Three Waltzes
LISZT: The Dance in the Village Inn (Mephisto Waltz No. 1), from Two Episodes from Lenau’s Faust
RAVEL: La Valse, poème chorégraphique pour orchestre
RODGERS: Carousel Waltz
Franz (Ferenc) Liszt was born in Raiding, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on October 22, 1811, and died in Bayreuth, Germany, on July 31, 1886. He composed his Two Episodes from Lenau’s Faust in 1860. The Dance in the Village Inn (Episode No. 2, also known as the Mephisto Waltz No. 1) was introduced to San Francisco Symphony audiences by Alfred Hertz, who conducted the first performances here in October 1922. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones (two tenors and one bass), tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, harp, and strings.
Maurice Joseph Ravel was born in Ciboures, Basses-Pyrénées, France, on March 7, 1875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. Though sketches for material used in La Valse go back as far as 1906, the work was composed only in 1919-20. Ravel and Alfredo Casella played the two-piano version in Vienna in November 1920 at a concert of Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances. Camille Chevillard conducted the Lamoureux Orchestra of Paris on December 12 that year in the premiere of the orchestral version. Alfred Hertz led the first American performances of La Valse with the San Francisco Symphony in October 1921. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, antique cymbals, castanets, tam-tam, triangle, snare drum, celesta, bells, two harps, and strings.
Richard Rodgers was born in Hammels Station, New York, on June 28, 1902, and died in New York City on December 30, 1979. Carousel, his second collaboration with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, was introduced at the Majestic Theater in New York City on April 19, 1945. The San Francisco Symphony has performed the Carousel Waltz frequently, first at a pops concert in August 1969, when Arthur Fiedler conducted. It is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, harp, and strings.
The waltz. Born early in the nineteenth century. Believed at first to harness its dancers’ libidos and imaginations, inching them toward intimacy’s dangerous brink. The waltz, which went on to inspire some of music’s most elegant creations, was packed with potential waiting for release, too potent to be confined to the ballroom. To composers such as Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel and Richard Rodgers, the waltz was a dance and more. The music we hear this evening taps its latent energies, evokes its essence and spirit, its emotional connotations. This is music meant not for dancing, but to be heard.
Mephisto Waltz No. 1
The tale of Faust traces its ancestry to Germany in the early sixteenth century, when a real-life Johann Faust claimed to have made a pact with the devil. Within a few decades, the stories of necromancy and alchemy that swirled in the wake of Johann Faust’s death were codified in a published Faustbuch (1587). Translated and disseminated throughout Europe, that volume inspired further developments of the Faust legend, including contributions by such figures as Christopher Marlowe, Gotthold Lessing, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For most of us the general outline of the Faust story will be Goethe’s, particularly in his Part One. It deals with how the devil (Mephistopheles) seeks and receives God’s permission to try to corrupt Faust, a disaffected academic; of Faust’s dealings with Mephistopheles, which enable him to acquire knowledge and a girlfriend (Gretchen); and the consequences his actions have on others (his seduction of Gretchen brings her to ruin, though his turn of heart leads to her eventual redemption).
Many Romantic composers were swept up in Faust mania. In 1830, Hector Berlioz, who would go on to compose The Damnation of Faust, introduced Goethe’s Faust to his friend Franz Liszt, who also succumbed to its spell.
Liszt’s monumental Faust Symphony of 1854 was only the beginning of his infatuation with the legend, and he wrote more than a dozen further Faust-inspired pieces, among them the work that opens this concert. It was inspired not by Goethe’s Faust but by Faust: A Poem, an 1836 work by Nicolaus Lenau, an Austrian poet remembered by music-lovers mainly because his epic poem Don Juan would serve as inspiration for Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem of that name. In Lenau’s Faust story, the hero wanders through a life without meaningful values. Liszt’s Two Episodes from Faust are like brief tone poems, each inspired by a different moment encountered in Lenau. The first, the Nocturnal Procession, is a relative rarity. The second of the Episodes is as famous as the first is obscure. In Lenau’s poem, Mephistopheles coaxes Faust to a village inn, where they seek romantic pleasure. According to Liszt biographer Humphrey Searle, “The peasants are dancing, and Mephisto seizes the violin and intoxicates the audiences with his playing. They abandon themselves to love-making, and two by two slip out into the starlit night, Faust with one of the girls; then the singing of the nightingale is heard through the open doors.”
The concluding section follows the nightingale (a flute, of course) and a string of harp glissandos. Sacheverell Sitwell wrote that “the very tone of the music is haunted and evil,” but it is an evil of calculated seductiveness rather than of sinister threat.
This Second Episode will be familiar to many listeners in its better-known guise as Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, the first and most famous of the four such piano pieces he would write.
La Valse
The piece that became La Valse was to have been a waltz portrait of unalloyed affection. As early as 1906, Ravel planned a tribute to Johann Strauss to be called Wien. For many reasons he kept getting distracted from the project, and the experience of the 1914-18 war made it impossible for him to retrieve the spirit of the original idea. To be sure, he declined to join a National League for the Defense of French Music, one of whose purposes was to ban music by living German and Austrian composers; nonetheless, early in the war he had written to his friend Cipa Godewski: “And now, if you wish, Vive la France! but above all down with Germany and Austria! or at least what those two nations stand for at the present time.” When, late in 1919, he began work on the score, the world had become a different place. Waltzing Vienna was no longer to be seen in quite the same way, and so La Valse became a bitter and ferocious fantasy, a terrifying tone poem that helped define a new language of musical nightmare.
Ravel completed La Valse on commission from Serge Diaghilev. But when Ravel played it for him, the ballet impresario saw no dance possibilities in it. The composer was offended, and this split counted for more than the memory of the success of Daphnis et Chloé in 1912. Ravel and Diaghilev never collaborated again. Still, Ravel published the score as a poème chorégraphique, and there is a prefatory note with a hint of a scenario: “Swirling clouds afford glimpses, through rifts, of waltzing couples. The clouds scatter little by little; one can distinguish an immense hall with a whirling crowd. The scene grows progressively brighter. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about 1855.” Ravel indicates specific musical cues for the scattering of the clouds (the slow tune in thirds for divided violas and bassoons) and for the full lighting of the chandeliers.
La Valse, then, first made its mark as a concert piece. But beginning with Bronislava Nijinska, who set it for Ida Rubinstein in 1929, a number of choreographers have found it inspiring, and George Balanchine in 1951 used Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and La Valse as a sequence.
Carousel Waltz
Theatergoers who had been captivated by the music of the 1943 show Oklahoma! were in for even better with the next collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. That’s an arguable statement, of course, but Carousel, which opened on Broadway in 1945 and ran for almost two years, continues to be among the best-loved musicals created by one of the most successful composer-writer partnerships in the American musical theater. Carousel treats its audience to songs such as “If I Loved You,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” “Mr. Snow,” and so many other show-stoppers that you can only imagine the final curtain being postponed for hours.
The bittersweet quality with which Rodgers infused his score meshed perfectly with the story, which is based on Liliom, a 1909 play by Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952)—not to be confused with the Ferenc Molnar who served as the San Francisco Symphony’s principal violist from 1944 to 1963. In Carousel, irascible carnival barker falls in love with sweet young girl, gets fired, tries to make ends meet, becomes increasingly desperate upon learning he’s to become a father, finally resorts to a robbery in which he meets his death. Allowed to return to earth to perform one good deed, he visits the now-teenaged daughter he has never seen and encourages her to be confident in herself, assuring her of his continued vigilance by giving her a star, a gift from heaven. This may sound sentimental in the telling. In the theater, it works, not least because the story of union with loved ones after death evokes an elemental response, no matter what spiritual beliefs we embrace, or don’t.
The Carousel Waltz, which serves as the show’s overture, is a stand-alone piece, making no reference to tunes from the play. Whoever imagined that carousel music could sound like this? Rodgers captures the essential elements we all know from merry-go-round rides past and present, that dizzying sense of spinning while the horses or cows or frogs on whose backs we ride rise and fall with the music. The atmosphere is simultaneously one of carnival and ballroom, abandon and elegance. In 2007, on tour in Vienna, Michael Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra offered their listeners the Carousel Waltz as an encore—daring, as MTT said in announcing the work, to bring the Viennese a genre they had invented. The audience loved it. How could they not have?
—James M. Keller (Mephisto Waltz), Michael Steinberg (La Valse),
and Larry Rothe (Carousel Waltz)
Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in July, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.