Springfield Symphony Orchestra
2010-2012 MasterWorks II

November 12, 2011

Peter Stafford Wilson, Conductor
Kemal Gekić, piano

Kodaly: Dances of Marosszek
Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major
Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major
Brahms: Hungarian Dances (selected)

Zoltán Kodály
Born December 16, 1882, in Kecskemét, Hungary; died March 6, 1967, in Budapest

Dances of Marosszék
Composed for piano in 1927; arranged for orchestra in 1930.
Piano version premiered on March 17, 1927 in Budapest; orchestral version premiered on November 28, 1930 in Dresden, conducted by Fritz Busch.
Scoring: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bassoon, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion and strings.

Marosszék is a district within Transylvania, which has been a region in central Romania since World War II but was for many centuries controlled by Hungary. For much of its history, Marosszék, nestled in the scenic Carpathian Mountains, was dominated by Hungarian culture and language, and it was one of the areas that Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók found especially rich in material during their trips through Eastern Europe studying traditional village folk songs, dances and customs.

Kodály first considered writing a concert work based on melodies from Marosszék in 1923, when the Hungarian government was organizing a concert commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the merging of the cities of Buda and Pest into the unified capital of the country, but Bartók was already working on a similar Dance Suite so he instead composed the Psalmus Hungaricus, a Hungarian-language paraphrase of Psalm 55 by the 16th-century poet Mihály Keckeméti Vég in which David pleads with God to deliver him from the persecution of his enemies and to relieve the suffering of his nation. Four years later Kodály returned to the music of Marosszék and composed a work for solo piano on several themes that was premiered in Budapest on March 27, 1927 by Louis Kentner, a student of his who was just beginning an international career. In 1930, Kodály orchestrated these Dances of Marosszék, which were first performed in Dresden on November 28, 1930 under the direction of Fritz Busch.

Kodály, who was profoundly aware that he was studying quickly waning traditions in his field research, noted that the sources for the Dances of Marosszék “have their roots in a remote past and represent a fairyland that has disappeared.” The work is based on a broad, atmospheric theme introduced at the outset that returns with varied instrumentation, accompaniments and settings. The first interlude is a rustic dance; the second uses a highly ornamented tune, reminiscent of a shepherd’s piping, that features solos for oboe, flute, piccolo, violin and double bass; the third is a vigorous strain whose drone accompaniment recalls a bagpipe. A fiery coda brings the Dances of Marosszék to a jubilant close.

Franz Liszt
Born October 22, 1811, in Doborján, Hungary (now Raiding, Austria); died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany.

Piano Concerto No. 1 for in E-flat major
Composed 1839-1849; revised in 1853.
Premiered on February 17, 1855 in Weimar, conducted by Hector Berlioz with the composer as soloist.
Scoring: woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major, Op. 23
Composed in 1839 and 1849.
Premiered on January 7, 1857 in Weimar, conducted by the composer with Hans von Bronsart as soloist.
Scoring: piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals and strings.

“Franz Liszt was one of the most brilliant and provocative figures in music history. As a pianist, conductor, composer, teacher, writer and personality – for with Liszt, being a colorful personality was itself a profession – his immediate influence upon European music can hardly be exaggerated. His life was a veritable pagan wilderness wherein flourished luxuriant legends of love affairs, illegitimate children, encounters with great figures of the period, and hairbreadth escapes from a variety of romantic murders. Unlike Wagner and Berlioz, Liszt never wrote the story of his life, for, as he casually remarked, he was too busy living it.” If it were not for the fact that Liszt’s life had been so thoroughly documented by his contemporaries, we might think that the preceding description by Abraham Veinus was based on some profligate fictional character out of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Not so. By all accounts, Liszt led the most sensational life ever granted to a musician. In his youth and early manhood, he received the sort of wild and unbuttoned adulation that today is seen only at the appearances of a select handful of rock stars. He was the first musical artist in history with enough nerve to keep an entire program to himself rather than providing the grab-bag of orchestral, vocal and instrumental pieces scattered across an evening’s entertainment that was the typical early-19th-century concert. He dubbed those solo concerts “musical soliloquies” at first, and later called them by the now-familiar term, “recitals.” (“How can one recite at the piano? Preposterous!” fumed one British writer.)

By 1848 Liszt had made his fortune, secured his fame and decided that he had been touring long enough, so he gave up performing, appearing in public during the last four decades of his life only for an occasional benefit concert. Amid the variegated patchwork of duchies, kingdoms and city-states that constituted pre-Bismarck Germany, he chose to settle in the small but sophisticated city of Weimar, where Sebastian Bach held a job early in his career. Once installed at Weimar, Liszt took over the musical establishment there and elevated it into one of the most important centers of European artistic culture. He stirred up interest in such neglected composers as Schubert, and encouraged such younger ones as Saint-Saëns, Wagner and Grieg by performing their works. He also gave much of his energy to his own original compositions, and created many of the pieces for which he is known today — the symphonies, piano concertos, symphonic poems and choral works. Liszt had composed before he moved to Weimar, of course – his total output numbers between 1,400 and 1,500 separate works – but the early pieces were mainly piano solos for use at his own recitals. His later works are not only indispensable components of the Romantic musical era in their own right, but also were an important influence on other composers in their form, harmony and poetic content.

As if composing, conducting and performing were insufficient, Liszt was also one of the most sought-after piano teachers of the 19th century. He was popular with students not just because he possessed an awesome technique that was (and remains) the model of every serious pianist. Liszt was also a direct link to that nearly deified figure, the glorious Beethoven, who had, so the story went, actually kissed the young prodigy on the forehead with his own lips. Furthermore, Liszt was a pupil of Carl Czerny, the most eminent student of Beethoven. To make this already unassailable combination of technique and tradition absolutely irresistible, Liszt brought to it an all-encompassing view of man and his world that enabled the mere tones of the piano to surpass themselves and open unspeakable realms of transcendent delight. One friend once remarked about the composer’s wide variety of interests, “One could never know in which mental stall Liszt would find his next hobby horse.” He was a truly remarkable man, one of the most important figures in terms of his cumulative influence on the art in all of 19th-century music.

Liszt sketched his two piano concertos in 1839, during his years of touring the music capitals of Europe, but they lay unfinished until he became court music director at Weimar in 1848. The first ideas for the E-flat Concerto appeared in a notebook as early as 1830, but the score was not completed, according to a letter from Liszt’s eventual son-in-law, the pianist/conductor Hans von Bülow, until June 1849; it was revised in 1853. The premiere was part of a week of gala concerts honoring the music of Hector Berlioz at the Grand Ducal palace in Weimar, thus allowing the French composer to conduct while Liszt played. A memorable evening!

Liszt required of a concerto that it be “clear in sense, brilliant in expression, and grand in style.” In other words, it had to be a knockout. While it was inevitable that the E-flat Concerto would have a high degree of finger-churning display, it was not automatic that it should also be of fine musical quality – but it is. Liszt undertook an interesting structural experiment in the Concerto by fusing the substance of the concerto form with the architecture of the symphony. (“Music is never stationary,” he once pronounced. “Successive forms and styles can only be like so many resting places – like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.”) Though the work is played continuously, four distinct sections may be discerned within its span: an opening Allegro, built largely from the bold theme presented immediately at the outset; an Adagio that grows from a lyrical, arched melody initiated by the cellos and basses; a vivacious, scherzo-like section enlivened by the glistening tintinnabulations of the solo triangle; and a closing Allegro marziale that gathers together the motives of the preceding sections into a rousing conclusion. Of the finale, Liszt wrote, “It is only an urgent recapitulation of the earlier subject matter with quickened, livelier rhythm, and contains no new motive.... This kind of binding together and rounding off of a whole piece at its close is somewhat my own, but it is quite maintained and justified from the standpoint of musical form.” Béla Bartók judged this Concerto, because of its grandiose recall and interpenetration of themes in the finale, to be “the first perfect realization of cyclical sonata form.” It was this formal concept – a single-movement work in several sections utilizing just one or two themes – that Liszt was also to use in his tone poems of the following two decades and in the Second Piano Concerto.

Liszt’s First Concerto drew much criticism when it was new: not for its novel formal construction – but for its innovative use of the triangle. When the piece was first performed in Vienna in 1857, the powerful critic and redoubtable Wagner-Bruckner-Liszt hater, Eduard Hanslick, called it, disparagingly, the “Triangle Concerto.” Liszt rushed to the defense: “As regards the triangle I do not deny that it may give offense, especially if struck too strong or not precisely. A preconceived disinclination and objection to instruments of percussion prevails, somewhat justified by the frequent misuse of them…. In the face of the most wise proscription of the learned critics I shall, however, continue to employ instruments of percussion, and think I shall yet win for them some effects little known.”

The procedure on which Liszt built Concerto No. 2 and other of his orchestral works is called “thematic transformation,” or, to use the rather more jolly phrase of the late-19th-century American critic William Foster Apthorp, “The Life and Adventures of a Melody.” Basically, the “thematic transformation” process consisted of inventing a theme that could be used to create a wide variety of moods, tempos, orchestrations and rhythms to suggest whatever emotional states were required by the different sections of the piece. It is not unlike a single actor changing costumes to play Puck, Bottom the Weaver and Oberon all in the same production (now that’s an actor) – recognizably the same at the core, but dressed up differently for each scene.

There are at least six such scenes in Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto. The composer provided no specific plot for any of these, but wrote music of such extroverted emotionalism that it is not difficult for imaginative listeners to provide their own: languor, storm, love, strife, resolve and battle is only one possible sequence. It is a diverting game to play, and Liszt has invited all to take part. The melody on which this Concerto is based is presented immediately at the beginning by the clarinet. It courses through each section, and can most easily be identified by the little half-step sigh at the end of the first phrase.

Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto is a hugely entertaining work that creates a special, almost unique, atmosphere. In the words of William Apthorp, “It is monstrous, formless, whimsical and fantastic; but it is also magical and gorgeous as anything in the Arabian Nights.”

Johannes Brahms
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.

Hungarian Dances Nos. 1, 3, 10, 6 and 5
Composed in 1869 and 1880.
Scoring: woodwinds in pairs plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion and strings.

According to an old Hungarian saying, “Give a Magyar peasant a glass of water and a Gypsy fiddler, and he will become completely drunk.” So it is not surprising that when Kossuth and his Hungarian forces rose up in 1848 against the domination of their homeland by Austria, their ardor was reinforced by the sound of fiery Gypsy music played by Ede Reményi, a young violinist whose politics were as radical as his performances were inspired. Reményi was exiled for his participation in that unsuccessful coup, and he packed his fiddle and his chauvinism off to America for a time.

Returning to Europe in 1852, Reményi met a young pianist in Hamburg named Johannes Brahms, and the two lit out on foot to dazzle the world with their music. The hit of their programs was the traditional Magyar music that Reményi played “with a fire and abandon that excited his hearers to a wild enthusiasm,” according to one contemporary report. Brahms took part by improvising the accompaniments. They traveled mostly through villages and byways, where they added to their repertory by watching the peasants sing and dance. Despite a certain success as a team, however, the differences between the quiet, conservative Brahms and the flamboyant, revolutionary Reményi drove the two apart less than three months after they started their tour.

The seed planted by Reményi’s playing and the enthusiastic music-making of the country villagers, however, stayed firmly rooted in Brahms’ mind, and it later blossomed in such Gypsy-inspired compositions as the finale of the Violin Concerto, the closing movement of the G minor Piano Quartet (Op. 25), the Zigeunerlieder (“Gypsy Songs”), and, especially, the Hungarian Dances. The themes of most of the Dances were not original with Brahms. He collected them, thinking – as did almost everyone else – that the melodies were folk tunes, and he was specific in stating that they were arrangements of traditional melodies. He offered the set of ten Dances arranged in 1869 to the Budapest publisher Roszavolgyi for a very modest fee, but was refused because of Roszavolgyi’s belief that the music would be a bad investment. Brahms then sent the manuscript to his regular publisher, Fritz Simrock in Berlin, who gave him a small one-time payment, and then proceeded to make a fortune from the Hungarian Dances when their popularity spread like wildfire across Europe. In 1880, Brahms composed a second set of Dances comprising eleven original numbers composed “in the Hungarian manner.”

Brahms, one of the most honest and forthright of all the great composers, was accused of plagiarism by his old friend Reményi, who claimed that Brahms had stolen the tunes from him. When that tale was easily exploded, Reményi issued a list of the composers of the melodies in an interview printed in 1879 by the New York Herald, forcing Simrock to distribute a pamphlet defending Brahms on the basis of the Dances being arrangements that Brahms had never intended to pass off as his own original work – Brahms did not even give them an opus number. (When Brahms first sent the score to Simrock, he wrote, “I offer them as genuine Gypsy children which I did not beget, but merely brought up with bread and milk.”) Despite this petite scandale, the Hungarian Dances proved to be the most popular of all Brahms’ works during his lifetime.

Brahms retained a special affection for the Gypsy fiddlers and their music throughout his life, and he made frequent visits to the Prater, Vienna’s amusement park, to hear them play there. He caught the fire and brilliance of their performances with such fidelity in his Hungarian Dances that Elizabeth von Herzogenberg, his close friend and constant correspondent, wrote to him about them, “This medley of twirls and grace notes, this jingling, whistling, gurgling clatter … carries one right away into the midst of the fiddlers.” Most of the original piano versions of the Dances have been orchestrated over the years, three of them (Nos. 1, 3 and 10) by the composer himself, the rest by other hands. The Dance No. 1 in C minor was based on the Isteni Czàrdas by Sárközy. The Dances No. 3 (F major) and No. 10 (F major) have been traced to the Tolnai Lakadalmas (“Wedding Dance”) by J. Rizner. Dance No. 6 (D major), modeled on A. Nittinger’s Rózsa Bokor, was orchestrated by the conductor Albert Parlow (1822-1888). The Dance No. 5 (G minor), also arranged for orchestra by Parlow, is a setting of the melody Bartfai-Emlek (“Remembrance of Bartfa”) attributed to the German-Hungarian bandmaster and composer of light music Kéler-Béla.

©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda