Elegy, from August 4, 1964 Steven Stucky

Elegy, from August 4, 1964 conductor, composer, and pianist, as well as an educator who inspired a generation Steven Stucky of music lovers when the Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts that he conducted Born: November 7, 1949, in Hutchinson, Kansas became a television sensation. His com- Died: February 3, 2016, in Ithaca, New York positions range from symphonies in the Work composed: 2008 concert hall tradition to stage works like his beloved Broadway hit West Side Story. World premiere: September 18, 2008, in His comic operetta Candide preceded Dallas, Texas, by the Dallas Symphony that show by a year. A fantasy based on the Orchestra, Jaap van Zweden, conductor novella by the 18th-century author Vol- New York Philharmonic premiere: January taire, it opens with an invigorating Over- 24, 2019, Jaap van Zweden, conductor ture that foreshadows the operetta’s humor. Voltaire’s tale revolves around of Defense Robert] McNamara are begin- the wide-eyed hero, Candide, whose ning to talk about bombing. … The prin- trips to distant points of the globe in- cipal motive from the Elegy eventually variably turn into dismal misadven- became the main motive of the whole ora- tures, much though he may be assured torio once I composed the rest of the music. by his idealistic tutor that everything is for the best. The novella was written Although he was born and raised in Mas- as a charming but persuasive rebuttal sachusetts, Leonard Bernstein today is to the German philosopher Gottfried thought of as a quintessential New York- Wilhelm von Leibnitz’s metaphysi- er. The Philharmonic’s Music Director cal assertion that “All is for the best in from 1958 through 1969, he was a Renais- the best of all possible worlds.” Vol- sance man of 20th-century music: a stellar taire countered that many things have Did You Know? • In June 1964, New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner traveled to Mississippi for the Freedom Sum- mer initiative, which aimed to register as many African American voters as possible in the state, where voter sup- pression efforts had kept them from the polls. They, and James Chaney of Mississippi, were abducted and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. • The Gulf of Tonkin incident involved gunfire between the USS Maddox and North Vietnamese torpedo boats on Au- gust 2, 1964. Reports of a second incident on August 4 (later proven to be false) led to the Gulf of Tonkin Res- olution, which gave President Johnson authority to use military force in Southeast Asia. FBI missing poster from 1964 30B | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC nothing good about them, like violence, Did You Know? shipwrecks, or the Spanish Inquisition. • Less than two months before Candide’s In its initial Broadway run, in 1956–57, Broadway opening, Bernstein was named Candide played for 73 performances — Co-Principal Conductor of the New York hardly a stunning success — and Bernstein Philharmonic, alongside Dimitri Mitropoulos. would go on to alter the piece, again and • The Overture was heard in the Philharmon- again, for later revivals. Through all of ic’s historic 2008 performance in North Ko- the show’s transformations, the rollicking rea, when it was played without a conduc- Overture remained essentially untouched. tor, a tradition first adopted in tribute to Bernstein after his death. Born in Brooklyn, Aaron Copland polished his composing technique in France but and neighborly friendship. This expanse has returned home to establish what became found more success than the opera overall, recognized as a profoundly American sound, and it is often performed in a choral setting a musical language rich in folk inflections the composer prepared, with multiple voices and wide-open harmonies that proved irre- rendering each line. sistible to imitators. Copland’s Rodeo was also a stage work — His 1953 opera The Tender Land is a fine a ballet choreographed by Agnes de Mille, example of the lyrical aspect of Copland’s who said: Americana. Set in the 1930s, it tells the tale of Laurie, a teenager who is about to graduate It is not an epic, or the story of pioneer con- from high school and yearns for experiences quest. It builds no empires. … There are beyond her life on a farm in the nation’s heart- never more than a very few people on the land. The first of the opera’s three acts con- stage at a time … one must be always con- cludes with The Promise of Living, in which scious of the enormous land on which these Laurie’s family extolls the virtues of hard work people live and of their proud loneliness. Overture to Candide Leonard Bernstein Born: August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts Died: October 14, 1990, in New York City Work composed: completed in August 1956; Hershy Kay assisted with the orchestration World premiere: October 29, 1956, in the first pre- view of Candide, at the Colonial Theatre in Boston New York Philharmonic premiere: January 26, 1957, Leonard Bernstein, conductor Most recent New York Philharmonic performance: July 20, 2018, at Bravo! Vail in Colorado, Bramwell Tovey, conductor Bernstein in the 1950s APRIL 2019 | 31.

Load more