A Little Night Music …

Music, it seems, has always been associated with the night. We imagine the earliest human groups singing stories in cave dwellings to ward off fear of the encroaching dark. In our own earliest memories, loving parents calm us to sleep with favorite lullabies. Later in life, pubs and nightclubs offer a different kind of nocturnal music, unless, of course, we prefer to attend evening performances of opera, ballet, or orchestral music.

The musical nocturne, popularized by composer-pianist Frédéric Chopin, began as a genre intended to accompany evening gatherings in the 18th century. Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 for strings, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, is perhaps the most famous instance of this multi-movement instrumental genre. In the hands of Chopin and his Romantic contemporaries, however, the nocturne became a genre of single-movement piano works characterized by lyrical melodies and sweeping arpeggiated accompaniment — conjuring sensuous moonlit scenes.

Drawing from much more than just nocturnes, this evening’s program tells the musical story of an evening from the first glimmers of moonlight to the pink hues of dawn.

Written in 1802, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 was given the enduring nickname “Moonlight” three decades later by the German critic Ludwig Rellstab, who saw in the remarkable opening movement “a boat passing the wild scenery of Lake Lucerne in the moonlight.” The second movement offers respite from the inky depths of the moonlit lake, but the placid evening turns stormy in the finale, as Beethoven unleashes a furious torrent of unrestrained passion.

Whether peaceful or stormy, the evening’s concealing shadows are a favorite disguise for impish tricksters. Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908) musically depicts three stories from Aloysius Bertrand’s eponymous book. The first movement, Ondine, tells the story of a nymph luring strangers to their watery deaths in her lake-bottom home. In the poem — and the music — a man refuses Ondine, churning her into spiteful outbursts. The second movement, Le Gibet, depicts a corpse hanging on a gibbet (or gallows) in the desert. The eerie scene is punctuated by the sound of insects completing the circle of life. The slippery third movement, Scarbo, follows a nocturnal goblin who enters houses and vanishes just as suddenly, without a trace.

Contemporary composer-pianist Dobrinka Tabakova offers a much more reverent view of nighttime. Her music often seeks to capture light, even amid darkness. Tabakova’s Nocturne (2008) is a refreshing nod to Chopin’s genre. Undulating and repetitive, it builds out in concentric circles from a familiar musical cell. The first sense of a melody comes not in the right hand as expected, but from the lower left hand playing a syncopated tune below the still-pulsating chords. The mesmerizing piece fades to nothing almost before it has a chance to get started.

A much earlier work, Halo (1999) was written when the composer was only 18. She explains:

The inspiration for this suite came from a beautiful halo which had formed around the moon one summer’s night. Exploring a range of techniques for achieving harmonics on the piano, the piece describes a hypothetical life of a halo. The first movement sees its birth from darkness, in the second the full strength of light is evoked through rapid repetitive figures, and the extreme registers of the piano; and the final movement portrays a mature and settled halo.

The program closes as it opened, with a Beethovenian depiction of light. Often called the “Waldstein” Sonata for is dedicatee, Count Ferdinand Ernst Gabriel von Waldstein, Piano Sonata No. 21 (1804) also bears the nickname “L’Aurora” (The Dawn). After the pulsating, energetic first movement, the open sonorities that begin the second movement conjure daybreak in much the same way as Rossini’s Overture to William Tell or Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. And thus, our evening closes with the promise of a new day.

— Ellen Sauer Tanyeri

Ellen Sauer Tanyeri is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Archives & Editorial Assistant and is a PhD candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University.