SHEKU KANNEH-MASON & HEYWARD
Ernest Bloch
Born July 24, 1880, in Geneva, Switzerland Died July 15, 1959, in Portland, Oregon
SCHELOMO: HEBRAIC RHAPSODY [ Work composed: January and February 1916, from sketches made earlier ]
Ernest Bloch began his musical studies in his native Geneva, after which he received a truly international education through studies in Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, and Paris. In 1916, he traveled to the United States to direct music for a touring dance company. The troupe went bust, but he soon landed on a position teaching music theory and composition at the newly founded Mannes College of Music in New York. He moved to Ohio in 1920 to become the founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, and later became director of the San Francisco Conservatory and then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. After his retirement he moved to Agate Beach, a breathtaking spot on the Central Oregon coast, where he lived in considerable seclusion and collected mushrooms, agates, and awards from national music organizations.
Schelomo dates from the moment when Bloch was giving up on a European career and beginning to look across the ocean to America. His daughter, the lutenist Suzanne Bloch, reported that the piece was“ sketched slowly, inspired by the dark and pessimistic passages in the Book of Ecclesiastes:‘ I have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. … Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’” Many years after completing the piece Bloch would write:“ I had no descriptive intention. I was saturated by the Biblical text and conscious of the woes of mankind to which I have always been acutely sensitive. It was much later that I had the idea of psychoanalyzing my work ….” At that point he drafted a written program, largely based on Biblical quotations, but he stressed that this literary description was an afterthought to what had been conceived in purely musical form.“ One may imagine that the voice of the cello is the voice of King Solomon,” Bloch wrote( Solomon being the English equivalent of the Hebrew Schelomo).“ The complex voice of the orchestra is the voice of his age, the world, his experience. There are times when the orchestra seems to reflect his thoughts, just as the cello voices his words.… The rhapsody says,‘ I have tasted all of this … and this too is vanity.’”
Instrumentation: Three flutes( third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, tambourine, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, celesta, two harps, and strings, in addition to the solo cello.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born April 25( old style)/ May 7( new style), 1840, in Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, Russia Died October 25 / November 6, 1893, in St. Petersburg, Russia
SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN E MINOR, OP. 64 [ 1888 ]
In May 1888, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky confessed in a letter to his brother Modest that he feared his imagination had dried up, that he had nothing more to express in music. Still, there was a glimmer of optimism:“ I am hoping to collect, little by little, material for a symphony.” He spent the ensuing months at a vacation home he had built on a forested hillside at Frolovskoye, not far from his home base in Moscow. The idyllic locale apparently played a major role in his managing to complete this symphony in the short span of four months.
Tchaikovsky made a habit of keeping his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, informed about his compositions through detailed letters, and thanks to this ongoing correspondence we have a good deal of information about how the Fifth Symphony progressed that summer.“ I shall work my hardest,” he wrote to her.“ I am exceedingly anxious to prove to myself, as to others, that I am not played out as a composer. Have I told you that I intend to write a symphony? The beginning was difficult, but now inspiration seems to have come. We shall see ….” His missives during those months brim with allusions to the emotional background to this piece, which involved resignation to fate, the designs of providence, murmurs of doubt, and similarly dark thoughts.
Critics blasted the symphony when Tchaikovsky led its premiere, due in part to his limited skill on the podium; and yet the audience was enthusiastic. The work’ s orchestral palette is colorful indeed, despite the fact that the composer employs an essentially Classical orchestra of modest proportions.“ If Beethoven’ s Fifth is Fate knocking at the door,” wrote a commentator when the piece was new,“ Tchaikovsky’ s Fifth is Fate trying to get out.” It nearly does so in a journey that, in the finale, threatens to culminate in a series of climactic B-major chords. But notwithstanding the frequent interruption of audience applause at that point, the adventure continues to a conclusion that is to some extent ambiguous: four closing E-major chords that we may hear as triumphant but may just as easily sound ominous.
Instrumentation: Three flutes( third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.
JAMES M. KELLER served as the longtime program annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, where he recently completed his 25th season. He is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’ s Guide( Oxford University Press).
36 | OVERTURE | BSOmusic. org