Rachmaninoff’s Third Program Notes

Fate Now Conquers

Carlos Simon
Born 1986 in Washington D.C
Approximate duration 5 minutes
World premiere: March 26-29, 2020 in Philadelphia

Turning 40 this year, Carlos Simon has already amassed an impressive resume
He was a Sundance Composer Fellow in 2018 at historic Skywalker Ranch
In 2024 the Boston Symphony named him its inaugural Composer Chair
Social justice is an underlying theme in many of his works

In 2022, Carlos Simon told The Washington Post, “My dad, he always gets on me. He wants me to be a preacher, but I always tell him, ‘Music is my pulpit. That’s where I preach.’” Immersed in gospel music as a child, Simon acknowledges gospel’s improvisatory nature as a key influence on his own compositions. Currently composer-in-residence for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and an Associate Professor at Georgetown University, Simon is also the Boston Symphony’s first Composer Chair in the institutions nearly 150-year history. A graduate of Morehouse College and Georgia State, he earned his doctorate at University of Michigan, studying with Michael Daugherty and Evan Chambers. His album Requiem for the Enslaved, a multi-genre tribute commemorating the lives of enslaved persons sold by Georgetown University in 1838, was nominated for the Grammy Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2023.

His composer’s note reveals a surprising connection to Beethoven.

This piece was inspired by a journal entry from Ludwig van Beethoven’s notebook written in 1815: “Iliad. The Twenty-Second Book But Fate now conquers; I am hers; and yet not she shall share In my renown; that life is left to every noble spirit And that some great deed shall beget that all lives shall inherit.”

Using the beautifully fluid harmonic structure of the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, I have composed musical gestures that are representative of the unpredictable ways of fate. Jolting stabs, coupled with an agitated groove with every persona. Frenzied arpeggios in the strings that morph into an ambiguous cloud of free-flowing running passages depicts the uncertainty of life that hovers over us.

We know that Beethoven strived to overcome many obstacles in his life and documented his aspirations to prevail, despite his ailments. Whatever the specific reason for including this particularly profound passage from The Iliad, in the end, it seems that Beethoven relinquished to fate. Fate now conquers.

-Carlos Simon

Simon’s intense score layers punctuation marks of sound, pulsating strings, and elongated melodies. He taps into repetitive minimalism and unexpected moments of lyricism, without sacrificing a sense of forward movement that persists as an undercurrent even in slower passages.

Instrumentation: piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings

Verklärte Nacht
[Transfigured Night], Op.4

Arnold Schoenberg
Born September 13, 1874 in Vienna | Died July 13, 1951 in Los Angeles
Approximate duration 30 minutes
World premiere of string sextet: March 18, 1902 in Vienna | String orchestra version: November 29, 1916 in Prague

No twelve-tone music here—this is ravishing late romantic stuff
Read the poem [see sidebar] and try to follow the story
Love conquers all in this gorgeous, uplifting work

Schoenberg was only 25 when he composed Verklärte Nacht. Considering his astonishing influence on 20th-century music during the remaining 52 years of his life, Verklärte Nacht is a fascinating youthful work. Schoenberg abandoned tonality in 1908, and listeners correctly identify him with the invention of the twelve-tone system. Verklärte Nacht is thus an aural surprise, for it is firmly entrenched in the 19^th century. Its harmonic language is rich and lush—in many places unabashedly Wagnerian—and the thematic material highly expressive and impassioned.

The piece was inspired by a romantic poem of Richard Dehmel, which describes a conversation between a man and woman walking together in a moonlit forest. She confesses that she is carrying another man’s child, having sought fulfillment in motherhood, if not happiness, prior to meeting her present lover. He responds with forgiveness, asserting that their love will transfigure the child, making it issue of their union.

Cast in a single extended movement, Schoenberg’s music subdivides into five sections that are closely related to the poetic structure. The slow introduction, for example, depicts the somewhat foreboding natural beauty of the forest at night. The exquisite coda illustrates the ecstasy of love and forgiveness inspired by nature’s radiance. In between, the woman’s agitated confession, an animated transition, and the man’s generous response give Verklärte Nacht its logic and formal continuity.

Poetry and Chamber Music: A New Concept

Verklärte Nacht was originally composed for string sextet (two violins, two violas, two cellos). Schoenberg arranged it for string orchestra in 1917. He returned to the piece in 1943, revising the string orchestra version. The work is a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century large scale symphonic tone poems of Liszt and Richard Strauss. Schoenberg’s inspiration was a poem by Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), a German lyric poet influenced by naturalism, expressionism, and the philosophy of Nietzsche.

Verklärte Nacht established a new genre of programme chamber music by virtue of its association with the Dehmel poem. Schoenberg was nevertheless a proponent of absolute music, and his careful attention to large-scale musical architecture, contrapuntal intricacy, and integrity of form would assure Verklärte Nacht a prominent place in the musical literature without its provocative programme.

A paraphrase of Dehmel’s text follows.

Two mortals walk through a cold barren grove
in a cloudless moonlit night.
The woman speaks:
She confesses that she is with child and that
he is not its father.
She had lost belief in happiness and,
longing for fulfillment in motherhood,
had abandoned herself to a stranger.
But life has avenged itself on her
now that she has met the man she loves.
She stumbles on, her dark face lighted
by the moon which follows her.
The man speaks:
“Let the child be no burden to you.
See how the universe glistens.”
Together they float on a cold sea,
But a flame from each warms the other.
It too will transfigure the child and
she will bear the child to him
For she has kindled the flame in him
and made him too unto a child.
He holds her fast, their breath kisses in the air.
Two mortals walk through the high, bright night.

–Richard Dehmel

Instrumentation: strings

Piano Concerto No. 3
in D minor, Op. 30

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Born April 1, 1873 in Oneg, Novgorod district, Russia | Died March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California
Approximate duration 39 minutes
World premiere: November 28, 1909 in New York City

This concerto is popularly known as “Rach Three”
A finger-buster, it is beyond all but the most virtuosic pianists
Rachmaninoff spins wonders from the deceptively simple opening theme
His magnetic music epitomizes its era: the last decade of Czarist rule in Russia

The work grows in impressiveness upon acquaintance and will doubtless take rank among the most interesting piano concertos of recent years, although its great length and extreme difficulties bar it from performance by any but pianists of exceptional powers.

–The New York Herald, 17 January 1910

Amen.

For more than 115 years since that review of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto appeared in print, pianists who aspire to perform it have endeavored to master those ‘exceptional powers.’ They are responding to popular demand. Listeners love this piece.

Indeed, when a work is so familiar, so central to the repertoire, it is difficult to grasp how fresh and exciting it must have sounded to Rachmaninoff’s first audiences. He introduced the concerto in late November 1909, performing with the New York Symphony under the baton of Walter Damrosch. In New York, a brand new piece by a famous European composer-pianist was a major event. For the January performance that The New York Herald reviewed, the celebrity factor was even greater. This time, not only was Rachmaninoff the soloist, but Gustav Mahler was on the podium.

Summer vacation: a working holiday

As it happens, the premiere was a big event for the composer, too. He had weighed the prospect of an American tour for some time. Rachmaninoff had reservations about such a long and taxing journey; however, his solo pieces and Second Concerto enjoyed immense popularity in the United States, therefore such a trip would be highly lucrative. As plans for the tour coalesced, it became apparent that he would require a new piece for piano and orchestra to showcase on the American concerts. He worked on the new concerto during summer 1909, while on holiday at Ivanovka, a country estate belonging to his wife’s family, completing the manuscript on 23 September. Three weeks later he was en route to the United States, with manuscript and parts in his luggage. There was no time to engrave printed music.

How to top a known winner?

The challenge that Rachmaninoff faced was to match the quality and appeal of his popular Second Piano Concerto in original and compelling music. He knew that the new work would be compared to the earlier one. His solution was to take a different approach in thematic treatment. In the Second Concerto, after the dramatic solo piano chords of the opening, the orchestra declaims the first theme forte, while the piano surges in tandem with Schumannesque arpeggios.

Rachmaninoff altered his tactic for the Third Concerto. The soloist states the theme straightaway in open octaves, preceded only by two bars of a subdued orchestral accompaniment. The dynamic level is quiet and the texture spare. Rachmaninoff’s melody is deceptively simple, moving primarily in stepwise motion or in small intervals. The theme is also unusually long, which makes it linger in our ears. Motives from it will recur throughout the entire concerto, providing subtle thematic unity.

When the orchestra takes up the theme, the soloist embarks on a series of exploratory variations, leading to a second theme that has all the warmth and lyricism we associate with Rachmaninoff. He develops this material with a profusion of brilliant writing for piano. While the keyboard technique is indebted to Liszt, Rachmaninoff’s style is distinctive. He demands quick shifts of hand position, rapid repeated notes, the ability to play with delicacy and lightness as well as with power – and plenty of enormous chords. In places, the piano practically explodes with activity.

Gemini cadenzas

After the furore subsides, Rachmaninoff proceeds to his solo cadenza. He actually composed two cadenzas for this concerto. Only their closing measures are the same. The first is shorter—possibly he wrote it in order to accommodate the time restrictions of 78 rpm records—and emphasizes complex passage work. The second, a massive 75 bars, requires both strength and stamina for extensive chordal playing. Both cadenzas are wonderful musically and pianistically. Some pianists believe that the briefer version expresses a more succinct and musically sensitive aspect of Rachmaninoff’s keyboard personality. Others prefer the thunderous drama of the 75-bar version. For these performances, Mr. Li plays that longer cadenza.

The slow movement, which Rachmaninoff called Intermezzo, consists of a theme and four variations. Oboe introduces the melody; the orchestra establishes an elegiac atmosphere. The piano joins in with extravagant harmonic wanderings. The music feels improvisatory, yet at every turn there are hints and fragments of that opening theme from the first movement. Occasional outbursts from the piano precipitate mood changes and enhance the narrative flow. It proceeds without pause to the finale, a dance-like, energetic movement in the Russian tradition—and a bravura tour de force.

From the standpoint of compositional technique, the Third Concerto represents an enormous leap forward for Rachmaninoff. The flow and continuity are superb. He writes with more immediacy and variety to his rhythms. The cyclic references among the three movements allow his ideas to blossom. Orchestral moments are rich and abundant. The virtuoso display aspect of the solo part has eclipsed Rachmaninoff’s symphonic approach to concerto form. His writing for winds and brass is far more imaginative than in the earlier concertos.

The power and bravura of the piano part rarely fail to prompt audiences to their feet at the conclusion of this concerto. Its splendor and genius lie just as much in the delicate, whimsical moments and the infinite variety of Rachmaninoff’s decorative passages.

Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, solo piano and strings