A Heroic Symphony

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) 
D’un soir triste (On a Sad Evening) (1917-18) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Clemens Schuldt led the Oregon Symphony on November 1-4, 2019, at Smith Auditorium at Willamette University and the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, sarrusophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 12 minutes

The story of Marie-Juliette Olga “Lili” Boulanger is the story of promise unrealized, of a dazzling talent lost to tuberculosis at the age of 24. Her sister Nadia went on to a magnificent career as a teacher and mentor to scores of young composers, but for Lili, it came to an end before it had scarcely begun. Her output – what little there is of it – bears witness to her superb gifts.

She was in ill health for most of her short life. Bronchial pneumonia at age two left her with a shattered immune system that led to a host of ailments, including intestinal tuberculosis. Undaunted, she pursued music with what vigor she could muster. She became an accomplished organist, pianist, violinist, cellist, harpist, and singer in addition to studying composition. Her achievement was such that at age 19 she became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, the highest honor France could bestow on its young composers. Her artistic growth was exponential over the next five years, as she shed the meticulous practices she had learned at the Paris Conservatoire and forged a musical language of her own.  

Boulanger composed a pair of orchestral poems during the last year of her life, D’un matin de printemps (On a morning in spring) and a companion piece D’un soir triste (On a sad evening.) As their respective titles suggest, the first piece offers optimism while the second is distinctly mournful. Listeners may be intrigued by its antiquarian quality. The late 19th-century revival of Gregorian Chant had inspired composers such as Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé to incorporate plainchant elements in their compositions. Boulanger followed suit, but she added a layer of harmonic grit that was alien to the suave textures of her chant-influenced contemporaries.  

D'un soir triste opens with a sorrowful plainchant-like melody in the winds. The mood is unsettled but angst soon arises as opulent harmonies curdle into pungent dissonances. Eventually the music calms and gradually unwinds to end in a palpable sense of resignation. Considering that D’un soir triste was the last composition Lili was able to write without her sister Nadia’s assistance, one can’t help but hear in these somber final pages a reflection on life’s transience and, perhaps, a lament for what might have been.

Alban Berg (1885–1935) 
Violin Concerto (1935) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Carlos Kalmar led violinist Christian Tetzlaff and the Oregon Symphony on June 5-7, 2021, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: solo violin with two flutes (both doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, trombone, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 22 minutes 

Many of our greatest violin concertos were written by composers who were not themselves violinists. As a rule they would work in tandem with the violinist for whom the concerto was intended, in some cases so closely that we might be tempted to consider the completed work as having dual authorship. Consider Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David, Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim, Igor Stravinsky and Samuel Dushkin. 

To that list we may add Alban Berg and Louis Krasner. The latter approached the former, and the former wasn’t particularly interested at first. Berg had been blessed with a modest independent income that left him free to live his life on his own terms. He went to the movies, he went to soccer games, he read voraciously, he played with his dogs, he corresponded widely, he travelled. He also composed, but at a glacial speed. When Krasner’s invitation to write a violin concerto arrived in February 1935 with a proposed fee of $1500 (about $35,000 today,) Berg demurred, insisting that he wasn’t a violin composer. Besides, he was going hammer and tongs (for him) on his opera Lulu.

But he changed his mind. To begin with, he needed the money. He wasn’t that financially independent; royalties from his opera Wozzeck had been propping up his decidedly upper-middle-class lifestyle for some time, but all performances of the opera had been banned after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. More significantly, he had been devastated by the death from polio of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel and her second husband, architect Walter Gropius. (Alma’s current husband was novelist Franz Werfel; her first husband had been Gustav Mahler.) Manon had been beautiful, gifted, gentle, and loved by everyone who knew her. The Krasner commission gave Berg an opportunity to write a memorial in her honor – as it says right on the title page of the concerto: “To the Memory of an Angel.” 

Krasner stayed in Berg’s home during June of 1935, where he played violin improvisations for hours on end in order to demonstrate his overall style and technique. It all came together to create a kind of critical mass for Berg, who did the near-unthinkable by writing the concerto in a speedy four months. “I am more surprised by it than you will be” he wrote Krasner, who played the premiere in Barcelona on April 19, 1936. 

Listeners approaching the Berg Violin Concerto might keep three considerations in mind. First, Berg wrote it using 12-tone technique, in which the 12 tones of the chromatic scale are arranged into a ‘row’ that is manipulated via assorted methods to create the composition. Many 12-tone pieces are forbiddingly dissonant, but they don’t have to be. That leads to the second consideration, which is that Berg arranged his row so as to generate recognizable tonal patterns; for example, the row’s first two tones are G and B-flat, which form a good ol’ minor third. 

Last but by no means least, Berg chose to end the concerto with an extended fantasia on Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug” (It is enough) from Cantata No. 60. His handling of that exquisitely unsettling melody spins a web of enchantment that transcends all notions of modernity or technique. This wonderful music not only serves as a requiem to a beloved young woman, but it is Berg’s memorial as well. He died in December 1935, only a few months after completing the concerto.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) 
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 55 “Eroica” (1805) 

Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: David Danzmayr led the Oregon Symphony on November 5 & 7, 2022, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall 

Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings 

Estimated Duration: 47 minutes 

Music changed forever on the afternoon of April 7, 1805, the first public performance of Beethoven’s newest symphony. By now, the Viennese had a general idea of what to expect from their most newsworthy musician. Something along the lines of his previous two symphonies, perhaps: a slow introduction leading into a rambunctious first movement, three assorted movements following, the whole rather like a Haydn symphony on steroids. 

What the Viennese got that day was not so much a symphony as it was a revolution. Nothing could have prepared them for the experience about to unfold, starting with the very opening: two brutal hammerblows from massed strings and brass followed by a seething, intense, and muscular first movement that lasted an ear-popping fifteen minutes. But length did not imply laxness; quite the opposite in fact. Tightly woven and meticulously organized via a few basic motives, it stands amongst the most imposing structural achievements in Western art. This is music-making in the grandest manner, combining the meticulous precision of a master clockmaker with the all-encompassing vision of a Michelangelo. And it changed the rules. As a beam of light can be bent off its course by a strong gravitational field, the evolution of the symphony was irrevocably altered by the first movement of the Eroica.

And that was just the beginning. An appallingly tragic funeral march followed, unrelenting in its lugubriousness. This was stern stuff indeed, a far cry from the typically gracious aria-like movements of the Viennese Classical symphony up until then. As the third movement approached, no doubt some listeners were expecting (or craving) something light, maybe even charming, since the traditional third movement is a dance, usually a nice tuneful Minuet. But Beethoven had already made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t one for twee courtly dances. Nor did he cater to the elevated-pinky contingent in the Eroica. Instead, the Viennese were treated/subjected to a downright manic scherzo movement, joyous but also subtly unhinged. 

About forty minutes had passed so far, with the wrap-up fourth movement still to go. If some in the audience were holding out for a vivacious lark of a finale, something short and sweet and toe-tappy, those hopes were dashed. Beethoven swept them up into a staggering tour de force that starts with an utterly insignificant bit of musical puffery – a bass line he had used previously for his Creatures of Prometheus ballet music – which he proceeds to shepherd through an unprecedented blend of sonata form and variation that culminates in a cosmic vision of utter grandeur before ending in a wild-and-woolly final peroration. 

It’s a well-known story how Beethoven, infuriated by Napoleon’s proclamation of himself as Emperor, scraped off the symphony’s original dedication to Bonaparte with such vehemence as to rip a hole on the title page. Thus the Bonaparte Symphony became the Eroica. No matter what the title, it is no mere symphony. Rather, it stands as the hinge between Classicism and Romanticism, the glorious herald that announced the arrival of a new order.