PROGRAM NOTES
Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931)
Meditation on the Bach Chorale “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (Before thy throne I now appear),” BWV 668
One of the most magical moments in Sofia Gubaidulina’s childhood in the Soviet Union was the day her family purchased a baby grand piano. Though it caused them tremendous financial strain, they were aware of Gubaidulina’s talent and were keen to support and nurture it. She enrolled in the Kazan Music Gymnasium as a piano student, and also branched out into composition. After concluding her studies at the Kazan Conservatory, she went on to the Moscow Conservatory in 1954. During her third year there, she committed to composing over piano performance. In an interview, Gubaidulina reflected on the various individuals whose music she studied and admired, which particularly included Johann Sebastian Bach. “During my whole life, Bach has been central to my work. After that I began to go through all the different styles in music, paying particular attention to the Russian school. But when I was 19 or 20, I was completely taken with Wagner. I was also interested in the Second Viennese School, and then Shostakovich in the Russian school, and subsequently the composers from my own generation. When I look back on my path in music, the names of Bach and Webern lie at the center.”
As if yearning to be in direct dialogue with one of her musical heroes, Gubaidulina has written a handful of works inspired by or responding to some idea or musical themes of J.S. Bach. In 1993, she wrote the Meditation on the Bach Chorale “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (Before thy throne I now appear),” known as Bach’s “deathbed chorale.” It earned the nickname through an anecdotal story that Bach, whose fading eyesight was fully taken from him after a botched surgery, dictated the music to a student during his final months of life, making it one of his final works and his last chorale. She described the work as a contemplation on BWV 668, especially her fascination with Bach’s use of representational numbers to determine the proportions of various sections of his music. “Amazingly,” she noted, “Bach’s working with numbers represents and reflects his deepest and most personal relation to God…Analyzing it, I discovered that Bach used ‘his own’ numbers 41, 14, 23. Scholars of Bach’s music know that each of these numbers represents his name, like his signature…their usage is so beautiful that one might conclude that, addressing God in this chorale, Bach meant: ‘Look, God: I, Johann Sebastian Bach, step before thy throne.” Throughout, we hear appearances of the original chorale melody (it arrives first in the solo bass) emerging from the dissonances of Gubaidulina’s reflective episodes. Dissonance plays an important role in this music, as it increases and builds greater tension between the quotes of Bach. Theorist Noah Kahrs observed that the Meditation is “consistently governed by the notion that dissonance should resolve to consonance.” We hear this play out forcefully in the concluding moments as the chorale theme is assuredly played in the strings against the oscillating pattern of notes in the harpsichord.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K. 525
In 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart moved to Vienna. At 25 years old he was well past his days as the wunderkind of Europe, and eager to establish the next phase of his career. Without a court position secured, Mozart had to rely on his own ingenuity to create opportunities as a freelancer, which he accomplished relatively swiftly through self-producing concerts and penning numerous piano concertos that were vehicles to present himself as soloist. Through these tireless efforts, Mozart cemented his reputation beyond that of a former child prodigy, earning a place among the elite of the city’s musical circle, which included Franz Joseph Haydn. In early 1785 Mozart’s father, Leopold, paid a visit to the city and wrote home describing a conversation in which Haydn offered his endorsement saying, “Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.”
During the summer of 1787, when Mozart was furiously working at completing his opera, Don Giovanni, for its upcoming premiere in Prague, he paused—for reasons long since lost—to write his thirteenth Serenade, which he called Eine kleine Nachtmusik, “a little night music.” Displaying a sense of fun and humor, the title is simply descriptive of the very nature of a serenade, which, along with the divertimento, constituted a genre of light background music usually enjoyed outside at nighttime. Mozart had originally intended the work to consist of five movements, but only four survived (the original second movement was ripped from the manuscript). It has arguably become one of the composer’s most recognized and beloved works. Through countless performances over the centuries, it remains strikingly fresh. The opening movement is carried on the momentum of bustling energy in the accompanying parts, while the leading melodies soar above. This is a particular magic trick of Mozart, where he contrasts density and spaciousness to enhance the sense of anticipation and release. An elegant Romance follows, which is structured in rondo form where the serene main theme is intercalated with various new melodic ideas. Next is a brief stately minuet and trio, and finally another rondo, but this time shimmering and dynamic, to bring the work to its conclusion.
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
While studying at the Budapest Academy of Music, Béla Bartók attended the city’s premiere of Richard Strauss’ tone poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra. It proved to be a pivotal moment, one that would inspire and influence the young composer toward a new phase of musical development. Concurrent with his maturation as a writer, he became increasingly well known as a piano soloist, booking performances in Vienna and Paris that would eventually earn him a post on the piano faculty of his alma mater, where he worked until 1934. All the while, since 1905, Bartók had engaged in the studying and recording folk music from around the countryside with his friend and colleague, Zoltán Kodály. His discovery of that tonal world was also reflected in the scope of his output. He wrote: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of major and minor keys…It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing in their vigor.” It was this distinct blend of classical modernism and folk music idioms that would give Bartók’s music its nearly unmistakable signature sound.
This dedicated research would eventually lead Bartók to a full time appointment as an ethnomusicologist at the Academy of Sciences—a role he enthusiastically embraced. It was at this personal and professional highpoint that he was tapped by Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and founder of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble dedicated to the promotion of new music. To celebrate the group’s 10th anniversary, Sacher commissioned Bartók for a new work. The result was Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, premiered in 1936, which would become one of the best-known pieces in his oeuvre.
A defining feature of the music is its physical layout that calls for a division in the strings into two mirroring groups placed on opposite sides of each other, allowing for surround-sound effects. A battery of percussion is enhanced by the celesta and a sizeable piano part. Likely in homage to one of his favorite composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, Bartók kicks off the piece with an elaborate fugue. Entrances of its themes move simultaneously up the interval of a 5th and down the interval of a 5th from the departure pitch ‘A,’ until the music arrives back at ‘A’ at the end of the movement. Its mood is brooding and uneasy thanks to the chromatic movement of the pitches that defy the establishment of a harmonic center, and a near constant changing of time signatures that throws off the listener’s ability to sense the true location of downbeats and upbeats. In the second movement the percussion instruments join the action. Here, the lively and whirling energy takes its cue from the folk music Bartók knew so well, and a link is maintained thematically to the first movement through allusions to fragments of its chromatic fugue theme. A dramatic shift arrives with the third movement, an example of Bartók’s “night music,” a nickname given to a distinctive eerie and unearthly feeling he frequently injected into the slow movements of his works. Again, structure is given significant thought as he shapes the themes and their repetitions into a palindrome (A-B-C-C-B-A), which has been noted to reference back to the palindromic tonal structure of the opening fugue. In the finale, we hear the strings strumming to invoke the sound of a Hungarian zither. Rising out of its frenetic pace are further call backs to the opening movement that culminate in a momentary reprise before the ensemble tumbles into a virtuosic euphoria that ends by landing on an A chord, thereby bringing the work to a true full circle conclusion.
Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
