Igor Stravinsky
b. 5 / 17 June 1882* in Lomonosov, near St. Petersburg, Russia; d. 6 April 1971 in New York.
Scherzo à la Russe, premiered 5 September 1944 in New York, age 66.
After Stravinsky immigrated to the United States in 1940 with Vera Soudeykina, with the two marrying in Bedford, Massachusetts, in March and settling near Los Angeles in Spring 1941, he was in a financially precarious position. He had left all manner of friends, colleagues, and useful contacts in Europe. In addition, the United States was not part of the Berne Copyright Union, so Stravinsky's royalty income dropped off precipitously. He made appearances as a conductor, but traveling around as a guest conductor was difficult and yielded limited income.
Stravinsky considered composing film scores. Stravinsky's only involvement with Walt Disney's Fantasia was to accept a $5,000 fee from Disney for using The Rite of Spring. Disney owed Stravinsky nothing for using the music in the United States. And then Disney (with Leopold Stokowski's assistance) hacked The Rite to pieces. Another project for which Stravinsky would have actually composed music was a film titled The North Star with a story and screenplay by Lillian Hellman. Stravinsky began making sketches, one of which Richard Taruskin notes has a precise timing at the end indicating its destiny as film music. But that job eventually went to Aaron Copland.
Stravinsky was not one to let good material go to waste, and the sketches for the film score were used in the Sonata for Two Pianos and the Scherzo à la Russe. The title, Scherzo à la Russe, is borrowed from the first of Tchaikovsky's Two Pieces for solo piano, op. 1. Stravinsky composed his Scherzo for Paul Whiteman's band, who premiered it on a radio broadcast. The piece is generally known in its version for symphony orchestra, which Stravinsky introduced on a program conducting the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on 22 March 1946.
But that isn't the whole story. Richard Taruskin, in his study of Russian folk music in Stravinsky's compositions, has identified a little collection of Russian folk songs that Stravinsky purchased in a used music shop in Los Angeles in 1942. All of the main themes in the Scherzo à la Russe can be traced to songs in that collection. The overall structure is simple: the main scherzo material is played three times with two intervening trios. This is not the challenging Stravinsky, but rather Stravinsky in a jovial, playful mood.
Aram Ilych Khachaturian
b. 24 May / 6 June 1903* in Tbilisi, Georgia; d. 1 May 1978 in Moscow.
Violin Concerto in D minor, premiered in late 1940 in Moscow, age 37.
Khachaturian's music does not have the same heroism, deep tragedy, or blazing triumph that is common in Shostakovich's music. And it is important to realize that Khachaturian had a completely different intent in his compositions. Born and raised in the Caucasus, of Armenian ancestry, Khachaturian frequently and proudly had his music sing with an Armenian voice or dance with an Armenian rhythm.
He came to Moscow in 1921, at the age of 18, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, and saw the new regime opening all sorts of opportunities after the repression of the toppled empire. He saw how things began to change when Stalin took control after Lenin's death in 1924, but most of the time he gave the Party the benefit of the doubt and kept on cordial terms with it. No doubt the fact that Stalin and he were both from Georgia worked to his benefit on numerous occasions.
Therefore, he was as devastated as anyone else in February 1948 when the decree condemning "formalism" was issued by the Party's Central Committee. When it came to naming names, there was Shostakovich, then Prokofiev, then Khachaturian. Along with his colleagues, Khachaturian was forced to make new decisions about purposes and priorities. In his case, his artistic response was the epic ballet Spartacus.
But the Violin Concerto is from much earlier in Khachaturian's career, before life got so dangerous. He had first heard David Oistrakh at a competition in Leningrad in 1935. Five years later, as the Violin Concerto took shape in Khachaturian's mind, it was Oistrakh that he imagined playing it. The work was dedicated to Oistrakh, and Oistrakh gave the first performance. When Khachaturian showed Oistrakh the piece at first, Oistrakh's only complaint was the length of the cadenza. The composer kept putting off revising the cadenza, so Oistrakh wrote his own, which Khachaturian liked so much that he had both candenzas printed in the score.
The outer movements are both brilliant showpieces, with earthy dance rhythms and vigorous energy. Between them is a slow movement that reveals Khachaturian's wonderful gift for expressive melody and melancholy.
Anatoly Konstantinovich Lyadov
b. 29 April / 11 May 1855* in St. Petersburg, Russia; d. 16 / 28 August 1914* in Novgorod district, Russia.
The Enchanted Lake, op. 62, completed in 1909, age 54.
Anatoly Lyadov was a uniquely gifted composer who produced little and is not well known in the West, partly because he was severely critical of his own compositions and partly because he was gifted, but famously lazy.
After graduating from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Lyadov from 1879 was a theory professor there, advancing to teaching counterpoint in 1901 and "practical composition" in 1906 once Rimsky-Korsakov retired. After Nikolai Tcherepnin (the father of the Russian-American composer Alexander Tcherepnin), Lyadov was briefly the composer commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev to compose the music for The Firebird. There is no surviving evidence to indicate what happened to Lyadov's involvement; he backed out or was passed up, to be succeeded by Stravinsky.
This story is worth telling because Lyadov had a deep interest in Russian folksong and folklore, which provided the raw material for The Firebird. His musical personality was perfectly suited to the subject. His best known works are three marvelous orchestral miniatures on Russian folklore subjects, Baba-Yaga (1904), The Enchanted Lake, and Kikimora (1909).
A "fairy tale picture," The Enchanted Lake has no conventional formal structure; there isn't a great deal that one could call a theme. It is rich, however, in harmony and orchestral color that transports us outside time to a place of mists and magic.
Aleksandr Porfiryevich Borodin
b. 31 October / 12 November 1833* in St. Petersburg, Russia; d. 15 / 27 February 1887* in St. Petersburg.
Symphony no. 2 in B minor, premiered 26 February / 10 March 1877* in St. Petersburg, age 43.
In one particular sense, the career of Aleksandr Borodin anticipated the experience of many musicians today: he never gave up his "day job." His formal education took place at the Medico-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, where he completed a medical doctorate with an emphasis in chemistry in 1858. He published more than 40 scientific papers during his career. The first, presented in Spring 1858, was a "Report on the Action of Ethyl Iodide on Hydrobenzamide and Amarine and the Constitution of These Compounds." I'll spare you the title of his doctoral dissertation.
Borodin returned to St. Petersburg in 1862 from studies in Germany and began teaching at the Academy. He soon was drawn into the musical circle led by Mily Balakirev. With Balakirev's encouragement, Borodin began his first Symphony. Work on it continued probably until 1867; Balakirev, who meanwhile had become the conductor of the Russian Musical Society's concerts, conducted the Symphony's first performance in January 1869, with distinctly mixed reviews.
His most important composition, the opera Prince Igor, was left unfinished at his death, despite two long stretches of work on it, 1869-70 and 1874-87. The best known extract from it, the Polovtsian Dances, was to be performed in February 1879. To get the parts ready, Rimsky-Korsakov (who conducted the performance), Borodin, and Anatoly Lyadov spent the greater part of a night finishing the orchestration. When Borodin died, there was no way to perform the opera in its current state. Rimsky-Korsakov and Aleksandr Glazunov made a finished piece out of it, and it was premiered in St. Petersburg on 23 October / 4 November 1890.*
The Symphony no. 2 is the largest composition that Borodin brought to completion without any outside help. It is possibly his best work aside from Prince Igor. Primary labor on it dates from 1869 to 1876. The composer revised it further after the first performance in 1877, but again it was Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov who saw the score through to publication in 1887.
The Symphony is well built throughout, though it does not have the sense of architecture that is familiar from Beethoven. The first movement sounds stern, with its modal-minor opening motive, but its true characteristic is vigorous energy. The Scherzo is reminiscent of Mendelssohn, who was one of Borodin's favorites. The third movement, Andante, shows Borodin's greatest strength, eloquent lyricism. The finale is energetic and optimistic.
*Note on Russian dates and names: Before 1 February 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar versus the Gregorian calendar generally used elsewhere. In each of the "double dates" in these notes, the second date is the Western equivalent of the first. The middle names are patronyms, that is, they identify the person's father by his first name, normally constructed of name + -vich. In one sense, Stravinsky would be formally identified in Russia as Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky; but he seems never to have used the patronym once he left Russia.
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