Repertoire & Program Notes

TCHAIKOVSKY Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
TCHAIKOVSKY Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 33
DVOŘÁK Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda​:

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) | Romeo and Juliet, Fantasy-Overture

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, Russia and died on November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg. Romeo and Juliet was composed during the last months of 1869, and extensively revised the following year. Nikolai Rubinstein conducted the Russian Musical Society Orchestra in the premiere, in Moscow on March 16, 1870. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo and English horn, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Duration is about 19 minutes. The piece was last performed on January 15-17, 2010, with Jeffrey Kahane conducting the orchestra.

Romeo and Juliet was written when Tchaikovsky was 29. It was his first masterpiece. For a decade he had been involved with the intense financial, personal and artistic struggles that mark the maturing years of most creative figures. Advice and guidance often flowed his way during that time, and one who dispensed it freely to anyone who would listen was Mili Balakirev, one of the group of amateur composers known in English as "The Five" (and in Russian as "The Mighty Handful") who sought to create a nationalistic music specifically Russian in style. In May 1869, Balakirev suggested to Tchaikovsky that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet would be an appropriate subject for a musical composition, and he even offered the young composer a detailed program and an outline for the form of the piece. Tchaikovsky took the advice to heart, and he consulted closely with Balakirev during the composition of the work.

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet is among the most successful reconciliations in the orchestral repertory of a specific literary program with the requirements of logical musical structure. The work is in carefully constructed sonata form, with introduction and coda. The slow opening section, in chorale style, depicts Friar Lawrence. The exposition (Allegro giusto) begins with a vigorous, syncopated theme evoking the conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets. The melee subsides and a lyrical theme (used here as a contrasting second subject) is sung by the English horn to represent Romeo's passion; a tender, sighing phrase for muted violins suggests Juliet's response. A stormy development section utilizing the driving main theme and music from the introduction denotes the continuing feud between the families and Friar Lawrence's urgent pleas for peace. The crest of the fight ushers in the recapitulation, which is a considerably compressed version of the exposition. Juliet's sighs again provoke the ardor of Romeo, whose motive is given a grand setting that marks the work's emotional high point. The tempo slows, the mood darkens, and the coda emerges with the sense of impending doom. The themes of the conflict and of Friar Lawrence's entreaties sound again, but a funereal drum beats out the cadence of the lovers' fatal pact. Romeo's motto appears for a final time in a poignant transformation before the closing woodwind chords evoke visions of the flight to celestial regions.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky | Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 33

Tchaikovsky composed his Rococo Variations in December 1876 for Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, a fellow professor of cello at the Moscow Conservatory. Fitzenhagen gave the work's premiere on November 30, 1877 in Moscow. The score calls for pairs of woodwinds, two horns, and strings. Duration is about 17 minutes. Alban Gerhardt was the soloist and Joana Carneiro conducted when the Variations were last performed on April 20 & 21, 2012.

Tchaikovsky was far from happy with his teaching duties at the Moscow Conservatory, which left him less time for composing than he wished. One of the positive aspects of the job, however, was that he was able to meet some fine musicians in the course of his work, one of whom was the sonorously named German professor of cello at the school, Wilhelm Carl Friedrich Fitzenhagen. Fitzenhagen, like Tchaikovsky, was rather shy and introverted, and a nice friendship sprang up between them; it was for Fitzenhagen that Tchaikovsky composed his Rococo Variations.

The style of the Rococo Variations may be traced to Tchaikovsky's reverence for Mozart, whom he called "the greatest of all composers" and even "the Christ of music." This is a work of deliberate grace, charm, and elegance that plumbs no great emotional depths nor reveals any of those melancholy corners of Tchaikovsky's soul that were to be exposed in the Fourth Symphony, composed only a few months later. "The Variations," according to Edward Garden, "were from a world of happy make-believe where the frustrations and terrors of the present existence could be forgotten for a time in the contemplation of the past."

The theme of the Variations, original with Tchaikovsky, is prefaced by a subdued introduction. After a brief, vaguely Oriental interlude for double reeds that looks forward to the nationality dances in The Nutcracker, the cello presents the first of the seven variations. The opening two variations are decorated versions of the theme, each ending with a strain for double reeds. Variation 3 presents a long-breathed cantabile in a new key and tempo. The fourth variation resumes the earlier tempo, and includes some dazzling, airborne scale passages that exploit fully the tone, agility, and range of the solo instrument. The next variation allots the cello a trilled accompaniment to the theme, played by the flute; a cadenza closes this section. The penultimate variation slips into a minor mode that both balances the preceding tonalities and creates a good foil to the virtuosic closing variation that immediately follows.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) | Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70

Antonín Dvořák was born on September 8, 1841 in Nelahozeves, Bohemia and died on May 1, 1904 in Prague. He began the D minor Symphony on December 13, 1884 and dated the completed score on March 17th of the following year. It was premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra on April 22, 1885 under the composer's direction. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs (with the 2nd flute doubling piccolo), four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 36 minutes. Peter Oundjian conducted the last performance of the work on January 31, February 1 & 2, 2014.

When Dvořák attended the premiere of the Third Symphony of his friend and mentor Johannes Brahms on December 2, 1883, he was already familiar with the work from a preview Brahms had given him at the piano shortly before. The effect on Dvořák of Brahms' magnificent creation, with its inexorable formal logic and its powerful shifting moods, was profound. Dvořák considered it, quite simply, the greatest symphony of the time, and it served as one of the two emotional seeds from which his D minor Symphony grew. The other, which followed less than two weeks after the premiere of the Third Symphony, was the death of his mother.

Brahms not only encouraged Dvořák in his work, but also convinced his publisher, Simrock, to take on the music of the once little-known Czech composer. Dvořák always respected and was grateful to his benefactor, and when Brahms' Third Symphony appeared he looked upon it as a challenge presented to him to put forth a surpassing effort in his next work in the form. With Brahms' Symphony as the inspiration, and his grief at his mother's passing as the soul, the idea of a new symphony grew within him. He poured some of his sadness into the Piano Trio in F minor, Op. 65, composed early in 1884, but the spark that ignited the actual composition of the Seventh Symphony was not struck until the following summer. Dvořák had been garnering an international success with his music during the preceding years, and his popularity was especially strong in England. As one of the stops on his busy conducting tours through northern Europe, he visited Britain for the first time in the spring of 1884, and on June 13th he was elected an honorary member of the London Philharmonic Society and simultaneously requested to provide a new symphony for that organization. It gave him the reason to put the gestating Symphony to paper. Following another English foray in the fall that was even more successful than the earlier one, he set to work on the Symphony in December.

With thoughts of his mother still fresh in his mind and the example of Brahms always before him ("It must be something respectable for I don't want to let Brahms down," he wrote to Simrock), Dvořák determined to compose a work that would solidify his international reputation and be worthy of those who inspired it. In his study of the composer's work, Otakar Šourek wrote, "Dvořák worked at the D minor Symphony with passionate concentration and in the conscious endeavor to create a work of noble proportions and content, which should surpass not only what he had so far produced in the field of symphonic composition, but which was also designed to occupy an important place in world music." On December 22nd, Dvořák wrote to his friend Antonín Rus, "I am now busy with the new Symphony (for London) and wherever I go I have no thought for anything but my work, which must be such as to move the world — well, God grant that it may be so!" He was so pleased with progress on the piece, even during the busy holiday season, that on New Year's Eve he told another friend, Alois Göbl, "I am again as happy and contented in my work as I have always been up to now and, God grant, I always shall be." The orchestration was undertaken during the winter and the score finished in March, only a month before its premiere in London.

The Seventh Symphony begins with an ominous rumble deep in the basses. The haunting main theme is introduced by the violas and cellos, then echoed by the clarinets. Almost immediately, the possibilities for development built into the theme are explored, and the music rapidly grows in intensity until a climax is achieved when the main theme bursts forth in dark splendor from the full orchestra. The tension subsides to allow the flute and clarinet to present the lyrical second theme. The development, woven from the thematic components of the exposition, is compact and concentrated. The recapitulation is swept in on an enormous wave of sound that is capped by the re-entry of the timpani. The main theme is abandoned quickly, and the reprise of the flowing second theme is entrusted to two clarinets in a rich setting. The main theme returns, at times with considerable vehemence, to form the coda to this magnificent movement. The second movement opens with a chorale of an almost otherworldly serenity that had been little portrayed in music since the late works of Beethoven. A complementary thematic idea with wide leaps of pathetic beauty is heard from the strings. The unusual form of the movement, part variations, part sonata, is perhaps best heard as the struggle between the beatific grace of the opening and the various states of musical and emotional tension that militate against it. It is likely that Dvořák intended this expressive music as the heart of the Symphony, as a cathartic portrayal of the feelings that had troubled him since the death of his mother. The Scherzo is at once graceful and compelling, airy and forceful. Its bounding syncopations give it an irresistible vivacity set in a glowing, burnished orchestral sonority. Though the central trio is more lyrical, it has an incessant rhythmic background in the strings that lends it an unsettled quality. The finale, which continues the brooding mood of the preceding movements, is large in scale and assured in expression. Unlike many minor-mode symphonies of the 19th century, this one does not end in a blazing apotheosis of optimism, but, wrote Otakar Šourek, "rises to a glorious climax of manly, honorable and triumphant resolve."

©2019 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

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