Program Notes

Paul Haas

The Father

I took as my inspiration for this piece the act of purposefully softening one’s eyes to achieve a beautiful, blurry composite of whatever is in one’s field of vision.  If you look at a Monet painting, for instance, he achieves this softening of focus in a visual, almost tactile way.  With this piece, along with a few others in my output, I set out to achieve an aural softening of a familiar piece, a sonic blurring that I hope yields a beauty latent but not quite expressed in the original (in this case, the “Gloria patri” movement from Monteverdi’s 1610 “Vespers of the Virgin Mary”).  This piece features two solo oboes, accompanied by strings, in the outer sections.  In the middle, the brass play a plainchant melody in very slow rhythms while solo violins “blur” fragments from another movement of the Vespers (“Deposuit potentes de sede”).

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)

Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104 (1894)

Nineteenth-century America is typically derided as a musical desert, and the charge carries just enough voltage to sting. But it wasn’t really all that bad: fine conservatories, elegant concert halls, multitudinous choruses, and renowned touring recitalists were most definitely on hand. But American composers, such as they were, mostly churned out faux-Mendelssohn and echt-Brahms, while music education and concert programming were just as resolutely Eurocentric.

That state of affairs didn’t sit well with New York arts patron Jeannette Meyers Thurber, who had attended the Paris Conservatory and recognized the vital role a national conservatory could play in a nation’s musical heritage. To that end she founded the National Conservatory of Music of America, which opened in 1885.

Thurber sought a musician of international stature to head up the Conservatory and convinced Antonín Dvořák to take up the directorship in 1892; he stayed at the post until 1895. Unlike some Europeans such as Charles Dickens who took a dim view of all things American, Dvořák was in general happy with his sojourn in the United States, producing a fair number of works, among them the beloved “New World” Symphony No. 9 and the Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104, which he began in the winter of 1894 and revised during the spring of 1895.

He may have been particularly inspired by his National Conservatory colleague Victor Herbert, nowadays remembered for sweet but faded operettas such as Babes in Toyland and The Red Mill. But Herbert was a formidable musical presence in his day, composer of a wide range of works including the first-rate Cello Concerto No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 30. A skilled cellist himself, Herbert was able to prove Dvořák that such a concerto was, indeed possible.

For which posterity may be duly grateful. “The most beautiful one we have,” claims Michael Steinberg. “The success is brilliant, both in form and in dramatic expression,” writes ace British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey. “Why on earth didn’t I know one could write a cello concerto like this?” Johannes Brahms is reported to have exclaimed. “If I’d only known, I’d have written one long ago!”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92 (1813)

Although there is no evidence that Beethoven intended the Seventh Symphony as an expression of victory against Napoleon, audiences certainly considered it as such at the time of its earliest performances. However, some of Beethoven’s colleagues failed to recognize what now seems so obvious. Composer-conductor Carl Maria von Weber, flummoxed by a particularly obsessive passage in the first movement, wondered if Beethoven might have taken leave of his senses. (He hadn’t.) Hector Berlioz toyed with the notion that Beethoven intended the first movement as a “peasant rondo.” (He didn’t.) Critic François-Joseph Fétis, a silly fellow with a penchant for rejecting the major composers of his day, suggested that the outer movements were victims of Beethoven’s encroaching deafness. (They weren’t.) Beethoven himself, on the other hand, referred to the Seventh as “one of the happiest products of my poor talents.” (It is.)

Beethoven’s Seventh presents the listener with an arm-flinging affirmation of joy, the clouds of despair being kept firmly at bay. After one of the most spacious slow introductions ever written, an obsessive rhythmic figure (sounding for all the world like a message in Morse code) sweeps away the former expansiveness with the tightly wound energy of the Vivace proper, and the revelry begins, pounding away at that wondrously incessant telegraph-key rhythm.

Even the celebrated second movement, with its whiff of the graveyard, is ultimately more dignified than sorrowful. A third-place Scherzo (essentially a supercharged Minuet) follows, after which we are allowed only a few breaths before being swept into a madcap hurricane, surely one of the most exhilarating finales in all symphonic literature.