Fire & Fantasy

Program Notes:

Richard Wagner (May 22, 1813 – February 13, 1883)
Overture to The Flying Dutchman

Before he attained operatic fame, Richard Wagner was crossing from London to Paris to escape unpaid debts in Germany when his ship was caught in a violent storm. The experience, including a quick refuge in the Norwegian Fjords and hearing the tales of its sailors, served as the inspiration for his opera Der fliegende Holländer, also known as The Flying Dutchman. The opera marked his first step towards his Gesamtkunstwerk ideals, a novel technique in which specific musical figures and themes had direct associations with the characters and emotions of the story, a total synthesis of music and drama.

The overture, which also opens the opera, is the full story in miniature form. The Flying Dutchman is stuck between the living and the dead due to a curse that condemns him to sail the ocean indefinitely except for a once-in-every-seven-years excursion to find true love, which will redeem him and break the spell. In one excursion to the shore, he meets the sea captain named Daland, who offers his daughter Senta to the stranger. Senta and the stranger fall in love, despite Senta having a boyfriend. The boyfriend’s protests threaten Senta and the stranger’s plans, but after learning the stranger’s identity as the Flying Dutchman, Senta throws herself into the ocean to be with the Dutchman. She dies, and her love releases the Dutchman from his purgatory so he may die, too. They attain love through death, a common theme across Wagner’s operas.

Wagner wrote fantastical music to tone paint the mythical story. The opening horn call is of open intervals, expressing the loneliness of the Dutchman, after which chromatic grace notes and dramatic, dissonant chords speak to his predicament. The turbulent waves of the stormy sea are represented in chromatic surges in the string section. However, a lyrical and tonal section, led by the oboe, portrays Senta and her instant love for the stranger, who turns out to be the Dutchman. The rest of the story unfolds as expected in the music, shifting between the lovers and the situational maelstrom, with the lovers’ final ascent depicted in hymn-like glory.

Camille Saint-Saëns (October 9, 1835 – December 16, 1921)
Violin Concerto No. 3

French composer Camille Saint-Saëns can be best described as non-partisan in the musical politicis of his time. Coming of age during the mid 19th century debates between story-based program music and authentic, absolute music, Saint-Saëns took a neutral position, defending program music just as he embraced absolute forms. He additionallyl felt indebted to earlier periods in classical music’s development and advocated that the music of the past should be studied and appreciated in the present. However, by avoiding controversy and taking the middle ground, Saint-Saëns’ music is sometimes perceived as unprogressive. As the critic Douglas Charles Parker once wrote, “It is obviously difficult to estimate accurately the value of a man who has been a classicist, a romanticist, an individualist with a great reverence for the past, a pedagogue of the best type, a partisan of programme music.”

In the 1870s and 1880s, Saint-Saëns wrote some of his most successful works, including the Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor. The concerto is absolute in that it doesn’t attempt to set a vivid tale to music. But it is no less expressive than a work of program music. It features beautifully evocative melodies with plenty of violin pyrotechnics over appealing harmonies and orchestration. The first movement, an Allegro non troppo, is a dramatic, minor-key Romantic oration. The second movement, Andantino quasi allegretto, is tender and graceful. Listeners may detect some Latin influence in the final movement, as Saint-Saëns wrote the work while in Spain and dedicated it to the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, who premiered it in 1881. A rousing brass-and-strings chorale features near the end of the movement, an homage to earlier musical forms that Saint-Saëns was fond of including in works of this period

Sergei Prokofiev (April 23, 1891 – March 5, December 16, 1953)
Symphony No. 3

Visitations by demons, supernatural séances, and a woman burned at the stake for her occult visions are just some of the haunting and metaphysical events buried deep in Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 3. The symphony’s musical content originates in Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel. Based on a symbolist novel, the opera’s plot centers around a woman named Renata who has fallen in love with visions of a spirit angel, whom she believes has taken earthly form as Count Heinrich. She marries the count, but in a devastating blow, he leaves her. She enlists the help of a knight, Ruprecht, who accompanies her on her scandalous paranormal attempts to reunite with the count, which are unsuccessful. The knight, however, falls for Renata, a love that remains unrequited. Renata eventually checks into a convent, where she is labeled a witch and burned at the stake. It’s prime Halloween fodder for an October concert.

Prokofiev worked on the opera for over a decade, making every attempt to secure a performance. Both outside circumstances (one interested opera director was fired after it was discovered he was having an affair) and concerns about the subject matter stifled its production. Prokofiev never saw a production in his lifetime. But having invested so much energy in the opera, Prokofiev wasn’t about to let it go to waste. Upon hearing the work in concert format, Prokofiev reworked the music into what we now know as his Third Symphony.

Chilling dissonant chords open the first movement, a diabolical referendum on the story ahead. Although this is a symphony with an opening movement in sonata form, the work unfolds like a soundtrack, driven by the sudden contrasts, raucous outbursts, and sarcastic extremes of its underlying plot. Swells, glissandi, tremolos, bitonality, and more create Renata’s alternative reality. The second movement, Andante, is a distorted meditation with glassy, strange textures. The third movement, Allegro agitato, launches into a manhunt, with music that could be straight out of a horror film. Prokofiev’s eerie string glissandos here predate the modernist experiments of composers like Krzysztof Penderecki. The final movement is Renata’s judgment day, starting with an angry death march and featuring Prokofiev’s strident writing for the strings and brass. A quieter middle section pensively recalls the strange love that drove Renata’s actions. But Renata meets her fate with harsh bell tolls and the orchestra in chaos.

Program notes by Anna Reguero, PhD, a Rochester-based scholar and arts writer