A Forgotten # 2 Hit Composition

From the premiere in 1898 until the 1950s, it consistently vied with Mendelssohn's Elijah as the second-most popular choral work in England, the land of large amateur choral societies and festivals.  (Messiah, of course, reigned unchallenged in first place!).  Since then, it has dropped so far out of sight that most music lovers today have never heard of it, let alone actually heard the music.  For that matter, how many people today have even heard of the composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor?

No, that is not the poet, and no, I did not get the name backwards.  Coleridge-Taylor's father came from a mixed African-European parentage in Sierra Leone, and was living in London when he met Alice Hare Martin.  However, they were not married and Daniel Taylor returned to West Africa without finding out that she had borne him a son.  One of the most remarkable aspects of the story of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is the way that a man of African descent rose to such high prominence in both Britain and the United States at a time long before the modern Civil Rights movement.  Indeed, he was personally invited to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt, an almost unheard-of honour for an African at that time!

However, during his upbringing in England he studied with major musical figures of the day, particularly Charles Stanford, and was given an early boost by Edward Elgar.  Given his English upbringing, it's hardly surprising that he set out to compose a work for choir and orchestra at the relatively early age of 23.  His choice of text was fashionable, but still unusual for a choral work:  Hiawatha's Wedding Feast from the poem of Henry Longfellow.  Great interest was aroused when copies of the score were on sale even before the premiere on Nov. 11, 1898, and the hall was so packed that hundreds of people had to be turned away.  The success of the work was immediate, and Coleridge-Taylor swiftly followed with two more cantatas, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha's Departure.  All three were frequently performed, but the first one far more than the other two.  Until its popularity declined after World War Two, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was performed literally thousands of times throughout the English-speaking world, and sales of the vocal score soared into the hundreds of thousands.  

Listening to the work now, I get the distinct impression that it certainly was a breath of fresh air blowing through the cobwebs of the English choral tradition.  Sanctimonious harmonies, stodgy accompaniments and learned academic fugues are swept away.  In their place we hear a profusion of pleasing melody, and orchestral parts of independent distinction (the woodwind lines in many sections are especially lovely).  There's nothing at all revolutionary about the choral writing -- indeed, it seems simple almost to a fault because the very sophistication is itself neatly concealed.  The lightness of texture throughout the work is notable.

The first notes heard from the orchestra outline a motto theme which works throughout the score.  A simple set of four notes -- A up to D, down to the D below, and back to the original A -- just the tonic and dominant formula, played quietly by flutes and trumpets, somewhat like a fanfare to call us to attention.  This same motto reappears in many guises, changing keys and rhythms with the changing course of the work.  It's interesting that Coleridge-Taylor avoids the obvious course of using the same music every time the chorus sings the repeated refrain:

That the feast may be more joyous

And the time may pass more gaily

And the guests be more contented.

Thus, each time we hear these words, the melody, harmony, and orchestration are different!

Most of the work is for the chorus, and the constant varying of vocal and orchestral textures is one of the delights of the score.  But the centrepiece is the soaring, lyrical aria for tenor, Onaway!  Awake, beloved!, which became such a staple of the tenor recital repertoire for half a century.  Here the motto theme is slightly varied.  It now starts on the dominant rather than the tonic:  D-flat up to G-flat, down to the G-flat below, and back to the original D-flat.  How many listeners, I wonder, have clued in to the slight variation?  Even with my musical background and experience, I only caught on today, when I have known the piece for over 40 years!  (Okay, so I'm kind of slow in the uptake sometimes!)  But it's such little subtleties that give the work its true distinction and quality.

In today's harsher, more politically correct world, a work treating of the First Nations culture could never be written in this way!  But then, Coleridge-Taylor never pretended that his work was "authentic" in any sense.  In fact, he was drawn to Longfellow's poem by the euphony of the names.  What you get here is a romantic musician's interpretation of a poem that is itself a highly-romanticized version of First Nations legends.  The very lack of pretension in the music is what makes Hiawatha's Wedding Feast so delightful.

For many years, it was closely identified with the name of British conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, and he in fact led the EMI recording I have here.  It was recorded in 1961, using the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Choral Society, and tenor soloist Richard Lewis.  I could hardly think of a better voice for that rapturous solo, and the choral singing and orchestral playing are of equal distinction.  The 35-minute cantata is joined on the CD re-release (Classics for Pleasure) by the Petite Suite de Concert and The Bamboula: Rhapsodic Dance.  These were both later works, written not long before the composer died of pneumonia in 1912 -- at the tragically early age of 37.  Both are lively works displaying more of the same melodic sense and virtuoso handling of the orchestra that distinguishes the earlier cantata.

The Fine Line Between Masterpiece and Muddle

I've often pondered the role of "popularity" in the growth of classical music.  This blog is devoted to the numerous delightful, and indeed wonderful, works of music which languish in the shadows because they (or their composers) are not popular, and hence not well known.  Popularity can be fickle too.  An extreme example is the opening "sunrise" passage from Richard Strauss' tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra.  This work definitely lay in obscurity until those opening bars were given spectacular vision by Stanley Kubrick in his epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Since then, Strauss' sunrise has become part of the popular cultural landscape (although the rest of the work still remains rarely heard). 

The issue gets further confused when the "great experts" anoint this work or composer as masterly while consigning that work or composer to the discard bin.  Sadly, many music-lovers base their choices on those of the "great experts", while forgetting that these experts too are human beings and have their likes and dislikes.  I strongly suspect that personal likes and dislikes, not to mention McCarthy-era politics, lie at the root of the matter in the case I am going to examine today.

Imagine, if you will, a piece which begins with a simple, obsessive rhythm beaten quietly on a snare drum.  Over a span of some minutes, the drum is joined by one instrument after another.  Each instrument that joins repeats the same melody given out by the first one.  At each repetition the music gets bigger, louder, brasher, until the entire orchestra is engaged -- yet the rhythm, melody and key never change.  UNTIL -- with a sudden modulation the orchestra swerves mightily into a different key, bringing the piece at last to its thunderous climax.

Ravel's Bolero, of course.  Probably a few of my gentle readers guessed that already.  Bolero is certainly not to everyone's taste.  All the same, it is -- rightly, I think -- regarded as a great masterpiece for the orchestra.

But no.  I was not actually describing Bolero.  It came as a shock to me when listening to another favourite work to realize that there is a lengthy passage in it which repeats the recipe of Bolero almost exactly.  And yet, this passage has been described as a "monumental miscalculation" and "banal beyond belief."

The piece I am referring to here is Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, the "Leningrad" Symphony.  This work was mainly composed in Leningrad and completed in Kuibyshev during the famous Siege of Leningrad by Nazi German armies in World War Two.  When performed, it was presented as a tribute to the people of the city and their endurance in the face of adversity.  Shostakovich himself said that the first movement was dedicated to the struggle and the last to the victory.  The piece achieved instant fame, and when the score was flown out by way of Tehran and Casablanca to New York, it quickly received over a hundred performances in the United States alone.  The propaganda value of the symphony was immense.

After the war, though, it was dismissed as being "only" a piece of propaganda, written off as a noisy socialist potboiler, and in any case almost all Russian music of the 20th century became suspect during the McCarthy era.  That judgement has continued to be repeated by many critics and commentators right to the present day.  I would submit, though, that after 70 years the time is ripe to reappraise the Leningrad Symphony.

Much of the negative critical reaction has centred on the long central passage of the first movement, the passage which so effectively uses the same formula as Bolero.  The tune in this case is a perky little melody, almost folk-like in shape, which takes on much more militaristic tone as the orchestration grows step by step.  In wartime terms, this was taken as a depiction of the German armies coming closer and closer, surrounding the city, and moving in to crush it.  Perfectly believable. 

But with Shostakovich, as we now know better, nothing is ever quite that simple.  You need to take his public utterances with a grain of salt, because it was in his public words that he bowed to the Stalinist empire.  Recent research, though, has shown a very different possible interpretation, and one that makes much more sense of the repeated, obsessive nature of that long central passage.  Take it instead as the invasion, suppression, and brutal destruction of the Trotskyite Leningrad cultural community by the relatively uncultured and uncouth Stalin, and suddenly that simple, obsessive melody which rises finally to a roar makes much more sense.  After all, thousands of prominent citizens of Leningrad disappeared in the Stalinist purges, yet the German armies never actually entered the city.  That possibility also adds much more depth and poignancy to Shostakovich's comments about the struggle and the victory -- and of the hard-won triumph when the central passage is finally subsumed in an altered version of the symphony's dogged opening theme.

All four movements of this symphony have moments of peace and austere beauty which were so characteristic of the composer.  All four also have moments of emphatic bombast, equally characteristic.  Take it as a whole, though, and I think it is by no means the least of Shostakovich's achievements in the symphonic form. 

I've heard several recordings, but have yet to hear a live performance.  Unfortunately, when the Toronto Symphony did it some years back, I was still teaching in Elliot Lake and unable to get down to Toronto for a mid-week concert.

My favourite recording is quite old now, but stands the test of time well.  It's one of a group of recordings done in the early 1970s by EMI with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Paavo Berglund.  The entire 70-minute work is held together with force and conviction and the playing is of high calibre. 

Where Berglund scores over all rivals is in the closing 5 minutes of the finale.  There are several different musical lines at work in this long, loud climax.  Berglund wisely chose a speed just a couple of notches less than others have done, and with care managed to balance the orchestra so that all the notes in all the levels come through clearly.  Quite a trick in such a massive work, but he definitely managed it.  It's a truly great performance, effectively raising the Leningrad Symphony to its proper stature as a major twentieth-century work for the orchestra, and (in my humble opinion) redeeming the symphony from its long exile in the outer reaches of the musical world.

Approved Alternates

Back in the nineteenth century, before the invention of recording, people who wanted to hear music had to make a lot of it for themselves.  Any home that could afford one had a piano, and some families went further by buying string and wind instruments.  Well-to-do people often played one or more instruments as a hobby, or perhaps avocation would be a better word.

To meet the demand, music publishers printed and sold numerous arrangements of classical orchestral works set down for piano duo (or 4 hands at 1 piano, the most common kind of arrangement), for string quartet, for flute or clarinet with piano -- the possible combinations were almost endless.  Some of the most popular pieces made it into a dozen or more different forms of arrangement.

In the midst of all this activity, there were composers -- here and there -- who arranged their own works for 4-hands or 2 pianos, and published these as authorised alternative versions of the better-known full score works.  In this post, I want to discuss three such authorised alternatives.

Johannes Brahms was primarily a pianist and preeminently a composer for the piano.  It's not surprising that he often turned to that instrument as a vehicle for his ideas.  One of his early masterpieces began life as a string quintet.  He then recast it in 1863 as a sonata for 2 pianos, lasting 3/4 of an hour!  From that stage, he finally moved on to the form in which it is best known today, the Piano Quintet Op. 34 for string quartet and piano.  But wait!  He also published the 2-piano version under Op. 34b!  Thus, the intermediate stage was clearly approved by the composer as worthy of circulation in its own right.

Ten years later, Brahms produced co-equal versions at the same time of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn:  the orchestral version as Op. 56a and the 2-piano version as Op. 56b.  Again, there is no doubt that the composer regarded both versions as having equal validity.

In both works, the character of the music is significantly altered when translated to the percussive sound of the pianos, but the musical ideas shine through with equal effectiveness.  Indeed, in the Variations especially, there is a fair bit of detail which sometimes gets submerged in an orchestral performance but has a much better chance of shining clearly through when played on 2 pianos.

Fast forward to 1940.  The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, then living in the USA, produced his last and (in some ways) most complex work, the Symphonic Dances, Op. 45.  This score, which bristles with stabbing cross-rhythms and hammered percussion sounds, is much more obviously apt to the piano medium than the two Brahms works I discussed above.  No surprise, then, that Rachmaninoff -- himself a foremost piano virtuoso of his day -- simultaneously composed a version for 2 pianos.  While this was never actually published in his lifetime, he gave it his imprimatur by himself giving the first performance alongside Vladimir Horowitz.  It has been recorded a number of times since then.

In each of these three cases, the 2-piano version exists very much in the shade of the orchestral parallel versions.  This is scandalous!  These three works each present significant challenges to the virtuoso pianist, and in addition there is the significant challenge of keeping the two pianists firmly in sync with each other.  In each case, too, I feel that the 2-piano version enormously illuminates and clarifies the orchestral text, and certainly ought to be heard by anyone who enjoys these particular works.

In the 1990s, the legendary pianist Martha Argerich teamed up with Russian pianist-composer Alexandre Rabinovitch, to record all three of the works mentioned here, as well as some Brahms waltzes and the two Rachmaninoff Suites for 2 pianos.  Many people have expressed preference for this or that other version of this or that piece, but for me these two collections are special because of the fire that invades all of the music -- unwavering Apollonian lamps in Brahms and flaring Dionysian torchlight in Rachmaninoff.  Playing and recording alike are exemplary.  If you can find these 2 Teldec CDs, don't hesitate to buy them!