transmitted May 2011
A Symphony Inspired By The Wrong Woman!
Andrés Gaos-Berea (1874-1959)
Here in full (and almost untinkered-with) are two scripts that I wrote on the life and works of Andrés Gaos-Berea. In the event, both were well-voiced and -engineered by Rupert Kirkham , to whom - as to Somer Valley FM - many thanks!
An amplified discussion of the Galician composer’s First Symphony is appended.
Mike Burrows.
1 CB 99 Andrés Gaos-Berea
Intro: Sarabande, Suite A La Antigua
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. You have just heard the Sarabande, first movement of Suite A La Antigua - Antique Suite - by the subject of today’s programme, which is a tribute to the Galician-born violinist-composer Andrés Gaos Berea, who was born in La Coruna, on the 21st of March, 1874 and died at Mar Del Plata in Argentina on the 15 of March, 1959. I have trouble so much as pronouncing his name, which is a pity. I have never found it in an encyclopedia of music, let alone discovered a study devoted to his long and largely successful career. Certainly, one might expect to find more record of a child-prodigy whose talents were first recognized by Pablo Sarasate, and who moreover attended the Madrid Conservatory before graduating to a busy schedule as a virtuoso-soloist, conductor and freelance composer. emigrating to Argentina
Having googled his name, I found the odd study or potted biography, and a website on which the Sarabande is performed by an amateur orchestra.
(Nb, there is at least one good site - www.andresgaos.com/home.html: it contains a biography, professional photographs of Gaos, his associates and two wives, and even two videos of film-clips - one in which he performs on the violin in old age, a spell-binding spectacle, sadly silent - though I must say, to watch is to feel that one hears - and the second in which, at the piano this time, he acompanies a grand-daughter in The Rice-pudding Song! Most importantly, one can hear his music - the Second Symphony, the Suite A La Antigua, the Prelude from his One Act opera, Forbidden Love, a song, Rosa D’Abril, his masterly tone-poem, Granada: Evening In The Alhambra, the Nocturnal Impression for Strings and some folksong arrangements for piano).
The name Berea
The younger Andrés, known as Andresito, grew up serving in the shop, demonstrating the music and in the process learning violin to a high standard. A visiting violinist took his education in hand, to be succeeded by a more gifted soloist at the local music school; with him, Andrés gained fame. At ten, he competed in a competition and not only won it but was awarded an unprecedented gold medal struck in his honour.
At eleven, he enrolled in the Madrid Conservatoire, where he studied violin, piano and harmony. A year later, the Galician virtuoso, Pablo Sarasate, for whom fame had begun at eight, with a concert under the baton of Pilar’s Father, Sebastian Canuto Berea, heard him play and tried to persuade Gaos’s parents to let him take the boy with him to Paris
In 1889, at fifteen, he won a place at the Paris Conservatoire, and at sixteen moved to Brussels; the move was significant, in that it brought him under the tutelage of the great violinist, Ysaye, but also to a place imbued with a perhaps more deeply expressive musical tradition; the solemn but intensely visionary Franckists in Paris were more embattled than those in Franck’s country of birth.
By 1894, he was performing his own compositions as a practising musician - and visiting Havana
Perhaps there was no future in this... Soon, he moved to Mexico and, in 1895, to Buenos Aires
Soon after, he fell in love with America Monenegro, an Italian violinist born in Venezuela , who was visiting Buenos Aires Uruguay Montevideo
Track One: Suite A La Antigua , Fughetta, (1.43 min)
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM and I’m Mike Burrows.
Today’s programme is a tribute to the little-known composer Andrés Gaos-Berea.
The Fughetta for strings that we have just heard dates from a time when most composing violinists of ambition were rediscovering the baroque, perhaps via Schumann, Brahms and the Grieg of Holberg Suite; certainly, this was true of Gaos, whose avowed favourite composers, Chopin, Schumann and Grieg, were all masters of baroque techniques if not often given to purely baroque expression. One can hear the influence of Bach overlaid by the romantic style of these composers, the overall effect being pleasingly objective in formulae and yet, as all good music is, immediately intense and moving, although the piece is so terse and even unambitious in development. The flatward drift in the harmony is Schumannian and Grieg-like in equal measure. There is the feel of a violin solo-study played and filled in by a small string orchestra. Gaos did soon after - in 1899 - write One Hundred Progressive Technical Exercises For The Violin.
In 1898, the married couple returned to Buenos Aires Argentina , as a teacher at many schools in Bueno Aires, a performing musician, as both violinist and conductor, shuttling between Buenos Aires and Montevideo , going on European tours with America , and functioning as an inspector at the State-run Teacher Training College
Sadly, within months, he began to suffer symptoms of what might now be called ‘burn-out’; the likely consequence of marriage and deeply suppressed awareness of many lost opportunities to become a world-figure of the stature of Sarasate or Ysaye.
It is instructive to compare Gaos’ feelings there with those of two frustrated virtuosi, Schumann and Sibelius, both of whom began as aspiring performers, Schumann on piano, Sibelius on violin; Schumann’s famous damaged fingers and Sibelius’ realization that he did not have the nerves to cope with solo-performance. Both could only dream of being a virtuoso, while being possibly the greatest composers of their respective ages. Gaos was a great violinist and excellent composer, but the attentions of Fame were denied him on both fronts.
His wife took up his teaching posts, and for the next eighteen months, Gaos fought to recover at a rented country retreat. Some holiday-trips were taken to Montevideo
It was now that he first composed music in Argentinian folk-style.
When the first European tour with America - in fact a tour of Galicia and Portugal - came about, the first stop was at Gijon in Asturias
On his return to Buenos Aires , it looked as though things looked up with the winning of Second Prize in a competion in the Argentinian province of Entre Rios to write a hymn in honour of Urquisa, the founder of Argentina
Our next piece is the Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 24. This dates from 1903, and is an Allegro opening movement to a Concerto the last two movements of which were never written. In its ambitious, vaulting style, there is no trace of exhaustion or bitterness. It is discernably Spanish in opening orchestral flourish on strings and horns, baroquely dancing strings and trombone - the flourish repeated by the double-stopping soloist ably and abetted in its development by strings, clarinet, oboe, horn and the rest of the orchestra. The music owes something to Schumann, Brahms and Saint-Saens as well as many of the touring virtuoso violinist-composers of the latter half of the 19th Century. The double-stopping is pure Brahms. In the second subject, slow and lyrical, the use of woodwind, particularly liquid clarinet and tender solo violin is beautiful and distinctive, but the whole work, though dated and so stereotypical in idiom, seems inspired. Its warmth and energy reminds me of the Irishman Hamilton Harty’s Violin Concerto, written a little later. The development is leisurely, bracing itself up with passagework and imitations, but the overall effect is one of songfulness. All ends abruptly, even perfunctorily with the opening flourish, but on repeated listening, this work strikes one as being beautifully shaped as well as beautifully and effectively written. It should be well-known.
It was first performed by America and an orchestra of Conservatory staff at the Odeon Theatre in Buenos Aires Argentina
Track 2: Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 24 (10.O5 Min)
As the website on Gaos that I consulted says, at his death in 1959, ‘great part of Gaos’ symphonic creations were in the dark’. The Symphony No 1 was first performed in Galicia
No 2, ‘En Las Montanas De Galicia ’, ‘In The Mountains of Galicia
(Note: This is the composer’s own testimony, quoted in sleeve-notes).
The period of the first two movements’ composition saw Gaos writing an opera, Forbidden Love, for which he adapted his own libretto, and several songs as well as symphonic movements. It ended with divorce from America America remained in Buenos Aires
Gaos wrote at least three creole folk-operettas, The Last Violets, Facundo and the resoundingly entitled X-Rays, but the return to symphonic writing was both heroic and an inspired rejoinder to his friends, colleagues and even members of his own family who did not believe in his compositional ability.
The addition of a finale to what became the Second Symphony created one of the finest symphonies I have ever heard. I make no apologies for playing the whole work. Its influences are not far to seek, chromatic harmony and melodic freshness whose inspiration is dance and song and a real verve and richness in its scoring implicate Grieg, Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov or Glazunov; grand, persistent use of canon, where different sections play rounds at short intervals of out-of-phaseness as at the climax of the first movement, pitting trombones on the one hand against trumpet and strings on the other, may be owed to Grieg or Franck and D’Indy; and trochaic rhythms in the strings in the third movement are possibly owed to the Schumann of the Spring Symphony or Overture Scherzo and Finale - for two examples.
The First Movement, Andante Mosso, Cantas Celtas, opening pastorally or moresquely on bassoon, oboe and sidedrum in imitation of modal bagpipes and tambour, is a sonata-movement, to my ear, with three themes in exposition developed largely sequentially or in thematic transformation before restatement and the triumphant, canonic close. I disagree with the sleeve-notes, which state that the movement is a simple ABCAB structure, where C replaces development, presumably. The manner is delightfully cheerful and heartfelt, unpretentious, the intertwining of the melodic strands affording delight in flute and oboe and Russian-sounding unison violins, and working up in Borodin-like style, contrasts between modal and Romantic harmony, a nostalgia-filled use of flatward chromaticism and crescendi over strongly held pedal
-notes varying the material but also building and subsiding for contrasting moments of reflection, the scoring having a keeping or range in which colours are mixed. The composer knows how to sustain momentum and leaves no passage under- or overscored, blending the sections of the orchestra so that solos and climaxes are always effective.
Brass and percussion are vigorous, high woodwind fresh and artless and strings (and horns or oboe) deeply nostalgic and humane. All ends happily on the strong B theme and a simple upward three chord cadence. Let’s hear the first movement.
Track 3: Sinfonia En Las Montanas
This introduction is followed by an Andante movement: Danza Campestra rhapsodizes in the manner of D’Indy in his Jour D’Ete A La Montagne. From a deep-toned, curiously Irish lament-
sounding opening on deep woodwind and strings, it functions as a slow movement, its melodic development rich in harmony and wistfulness, the strings - violas and cellos in particular - at length predominant with what sounds like use of bell-like celesta. It reminds me slightly of Eric Coates in Westminster Meditation, but is the real thing, where Eric Coates is a master of genre. A central scherzando section is the dance of the title, heavy in hispanic dotted rhythms, deep strings and bassoon opening, higher strings and warm brass, violins, horns and trumpets interplaying in canons or imitations - in the use of horns and violins, I’m reminded of a composer quite unrelated, the Swede, Wilhelm Stenhammar: but possibly it relates to the study of folk-music at about the time of Gaos’ enforced sabbatical on his return to Argentina (from Montevideo). The dusky music of the opening returns and rounds off the movement as it began.
Track 4: 11 Andante (10.57 min)
The Last movement, Fiesta De Alde, Allegro Moderato is the most complex and melodically contrasting movement of the symphony. It is the most furiously imaginative, the most extroverted and defiant: fanfares, fierce ‘Spanish’ dance-rhythms, stormy gusts, those Schumannian, tongue-in-cheek skippings I mentioned earlier - and as another contrast, a lovely, unexpected and extended tune on oboe and strings whose whose modal, flatward-tending harmonies induce a mood that used once to be called ‘smiling with a sigh’. This tune never recurs. The other constituents are worked out in changingly scored juxtaposition, the quicker dance-elements spurring on, the moments of repose or dry Schumannian chatter always heightening the sense of climax-on-the-way until, on Schumannian muttering, two loud chords provide the final cadance.
Track 5: 111 Allegro Moderato (8.46 min)
The Symphony went unperformed apart from the Third Movement, in Gaos’ lifetime: it was first performed in full in 1974!
To end the programme, the last movement of Suite A La Antigua , Fantasia.
This was Classical Break and I’m Mike Burrows. I hope you’ve enjoyed our programme and that I’ll have your company again, soon.
Track Six: Suite A La Antigua : Fantasia (6.20)
(Note: Since I wrote this script, I have obtained a double CD set of Gaos’ Complete Symphonic Works - the two Symphonies, the tone-poem, Granada: An Evening in The Alhambra, the Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, the Nocturnal Impression and the Suite a la Antigua. The music is performed by the Symphonic Orchestra of Galicia Britain only by download; CDs are available from Verdi , Spain
2 Classical Break: Gaos ll
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows.
Not long ago, we broadcast a programme devoted to the music of the Galician violinist composer Andrés Gaos--Berea , who was born in A Coruna (or La Coruna ) in 1874 and died in Mar del Plata in Argentina
Since that broadcast, we have obtained a double CD of The Complete Symphonic Works of Andrés Gaos. Today’s programme is given over to the three-movement First Symphony, written in 1899, when Gaos was 25 and recovered from a nervous breakdown severe enough to have necessitated a long break in the Argentinian countryside and to have prevented him from performing or composing for some time.
Let’s hear the First Movement: one could analyse the irregular sonata-form, the melodic and harmonic material the wonderful, bold or subtle scoring, the masterliness of constant development, the sense of musical logic and appealing emotional quality in every note, but it ought to be unexpected the first time you listen, to burst into wherever you are in life.
The tempo-marking is Allegro moderato e con ritmico: moderately lively and rhythmically.
Track One, Symphony Number One, Allegro moderato e con ritmico, Gaos. (16.04 min)
This is Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. Today, the topic is the First Symphony of Andrés Gaos, a little-known Galician violinist-composer who emigrated to Argentina
It is a brave young composer who in his First Symphony writes a first movement longer than a quarter of an hour, and is able to take what he thinks due liberties in form with such effective results. This first movement was shaped by an internal logic, dictated by its material, not by the text-book; what matters is that nothing seems mechanical or ineptly incongruous in placement; one finds a beginning, middle and end.
In Gaos’ day, as now, a First Symphony was an undertaking to hesitate over. So much weight of perceived meaning, musical and philosophical, had turned the form into a source of endless argument and generational conflict among creative, performing and pedagogical musicians, an argument ably exploited by newspapers and periodicals.
By the age of twenty-five, he had become a known solo-violinist, a professor of the violin at the Buenos Aires
Lately married after a scandal - he had married his now-Wife, the violinist, America Montenegro only after she had fallen pregnant - he had endured nervous breakdown, and now he set himself the task many composers would dread: moreover any symphony would have to be written at white-heat; he had a family to provide for! As the laid-off composer says in Singin’ in the Rain, “At last, I can start suffering and write that symphony!” and, when offered work at a higher salary a few moments later, “At last, I can stop suffering and write that symphony!”
There was no certainty of a premiere or even run-through, unless played by students, no certainty that the right people would hear it, therefore no hope of publication, he would have to copy out full-score and parts himself, perhaps with the help of his wife and colleagues, or pay a professional copyist to do it; he and his family would go without, his return to employment would be delayed, but, like the single-minded artist he was, he forged ahead.
His ambitious and able First Symphony was very likely pieced together from Galician and South American folk-music, student attempts at the form, harmony, fugue, orchestration; from violin-studies - the vaulting, wayward first subject may come from such a source. He called on a lifetime of reading scores and performing.
He had begun as something of a local wunderkind. Even so, his family on both sides had been musicians for generations; like Elgar’s, his love of music had been fostered by a father who ran a music-shop. His mother was a woman of sensibility whose family owned that music-shop, organised concerts, composed and were as famous in their district as - say - the Bach family in theirs. By the time the Symphony was begun, Gaos had studied at Madrid , Paris and Brussels
His second movement, after a strongly energetic first, is like a thorough-composed song; there are at least three verses, the material continuing to develop ideas first stated in the improvisatory opening of the Symphony. The time seems twilight becoming deepest night, the place a room and oneself alone with the darker elements of the first movement. There is only one insuperable obstacle to one’s happiness, it seems to say, but that’s life, we have to live well and to die well; accept our fate and win some kind of moral victory of which it may well be, no-one will ever know: a victory over self in which we attain what we wanted. In answer, the obstacle - undoubtedly fear - rises for a third time and meets...silence, a pause; the music sinks to its overtired close; this is as much of a happy ending as Gaos permits us.
There is magnificent use of violins and violas and of the strings as a section. The woodwind, too, have fine moments, particularly the plaintive oboe and sinisterly underlining bassoon. The brass at climaxes are - as always in Gaos - extremely strong and effective without overstatement. He understood how to sustain not only his musical thinking but also how to combine timbres of instruments or highlight a solo detail without inconsistency in overall sonority or an ungrateful exposure of any instrument’s weakness. This was a practical, highly professional musician.
Here is the second movement: Andante - At Walking-pace.
Track Two: Symphony No 1, Andante, Gaos (10.14 min)
The heart of this Symphony has been sombre indeed, dark but neither dull nor morbid. Perhaps the anxiety-sufferer may hear something of his own struggles in it, but what is notable about this movement ‘at walking-pace’ is that it is not merely good ‘psychology’ but also good, in fact fine, music. Gaos’ childhood and adulthood so far had been a time of severely focused hard work as a developing executant and composer, and travel in Europe and South America that in itself must have left even a city-boy desperate for repose, some sense of home, outright success or easy living. The mysterious, halting turns of this piece find resolution in unadorned resignation to fate that is brave in understatement and dignified without seeming weak or evasive.
Besides being the most consuming, the Andante is the least forward-looking movement of this symphony; when it was composed, such a song of earnest sentiment and sensibility must have seemed a feature of the genre.
Commonly, a swift, effective Scherzo and trio - a dance or march with contrasting lyrical material - in lighter, often national style commonly followed.
However, as was fashionable in the last third of the Nineteenth Century and in France in particular - as a student, Gaos attended the Paris Conservatoire before moving onto Brussels to study with the great violinist, Ysaye - this is a three-movement symphony; there is no scherzo. The piece is cyclical in construction: themes proposed at the outset recur in other guises in the following movements - in theory it permits a closer and more thorough musical argument and presents an essential profile, with no scherzo/intermezzo to distract. Frequently, and following Franck’s example, composers would sandwich quicker scherzando-music within the slow movement to ensure contrast within a structure itself roughly in proportions of thirds.
The outer movements of symphonies were of great significance; the finale came to pack in so much significance, such culminatory expressiveness that it fell apart in a pointless dissension between quickness, dynamism and grandeur, between an attempt to sum up and bring down the house at the end.
Here, we return to the tempo-marking of the first movement: Allegro Moderato, moderately fast. Such are Gaos’ material, his formal control and the movement’s length - about two minutes shorter than the first and one-and-a-half longer than the second - that moderately doesn’t become dully or unnecessarily. This is a French rondo of the kind familiar from Franck’s followers; subtle development makes it seem less bald than a straightforward ternary structure.
The material is frequently delightful, thoughtful, vigorous and there is a fine melody that at last reaches its full length - and some considerable glory - the apotheosis of every lyrical impulse in the Symphony as a whole. Each time the tune occurs, the first violins have made a keener, lovelier sound in unison each time. Even now, the tune is shorter than expected. At last, the music is worked up patiently through combining of fugitive recollections. When, heavy brass chant uncertainty and protest - the strings reply without difficulty with an optimistic first movement motif; then, back comes the beginning of the Symphony’s commanding First subject.
The close of the rondo is broad and confident - and now comes the pay-off of the whole piece, it seems to me: within the flourish, a sawing up-down exercise on massed violins. It incorporates widening rising intervals and, clinching the first subject’s nature: you may think it resembled a wayward study- or caprice for violin, gives the last word to the victorious spirit of a fiddler!
Track Three: Symphony No 1: lll Allegro Moderato, Gaos
As a violinist himself, Gaos’s most ambitious work might have been expected to have more than it did of Bruch or Saint-Saens in it - or of Sarasate or Ysaye, two of his violinist-composer-mentors - but they were all arch-conservatives in style, creators of sterotypical form for its own sake. This work is on the Franckist-Brahmsian-Borodinian axis, less woolly than Chausson, in matter more distinguished than D’Indy or Dukas. It has no real kinship with the work of minor symphonic composers. It is not too skilful or eloquent, but too creatively original, too much the genuine article. True musical and psychological problems are set and the solutions are convincing. It can’t be Debussy, Sibelius, Nielsen, Elgar or Mahler, and has none of the exquisite delights and esoteric nightmares of modernists like Scriabin or Schoenberg. It is unvisionary, courting no-one unless with an unself-indulgent, objective classicism vigorous and suffused with poignant lyricism, its musical procedures romantically expressive of one man’s inner life and experiences.
Again, Spanish folk and Art-music, Grieg, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Franck, D’Indy and possibly early Delius are brought together not merely as influences, but in real integration? Gaos’ models were first-rate artists; he had the sense to know by whom to be influenced, having a hard-headed estimate of his own nature and abilities; he did not underestimate himself, and even at the age of 25, did his influences proud.
Yet the Symphony No 1 was never played in his lifetime, never published. It was put on one side to all intents and purposes forever.
His son, another Andrés, found the full score by chance. It appears that the Symphony had unhappy associations for its composer.
In his old age, Gaos had been displeased when his son had uncovered the score of the Violin Fantasy and showed him it. After his divorce in 1917, any work associated with America Montenegro, his violinist first wife of twenty years, unsettled him; in the case of the Violin Fantasy, she had performed the solo for the premiere. His second marriage was happy and lasted for four decades; the First Symphony may simply have been inspired by the wrong woman. Inspired, it most certainly was.
It must also have been an uncomfortable reminder of the upswing from anxiety disorder into the old hopes of fame and success to repay him for his early struggles and labours and the agonies of a painful illness. A 25 year-old thinks most things may still be possible. How much more hopeful than the next will a 2-5 year-old feel when he has recovered from a severe bout of nerve-exhaustion? We close the programme with the first and last movement of Suite A La Antigua , Suite From Olden Days, another work from Gaos’ youth, an orchestration of miniatures for piano: Canon and Fantasia. Here is the Canon.
Track Four: Suite a la Antigua , Movt l (c3.00 min)
This is Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Mike Burrows. We hope that you have enjoyed what may be the first broadcast on English radio of Andrés Gaos’ First Symphony, and that you will join us for our next journey into the world of classical music, where great works are in such full supply that life is ever-enriched by new treasures! We leave you with the Fantasia
from Suite a la Antigua .
Track Five: Suite A La Antigua , Movt lV, Fantasia Gaos (6.23 min)
3 A Description of Andrés Gaos’ First Symphony, Based On The Original Script
Written for Classical Break.
The three-movement First Symphony was written in 1899, when Gaos was 25 and recovered from a nervous breakdown that had been severe enough to have necessitated a long break in the Argentinian countryside and to have prevented him from performing or composing for some time. Unusually for the time, it is not described as being in a given key, and flirts with chromaticism and diatonic and modal harmony as contrasts while giving one an impression of stable overall tonality. The freshness of the idiom is at least partly due to an imaginative and fluid use of harmony and key, neither too chromatic on the one side nor too conventionally diatonic on the other; the system is neither complex for the sake of complexity, nor obvious.
1 Allegro moderato e con ritmico. (16.04 min)
The Symphony holds one’s attention from the outset. The first movement, Allegro Moderato e ritmico, opens in a muted pulsing, theme - Fate, perhaps? It meets with an as unyieldingly downcast reply. This, too, is like Grieg at his most austere, confined to the alto and bass, the trombones grim in purpose. Then comes a more outward subject or group of motifs, latterly flirting with sharpening or flattening of intervals. This leaps out at one though unlike any other first subject that I have heard, sombre, crabbed but not cramped, swerving, athletic; its wayward shape resembles that of a bold solo violin--study or caprice, where most of the harmonic interest is of necessity in the top line, other notes got by double-, triple- or quadruple-stopping. Its veering would certainly promote memory, concentration and skill in its player. This theme may therefore have an autobiographical significance. Also, it contains the significant intervals and harmonic patterns of much of the Symphony. Its emotions begin in pride; become less simple but gain in intriguingness. A short chant bridge-passage leads to the contrasting second suject or group of motifs; these tend to an increasingly long-suffering, flatward if touching tone, feminine, prettily though soberly scored. These fragments are as ‘national’ as the first group and seem not far from Delius’ ardent, yet somnolently tropical Florida
11 Andante (10.14 min)
It is a brave young composer who in his First Symphony writes a first movement longer than a quarter of an hour, and is able to take what he thinks due liberties in form with such effective results. This first movement was shaped by an internal logic, dictated by its material, not by the text-book; what matters is that nothing seems mechanical or ineptly incongruous in placement; one finds a beginning, middle and end. Gaos has proved that his essentially introspective nature is also dynamic, developing and pacing his work with true zest, his music peculiarly rich and alive, the many telling details and unexpected juxtaposition of ideas astonishingly doughty and strong as well as warmly tender and humane.
The slow second movement, an Andante, opens elegiacally on heavy-pedalled, imitatively havering strings, the oboe adding contrast to their drawn-out - and drawn-up - solemnity. The arioso-style thematic material seems to have grown naturally out of the pulsing opening phrases of the first movement - and a sense of foreboding takes over as the pulsing turns to menace. The tone is now almost Debussyan, its murky, terraced scoring impressionistic, Nuages-like, but anticipating this work by some years! Woodwind and brass enter, Fate or protest in grief or doubt briefly expresses itself in brassy, thickly scored accompaniment to a unison in first violins. This is soothed imperfectly. Then, in irresolute development of protest, the flute and oboe and horn are contrasted with more dusky violas and cellos, as in the first movement, such a sound is not unlike Delius or possibly Dukas whose Symphony in C antedated this work by a few years. The conrasts to be created by sustained string tone and rocking woodwind notes, or bold misalliances of woodwind soloists and lower strings had become mannerisms in the works of nationalist composers of the second half of the nineteenth Century. Out of viola-coloured unease, the opening theme bursts out in its protest less loudly and less sustainedly than before, yet again loses itself in dusk before relapsing to be lulled by a motif straight from the first movement second subject! This is a subtle, unstudied touch from an inexperienced symphonist, but Gaos seems to have believed that true art conceals itself in art! The violins have it, though lower instruments - basses, cellos, bassoon, and higher woodwind - how Gaos loved the flute and oboe - and middle to lower strings exchange dolefulnesses. The arioso returns, but again, the protest motif builds - there is a pause; we hold our breath, but this time, no attack. The music falls to string chords in conclusion that seems straight out of the mezzo-forte close of Sibelius’ Fourth in scoring and stoical finality of tone - composed some twelve years before Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony would be heard... The heart of this Symphony is sombre indeed, dark but neither dull nor morbid. Anxiety-sufferers may hear something of their own struggles in it, but what is notable about this movement ‘at walking-pace’ is that it is not merely good ‘psychology’ but also good, in fact fine, music. Gaos’ childhood and adulthood so far had been a time of severely focused hard work as a developing executant and composer, and travel in Europe and South America that in itself must have left even a city-boy desperate for repose, some sense of home, outright success or easy living. The mysterious, halting turns of this piece find resolution in unadorned resignation to fate that is brave in understatement and dignified without seeming weak or evasive.
111 Allegro Moderato
The second movement has been a beautiful interplay of consoling lyricism and troubledness: the models were perhaps French or Scandinavian - Svendsen comes particularly to mind, though Svendsen is more forthright and not as complex. The composer could not forget his troubles, but was controlled in alternation of these two moods; the troubledness left one in no doubt as to its sincerity, the close as bare once again as Sibelius at his most uncompromising. The twilit lengths permitted bright moments now and again, the use of cellos and violas dusky, the violins keener and more passionate, the basses and brass growling, the woodwind, particularly the oboe and clarinet, providing essential contrasts of their own. The climaxes were deliberate; the last built up to meet nothingness; with relief, one collapsed into that Sibelian coda.
Besides being the most consuming, the Andante is the least forward-looking movement of this symphony; when it was composed, such a song of earnest sentiment and sensibility must have seemed a feature of the genre. Commonly, a swift, effective Scherzo and trio - a dance or march with contrasting lyrical material - in lighter, often national style commonly followed.
However, as was fashionable in the last third of the Nineteenth Century and in France in particular - as a student, Gaos attended the Paris Conservatoire before moving onto Brussels to study with the great violinist, Ysaye - this is a three-movement symphony; there is no scherzo. The piece is cyclical in construction: themes proposed at the outset recur in other guises in the following movements - there’s always the danger that repeated motifs become reiteration made the more didactically tedious by the complexity of their surroundings, but, in theory, cyclical construction permits a closer and more thorough musical argument and may present a more essential profile, if there’s no scherzo/intermezzo to distract. Frequently, and following Franck’s example, composers would sandwich quicker scherzando-music within the slow movement to ensure contrast within a structure itself roughly in proportions of thirds.
The outer movements of symphonies were of great significance; the finale came to pack in so much significance, such culminatory expressiveness that it fell apart in a pointless dissension between quickness, dynamism and grandeur, between an attempt to sum up and bring down the house at the end.
Gaos has no scherzo or scherzando in his symphony, the slow movement has been deep and brooding. His reflective personality tends to contained bursts of energy between cogent reveries; it is a very effective method, honest and avoiding a forcing of his disposition. So far from being the weakest, his finale is possibly the strongest movement of the three.
We return to the tempo-marking of the first movement: Allegro Moderato, moderately fast. Such are Gaos’ material, his formal control and the movement’s length - about two minutes shorter than the first and one-and-a-half longer than the second - that moderately doesn’t become dully or unnecessarily. This is a French rondo of the kind familiar from Franck’s followers; subtle development makes it seem less bald than a straightforward ternary structure. It begins in bustle, strings, woodwind and punctuating percussion about which measures dance. Music is regaining its confidence in life, perhaps; there are sly references to the first subject’s hesitations. A slower, lyrical strings-moment, like a chorale, grows out of the pulse of the protest-theme which threatens another attack, yet ‘sets’ beautifully in the major and returns to the dance, which is bassoon-led at first. Held notes pass one onto woodwind commentary on the slower moment, weary arabesques and chant on oboe, clarinet, bassoon and flute also making themselves prominent, in Sibelian or Russian folk-style, this, like the chorale has been generated from a fragment in the first movement; the dance measures, interrupted by those punctuating chords - this time with brass and as if presaging protest - suddenly give way instead to a new, wonderful tune with Tchaikovskian chromatic falling and rising figures, related to the lyrical and uncertain contrasting motifs in the first movement, in which violins and the whole orchestra play a telling part in melody, harmony and decoration, the brass providing a swell pedal in the middle-harmony - this is interrupted brusquely but returns still more earnestly. There is an upward sweep echo in the accompaniment at one point that is a Gaos fingerprint. The manner in which this significant tune is interrupted and builds again into a still more flowing, beautiful sound - is another finger--print of Gaos: statement, qualification or distraction and fuller restatement. The trombones sound repeated notes - a deep, warning tucket of a kind familiar from Russian music. The second theme is reprised. A reminder of the first subject of the entire symphony chirps, a dying fall returns to the chant (a reminder of the second movement. Its pendant phrases seem possibly Moorish. Dance returns briefly... Cadential string chords alternate with brass notes involving trombones, trumpets, horns in permutation; the brass inhibit forward movement, but dance and the protest and uncertain motif have a moment before back comes the big tune, more smoothly, horn protest and uncertainty in falling string scales interrupting as before - then in full glory, reaching its full length, decorated, rising with woodwind flourishes, the apotheosis of every lyrical impulse in the work. Not the least of its qualities is its sensitive, sincere-seeming fervour. The first violins have made a keener, lovelier sound in unison each time. Even now, the tune is shorter than expected, but that is a third Gaos fingerprint - leave people wanting more!
This isn’t the conclusion. It is time for memories of slow-movement heard from under dance-matter; there has to be an end to this, and hints of the first movement lead to the music’s being worked up patiently through fugitive recollections with the assistance of the dance. Suddenly, heavy brass chant uncertainty and protest - the strings reply without difficulty with an optimistic first movement motif; then, back comes the beginning of the commanding First subject. In retrospect, like the short pulsing Fate-theme - protest - of the very outset it appears to have been behind everything that has occurred through three movements. Here, it is shorn of former exhaustiveness. The close of the rondo is broad and confident - within the flourish, a sawing up-down exercise on massed violins incorporating widening rising intervals and, clinching the first subject’s study- or caprice-nature perhaps gives the last word to the victorious spirit of a fiddler!
It should be remembered that Gaos was working on the Symphony at about the time that he was writing and collating his own One Hundred Progressive Technical Exercises For The Violin.
Significance
This Symphony is of its time, yet vitally different: whatever feelings were at the core of Gaos’ soul expressed themselves with something other than proficiency in his music, no dreadful abstraction and impersonal-seeming drudgery, staid rushes of theatrical blood to the head signified by staged diminished, sevenths, profound artistic inspiration sign-posted by careful fuguing, or languishment in the tedium of pious parlour-tunes standing for second-subjects - no slow-movement expatiation that afflicts minor symphonists of the period. This is to say that it somehow transcends the competent models. Gaos’ natural fastidiousness can be said to have been down to fine sensibility and high intelligence as well to his being conversant with the symphonic techniques of his day. The young man stood on the threshold of the New Age and looked forward - like his near-contemporary, Rachmaninoff.
“The sinister uncertainty of the Age is portrayed without theatricality and Gaos meets it and wins without stuffiness or bombast. He doesn’t retreat into piousness, wear what may pass for a heart on his sleeve or give himself a toffee-apple for knocking the pipe out of an Aunt Sally’s mouth.
. His First Symphony is not self-consciously heroic symphony-as-drama; it lacks obvious display though not large lines. It eschews the self-indulgent or irrational; it is intended to be abstract, to manipulate attractive musical material whose shapes generate an engrossing argument as it invoked emotions on the human scale.
It isn’t forthright and latterday Beethovenian; it had none of the Superman mysticism and vast dimensions of many of music’s philosophers of the time, either. As a violinist himself, Gaos’s most ambitious work might have been expected to have more than it did of Bruch or Saint-Saens in it - or of Sarasate or Ysaye, two of his violinist-composer-mentors. But they were not; by 1899, they were all arch-conservatives in style, creators of sterotypical form for its own sake (beautifully but inimitably).
It is on the Franckist-Brahmsian-Borodinian axis, less woolly than Chausson, in matter more distinguished than D’Indy or Dukas. It had no real kinship with the work of minor but more prolific symphonic composers like Stanford, Martucci, Glazunov or Sinding. It is too skilful or eloquent, far too original. There is nothing of the factitiously strenuous or pallidly lyrical about it, nothing of storm and stress turned dutiful, a pale thin hand wafting away a whirlwind. On the other hand, it may make you think more of Kalinnikov, Stenhammar or Rachmaninoff than of Debussy, Sibelius, Nielsen, Elgar or Mahler. It is quite consciously unvisionary, courting no-one unless with an unself-indulgent, objective classicism with all the appeal of lyrical romanticism and disciplined conflict generated by purely musical procedures. It can’t be acused of easiness, bourgeois complacency or pedantry, either, though it has nothing to do with the exquisite delights and esoteric nightmares of Scriabin or Schoenberg - it is conspicuously unfebrile for much of its length.
Compared with Chapi, Isasi, Turina and other Spanish symphonists of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, he remains articulate, eloquent, distinct: less mannered, less of a kind. There is a uniqueness in his work - a uniqueness aimed for, that has nothing of the academy or circus about it. Within its individuality, however, it has a line and keeps to it from first note to last, pursuing an argument that develops almost for its entire length and that is singlemindedly resolved. It begins peremptorily and ends self-reliantly, and in between, it seeks to explain itself - as it was felt that a Symphony ought to do. Many, many other symphonies follow a line from first note to last; many are competent in doing this, but nothing more. Many are full of a National Manner or attempts at display of self-defining ego. Some aim at ‘cosmopolitan’ Mendelssohnian or Brahmsian taste and clarity of argument, and may succeed in some sense. Die-hards and moderns alike can date dreadfully, either because too personal or too lacking in personality. A single miscalculation in matter or style can, with hindsight, be the damning of an entire piece, and usually is.
On the other hand, the highly-worked First Symphony of Gaos has a distinctive flavour of its own from beginning to end. It seems fresh, spontaneous and deeply poignant. Who else could have brought together Spanish folk and Art-music, Grieg, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Franck and D’Indy and early Delius as influences, not only together but in highly artistic synthesis? The contrasts are there, fresh as paint, the music sounding anything but samey or laborious, constantly developing, and the maturity of the form is there, too, to prove the contrasts ingredients of an integrated style. The older Gaos matured - the Second Symphony is even richer in beauty, more sustained, fluent and incisive, but all in all, the First Symphony is to be seen as a better work than those of many experienced composers of double his age. All that is minor about Gaos is the size of his output, roughly comparable to that of Paul Dukas, another highly-self-critical composer whose actual creative genius transcended such considerations much the same but who, once more like Gaos, was sadly valued most as a teacher.
The manner in which he impels his music, particularly in building up to climaxes, with sonorous runs in the strings from bass to treble seems classical, Haydnesque, or even of the Baroque, Bachian or Vivaldi-like; perhaps the technique came via Schumann, one of his self-avowed heroes; it is one more fruitful facet of his learning, along with a highly enjoyable employment of syncopation and dotted notes. There is an amplitude to his filling-in that impresses with its rhythmical sense, imparting a momentum and verve that are irresistible. His use of the strings in general is masterly, as impressive as that of Sibelius who was another trained violinist. In spite of his memorable scoring for woodwind and bare-bones use of brass - almost classical in its restraint - it is a matter for regret that Gaos left us no introduction and allegro, concerto grosso or sinfonietta for strings!
His skill in scoring for full orchestra - knowing how to highlight or blend particular instrumental voices is not only economical but also highly effective. Again, like Sibelius, he understood the vital importance of maintaining a pedal, whether in the bass, alto or treble - a consistent level of sonority in which the sections are blended and support one another. It is a very practical skill to know the weak registers of instruments - most instruments have them - as well as the methods by which the notes have to be found, or whether the notes can be found! It is possible to score to create quite deliberately a sense of strain or unease - to create misalliances of timbres, but many composers create a sense of strain or unease by accident. Gaos was a very conscientious artist, and to my ears any tortured or murky sounds that he creates must be deliberate, to judge from the absence of over- or underscoring elsewhere. His orchestra appears to be of what was then regarded as classical size; if scored on larger lines and in a more flashy manner, the symphony would be more immediately striking at climaxes, but leave a less solid but unself-conscious impression.
All his models were first rate artists; he had the sense to know by whom to be influenced, having a hard-headed estimate of his own nature and abilities; he did not underestimate himself and even at the age of only 25, did his influences proud.
Yet the Symphony No 1 was never played in Gaos’ lifetime, never published. It was put on one side to all intents and purposes forever.
His son, also Andrés, found the full score by chance amongst his father’s papers. It appears that the Symphony had unhappy associations for its composer. In his old age, he was displeased when his son uncovered the score of the Violin Fantasy and showed him it. After his divorce in 1917, any work associated with America Montenegro, his violinist first wife of twenty years, unsettled him; in the case of the Violin Fantasy, she had performed the solo for the premiere. His second marriage was happy and lasted for four decades; the First Symphony may simply have been inspired by the wrong woman. Inspired, it most certainly was. It must also have been an uncomfortable reminder of the upswing from anxiety disorder into the old hopes of fame and success to repay him for his early struggles and labours and the agonies of a painful illness. A 25 year-old thinks most things may still be possible. How much more hopeful than the next will a 25 year-old feel when he has recovered from a severe bout of nerve--exhaustion?
Gaos at twenty-five was as impressive a figure as anyone.
A poignant touch in the Violin Fantasy sees the brusque downward string cascades that interrupt the big melody in the finale of the First Symphony recycled to provide a few moments of the solo-part... A brief echo of 1899’s real monument to his talent, with a private, personal significance, or simply an effective phrase? No-one will ever know.
We hope that you enjoyed what may be the first broadcast on English radio of Andrés Gaos’ First Symphony, and that you will join us for our next journey into the world of classical music, where great works are in such full supply that life is ever-enriched by new treasures!
In Closing:
Of other works by Gaos that might be recorded are his opera, Forbidden Love, a violin sonata, his solo-studies for violin, some small Galician folk song-arrangements for piano (he was by all accounts a superb improvizer at the piano), a number of songs, and popular operettas. The prelude to Forbidden Love is very characteristic of his mature style. The finale of his Second Symphony may have been based partly on storm-music written for this opera.
In conclusion, I have not the slightest doubt of his mastery. The music was tested to destruction, but could not be ruined for me even by my having to advocate works in analytical terms when, as an untaught critic, all I thought that I had was instinctive feeling for the subject. I was fascinated. I have heard a great deal of Spanish and South American music of all periods, and none of it has impressed me more. The situation regarding international stature is as heartening. Whatever failed to happen for Gaos-Berea in his lifetime, for whatever reasons, it seems to me that he can hold his head high in any company. In the case of the First Symphony, I am still formulating new perceptions in re-considering its complex - and seemingly spontaneous - structure! It is an elevating, revitalizing work.
Once again, I’d like to thank Rupert Kirkham for his help with these two programmes and Somer Valley FM for broadcasting them. I suspect that there could be no room for them on national radio; I am not a trained musician and I am talking about an obscure figure too consistently inspired to be interesting to those in the know. I hope that we shall be able to present more new treasures on Classical Break - a programme with local roots but without provincialism of outlook.
copyright Mike Burrows 2011
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