George Whitefield Chadwick
(b. Lowell, Massachusetts, 13 November 1854 - d. Boston, 4 April 1931)
»Aphrodite« (1910/11)
Symphonic Fantasie for large orchestra
Preface
George Whitefield Chadwick was one of America’s earliest composers of real importance and an eminent connoisseur and a master in the field of musical characterization for the orchestra. After completing his studies with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn in Leipzig and with Joseph Rheinberger in Munich, he worked in Boston from 1880 onwards. His early style owed much to the conservative German school but gradually Russian influences prevailed, as well as that of Wagner’s Tristan (sic !) and the French Impressionists, all of which he succeeded in moulding into a personal musical idiom that was considered more and more "American" in character during more recent years.
Chadwick’s Symphonic Fantasy, Aphrodite, was composed immediately after his Symphonic Suite in E flat, which had taken him many years to complete. The work was inspired by a fragment of an antique Greek sculpture, the head of the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, which had been discovered in Cnidos and donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Imagining that the Aphrodite statue, which had stood in a Greek harbour for several hundred years, Chadwick conjured up in his music what might have been witnessed by the stone Goddess. He put together a number of scenes to form an ambitious large-scale fantasia for orchestra. As he commented in an introduction to the piece: "This Symphonic Fantasie or Tone Poem is an attempt to suggest in music the poetic and tragic scenes which may have passed before the sightless eyes of such a goddess."
Chadwick composed the major portion of Aphrodite at his summer residence in Martha’s Vineyard, West Chop, during 1910. He put the finishing touches to the orchestration during the summer of the following year. The premiere at the Norfolk Festival (Connecticut) on June 4, 1912, was conducted by the composer himself, being the second of five first performances of his works there between 1909 and 1922.
The following description is taken from the programme notes for the first performance: "These scenes, which are preceded by a short introduction in the nature of an apostrophe, might be characterized as follows:
Moonlight on the Sea. Andante con moto.
Storm. Allegro con fuoco.
Requiem. Andante lamentabile.
The Lovers. Andante amoroso.
Children Playing. Allegretto semplice.
Approach of a Great Army. Moderato alla marcia.
Hymn to Aphrodite. Maestoso.
Moonlight Scene, partly repeated. Andante con moto.
Finale. Molto maestoso.
Although each of these scenes is complete in itself, they are connected together by an Aphrodite motive which is developed throughout the whole piece in various forms and is given originally to the English horn [cor anglais] in the first scene."
Chadwick later withdrew these programme notes and substituted a short poem by way of introduction to the score, which experts agree to have been written by him. Soon after its successful premiere, Aphrodite was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock and later by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That same year (1912) the score was printed by the Boston music publishers, Arthur P. Schmidt. After the First World War Chadwick’s music fell into total public oblivion and Aphrodite disappeared from the standard repertoire. It was not until 1996 that José Serebrier made the much acclaimed first recording of this spectacular ambitious work (Reference Recording RR-74CD with the excellent liner notes by Steven Ledbetter) with the Czech State Philharmonic Orchestra in Brno. It is hoped that Serebrier’s luminous example will inspire many others and that this first edition in study score format in 2003 will have made a significant contribution to this initiative.
Translation: Jonathan Price
For performance materials please contact the publisher Summy-Birchard Inc., Miami.
Reprint of a copy in the Musikbibliothek archives of the Münchner Stadtbibliothek, formerly in the ownership of Leopold Stokowski.
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