Suite from The River
Edward Kennedy Ellington
Edward Kennedy Ellington, universally known as Duke Ellington, was one of the most inventive, most fertile of 20th century American musicians. Composing more than 1,000 works, he revolutionized the concept of a jazz ensemble. By introducing more instruments and larger forces to the “big band,” Ellington expanded its scope. The range and complexity of his musical arrangements led him also to explore composition on a symphonic scale. His large-scale works, suites for orchestra and sacred services with voices, were frequently performed in concert halls and churches, and Broadway and Hollywood producers often requested him to write music for their spectacles as well. With works such as The New Orleans Suite, Black, Brown, and Beige Suite, and Suite from The River, he broadened the parameters of jazz, edging closer to the classical idiom.

His only formal ballet score is The River, written for the American Ballet Theater in 1970. Alvin Ailey created choreography for it. The “river” is an imaginative symbol of time and of its flow through human life. It is, Ellington said, “the river of birth, of the well-spring of life, of reaffirmation, of the heavenly anticipation of rebirth.”

The Suite from “The River” has seven sections, which Ellington extracted from his complete ballet score. In it, he combines elements from the European classical music tradition in both form and orchestration, using jazz features such as expanded chord structure, blues inflections, improvisatory-sounding riffs, swing rhythms, and the technique of call and response.

The first section of the suite, Spring, begins with French horn and English horn solos. Its warm sensuousness is reinforced by expanded harmonies and colorful instrumentation. Meander, with its slow bluesy swing rhythm, develops into a jazz waltz before the opening material returns. Giggling Rapids begins in the strings and winds as a spirited jazz waltz and is complemented by the response of unison riffs in the brass. Lake is a relaxed, leisurely movement featuring woodwind solos. Ellington, one of the first to use Latin rhythms in American jazz, gave this section a Latin flavor. Vortex swirls with snare drum rhythms, and in some spots sounds like one section is pursuing another. Riba is a catchy swing with jazz riffs added. Village Virgins, the final movement, has a reverential air with the blues making interjections.

Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, in B-Flat, Op. 4, No. 6.
George Frideric Handel
Handel’s concerto is probably the first harp concerto ever written. He first published it as a concerto for organ or harpsichord, but he composed it in London in 1735 for a Welsh harpist named Powell. During his mature years in Britain, Handel wrote some twenty oratorios that were the most popular musical entertainments of the time, and he led the performances from the organ, usually playing his own concertos as entr’acte music during the intermissions. The expressive themes and simple forms of the concertos soon made them as popular as the oratorios.

Powell premiered this concerto on February 19, 1736, at the gala occasion that was not only the first performance of Alexander’s Feast, or The Power of Music, Handel’s setting of John Dryden’s famous ode in honor of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians, but also the premiere of the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day for soloists, chorus and orchestra, a Concerto Grosso, and the Organ Concerto in G minor, Op. 4, No. 1. When subsequently Op. 4 was published, the remarkable Harp Concerto appeared only as a concerto for organ and orchestra, although Handel truly intended it as a concerto for harp. One indication of that intention is that he gave it lighter orchestra parts than he would have for an organ concerto (and the other organ concerti published in that opus did indeed have much heavier orchestration).

The delights of this three-movement concerto are all too brief. In the pattern of Handel’s organ concerti, the harp soloist is entirely dominant in the first movement with the orchestra participating only at the movement’s opening and closing as well as at two brief but necessary points in the center. The movement combines vigorous rhythms and charming wit. The central movement, a Larghetto, contains not only a lovely lyrical theme, but the harp also has the opportunity to give forth with improvisatory sounding lines. This movement leads into an engaging, dance-like tightly knit Allegro moderato finale, largely constructed in symmetrical question and answer phrases.

The accompanying orchestra consists of two oboes (optionally two flutes) and strings. In Handel’s time, extra oboes and one or more bassoons were often added. The violins are muted, and the bass parts are pizzicato.

Symphonie Fantastique (“Fantastic Symphony”), Episode in the Life of an Artist, Op. 14
Hector Berlioz
In 1830, three years after Beethoven’s death, the little known Hector Berlioz composed Symphonie Fantastique, a work that revealed him as an original musical thinker, composing with great new expressive powers. His work is remarkable for combining musical imagery and emotional representation. It became a model for Liszt, Wagner, and Strauss, yet when first performed, it drew a wide range of response, much of it negative.

In his mid-twenties Berlioz became acquainted with Beethoven’s symphonies and Shakespeare’s plays; both effected him greatly, and he expressed his feelings for them in Symphonie Fantastique. In 1827, he viewed Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in a London traveling theatrical company’s production. Harriet Smithson, a beautiful Irish actress exactly Berlioz’s age, played both Ophelia and Juliet, and Berlioz fell passionately in love with her. He arranged for her to attend the performance of his symphony five years later when she knew of his interest in her but had not met him. She did not know that she had inspired the symphony until she saw written Berlioz’s words of longing for “the Juliet, the Ophelia for whom my heart cries out.” She was charmed to discover Berlioz’s text expressed his feelings for her; they married the following October. The flame of his “eternal and inextinguishable passion,” however, soon died. Within a few years, they separated. When Harriet died a decade later, Berlioz married his mistress of many years.

Symphonie Fantastique is most renowned for its brilliantly imaginative orchestration and the use of a single melody pervading all five movements. The work varies from traditional four-movement symphonic form by the addition of a waltz before the slow movement and a march after it. Berlioz felt his work followed naturally from Beethoven’s symphonies, and that his “idée fixe” was the next musical step toward symphonic unity. In an entirely original way, Berlioz used the “idée fixe” theme in every movement, as a connecting link binding the symphony together and as the germ from which other themes grow. This melody represented his beloved, Harriet Smithson, and like her, was an “ideé fixe,” a persistent obsession.

The work also reflects his fascination with the supernatural and the grotesque, with heroic longing and frenzied romance. Berlioz utilized new possibilities for orchestration, new tone colors and effects as well as sounds that suggested an infinite variety of emotions and ideas. In concentrating on his innovations, he neglected standard motivic development.

Berlioz distributed a literary program at the premiere in which a footnote stated: “The distribution of this program to the audience, at concerts in which this symphony is to be played, is indispensable for the complete understanding of the work’s dramatic plan.” In writing it, he drew from such diverse sources as Goethe’s Faust, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tales, DeQuincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, and Chateaubriand’s René. The original program included:

PART ONE: DAYDREAMS, PASSIONS
He recalls an uneasiness of soul, moments of melancholy and joy which he experienced before seeing his beloved; then comes the fiery love with which she inspired him, leading to moments of delirious anguish, of jealous fury, a return to loving tenderness and his religious consolation.

PART TWO: A BALL
He sees his beloved at a ball, in the midst of a brilliant fête.

PART THREE: SCENE IN THE COUNTRY
One summer evening in the country, he hears two shepherds playing Ranz-des-vaches in alternate dialogue; this pastoral duet, the scene around him, the trees gently swaying in the breeze, and his own hope all combine to restore an unusual calm in his heart; but then she appears again, his heart stops beating, and he is agitated and concerned about whether she might betray him! One of the shepherds begins his song again, the other does not answer him. The sun sets and there is the sound of distant thunder and solitude. Silence.


PART FOUR: MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD
He dreams that he has killed his beloved and is condemned to death. He is being led to execution. The procession advances to a somber and wild, as well as brilliant and solemn march. The dull sound of heavy footsteps follows after resounding outbursts. At the end, the idee fixe reappears briefly, like the last thought of love interrupted by the fatal stroke.

PART FIVE: DREAM OF A WITCHES’ SABBATH
He sees himself at the witches’ Sabbath in the middle of a group of ghosts, magicians, and monsters of all sorts, who have come together. He hears strange noises, groans, ringing laughter, and shrieks. The idée fixe reappears, but it has now become an ignoble, trivial, and grotesque dance-tune. She comes to the witches’ Sabbath. There are expressions of joy at her arrival. She takes part in the diabolic orgy. Funeral bells and a parody of Dies irae sounds. Witches’ dance and then the Dies irae and the witches’ dance come together.

The first movement’s thematic material suggests the artist’s reveries and passions. The violins first articulate the “idée fixe,” a forlorn statement of longing, after the long, slow introduction. By the first movement’s end, the protagonist’s anxiety subsides into religious consolation, announced by repeated, sustained hymnal amens.

The second movement, Valse, Allegro non troppo, a traditional ternary dance movement, a waltz, places the “idée fixe” in the Trio. The harps and woodwinds add special color to the ball. The music focuses on an invocation of the surroundings, yet Berlioz deftly blurs the boundary between interior and exterior space when the hero finds himself briefly confronted by his beloved at the ball.

The slow movement is placed third, just as Beethoven did in his Symphony No. 9. An Adagio, it includes bird calls and intermittently flowing rhythmic patterns, owing much to the “scene by the brook” movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. Here the “idée fixe” is the secondary theme. The movement opens with an English horn-oboe dialogue, simulating shepherd calls of the ranz des vaches, or alphorn sounding “the tune used by the Swiss to call the flocks together.” The scene buoys the musician’s imagination, but when the beloved reappears with intimations of faithlessness, darkness gathers. The close is equivocal: the shepherd falls silent and the muffled tympani suggest distant thunder, preparing the way for the nightmare that follows.

Again recalling Beethoven’s Pastorale, the fourth and fifth movements are structurally linked in their scoring for large orchestra with a full brass ensemble. The garish March to the Scaffold serves as prologue to the Witch’s Sabbath finale. The march, Allegretto non troppo, based on the March of the Guards from Berlioz’s unfinished opera Les Francs-Juges, tonally and temperamentally provides an effective transition to the fourth /fifth-movements, Larghetto – Allegro, unleashing of horror in which the Beloved (the “idée fixe”) turns into a hideous witch, a shrieking clarinet leading the other spirits on the wild dance of the Witches’ Sabbath. The lovely “idée fixe” melody becomes grotesque with grace notes and trills, but the witches greet the sound with shrieks of laughter. The original “idée fixe” returns, yet the bell sounds and the Dies Irae, a medieval melody used for funerals as part of the Requiem Mass, (and well known to audiences of the time) interrupts the revelry. Dies Irae signified Judgment Day. Witches poke fun at the sacred; they profane the good and the just. The “idée fixe” and Dies irae mix in a grotesque Ronde du Sabbat (Sabbath Round Dance), which eventually becomes a fugue. The orchestra explodes energetically in the coda.

The symphony was completed in Paris in 1830, and first performed on December 5, but it differed from the Symphonie Fantastique we hear today. Berlioz reworked much of it in the next two years in Italy, after winning the Prix de Rome. Later, he added the first movement’s religioso coda and wrote several versions of the descriptive program. He originally called it Episodes from the Life of an Artist, adding Symphonie Fantastique later as a subtitle.

He considerably toned down his attack on the beloved’s faithlessness, and over time allowed the music to speak for itself without accompanying text. By 1855, he had recast the program so that the musician takes a dose of opium at the beginning, and thus the symphony becomes an opium dream. The beloved transforms into a melody, like an “idée fixe” which he hears everywhere. The following is a translation of his final program:

“A young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of despair over love. The narcotic dose, too weak to bring him death, plunges him into a heavy sleep accompanied by the strangest of visions, in which his sensations, sentiments and recollections are translated, in his sick mind, into musical ideas and images. Even his beloved has become a melody for him, an obsession that he finds and hears everywhere.”

The instruments required are two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, three clarinets and small clarinet in E-flat, four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, two harps and strings.

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