Our music for this week is La Valse by Maurice Ravel, performed by the Orchestre Nationale de France with the legendary Leonard Bernstein conducting.
Ravel initially composed La Valse as a piano duet for his friend Arnold Schoenberg (whose music we’ve heard a couple times before here at TWM). He had often thought of turning it into an orchestral work, but World War I interrupted those efforts. After serving as a driver in the French motor transport corps in the war, Ravel returned to composing in the 1920s. In 1928, he collaborated with ballet choreographer Ida Rubenstein to transpose it for orchestra and create a ballet set in “an imperial court, about 1855.”
One can hear the nostalgic grandeur of the mid-19th century Viennese waltz era combined with the “movie music” modernity of Ravel’s contemporary context. However, the ending of the piece is particularly un-Viennese. Ominous timpani, Brahms-like slides in the strings and brass, and frenetic trumpet lines combine to form an intense and shocking finale. One wonders if this is a result of Ravel’s experiences in World War I and his misgivings about the upper-class “waltz culture” that had contributed to World War I.
We’ve done a wide range of series here on This Week’s Music over the past eight (8!) years. We’ve done series on music written for a particular instrument, series on the music of individual composers, and series on entire eras of music. Until now, however, we’ve never done a series about a single ensemble. But I think it is time we do. The legendary Emerson String Quartet will be wrapping up its 47-year career next week, so I thought it would be nice to spend a few weeks listening to their best recordings and performances.
Philip Setzer, Eugene Drucker, Guillermo Figueroa, and Eric Wilson formed the Emerson String Quartet in New York City in 1976. Figueroa was soon replaced on viola by Lawrence Dutton, who remains the ensemble’s violist today. And Wilson was replaced by David Finckel, who remained the (much-loved) cellist of the ensemble until he was succeeded by Paul Watkins in 2013. The ensemble took its name from the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. They made history by not designating a first violinist; instead, they rotated between their two violin players as to who led the quartet. Over the years, the Emerson made more than 30 recordings and won nine Grammys, three Grammophone awards, and the prestigious Avery Fisher prize. Their unmatched discography includes the complete string quartets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bartok, Webern, and Shostakovich, as well as sets of the major works of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Dvorak. They have taught as faculty-in-residence at Stony Brook University since the mid-1990s and have been given honorary musical doctorates from over twenty other conservatories and universities.
After announcing their retirement this past spring, the Emerson embarked on a jaw-dropping international farewell tour that included over 100 performances of the entire Beethoven, Bartok, Schumann, and Shostakovich string quartet cycles across 60 countries. And if that weren’t enough, they also released three new albums in 2023 alone! (Most ensembles are lucky to do one per year).
All of the Emerson’s recordings are masterful, but their interpretations of four composers in particular have received special commendation: late period Beethoven, Shostakovich, Bartok, and Ives. Thus, for the next four weeks, we will listen to the Emerson’s best recordings and performances of those four composers’ works. And to start things off, we will be listening today to one of their live performances of the first movement of Beethoven’s twelfth string quartet.
The twelfth string quartet is the first chamber music composition in Beethoven’s late period (1822-1825). The first movement is structured in sonata form (opening-development-recapitulation) with a few twists thrown in. For instance, Beethoven opens the movement with a six-bar chorale before introducing the primary theme in bar 7. Later, the choral returns in a bizarre rhythmic structure in which the time signature remains 4/4 but the underlying quarter notes are grouped 5 + 3. Beethoven also included multiple canons in the movement, each one using a different fragment of the opening theme.
We are continuing our series on the Top 25 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music with Adagio for Strings by American composer Samuel Barber.
Samuel Barber wrote this piece in 1936 as part of a string quartet. The legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini, upon hearing it, begged Barber to arrange it for full string orchestra. Toscanini later premiered the work with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and it became an overnight sensation. It has become renowned as one of the most moving pieces of music in the world. It was played at the memorial services for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy, and Albert Einstein.
This piece is powerful because of its simplicity. It is a study in the bare essentials of music. Notice how the melody is only in one instrument at a time. The rest of the instruments provide a held-out chordal background over which the melody floats. It is also powerful because of the tension that it creates. Notice how the harmony and melody never change at the same time; this tug-of-war creates rising tension as the tonal exchange escalates.
As you listen, keep in mind the words from Virgil’s Aeneid that inspired this piece:
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls.
This Week's Music 