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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Giuseppe Verdi Overture to I vespri siciliani Giuseppe Verdi’s opera The Sicilian Vespers was written for the Paris Opéra in 1855. Its premiere in June of that year marked the culmination of almost two years of work for the composer and his librettist Eugène Scribe. The Sicilian Vespers is truly a French grand opera, written in five acts with the requisite ballet. The plot involves a thirteenth-century conflict between Sicilians in Palermo and occupying French forces under Governor Guy de Montfort, who served at the pleasure of the King of Naples, Charles d’Anjou. Matched against Montfort is the insurgent Jean Procida. The romantic leads are the young Sicilian Henri and a captive, the Duchess Hélène. Hélène hates Montfort for killing her brother, Duke Frédéric of Austria, and for holding her hostage. Henri hates Montfort because he is the French governor, of course, but Henri has also recently been imprisoned. In the second act, Hélène agrees to run away with Henri if he will get revenge for her brother and Procida returns to Sicily with word that the Spanish will aid the Sicilian’s cause. Henri, in the next act, learns that Montfort is actually his father, which somewhat shifts his alliances. The conflicted Henri opens the fourth act by visiting Hélène and Procida in prison where they await execution after trying to assassinate Montfort. After a great deal of drama, Henri agrees to recognize Montfort as his father, which leads to his parting with Hélène. In the finale, Procida leads the uprising that the Spanish are waiting for, and Montfort and his fellow Frenchmen are destroyed. Modern companies rarely stage these lengthy French operatic spectacles. The cost is exorbitant and audiences seem reluctant to spend that much time in the opera house. The Sicilian Vespers is known today primarily for the ballet music from the third act, generally known as “The Four Seasons,” and for its overture. The overture is the longest Verdi wrote and is an elongated version of the popular overtures he wrote for his Italian operas. Verdi uses the extra time well. The overture is in sonata form with contrasting themes taken from the drama that are grouped to reflect a distillation of the opera. As David Kimbell pointed out in The Cambridge Companion to Verdi, “Everything in the introductory Largo proves to be expressive of the condition of Sicily and its people,” and “the Allegro agitato is built from themes that might be said to contain … themes associated with conspiracy and with family bonds.” All the music is, of course, woven together with Verdi’s consummate skill in a piece that is as rousing in the concert hall as it would be when used to introduce the opera. Jean Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 4 As a child, Jean Sibelius had loved to improvise music, and when he was fifteen he set his sights on becoming a violin virtuoso. He progressed quickly on the instrument, and formed a trio with his older sister on piano and his younger brother on cello. When he entered the University at Helsinki, his violin teacher labeled him a genius. But Sibelius found that he could not overcome debilitating stage fright and he switched his emphasis to composition. Sibelius later recorded dreams of being a violin virtuoso in his diary, and his relationship with the violin certainly informs the type of concerto he wrote for the instrument. The Violin Concerto is primarily a display piece (closer to Liszt than to Beethoven), but it is still music by Jean Sibelius, and the intellectual rigor we enjoy in his symphonies shows through. As Donald Tovey wrote in his third volume of Essays in Musical Analysis, “In the easier and looser concerto forms invented by Mendelssohn and Schumann, I have not met with a more original, a more masterly, and a more exhilarating work than the Sibelius Violin Concerto.” Composition of the Violin Concerto began almost simultaneously with the launch and public embrace of the Second Symphony. Aspects of both these major works seem to have been generated by Sibelius’s travels. Urged by a patron to spend a season in Italy, Sibelius went there in 1900 and rambled home with stops that included Berlin, Paris, and Prague. Along the way he played and conducted his own music for new audiences, but he also spent time absorbing the music of these more southern cities. He had promised the virtuoso Willy Burmester a concerto and began to write one in 1903. The concerto was finished in 1904 but was not performed by Burmester. Instead, Sibelius hastily arranged for a concert performance with the violinist Viktor Nováček in order to raise money to pay off some debts. Nováček was not up to the challenge of the work and the premiere was a fiasco. Sibelius withdrew the concerto for revision. In 1905, he allowed the piece to be performed again — this time in Germany with the violinist Karl Halir and the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Richard Strauss. Strauss and Halir took the necessary time and effort to get to know the score, and the critical response was very positive. The first movement is a quasi-sonata form with an extended cadenza. The second movement is in three sections with a statement, contrast, and return ( ABA form). The finale has a rondo feel with two contrasting sets of thematic materials struggling back and forth. Throughout, we hear warm Italianate melodies contrasting with the cooler Scandanavian lines that we know from Sibelius’s tone poems. Both are presented intensely by the soloist. This is the kind of concerto that inspires awe in those of us who don’t play the instrument, especially given the opportunity to watch a soloist perform or to follow a score with a recording. The extremely fast runs, leaps up and down the neck of the violin, and most especially double and triple-stop playing, look and are hard to perform. Although Halir brought the concerto to the public for the first time, it took recordings by the stellar talents of Jascha Heifetz and David Oistrakh to gain the concerto a wide public following. Over the succeeding decades, the difficulties of the concerto have only endeared it to the generations of bright young performers who have taken it to concert stages around the world. Ultimately, we see that Jean Sibelius made a much greater impact writing for the violin than he ever would have made in taking the concert stage himself. Amilcare Ponchielli “Danza delle ore” from La Gioconda Trained as an organist and educated at the Milan Conservatory, Amilcare Ponchielli had a difficult time establishing himself as a composer of operas. While he made a living as a bandmaster and occasionally as an opera conductor, his compositions could not win a following. He gained some popularity with an opera called I promessi sposi in 1856. This same story, but with new music set to a superior libretto, finally won Ponchielli acclaim in 1872. The publisher Giulio Ricordi decided that Ponchielli would be the successor to Verdi and put his resources behind the composer. But even with this generous sponsorship, Ponchielli did not take the opera world by storm. Four years later, in 1876, La Gioconda premiered at La Scala. It has been in the repertoire of opera houses ever since. Ponchielli would later be a beloved mentor to composers like Puccini and Mascagni, but he was really only given this one great stage success before an untimely death from pneumonia. The story of La Gioconda was adapted from a play by Victor Hugo. In the drama a young street singer, known only by the nickname La Gioconda (the happy one), and her blind mother (La Cieca) are swept up in the marital intrigues of nobles with fatal consequences. The sordid action takes place in the city of Venice under the grim circumstances of the seventeenth-century Inquisition. La Gioconda is pursued by an unsavory spy for the Inquisition named Barnaba, but she is secretly betrothed to the banished nobleman/sailor Enzo Grimaldo. Grimaldo, unfortunately, still carries a torch for Laura, the wife of Duke Alvise, and remains in Venice in disguise. “The Dance of the Hours” is in the second scene of the third act — a huge party Duke Alvise is holding at his palace, known as the House of Gold. The ballet is entertainment for the party guests, but it was also an expected part of the evening’s entertainment for French opera patrons. While dramatic expression through dance has been traced back to the Greeks and was restored to European culture by the great creative minds of the Renaissance, it was the French who really took ballet to heart. When Italian opera became popular in Paris in the 1640s, it was with the provision that the shows also included dancing and, from that point, any opera that was to be successful in France had to include a ballet interlude. As we see in La Gioconda, composers and librettists eventually found ways to work the interlude into the action of the drama. “The Dance of the Hours” is a musical illustration of the symbolic interplay of darkness and light within the day. The light opening is music perfectly written for lithe young ballerinas. After a lyrical interlude with a soaring melody, we hear the bell on the mantle clock chime and the piece ends in a rousing finale. While this music is extremely familiar, we should remember that it had been extremely popular for over half a century before animators began using it and before it was made into America’s best-known “camp” song. Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Symphony No. 4 in A major, Opus 90 “Italian” Felix Mendelssohn’s career was certainly one of the most highly regarded of the nineteenth century. Raised in a wealthy Berlin banking family, Mendelssohn had the best general and musical education possible at the time. He was encouraged to pursue philosophy, including aesthetics, and a thorough study of literature. Musical studies led him to the works of the great Baroque composers, like Handel and J.S. Bach, that had all but disappeared from the concert repertoire. With his prodigious intellectual and musical gifts, Mendelssohn developed an individual style of composition that falls snugly into the gap between Classicism and Romanticism. Having made his mark as a consummate performer and now a musical leader well-versed in tradition, Mendelssohn decided to see the rest of Europe. Initially, he went to London and explored Scotland. Returning to London, he was injured in a coach accident and went home to Berlin where he was asked to lead the music faculty at the University of Berlin. He declined, survived a winter attack of measles, and headed out on the road again. This trip, in 1830, was to have a lasting effect on the brilliant young man. He spent time in Weimar with his great friend, the aging poet and philosopher Wolfgang von Goethe. He made his way through Vienna and Hungary to Venice. A final leg of the trip, in the fall, led through Florence to Rome. Mendelssohn’s letters to friends and family reflect his intense joy at being among the relics of history and at being enveloped in the southern climate. His exacting sketches show countryside still lush with vegetation. Spending the winter in Rome Mendelssohn also got a good taste of daily life, which his letters describe in detail. He headed north again in the spring of 1831 with a very full year’s worth of experiences and a new symphony. Felix Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony is generally regarded as his most popular composition. He wrote that it was born from his travels through the Italian countryside and the vivacity of the Italian people. The exhilarating first movement weaves together three lively themes in an exhaustive sonata movement that is twice as long as any of its fellows. Various sources have been identified over the years for the thematic materials in the subsequent movements. Mendelssohn’s friend, the pianist Ignaz Moscheles, recorded his understanding that the second movement was derived from a Czech pilgrim’s song heard in a procession in Naples. A letter from Mendelssohn to his sister sheds a little light on the third movement. He wrote that he wanted to turn Goethe’s humorous poem “ Lilis Park” into a “scherzo for orchestra.” The brilliant finale is based on Italian dances — the salterello spiced with a touch of tarantella. Mendelssohn completed work on this symphony in the winter of 1832. He led the London Philharmonic in the symphony for its world premiere in May of 1833. © 2007 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth
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