François-Xavier Roth conducts Strauss, Berlioz and Boulanger

About the Work

Richard Strauss was eighty when he wrote Metamorphosen, and the world he had lived in was being destroyed around him. In October 1943 the National Theatre in Munich was burned out in an air raid. It was the house where his father had played first horn for nearly half a century, and where Strauss himself had first heard an opera as a child. He wrote to his friend and biographer Willi Schuh that this was “the greatest catastrophe which has ever been brought into my life, for which there can be no consolation”. Soon afterwards he sketched a few bars of music under the heading “Mourning for Munich”.

Those sketches found a purpose when the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher commissioned a piece for strings. Strauss wrote out the score in a single month, beginning on 13 March 1945, the day after the Vienna State Opera was destroyed, and finishing on 12 April, a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Sacher conducted the first performance in Zurich on 25 January 1946, with the composer present.

The subtitle is “study for 23 solo strings”, and it is meant literally. There are ten violins, five violas, five cellos and three double basses, and each player has an individual part. The title comes from Goethe, whom Strauss was rereading at the time and who used the word for the slow transformation of living things. It describes the method as well: a handful of short themes are turned over, combined and changed across an unbroken span of about 25 minutes.

Strauss never said in so many words what the piece mourns, and listeners have argued about it since. The score itself offers one clue. In the final bars the lowest strings play the opening of the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, and beneath it Strauss wrote two words: “IN MEMORIAM!”

What to Listen For

The piece opens in the depths, with cellos and basses moving through a slow sequence of dark chords. Then the violas introduce the idea that haunts the whole work: a few repeated notes followed by a falling phrase in a halting, dotted rhythm. If it sounds half familiar, that is because it is very close to Beethoven’s funeral march, though Strauss keeps the full quotation back until the end.

The overall shape is slow, faster, slow. From the dark opening the music gradually gathers speed and warmth. New melodies appear in major keys and the texture grows more and more intricate, until all 23 lines are in motion at once. Listen for how often a solo violin or cello rises out of the web and sinks back into it. These brighter passages sound like memories, and each time the falling theme pulls the music back.

At the height of the fast central section the momentum breaks, and the opening tempo returns with full weight. The last pages are a long descent. When the cellos and basses finally state Beethoven’s march plainly, under the theme that has been shadowing it all along, the connection is made, and the piece ends in C minor, very quietly.

About the Work

Hector Berlioz first saw Romeo and Juliet at the Odéon theatre in Paris in September 1827, given by a visiting English company. He knew almost no English, but the play overwhelmed him, and so did the Juliet, the actress Harriet Smithson, whom he later married. The idea of setting the story to music stayed with him for twelve years. The means to do it came at the end of 1838, when the violinist Nicolò Paganini, having heard Harold en Italie, sent him a gift of 20,000 francs. The money cleared his debts and bought him time to compose. Berlioz wrote Roméo et Juliette in 1839 and conducted the first performance at the Paris Conservatoire on 24 November that year. The score is dedicated to Paganini.

He called the work a symphonie dramatique. It lasts about an hour and a half and uses solo singers and chorus, but they only narrate and comment. The lovers themselves never sing: Berlioz gives their scenes to the orchestra alone, arguing in his preface that instrumental music could express such feeling more freely than words. These purely orchestral movements are the core of the work, and they are often played on their own, as they are here.

The first of them carries a long title that amounts to a programme: Roméo seul. Tristesse. Bruits lointains de concert et de bal. Grande fête chez Capulet (Romeo alone. Sadness. Distant sounds of music and dancing. Great festivities at the Capulets’).

What to Listen For

The movement begins with the violins entirely alone, playing a slow, wandering, chromatic line: Romeo by himself, restless and melancholy. Other instruments join gradually, and from far away come fragments of a quick dance. Then a solo oboe sings a long, tender melody over a quiet pulse from the percussion, which keeps the rhythm of the distant ball going underneath. Berlioz had written this tune years earlier for one of his Prix de Rome cantatas and saved it for a better use.

The dance music draws closer and the tempo changes to Allegro: we are inside the Capulets’ ballroom, with the full orchestra in brilliant colours. The high point comes when Berlioz brings back the oboe’s melody, now given out at full volume by the wind and brass, and sets it on top of the whirling dance tune. Combining two themes in this way was a favourite device of his. The movement drives on over a repeating figure in the bass, pauses for a last, brief memory of the solo oboe, and ends in a blaze.

About the Work

In Act One of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo’s friend Mercutio teases him with a long speech about Queen Mab, the fairies’ midwife, who rides by night in a tiny chariot through the minds of sleepers and brings each of them the dream that suits them. Berlioz had wanted to turn this speech into an orchestral scherzo long before he wrote Roméo et Juliette. In his Memoirs he recalls mentioning the idea to Felix Mendelssohn in Rome in 1831, and then worrying that Mendelssohn, who had already written his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would get there first.

In the symphony the scherzo comes straight after the love scene, as a complete change of air. It is among the most difficult pieces Berlioz ever asked an orchestra to play, and he went on refining it: after hearing the symphony from the audience in Vienna in 1846 he gave the movement a new and longer ending.

What to Listen For

The marking is Prestissimo, and almost everything is quiet. The strings play with mutes, divided into many parts, while the double basses are silent for long stretches, so that the music seems to have no weight at all. Short phrases dart between strings and woodwinds, break off in sudden silences and start again.

In the middle the pace relaxes. A plaintive melody floats over high, glassy harmonics from the violins and the harps. When the fast music returns it brings new colours with it. Listen near the end for a faint, bell-like chiming: these are antique cymbals, a pair of very small tuned cymbals that Berlioz specified for this movement. The scherzo vanishes as lightly as it arrived.

About the Work

Faust et Hélène is the piece with which Lili Boulanger, aged nineteen, won the Prix de Rome in 1913. The prize was France’s highest award for a young composer, with a list of winners that included Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Debussy, as well as her own father. No woman had ever taken the first prize. Her elder sister Nadia had tried several times without success, and Lili herself had entered in 1912 and had to withdraw because of illness.

The final round followed a fixed ritual. The competitors were shut away for about four weeks, each to set the same text as a cantata for three solo voices and orchestra. In 1913 the text was by Eugène Adenis, after the episode in the second part of Goethe’s Faust in which Faust calls up the shade of Helen of Troy. Boulanger’s setting won decisively. The jury praised its intelligence, feeling and orchestration, and Claude Debussy, reviewing it, wrote that she was only nineteen but that her command of technique made her seem much older. The Italian firm Ricordi offered her a publishing contract.

The cantata lasts about half an hour. Its language is that of late Romanticism: there are clear echoes of Wagner, and the influence of Debussy and of her mentor Fauré in the harmony and the orchestral colour. What is striking is how assured it sounds, and how far it goes beyond the requirements of an examination piece. Boulanger had less than five years left to live. She died in March 1918, at 24.

What to Listen For

The story is told in a single span. It begins with an orchestral prelude: Faust lies in troubled sleep, and Méphistophélès (baritone) sets spirits to watch over him. When Faust (tenor) wakes, he can think only of Helen, the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and demands that Méphistophélès bring her back from the dead. Méphistophélès complies.

Hélène (written for mezzo-soprano, sung here by a soprano) appears. At first she resists Faust: too many men have already died for her. The duet in which he wins her over is the centre of the work.

The ending is swift. Méphistophélès breaks in to say that Helen must return to the grave. The orchestra darkens as the ghosts of the Trojan War rise up, with Paris at their head, to claim her. Faust tries to fight for her, and is struck down.