MENDELSSOHN: Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 61: Wedding March

“Wedding March” from the Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61 (1842)

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)

Mendelssohn was enamored during his teenage years with reading the works of Shakespeare, and in the summer of 1826, when he was seventeen, he was inspired to write an overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was premiered in February 1827 in Stettin and immediately garnered a success that has never waned. By 1842, Mendelssohn was the most famous musician in Europe and in demand everywhere. He was director of the superb Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, a regular visitor to England, and Kapellmeister to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in Berlin. For Mendelssohn’s Berlin duties, Friedrich required incidental music for several new productions at the Royal Theater, including Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone, Racine’s Athalie, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which he composed twelve pieces of the incidental music that perfectly matched the inspiration and style of his 1826 Overture. The majestic Wedding March, the Entr’acte to Act V, accompanies the festive triple wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, Demetrius and Helena, and Lysander and Hermia.

RACHMANINOFF: Piano Concerto No. 3

Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 (1909)

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943)

The worlds of technology and art sometimes brush against each other in curious ways. In 1909, it seems, Sergei Rachmaninoff wanted one of those new mechanical wonders — an automobile. And thereupon hangs the tale of his first visit to America.

The impresario Henry Wolfson of New York arranged a thirty-concert tour for the 1909-1910 season for Rachmaninoff to play and conduct his works in several American cities. Rachmaninoff was hesitant about leaving his family for such an extended overseas trip, but the generous financial remuneration was too tempting to resist. With a few tour details still left unsettled, Wolfson died suddenly in spring 1909, and the composer was much relieved that the journey would probably be cancelled. Wolfson’s agency had a contract with Rachmaninoff, however, and during the summer finished the arrangements for his appearances so that the composer–pianist–conductor was obliged to leave for New York as scheduled. Looking on the bright side of that daunting prospect, Rachmaninoff wrote to his friend Nikita Morozov, “I don’t want to go. But then perhaps after America I’ll be able to buy myself that automobile.... It may not be so bad after all!” It was for the American tour that Rachmaninoff composed his Third Piano Concerto.

The first movement is a modified sonata form that begins with a haunting theme, recalled in the later movements, which sets the work’s mood of somber intensity; the espressivo second theme is presented by the pianist. The development is concerned mostly with transformations of fragments from the first theme. A massive cadenza, separated into two parts by a recall of the main theme by the woodwinds, leads to the recapitulation. The Intermezzo is a set of free variations with an inserted episode. The finale is in three large sections. The first part has an abundance of themes derived from those of the opening movement, a relationship further strengthened in the second section, where both themes from the opening movement are recalled in slow tempo. The pace again quickens, and the music from the first part of the finale returns with some modifications before the Concerto’s brilliant close.

TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 4

Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1877-1878)

PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893)

The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most crucial and turbulent time of Tchaikovsky’s life — 1877, when he met two women who forced him to evaluate himself as never before. The first was the sensitive, music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, Nadezhda von Meck, who became not only his personal confidante but also the financial backer who allowed him to quit his irksome teaching job at the Moscow Conservatory to devote himself entirely to composition. Though they never met, her place in Tchaikovsky’s life was enormous and beneficial.

The second woman was Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Moscow Conservatory who had worked herself into a passion over her professor. Tchaikovsky paid her no special attention, and he had quite forgotten her when he received an ardent love letter professing her desire to meet him. Tchaikovsky (age 37), who should have burned the thing, answered the letter of the 28-year-old Antonina in a polite, cool fashion, but did not include an outright rejection of her advances. He had been considering marriage in the hope that it would give him both the stable home life he had not enjoyed in the twenty years since his mother died, as well as to help dispel the all-too-true rumors of his homosexuality. He believed he might achieve both those goals with Antonina. What a welter of emotions must have gripped his heart when, a few weeks later, he proposed marriage to her! Inevitably, the marriage crumbled within days of the wedding amid Tchaikovsky’s self-deprecation.

It was during May and June that Tchaikovsky sketched the Fourth Symphony, finishing the first three movements before Antonina began her siege. The Finale was completed by the time he proposed. Because of that chronology, the program of the Symphony was not a direct result of his marital disaster. All that — the July wedding, the mere eighteen days of bitter conjugal farce, the two separations — postdated the actual composition of the Symphony by a few months. What Tchaikovsky found in his relationship with this woman (who by 1877 already showed signs of approaching the mental ward in which, still legally married to him, she died in 1917) was a confirmation of his belief in the inexorable workings of Fate in human destiny.

Tchaikovsky wrote of the Fourth Symphony: “The introduction [blaring brasses heard in a motto theme that recurs throughout the Symphony] represents Fate, which hinders one in the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing to do but to submit and vainly complain [the melancholy, syncopated shadow-waltz of the main theme]. Would it not be better to turn away from reality and lull one’s self in dreams? [The second theme is begun by the clarinet.] But no — these are but dreams: roughly we are awakened by Fate. [A brass fanfare begins the development.] The second movement shows how sad it is that so much has already been and gone! In the third movement are capricious arabesques, vague figures that slip into the imagination when one is slightly intoxicated. Military music is heard in the distance. If you find no pleasure in yourself go to the people, so the finale [based on the traditional song A Birch Stood in the Meadow] pictures a folk holiday.”