Czech Philharmonic • Brussels

“Whatever we have in Czech history that is truly great has grown from the bottom up!” This sentence by the famous Czech author Jan Neruda tells us a great deal about the history of the Czech nation and its great figures. It certainly applies unreservedly to Antonín Dvořák, whose growing artistry took him from a little village to the world’s greatest metropolises.

When Neruda wrote these words in 1884, he was 50 years old. And what was Antonín Dvořák doing in 1891 at age 50? He was a famous, sought-after composer, an artist whose popularity had long since crossed the borders of Austria-Hungary and spread all over Europe. It was in the year of his 50th birthday that he was offered the directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He considered the matter very carefully, consulting with many of the people who were close to him. For example, he wrote to his friend Alois Göbl in June 1891: “I’m supposed to go to America for two years! […] Should I accept the offer? Or not? Send me word.” Dvořák had never been very fond of celebrations, so it is no surprise that in early September he refused to take part in celebrations in Prague for his 50th birthday because he was spending time with his family at his beloved summer home in Vysoká, where he went to rest and to compose. Four days after his birthday (12 September 1891), he finished orchestrating Carnival Overture, Op. 92, the second work in a cycle of three concert overtures that are programmatic in character. We do not have a concrete programme from the composer, but he clearly realised something here that no one would have expected from him in the realm of symphonic music. Two years earlier, he had already gone down this path in chamber music with his Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85, thirteen pieces for solo piano, about which he jokingly commented: “I’m not just an absolute musician, but also a poet.” Dvořák had originally conceived his triptych of concert overtures depicting three aspects of human life as a single whole with the title “Nature, Life, and Love”. All three overtures are also carefully motivically interconnected. Ultimately, however, the composer told his publisher Simrock that his overtures “each can also be played separately”, and he gave them the opus numbers and titles In Nature’s Realm, Op. 91, Carnival Overture, Op. 92, and Othello, Op. 93. The first performance of all three overtures took place on 28 April 1892 at the Rudolfinum in Prague at the composer’s farewell concert before his departure for America, with Dvořák himself conducting the orchestra of the National Theatre. Dvořák also conducted their second performance, this time across the ocean on 21 October 1892 at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella came on the heels of the First World War, but they react in entirely different ways: while Elgar’s music turns inward with sorrowful reflection, Stravinsky radically alters his musical language with ironically stylised detachment.

The English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) grew up in the family of a church organist who owned a shop that sold sheet music and instruments. Little Edward began playing the piano at school, and he learned to play the organ by watching his father. He also borrowed a variety of instruments from the family shop and taught himself to play them without receiving any kind of instruction, so he soon mastered not only piano and organ, but also violin, viola, cello, and bassoon. He also began composing in a similar manner. At age 16 he became a free-lance musician, so he got experience mainly as an instrumentalist, church organist, and conductor. He mostly composed choral music, but he did not achieve true renown as a composer until he reached the age of 42, when he wrote his Enigma Variations, Op. 36. The great conductor Hans Richter held the work in high esteem and prepared and led its premiere. The idea of creating a set of variations with a secret, “encoded” theme is indicative of Elgar’s unusual imaginativeness, and as a self-taught composer, he was not under any restraints. The work is a covert tribute to the composer’s wife Alice and to the friends who supported Elgar during the years of uncertainty as he got his start as a composer.

Another of Elgar’s most important works is the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85. Just choosing the cello as a solo instrument represents a great challenge for composers. Antonín Dvořák may have put it most succinctly, once warning his composition pupils that unlike the piano or violin, which are capable of carrying themselves in front of an orchestra as ideal solo instruments, the cello does not possess comparable tonal qualities: “It whines up high and mumbles down low.” It is possible that after Elgar’s Violin Concerto (1907–1910), he was taking on a challenge as Dvořák had done—dealing with a difficult compositional task. The solutions the composer selected definitely hint at this. Elgar chose an unusual four-movement layout that differs from most other concertos and is more typical of chamber music, and Elgar’s concerto has a great deal in common with the chamber music genre. The composer deals with the cello’s sonic limitations by using a very delicate instrumental touch, and the music itself is in fact very personal, even intimate in character. Elgar’s musical language achieves perfection in its musical expression of pain and sorrow. The melancholy phrases that descend ever more deeply into despair and gloom are the key to the interpreter’s grasp of the entire work. The concerto dates from a time of great resignation immediately after the First World War. The composer himself was battling illness, but above all he was affected by the decline of his beloved wife’s health. She managed to attend the concerto’s premiere, but she died the following year. Although the premiere on 27 October 1919 featured the superb cellist Felix Salmond, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Elgar conducting, the performance did not turn out well because of a lack of sufficient rehearsal time. The failed premiere proved to be too much for the concerto. Despite the efforts of many outstanding cellists, it was not until 1965 that the work gained wide recognition thanks to the legendary recording made by Jacqueline du Pré, who was 20 years old at the time.

In 1912, Igor Stravinsky was also 30 years old. 59 more years of life were still ahead of him, and he was at work on his most daring work to date. He was known to all of Paris, the centre of the artistic avant-garde at the time. Paris is also where the progressive Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev had been working since 1909. His ensemble’s productions of Stravinsky’s ballets The Firebird and Petrushka had been the talk of Paris, but the greatest event was yet to come. On 29 May 1913, the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave the premiere of his third ballet, The Rite of Spring, subtitled Picture of Pagan Russia. A riot ensued, pitting the disapproving, disgusted conservative part of the audience against enthusiastic progressives. Nothing would ever be the same again—not only the music, but also the choreography and costumes differed from anything that had come before.

 “The idea of The Rite of Spring came to me while I was still composing Firebird,” recalled Igor Stravinsky 45 years after the work’s premiere in his book Conversations. “I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” In the summer of 1911 in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Stravinsky signed a contract with Diaghilev for the composing of the last of his three early ballets. He worked on the composition in 1911 and 1912, and he made the final revisions in March 1913. To prepare himself to compose the music, Stravinsky joined the stage designer and scenario author Nicholas Roerich, who was also an archaeologist, on a trip to the Russian town Talashkino near Smolensk to study the rituals of Slavic tribes at a local centre for the folk arts. Rather than using specific folk themes, they were interested in archetypes—the mystical, wild, primitive, and uncivilised—that they would present in opposition to the bourgeois conventions of the day and to excessive sensitivity in the arts.

Stravinsky did not borrow any specific Russian folk songs, but The Rite of Spring is still the high point of his creative period under the influence of folklore. The only actual folk melody in The Rite of Spring is played by the bassoon at the very beginning, but the composer later said that the tune was not Russian—it supposedly came from an anthology of Lithuanian folk music that he found in Warsaw. In 1943, Stravinsky’s contemporary Béla Bartók, himself a folklore enthusiastic, called The Rite of Spring “the apotheosis of the music of rural Russia”, and about the ballet he declared: “Rhythmic cells that contract and expand can be found commonly in the music of Russia and eastern Europe.”

For Stravinsky, the character of the theme opened up incredible musical possibilities, particularly in the use of the power of elementary rhythm with the whole orchestra acting as a gigantic percussion instrument employing fierce rhythmic pulsation, polyrhythm, and the rapid alternation of metres. Later, Stravinsky recalled playing the beginning of the composition for Diaghilev for the first time at the piano. “Diaghilev asked if those repeated chords would go on much longer. And I answered ‘until the end, my dear’” Also in terms of tonality, The Rite of Spring went beyond tradition with hints of bitonality and tritonality, as Stravinsky superimposes chords separated by as little as a semitone.

Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography was also in keeping with the totally revolutionary conception of the music. The dancers’ primitive movements were entirely contrary to the aesthetic ideals of classical ballet. In hindsight, the choreography and Nijinsky’s rather inadequate comprehension of the innovative music could be chiefly blamed for the failure of the work’s premiere. A year later, a concert performance of The Rite of Spring in Paris met with public acclaim, and the work became a definitive milestone on the path towards modern music.