Georges Enesco (1881-1955):
Rumanian Rhapsody No. 1 in A major, Opus 11
Enesco once described himself as “a savage, whom nothing could fully discipline, a staunch adept of independence, who accepted no constraint and did not recognize any school.” He studied first at the Vienna Conservatory, and later at the Paris Conservatory. His teachers included Massenet and Fauré, and his own pupils included Dinu Lipatti and Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin called him “the one man to whom I owe everything.”
Despite his internationalism, he maintained ties with his native Rumania, serving as court violinist to the Queen of Rumania, conductor of the Bucharest Philharmonic and founder of the Enesco Prize for composition. He said Rumanian folk music “is influenced not by the neighboring Slavs, but by the Indian and Egyptian folk songs introduced by the members of these remote races, now classed as gypsies, brought to Rumania as servants of the Roman conquerors. The deeply Oriental character of our own folk music derives from these sources and possesses a flavor as singular as it is beautiful.”
The two Rumanian Rhapsodies appeared in 1901. Both were introduced at a Pablo Casals concert in Paris on Feb 7, 1908 with Enesco conducting. A drinking song (I Have a Coin and I Want a Drink) and four other national melodies appear in No. 1, which S.W. Bennett describes as “all jollity, from its opening `call' by clarinets and oboe through its chain of rousing dance motifs, and without ever losing its earthly folk quality, it achieves near the end a Dionysiac rapture.”
Max Bruch (1838-1920):
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Opus 26
Bruch was nineteen years old when the first sketches for his First Violin Concerto appeared. By 1866 the work was ready for a planned performance by the concertmaster of the Mannheim Symphony, Johann Naret-Koning. After two postponements due to the illness of the soloist, the Concerto was finally performed by the concertmaster of the Gürzenich Orchestra, Otto von Königslöw, on April 24, 1866 in Coblenz, with Bruch conducting.
The performance inspired Bruch to revise the work. The following summer, he sent the score to the great violinist Joseph Joachim, with a note wondering if the music was too “free” to be called a concerto.
Joachim replied: “I find that the title `concerto’ is fully justified; for a fantasy, the last two movements are too completely and symmetrically developed. The different sections are brought together in beautiful relationship, and yet--this is the principal thing--there is sufficient contrast.” Joachim did suggest some changes in the music, and Bruch complied. Indeed, he dedicated the work “in friendship to Joseph Joachim.”
After a private performance in Hanover in October, 1867, Joachim played the revised version on January 7, 1868 in Bremen, with Karl Reinthaler conducting. Eduard Lalo, usually no friend of rival violin concertos, found the piece to be “magnificent.”
The huge popularity of the G minor Concerto eventually began to irk its composer. When violinists insisted on playing the piece for him, Bruch would exclaim, “The G minor Concerto again! I couldn’t bear to hear it even once more! My friends, play my Second Concerto or the Scottish Fantasy for once!”
Bruch once published a letter, titled “Prohibition by Order of the Police concerning Max Bruch’s First Concerto.” The letter stated: “Since recently the astounding eventuality has come to pass that violins have of their own accord, been playing the First Concerto, we make known with all possible haste, to reassure fearful souls, that we hereby sternly prohibit the said concerto.”
Sir Donald Francis Tovey wrote: “It is really easy for Bruch to write beautifully, it is in fact instinctive for him; and such instinct is a matter which all modern critics and psychologists will agree to rate very high. Further, it is impossible to find in Max Bruch any lapses from the standard of beauty which he thus instinctively set himself….Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto thoroughly deserves the great success it has always had. Nobody who can appreciate it will believe for a moment that its composer has written nothing else worthy of the like success.”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827):
Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Opus 55 (Eroica)
As early as the spring of 1798, so the legend goes, the French ambassador to Vienna, General Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, suggested that Beethoven write a symphony about Napoleon Bonaparte. At the time, Napoleon was one of Beethoven's idols, but it wasn't until 1801 that the composer first sketched “Third Symphony, written on Bonaparte.” He worked on it during 1803 in the countryside near Vienna and finished during the spring of 1804.
The title page originally read “Grand Symphony composed on Bonaparte.” But in May, 1804, Beethoven heard the news that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor. Beethoven flew into a rage, tore up the title page, and bellowed: “Is he too no more than a mere mortal? Now he will trample on all the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition. He will exalt himself above all others, become a tyrant!” He later gave the symphony a new title, “heroic symphony to celebrate the memory of a great man,” and dedicated it to his patron Prince Lobkowitz.
After several private performances, the Third Symphony received its first public performance in Vienna on April 7, 1805. One critic found the work “strident and bizarre,” but another recognized “the true style of really great music.” The Director of the Prague Conservatory banned the piece as a “dangerously immoral composition.”
When the Third Symphony was published, Beethoven included a note, requesting that “this Symphony, being purposely written much longer than is usual, should be performed nearer the beginning rather than at the end of a concert…if it is heard too late it will lose for the listener, already tired out by previous performances, its own proposed effect.” At the première, one heckler in the audience exclaimed, “I'd give a kreutzer with pleasure if it would only end.” But others were undeterred by the size of the Third Symphony. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia once insisted on hearing it three times in a single evening.
Paul Henry Lang called the Eroica “one of the incomprehensible deeds in arts and letters, the greatest single step made by an individual composer in the history of the symphony and the history of music in general.” For Richard Wagner, “the first movement embraces, as in a glowing furnace, all the emotions of a richly-gifted nature in the heyday of unresting youth.” When, in 1821, Beethoven heard the news of Napoleon's death, he remarked: “Well, I've written the funeral oration for that catastrophe seventeen years ago,” referring to the second movement, a funeral march. Donald Francis Tovey said the third movement is “the first in which Beethoven fully attained Haydn's desire to replace the minuet by something on a scale comparable to the rest of a great symphony.” The Finale is a set of twelve variations on a tune Beethoven first used in a little country dance in 1801, then again in The Creatures of Prometheus ballet and also in the Eroica Variations for piano. Edward Downes comments that “each variation is a little cosmos in itself and the sum of them is overwhelming.”