The Isle of the Dead

From the title, some of my readers may be expecting me to bring in Rachmaninoff's tone poem of that name.  Well, they're right -- but only partly.  Rachmaninoff was not the only composer whose musical inspiration was fired by Arnold Böcklin's symbolist painting, Die Toteninsel.

The picture, first of all, depicts a towering rocky island  punctuated with doorways that suggest burial crypts.  A boat approaches the shore, rowed by an oarsman, and bearing a draped casket, with a robed and hooded figure standing watch over the body.  Böcklin plainly set great store by the theme, since he created five versions of the picture between 1880 and 1886; the third version is shown here.  The title of the picture was actually not the artist's, but was suggested by an art dealer.

Rachmaninoff's tone poem, composed in 1909, is remarkable for its uniquely unsettling and evocative use of 5/8 rhythm.  The choice of a barcarolle, with its rhythm replicating the sounds of the oars dipping into the water, was a natural enough idea.  Rachmaninoff, though, dislocates expectation by setting his A minor barcarolle in a stately 5-beat rhythm, 2-2-1, repeated over and over as a rising tonic-dominant-tonic figure in A minor in the bass.  Over this rhythm, melodic lines slowly appear, all of which are variants on the idea of a rising triadic arpeggio.  This simple formula produces a lengthy musical paragraph of great diversity of texture.  Over the course of the music, the orchestration grows steadily broader and grander, to the point where that main theme erupts with great force in the full orchestra.

A contrasting central section brings a more varied, somewhat wistful melody, very plainly by the same composer as the slow movements of the more famous second and third piano concertos.  This too is gradually worked up to a climax of passion and regret.  After a brief lull, a second and even more anguished climax grinds its way through the orchestra until the music darkens and disintegrates into a massive tremolo above which six huge staccato chords extinguish this more humane song of life.  The Dies irae medieval plainchant appears, is briefly developed, and then a cello solo leads to the return of the opening barcarolle, in all its quiet, mysterious depth.

Incidentally, or perhaps not, Rachmaninoff had not seen any of the versions of the painting but only a black-and-white reproduction of it before composing his tone poem.  After he saw one of the actual paintings, he remarked that he preferred it in black and white and probably wouldn't have written the music at all if he had seen the picture in full colour!

Rachmaninoff was only one of half a dozen or more composers who composed works inspired by this painting. The only other version I've heard is the work of Max Reger, one of four movements of his Böcklin Suite.  Although written four years after Rachmaninoff's work, Reger's piece sounds like it could be older, some of the densely chromatic harmonies being positively Wagnerian.  

This work was actually a major departure for Reger, who until this time had resolutely continued to compose absolute music, often denying the value of programmatic music.   In sharp contrast to Rachmaninoff's approach, Reger makes no attempt to portray the scene, being content to capture the moods evoked by the picture.  His musical painting always strikes me as being steeped in a very real and human sorrow where Rachmaninoff's more severe work suggests a deeply fatalistic, even hieratic view of death.

The other three movements of Reger's Böcklin Suite are equally fascinating.  The Hermit With a Violin uses winds, brasses, and a double string orchestra, one playing with mutes and one without, to provide a backcloth for the slow, lyrical violin solo.  At Play in the Waves, representing a painting of naiads and tritons disporting themselves in the sea, brings a faster, more playful sound world whose sparkling sea music can stand comparison with Debussy.  The Isle of the Dead follows in third place, and the final Bacchanal is a riotous summing up of sheer virtuoso orchestral brilliance.

 

In Memoriam Krszystof Penderecki

The passing of Polish composer Krszystof Penderecki this week took from the musical world one of the most remarkable figures of recent musical history: renowned as a prolific composer in all major genres, respected as a conductor and teacher, a man of deep faith in a predominantly secular age, a composer who achieved a unique synthesis of the experimental and the traditional, and above all the most prolific and significant contributor since the 1950s to the literature of music for large choral forces with orchestra.

Love Penderecki or hate him (and there's no shortage of music lovers in both camps), no one with any desire to immerse themselves in the choral-orchestral literature can ignore him.

His St Luke Passion of 1965 was his first large-scale foray into the field of choral-orchestral music, and featured extensive use of the techniques which dominated his first, modernist period -- the tone clusters, glissandi, cries and shouts, indeterminate or "chance" passages, microtonal writing, all are present.  Yet the score is also marked by sparing but noteworthy use of traditional tonal elements in the form of melodic ostinati, and even moments marked out by clear tonal chords.

In the 1970s, his style underwent a shift which he himself characterized as a move back to a more traditional language.  Yet in retrospect, we can see that what he was actually doing was broadening his musical language by making broader use of traditional musical language, in harness and in contrast with continuing use of some of his more experimental techniques.  In effect, through this transition he became an early harbinger of a trend in composition which has gained significant momentum since the turn of the twenty-first century.

I've always been a great admirer of his music ever since my first encounter -- a recording of the Magnificat, made in 1970.  That's not to say that I always enjoy it -- many pages of the St Luke Passion are definitely harrowing and not comfortable at all.  But the dramatic intensity of this extraordinary piece is remarkable, and I should probably write about it in my next post.

Nor do I mean to convey that Penderecki's output was of uniformly high quality.  The Magnificat is frankly uneven, with some truly gripping moments but much that is less so.  The two-part Utrenja which followed it a year or so later has always struck me as a complete misfire.  Although I've dutifully listened through it a number of times, I can never sense any kind of overarching design or plan behind it, and the endless streams of aggressive sounds wear out their welcome.

But there are two of Penderecki's major choral-orchestral frescoes that I truly love, and will gladly listen to several times every year.  One is the massive Seventh Symphony from 1996, "The Seven Gates of Jerusalem."  You can read my thoughts about that work, with its propulsive, energetic central scherzo, here:  Modern Energy II.  Here I will only add that it has been among the most successful of his major compositions, with multiple recordings and frequent performances in many musical centres of Europe.

The other, the Te Deum, was one of the first products of his self-labelled "return to tradition," completed in 1973.   He was writing it at the same time as he was working on his Symphony No. 2, a single-movement work which has become known as the "Christmas Symphony" because of its quotation of the old German carol, Stille nacht ("Silent Night").  In fact, the two pieces, both running about the same playing time of 35 minutes, are so alike in character that they form a natural pair -- so it's not surprising that the composer's own performances were combined for the EMI reissue which I have in my collection.

In the Te Deum, the orchestral instruments spend much more time playing in their respective "proper" styles.  Such effects as string players slapping their instruments or wind players blowing through without reeds or mouthpieces are less common, and the use of percussion is much more sparing.  The vocal parts, too, involve some use of the tone clusters and microtonal glissandi so prominent earlier, but again employed here with much more discretion.  But be aware that the music nonetheless remains very dramatic in expression, in a way that sometimes seems ill-attuned to the text.  It's a characteristic of Penderecki's large choral works that the text may condition the overall atmosphere of the piece -- but one shouldn't expect nor seek for line-by-line illustrative treatment of the words.

The major signature mark of the Te Deum -- as with the co-incident Symphony -- is a casual, laissez-faire attitude towards tonality.  There's one very prominent stylistic mannerism in which the orchestra lands on an unmistakably tonal chord -- and immediately follows it with an equally unmistakable chord in a completely unrelated key.  Sometimes the two chords are sounded by the same instruments (say, the wind and brass choir) and in the same register.  More often, though the first chord (usually very high up) is answered by the contrasting chord far below it in the bass register.

The effect is, at first, remarkably like a classical cadence until you realize that these chords do not bring a completion but rather an undermining of whatever feeling of tonal rootedness you may be experiencing.  Another common feature of both works is a slowly rising scale figure of four or five notes in the low brass, and indeed the texture of these two pieces is often dominated by the low brass and wind sound.  By contrast, the vocal lines often feature chains of descending semitones.

The centre of the Te Deum brings a remarkable moment of peace amid the turmoil of so much of the music.  The orchestra falls silent and the choir slowly and quietly intones an ancient Polish hymn, set to its traditional tune.  The hymn is briefly broken by one of Penderecki's characteristic wandering solo lines (a soprano) and then resumes with the soprano in concord with the choir.

The second half of the score involves even more turbulent writing, culminating in a wildly anarchic rising cadenza for the massed violins, a cadenza which keeps doubling back on itself while slowly and remorselessly accelerating to an enormous climax marked by the last and hugest occurrence of those paired chords.  In the final pages the music slowly dies away in a shimmering haze of sound, and the final pages are a quiet but widely spread final major chord repeated multiple times as the choir chants the final words, "non confundar in aeternum."