Copes Plays Korngold

First SPCO performance: May 20–21, 1986; most recent SPCO performance: May 5–8, 2011. Instrumentation: strings. Approximate duration: 22 minutes.

Shostakovich traveled to Dresden in July 1960 to work on a film called Five Days—Five Nights, commemorating the devastation of the German city during World War II. Once there, however, his muse led him in an unexpected direction. He explained in a letter to a friend, “However much I tried to draft my obligations for the film, I just couldn’t do it. Instead I wrote an ideologically deficient quartet nobody needs. I reflected that if I die some day, then it’s hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on the cover: ‘Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet.’”
This new work, the String Quartet No. 8, emerged from three days of feverish work. It reads like an autobiographical elegy, or even an unfulfilled suicide note, reflecting a period of great personal anguish for the composer. Shostakovich had recently divorced his second wife, and then had been rejected (again) by a former student he was infatuated with, Galina Ustvolskaya. At the same time, his health was deteriorating, with a form of polio gradually robbing him of his ability to play piano and landing him repeatedly in the hospital. In the midst of this turmoil, he bowed to pressure to join the Communist Party, an embarrassment he had previously managed to avoid.
Shostakovich’s central role in his somber quartet is evident from the opening notes. The first four pitches are D–E-flat–C–B, or, in their German spelling, D–S–C–H, signifying the composer’s first initial and last name. This motto theme had appeared in earlier compositions, but in the Eighth Quartet the motive’s lugubrious rise and fall becomes a morbid obsession. The score also quotes other Shostakovich works, with passages referencing the First and Fifth Symphonies and the Second Piano Trio. The work unfolds as a continuous arc of five connected movements, opening and closing in a slow largo tempo and encompassing central episodes of greater urgency and agitation.
The Chamber Symphony for Strings, Op. 110a, is an arrangement for string orchestra of the Eighth Quartet. Russian conductor and violist Rudolf Barshai created this faithful transcription for performances by full string sections, adding another treasure to Shostakovich’s significant catalog of large ensemble works.

First performance: January 26, 1920 in New York. First SPCO performance: November 19, 1973; most recent SPCO performance: November 29–30, 1991. Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, percussion, piano, and strings. Approximate duration: 24 minutes.

Months after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Prokofiev left Russia on an open-ended passport granted by the cultural commissar. With World War I raging to the west, Prokofiev traveled east through Siberia and Tokyo before entering the United States in San Francisco, where he was suspected of being a spy.

Prokofiev struggled to restart his career after settling in New York. One bit of help came in the form of a commission from Zimro, a Russian sextet that had been traveling around the world under the auspices of a Zionist organization. The driving force behind Zimro was the illustrious clarinetist Simeon Bellison, who had played first clarinet in the Imperial Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg and who went on to serve as principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic from 1920 to 1948. Bellison kept a notebook of Jewish folk themes, which he shared with Prokofiev; these motives became the basis of Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, originally scored for clarinet, string quartet, and piano. Prokofiev played the piano part himself at the premiere performance in New York in 1920.

Prokofiev orchestrated the Overture on Hebrew Themes in 1934. He had long since given up on New York, settling in France in 1922. Meanwhile, he renewed ties with the Soviet Union, and made regular visits starting in 1927. His slow circumnavigation was complete in 1936, when he moved his family to Moscow, making him the only major émigré composer to return to the Soviet Union.
The “Hebrew themes” of Prokofiev’s work come from the traditions of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia. The sinuous minor-key melodies and dancing rhythms are typical of klezmer music, as is the prominent role for the clarinet, an instrument that found its way into folk ensembles once Jewish musicians joined Tsarist military bands. The overture ruminates on two main themes: the lively tune first heard in the clarinet, and a slower motive drawn out by the strings over a bubbling accompaniment.

First performance: February 15, 1947 by Jascha Heifetz and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. First SPCO performance: April 24–26, 2003. Instrumentation: solo violin; two flutes second doubling piccolo, two oboes second doubling English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta, and strings.

Erich Korngold, the son of an influential music critic, made an early splash as a child prodigy. By the time he was in his thirties, he was a successful opera composer and teacher in Vienna. For all his European triumphs, he is best remembered for his work as a film composer, which began in 1934 when Max Reinhardt, the Austrian director, invited Korngold to Hollywood to adapt Mendelssohn’s music for a new film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For four years, Korngold shuttled between Vienna and Hollywood, composing scores for such films as Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), which both won Academy Awards for best score. Drawing on his operatic background, Korngold reshaped the art of film scoring by applying the principle of leitmotif, wherein memorable snippets of music accompanied particular characters or ideas. 

Korngold was in California when the Nazis annexed and occupied Austria in 1938. From then on he made Hollywood his home, taking American citizenship in 1943. He ceased composing “serious” music for the duration of the war, although he continued to produce film scores. In the spring of 1945, he finally acquiesced to his friend Bronislaw Hubermann, who had been urging Korngold to write him a violin concerto. The work stalled after a young violinist gave a disastrous reading of a draft, leaving Korngold to wonder if the violin part was too difficult; meanwhile, Hubermann balked on scheduling a premiere, hedging until he could see a finished score. The impasse broke when Jascha Heifetz’s manager learned of the situation, and arranged for his star violinist to look over the concerto. Heifetz loved it, and actually encouraged Korngold to make the solo part more virtuosic. Korngold soon finished the work, and Heifetz gave the premiere performance in St. Louis. Heifetz’s many subsequent performances, plus his 1953 recording, helped establish Korngold’s concerto as standard repertoire for violinists.

The Violin Concerto exhibits the same Romantic grandeur as Korngold’s film scores; in fact, it borrows most of its main themes from the movies. In the first movement, the alluring opening melody—with the soloist entering right away, as in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto—comes from the film Another Dawn (1937). A poignant secondary theme originated in the Juaréz (1939). The middle movement, a Romanze, takes its main theme from Korngold’s Oscar-winning score to Anthony Adverse. The finale’s musical material, from The Prince and the Pauper (1937), affords ample opportunities for the violinist to weave sprightly filigree among the melodic statements.