Perhaps we don’t make the point often enough, but the very experience in which we are collectively engaged this evening has only existed for a short time relative to human civilization. In other words, gathering to listen to music in a concert setting would not have been a familiar experience to most of humanity prior to (say) the early 1800s. Certainly we do have audiences attending concerts in the 1700s, but even then the norms of behavior were different, and audiences were much more concerned with social interactions than with what transpired on the “stage.” Furthermore, we would do well to note that, prior to the 19th century, most music was created for one of two situations: either it was service music for court or chapel, or it emerged as accompaniment to dance. We have had numerous chances to indulge in the former, so tonight we celebrate the essential, deep connection between music and movement.

The name of Strauss is today synonymous with Viennese dance music. And though there are many such dances and also many such Strausses, the name usually summons up a waltz written by Johann Strauss, Jr. (1825-99), the so-called “Waltz King.” Johann’s father was also an esteemed composer and band leader, which opened up numerous opportunities to his talented son. Eventually Johann Jr. would eclipse the fame of his father, merge two of the most important Austrian dance orchestras, and ascend to the position of music director for the royal galas. In 1873 Strauss produced the stand-alone waltz Viennese Blood (Wiener Blut), which later became the center of a composite stage work just after he died. Nearing his 50th birthday and valorized across Europe, Strauss was at the peak of his profession when composing Viennese Blood. He was commissioned to write a celebratory waltz for the royal wedding between the Emperor’s daughter and the Prince of Bavaria. As such, a certain amount of grandeur was requisite and Strauss obliged with a richly orchestrated piece.

Tonight’s performance offers a world premiere arrangement completed in 2025 by Zachary Wadsworth. Wadsworth comments that, even prior to him, “Many hands have touched this music. A generation after Wiener Blut appeared, Adolf Müller Jr. created a three-act operetta of the same title and adding lyrics by the playwriting team Victor Léon and Leo Stein. “These lyrics added depth and nationalist fervor to the original music’s lusty evocation of Austrian spirit,” says Wadsworth. “I have adapted the last movement of Müller’s operetta to be performed by a chamber ensemble of strings, harp, and baritone. Though my arrangement lacks some of the orchestrational might of Strauss’s original (and playfully transplants the middle section’s sopranistic romantic longing to the voice of a baritone), I hope it maintains the dancing spirit of this most Austrian of selections.”

Jacob Van Eyck (ca. 1590-1657) was a Dutch musician and inventor. Jacob was born blind to a wealthy family in The Hague. The family’s prosperity no doubt allowed Van Eyck to enjoy some measure of a normal life despite his lack of sight. Jacob was highly regarded for his developments surrounding the carillon. He became bell master in Utrecht during his 30s and made important advances in the physical understanding of sound, work admired even by the famous mathematician René Descartes. In the context of tonight’s concert, however, it is Van Eyck’s massive collection of recorder music that merits our attention. In the 1640s he published two collections entitled Der Fluyten Lust-hof or The Flute’s Pleasure Garden. Containing nearly 150 pieces, Der Fluyten Lust-hof remains the largest set of works for any solo wind instrument. Many of the contents are virtuoso recorder arrangements of existing music: lute songs, sacred hymns, and dance tunes.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) grew up in Brooklyn as the second son of Jewish/Ukrainian immigrants. Beyond rudimentary music instruction as a young boy, his first taste of live music-making came in his late teens when he took work as a “song plugger” around Broadway. This quickly spilled over into creating original songs and full-length shows and a more serious interest in learning composition. At the time, ambitious American composers sought guidance from prominent Europeans. Gershwin was no exception, and he spent a short time in Paris in the mid-1920s petitioning Maurice Ravel and Nadia Boulanger to take him on. Both declined, for they recognized that severe classical instruction would impede Gershwin’s mature command of American song and jazz.  Indeed, he had already composed the successful Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and put pen to paper for An American in Paris while he was living out that description himself.

Among Gershwin’s solo compositions, none are better known than his Three Preludes for piano. Originally intended to be part of a much larger set, these pieces were first played publicly by the composer in 1926 at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. Prelude No. 2 in C-sharp minor sings out the epitome of dolorous longing. Immediately recognizable in the sway of its opening chords, this prelude projects a definite vocal inspiration and reminds one of melodies from Porgy and Bess. By contrast, Prelude No. 3 in E-flat launches forth in crescendoing chords that pause and linger wonderfully on the flat-6th scale step. Both use a conventional ternary shape, yet they could hardly differ more in character. Tonight’s performance features an arrangement by violinist Fritz Kreisler for clarinet and piano.

In contrast to all the dance music heard so far – from Austrian waltzes to Renaissance wind tunes to upbeat jazzy riffs – Eric Guinivan’s Ritual Dances summon forth a more primitive world. Associate professor of composition at James Madison University, Guinivan is also a professional percussionist, which explains the prominent role percussion plays in many of his works. The Festival has been fortunate to feature Guinivan as both composer and performer in past seasons, and 2025 is no exception. Tonight we hear the first of the five-movement “musical ceremony” called Ritual Dances, composed in 2009 and scored for percussion quartet. The Processional accompanies the entrance of the dancers and features a moderate, march-like tempo with elaborate, decorated musical fanfares.

During the entire lifespan of Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), social dances were a ubiquitous feature of life in cities and courts. Several of these dances – the mazurka and the polonaise, for example – were native to Chopin’s Polish homeland. Despite traveling across Europe and spending half of his life in Paris, Chopin never lost touch with the musical traits of these Polish dances. It is true that most instrumental dances were, by that time, highly stylized and not intended for actual dancing. Still, enough of the defining rhythms, patterns, and gestures remain for the dance to exert something of its expressive hold on the music itself. Many composers have written polonaises, from Bach and Beethoven to John Philip Sousa, but Chopin’s are certainly the most familiar.

Consider his Polonaise-Fantasie, composed and published in 1846. As the title implies, this piece synthesizes two musical genres. On the one hand, Chopin builds his main themes on foundations of the polonaise, a traditional dance noted for its signature rhythm (note the rapid 16th notes that appear in the first of the dance’s basic three beats). On the other hand, the overall form pays homage to the free succession of ideas inherent in the Fantasie. During the introduction, Chopin seems to simply revel in sound. He moves chromatically through a wide compass of keys, each involving deceptive cadences and languorous rising arpeggios, before landing on the home dominant for the start of the polonaise proper. It must be admitted that Chopin uses the polonaise dance element as just a starting point from which to spin a series of ever increasing episodes. In other words, where one could conceivably dance to a few of Chopin’s mazurkas or waltzes, this Polonaise-Fantasie is so abstract – and so spectacularly departs from the simple dance rhythms – as to make it only suitable as a dazzling recital piece.

If his reputation for abstract, atonal music precedes him, then Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) would not be a name readily expected to appear on a program of dance music. Yet for all his modernity, Schoenberg knew the history of tonal music deeply. Thus when considering his Suite Op. 29 for clarinets, strings, and piano, we should not be surprised that Schoenberg includes conventional dance movements, such as a Gigue. That does not mean our ears will be accustomed to this music. More than any other pieces tonight, it is probably Schoenberg’s Tanzschritte (“Dance Steps”), the second movement of his Suite, that requires some elaboration.

By the time the Suite was finished in 1926, Schoenberg had already developed his twelve-tone method, an approach that tried to eviscerate the feeling of a tonal center. Instead, he based music on the free collection of twelve unique pitches in the Western musical octave. In rigorous twelve-tone music, themes utilize each and every one of the twelve pitches before repeating any. Schoenberg and others eventually pressed this line of creative thinking further, such that one utilized a series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, or intervals in a highly-regulated order before any are repeated. This method, known as “serialism,” works as the germinating force in the Suite. In the second movement, what sound at first like chaotic interactions across all seven instruments and across the full pitch spectrum, are in fact precisely organized expressions of Schoenberg’s serial technique.

Still ranked as one of the greatest Broadway and Hollywood successes, My Fair Lady appeared on stage in 1956 and on screen in 1964. The script is based on G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion, relating the romantic comedy between a poor Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, who receives training in “proper” English grammar and etiquette from Prof. Henry Higgins. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the lyrics in conjunction with composer Frederick Loewe (1901-1988), an Austro-German emigré living in the U.S. during WWII. The pair had already achieved critical success with Brigadoon (1947) and Paint Your Wagon (1951), and would continue with both Gigi (1958) and finally Camelot (1960) before health and professional tensions forced them apart. My Fair Lady received all manner of awards, including six Tonys and eight Oscars. In addition, many individual songs have gone on to have lives of their own, none more so than the ebullient number performed by Eliza at the climax of the opening act. Audiences will already be sensing that the animosity between Eliza and Henry barely masks their growing love affair.  “I Could Have Danced All Night” follows immediately after the pair share a harmless dance as Eliza finally achieves some measure of progress under Henry’s tutelage. Once again we are treated to a new arrangement by Zachary Wadsworth.  “Every crisp chord and rhythm,” says Wadsworth, “paints a picture of fluttering excitement and youthful love.  In my arrangement, I have tried to maintain that optimistic, restless energy.”

INTERMISSION

From composer Zachary Wadsworth:

When Johannes Brahms wrote his two volumes of Liebesliederwalzer (Love-Song Waltzes), he selected his texts from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s Polydora, a 600-page tome containing German translations of poetry from all over the world. The central message of Daumer’s hefty volume is that basic human emotions – love, joy, sorrow, and pain, to name four – transcend language and culture. And Brahms’s Liebesliederwalzer are notable for their embrace of love-songs from all around the world. Three years after Brahms died, the German poet Elisar von Kupffer was working on his own compilation of poetry from around the world. But his goal was a different one: to find as many examples as he could of a new kind of love-song, about forbidden love between two people of the same gender. The revolutionary result was his Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (1900). This is the tome from which I have chosen to write a series of new love-waltzes, entitled Walzer einer neuen Liebe (Waltzes of a new love). These love songs sometimes speak in codes, jokes, and obfuscations, but the central message is clear: love is love, and we intend to sing about it.

Tonight’s program closes with two composers who were very familiar with dance. Both Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) and Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) composed many dance pieces that have become staples of the symphonic literature. In one sense, this is not surprising because a dance movement had become standard in the four-movement symphony form by 1800. Thus, for instance, even had Dvořák not written his beloved Slavonic Dances, he still would have passed down a rich legacy of dance movements from his nine symphonies. Most listeners know the famous “New World” Symphony No. 9, but Dvořák’s earlier symphonies certainly reward deeper exposure.

The delightful Symphony No. 8 in G Major (1889) was written quickly and reveals the composer in an optimistic frame of mind. He had recently been elected to a prestigious academy in Bohemia, and the work as a whole breathes deeply in the air of his native land. The third movement carries the formal designation of a Scherzo and Trio, though the main theme clearly invokes a waltz. Set in G minor, the music portrays a tinge of melancholy as it undulates through the rising and falling strings. Dvořák is at his best during moments that combine multiple ideas, as when the theme moves to the woodwinds while the strings sweep gradually higher in rippling cascades of sound. The central Trio section in G major offers a more folksy appeal, though rumbling timpani add a measure of rhythmic dissonance. After a reprise of section A, Dvořák inserts a short and lively coda in duple meter. Here is the composer of the Slavonic Dances; all that’s missing are the majestic final chords, suppressed here in order to set the stage for the symphony’s imminent finale.

Like Dvořák, Johannes Brahms originally composed his 21 Hungarian Dances for four-hand piano. In fact, it was Brahms’s first set of Hungarian Dances – written in the 1860s – that inspired Dvořák’s Slavonic variant. Brahms was born in northern Germany and had no obvious connections to Hungarian culture. However, during the period of his first fame as a pianist, he met and befriended a brilliant Hungarian violinist. The pair then toured central and eastern Europe, taking Johannes to dozens of small cities and towns where folk music and dance were still very much alive. It’s not easy to summarize the richness of Hungarian dance, though certain recurring traits do stand out. First, syncopation and rhythmic contrast help define the form. Hungarian dance tunes often feature a very slow lead-in to a rapid response. Second, one cannot resist the excitement generated by the accelerating tempo as the end draws nearer. Many dances, the czardas for instance, involve a whirling step pattern that speeds up into a dizzying vortex before the breathless finish. Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G Minor typifies the pattern. The opening theme is all passion and fervor in the strings, punctuated by tripping lines in the high winds. In the middle the music continues its restless oscillation of sprinting forward and playful restraint. We know a repeat of the main theme is still destined to come our way, and this constant fluctuation of tempo – paired with a Lisztian flair for the virtuosic – combine to drop us happily into the countryside an hour outside Budapest.

Jason Stell, © 2025