Way In #2: Programs and Stories

“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.” -Gustav Mahler

The opening of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade might evoke a festival in Baghdad, as the movement's title would suggest. Under Leif Segerstam's baton, does it become something else? Or is it pure music untethered from any plot at all?

Segerstam certainly has distinctive interpretative choices in this music—he is at least the only conductor I've ever heard to start a war cry in the middle of this movement. I can't listen to his interpretation hearing anything other cavalry charging into battle, and I feel my pulse quicken. Music students will listen to this and think, “Is that allowed??”—a question that is both perfectly understandable and hilariously absurd in the context of art.

Most classical music survey books take a history-based chronological approach, teaching the reader the difference between 18th and 19th-century style, but not necessarily between fire and water. This book moves through music based on its content instead, from concrete, literal pieces toward increasingly abstract ones, using the former to teach us about the latter. The goal is not to learn all about opera or ballet or any specific genre, but instead to use them as entry points to classical music as a whole.

There's a debate in classical music about whether music should tell a story at all. On one side, you have advocates of “absolute music”—music that exists purely as sound, with no extra-musical meaning attached. On the other side, you have supporters of “program music”—music that depicts specific scenes, stories or ideas (these pieces often have written programs explaining their meaning, hence the name).

The composers themselves seemed conflicted. Wagner declared grandly that “Where painting says 'this is the meaning,' music alone says 'this is.'” Strauss would get impatient when asked about his music's “meaning,” insisting it was “just music.” Aaron Copland put it most clearly: “Is there meaning in music? Yes. Can you say in words what the meaning is? No.” (He then ranted: “Simple-minded souls will never be satisfied with the answer to the second of these questions. They always want music to have a meaning, and the more concrete it is the better they like it.”)

And yet, despite their insistence on music's purity, Wagner wrote massive operas telling elaborate stories, including the ~fifteen hour Ring Cycle which inspired Lord of the Rings. Strauss pioneered the “tone poem”—orchestral works specifically designed to evoke literary scenes. And Copland's most beloved work remains Appalachian Spring, a ballet telling the story of American pioneers.

So were they hypocrites? I don't think so. In reality, they recognized great extra-musical sources of inspiration, but sought for their music to transcend them. Copland and Stravinsky's ballets are now more often performed as pure concert music, without dancers or staging. Even Wagner's gargantuan operas have found life outside the theater—their most memorable passages are frequently performed by orchestras alone, or even transcribed for solo piano, not a singer in sight. When Strauss was asked to provide program notes for Don Quixote, the composer snapped, “Get out! You don’t need any.” (He later relented.)

I understand why some purists resist programmatic music. After all, isn't the whole point that music can speak directly to the soul? If you wanted to tell a story, why not just write a book? The interpretation chain is already so long—composers interpret life; performers interpret composers; listeners interpret performances. Would composers really want to stop interpreting life directly, and instead interpret someone else's story or poetry or image or libretto? Yes, it turns out, and still we can listen to the music and hear the life in it all the same.

Scheherazade

Let's take the tale of Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights, and its interpretation over the centuries. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov tells the story in his opening night program note:

The Sultan Schakhriar, convinced that all women are false and faithless, vowed to put to death each of his wives after the first nuptial night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by entertaining her lord with fascinating tales, told seriatim, for a thousand and one nights. The Sultan, consumed with curiosity, postponed from day to day the execution of his wife, and finally repudiated his bloody vow entirely.

But from this harrowing story, Rimsky-Korsakov gives us music that often feels like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a rainy day. Listen to the oboe solo from the second movement—Scheherazade herself, perhaps?

The contemporary composer John Adams has trouble with this music being so beautiful, or at least the way audiences bask in its beauty. A story about a man who puts each of his wives to death? “I don't know how people can really listen to this Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov and not just really think of how hideous the story is,” he says. Mikhail Fokin's ballet goes so far as to use the music to tell the story of all the women the Sultan has murdered before. All of a sudden, you can't help but feel the music as violent and brutal where it was once the opposite.

Personally, in my decades of listening to this piece, I don't think I've ever even thought of the story. Is that wrong, in some way, to remove the program from the interpretation of the work? Well it turns out, Rimsky-Korsakov actually removed all the programmatic titles from the piece in a later edition, saying in his memoirs that the only thing the listener should take from the title is the atmosphere of fairy-tale wonders of the East.

The Long Play

The second movement is called “The Story of the Kalendar Prince,” which Scheherazade may have told to the Sultan one evening. Here is the music from where the oboe solo leaves off, with conductor Elim Chan. In her interpretation, is Scheherazade here plotting under the surface, weaving this tale of intrigue and adventure to keep the Sultan interested?

There is of course no correct answer to what music is “about”. I expect that the Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade will always be a piece of comfort music for me—in spite of the drive and excitement and the darkness of the story—it is still just pretty, and I'm fine with that. There is other music for which the context may spoil the magic. Respighi's Pines of Rome is a concert hall crowd-pleaser akin to Scheherazade. It's also a celebration of Mussolini's proto-fascist march on Rome. On some days, for some listeners, the overwhelming sunrise music may be enough to wash away the context; for others, knowing the history spoils the magic entirely.

Scheherazade 2.0

Ultimately, John Adams responded to Rimsky-Korsakov by writing his own Scheherazade.2—a violin concerto that reimagines her as an strong, empowered woman without trivializing her oppression. The solo violin, played here by Leila Josefowicz, represents Scheherazade not as a storyteller, but as a woman confronting religious authorities and making her own path to freedom.

In the second movement we hear of her true love, Adams says, forbidden by the powers that be.

This is Adams' music that most resembles Rimsky-Korsakov's romantic version, but even here there's an underlying danger that quickly takes the turn for the worst that we knew was coming. In the third movement, Scheherazade and the Men with Beards, she faces an interrogation from a religious council and is sentenced to death.

Any sense of melody is consumed by dissonance—no song remains, just panic, terror, and violence, until it dissolves into a lone cimbalom ringing. To me, without the story's context this clip would be less effective. We might have associations with these sounds from film scores, but it would be more detached than when we see the violinist-Scheherazade have her sound entirely overwhelmed by the orchestra.

I wonder if we heard the Adams and Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazades back-to-back without knowing their titles if we would guess that they are based on the same story. The works might even seem more different than they are similar. I don't say this to diminish the importance of a strong source of musical inspiration, but to point out the power of differing interpretations.

From Programmatic to Absolute: Price and Dvořák

As we go through various types of program music, we'll also see how it can provide a new perspective on more absolute music. In both Scheherazades, we saw non-Middle Eastern composers taking inspiration from a famous legend to transport their listeners to another world.

Antonín Dvořák accomplishes the same thing with his Ninth Symphony, which comes with no accompanying story, just a hint to the audience that it comes “from the New World,” referencing the Indian-American, African-American, and American folk music which inspired it. But like Rimsky-Korsakov, he achieves a blend of exoticism and comfort with seductive melodies and instrumental solos that pull you in to a world that you could easily imagine a story for.

One could hear the finale's Jaws-like opening as an impending confrontation. And this the nostalgic English Horn solo that might remind you of Scheherazade's oboe solo from earlier.

Now compare that passage to this excerpt from Florence Price, which does have an explicit program.

This piece, Ethiopia's Shadow in America, tells the story of the Black experience in America, from “The Arrival of the Negro in America when first brought here as a slave” to “His Resignation and Faith” and finally “His Adaptation, a fusion of his native and acquired impulses.”

I wonder why Price felt it was necessary to accompany her music with a story while Dvořák did not. There are many similarities between the two. Both are lyrically rich. Both fuse the Western symphonic tradition with American folk music in a way that makes both forms feel foreign. Most importantly, both are emotionally complex—to me, a mix of nostalgia, longing, consolation, and solace.

I don't feel that the Price needs any “help” from a program to convey her message. Perhaps she just wanted to ensure that audiences received her message as directly as possible. Opposite Dvořák, who was an established Czech composer but an outsider to the Indian-American and African-American communities, Price came from outside the European musical world but was herself a part of the African-American community. Perhaps the program was in response to audiences and critics who didn't engage with her work seriously.

But interestingly, the rest of Price's work is mostly absolute music. The same year that Ethiopa's Shadow was composed, her Symphony No. 1, eschewing a program altogether, became the first symphony by a Black woman to be premiered by a major American orchestra.

In the subsequent chapters we'll continue to see how works with programs shed light on classical music more generally. The next chapter will revolve around the most concrete music: the movie score.

The Rabbit Hole

If you liked the works in this chapter and are looking for more pieces that blend comfort listening with adventure and a hint of the exotic, here are some to explore.

Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian's Spartacus, about the Roman slave uprising, is played by ballet companies, orchestras, solo pianists, and used in soundtracks. The Adagio, which depicts a scene between the slave leader Spartacus and his wife Phrygia, is often programmed by itself, notable for its woodwind solos and passionate climax.

In Ernst Bloch's Schelomo, the solo cello plays the main character, King Solomon, and the orchestra represents the world around him (a device also used by Strauss in Don Quixote, where the cello is the protagonist and the viola represents the sidekick Sancho Panza).

Camille Saint-Saëns's Piano Concerto No. 5 has no official program, but is frequently known as the “Egyptian,” inspired by the composer's frequent trips to Africa.

In the vein of Scheherazade, Nielsen's Aladdin Suite draws from another tale from the Arabian Nights, and shares some of Rimsky-Korsakov's oriental colors. But Scheherazade has inspired many more composers to write their own, and not just for full orchestra. In particular, there's a song cycle by Ravel, and a piano solo work by Szymanowski that are evocative in their varied musical languages, quite distinct from Rimsky-Korsakov's. Contemporary Turkish composer Fazıl Say's violin concerto 1001 Nights in the Harem tells a different story but is still inspired by Scheherazade.

One more step removed from Scheherazade, but two steps closer to today, the Joolaee trio's Be Hich Diyar (Belonging To No Homeland) is dedicated to the women of Iran.