Beethoven, Sonata "Les Adieux"

Although by that time he had been dealing with increasing deafness for about a decade, between 1808 and 1811 Beethoven did complete a stream of compositions that, if his life had stopped at the end of that period, would have been enough to secure him a prominent place in the history of music. The composition of the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the piano concertos No. 4 and No.5, the violin concerto, the opera Fidelio, and the piano sonatas Waldstein, Appassionata, and Les Adieux belong to this period.

The three patrons
These were also the years of the signing of the "pact" by which his main patron and pupil, Archduke Rudolph, together with his peers Princes Lobkowitz and Kinski, agreed to give Beethoven financial support of no less than 4000 florins per year. Due to fateful circumstances, only Archduke Rudolph was able to fulfill the agreement, paying the maestro his share faithfully year after year. It is no coincidence then that the archduke was the recipient of fourteen of the master's compositions.

Archduke Rudolph of Austria
1788 - 1831

Sonata No. 26, in E flat major, "Les Adieux"
On May 12, 1809, for the second time in a decade, Napoleonic forces seized Vienna. The imperial family was forced to leave the capital of the Empire. A week before the occupation, Archduke Rudolph had also left the city, although to return soon. But he had to wait until January 30, 1810. Upon his arrival in Vienna, he was offered the dedication of Sonata No. 26 composed by Beethoven in the preceding months, not by commission, but to mark the departure, absence, and return of his most faithful patron and friend.

The sonata was first published in London by Muzio Clementi, who translated Beethoven's original subtitles into French for market reasons. The dedication reads: "On the departure of His Imperial Highness, Archduke Rudolph, with admiration".

Movements:

00       Les Adieux: Adagio - Allegro (1:54)

07:14  L'Absence: Andante espressivo - Links without pause to the third movement, at:

10:50  Le Retour: Vivacissimamente - A technically demanding movement, it is supposed to express the rejoicing at the return of the friend and protector to whom the work is dedicated.

The performance is by the Chilean maestro Claudio Arrau, in a solo Beethoven recital. Berlin, April 10, 1970.

Pablo de Sarasate, "Carmen Fantasie"

Born in 1844 in Pamplona, the city of the famous running of the bulls for the San Fermin festival, the Spanish violinist and composer Pablo Martin Melton Sarasate y Navascuez, better known as Pablo de Sarasate, made his public debut at the age of eight. At twelve entered the Paris Conservatory thanks to a scholarship kindly granted by Queen Isabel II of Spain, after he dazzled the court in Madrid with his talent. Five years later, he won first prize for violin at the Conservatory.

A virtuoso concert pianist
It was the beginning of a long and successful career as a concert pianist that took him all over Europe and the United States in an almost non-stop tour that lasted three decades. Possessing a delicate touch and a virtuosity without boasting, a good number of the most significant works of contemporary composers were dedicated to him — Lalo's Spanish Symphony, Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and Max Bruch's Concerto No. 2 are among them.

Pablo de Sarasate (1844 - 1908)

Sarasate, the composer
Pablo de Sarasate is the author of nearly 50 pieces for violin and orchestra (or violin and piano), which were part of his sought-after repertoire. Among the most popular are Aires Gitanos, from 1878, and the Carmen-Fantasie op. 25, composed in 1883 when the opera had already won the public's favor after its failed premiere in 1875.
As he had already done with Don Giovanni and La Forza del Destino, Sarasate thought it was time to make an arrangement for violin and orchestra of Bizet's work, which was gaining more and more followers day by day, although its author had died convinced of its failure.

Fantasia - Sections
Following, the opera pieces from which Sarasate built his Fantasia:

00       Preludio - intermission adaptation introducing Act IV (Aragonesa).

02:56  Habanera, from Act I.

05:36  From Act I, episode in which Carmen mocks the officer of the guard.

08:00  Seguidilla, from Act I.

09:53  Baile Gitano, from Act II.

The performance is by Hilary Hahn, accompanied by hr-Sinfonieorchester – Frankfurt Radio Symphony, conducted by Andrés Orozco.

Verdi, La Traviata, duet "Dite alla giovine"

In the late 1840s, with more than a dozen operas to his credit – including the highly successful Nabucco – Giuseppe Verdi was not yet rich, but he was close to it. By then he enjoyed the most complete financial independence and, lover of the countryside as he was, in 1849 he decided to buy a farm near Busetto, the town that had seen him grow as a musician. And there he took Giuseppina Strepponi, a singer he had met in the distant days of his first operas, and with whom he had become engaged after a chance meeting in Paris two years before.

Giuseppe and Giussepina, in Buseto
The people of Busetto were not amused by the return of Verdi, now victorious and famous, to live among them with a woman who was not his wife, and a singer as well. Verdi, in addition, was a widower. His first wife, Margherita, daughter of his first protector, Antonio Barezzi, had died in 1840. Barezzi was no stranger to gossip either, and when Verdi learned of his former father-in-law's disapproval, he replied with an indelicate letter.
A year later, Verdi began composing La Traviata, which tells the tragic story of Violetta Valery who must renounce her love for Alfredo so as not to tarnish the good name of a family.

Giuseppe Verdi, in 1843
(1813 - 1901)

Duet "Dite alla giovine"
In Act II, Violetta and Alfredo have already fallen in love and live together in the house she owns in the countryside, the fruit of her courtesan life. In the absence of her beloved, Violetta receives a visit from Alfredo's father, Giorgio, who has come to ask Violetta to end her relationship with his son, since his sinful behavior will only damage his family's reputation, especially now that his daughter, Alfredo's sister, is about to get married as God intended.

Violetta refuses at first, arguing that Alfredo is her first and only love, but Giorgio eventually convinces her. Violetta then sings Dite alla giovine, announcing "to the young girl" her renunciation of life with her beloved Alfredo, a sacrifice she fears will lead to her death. Giorgio then steps in to thank her for the merciful act.

In a performance by the Opéra National de Paris, Violetta: the Albanian soprano Ermonella Jaho; Giorgio: the Russian baritone Dimitri Hvorostovsky.

 

Mozart, Don Giovanni, overture

In January and February 1787, W.A. Mozart was in Prague conducting several performances of his most recent and successful opera The Marriage of Figaro when he received a commission for a new opera, which was to be based on the literary theme of Don Juan, to be premiered in Prague in October. He rushed back to Vienna to meet with Lorenzo Da Ponte, the author of the Figaro libretto. They agreed on the terms and each went about his task. While waiting for the first pages of the libretto, Mozart could well have worked on the overture but left it to the last minute.

Don Giovanni, the overture and the legend
Numerous and varied are the legends about the opportunity in which Mozart wrote the overture of Don Giovanni ossia Il disoluto punito (...the punished libertine). Some say that he wrote it the day before the premiere, others that he finished it a few hours before. A very sympathetic one refers that, after attending a merry evening on the eve of the premiere, Wolfgang and Konstance left after midnight because Wolfgang had to compose an overture. The conditions were not the best, but Konstance managed to keep Mozart awake with a pitcher of punch and tasty stories that she told him all night long. By seven in the morning, the overture was finished. Be that as it may, it was not the first time – nor would it be the last – that Mozart had composed a work in a jiffy.

The premiere in Prague
In Prague, the premiere of the two-act dramma giocoso was a resounding success. The indefatigable optimist Wolfgang Amadeus, who made a sense of humor almost a reason for living (of which he had little left, let us say in passing), wrote in this mood to a friend shortly after the premiere:

"On October 29 my opera Don Giovanni had its first performance, and was received with great applause. Yesterday it was given for the fourth time (and this time to my full benefit)... I intend to leave here on the 12th or 13th.... but everyone wants me to stay here a few more months, and compose a couple of operas. As flattering as the offer is, I can't accept it... My great grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop. So I intend to follow my sister's advice as it was handed down to her by our mother, our grandmother, and our great-grandmother, and I take this opportunity to put an end not only to this moralizing digression, but also to the whole letter."

The overture to Don Giovanni lasts just over five minutes. The Westminster Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by British conductor Daniel Harding, performs this version.

Barrios-Mangoré, "Sueño en la Floresta"

One of the main disadvantages in the composition and performance of classical guitar music is the short duration of string vibration, which makes the notes carried by a melody not long enough, contrary to what a violin or any bowed string instrument is able to produce by the simple expedient of passing the full extension of the bow over the string and, if necessary, pass it again in the opposite direction.

The tremolo
This disadvantage of the classical guitar was solved by the tremolo technique, born in the Romantic period and that the Spanish composer Francisco Tárrega brought to its climax in the second half of the 19th century, leaving it embodied until the end of time in the very popular work Recuerdos de La Alhambra, composed in 1896.

The technique, whose purpose is to extend the duration of the notes that make up the melody, basically consists of the repetition of a note using the ring, middle and index fingers, accompanied by the thumb that carries a bass resting on the lowest strings. The uniformity and regularity with which the three repeated notes are played is the key to the creation of an exquisite tremolo.

Agustín Barrios-Mangoré (1885 - 1944)

Barrios-Mangoré
As Tárrega did for Spain in the previous century, the Paraguayan composer and classical guitarist of Guaraní origin, Agustín Barrios-Mangoré forged in the first half of the 20th century one of the most extensive guitar productions in Latin America, combining the classical European tradition with the melodies and rhythms of popular Latin American musical forms.

An extraordinary guitarist, he made excellent use of the tremolo technique with short works such as El Último Trémolo – which turned out to be his last composition –, and the one presented here, the somewhat longer Un Sueño en la Floresta, in an outstanding rendition by the Scottish-born artist David Russell.

Tchaikovsky, "Romeo & Juliet" Overture

Despite his recurrent depressive episodes, before he was 35 years old Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky had definitively consolidated a career as a composer in Tsarist Russia. Between 1869 – when he was 29 –and 1875, a good number of his best works were released, including the popular Piano Concerto
No. 1, the Second and Third Symphonies, and the overture Romeo and Juliet, the first of his three works of descriptive music based on Shakespeare's dramas. The Tempest would follow, and much later, Hamlet.

First version
Setting to music the immortal tragedy of the lovers of Verona was certainly a good idea. His first intention was to write an opera, but his friend and advisor, Mili Balakirev, leader of the renowned group The Five, thought it would work better as an instrumental drama. To that end, he offered some advice, suggesting the scenes to be worked out and even the key in which they should be written. Too many suggestions for the highly self-critical author that Tchaikovsky was. He only half-heartedly listened. The premiere, in March 1870, went almost unnoticed.

Second version
When, some time later, he learned that the work had been whistled in Vienna and coldly received in Paris, he forced himself to take a closer look at the profuse correspondence exchanged with Balakirev. He wrote a second version, and hastened to publish it. Balakirev agreed that it had improved, but warned that it would have been better to keep it unpublished for a long enough time to await new ideas.

Tchaikovsky, in 1878
(1840 - 1893)

Third version - Fantasy Overture

The leader of The Five was right. Ten years later, Pyotr Ilyich wrote the third version, adding to it the subtitle "Overture-Fantasy". It is the one that today is performed on the stages of the world, surpassing in popularity, by far, the versions that in their time other authors – Berlioz and Prokofiev – made of the tragic love story of Juliet and her Romeo. The work lasts just under 20 min.

In popular culture
The various arrangements of the popular love theme (scene on the balcony: minute 7:45) are counted by the dozen, as well as its presence in the most diverse films and TV shows: in more than one episode it accompanied the never-ending and never-ended love affair between Doña Florinda and Professor Jirafales, in the Mexican series El Chavo del Ocho.

The performance is by The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Dima Slobodeniouk, a Russian conductor based in Finland with a Finnish citizenship.

Villa-Lobos, Five Preludes for guitar

In addition to being a skilled amateur guitarist, Heitor Villa-Lobos' father was a man of broad culture and uncommon intelligence. For years he worked as an official of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, and at the time of his death in 1899, he left no great possessions, except for a vast and expensive library that his son Heitor would be forced to sell to feed the fatherless family when the future composer was only twelve years old.

In the streets of Rio
At the beginning of the 20th century, Rio de Janeiro was far from being the metropolis we know today. But music flooded its streets even during the day. And in the evenings, after having participated in some party, or dance, wedding, or carnival, groups of young musicians would roam the streets making music, taking a break to enter a bar here and then another so that the mood would not wane.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was part of these bands of young musicians and it was in the street where he made his first guitar playing, in addition to numerous bohemian friendships, because any volume from his father's library was also enough for several drinks.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959)

Brazil and Paris
Reluctant to receive formal musical education, between the ages of 18 and 25 Villa-Lobos made extensive trips throughout Brazil, collecting songs and getting to know the main characteristic styles of autochthonous music. By 1923 he was already a renowned composer in his homeland. So, the Brazilian government agreed to grant him a scholarship to travel to Europe so that he could get to know other worlds and other music. He lived in Paris until 1930, receiving the recognition and admiration of the musical celebrities of the time, including the famous Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, to whom he dedicated much of his guitar work.

Five Preludes for guitar
Apparently, there were originally six of them and one was either lost or never published. Composed in 1940 at Segovia's request, they are dedicated to Mindinha, his wife, Arminda Villa-Lobos. They are a clear example of the fusion of styles that characterizes Villa-Lobos' guitar work: Brazilian popular music and classical European tradition.

Its parts, or movements, with a subtitle added by Villa-Lobos, are:

00       Prelude No. 1 in E minor ("Melodia lírica"): Andantino espressivo-Più mosso

04:20  Prelude No. 2 in E major ("Melodia capadócia"): Andantino-Più mosso

07:02  Prelude No. 3 in A minor ("Homenagem a Bach"): Andante-Molto adagio e dolorido

12:40  Prelude No. 4 in E minor ("Homenagem ao índio brasileiro"): Lento-Animato-Moderato

16:02  Prelude No. 5 in D major ("Homenagem à Vida Social"): Poco animato-Meno-Più mosso

The rendition is by the Greek artist Evangelo Assimakopoulos.

Johann Pachelbel, Canon in D major

As one might expect, the German organist and composer Johann Pachelbel, born in Nuremberg in 1653, did more in life than just write his highly acclaimed Canon in D major. Pachelbel, indeed, was a key figure of the Baroque period and his work was an important contribution to the development of sacred and keyboard music in the German Lutheran Church. 

For many years he lived in Vienna, where he became acquainted with the work of the Italian Frescobaldi, which greatly influenced his choral preludes, which in turn inspired the music of the same genre by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose parents Pachelbel met in Eisenach while serving as court organist there in 1677, eight years before Johann Sebastian came into the world.

Johann Pachelbel (1653 - 1706)

Oblivion and rediscovery

Pachelbel, like many other baroque musicians, was a very popular composer in his time. And like so many others in the history of music – Bach himself, for example – he remained forgotten for centuries.

But in the mid-sixties of the twentieth century, violinist and conductor Rudolph Baumgartner and the Swiss Lucerne Festival Strings recorded a baroque piece called Pachelbel's Canon for France's Erato. It was a canon and a gigue by Pachelbel composed around 1700. Surprisingly, within a short time, the piece had become a best-seller.

Canon in D major

A few years later, actor Robert Redford used the piece as part of the soundtrack for the film with which he made his directorial debut, 1980's Ordinary People. As a result, Pachelbel's Canon became for a short period the most popular classical piece of all time.

From that date until today, the various versions are counted by the hundreds, and there are versions for all tastes and for every conceivable instrument or set of instruments.

We are presenting here the San Francisco Early Music Ensemble "Voices of Music", with period instruments and the original ensemble, for three violins and basso continuo.

Chopin, Waltz in A flat, Op 42

In the summer of 1840, the singular family formed by Chopin, the writer George Sand and her children, Solange and Maurice, could not repeat what had happened the previous year when they packed their belongings and left to enjoy three months of well-deserved rest in the summer house that Sand kept in Nohant, 200 km south of Paris. This time there was no budget, since the last work of the tireless and prolific writer had turned out to be a failure, and there was no way to pay for the three-month stay at the summer house, at four thousand francs a month, not counting travel expenses.

Summer in Paris
So they remained in Paris. George Sand would edit and rewrite her works, and Chopin, who had already begun to get used to composing only in Nohant, would have to readjust his routine and work in Paris during the summer. Otherwise, he had no pupils during those months. And despite the unusual circumstances, 1840 was a fruitful year, a year of uninterrupted work at 16 Rue Pigalle. For example, the Fantasia in F minor, and the sinuous Waltz in A flat, opus 42, published that same year without a dedication, date from that date.

Waltz in A flat, opus 42
Robert Schumann, an enthusiastic admirer of Chopin and who had already spoken highly of the Etude opus 25 No. 1, wrote of this waltz that "if it were ever to be danced, only the countesses would have to do it". We do not understand what he really meant, perhaps that it required extreme elegance to do so.
The superimposition of a binary rhythm in the right hand and a ternary rhythm in the left hand in the main theme, together with the speed here infused by Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky, make the dance impracticable even for the countesses. A scintillating coda (2:37) brings the little piece to a close, crowned by vigorous unison notes in the low register.

György Ligeti, Two Études for piano

György Ligeti, one of the most important avant-garde composers in the second half of the 20th century, widely known after Stanley Kubrick included excerpts of his work in the soundtrack of the film 2001 Space Odyssey, began his musical career by simply writing a waltz. He was 14 years old and had recently begun his first piano lessons in a small town in the Transylvania region of Romania.
The Second World War would interrupt his studies.

The postwar period
But he survived the holocaust (his father and brother did not). After the war, Ligeti will have to face the new authorities and try to create a new post-war musical language immersed in a society living in isolation from modern Western trends. After the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he fled to the West, settling in Vienna. There he met Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.

Experiments

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006)

But the experiments of the European avant-garde leaders rather disorient him. He had always been somewhat skeptical of electronic music and also of dodecaphonism. After three years in the Cologne circle, he abandoned the electronic trend to study an intricate rhythmic approach proposed by the Mexican composer of American origin, Conlon Nancarrow.

Études for piano

From the seventies onwards, Ligeti added to his search an interest in the rhythmic aspects of African music. In the following decades his work will see an accentuated emphasis on polyrhythm, leading him to propose very complex rhythmic structures. An example of this is his trilogy Études pour piano, three books each containing from six to eight études written between 1985 and 2001. They abound in influences as varied as gamelan, African polyrhythms, Béla Bártok, Nancarrow of course, and even reveal a debt to the American jazz pianist Bill Evans.

Chinese pianist Yuja Wang offers us the Étude No. 4, Fanfares, from Book I, and the Étude No. 4, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) from Book II. 

Strauss / Grünfeld, "Soirée de Vienne"

Unlike their contemporaries and fellow musicians in much of Western Europe, the pianist and composer Alfred Grünfeld and his brother Heinrich, a cellist, were not sent by their parents to study law or to pursue a career in arms. On the contrary, from a very early age their audacious parents – the father, a leather merchant – raised them to develop an adult life as renowned professional musicians. It will be the older brother, Alfred, who will reap the greatest successes.

Alfred Grünfeld, pianist
Born in Prague in 1852, he was just over ten years old when he was sent to Berlin to study piano. Remarkably gifted, at 21 he was already settled in Vienna, developing a successful career as a piano teacher and concert pianist in the European musical capital of the time, where he remained until the end of his days, delighting Viennese audiences with his slightly syrupy, if very novel, piano transcriptions of the waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr.

Alfred Grünfeld (1852 - 1924)

A recording pioneer, in 1899
Also the author of a couple of operettas that did not stand the test of time, Grünfeld was the first major professional pianist to make recordings, the first of them in 1899 for the nascent Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft label. By 1914, he had made more than a hundred.

But as a composer – or rather an arranger – he is remembered today mainly for his Strauss transcriptions, which from time to time some intrepid pianist gives as an encore at the end of a slightly modern program, as compensation.

Soirée de Vienne
In Evgeny Kissin's version, one of Grünfeld's greatest successes is presented here, a paraphrase of Viennese waltzes entitled "Soirée de Vienne", a highly technically demanding piece. Grünfeld was a minor composer, of course, but as a performer, he must have been an outstanding pianist.