Paul Dooley, Pomo Canyon Air (2005)
Paul M. Dooley is a composer, pianist, and percussionist currently working on his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Michigan. Paul grew up in the wine country just inland from the Pacific and began composing music at age 12. Paul has “clearly learned how to deal with the orchestra” (composer Steve Reich) and his music “shimmered beautifully” (Omaha World-Herald). His compositions take inspiration from dance, nature & travel. Paul’s Dani’s Dance (2007), inspired by his travel and dance fanatic mother, received a 2008 Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Encaenia (2008), inspired by the Grecian Elusian mysteries, commissioned and premiered by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, has been choreographed for ballet by UC Berkeley Dance and was featured in a master class with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. His Pomo Canyon Air (2005), an homage to the Sonoma Coast, has been performed by the Omaha Symphony, the Aspen Music Festival’s American Academy of Conducting Orchestra and read in rehearsal by the Detroit Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Program notes on Pomo Canyon Air by the composer:
“Pomo Canyon is located in Northern California along the Sonoma Coast where I grew up. The Pomo Canyon trail begins at a campground in a redwood grove two miles inland from the Pacific. It ascends about 300 feet and gives magnificent views of the ocean, before descending to the shore at Shell Beach.”
“This area was inhabited by the Kashaya Pomo, and the trail was part of a network of aboriginal trails that connected the Sonoma County towns of Sebastopol and Occidental, Willow Creek, and finally made its way out to the coast at Shell Beach. For years I have explored this area with friends, family and by myself and I have found remnants of these old trails.”
“Pomo Canyon Air is not an attempt to translate the visual into the aural, but is a piece composed through the memory of this place. I often find memories to be even more inspiring or emotional than the experience itself. Even though I visit Pomo Canyon almost every time I go home, I find that each time I return to school the memory of Pomo Canyon is stronger, and is a source of creativity. Pomo Canyon Air is about the feelings I associate with this beautiful area when I am unable to experience it firsthand.”
Robert Schumann (1810-1856), Piano Concerto in A Minor
Robert Schumann was in many ways the quintessential romantic artist, with a life that included the requisite amount of both unrecognized genius and tragedy. A tremendously gifted pianist who due to self-inflicted injury to his hand never became a performing concert artist, Schumann concentrated his formidable artistic talents in musical composition in a number of genres as well as in writing, in particular criticism, founding the seminal German musical journal Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (The New Journal for Music). His personal life was rife with drama, including the wooing and eventual marriage of his piano teacher’s daughter despite her father’s strenuous (and legal) objections, contraction of syphilis during his formative years, mental illness, attempted suicide and finally being admitted to an asylum for the insane where he died at the age of only 46.
In a real sense it is unfair to Schumann’s legacy to focus solely on the sensational aspects of his personal life whenever his music is discussed, as Schumann had a truly unique musical voice, a fertile musical imagination and a seemingly inexhaustible melodic gift. But as a true romantic artist Schumann’s tumultuous personal and artistic lives were indissolubly linked, and perhaps the fairest way to assess the music of this 19th Century master is to discern how the personal affected the artistic without letting the personal drama overshadow his oftentimes subtle musical achievements.
The Piano Concerto we are hearing this evening is a perfect example of how the personal and musical in Schumann’s life are complexly interrelated. An ardent and impetuous young man, Schumann fell madly in love with Clara Wieck, the daughter of his private piano instructor, Friedrich Wieck. Nine years Schumann’s junior, Clara was a world-class pianist herself and due to Schumann’s not overwhelming professional prospects and Clara’s tender age of only 15 when the romantic relationship began, Friedrich Wieck forbid the two young lovers to see each other, going so far as to eventually attempt legally to prevent the two from marrying. This did not deter the young lovers, and when Clara reached the age of 18 the two were married. Clara was widely recognized as one of the finest pianists of her generation, and her fame as performer generally overshadowed Schumann’s creative work as composer and musical critic during his lifetime.
The genesis of the Piano Concerto is in the first year of the happy couple’s September 1840 marriage. An enormous outpouring of compositions surrounded the happy event, including 168 lied or songs, and soon thereafter Schumann wrote in little more than a week a one movement Fantasy in A minor for Piano and Orchestra. Clara played through this piece at a reading rehearsal of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in August 1841. Schumann thought enough of the work to attempt to have it published, but fortunately for posterity he could not find a publisher willing and he reluctantly laid the piece aside.
In 1844 Schumann suffered a prolonged bout of emotional disorder, one of a series he endured throughout his lifetime, making creative work in possible. When recovered in 1845, Schumann felt invigorated, and returned to the single movement Fantasy, adding an Intermezzo and Finale, completing the three movement Piano Concerto as we know it today.
The Piano concerto occupied a special place in the musical and personal relationship between the Schumann’s- as early as 1837 Robert wrote in a letter to Clara of a plan for a work for piano and orchestra that would be, “…a compromise between a symphony, a concerto and a huge sonata.” This plan is borne out in the concerto- while it is a three movement work, the final two movements are played without a break and much more importantly, the opening theme of the first movement is transformed musically throughout the entire piece and serves as the musical “glue” that binds the piece together. This is reminiscent of another of Schumann’s often heard works, his Fourth Symphony, or somewhat akin to the famous idée fixe of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique. Schumann wrote a famous analysis of this work by Berlioz in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and perhaps his admiration for Berlioz inspired him to expand musically upon the French composer’s innovation which was used programmatically in the Symphonie Fantastique.
Undeniable is the lyric and melodic charm of Schumann’s Concerto in A Minor, and this, along with its unique structural integrity, has made it a favorite of musicians and audiences since its debut on January 1st, 1846, with none other than Clara Schumann performing as soloist.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Symphony in B Minor, D. 759 “Unfinished”
Another composer who undeniably fits the “romantic artist” archetype is Franz Schubert. His life was filled with tragedy, illness and an early death, but despite it all managed to write music that has enshrined him among the greatest of all composers of western art music.
Born the son of a school teacher in Vienna, Schubert received an excellent grounding in music through his studies with Antonio Salieri at the Stadtkonvikt, the Imperial Seminary School where Schubert gained entry through his vocal talents as a member of the boys choir. After his voice broke and he was forced to leave the school, he continued to study with Salieri while working as a teacher in his father’s school. These youthful years were among his most productive- in 1815 Schubert composed over 20,000 bars of music, including a symphony, nine works for the church and over 140 lieder, among these works many of undeniable genius.
Schubert’s life was a constant struggle to support himself financially while composing, which he viewed as his real vocation. He worked as a school teacher, as was mentioned above, but soon abandoned his father’s profession for tutoring and private music lessons which allowed him more freedom to compose. Schubert also had the support of family and friends who recognized his genius and assisted him materially as well as promoting his compositions to a wider audience. The image of Schubert living in grinding poverty does have more than a grain of truth in it, although he was never as destitute nor as unrecognized as is often described. He did, however, after 1822 live under the specter of a disease for which there was no known cure at that time and that had only one ultimate outcome- insanity and death. The diagnosis of syphilis would obviously be a major emotional shock to anyone, but to a sensitive artist of genius like Schubert we can only imagine the psychic pain and trauma it caused.
The Symphony in B Minor, or as it is commonly referred to, the “Unfinished,” dates from 1822, the year that Schubert was diagnosed with syphilis. The somber, melancholy mood of the two movements that were completed by Schubert gives credence to the theory that Schubert was giving vent to his despair and melancholy through music, and the fact that only two of the four movements of the symphony were completed supports the hypothesis of emotional trauma as well. It is perhaps germane to note that Viennese music and musicians seem to savor the melancholy- even the popular music of Vienna’s waltz kings, Johann Strauss Jr. and Sr., always contain a hint of the bittersweet, and this is music at the farthest remove from a Schubert symphony. Perhaps melancholy could be said to be a vital component of the 19th Century Viennese character. But the depths of emotion Schubert plumbs in the Symphony in B Minor are truly tragic in their depths, not just melancholy, especially so for a work of 1822 that still is essentially a “classical” era composition. The works of Schubert in the later years of his short life do tend to explore the theme of death, often with a sad resignation, typified by the 1827 Winterreise song cycle. Again, we can never know with any degree of certainty what the inspiration behind the Symphony in B Minor was and why Schubert failed to complete it, but evidence as well as common sense does point to a real psychic trauma being portrayed musically.
Schubert completed the first two movements of the Symphony in B Minor in full score and the third movement in piano score with a fragment orchestrated as well. Schubert sent the symphony in manuscript to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner the following year. Hüttenbrenner put it in a desk drawer where it languished for over 40 years until the completed two movements saw their first performance in Vienna in 1865. Eduard Hanslick wrote about the premiere that, “With a few horn figurations and here and there a clarinet or oboe solo, Schubert achieves, with the most simple, basic orchestra, tonal effects which no refinement of Wagnerian instrumentation can capture.” The polemical swipe at Wagner notwithstanding, Hanslick praised the work’s tonal beauty and simplicity and the symphony has been a part of the orchestral repertoire since that time.
This evening we are hearing a “completed” version of the “Unfinished” symphony. British Schubert scholar Brian Newbould has taken the piano score of the third movement Scherzo and based upon the fragment of instrumentation by Schubert, orchestrated the remainder of the movement. It has often been conjectured by scholars over the years that Schubert had originally intended the Entr’acte from the incidental music to the play Rosamunde as the finale of the Symphony in B Minor. They came to this conclusion based on the key of the Entr’acte; the fact that it is written for the same instruments as the Symphony in B Minor, including the unusual (at the time) inclusion of three trombones; and that it was composed at the same time as the Symphony. It is with this piece that our performance of the “Unfinished” Symphony will conclude.
Mozart’s Requiem, Puccini’s opera Turandot and Mahler’s 10th Symphony are among the best known compositions that are regularly heard in “completed” versions by other than the original composer. Only time will tell if this “completion” of the “Unfinished” Symphony will enter the standard repertoire as a fully recognized masterpiece.
