WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Stories of Symphonic Music / A Guide to the Meaning of Important Symphonies, Overtures, and Tone-poems from Beethoven to the Present Day cover

Stories of Symphonic Music / A Guide to the Meaning of Important Symphonies, Overtures, and Tone-poems from Beethoven to the Present Day

Chapter 55: "THE KREMLIN," SYMPHONIC PICTURE IN THREE PARTS: Op. 30
By Lawrence Gilman
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Essays, Letters & SpeechesMusic

About This Book

The guide offers concise, non-technical explanations of symphonies, overtures, and tone-poems, arranged by composer, that orient concert-goers to the illustrative or poetic intentions behind each work. A preface argues for knowing a composition's programme when it is central to the music; individual entries summarize a work's descriptive basis, thematic outline, and salient orchestral effects without indulging in speculative interpretations. Coverage ranges from Beethoven through late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century composers and selects items likely to appear on contemporary orchestral programs, providing practical background to enhance informed listening.

"THE KREMLIN," SYMPHONIC PICTURE IN THREE PARTS: Op. 30

This "symphonic picture" (composed in 1890) is a delineation, in three sections, of scenes associated in the imagination of the composer with the historic and picturesque citadel at Moscow. They are arranged and titled as follows:

I. POPULAR FEAST

(Scenes of festivity, the music based on or suggested by Russian folk-songs.)

II. IN THE MONASTERY

(There are, first, passages of religious character; then a section of contrasted quality, with a suggestion of temple gongs and Oriental color.)

III. ENTRANCE AND MEETING OF THE PRINCE

(The prevailing spirit of this movement is festal. There is a suggestion of pomps and occasions, of brilliant pageantry.)

"The Kremlin," writes Mr. Arthur Symons in his Cities, "is like the evocation of an Arabian sorcerer, called up out of the mists of the North; and the bells hung in these pagan, pagoda-like belfries seem to swing there in a lost paradox, as if to drive away the very demons that have fixed them in mid-air.... All the violence of the yellow, Mongolian East is in these temples, which break out into bulbs, and flower into gigantic fruits and vegetables of copper and tiles and carved stone; which are full of crawling and wriggling lines, of a kind of cruelty in form; in which the gold of the sun, the green of the earth's grass, and a blue which is to the blue of the sky what hell is to heaven, mock and deform the visible world in a kind of infernal parody....

"... The priests, with their long hair and Christ-like presence, wearing heavy vestments of blue and red velvet and gold-embroidered stuff (in which one sees the hieratic significance of the blue of the domes), pass through the concealing door from the presence of the people to the presence of God, the door which, at the most sacred moment, shuts them in upon that presence; and a choir of sad, deep, Russian voices, the voices of young men, chants antiphonally and in chorus, weaving, in a sort of instrumental piece in which the voices are the instruments, a heavy veil of music, which trembles like a curtain before the shrine."