Hans Gál was born in the small village of Brunn am Gebirge, just outside Vienna. He studied with some of the foremost teachers in Vienna, including Richard Robert for piano (teacher of Rudolf Serkin , Clara Haskil and George Szell) and Eusebius Mandyczewski for composition, who had been a close friend of Brahms. In 1915 he won the K. und K. (Royal and Imperial) State Prize for composition for a symphony (which he subsequently discarded). In 1928 His Sinfonietta (which was to become his ‘First Symphony) won the Columbia Schubert Centenary Prize. The next year, with the support of such important musicians as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss and others, he obtained the directorship of the Mainz Conservatory. Gál composed in nearly every genre and his operas, which include Der Artz der Sobeide, Die Heilige Ente and Das Lied der Nacht, were particularly popular during the 1920s. When Hitler rose to power, Gál was forced to leave Germany and eventually emigrated to Britain, teaching at the Edinburgh University for many years.
Gál’s music enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity in the years immediately after World War II, and was featured regularly in broadcasts on BBC radio. However, by the 1960s, BBC director William Glock’s programming philosophy, sharply slanted in favour of strictly modernist music, meant that Gál and other tonal composers of the time found themselves unable to get their music on the airwaves of the “Third Programme.” Gradually, performances also became more and more scarce, and Gál was deeply affected by the death in 1964 of his friend and foremost champion, conductor Otto Schmitgen. There were personal tragedies as well- Gál’s younger son Franz died by his own hand during this period. Circumstances for new work in a tonal idiom were similarly bleak on the continent, and commissions for new works in standard genres or for traditional instruments were almost non-existent. Indeed, the main champions and patrons of Gál’s music at this time were recorder player Carl Dolmetsch and Vinzenz Hladky, Professor of Mandolin at the Vienna academy of Music and publisher of mandolin music, who had instigated Gáls’s writing for mandolin in the period back in Vienna between 1933 and the Anschluss in 1938. Now in the 60s, Hladky published and regularly performed Gál’s music with his mandolin ensembles, to which Gál responded with two Sinfoniettas for Mandolin Orchestra, amongst other works. The Concertino for Cello and Strings, the last of Gál’s five concertinos, was written in 1965, inspired purely by Gál’s inner impulse, rather than a commission. It was premiered in 1968 by the Sudwest Rundfunk Orchestra.
What exactly does Gál mean by a “Concertino” rather than a “Concerto”? For some composers, the word “concertino” implies a certain frivolity or lightness of tone, while for others, it implies a work of very modest scale. Neither is true for Gál- the sole unifying factor of his five concertini is that they are all scored for solo instrument and strings, rather than full orchestra. Certainly, there is nothing frivolous about the Cello Concertino, and it is substantial work by any measure- at 27 minutes, it is roughly the same length as his Violin Concerto from 1933. There, however, is plenty of quirky humour in the Finale, which bears the curious tempo marking of “Allegretto ritenuto assai” or “slightly fast, but very held back.” The first movement, which is far more serious in tone, is built from the six note cell which opens the entire piece. Typical of Gál is the persistent ambiguity of major and minor which makes for an atmosphere both questioning and uncertain. At the work’s heart is a touching and lyrical Adagio, absolutely echt-Gál in its bittersweet tenderness. Had he so wished, Gál could certainly have made a killing in the lullaby-writing business.
Overture- “The Hebrides” (“Fingal’s Cave”), opus 26
Symphony no. 3 in A minor, “Scottish”, opus 56
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
In 1829, the twenty year-old Felix Mendelssohn was already a major international figure. As a teenager his precocity had far exceeded even that of Mozart. He had already completed a collection of works that were staggering in their originality and maturity, including the First Symphony, written when he was just 15, the Octet for Strings, completed at age 16 and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, finished a year later. Early in 1829, his twentieth year, he famously revived the music of J. S. Bach, organizing and conducting a history-changing performance of the St Matthew Passion in Berlin- the first time the complete work had been heard since Bach’s death over sixty years earlier.
That summer, Mendelssohn made the first of many trips to the United Kingdom, conducting a performance of his First Symphony with the London Philharmonic Society, and performing extensively as a solo pianist (his performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto was the first time London audiences had seen a pianist perform it by memory). After such a busy and successful year, Mendelssohn stayed on in the UK for some sightseeing and relaxation. He made his way to Edinburgh, a city he quickly came to love:
“Everything here looks so stern and robust, half enveloped in a haze of smoke or fog. Many Highlanders came in costume from church victoriously leading their sweethearts in their Sunday attire and casting magnificent and important looks over the world; with long, red beards, tartan plaids, bonnets and feathers and naked knees and their bagpipes in their hands, they passed along by the half-ruined gray castle on the meadow where Mary Stuart lived in splendour.”
Holyrood Palace c 1649
After another day of sightseeing at Holyrood Chapel on the 30th of July, 1829, we wrote this famous letter:
“In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Mary lived and loved. A little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door. This is the staircase the murderers ascended, and, finding Rizzio [Mary‟s Italian advisor and, probably, lover, whom the Scots mistrusted] .. drew him out; about three chambers away is a small corner where they killed him. The chapel close to it is now roofless, grass and ivy grow there, and at the broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of England. Everything around is broken and moldering and the bright sky shines in. I believe I have found today in that old chapel the beginning of my Scottish symphony.”
Ruins of the nave at Holyrood Abbey
Later that day, he sketched out sixteen measures of music that were to become the introductory melody of the Third Symphony. The work he began that evening would take a further thirteen years to reach its final form.
Meanwhile, just a week later Mendelssohn made his way north to Fingal’s Cave, where there followed another short sketch. Soon after, work began in earnest on what now known as the “Hebrides” Overture. Mendelssohn originally called the piece “The Lonely Island,” adopting the title we know now when he revised the work in 1832. The “Hebrides” is more of a tone-poem than an “overture” in the traditional sense. Rather than preparing the listener for a performance of an opera or play, it paints a vivid musical portrait of the remote cave, the stormy seas that surround it and the tone poet’s sense of loneliness and solitude.
Mendelssohn’s Scottish overture was complete, but what of the symphony he had begun a week earlier? By 1831, it seemed as if inspiration was fading, Mendelssohn reporting to a friend that he could not “find his way back into the Scottish fog mood,” and the idea receded farther and farther from the forefront of his mind. A decade passed before he returned to work on his A minor symphony, a decade in which he completed his three other symphonies, two piano concertos and four string quartets.
Finally, in 1841, he began work in earnest on the A minor “Scottish Symphony,” returning to that sketch made in 1829. By September he had completed the first two movements and was hard at work on the Adagio. Mendelssohn completed the work on the 20th of January, 1842, and conducted the first performance at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig on the 3rd of March. The work was rapturously received, but Mendelssohn had concerns about the piece, and made major and radical revisions before the second performance just two weeks later, on 17 March in Berlin. In June, he conducted the work in London. The success of this performance emboldened Mendelssohn to ask Queen Victoria’s permission to dedicate the work to her. Permission was duly granted, and Mendelssohn became her favourite composer for life.
Although the work had been a success in each of these early performances, Mendelssohn made one final round of major cuts and revisions before the work was published by Breitkopf in the fall of 1842.
The final version of this work was published as his “Third Symphony,” but it was actually the last of his five symphonies, and many consider it his greatest. It is in many ways the most serious in tone, and his most sophisticated in construction, with the whole symphony evolving organically from the possibilities of that sixteen bar sketch written in 1829. Critics and musicians have argued at length about just how “Scottish” the work is: although Mendelssohn regularly referred to the A minor Symphony as his “Scottish,” he conspicuously omitted any reference to Scotland from the publish score. Some have found numerous references to Scottish folk themes in the score (there is a famous instance of the so-called “Scottish snap” rhythm in the Scherzo), but Mendelssohn himself was no fan of folk music. “No national music for me!” he proclaimed. “Infamous, vulgar, out-of-tune trash…. It is distracting and has given me a toothache already,” he wrote. Even before his visit in 1829, Mendelssohn had hoped that the trip would inspire a Scottish piece or two “since I greatly love the sea from the mainland and even want to use it in a symphony with Scottish bagpipes.” After his visit, however, his enthusiasm for the pipes had decidedly waned, writing that “Scottish bagpipes, Swiss cow-horns, Welsh harps, all playing the Huntsmen’s Chorus with hideously improvised variations then their beautiful singing in the hall, altogether their music is beyond conception.”
What did make its way into the score was a deeply felt impression of the mystery and darkness of that visit to Holyrood; “”It is in pictures, ruins and natural surroundings that I find the most music.”
Mendelssohn specified in the first edition of the score that the four movements of the piece, all of which are thematically interconnected, must be played without pause. The prevailing mood of the first movement is dark indeed, from the slow opening in which the divided violas state the “Holyrood” theme into the main Allegro, which begins broodingly and then becomes decidedly stormy and violent. Mendelssohn placed the Scherzo second in this symphony, rather than in the traditional spot before the Finale. It is in this movement that one is most likely to find hints of folk music. Unlike most scherzos and minuets, it’s in duple rather than triple meter, and is in sonata-allegro form rather than structured as a dance. This helps make the movement feel more like a hopeful answer to the tragedies of the first movement, rather than a mere diversion. The Adagio which follows it is one of Mendelssohn’s greatest creations, and certainly one of the great symphonic slow movements. Although written in A major, the overall mood is deeply serious and often tragic, with a climactic central funeral march perhaps harkening back to the example of the Marcia funebre of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Mendelssohn had originally labelled the final Allegro vicacissimo as Allegro guerriero and it is decidedly warlike in character.
Our 2013 Christ Church Season comes to a thrilling conclusion with an evening of Russian masterworks and a guest appearance from on of Britain’s most talented and charismatic violinists. Tchaikovsky’s widely-loved Violin Concerto is a work full of optimism, passion and high spirits, from the epic first movement, to the humorous and staggeringly virtuosic finale. With its endless abundance of melody and thrilling violin writing, it’s hard to imagine how much trouble it gave its creator. The Concerto was conceived and composed in a period of profound personal crisis, just after Tchaikovsky’s disastrously failed marriage in 1878, and after it was completed, Tchaikovsky suffered seemingly endless setbacks in trying to get the work performed, with its dedicatee calling it “unplayable” and later making myriad unwarranted cuts and changes. Such a difficult birth is hard to fathom for those of us who know it as one of the most beloved works in the repertoire. Like Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich excelled in an usual breadth of musical genres, and always seemed able to tap into the spirit of folk music. In fact, his Fourth String Quartet was composed “for the drawer” with no possibility of immediate performance during the Stalinist repression of the post-WW II Soviet Union. A generation later, Shostakovich’s friend and student Rudolf Barshai orchestrated the work as the Chamber Symphony opus 83a- it’s a communicative and moving masterpiece that ranges from spooky stasis to tragic grandeur.
