Franz von Suppé (1819–1895)
Overture to Dichter und Bauer (Poet and Peasant) (1846)
Scored for: two flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Performance time: 10 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: September 8, 1936; George Dasch, conductor

Born in the Dalmatian town of Spalato (present-day Split, Croatia), Franz von Suppé rose to prominence as a conductor and composer of light opera in Vienna. He penned over 100 works for the stage, including incidental music, parodies, and operettas. Today, he is largely remembered for his sparkling overtures, the most famous being the Poet and Peasant. He had used this overture in two previous productions with limited success, but it finally stuck as part of the incidental music for Karl Elmar’s 1846 musical comedy Poet and Peasant. In the play, a lovelorn poet escapes to the country, where he wreaks havoc on the hearts of the peasant girls he meets. Although the overture was not written expressly for this play, it does capture its bucolic setting and dramatic arc. After a stately brass introduction, the poet’s heartbreak can be heard in the solo cello’s sweeping melody and gentle harp arpeggios. The mood shifts abruptly to music befitting an operatic imbroglio, which alternates with a charming waltz before hurtling to a raucous finish.

Edouard Lalo (1823–1892)
Symphonie espagnole, op. 21 (1874)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings, and solo violin
Performance time: 33 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: August 10, 1937; Ebba Sundstrom, conductor and Evelyn Levin Davis, violin

In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, France, stirred by a surge of nationalist feeling, was keen to promote the music of its own composers. Earlier in the century, opera had dominated the French musical landscape, whereas large-scale instrumental works such as symphonies were considered Germanic forms. That began to change in 1870 when the Société Nationale de Musique was founded to support French composers. In the aftermath of the war, opera was too expensive to produce, so attentions turned to instrumental music. One composer who was primed to take advantage of this shift was Édouard Lalo.

For 30 years, Lalo had led a quiet musical career in Paris as a teacher, composer, and string player. In 1855, he formed the Armingaud Quartet with the aim of introducing French audiences to the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. Lalo wrote some chamber music and two early symphonies, which he later destroyed. But when an opera score he submitted to a competition failed to win, he became discouraged and took a break from composing for several years. In the 1870s, the tides turned for Lalo, now in his 50s. The composer gained not only the support of the Société Nationale and some private individuals but also the ear of Spanish violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate. Renowned for his purity of tone and engaging stage presence, Sarasate was the dedicatee of numerous violin works throughout his career, including Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto No. 3 and Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Sarasate would premiere Lalo’s Violin Concerto in F in 1874 and his Symphonie espagnole the following year.

Not quite a symphony, not quite a violin concerto, Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole is a bit of an anomaly. Although the violin soloist is rarely absent from the score, there are no cadenzas, as would be expected in a concerto. What’s more, the work’s five movements place it neither within the scope of a three-movement concerto or a four-movement symphony. Nevertheless (and despite the misleading title), the work has earned a place in the repertoire alongside the best-loved violin concertos. Based on Spanish musical idioms, Symphonie espagnole is a character piece that reflects both Sarasate’s unique playing style and the music of his homeland. Premiering one month before Bizet’s Carmen, the piece helped spark a series of French works on Spanish themes over the ensuing decades. Symphonie espagnole even inspired Tchaikovsky to write his own Violin Concerto when violinist Iosif Kotek brought him the score in 1878, the two playing through it “to great delight.”

With the orchestra’s opening fanfare in the Allegro non troppo, Lalo introduces an idiomatically Spanish rhythmic pattern of alternating duples and triplets, which will come to define many of the work’s themes. The violin soloist soon enters, expanding upon the fanfare with a melody full of pathos. The following Scherzando employs a playful seguidilla rhythm, characterized by an accent on the second beat of a three-beat bar. The Intermezzo contains some of the most virtuosic and Spanish-flavored music of the whole work, though the movement was historically omitted from performance until the mid-20th century. There doesn’t seem to be a logical reason for its exclusion except perhaps to adhere to the expected four-movement structure of a symphony. After a melancholy Andante, the finale sparkles with a lively gigue rhythm and virtuosic fireworks.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
Romeo and Juliet (Romeo i Dzul’etta) Overture-Fantasy, TH 42c (1869)
Scored for: three flutes including piccolo, three oboes including English Horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
Performance time: 19 minutes
First Grant Park Orchestra performance: August 20, 1935; Ebba Sundstrom, conductor

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky had a special affinity for the works of William Shakespeare. An avid reader and theatergoer, Tchaikovsky would attend performances of Shakespeare plays and carry volumes of The Bard’s works wherever he traveled. So when fellow composer Mily Balakirev suggested Tchaikovsky write a piece based on the story of Romeo and Juliet, he leapt at the chance. Written in 1869 and revised in 1870 and 1880, the Romeo and Juliet Overture–Fantasy was the first of three symphonic poems Tchaikovsky wrote based on Shakespeare plays, followed by The Tempest in 1873 and Hamlet in 1888.

Tchaikovsky likely identified with the tragic story of the star-crossed lovers, as he was often drawn to stories about unrequited or ill-fated love. While composing the Romeo and Juliet Overture–Fantasy, he may have been romantically involved with one of his students at the Moscow Conservatory, Eduard Zak, then only 15 years old. Although we do not know much about Zak or their relationship, we do know that Zak committed suicide in 1873, three years after leaving the conservatory. Tchaikovsky was evidently still hung up on him years later, writing in 1887, “I have never loved anyone so strongly as him.” In light of Zak’s deliberate omission from memoirs and testimonials, “one begins to sense the presence of some complex and intense psychodrama almost entirely hidden from view,” Tchaikovsky scholar Alexander Poznansky writes. While it is not always productive to read pieces through the lens of the composer’s biography, one cannot help but hear immense personal passion and yearning in this piece.

Tchaikovsky does not try to depict the plot of Romeo and Juliet but rather distills the central drama of the five-act play into a 20-minute overture–fantasy using three main musical themes. The first theme is that of Friar Lawrence, heard as a rising melody in the woodwinds in the foreboding introduction. A go-between for Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence tries to stop the feud between the Montagues and Capulets by agreeing to wed the lovers, but good intentions throughout the play ultimately lead to their tragic deaths. The agitated feud theme eventually breaks through, its off-beat rhythm and cymbal crashes suggesting an epic sword fight. The English horn and muted violas are the first to introduce the famous love theme. Composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov said of the melody, “What ineffable beauty, what burning passion! It is one of the finest themes in all of Russian music!” The three motives continue to weave in and out throughout the development. Finally, the love theme gets its full, glorious expression in the recapitulation, but it is ultimately broken off yet again by the fighting music. We hear the love theme one last time in the elegiac coda, intoned above a quiet funeral march in the timpani, the pair’s love so strong that it transcends death.

—Katherine Buzard