Peeling the Onion

I once heard a theater director describe working on Hamlet as “peeling the onion” — pulling back layer after layer to discover new levels of meaning and nuance. This is also a good metaphor for score-study, the conductor’s lifelong pursuit. No matter how many times you come back to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, there always seems to be one more discovery to be made.

I had a fun “peeling the onion” moment this spring, as I worked on Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. My journey with this piece has been especially rich. Back in 1985 or so, I heard it for the very first time, listening to an LP one afternoon after school at the home of my high school pal, Todd Kovell. This was an unusual first encounter with the piece, since Todd had a score, which we followed along as we listened. A year or two later, I played through the piece with the Tacoma Youth Symphony — one of the more traumatic sight-reading experiences of my viola-playing adolescence! In Philadelphia in the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to work as Assistant Conductor of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, where PYO Music Director Joseph Primavera shared with me his score for The Firebird Suite. It was marked up with hundreds of tiny corrections, many of which he had personally confirmed with Stravinsky. (Clinton Nieweg, the eminent retired librarian of the Philadelphia Orchestra, maintains that the standard 1919 version of The Firebird Suite is “the most mistake filled engraving in the history of music, with over 5000 errors for a 23 minute work.”) Since then, I’ve played or conducted the 1919 Suite from The Firebird many times. Because it is a great piece, however, there will probably always be new things for me to learn.

My latest discovery is small, but it’s the kind of thing I love. Near the end of the Finale, Stravinsky presents a slowed-down version of a clanging, bell-like chorale he has been repeating obsessively:

Press the play button below to listen to it:

There is lots of wonderful stuff here. (Forgive me in advance for geeking out; you might even skip this paragraph if you are scared of musical jargon.) The chorale in the upper voices is a rhythmically atomized version of the beautiful horn melody that opened the finale (a Russian folk tune that begins “By the gateway there swayed the tall pine tree”); to me the effect is similar to Picasso’s cubism, a folk melody that has been broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. The slightly dissonant harmonies that underlie this tune are called seventh chords; surprisingly, though, Stravinsky carefully avoids the F-sharp dominant seventh chord that we would usually expect before a major cadence in B major. The result is a glorious chiming sonority that has roots in Russian romantic composers like Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.

What is my new revelation? Focus on the bass line, played by bassoons, tuba, timpani, and double basses. It alternates between F-sharp and B, a rocking motion between what musicians call dominant and tonic that is a familiar cornerstone of many big musical moments. But look at how Stravinsky plays with note lengths here. In the example below, I’ve added brackets denoting how many beats each note lasts. The first two seven-beat measures alternate notes in support of the melody, reinforcing the home key of B major; but over the next three measures, Stravinsky systematically shortens the note lengths. Four beats, then three beats, then two, then one. The effect is a subtle acceleration of the bass line, just as the overall tempo is slowing down. The powerful release of energy when we arrive at the climactic chord is beautifully set up by this subtle harmonic acceleration.

What does this mean? Having found this detail, do I try to emphasize it or bring it out somehow in performance? Is it simply one more piece of the mosaic that makes up my mental map of the piece?

In the end, conductors don’t usually stand around in rehearsal and talk about these layers that we discover as we live with a score. The hope, though, is that each peel of the onion enriches and deepens our sense of how the music should unfold in performance. For now, I need to make one more trip through the score before conducting it again on Sunday…