DVOŘÁK: Slavonic Dance No. 8 in G minor, Op. 46, No. 8

Slavonic Dance No. 8 in G minor, Op. 46, No. 8 (1878)
ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK (1841-1904)

Antonín Dvořák was 33 years old when he received his first break as a composer, in 1874: he was awarded the Austrian State Stipendium, a grant to assist young, poor, gifted musicians—which described him exactly. That he received the award five years in a row underscores how little his financial situation improved in the 1870s. The Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick was on the jury that first year, and Johannes Brahms joined him as a judge beginning in 1875. In 1877, Hanslick encouraged Dvořák to send some scores to Brahms. Dvořák did, and Brahms recommended the emerging composer to his own publisher, Fritz Simrock, who immediately published Dvořák’s Moravian Duets, commissioned a collection of Slavonic Dances, and contracted a first option on all the composer’s new works. Simrock hoped the Slavonic Dances would resemble Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, and that is the spirit in which the public received them. A Berlin newspaper reviewer proclaimed: “Here is at last a hundred-percent talent and, what is more, a completely natural talent. I consider the Slavonic Dances to be a work which will make its triumphant way through the world in the same way as Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.” They put Dvořák on the musical map. That initial set of eight dances—Dvořák’s Op. 46, scored for piano four-hands—brought him his first composer’s fee, however modest, and it earned a small fortune for the publisher. Within months, Dvořák produced orchestral versions of them, and in 1886 he followed up with eight further Slavonic Dances for piano four-hands (Op. 72), which he similarly enlarged into orchestral settings. Slavonic Dance No. 8 from the first set is an example of the furiant, a fiery dance with shifting accents.

PROKOFIEV: Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63

Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63 (1935)
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

Just before the Russian Revolution broke out, Sergei Prokofiev boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, sailed on to Japan, Honolulu, and San Francisco, and from there proceeded cross-country to New York. New York and Paris would be his base for more than a decade, but by 1932 his steps began turning homeward to what in the meantime had become the Soviet Union—and in 1936 he settled in Moscow for good. He composed his Violin Concerto No. 2 while he was still based part-time in Paris and on the verge of returning to the Soviet Union. “Reflecting my nomadic concertizing experience,” Prokofiev stated in his so-called Short Autobiography of 1939-41, “the concerto was written in the most diverse countries: the main subject of the first movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the second movement in Voronezh, the instrumentation was completed in Baku, and the premiere took place in December of 1935 in Madrid.” He initially thought of titling the piece “Concert Sonata for Violin and Orchestra,” but he finally gave up that unnecessary complication and called it simply Violin Concerto No. 2, his Violin Concerto No. 1 having been premiered a dozen years earlier.

Prokofiev was a master orchestrator, and his Violin Concerto No. 2 brims with extraordinary, often spare, instrumental effects. He calls for five percussion instruments in the score—bass drum, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, and castanets—arranging everything so that all can be handled by a single player if necessary. It has been suggested that the castanets were added late in the orchestration process, just after plans changed such that the concerto would be premiered in Madrid rather than Paris. Whether a passage of “Spanish rhythms” in the string parts near the end of the third movement was already in place is anyone’s guess. 

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, Pastoral

Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68, Pastoral (1808)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)

Like many modern urbanites, Ludwig van Beethoven drew sustenance from the city—in his case, Vienna—but complained about its inconveniences. He enjoyed escaping to places like the village of Heiligenstadt, where he installed himself while composing his Sixth Symphony in the summer of 1808. “How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks,” he wrote two years later. “No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.”

Beethoven worried that priming listeners to hear specific images in his music might restrict their experience of a work. Jottings in his sketches for the Sixth Symphony reinforce that idea: “The hearers should be allowed to discover the situations,” “All painting in instrumental music is lost if it is pushed too far,” and so on. Nonetheless, he condoned the use of the title Pastoral even as he downplayed the music’s illustrative qualities. At the head of a violin part used in the first performance (and only parts were available at that time, since the orchestral score was not published until 1826) is written “Sinfonia Pastorella / Pastoral Symphony/ or / Recollection of Country Life / More an Expression of Feeling than Painting.” Each of the five movements also carries an individual motto describing a rural experience. Numerous compositions have been cited as prefiguring the programmatic bent of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, including a piano fantasia by Franz Jakob Freystädtler called A Spring Morning, Noon, and Night, and a symphony by Justin Heinrich Knecht titled Le portrait musical de la nature. Such pieces were characteristic of an epoch nursed by the back-to-nature philosophy of Rousseau and Herder. In Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, nature found its supreme musical mirror.