BELA BARTOK (1881 – 1945)

BALLET: THE WOODEN PRINCE

 Back in the very early 1950’s the name to strike terror in talking about modern music was Bartok, rather like Stockhausen today. It was with trepidation that I borrowed some 78’s from the record library of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and thought myself courageous to listen to it. It presented little problem for one with more of an ear for adventure then than perhaps one has today. So just who was Bela Bartok and what can we expect from his output during the first world war?

 First of all he was a Hungarian. But even to say that begs a question because Hungary had a habit, not of its own choosing, in changing its size and borders and exact whereabouts from time to time and what was part of Hungary when Bartok was born ceased to be so later on, particularly with the break up after 1918 of Austria-Hungary, a two state – one kingdom power. Take for instance his popular Five Rumanian Dances for violin written in 1915, just before The Wooden Prince. These were dances from Transylvania, an area of Rumania taken over by Hungary in 1867. Thus Rumanian Dances were for Bartok a provincial diversion, just as Scottish Dances were for Malcolm Arnold.

 Bartók was born into a musical family and received good pianistic training from his mother. He was something of a prodigy, and began composing at the age of ten. In 1898 he was accepted at the Vienna Conservatory, but chose instead to stay in Hungary at the Budapest Academy where he first met Zoltan Kodaly. His early work was influenced greatly by Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt , but his first major work, the Staussian Kossuth (1903), also stands out for its telling of a nationalist story.

In 1904 Bartók began collecting folk music by recording musicians on wax cylinders. Much of this was done in conjunction with Kodaly, just as Vaughan Willams and Holst did with English folk music. This had a profound impact on Bartok’s compositional style, for in these pieces he found elements that he began to incorporate into his own writing. The melodies of these folk tunes, removed from the traditional major/minor tonality of Western music, provided new melodic and harmonic resources, and the powerful and often asymmetrical rhythms (often freely mixing groupings of twos and threes) became a hallmark of Bartók’s rhythmic style. Bartok soon also realized that Hungarian folk song was not the same as the gypsy music popularized by Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsodies or Brahms in his Hungarian Dances.

In 1907 Bartók was appointed professor of piano at the Budapest Academy and he continued his compositional activity, creating works of greater complexity. By the early 1920s his music was verging on an atonal style. He gained international success with a less challenging work, The Wooden Prince (1917), and by the late 1920s his music started to take on more of a neo-classical approach.

The crises leading up to World War II forced Bartók to flee Hungary and settle in the United States. He had opposed the fascist governments of Hungary of the 1930’s and 40’s. This move caused both financial and personal difficulties, and failing health heightened these. Nonetheless, in his final few years he created a group of important pieces, including the Concerto for Orchestra.

 The Wooden Prince is a ballet needing a large orchestra including two saxophones, four trumpets, two cornets and a large batter of percussion. Not the size of orchestra normally contained in the opera pit. The story, like so many ballet stories, has been described on my CD leaflet as implausible. That is putting it mildly. It concerns the love of a prince for a princess (who else?) but he is scorned by the princess who favours a wooden puppet he has carved of himself adorned with his own mantle and a lock of his hair. He uses this to lure the princess from her castle and she dances with the puppet in a fifteen minute central section until the point where she cannot get the puppet to dance any more. She then tries to attract the real prince with her seductive dancing but cannot follow him as the forest bars her way. Well, I suppose that is as plausible as a prince falling in love with a swan.

 Bela Balasz who wrote the libretto for Duke Bluebeard’s castle explained that the wooden puppet symbolizes the work of the creative artist and that this gets more revered than the artist himself. So a Pygmalion kind of character?

 The music is cast in an introduction and eight scenes. There is no apparent break and it may be best not to try and make out the story as it goes along but just listen. To my mind the music has a tendency to ramble from one idea to another and lacks the tautness that Bartok later imposed.

The Wooden Prince by Bartok formed part of the series “Music 1914-18 presented by Matthew Taylor in February 2011

Note written for the Blackheath Music Appreciation Group and copyright is claimed by Lionel J Lewis

CHARLES EDWARD IVES (1874- 1954)

Symphony No 4

The purpose of this note is to give some general background only to Charles Ives. The outline of the symphony itself will be dealt with by Matthew.

Charles Ives is regarded as one of the first American composers of international renown although his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. His influences were a combination of American popular and church music traditions of his youth, coupled with military marches and European (Beethoven-Brahms) tradition. At the same time he was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music using techniques including polytonality polyrythm and quarter tones, foreshadowing by many years many musical innovations of the 20th century. Ives’ music reaches our ears even now with a similar shock to that of Stravinsky in his time. Yet Ives did not write to shock. He wrote as a professionally trained amateur and, without the expectation of his music being played, did not court popularity. What never ceases to surprise is that his music was written mainly before 1918 at the same time as Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, composers he was unlikely to have encountered, were flying their revolutionary flags in Europe.

He was born in Danebury, Conneticut in 1874, the son of George Ives, a U.S army bandleader in the American Civil War. His father was his principal teacher whose influence instilled in him the desire to reproduce the surrounding sounds and not to be afraid of resulting discord. Ives himself became a church organist at the age of 14 and composed his own hymns. He went on to Yale where he studied music as well as being an all-American lad in the football team. His teachers were more than bemused by his early compositions. Ives did not go on to be a composer waiting to be performed. Composition was a serious pastime but his chosen career was as an insurance broker. With his business partner and friend he formed the firm of Ives and Myrick in 1906 and he wrote “Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax” a tome, which was to be an insurance broker’s bible for many years. In 1908 he married and moved to New York giving up the church organ in the process. For a composer his wife bore the most delightful name, Harmony Twitchell

Despite a long life Ives was composing mainly between 1900 and 1920. Like his contemporary, Sibelius, he stopped altogether in 1927 having in tears announced to his wife he would never compose again. He did continue to revise existing works.

Ives’ music is like that of none other. His works often resemble an aural collage of sepia photographs evoking old memories. For example in his Holidays Symphony one hears misty impressionist sounds and buzzings with vague mixtures of distant military calls or hymn tunes intermingling and merging but one should not be surprised to hear a sudden upsurge from the military town band parade as if John Philip Sousa himself had taken over. Then out of some indefinable chaos one can be given a popular tune such as the Campdown Races played on a jews harp. Much is based on reminiscences which Ives would recall, particularly of his father rehearsing the military band in the town square or, as in the fourth symphony two bands marching past each other in opposite directions.

The fourth symphony written between 1910 and 1916 bears some relationship to his earlier work, “The Unanswered Question”. Ives is stated to have said “that it contains a searching question of ‘What’ and ‘Why’ which the spirit of man asks of life” It is said to have included 15 references to earlier compositions of Ives and some thirty hymns. It also has an offstage battery of percussion, six trumpets and an ether organ (which might have been some sort of synthesiser) and it needs a second conductor. So get yourselves ready for a unique aural experience

This note was written for the Blackheath Music Appreciation Society by Lionel J Lewis ©

VIOLIN CONCERTO

Some of you may remember, without necessarily owning to it, a popular television programme in the 1960’s called “Juke Box Jury”. It contained a panel of four mediocre celebrities of the day who discussed the merits or demerits of the latest release and then voted if it would be a hit or a miss. The chairman of these proceedings, David Jacobs, would then ding a bell if it were voted a hit or squeeze a rude motor horn if it were forecast to be a miss

I suppose one could say of Frederick Delius that in his time there were to be more misses than there were hits. This may explain a long ambivalence towards this composer. Born in Bradford where he went to the local grammar school his life was to become spent in Florida, Germany, Norway, and France where he lived and died.

Delius is one of those composers with whom some become enraptured whilst others are totally non-plussed. It is not that his music is difficult but he was certainly his own man with his own distinctive style . He was not a composer of structures like Beethoven or Brahms or Elgar, his British contemporary. His scoring is based on chromatic harmony. No need to be frightened of that expression. Chromatic is simply the Greek word for colour and the effect of colour is obtained by adding harmonies in a different key to that of the principal theme. Delius was a painter in sound not with the intention to produce visual images à la Richard Strauss but to evoke the “son et parfum” surrounding his subject. His music bore equally evocative titles. Brigg Fair, Summer Night on the River, Appalachia, Sleigh Ride, A Village Romeo and Juliet, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring . His Deux Aquarelles have more in common with the Summer Exhibition than the Conservatoire. Paris, The Song of A Great City, is a nocturne which owes more to Whistler than to Debussy. Debussy and Delius, both born the same year, are described as impressionists but in different ways. If Debussy’s music is said to be atmospheric, then that of Delius would best be described as aromatic

His father, Julius Delius, was a German immigrant industrialist in the wool trade. Delius, one of four brothers and ten sisters, was expected to follow in the family business despite his wishing to study music. He spent some time in the business in Stroud and then abroad without great success. He then went at his apparent request to manage an orange plantation in Solano Grove, Jacksonville Florida in 1884. There, he took lessons in music and was influenced by the surroundings and the songs and dances of the negroes. From this period there came first his Florida Suite, which included the original version of his famous La Calinda. Later on he wrote Appalachia, variations on a slave song, a big score indeed which would have won him an Oscar for its open prairie Western style music, except that the kinematograph had yet to be invented.

After 18 months he returned to Europe with parental sanction and support to study music in Leipzig coming under the spell of Wagner. Here he studied counterpoint and other tools of his trade but the really great influence there was his meeting with Edvard Grieg who encouraged and approved the early works of Delius. Through the Grieg set he established long standing friendships with Halvorsen and Percy Grainger who was to introduce to Delius the folk song, Brigg Fair.   Delius was to return regularly throughout his life to Norway until ill health prevented him from doing so.

In the mid 1880’s, Delius moved to Paris where he moved in the circles of Gauguin, Munch and Strindberg. However he did not meet with many French musicians and his music was hardly ever to be recognized in France. It was in these late years of the 1880’s that he is thought to have contracted syphilis but its devastating effects did not incapacitate him till the late 1920’s when he became blind and paralyzed. In 1893, he met Jelka Rosen, an artist. She is variously described as Danish or German but she was in fact born in Belgrade and was the granddaughter of the famous 19^th century Bohemian pianist and composer, Ignaz Moscheles. Jelka had exhibited at Salon des Indépendents. She had purchased a house at the artists’ colony of Grez sur Loing, near Fontainebleau, about 40 miles from Paris. Delius moved in with her in 1896 and they married in 1903. They continued to live at Grez except for a short period during the first world war when they stayed temporarily in England. Their marriage was described as unorthodox with Jelka the main breadwinner whilst Freddy played away from home too often for her liking.

The early compositions of Delius were first promoted in Germany with two or three conductors including his works. It was when this work was performed in England in 1907 that Sir Thomas Beecham first heard Delius. Beecham was bowled over. He was not a man to do things by halves and soon he had mounted A Villlage Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden as well as including Delius whenever he could in his concert programmes. This was the making of Delius financially and without Beecham he would probably have sunk into oblivion.

There are few orthodox forms in Delius’ music but during the first world war he turned to writing concertos for violin, cello, double concerto and it is the violin concerto that Matthew Taylor will be considering. There is little point in this note trying to guide you through it. That can be left to Matthew. In any event even a satnav would lose its way in this particular work as it is not a conventional concerto but more a continuous rhapsody for violin intermingled with orchestra. Even the movements are difficult to make out although there is in the last “movement” a tune somewhat reminiscent of Brigg Fair. Still you should not even be reading this note. Far better to close your eyes and let the music take over.