Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast

When the great pianist and composer Frederic Chopin decided to write a piano sonata in 1837, fashions had turned against the genre itself. Perhaps it was a feeling that Beethoven had essentially "finished" the genre, or perhaps it was a sense that a non-Germanic composer couldn't possibly master a form such as the Sonata, but Chopin's forays into the realm of the Piano Sonata were not generally appreciated. Robert Schumann famously said this about the Sonata: "The idea of calling it a sonata is a caprice, if not a jest, for he has simply bound together four of his most maddest children, thus under his name smuggling them into a place into which they could not else have penetrated.", This is criticism that we'll pick apart later, because it is very specific and goes to a big challenge within the piece. Mendelssohn also despised the piece, and until 1900, most of the critical reception to the piece was negative, criticizing its supposed lack of coherence and the strange last movement in particular. As a complete piece, the Sonata was rarely played until the 20th century. But there was one movement of the Sonata that was played a lot, and which has remained perhaps one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music in history. Yes, the famous Chopin Funeral March isn't a standalone piece, it's part of the 2nd piano sonata! And slowly, as forms became less rigid, and as experiments with tonality and even with inner coherence of movements became less taboo, Chopin's sonata received a critical second look, and performers began to take on the piece not as an exercise in trying to make the rest of the Sonata work around the Funeral March, but as a great work in its entirety. Now it is firmly part of the repertoire and is hailed as a masterpiece of innovation and creativity. The Funeral March itself is probably in the top 5 most played pieces of classical music, and was played at Chopin's own funeral, as well as at the funerals of John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, as well as of Soviet and Communist leaders. This of course doesn't include the countless times the movement has been heard at funerals of lesser-known figures. It is practically a cultural meme at this point and has been adapted thousands of times - if you think about a funeral, or about death, it is certainly possible that the Chopin Funeral march filters through your mind. But today is about much more than the Funeral March, it is about exploring this whole sonata, from its scintillating first few chords, to the experiments with sonata form throughout the first movement, to the dramatic scherzo, to that funeral march, and to the frankly bizarre last movement, which is over before you even blink. We're going to talk about all this, and more, on this Patreon Sponsored episode. Join us!

As I've often said, I love doing Patreon-sponsored episodes in part because they allow me to discover music I might never have encountered otherwise. Today's episode is one of those, because the truth is that before I made it, I had heard of Finzi, but that was about it. I knew nothing about the circumstances of his life or his music, and while I knew this was a hole in my musical knowledge, I hadn't had time to fill it. Well, thanks to Jillian, I got the time to explore this wonderful 20th-century composer's works, and now I'm ready to tell you about him, since I imagine his is an unfamiliar name to many of you listening.
Gerald Finzi was a terrific composer and a fascinating figure in 20th-century music. He struck out on his own path, refusing to follow the trends of the time, and as a result his music has a special, unique quality: a bit more modest than that of someone trying to change the world, like Schoenberg, but nonetheless deeply human and often inspired by literary interests. Finzi was interested in much more than music, and amassed a library of over 3,000 volumes of English poetry, philosophy, and literature, much of which ended up appearing in his music.
This powerful marriage of poetry and music produced Finzi's strongest and most enduring works. Since Jillian left it up to me which of his works to tell you about today, I decided to lean into his love of English poetry and take a detailed look at a piece many consider his masterpiece: Dies Natalis, which translates to "Day of Birth," a work for solo voice and string orchestra.
The piece is set to the poetry of the 17th-century English Metaphysical poet and priest Thomas Traherne, and explores innocence, from the first moments a baby enters the world to the tarnishing of that innocence as the child grows older. This was a topic Finzi knew all too well, having lost all three of his brothers during his early years. The piece is a profound yet tender meditation on the joys and sufferings of new life, and I can't wait to share it with you today.

Dmitri Shostakovich: "I have set myself a task fraught with tremendous responsibility, to express in sound the immortal image of Lenin as a great son of the Russian people and as a leader of the masses. I have received numerous letters from all over the Soviet Union with regard to my future symphony. The most important advice contained therein was to make considerable use of musical folklore."
In the massively consequential year of 1939, Shostakovich used these words to launch his Sixth Symphony. The piece was meant to have soloists and a chorus alongside the orchestra — perhaps a nod to his Second and Third Symphonies, which were essentially propaganda pieces. Shostakovich even promised to use the poem "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" by Vladimir Mayakovsky as the basis for his choral text.
The Soviet public eagerly awaited this new symphony, which was inevitably going to be compared with his Fifth Symphony — the piece that had brought Shostakovich back into the Soviet government's good graces, and which remains one of his most popular works even as it's also one of his most complex and nuanced pieces beneath its relatively conservative surface.
But whether Shostakovich ever actually planned to write this gigantic "Lenin" symphony is highly doubtful, since no sketches of it have ever turned up. Instead, Shostakovich pivoted publicly to describing his new symphony this way:
"The musical character of the Sixth Symphony will differ from the mood and emotional tone of the Fifth Symphony, in which moments of tragedy and tension were characteristic. In my latest symphony, music of a contemplative and lyrical order predominates. I wanted to convey in it the moods of spring, joy, youth."[6]
As you can see, Shostakovich wasn't actually saying much about the content of the symphony — if anything at all. He was leaving things deliberately ambiguous, and, fittingly, ambiguous is a pretty good description of this highly enigmatic symphony.
Everything about this symphony is slightly off. It's in three movements, not the typical four, and it opens with a massive slow movement; the two remaining movements are fast and significantly shorter, together lasting less than the first movement alone. It was written in 1939 — supposedly a year of military triumph for the Soviet Union, given the Stalin pact with Hitler that allowed Hitler to invade Poland and launch World War II — and yet there is not a hint of military triumphalism in it.
In short, this symphony confused a lot of people and has always received mixed reviews, whether from musicologists trying to fit it into the traditional "everything in Shostakovich is about Stalin" narrative, or from Soviet critics of the time trying to fit it into Socialist Realist aesthetics. In the end, descriptions of Shostakovich always attempt to put him into a box — silent dissident, Soviet stooge, hero, coward, etc. The truth, of course, is complicated, and this symphony is a great example of the eternal enigma that is Dmitri Shostakovich.
Today, on this Patreon-sponsored episode, I'll take you through this wonderful symphony from a musical perspective, trying to parse its unusual form, its unusually lyrical first movement, and the wild, madcap dash of the final two movements. Join us!

Grieg's Peer Gynt suites are among the best-known and best-loved works of classical music in the world. They are practically embedded into popular culture, being used in a dizzying number of cartoons, advertisements, and films. In the classical music world, as with Beethoven's 5th symphony, they have almost become a cliché, and they are often performed on so-called Pops concerts. The two big hits from Peer Gynt, Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King, are instantly recognizable to the general public, even if they don't know who wrote the music or where it comes from. And where all this music comes from is really interesting, and is going to be one of the main topics of this show. Because the famous music from Peer Gynt comes from the two suites that Grieg took from his massive score of incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play in verse, Peer Gynt. The two suites together take about 45 minutes to perform, but Grieg actually wrote an extra hour's worth of music! He then extracted, for his suites, the music that he felt would stand on its own without the text, and this was quite a good decision, as they are certainly his most popular pieces and have etched his name into the classical music pantheon forever. But what about the rest of that music? What about the play itself? Today, on this Patreon-sponsored episode, we'll tell the story of the origins of Peer Gynt, both from Ibsen and from Grieg, and then we'll go through the nearly 2 hours of incidental music, most of it in a bit of a cursory way (which frankly is perfectly appropriate for Grieg, whose music abounds with naive simplicity and gorgeous tunes), but all the way through we are going to tell the wacky, wonderful, and way-ahead-of-its-time story of Peer Gynt, all through the music that Grieg wrote. On the show today you'll hear some of the most famous music in the world, and then some music that only the most passionate of connoisseurs have encountered. So, in essence, my kind of show. Join us!

When it comes to a piece like the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, a few words or phrases regularly come up: the concerto is described as "mellow" or Mozart's "swan song," but most often it is described as "perfect." Such a perfect piece as Mozart's Clarinet Concerto must have been hugely popular during Mozart's lifetime, right? It must have been played all over, by all the virtuoso clarinetists of the day. Well, that is not even close to the case. At the age of 35, Mozart was kind of old news in the economically depressed, repressed, and censored city of Vienna in 1790. There were very few concerts during this period, and Mozart's popularity had waned severely. The clarinet concerto, one of a wealth of brilliant (and yes, perfect) pieces Mozart wrote in the final year of his life, was performed once by the man for whom Mozart wrote it, Anton Stadler, before Mozart's death, but the location and the program of that concert are forgotten. The manuscript of the concerto is lost, which means we actually don't know a lot about it, especially considering it wasn't actually written for a standard clarinet, but for a basset clarinet (we'll get to that later). The piece was written just about two months before Mozart's death and was his last completed work, though there's absolutely no evidence that Mozart knew he was dying when he wrote it. All in all, there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding this perfect piece, and yet, when we hear the luminous music that Mozart wrote, all of this falls away. There is truly a kind of perfection to this music, a golden quality that is inescapable. There is no clarinet concerto that is performed more often or more recorded, and it remains a perennial favorite for clarinetists and orchestras around the world. Today, on this Patreon-sponsored episode, we'll talk about all these mysteries surrounding this concerto, Anton Stadler, the basset clarinet, and of course, the wonderful music itself, though, as always, Mozart sometimes defies description. Join us!