Dvorák’s New World Symphony Program Notes
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington
Harlem
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D. C. on April 29, 1899 and died in New York City on May 24, 1974. His Harlem Suite was written in 1950 and premiered in January, 1951 in its original version for jazz band. The version heard this evening, with orchestrations by Luther Henderson and Maurice Peress, was premiered on March 16, 1955 at Carnegie Hall in New York City, with Don Gillis leading the Symphony of the Air (formerly the NBC Symphony when it was led by Arturo Toscanini.) Harlem Suite is scored for 3 flutes (including piccolo), 2 oboes, English Horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 alto saxophones, 2 tenor saxophones, baritone saxophone, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings (Violins 1 and 2, Violas, Cellos and Basses).
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Edward Kennedy Ellington was granted the mocking title “Duke” by a friend while still growing up in Washington, D. C. The coddled child of doting parents, he never doubted that people would listen to him and carry out his wishes. As an adult, he found musical and romantic partners who gave generously of themselves, often unacknowledged, and helped him move to the forefront of American musical life, crossing boundaries that no black jazz musician had crossed before.
He was alert to the uses of technology to further his career and that of his band, the two mostly inseparable. In the 1930s and 40s, Ellington and his band broadcast live from New York City clubs, creating audiences for the band’s tours. He also recorded extensively, beginning with 4-minute songs that fit on one side of a 78 rpm disc, while constantly chafing at this limitation, stretching toward greater things. The invention of the long-playing 33 rpm disc freed him to write music that fully explored his ideas.
The Ellington band was both an extension of his imagination and the inspiration for his writing. He imagined his players’ tonal qualities, technical gifts and improvisatory prowess as he wrote. For his musicians, almost all of them Black men, life with the band meant constant touring, nights spent on buses and trains, rundown hotels. Subpar food, scant medical care, and the constant indignity of segregation and racial hostility were routine, but there was always the possibility of high musical inspiration during a band-mate’s solo or a first reading a new piece dashed off the night before. For many of his musicians, the steady work and high musical level were enough to keep them loyal to the band for years. For Ellington, the band, the music, the public became his reason for living.
Harlem Suite has been called the composer’s most successful large-format work. Commissioned by conductor Arturo Toscanini for his NBC Symphony and imagined as part of a full evening of new works describing New York City neighborhoods, it was never conducted by Toscanini and remains the only part of this project actually written. Composer Billy Strayhorn was a crucial resource during its creation, and Luther Henderson and Maurice Peress contributed the arrangement for symphony orchestra. Ellington later wrote that he completed Harlem onboard the ocean liner Île de France, returning to the US after a highly successful European tour with his band.
In the composer’s words: “It is Sunday morning. We are strolling from 110th St up Seventh Avenue, heading north through the Spanish and West Indian neighborhood toward the 125th St. business area. Everybody is nicely dressed, and on their way to or from church. Everybody is in a friendly mood. Greetings are polite and pleasant, and on the opposite side of the street, standing under a streetlamp, is a real hip chick. She, too, is in a friendly mood. You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognize the passage of those who are making our Civil Rights demands.”
At the outset, the trumpet gives a two-note motif several times: it is the word “Har-lem”. The work is built on this motif. The walking bass line is the composer strolling through the neighborhood; the clarinet is his musing gaze seeing the familiar and describing it for listeners. Ellington’s vision of his sometime home neighborhood is generous, lively, affectionate. He is describing not streets or architecture, but the people, known and unknown, he encountered there every day.
– Martin Webster
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Erich Korngold
Concerto for Violin & Orchestra in D Major, Op. 35
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born in Brünn, Moravia (now Brno in the Czech Republic) in 1897 and died in Hollywood, California in 1957. He composed his Violin Concerto in 1945, and it was first performed in 1947 by Jascha Heifetz with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. The concerto is scored for solo violin, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, percussion, and strings.
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You may never have heard Erich Korngold’s name before, but the chances are good that you have not only heard his music, but enjoyed it. That’s because Korngold composed the film scores for a number of classic movies such as The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, King’s Row, The Prince and the Pauper, Anthony Adverse, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. These last two earned him Oscars for best film score.
Korngold didn’t start out as a film composer: in fact, he was a child prodigy in a league with Mozart and Mendelssohn. Korngold was playing piano at age five and composing at six. By age ten he’d written a ballet score, and at thirteen a piano sonata that was premiered by no less than Artur Schnabel. He went on to write several very successful operas that were performed all over the world.
At which point, his life changed entirely.
Korngold came to Hollywood in 1934 to work with Max Reinhardt on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was immediately asked to write music for Captain Blood, and for the next few years he divided his time between Vienna and Hollywood. When the Nazis made it impossible to return to Vienna he moved his entire family to Hollywood, where he became one of the truly great film composers.
After the war, Korngold began to write concert music again, starting with this Violin Concerto. If it’s hard not to think of the movies when you hear it, there’s a good reason: much of the music is drawn from the scores he wrote for the silver screen. In the first movement the violin enters straight away, with a sweet and lyrical theme from Another Dawn. Even as the movement expands and the solo part becomes more and more showy, lyricism is at its core.
The atmospheric opening of the second movement Romance sets the scene for a gorgeous aria for the soloist; this is music where there is beauty simply for beauty’s sake. The Finale, drawing from The Prince and the Pauper, is a rondo full of the spirit of the dance.
While many classical composers including Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Copland, Bernstein, and others wrote the occasional movie score without tarnishing their reputations, it was not a two-way street. Once he moved to Hollywood, the critics tended to dismiss Korngold as just another hack film composer. Part of this was sheer prejudice, but another part was that composers of orchestral film scores—to this very day—usually write them in the late-romantic style. That style was “obsolete” even before Korngold wrote his first note. It’s one thing to dabble in films, but it’s quite unforgivable (to the musical elites, that is) not to have rejected a manner of composing that dates back to Brahms in favor of something new. Korngold had a hard time getting his works played, or even noticed, once he became a Hollywood success. Music lovers, on the other hand, love music when it’s good no matter what the pedigree of the composer might be—and they, for once, are leading the critics back to Korngold to re-discover the treasures in his work.
– Mark Rohr
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Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 “From the New World”
Antonín Dvořák was born in Mühlhausen, Bohemia in 1841 and died in Prague in 1904. He completed his Ninth Symphony in May of 1893, and Anton Seidl conducted the first performance with the New York Philharmonic later that year. The score calls for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.
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Dvořák might never have come to the new world—or composed a symphony by the same name—had it not been for the tenacity of a dedicated, indefatigable, and fabulously wealthy woman. Jeanette M. Thurber, the wife of a millionaire green-grocer, had single-handedly established the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. When the conservatory needed a new director in 1892, Mrs. Thurber set her sights on Dvořák. At first Dvořák wasn’t interested. But Mrs. Thurber persisted, and after a long series of cables culminating in an offer of twenty-five times his current salary, Dvořák finally relented.
Once in America, Dvořák was drawn to American folk music of every kind. He frequently asked a Black composition student, Harry T. Burleigh, to sing and play him Negro spirituals and plantation songs. According to Burleigh, “Dvořák just saturated himself with the spirit of these old tunes.”
Dvořák said: “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called the Negro melodies. In the Negro melodies of America I have discovered all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. America can have her own music, a fine music growing up from her own soil and having its own special character—the natural voice of a free and great nation.” Dvořák set out to capture that spirit in his new symphony. (The composer was correct in his assessment in every particular save one: he could not have known that the “great and noble school of music” he predicted would one day become known as “jazz.”)
The debut of the Ninth sparked a debate over just how American it really was. No one can miss the resemblance of the first movement’s flute solo to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The second movement’s English horn melody is so like a Negro spiritual that someone later turned it into one, writing words to go with Dvořák’s music. And we have it from Dvořák that Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha inspired the symphony’s middle movements—the second movement by Minnehaha’s funeral scene, the third by the ritual Indian dance. But the music was Dvořák’s: “I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of Negro and Indian music and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestral color.”
Yet when European audiences heard the Ninth, they found it to be as Bohemian as anything Dvořák ever wrote—and they were correct. Despite his enthusiasm, Dvořák’s knowledge of American music was superficial; when he wasn’t actively trying to sound American he sounded just like Dvořák. And those who hear the landscapes of America in the Ninth might be surprised to know that Dvořák composed it before he had set one foot outside New York City. Perhaps it is, as Kurt Masur has observed, a great tragic symphony written on the theme of homesickness.
All such questions are insignificant beside the achievement of the symphony itself. It brims over with melody and drama. Its emotional span runs from quiet tenderness to sheer ferocity. It is full of magical moments—one thinks of the other-worldliness of the second movement’s opening chords, and how they are reincarnated with fearsome power in the Finale. If Dvořák took little that was truly American, he gave back what is arguably the greatest symphony composed on these shores: a magnificent gift from a generous man. Our gratitude is due him—and, of course, to Mrs. Thurber.
-Mark Rohr
