Three distinct genres and three generations of modernism are
represented on this program of masterworks for the violin.
Chronologically, the First Violin Concerto of Sergei Sergei-
vich Prokofiev (1891-1953) marks a vital turning point in
the composer’s creative career and, for that matter, in the
history of the world. For the score was completed during a
solitary sojourn at a country retreat near Petrograd (formerly
St. Petersburg, now Leningrad) in the fateful summer of 1917
—even as that city was being readied for a political trauma
from the consequences of which this planet is still reverberating
a half-century later.
Because the next chapter of the composer's life story includes
much about America, and also because it is taken as patent
that the overthrow of Czarism was crucial in Prokofiev's
development, it would not be untoward to review briefly the
influences to which he was subject between the twilight of the
Romanov dynasty and 1923, when the Op. 19 received its
belated premiere. They were mostly geographical and not at all
dialectical, whatever was to be the effect of Marxism on his
subsequent aesthetic persuasion. In his autobiography he states
flatly that “I had not the slightest idea of the scope and
significance of the October Revolution.”
What he did know about, soon enough, was that “Russia
had no use for music at the moment,” and so he wanted to go
away: “The previous summer I had met an American named
McCormick (of the reaper family) .. . and on leaving he had
said, ‘If ever you wish to come to America, wire me’. . . hence
the idea of going to America took root in my mind... in
America I might learn a great deal and interest people in my
music at the same time.” The more he thought about this
prospect the more he liked it.
it happened that A. V. Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of
Education, attended the Petrograd premiere of the Classical
Symphony on the following April 21st (1918) and was much
impressed. Introduced to him on that occasion, Prokofiev at once
brought up his desire to relocate. The functionary replied: “You
are a revolutionary in music; we are revolutionaries in life. We
ought to work together. But.if you want to go to America I
shall not stand in your way.”
Whereupon the government machinery was set in motion,
and shortly the composer received word that he was being
sent abroad in connection with “matters pertaining to art.”
He departed Vladivostok the next month for Yokohama and
proceeded thence to Honolulu, San Francisco, and finally New
York, where he gave a piano recital that fall in Aeolian Hall.
The critics properly esteemed him a “titan” as a performer, but
found his works “savage,” “furious,” and “weird.”
Prokofiev spent the three post-Armistice years in the United
States, concertizing widely but winning little approval for his
music. Only in Chicago, where he introduced the Third Piano
Concerto and supervised the initial production of The Love
for Three Oranges, was it accepted at anything like its real
value. In the spring of 1922 he gave up and removed to
Europe, eventually to settle in Paris for a decade.
It was there, on October 18th, 1923, that Koussevitzky con-
ducted the premiere of his First Violin Concerto, with Marcel
Darrieux as the soloist. It has been in the international standard
repertoire uninterruptedly ever since.
In decided contrast to the products of Prokofiev's enfant
terrible yeats at the (then) St. Petersburg Conservatory and his
postgraduate regimen (1909-14) with the celebrated piano
pedagogue Annette Essipova, the Op. 19 is uniquely devoid of
bravura. (The composer himself remarks on his “softening of
temper” about 1915, when the Violin Concerto had its genesis
as a sketch for a Concertino.) Moreover, it is not in any way a
contest in the usual concerto fashion. The writing is really
symphonic, with the continuous figuration of the solo instrument
always complementing the orchestral texture. The violin enters
contemplatively, later takes to running patterns of sixteenth
and thirty-second notes, finally returns to the opening mood.
The Vivacissimo schetzo confronts it with a mercurial sequence
of accented rhythms, taxing intervallic jumps, and slides on
double stops resulting in double harmonics, The lyric Moderato
finale asks the soloist to cope with a theme comprising staccato
and sustained phrases. After the climax there is a reversion to
the very opening Andantino melody (marked sognando —
“dreamily”), and at length a series of altitudinous trills through
which the violin soars to a haunting high D.
Perhaps “discreet” is the word that best describes the art
of Ernest Amedee Chausson (1855-1899). Its essence was a
unique way of conveying passions so subtly that they seem to
be genteel. To put it otherwise, his music embodied even as his
own life did the most careful deployment of considerable re-
sources. Born into a wealthy Parisian family, he metamorphosed
rapidly from a stereotyped little rich boy into a sophisticated
young aristocrat of idealistic, not to say democratic, tendencies.
Because his parents wanted him to become a barrister, befitting
his station, he dutifully matriculated in law. If there were any
latent predisposition to music it was well suppressed; Chausson
actually completed his legal studies and won admission to the
bar. Only then did he consider a career in music, In 1880, at
the age of twenty-five, he overcame his indecision and entered
the Conservatoire as a regular student.
Chausson showed courage in responding thus to his innermost
impulses. True, he was not a poor man; the bold new direction
posed no financial problems whatever. All the same, it was
surely a seven-league step for this scion of the landed gentry,
already married and a father, to turn his back on the mores
of his class. Nor did he renege, once under way. From the Con-
servatoire he went to Cesar Franck as a private pupil, and
worked diligently under his tutelage for three years. Chausson
was to die at forty-four, but what he accomplished in something
under two decades was neither too little nor too late to earn
posterity’s affection. As a catalyst, his tactful subsidy of co-
professionals exerted the happiest influence on the musical
scene of his time. As an unashamed promoter of music in high
places, he was able to further this and that worth-while cause
as only a knowledgeable man of affairs could.
As to his own music, Chausson unquestionably enjoyed the
most spontaneous melodic gift among the disciples in the
Franck entourage. And he was, in fact, essentially a lyricist—
it would be defensible to categorize him as a kind of latter-day
and only slightly less prolific Schubert. There is a vein of
sadness in everything he wrote which was doubtless a mirror
of his own secret melancholy, but his fey sentiment nowhere
sank to empty sentimentality, and his chronic self-abnegation
had none of its earlier morbidity when he composed the
exquisite Poeme in 1896.
Balletomanes will need no introduction to this music because
they know it as the backdrop for Antony Tudor’s highly suc-
cessful Jardin aux lilas — since 1936 a staple of the repertoire
and therefore by definition a classic in this most ephemeral of
the arts. Those who have not encountered this piece in the
theater, however, probably will not have encountered it in the
concert hall, either, because it is by no means a “vehicle” in
the usual sense for all its difficulties of execution. Nor is it
quite the intimate expression implied by its title. Simply stated,
the Poeme is a free-wheeling rhapsody for the violin, with just
enough ritornel to hold the line while the solo instrument
glides aloft on flights of romantic fancy, and its strength lies
not in form but in communication. In the hands of a sensitive
virtuoso this music can “speak” with a tenderness and an
eloquence of almost frightening verisimilitude.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was not a violinist and neither
was he a Gypsy, but his Tzigane is both violinistic in the
extreme and an impeccable stylization of Magyar elements. It
was introduced in 1924 by the Hungarian virtuoso Yelly
d’Aranyi, grandniece of the celebrated Joseph Joachim, and the
score bears a dedication to her. Ravel's assimilation and re-
creation of the Gypsy essence may not fool the ethno-
musicologist familiar with all of the indigenous sources, but this
piece is certainly an impressive demonstration of his genius for
subsuming even the most exotic modes of expression. And for
any virtuoso merely to get through this awesomely demanding
music without mishap is bound to be an impressive demonstra-
tion of the performer's artistry. Few attempt it, and fewer still
can make Ravel’s tour de force their own.
Notes by JAMES LYONS
Editor, The American Record Guide
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