The 5th!



Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
1840-1893

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Waltz from Eugene Onegin, Op. 24

Best known today for his symphonic music, Tchaikovsky also composed eleven operas, two of which, The Queen of Spades and Eugene Onegin, see regular productions today. Both operas are based on works by the premier poet of nineteenth-century Russia, Alexander Pushkin.

Tchaikovsky, ever on the lookout for suitable operatic material, got the idea for using Pushkin's epic poem from a friend during a casual conversation. The composer wrote that the idea at first seemed far-fetched, but after dining alone in a tavern he had made up his mind to use it. After a sleepless night, had created in his mind the scenario for Eugene Onegin.

Composed in 1877-78, Eugene Onegin is a story of love, jealousy and missed chance for happiness. Tatiana is madly in love with Onegin who rebuffs her and flirts instead with Olga – the beloved of his friend Lensky – who flirts with him in return. Lensky challenges Onegin to a duel and is promptly killed. Onegin goes into exile, returns after six years and tries to talk Tatiana into eloping with him but she, by then older and wiser, rejects his offer.

Tchaikovsky described Eugene Onegin as lyrical and wanted his performers to concentrate on subtlety of characterization. He chose students of the Moscow Conservatory to give the premiere, fearing that seasoned opera singers would think their job was only to make a beautiful sound.

The Waltz is the introduction to Act II, a ball in progress in Tatiana’s parents house. In the opera, the chorus and principals sing and comment while the orchestra plays the waltz, but the orchestra part has been extracted as a separate work. The form is typical of the Viennese waltz made famous in the mid-nineteenth century by the Strauss family. It consists of a refrain

and a variety of episodes.

Listeners familiar with Tchaikovsky’s ballets, which are better known in this country than his operas, will feel right at home.



Antonin Dvorák
1841-1904

Antonin Dvorák
Violin Concerto in A minor, Op.53

The son of a Czech innkeeper and butcher from a small town in Bohemia, Antonín Dvorák showed his musical talent at a very early age. However, as a member of a minority in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was looked upon as a second-class citizen. He sensed condescension in the support and encouragement of the Austrian musical establishment and was resentful at being forced by economic necessity to accept government stipends. Beginning with the 1870s, influenced by the emerging Czech demand for self-rule and of Bedrich Smetana's nationalistic music, Dvorák applied a decidedly more nationalistic style to his musical language.

In 1875 Dvorák met and became a disciple of Brahms; the admiration was mutual. Brahms urged Fritz Simrock, the most famous music publisher in Berlin, to publish Dvorák’s Moravian Dances and the first set of the Slavonic Dances. Brahms supported him when he entered – and won – the competition for the Austrian State Prize in music for young, poor and talented artists (Dvorák won the competition twice more.) The committee report stated that “...the applicant, who has never yet been able to acquire a piano of his own, deserves a grant to ease his strained circumstances and free him from anxiety in his creative work.”

By the time Dvorák started the Violin Concerto in the summer of 1879, prizes, honors and commissions were pouring in. The suggestion to write a violin concerto came from Simrock, and Dvorák hoped to enlist the help of the famed violinist Joseph Joachim to evaluate and edit the concerto. Joachim, who had also helped Brahms and Max Bruch with their concertos, suggested after a trial rehearsal that the composer start from scratch. Dvorák rewrote the Concerto and destroyed the original version. He finally completed it in 1882, stating, “I have retained the themes, and composed some new ones too, but the whole concept of the work is different.” But still the two friends did not see eye to eye. Joachim, although the dedicatee, did not premiere the finished work.

There is no specific information regarding Joachim’s objections to Dvorák’s Concerto. On the surface, it shares many elements with the concertos of Brahms, Bruch and Mendelssohn, frequently performed by Joachim. Unlike these works, however, the Concerto strays from the more conventional forms in the first and second movements, in which Dvorák reveals an intensely emotional, almost elegiac side of his musical personality.

The Concerto is in the conventional three movement form, but the first two are played without interruption. A short orchestral fanfare followed by a lyrical melody on the solo violin present the material from which this extensive first movement is built,

although a second theme is introduced much later.

All in all, the movement combines elaborate virtuosity with moments of intense pathos. A brief passage over pulsing tympani recalls two famous predecessors of the violin concerto repertory, Beethoven and Max Bruch. There is no real recapitulation, only a six bar fragment that leads to the transition to the second movement.

The slow movement is in the customary ABA’ song form of so many slow movements, but Beethoven had opened up vast possibilities for elaborating on the two or three themes that normally make up the form. In this vein, Dvorák opens with a gentle melody on the solo violin, accompanied by the oboe. But the initial folk-like simplicity of the melody is deceiving; starting from the second phrase, he suddenly darkens it.

And as he spins out the theme, it becomes increasingly passionate. It is true that Dvorák produces intense emotional affect by the soaring violin line, but the “catch in the throat” comes with the abrupt and surprising harmonic shifts under a simple melodic line.

In the middle (or “B”) section, he again ramps up the emotional intensity.

Listeners familiar with the later and better known Cello Concerto will perceive the same tragic sensibility the composer used there to pour out his grief upon hearing of the death of his old love. The movement is largely a personal conversation between the violin and the upper winds; in one case, the oboe “suggests” a new harmonic variation on the principal theme.

The movement also presents the soloist with an opportunity for some delicate figurative passages, but always subdued, in keeping with the wistful mood.

In the Finale, it’s time to put the handkerchiefs away. Dvorák reveals his Bohemian roots; the soloist introduces a lively dance, a furiant, that recurs as a rondo throughout the movement, each time with a different instrumental mix.

The violin also introduces and develops a second theme.



Ludwig van Beethoven
1770-1827

Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67

The four most clichéd notes in classical music were once the most revolutionary. For the first time a rhythm, rather than a melody, became the main subject of a symphonic movement – and not merely as a first theme to be stated and picked up again for a while in the development and recapitulation sections. Beethoven wove the rhythm into the entire fabric of the first movement, and subsequently into the rest of the Symphony. The motive first appears as a repeated demand, subsequently expanded into a genuine melody in the first theme. It recurs as a throbbing accompaniment in bass and timpani in the second theme, all the way to the final cadence of the exposition.

Such an original symphonic structure did not come easily, especially to a composer who lacked the ever-ready melodic genius of a Mozart, Bach or Haydn, who all produced copiously on demand. A collection of the composer’s sketchbooks bears witness to the lengthy and often painful gestation of some of his greatest music. The Fifth Symphony took four years to complete, between 1804 and 1808. But Beethoven also had to eat, and during those four years he also produced the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three String Quartets Op. 59, the Mass in C and the Violin Concerto.

Although Beethoven had already been at work on what was to become the Fifth Symphony, he composed the Fourth in fairly short order in 1806 on commission from Count Franz von Oppersdorff. The Count eventually paid the 500 florins agreed upon for the work and in 1807 commissioned another symphony with a down payment of 200 florins. Beethoven notified Oppersdorff in March 1808 that the Fifth Symphony was ready and that he should send the remaining 300 florins. But the Count sent only another installment of 150 florins, and by November Beethoven, in one of his less than ethical moves, apparently felt justified in selling the score to the publisher Gottfried Härtel. Upon finally paying in full, Oppersdorff received a copy.

The Symphony No. 5 was premiered at one of those monster public concerts common in the nineteenth century; on the program were premieres of the Sixth Symphony and the Fourth Piano Concerto, the aria "Ah! Perfido, the Choral Fantasia and several movements of the Mass in C. One can only imagine the bewilderment of the audience on their first encounter in a single evening with the "Pastoral" and the Fifth.

Because the Fifth Symphony is so familiar it is difficult to think of it as innovative, but it was not only the integration four-note rhythmic motif into the first movement that was new. It is the fact that this little rhythm becomes the motto that unifies the entire symphony.

In the first movement, the principal theme hammers away at the rhythm in almost every measure. Then, the second theme, which should provide a significant contrast, starts off with the motto in the solo horn, only afterwards becoming somewhat more gentle and legato – although that, too begins to ramp up the emotional tension as it continues.

The second movement, marked Andante con moto, involves its own kind of innovation. It is made up of two short juxtaposed, contrasting themes, the first in dotted rhythm,

the second a slow almost military theme in the brass. Beethoven produces from the two themes a double set of variations. And it should be noted that the second theme contains within it in augmentation the germinal four-note rhythm of the first movement.

After what has been called a "ghostly" opening of the scherzo, Beethoven takes up the motto again prominently in the horns, and it is this segment of the third movement that he chooses to repeat in the finale.

Symphony No. 5 has frequently been referred to as a struggle from darkness to light, but it is a commonplace that has palpable grounding in truth. Not only does the symphony begin in c minor and end in C major, but there is also the magnificent transition between the third and fourth movements, a kind of breaking through of sunlight clouds with violins stammering over throbbing timpani towards a cadence.

The eruption through to the triumphant finale paved the way for the symphonic writing of the future, including Beethoven's own Ninth.