Shura Cherkassky

Shura Cherkassky The 1982 San Francisco Recital 1 -5 Lully: Suite de pièces Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), although known as the founder of French grand opera, was born in Florence, Italy, becoming a naturalized French citizen in 1661. At the age of thir- teen he was taken to France by the Chevalier de Guise, to amuse Mlle. de Montpensier, hav- ing learned to play the violin and guitar from a Franciscan monk. However, he was initially given kitchen work. It was only when he was heard playing the violin that Lully was prompt- ly transferred to Mademoiselle’s own orchestra. This was for only a short time, for he set to music a satirical poem reflecting on Mlle. de Montpensier, who expelled him from her house. After studying the harpsichord and composition he obtained a position in the band of Louis XIV and soon organized another group, which acquired the reputation of being the finest orchestra in France. By this time Lully was unrivaled as a violinist, and was most solidly in the favor of the king, writing ballets and masques in which both he and the king took part. Eventually he was given sole authority to produce operas in France, establishing an “Academie Royale de Musique” (now the Grand Opera), and the theater of his rival, Cambert, was closed upon order of the king. From then on Lully was the dominating power in French music. He not only composed prolifically, but also created new traditions in theatre discipline; taught singers how to walk on the stage; invented steps for the ballet; changed the entrances, and above all, insisted on a precision of attack in the orchestra. It has been said that he “more than once broke a violin on the back of a man who was not playing to his taste, but when the rehearsal was at an end would send for the man, pay him three times the value of his instrument, and take him out to dine.” He was an amusing bundle of contradictions. A master of truckling and deceit, he was sometimes recklessly impudent to those who held power over him. Once, when a mechanical difficulty caused delay in beginning a performance of one of his operas which the King was attending, a message was sent to Lully that the Grand Monarque was tired of waiting. “The King is master here,” retorted Lully, “and is at liberty to be as tired of waiting as he pleases!” For fourteen years, as overlord of the Opera, he acted as director, composer, conductor, stage- manager, ballet-master, and machinist (if electricity had been in use, Lully would have man- aged the lights). He did all these things with superlative ability, energy, and resource; yet – 2 – this amazing Italian found time to become (as biographer W. F. Apthorp has pointed out), “not only the true founder of French Opera, but to adapt, with surpassing clev- erness and insight into the French charac- ter, what was essentially Italian opera to the French taste.” From 1658 to 1671, he wrote about thirty ballets and divertisse- ments, and between 1672 and 1696, twenty operas, in addition to instrumental and church music. He was a master of var- ious styles, from tragedy to burlesque. He turned upside down the traditions of the court ballet. He knew the theatre back- wards and forwards. His sense of stage effect was keen and intuitive; and he knew a subtler and deeper secret: how to make music speak with dramatic veracity and point. At the end this buffon odieux (as Boileau called him) – this rake, knave, intriguer, who had lifted himself out of Jean Baptiste Lully the obscurity of his Italian origin into a position where he talked back to a King, – died of an abscess of the toe. His estate consisted of fifty-eight sacks of louis d’or and Spanish doubloons, diamonds, and silver plate, worth in all about seven million francs. To the very last he was cheerfully unscrupulous, for (according to a story told immedi- ately after his death) he cheated to attain Heaven. His confessor, so runs the familiar tale, required as a condition that Lully should burn all that he had written of his new opera, Achille et Polyxène. Lully gave the abhorred score to the confessor, who triumphantly threw it in the fire. “What, Baptiste!” remonstrated a prince who visited Lully soon after, “you have destroyed your opera?” “Gently, Sir,” whispered the expiring rascal: “I have another copy.” So he died, radiant, corrupt, and unashamed, a poet and a genius; and his epitaph in the – 3 – Church of Saint-Pères declares that “God gave him. a truly Christian patience in the sharp pain of his last illness.” The so-called Suite de Pièces was not actually assembled by Lully. Lully’s fame was so great that his editors often collected his dances and published them as keyboard suites. These tran- scriptions from Lully’s operas and ballets were particularly abundant in the nineteenth cen- tury and appeared in editions produced by Théodore Lack and Louis Oesterle. Shura Cherkassky performed Lully’s Suite de Pièces utilizing as a point of musical departure Oesterle’s edition published by G. Schirmer in 1904. Cherkassky changes the order of the pieces, making the suite more cohesive, and adds his own touches of ornamentation in a very Romantic style. 6 Mendelssohn: Scherzo a Capriccio in F-sharp minor “Felix” (Latin for “the happy one”) was a well-chosen name for Mendelssohn, for the Goddess of Fortune gave him her choicest gifts, a diadem of genius for his curly head, inher- ited wealth from his father, a winning charm of manner and a graceful upright physique. The frustrations, maladjustments, and conflicts of most great composers make the life of Felix Mendelssohn as refreshing as sunshine. Born in Hamburg, February 3, 1809, Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was the grandson of the Jewish pragmatic philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn – known as the “German Plato” – and son of the banker, Abraham Mendelssohn. His mother Lea Salomon-Bartholdy was his first piano teacher. He studied with Ludwig Berger (piano), Carl Friedrich Zelter (theory), and Wilhelm Hennig (violin). At nine he played the piano part of a trio by Wolff in public; at ten he sang alto in the Singakademie; at eleven he was introduced to Goethe who spoke the highest praises of his piano-playing and insisted that the wunderkind stay with him in Baden for two weeks. At their first meeting the poet requested he play a Bach fugue, and though he forgot a part of the composition, he was able to extemporize the missing portion weaving contrapuntal lines into a heavy brocaded baroque fabric that pleased all who were present for the performance. Shortly after Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony came out, Mendelssohn, then 15, could play it all on the piano without a score. At seventeen he wrote the overture to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Light, aerial music was his unsurpassed speciality. Between 1827 and 1835, Mendelssohn’s activity took him from city to city on the Continent and in England. His popularity increased to a point where he was deluged with invitations to the finest homes. In 1829 he conducted the first performance, after Bach’s – 4 – death, of the great St. Matthew Passion. The next several years saw the production of many important works, among which were the first volume of the Songs Without Words, the Hebrides Overture, the Italian and Reformation symphonies and the G minor Piano Concerto. In 1835, Mendelssohn became the conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, and eight years after that he helped to found the Leipzig Conservatory. On May 8, 1847 after a grueling concert schedule in England, taking a rest in Frankfurt am Main, Mendelssohn was brought word of his sister Fanny’s untimely death. She had been rehearsing with a chamber group for a performance in the family home when she suddenly lost consciousness and died a few hours later. This was more than Mendelssohn could bear. He himself fell to the ground unconscious, a blood vessel in his head ruptured mirroring the phantom hemorrhage of his beloved Fanny, Felix Mendelssohn sharer of his hopes, and an emotional double of his inner self. There seemed no joy left in the world for Mendelssohn from that point on. Mendelssohn a young man of thirty-eight died of a paralytic stroke on the fourth of November 1847. He was put to rest in the family vault in Berlin. Mendelssohn probably composed his little-known Scherzo a Capriccio in F-sharp minor in 1835-36. The piece was not given an opus number, but appeared in a collection called Album des Pianistes, published in Bonn. This highly charged masterpiece is a blend of vitality and poignancy. The scherzo is built from the alternation of several contrasting themes or seg- ments, the first light and staccato, the second more legato and expressive, and a third marked con fuoco (with fire). This and other neglected piano works by Mendelssohn were always favorites of Shura Cherkassky, who played them since his childhood. – 5 – 7 -10 Tchaikovsky: Grand Sonata in G Major, Op. 37 Piano works composed over a period of 26 years (1867-1893) comprise a by no means insignificant part of Tchaikovsky’s chamber music. True, his compositions for the piano cannot claim a leading place in his musical legacy, nevertheless against the background of the post-Lisztian piano liter- ature of Western Europe, his works for the piano are distinguished by their variety and originality. Tchaikovsky was an excellent pianist from his youth.

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