Emil Brack, Planning the Grand Tour (late 19th century)
Though the three composers on tonight’s program represent vastly different musical styles, each of them uses the orchestra as a sound map for the exploration of time and place. Roberto Sierra, Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, and Ottorino Respighi look to the lands of the Mediterranean – the latter as a native, the first two as travelers – as the repository of vital musical and historical traditions worthy of excavation and reimagination for the modern orchestra. And each of the three elevates popular music forms – dances, folk tunes, children’s songs – to the concert stage. Through their explorations of the familiar, Sierra, Tchaikovsky, and Respighi break new ground for the orchestra and lead their listeners on a journey through history.
Roberto Sierra, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor of Music Emeritus at Cornell University, uses the fandango, a popular eighteenth-century Spanish dance, as the starting point for a trip through the possibilities of the modern orchestra. Sierra, a native of Puerto Rico, never strays far from the Spanish roots of the dance, maintaining its persistent rhythmic pattern through a dazzling array of colors, textures, and dynamics, but returning again and again to the Iberian markers of trumpets and castanets.
Tchaikovsky puts his own stamp on the popular dance form of the tarantella in Capriccio Italien. The composer left Russia in 1878 after the demise of his disastrous marriage (most likely undertaken in denial of his homosexuality) and traveled across Europe for several years, finding himself in 1880 in Italy, the ultimate destination for many Russian nineteenth-century artists and thinkers; both the novelist Nikolai Gogol and the composer Mikhail Glinka had repatriated there at mid-century, living in Russian enclaves in Rome and Milan. The lively street music Tchaikovsky heard during Carnival season in Rome inspired him to write what he called “an Italian fantasia on folk tunes.” In a letter to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, he described his composing process as a kind of gleaning from the music of the common people: “I have sketched the rough draft of an Italian capriccio based on popular melodies . . . it will be effective because of the wonderful melodies I happened to pick up . . . out in the streets [of Rome] with my own ears.”
Writing 40 years later during the rule of Mussolini, Ottorino Respighi turned his own ears both outward to the music of the Italian street and inward on a journey through Italian history, using the city of Rome’s iconic umbrella pines as waymarkers. Respighi wrote detailed descriptions for each movement of The Pines of Rome:
- The Pine Trees of the Villa Borghese – Children are at play in the pine groves of Villa Borghese; they dance round in circles, they play at soldiers, marching and fighting, they are wrought up by their own cries like swallows at evening, they come and go in swarms. Suddenly the scene changes.
- Pine Trees Near a Catacomb – We see the shades of the pine trees fringing the entrance to a catacomb. From the depth rises the sound of mournful psalm-singing, floating through the air like a solemn hymn, gradually and mysteriously dispersing.
- The Pine Trees of the Janiculum – A quiver runs through the air: the pine trees of the Janiculum stand distinctly outlined in the clear light of a full moon. A nightingale is singing.
- The Pine Trees of the Appian Way – Misty dawn on the Appian Way; solitary pine trees guard the magic landscape; indistinctly, the ceaseless rhythm of unending footsteps. The poet has a fantastic vision of bygone glories. Trumpets sound and, in the brilliance of the newly risen sun, a consular army bursts forth toward the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph to the Capitol.
The children’s dance – we clearly hear an Italian version of “Ring Around the Rosy” in the first movement – seems to open up a portal in time, taking us back in the second movement to monastic life in the Middle Ages, where we hear snippets of the Mass and Gregorian chant. The third movement is an atmospheric nocturne, into which Respighi introduces the first use of electronics in the concert hall, writing into the score the use of a specific recording of a nightingale (we have reproduced this recording, the first ever made of a live bird, in tonight’s concert). Finally the scene changes again, leaving the listener along the Appian Way, the famed military road leading into ancient Rome, as the sun rises and a legion of victorious Roman troops enters the city. Respighi calls for ancient Roman circular horns, known as buccine, to evoke the music of the triumphal army: our buccine are the trumpets and trombones you see and hear in the boxes overlooking the audience. The earth itself seems to shake under the tramp of thousands of soldiers’ feet heard in the tympani, and the swelling brass crescendos leave us in the thrilling presence of Roman glory – a fitting end to this evening’s Grand Tour in music of the Mediterranean.
© Julia Grella O'Connell (2024)