Tchaikovsky: Music from Swan Lake

In his music for Swan Lake, PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-93) produced a score of symphonic proportions and re-established music’s equal partnership with the dance. Yet its Moscow premiere in March 1877 was a debacle. Swan Lake did not achieve full recognition until after Tchaikovsky’s death, when in 1895 it was presented in its complete version.

Here is a brief synopsis: Prince Siegfried’s hunting party is at a lake, where swans swim past. Though some of the hunters are eager to pursue the animals, the Prince convinces his friends to leave them in peace. The Swan Queen appears in human form as Odette. She and her friends are in the power of a magician, Von Rothbart, who has changed them into swans, but they can assume human shape at night. The spell can be broken only by a lover who has never pledged himself to another. The Prince falls in love with Odette and swears to kill the magician, but Odette tells him that Rothbart will not die until a lover kills himself for her sake. At a ball, Rothbart disguises his daughter to appear as Odette. The Prince is deceived into pledging himself to her. Then, realizing he has been tricked, the Prince searches for Odette and begs her pardon. Odette embraces him and throws herself into the lake. The Prince follows her, causing the magician’s death and breaking his spell. The lake vanishes. The lovers are united.

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B‑flat minor, Opus 23

Nicolai Rubinstein, Director of the Moscow Conservatory, was the man Tchai­kovsky hoped would introduce his Piano Concerto No. 1. Their encounter over the work was a disaster. "He repeated that my concerto was impossible,” the composer reported, “pointed out many places where it would have to be completely revised…. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I replied.”

The premiere took place far from home, in Boston’s Music Hall, on October 25, 1875. Hans von Bülow, who had a dis­tinguished double career as pianist and conductor, triumphed with the work. The music hardly needs explication. Listeners of sufficient antiquity will remember that the theme of the introduction flourished in the early forties as a pop song, “Tonight We Love.” Tchaikovsky himself had borrowed two of the concerto's other melodies: The hopping theme that starts the Allegro is a song traditionally sung by blind beggars in Ukraine, while the scherzo‑like interlude in the middle of the second movement is a song, “Il faut s’amuser, danser et rire” from the repertory of Désirée Artôt, a Belgian soprano. Their paths crossed in the winter of 1868‑69. Tchaikovsky, for the first and only time in his life, found himself sexually inflamed by a woman. His intentions were serious, but after the touring company she was with moved on to Warsaw, Artôt suddenly brought their relationship to an end by marrying a baritone colleague of hers. When Tchaikovsky next saw Artôt on stage, he wept all evening.

Gershwin: An American in Paris

In1926 GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937) went to England to prepare the London production of Lady, Be Good. A short holiday across the Channel produced a big dividend: an idea for a tone poem about Paris. He departed with a highly original notion, the saucy walking theme with which An American in Paris gets under way. When he went shopping on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, then lined with auto parts dealers, he purchased several taxi horns. Soon he was brimming with new thematic ideas.

Two years passed before Gershwin completed the work during a return visit to Paris. He finished the orchestration in mid-November, and four weeks later Walter Damrosch conducted the premiere at Carnegie Hall.

Gershwin offered these comments: “As in my other orchestral compositions, I’ve not endeavored to represent any definite scenes in this music. The rhapsody is programmatic only in a general impressionistic way, so that the individual listener can read into the music such as his imagination pictures for him.

“The opening gay section is followed by a rich blues with a strong rhythmic undercurrent. Our American friend, perhaps after strolling into a café and having a couple of drinks, has succumbed to a spasm of homesickness. The harmony here is both more intense and simpler than in the preceding pages. This blues rises to a climax followed by a coda in which the spirit of the music returns to the vivacity and bubbling exuberance of the opening part with its impressions of Paris. Apparently the homesick American, having left the café and reached the open air, has disowned his spell of the blues and once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life. At the conclusion, the street noises and French atmosphere are triumphant.”

Bernstein: Music from On the Waterfront

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-90) wrote his only motion picture score for Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, which starred Marlon Brando. Much of Bernstein’s music ended on the cutting room floor but found its way into the suite he later constructed. An unsigned note accompanying Bernstein’s first recording of this music includes this summary: “On the Waterfront was the story of a young longshoreman who was more sensitive than most to the racketeering in his trade and to the deeper longings in himself. In this context the soft and lyrical opening of the Suite could conjure up any number of soft and lyrical images, such as a sunrise over the Hudson River, just as the angry and percussive sequence that follows it suggests various forms of violence on the piers.

“Thereafter the anger abates and the Suite takes on a rueful mood. A thin, seesaw melody is soon introduced by the flute, one that appears to have no chance of escaping its narrow environment. Yet it does break out and build into a theme of nobility and joy.

“The final impression, after the Suite uncoils to its end, never reaching the same plateau of joy again, is not one of turmoil on the waterfront, though the music did serve that assigned purpose in the movie. What remains is a larger portrait of urban life—its pace, its dangers, its solitude and its hope.”