This Weekend's Russian Festival with the Columbus Symphony

The Columbus Symphony performs a Russian Festival in the Ohio Theater  Friday January 9th and Saturday the 10th at 8 p.m. Your humble author (!) offers pre-concert talks in the theater one hour prior to every Classical series performance.

Rossen Milanov conducts the Columbus Symphony in two programs of music by Russian composers in the Ohio Theater this weekend. We'll hear Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a Suite from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto 3, and Shostakovitch's Symphony 5. 

If these gray days of winter seem akin to the howling winds on the Russian steppes, it seems worth looking at the life of a musician in Russia over the past 150 years.

Shostakovitch lived and trembled under the Soviet regime. Rachmaninoff left Russia prior to the murder of the last Tsar in 1918. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky -Korsakov were the products of a society influenced by the Russian autocracy. Mussorgsky, who may have been the most gifted of all, died young from alcoholism, having spent most of his working life as a low level Russian bureaucrat.

Mussorgsky is an interesting case. His addictions and "day job" made it difficult for him to finish a lot of his music. Of his larger scores given today, only A Night on Bald Mountain is considered complete in the composer's own handwriting. Pictures at an Exhibition was begun as a work for solo piano, later orchestrated by Ravel. Mussorgsky's great opera Boris Godunov was re orchestrated after the composer's death by Rimsky-Korsakov, and later by Shostakovitch. Tchaikovsky, also emotionally fragile, was left to create and finish his own music.

Over the last thirty years musicians have returned to Mussorgsky's original scores. We hear a spare, sinewy and harsh orchestral color, very far from Rimsky-Kosakov, that master orchestrator. Did Rimsky improve upon Mussorgsky's music, or just get in the way? The fact remains that without the intervention of Rimsky-Korsakov and others, we would know less of Mussorgsky's music than we do now. And had Mussorgsky lived to maturity, and been blessed with better mental health, who knows what he would have accomplished?

And here is Mussorgsky's original:

Russian composers of the 19th century were subjected to the same market forces and critical perceptions affecting (plaguing?) composers today. If the people don't like your music they won't come to your concerts. If the news papers don't like your music people will stay away. Tchaikovsky did not have a strong enough ego to resist these forces, though his talent was obviously divine. Rimsky-Korsakov, known in his lifetime as a (great) teacher of music -Stravinsky was his pupil-had a healthy sense of his own worth and struggled on.

Russian musicians were influenced by the modes and melodies of the Russian church, and by the music making available to the eighty percent of the population living in want, if not slavery in the countryside. Peasants made there own music, filled with sorrow and joy. The intelligentsia listened, copied, expanded and gave a Russian language of music to the west. As vast as he country itself.

If the Soviet Union mean to enforce complete equality it also took away any vestige of artistic Shostakovitch had to write what the Politburo wanted people to hear. The influence of church music was verboten-if hard to eradicate. The countryside was fine, as long as the downtrodden peasants were uplifted. What would not do was free thought. 'Formalism' was a capital offense, writing or creating what you wanted. Shostakovitch was ruined when Stalin heard Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. This opera by the thirty year old Shostakovitch depicted Russian peasant life in its brutality, with music and on stage depictions often pornographic. Watch the clip and listen to the music. The characters are doing exactly what the music suggests they are doing.

freedom.

For his sins all the knives went out for Shostakovitch. Hiding away was not an option. The Soviet world  literally put a gun to his head making it crucial that his next work, be what it may, delight the Soviet authorities. Indeed, a letter signed by he composer indicated his 5th symphony to be "A Soviets' response to just criticism." Shostakovitch's Fifth symphony was premiered in Leningrad in 1937. The success was immediate. The conductor Mravinsky held the score up above his head, like the gospels, as the audience roared its approval. 

Inevitably, persons began to assign emotion to this work. Was it a victory symphony over the Soviet bureaucracy? Was it an apology? Was the martial finale a call to arms or a victory march? Was the long, largo movement, meditative and enthralling in its beauty, a lament?

Shostakovitch could say nothing. Russian music had come full circle, with the market circumventing the

authority of the government, as it had in the days of the Tsars a hundred years before, The people-peasants?-heard what they needed to hear in a new work the composer needed to write. Statues of Stalin are being pulled down in the 21st century. Shostakovitch's music triumphs in Moscow, St. Petersburg, London, Paris, New York and Columbus.

NOTES ON GIANNI SCHICCHI (buy tickets!)

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

OPERA PROJECT COLUMBUS PRESENTS GIANNI SCHICCHI THIS WEEKEND: 

www.operaprojectcolumbus.org


Sat 8 pm Sunday 3 pm
Jewsih Community Center of Columbus
tix at the door

NOTES ON GIANNI SCHICCHI

   

Christopher Purdy

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) spent some of his time writing the wonderful operas we love today, among them: Madama Butterfly, La boheme, Tosca and Gianni Schicchi,  and spent most of his time chasing down subjects for his next opera, arguing with librettists, placating singers, supervising rehearsals, and trying to stay clear of his bad tempered wife, Elvira.

Dante

Like Verdi before him and Mozart before him, Puccini was never satisfied until he had found a new subject for an opera. Later in his career he found three subjects. He planned an evening of three one -act operas and called the grouping Il trittico.

He completed a one act grande-guignol shocker, Il tabarro, (The Cloak) and the story of a young woman who bears a child she is forced to give up, and made to enter a convent: Suor Angelica.  Gianni Schicchi , Puccini’s only comedy,  was the only one of the three to achieve success in the composer’s life time. It was the last opera Puccini completed.

Puccini’s librettist for Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi was Giovacchino Forzano (1884-1970). Forzano had studied singing and medicine before turning to journalism. He continued his career as a stage director at La Scala and as a playwright. For Gianni Schicchi ,  the writer turned a few lines from Dante’s Divina Commedia. The story of Gianni Schicchi is expanded upon in Commentary on the Divine Comedy by an Anonymous Florentine of the 14^th century. The subject didn’t immediately interest Puccini, who thought the plot too complicated.

Here’s the deal: In 13^th century Florence, old Buoso Donati has just died. A rumor has

Giuseppe DeLuca as Figaro. He was the first Gianni Schicchi

been going around that Buoso has left his entire estate, including his house, his mule (la mula) and the mills at Signa (I mulini di Signa) to the local monks. This will never do. Buoso’s family searches frantically for the will (‘il testamento’) and find the rumors to be true. Young Rinuccio suggests calling on Gianni Schicchi, a wily soul of lower classes who is nevertheless the smartest guy in the room. The fact that Rinuccio is in love with Schicchi’s daughter Lauretta doesn’t hurt. The family is outraged. They want no part of this low rent upstart and his daughter.

Rincuccio prevails and Schicchi and Lauretta arrive. Gianni has as little use for the Donati as they for him. Nevertheless he has Buoso’s body taken out, dresses in Buoso’s clothes, summons the lawyers and dictates Buoso Donati’s new will leaving the mills at Signa, the house and the mule to…Gianni Schicchi. Lauretta and Rinuccio chirp away romantically. The relatives loot everything they can carry and Gianni Schicchi, consigned to hell by Dante, asks for our applause.

Work on Il trittico began around the beginning of World War I. Puccini’s recent opera The Girl of the Golden West, was written for the Metropolitan in New York. That premiere, with Caruso, Toscanini and Emmy Destinn had been a success, but as the years went by critics carped this was not Puccini at his best. World War I made a production of his newest effort, La rondine difficult. Domestic problems and supervising productions of his operas in Europe and America kept Puccini pre -occupied. Finally the Met asked him for another new opera, and wound up with three.

Florence Easton the first Lauretta

Opening night in New York, December 14, 1918, was THE musical event of the season, as The Girl had been eight years earlier. No expense was spared. The first casts included some of opera’s  greatest names: Giuseppe de Luca, Claudia Muzio, Geraldine Farrar and Luigi Montesano. British soprano Florence Easton as Lauretta made O mio babbino caro an instant hit. De Luca, adored by New Yorkers, delighted with his Gianni Schicchi. The audience laughed and applauded the wily Gianni and the horrible Donati relatives. Il tabarro and Suor Angelica were another story. Neither rose above a success d’estime. Not even Farrar, opera’s most glamorous soprano,  could save Puccini’s doomed nun. Puccini was heard to say, “La Farrar has lost her voice!” Il tabarro was thought too dark and heavy. The opening night audience, having endured two operas they didn’t like, may have lost hope until the curtain rose on the dead Buoso Donati, his awful relatives, a pair of young lovers and a smart and shifty title character.

The years have been good to Il tabarro and Suor Angelica. Gianni Schicchi was an

Geraldine Farrar the first Suor Angelca

immediate hit, needing no one’s help. O mio babbino caro was encored. De Luca was cheered to the walls.  The New York Times feared critic W.J. Henderson was polite to Farrar and Muzio and called Gianni Schicchi “one of the most delightful bits ever put on the Metropolitan stage.” Puccini, womanizer he was, was one of very few men who never cared for Geraldine Farrar,  but the success of Gianni Schicchi didn’t surprise him. He turned his attention to the Italian premier scheduled for later that December, and went to work on his opera Turandot. But that is another story.