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Notes on the programme for February 3rd 2008

Overture Cockaigne: Edward Elgar

Edward Elgar composed the Cockaigne Overture in 1901, the year of the accession of Edward VII, shortly after completing the first two Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Although ‘Cockaigne’ refers to a medieval land of plenty, Elgar subtitled his brilliant concert overture ‘In London Town’ and appropriately dedicated to ‘my friends the members of the British orchestras’. He intended it to be ‘stout and steaky’ but never vulgar: stuffed with musical representations of people, places and sounds of the city, ‘humorous and strong’. The writer and Elgar authority Percy Young amusingly observed that ‘Cockaigne shows ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ in undress’. Elgar himself described it as ‘a work to tweak a teetotaller’s beak’ when writing to his friend and admirer, August Jaeger (Nimrod of ‘Enigma’ Variations, 1899).

Four Last songs: Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss set the texts of his Four Last Songs in 1948, when he was 84, while living in exile in Switzerland awaiting absolution for having served as President of the Reichsmusikkamer during the Third Reich. He was attracted to the Eichendorff poem ‘Im Abendrot’ (At Sunset) – which expresses the vantage point of an elderly couple watching the sunset and the flight of larks, and wondering whether they might signal Death – and immediately began setting it for soprano and orchestra. When a friend subsequently gave him a volume of modern poetry by Hermann Hesse, Strauss began thinking in terms of a cycle of five songs, though in the end he only completed four. The settings of Hesse – ‘Frühling’ (Spring), ‘September’ and ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ (Falling Asleep) – contain poignant solos for horn and violin. Today, the Four Last Songs rank among his finest and most loved works.

Strauss seems to have had the voice of his wife, Pauline, in his mind when he composed them. He wrote many of his early songs to perform with her and later, when he became a conductor, orchestrated them. This music, coming after all the operas, recalls some of the greatest of his heroines, Arabella, Daphne, the Countess of Capriccio, and Sophie of Der Rosenkavalier. The texts are especially important because of the way the music pervades the images and seeps between the words. The final song ends in stillness (the conductor and Strauss biographer Norman Del Mar knew from experience that ‘it is an end which leaves few dry eyes amongst listeners and performers alike’). It was inevitable that a valedictory spirit should pervade them: Strauss was doing what he did best and doing it better than ever, even though in a Post-Romantic style other composers had long since abandoned.

Strauss died on 8 September 1949, never having heard the Four Last Songs performed. The first performance took place in London, at the Royal Albert Hall, sung by Kirsten Flagstad and played by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Scheherazade Suite: Rimsky Korsakov

In July 1888 Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov completed his symphonic suite Scheherazade at what for him proved a turning point. The four-movement work was inspired by Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, which Rimsky-Korsakov had recently completed and orchestrated following the composer’s death, and based on the exotic ‘Arabian Nights’. Shortly after he conducted the premiere of Scheherazade that October in St Petersburg, Wagner’s Ring was performed there for the first time. The impact was felt by musicians and music lovers alike. Rimsky-Korsakov admitted as much in his autobiography, referring to works he composed during the period 1887-88 (Capriccio Espagnol, Scheherazade and the Russian Easter Festival), as the last in which, for him, the pursuit of lush orchestral ‘virtuosity and bright sonority’ had prevailed.

In Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov claimed not to have attempted to tell a story, but rather to illustrate a series of unconnected episodes: ‘The Sea and Sinbad’s ship’, ‘The Story of the Calender Prince’, ‘The young prince and the young princess’ and the ‘Festival at Baghdad – The sea – The Ship goes to pieces against a rock surmounted by a bronze warrior’ (also known simply as ‘The shipwreck’). Scheherazade herself, however, is portrayed in the third movement by a solo violin.

Themes do recur from one movement to another, but never as Wagnerian ‘leitmotivs’ conveying specific connotations. Later he would write: ‘In composing Scheherazade I had intended these hints merely to direct the hearer’s fancy along the path which my own fancy had travelled and to leave more minute and particular conceptions to the individual will and mood. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he like my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders….’

In 1910 the first, second and fourth movements were choreographed by Fokine and Diaghilev and performed in Paris with sets and costumes by Bakst. With an extraordinary, exotic Russian-Jewish actress and dancer, Ida Rubinstein, in the role of the Sultana, the production took Paris by storm. Referring to the blue wig she wore, the French poet Jean Cocteau remarked that ‘disposed as I was to admire Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, Madame Rubinstein has fixed it in my heart, as a long blue-headed pin might impale a moth with feebly fluttering wings’.

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