Month: March 2022

Berlioz’ “Waverley” Overture: Adventures of a Youthful Dreamer

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The Waverley Overture is vibrant, youthful music by the 23-year-old Hector Berlioz. Literary influences abound throughout the works of Berlioz. This early Overture was inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, which depict the adventures of Edward Waverley, a young English soldier and dreamer who travels to Scotland amid the Jacobite uprising of 1745. The manuscript and printed score are prefaced with a poetic quote from an early chapter of Scott’s initial novel: Dream of love and …

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Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 2 in G Minor: Elegiac and Transcendent

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Antonín Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 2 in G minor, Op. 26 was written in the wake of personal tragedy. In August of 1875, Dvořák lost his newborn daughter, Josefa, within days of her birth. The G minor Piano Trio was composed four months later. Written over the course of seventeen days, it was the first piece Dvořák completed following the painful loss, and it opened the creative floodgates for music to come. …

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Ravel’s “Trois poèmes de Mallarmé”: Reveries Transcribed

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In a 1927 interview with the New York Times, Maurice Ravel discussed the influence of the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898): Mallarmé exorcised our language, like the magician that he was. He has released the winged thoughts, the unconscious daydreams from their prison. Ravel’s 1913 song cycle, Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, enters this dreamy world in which allusion, metaphor, and ambiguity reign. The composer said that his aim was to “transcribe …

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Schubert’s Sixth Symphony: The Youthful Charm of the “Little C Major”

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In March of 1827, the biographer Anton Schindler brought a stack of Franz Schubert’s lieder to Beethoven’s deathbed in an attempt to comfort the ailing composer. Schindler recounted that after studying the songs, Beethoven commented, “Truly in Schubert there is the divine spark.” Schubert and Beethoven lived in Vienna at the same time. Yet, they traveled in different circles and their creative paths diverged widely. While Beethoven’s ferocious, revolutionary symphonies were shaking up the musical …

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John Corigliano’s “Gazebo Dances”: Visions of the Village Green

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Gazebo Dances, by the American composer John Corigliano (b. 1938), inhabits a dreamy, nostalgic world of summer afternoon picnics and concerts on the village green. Composed in 1972, the piece was scored originally for piano four hands. Each of its four brief movements was dedicated to one of the composer’s “pianist friends.” In his program notes, Corigliano writes, I later arranged the suite for orchestra and for concert band, and it is …

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William Schuman’s Third Symphony: An American Monument

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The ten years between 1935 and 1945 produced a handful of contenders for the title of “great American symphony.” The list includes Samuel Barber’s epic 1936 Symphony in One Movement, the third symphonies of Roy Harris and Aaron Copland, and David Diamond’s Second Symphony, as well as symphonies by Howard Hanson and Walter Piston, among others. Many of these commissions were initiated by Serge Koussevitzky, the influential music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, …

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