At least since the medieval period, folk music has been an important influence on—and ingredient in—what we’ve come to call “classical music.” But it has played different roles at different historical periods. You can certainly find some references to folk music in Mozart and especially Haydn, but it’s usually a matter of adding a bit of local color to the work. Folk music became more prominent starting in the Romantic period—especially as the nineteenth century wore on—when it was caught up in politics (including nation-building) and cultural identity.

Even here, though, ...

At least since the medieval period, folk music has been an important influence on—and ingredient in—what we’ve come to call “classical music.” But it has played different roles at different historical periods. You can certainly find some references to folk music in Mozart and especially Haydn, but it’s usually a matter of adding a bit of local color to the work. Folk music became more prominent starting in the Romantic period—especially as the nineteenth century wore on—when it was caught up in politics (including nation-building) and cultural identity.

Even here, though, it was incorporated in several different ways. One distinction is especially important. On the one hand, we have settings or quotations of pre-existing material (songs, dances) with new harmonies, colors, and elaborations: Vaughan Williams’s orchestral version of “Greensleeves,” for instance, or Tchaikovsky’s quotation of “The Marseillaise” in the 1812 Overture. On the other hand, we have inventions of folk-sounding material. The main theme of the slow movement of the “New World” Symphony, composed entirely by Dvořák, is often mistaken for a pre-existing folk song. (It was, in fact, later turned into the song “Goin’ Home” by one of Dvořák’s pupils.)

This concert of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music from Eastern Europe—what our Bulgarian-born conductor Stilian Kirov is offering as “a little bouquet from home”—represents both types of folk influence. At the same time, it offers us a program that “is very close to the human soul in so many different ways, whether it be a nostalgic, beautiful melody, or a fun, energetic dance.” Stilian also hopes you’ll feel the “ritual” and “mystical” aspects of Eastern European folk music: “The music is tightly related to the spiritual element of chanting, meditation, dancing together, the rhythms that repeat again and again that create this loop of immersiveness.”

The folk flavor of the Czech Suite (1879) by Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) had at least a double motivation. First, there was an economic factor. Music with an ethnic flavor was popular with listeners, not only in the concert hall but also at home; the market for four-hand piano music was especially profitable. Dvořák’s mentor Brahms had a hit on his hands when he published his first set of Hungarian Dances in 1869 (it was followed by a sequel in 1880); and he was able to use his influence to get his publisher Simrock to commission a similar set from Dvořák in 1878, a set that had a similar success. The Czech Suite came in its wake a year later.

But there was a second reason for Dvořák’s mining of folk music: He was very much a nationalist composer in the sense that he saw folk music—of whatever country a composer happened to inhabit—as an important source of musical vitality and character. (He brought that philosophy to the United States when he lived here briefly at the end of the century, encouraging American composers to draw on the spirit of African-American and Native American music to create their own artistic culture, free from European domination).

Oddly, despite his commitment to Czech folk music, Dvořák wrote the tunes for the Czech Suite (and the Slavonic Dances, for that matter) himself, relying not on pre-existing music but rather on his distillation of the spirit of Czech folk music. (In contrast, Brahms—who had no ethnic, philosophical, or political commitment to advancing Hungarian music—used pre-existing tunes for most of his Hungarian Dances). But Dvořák did catch that Czech spirit well, just as he was able to catch the spirit of America in his “New World” Symphony.

The Czech Suite has five movements. Two of them—the Prelude and the Romance—are pictorial evocations of the Czech landscape (you may hear bird calls in the Prelude) and spirit. The remaining three are specific dances (a polka, a sousedská, and a furiant to close) of his own devising, incorporating the gestures of Czech folk music. This is, in other words, idealized folk music with polish—more “authentic” than the Middle Eastern music we heard in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade at our last concert, but still well-dressed and sporting company manners.

The two works by Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) are a bit rougher than Dvořák’s (although not as rough as some of Bartók’s other music could be). Certainly, as Stilian puts it, they reveal less “influence from Western European music.” Indeed, while both men respected the great Austro-German composers who dominated the concert halls (Bartók, in fact, made piano recordings of Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, and Brahms, among others), as composers they wanted to escape from the strictures of that tradition—and their interest in Eastern European folk music helped them do that. That interest was not casual. Both were, in fact, ethnomusicologists, among the pioneers of rigorous phonograph-based field study. These works are the result of serious research.

Bartók’s brief set of Romanian Folk Dances, one of his most popular works, was originally composed for piano in 1915 and arranged for orchestra in 1917. (There are many other versions as well, most notably one for violin and piano, arranged by his good friend and chamber-music partner, Zoltán Székely). Mostly fast and upbeat in spirit, these are settings of dances that Bartók himself collected, keeping their original melodies intact, but providing his own harmonic support, instrumental coloring (except for the final pair—which form a single movement in the piano original—each has a slightly different orchestration), and a certain amount of elaboration.

Kodály’s Dances of Marosszék also began as a piano piece. In fact, says Stilian, “it’s a very special piece to me, because when I was living in France, I played it on the piano for my graduation piece.” The work was later orchestrated at the request of Arturo Toscanini for the New York Philharmonic and premiered in 1930. Like the Bartók, it is based on pre-existing tunes, but they’re earlier in origin (in the preface to the score, Kodály contrasts these tunes “from a former epoch” with the more urban music Brahms set in his Hungarian Dances.) More specifically, says Stilian, “the piece was inspired by old Transylvanian (Erdély) folk music of the region around Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mure? (which today is in Romania), particularly melodies played on the shepherd’s flute or violin.”

Whereas Bartók keeps his chosen dances distinct, Kodály combines them, as Stilian notes, into a “single continuous movement.” More specifically, it’s a modified rondo, where a mournful main theme (varied on each return) weaves around the three following dances, before a brilliant finale—a device that reminds Stilian of the Promenade that holds Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition together. On the whole, it’s a somewhat slower and darker piece than the Bartók is, but it has much the same spirit.

We close with the Concert Românesc by György Sándor Ligeti (1923–2006). Ligeti led a troubled and peripatetic life. He’s generally described as a “Hungarian” composer, although the region where he was born was part of Romania at the time. A member of a Jewish family, he lost his father and brother in the Holocaust and was himself sent to a forced labor camp. Even after the war, living in Hungary behind the Iron Curtain, he suffered both from anti-Semitism and from the artistic strictures imposed by the Soviets, until he emigrated to Vienna in 1956 after the Hungarian Uprising. Yet through it all, he maintained both his integrity and his imagination—as well as a certain rebellious spirit that was suspicious of all musical dogmas, including the conservative dogmas of the Soviet authorities and the more radical serial dogmas in the post-war West.

Even if you think you don’t know his music, you may well have heard it. More than a half hour of it was used, to the composer’s surprise, by Stanley Kubrick in the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey. His fame has only grown since then. His Études, for instance, are widely regarded as the most significant since Debussy’s and have been taken up by such luminaries as Yuja Wang and Jeremy Denk.

For all that later acclaim as an innovator, however, Concert Românesc shows him at an early stage of development. He had, in fact, done a fair amount of folkloric study himself, which shows up clearly in this score. For some reason, it ran afoul of the authorities at the time, but it’s an approachable work very much in the line of Bartók and Kodály (who was in fact one of his teachers).

The Ligeti makes an especially good closer to the concert for three reasons. First, it combines the treatment of folk melodies found in the Bartók and Kodály with that found in Dvořák, intermingling real folk melodies with others drawn from Ligeti’s imagination. Second, the title suggests that it’s a concerto—and although there’s no dominant soloist, you can sense a similarity to the Concertos for Orchestra by Bartók and Kodály. Every piece on the program, as you’ll see, gives individual players solo turns; but this one offers the greatest opportunities for display. Finally, in purely sonic terms, it’s the splashiest piece on the program. The ending, with its striking dynamics, its unusual colors, and its antiphonal effects, may leave you speechless. Says Stilian: “In a way, Concert Românesc already hints that this composer is going to be an innovator, showing the teeth of the little monster that he will evolve into being.”

Peter J. Rabinowitz
Have any comments or questions? Please write to me at prabinowitz@SyracuseOrchestra.org