Program Notes: October 14, 2001

Bedrich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (1866) is a comedic opera with a Czech nationalist agenda, depicting a Bohemian peasant-world in which, if you’ve wit and luck, seemingly unsolvable problems might readily dissolve into a happy ending. The components of the overture, skillfully woven together in alternation with each other, reference some of the main elements of the story: a carnivalesque outburst, a polka (both redolent of Bohemian peasant life), and a more lyrical central interlude (undoubtedly the love interest). Recurring throughout, as well, are stretches of an ongoing perpetual-motion fugue, in which each instrumental group enters, lurching into motion by "assembling" its melodic line bit by bit, beginning with one note, then three, then five, then seven, until finally it is well underway. This is where the real energy of the overture comes from, and this music serves a musical function analogous to the machinations of the musical-comedy plot to follow–with clear roots going back to Mozart.

Leos Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen (1923) is an operatic oddity, inspired by a novel written to accompany a series of drawings and first published, in serial form, in the newspaper. Not so odd, although it may seem so, is its use of animals as central characters; in this he was self-consciously following Edmond Rostand’s play Chanteler (1907; Ravel’s children’s opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges, in many ways a close relative, was still a year or so off). The tale as Janácek tells it concerns the adventures of "Sharp-Ears the Vixen" (a more accurate translation than "The Cunning Little Vixen"), who is caught by a forester, escapes to marry and start a family, but dies at the forester’s hands so that her litter will have food. In the orchestral suite, however, we hear only the first two parts of the story. In the first, the forester falls asleep while a cricket and grasshopper play, joined by a mosquito and a frog; the frog, frightened by a vixen cub, awakens the forester, who captures the vixen, leaving the dragonfly to mourn her departure. In the second, it is the vixen who sleeps and is awakened; we hear her dreams of being a young girl, and the carnage she wreaks on the hens when she awakens. It is Janácek’s special gift to juxtapose with seeming naturalness a wide variety of musical gestures, here representing an unusual assortment of creatures and actions–all with an equanimity that somehow absorbs bad and good into a general celebration of life.

Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto in E flat (nicknamed the "Emperor"; composed 1809) is the only one of his five keyboard concertos that he did not himself perform in public, and his inability to do so, owing to his growing deafness, may well be why he wrote no further works of this type. Beethoven is often credited with making the piano concerto more symphonic, and the "Emperor" amply demonstrates the legitimacy of this claim. Paradoxically, however, Beethoven’s radical transformation of the genre increased the dramatic importance of the soloist far more than that of the orchestra. In Mozart’s concertos, from which Beethoven learned much, the soloist often seems to play a secondary role, following the orchestra at a distance and then having to negotiate a place within an already established sound-world. But in Beethoven’s last two concertos, the soloist enters right at the beginning, and sets the conditions under which the orchestra can then launch its own statement. The first movement of the "Emperor" opens with a powerful exchange between orchestra and piano, and at various points the movement turns into a battle of wills between the two titans; especially dramatic are the contesting scale passages just before the return of the main theme, two thirds of the way through. But the contest of wills has its poetic side, too, as when the horn gently enters in the middle of the soloist’s cadenza late in the movement–thereby violating all rules of concerto decorum, but with an effect too beautiful to be taken as violent. However conflicted the opening movement might seem at times, it casts no shadow over the ravishing, other-worldly slow movement, which seems to consist of one long, unbroken arc of song. And even when the finale returns us to the "real world"–and we hear that return vividly in the drop of a half-step just before it takes off–we sense a more cooperative energy between piano and orchestra–as a legacy, perhaps, of the intervening span of beatific contemplation.

-- Raymond Knapp

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