Also Sprach Zarathustra Program Notes
Gabriela Ortiz
Kauyumari
Gabriela Ortiz was born in 1964 in Mexico City, Mexico. She continues to live in Mexico. Kauyumari was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and first performed by that orchestra with its music director Gustavo Dudamel on October 9, 2021 at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. The work is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English Horn, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, four percussionists, harp, and strings. It lasts approximately 7 minutes in performance.
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Among the Huichol people of Mexico, Kauyumari means “blue deer”. The blue deer represents a spiritual guide, one that is transformed through an extended pilgrimage into a hallucinogenic cactus called peyote. It allows the Huichol to communicate with their ancestors, do their bidding, and take on their role as guardians of the planet. Each year, these Native Mexicans embark on a symbolic journey to “hunt” the blue deer, making offerings in gratitude for having been granted access to the invisible world, through which they also are able to heal the wounds of the soul.
When I received the commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to compose a piece that would reflect on our return to the stage following the pandemic, I immediately thought of the blue deer and its power to enter the world of the intangible as akin to a celebration of the reopening of live music. Specifically, I thought of a Huichol melody sung by the De La Cruz family -dedicated to recording ancestral folklore- that I used for the final movement of my piece. Altar de Muertos (Altar of the Dead), commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet in 1997. I used this material within the orchestral context and elaborated on the construction and progressive development of the melody and its accompaniment in such a way that it would symbolize the blue deer. This in turn was transformed into an orchestral texture which gradually evolves into a complex rhythm pattern, to such a degree that the melody itself becomes unrecognizable (the imaginary effect of peyote and our awareness of the invisible realm), giving rise to a choral wind section while maintaining an incisive rhythmic accompaniment as a form of reassurance that the world will naturally follow its course.
While composing this piece, I noted once again how music has the power to grant us access to the intangible, healing our wounds and binding us to what can only be expressed through sound. Although life is filled with interruptions, Kauyumari is a comprehension and celebration of the fact that each of these rifts is also a new beginning.
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Ludwig van Beethoven
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58
Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827. He composed this concerto in 1805 and 1806, and it was first performed publicly in 1808 in Vienna with Beethoven the soloist. The score calls for solo piano, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings.
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Beethoven knew full well what audiences expected in a concerto—by this time the form had hardened into a shape everyone thought they knew—so it gave him the greatest pleasure to break the mold at every opportunity. His Fourth Piano Concerto has surprise after surprise, if we can open our ears to hear them.
The trouble is, modern listeners simply cannot hear Beethoven as his own audiences did. We know the rest of Beethoven’s music, and we know all the music that came after: it’s hard to be shocked by Beethoven once you’ve heard Stravinsky, or Webern. But Beethoven’s music continually broke new ground, re-evaluated first principles, and came to different conclusions about what music ought to be. This came as a shock to his own audiences—some thought they were hearing the ravings of a lunatic. Our ears aren’t as innocent as theirs, but it’s still possible to allow ourselves to be delighted when Beethoven defies our expectations.
For example: everyone knows that a concerto begins with a lengthy orchestral exposition where we hear the themes the soloist will expand upon later. But here the piano begins the first movement alone, and quietly. Is this any way to begin a concerto? It is now! And what a marvelous beginning: sweet and gentle, yet incomplete. We want more.
We get more, but not exactly what we had in mind. Beethoven has the orchestra play a similar phrase, but in what is quite obviously the wrong key. Really wrong—no wonder people thought he was mad. Beethoven brings us back home to G major in short order, but then we’re left with the question: where did the piano go? In other concertos we dutifully wait for the piano to enter at the usual place, but here he’s given it to us and then taken it away. Now we wonder when it will be back—and that’s just what Beethoven wanted.
Eventually the piano re-enters, but almost casually, as if it has only now thought of something to say. As the movement unfolds, listen for the several fantasia-like episodes, each lasting only a few bars and always in a wildly distant key. By the time we realize how magical they are, they’re gone. And so is the movement, before we know it.
The second movement is startling in its originality, even for Beethoven. The orchestral strings, in octaves, sound a series of loud, aggressive statements, each followed by piano ruminations of sublime tenderness. These alternations begin to come closer together, even to the point of overlapping. Finally the piano extends its thoughts in a passage of great depth and passion, and the orchestra is tamed by its influence. A remarkable piece of music.
The Finale brings one revelation after another: how a simple theme can yield such a bounty of variations, how a piano and orchestra can interact in such unpredictable ways, how we may detour into fantasy episodes that remind us of the first movement—and how Beethoven saves the last delight for the ending.
We have to expect the unexpected in this concerto, because Beethoven looks at the form and says, “Why, anyone could do that. I believe I’ll do something a bit more fun.” Yet he isn’t merely satisfying a whim: nothing happens in Beethoven by accident. There is a powerful, inexorable logic at work here. It may be hidden from view or disguised as caprice, but by the end we will feel it in our bones.
-Mark Rohr
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Richard Strauss
Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30
Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 and died in Garmisch, Germany in 1948. He composed this work in 1896 and it was first performed the same year by the Museums-Orchester of Frankfurt-am-Main under the direction of the composer. The score calls for 4 flutes, piccolo, 4 oboes, English horn, 4 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 4 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, percussion, 2 harps, organ, and strings.
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In Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) famously proclaimed, “God is dead.” It was a notion to which Richard Strauss subscribed.
Though he was certainly an atheist, what most attracted Strauss to Nietzsche’s philosophy was, in the words of Roger Scruton, that “Nietzsche’s philosophy arose out of art and the thought of art; it involved an effort to perceive the world through aesthetic value, to find a way of life that would raise nobility, glory, and tragic beauty to the place that had been occupied by moral goodness and faith.”
Nietzsche’s book was not your standard treatise on philosophy: for one thing, it was a work of fiction. In its bare-bones plot, Zarathustra (or Zoroaster, the Persian prophet and founder of Zoroastrianism) mostly wandered, declaiming on the state of mankind as he went. Man, he mused, was an intermediate step between the apes and the übermensch (“overman”), the perfected man. “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” Other themes common to Nietzsche’s other books are here as well, packaged with his relentless atheism.
How does one turn Nietzsche’s scattershot philosophy-by-allegory-and-aphorism into music? Well—one doesn’t, really. Strauss had a hard time explaining the thing to his audiences. His first attempt, printed in the program book at the premiere, was almost comic: “First movement: Sunrise. Man feels the power of God. Andante religioso. But Man still longs. He plunges into passion (second movement) and finds no peace. He turns toward science and tries in vain to solve life’s problem in a fugue (third movement). Then agreeable dance tunes sound and he becomes an individual, and his soul soars upward while the world sinks far below him.”
The composer did better when writing to a friend: “I did not intend to write philosophical music or to portray in music Nietzsche’s great work. I meant to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of its development, religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the overman. The whole symphonic poem is intended as my homage to Nietzsche’s genius, which found its greatest exemplification in his book Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
From the more than eighty sections of Nietzsche’s book Strauss chose nine:
I. Sunrise. The opening passages of the book depict Zarathustra awakening in his cave, where he has spent ten years contemplating; at this sunrise he decides to descend and spread the word. Based on very simple themes, this music is immensely stirring—even if one cannot hear it without thinking of a certain movie.
II. Of the otherworldsmen. “Otherworldsmen” was Nietzsche’s name for the benighted religious. Though Nietzsche was an atheist and Zarathustra an almost hysterically anti-Christian work, Strauss’ music does not mock: its reverence is meant to show a previous, “undeveloped” state of Man.
III. Of the great longing. This music is characterized by the vaulting, upward-reaching theme that will recur—through many transformations—throughout the work.
IV. Of joys and passions is highly agitated, impetuous, and ultimately unsettled.
V. The dirge combines previous themes in a quieter moment.
VI. Of science takes the “Sunrise” theme and expands it—of course!—into a fugue. Here we have an example of just how avant garde Strauss was: the full theme of the fugue contains all twelve notes of the scale.
VII. The convalescent begins with the fugue subject piling onto itself ever faster until it gathers into a great climax; the frenetic sounds that follow devolve into dance-like music.
VIII. The dance song could almost have been written by Strauss (Johann) rather than Strauss (Richard). Led by a solo violin, the orchestra—and presumably Zarathustra—begin to waltz.
IX. The night-wanderer’s song. In the book Zarathustra reflects on the “eternal recurrence” of the same events and upon his accomplishments. Strauss’ music gradually winds down to calm and quiet wind chords, punctuated by low, out-of-key rumblings. There is no bang-up ending: as in the book, Strauss leaves things unresolved and unfinished—the progression of Man continues.
-Mark Rohr
