The Church: Lecture & Recital w/ Pianist Nana Miyoshi, March 25th, 4 PM

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Three Preludes, George Gershwin

Published in 1926, these delightful works were given their premiere by the composer at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. As short classical pieces inspired by Gershwin’s love of jazz, they remain some of his most beloved compositions almost a century later.

Though he originally intended to compose 24 such preludes, only seven exist in manuscript form, with six receiving public performance, and only the three on this concert being published. Two of those remaining were rearranged for solo violin and piano and published under the title “Short Story.”

Gershwin taught himself to play his first song when he was eleven years old by watching the keys on a player piano. Four years later he dropped out of school and started earning a living making piano rolls for player pianos, and performing in New York clubs. He also worked as a “plugger”; someone who played songs for potential sheet music customers, for the Jerome Remick music publishing company. This not only improved his improvisation skills, but also his playing ability. He published his first song and first piano composition by age seventeen, and Rhapsody in Blue in 1924. By the time he had written Three Preludes he was already internationally famous.

While his combination of ragtime, blues, jazz and classical music would be the elements defining his unique style, during his time the type of chords and scales he used were sometimes considered nothing short of bizarre. The first prelude, marked Allegro ben ritmato e deciso or “fast, well-paced, and decisive” opens with a bluesy type phrase and continues with a Brazilian baião rhythm and beat, thus defining the Latin feel of the music.

The second prelude, described as “a sort of blues lullaby” by Gershwin himself, begins with a pensive and solitary melody played with one hand, before going on to a short middle section that brings in a slightly brighter sound and slipping away quietly toward the end of the work.

The third, marked “Agitato” in some scores, seems to almost bolt out at the listener with a rapid-fire question-and-answer series of melodic phrases which culminate in a kind of definite completion of both the prelude and the three works themselves.

It is also interesting to point out that Gershwin composed these pieces along the same time (1923—1927) that works were being written by composers like Ravel, and Ysaÿe. The diversity of styles demonstrates the vibrant nature of the 1920s, as well as the many individual and groundbreaking musical stamps that were being created.

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Bamboula, Op.2, Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Bamboula, Op. 2, is a fantasy composition for piano written during an outbreak of typhoid fever in the French town of Clermont-sur-l’Oise in the summer of 1848, and dedicated “à sa Majesté Isabelle II, Reine des Espagnes” (to her majesty Isabelle II, Queen of Spain). It is the first of four “Louisiana Creole pieces” that Gottschalk composed between 1848 and 1851.

The term “bamboula” refers to “a kind of vigorous African-based dance with singing and drumming” and is used in this work to recall the street cry of a Louisiana yam vendor. We can certainly hear the drums right from the start of the piece, as they introduce the wonderfully melodious material upon which the work is based.

Achieving great fame as a virtuoso for his touring and performing, Gottschalk was an American pianist and composer born in New Orleans to a wealthy London businessman and Creole mother. Greatly influenced by the music he heard there as a child, most particularly the musical traditions of the Caribbean, he traveled to Europe for study, arriving in Paris as a thirteen-year-old with an array of excellent recommendations, while hoping to study at the prestigious Paris Conservatoire. However, the director Pierre Zimmerman refused to accept him, believing it impossible for any American to be capable of attain musical proficiency, much less greatness.

Nonetheless Gottschalk stayed in Paris, continuing his musical education privately, and studying piano with Camille Stamaty, and composition with Pierre Maleden of Limoges, which gave him a thoroughly professional education, albeit one that lacked the cachet of the Conservatoire. Two of his fellow students were Camille Saint-Saëns and Georges Bizet, both of whom heightened the spirit of competition that went alongside his studies.

Three years later Stamaty thought his student from America ready to face the Parisian musical public, and booked him for a performance at the Salle Pleyel, considered the most luxurious concert hall in the city, with an audience invited by Stamaty that included Frédéric Chopin who, following the concert made his way backstage to be introduced to the American prodigy. “Give me your hand, my boy,” Chopin said. “I predict you will become the king of pianists.”

Gottschalk’s parents, who later traveled to Paris to join him in his new-found celebrity, were delighted with those familiar airs being played in the most sophisticated salons. At the same time, adding to his popularity was their being elevated to a nationalistic level where Gottschalk’s compositions would go on to be compared with the Polish mazurkas of Chopin and the Hungarian rhapsodies of Liszt. “Who does not know ‘Bamboula’?” asked La France Musicale during the height of the Gottschalk rage.

As his fame increased Gottschalk also moved in Parisian literary circles, where he met with Dumas, Hugo, Lamartine, and Gautier. Still, perhaps the greatest sign of triumph came in June 1849 when he was asked to sit with Pierre Zimmermann of the Paris Conservatoire—the same man who once told him to “go back home and build steam engines”—as a judge at their annual concourse for students of the piano. One of the contemporary works selected as a test piece was Gottschalk’s own Bamboula.

The French, (and perhaps Mr. Zimmermann as well), would ultimately ignore Gottschalk’s American background and claim him as their own, as witnessed by the critic Oscar Comettant, who proclaimed “II est Français d’esprit, de coeur, de goût et d’habitudes.” (“He is French in spirit, in heart, in taste and disposition.”

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Impromptu No. 2 in B Minor, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

The term “impromptu” describes a free-form musical composition whose characteristics are those of something being improvised, as if being done in the spirit of the moment. The term and the form itself were first attributed to Johann Baptist Cramer, an Englishman of German descent who enjoyed a worldwide reputation, even performing in Vienna with Beethoven.

While some critics maintain British piano music of the 19th and 20th centuries has very little to distinguish it, particularly compared to works by composers such as Debussy and Ravel, these same critics often cite the works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as being the pleasant exception, and use the Impromptu No. 2 as some of the evidence by which to make their point. Classical music writer Simon Brackenborough maintains this impromptu “has a magical sense of stillness, with an easy melodic grace.”

Coleridge-Taylor is considered a pioneer in classical music and an iconic figure in British musical history. His notable works include Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), The Death of Minnehaha (1899), and Hiawatha’s Departure (1900), all of which received popular acclaim rivaling that of Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The Hiawatha trilogy remains extremely popular among British choirs and orchestras even today.

Coleridge-Taylor was born in London, England to Alice Hare Martin, an English woman, and Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a descendent of slaves from Sierra Leone. He was named after the great English poet Samuel Taylor-Coleridge who by interesting coincidence was a great source of inspiration throughout his lifetime. A mistake in listing the composer’s name in a newspaper caused him to keep the inversion of the hyphenated surname.

Exhibiting a prodigious talent, by 1896 Coleridge-Taylor was gaining such a substantial reputation as a composer that the great English composer Edward Elgar helped him in ways that soon led to a tour of the United States and a performance before President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. As a composer he sought to draw from traditional African music and to incorporate it into the style of his compositions, a fact evident in this particular impromptu, along with slight overtones of spirituals.

Although he died very young, Coleridge-Taylor composed more than eighty works for orchestra, piano, voice, and chamber ensemble.

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Sonata in E Minor, Florence Price

A sonata by definition is a musical composition for solo instrument or chamber ensemble, consisting of two to four movements or sections each in a related key, but with a unique musical character. Interestingly enough, the term is based on the past participle of the Italian verb sonare, “to sound” or “to play,” and was invented to distinguish between works for instruments, and those that took a similar form but were sung, called “cantatas,” from the Italian verb cantare, “to sing.”

Dr. Lia Jensen-Abbott, in writing about this work in her paper “Expressive Meaning in Florence Price’s Piano Sonata” maintains that “Price liberates certain sonata expectations and gives her music a greater lyrical, harmonic, and textural freedom, by interspersing cadenza and vocal episodes throughout the three movements.” Price’s works are often based on spirituals, as well as late Romantic/Impressionistic piano writing.

Florence Beatrice Price, while largely ignored during her lifetime, is now the first noted African American female composer to gain international acclaim. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, her early studies began with her mother, a music teacher. She gave her first piano performance at age four, and had her first composition published when she was eleven. Her Symphony in E Minor, given its debut after winning the overall prize in the Wanamaker Competition (along with this sonata), left the remainder of her more than 300 compositions largely forgotten, being discovered only after her death.

Enrolling in the New England Conservatory in 1902, Price did so as a Mexican to bypass discrimination against African Americans, and listed her hometown as “Pueblo, Mexico”. She graduated in 1906 with honors. It has only been in the past several years that her music has been rediscovered, and is moving toward gaining the place it so rightly merits.

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Nocturne, Op. 6, No. 2, “Soirées musicales”, Clara Schumann

As the word implies, a nocturne is a composition that is either inspired by, or evocative of night, and grew out of the 19th century primarily as a piano piece designed to inspire a particular mood. The form originated with the Irish composer John Field, who published the first set of nocturnes in 1814, and reached its zenith with Chopin, who write nineteen of them.

In Germany the nocturne, or Nachtstück, became popular with composers from Robert Schumann to Paul Hindemeth (Suite for Piano, 1922), and would be transferred successfully to the orchestra by Debussy, and later Bartók.
Clara Schumann has been traditionally celebrated as one of the great pianists of the Romantic Era, known for giving world premières of her husband Robert Schumann’s masterpieces. At the same time she was a fine composer in her own right, and Robert often played this particular work himself, counting it as one of his favorite pieces overall, along with her Toccatina from the same opus.

Until her marriage Clara composed only works for performance at her own concerts, events that were carefully planned by Friedrich Wieck, her teacher-manager-father. Almost all of the 182 programs she gave between 1824 and 1840 boasted at least one work by the young Clara Wieck.

By the time of their marriage however, when Clara was twenty years old, she had already been acclaimed throughout Europe as a phenomenally talented pianist and composer; her admirers included Goethe, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Paganini and Schumann. Liszt declared she had “complete technical mastery, depth and sincerity of feeling.” In 1838 at age eighteen, she was appointed to the Austrian Court as Imperial Chamber-Virtuoso, an honor rarely bestowed on a foreigner, especially one so young. During those early years Clara published a number of compositions for solo piano.

Clara found composing a source of great pleasure, stating numerous times that only a composer could achieve true immortality. Yet she herself had serious doubts about her role as a composer and was more comfortable in the world of the interpretive artist. The ambivalence she displayed was due, in part, to society’s attitude toward women composers, and was certainly influenced by her position as the wife of a creative genius.

Fortunately for us today, her works are receiving a great deal of attention in both performance, and as models for musical analysis and composition pedagogy.

Widmung, Schumann/Liszt

In addition to being a brilliant composer, Franz Liszt proved a great colleague to his fellow composers, often transcribing their music while using his fame to promote works he felt should be more familiar to the public. In doing so he often created works that became masterpieces in their own right, of which this work is a splendid example.

Robert Schumann wrote Widmung or “Dedication” in 1840 based on a poem by Friederick Rückert. It is an impassioned love song and part of a cycle called Myrthen (Myrtles) which he gave his bride Clara as a wedding gift:

Widmung

Friedrich Rückert

Du meine Seele, du mein Herz,
Du meine Wonn’, o du mein Schmerz,
Du meine Welt, in der ich lebe,
Mein Himmel du, darein ich schwebe,
O du mein Grab, in das hinab
Ich ewig meinen Kummer gab!
Du bist die Ruh, du bist der Frieden,
Du bist vom Himmel mir beschieden. Dass du mich liebst, macht mich mir wert, Dein Blick hat mich vor mir verklärt,
Du hebst mich liebend über mich,
Mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich!

Dedication
Translation by Richard Stokes

You my soul, you my heart,
You my rapture, O you my pain,
You my world in which I live,
My heaven you, to which I aspire,
O you my grave, into which
My grief forever I’ve consigned!
You are repose, you are peace,
You are bestowed on me from heaven. Your love for me gives me my worth, Your eyes transfigure me in mine,
You raise me lovingly above myself, My guardian angel, my better self!

Despite the absence of text, Liszt still manages to incorporate all the passion of the poem into this excellent transcription.

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Piano Sonata No.14, in C Sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, Ludwig van Beethoven

Clearly demonstrating Beethoven’s further advance toward Romanticism, this sonata was written in 1801, and had such popularity during Beethoven’s life that he complained to his student and confidant Carl Czerny “Surely I’ve written better things.” Although the term “Moonlight” was not given to the work by Beethoven himself, it has remained associated with it by virtue of the poet and writer Ludwig Rellstab, himself a highly competent pianist, saying in 1825 that it reminded him of moonlight over Lake Lucerne.

There are endless accounts of Beethoven bringing audiences to tears with his performances of this work, though perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that he dedicated it to his pupil Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, long held as a possible recipient of Beethoven’s famous “Immortal Beloved” (Unsterbliche Geliebte) love letter, written on 6–7 July 1812 in Teplitz. The apparently unsent letter was found in the composer’s estate after his death, after which it remained in the hands of Anton Schindler until his passing, was subsequently willed to his sister, and sold by her in 1880 to the Berlin State Library, where it remains today. The letter is written in pencil and consists of three parts.

Since Beethoven specified neither a year, nor a location, an exact dating of the letter and identification of the addressee was speculative until the 1950s, when an analysis of the paper’s watermark yielded the year, and by extension the place. Scholars have since this time been divided on the intended recipient.

The first edition of the score is titled “Sonata quasi una fantasia” a title this work shares with its companion piece, Op. 27, No. 1. Grove Music Online translates the Italian title as “sonata in the manner of a fantasy”. (Directly translated “sonata almost a fantasy”).

Beethoven was living in Vienna when he completed this piece. At this point in his life he had not yet gone completely deaf, but his hearing had begun seriously deteriorating. In fact, the Heiligenstadt Testament (where Beethoven wrote of his realization and grappling with his hearing loss and its permanence) was written the following year in 1802.

Unlike this more Classic form, the Moonlight Sonata is notable for the way the characters of the different movements stray from standard late 18th century/early 19th century classical sonatas.

Rather than having the movements go fast-slow-fast, the work instead ramps up over time, starting with a contemplative opening movement, moving on to the lighter but quicker feel of the second, and ending with a turbulent third movement. (With thanks to Laura Staffaroni.)

Reminiscences de Lucia di Lammemoor-Donizetti/Liszt

Gaetano Donizetti (1797—1848) was a prolific Italian opera composer who wrote completed 65 operas during his career. The Reminiscences of Lucia di Lammermoor is based on the very famous sextet in the opera in which Lucia is forced to marry a man she doesn’t love in order to save her family from financial ruin, even though she has already secretly married Edgardo, the man she truly loves but who is a sworn enemy of the Lammermoors.

Juxtaposed simultaneously in this magnificent work are the laments of the individual characters, separate, and yet all connected by tragedy. Lucia is forced to deny the marriage that has already taken place to her beloved Edgardo; Edgardo in turn, having interrupted Lucia’s wedding to Arturo, her family’s financial savior, questions why he is hesitating to exact justice by killing him. Lucia’s brother, Enrico, wonders why he is not acting more swiftly to kill Edgardo, who had the audacity to disturb the wedding, and possibly the much-needed financial alliance; Alicia, Lucia’s nurse, can only stand idly by and watch how this entire situation is destroying poor Lucia emotionally, while Raimondo, the family priest, is full of compassion for Lucia, and her having to be subjected to this dreadful situation.

The work by Donizetti, considered masterful in its own right, is given even more nuance in the transcript by Liszt taking the theme and amplifying it, using his extraordinary abilities at the piano.

Ballade No. 3 in A-flat Major, Op. 47-Frederic Chopin

Chopin wrote four large scale works that he entitled Ballades, and they are among some of his most demanding and inspired compositions. This one was written in 1841 when the composer was just twenty- one years old. As the title implies, they were undoubtedly inspired by epic narrative poetry, and the work certainly has that scope in terms of breadth, drama, and changes of character and mood. Chopin never revealed the origin of his inspiration for the Ballades. In them, we hear all the aspects that characterize Chopin’s music: soaring expressive melodic lines, harmonic innovation, and a striking sense of emotion.

Chopin first makes mention of this work in a letter to Julian Fontan on October 18, 1841. The ballade was most likely composed during that summer in Nohant, France, where he also finished the Nocturnes, Op. 48, and the Fantaisie in F-minor. Several months later in January of 1842, the first German edition from Breitkopf & Härtel was published.

Having dedicated the work to his pupil Pauline de Noailles (1823—1844), it is believed to have been inspired by the poem Undine by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. One also hears in the work structural similarities with Chopin’s famous Raindrop Prelude, which was inspired by the weather in Mallorca during a vacation with George Sand.

—Notes written by Barry Alexander and Cosmo Buono 

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48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor, NY, 11963

www.thechurchsagharbor.org 

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AAQ / Resource: Stelle Lomont Rouhani Architects

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