Program Notes: Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6

MUSIC WITH REVOLUTIONARY ROOTS

In 1930 Antheil’s opera Transatlantic premiered in Germany. A farce about a fake U.S. presidential election, the music referenced jazz and popular Americana tunes in an attempt to communicate with a wide range of listeners. The seed of this music blossomed into the sound Antheil solidified in his symphonic music of the ’40s. This sound is crystal clear in his symphonic overture McKonkey’s Ferry, completed in 1948 and coming after a decade of intense study of orchestral music and form—focusing particularly on works by Beethoven, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as jazz and other American music.

Antheil had a lifelong love of visual art that resulted in collaborations with Fernand Léger, Man Ray and other visual artists. For McKonkey’s Ferry Overture, he was inspired by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous “Washington Crossing the Delaware” oil paintings of 1851. Ironically enough, as Leutze was a German-American artist like Antheil, the paintings celebrate Washington’s victory over Hessian forces—German soldiers who aligned with the British in the Revolutionary War—at the Battle of Trenton, New Jersey.

While not expressly stated, this overture could very well be a quiet political statement from Antheil. Antheil’s avant-garde music fell out of fashion with the rise of Nazi Germany, and he experienced World War II and Hitler’s defeat while living in the U.S. Composing a militaristic overture three years after the end of World War II, inspired by a painting related to the defeat of German forces in another century, could be a statement against German fascism—a quiet statement, but a statement nonetheless.

AN EVOCATION OF BATTLE

Antheil’s eight-minute overture displays clear orchestration, clear melodic themes, call-and-response, counterpoint, canon (the same melody starting at different times, yet still creating logical harmonies), military-style percussion, march rhythms, well-highlighted solo moments (especially for violin, cello, piccolo, English horn and brass), and well-placed harp glissandos that give a wonderful color to specific, punctuated moments. While the inspirational painting depicts soldiers on a boat in the water, the music more strongly symbolizes a battle, perhaps the one in Leutze’s companion painting “Washington Rallying the Troops,” also dating from 1851.

McKonkey’s Ferry Overture received its premiere by the National Symphony Orchestra under Hans Kindler’s direction on December 12, 1948. Its performances this week are the Minnesota Orchestra’s first.

Instrumentation: 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, castanets, tambourine, triangle, harp and strings

PROGRAM NOTE BY ANTHONY R. GREEN.

Much happened over the next eight years. De Waart left San Francisco for Minneapolis to become the Minnesota Orchestra’s eighth music director, and Fleezanis moved here as well, becoming the first woman to hold the Orchestra’s concertmaster position. De Waart reopened the question of a violin concerto, and eventually a triple commission was arranged by the Minnesota Orchestra, New York City Ballet and London Symphony Orchestra.

“WE HAVE BEGUN IT”

On January 7, 1993, at 8:19 p.m., Fleezanis received a fax from Adams with the words “Wir haben es angefangen”—German for “we have begun it”—and an A-minor chord about five octaves deep. (Adams had previously told her that the work would be in A minor and had promised that it would be “drenchingly beautiful.”)

In no way did Adams approach the task lightly; indeed to begin with he found it quite intimidating. For one thing, so many composers—Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Elgar, Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, just to begin a list—have written just one violin concerto. “These,” Adams has remarked, “tend to be among their greatest works, so unless one is completely historically indifferent, which I can’t say I am, one tends to tread lightly.”

At the same time, Adams was excited by the challenge: “The violin commands incredible lyric intensity and has a fantastic capacity to deliver a white-hot message.” Adams wanted to write a truly violinistic piece, and Fleezanis eventually became his partner in it. Suggestions, emendations and counter-suggestions flew back and forth by phone and fax between Berkeley and Edina. Sometimes three alternative new versions of a passage would arrive by fax, and Fleezanis would play the various solutions back over the phone, sometimes into Adams’ answering machine.

Adams originally had imagined a two-movement concerto lasting a little over 20 minutes, something on the scale of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. The idea was to have a highly energetic first movement and then a contrasting slow movement, probably a chaconne, which would begin quietly but end grandly. As he worked, Adams became dissatisfied with this design and saw the musical material demand a three-movement plan. Thus the work in its final form has the familiar shape of fast-slow-fast. It is also a far larger work than Adams had originally foreseen and takes something like 32 minutes in performance. As Adams put it, “I was trying at first to avoid a collision with destiny; nevertheless it came out big.”

Fleezanis, de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra performed the world premiere of the concerto on January 19, 1994—not quite a decade after Fleezanis first proposed the piece—and Fleezanis reprised it here as soloist in November 2003, this time under the direction of Osmo Vänskä. This week’s concerts mark the first time the concerto has been heard at Orchestra Hall with a soloist other than Fleezanis, who passed away in September 2022 at age 70.

THE CONCERTO: FREEDOM, CONTRAST AND TRADITION

[QUARTER=78–QUARTER=112]. The first music we hear is a figuration in the orchestra—eight notes rising, to begin with—whose presence is constant enough to give us a sense of regularity, but whose details keep changing. The solo violin lays a wonderfully free melody across this pattern. “Composed rhapsodizing,” Fleezanis called it, and this sense of freedom, of something being invented on the spot and born out of the very spirit of the violin, the contrast between this and the firm dance floor provided by the orchestra, is characteristic of the concerto throughout. With a brilliant passage for flute, the orchestra makes its exit, and after a cadenza for the violin and a brief coda at a more spacious tempo, the music flows directly into the second movement.

CHACONNE: BODY THROUGH WHICH THE DREAM FLOWS. The middle movement’s title is a phrase taken from a poem by Robert Haas. A chaconne is a set of variations over a repeated bass or harmonic pattern. As such it is, as Adams puts it, “a highly identifiable musical artifact”—the Pachelbel Canon is probably the most familiar example—and the “recognition factor” is definitely part of Adams’ plan.

The six-measure repeated bass itself is a cliché, just as the chaconne and passacaglia basses in Baroque and earlier music were generally cliché. While in Baroque music these basses usually stayed at the same pitch and kept their rhythmic shape, Adams’ bass begins to travel after the third variation. At first, the rhythm changes, and the pattern that took six measures to traverse when we first heard it is now expanded to nine. Later it will, for example, be compressed to four.

In this movement, too, there is a contrast between firmness and freedom (the body and the dream) as the violin melodies float and soar freely across the bass. Something comparable happens in the harmony as well. The bass, at first, outlines the simplest imaginable major-key harmonies, but later, though it always remains recognizable, moves into other, less familiar modes.

TOCCARE. The finale’s title is an Italian verb meaning both to touch and to play a keyboard instrument—and we are more familiar with “toccata,” the noun derived from it. In post-Baroque music, a toccata is usually a brilliant display piece with a steady rat-tat of 16th notes, and this Toccare is a finale in that spirit. Adams’ wife, the photographer Deborah O’Grady, referred to the fast movements of his Chamber Symphony as “caffeine music”—one of the most characteristic features of the Adams-O’Grady household is the aroma of fresh and strong coffee—and this heady, high-spirited finale is definitely of that ilk. And no nonsense about decaf, either.

Instrumentation: solo violin with orchestra comprising 2 flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (1 doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, timpani, bass drum, 2 bongos, claves, 2 congas, high cowbell, suspended cymbal, guiro, tambourine, marimba, vibraphone, chimes, 2 synthesizers and strings

PROGRAM NOTE BY MICHAEL STEINBERG, THE LATE HUSBAND OF JORJA FLEEZANIS, EXCERPTED FROM THE CONCERTO: A LISTENER’S GUIDE (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1998), USED WITH PERMISSION.

Death seems to lurk in much of the work. The words “death” and “dying” occur in a letter Tchaikovsky wrote explaining the plan of the symphony. Some listeners hear an expression of a hypersensitive artist given to alternating moods of exaltation and dejection, and try to follow each emotional state in the music as a mirror of the composer’s soul. Others take their cue from critic Philip Hale, who wrote: “Here is a work that, without a hint or a suggestion of a program, sums up in the most imaginative language the life of man, with his illusions, desires, loves, struggles, victories, unavoidable end.”

Tchaikovsky began working on his last symphony in February 1893 and conducted the first performance on October 28 in St. Petersburg. It was only mildly successful, yet he felt that it was “the best and especially the most sincere of my works. I love it as I have never loved any of my other musical creations.” At the second performance, three weeks later, conducted by Eduard Nápravník, the symphony left a powerful impression. But the composer was dead: his Symphonie pathétique had become his swan song.

THE SYMPHONY: POIGNANT AND TRAILING TO SILENCE

ADAGIO–ALLEGRO NON TROPPO. The introductory bassoon solo, which crawls slowly through the murkiest colors of the orchestra, becomes the melodic material for the Allegro section’s principal theme. The second theme, presented by the violins, is probably the most memorable of the entire work, haunting in its beauty, poignancy and sad lyricism. The clarinet brings this theme down to the limits of audibility. A crash shatters the mood abruptly, and the development section ensues, one of the most violent and ferocious passages Tchaikovsky ever wrote. A brief recapitulation is followed by a consoling coda.

ALLEGRO CON GRAZIA. The second movement, in 5/4 meter, has famously been called a “broken-backed waltz, limping yet graceful.” A Trio section in the middle, also in 5/4, is noteworthy for the steady, pulsing notes in the bassoons, double basses and timpani.

ALLEGRO MOLTO VIVACE. The Pathétique’s third movement combines elements of a light scherzo with a heavy march. So festive and exuberant does the march become that one is tempted to stand and cheer at the end, making all the more effective the anguished cry that opens the finale.

FINALE: ADAGIO LAMENTOSO. The finale’s infinitely warm and tender second theme in D major works itself into a brilliant climax and crashes in a tumultuous descent of scales in the strings. The first theme returns in continuously rising peaks of intensity, agitation and dramatic conflict. Finally the energy is spent, the sense of struggle subsides, and a solemn trombone chorale leads into the return of the movement’s second theme, no longer in D major but in B minor—dark, dolorous, weighted down in inexpressible grief and resignation. The underlying heart throb of double basses eventually ceases and the symphony dies away into blackness…nothingness.

Instrumentation: 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam and strings

PROGRAM NOTE BY ROBERT MARKOW.