Chief among the many benefits accruing to us from the Music Academy of the West’s four-year partnership with the New York Philharmonic is that it gives the instrumental fellows the chance to be conducted — and instructed — by the music director of one of the greatest orchestras in the world (not to mention our chance to hear and witness the events).
Maestro Alan Gilbert, who now serves in the position once held by the likes of Gustav Mahler, Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, will direct the Music Academy’s Festival Orchestra in a concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 16, at The Granada Theater.
Gilbert will lead the superb young orchestra through the epic and ominous sounds of “The Representation of Chaos” from Franz Josef Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1797-1798), Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (1914) and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 In E-flat Major, Op, 55 “Eroica,” (1805).
This is a powerful program, and — for all “Eroica’s” triumphant coda — largely a dark one. In each of the three works, there is a new world struggling to be born.
That hardly ever happens without disruption and violence, and the people who were doing just fine in the old world — or were, at least, getting by well enough (i.e., most of us) — can be forgiven for panicking when the familiar is taken away from them (blown up, burned to the ground, stood against a wall and shot).
How does the old Chinese curse go? “May you live in interesting times!”
The Haydn work would seem to be partially exempt from the above, in that the world whose birth he so elegantly describes is the first of its kind: there is no “old world” to be replaced, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Still, when he was writing The Creation, the Bastille was eight years fallen, the king and queen of France had been beheaded, Napoleon had conquered Italy and made himself, as First Consul, ruler of France.
Although Haydn had spent most of his career in service to the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, he seemed to have been musically liberated by the social upheavals of his time.
He was no regicide, however, and was deeply patriotic. In 1809, when Napoleon occupied Vienna, he put a guard of honor around Haydn’s house, to keep away looters.
Haydn, dying, had himself carried to his piano so he could play the Austrian national anthem, which he had written in 1797, the same time he was writing The Creation.
The words Haydn set as the anthem, “Gott erhalte,” were written by Leopold Haschka, a Mason. Haydn had become a Freemason, probably through his friendship with Mozart, in 1785, and to this day, the Masons claim that he composed The Creation with the goal of creating a Masonic work on the level of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Whether or not that is the case, what is truly amazing about the oratorio is its uncanny (musical) anticipation of Beethoven’s “Eroica,” which is probably why Gilbert put the two works on the same program.
Berg wrote his Three Pieces in 1914, on the brink of the abyss known to history as World War I, which swept away the familiar dynasties — Hapsburg, Romanov, Hohenzollern, Ottoman — that had ruled Europe and the Levant for centuries, killing tens of millions on the battlefield: the first industrial war, mass-producing death with the aid of the new technologies.
The curtain was rising on what Evelyn Waugh referred to as “the so-called ‘Twentieth Century.’”
Berg — a McLuhanist artist who so thoroughly understood the present that his works, like Kafka’s, seem prophetic — was under no illusion that the world being born before his eyes would bring universal peace and happiness.
No wonder the music sounds uneasy and apprehensive! Five years later, William Butler Yeats would write:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Tickets to this Festival Orchestra concert are $10 (community access), $40, $50 and $60 (VIP experience box seat), and they can be purchased at The Granada Theatre ticket office (1214 State Street), by phone at 805.969.8787 or 805.899.2222 or online at www.musicacademy.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.