Program notes by J. Michael Allsen

In this program, we present four musical landscapes. Our opener, by Hamish MacCunn, is a highly romanticized painting of his native Scotland. In Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of of a Faun, it is the imaginary landscape conjured in the mind of a faun, hazy and impressionistic. Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus conjurs up a vast subarctic marshland in northern Finland, populated by thousands of migratory birds. Finally, in his music for Peer Gynt, Grieg evokes the landscape of Norway…with side trips to the exotic locales Peer visits on his travels.

This work by late romantic Scottish composer Hamish MacCunn takes its title and inspiration from a poem in praise of Scottish bards and of Scotland itself by Sir Walter Scott.

Hamish MacCunn

Born: March 22, 1868, Greenock, Scotland.

Died: August 2, 1916, London, England.

The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, Op. 3

• Composed: 1886.
• Premiere: November 5, 1887 at the Crystal Palace in London, conducted by August Manns.
• Duration: 9:00.

Background

Born into a Scottish Highlands family, James MacCunn (he formally adopted “Hamish”—the Scots version of James—at age 18) grew up surrounded by music. In 1883, he was awarded one of the very first composition scholarships at the newly founded Royal College of Music in London, where he studied with Hubert Parry. In 1889, after he left the RCM, MacCunn produced one of the greatest hits of his career, the opera Jeannie Deans, based upon a novel by Sir Walter Scott. His best-known orchestral work, The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, was written while he was still a student at RCM and received its premiere at the prestigious concert series at the Crystal Palace in 1887. It takes its title from a line from another work by Scott, an extended poem in praise of Scottish bards titled The Lay of the Last Minstrel, from a section that praises craggy Scotland itself:

O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of the heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,

Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e’er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!

What You’ll Hear

The Victorians loved Scotland, and it remained a phenomenally popular subject for romantic writers, landscape painters, ballet choreographers, and composers throughout the 19th century. This concert overture is a perfect reflection of this idealized Scotland. It opens with a quiet but distinctly belligerent melody, full of the rhythmic “Scotch snap.” After a stormy transition, strings introduce a broad and lyrical, but still distinctly Scottish second theme. This is worked up into a robust dancelike character, before a solo horn provides a transition into the development section. Here MacCunn works mostly with the opening theme, transforming it in a warlike climax. The piece ends with a recapitulation, and a fine brassy coda.

This quiet work was thoroughly revolutionary for its time and secured an international reputation for its composer. It grew out of Debussy’s fascination with symbolist poetry. It was originally written for a planned theatrical production of his friend Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem The Afternoon of a Faun (L’après-midi d’un faune) The work’s outer sections are dominated by repeats of the famous opening flute solo, but Debussy develops this idea in a radically unorthodox way.

Claude Debussy

Born: August 22, 1862, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France.

Died: March 25, 1918, Paris, France.

Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun

• Composed: 1892-94.
• Premiere: December 22, 1894, in Paris.
• Duration: 18:00.

Those nymphs, I want to make them permanent.

So clear, their light flesh-pink, it hovers on the atmosphere

Oppressed by bushy sleeps.

Was it a dream I loved?

My doubt, accumulated through the night past, branches out

To many a fine point—no more in fact than twigs—

Proving, alas! that what I’d claimed for my trophy by myself

Was only my imagination’s lack of roses.

Let’s think…

– Mallarmé, The Afternoon of a Faun (translated by W. Austin)

Background

The composition of this work marked a clear turning-point in the career of Claude Debussy. He had attended the Paris Conservatoire as a young man and in 1884 had won the prestigious Prix du Rome, the stamp of approval from the French musical establishment. In the late 1880s—what he later called his “bohemian years”—he scratched out a living in Paris as an accompanist and composer and absorbed all the musical influences in the air. In these years he befriended many of the most forward-thinking musicians in Paris, flirted with the music of Wagner (even making two pilgrimages to Bayreuth), and was deeply impressed by a performance of Javanese gamelan music he heard at the Paris Exposition in 1889. One of the most important influences from around 1890 onwards was his association with the Symbolists. Just as Impressionist painters like Monet and Renoir were rejecting realism in favor of pure color and light, the Symbolist poets rejected rigid poetic forms and description in favor of a free and sometimes kaleidoscopic style, in which fleeting images become symbols of deeper truths. Symbolism was the avant garde in French poetry from the 1880s through the turn of the century, and Debussy associated with many of the movement’s leading poets: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valéry, and Mallarmé. The Symbolists often described their poetry in musical terms—imagery that expresses what cannot be directly expressed in words—and Debussy responded by setting many of their poems as art songs, or, as in the case of his Prelude, using their works as inspiration for purely instrumental compositions. Stéphane Mallarmé was a particularly important contact for Debussy—he hosted weekly salóns at his home, inviting poets, artists, and musicians to present and argue over their latest works. Debussy was a regular at Mallarmé’s salóns in the 1890s, and their association led to the composition of Debussy’s most famous orchestral piece.

It went through several different versions from the 1870s onwards, but Mallarmé’s lengthy poem The Afternoon of a Faun was nearly in its final form in 1890, when he asked Debussy to provide music for a projected theatrical presentation of the work. Mallarmé’s poem is vaguely erotic throughout, with a faun free-associating on his encounters with various nymphs. Debussy’s Prelude, written between 1892 and 1894 was all that ever came of the theatrical presentation, though in 1912, Vaclav Nijinsky choreographed a ballet on Debussy’s Prelude for the Ballets Russe. (Nijinsky’s ballet went far beyond Debussy’s music and even Mallarmé’s poem in its frank sexuality—so much so that it horrified even a Parisian audience!) Debussy’s Prelude was a stunningly avant garde work for 1894, and more than any other piece, made Debussy an internationally known composer. Rather than setting this as a conventionally programmatic symphonic poem, Debussy tried to capture the ambience of Mallarmé’s poetry without really telling a story. Mallarmé, after hearing Debussy play the score on piano for the first time, exclaimed: “I didn’t expect anything like this! The music prolongs the emotion of my poem and sets its scene more vividly than color.” Though critics generally—and predictably—disliked a piece as startlingly new and radical as the Prelude, audiences and musicians took to it quickly and it was being performed across Europe and in the United States within just a few years.

What You’ll Hear

On the surface, the Prelude has a conventional three-part form: an opening section that is repeated in varied form at the end, and a contrasting middle section. However, there is nothing conventional about the way that Debussy constructed the work. The main idea—perhaps representing the faun himself—is the familiar, sinuous flute theme heard in the opening bars. Mallarmé jotted a brief poem about this melody on the first page of the manuscript score: “Sylvan of the first breath: if your flute succeeded in hearing all of the light, it would exhale Debussy.” This theme reappears some eight times in the course of the work, but it is never developed in a traditional way. Each time it shows up it ends—like one of the faun’s lazy thoughts—by spiraling off into new, unrelated ideas. The flute theme dominates the two outer sections, and the middle section presents a succession of contrasting ideas. There are a few climactic moments in this central section, but the music is never strident, and the scoring remains transparent and colorful through the whole work. (As apt as the designation “Impressionistic” seems for the music of Debussy, it is worth noting that he disliked the term just as much as the “Impressionist” painters!) The coda presents one final mysterious reference to the faun in the horns, before the music evaporates into silence.

The Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara composed this work for orchestra and his own recording of birds summering in northern Finland.

Einojuhani Rautavaara

Born: October 9, 1928, Helsinki, Finland.

Died: July 27, 2016, Helsinki, Finland.

Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra

• Composed: 1972.
• Premiere: October 18, 1972, in Oulu, Finland, conducted by Stephen Portman.
• Duration: 19:00.

Background

Rautavaara was in many ways Sibelius’s great successor in Finnish music. In the 1950s, he studied composition at the musical academy founded by Sibelius. Near the end of his life, Sibelius took an interest in the young Rautavaara and recommended him for a Koussevitsky Fellowship in New York, which allowed him to study with Aaron Copland, Vincent Persichetti, and Roger Sessions. From 1966 until his retirement in 1990, Rautavaara taught composition at the Sibelius Academy. His works include dozens of works for the stage, from conventional operas to works for television and more avant garde theatrical pieces. He also composed eight symphonies (some of which he later withdrew or extensively revised), several concertos—including the concerto for birds and orchestra heard here—and dozens of other orchestral pieces. Like Sibelius, Rautavaara was a composer whose style evolved constantly over his long career. His earliest works were influenced strongly by Bartók and Stravinsky, but also by Finnish folk styles. He later experimented with avant garde serialism and chance elements. Since the 1960s, much of his music might be described as “neo-Romantic”—highly eclectic, and generally approachable to audiences. Many of his works also have a mystical, supernatural quality.

In 1972, Rautavaara was commissioned to write a piece for the very first doctoral degree ceremony of the University of Oulu. Oulu, at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea and just 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, is relatively isolated from the rest of Finland. The region surrounding it, particularly the Liminka marshland south of the city, is a destination for migratory birds during the short Finnish summer. In his Cantus Arcticus, Rautavaara took inspiration for each movement from these birds, and recordings he made in the Liminka Marsh and near the Arctic Circle are worked unto the texture.

What You’ll hear

The first movement, Suo (Marsh), opens with a pair of flutes, dividing a winding melody between themselves. (Rautavaara notes that they are to “think of autumn and of Tchaikovsky.”) They are joined by a recording of marshland birds, and then by other woodwinds in a rhythmically free texture that mimics the bird calls. The lower strings enter with a solemn new idea, which the composer describes as “the voice and mood of a person walking in the wild.” This theme gradually takes over from the woodwinds, though the recorded birdsongs remain in the background. At the end, it is decorated by a quiet clarinet solo.

Melankolia features the song of a shore lark, though the recording is slowed and brought down two octaves in pitch. This haunting sound (which Rautavaara referred to as a “ghost bird”) is eventually joined by a slow-moving string theme.

Joutsenet mututtavat (Migrating Swans) begins with the sound of hundreds of swans. Rautavaara responds to this chaotic soundscape with music that is partly “aleatory,” where events in the score are only approximately coordinated with one another. He defines four musical characters, and gradually introduces them into the texture and allows them to fade in turn: first, string tremolos, then a second group of twittering woodwinds. The third idea is a calm, hymnlike theme gradually swells to incorporate the entire orchestra. The final idea, sweeping runs from the harp and celeste, appears when the hymnlike music reaches an emotional peak. At the end, both swans and orchestra fade into silence.

Grieg’s evocative music for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is heard here in its Prelude and in a pair of orchestral suites extracted from the score.

Edvard Grieg

Born: June 14, 1843, Bergen, Norway.

Died: September 4, 1907, Bergen, Norway.

Music from Peer Gynt: Prelude: At the Wedding, Suite No. 1, Op. 46, and Suite No. 2, Op. 55

• Composed: Grieg composed the incidental music for Peer Gynt in 1874-75. In 1885, he extracted the Prelude and the two suites, publishing them over the next few years: 1 in 1888, No. 2 in 1893, and the Prelude in 1902.
• Premiere: Grieg’s incidental music was first performed with a staged production in Oslo on February 24, 1876.
• Duration: 35:00.

Background

In early 1874, Henrik Ibsen asked Grieg to compose a set of incidental works for a planned production of his Peer Gynt. This was a meeting of the two Norwegian superstars of the age. Grieg was already recognized as the finest musician in his native Norway, and his music was widely admired in his homeland. Ibsen, some fifteen years older than Grieg, was just as famous, though his plays sometimes scandalized his audiences with their stark realism and sometimes bitter irony. Staging Peer Gynt was (and remains today) a formidable challenge. It was not, in fact, originally intended as a stage play—unlike Ibsen’s usually realistic works, it is a fantasy, composed entirely in verse. It also includes innumerable scene changes. The incidental music turned out to be a larger task than Grieg had anticipated. Writing disgustedly to a friend in 1874, Greg complained

“With Peer Gynt it goes very slowly and there is no possibility of being finished by autumn. It is a frightfully intractable subject, with the exception of one or two parts, as for example where Solveig sings—all of which I have done. And I have done something for the hall of the troll king in Dovre which literally I can’t bear to hear, it reeks so of cow-turds, ultra Norwegianism, and to one’s self-satisfaction! But I am hoping that the irony will be able to make itself felt.”

In the end, he produced an enormous set of pieces for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra, over two dozen in all, lasting nearly an hour and a half.

Peer Gynt was at some point a real figure—an 18th-century Norwegian adventurer—but a whole series of legends grew up around him. By the time Ibsen borrowed him from Norwegian folklore, Peer was equal parts Sinbad, Don Juan, and Prodigal Son. The essential story is that of a young man whose father wastes his inheritance. Though Peer’s mother tries to raise him up to reclaim the family fortune, he proves to be a slacker, seducing (and leaving) a young girl who loves him, Solveig, and launching into a whole series of improbable adventures. Among other things he escapes a “shotgun wedding” when he gets the daughter of the Mountain King pregnant, meets figures representing Satan and the ghost of Lord Byron, spends many years in Morocco and Egypt, and eventually survives a shipwreck. He finally arrives back home, barely aware of who he is. Solveig, who has waited for him all these years takes his head onto her lap and forgives him in the end.

What You’ll Hear

Though Grieg’s complete incidental music to Peer Gynt is occasionally performed today, the music is best known in the excerpts heard here. The Prelude is Grieg at his folksy best: a set of rustic Norwegian wedding dances. There is a long middle section featuring a clarinet solo introducing more wistful theme, and a rough-edged folk violin solo. The wedding celebration is for Ingrid, a young farm girl whom Peer had been interested in. This starts off Peer’s world travels: he kidnaps and rapes Ingrid on her wedding night and flees. Suite No.1 begins with Morning—music that has been used everywhere from commercials to cartoons for its evocative picture of sunrise at the beginning of a beautiful day. In the first act, Peer returns home from life as an outlaw in the mountains just in time for his mother’s death. The Death of Åse is a solemn lament that accompanied this moment in the play. Anitra’s Dance was originally music for a young Bedouin woman who catches Peer’s eye with a sexy belly dance. In the Hall of the Mountain King paints a picture of a band of rather nasty trolls partying away, as the tempo increases and the music becomes more and more furious. Suite No. 2 begins with Ingrid’s Lament was for Ingrid, whose wedding was so tragically ruined by Peer. After an agitated passage—an angry reference to the wedding dances of the prelude—the movement has deeply sad music for the strings. The opening flurry of anger returns at the end, but the music soon fades away in a mood of resignation. The Arabian Dance is exotic music driven by percussion in its opening section. There is brief movement of lyricism before a return of the sprightly opening music. The final two sections are drawn from the conclusion of the play. The Return of Peer Gynt accompanies Peer’s return to his homeland as a broken old man. This is stormy, nervous music throughout. Just as Peer seems to the stumble in exhaustion, there is a quiet transition—as close to Wagnerian style as Grieg ever managed—and the mood changes for Solveig’s Song. This was originally sung by Solveig as a kind of benediction for the prodigal Peer, but here is transformed to a song for violins and harp.

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Program notes ©2025 by J. Michael Allsen