This week’s theme is…All That Glitters! Gold has been attractive to humankind and symbolic of opulent wealth through all of recorded history. It has shaped human civilization and provided an evocative poetic metaphor. This week we explore music that was influenced by gold as it altered the course of history and provided poetic inspiration.
All That Glitters, Day 2 – “Gold Rush” from San Francisco Suite by Ferde Grofe
The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California unleashed a rush of hopeful prospectors from all over the world that transfigured the society and culture of the infant state. Among its effects was the supercharging of a settlement only recently named San Francisco. The mission, named after Francis of Assisi, which would become San Francisco, was founded in 1776 by Spanish missionaries, part of the extensive network of such establishments that figured so formatively into California’s early history of European colonization and settlement. Over the ensuing century it transferred hands from the Spanish to the Mexicans, and then finally to the Americans. Under the Mexicans it was called Yerba Buena, “good herb”, and the Americans, after claiming it in early 1846, changed the name to what we know today, San Francisco. It was named just in time for the massive gold rush which, over the course of only two years, inflated sleepy little San Francisco’s population more than 400-fold, from a mere 500 to more than 25,000. Its metropolitan growth continued beyond the gold rush and today San Francisco boasts a population in excess of 850,000, within California’s borders smaller only than Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose. But it is the most densely populated city in California.
Prospecting was one way to make money, or at least try, but a more reliable way was to serve those who prospected. Solid brands were created in the process of doing so, colorful and influential brands which are still in existence, from Levi Strauss to Ghirardelli Chocolate. And the prospectors craved entertainment too, the fulfillment of which created a bona-fide cultural center of international league smack dab in the middle of California where none had existed only a few years prior. San Francisco’s new found urbanity proceeded to attract skilled musicians from all corners of the Western world who passed through along their American and international tours.
I’m not sure about you, but it is all too easy for me to compartmentalize the history of the United States from what was happening simultaneously in Europe, particularly with regard to culture and music. Consider this: in 1776, when independence was declared from Great Britain (and the mission at modern day San Francisco was founded, by the way), Haydn’s first visit to London was 14 years in the future, and Handel had been gone for 18 years, but his Messiah still rang out annually in concert halls. Both of these musicians’ fates were inextricably bound with England; what would they have made of American independence? Presumably Beethoven would have supported it, given his professed admiration for revolutionary ideals. He came a bit later – American independence was declared when he was 6 years old. Thomas Jefferson was an accomplished violinist and routinely wrote to European publishers entreating them for the most recent Rococo sonatas to be shipped across the Atlantic for him to read.
And what about the gold rush of the middle nineteenth century? Why, it was thirty years after Beethoven’s death, of course. Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn were gone by then, or nearly gone, and the later Romantics who would build the bridge to modern music were a decade or two from birth. Some of the middle romantics, like Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Berlioz were active. But they didn’t visit the United States. So, who did? The virtuosi of the mid 1800s did, jet setting across Europe and American, concertizing extensively, garnering reviews, and living out their careers. Paganini and Chopin were the inspiration, and then came Liszt. Many of their ilk, who tended to see Paris as their headquarters no matter their place of birth, and most of whom are not that well known anymore, traveled to San Francisco and other places in America to concertize. There was also Italian opera, although its greatest early Romantics were either gone or retired by then (Rossini was alive but retired – see this post). Even though Vincenzo Bellini had died young in the 1830s, his super melodic Italian operas still graced European stages, and in 1851 one of them, The Sleepwalker, became the first complete opera to be staged in San Francisco.
Virtuosi of the piano and violin included San Francisco on their tour routes. The suave Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski was one such virtuoso. He visited San Francisco in the early 1870s and created a musical memory, as he did for other cities he had experienced, including Moscow and Posen, Germany, a virtuoso work for violin and piano called Reminiscences of San Francisco, which reportedly incorporates numerous American folk tunes. I would love to hear that piece, but it seems to be obscure and, as far as I can see, is not available on YouTube or Amazon. Incidentally, Wieniawski also created a fantasia on themes from Bellini’s Sleepwalker, which is something of a coincidence, although this was much earlier and probably in Europe, but by that time the opera had been staged in San Francisco.
San Francisco has continued, and continues, to inspire musicians with its bewitching character. One musician who saw fit to pay tribute to the enchanting city, was the American Ferde Grofe, who composed his San Francisco Suite in 1960, just a little more than a decade before his death, and less than a century after the gold rush kicked off. Grofe is a little-known but integral cog in the American musical scene of the middle twentieth century. Versatile and poly-stylistic, his typical modus operandi combined classical and jazz idioms with ease and fluency. I imagine most people don’t realize that Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue, commissioned by the bandleader Paul Whiteman, originally written for two pianos, was orchestrated by Grofe.
Grofe first arranged it for Whiteman’s jazz orchestra, and later made an arrangement for symphony orchestra in the early 1940s, which is the version most commonly heard today, as in Fantasia 2000, for example:
In addition to serving as Paul Whiteman’s lead arranger, Grofe was an active pianist, conductor, teacher of orchestration at Juilliard, and a prolific composer in his own right, although he is primarily remembered in this endeavor for one work in particular, the lushly orchestrated and tuneful Grand Canyon Suite of 1931. Even though it was written more than 40 years before his death, it seems he was never able to top this success, which deftly combines passages of rapturous melody with comical, popular touches.
The Grand Canyon Suite is actually just one of numerous suites by Grofe based on iconic American landmarks and institutions, which also include: Niagara Falls, the Kentucky Derby, Mississippi, Death Valley, and the San Francisco suite of 1960, among others. Grofe was a most active member of the American school of composers, inspired to some degree by Copland, and all of who sought in some way to combine a sense of American national pride with grand, sweeping orchestration, piquant rhythms, and a bit of jazz flavoring when appropriate. Grofe is not Copland; he found his own approach. But you can read about Copland’s contribution to a major event with which Grofe was also involved, the 1939 World’s Fair, in this post.
Here is the lively opening movement of Grofe’s San Francisco Suite, called Gold Rush, which conveys the bustle and excitement of San Francisco’s meteoric growth during the early days of the California Gold Rush. You can hear Grofe’s crisp rhythms pervading clear but grand orchestration, all pointing to a folk song centerpiece that I bet you will recognize…
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