Mendelssohn Bicentennial Concert

Program Notes

• Irish Rhapsody No. 1, Charles Villiers Stanford
• Violin Concerto, Felix Mendelssohn
• Variations on a Theme (Enigma), Edward Elgar

Irish Rhapsody No. 1 (1902)

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1926)

A town mouse I was born and bred, and the town which sheltered me was one likely to leave its mark upon its youngest citizens, and to lay up for them vivid and stirring memories.

—Charles Villiers Stanford

The town was Dublin, where Stanford was born in 1852. But later composers -- such as Arnold Bax -- dismissed him as a musical tourist rather than a genuine Irishman.

Stanford was an Anglo-Irish Protestant who lived in England from age ten and hated the idea of Irish home rule. Yet his works include six Irish Rhapsodies, an Irish Symphony, Irish Fantasies, Irish Sketches, an Irish Idyll, Songs of a Wandering Celt, and the opera "Shamus O'Brien," which has been variously described as "a delightful piece of Irish dramatic writing" and a hodgepodge of hateful ethnic clichés.

He idolized Brahms, to whom he devoted his "Songs of Old Ireland: A collection of Fifty Irish Melodies Unknown in England." One of those melodies, of possibly English, Irish, or Scottish provenance, was first published (in Stanford's infancy) as the "Londonderry Air." It provides half the thematic material for Stanford's First Irish Rhapsody, it is very unlike traditional Irish song, and it is known to us as "Danny Boy."

The other half is a march called "Leatherbags Donnell."

The First Rhapsody was a great success, and helped Stanford regain the acclaim he had lost to Edward Elgar, who had recently published the "Enigma Variations."

"A structural imperative of Stanford's rhapsody, and one that was to pervade the majority of his essays in the genre," says biographer Jeremy Dibble, "was to allow the Irish melodies to take centre stage, and though there are attempts to derive 'developmental' episodes or transition passages from the folk material, the overwhelming effect is… of 'recourse to entire melodies which are arranged rather than recomposed into the musical fabric.'"

Another scholar, Christopher Howell, says that "Stanford understood more than any composer except Charles Ives the value of musical quotation." But what could the conservative Stanford have shared with the American avant-gardist Ives?

The answer can probably be found through the music Brahms. The "Academic Festival Overture" - based entirely on German student drinking songs - is simultaneously a joke and a masterpiece. Perhaps it influenced both of his admirers, both of whom loved musical humor and both of whom quoted his music in theirs.

At any rate, Stanford and Ives both "understood that the sudden recognition of a musical theme by the listener, in a context far removed from its normal one, can create an effect which is both powerful and moving."

Stanford also wrote lighter music under the name Karol Drofnatski.

Violin Concerto (1844)

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47)

Mendelssohn's E Minor Violin Concerto is an absolutely perfect piece. By this I simply mean that it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do. It is a miraculous, multitiered balancing act of Classical grace and Romantic ardor, musical taste and dazzling display, formal structure and impetuosity. And in just 25 minutes!

—Anthony Tommasini, music critic, New York Times

The word "perfect" often gets attached to the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. "It's become almost a cliché but it really is true," explains Joshua Bell, one of today's leading violinists. "The balance, the proportions between the movements, and what it offers, the most beautiful melodies and the excitement, and the way it sits for the violinist, where a beginner can sort of handle it, and then a great artist can really do something with it. So, it's an incredible piece."

Mendelssohn's pupil Joseph Joachim, the great violinist and friend of Brahms and Stanford, spoke of the four great German violin concertos: by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruch, and Mendelssohn, 'but the dearest of them all, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's."

Given all this rapturous praise, it's hard for us to understand why critics dismissed him as a lightweight for the hundred years or so between Joachim and Bell. Wagner seems to have started it in his grotesque screed "Judaism in Music." He acknowledged Mendelssohn as "the most gifted of his race," but condemned him for lacking national roots and therefore being incapable of true art.

Queen Victoria and the Victorians loved him, which became a problem after the old queen died and "Victorian" came to mean fusty and repressed. It was held against him, even though he denied before the Victorian age began. George Bernard Shaw, a famed music critic before his success as a playwright, inveighed against his "kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio mongering." (Shaw said similarly awful things about Brahms.) Charles Villiers Stanford thought Mendelssohn was good, but not as good as Schumann.

Even Mendelssohn's father was bothered by what the Oxford Companion to Music describes as Felix's "frothy scherzos." The Oxford Companion's two-page biography is itself a masterpiece of simultaneous glorification and belittlement.

But this is the Mendelssohn Year - the two hundredth anniversary of his birth - and critics are bending backwards to point out innovations and profundities in his work which had hidden themselves for the past century. Mendelssohn has been proclaimed cool.

This perfect concerto is in three movements: an allegro appassionato, a poignant slow movement, and a rousing, concluding allegro molto vivace which the Oxford Companion to Music might describe as frothy.

Variations on a Theme (Enigma) (1899)

Edward Elgar (1857-1934)

Mr. Edward Elgar, who is without doubt the most prominent and the most brilliant of the younger generation. His oratorio Lux Christi, his cantatas King Olaf and Caractacus, his Sea Songs Cycle, and above all his Variations for Orchestra… are an honor to English Art.

—Charles Villiers Stanford

Elgar loathed Stanford, who promoted the younger man's work throughout his career. This seems less odd the more you know about Edward Elgar.

To quote again from the Oxford Companion to Music: "His personality was complex; his appearance, that of a country squire with dogs at heel, was a consciously adopted pose which complemented his frequent defence-mechanism assertions that he had no interest in music." A shopkeeper's son, he was deeply insecure about his place in English society and deeply ambivalent about his not-quite-acceptable Catholicism. He loved cryptography, horseracing, and dogs, and frequently declared himself done with composing. "Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger," says one commentator. Elgar was an enigmatic man.

Churchill famously described Russia as "an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle." Russia had nothing on Elgar's Variations on a Theme.

According to Elgar, the Enigma allegedly began as an absent-minded piano improvisation at the end of a long day. "That's a good tune," said his wife, Alice. "What tune?" asked Elgar. Soon he was improvising variations to depict, say, the way a certain friend "goes out of the room."

This story may or may not be true.

Elgar offered further explanations, of sorts:

This work, commenced in a spirit of humour & continued in great seriousness, contains sketches of the composer's friends. It may be understood that these personages comment and reflect on the original theme & each one attempts an original solution of the Enigma, for so the theme is called.

The Enigma I will not explain. Its dark saying must be left unguessed. And I warn you that the apparent connexion between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme 'goes,' but is not played… So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas… the chief character is never on the stage.

The chief character in those recent plays was Death. This may or may not help us understand the Enigma Variations.

According to John Pickard, General Editor of the Complete Elgar Edition:

There appear to be not one, but two enigmas here: the title itself (why call it 'Enigma' in the first place?) and the reference to the 'larger theme' that 'goes, but is not played'. Many commentators have attempted, with varying degrees of ingenuity and success, to show that the Theme is a counterpoint to another tune, usually of popular origin and ranging from 'Rule! Britannia' and 'God Save the Queen' to 'Pop Goes the Weasel' and 'Auld Lang Syne'. They are probably wasting their time, because Elgar clearly stated that 'through and over the whole set' a larger theme goes. In other words, the 'larger theme' runs across the Variations, not the Theme.

It seems likely therefore that the larger theme is not musical, but conceptual: a bond that links the 14 individuals. Perhaps the bond is simply friendship - or love.

Others are convinced that two measures from Mozart's "Prague" Symphony (No. 38) are the source of the whole thing. The "Prague" Symphony, in fact, rounded out the program at the Enigma Variations' premiere.

The theme we actually get to hear is in two parts, alternating "major and minor, leaps and steps, triple hint and quadruple reality," explains Elgar biographer Jerrold Northrop Moore. "Each of the variations juxtaposed elements of both the A and B figures from the original theme. The problem addressed in each variation, then, was that of finding out how the fundamental differences of musical discourse represented by those two figures could be reconciled." The Finale provides the solution, says Moore.

The names Elgar assigned to each variation are fitfully informative. The first is dedicated to "C.A.E." - the composer's wife, Alice. The rhythmically challenging seventh, "Troyte", recounts Elgar's failure to teach piano to a non-musical friend.

We can be sure that "Nimrod," the mighty ninth variation, is based on his close friend and editor A.J. Jaeger, since Elgar wrote to Jaeger: "You are Nimrod." ("Jaeger" means "hunter" in German, and the biblical Nimrod was "a mighty hunter.") We are told it depicts Elgar and Jaeger discussing the slow movements of Beethoven, specifically that of the Sonata No. 8, the Pathetique.

The eleventh is called "G.R.S." after George Robertson Sinclair, but depicts Sinclair's bulldog, Dan, "falling into the river Wye, swimming upstream and scrambling to the bank with a triumphant bark." Critic Michael Steinberg calls it "the best dog music since Haydn…"

Fourteen is labeled "*** (Romanza)" and contains a quote from Mendelssohn. Several women have been described as the inspiration for ***. Alice is not one of them.

The Finale, "E.D.U.", is an alleged self-portrait, using Alice's pet name for her husband, "Eddu." If so, it expresses either Elgar's solution to the Engima, as Moore suggests, or a portrait of an imposing, supremely self-confident man.

Porgram Notes by David Hirsch, March 15, 2009.