsky-Korsakov was a master. The second movement presents a curly tune on a bassoon supported by four double-basses. This is passed around the woodwinds before more dramatic events intervene.

The third movement is beautifully relaxed, free of such disturbances, while the finale brings back most of the themes, linked by frenetic movement as if for a dancing dervish. In the end a great sense of calm is restored, since Scheherazade has been spared and can now look forward to the permanently warm regard and patient ears of the Sultan Shahriah.

The origins of this fascinating work go back to the death of Alexander Borodin in 1887. Having already helped to complete some of Mussorgsky's music left behind at the time of his early death, Rimsky-Korsakov, now with Glazunov, took on the completion of Borodin's unfinished opera Prince Igor. This work stimulated his own urges, with the result that Scheherazade along with the Spanish Caprice and the Easter Festival Overture, his three principal orchestral works, were all completed within the year.

At no time did he imagine the work as a ballet. This was taken up by when Vaslav Nijinsky and Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, after the composer’s death, and was presented at the Paris Opera in 1910.

— Hugh Macdonald