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Siete qui: Home Festival Festival 2011 From music “composed to a program” to the purity of language in dissolution
From music “composed to a program” to the purity of language in dissolution PDF Print E-mail
It was in 1908 that Webern composed the Passacaglia per grande orchestra which was subsequently assigned No.1 in his basic catalogue. It was about then that he finished his four-year study period with Arnold Schönberg, and it was this seductive orchestral work – with a “conventional” full orchestra that he never used again – that marked the point when his youthful experiences fused with his final detachment from the late Romantic musical world, affirming his independent personality, about to take the path of radical linguistic horizons.
The Passacaglia is structured as 23 variations on an eight-note theme, with an ample conclusive section developing and ducking back freely. But while his adoption of the rigorous 18th century form is an explicit homage to Brahms’s grand final passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony, the originality of Webern’s work loses nothing from Schönberg’s influences or the extreme, sensual tensions of the tonal lexicon (which moves through some surprising “vertical” experiments, but remains firmly in D minor at the start and finish, and D major in the middle); this is clearly traceable to Mahler’s late symphonies. It already fosters the seeds of that microcosm of crystalline, aphoristic austerity that eventually marked the unmistakable authentic stylistic physiognomy of the composer. His biographer Hans Moldenhauer notes: «his chamber-music use of the instruments, with economy and transparency despite the large orchestra, counterpoint invention with rich thematic transformation, ample use of triplets, subdued dynamics, and – finally – silence as a structural element».
Les préludes, performed for the first time in Weimar in 1854, is the third and best-known of Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems. Like all his symphonic works, it resulted from his need to compose music “to a program” , i.e. inspired by a literary text or some other extra-musical stimulus. The tone poems were an idea of Liszt’s, responding to his lifelong innermost need to achieve an absolute ideal of “poetic-literary” music. He considered this the highest possible expression of artistic independence. In this case the association of Les préludes with the piece of the same name by Alphonse de Lamartine in 1823 (part of the collection Nouvelles méditations poétiques) was in fact an adaptation, as Liszt had actually written it in 1844-1848, well before the first performance. It was the overture to an opera for male chorus and piano, entitled Les quatre éléments, on a text by the Provençal poet Joseph Autran. This is why, as the music was rearranged substantially to make it a symphonic composition on its own, the connection with the poet’s verses is remote, mostly involving a broad conflict between feelings of love and death. This seems odd since Liszt’s own words – or perhaps those of Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, his admirer and lover – paraphrasing Lamartine in the program notes at the first performance, ask: «What is life if not a series of preludes to an unknown hymn, whose first solemn note is sung by Death?». Les préludes thus depicts mankind’s battle for existence, in its continual transformation of the basic thematic material, remodelled in fresh motives each time through the various episodes of the poem; it alternates moments of passionate excitement with pastoral, martial or stormy interludes, but the imposing concluding section celebrates the heroic and vital triumph of Destiny, in a spirit of exalted affirmation.
With strikingly similar intentions, Tchaikovsky claims that his Symphony no. 4 was inspired by «reflection on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony». However, he was referring not so much to the language as to the pervasive central theme “of Fate” which in Op. 36 breaks in unexpectedly with a tragic introductory fanfare in F minor on the horns and trumpets; it then cycles obsessively back to the basic formal nodes of the first and last movements.
Here again, therefore, we have an explicit reference to the tragic destiny that overshadows us all, like «an invincible sword of Damocles… constantly preventing us being happy… a sort of implacable poison for the soul». Tchaikovsky expressed himself in these terms in a letter to Nadezhda von Meck, to whom the work was dedicated («A mon meilleur ami»), a benefactor who supported and encouraged him in a lengthy exchange of letters betraying deep spiritual affinity.
The Symphony, terminated in 1878 after a stressful year of work, reveals the literature program that inspired it, while the complex prolongation of the first movement – which lasts almost as long as the other three together, leading some critics at the time to consider it a piece on its own – seems to reflect an expressive intention unrelated to the classic tradition, and closer to the symphonic poem. Tchaikovsky’s exuberant poetic force often uses direct, frequently brutal emotional language, cresting his wave of creative energy with its shifting nuances and hallucinating inventions, where the palpable deflagration of inner conflict sometimes results in grotesque, auto-ironic deformation.

Federico Scoponi