SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE

Program Notes

Piano Concerto in One Movement

Florence Price (1887 - 1953)

Florence Beatrice Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She performed a piano recital at age 4, published her first work by age 11, studied at the New England Conservatory at age 16 and ultimately became the first female African-American composer to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. That happened in 1933, and she would go on to compose some 300 works including the Piano Concerto in One Movement, premiered in 1934.

Success for Florence was an uphill battle - "a battle much larger than any war that pure talent and musical skill could win. It was a battle in which the nation was embroiled - a dangerous melange of segregation, Jim Crow laws, entrenched racism, and sexism." (Women’s Voices for Change, March 8, 2013) She had been refused admission to the Arkansas Music Teachers Association, and so founded her own school and taught music in the segregated black schools. Tensions in Little Rock increased and led Florence to move to Chicago with her two daughters in 1927. She found Chicago more welcoming and was able to develop her own late-Romantic style with echoes of her African-American heritage to produce a large catalogue which included orchestral and choral pieces, works for individual instruments and arrangements of spirituals.

The Concerto in One Movement for piano is actually in three parts, beginning with a moderato which includes a piano cadenza with traditional overtones. This is followed by a lovely adagio, again including folk accents. The work is concluded with an allegretto section, based on the juba, a folk dance performed on plantations before the American Civil War.

No evidence has been found that this work was ever performed after the 1930s, and the score had been missing since about 1940. In 2010 the Center for Black Music Research hired a music professor from Drew University, Dr. Trevor Weston, to reconstruct the long-lost score. As Weston says, "My name came up as someone who could put Humpty Dumpty together again."

He was known for being sensitive to what an orchestra sounded like in 1934, and who upheld the work as an important piece of African-American history. He used Price’s notes jotted on the piano score, listened to the only recording surviving, and studied three of Price’s piano rehearsal scores - whatever he could find - to produce the complete work we have today.

Following its "second" premiere on Feb 17, 2011, 77 years after its first, reviewer Rae Linda Brown, herself a music professor at Loyola, said "We can uphold Trevor’s score as authentic…He stayed true to Florence Price’s voice."

Beryl McHenry

Program Notes

Symphonie Fantastique

Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869)

Hector Berlioz was born in a small town near the French Alps. At age 12 he began teaching himself to play instruments, including flute, guitar and drums. He was a solitary child who was subject to uncontrollable mood swings. His volatile episodes, and fantasies of love and loss, prepared him to incorporate dramatic emotions into his music. He went to Paris to study medicine, but decided music suited him better. His first idol was Beethoven, whose music often ignored the classical structure of the times to accommodate his own emotions.

Berlioz also became a fan of Shakespeare's work, and it was at a performance of Hamlet that Hector fell passionately in love with Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress playing Ophelia. She repeatedly ignored his messages and Hector was devastated. Out of his obsession and subsequent suffering grew the idea for a "fantastic symphony", which describes in music a time in the life of an artist obsessed by his vision of the perfect, unattainable woman. The work was clearly an attempt to attract Harriet's attention, but it initially failed in that regard.

In five parts, the Symphonie fantastique begins by describing the protagonist's fixation with the perfect woman. Charming melodies mingle with orchestral motifs representing frustration and despair. There are tender moments and frenzied outbursts. The second movement describes a ball where the protagonist is tortured by the sight of his beloved. The music alternates between dancing and the antics of the man trying to get her attention. The third movement is a country scene, complete with landscape and animals, and echoes Hector's childhood. His jealous rages are thinly suppressed, and in the fourth movement break free. He poisons himself with opium. He dreams that he is executed for the murder of his beloved. This is the famous March to the Scaffold. He is escorted by a military band and the theme is cut short by the sound of the blade of the guillotine falling. His head bounces down the steps and drum rolls end the movement.The fifth movement describes a group of monster figures gathered for his funeral. His beloved appears as a witch. A church bell chimes his death. Chants and rituals become a black Sabbath dance and a fugue bears the soul of our hero to hell as the beloved gloats.

Harriet Smithson did not hear the symphony until two years after it had premiered. She realized then that she was the inspiration for the work. Intrigued, she agreed to meet Berlioz, and he overwhelmed her with his passionate appeals, at one point reportedly threatening suicide if she would not marry him. They were married in October of 1833, but after a time the passion faded. They were divorced seven years later.

Beryl McHenry