12 Works of Christmas - 1. Grieg's Christmas Lullaby

It's odd - for a holiday that people most associate with classical music, Christmastime radio programming features very little classical music written about Christmas, opting instead to showcase hour after hour of good-to-middling arrangements of the same dang carols we hear every year.  I've actually made a point of tracking down interesting classical pieces written about Christmas to curtail this very problem, and this year I'm doing my own "12 Days of Christmas" schtick to show the best of them off.  First up - a much-belated visit to the world of one of my favorite composers, Edvard Grieg.

While Grieg's piano and orchestral pieces get a lot of play (and in the case of his Piano Concerto way too much play, if you ask me) his songs are largely neglected, mostly due to vocalists' unease in singing in Norwegian despite Norwegian pronunciation not being all that dissimilar from most other Northern European languages.  There are some recordings of his lovely song cycle Haugtussa by the likes of Anne Sofie von Otter, however, and hopefully this appropriately soporific gem will trickle into Winter concerts eventually.  Going to sleep is a big part of the ritual of Christmas for many children, and so this Christmas Lullaby is a welcome, non-Santa variation on the theme, featuring subterranean rocking in the bass and surprising harmonic subtlety in the right hand and melody, reminding us once again how well Grieg's music has aged since his death over a hundred years ago.  The melody chromatically tiptoeing down the stairs in the vocal part is straight out of Debussy's Beau Soir, but the unexpected shift to G minor is pure Grieg, deftly tiptoeing back into D major in the bass.  And hey - Anne Sofie von Otter sang it!

~PNK

Wagner's Elegy to the Future

Whether you adore his work or despise it, whether you hold his antisemitism against him or choose to ignore it, you can't deny that Richard Wagner was one of music's great geniuses; his "music of the future" was far ahead of his time and enormously influential to late-19th century composers.  That being said, it's entirely understandable why some modern listeners may be put off by his work, as the majority of his output was comprised of obnoxiously long operas.  Wagner was a megalomaniac to end all megalomaniacs, including commissioning instruments to be built for his as-of-then unperformed works and building a radical new theater for his own 15-20 hour Ring cycle.  That isn't to say that all his work is intolerably huge, as is proved by this sliver of a piece:

Though it bears a dedication of December 26, 1881 (very near the end of Wagner's life), the Elegie's harmonic language bears some resemblance to that of the ever-taught Tristan und Isolde, written in the late 1850's, and some references state that it was written in 1858.  Either way, it remains some of the most sensitive music Wagner ever wrote (and is as close as I'm able to highlight fellow musical futurist Liszt's En rêve in this blog).  Man, those opening chords - he digs into them so hard, only to recede into unpredictable harmonic movement.  Measures 5 & 6 feel very much like the undulations in the slow movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, and that was pretty much as beautiful as Schubert ever got, so kudos.  The hairpin dynamics compliment romantic pianism very well, requiring both incredible sensitivity and a willingness to throw your whole weight into the keys.  The piece has probably been eluding capture for a while thanks to poor publication, but earlier this year one Francisco Javier Hernando Rodríguez was kind enough to make a very readable engraved version in honor of Wagner's bicentennial.  As you can see at the top, the Elegie began its life as a two-line scrabble, and you can see the original up close as well as the typeset version and a subpar published version here.  Perhaps it would have been more resonant to publish this article the day after Christmas like the dedication, but I think publishing it ahead of its time is more in the spirit of the "music of the future".  Whichever way you look at it, the Elegie is an apt representation of the darkest month of the year, and his bicentennial is slipping away faster each day - and this performance is just as fine a memorial as anything.

~PNK

Trickery's Eternal Return

Classical music is a largely humorless enterprise, save for the illustrious oeuvre of P.D.Q. Bach.  Perhaps academia is to blame, or perhaps composers fearful of their reputation among the pompous and vindictive, but either way classical jokes are few and far between (and often not funny).  One of the most prolific classical humorists, Joseph Haydn, wrote the "Surprise" symphony, wherein loud orchestral hits interject quiet passages, and this was considered the height of classical trickery for some time.  There's also that guy who wrote a piece for each key of the piano exactly once, but it's humor value lies in how much you care about how many keys a piano has and how important serialism is to your life.  In this mire of stiffness one device has cropped up not once but three times in leaf form, each time separated by decades of time and composer M.O.'s - and we're looking at all three today.  With the image above in mind, take a wild guess what it is.

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See it?

As you can probably guess, repeat signs are usually followed by more music, or at least have another ending as to give the section closure.  Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894) was a charming and clever lad, and many of his works exude a sunny smile, one that would shine across the works of Debussy and Ravel.  His Petite Valse may not seem that odd at first glance, but that repeat sign gives it a snickering new dimension.  As the bar is the dominant ending to the phrase, it wants to lean to the tonic, and the pickup note leads back to the first bar.  However, there is no exit - following the score forces infinite repetition.  The pianist Georges Rabol decided that if he was to circle around the mulberry bush he was at least going to put an octave jump in there for yucks.

It's an elegant trap, and recalls a scene from Animal Crackers:

And if Chabrier could do it, Erik Satie (1866-1924) could certainly up the ante.  Satie was one of the most eccentric and enigmatic composers in history, and his extensive piano oeuvre includes such gems as Pièces froides and Embryons desséchés (I'll let you translate that).  His superb piano set Sports et Divertessements is one of his most extensive and varied works, and near the set's end this appears:

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If you'll tear your eyes from the beautiful fountain penmanship for a second, you'll notice that symbol at the end of the score, and the lack of a double bar.  The symbol means that you go back to where it appears earlier in the score, and that just so happens to be the very beginning.  When Satie calls something Le Tango perpétual you'd better believe he means it.  It's the most famous of the three by far, and Satie's influence ensured at least one direct Tango descendant (but we'll get to that later).  YouTube's scrolling score project illuminates how the Devil's preferred music is the path to madness.

If one were asked to name the most humorless composer of all you couldn't give a much better answer than Anton Webern (1883-1945), the master of serial purity and smile suppression.  His mature style is so spare and emotionally cold you'd be hard pressed to find a jokey moment in all that empty space.  With that in mind, there may be a reason he left off the opus number for his 1924 Kinderstück.

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Is "lovely" really the most appropriate mood for this piece?  "Quizzical" seems more apt, and it shall remain quizzical to me because I'm of the opinion that life is too short to divine the root collection of serial pieces without good reason (it's not palindromic, that's for sure).  I can see some humor here, what with the "lovely" at the top and the bubbling texture in the meat of the thing, but I can't see the appeal for children, if that's at all what Webern had in mind.  And ultimately, it's that dang stinger under the last bar that cements this piece in the joke rep, the one at the start of this article, and the one that the pianist in the recording below chooses to ignore - but he does squeeze a heck of a lot of charm into his go at it.  Perhaps rather than asking the question of "Why the repeat?" should we be asking "How can we use the repeat to our advantage?"  The problem is that every time I get an answer to one I come back to the other.

~PNK

Sibelius's Kantele Lullaby

The kantele is a a plucked string instrument traditional to Finnish music, normally equipped with 5 to 15 strings on the small variety and 38 strings on the concert variety, tuned to make a diatonic scale.  Like many folk instruments it has enjoyed a long history in its own wheelhouse but only recently has seen any development in classical music.  Jean Sibelius needs no introduction from me, and as the grand statesman of Finnish music its no surprise he wrote a piece for an instrument native to his country.

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The IMSLP uploader Nikolaos-Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis (who I'll get to later) offered some info on the piece:

"The Lullaby for violin and kantele JS 222 (11/9/1899) was printed in 1935 in the periodical Väisänen, and thus it has been generally known since then. The birthday of the writer Juhani Aho was celebrated at the home of the painter Pekka Halonen, whose mother had taught him and his brother to play some Finnish folk song tunes on five-stringed kantele (traditional stringed Finnish instrument, also common in other areas of the Baltic, and Russia). Pekka Halonen performed a Waltz, and Sibelius composed a violin part to the kantele's music."

Realizing that the original printing was hard to read, Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis made a typeset version:

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The violin part, composed on top of an accompaniment from time immemorial, plays beautifully off the enchanting harmonies, allowing for light dissonance and creating a plaintive, distant feeling.  It's perfect as a lullaby, and I couldn't imagine it being played on any other instruments.  Here's a performance on YouTube that shows the kantele part first before looping the full piece, performed by two unrelated men who look like brothers:

~PNK