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Manfred Symphony
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The Manfred Symphony in B minor, Op. 58 is a programmatic symphony composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between May and September 1885. It is based on the poem Manfred written by Lord Byron in 1817. It is the only one of Tchaikovsky's symphonies he completed which is not numbered (the Symphony in E flat is a conjectural work left unfinished by the composer) and was written between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies.
Lento lugubre
- Tchaikovsky's program for this movement reads, "Manfred wanders in the Alps, tormented by fateful pangs of doubt, rent by remorse and despair his soul the victim of nameless suffering." The musical embodiment is presented in five extensive musical slabs spaced out by four silences.
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Encyclopedia
The Manfred Symphony in B minor, Op. 58 is a programmatic symphony composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between May and September 1885. It is based on the poem Manfred written by Lord Byron in 1817. It is the only one of Tchaikovsky's symphonies he completed which is not numbered (the Symphony in E flat is a conjectural work left unfinished by the composer) and was written between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies.
Form
- Lento lugubre
- Tchaikovsky's program for this movement reads, "Manfred wanders in the Alps, tormented by fateful pangs of doubt, rent by remorse and despair his soul the victim of nameless suffering." The musical embodiment is presented in five extensive musical slabs spaced out by four silences. A brooding first theme, briefly unharmonized, builds to music both spacious and monolithic. A second theme leads to a second musical slab, this time pushing forward with the loudest climax Tchaikovsky ever wrote. The music in the third slab seems calmer, while the fourth slab marks the appearance of Astarte. The fifth slab culminates in a frantic climax and a series of abrupt, final chords.
- Vivace con spirito
- Tchaikovsky headed this section, "The Alpine Fairy appears before Manfred in a rainbow." His efforts in exploring fresh possibilities in scoring allowed him to present his music with new colors and more refined contrasts. In this scherzo, it seems as though the orchestration creates the music, as though Tchaikovsky has thought directly in colors and textures, making these the primary focus. Put simply, there is no tune and little definition of any harmonic base, creating a world alluring, fragile and magical. The point becomes clear when an actual tune enters the central section of the movement.
- Andante con moto
- This
pastorale opens with a siciliana, then the three-note call of a hunter. The opening theme returns. We hear a brief and lively peasant dance, then an agitated outburst, before the opening theme returns. The opening pastoral theme eventually returns more spaciously and in a fuller, more decorative scoring. The hunter sounds his horn; the music fades.
Allegro con fuoco
- Many critics consider the finale to be fatally flawed, but the problem lies less with music than with the program: "Arimanes' underground palace. Manfred appears in the middle of a bacchanal. Evocation of Astarte's ghost. She predicts an end to his earthly sufferings. Death of Manfred." Up to this point Tchaikovsky has done well at reconciling the extra-musical requirements for each movement with the music itself. Now, however, the program takes over, beginning with a fugue, which is by its nature academic and undramatic, to depict the horde's discovery of Manfred within their midst. The result, though in many ways becoming a condensed recapitulation of the latter half of the first movement, becomes a fragmented movement with musical disruption and non-sequiturs, ending with the Germanic chorale depicting Manfred's death scene.
Orchestration
Woodwinds
- 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo)
- 2 oboes,
- cor anglais
- 2 clarinets in A, B-flat
- bass clarinet
- 3 bassoons
Brass
- 4 horns
- 2 cornets
- 2 trumpets
- 2 tenor trombones
- bass trombone
- tuba
Percussion
- timpani
- bass drum
- cymbals
- tam-tam
- triangle
- tambourine
- bells
Keyboard
- organ, featured in the climactic coda of the finale.
Strings
- violins
- violas
- cellos
- double basses
- 2 harps
Overview
Berlioz
As an inspiration for many Russian composers, Hector Berlioz played a part in the origins of Manfred. During his second and final trip to Russia in the winter of 1867-8, Berlioz conducted his program symphony Harold en Italie. The work caused considerable stir. Its subject was very much to the tastes of its audiences, whose enthusiasm for the works of Lord Byron had not exhausted itself as it had begun to do in Europe. Berlioz's use of a four-movement structure for writing program music intrigued many Russian musicians. One immediate consequence was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's four movement suite Antar, written in 1868.
At roughly the same time Rimsky-Korsakov was writing Antar, critic Vladimir Stasov was writing a scenario for a sequel to Harold, this time based on Byron's Manfred:
1st movement. Manfred wanders in the Alpine mountains. His life is shattered, but he is obsessed with life's unanswerable questions. In life nothing remains for him except memories. Images of his ideal Astarte permeate his thoughts, and he vainly calls to her. Only the echo from the cliffs repeats her name. Memories and thoughts bum and gnaw at him. He seeks and begs for oblivion, which no-one can give him.
2nd movement. A mood quite different from the first - the programme: The life of Alpine hunters, full of simplicity, good nature and a patriarchal character. Adagio pastorale (A major). Manfred clashes with this, providing a sharp contrast.
3rd movement. The Alpine fairy appears to Manfred as a rainbow from the spray of a waterfall.
4th movement A wild. unbridled Allegro, in the subterranean halls of the infernal Arimanes (Hell), where Manfred arrives, longing to be reunited with Astarte - a contrast to this infernal orgy will be the summons and appearance of Astarte. Although there the idea was fleeting, like a memory, and was immediately engulfed by Manfred’s suffering, yet here this same idea should appear in a complete and fully-realized form. The music should be simple, transparent, fresh and innocent). Eventually, a return to the Pandemonium, then sunset and the death of Manfred.
Stasov sent the program to nationalist composer Mily Balakirev. Balakirev did not feel attracted to the idea himself, so he forwarded the program to Berlioz, only hinting it was not entirely his own. Berlioz declined, claiming old age and ill health. he returned the program to Balakirev, and there it had remained.
Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky's entrance into this story was strictly by circumstance. He finished his final revision of Romeo and Juliet in 1880. He and Balakirev had worked tirelessly together on the piece in its previous incarnations a decade earlier. Moreover, Romeo was dedicated to Balakirev. Since Balakirev had essentially dropped away from the music scene in the intervening time, Tchaikovsky asked Bessel to send a copy of the printed score to Balakirev, thinking the publisher would have a current address.
A year later a letter arrived from Balakirev, thanking Tchaikovsky profusely for the score. In the same letter, Balakirev suggested another project—"the programme for another symphony which you would handle wonderfully well." He presented Stasov's detailed plan, explaining it was not in his character to engage in such composition. As he explained in a letter to Tchaikovsky in October 9, 1882, "this magnificent subject is unsuitable, it doesn't harmonise with my inner frame of mind". When Tchaikovsky showed polite interest, Balakirev sent a copy of Stasov's program, which he had amended with suggested key signatures for each movement and representative works which Tchaikovsky had already written to give some idea of what Balalirev had in mind. Balakirev also gave warning to avoid "vulgarities in the manner of German fanfares and Jägermusik," plus instructions about the layout of the flute and percussion parts.
Tchaikovsky also passed on the project at first. He claimed the subject left him cold and seemed too close to Berlioz's work for him to manage anything but an imitation of that composer's work; such a piece, he claimed, would lack both inspiration and originality. Tchaikovsky's reasoning did not stop Balakirev from persisting. "You must, of course, make an effort," Balakirev exhorted, "take a more self-critical approach, don't hurry things." His importunity finally changed Tchaikovsky's mind—after two years of effort. So did Tchaikovsky's re-reading Manfred for himself while tending to his friend Iosef Kotek in Davos, Switzerland, nestled in the same Alps in which the poem was set. Once he returned home, Tchaikovsky revised the draft Balakirev had made from Stasov's programme and began sketching the first movement.
Tchaikovsky may have found a subject in Manfred for which he could comfortably compose. However, there was a difference between placing a personal program into a symphony and writing such a work to a literary program. He wrote his friend and former student Sergei Taneyev, "Composing a program symphony, I have the sensation of being a charlatan and cheating the public; I am paying them not hard cash but rubbishy bits of paper money." However, he later wrote to Emilia Pavlovskaya, "The symphony has turned out to be huge, serious, difficult, absorbing all my time, sometimes to utter exhaustion; but an inner voice tells me that my labor is not in vain and that this work will perhaps be the best of my symphonic works."
Instead of following Balakirev's instructions slavishly, Tchaikovsky wrote it in his own style. Initially, he considered it to be one of his best compositions, but wanted a few years later to destroy the score, though that intention was never carried out.
The Manfred Symphony was first performed in Moscow on March 1886, with Max Erdmannsdörfer as conductor. It is dedicated to Balakirev.
Analysis
Several features make Manfred unique among Tchaikovsky's works. It is the only programmatic work he wrote in more than one movement. The first two movements do not recapitulate their middle sections. The entire work is not only extremely long, playing up to and sometimes over an hour, but it is designed with the utmost spaciousness in mind. There is nothing else in Tchaikovsky's works that captures the long-breathed deliberation of the third movement or the practically verbatim recapitulation of the widely variegated opening section of the second movement following the equally huge middle section. At least one critic has suggested that, in its heroic but perfectly judged dimensions, Manfred resembles Richard Strauss's later tone poem Ein Heldenleben.
Of all Tchaikovsky's major neglected works, Manfred may be the one which least deserves this fate. While Tchaikovsky had his doubts about program music, he was actually better able to handle large forms when there was the impulse of an emotional idea behind the music. He apparently felt such an impulse—if not from Byron's poem, then from the program Balakirev gave him—and that impulse brought forth a work of great originality and power. While he did not follow Berlioz in how he might have handled the program, Tchaikovsky did make use of an idée fixe recurring in all four movements. He also followed a Berliozian design of a lengthy, reflective, melancholy opening movement, two colorful interludes as inner movements, and a finale in which Berlioz' Brigands' Orgy becomes (without any hint from the poem) a bacchanal.
Here again is the description of the first movement from the program:
Manfred wanders in the Alpine mountains. His life is shattered, but he is obsessed with life's unanswerable questions. In life nothing remains for him except memories. Images of his ideal Astarte permeate his thoughts, and he vainly calls to her. Only the echo from the cliffs repeats her name. Memories and thoughts bum and gnaw at him. He seeks and begs for oblivion, which no-one can give him.
It is not hard to see how these carefully selected elements might appeal to Tchaikovsky. Free from having to reconcile the first movement to sonata form, Tchaikovsky constructs his own form which succeeds well as an expression of the program. A massive opening motive associated with Manfred himself expresses both the strength and gloom of his character. This motive returns at crucial parts to identify Manfred's part in the action. Beneath this theme is a musical structure that, while not conforming to the traditional recapitulation of themes in sonata form, succeeds in moving forward without losing unity or degenerating into a series of episodes. It is a musical portrait of the guilty, doomed sensibility, drawn strongly as Berlioz' Harold. This was perhaps the aspect of Byron which appealed most vividly to Russians; it also may have touched closely on Tchaikovsky's own situation.
The two inner movements work as effective structural contrasts to the opening drama. The waterfall in the second movement gives Tchaikovsky the opportunity for one of his longest and most beautifully worked out scherzos, scored with a delicacy that Berlioz might have admired; Tchaikovsky's Alpine experiences might have come in handy here. For the third movement pastorale, Balakirev had hoped for a Russian version of the corresponding movement from the Symphony Fantastique. Tchaikovsky's version is more conventional, with two simple themes—one graceful, the other more roughly rustic. It forms in its static quality an idealized retreat before the turmoil of the finale. The finale reflects Harold en Italie in the exuberance of the revelling. Tchaikovsky manages to add a fugue, a return of Astarte and a death scene at the end.'
Nevertheless, the finale is also considered by some as the weakest part of Manfred, not because of the music itself but of the programme. Up to this point Tchaikovsky had very successfully reconciled extramusical specifications with musical structure. Now the program takes over, resulting in a fragmented movement with musical disruption and non sequiturs. The fatal flaw, according to Tchaikovsky scholar David Brown, is the fugue. The composer wrote it to convey the Arimane hoarde's reaction to Manfred's appearance amongst them. However, Brown argues, a fugue is by nature undramatic in both its fixation on one thematic idea and its measured progress; therefore, it cannot help but sound stodgy, resulting in a misstep from which the music never fully recovers. Nevertheless, others have stated, while the finale may have its faults, there is still much about the music that is quite good.
Key signatures
Below are the key signatures Balakirev initially envisioned for Manfred, what he later suggested and what Tchaikovsky eventually used in the symphony:
- Balakirev (1882)
- (I) F sharp minor
- (second subject in D major)
- (II) A major (slow movement)
- (III) D major (scherzo)
- (IV) F sharp minor
- (appearance of Astarte in D flat)
- Balakirev (1884)
- (I) B flat minor
- (second subject in D major)
- (II) G flat major (slow movement)
- (III) D major (scherzo)
- (IV) B flat minor
- (appearance of Astarte in D flat);
- coda—B flat major
- Tchaikovsky (1885)
- (I) Tonally ambiguous (only
- establishing B minor more than
- halfway through the movement)
- (second subject in B major)
- (II) B minor, D major,
- B minor (scherzo)
- (III) G major (slow movement)
- (IV) B minor (appearance
- of Astarte in D flat);
- coda in B major.
Consensus
Some regard Manfred as one of Tchaikovsky's most brilliant and inspired works; conductor Arturo Toscanini considered it the composer's greatest composition. (This did not stop him from making changes in the score when he performed and recorded it, including a number of cuts). However, others despise it. According to music critic David Hurwitz, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein referred to it as "trash" and never recorded it.
Some critics have commented that, for all Tchaikovsky's distrust of program music and Manfreds kinship to a Berlioz work he did not wish to repeat, the symphony proves its composer's capacity to infuse another composer's example with his own personality, provided the emotional nature of the work found a response in him. These critics have called Manfred one of the great program symphonies of the 19th century.
Recordings
The symphony has been recorded many times, with recordings made by major orchestras and conductors. Conductors who have recorded the work include Lorin Maazel, Andre Previn, Eugene Ormandy, Yuri Temirkanov, Evgeny Svetlanov, Riccardo Muti, Igor Markevitch, Andrew Litton, Mikhail Pletnev, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Riccardo Chailly, Mariss Jansons, and others. Manfred is less frequently performed in concert. This is due to its length, unfamiliarity, and its requirement for a large orchestra, including obbligato organ. It is also thought to be very difficult to play well.
Bibliography
- Brown, David, Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007). ISBN 0-571-23194-2.
- Holden, Anthony, Tchaikovsky: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1995). ISBN 0-679-42006-1.
- Warrack, John, Tchaikovsky (New York: Charles Scribner's Sonss, 1973). ISBN 684-13558-2.
- Wood, Ralph W., ed. Gerald Abraham, "Miscellaneous Orchestral Works," Music of Tchaikovsky (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1946). ISBN n/a.
External links
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- (BBC Radio, Manfred Symphony performed by BBC Philharmonic; Includes brief review of the work.)
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