Subtitled “Nuit de la Saint-Jean”, one of the most famous pieces of music in the Swedish repertoire, the 1D Rhapsody by Hugo Alfvén is hardly known in our skies. This observation led us to look into various music inspired by the summer solstice, the sun and the summer season.
The summer solstice is still actively celebrated especially in Northern Europe. In Sweden, Midsommar is the most important day of the year after Christmas. An important ritual associated with this holiday is the dance around the Midsommarstångpole braided with green garlands and flowers.
Various festivities take place in Norway, Denmark (scarecrows representing witches are burned there), Finland, home of “Summer Christmas”, and Iceland, where Jónsmessa Day is supposed to give the floor to the cows!
Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960) composed three Swedish rhapsodies, but the first, midsommarvaka, or “St. John’s Night”, from 1903, is known as “the” Swedish rhapsody of Alfvén. The content, overtly descriptive, is one of the few inspired by Midsummer’s Day since the work is intended as a “fantasy on popular Swedish melodies describing the atmospheres of a Swedish Midsummer’s Eve of yesteryear. , dances and games around the mast”.
The work includes a theme created by Alfvén interspersed with folk tunes. One of the greatest interpretations of this Rhapsodyrecorded by the OSM and Charles Dutoit, was proposed by Esa-Pekka Salonen at Sony, in a program of popular Nordic music.
Witches and elves
Even though Kent Nagano and the OSM included it in a Halloween disc, a much more famous work takes place during the night of Saint John: A night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky (1867). This score is inspired by a tale by Nicolas Gogol, Saint John’s Night (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupalaaccording to the transliteration of the original title) with a spectacular Witches’ Sabbath.
Mussorgsky, who originally titled his symphonic poem Saint John’s Night on Bald Mountainhad been so fascinated by Gogol that he had considered making an opera subject from it as early as 1858. This score popularized by the film Fantasia in 1940 was best known in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “rounded” and watered-down rewrite (1908). From the original score, raucous and wild, published in 1968, Claudio Abbado and Esa-Pekka Salonen gave excellent interpretations.
Let’s go from witches to elves. The summer night can be otherwise magical, with A Midsummer Night’s dream (A Midsummer Night’s Dream). The Shakespearian substrate is found in The Fairy Queen by Purcell, a “semi-opera” combining music, dance and theatre. But the most eloquent music from this source is obviously that of Mendelssohn. From the opening, we hear the braying of Bottom, transformed into a donkey by Puck. The lightness and spirit of this score are perfect. Among its great performers: Kurt Masur and Neville Marriner.
On the same subject, let’s not forget Britten’s opera composed in 1960. We will particularly listen to the color of the orchestral treatment. Apart from Shakespeare, but more specifically attached to the context of Saint-Jean, another English lyrical score from the 20th century should not be overlooked.e century : The Midsummer Marriage by Michael Tippett (1955), a kind of modern transposition of The Magic Flute. The last two scenes of the opera (end of 3e act) take place on Saint John’s Day. It is about fire and light.
On an opposite aesthetic register, A Little Night Musica musical comedy by Stephen Sondheim created in 1973, which opens with the famous Send in the Clownsis inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film Sommarnattens leende (1955) known as Smiles of a summer nightbut which refers to the smiles of “the” summer night, that of Saint-Jean during which the plot takes place.
The sun
The solstice festival celebrates the day, the light. No one has staged the irruption of light on earth more effectively than Haydn in his oratorio Creation. The shock on Und es war Licht (And there was light) is unforgettable, and Herbert von Karajan’s recording with Gundula Janowitz and Fritz Wunderlich remains the most gripping to date.
Haydn is also the author of the “Sun Quartets”, a nickname which adorns his third series of quartets, theOpus 20. In fact, this name is only due to the cover of one of the first editions of the scores, which sported a radiant sun. There is nothing more specific and musical.
It’s just the opposite for the opening Helios by Carl Nielsen, in which the sun and its course are the central theme. The work is the fruit of a stay of the Danish composer in Greece in 1903. Athens gave him the idea of a work representing the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea. The ten-minute overture that describes this journey has been magnified by Herbert Blomstedt and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
Two other spectacular scenery of sunrise and sunset in the heat of summer dominate the XXe century: the Alps and the Grand Canyon. Richard Strauss was familiar with the mountain resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, where he had a home. Her Alpine Symphony (1915) is a real cinematographic score that describes a mountain hike. It begins in darkness and returns to darkness.
Here too, the sunrise over the peaks and the discovery of the first viewpoints at the exit of the woods are sumptuous, radiant moments. Listening on demand, try to find the confidential, transcendent version of Kazimierz Kord, our favorite for 20 years.
Between 1929 and 1931, the American composer Ferde Grofé effectively applied in five paintings illustrating the Grand Canyon the recipe tested by Strauss in the Alps: there is in particular a sunrise, a sunset and a storm. Grofé, the orchestrator of the Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, is very inspired, in a very pleasant descriptive work, abundantly recorded from 1940 to 1990, from Toscanini to Maazel, totally neglected for 30 years. Among the excellent versions of this Grand Canyon SuiteDoráti-Detroit, Maazel-Pittsburgh and Kunzel-Cincinnati.
Summer music
More than bittersweet summer nights of Berlioz, we will look for a summer atmosphere in the summer evening (Nyari is) by Zoltán Kodály, his first orchestral composition, a graduation work (1906) which the Hungarian tried to withdraw from circulation before reworking it for Toscanini in 1928.
The importance of this composition is to sign the first encounter between folklore and scholarly music which will mark the Hungarian music of the 20th century. The composer himself and Antal Doráti recorded it successfully.
In the same evocative vein, we can rank the Francophile Englishman Frederick Delius, an atmospheric impressionist composer. His best-known summer work is A Song of Summer, a symphonic poem from 1931. Blinded and paralyzed, Delius could not write the score, which he dictated to his assistant Eric Fenby. “I want you to imagine that we are sitting on top of a cliff in the heather, gazing out to sea. The high sustained chords of the strings suggest the clear, calm sky and the tranquility of the scene…” he said. Delius also composed the fantasy In a Summer Garden (1908), summer night on the River (1911) and Summer Evening (1890).
Atmospheric music transmitting the summer heat or water games, Respighi is one of the masters. Whether in the Fountains where the Pines of Romemagnified by Riccardo Muti, Fritz Reiner or Seiji Ozawa.
Obviously, there are all the classic seasonal works: The fourth seasons of Vivaldi, those of Piazzolla which are now attached to them, and those, derived and amusing, of Nicolas Chedeville. There are the months of Seasons pianistics of Tchaikovsky and the “Summer” of Seasons by Glazounov, an allegorical ballet whose “Autumn” is best known to Quebec, which has become the musical signature of the Beautiful stories from the pays d’en haut.
And rather than by the expected air Summer time from Porgy and Bess of Gershwin, we will be allowed to conclude on the great unknown beauty of the scores of Vincent d’Indy, in particular the Mediterranean diptych and the Poem of the shores, music from the 1920s ideally immortalized by Emmanuel Krivine at Timpani. Let’s take advantage of the season to discover calm and light, The joy of deep blue, morning sun, The mystery of the oceanso many episodes that largely keep their promises.