Expert-led trips to the musical capitals of Europe

There are several stories of great musicians who battled deafness yet continued to compose. Of course, Beethoven comes to mind. We all know his struggle to accept the impending loss of his hearing, and yet he continued to write miraculous music late into his life even without being able to hear the sounds that he wrote. Another composer who suffered a similar fate was Bedřich Smetana.

The Vltava River in Prague with the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle

Smetana (1824-1884) had already established himself as a uniquely Czech composer. He was born in Bohemia and had developed a style of music that was intimately connected to his homeland’s struggle to be an independent country. Beyond composing operas based on traditionally Czech stories, he even was politically active, once taking part in barricading the famous Charles Bridge in Prague when under attack from Austrian forces.

“I Fear the Worst”

The composer’s deafness got worse as he was turning fifty, and he suffered continuous pain in his ears. He wrote in his diary, “I am to stay at home for almost a week. I cannot go out and have my ears wrapped in cotton wool since I must have complete quiet. I fear the worst—that I will become permanently deaf.”

Just like Beethoven, Smetana’s hopes and prayers to hold on to his hearing went unfulfilled. The Czech composer’s deafness soon became permanent. Yet, again like Beethoven, Smetana continued to compose and actually wrote some of his best known music when his ability to hear had left him completely.

Smetana's piano in Prague's Smetana Museum

“My Country”

He had just completed an orchestral work entitled Vyšehrad, based on the ancient castle overlooking his home of Prague. Then Smetana had the idea to create a series of movements that would represent his personal feelings about the heroism and optimism of his Czech compatriots as they looked to build a new and independent nation. To show his dedication to this cause, he named the series of six movements Má Vlast, or “My Country”.

The second movement of Má Vlast has turned out to be Smetana’s best-known music, and the piece has enchanted audiences for more than a century. Most often it is performed as a single work, and not in the entire Má Vlast suite. The genesis for this singularly Czech music is country’s most historic river, the Vltava.

The Smetana Museum (left) is fittingly in the old water works building overlooking the Vltava River

Inspiration in the Czech Countryside

Smetana had been staying with friends in the country. His friend later wrote about the composer’s reaction. “Here he heard the gentle poetic song of the two rippling streams. He stood there deep in thought. Looking around the enchantingly lovely countryside he followed the Otava (River), accompanying it in spirit to the spot where it joins the Vltava, and within him sounded the first chords of the two motives which intertwine, and increase, and later grow and swell into a mighty melodic stream.”

Watch a video of the Czech Philharmonic performing the main theme of “Die Moldau”.

The Charles Bridge over the Vltava River at night

Once the inspiration came to Smetana, the rest of the piece naturally flowed (sorry for the pun) onto his music paper. Listening to this music is literally taking a trip on the river from where the tiny streams begin to the majestic river that bisects the capital city of Prague. On the way, it passes rustic wedding scene, picturesque woods and meadows, the dance of a mermaid (from traditional Czech folklore), and loud rapids.

In a strange twist of fate, the music has usually been called “Die Moldau” which is the German name of the river instead of the Czech “Vltava”. One would think that such a prominent piece of nationalistically Czech music would have maintained its title in the native tongue. Regardless of its name, it is a remarkable composition, and we will be able to hear it in a fine performance in the upcoming concert. Unfortunately, the deaf Smetana was never able to hear it for himself.

This article originally appeared in Greensboro, North Carolina’s News and Record newspaper on October 30, 2011.

Photos by David Nelson

The Enigma Variations started as a way for Elgar to entertain his wife. One night in 1898, the composer was improvising melodies at the piano. Alice liked one of these and asked her husband to play it again. Not only did Elgar repeat the music, but he then spontaneously created variations on that theme in different styles that reminded them of different friends. Sometimes profound works of art have simple beginnings.

Elgar obviously liked what he had started and expanded the little “portraits” into the piece performed tonight. He dedicated the work “to my friends pictured within” and even included the initials of his “subjects” in the name of each variation. Just some of the musical caricatures include the excited voice inflections of an actor (Variation III), an amateur violinist who had trouble crossing strings (Variation VI), the house of a music lover (Variation VIII), and the bulldog of one of his friends as it jumps into a river (Variation XI).

The most intriguing aspect of the Enigma Variations is that Elgar wrote that there was a hidden theme in the work that is “not played”. Just what was meant by this has been fodder for scholars to debate for more than a century. Some think that the mysterious music is “Auld Lang Syne”, but the composer ruled this out. “Rule Brittania” is another possibility, and many have supported this idea over the years. It may be Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony, which shared the concert when the Enigma Variations were first performed in 1899. And others feel that the “Enigma melody” is really an accompaniment to some other tune.  Personally, I support those who say that the “solution” to this enigma is better left unknown.

Here is a nice video of Daniel Barenboim conducting the Nimrod Variation. This is divine music.

This article first appeared in the Program Notes for the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra’s 2011-12 season.

Igor Stravinsky’s “A Soldier’s Tale” is one of music’s best-known pieces for chamber ensemble. Written a few years after “The Rite of Spring”, this work for seven musicians has been performed and recorded countless times, both in its original version with narrator, actors, and a dancer, and in the popular suite. But sometimes, even an established composition needs a little revising, and that is what Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Musical Director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, has done.

Juilliard Days

Dima Sitkovetsky’s history with “A Soldier’s Tale” goes back many years. “When I was a student at Juilliard I had friends who were great musicians, and one year we decided to do the Stravinsky. A few performers were also very enterprising, and in Spring 1979, we did twenty performances of the entire work, complete with the narrator, actors and dancer, throughout the New York area. All were Juilliard students, and one of the actors was actually later in the film ‘Amadeus’. We performed throughout the city and even into Connecticut. We even played it in the high school in Brooklyn that Barbra Streisand and Bobby Fischer attended.”

When Dima launched his professional career, he continued to perform “A Soldier’s Tale”. It was during performances in Finland and other places—even with a puppet theater—that he began to notice problems with it. Discussing this he said, “When I came back to the piece after my student days, I realized that it is an imperfect piece of theater. It is misbalanced. The first half has too much text and not enough music, and the second half has too little text. The best music of the composition is towards the end of the piece, but the plot gets lost. You don’t even know why the devil wins. The piece, as it has been played for almost a hundred years, has a significant structural problem.”

The first page of the conductor's score

Re-Balancing the Music

So after performing the work many dozens of times and coming to the realization that it is not as good as it could be, Dima has decided to carefully edit the work to make it more effective as a piece of theater. To do this, he added other music by Stravinsky and has removed a few parts of the original that were overly repetitive. He says, “The main thing with this new version is that the first and second halves will be well balanced between the text and music. I chose this additional music because it fit the mood and action of that moment in the story. And most of the pieces were also written around the same time as ‘A Soldier’s’ Tale so that all their styles were similar.”

Most of Dima’s work to create this new version of “A Soldier’s Tale” for the performance in Greensboro was done last summer. An interesting historical anecdote was the reason that one of the six “new” works was added: “As I studied the background of the piece, I learned that the clarinetist for the first performance paid for the whole thing. To thank him, Stravinsky wrote his famous ‘Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet’ and gave it to the clarinet player as a gift. This is one of the pieces I added. Kelly Burke will play it in the concert.” All of the new music is original or has been arranged to fit the instrumentation of “A Soldier’s Tale”.

When I asked Dima whether he had performed his adaptation before, his answer was fast and simple: “This will the first time the work has been done this way. It’s absolutely a world premiere.”

Stravinsky's recording of "A Soldier's Tale" is well known.

Yura Lee is one of only a handful of musicians to have successfully made the transition from child prodigy to mature artist. Her story is remarkable. She was born in South Korea in 1985, began studying violin when she was four, and won her first major competition the following year. Since then, she has studied at Juilliard, performed concertos with orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, and Cleveland Orchestra, and has worked with conductors Lorin Maazel, Christopher Eschenbach, and Leonard Slatkin.

But what makes her upcoming performance with the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra so special is that it will be the second time Yura Lee has played with the orchestra. And the first was in 1997 when she was not even a teenager.

Impressions By Two Conductors

To get perspectives on Yura’s playing from the different stages of her career, I spoke with two musicians who know her first hand: Stuart Malina, who conducted her 1997 performance in Greensboro, and Dmitry Sitkovetsky, who will lead the performance next weekend.

Malina set the scene with a good perspective on what it is like to work with a 12-year-old soloist. “You never know what to expect with young players. When you see a prodigy, you ask how they are going to do as performers, what kind of interpreter they will be because they do not have years of maturity behind them, and how are they going to deal with the pressures of performing with an orchestra.”

A Dazzling Performance

So how did the young violinist perform in Greensboro? “She was dazzling and gave a mature performance of a difficult piece, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.” And when I asked whether Yura was nervous, the former music director of the orchestra laughed and said, “No, not at all”.

Of course, I wondered how such a child would act in the spotlight of soloing with an orchestra. Malina was more than complimentary about how Lee did. “The most amazing thing was how maturely she carried herself in rehearsals and in performance, and also how she was with the patrons. Yura was gracious. I never saw her as a little girl pretending to be an adult, but as a little girl being absolutely comfortable in her ‘little girlhood’. She was charming, polite, and dazzling as a musician.”

When such a young performer takes the stage, the audience is frequently both curious and captivated. It’s one thing to hear a mature virtuoso, but witnessing a prodigy is something different. Stuart continues, ”When you see a little kid come on stage and move her fingers so fast and play a complex concerto from memory without any kind of a mess up, it’s amazing. At that point, the audience had a combination of awe, enthusiasm, and wonder. Yura’s performance was a tremendous sensation. I know that everyone left the concert happy.”

Sitkovetsky on Lee

As Yura Lee prepares to return to Greensboro to play Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1, I asked Dima Sitkovetsky what his impressions of her were. “I first met her about four years ago when I was conducting the Mozart Competition in Augsburg, Germany. There were three finalists and by far she was the best. Yura played a Mozart concerto, but I was especially taken with her rendition of the Bartok 2^nd Violin Concerto, which was just sensational, really terrific. I knew she was a first-class talent.”

At time Dima did not realize that the now mature violinist has played with “his” orchestra. “When I returned to Greensboro, to my surprise, I learned that she had played here when she was quite young. It’s a pleasure now for us to have her back with the orchestra after fourteen years.”

This article was first published in Greensboro, North Carolina’s News and Record on January 16, 2011.