Boston Symphony Orchestra
Part of: Tania León, Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice, and Carnegie Hall Live on WQXR
Performers
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Andris Nelsons, Music Director and Conductor
Seong-Jin Cho, Piano
Program
TANIA LEÓN Stride
RAVEL Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
STRAVINSKY The Rite of Spring
Encore:
LISZT Consolation No. 3 in D-flat Major
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately 90 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission.This Concert in Context
While his ballets The Firebird and Petrushka were warmly received among the concertgoing public at their Parisian premieres in 1910 and 1911, respectively, Stravinsky would not be so fortunate two years later with his work The Rite of Spring. The ballet sparked a riot among some members of a shocked audience, though it remains a matter of some debate whether the outrage stemmed from the music or Vaslav Nijinsky’s scandalous choreography, which saw the dancers engage in jerky, twisting movements. As historian Modris Eksteins once wrote, this hysterical reaction presaged dark and violent energies that lay hidden just under the surface of a European civilization that would explode in a world war just one year later. The costs of that war would reverberate well into the 1920s in culture no less than politics, as Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand illustrates. Commissioned in 1929 by Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war, the work was premiered in Vienna in 1932—the same year Engelbert Dollfuss ascended to the chancellorship in Austria, thereby ushering in that country’s slide into authoritarianism. If Weimar Germany has become virtually synonymous with economic and political crisis, it is worth remembering that at its founding, the Weimar Republic was among the most democratic governments in the world. It extended voting rights to every citizen over the age of 20, such that German women were able to vote in elections from 1919 onward—well before their American counterparts secured the same right in August 1920. Female suffrage would not have been possible without trailblazers like Susan B. Anthony, whose life and work were a source of inspiration for Tania León’s Stride.
—Brendan Fay, author of Classical Music in Weimar Germany