From: METROPOIS SYMPHONY Fifth Movement: “Red Cape Tango”
Michael Daugherty

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Michael Daugherty is the oldest of five brothers, all professional musicians. He was educated at Yale University and trained originally as a jazz pianist. Before returning to Yale for his doctorate in composition, he spent a year in Paris as a Fulbright Fellow composing computer music at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique – a research and educational center for musicians and scientists working on music and new technologies) He is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Daugherty has always been fascinated by American pop culture, and many of his compositions, such as Jackie O, Hell’s Angels, Motown Metal, Le tombeau de Liberace and Sunset Strip, reflect that interest.
Another is Metropolis Symphony, composed between 1987 and 1993 and based on the Superman comics.

Daugherty writes: “I began composing my Metropolis Symphony in 1988, inspired by the celebration in Cleveland of the fiftieth anniversary of Superman's first appearance in the comics. [It] evokes an American mythology that I discovered as an avid reader of comic books in the fifties and sixties. Each movement of the symphony – which may be performed separately – is a musical response to the myth of Superman. I have used Superman as a compositional metaphor in order to create an independent musical world that appeals to the imagination. The symphony is a rigorously structured, non-programmatic work, expressing the energies, ambiguities, paradoxes, and wit of American popular culture...”

“Red Cape Tango” was composed after Superman's fight to the death with Doomsday and was Daugherty’s final musical work based on the Superman legend. The principal melody is derived from the Dies irae, the medieval Latin chant for the dead. Daugherty joins a slew of composers, most notably Franz Liszt and Sergey Rachmaninov, who used the chant extensively both programmatically (as in Liszt’s Totentanz) and symbolically (as in nearly all of Rachmaninov’s major works).

Like Liszt, Daugherty conceives the chant as a “dance of death,” in this instance a tango. The work, in fact, hardly ever gets away from the chant; it is repeated in numerous instrumental combinations and rhythms – although remaining in the same key throughout.

Ironically, it begins with a horn solo with echo,  playing with the disorganized pitches of the chant before they coalesce into the chant theme. After this introduction, a solo bassoon, accompanied by a chime, introduces the first iteration of the theme.

DON JUAN, Op.20
Tone Poem After Nikolaus Lenau
Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss came from an extremely conservative family. His father, Franz Joseph, the principal horn player in the Munich Court Orchestra, considered Brahms a radical and Wagner’s music beyond the pale, forbidding his son to listen to it. Richard assimilated the music of the early and middle nineteenth century in his early works, composing as a committed classicist. But he soon discovered that the musical language taught by his father was too confining for his own fertile mind.

Strauss quickly found his voice through his own unique development of the tone poem, or symphonic poem, a purely instrumental rendition of a text, usually poetic or narrative in nature. The term “symphonic poem” had been coined by Liszt in 1854 for compositions accompanied by a program that the audience was supposed to read before listening to the music. Although they did not all use Liszt’s term, the concept had become a standard medium for the nineteenth century Romantics, including Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, reaching its apex with Strauss. Moreover, the fusion of the arts was epitomized in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagner’s music dramas. Strauss was to create his own version of this fusion, both in his purely instrumental tone poems and operas.

Strauss’s musical rendering of specific texts is far more detailed than Liszt’s, although it is often difficult to follow without a “road map.” The anecdotes about Strauss' attempts at narrative music are many: “I want to be able to describe a teaspoon musically,” he is said to have commented. In the ten years between 1888 and 1898 he produced a string of tone poems, beginning with Aus Italien and Macbeth. Don Juan, completed in 1889, was the first to be publicly performed, catapulting him to international recognition.

Don Juan represents Strauss’s liberation from the confines of his father’s restrictive world. He completed the score in Bayreuth where he was a coach at the Festspielhaus – the venue Wagner had built to showcase his music dramas – between performances of Tristan und Isolde. At the time, the 24-year-old Strauss was involved in a scandalous love affair with a married woman. He expressed his youthful exuberance and desire with three extracts from Don Juan, an incomplete verse play by Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850), which he copied as a preface in the score.

Lenau’s play is just one of the incarnations of the Don Juan legend, which first appeared on the literary scene in the seventeenth-century Spanish play El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) by Tirso de Molina, and was immortalized musically in Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Lenau's version follows Don Juan through five conquests and a level of debauchery that leaves a wake of misery and death. In response to his brother’s attempt to dissuade him from his dissolute lifestyle, Don Juan expounds on his desire to experience all the diverse and novel joys of sexual gratification, hoping to die of a kiss from the ideal woman. His paramour/victims are: Maria, who follows Don Juan to escape from a forced marriage and is abandoned; Clara, who actually rejects him before he can reject her; Isabella, whom Don Juan seduces, disguised as her fiancé; Anna, who never actually appears but whom Don Juan apostrophizes from afar; and finally, an unnamed woman who dies of a broken heart. Don Juan receives the news of her death at a masked ball. Unlike Tirso's Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Lenau’s hero is not felled by a stone dinner guest meting out divine retribution. Rather, he intentionally lowers his guard during his last duel with his victim's son, because victory, and even life itself, has lost its appeal. All this, Strauss condenses and transforms into a single symphonic movement.

While presenting a narrative in music, Strauss' tone poems also conform to the current conventions of musical form. In the case of Don Juan, Strauss adapted the narrative to a modified sonata allegro structure. The principal theme, incorporating an orchestral fanfare and an upward-swooping melody, is a composite musical idea expressing the wild abandon and sexual striving of his hero.   There follow three subsidiary themes representing the Don’s conquests. Although it is difficult to identify any of the specific paramours of the source play, Strauss creates a different “character” for each of the secondary themes that reflect their diverse personalities and qualities of love: one theme introduced by soaring introduction on a solo violin;    a second accompanied by a gasping flute theme  and a sultry Spanish oboe melody; all develop alongside the restless motives of the Don.

The second half of the tone poem – the development in formalistic terms – begins with the so-called the “Carnival Scene” that corresponds to Lenau’s masked ball. Strauss breaks free of the sonata form tradition, however, by redefining the Don's personality with a new heroic theme, which has become the best known signature tune of the piece. it also signals a turning point, the beginning of his downward slide, including the haunting of his conscience by his former lovers, whose themes recur to haunt him.

Strauss alludes to further unspecified adventures in the increasingly manic development of the Don's themes. Eventually he turns up in a churchyard where he comes upon the statue of a nobleman whom he has killed and whom, in a final act of bravado, he invites to supper.

The recurrence of the Don's original theme is Strauss' abbreviated take on a formal recapitulation – forgotten are all his earlier amours. Instead of the stone guest, the nobleman’s son arrives, seeking revenge. Don Juan puts up a valiant fight, during which all his themes are further developed and contrapuntally combined in a manner the composer certainly learned from Wagner. Suddenly the music halts and a minor chord precedes a blast on the trumpets as Don Juan surrenders to his adversary and his despair – the opposite of Don Giovanni’s defiance. Pianissimo timpani and pizzicato basses conclude the piece.

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
Paul Dukas

Paul Dukas is known to audiences in this country mainly for one work: The Sorcerer's Apprentice – particularly via the famous Disney animation with Mickey Mouse in the film Fantasia. Although Dukas did write other works, he was a perfectionist and burned all but a dozen of them. His major works are the dance poem La Péri, the Symphony in C and the opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (Ariadne and Bluebeard).

The tale is by Germany’s Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, usually known for the seriousness of his poems and novels. But Goethe had his lighter side, and nowhere more so than in his ballad “Der Zauberlehrling.” Based on a universal folk theme – the disaster wrought by too much of a good thing – it tells of a sorcerer’s Apprentice who tries to avoid his domestic chores employing magic he learned from his master. He casts a spell on a broom to fetch water for his master’s bath, but when the tub is full, does not know how to stop it. In desperation he chops the broom in half with an axe, only to have the pieces each rise up and continue to fetch and pour. Compounding this initial mistake the Apprentice continues to hack at the brooms, who multiply in geometric progression. Finally the Sorcerer returns and with a sweep of his hand brings order back from the chaos.

Dukas prefaced his score with the French translation of all fourteen stanzas of the ballad and tried to follow the story musically to the letter. So effective are his eerie opening bars that they have been imitated again and again to represent mystery and foreboding in film scores. To a background of dripping water in the harp, a solo clarinet begins a theme that continues through each of the upper woodwinds, foreshadowing the march of the brooms and the catastrophe to come. Dukas builds up the drama and the Apprentice's increasing panic with the masterful mustering of the orchestral forces, using instrumental color to achieve such comic effects as the bassoon portrayal of the awkward lumbering of the broom. While the aquatic accompaniment begins as slow drips from the harp, it is soon represented by the jangling triangle. Dukas represents the phalanx of multiplying brooms by adding more and more instruments, marching in lockstep to a sinister military fanfare. The rhythm of crashing waves portrays the growing flood, in which the harp drips morph into wild glissandos.

For those interested in musical structure, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is in sonata allegro form, the prinipal theme forming part of the march of the broom.   In fact, a single broom appears to wreak increasing havoc through the exposition and development sections, which concludes as the Apprentice makes the fateful decision to chop it up. The recapitulation begins as two new brooms stagger to their "feet." Dukas even turns the march into an abbreviated fugue ("fuga" in Italian meaning chase or flight), a neat piece of musical symbolism and tone painting. Because the whole point of the story is the impossibility of starting over, the recapitulation becomes even more heavily orchestrated and frenetic.  Disney probably got it right when he interpreted the viola and clarinet solos – with more drips from the flute and harp – as the Mickey's tearful apology and the sudden fortissimo cadence as a kick in poor Mickey’s rear end.

Aaron Copland 1900-1990

Suite from the Ballet BILLY THE KID
Aaron Copland

During his long career, Aaron Copland composed in many diverse styles: scores for films (The Red Pony, Our Town, The Heiress); works incorporating jazz (Piano Concerto, Music for the Theater); and serial (12-tone) compositions (Piano Quartet, Piano Fantasy). But the works by which he is best known are his three American ballets: Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1943).

In his early works from the 1920s, for example his Piano Concerto of 1926, Copland used a jazzy, hard-edged musical language, culminating in his highly dissonant Variations for Piano of 1930. The public refused to accept these works, especially the Piano Concerto: not since the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1911 has a premiere generated so much controversy, not to mention invective, as its premiere in January 1927 in Boston, under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky.

By the mid-1930s Copland began to feel “an increasing dissatisfaction with the relation of the music-loving public and the living composer.” In order to reach a wider audience he started to simplify his style, making it more accessible, but without sacrificing sound artistic values. The first work in this more popular vein was El Salón Mexico in 1936. The second was Billy the Kid.

In 1938 Lincoln Kirstein, director of the American Ballet Caravan, became fascinated by a biography of the outlaw known as Billy the Kid (real name William Bonney), and approached Copland with the idea for a ballet. Copland, who admitted that he frankly disliked cowboy songs, agreed to try when he learned that Billy the Kid was originally from New York City. Incongruously, Copland spent the summer in Paris with a package of cowboy songs, working on the Western ballet. He finished it in September at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire. It was premiered in Chicago in October of that year but accompanied by two pianos only. The Ballet with full orchestra finally premiered in New York in May 1939. It was a smashing success and has remained an audience favorite ever since.

In the summer of 1939 Copland compiled an orchestral suite from the ballet in which he used about two-thirds of the original music. Among the noteworthy features of Copland's orchestration is his use of the upper winds and muted trumpet in imitation of the harmonica. The six connected movements of the suite, which match the action sequence of the ballet, are:

“The Open Prairie:” Copland's characteristic open fifths, which have come to symbolize the open spaces of the American West, depict the land as yet undisturbed by the violence of man.

“Street in a Frontier Town:” Copland captures the bustle and energy of the town in a medley of cowboy songs. The first one, played by solo piccolo, is based on the tune "Great Granddad." It is followed by a lively original melody. A theme on muted trumpets playing a semitone apart represents a fight between two drunks in the ballet. The Mexican dance is probably the most famous of the Billy the Kid themes. Copland's source was "Come Wrangle yer Bronco." The final tune, based on "Git along Little Doggies," concludes the scene. 

“Card Game at Night:” This gentle nocturne belies the conflict one would expect at a card game, but it sets up the audience for the shock of the gun battle. It is based on "Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie."

”Gun Battle:” A volley of timpani, bass trombone and snare drum gunshots ring out over a brief melodic motive for muted trumpet. As the movement closes, they become slower and fade into the distance.

“Celebration after Billy’s Capture:” The celebration is hardly an orchestral extravaganza, rather a folksy dance in which the instruments play the tune in two different keys a semitone apart.

“Billy’s Demise:” This gentle melody is almost nostalgic, as the outlaw's death fixes him in legend. The Open Prairie theme returns, the seemingly endless expanse once again undisturbed and unchanging.

Conspicuously absent, however, is Home on the Range. “I had to draw the line somewhere,” Copland remarked.

Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2007