Opening Night: The Creative Essence

Sunday, June 9 | 5 p.m.

Seligman Performing Arts Center
Sponsored by Aviva & Dean Friedman

Artists | Leila Josefowicz, Paul Watkins

Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings

PROGRAM NOTES | © Ty Bouque 2024

It is a festival of doors. Windows too. Not to mention all manner of crevices, vents and cracks, joints, seams, sutures, little ducts and drafty tunnels down which music whispers to itself across the centuries.

Creative Connections: connect, from the assimilated Latin com+nectare, literally to bind together. If the task of the composer is to erect a world from sound, ours is to find the portals that hinge between their realms.

So: let’s crack the doors a bit, and see just what slips through.

We begin on a staircase. It is Christmas morning, 1870, and Cosima Wagner wakes at 7:00 AM to music. Confined by the narrow red-carpet stairway that wound through the center of the little villa in Tribschen, a mere 15 musicians had tiptoed in at sunrise to surprise Wagner’s soon-to-be-legal wife with a musical tribute on her birthday. For a man better recognized by his egomania, it is a rare gesture of selflessness, and Cosima’s diary records something of her rapture:

When I woke up I heard a sound, it grew ever louder, I could no longer imagine myself in a dream, music was sounding, and what music! […] I was in tears, but so, too, was the whole household; R. had set up his orchestra on the stairs and thus consecrated our Tribschen forever!

The Siegfried Idyll is thus a love letter first, a private communion between two souls that was never meant to be heard by others (it was only sold off when the couple hit financial straits in 1877; even acts of love can be given a price if necessary). The piece stands as a document to what Wagner called the happiest year of his existence: “he [has] unconsciously woven our whole life into it,” Cosima fawned. And though much of the music was later repurposed for the final duet of his opera Siegfried—prompting the title change from Tribschen Idyll to Siegfried Idyll—the music retained its intimate significance for the pair: Siegfried was also the name given to their only son, born in June of that same happy year, whose arrival is preserved in the music’s central swells.

But it is also a document to perceived inadequacy. The symphonic form weighed heavily on Richard Wagner. His intense veneration of Beethoven meant he prized the symphony above all, and his inability to produce one of personal satisfaction was a constant source of anxiety. Even on his deathbed, he clung to the dream of someday crafting a symphony where all themes would flow together in a long unbroken phrase. He never did write that work. And so the foreshortened Idyll is as close as we have to a Wagner symphony: it testifies to a vision of music much broader than it contains, like a small sliver of an imagined landscape that stretches beyond its borders into infinity.

Like Wagner, Benjamin Britten endured a fraught and often volatile relationship with symphonic form. We are in 1932 now, change is heavy in the air: Arnold Schoenberg has gone public with his method of organizing twelve-tone music, and it sends shockwaves through music students around the globe. At a time when the dominant fashion in England is still pastoral grandeur, Britten, an 18-year-old student at the Royal College of Music, becomes fixated on an Austrian’s quest for total formal unity. The Sinfonietta, completed in just three short weeks over the summer of 1932, is his private form of rebellion. “It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for,” Britten later admitted, and by Vaughan Williams, he meant that distinctly English incarnation of the Germanic symphonic model: fast movement here, slow movement here, insert, copy, paste. Britten, even at that early stage, was always a structuralist at heart; the inherited architecture of the classical symphony was only getting in his way.

An Opus One, however, is a volatile and loaded thing, and Britten’s Sinfonietta is no exception. That it has survived this long is not so much a measure of its achievement as its ideal: it is the first work where we can see the adult Britten stretching his legs. Taking Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony as a model—he also borrows its instrumentation, minus doublings—the work is a twenty-minute attempt at a musical form which arises solely from the organic metabolism of its materials (which is to say: without the delineated boundaries of the standard partite symphony; each of the three movements elides with the next). In this regard, it fails. What begins as distinctly Viennese, with all these little cells of material sprawling across the canvas, arrives in the final movement at the sort of recapitulating dance we’ve come to expect of Britten.

And yet the pair of brazen fifths that close the Sinfonietta still manage to feel so fully satisfying perhaps not because they’re musically earned—the form is tenuous, uncontrolled—but because they’re the symbolic result of Britten sloughing off his borrowed clothes. The work’s great joy today is hearing the adult Benjamin Britten peeking out between the sometimes-clumsy folds. Peter Grimes’ tolling steeple, Screw’s terse austerity, the Requiem’s brooding majesty flash in an instant before our eyes. The Sinfonietta, like Wagner’s Idyll, is a dream of music yet unwritten, echoes of the promise of what’s to come.

And Béla Bartók, too, found himself at odds with a borrowed form. Flash forward five more years to 1937, and the Hungarian maverick is just unpacking his bags from a research trip to Turkey when his fellow countryman Zoltán Székely—a violinist and composer in his own right—is announced as the concertmaster-to-be of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. To mark his proper debut, Székely wants a new concerto; Bartók, twenty years his senior and an early advocate, is the obvious choice.

When asked for a concerto, Bartók immediately suggests an austere work of modernist invention: like Wagner and Britten, his dream is a test of movement-less variation, one grand unbroken string spinning a single idea to infinity. To which Székely says: no. He wants a classic, something to join the repertory, a three-movement showpiece to rival the best of them. And Bartók, acknowledging the concerto was for Székeley and not for himself, concedes—but not without a few tricks up his sleeve.

The work, true to promise, is dutifully divided into fast-slow-fast, but at every turn remains overloaded with the variation-structures of its original dream. The first movement rhapsodizes its central theme to nauseating limits, pushing and pulling the gravity around it into a kaleidoscope of temporal friction. The same theme is then picked up in the final movement, which weaves from it a tapestry of dizzying permutations. (Here, as in the Britten, Schoenberg’s influence rears its head: though resistant to serial purity, twelve-tone melodies abound.) And then the middle movement is what Bartók had desired all along: a set of six variations on a lonely, simple theme whose plaintive urgency is the product of nothing less than rigor. The work unifies itself by the idea of endless difference—even with the movement breaks left in.

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All three works tonight nestle somewhere in the thresholds between inherited model and personal dream, social container and artistic conception, practical limitation and utopian ideal. They speak to a not-quite-yetness, a state of becoming whose incompleteness is, paradoxically, what makes them feel so full. This reaching out is what we might call their essence: from Latin esse, “to be,” the very thing that the thing is. Blanchot, writing in The Space of Literature, admits that “the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished or unfinished: it is.” Tonight, the Creative Essence will be revealed in the gap between imagination and achievement, because there is no such thing as musical perfection: only the endless work of reaching towards the impossible. © Ty Bouque 2024