Enough with your jokes about alphorns and cuckoo clocks! This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we listen to forgotten music from Switzerland.
Ernest Bloch, who is best known for his music on Jewish themes (such as his Hebraic rhapsody “Schelomo”), actually spent most of his life in the United States. He died in Portland, OR, in 1959, at the age of 78.
50 years earlier, while still in Switzerland, he composed his song cycle “Poèmes d’automne.” At the time, he was at work on his opera, “Macbeth,” but was sidelined when he made the acquaintance of a young poet by the name of Beatrix Rodès. He fell instantly in love with her, and set four of her poems within two months. Rodès would eventually become his mistress, though in the end Bloch chose to remain with his wife. It’s said that the texts, even in the original French, are of dubious literary quality.
The composer arranged them to form a kind of progression, in which a woman passes from sadness and desolation, to peace and love, to lamentation for the passing of her beauty, to an air of serenity as she becomes a priestess.
Okay, so it’s not his strongest work, but it is seasonal and interesting to listen to.
Hans Huber, who lived from 1852 to 1921, was the composer of nine symphonies (of which he acknowledged eight), five operas, and a number of concertos for various instruments. His four concertos for piano are somewhat unusual in that, like Brahms’ experiments in the form, they are made up of four movements, with the addition of a scherzo, as opposed to the customary three.
The Piano Concerto No. 3 first appeared on a concert in Basel, in February of 1899, which also included Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No. 3” and Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy.”
It’s an unusual piece, for, among other things, presenting in the first movement the theme from the work’s finale as the underpinnings of a passacaglia.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of forgotten music from Switzerland – “Swiss Missed” – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
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