ETHEL SMYTH ON THE CLIFFS OF CORNWALL PRELUDE TO ACT 2 OF "THE WRECKERS"
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Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an English composer, author, and a member of the women’s suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. On the Cliffs of Cornwall is the prelude to Act 2 of her 1904 opera The Wreckers, and is a brilliant standalone piece of music.
RESOURCES
A recording by BBC Philharmonic, with score to follow along!
A live performance recording of the full opera The Wreckers by Bard SummerScape Opera
HIGHLIGHTS
The Wreckers, is a 3 act opera set in a Cornish village. It explores themes of morality and sacrifice through a story about piracy, love, and betrayal in a community of religious fanatics. Basically the community survives by intentionally drawing boats toward a terrible demise on the rocky shoreline during stormy weather, and then looting the wreckage. But someone is sneaking around lighting fires to illuminate the dangerous shoreline. High stakes drama ensues. Hey, it’s opera!
In the prelude to Act 2, "On the Cliffs of Cornwall", Smyth deftly captures the swirling uneasy psychological turmoil involved in the drama of luring sailors to crash on the rocky shoreline in the roiling sea. We can hear the wind and the waves in the music, as well as the foreboding melody telling us all is not well.
The Wreckers premiered in 1906 in Germany. It was first performed in England in 1909, and didn't make it to the United States until 2015! The overture, and the prelude to Act 2 "On the Cliffs of Cornwall" were performed at the BBC proms 27 times by 1947.
A typical performance of "On the Cliffs of Cornwall" lasts about 10 minutes.
More about Ethel Smyth
Ethel Smyth was a true firebrand. She absolutely defied societal expectations of women, showing a strong will and commitment to independence and personal expression. She had the support of her family from a young age to study music and design her own personal path. She eventually studied composition with Carl Reinecke at the Leipzig Conservatory, went on to a prolific career in music composition and writing, and was hugely influential in securing women's right to vote. Her output included operas, choral pieces, chamber music, a concerto for violin and horn, numerous songs and solo piano pieces, as well as several books.
In 1912 she spent two months in Holloway Prison for engaging in suffragette movement protest actions. In 1922 she became the first female composer to be awarded the DBE - Dame of the British Empire - for her contributions to the arts and civic culture.
Her feminist activities dovetailed with her music in the form of March of the Women, a song she composed in 1910 that today has become emblematic of all she stood for. During the time she and 100 other women were imprisoned for protesting for the right to vote, she was visited by a friend who observed all the suffragettes marching in the quadrangle and singing, as Smyth leaned out of a window conducting the song with a toothbrush!
Her opera The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the most important English opera composed during the period between Henry Purcell (of the 1600s) and Benjamin Britten (of the early/mid 1900s).
Ethel Smyth hung out with some pretty spectacular people: for example composers Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, British political activist Emmeline Pankhurst, and, at the age of 71, she met and fell in love with the writer Virginia Woolf. Smyth wrote "I don’t think I have ever cared for anyone more profoundly”. Woolf, who was 25 years younger, wrote “an old woman has fallen in love with me. It’s like being caught by a giant crab.” ❤️🦀 😂 Regardless, the two of them became very close friends through the remainder of their lives.
Ethel Smyth’s life and career was marked with a seemingly endless energy and commitment to music composition and social justice. It is impossible to overstate her contributions to society and culture.
Most fittingly, there is a place setting for Ethel Smyth in artist Judy Chicago's monumental feminist artwork The Dinner Party.
"Ethel Smyth kickin it with Virginia Woolf", photo from the excellent site Composers Doing Normal Shit
A live performance of March of the Women, sung by the Glasgow University Chapel Choir
Ethel Smyth's place setting in Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party - photo taken in the wild by J Marsh (thanks!)
Portrait photos of Ethel Smyth and dogs Marco and Pan.
Because duh, doggles are the bestest. Also, that hat... 🔥
SERGEI PROKOFIEV
VIOLIN CONCERTO #2
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Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was a Russian composer and pianist. He composed his first piano piece at five, his first opera at age nine, and was invited to study at the St Petersburg Conservatory by the age of 13. Violin Concerto #2 is as beautiful and alluring as it is powerfully ecstatic. Enjoy learning about, and listening to this wonderful piece of music!
RESOURCES
A live performance featuring guest soloist Stefan Jackiw with conductor Andrew Litton
HIGHLIGHTS
Violin Concerto #2 was composed and premiered in 1935, when Prokofiev was looking to return to the Soviet Union after many years away from his homeland traveling, performing, and composing. It was his last Western commission before returning to the Soviet Union.
Prokofiev was homesick enough to risk running afoul of the Stalinist regime, and had begun to compose music that would find more approval from the Soviet government. Violin Concerto #2 represented a more restrained compositional approach than Prokofiev’s earlier works.
Violin Concerto #2 is in 3 movements: Allegro moderato (moderately quick pace), Andante assai (walking pace), Allegro ben marcato (quick and punchy)
About the first movement, guest soloist Stefan Jackiw writes “Prokofiev puts the listener ill at ease right from the start. The piece opens with the solo violin alone, playing a foreboding melody in G minor that is based on a 5‐beat motive. We are used to hearing musical ideas that fall neatly into 2, 3, 4, or 6‐beat patterns. Five beats don’t feel comfortable. Furthermore, since the violin is alone, the orchestra gives the listener no additional context to find his bearings. When the orchestra finally comes in several bars later, it enters in a completely different tonality, further throwing the listener off balance and compounding the sense of unease. The movement closes with one of the most nihilistic statements in music I know: two short, dry thuds from the entire orchestra, like a falling guillotine.”
It is true that the first movement theme doesn’t tidily fit into a traditional or expected pulse structure. This gives it a spinning out kind of quality, like a story being created as it’s being told. It feels perfumey and enchanting in this way and is a genius technique for drawing us into a sound world that is both song and dance.
The second movement plays with math in the most beautiful way, weaving through a 12 note pattern in pulse groupings of 2, 3, and 4. This creates a gauzy texture in the beginning and a middle section that scampers through an overactive mind.
Finally the third movement is a proud dance with a LOT of fire. Toward the end the dance becomes positively ecstatic. Along the way we get glimpses into how off kilter things will get. One way Prokofiev does that is to take a Big 3 waltz type pattern and elongate the middle beat, the 2, so it feels like 1, 2.5, 3. The easiest way to achieve this is to write the music across 7 beats so that they are packaged together as 1,2 - 3,4,5 - 6,7. Still a waltz, but harder to know where to put your foot down or swing your partner!
Prokofiev was on a concert tour while he was working on the concerto. In a recollection later, he said, "the number of places in which I wrote the Concerto shows the kind of nomadic concert-tour life I led then. The main theme of the 1st movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the 2nd movement at Voronezh, the orchestration was finished in Baku and the premiere was given in Madrid.”
Knowing it would be premiered in Madrid, Prokofiev incorporated Spanish castanets into the final movement for extra flair during the whirling dervish ending. It’s scored for a smallish orchestra of strings, winds and brass in pairs, and a colorful percussion section of bass drum, castanets, cymbals, snare drum, and triangle.
A typical performance lasts around 30 minutes.
NERD ASSIGNMENTS
Start with a Conversation
A concerto is a type of musical form that creates dialogue and drama between a single performer, and a much larger group of performers. What exactly is dialogue? How is dialogue made? Think about constructing a brief dialogue between two people. What can you do to alter this dialogue so that one participant becomes a whole group of people? What are some examples of this type of dialogue you can think of in your every day life? [call and response in pep rallies, a religious service, etc.] Now imagine what it might be like if each person in the large group had an individual response in this dialogue. Would we be able to understand all the responses simultaneously? In music, many different sounds (often called ‘voices’) can be processed simultaneously by the human ear. Because of this it’s possible to have a two part musical dialogue with many individual voices!
Listening for dialogue and interpretation
Try to listen carefully for musical dialogue and dramatic interpretive elements in this composition. How did the conversation and comparison/contrast activities help you to better engage as a listener?
Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 5
& Encore: Hungarian Dance No. 3
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Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German composer and pianist from the middle Romantic era. Composed in 1833, Symphony #3 firmly solidified him as a major symphonic composer and was generally a success from the moment it premiered.
RESOURCES
A live performance of Symphony #3 with Frankfurt Radio Symphony and Andres Orozco-Estrada
Hungarian Dance #5 with WDR and Cristian Macelaru
HIGHLIGHTS
Johannes Brahms composed Symphony #3 in 1883 over the course of just 4 months while on summer vacation on the Rhine river.
Symphony #3 is a super efficient and structurally compact 35-40 minutes long - the shortest of his four symphonies - and employs a “wholistic” approach by presenting thematic material across different movements. About that, composer and pianist Clara Schumann noted “All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart…”
Composers and musicians are proud nerds. Case in point, the primary motive of the symphony - F, A-flat, F - is a play on his violinist friend Joseph Joachim’s motto of F, A, E. FAE signifying Frei aber einsam (free but lonely), as opposed to FAF signifying Frei aber froh (free but happy). Peeling one more layer of the nerd onion we see Brahms playing with the idea of “happy” by using both A and A-flat, which in the key of the symphony, F, incorporates both major and minor modes, drawing on both elated and pensive sounds.
Another important way Brahms presents the feeling of searching or ambiguity is to lean heavily on rhythmic instability. He notoriously mixes a march feel with a waltz feel to achieve this, and he uses it in both micro and macro ways in this symphony to great effect. As a listener you may not be fully aware of this when it’s happening, but rather sense a churning kind of movement to the texture.
Random drama for you to chew on: Even though Brahms respected his work, he and composer Richard Wagner had a pretty nasty public feud going on, and even though Wagner died months before Brahms composed Symphony #3 the fur was still flying in the community so much so that Wagner supporters tried to wreck the symphony’s premiere.
Random conspiracy theory for you to chew on: In his symphony, Brahms included a musical quote from the Wagner’s Siren’s Chorus. The spot on the Rhine river where Brahms composed the symphony is also very near the infamous Lorelei rock cliff, named after the siren-like water spirit that lured sailors to crash their ships. Was he honoring Wagner's composition skills, mocking his death, OR WAS HE PREDICTING ETHEL SMYTH’S 1904 OPERA "THE WRECKERS" AND THIS WEEKEND’S PROGRAM LIKE A SYMPHONIC NOSTRADAMUS. You be the judge.
The symphony is in 4 movements: Allegro con brio (quick lively pace), Andante (medium pace), Poco allegretto (a little quick-ish), Allegro (quick pace)
It’s a very powerful 35 minute expression of introversion, and ends quietly. So we’ve planned an encore of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance #5 to send you off with an even bigger smile.
EXTRAS
As is my way, the fun stuff!
First, a truly excellent scene from Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator which features Hungarian Dance #5. Then, satisfy your curiosity with two contrasting takes on the Symphony #3 third movement melody as repurposed by Frank Sinatra and Diahann Carroll.
Hungarian Dance #5 scene from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator
Sinatra song "Take My Love" based on Brahms's 3rd movement melody
Diahann Carroll singing "Say No More, It's Goodbye" from the soundtrack to the Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Perkins film Goodbye Again, also based on Brahms's 3rd movement melody.
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