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Programme notes for May 10th 2008
The original Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921) was a German composer best known for his fairytale opera Hänsel und Gretel, which he produced in the early1890s. Its origins were domestic: Humperdinck’s sister asked him to compose four songs suitable for children to sing in her adaptation of the Grimm Brothers’ fairytale. He then enlarged it to 16 songs with piano accompaniment, called it a ‘Singspiel’*, and presented it to his fiancée at Christmas in 1890 as an engagement present. Hardly had the holiday passed when he began work orchestrating it.
Rather like a beanstalk, the Singspiel gradually became a fully fledged three-act opera and was given its first performance on 23 December 1893 before the Grand Duke Karl of Saxe-Weimar at the Court Theatre in Weimar under Richard Strauss. Although the première was fraught with problems (notably, the performance went ahead without parts for the overture), the opera soon gained wide appeal. Among those involved in early performances were Gustav Mahler, who conducted the first performance in Hamburg in September 1894, Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima, who directed another in Dessau in November, and Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, who attended the première in Vienna in December of that year.
The appeal of Hänsel und Gretel lay in its origins: simple folk tunes, beautifully orchestrated in a post-Wagnerian style. Humperdinck first heard Wagner’s operas in the 1870s while at conservatory and later joined the Orden vom Gral (The Order of the Grail), a student society in Munich that promoted Wagner’s music and ideas. During the 1880s he became friendly with Richard Strauss and in 1890 met Hugo Wolf – all of whom in some way influenced the harmonic language of Hänsel und Gretel. However, its modest beginnings proved the greater influence, ensuring that it emerged, as the British writer Arnold Whittall observed, as ‘the least radical yet most attractive of post-Wagnerian operas’, a masterful synthesis of late 19th-century styles.
Humperdinck himself considered the overture to be a prelude and is said privately to have called it ‘Children’s Life’. As with many overtures, it makes reference to songs and dances in the opera and, most memorably the ‘Evening Prayer’ – a gentle hymn to innocence from Act 2 played by the horns – which tops and tails it rather like the ‘Pilgrim’s Hymn’ in Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser.
* A Singspiel is a German play with music.
Max Bruch (1838-1920), also German, 
composed three violin concertos. Best known is the first, composed in the 1860s while in the service of the court at Koblenz. Bruch conducted the first performance in 1864, but the concerto as we know it emerged only after revisions were undertaken with the help of the celebrated violinist and friend of Brahms, Joseph Joachim, who then gave the second ‘première’ of the concerto in 1868. Much loved by violinists, it quickly found a lasting place in the concerto canon. Apart from this concerto, only his Schottische Fantasie for violin and Kol Nidrei for cello are regularly performed today.
Bruch originally intended to call the Violin Concerto a fantasy. The first movement is entitled Vorspiel, in effect a prelude, which seemingly shifts the concerto’s centre of gravity to the second movement Adagio. In the first movement the violinist undertakes a passionate dialogue with the orchestra, at times evoking the sound of a gypsy violinist; the movement ends with two short cadenzas. A single note from the bassoons links the first movement with the second, in which the violinist delivers an intimate soliloquy with gracefully arching phrases, valedictory in its mood, while the orchestra provides the heartbeat. The Finale lives up to its subtitle Allegro energico when, after the orchestra has created an atmosphere of hushed suspense, the violinist enters with a vibrant dance theme, made daring by uncompromising double-stops. There follows a lyrical second subject, reminding us of the second movement, but eventually an accelerando signals the end, reinforced by a crescendo and, of course, pyrotechnics from the violinist.
The turn of the century saw Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) in peak form, composing Finlandia and his First Symphony in 1899, his celebrated song, the saucy ‘Flickan kom’, and his Second Symphony during 1901-1902 and the Violin Concerto the following year. He began working on the Second Symphony while in Italy early in 1901 and completed it on his return to Finland. Because of the political context (the Finns were then actively resisting Russian repression), qualities of freedom and Finnish national pride as well as evidence of ‘Nordic pastoralisms’ have often been ascribed to the music by commentators, though Sibelius himself decline to admit that it was associated with Finnish protest. The composer conducted the first performance on 8 March 1902 in Helsinki.
Like the First Symphony, the Second, in D major, is still very much rooted in the 19th century. Sibelius, however, did add a third trumpet and a tuba to the instrumentation of the Second. It has a restlessness about it, too, apparent from the beginning of the first movement, which is marked Allegretto: the throbbing 11-note opening motive (based on the notes F#-G-A) in the strings is quickly followed by a succession of different, fragmentary themes, each associated with particular instruments. The highly charged ‘second subject’ (C#-B-C#-A-D) first heard in the woodwinds is more sustaining. Sibelius – who vehemently denied building his themes out of small fragments – shows his genius in the way he concentrates this rich array of thematic material in the recapitulation*.
The rhapsodic second movement, Tempo Andante, ma rubato, is cast in the parallel minor (D minor). Heralded by a drum roll, alone and in pizzicato, the cellos and basses provide a stepwise ‘walking bass’ for the bassons, whose rather morose theme Sibelius marked ‘lugubre’. Tension quickly mounts and with the arrival of more instruments so, too, do the dynamics and tempo increase before dissipating with the arrival of the second subject in F major (closely related to the D minor of the preceding movement). Respite is fleeting, however, and soon the menacing buzzing of strings gives way to an ostinato** accompaniment which once again serves as an introduction for a sequence of entrances by different sections of the orchestra culminating in antiphony and syncopation. The orchestra members collectively draw breath before taking their leave, though not without a final flurry of instrumental and thematic juxtapositions.
The third movement, marked Vivacissimo is a blazing virtuoso scherzo in B flat major with a brief 13-bar trio in G flat providing a moment of calm; both are repeated and followed by an epilogue that leads into the triumphal D major Finale. As in the third movement, ostinatos and syncopation pervade music of the fourth. The opening theme relies on an upward three-note motive, which is given to the strings, with brass and percussion providing the ostinato accompaniment. When the oboes introduce the second theme (in B minor), the string return the favour. As in the preceding movements, the recapitulation offers new perspectives on the thematic material which Sibelius then crowns with a stirring coda.
Julie Anne Sadie
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