Lecture Five--The Concert Overture

I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous. -- Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Today there will be a quiz at the beginning of the period. We then continue with Symphonic music, specifically late-nineteenth-century orchestral program music: The Program Symphony, The Concert or Symphonic Overture, and the Symphonic or Tone Poem. A discussion of Shakespeare’s importance to the music of the nineteenth century follows. We then introduce the life and personality of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and they conclude with an in-depth examination of his Overture-Fantasy to Romeo and Juliet and a video of the composition of the 1812 Overture. 

Tchaikovsky

Outline 

    I. We begin with a brief review of program music. 

A.   Program music is instrumental music that describes some extra musical content or a picture, story, poem, or play. 

B.  During the nineteenth century, the content of program music became increasingly explicit.

Featured Music:

Mozart, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, second movement (1787)

Beethoven, Symphony no. 6, fourth movement (1808)

Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet, Love Theme (1869)

Mahler, Symphony no. 1, third movement (1888) 

C.  These examples demonstrate increasingly explicit programs.

    1. The Mozart piece is an example of absolute music.

     2.  The Beethoven piece is music as metaphor of a summer thunderstorm.

     3.  The Tchaikovsky piece is music with an absolute emotional meaning with reference to two specific individuals.

     4.  The Mahler piece has emotional, programmatic, and visual meaning.

     II.    There are several Romantic era program music genres.

A.   A program symphony is a multi-movement work that tells a single story.

B.  A concert overture (or symphonic overture) is a single-movement work, organized in something resembling sonata-allegro form, which tells a story.

C.  A symphonic poem is typically a single-movement work in which the form is determined by the literary story being told.

D. Tone poem is for Richard Strauss a single-movement work without any predetermined form. 

III.    Shakespeare and the Romantics.

A.   A huge Shakespeare revival began in the early nineteenth century and continues to this day.

B.  Shakespeare’s plays, with their incredible emotional power, spoke powerfully to composers and audiences alike.

C.  A few nineteenth-century works were based on Shakespeare’s plays:

    1.  Opera

        a.    Macbeth: Verdi

        b.    Othello: Verdi

        c.    Faistaff (Merry Wives of Windsor): Verdi

        d.    Beatrice e Benedict (Love’s Labors Lost): Berlioz

        e.    Hamlet: Thomas

    2.  Grandiose and instrumental works

        a.    Romeo and Juliet: Berlioz

        b.    Romeo and Juliet: Tchaikovsky

        c.    Hamlet: Tchaikovsky

        d.    Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Mendelssohn

       Featured Music:

        Mendelssohn, Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Bottom’s Theme”

         e.   13 examples of the symphonic poem such as  Les préludes: Franz Liszt 

IV.   Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93) 

A.   We begin with a brief biography.

    1.  Tchaikovsky grew up in St. Petersburg.

    2.  He entered the St. Petersburg conservatory—a repository of Germanic musical craft—at age 21 in 1861.

    3.  Following graduation, he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

    4.  He was a nervous, neurotic, and unhappy man who feared throughout his life that his homosexuality would be discovered.

B.  His compositional output included:

    1.  Six symphonies

    2.   One violin concerto and three piano concerti

    3.   Two operas

    4.   Three ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker

    5.   Various program works: Romeo and Juliet, 1812 Overture, Manfred Symphony, Hamlet

C.  Tchaikovsky had two important relationships with women.

1.   His brief marriage in 1877 to Antonina Ivanova Miliukova was a fiasco.

2.   Nadejda von Meek, a wealthy widow, served as Tchaikovsky’s financial patron for seventeen years.  

V.    Tchaikovsky’s compositional style was an mixture of diverse international elements.

A.   It combined Tchaikovsky’s Russian cultural and emotional heritage with his Western/German-style musical training and his excessively emotional personal temperament. 

B.  Tchaikovsky also showed a remarkable gift for melody. 

VI.   Overture-Fantasy to Romeo and Juliet, I869 (revised I880). 

A.   This work is loosely written in sonata-allegro form. 

B.  It follows the larger outline of the Romeo and Juliet story.

C.  The musical themes correspond to the literary themes Tchaikovsky seeks to set forward. 

    1.   The piece begins with the hymn theme—dramatic and religious in tone, it presages the tragic ending of the piece.

    2.   Theme I is the vendetta theme, a powerful theme, that represents the violent hatred between the Montagues and Capulets.

    3.   Theme 2 is the love theme, a sweet, enthralling theme diametrically opposed to the vendetta theme; it represents the idealized love between Romeo and Juliet. 

D.  Unlike the play, which ends in tragedy, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet ends with transcendent love music, reflecting the nineteenth-century notion of eternal love.  We will see that later in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

      Featured Music:

Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet

E. Video Presentation of the 1812 Overture.