Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884)
Vltava (The Moldau), from Má vlast (1874)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Performance time: 12 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 2, 1935; Eric DeLamarter, conductor

Alongside Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana is recognized as a seminal figure in the development of a Czech national musical style. Although he grew up speaking German and spent five years in Sweden, Smetana became committed to the ideas of Czech nationalism. In the 1860s, he began composing specifically “Czech” music, focusing on Bohemian themes and incorporating folk styles as an essential element of his musical language.

Smetana’s cycle of six symphonic poems, Má vlast (My Fatherland), is a prime example. Each tone poem depicts an element of the history, landscape, and traditions of Bohemia in what he called “musical pictures of Czech glories and defeats.” He began composing the work in 1874, shortly after resigning from his post as principal conductor of the Prague Provisional Theatre. Increasing deafness and tinnitus that was the result of syphilis had made conducting impossible. Nevertheless, he continued to compose, completing the suite that would become one of his most enduring works over the next five years. Ultimately, he lost his eyesight as well, and hallucinations and self-destructive behavior led to his institutionalization in a Prague asylum, where he died in 1884.

The second tone poem, Vltava (The Moldau), is the most famous of the cycle. It traces the journey of the Moldau River from its source in the Bohemian Forest to where it joins the Elbe. On its way, the river flows through fields and forests, past hunters and a peasant wedding, by river nymphs dancing in the moonlight, and down the rapids of St. John before majestically opening into a broad stream as it enters the city of Prague. Smetana musically paints the rolling waters of the river with a Wagnerian leitmotif before layering a broad folk tune on top. The melody may stem from a 16th-century Italian song called “La Mantovana,” which has spread throughout Europe in different guises (even forming the basis of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” via Romania). While the melody’s origins may not be Bohemian, Smetana’s posthumous reputation as the father of Czech music, combined with the work’s popularity, has made Vltava an unofficial anthem of the Czech Republic.

Mark Adamo (b. 1962)
Last Year (2019)
Scored for: timpani, percussion, harp, strings, and solo cello
Performance time: 25 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance

While Mark Adamo is best known for his work as an opera composer and librettist—with his debut opera, Little Women (1998), standing as one of the most performed American operas today—he has recently turned his hand to symphonic, choral, and chamber works. Mark Adamo began composing Last Year in 2018 in response to Hurricane Harvey. He had been listening to a recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at the time and pondered what Vivaldi would write if he were alive today, confronted with the reality of climate change. In writing this piece, Adamo said he attempts to “give voice to the fears and hopes we experience during this moment of crisis.”

Instead of a cycle of four concertos for solo violin, Adamo scores his work as a concerto in four movements for solo cello, adding harp, piano, and percussion to the sonority of the string orchestra. Like Vivaldi’s cycle, each movement bears the title of a different season but also a subtitle. The first movement, “Autumn: Dismissing Eunice,” invokes Eunice Newton Foote, an American climatologist who, in 1856, was the first to scientifically prove what we now refer to as the greenhouse effect. The movement begins with a fanfare that alternates uneasily between major and minor. Adamo weaves in a theme from Vivaldi’s Autumn in what he calls a “polymetric scherzo of nervous and glittering character” interrupted by tolling chords in the percussion choir.

“Winter: Le triangle noir” refers to an ice storm in January 1998 that left an area south of Montreal without power for several weeks. The media nicknamed the area “The Triangle of Darkness.” Here, Adamo captures the eerie stillness of a landscape encased in ice with a hushed theme, as strains of Vivaldi murmur underneath. Again, the percussion choir interrupts, but this time with a clear statement of the Gregorian “Dies Irae” chant. This acts as a warning knell for the third movement, “Spring: Zephaniah 1:14–15,” which proceeds without pause. The bible verse alluded to in the title warns of the coming of the day of judgment—a day of wrath and destruction. The theme from Vivaldi’s Spring alternates in fast and slow iterations. Eventually, the orchestra erupts into a thundercloud of sound before evaporating to reveal the soloist serenely sustaining a note underneath.

“Summer: For Julia, born 2045” again continues without a break. In this movement, Adamo envisions a barren landscape emptied of everything but low bass notes and the cries of seagulls. Even amid this bleakness, the cello is determined to be hopeful. “But—even as the orchestra takes up and develops, harmonically, that determined theme—the solo cello cannot help, for a moment, but lose itself in recrimination,” Adamo writes. “Memories of chaos, and that opening premonition, return to haunt the final moments: but the cello maintains the last word.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
La mer (1903)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, four bassoons including contrabassoon, four French horns, five trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, and strings
Performance time: 23 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: July 28, 1965; Irwin Hoffman, conductor

“My old friend the sea; it is always endless and beautiful,” Claude Debussy mused. “It is really the thing in nature which best puts you in your place.” Debussy had a lifelong affinity for the sea. As a child, he spent his summers at the shore in Cannes, and at one point, he had a mind to become a sailor. Throughout his life he had accumulated enough memories of the ocean that he did not need to be on the waterfront to compose La mer. Like the English painter J. M. W. Turner, Debussy worked from memory. To Debussy, memories were more useful for composing than reality, “whose beauty weighs down thought too heavily.”

Turner’s seascapes served as a direct inspiration for Debussy after he saw an exhibition of the English artist’s paintings while on a trip to London in 1903, the year he began writing La mer. Turner anticipated the French Impressionist movement in his study of light, color, and atmosphere. His dynamic seascapes capture fleeting moments of the ever-changing sea as it reflects the sun and catches the wind. Debussy sought to channel this aesthetic in music in La mer. However, where music surpasses painting, Debussy said, was in its ability to “bring together all manner of variations in color and light as they continually change in time.”

Although there is plenty of precedent for musical depictions of water, Debussy was original in his impressionistic approach to La mer, a work he described as “three symphonic sketches.” In contrast with Smetana’s Vltava, which charts the Moldau’s exact course with distinct scenes along the way, Debussy’s evocation of water is more nebulous, though no less effective. Like the sea, musical ideas and colors constantly shift as if viewed through a kaleidoscope. Short melodic snippets are favored over long-drawn-out thematic development, and harmonies do not necessarily resolve but are used as color. Debussy’s groundbreaking orchestration also plays a role in achieving his desired effect. He blurs the traditional divisions of labor between the strings, winds, and brass and puts them in unique combinations to achieve specific colors. Any doubling is done with the utmost intention, as Debussy considered timbre a musical element of equal stature to harmony and melody.

While La mer is more suggestive than narrative, it is easy to imagine the scenes Debussy sketches in each movement. In “De l’aube à midi sur la mer” (“From dawn to midday on the sea”), the seascape gradually emerges from the mist at dawn. The sun peeks over the horizon in a melody in the cor anglais and muted trumpet, and the sea begins to swell. Later, a horn chorale sounds as the sun reaches its apex at noon. “Jeux de vague” (“Play of waves”) is even more spontaneous, capturing the waves shimmering in the sun in its rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic irregularities. The sea gathers strength in “Dialogue du vent et de la mer” (“Dialogue between the wind and the sea”). A turbulent storm brews, with surging waves and battering winds, while the eye of the storm brings an uneasy moment of calm. The “symphonic” aspect of the work reveals itself at the end in the recollection of the horn chorale of the first movement, this time in full brass.

—Katherine Buzard