Location: Morris Performing Arts Center (574) 235-9190

Morton Gould
Cheers! A Celebration March

Morton Gould was born in Richmond Hill, New York in 1913 and died in Orlando, Florida in 1996. He composed this march on a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra to commemorate Arthur Fiedler’s fiftieth season as conductor of the Boston Pops. Fiedler led the first performance with the Boston Pops in 1979. The score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

Morton Gould was a household name to American music lovers for much of the twentieth century. He began his career during the Depression, playing piano in movie theaters and for vaudeville, eventually becoming a staff pianist for the newly-opened Radio City Music Hall. He went on to conduct and arrange programs for WOR radio in New York, programs we now recognize as “pops”—a blend of light classics and popular music. In the 1940s Gould became music director for “The Chrysler Hour” and “Cresta Blanca Carnival” radio programs. He also composed Broadway musicals, including Billion Dollar Baby and Arms and the Girl, as well as composing film and television soundtracks

Though he will forever be remembered for his contribution to pops-style music, Gould was also a prodigious composer of classical music. His long list of works includes five symphonies, several concertos, piano sonatas, chamber music, and several settings of traditional American songs such as Foster Gallery and American Ballads. He conducted orchestras all over the world, served as the president of ASCAP, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received a Grammy Award for his recording of Charles Ives’ First Symphony, and the Pulitzer Prize for StringMusic.

Who better, then, to celebrate in music the fiftieth anniversary of Arthur Fiedler’s tenure with the Boston Pops? Cheers! A Celebration March is lively, spirited, outrageously colorful, and grand (but not grandiose) at the end. There are a couple of good-natured pokes in the ribs thrown in for good measure as well, such as the entire first section being built around the interval A-F—for Arthur Fiedler, of course!

Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto for Piano & Orchestra No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73, “Emperor”

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827. He composed this work in 1809, and it was first performed in 1811 by Friedrich Schneider with the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, Johann Schulz conducting. The name “Emperor” didn’t come from Beethoven; there are conflicting theories about how the concerto acquired it. The work is scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.

Had Beethoven known that one day his Fifth Piano Concerto would be known as the “Emperor,” he would not have been amused. In 1809, while Beethoven was composing the work, Vienna was being attacked and later occupied by Napoleon’s troops. At one point Beethoven had to take refuge in his brother’s basement: “The whole course of events has affected me body and soul. What a disturbing, wild life around me! Nothing but drums, cannon, men, misery of all sorts!”

Years previously, Beethoven had felt an affinity between himself and Napoleon, a self-made man of professed republican intentions; he even wrote his Third Symphony with Napoleon in mind. But when the Frenchman proclaimed himself emperor and set a course for world domination, Beethoven reacted bitterly: “Now he, too, will trample on all the rights of Man and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” Beethoven so violently scratched out Napoleon’s name on the symphony’s dedication page that he went right through the paper. Under the circumstances, “Emperor” was the last title Beethoven might have chosen for a work composed while under attack.

Beethoven never wrote an ordinary concerto: there’s something unusual around every corner. While most concertos lay out the themes in the orchestra before the soloist enters, here the piano launches right in, only to fall silent. This deceit creates a certain tension about when it will re-enter. Later, at the place where we expect a to hear a cadenza, Beethoven specifically forbids one, instructing the soloist to push on.

The theme-and-variations second movement begins in the unexpected key of  B-major, about as far removed from E-flat as can be. Its ending is pure genius. The piano ruminates, inventing a new melody note-by-note; it keeps adding notes until it achieves the opening theme of the Finale, which follows without pause.

This Rondo is an astonishing dissertation on the use of form. The first episode of the rondo is in fact a sonataform; the second episode is itself a miniature rondo. You might only hear these forms-within-forms and compositional devices if you deliberately listen for them, but they create a finely crafted, multi-layered cohesiveness—and music that sounds utterly fresh and spontaneous.

This remarkable concerto was Beethoven’s last, even though he would live a further eighteen years.  The piano concertos had been vehicles for his own prodigious pianism, but by this time he had grown too deaf to perform. Despite the cruel irony of his affliction and the frightening scenes around him, Beethoven left us a magnificent work of noble spirit and profound affirmation.

Igor Stravinsky
Petrouchka

Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum, Russia in 1882 and died in New York City in 1971. He completed his ballet Petrouchka in 1911, and it was first performed the same year by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris under the direction of Pierre Monteux. Stravinsky revised the orchestration several times; the version heard tonight was his last revision, done in 1947. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, celeste, piano, and strings.

In nearly every culture that has had a tradition of puppetry there have also been legends, myths and fairy tales about puppets brought to life. Pierrot for the French, Punch for the British, Pinocchio for the Italians and Petrouchka for the Russians—all are characters whose straw and sawdust turn miraculously into flesh and blood. For Stravinsky, Petrouchka was “the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair.”After the huge success of The Firebird, Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev (director of the Ballet Russe) planned to collaborate again on a ballet based on pagan rituals—The Rite of Spring. In the meantime Stravinsky sought to “refresh” himself by composing a concert piece with a prominent piano part, motivated by the idea of a puppet brought to life. When Diaghilev heard what Stravinsky had composed, he instantly saw its dramatic potential and persuaded Stravinsky to develop his ideas into a large-scale ballet called Petrouchka.

The first scene depicts a fair in Admiralty Square in Saint Petersburg. People of all classes—some sober, some not—are seen browsing among the many stalls and entertainments. The bustling music may be heard to stop and, like a zoom lens, focus on one hurdy-gurdy player, then another. The Puppet-Master draws open the curtain of his theater to reveal his three puppets: Petrouchka, a Ballerina, and a Moor. He plays his flute, charming them into life, whereupon they perform a vigorous Russian dance.

Scene two opens with Petrouchka in his tiny cardboard room. The dissonant theme in the clarinets is his anguished cry—he is disgusted at his grotesque appearance and his dependency on the Puppet-Master. When the Ballerina enters, he falls in love with her. When she rejects him, he erupts in rage.

In scene three we find the Moor dancing about his opulent room. The Ballerina enters (trumpet solo) and she and the Moor dance to a purposely banal waltz. Petrouchka tries to intrude, but is kicked out.

Scene four depicts the fair, this time at night. Among other things we hear a group of dancing nursemaids and a peasant leading a performing bear, brilliantly scored for tuba solo. Petrouchka enters, pursued by the Moor; after a chase the Moor slays Petrouchka with his scimitar. The Puppet-Master reassures the onlookers that Petrouchka was, after all, only a puppet. But as he drags the body off-stage, Petrouchka’s ghost appears above the puppet theater, jeering one last time at the Puppet-Master and—it seems—the whole world. The music fades quickly and quietly, almost like a question.

Where The Firebird is commonly described as late-romantic, Petrouchka presents a much more harsh and dissonant musical idiom. Stravinsky accentuates the stridency in the fair scenes by interspersing literal quotes from dance-hall tunes and Russian folk songs; the contrast is telling. Petrouchka’s jeering theme—mournful in the second scene, terrifying at the end—is bi-tonal. That is, it is simultaneously in two different keys; in this case, C major and F-sharp major, as distant as two keys can be. Thus Stravinsky’s two-sided theme expresses the two sides of Petrouchka: a puppet of wood and straw, and a living, feeling being. The appearance of Petrouchka’s apparition after his death suggests that the puppet was not only alive, but had a soul; with the mysterious ending that remains unresolved, the question is left hanging.