Puccini, Turandot - aria "Nessun dorma"

Although without surpassing the popular appeal of Brindisi from La Traviata or La donna è mobile from Rigoletto, the aria Nessun Dorma from the opera Turandot by Puccini has lately become the workhorse of aspiring celebrities in every America's got talent contest held anywhere in the Western world.

The modern popularity of the piece is mainly due to the Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti who, despite rarely performing it on stage, from a 1972 recording accompanying the coverage of the 1990 World Cup soccer championship in Italy, turned it into the famous aria with which non-professional singers try to win the main prize and, subsequently, be launched to fortuitous stardom.

Turandot
The aria belongs to the third and last act of Turandot, the last work that Giacomo Puccini approached and left unfinished because he died while working precisely in the third act. For its posthumous premiere, in April 1926, the conductor Arturo Toscanini stopped the work at the last bar written by Puccini and, addressing the audience, murmured "here the maestro died".

The work was completed by the composer Franco Alfano. Still, Puccini had already written the famous aria, entrusted to the co-star, Calaf, the prince whose name is unknown to Turandot, the protagonist.

Giacomo Puccini (1858 - 1924)

The aria
The play is set in Peking, a millenary China. Princess Turandot, as beautiful as cold and distant, has decided to behead any suitor who cannot answer to three riddles of her invention. Calaf successfully overcomes the test, but the princess backs out. Calaf proposes to Turandot that she guess his name. If she succeeds she can roll his head, if not, she must marry him.
Turandot orders that no one sleeps in Peking until she finds out the name of the daring suitor. Calaf assures that no one will be able to find out, that only Turandot will know it when he "says it over his mouth", at dawn, victorious: All'alba vinceró.

The concert version is by Luciano Pavarotti, in Los Angeles, 1994.

Aaron Copland, "Salón México"

After spending three years in Paris, from 1921 to 1924, studying with the famous pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and immersing himself in European musical culture, the American composer of Russian descent Aaron Copland returned to the United States with the idea of playing a central role in American music, in the triple facet of composer, music promoter and audience educator. He fulfilled it at length. As a composer of popular scope, his Fanfare for the Common Man, from 1942, attests to this. As a promoter and educator, he is the author of the short volume How to Listen to Music, a gem of popularization published in 1939, which had been reprinted five times by 1975.

In 1932 he traveled to Mexico and among many other activities he visited a dance hall. The salon had opened its doors in April 1920 and included a hall of mirrors and three dance floors classified according to the social class dancing there: "Mantequilla" for the upper class, "Manteca" for the middle class, and "Sebo" for the poor, who also like to dance, of course. Curiously – despite the current political situation or, perhaps, because of it – they all gathered in the same place, dancing, let's say, together but not scrambled.

Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)

The work

"It was not the music I heard but the spirit I perceived there that attracted me," he would later say when he finished the work based on popular Mexican themes that he decided to write after his experience in the ballroom. Completed in 1936, he titled it with the name of the venue, El Salón México, a symphonic work in one movement incorporating fragments of recently published Mexican music, such as the popular tunes El Palo Verde, La Jesusita, El Mosco, and El Malacate.

The rhythm

Rhythmically, the piece makes extensive use of the "huapango", a Mexican rhythm consisting of a 6/8 time followed by a slightly more accentuated 3/4 time.

The rendition is by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the Mexican maestro Carlos Miguel Prieto.

Chopin, Rondo a la mazur, opus 5

 
Some scholars speculate that Chopin was especially fond of the number four since he composed four ballades, four scherzos, four impromptus, and four rondos. But we must attribute it to pure chance because next to this undeniable count are the twenty nocturnes, the twenty-seven etudes, the fourteen waltzes, the twenty-six preludes, the fifty-seven mazurkas and a very long etcetera that has nothing to do with the aforementioned number.

Paris, 1832: nocturnes instead rondos
But it is also true that, as far as the production of rondos is concerned, Chopin wrote the fourth and last of them in 1832, when he was only 22 years old. Having just settled in Paris, it is likely that his audience, that of the salons of the rising bourgeoisie and fading aristocracy, rather than typically "classical" musical forms, would have celebrated with greater enthusiasm his more melodious and novel nocturnes or preludes, with which Chopin was establishing his most genuine musical personality in the composition of pieces with an intimate character.

Rondo a la mazur op 5 in F major
The rondo a la mazur (that is, in the style of a mazurka, a typically Polish dance) is the second rondo written by Chopin. At the time, 1826, the author was sixteen years old, was living with his parents and sisters in Warsaw and was about to take his maturitas – Latin exam to become a bachelor – which would open the doors to the university, or to the Conservatory. Chopin would prefer the latter. At the recently opened Warsaw Conservatory he would have lessons in harmony, counterpoint and composition, because his piano teacher, the violinist and harpsichordist Wojcieh Zwyny, had no more to teach him by the time Chopin turned twelve.

Published in 1827, the work is dedicated to his pupil Countess Alexandrine de Moriolles. (Indeed, Chopin had pupils at the age of sixteen.) Quite demanding, it presents two contrasting themes, lively and graceful the first over a mazurka rhythm, quiet and cantabile the second (1:35). The piece closes with a brilliant finale.

The performance is by Bulgarian pianist Evgeny Bozhanov, while participating in the International Chopin Competition, in Warsaw, 2010.

Chabrier, "España", a rhapsody for orchestra

As has already been said on this site on other occasions, there have always been "minor" musicians. The 19th century was rich in them, perhaps due to the popularization of music in that century. Although they were talented composers who earned their living as musicians, a scarce production, or simply the absence of dazzling genius, kept them on the periphery, at the rear of the great masters. However, as in any hierarchy, it also happened that among the "minor" musicians, some were more so than others, that is to say, even more minor.

Chabrier, a "minor" musician

This is the case, with all due respect, of the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, born in Ambert, France, in 1841, and author of España, a rhapsody for orchestra that became very popular in its time. Composed in 1883 after Chabrier spent a few months in the peninsula, España is part of the widespread tendency of those years to compose music "a la española", or with "Spanish airs", according to a somewhat exotic vision of the Spanish reality, shared by most of the romantic or later artists (Glinka with his Jota aragonesa, Lalo and his Sinfonía española, Bizet and Carmen, Rimski-Kórsakov and the Capriccio español, Ravel and his Rapsodia española; and of course, Erik Satie, who composed his Españaña to signify his ultra "Spanishness", and mock all of the above).

Emmanuel Chabrier
(1841 - 1894)

Not so "minor"

But Chabrier, in his time, apparently was not so "minor." An author of songs, piano and orchestral works, he also wrote operas, most famously Le Roi malgré lui, whose opening bars Ravel said had changed the course of harmony in France.

Recognizing the "minor" musicians

And curiously enough, it has been these "minor" musicians who today allow us to acknowledge a certain familiarity with classical music, even if it deals with only one work.
We owe it to the media. We have had the first hearing of España and so many other works in circumstances completely alien to musical circles. The repetition makes us subsequently remember its melody, but we do not know anything else. We recognize it but completely ignore the author and his era. But there it is, recognizable, the work of the "minor" composer who has gone through, in this case, one hundred and thirty years of history and is still in good health.

España is a short work, lasting less than seven minutes, and like all rhapsodies, it has no sections, or parts.

The performance is by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Plácido Domingo.

Brahms, Variations on a Theme of Haydn

Almost twenty years after Robert Schumann's death, the Hamburg composer Johannes Brahms was still writing to Clara Schumann, the object of that ideal passion, at once so close and yet so distant. On the occasion of the premiere of his first symphonic work of maturity, the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, he wrote to Clara confessing his special predilection for this piece, which, although short and simple, brought him "greater satisfaction and pleasure" than many others.

Nine variations
Brahms was certainly fascinated by the theme appearing in the first of six divertimenti for wind instruments published in 1831 and, as was believed at the time, written by Haydn around 1800. The theme was based on an old pilgrims' song called "St. Anthony's Chorale".

Enchanted with the melody of irregular meter, Brahms built on it a set of nine variations that would become his first mature orchestral work, and whose good reception would open the way to the confidence needed to finish his First Symphony.
As usual, and for practical reasons, Brahms also wrote a version for two pianos.

Brahns, at the age of 20
(1833 -1897)

A Haydn theme?
Although Haydn's authorship of the divertimenti has been in doubt for more than fifty years - being today generally attributed to Ignaz Pleyel, a disciple of Haydn, and father of Camille, a friend of Chopin's -, current usage and recording tradition maintains the title given here and, probably, because of this, the error will be perpetuated. However, serious music lovers are accustomed to refer to the work as "St. Anthony Variations Chorale", for the sake of its seriousness.

The variations
Composed in the summer of 1873 during a stay of Brahms in a town in Bavaria, the work was premiered on November 2 of that year by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by its author, to great public and critical acclaim.

Its sections are:
00       Thme
02:24  Var 1. Poco più animato
03:40  Var 2. Più vivace
04:42  Var 3. Con moto
06:30  Var 4. Andante con moto
08:50  Var 5. Vivace
09:47  Var 6. Vivace
11:12  Var 7. Grazioso
14:29  Var 8. Presto non troppo
15:39  Finale. Andante

The rendition is by Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, conducted by Dima Slobodeniuk.