New question series: "Fiascos, Flops, Fabulous Firsts." Handel's "Fireworks Music" - your thoughts?

Question

This proposed new series will be about the initial exposure of some great musical masterpieces, and the public/private response. The idea of this series is to familiarise people with some memorable premiere performances, and to exchange information and ideas.

Alberich, a good friend and fellow patron of this classical music category, has kindly agreed to collaborate with me in this series. He will act as co-host, and each of us will alternate in postings of the questions, and we invite you to share thoughts about particular works.

A few weeks ago, we requested your musical nominations in the afore-mentioned three categories. We received a colourful array, including:

1. FIASCOS

- Rossini: "Il Barbiere di Sivilglia"
- Stravinsky: "Rite of Spring"
- Debussy: "Pelleas and Melisande"
- Puccini: "Madama Butterfly"

2. FLOPS
- Tchaikowsky: Piano Concerto #1
- Handel: "Ezio" - his greatest operatic failure
- Bizet: "Carmen"
- Rachmaninov: Symphony #1
- Puccini: "Le Villi"
- Beethoven: "Leonore" (later renamed "Fidelio")
- Shostakovich: Symphony #4, Symphony #13

3. FABULOUS FIRSTS

- Wagner: "Ride of the Valkyries"
- Mozart: "Magic Flute"
- Beethoven: Symphony #9
- Rossini: "Tancredi"
- Verdi: "Rigoletto," "Aida"
- Handel: "Water Music"

**********

I'll open this new series with a memorable musical "Fiascos" of the Baroque period, Handel's "Music for the Royal Fireworks."

The premiere performance was held on 27 April, 1749, in London. Despite the inclement weather, crowds of people avalanched Green Park, excitedly anticipating an evening of thrilling new orchestral music performed by a massive ensemble including 24 oboes and 12 bassoons, all accompanied by a grand fireworks display.

Rain put a damper on the fireworks display - only a fraction went off, and only the Overture was performed. Then, on top of that, the specially constructed wooden stage caught fire!

Even the public dress rehearsal six days earlier was a fiasco. Twelve thousand people avalanched Vauxhall Gardens, causing a massive three-hour traffic jam - but at least the work in its entirety was performed...

Please share some more thoughts about one of Handel's most popular works.

And feel free to submit more musical nominations for the series.

Thanks,

Hafwen.

Answer 1

Handel the great genius, exact contemporary of Bach; They never met, but i sometimes like to imagine what they would have said to each other. On the one-hand you have the great perfecter that is Bach, no new forms for him, his work was to bring the baroque era to a triumphant close. Then Haendel (sic i can't do umlauts!) that great innovator, inventor of oratorio, master of orchestration.....the mind boggles at the prospect



the Royal fireworks were deemed a great success , perhaps despite of the events you describe



here is a poser for you . Mozart's requiem the opening number is a direct quote from Handel, can you identify it ?

Answer 2

Further to rdenig's posting, Shostakovich's 4th should be under the 'fiasco' section. The fiasco being that it was not even given the opportunity to be a flop in 1936. Shostakovich was 'advised' (probably by the KGB) to withdraw the 4th Symphony from rehearsals in the interests of his not being shipped off to Siberia (for many years Shostakovich kept a packed suitcase under his bed in case this happened) following Uncle Joe's less-than-enthusiastic response to the opera 'Lady Macbeth from Mtsensk'. The great conductor Kirill Kondrashin was valiant enough to agree to give the first performance in December 1961.



A true 'flop' would be Rakhmaninov's 1st Symphony. The first performance in St Petersburg in 1897 was both a flop and a fiasco. The conductor was Glazunov, who was drunk on the podium (Glazunov was drunk most of the time!) and led a truly awful performance. It was so bad that not even Rakhmaninov could bear to listen to the end and he fled the concert hall and spent several hours with his head buried in his hands on a tram. This was a disaster for a young composer not yet 22 and it later caused a huge nervous breakdown from which Rakhmaninov did not recover until 1901 when he wrote the now famous 2nd Piano Concerto (dedicated to his analyst!).



Rakhmaninov banned the 1st Symphony ever being performed again. However, in 1944, the year after Rakhamninov's death in the USA, the Russian conductor Alexander Gauk discovered the original set of parts in the St Petersburg (then Leningrad) Conservatoire and reconstracuted a score of the work. He then performed it in Moscow on 17 October 1945, thereby giving the work a rebirth.

Answer 3

Berlioz must have one or two nominations for Fiascos.



His Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale was finished one week before the opening (to commemorate the July revolution), so there was barely enough time to copy the scores, and there was no official rehearsal. It was played in open air, with a military drum band which completely drowned the orchestra.



Before that, his opera Benvenuto Cellini, which had been the most expensive to set to that date, lasted one performance, when most of the audience rioted and left the theater before the ending.



As for Handel's Water Music, despite the success and the three encores, I once heard that the musicians barge drifted away because of the wind and the performance had to be delayed. Has anyone heard something like that?

Answer 4

Dear god. I could not believe the fiasco Madama Butterfly received on its premiere. 'Butterfly is pregnant!' LOL.



What about THE Symphony No 5? Wasn't Beethoven's Fifth was also a failure at its premiere?



The hall was cold, the symphony itself was overlong (by then standards), and there were nine (!) separate new works in the program, and the orchestra itself was poorly rehearsed, hence the audience thought little of it, and the critics belittled it. But one year and a half later, (and after a long dose of rehearsals) it became what it is today: the hallmark of classical music. Mr E.T.A Hoffman himself said so.

Answer 5

Even though I'm the co-host of this series, I trust that no one will consider it inappropriate for me to respond here?



This premiere, sounds like it was one of those that transpired according to "Murphy's Law": everything that could go wrong, did just that(or whoever the guys name was).



Sir(?) Fredrick has never been one of my favorite composers; and a hearing of this particular composition of his, has never caused "cold chills" to run up and down my spine. That having been said, I will readily admit that he is one of the Great composers of the past: "The Messiah" and his "Water Music" are especially noteworthy, and I feel that all serious classical music lovers would/should grant this, even if that don't personally care for either of them.



And I was just wondering, who the reigning monarch was at the time, and what his comments were regarding such a fiasco? If he were anything like Henry the VIII, he probably would have become extremely angry.



Alberich



EDIT: thanks hafwn. You're obviously a much better English/British historian than I. At least George II knew a good thing - Handel, in this instance - when he saw it; have always felt that most of the UK's monarchs were overly self-indulgent, downright s.o.b.'s.(with all due respect to our good friends across the pond)

Answer 6

A few comments. Shostakovitch's 4th symphony was not a flop. In fact, it was well received on first performance, then Stalin went to another, didn't like it and it had to be withdrawn, not resurfacing until the 1960s. It was followed by the 5th -'Soviet artist's reply to just criticism'! Similar comments apply to his opera, contemporaneous with the 4th, Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District.



I'm surprised Ride of the Valkyries gets in - that's just 10 minutes out of a much larger piece, surely? Can the 1st performance of Rite of Spring be truly called a fiasco? There was a certain part of the audience who didn't like it and made their feelings known, but does that qualify as a 'fiasco' ('a complete failure' - Chambers).



Beethoven's Eroica certainly attracted criticism - there is the famous story of the critic who said the the horns came in at the wrong point in the recapitulation to the 1st movement.



Not sure if this counts as a fiasco or flop, but William Walton could not satisfactorily complete his 1st symphony and it had to receive its first performance without a final movement. Vaughn Williams is famously quoted as saying after the 1st perfomance of his 4th Symphony 'I don't like it, but it's what I meant'!



Later edit - with apologies, and an object lesson in the need to check sources! Shostakovitch's 4th was NOT heard by Stalin. Rather, he had attended a performance of 'Lady Macbeth of Mtensk'. This had been first performed in Leningrad in1934, and was repeated at the Bolshoi in 1936. That perfomance was attended by Stalin which led to the famous article condeming 'formalism' in music. That led Shostakovich to withdraw his 4th symphony altogether and it was not heard until well after Stalin's death, in 1961. I maintain my argument, however, that it was not a 'flop'. Similarly, the 13th was the subject of political interference. The. The 1st performance was not a flop, but the work was withdrawn thereafter until Yevtushenko had made alterations to the verses, adding extra lines to show Soviet solidarity against the Nazis. The revised version received a performance in February 1963, but not a second until November 1965.



Another work which fell foul of censorship was Verdi's Masked Ball where the setting had to be changed from 18th century Sweden to 17th century Boston as the assassination of a King was deemed unsuitable in the reactionary Kingdom of Naples where it received its 1st performance.



Later still. I have to respectfully disagree with del_icio re Shostakovich's 4th. I really cannot see how a work that was not performed can be said to be a fiasco. It was not heard for nearly 30 years after composition. But I accept we are talking semantics rather than music.

Answer 7

In the flops category, I'd put the initial version of Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" (2006) (I'll leave it as choice if you think Tan Dun is classical or not.)



The star power of Placido Domingo brought people out to the Met to see it, and reviews were mixed and some probably too kind. Perhaps the Guaridan said it best: "Everything is excellent apart from the music and the words..."



While the opera's story is interesting and the set design was minimalistic but spectacular ... but the opera moved s-l-o-w-l-y; I understand that it has since been reworked and I expect that version 1.1 is far better than the original release.



http://www.nysun.com/arts/first-emperor-with-lessons-to-learn/45704/

Answer 8

Hafwen,

You have created a beautiful backdrop for discussion, and you have put a lot of thought into this.

I have to agree with Sky that Hector Berlioz must be included under fiasco.

A little known fact. The first violin melody that appears in Symphonie Fantastique is actually a song Berlioz wrote in his teens called,"Je vais donc quitter pour jamis," for Jean-Pierre Florian's pastoral Estalle et Nemorin. Estelle was a childhood love.

Answer 9

I'm not too familiar with this story on Handel...I'm not much of a Handel fan, anyways. Terrible, terrible story though.



I do have some nominations:

Fabulous Firsts:

Dvorak's "From the New World" Symphony

Saint-Saens "Piano Concerto No. 2"

Answer 10

Good choice on the Rite of Spring, the piece was so abstract at the time that riots began in the concert hall on its first performance between supporters and detractors of the piece!



Personally, it is my favorite piece by Stravinsky, next to the Firebird.

Answer 11

24 oboes and 12 bassoons????!!!!!

How could they stay in tune?? Or maybe they didn't...



I don't know much about the history of music or composers, so I won't be able to nominate a piece.

I will, however, follow along with this series...it seems very interesting.

=]

Answer 12

I love my classical music. To listen too. I am not interested if it was first, second, last or somewhere in between. And if the 'damn' thing was written in 1749 or 1822 it is still good, very good or fantastic. Thus, while you debate the pros's and cons of your particular favorite, I'll only listen. Splayed out flat in the lazy chair, eyes closed and a red wine to hand.

Peace.

Answer 13

I don't like Handel's orchestration. His music is SOMETIMES also too heavy and otherworldy for my taste. Like the overture to the Messiah. It's unbearable.



Gorgeous vocal writings.