Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun)

Debussy's ten-minute tone poem for orchestra takes its inspiration from the eponymous poem by Stephane Mallarme, and was meant to be the prelude to a ballet choreographed by Valery Nijinsky. Though the ballet is rarely performed, Debussy's prelude has proven to be nothing short of one of the most important watershed works in modern music history. Ambiguous in its meter, capricious in tonality, and full of the impressionistic colors which were Debussy's unique legacy, the prelude is a loose montage of scenes from a torpid afternoon in which the mythical faun vainly pursues a pair of elusive wood nymphs. He reaches them only in a sensual, dream-filled slumber in which he is united with them and nature. The language in both the textual and musical poems is suffused in light, unrealized passion, and vivid languor.

The famous opening flute solo is representative of the faun, who plays his pan-pipe in the woods. From the beginning our sense of tonality is tricked and tricked again, as the flute oscillates between the two notes of a tritone; the melody hints briefly at E-major, but then the orchestra enters in B-flat major, the most unexpected key possible. There is a silent bar as the music seems to ponder this turn of events, before trying again. Wandering interjections from horns and harp wreathe the flute, padded by soft strings. The harmonies wander, but every time it seems to be reaching a point of arrival, of realization or resolution, the goal shifts or evaporates altogether.

With the entrance of a solo clarinet and muttering celli, the shadows of the nymphs appear, and the consequent pursuit and flight are shown by fleeting, unresolved scales, muted brass, and tantalizing pizzicati. As the music grows more animated and passionate, the orchestration grows lush and colorful, but the sweetest moments are also the most hushed and delicate, undulating just underneath the surface. This is the ethereal world that persists to the end of the piece, drifting in between enchanted yearning and fleeting luxuriousness. And what to make of the resolution: clear, unambiguous E Major, a certainty which has eluded us the entire piece? The faun escapes to sleep, forsaking his pursuit, but realizes his desires in the other world of slumber: “Farewell to you... I go to see the shadow you have become.”

Liszt: Symphonic Poem No. 5, S. 99 "Prometheus"

S stands for humphrey searle, who compiled a catalogue of liszt's compositions in 1966 - no small task, for a composer who composed almost a thousand works. but the catch of this is that the catalogue is organized typologically - the operas and choral works come first, then all the symphonic poems (13 of them, S. 95-107), works on "national themes" (organized by nation), solo piano stuff, original and transcribed... etc. 

liszt gets most of the credit for inventing the symphonic poem genre, a process about which you can read here. but for all that, only one of his symphonic poems has actually entered the standard repertoire, the completely overplayed les preludes.

the kernel of the symphonic poem, if you don't feel like clicking that link (it's kind of a long article, but if you're interested it's good reading) is that it have the scale of the first movement of a symphony but also be infused with a program. heftier than an overture, but not quite a symphonic movement. it doesn't like sonata form and generally just goes with the development of several different motifs.

liszt wrote prometheus in 1850 and revised it in 1855. it is based on the greek myth of prometheus (who you might remember, if your memory is better than mine for these names, is the guy who stole fire and gave it to the humans, punished afterwards by being chained to a rock while a hawk daily comes to rip his ever-regrowing entrails out). in the original version this work was not a symphonic poem but an overture, followed by eight choruses w/ orchestral accompaniment. afterwards the overture became a symphonic poem, and the choruses, a concert stage work.

apparently with this work liszt wanted to depict the pain and eventual triumph of prometheus, but the concert stage work fell flat, with the poem gaining a sort of life as a free-standing work. this can be taken as a sort of indicator of why the symphonic poem is a unique genre - expanded to a symphony, it would probably have suffered the same fate as the choral work. but it has too much material to be merely an overture, which was why liszt expanded it in the first place.

ok, on to the piece itself.

huuuuge bombastic ominous beginning. this is the beginning of the drama. liszt uses dark colors, lots of dissonances, and lots of stretched diminished chords, though he holds the harmonies long enough for us to comprehend that they don't sound quiiite atonal yet (though we definitely have a hard time finding a tonal center after the opening measures). we get a meandering theme in mid and lower strings, with a motif consisting of a falling semitone followed by falling minor and diminished thirds.

2:27 is where the upper strings come in with a furious play on that same motif, falling diminished chords. grinding semitones dominate the landscape, whether they are oscillating or moving up and down in extended chromatic scales. maybe this is all to demonstrate the drama and fear of having stolen from the gods.

middle section, starting at the beginning of the second video, hesitates with those diminished chords for a while before a luxurious cello melody comes in. still with uneasy murmurings from the inner voices, and an unstable tonal center, we go to a rising g-sharp major chord, expecting it to resolve to c-sharp major. instead we are led on to the next episode, a sort of scurrying f minor fugue that lets everyone join in section by section, including percussion. then liszt does something that he pretty much does in les preludes - he progresses back through all the sections he's already gone through. we get a sort of recapitulation, then a rephrase of the the fury section. at 6:00 though, we get some new material - this is the coda of the piece. in the article i cited above, the writer mentions that symphonic poems usually have extended codas that affect our perceptions/recollections of the "principle" musical material. the finale tends to become an episode in itself, much like the final movement of a symphony. that's how this coda sounds to me - the material relates back to the original themes but in a very morphed way that goes on for some time, much longer than typical classical codas.

also, if you had asked me what key this was in before the last minute or so, i probably couldn't have given you an answer. liszt wrote some of the very first "atonal" music.

Smetana: Má Vlast - Vyšehrad

having had a headache for the last hour or so, this is a great balm and destressing piece. 

wikipedia has a perfectly acceptable and fairly comprehensive overview of the entire suite, and an especially fair explanation of this particular movement, so fair warning, i'm about to just copy most of it.

this tone poem, Vyšehrad (VEE-sheh-rad), is the first in a set of six that belong to the set "Ma Vlast," or "my country." smetana's vision/mission was basically to establish nationalist music for the czechs, and he accomplished this splendidly, with current czechs treating this and the moldau (the outrageously popular second poem of the six) as something like a second and third national anthem. in the course of this whole suite, we explore the Vyšehrad, a castle in Prague which was home to the earliest Czech kings; the Vltava, the river which runs the bohemian countryside; the local czech legends of a female warrior named Sarka and the army of knights which sleeps inside a mountain known as Blanik; the countryside and woods themselves, and Tabor, a city.

another interesting thing about smetana was that he went deaf in 1874 at the age of 50 (yea i bet that reminds you of someone). the Vyšehrad was composed/mostly completed almost immediately before he went deaf. which means that the rest of the cycle was composed in silence. here's an amusing take on that compositional process.

weird to call this a "movement" because they're not very commonly played as a complete cycle. think of it as a set of independently functioning pieces with a common theme, like dvorak's slavonic dances. they were all composed over a span of 5 years (1874-1879) and all premiered separately.

kubelik and the czech philharmonic. who better?

ok, so apparently *the* thing to talk about is that theme: b-flat, e-flat, d, b-flat (or any other relative setting of those pitches). there are claims that this actually represent bedrich smetana's name, because apparently "b" and "s" represent b-flat and e-flat in german notation. anyway, regardless what that is, it is definitely the most important recurring motif in the entire set of six poems, coming up again and again, from the dreamy double-harp arpeggios that nostalgically open, to the warm orchestral entrance, to the gigantic grandiose music that occurs about five minutes in (and if you think about it, the only possible visual incarnation of this music for me is some great hall with a huge court in a castle like the vysehrad...). but all this is still just overture, and the exposition or plot doesn't seem to start until almost six minutes in.

now we get some curiosity-inspiring drama. if you think of this whole piece as a sort of movie, this would be where the exposition actually starts, and according to the wiki article this is smetana taking us back and telling us the tale of the castle. a brisker tempo lends itself to a bit of distress but also streams of lush, "good-old-times" glory in the strings and fanfares in the upper brass. these are periodically interrupted by a tenser motif, the descending halfstep followed by a descending fourth. finally the tension builds until we get a gigantic descending chromatic scale at about 9:30, depicting the fall of the castle. the flutes enter again tentatively, followed by string tremolos, and a few quietly mournful wind passages. then at about 11:30, the opening harp flourishes return again, this time with string echoes pregnant with remembered glory. the big climax at this point seems to reaffirm the glory, but a shade of darkness in the strings swells out near the concluding measures, and the ending of the poem is actually quiet, seeming to say that all this is merely wonderful memories of days gone by. which, well, it is.

pretty good for sappy nationalistic music, wouldn't you say.

Respighi: Pini di Roma - III. "I pini del Gianicolo" (Pines of the Janiculum)

so the first thing you might be thinking after actually reading the title is, what is the gianicolo?
the janiculum is a hill in western rome. it happens to be home to some of the most ancient temples and monuments in rome, one of which (the temple to the god janus) is claimed by wiki to be the site and setting of this movement. right now i am too annoyed at the fact that this fact is neither cited nor substantiated on wiki's site and yet every info site on the internet seemingly has just taken to mirroring wiki's entry that i am not really going to give this notion the time of day. i think this movement is about said hill, the sense of isolation and elevation one might have standing atop it, and the proximity to nature that it provides (it is, or apparently was, covered at one time almost completely in pines).

pines of rome is a four movement suite or orchestral tone poem, which became respighi's genre of choice after his more or less unsuccessful run at opera (the great italian tradition...) the first of his most famous works (set of three suites known as the roman trilogy) was fountains of rome, written in 1916. pines of rome (or just "pines" as orchestra players usually call it) was composed in 1924. the third, roman festivals, is actually played quite rarely. it was written in 1926.

before we go any further, here are two great recordings of this particular movement, sifted out of the mass of university orchestra and high school band ensembles that are on youtube.

Tosca and NBC. before i saw this video i had actually never seen toscanini conduct. this recording is very... straight. no nonsense, nothing fluffy. nice sound though. check out the cello soli at 2:15.

this is a much more "typical" recording and achieves the dreaminess that i think attracts a lot of people to respighi's music. i'm posting it for comparison's sake and also because it's ridiculous having to wade through all the band performances on youtube to find an actual well done recording of this piece that even a recording by this relatively unknown orchestra is definitely in the top echelon... and it's pretty good. some nice wind solos.
you'll notice right away that the most characteristic writing of this movement (and maybe of the entire suite) is the solo wind writing - the long-winded opening clarinet solo is famously difficult to pull off. the movement is lush and tranquil. the obligatory program note is just respighi's accompanying description -

A quiver runs through the air: the pine trees of the Janiculum stand distinctly outlined in the clear light of a full moon. A nightingale is singing.

the string writing evokes something of debussy - washes of colors and blobby chords that sort of metamorphose into other key areas by sliding around chromatically. the main theme is super chromatic and always seems to want to rise up but never quite come into the sun.
and of course there's the famous nightingale. maybe the first ever recorded instance of using pre-recorded sounds in a piece. done tastefully and to great effect.
ok, off to new york.