The complete idiot's guide to classical music (28 page)

The minuet was pretty well stuck in ¾ time, given the dance origins of the movement, but in between the main section and its repetition came a new segment in a contrasting mood (called a Trio, because in the earliest days it was traditionally written for only three instruments). Beethoven, hardly the dainty minuet type, preferred the more vigorous scherzo (the Italian word means “joke”), which nonetheless stays pretty close to the form of Minuet and Trio, and normally stays in ¾ time as well. Later composers refused to be bound by even those loose rules, and would substitute other forms as their third movements, a waltz, for example, or a march.

The last movement occasionally returns to sonata form, but far more often takes the more buoyant form of the rondo (which we will explain eventually).

The romantics embellished symphonic form, the better to evoke specific moods, pictures or passions. Even the basically conservative Brahms, who pretty much followed the Classical style, added innovative links between and within movements; other composers let themes (or parts of themes) from the first movement swirl through the later portions of the symphony as well. As noted earlier, most of the great 20th century composers, the list including Sibelius, Ives, and Vaughan Williams, continued to pour their symphonic thoughts into some form of this traditional mold.

As late as the 17th century, the word
concerto
was sometimes applied to ensemble music for voices and instruments, but for all practical purposes, you can assume it means a composition for one or more soloists and orchestra. A favorite Baroque form was the concerto grosso (literally “grand concert”), where a group of instruments within the larger ensemble made up the solo contingent, but solo concertos for a single featured instrument were in use as well. Then, as in every succeeding musical period, the violin and keyboard were most frequently the solo instruments of choice, with the cello, trumpet, flute, and others rather distant runners-up.

 
Music Word
A
concerto
is an extended work for one or more solo instruments and orchestra, usually in three movements. Sometimes composers use that designation for purely orchestral pieces when various individual instruments have opportunities to stand apart from the larger symphonic ensemble.

As always, there are rule-breaking concertos that range from a single movement up to four or five, but the great majority settle happily for three: the first usually being the longest and most dramatic, the middle movement the slowest and most expressive, the third the shortest and jolliest. Soloist and orchestra normally share the important

themes, though the soloist is expected to demonstrate his or her virtuosity with strenuous passagework and other demanding flights of instrumental fancy. When the orchestra puts down its instruments and the soloist goes it alone (most often just before the end of the first movement, but sometimes before the conclusion of the second also), we’re in a
cadenza
, the showoff vehicle par excellence, where the featured player can demonstrate his or her brilliant technique without interference from the conductor or anybody else.

Liszt, Brahms, and other icons of the Romantic age, by giving greater emphasis to the symphonic elements in their scores, began converting the concerto from its original concept of solo with orchestra into something more aptly described as solo versus orchestra. Instruments other than the featured one would be given extended solo passages, sometimes entire sections of the orchestra rose up as if to challenge the supremacy of the soloist. Pieces like Franck’s
Symphonic Variations
and Prokofiev’s
Sinfonia Concertante
—both of which are actually concertos in disguise, respectively for piano and cello—indicate another way in which concertos have gravitated toward a more equal division of musical labors.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Brahms’ D Minor Piano Concerto so startled audiences that it was a total flop at its first couple of performances. “At its conclusion,” the composer wrote to his friend Joachim, “three pairs of hands were brought together very slowly in applause, whereupon a perfect storm of hissing from all sides forbade any such further demonstration.” Nearly 40 years later, a London critic still found the piece hard to take, conceding only that it was “distinctly less abominable than Brahms’ other one” (the B-flat Piano Concerto).

Once past the baroque concerto grosso, the concerto normally pits a single soloist against the orchestral horde. Many composers, though, possibly wanting to even the odds a bit, have put two or three virtuosos into the solo spotlight. Bach composed a Concerto for Two Violins, Mozart one for Flute and Harp; Mendelssohn wrote one (in fact two) Concertos for Two Pianos, as did Poulenc, Milhaud, and Walter Piston in our own century. Brahms’ radiant Double Concerto pairs violin and cello; the Beethoven Triple Concerto brings together violin, cello, and piano; and Schumann wrote a piece for four horns and orchestra. Other intriguing combinations worth searching out are the Shostakovich Piano Concerto no. 1, with its featured role for solo trumpet, and Samuel Barber’s
Capricorn Concerto
for flute, oboe, trumpet, and strings.

Here are some of the forms you’ll likely to run into in sonatas or symphonies.

Minuetto is how you say minuet in Italian, but since the dance is of French origin, we might as well stick with the word as we know it in the good old USA. It’s a dance in modern triple meter that gained favor at the court of Louis XIV, and until the late-18th century was popular with most of the European aristocracy. Lully was famous for introducing minuets into his operas and ballets, and the dance soon became a staple of Baroque suites. The Italian minuet (sorry, minuetto), was often faster than its French counterpart. Interestingly, even as so many other of the old dance forms faded, the minuet not only survived but was transformed by Haydn and Mozart into an integral part of the classical symphony.

 
Music Word
Minuet
is a dance in triple time that graduated from its rustic French beginnings to become a fashionable and highly popular dance at most 18th century European courts. Its form is A-A-B-A: a first section, which is repeated; a contrasting section (the Trio), and a return to the original.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Louis XIV not only liked ballets, he used to dance in them, wearing pink tights, silk stockings, high heels, and big hats with ostrich plumes. That’s our kind of king.

As we mentioned earlier, scherzo means “joke” in Italian, and the term came into use in the early-17th century to describe light madrigals. Later it was applied to movements that were faster or more robust than the delicate minuet, and Beethoven firmly established the scherzo as the preferred alternate in symphonies, sonatas, and chamber music. Eventually composers began writing scherzos as independent pieces, famous examples including Chopin’s four piano works of that title, and Paul Dukas’
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
(remember Mickey Mouse’s battle with the water buckets in
Fantasia
?), which is officially listed as a symphonic scherzo.

Variety is the spice of life, they say, and Nicolas Slonimsky dubbed variations “the sweet adornments of melody.” In its simplest form, a theme is stated, then embellished with added figurations or otherwise altered in shape, rhythm, or texture. Mozart was a master of the form, employing it in concertos,
divertimentos
,
serenades
, and sometimes in his string quartets and piano sonatas. Beethoven was also an inveterate variation man (his output in the form including several sets based on Mozart themes), and composers of each succeeding generation have swiped everything from folk tunes to opera arias as grist for their own musical mills.

 
Music Words
A
divertimento
(from the Italian for “amusement”) refers to a not overly serious work, usually cast in a number of short movements, and intended for performance by a smallish instrumental ensemble.

The term
serenade
derives from “Sera,” the Italian word for evening, and Serenata, which is an evening song. Think of a lovelorn swain proclaiming his eternal devotion beneath his fair maiden’s window. Later the word came to signify any sort of light entertainment music, like the Divertimento, usually scored for a small instrumental ensemble, but often specifically intended for open-air performance.