PROGRAM NOTES UNDERWRITTEN BY THOMAS WARD

C major. We talk about most pieces of music, certainly classical music written between roughly 1600 and 1900 as being “in a key” like C major In technical terms, a key defines an organized set of pitches and the harmonies built out of them. There exist pitches outside any key; we call those “chromatic” (from Greek root chroma or color) partly because they introduce new tonal color into our palette.

So what, then, is specific about C major? How can one craft an entire concert of music in C major? For one thing, C major is a relatively modern name for an older musical concept. Prior to 1600, musicians were familiar with numerous “modes” or scales that have largely dropped out of usage. They have curious names like Dorian, Phrygian, and Mixolydian (again stemming from ancient Greek terminology). You can recreate them on a modern piano quite simply. For instance, using only the white keys, start on D and play the next seven white keys. That’s the Dorian mode. Now start on E, using only white keys, and you will play the Phrygian mode. Start on C and you have the so-called Ionian mode - a set of pitches equivalent to our friend C major (C-D-E-F-G-A-B).

From 1600-1900, the so-called “common practice era,” composers wrote freely in a dozen or more keys, and C major was only one of them. However, music theorists began to associate each key with specific emotions or characteristics. Once again borrowing from the Greeks, they felt that the unique structure of each key could inspire certain emotions in the listener. Not all authors agree – this is a somewhat personal matter – but generally C major is described as being “open” or “clear,” untroubled, resolute and strong, simple to the point of naivety. Shall we see how these labels hold up?

On Sunday afternoon’s concert we heard a new version of Firebird by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). That music shows Stravinsky as a young man, filled with modern ideas about tonality and ready to shake things up. However, there are many Stravinskys; as a composer he moved through many different stylistic periods in his long life. Firebird helped launch his first “Russian” period. This was followed by a lengthy “Neoclassical” period (1920-1951) in which he leaned into influences from the 18th century. Stravinsky’s escape into an antique style of composition may very well represent a psychological escape. As the outbreak of World War II loomed over Europe, the dark specter of illness also descended on the composer. Tuberculosis relocated his wife and daughters to a Swiss facility, and Stravinsky himself received the dread diagnosis in 1937. Between late 1938 and mid 1939, Stravinsky endured the deaths of his mother, wife, and eldest daughter, his own quarantine in hospital, and the eruption of war.

During this period he began sketching two movements of a Symphony in C Major. The motivation came from a commission to help celebrate the Chicago Symphony’s 50th Anniversary. Despite all that was going on in his life, Stravinsky launches the Symphony in C with a sunny, gracious movement. This is certainly accessible music, redolent of Prokofiev’s popular “Classical” Symphony (1917) and suggesting the influence of young Shostakovich. At times, Stravinsky seems to lose his way in too many repetitions of certain minor ideas. But the main theme is charming, coming back again and again like a welcome friend, and the wind writing is particularly appealing. There is little here to suggest a composer beset by crushing grief.

Among the hundreds of instrumental works by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), some are simple, short, and instructive; others are long and elaborate, even virtuosic. Among the organ pieces, there is also the question of liturgical function (as in some chorale preludes). But the Prelude and Fugue pairings, such as the one in C Major, BWV 545, probably show us nothing more clearly than Bach’s complete command of the organ as a performer and composer. While his organ works certainly do not appear out of thin air – i.e., there are clear links to his immediate predecessors – it is also true that the scale and intricacy of Bach’s compositions move beyond anything written previously. BWV 545 likely was written during Bach’s time in Weimar around 1715 or even a few years earlier.

One point that Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major makes quite clearly is that no musical work of any reasonable length stays entirely in the same key. Modulation – changing key – happens many times throughout a piece like BWV 545. So while classical works nearly always start and end in the same key, they journey widely between those points. This C-major prelude lasts about two minutes and features active motion in all registers, including the pedal that leads off the action. The fugue is based on a stepwise “antique style” theme recalling vocal music of the Renaissance. But upon that simple idea Bach constructs a majestic contrapuntal display that packs so very much into its four minutes.

Bach was also capable of writing music that charms by its simplicity. He wrote numerous short pieces as pedagogical models for his own children, including early versions of preludes and fugues that later turn up in his grand compilation, The Well-Tempered Clavier. The very first prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier remains perhaps the most famous of all. Known as a “pattern” prelude by virtue of the continuous arpeggiated texture and predictable chord structure, the Prelude in C Major (BWV 846) strips music to its essence. The arpeggios are deceptively hard to render smoothly, but when done well, the piece flows with a grace and momentum that are irresistible. Later composers have borrowed Bach’s material, including Andrew Lloyd Webber (Bach’s Prelude is the quiet accompaniment heard in “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita) and Charles Gounod for his Ave Maria – more on that in a moment . . . .

One of the outcomes of Martin Luther’s reform efforts was to develop music that more directly connected parishioners to the divine. That intent directly opposed Catholic aesthetics of grandeur, which had allowed sacred music to grow increasingly elaborate through dense polyphony and overall complexity. The criticism landed with Catholic leaders. Legend says that the Catholic Church’s main counter-reformation effort, the Council of Trent, was poised to ban polyphonic music entirely until Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525-1594) composed a new mass to point an acceptable way forward. The truth is a bit more nuanced, for Palestrina had already settled on a leaner, more text-based style before the Council even convened. Of course, as news of the Council’s feelings about music emerged, Palestrina was perfectly positioned to take advantage.

In 1551 he took his first job in Rome at St. Peter’s. All of his remaining life was spent in the Eternal City and involved several of the most significant church positions. As the first native talent to compose such brilliant masses, Palestrina’s reputation flourished during his lifetime, particularly among advocates of his conservative, text-friendly aesthetic. Crystallized in the works like the Pope Marcellus Mass (1567) and Missa ut re mi fa sol (1570), Palestrina’s new direction pays great attention to clarity of text. Cadences at keywords reinforce the spiritual message and break up the entire narrative like scenes in a play or film. However, as demonstrated by the two “Agnus dei” movements from the Missa ut re mi fa sol heard this evening, Palestrina could easily sustain a seamless, serene unfolding across many minutes if the text is short.

One key for coming to terms with the style of Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) is to appreciate his ability to write wonderfully appealing “mistakes.” That is, he utilizes conventional cues to set up expectations about where an individual melody or chord is going to move. But then, precisely at the moment of resolution, he avoids the anticipated note and lands instead on something bitingly dissonant – hence the sensation that a “wrong note” has been played. This principle may be chalked up to Prokofiev’s modernist aesthetic, and early on it helped him gain recognition as Russia’s enfant terrible. Born into a privileged Ukranian family, Prokofiev’s precocious musical talent earned him a place at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1904 to 1914. These were turbulent years in Russia, of course, and young Sergei soon became the Conservatory’s most unruly student, devoted to the European avant-garde. On the last day of 1908 Prokofiev made his dramatic debut as composer-pianist. His reputation blossomed over the next decade. When war and revolution came to Russia, he emigrated to Western Europe.

While living in France in 1932, Prokofiev received a commission to compose a new piece of chamber music for a prominent Paris-based concert series. The resulting work, a Sonata for Two Violins in C Major, summarizes Prokofiev in a nutshell. It borrows the centuries-old four-movement form of the Baroque sonata da chiesa. At the same time, his immediate motivation sprang from a polemical jab. “Listening to bad music can sometimes inspire good ideas . . . One time, after hearing a mediocre piece for two unaccompanied violins, I realized me that despite such a duet’s limitations, one could make it interesting enough to listen to for maybe ten or fifteen minutes.”

The portion we hear tonight, the Allegro finale, starts in C major but quickly sheds its tonal robe for a chromatic, rhythmically varied and athletic cloak of many colors. This style is paradoxical: hints of fugue point back to Bach, while the dissonant, acerbic vocabulary make it fully modern. Prokofiev enjoyed the fame and artistic freedom of life in Europe while also cultivating a possible return to Soviet Russia. The decision whether or not to return to Mother Russia – now firmly under Stalin’s rule – appears to have been protracted and painful. In the end Prokofiev naively underestimated the political consequences of his act and settled permanently in Moscow in 1936, at the start of the Great Purge. His timing could not have been worse.

French composer Charles Gounod (1818-1893) will always be known for several incredibly successful grand operas – Faust above all else. He also wrote a lot of music in other genres, including organ works, sacred motets, chamber music, piano solos, and over 100 songs. Gounod grew up in a comfortable and very musical household. His parents were both musicians, and for a time the family lived in an apartment at Versailles while Charles’ father – a painter – served the Duc de Berry. Young Gounod attended the Paris Conservatory, taking the coveted Prix de Rome and its subsidy for study in Italy in 1839. During this period of travel, he met the Mendelssohns: Fanny the brilliant pianist and budding composer, as well as her brother Felix. Both were heavily involved in the revival of Bach’s music that had already brought the great St Matthew Passion to performance a decade earlier.

Gounod’s exposure to Bach fueled a new aspect in his development. The following years, as his career gradually flourished, it would be opera that garnered Gounod’s attention. But always the echo of Bach remained. In 1853 he used Bach’s Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier as the basis for a new work. Originally scored for violin and keyboard, Gounod composed an original melody to drift languourously above Bach’s chordal foundation. Six years later, in 1859, he adapted the violin solo for soprano and inserted the Latin “Ave Maria” text. Over the last 150 years, this simple piece has become one of the most recorded pieces of music ever, popular as a concert encore, wedding anthem, and funeral lament.

Our first half closes with the final movement from Stravinsky’s Symphony in C. The style is noticeably changed from the earlier movements. By this point, nearly 18 months had passed since the first movement was written, and Stravinsky was living in Hollywood, seemingly worlds away from the cataclysm engulfing Europe. The finale opens with a lugubrious dirge for woodwinds and brass. We would be tempted to think that the gravitas of Stravinsky’s personal circumstances – recall his family tragedies and forced exile to America – might finally be coming out in the music. But the dark tone is quickly dispelled by the appearance of our spritely friend, the main theme of the first movement. Compared to the first movement, the finale feels more angular and edgy. Still, the contrast of sections for reduced forces gives this movement the same chamber-music intimacy that helped define the appeal of the Symphony’s opening Allegro. At the end, it drifts off with barely a whisper.


INTERMISSION


Words can do little to enhance a masterpiece like the “Jupiter” Symphony in C Major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Instead their goal must be to complement (or compliment) the work and not detract from it. Indeed, so comprehensive is the “Jupiter” Symphony that almost any superlative, any flattering assessment, will ring true. Here one will find the brilliant world of Mozart’s comic operas; one will find extremely dense cohesion and development that never sounds academic or forced; here, too, one will find sublime moments that break through the conventional fabric of galant 18th-century idioms. As this is the last of Mozart’s 41 symphonies, it is obvious that we are not dealing with a beginner. True, the boy Mozart was once the most famous musical prodigy alive. But by 1788 he had ripened to an artistic maturity rarely experienced. One of the joys attendant upon hearing the Jupiter Symphony is the chance to hear so much of what he has learned, to witness a culmination of so many experiences and imaginings.

Resplendent in C major, the opening Allegro vivace steps boldly upon the stage in three powerful strides. Within the first sixteen bars Mozart lays out several key motives that drive later action: first, the opening salvo with its uprising upbeats; second, the quiet answer that ingratiatingly ascends from C to G; and third, a confirmatory rounding off of C major with strong chords and descending five-note cascades. Compare the opening of his Overture to The Marriage of Figaro for a similar opera buffa sound, and perhaps you may also expect Figaro any moment to appear from off-stage, singing “Cinque . . . dieci . . .” Early in the form Mozart starts playfully reworking diffferent motives. However hard that picture is to square with his straitened personal circumstances, musical joy nevertheless radiates from every bar. From that very joy springs the moment of maximum drama: a grand pause, silence, and a tutti explosion of C minor. Additional tonal surprises are in store as we move from development toward a reprise, which ultimately comes as a gentle glide back home to C major. With the heavy work over, listeners can use the recapitulation to take in the richness that may have passed too quickly during the exposition.

Not surprisingly, given the scale of activity in the first and fourth movements, the Jupiter’s two inner movements invariably fall into the shadows in most commentary. But the work would suffer if all four movements demanded an equal level of intellectual effort. The Andante Cantabile and Minuet & Trio sacrifice nothing in craftsmanship. They simply set themselves different goals and fulfill different roles from the outer movements. For instance, the Andante is a Sarabande in F major. Played with muted strings, it echoes the famous middle movement of Mozart’s C-Major Piano Concerto, K. 467. Turns into minor keys and periodic recurrences of the main theme, in various states of decoration, all serve a reflective tone – inward facing rather than outward. The aside being over, the Minuet and Trio pushes us back out in front of the footlights and injects a moment of graceful formality. The Minuet features a chromatic theme and expressive contrasts between winds and strings – a pattern that Beethoven would find to his liking. Its formal regularity acts like an anchor stabilizing the whole symphony before the truly extravagant flights explored in the finale.

The Molto Allegro finale is nothing short of a masterpiece, filled with memorable themes, contrapuntal interested and dramatic scene changes. Overall, its mood recalls the extroverted good cheer of the first movement. Its primary themes are similarly laid out quickly in the opening paragraph: the broad expansive C-D-F-E fugue theme in long whole notes; the active response; and the comic pattern of the repeated dominant-tonic cadences. The sonata-form second theme suggests an inversion of the fugue theme, an idea not fully explored until the very end of the work.

The greatest challenge for Mozart is to close off this finale, which seems intent upon perpetuating itself into ever-new episodes. The coda becomes the place for a grand working out of the movement’s various motives into a five-part fugue. Five-part fugues are incredibly challenging. Yet we are not talking about five statements of the same theme in various voices. Instead, this coda simultaneously overlaps five different themes that were presented earlier in the movement: the first theme, second theme, counterposed themes, tail ends and incipits, cadential patter – it all comes crashing together. And the music can bear such strain for only a short time. Mozart realizes that to sustain this complexity more than a half-minute would turn the sublime into the ridiculous as quickly as wise, benevolent Jupiter himself could transform into the tyrannical hurler of thunderbolts. In fully satisfying fashion, the ensemble comes together to close the entire symphony with a vibrant C-major cadence.

Jason Stell, © 2026