Program Notes for March 2012
Program Notes
By Francis Lynch
Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)
Overture to Prince Igor
The illegitimate son of Prince Luka Gedeanishvili, Alexander Borodin showed music ability as a child, dabbling in composition by the age of 9. But life as a composer was never considered a realistic proposition in Tsarist Russian, and so Borodin instead entered the Academy of Physicians at the age of 16, graduated with honors, and went on to study at Heidelberg. His studies centered on chemistry (his doctoral thesis was titled “On the Analogy of Arsenical with Phosphoric Acid”) and he returned to St. Petersburg in 1862 with an appointment as adjunct-professor of chemistry at the Academy. He would spend the rest of his life as a working chemist, authoring and translating textbooks, and serving as teacher and administrator. But music was never far from his attention, as he had married a young pianist whom he had met in 1861, and he managed to devote a considerable amount of time to composition, especially during academic holidays. In 1862 he met Balakirev, the influential and self-appointed leader of the Russian nationalist composers, and became an important member of Balakirev’s group. This association led to friendships with Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, and Mussorgsky, and an 1877 visit to Liszt at Weimar that convinced that generous composer to take up Borodin’s cause. Through Liszt’s influence, Borodin’s music began to be heard in Germany, France, and Belgium. Unfortunately, Borodin suffered from poor health most of his life, and heart trouble and an attack of cholera took their toll. He died at the age of 53 of a heart attack in the midst of his friends at a fancy-dress ball at the Academy of Physicians.
His opera Prince Igor, perhaps Borodin’s most important single work and one of the greatest of Russian national operas, was unfinished at the time of this death, and composers Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov worked to complete and orchestrate it for its first complete performance in St. Petersburg in 1890. Borodin began work on the opera in 1869 and 1870, then set it aside to work on his second symphony and returned to it in 1874, after which it occupied him for the rest of his life. The libretto is an adaptation of the East Slavic narrative, The Lay of Igor’s Army, which tells the story of the Slavic prince Igor’s struggle against the invading Polovtsian tribes in the twelfth century. The overture was composed by Glazunov based in part on having heard Borodin perform it on the piano on several occasions; but he was also able to find a number of important themes among the composer’s papers. Glazunov later acknowledged that he had composed just a few bars at the very end of the overture.
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Symphony No. 7 in d minor, Op. 70
Perhaps the least troubled of the major Romantic composers, the great Bohemian (Czech) composer Antonín Dvořák wrote music of appealing beauty, filled with enchanting melodies and surprising modulations, and steeped in the harmonies and rhythms of his native land. In his day, this country-born boy of peasant stock would become as popular as any of his contemporaries; even Brahms was willing to proof his music, and his fame was such that he was brought to New York to head the National Conservatory of Music in 1892. In photographs he seems always to be frowning, but throughout his career he remained the sunniest of composers. Not that there were not challenges in his personal life: at one point, he experienced the death of three children within a span of three years. But Dvořák was always able to recover from his setbacks and remained well-loved by his colleagues and his pupils. His one passion outside of music was trains, and he visited the Franz-Josef Station in Prague (whose timetables he knew by heart) at every opportunity to see the great locomotives that he so much admired. After winning the Austrian State Prize for a symphony in 1875, his career began to take off. Two sets of piano duets, the Moravian Duets and the Slavonic Dances, were the first of his works to gain international recognition.
The success of his sixth symphony in 1881 made Dvořák’s publisher decide that it was indeed worthy of publication, so it became the first of his symphonies to be published—as Symphony No. 1, even though it was the sixth to be written. (In the 1950’s, the Dvořák symphonies were renumbered when the earlier works were finally published.) In the early 1880’s, Dvořák devoted much of his time to opera; his Dimitrij was a great success in Prague, but any notion of a performance in Vienna was dispelled by strong anti-Czech feelings in Austria. Though he was advised to write an opera in German, Dvořák was too much of a Czech nationalist to allow himself to do so, and he turned instead to the writing of a new symphony on a commission from the London Philharmonic Society. In this symphony, he was able to compose with integrity and purpose and maintain his Czech nationalism by infusing the work with what he felt was the spirit of his native people. The resulting seventh symphony is considered by many to be his finest. Like its predecessor, the sixth symphony, it has a third movement that incorporates the rhythmic pattern of the Czech dance known as a furiant. The symphony was first performed on April 22, 1885, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Dvořák’s direction.