Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances

The composer Zoltán Kodály made it his life’s work to study the folk music of his native Hungary and to write original compositions inspired by it. That said, his Dances of Galánta from 1933 are much more than arrangements of folk dances from a field trip. This music held deep personal meaning for Kodály, because he had grown up in the town of Galánta, having moved there as a toddler with his family. (The town was then in Northern Hungary, now part of Slovakia.)

In the preface to the printed score, Kodály wrote:

The author spent the most beautiful seven years of his childhood in Galánta. The town band, led by the fiddler Mihók, was famous. But it must have been even more famous a hundred years earlier. Several volumes of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna around the year 1800. One of them lists its source this way: “from several Gypsies in Galánta.” ... May my modest composition inspired by this music serve to continue the old tradition.

During his research, Kodály found extensive evidence to show that the fame of those musicians had indeed spread far beyond the boundaries of their hometown.

As a child in Galánta, Kodaly not only had ample occasion to hear Mihók’s band, he also learned many folk songs from servants and his “bare-footed companions from the Galánta public school.” During his time in Galánta, Kodály was also introduced to Western classical music. He took up the cello and, because his parents loved to play chamber music with friends, young Zoltán was soon able to participate directly in musical evenings at home.

Forty-odd years after this initial encounter with the music of Galánta, Kodály returned to the published source material as a mature composer and leading scholar of Hungarian musical traditions. He took the melodies from the early 19th-century Viennese editions, which had recently been rediscovered by a musicologist named Ervin Major. But Kodály didn’t have to rely solely on the printed notes, for he also had the sound of the old town band still in his ears as he scored the music.

The style of these dances is known as verbunkos, from the German Werbung or “recruitment.” In centuries past, Austrian army recruiters traveled the countryside with impressively-dressed troops and musicians in tow; the officers would dance in formation to rhythmic music — all meant to entice young men to sign up. This verbunkos became the dominant Hungarian instrumental tradition of the 19th century.

In his Dances of Galánta, Kodály gave the various verbunkos melodies exquisite musical coloring, and arranged them in a masterful sequence with alternating moods and tempos. The pensive introduction anticipates the stately principal melody, played by solo clarinet. Later on, this melody returns several times as a rondo (or variation) theme. Two intervening episodes (one played by flute, the other by oboe) are faster in tempo and lighter in character.

In the second half of the composition, the variations of the rondo form are cast aside and we hear a series of dance tunes that — apart from one contrasting slower theme — gradually get faster.

The climactic ending is delayed for a moment by the return of part of the opening melody, with a short clarinet cadenza added. The entire second half of the piece is dominated by a characteristic syncopated rhythmic figure (short–long–short), which provides an ending that is as striking as it is simple. 

— Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

Bohuslav Martinů was born in a small town in Bohemia, where he showed early promise as a violinist, giving his first public concert at age 15. The proud townspeople raised money for his schooling and he enrolled at the National Conservatory in Prague a year later. He turned out to be a rather poor student, however, being twice dismissed from the Conservatory because of his “incorrigible negligence.” Despite these early setbacks, Martinů spent three years as a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic, where his exposure to the music of Debussy piqued his interest in composition. In 1923, he moved to Paris, where he encountered the Neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Les Six, American jazz, and other novel sounds, which he blended with his native Czech traditions and techniques derived from Renaissance polyphony and Baroque orchestral music to forge a uniquely personal style. Over the course of his career, he composed over 400 works in many genres, becoming one the 20th century’s most prolific composers.

Among Martinů’s numerous compositions were some 30 concertos or concerto-like works, including three for cello. The first of these, written in 1924, was a concertino for cello, winds, piano, and percussion, an ensemble that was typical of the emphasis on wind instruments in neoclassical circles during the early 1920s. (Stravinsky, for example, wrote his Symphonies of Wind Instruments and his Concerto for Piano and Winds at about the same time.) 

Martinů’s First Cello Concerto dates from 1930. The accompaniment was originally scored for a small Baroque-inspired chamber orchestra, but the composer re-scored the work for full orchestra in 1939, dedicating this new version to the French cellist Pierre Fournier. In one final revision, dating from 1955, the composer thinned out the orchestration a bit for greater clarity, and again dedicated the score to Fournier, who played it often over the rest of his career. (Martinů composed a second cello concerto while living in the US during World War II, which was premiered in New York in 1945.)

The first movement begins with a lively orchestral introduction that features a great deal of syncopation, perhaps reflecting the rhythmic energy of the American jazz bands that were taking Paris by storm in the years after World War I. The cello’s first statement introduces the faint hint of a blues melody and one of the most important features of Martinů’s music: that it rarely follows the regular phrasing and metrical feeling characteristic of most Western music of the past 300 years. Instead, Martinů incorporated the odd meters of Czech folk music as well as the irregular phrasing of Renaissance polyphony, which he admired greatly. Eventually, the energy of the opening section dissipates and gives way to quieter, more reflective music. These two contrasting moods alternate until, with an abrupt quickening of tempo, a short, sparkling coda brings the movement to a close.

A quietly unsettling chorale, played by clarinets, bassoons, and solo trumpet, introduces the second movement. The cello expands on this plaintive melody, accompanied by woodwinds and unobtrusive strings interrupted only by a brief but ominous appearance of the full orchestra. An extended meditative cadenza for the cello sits at the heart of the movement, which eventually builds to an anguished climax for full orchestra. The chorale melody reappears, its mournful nature confirmed by the orchestra’s outburst, and the movement concludes with a feeling of quiet lamentation.

Martinů’s debt to Baroque music is most apparent in the final movement. The texture of the opening section, with its constant alternation between orchestra and soloist, recalls a Vivaldi or J.S. Bach concerto, and the pulsating “spinning out” quality of the cello’s melody mirrors that of Baroque writing for solo string instruments. The liveliness of this opening music is continued in a second, more conventionally melodious section whose bouncy, irregular rhythms evoke the feel of a Czech folk dance. The excitement comes to an abrupt halt during an extended cello solo that recollects the second movement’s mournful atmosphere. Again the cello intervenes with a long cadenza-like solo that gradually increases in intensity and tempo, setting the stage for a return of the movement’s energetic opening music, which brings the movement, and the concerto, to a thrilling conclusion.

— Michael Strasser

Michael Strasser is professor emeritus of musicology at Baldwin Wallace University. He has published numerous articles and reviews and presented papers at international conferences on fin-de-siècle France, Arnold Schoenberg, and colonial music in British North America and Mexico.

In his years of self-exile from Russia, Sergei Rachmaninoff fought a constant battle with the arbiters of taste, both in Europe and in America, who had decided that modern music had to be … modern. His roots were deeply planted in Russian soil and in the way of life he led there, and his music had evolved within the great (but relatively recent) Russian tradition, best represented by Tchaikovsky. His technique as a composer and orchestrator was unequaled, and his imagination was never dormant, but his style had little in common with the spirit of the Jazz Age or the various approaches to Neoclassicism or Modernism that were coming to life in the first decades of the 20th century.

Perhaps because his Fourth Piano Concerto had been poorly received in 1927, Rachmaninoff cast his next piano concerto as a Rhapsody (in name) and a set of variations on a theme by Paganini (in form). This worked, and the public responded enthusiastically. The same approach brought into being the Symphonic Dances — the Third Symphony had similarly been roughly handled by the press in 1936. Rather than a Fourth Symphony, the new work — which turned out to be Rachmaninoff’s last major composition — was originally titled Fantastic Dances and then, acknowledging its true identity, Symphonic Dances.

This masterly swansong was composed in quiet seclusion in the summer of 1940 when Rachmaninoff was living in Centerport, New York, in a house overlooking Long Island Sound. Ballet was in his mind, in any case, because the great Russian choreographer Mikhail Fokine was planning a ballet using the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a project which had Rachmaninoff’s enthusiastic support. This was premiered in 1939 without much acclaim, and a follow-up Fokine ballet on the Symphonic Dances never materialized (owing to Fokine’s death in 1942, followed by Rachmaninoff’s death a year later).

Perhaps Rachmaninoff did feel this music as dance music, with the powerful stamping rhythm of the first movement echoing ballets by Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and with the fleet waltz rhythm of the second movement suggesting Ravel. The finale is more intricate and elusive, rhythmically, for behind the restless flow of sounds, the composer was thinking of plainchant, specifically the Dies irae from the Latin Requiem Mass, a motive Rachmaninoff cited frequently. There is also reference to the Russian chant “Blagosloven yesi, Gospod,” which he had set for chorus in his All-Night Vigil of 1915. These two references emerge as intrinsic to his melodic style, deeply rooted, probably subconsciously, in the chanting of Orthodox priests he had heard in his childhood. It is also significant that a theme from his First Symphony is quoted at the end of the first movement of the Symphonic Dances, played in a quiet and dignified manner and standing apart from the strong pulse of the rest of the movement.

The first movement is a superb example of how to build a large musical structure from simple materials, in this case a descending triad, weaving under and over firm rhythmic support and planted (with endless chromatic digressions) in the key of C minor. A dialogue between oboe and clarinet puts the brakes on for the second section, which is slower, cast in a remote key, and richly melodic. Here, an alto saxophone introduces one of Rachmaninoff’s rapturous melodies that grow and reshape themselves in a passionate evolution, often hinting at a Russian flavor.

The middle movement is a masterpiece of elegance in a waltz rhythm full of shifts and turns, its main tune being a plaintive melody first presented by English horn and oboe in partnership. The orchestration is dazzling, and a muted brass fanfare punctuates the movement from time to time.

The third-movement finale combines melancholy wistfulness with rhythmic exhilaration and virtuosity. The movement is a quest for its theme, which makes the initial Allegro sound restless and fragmentary, with contributions from the piccolo and trumpet that help to form a melodic core. But this is not to be reached until after a lengthy return to the slower tempo, when the cellos press the claim of something close to the Dies irae. The Allegro returns for an exuberant mixture of plainchants for the full orchestra. With so much of the finale devoted to gloomy Russian introspection, not remotely suggestive of dance, the whole work comes nearer to being the Fourth Symphony Rachmaninoff never wrote, with slow movement and finale being persuasively combined.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.