This weekend, April 11–13, popular guest conductor John Storgårds leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) and violinist Francesca Dego in a pair of big works by big names in the world of late 19th/early 20th century music.
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Lemminkäinen and the Fiery Eagle by Robert Wilhelm Ekman,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
The concerts open with the Violin Concerto, Op. 77, by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). The first performance was on New Year’s Day 1879 with the composer conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, but the humble acorn that would grow into this imposing symphonic oak was planted way back in 1853, when the Hungarian violinist Eduard (Ede) Reményi found himself in need of a substitute for his ailing accompanist. Auguste Böhm, whose music shop was across the street from Reményi’s Hamburg hotel, recommended Brahms, whom he described as “a worthy young man, a good musician, and very devoted to his family.”
Reményi was immediately impressed with Brahms. “He had scarcely touched the piano,” Reményi recalled, “before I found that he was a far better musician than my previous accompanist.” He asked Brahms to play one of his own sonatas and was “electrified and sat in mute amazement. I could not help making the involuntary remark, ‘My dear Brahms, you are a genius!’”
During a concert tour later that year, Reményi introduced Brahms to the legendary violinist Joseph Joachim, who was equally impressed. “My only companion here,” he wrote to his brother Heinrich, “is now a young Hamburger [sic] named Brahms, a 20-year-old powerful talent in composition and piano playing, the good fortune of wresting which from the darkness is mine.” Thus began a friendship that would last until the composer’s death in 1897.
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| Eduard (Ede) Reményi |
A hop into the TARDIS takes us to 1877 and we see a Brahms who has not only retained the creativity that so impressed Reményi and Joachim but also added to it a substantial toolbox of compositional techniques. The struggling young musician was now an established figure on the music scene, and with his critically praised (and long overdue) Symphony No. 1 behind him, he was ready to tackle his first violin concerto.
Naturally, he turned to his old friend Joachim for assistance. Brahms was, first and foremost, a pianist and was not especially comfortable writing for the violin. Joachim, on the other hand, was one of the most celebrated violinists of his time. Carried on entirely by mail, the collaboration was fraught with difficulty, as Jan Swafford wrote in program notes for the Boston Symphony:
As they worked, what usually happened was that Brahms would give Joachim a passage, the violinist would revise it, Brahms would throw out the revisions and come up with a third version, which might or might not work to Joachim’s satisfaction, and negotiations would begin again. When Joachim seemed to be slacking, Brahms threatened to find a more “severe” critic, then blithely continued to discard suggestions. Both men kept at it with dogged determination, both determined that this was going to be a great concerto.
Which it is. Although superficially in the standard concert format of the time—dramatic first and third movements separated by a lyrical second—the harmonic and emotional scope of the concerto gives it a truly symphonic feel. Yes, it’s technically demanding—violinist and conductor Joshua Weilerstein describes it as “one of the Mount Everests for violinists”—but not in the showy way that calls attention to the soloist.
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| Brahms, c. 1872 |
In fact, some of the most demanding sections (like the beginning of the third movement) sound less difficult than they actually are—pretty much the opposite of what some of the more famous virtuosi of the time would have preferred. “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music,” complained the Spanish violinist/composer Pablo de Sarasate, “but does anyone imagine […] that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?”
So why do violinists keep performing and recording it? Probably for the same reason that mountaineers keep returning to the real Mt. Everest—because the exhilaration is worth the effort. There are so many ways a performer can put their own stamp on this complex and many-layered work while still staying true to the composer’s intentions. “When I program the Brahms Violin Concerto,” says Weilerstein, “I know I’m not in for just a simple accompanying job—it is a piece that requires thought, understanding, and total commitment from every person on the stage. It deserves absolutely nothing less than that!”
What will this weekend’s soloist bring to the table? Fortunately, Dego recorded the work just last year for the Chandos label, and that’s the version the SLSO has on their Spotify playlist this week. Think of it as a sneak preview:
Dego, by the way, is a substitute (although not a last-minute one, happily) for the originally scheduled Christian Tetzlaff. The story behind that change is an interesting one but as its relevance is a bit tangential, I’ll refer you to my commentary on St. Louis Arts Scene.
The second half of the concerts is dedicated entirely to the Lemminkäinen Suite (Four Legends from the Kalevala), Op. 22 by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). The composer’s original plan was for an epic operatic cycle based on Finnish mythology—something along the lines of Wagner’s “Ring.” Titled The Building of the Boat (Veneen luominen), the opera was abandoned after just over a year (July 1893 to August 1894) and the musical ideas repurposed for subsequent compositions, including the Op. 15 symphonic poem The Wood Nymph and the Lemminkäinen Suite. That’s probably just as well; given that Sibelius never tried to write another opera, The Building of the Boat would probably have sunk without a trace.
The suite went missing for a while as it was. After performances in 1896 and 1897, Sibelius withdrew the first and third sections from performance, despite good reviews and a positive public response. The suite didn’t appear in its final form until 1939 and wasn’t published until 1954, which explains in part why it’s still far from being one of his more popular compositions. This weekend will mark the first time the SLSO has ever played the entire suite.
So, who is this Lemminkäinen, anyway? The short answer is that he’s a heroic but flawed mythical character—an amalgam of Siegfried and Don Juan born of Lempi, the goddess of love and fertility. His story, among many others, is related in the Kalevala, a compilation of ancient Finnish ballads collected by folklorist Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) and published by him in 1834 and 1850. At a time when Finland was struggling to free itself from Russian occupation (the country gained independence in 1919), the Kalevala served as a source of nationalist inspiration.
The Lemminkäinen Suite is based very freely on three runes from the full collection of fifty. Rune 29 is the source of the first movement, “Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island” (“Lemminkäinen ja Saaren neidot”). For many years it was (and still is in some circles) called “Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari,” presumably because the Breitkopf and Härtel score treats “saari” as a proper name rather than the Finnish common noun for “island.” Translation is a tricky business.
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Sibelius in 1890
Photo: Paul Hacksher |
Either way, the story describes how our hero beats a hasty retreat via boat from the island of Pohjola, where he has made himself persona non grata by decapitating his host in battle (beer and weapons being a bad combination). He fetches up on the Isle of Refuge, where his magical singing and good looks charm the local maidens. Eventually he becomes homesick and sails away, but not until he has done his share of carousing and wooing.
There’s more to it than that, but Sibelius isn’t trying to tell a story à la Richard Strauss but rather to convey the main emotional themes of the original poem. The movement opens with horn calls and quivering passages in the violins suggesting the ocean and a misty beach. Soon a drone in the lower strings leads to a rustic dance and cheerful tunes in the woodwinds. It all builds to a romantic climax dominated by the horns and brasses (a reminder that Sibelius had a touch of Wagner Fever at the time), then fades back to the misty ocean music as Lemminkäinen takes his leave.
If this were a movie the camera would focus on the water, which would then gradually change from sparkling ocean waves to a dark, glassy river. It’s the river that separates the world of the living from Tuonela, the land of the dead. Floating on it (yet seemingly immune to the river’s current) is an immortal swan depicted in the second movement, “The Swan of Tuonela” (“Tuonelan Joutsen”). The English horn, in one of the instrument’s more famous solos, sings the swan’s lament over strings divisi (eight violin lines, two each for violas and cellos, and one for the basses), conjuring up visions of the dark, ominous waters. This would have been the prelude for Sibelius’s opera and is still the most frequently heard of the suite’s four sections.
In the third movement, “Lemminkäinen in Tuonela” (“Lemminkäinen Tuonelasaa”), we’ve gone back in time to runes 14 and 15 wherein Lemminkäinen must, as a condition for marrying the daughter of Louhi, mistress of Pohjola, complete three tasks. One of them is to kill the swan of Tuonela with a single crossbow bolt. Alas, the swan has a protector (“Nasshut, blind and crippled shepherd”) who “sends a serpent, / Like an arrow from a crossbow, / To the heart of Lemminkainen, / Through the vitals of the hero” (translation by John Martin Crawford). Lemminkäinen’s body is tossed into the river and chopped up into five pieces. But his story is far from over, as his mother uses a mystic rake to collect the pieces and magically reassemble them.
This is as close as Sibelius gets to literal tone painting, beginning with ominous and threatening tremolos in the strings and slowly building to a massive outburst of musical violence as Lemminkäinen and killed. In a theme that rapidly descends through the entire orchestra, his body is tossed into the river, and the mood turns into one of mourning as the hero’s mother removes the body parts for some magical surgery.
You might think the final movement, “Lemminkäinen's Return” (“Lemminkäinen palaa kotitienoille”) is about his return from Tuonela, but according to a preface in the score, it’s a depiction of his heroic return to his homeland at the end of his many adventures. Certainly the music is thrilling as it gallops along, gradually gaining more and more strength until finally bursting into a bright E-flat major finale with exultant horns, brasses, and percussion.
The character’s final scene in rune 30 of the Kalevala is much more subdued—more on the order of Gandalf’s departure to the Grey Havens—but Sibelius clearly wanted something more triumphant as a finale. The sense of celebration and victory in the face of overwhelming odds makes for a rousing conclusion.
The Essentials: John Storgårds conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in Brahms’s Violin Concerto, Op. 77, with soloist Francesca Dego. Also on the program: the complete Lemminkäinen Suite (Four Legends from the Kalevala), Op. 22 by Jean Sibelius. Performances take place Friday at 10:30 am, Saturday at 7:30 pm, and Sunday at 3 pm, April 11–13 at the Touhill Center. The Saturday concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3.
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