Overture to the Opera, Guillaume Tell (William Tell) . . . Gioacchino Rossini
(Born February 29, 1792, in Pesaro, Italy; died November 3, 1868, in Paris)

Guillaume Tell is the French title of Rossini’s last and most serious opera, composed to a French libretto based on the drama Wilhelm Tell by the German poet Johann Friedrich Schiller. It concerns the legendary thirteenth-century Swiss patriot and his struggle to win independence for his country from tyrannical Austrian rule. The story’s plot, very simply told, has Gessler arresting Tell and then informing him that he will be set free on the condition that Tell shoot an arrow through an apple set on his own son’s head. Tell succeeds, then kills Gessler, inspiring the Swiss revolt against Austria.

The opera had a successful premiere in Paris on August 3, 1829, but it eventually declined in popularity, perhaps due to its tremendous length (six hours if it were performed without cutting). After composing William Tell and six other operas in a sixteen-month period, Rossini stopped writing for the theater forever. He explained: “As far as I’m concerned, I know no more wonderful occupation than food. …Food, love, singing, and cookery—those are the real four acts of that comic opera that is called life and that disappear like the foam from a bottle of champagne. Anyone whom it passes by without giving pleasure is a complete fool.”

Surprisingly, many music historians still consider William Tell to be Rossini’s finest work, surpassing even The Barber of Seville in its “melodic inventiveness, bold harmonies, detailed orchestration, and grand scope.” The overture has been very popular since the first performance. The music, which like many opera overtures now stands alone, is a miniature tone poem divided into four sections. The opening ensemble for solo cellos portrays dawn, a sunrise in the Alps. The second section, Allegro, depicts a violent mountain storm, after which there is a quiet English horn solo, Andante, the shepherd’s song of thanksgiving after the storm, derived from a traditional tune played on the Alpine horn to call the cows from pasture. A fanfare of trumpets ushers in the final Allegro vivace, the hunt, with an explosion of galloping brass, signaling the approach of the Swiss army. This theme has become an icon in modern American culture, and when the generation who grew up in the middle of the last century hear this music, very few who have ever seen the cowboy known as the Lone Ranger on television (or heard him on radio) will not remember his theme song and call, “Hi Ho Silver!"

The William Tell Overture is orchestrated for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings.


Piano Concerto No. 1, in G minor, Op. 25 . . . Felix Mendelssohn
(Born February 3, 1809, in Hamburg; died November 4, 1847, in Leipzig)

Felix Mendelssohn was an extraordinary child prodigy, a composer who had his first public performance at the age of nine. When the most distinguished musicians of the day assured his father, a wealthy banker, that the boy was an authentic genius, he did all that he could to bring him to artistic maturity. Mendelssohn’s parents held musicales in their great house in Berlin on alternate Sundays, which gained great notoriety and popularity with important touring performers who visited the Prussian capital. At these musicales, there was always chamber music, sometimes an orchestral performance and occasionally even an opera. The guests frequently played, and for almost every musicale, the young Mendelssohn composed a work. He wrote a great deal of music in this period, thirteen symphonies and several concertos, for example, that he considered juvenilia and never released for publication, but in this privileged workshop, he certainly had ample opportunity to develop his skills and polish his craft.

In the spring of 1829, when he was twenty, he left home for three years of travel. In a letter written in Paris, he recalled his father's parting instructions: “to examine closely the various countries and to fix on the one where I wished to live and work; I was to make my name and gifts known and I was to press forward in my work.” Mendelssohn did not fail his father. He went everywhere and worked everywhere, and during this period composed his Italian Symphony, his Scotch Symphony and his Hebrides Overture. The impression he made on London was so great that he influenced the music of two or three generations of English composers. He began to sketch his Piano Concerto No. 1 in November 1830, in Rome, at about the same time that he started the Italian Symphony. He finished the concerto within a year and played it for the first time on October 17, 1831, in Munich. He played the concerto in London and Paris and wherever his wanderings took him. Mendelssohn performed, according to a colleague, “as a lark soars; [with] adroitness, sureness, strength, fluency and a full soft tone; [with] ardor, inspiration, soul and intelligence.” Liszt and other pianists, even those who usually played only their own compo¬sitions, took up this concerto, and before long, Berlioz wrote a satirical essay about the last rites of a piano on which it had been pounded out thirty times.

Mendelssohn used a new and original form for this concerto. There is no separate, grand opening exposition of the themes by orchestra alone which classical procedure had required until that time, but instead only a condensed one, in which the soloist, too, takes part. Mendelssohn also ran the usual three movements together, making the concerto a large, uninterrupted whole instead of a collection of three separate units. Schumann and others soon adopted these new ideas and developed them; Liszt, in particular, used the idea when he wrote what were, in effect, large one movement concertos. Only Brahms, ever the classicist, preferred the expansive old form to the concentrated new one that grew from Mendelssohn's innovation.

The three main sections of young Mendelssohn's masterpiece can be quickly characterized: the first, Molto allegro con fuoco, spins out its themes with great ease and charm. The brasses signal the transition to the slower lyrical Andante, a precursor of the piano pieces that Mendelssohn later called Songs without Words. At the beginning of the last section, the brasses, as well as the piano with its brilliant runs, introduce the effervescent, spirited, final rondo, Presto Molto allegro e vivace.

The concerto is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani, and strings.
Symphony No. 9, in E minor, Op. 95 (From the New World) . . . Antonín Dvorák
(Born September 8, 1841, in Nelahozeves; died May 1, 1904, in Prague)

Antonín Dvorák began life modestly as the son of a village innkeeper and butcher, whose aspirations were limited to hoping that his son would take over the family trade, but Dvorák chose to make a career in music instead. He studied the violin and organ locally as a child, and at the age of sixteen, left home to study in Prague. Five years later, he joined the orchestra of the National Theater as a violist (in those days an instrument usually taken up only by failed violinists), but he was almost thirty before he had his first successful performance of one of his own major compositions. Then his career took off and as he wrote more music, his fame grew, and he eventually became a figure of world importance. He held a post as professor of Composition at Prague Conservatory, was the recipient of honorary degrees from Cambridge University in England and the Czech University of Prague, and during his three-year residence in the United States, was director of a conservatory in New York.
Dvorák came to New York in 1892, when he already had worldwide fame. Soon after his arrival here, he began the New World Symphony and soon completed it. In December 1893, the New York Philharmonic premiered it. In a letter to his publisher in Berlin, Dvorák said, “The Symphony was a splendid success. The newspapers say that no composer has ever had such a triumph. I was in a box and [Carnegie] Hall was filled with the best people in New York. They applauded so much that I felt like a king.”

Despite, or perhaps because of its success, the symphony became the subject of great controversy. Some said it was based almost entirely on folk songs of the “American Black and Indian” peoples, while others found it typically Czech. Modern opinion asserts that Dvorák intended it to set an example for American composers of how to use American themes without quoting folk songs. Dvorák only borrowed the spirit of American folk melodies.

Unquestionably, America had made an impact on Dvorák. One of the most gifted of the eager, young people who flocked to his classes was the African-American musician, Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949), who became a composer and singer. Burleigh spent many hours with Dvorák, singing spirituals that completely captivated him and became an important part of Dvorák’s inspiration for the Symphony. Shortly before the premiere, he said, “I am satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. These can be the basis of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American. They are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them. All the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people. In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”

Dvorák did not directly quote such songs in the symphony and explained, “I only tried to write in the spirit of those national American melodies.” What escaped notice is that despite their differing, distant origins, the folk music of Czech peasantry, of African-Americans, and of some Native Americans all shared certain musical characteristics, and it was the folk element that always fascinated Dvorák. “Omit the nonsense about my having made use of ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ motives,” he said. “That is a lie. I tried to write only in the spirit of those national American melodies.”

The first movement has a slow introduction, Adagio, before an Allegro molto. The flute and oboe play the first theme, a melancholy dance, and the flute introduces the second theme, based on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The principal theme of the nostalgic second movement, Largo, is a haunting melody for English horn that Dvorák originally sketched for a work he never wrote that was to be based on Longfellow’s lengthy narrative poem, Hiawatha. Dvorák explained that a transitional passage in the Largo is an Indian girl’s sobbing as she bids Hiawatha farewell. Although Dvorák evidently thought that the music was Native American in character, it later became popular as an imitation spiritual called “Goin’ Home.” Also, this movement contains an oboe passage introducing a skipping theme over the cello’s accompaniment in which Dvorák intended to suggest the gradual awakening of animal life on the prairie here. In it, he makes striking use of trills echoing back and forth between instruments.

A sprightly dance-like movement, Scherzo, Molto vivace, which has been compared to a Native American dance with chanting, follows. After the finale’s introduction, the horns and trumpets introduce the first theme, Allegro con fuoco. The clarinet intones the gentle second theme against strings’ tremolos; then themes of earlier movements reappear, giving the last movement a rich pattern of connecting motives.

The score calls for piccolo and two flutes, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals and strings.

Copyright Susan Halpern, halpernprogramnotes.com

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