Battle Creek Symphony
Saturday, March 27, 2010, 7:30 pm
W.K. Kellogg Auditorium
Williams: Hymn to the Fallen from "Saving Private Ryan"
Ravel: Tombeau de Couperin
Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, "Eroica" (Heroic)
Honoring the 150th birthday of Will Keith Kellogg and those who have fallen in battle.
Deeply affected by his experience during World War I, Ravel composed the Tombeau as an homage to the golden era of French music and dedicated each of the movements to a comrade who had fallen in battle.
Beethoven's Eroica Symphony was a manifesto in a world of powdered wigs and convention. His revolutionary sounds shook the world then and remains to this day one of the greatest symphonic achievements of all time.
50% discount for active and retired military - call 269-565-2199 for information
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"Le Tombeau de Couperin" was originally a suite for solo piano by Maurice Ravel. Composed between 1914 and 1917, it contained six movements, each of which was dedicated to one of Ravel's friends who had died fighting in World War I. (Though he was in his late 30s, Ravel himself had served as a driver during the war.) Then in 1919 Ravel arranged four movements of the work for orchestra.
By using the word "Tombeau," or tomb, Ravel simply meant a work written as a memorial. In terms of form, he went back to Baroque French keyboard suites, as had been composed by Francois Couperin (1668-1733).
Thus Ravel's work constitutes a series of dances, none of which is somber in the least. Ravel was certainly not insensitive to the loss of friends, but he felt that tributes to the dead should recall the best qualities of the lives of the subjects. As he put it, "The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence."
The "Prelude" was composed in memory of Lieutenant Jacques Charlot, a fellow musician who had transcribed Ravel's four-hand piece, "Mother Goose" for solo piano.
The "Forlane," or Italian folk dance, was composed in memory of Lieutenant Gabriel Deluc, a Basque painter from Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
The "Menuet" was composed in memory of Jean Dreyfus, who had cared for Ravel when he was thrown into a state of despair after he lost his beloved mother in 1917 as well as many of his friends during the war.
Finally, "Rigaudon," based on a duple-meter dance form, was composed in memory of Pierre and Pascal Gaudin, two brothers who were killed by the same shell.
The second "Fallen Heroes" selection is the magnificent Eroica Symphony No. 3 which was composed by Beethoven in 1803-04. Originally, Beethoven planned to dedicate this symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte and the ideals of the French Revolution. By 1804, however, when Napoleon declared himself emperor of France, Beethoven declared that Napoleon had become far too egotistical. In fact, Beethoven took a knife and, scratching the name "Bonaparte" off the title page of the symphony, he renamed it "Eroica," which means "Heroic" in Italian.
Many have said that the "Eroica" represents the turning point between classical and romantic music. Twice as long as the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, the work includes a much wider range of emotions.
Beethoven was already becoming deaf by this time, and his despair is certainly reflected in the somber second movement. But the symphony moves on, in the third and fourth movements, to sentiments of hope and triumph.
The first movement, Allegro con brio, introduces the powerful theme of heroism, or, as Romain Rolland defined it, "the Grand Army of the soul that will not stop until it has trampled the whole earth."
The second movement, Marcia funebre: Adagio assai, has often been performed in memory of great men, such as Felix Mendelssohn, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Arturo Toscanini. It was also played in memory of those who died in the "Munich massacre" during the 1972 Summer Olympics.
The Scherzo: Allegro vivace constitutes a welcome relief, with its brisk tempo and series of hunting calls, played by the horns.
Then, in the Finale: Allegro molto, Beethoven returns to the dramatic emotions of the first movement, incorporating a series of variations on his main theme. This movement builds toward a fugue which incorporates a triumphant hymn for woodwinds. The symphony ends in a titanic series of vital chords, asserting Beethoven's all-powerful sense of hope.
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