On Edward Elgar's "Enigma Variations," Leonard Bernstein's "Serenade" and George Walker's "Visions."
by Jake Cline
London Symphony Orchestra's Adrienne Arsht Center debut arrives 120 years after the orchestra premiered "Pomp and Circumstance," Edward Elgar's triumphant march that has ushered countless cap-and-gowned students across a stage and into the future. One of England's greatest composers, Elgar conducted the orchestra at that 1905 performance. It is no mystery, then, why LSO's current star conductor, Sir Antonio Pappano, will lead the musicians through Elgar's 14-movement Enigma Variations on Sunday, March 2 at the Knight Concert Hall. Elgar's epic, character-driven work will share a program with Leonard Bernstein's philosophical "Serenade" and George Walker's heart-rending "Sinfonia No. 5." Here is some background on each piece.
Sinfonia No. 5, “Visions”
George Walker (1922-2018)
A few weeks before his death in 2018 at 96 years old, George Walker told a friend how he wanted to be remembered. “He said, ‘I want people to play my music. I want people to play my music. I want people to play my music.’ He said it three consecutive times,” Howard University music professor Dr. Mickey Terry recalled on a 2022 episode of the podcast Classical Breakdown. “That was the one thing that really was important to him. He wanted people to play his music, to know his music and appreciate his music.”
There is indeed much to know and appreciate about Walker’s music. First things first: At 73, Walker became the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. When he was in his early 20s, Walker, a pianist, became the first Black instrumental soloist to perform at Town Hall in New York and, soon after, the first to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Five years later, he became the first Black instrumentalist to be represented by the powerful National Concert Artists agency.
Walker’s more than 90 compositions include concertos, string quartets, sonatas, choral works, chamber pieces and overtures. He won the Pulitzer for “Lilacs, for voice and orchestra,” a Boston Symphony Orchestra commission that debuted in 1996. Frequently performed, the work is based on Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Walker was an ardent champion of Black classical composers, and was frustrated by the lack of attention afforded to him and peers such as Adolphus Hailstork, Olly Wilson and T.J. Anderson. “One of the things that he had a really difficult time with was the fact that oftentimes people would associate Black music immediately with jazz,” Terry told Classical Breakdown.
In a 1991 essay for The New York Times titled “Make Room for Black Classical Music,” Walker lamented the “tokenism” displayed by orchestras whose Black History Month and Martin Luther King Jr. Day concerts offer “potpourris of Black idioms: gospel, spirituals and jazz.” He added: “The diverse nature of music by Black classical composers refutes the all-too-prevalent notion that Black music must be rock, rap or jazz.”
Walker returned to this argument in his 2009 memoir, Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist. “No matter how much traditional training in classical music a Black artist has absorbed,” he wrote, “there’s the underlying suspicion for some that his native habitat is the realm of jazz.”
Walker wrote his first sinfonia in 1984 and completed the fifth and final one in 2016. Titled “Visions,” Sinfonia No. 5 contains Walker’s response to the 2015 massacre of nine Black churchgoers by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina. The work is the longest of the sinfonias, and the last piece Walker completed before his death. At 18 minutes, “Visions” is turbulent and unnerving, with images of ocean reefs and slave ships present in the score’s textual passages and in an accompanying video Walker enlisted artist Frank Schramm to create. The text includes poetry written by Walker (“a lighthouse beams a stream of light that/Parts the misty shroud of starless night”) and lines from Ben Jonson and Stephen Foster. All are to be performed by soprano, tenor, bass-baritones and bass.
“He wasn’t worried about whether it would be comprehensible immediately,” the composer’s son Gregory Walker told The New York Times in 2019. “It’s an idealistic vision of what this combination of music and text and imagery could achieve.”
No matter how stormy or enigmatic Walker’s music gets, a listener can sense the composer’s absolute control. “One of the things about George Walker is the fact that he didn’t leave anything to chance,” Terry said. “Everything was calculated, premeditated, well-thought-out. And he was like that not only with regard to his musical compositions but in his attire. The way he dressed, it was always impeccable. His home, everything was in its place. It was just absolutely incredible. He was a very disciplined man. He had a very ordered demeanor. And he had a very ordered mind.”
Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium), solo violin, string orchestra, percussion
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
“I am a hopeless addict of crosswords and anagrams,” Leonard Bernstein told a New York Times interviewer in 1977. “The whole linguistic idea is a magical one to me, almost as magical as the phenomenon of music.” Arguing that language “distinguishes humanity from the beast,” the great American conductor and composer—who sadly never got the opportunity to curse into the void while playing Wordle—claimed that “words or verbal ideas are always connected with everything I write, connected with the strongest impulse within me, which is music.”
In 1953, Bernstein began work on one of his most challenging lyrical puzzles. Commissioned by the Library of Congress’ Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, “Serenade” boasts literary roots that stretch back more than 2,000 years. Bernstein said he wrote the concerto following a rereading of Plato’s Symposium, an account of an Athenian drinking party where a group of male artists, scientists and philosophers—including, of course, Socrates—expound on various forms and meanings of love.
“The Symposium has been immensely influential on thinking about love from antiquity to the present day,” British scholar Christopher Gill wrote of the work, adding, “It raises questions about love that are absolutely fundamental.”
Bernstein said he based the movements of his “Serenade” on five of the thinkers featured in The Symposium: Socrates, Phaedrus, Aristophanes, Eryximachus and Agathon. Having scrambled the order in which the men speak, Bernstein cautioned listeners against taking his concerto literally. (If you brought a copy of The Symposium to the theater, feel free to tuck it away.)
“The relatedness of the movements does not depend on common thematic material,” Bernstein wrote in a program note, “but rather on a system whereby each movement evolves out of elements in the preceding one.”
A month after Bernstein finished writing “Serenade” in 1954, the concerto debuted in Venice with a performance by the Ochestra Del Teatro La Fenice and American violin soloist Isaac Stern. Bernstein conducted. Years later, Bernstein claimed to regret titling his composition “Serenade” and not “The Symposium” so “that people would know what it is based on.” Bernstein, it appears, could be tragically optimistic.
In a 2018 essay for music magazine The Strad, Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman reflected on the challenges and rewards of tackling Bernstein’s “very difficult” work.
“I asked Isaac Stern how literally one should take the text when performing the piece, and how important it is to know what each of the quoted philosophers said,” Gluzman wrote. “Isaac said that Bernstein had told him, ‘Just think of love.’ From that, I took that for Bernstein, the music and the literary inspiration were parallel universes. You can try to make the connections, but love is always the guiding light when performing it.”
Enigma Variations
Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Edward Elgar could keep a secret. From the time he introduced his orchestral work “Enigma Variations” in 1899 until his death 35 years later, the British composer remained mum about the origin of the mystery in the piece’s title. Divided into 14 movements meant to represent Elgar’s family and friends, plus an intransigent bulldog, the work, according to the composer, offers a countermelody to a well-known song that he refused to identify. Was it “Pop Goes the Weasel”? “Happy Birthday to You”? A diss track? We’ll never know.
What appears to have started as an inside joke, however, immediately escaped Elgar’s control. For the public premiere of Opus 36, Variations on a Theme (the work’s official title) at St. James’s Hall in London, Elgar distributed a snippy, somewhat defensive program note.
“It is true that I have sketched for their amusement and mine, the idiosyncrasies of fourteen of my friends; not necessarily musicians,” Elgar wrote, “but this is a personal matter, and need not have been mentioned publicly. The Variations should stand simply as a ‘piece’ of music. The Enigmas I will not explain.”
Should Elgar have been alive 100 years later, he no doubt would have been delighted (and a bit confused) to discover his music on the soundtrack of The Matrix, the mind-bending science fiction film starring Keanu Reeves. Australian DJ Rob Dougan appropriated part of Enigma Variations’ first movement for his instrumental trip-hop track “Clubbed to Death,” which is featured prominently in the movie. Another movement, the ninth, known as “Nimrod,” received even greater attention in 2012 when London Symphony Orchestra performed it during the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics. That probably would have gotten a “Whoa” out of Elgar, too.
(Top: Photo of London Symphony Orchestra by John Davis.)