Ravinia 2022, Issue 5

keeps running through my head, and the opening gives me no peace.” Unfortunately, the “torment” of these germinating ideas did not spur Mendelssohn into prompt action. David inquired a year later about the score, only to learn that little real work had been accomplished. Understandably, Mendelssohn’s attention fo- cused elsewhere. His personal life centered on Leipzig, where he served as conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts. This Saxon town offered a stable environment in which he and his new wife, Cécile, could raise a family. However, Mendelssohn’s extraordinary tal- ents as composer and conductor regularly took him throughout Europe to the Birming- ham Festival in England, the Lower Rhine Festival in Düsseldorf, and the Prussian court in Berlin, among other places. David’s persistent nudging paid dividends when Mendelssohn finally found time for the promised concerto. Their close collaboration throughout the composition process was un- precedented. The composer relied on his vio- linist friend’s expertise regarding mechanics, as well as seeking his advice on purely musical matters. Their shared musical involvement often blurred the lines of creative ownership. Some writers, for example, claim that the un- accompanied first-movement cadenza (be- tween the development and recapitulation) contains more David than Mendelssohn. Da- vid gave the first performance on March 13, 1845, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under the direction of Niels Gade; Mendels- sohn had fallen ill and was unable to conduct. The Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64, por- trays Mendelssohn the Romantic-Classicist. His Romantic nature prompted not only lus- cious harmonies and broad melodic gestures, but also a reconception of concerto form. The traditional orchestral introduction complete- ly disappears, a bold formal adaptation used by many composers later in the 19th century. Furthermore, Mendelssohn joins the three movements into a continuous musical essay Ferdinand David whose links are easily perceived by the listen- er. The passionate first movement closes with an accelerating coda. A single bassoon pitch (B) holds over from the last dramatic chord into the Andante , an aria for violin that proceeds at an unhurried pace. Here, the Classicist in Mendelssohn strives for uncluttered orchestral textures, logical tonal relationships, and balanced melodic phrasing. A brief segment for strings alone bridges the tempo differential between the slow move- ment and the mercurial finale. Mendelssohn infuses the final movement with his inimita- ble, dainty “fairy-scherzo” expression. MODEST MUSSORGSKY (1839–1881) Pictures at an Exhibition (Orchestrated by Maurice Ravel) Scored for three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, alto saxophone, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, chimes, triangle, tam-tam, rattle, whip, cymbal, snare drum, bass drum, xylophone, celesta, harp, and strings The name of Modest Mussorgsky is most of- ten associated with “The Mighty Handful,” a group of late-19th-century composers, in- cluding Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, dedicated to the creation of a Russian musi- cal style independent of Western influences. (Critic Vladimir Stassov coined the epithet “Mighty Handful” in 1867.) The spiritual fa- ther of these nationalists was Mikhail Glinka, composer of the operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila . This group operated with greatest cohesion during the 1860s, al- though its aesthetic legacy extended through several generations of Russian composers. Mussorgsky emerged as the radical individ- ualist among The Mighty Handful. His aes- thetic viewpoints and seemingly irrational melodic and harmonic constructions baffled Felix Mendelssohn by Wilhelm Hensel (1847) even his musical colleagues. For a brief peri- od, Mussorgsky resided in a commune whose members believed that art should reflect life, an early type of “artistic Realism.” His close circle of artistic friends, all of whom invested social and political commentary in represen- tations of common or folk life, included the Nihilist author Nikolai Chernyshevsky and a promising young architect, Victor Hartman. Mussorgsky later reaffirmed his Realist con- viction in a brief autobiography, stating that “art is a means of communicating with peo- ple, not an aim in itself.” On July 23, 1873, Victor Hartman died prema- turely at the age of 39. Stassov considered the loss a national tragedy: “In my eyes he was the most talented, the most original, the most ad- venturous, the boldest of all our architects, even those of the new young school.” To hon- or his departed colleague, Stassov organized an exhibition of 400 sketches and paintings highlighting Hartman’s quirky blend of com- mon objects, folk art, and architecture. After visiting the exhibition, Mussorgsky drafted an “album series” (a collection of character pieces) for solo piano inspired by Hartman’s designs. He dedicated these Pictures at an Ex- hibition , composed between June 2 and 22, 1874, to Stassov. The Promenade , heard initially and through- out the piece, represents the composer “as he strolled through the exhibition, joyfully or sadly recalling the talented deceased artist,” according to Stassov. Polyglot titles for the 10 main selections give evidence of Mussorg- sky’s extraordinary linguistic skills as well as the diverse sources of fairy tales and scenes of ordinary life—borrowed from French, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, ancient Roman, and Russian cultures—that inspired Hartman’s idiosyncratic creations. These vivid musical characterizations, folkish melodies, and qua- si-symphonic textures have inspired large- scale instrumental transcriptions by Mikhail Tuchmalov, Henry Wood, Leo Funtek, Mau- rice Ravel (the most familiar, from 1922), Lucien Cailliet, Leopold Stokowski, Walter Modest Mussorgsky Goehr, Sergei Gorchakov, Lawrence Leonard, Elgar Howarth, and Vladimir Ashkenazy, among others. Hartman designed Gnomus , a nutcracker in the shape of a grotesque dwarf, for the Artists’ Club (1869). A guitar-strumming troubadour sings before an ancient Italian castle in Il vec- chio castello . In Tuileries , a nurse attends to quarreling children in the famous Parisian garden. None of Hartman’s known paintings corresponds to Bydlo , a bulky Polish peasant’s cart pulled by Sandomir cattle. The Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells arose from costumes designed for Marius Petipa’s ballet Trilbi , in which some children appeared as newborn canary chicks while others remain encased in their shells. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyl e presumably represented rich and poor Jews, such as Hartman encountered during an 1868 visit to the town of Sandomir in southeastern Poland. (Hartman’s wife was Jewish.) Women gossip about a missing cow and new dentures in The Market Place at Limoges . Mussorgsky carefully chose a Latin title for his illustration of a Parisian catacomb: “Latin text would be fine; the creative genius of the late Hartman leads me to the skulls and in- vokes them; the skulls begin to glow.” The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba-Yaga) drew on the fear- ful legend of the Russian witch Baba-Yaga, who crushes the bones of unwary children in her flying mortar. The artist/architect trans- formed Baba-Yaga into a clock standing on chicken legs. Hartman entered his watercolor design for a great gate at the city limits of Kiev with three massive arches and pointed cupola in an architectural competition following the unsuccessful Nihilist assassination attempt on the tsar in 1866. –Program notes © 2022 Todd E. Sullivan Victor Hartman’s design of the Great Gate of Kyiv RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIA MAGAZINE 27