Thunder and Lightning, Day 4 – The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini

This week’s theme is…Thunder and Lightning!  The awesome and wonderful phenomena of lightning and thunder, always companions in the natural world, has mystified, terrified, and amazed human observers as long as they have inhabited the Earth.  As our scientific understanding of the universe has sharpened our understanding of lighting and thunder has improved, but they still inspire vivid depictions in art and music.  This week we explore examples of this.

Thunder and Lightning, Day 4 – The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini

Idiom

1. :an expression that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words but that has a separate meaning of its own

2. : a form of a language that is spoken in a particular area and that uses some of its own words, grammar, and pronunciations

3. : a style or form of expression that is characteristic of a particular person, type of art, etc.

My guess is that when you hear the word “idiom”, you think of the first definition before the others.  We use idioms all the time in our daily speech and delight in learning new ones.  Do you have friends who teach you new idioms?  I have some and they are a lot of fun to have around, constantly commenting on situations with expressions of rich resonance that speak significant volumes of human experience.  An idiom in that sense is like a picture in words, a small group of words that is worth a thousand.

But when musicians use the word “idiom” it typically refers to the third sense, essentially another word for style, but a more nuanced way to say it.  It’s one of those facets of musical aesthetics that takes a bit of education and experience to understand, but it is a real distinction.

As I survey the history of human music making I am often amazed and inspired by the variety of complete and coherent idioms in existence.  Consider this…

Everywhere you go on the face of the Earth, you can probably find a keyboard instrument of some kind.  The most common type is a piano.  The keyboard has looked like this for centuries:

But over the course of those centuries music has been played in countless different idioms upon the same keys.  Each idiom has a distinctive manner of speaking and expressing.   What it expresses is often difficult to put a finger on, but they all relate to our souls (for lack of a better term) in different but, generally, effective ways.  Here’s a few examples:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Incredible, isn’t it?  And all with exactly the same piano keys.  I find that amazing.  You could make similar comparisons with choirs, orchestras, string quartets, guitars, any musical ensemble at all, not to mention the phonemes produced by the human voice that form every single language in the history of humankind.  All of the different idioms find ways to make the same notes and instrumental timbres feel new and different, often completely recontextualizing materials of previous idioms to feel different in their new contexts.  And there will be new idioms – humans, being endlessly inventive, creative and adaptable, will constantly create new languages, clothing styles, cuisine, technologies, modes of transport, architecture, music, and more to fit their outlooks, cultural priorities and societal goals.

In languages we can compare the same expressions and notice the subtleties of each (you could say that nothing truly translates due to the idiomatic nature, but the comparison is usually close enough).  But it’s a little trickier in music, because there’s no direct semiotic code of meaning as there is in language.  But, a manner of music-making called program music gives us the closest possible opportunity.  Program music is any kind of music that is written from the inspiration of a story or image.  The music will seek to evoke that image in some way, even though it’s not explicitly possible, but once the listener knows the program it often makes sense.  For a more detailed discussion of program music see this post.

Because programmatic music exists we have the opportunity to compare similar programs of different idioms and notice the differences.  So, here are a few examples of orchestral music which seek to illustrate thunderstorms.  Since you know what they are all trying to do, you can hear the marks of the different idioms at work.

1. Summer from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons:

 

The final movement of the Summer Concerto from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons depicts a fierce storm with hailstones that beat down the struggling crops.  Being for virtuosic Baroque Strings the harmonic rhythm is zippy and the figurations are quite violinistic; the whole movement is dense with busy figuration.  For more about Vivaldi concertos see this post, this one, and this one VIVALDI

 

2. Symphony No. 8 by Franz Joseph Haydn:

 

About 30 years after Vivaldi, we have Haydn writing stylish, elegant music in the Classical style.  His symphonies 6 – 8 each illustrate a different time of day, with No. 8 as night time, and the day ends with a light, pattering storm.  The texture is transparent with rich coloring from the woodwinds.  The flute gets pattering solos imitating raindrops and the strings bluster down scales as the winds blow.  The movement is cast in an extended binary form which approximates the emerging sonata form.  For Haydn’s Sixth Symphony, see this post.

 

3. Symphony No. 6 by Ludwig van Beethoven

 

The fourth movement breaks the jovial and peaceful atmosphere which pervades most of the Beethoven’s idyllic Sixth Symphony with a dramatic thunderstorm.  Beethoven has beefed up the orchestra he inherited from his teacher Haydn and, about 50 years after Haydn’s Eighth Symphony, crafted a brief bu concentrated symphonic movement full of violent contrasts and thickly orchestrated climaxes, full of Beethoven’s urgent sequences, traits which would become musical Romanticism.  For more about Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, see this post.

 

4. Prelude from The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner

 

In the 1870s, more than a century after Beethoven’s symphony, Wagner chose to begin the second opera of his monumental Ring Cycle with this stormy prelude.  If you are at all familiar with Wagner’s orchestral set pieces than you recognize his characteristic intensity, thick orchestration, and layering of motive upon motive.  Like so many of the orchestral pieces in the Ring, this number has the strength to convince you that it is about the most important thing in the world; it is an apocalyptic storm, truly heralding impending events responsible for shaping the fate of nations and peoples.  For more about The Valkyrie see this post.

 

5. The Tempest by Jean Sibelius

 

 

Shortly after Wagner the Finnish nationalist composed incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  Listen to his chromatic melodies layering and the murmuring piquancy of his orchestration which evokes the general spirit of his symphonic writing.  Sibelius’ storm draws out for minutes, a constant kaleidoscope of orchestral colors and rising and falling intensity, treating harmony in a different way than any of the others, but still a most convincing storm.

So many idioms, and all writing about the same thing.  Here is one more thunderstorm that fascinates me, a thunderstorm written in perhaps the least stormy idiom in all Western music, the Italian bel canto operatic style…

 

6. The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini

 

Just before the final scene of Rossini’s iconic comedy, night turns to day which Rossini illustrates through an orchestral thunderstorm.  It starts with just a few drops of rain in the woodwinds.  Then the strings begin to murmur with wind, just before the full orchestra bursts in with thunder and lightning.

 

What amazes me about Rossini’s storm is how successfully it evokes the force of the elements while staying true to the idiom of his operatic style.  It feels completely consistent with the other pieces that make up his brilliant and enduring comedy.
As humans continue to develop and interact with each other and their surroundings, more idioms will come.  Linguistic idioms, technological idioms, artistic idioms.  Musical idioms are mysterious – they all speak with such clear voices about things that are ultimately ineffable.  But programmatic music allows us to create something of a Rosetta Stone, compiling different works from highly varied composers with diverse aims, who all somehow convince us of the same image.  Upon doing this, we can more clearly understand the nature of musical idioms, mysterious and wonderful as they are.

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Music about Morning and Sunrise, Day 3 – BONUS Double Post! “Morning Mood” from Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg and William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini

This week’s theme is…Music about morning and sunrise!  Every day is like a gift, a chance to start anew and clear away whatever happened on the previous one.  The gift is always announced by yet another appearance of an old friend, the sun, who rises to greet us in the morning.  Because of our subjective view of astronomical features the sun seems to rise in the morning, first filling the sky with dawn’s glorious painting, keeping us in suspense, and then finally showing itself in full splendor.  This has been an inspiring image for many musicians who have sought to illustrate that cycle through sound.  This week we look at a variety of such examples.

Music about Morning and Sunrise, Day 3 – BONUS Double Post!  “Morning Mood” from Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg and William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini

Do you know this character?

Do you know who gave Rocky his voice?  Her name is June Foray, and she is one of the most prolific voice actresses in twentieth century America.

How about this character?

His voice was first given by an actor and impressionist named Daws Butler, another highly prolific comic voice actor.  Butler was also a notable mentor to vocal talent of the next generation, including Nancy Cartwright, the famous voice of Bart Simpson.

If you do a brief scan through the Wikipedia pages of June Foray and Daws Butler you will begin to develop a sense of just how prolific they were and how much of the voice acting they were responsible for during America’s golden age of comic animation.  You could write volumes about their work and the characters they brought to life.  But for me and my family, one of their most delightful projects was in their collaboration with an increasingly obscure American radio comedian, Stan Freberg.

If you’ve seen Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, you have heard Stan Freberg voice the beaver who is manipulated into freeing Lady from her muzzle.  That’s probably his most famous role today.  Incidentally, he was also invited by George Lucas to audition for the voice of C-3PO before the voice role was granted to Anthony Daniels, who also physically embodied the droid onscreen.  Oh, if that audition process had followed an alternate path, Freberg’s life after that would probably have looked considerably different (it’s amusing to imagine him on a panel at a Comic Con!).  Freberg may have been a bit ahead of his time in many of his endeavors.  In addition to his abundant voice acting, Freberg contributed to various animation and puppetry, and his very clever and satirical radio comedy, which has never achieved the renown that it probably deserves, has developed a most devoted cult following.

One of my favorite short sketches by Freberg, which incorporates the voice comedy of both Daws Butler and June Foray, is LIttle Blue Riding Hood, a hilarious sendup of TV’s Dragnet set in the fairy tale woods.

 

While Freberg is known for numerous shorts like Little Blue Riding Hood, which can fit onto one side of a 45 RPM record single, he was also adept at creating longer programs, like Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, the classic first volume of which was released in 1961.  The album is a series of comic audio vignettes which make fun of various episodes of early American history.  In addition to a large cast of voice actors, this album is enriched by another significant Freberg collaborator, the bandleader Billy May, who arranged the musical score.  Listen to this scene from the album, which presents Freberg’s sideways take on the British surrender at the Battle of Yorktown:

 

Funny stuff, right?  I love Freberg’s fun with the character of George Washington and lovably exaggerated British good manners, among other things.  The suggestion that the Revolutionary war was won by an act of sleight-of-hand trickery is almost sacrilegious to the American myth, but this is Freberg’s world.  Here’s something you may have missed: Billy May, a most facile arranger, embeds a clever touch into the music.  Let’s listen more closely; watch again and go to 1:58.

What did you hear?  There’s actually quite a bit going on there, but if you lend a careful ear I bet you can pick out a couple familiar tunes.  There’s one in the celestra, the kind of chime like instrument, and another one in the flute.  The two tunes are ingeniously played together polyphonically in one of those mystifying feats of arranging that manages to reconcile and synthesize two pieces of music with completely different harmonic and rhythmic structures, but in Billy May’s hands they sound as if they have always existed together, even as they are derived from two completely different musical works from completely different cultures.  I’ve been listening to Freberg’s history of American for decades and once I started to gain a greater appreciation for music literature I began to notice touches like that.  It tells me a lot about Billy May’s comic timing and problem solving abilities.  Both of those tunes are frequently employed to evoke the sense of dawn and sunrise, particularly in heavy-handed comedic storytelling.  May was perhaps trying to decide which tune to choose between the two, and then realized that blending both would enhance the comedy while, at the same time, giving a wink to the musical connoisseurs of the audience, of which I suspect there are many.  It was a brilliant little move and it goes by so quickly.  Can you hear the two different tunes?  Do you know what they are?  Let’s take them one at a time.

First, the chime part.  Here is the original version:

 

The music composed by the Edvard Grieg, Norway’s greatest composer, for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt, has become one of those odd, and even frustrating, ironies of classical music.  It is a little-known irony.  Ibsen, if you don’t know him, is one of the greatest playwrights in the history of Western letters, today performed less often only than Shakespeare.  Growing up with Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites, I had formed an image of the play as a quaint, enchanting folk tale rich with Norwegian lore.  And while Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is largely based on Norwegian folk tales and characters, its drama is intensely philosophical, probing deeply and acutely the nature of human morality and identity, all the while couched in an unsettlingmix of myth, surreal imagery and unflinchingly dark adventure.  Why, just reading a synopsis of the play is practically enough to inaugurate an existential crisis concerning a life well-lived.  The Norwegian Ibsen asked his fellow countryman, Grieg, to compose incidental music for his play, both of which premiered in what is now Oslo in 1876.  The irony of Grieg’s Peer Gynt music is that it now populates primarily the programs of orchestral pops concerts in the form of two four-movement suites extracted by the composer, presented primarily for the purpose of light-hearted diversion, and divorced from their original, highly challenging, contexts.

Morning Mood, which opens the first suite, is a fitting illustration.  In the context of the original Peer Gynt the sun evoked by the music rose above a desolate Moroccan desert in which the title character, having been looted during the night by his unethical business associates, is left to defend himself, penniless and naked, against a horde of aggressive apes!  Would you have ever formed that image from listening to Grieg’s Morning Mood out of context?  I would love to catch a production of Peer Gynt with Grieg’s original score and see how that works.  It is so easy to imagine a benign Norwegian sun casting its warm glow across snow-capped conifers…

In Billy May’s musical mashup which greets the day of the British surrender, there is also a flute part, presenting another familiar morning-associated tune amidst the celesta of Grieg.  It is the Ranz de Vaches, a short section of the overture from the opera William Tell, about the great Swiss hero, by Gioachino Rossini.  I suspect most people know that the galloping march of the Swiss Guard, the rousing finale of the overture, which has come to be associated with the Lone Ranger, hails from this overture, but I bet many of the same listeners, all of whom have heard this tune in various places as well, do not know its source.  They are companions in the same composition, which was as symphonically ambitious as Rossini ever became in an opera overture, and written at the very end of his short but productive career, on the cusp of a long and cushy retirement.  Read more about the fruits of Rossini’s retirement in this post.

William Tell pushes harder against the formulas that governed Rossini’s prior operatic output than any of his prior works, and this begins with the sprawling overture.  Most of Rossini’s overtures are interchangeable; you could easily cut and paste the majority of these perfunctory curtain raising pieces from one opera to another and notice little effect on the overall feeling of the presentation.  But William Tell’s overture is made for William Tell, and William Tell alone.  Each of its 4 short movements relate to the drama in some way, achieving a level of integration that was rather ahead of its time.  It would be fascinating to see where Rossini would have gone after that, but he saw fit to excuse himself from the scene after William Tell and let other ambitious and pioneering creative spirits have their say.

At this point, listen to the overture.  Here is a helpful video which labels each of the four sections as they begin:

 

You can see that the melody quoted by Billy May in Stan Freberg’s production is from the third section.  It’s funny, though, because while that melody is often associated with dawn, it is actually the first section of the overture, scored for five solo cellos, that is intended by Rossini to illustrate daybreak.  It is a bleak and unsettling sunrise, though, portending strife and sorrow.  The melody of the third section has been  deemed suitable to depict morning in lighter settings considerably more often.

The english horn melody is a Ranz de vaches, literally “call of the cows”  a brand of Swiss melody traditionally played on the alp horn while herding cows from one field to another.  It has a mysterious and rich tradition.  The Ranz de vaches possessed an odd and uncanny power to make Swiss folks extremely homesick, which is why it was sometimes banned from being played to Swiss troops in foreign lands, so intense was their respondent sadness and desire to desert.  Rossini was not the only classical composer to imitate the Ranz de vaches.  The despondent slow movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique is pervaded by double reed lines meant to evoke the melodic style of the Ranz de vaches:

 

Incidentally Berlioz, usually quite critical of the shallow nature of the Italian operas by Rossini and his contemporaries, seemed to be more impressed with William Tell and its ambitious overture.  Some listeners hear a bit of the Ranz de vaches in the idyllic opening of the final movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony:

 

The Ranz de vaches clearly left deep resonance in the ears and hearts of Europe’s classical music.
Billy May was a smart musician, a fitting sonic companion for a smart comedian like Stan Freberg.  I wonder if May knew of the rich heritage he was channeling when he so effortlessly paired Grieg and Rossini for a few seconds to greet the day on which the absurdly mild-mannered British surrendered to a cocky American general, as voiced by Freberg.  The roots of both tunes run much deeper than we tend to realize as we hear them in their often unassuming contemporary contexts, heralding the dawns of so many new days as they break upon the comic stage.  The suns of Grieg and Rossini rose to oversee dramatic struggles, both outward and internal.  Even if you enjoy these melodies as they accompany light-hearted daybreaks in animation and pops concerts, you can keep in the back of your mind the depths of human experience concealed within the history of these well-known but little-understood classical hit tunes.

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Music For Foodies, Day 2 – Quatre hors d’oeuvre by Gioachino Rossini

The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful Blog is…Music for Foodies!  Every piece of music this week deals with food or dining in an interesting way.  Fill your belly, listen to great music, and discover something new in the process…

Day 2 – Quatre hors d’oeuvre by Gioachino Rossini

What does a radish sound like?  What about a pickle?

Our appetizer this week comes from an odd little corner of musical history.  Everyone’s heard of the The Barber of Seville.  

As soon as the openings flourishes of Figaro’s introductory aria strike the air lots of people are struck by images of cartoon hijinks by the likes of Bugs Bunny and that little bird from the opening of Mrs. Doubtfire.  Those who know Rossini’s famous opera realize that the choice to pair Figaro’s aria “Largo al factotum” with rascally cartoon protagonists is not an accident.  Throughout Rossini’s best-loved opera Figaro, the barber of the title’s reference, is in the foreground outwitting anyone who makes his life difficult or gets in the way of his schemes, much like those great cartoon characters.  The results of both the opera and the animated shorts is always fantastically entertaining.  Rossini discovered around the time of Barber’s premiere in 1816 that audiences love to root for clever underdogs as they outwit their more powerful but often dim-witted rivals.

And so began Rossini’s reign of Italian comic opera.  The Barber of Seville was performed all over Europe and essentially made his career.  While his life was not immune to struggles and disasters (whose is after all?) Rossini was celebrated for the rest of his life, staging more of his operas, meeting royal heads of state, accepting lucrative professional posts, and making lots of money.  Lots and lots of money.

Rossini worked hard and retired early.  By the time of his retirement in 1830 he had averaged one opera for each of his 38 years of life, no small accomplishment.  His final opera was William Tell, best known to American audiences for the “Lone Ranger” theme in the overture.  The opera premiered in Paris, where he was living at the time and had decided to settle in for the remainder of his life.  While the reason is not clear, it was at this point that Rossini decided to retire from composing operas.  After William Tell he wrote no more of them.  Perhaps he had done all he wanted to in the genre.  Perhaps he was tired of the hassles that came with writing and staging them.  Perhaps he was just…lazy (gasp!).  But whatever the reason, Rossini composed very little notable music during the remainder of his 40 or so years.  The only significant work to come from that time was the sacred Stabat Mater.  And then there were a whole bunch of little solo piano pieces intended for salon performance.  He called them Péchés de vieillesse which means “Sins of Old Age”, perhaps a wry acknowledgement of their frivolity, or that of the whole salon enterprise in general.  Did he compose them out of boredom?  Whatever the reason, they have come to be published in 14 volumes.

Paris was a city of salons, fashionable rooms in which aristocrats held court and met with sophisticated and intelligent company to pass the time.  Often there was a piano and the gathering would enjoy entertainment from notable musicians during their gathering.  This is a much different setting than a concert, recital or opera performance.  The venue features an intimacy and just a much different set of priorities than the concert hall.  Music for the salon should be charming, transparent, witty, sparkling.  It should captivate its listeners with wry humor and clever effects, almost like whispering a secret in someone’s ear.  This is what Rossini’s late solo piano works do.

One more thing about Rossini before we get to the featured music of this post: he was a noted gourmand.  He loved to cook and eat, and to this day there are several culinary preparations that bear his name, like this one.  Pictures of the young and old Rossini look like a dieting before-and-after testimonial, but in reverse:

 

Perhaps it was due to his gastronomic enthusiasm, or maybe because he was just too clever for his own good, but 4 of those little solo piano pieces are written as a set he called Quatre hors d’oeuvres (“Four appetizers”).  Authors sometimes compare Rossini’s late piano works to those of Erik Satie for their surreal titles.  I’ve never been entirely convinced by the comparison because it doesn’t really transcend the titles.  Rossini’s late piano music, in spite of sometimes being oddly named, is charming, but not exactly surreal.  Just listen to the wackiness of Satie’s tiny little Dissicated Embryos (yep, that’s really what it’s called) and count the number of different musical moods it evokes over the course of a mere minute and a half  Oh, and then there’s the completely over-the-top coda that occupies a full 25% of the duration of this odd little piece.

You won’t find that kind of musical zaniness in Rossini’s late piano works, whatever they happened to be named.  I wonder if he was just trying to find something to occupy his mind during retirement and perhaps the salon environment inspired his inner Puck, (er, Wolfgang Puck?).  Whatever the reason, he must have been inspired by something because he committed quite a few of these sins to fill 14 volumes worth.

The appetizers from Volume 4 are Radish, Anchovy, Pickle and Butter.  They each follow a more or less theme-and-variation kind of plan and are deceptively difficult, requiring a highly accomplished pianist to successfully execute.  Although retired, Rossini clearly kept his finger on the musical pulse of Paris.  The Hors d’oeuvre evoke by turns the sound of Chopin, the sparkly French opera that would have been written during Rossini’s last days by composers like Offenbach, and perhaps even a little bit of Liszt at denser, more chromatic moments.  Paris was a veritable catalyst and melting pot of musical virtuosity at this time and Rossini’s sins of old age indicate that he absorbed much of what was going on around him in that great City of Love.

I hope you listen to all 4 Hors d’oeuvre, and lots more of Rossini’s charming piano music, but if I had to pick one to share with you it would be the second, Anchois (“Anchovy”).  Like its companions in the set it is a theme and variations and I find the jaunty theme…saucy (pun intended), rich with mischief, almost a salon-style distillation of Figaro’s self-satisfaction in his uncanny ability to outwit his rivals and get his way.  Perhaps this is what Figaro would play on the piano for his closest friends.  Was Rossini at all like Figaro?  I wouldn’t be surprised.

One more note about Rossini’s Hors d’oeuvre (which I never thought I would learn to spell correctly before writing this post) – the literal translation of hors d’oeuvre is “outside of work” as in, outside of the main dish.  While only 4 of Rossini’s Sins of Old Age go by this precise title, I think you can generalize that label to all of them.  Many people know Rossini’s operas (his main works) but never become familiar with his hors d’oeuvre (outside of his main works), and I hope that will no longer be you!

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