WASO Plays Dvořák's New World

Jessica Gethin
Conductor

Australian conductor Jessica Gethin has gained widespread attention for her stellar musicianship and vibrant energy, reviewers citing her performances as ‘… refined, charismatic and exhilarating’. Gliding seamlessly between core symphonic repertoire to ballet, opera, film and contemporary genres, Jessica’s international roster includes guest conducting engagements throughout the United States, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, with collaborations including the Dallas Opera, West Australian Symphony Orchestra, Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Perth Symphony, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Philharmonic and Macao Orchestra as well as regular seasons with the West Australian Ballet. Listed in Limelight Australia’s Top 20 Australian Artists for 2017, further accolades include winning the Brian Stacey Emerging Australian Conductor Award, Australian Financial Review’s 100 Most Influential Women, a Churchill Fellowship, a Fellowship at the Hart Institute of Women Conductors with the Dallas Opera and being named a finalist in the West Australian of the Year Awards. Most recently Jessica was appointed Head of Orchestral Studies and Conducting at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Jessica's dedication to championing classical music as it enters the twenty first century combined with bold programming choices, a natural flair for communicating with audiences and a commitment to foster the next generation of young musicians has contributed to her rapidly growing profile both at home and abroad.

Johann Strauss II
(1825-1899)

Die Fledermaus: Overture

Johann Strauss II, or junior, as he is sometimes called, is known mainly as a composer of waltzes. He wrote some 300, and The Blue Danube and the Emperor Waltz are among his best-loved pieces to this day. Two of his operettas still hold the stage - Die Fledermaus (The Bat) and Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron).

It is said to have been Offenbach who suggested to Strauss that he should write an operetta. A first attempt, The Merry Wives of Windsor, was abandoned when one of the leading singers withdrew; another, Indigo and the Forty Thieves, enjoyed success at the time.

However, friends suggested that the missing ingredient in all these early efforts was a suitable libretto. Perhaps this was the reason why the Viennese impresario, Steiner, bought for Strauss, sight unseen, a libretto entitled Die Fledermaus, written by Offenbach's librettists Meilhac and Halévy. When he eventually read it, however, Steiner was disappointed with his purchase - a costume drama set in Paris on Christmas Eve. Nevertheless the publisher Gustav Levy suggested it could be adapted for German taste. The resultant adaptation, by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée, so delighted Strauss that he was inspired to write in only 43 days a work which has become the epitome of Viennese operetta. From the moment the overture begins it is a score which captures not only the giddy hedonism of contemporary society but an excellently drawn cast of characters. The famous Fledermaus waltz: `Happy is he who forgets that which cannot be changed' could almost be taken as a motto for Strauss' life itself!

First performance:
5 April 1874, Vienna.

Most recent WASO performance:
20 March 2021. Thaddeus Huang, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones; timpani, percussion and strings.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840-1893)

Romeo and Juliet – Fantasy Overture

The doomed youthful passion of Romeo and Juliet had a strong appeal for Tchaikovsky. Shakespeare’s young hero and heroine, whose families, Montagues and Capulets respectively, are implacable enemies, have become in the popular imagination the representative type of star-crossed lovers. Many other great composers (Bellini, Gounod, Berlioz and Prokofiev among them) have been inspired to make music for the young lovers’ story.

Composed in 1869, the Romeo and Juliet overture is Tchaikovsky’s supreme early orchestral achievement. He subsequently revised the work twice, and the final form, with the title ‘fantasy-overture’, was achieved in 1880.

The music begins with a hymn-like introduction suggesting Friar Laurence’s cell, then Capulets and Montagues feud in a fiery passage, giving way to the love scene. There are two melodies here memorable even by Tchaikovsky’s standards. The development of the overture amplifies the lovers’ music, struggling with the brawls and Friar Laurence’s music. A furious climax may be the death of Tybalt at the hand of Romeo, but the love music dominates the ending, turning gradually to lament and tragic despair.

Tchaikovsky toyed with the idea of writing an opera based on Romeo and Juliet. Among the sketches found after his death was a love-duet for singers, in which Romeo sings the words ‘Oh tarry, night of ecstasy! Oh night of love, stretch thy dark veil over us!’ to a musical phrase which also appears in his fantasy overture. Although his interest in this project waned, his enthusiasm for Shakespeare endured and he composed a further two overtures on Shakespearean subjects: The Tempest (1873) and Hamlet (1888).

© Symphony Australia

First performance:
16 March 1870, Moscow. Nikolai Rubenstein, conductor.

First WASO performance:
17 May 1947. Warwick Braithwaite, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
8 May 2021. Thaddeus Huang, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling cor anglais), two clarinets, two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba; timpani, percussion, harp and strings.

Antonín Dvořák
(1841-1904)

Symphony No.9 in E minor, Op.95 From the New World

Adagio – Allegro molto
Largo
Scherzo (Molto vivace)
Allegro con fuoco

Dvořák composed his ninth, and last, symphony in New York between January and May 1893. As his secretary, Josef Kovařík, was about to deliver the score to the conductor of the first performance, Anton Seidl, Dvořák suddenly wrote on the title page, ‘From the New World’. That expression had been used in a welcome speech following his arrival in New York the previous September. Kovařík said the inscription was just ‘the Master’s little joke’; but the ‘joke’ has, ever since, begged the question: how American is the New World Symphony?

Dvořák could have written his ‘New World’ inscription, as in the welcome speech, in English. By writing it in Czech he was seen to be addressing the work, like a picture postcard, to his compatriots back in Europe. At the same time he challenged listeners to identify depictions of America or elements of American music. Either way, the composer was seen to be meeting the desire of his employer, music patron Jeannette Thurber, for music which might be identified as American.

Mrs Thurber had persuaded Dvořák to become director of her National Conservatory of Music in New York. Besides teaching students from a wide spectrum of society, he found he was expected to show Americans how to create a national music. So, controversially and perhaps naively, in a country which had not forgotten the Civil War, the egalitarian Dvořák told Americans they would find their future music in their roots, whether native or immigrant, and in particular the songs of the African Americans.

From his familiarity with gypsies in Europe, Dvořák had famously composed a set of Gypsy Melodies (including ‘Songs my mother taught me’), and was thus receptive when introduced soon after his arrival to the songs of the African Americans – the sorrow songs and spiritual songs of the plantation. As a devout man of humble rural origins, he responded to the pathos and religious fervour of the poor.

He told the New York Herald that the two middle movements of his new symphony were inspired by Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, a work he had long ago read in Czech and which Mrs Thurber was now suggesting for an opera. The famous slow movement, he said, was inspired by Hiawatha’s wooing of Minnehaha and the Scherzo by dancing at the wedding feast. Without using Native American melodies, he claimed to have given the Scherzo ‘the local colour of Indian music’ – an effect probably limited to repetitive rhythms and primitive harmonies.

As music, the New World Symphony is entirely characteristic of its composer (the ‘simple Czech musician’ he liked to style himself) and owes nothing to any specific ‘borrowings’ from the indigenous or African American musics Dvořák encountered in the New World. The ersatz-spiritual Goin’ home was actually arranged from Dvořák’s Largo movement by one of his students, not the other way around.

Strong non-musical impressions of America doubtless crowded the composer’s mind as he worked on the symphony. The surging flow and changing moods of the outer movements perhaps reflect the frenetic bustle of New York. The vast, desolate prairies Dvořák found ‘sad unto despair’, and this may be felt to underpin the deep yearning of the Largo (together with the composer’s own homesickness for his native Bohemia). As if to emphasise his personal longing for home, Dvořák uses a Czech dance as the central trio section of the third movement.

Musical ideas recur in the New World Symphony to link the symphonic structure. The two main themes of the first movement are recalled in festive mood in the Largo, at the brassy climax of the famous melody first stated by the cor anglais. They figure again in the coda of the Scherzo, the first theme (somewhat disguised) also making three appearances earlier in the movement. The main themes of both middle movements recur in the finale, and the main themes of all three preceding movements are reviewed in the final coda.

There, a brief dialogue between the themes of the first and last movements is cut short by a conventional cadence, spiced by unexpected wind colouring in the last chord of all.

Abridged from an annotation © Anthony Cane

First performance:
16 December 1893, New York. Anton Seidl conducting the New York Philharmonic.

First WASO performance:
28 October 1939. Malcolm Sargent, conductor.

Most recent WASO performance:
22-23 April 2022. Eduardo Strausser, conductor.

Instrumentation:
two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, cor anglais, two clarinets and two bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba; timpani, percussion and strings.