Review

Author(s): John Novak

Review by: John Novak
Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Sep., 2000), pp. 142-143
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/899796
Accessed: 21-11-2015 14:57 UTC

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142

NOTES, September

for example, and introduces enough evidence to give pause to those who would
dismiss his conclusions out of hand.) Although the discussion of musical issues
might have benefited from a different organizational approach, Studd's perceptive
comments on the development of the composer's style provide a foundation for those
who wish to explore the works in more
depth. In sum, this is not the comprehensive biography that is needed for a proper
reassessment of Saint-Saens's life and
achievements-it relies too much on previous work to warrant such accolades-but it
provides a good starting point for further
investigation.

2000

Smaczny finds convincing parallels between

the plans of the two works.
Another irony concerns the work's musical style. While I tend to see the concerto
as a close companion to Dvorak's Ninth
Symphony, most musicologists consider it a
deliberate turning away from the American
style to the composer's native Bohemia, for
which he was homesick during its composition. Smaczny demonstrates how the concerto clearly possesses traits of both styles.
A third ironic issue is Dvorak's quotation
of his emotional song "Lasst mich allein!"
in the second movement. Before developing feelings for his future wife Anna Cermakova, the composer had had a "burgeoning love" (p. 78) for her older sister
MICHAEL STRASSER
Baldwin-WallaceCollege Josefina while the latter was his pupil. Late
in 1894, as Dvoirk began the concerto, he
received letters from a distressed Josefina,
who was confined to bed with heart disease.
Dvorak:
Cello
Concerto.
By Jan
Dvoifk associated the song with her; the
Music Handtender manner in which it is incorporated
Smaczny.
(Cambridge
into the second movement reveals his embooks.) Cambridge: Cambridge Unipathy toward (or possibly longing for)
versity Press, 1999. [x, 120 p. ISBN 0someone for whom he cared deeply.
521-66050-5
0-521-66903-0
(cloth);
Smaczny devotes three chapters to
(pbk.). $44.95 (cloth); $15.95 (pbk.).]
Dvoirk's creative process, comparing preIn this monograph, Jan Smaczny examliminary sketches, the continuous sketch
ines from various perspectives a work comof the entire work, and the final score.
posed during a particularly creative transi- Although the concerto's form was develtion point in Antonin Dvoirk's career. The
oped primarily during the writing out of
result is an engaging study of Dvorak's
the continuous sketch, Dvoifk made many
sublime changes to the melodies and
compositional
process, his life in the
United States, his views on American and
rhythms when scoring the work. CompariCzech music, and his mysterious relationson of the continuous sketch and the final
score shows Dvoirk's uncanny gift for timship with the cello, an instrument he seems
to have championed unwittingly in one of
ing, drama, and developing variation.
the most famous concertos ever written.
Equally fascinating are his revisions of
the virtuosic solo passages. Cellist Hanus
Smaczny bases his work on original sources,
including revealing sketch studies as well as Wihan, who initially asked Dvoifk to write
writings of Dvorak and his colleagues, stu- the work, aided the composer with ideas
for these passages; nonetheless, Dvoaik redents, and friends.
The study begins with Dvorak's enigfused to honor Wihan's desire for an exmatic statement that "The cello is a beautitended cadenza.
ful instrument, but its place is in the orAlthough Dvoifk initially indicated that
chestra and in chamber music. As a solo
he completed the score in the United
instrument it isn't much good ... I have
States in February 1895, he was prompted
... written a 'cello-concerto, but am sorry to make extensive changes to the coda of
to this day I did so, and I never intend to
the final movement in June of that year
write another" (p. 1). This remark sets the
when he was back in Bohemia. It is likely
that Josefina's death in May was the pristage for a series of ironic issues concerning the concerto. One is that the famous
mary inspiration for the brilliantly elegiac
work was actually the composer's second
coda, which recalls and combines themes
concerto for the cello; his first dates from
from all three movements. This apotheosis
June 1865 and remains unorchestrated.
grants the work an essential formal bal-

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143

Book Reviews
ance, a concern of the composer even before Josefina's untimely passing.
Smaczny's brief study of the timings of
ten different performances of the concerto
appears to have one main conclusion: over
the years, each successive generation of cellists has tended to play the work more
slowly than the generation before. Smaczny
believes that the primary reason for Pablo
Casals's unqualified success with the concerto is that his tempos were very close to
Dvoirk's metronome indications. Later,

the trend was for cellists to play the lyrical

passages much more slowly than the surrounding passages, thus segmenting the
work and rendering it maudlin.
Better labeling of the music examples
would have made this study easier to use.
Smaczny often compares two examples, labeling each by their tempo indications
only, rather than specifying movement and
measure numbers as well.
JOHNNOVAK
NorthernIllinois University

TWENTIETH CENTURY
Schoenberg and His World. Edited by
Walter Frisch. Princeton:
Princeton
University Press, 1999. [xi, 352 p. ISBN
0-691-04860-6
(cloth); 0-691-04861-4
(pbk.). $55 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]
Roughly half of Walter Frisch's Schoenberg
and His Worldconsists of a group of new or
newly translated essays by American and
German scholars; the other half contains
reprintings or new translations of three
groups of historic documents. As Frisch observes in the preface, this organization is intended to depict "recent perspectives" on
Arnold Schoenberg (the essays) and "reveal
Schoenberg at three successive locales and
stages of his career" (the documents) (p.
[ix]). The essays are by Leon Botstein,
Severine Neff, Joseph H. Auner, Rudolf
Stephan, Reinhold Brinkmann, andJ. Peter
The documents
include
Burkholder.
Barbara Z. Schoenberg's translation of the
Festschrift Arnold Sch6nberg,assembled and
written mainly by Schoenberg's students
and published in 1912; German newspaper
accounts of Schoenberg's lectures and interviews in Germany from 1927 to 1933, assembled by Auner and translated by Irene
Zedlacher; and a selection of Schoenberg's
varied writings on his life and situation in
America, juxtaposed with five views of
Schoenberg by American composers (A.
Walter Kramer, Henry Cowell, Nicholas
Slonimsky, Lou Harrison, and Roger
Sessions), the whole American group assembled by Sabine Feisst. Also included is a
brief chronology of Schoenberg's life and
works by Marilyn McCoy.
Frisch takes the position that it is not so
much Schoenberg's music that has withstood the test of time as the "diversity" of

his activities and accomplishments as a pedagogue, theorist, commentator, and participant in the important cultural developments of his day (p. [ix]). This perspective
has colored the makeup of Schoenbergand
His TWorld,
which focuses more on the context of Schoenberg's musical creations than
on the works themselves. Nevertheless, in
the first half of the volume, two of the six
essays concern specific pieces of music
(Brinkmann, "The Compressed Symphony:
On the Historical Content of Schoenberg's
Op. 9," and Auner, "Schoenberg and His
Public in 1930: The Six Pieces for Male
Chorus, Op. 35"), and one takes up a topic
that concerns an array of works (Burkholder, "Schoenberg the Reactionary").
The other three address "Schoenberg and
Bach" (Stephan), "Schoenberg as Theorist:
Three Forms of Presentation" (Neff), and
"Schoenberg and the Audience: Modernism, Music, and Politics in the Twentieth
Century" (Botstein). Botstein's is the most
provocative of these essays; in the spirit of
postmodern revisionism, it dismisses accepted attitudes toward Schoenberg and
his music and suggests new strategies
for understanding. For example, Botstein
posits that Schoenberg expected from his
audience an elevated way of listening that
was greatly at odds with established ways
and that derived from an extreme,
Hanslick-inspired, psychologically artificial
absolutism mistakenly assigned by Schoenberg to the Viennese classicists. Hence, audiences have not been able to enjoy his
music. Botstein also opines that the twelvetone method came into being as a way for
nearly assimilated Jews to establish a
German musical identity independent of
the rising tides of nationalism that loomed

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