You're so 'romántica' - Chavez's Symphony No. 4

I wound up with today's symphony for the same predictable one-word reason I wind up with a lot of symphonies: Mahler. On the surface, there's very little that links Gustav Mahler and Carlos Chavez (1899-1978), the Mexican composer whose Symphony No. 4 — Sinfonía Romántica (1953) I explore here. But I'm just following in the footsteps of Leonard Bernstein, the great composer and conductor and even better expert at keeping a perfect crease.

In a concert during the New York Philharmonic's 1960 Mahler festival, Bernstein paired up this Chavez symphony with a selection of Mahler songs. Then, as today, conductors more often linked Mahler with other German-speaking composers than with Mexican modernists. In the 1950s, one of Bernstein's predecessors at the NY Phil, Bruno Walter, played a similar set of Mahler songs alongside works by Beethoven and Mozart.

But Bernstein was more likely than Walter to program Chavez during any concert, let alone during a Mahler festival. One of the many reasons for this was certainly Bernstein's interest in and awareness of new American music, broadly construed. Another may well have been the fact Bernstein and Chavez shared a close, influential friend in the outspoken American composer Aaron Copland. Copland wrote admiringly of Chavez's music; in 1941, Copland said that Chavez "succeeded in creating a music that not only is his own but is recognizably Mexican."¹

I don't know if there's anything "recognizably Mexican" in the Sinfonía Romántica in particular. (It's worth noting, perhaps, that the piece was a Louisville Symphony Orchestra commission.) But we do know that Chavez was a key musical figure in Mexico — not just as a composer of seven symphonies, a number of ballets, chamber pieces, and other works, but also as a journalist and a leader of major Mexican musical institutions. And I've heard that Chavez was interested in Native American music; themes have been identified in Chavez's other works, including his Symphony No. 2, the Sinfonía India (1935-6). In a fascinating set of pre-concert lecture notes from 1960, Bernstein seemed to define Chavez's Mexicanness in the Romántica in terms of stereotypes — as a blend of Indian austerity (and here Bernstein mentioned Aztec idols) with Latin passion (and here Bernstein crossed out a passage about Spanish olive oil).

Chavez doesn't start his Sinfonía Romántica with anything Latin, Indian, Mexican, or American. Rather, the English horn presents a puzzling, tonally ambiguous melody that will resurface throughout the symphony. Across this clip (recording by Enrique Bátiz and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra), but especially with the repeated short-long-long trumpet figure toward the end, I do sense the kind of starkness to which Bernstein may have been referring:



And perhaps this more flowing line is where the olive oil-like passion comes in:



But if there's anything really "romántica" about Chavez's fourth, it's probably the second movement. The first violins languidly offer the same melody the English horns started the whole symphony with, but they use it to kick off a luscious, polyphonic rhapsody for all the strings:



And this movement is all about soaring strings. For a few minutes I thought I was listening to Bruckner (thanks to the sequences and warm blankets of brass) or Mahler (because of the big leaps, high-register reaches and appoggiaturas):



But the return of woodwinds and of more complex textures jolts us back to reality at the beginning of the third movement. Our original English horn theme gets a new context, appearing here on the heels of the last movement's more playful main theme.



(And with that appearance, all you Méhul fans can credit yet another symphony to the cyclic tradition your favorite composer supposedly invented.)

Overall, the third movement brings the symphony an appropriately light, celebratory ending. It nicely contrasts with both the solemnity of the first movement and the emotional fervency of the second. But the mysterious concluding sonority creates a slightly unsettling final sensation after all the partying:



I don't know if that's a "romantic" ending to a "romantic" symphony, but it does make me crave olive oil. But I always crave olive oil, so you be the judge.

— Matthew Mugmon

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1. Copland, Our New Music (1941) 205.

The "Lost" Romantic: Méhul's Fourth

Today we discuss a composer from the turn of the 19th Century whose four symphonies had until relatively recently fallen off the face of the (musical) Earth. During the Revolutionary Period, Étienne Méhul (1763-1817) was regarded as one of France's most popular and innovative composers of opera, labeled a "Romantic" in the rather early year of 1793. He was responsible for a 1790s golden age for opéras-comique with his then-inescapable historico-mythical stage works. In them, one might be struck by stylistic traits not usually found until the much later works of Richard Wagner (or at least Carl Maria von Weber): jolting modulations, a hefty orchestral role, and a thorough use of "reminiscence motifs" -- themes linked with important ideas that recur at various stages in the work. The commanding stature of his serious operas, along with a steady production of patriotic marches and choruses, led to a friendship with Napoleon himself, who commissioned works from Méhul directly. Though the popularity of his stage works waned somewhat with changes in taste after 1800, they were nonetheless highly praised by a generation of later composers, particularly Berlioz. 

Seeking to branch out into new sound worlds, Méhul set about writing a cycle of five symphonies during the Imperial Era, which otherwise boasted no significant new such works from any French composer. Orchestral culture in Paris deemed symphonies the proper province of the Germans, so that while Méhul's plunge into the genre would not have been expressly discouraged, he was swimming against the tide. Completed between 1808 and 1811, these five symphonies received quite positive reviews, but it seems that their place in posterity was damned by the barbs hurled by two influential critics, Cherubini and Fétis. The former dismissed the symphonies as musical "ephemera" while the latter sneered that they were "dry and pretentious" attempts at ersatz Haydn. (Quoted in Schwartz, 1987, 92).

Noting a debt to the Germans is indeed warranted, but the negative assessment is not. Cherubini and Fétis's vituperation seems to have been the determining factor against the dissemination of Méhul's symphonies, overcoming the sporadic revivals of his music in the 19th Century. (Schumann, after Mendelssohn performed the First Symphony, was guardedly impressed). "Stick to opera!", it seems, was the judgment history placed on Méhul. Correspondingly, the idea that there was an influential French symphonist before Berlioz sputtered and languished until very recently.(1)

In 1979, while researching Berlioz, musicologist David Charlton discovered to his astonishment the orchestral part manuscripts for the 3rd and 4th symphonies of Méhul, whose full scores had long gone missing (the 5th remains incomplete, possibly never finished). His editorial reconstructions were published in 1982 in a full volume of Méhul symphonies, and a CD recording from Nimbus Records came out seven years later with all four performed by Michel Swierczweski and the Orchestra of the Gulbenkian Foundation. Now, we seem to be witnessing an upswing in the  reception of this composer, as tonight (Nov 9, 2010), the world will witness the first British performance ever of Méhul's Fourth Symphony in E Major (1810)! The work will "premier" at a concert with the Orchestra of the Enlightenment, alongside other music of Parisian vintage from Cherubini, Berlioz, and Mozart (Symphony No. 31). An article in the Telegraph by Richard Savill boldly announces to the world the importance of this event: "Lost Étienne Méhul symphony set for London premiere."

While articles trumpeting the arrival of "new" or "discovered" Classical works often are guilty of some sensationalist imprecision, Savill's article rightly points out some of the remarkable features of the Fourth Symphony. Foremost of these is the allegedly prescient use of "cyclic form," usually defined as the integration of thematic ideas across multiple movements. Journalists and musicologists alike salivate at the prospect of locating a "precedent" for some later widespread practice, and Méhul, that consummate weaver of reminiscence motifs, seems like a prime candidate for such. (and, it should be said, attendant reevaluation in history textbooks, all of which I surveyed bear scant or no mention of Méhul at all). Remarkably, the cyclical principle did not become widespread practice until quite far into the 19th Century; symphonic movements even after Berlioz's generally held their movements at arms length, thematically speaking. What has always seemed to me an obvious idea -- perhaps being raised on Dvorak's 9th will do that to you -- took an exceedingly long time to become stylistic norm.(2)

The cyclic linkage in Méhul's Fourth occurs between the 1st Movement's slow introduction and a leg of the 4th spasmodic Allegro theme. Beginning the 1st is a stately harmonic progression that sculpts out E-major in no big hurry.



In the 4th movement, we hear that progression and its melodic outline sped up and decorated by a swift bum-bada-bum-bum rhythm (at the very end of the clip) that courses through the entire movement -- easily the best of the four in my estimation



Certainly a clever incorporation, but not exactly the overthrowing of all symphonic shackles Savill's article makes it out to be. Frankly, I find the more compelling "cyclical" element to be the reuse of an adventurous sequence (for which Méhul had a decided knack) from 1st Movement's first subject. In the 4th movement, it comes fast on the heels of the example above, adding yet more nervous energy. It's a more abstract kind of connection than we're used to in thematic recollections, and it suggests tighter formal control than I think Méhul's critics were willing to grant him. For convenience's sake, I've merged the two instances of the sequence into one example.



There are smaller hints of recall between the two outer movements, but I feel like this connection above all "makes" the boundlessly energetic 4th movement, as if we were hearing 1st on speed. The inner movements don't participate in this game, but have remarkable components as well. The 3rd movement, totally rewritten after some critiques of the original (apparently over-contrapuntal) is a Haydnesque minuet, managing even in its stripped-down veneer to sound arch, even a bit tipsy at moments. The 2nd movement Andante is, to my ears, without precedent in terms of symphonic orchestration, consisting for 58 measures of nothing but an intensely lyrical (aria-like?) cello melody supported by bass pizzicato. And yes, that's the NPR motif appearing briefly in its second sentence (around :52).



One of the greatest pleasures of this symphony is hearing how that initially spare type of orchestration is fleshed out  as the movement progresses, as you can begin to hear at the end of the above clip. It is clear why Berlioz would cite Méhul again and again in his instrumentation treatise as a surpassingly sensitive and experimental worker of the orchestra.(3)

We await the U.K. premier of the Fourth -- ultimately it is up to the public to judge whether Méhul's symphonic oeuvre is, like Charlton says, a seismic jolt of unheard masterpieces or just another historical curiosity. To those willing to probe a little beyond the headlines, however, one will discover a wily and resourceful composer, having absorbed everything Haydn through Beethoven could teach at that moment and pushing his own limits as a composer of opera.

--Frank Lehman

1. Charlton's editions with commentary of the First Symphony and 3rd through 5th provided a great deal of the background for this post.

2. Early precedents of course exist (Matt brings up Haydn's Symphony No. 31 "Horn Signal" as one of the first, and of course we have Beethoven's 5th, written a little earlier than Méhul's 4th but basically unheard in France for several more decades)

3. Examples culled, of course, from his operas -- I found no evidence that Berlioz ever heard any of Méhul's symphonies.

Neo-Romantic Minority Report - Hanson's 6th

Middle America has given us two great musical Hansons. We're still waiting for a symphony to come from the Oklahoma-born Hanson clan who left us MMMBop. That means Wahoo Nebraska's own Howard Hanson (1896-1981) gets the spotlight to himself today. Hanson was a major figure in the institutional history of American music, a member of the generation that included Copland, Sessions, and Wally Piston. His 40 year (!) tenure as director of the Eastman School of Music and his co-founding/presidency of the National Association of Schools of Music testify to his reputation for life-long advocacy for composers, conductors, and performers. He's not called the "Dean of American Music" for nothing.

If I were asked to sum up the idea of Neo-Romanticism in music for someone, I'd probably hand them a recording of Hanson's symphonies (perhaps this one) and then something rather different from roughly the same time (perhaps this one!). The allegiance to tonality, the eschewing of bizarre or overtly novel orchestral effects, the generally harmonious and positive outlook on humanity -- it's all there! Reactionary is an ugly word, but it does capture the conscious rebellion Hanson undertook against the serial/neo-classical establishment in his own music (not in his teaching, however). His most famous work, the Second Symphony "Romantic" was written, he attests, as "a genuine expression of romanticism and a protest against the growing Schoenbergianism of the time -- the cold music -- and I wanted to write something that was warm and young, vigorous and youthful."¹

Hanson was a conservative, no doubt, politically as well as musically. That's basically a death knell for one's hopes of entering the ~Classical Canon~. Well, our blog's motto is to hell with the canon! So let's take a nice, unabashed neo-Romantic bubble bath.

Actually, the member of Hanson's cycle of seven symphonies I've chosen to discuss is not his most sentimental, consonant, or accessible. In fact, the Symphony No. 6 (1967) contains passages that commentators point out as being uncharacteristically dissonant or "demonic." I believe this may be the best manifestation of a certain tension I've always felt about Hanson the composer and Hanson the thinker. For this peddler of symphonic romanticism that would make Rachmaninoff blush was also an indisputable pioneer in the realm of advanced music theory for atonal music! More than a decade before Allen Forte's The Structure of Atonal Music, Hanson published his Harmonic Materials of Modern Music, a textbook that lays out a system for describing (and exercises for composing with) any combination of chromatic pitches. His system is idiosyncratic but thorough, introducing many of the concepts that were supposedly "big finds" in Fortean set-theory. On a couple of occasions, I've noted severe condescension towards Hanson's system from music theorists who deride it for not being as "systematic" or versed in mathematical set theory as Forte's. I think this is outrageously unfair towards Hanson (who was, after-all, neither career mathematician or music theorist) and his innovative theory.

Hanson's basic idea is to represent the interval content of a group of pitches by listing off the occurrences of (inversionally equivalent) intervals within it. For example, the succession of C to G to A has one perfect fifth/fourth (C-G), one minor third (A-C), and one major second (G-A). Hanson labels this group pns (no, not that). Descriptions for bigger groups can get a lot more complicated (the major scale, for example, is an inelegant p⁶m³n4⁴s⁵d²t...), but the basic idea of capturing interval distribution is the same, and is a huge conceptual step towards modern atonal music theory.

But he didn't write atonal music.

At all.

Can this weird facility with atonal pitch sets be reconciled with his consistently conservative harmonic idiom? I think it is in the Sixth Symphony. Hanson attested that the work was based entirely on the opening idea, the pitches C-G-A (pns strikes back).² This is not a particularly dissonant idea, but it can be manipulated in a number of ways similar to what atonal composers were doing mid-century. For example, one can invert (or, "involute" as Hanson would say) it, preserving the intervals in mirror image form. C-G-A, flipped around C, becomes C-F-Eb. Still pns, still pretty tonal sounding.

That flip is the very first thing to happen in the symphony. Winds in octaves state C-G-A-F-Eb, and the phrase is completed by a timpani+tuba strike on C. A little conversation subsequently grows out of the motif, and this sort of tentative dialog within orchestral choirs is typical of the whole first movement.

Hanson alternates between slow/emotional and fast/demonic moods from movement to movement. Though C-G-A does not literally appear at every point, pns or some slight variation or derivation of it ostensibly does, resulting in an breathtakingly tight, integrated work. Case in point the second "Allegro scherzando" movement -- two snares introduce a driving triplet rhythm that persists to the end. Winds enter, stating C-G-A-Eb-F (pns x2!) in a case of motivic shrinkage, soon to be incorporated into a playful, slightly malevolent scherzo.

A totally different mood is created in the third movement. Here the composer lets a lush adagio develop out of that little interval configuration. Vintage Hanson neo-romanticism, but with a formalist twist!

I was introduced to the sixth movement finale prior to my exposure to the whole symphony -- it's the first track on this -pretty awesome- CD. This is rollicking chase-scene music³, barreling down a track laid by a rotated, transposed pns (C-Eb-Bb) ostinato. Near its conclusion, you can hear a slightly more lyrical idea played by the brass (an octave leap from Bb followed by a stepwise descent) -- this is the last, cumulative appearance of a secondary theme that makes its first appearance towards the end of the second movement. Unrelated to pns (I think it'd be called p¹mnsd²), it's something of the symphony's defiant minority opinion. Yet pns is ultimately in charge here, and the whole work concludes on a blast of the initial C-G-A-F-Eb-C. Heck, here's the whole Earquakin' movement.

I think the symphony should serve as a reminder that sophistication of composition or theory does not need to equal "difficult" or "abstract" music. If this work is successful, it is because Hanson is able to translate a tiny mote of musical data into a succession of vividly different symphonic moods. Their brevity insures that the Sixth Symphony is never heard to be heavy, tasting more like a well thought out menu of little dishes that together make for a satisfying meal.

Frank Lehman

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1. Quoted in Liner notes to Delos Box Set of Hanson Symphonies, DE 3150 1990.

2. In his book Howard Hanson in Theory and Practice (Praeger, 2004), Allen Laurence Cohen analyzes Hanson's music according to the composer's own theoretical ideas.

There is a lengthy discussion of the 6th Symphony within for the curious.

3. Compare the movement's beginning to this chase scene at 5:50. Also, sort of, this. Hanson's effect on certain film composers is considerable.