Mozart, Falla and Ligeti

First performance: May 1, 1786 in Vienna, conducted by the composer. First SPCO performance: October 30–November 1, 1980; most recent SPCO performance: May 27–29, 2010. Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. Approximate duration: 4 minutes.

The Marriage of Figaro was the first of Mozart’s three collaborations with the Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, who also scripted Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. It was possibly Mozart’s idea to borrow the scenario from a 1778 French play by Pierre Beaumarchais, a sequel to his earlier hit, The Barber of Seville (later immortalized in Rossini’s 1816 opera). The farce was banned in Vienna at the time for its sarcastic condemnation of the aristocracy, and da Ponte had to scrub the work of its political overtones to gain the emperor’s approval. 

The Marriage of Figaro transpires over the course of “one crazy day.” Figaro, the head servant to Count Almaviva, is due to wed the maid Susanna, who meanwhile has been subjected to the Count’s lecherous advances. In the end, the Count gets his comeuppance, and Figaro and Susanna marry. Although the music of the overture has no major presence later in the opera, it sets the scene for the hilarity that ensues. The overture’s form is quite lean, with neither a repeat of the exposition nor a development section. The frenetic Presto tempo and persistent eighth-notes give the prelude a breathless feeling throughout its four-minute sprint, while rising figures and drawn-out crescendos establish the buoyant tone of the opera.

First performance of the final version: June 9, 1993, by Saschko Gawriloff and Ensemble InterContemporain, conducted by Pierre Boulez. First SPCO performance: these concerts. Instrumentation: two flutes doubling recorder, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, several winds doubling ocarina, two horns, trumpet, timpani, and strings. Approximate duration: 28 minutes.

In a generation of composers best known for rigorous orthodoxy, György Ligeti was a trendsetter and a free spirit. He studied from 1945 to 1949 at Budapest’s Academy of Music, and his early compositions followed Bartók and Kodály in their explorations of folk materials. Ligeti fled Hungary after the Soviet invasion in 1956, and he discovered musical life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Like many of his peers, he was drawn to the focused twelve-tone music of Webern, but he never fully embraced the total serialism espoused by Boulez and others. In the 1960s, Ligeti developed a signature style of “micropolyphony” in such scores as Atmosphères (1961), Requiem (1963–5), and Lux aeterna (1966), works that achieved special acclaim after appearing in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti developed a fantastical world of his own in the 1977 opera Le Grand Macabre, an ironic masterpiece that has been produced more than thirty times. His style continued to evolve, shaped by his diverse appetite for music that ranged from the player piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow to traditional music from the Caribbean and Africa. Starting in the 1980s, many of Ligeti’s works reinvigorated old forms, including a book of Etudes for piano (1985) and a Piano Concerto (1988).

Ligeti composed the Violin Concerto in several stages between 1989 and 1993. The first version premiered in 1990 with three movements; Ligeti then replaced the first movement and added two more in 1992. He revised it once more before the 1993 premiere of the work in its current form. The concerto is dedicated to the German violinist Saschko Gawriloff, who gave the premiere performance with the Ensemble InterContemporain.

In the concerto’s opening Praeludium, the music melts from pure consonance to alien sonorities, colored by a detuned violin and viola in the orchestra. A melody pops out of the solo violin’s angular figures with percussive reinforcement, and the prelude continues as a dizzy whir of textures. The second movement references three more historical forms: Aria, Hoquetus, and Choral. The violin’s folk-like melody is a reminder of Ligeti’s Hungarian roots, but the introduction of breathy ocarinas and horns playing only natural harmonics (including notes that are naturally out of tune) generates an exotic, unsettling tension. Next come a fluid and ghostly Intermezzo, then a Passacaglia, another reference to antique musical structures. Traditionally, a repeating “ground bass” plays throughout the Passacaglia form; in Ligeti’s conception, a rising chromatic line fulfills a similar, grounding function. The final movement traverses violent outbursts and chaotic juxtapositions, culminating in a solo cadenza that Ligeti chose to leave open, as in eras past. (Gawriloff notated a cadenza based on discarded snippets of Ligeti’s writing, and the American composer John Zorn developed another cadenza for the violinist Jennifer Koh.) The free cadenza is a fitting way to end this singular concerto, which, for all its progressive qualities, maintains a virtuosic flair akin to the greatest of the Romantic concertos.

First performance: May 22, 1925 in Paris, conducted by the composer. First SPCO performance: February 11–12, 1993; most recent SPCO performance: May 5–7, 2005. Instrumentation: solo mezzo-soprano; two flutes second doubling piccolo, oboe doubling English horn, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, piano and strings. Approximate duration: 25 minutes.

Manuel de Falla was born in the port town of Cádiz in southwestern Spain, an area with rich Moorish and Gypsy legacies. He first studied piano with his mother, and later enrolled at the Madrid Conservatory. Early piano works and zarzuelas (a type of Spanish musical theater) failed to distinguish Falla, and no company would mount his prize-winning opera La vida breve. Fed up with his homeland, he moved in 1907 to Paris, where he circulated with Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas and adopted a touch of French impressionism in his musical language. At the same time, French interest in Spanish folk music, seen in such works as Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole (1907–8) and Debussy’s Iberia (1905–10), encouraged Falla to explore his own native roots.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Falla returned to Spain and enjoyed the triumph of the long-overdue Madrid premiere of La vida breve. A few months later, he began El amor brujo (Love, the Magician), a gypsy-themed blend of song, dance, and theater featuring the talents of Pastora Imperio, a star flamenco dancer. Using a libretto credited to the theater impresario Gregorio Martínez Sierra (more likely ghost-written by Sierra’s wife, María Lejárraga), Falla crafted gypsy-inspired songs and dance episodes to tell the story of Candelas, a girl haunted by the ghost of her dead lover. The original 1915 production, starring Imperio and her family with a small accompanying chamber ensemble, received mixed reviews, and Falla revised El amor brujo the following year, excising spoken dialogue and reworking the score for full orchestra. He revisited the work again in 1925, creating a one-act ballet suite with songs for mezzo-soprano, the version commonly performed today.

El amor brujo opens with a fanfare-like proclamation from a muted trumpet, its piercing clarity reinforced by high woodwinds and piano. The scene fades to a cave at night, with trembling, ominous music. The vocal soloist first appears in The Song of the Broken Heart, composed in a gut-wrenching style that recalls the cante jondo (“deep song”) tradition of Flamenco music. The appearance of The Apparition—the ghost of the gypsy girl’s dead lover—leads to the Dance of Terror, with its stuttering main theme.

The tender calm of The Magic Circle: Romance of the Fisherman breaks with the tolling of the clock At Midnight, heralding the ballet’s most famous number. The Ritual Fire Dance, with its sinuous themes and thumping rhythms, is meant “to drive away the evil spirits.” A short scene with florid oboe and flute melodies sets up the next vocal selection, the Song of the Will-o’-the-Wisp. The song compares love to that mysterious phenomenon—known in Spanish as “fuego fatuo,” or foolish fire—that seems to follow its observer and then disappear when approached. The Pantomime brings back the music of the introduction, pairing it with a romantic melody in an off-kilter 7/8 meter. The Flamenco strain returns in the Dance of the Game of Love, and then the scene brightens with the sound of The Bells of Dawn, cheered on by the singer’s exclamation that “happiness is returning!”