Making waves: Four works by composers who heeded the clarion call of the sea

Wild, untamed nature has long inspired artists and writers, particularly since the dawn of the Romantic era. In one way or another, all four works programmed by French conductor Fabien Gabel for his Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts Dec. 12-14 are essentially Romantic works that celebrate the heroic individual and that person’s relationship with the natural world. Admittedly, two of the works are based on narratives that predate by several centuries the Romantic era — at its height in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the 19th century — but these are as depicted or re-envisioned by Romantic or post-Romantic composers.

The earliest, Tchaikovsky’s Symphonic Fantasia on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was composed in 1873. The subject was first suggested to the composer by the influential critic and writer on cultural matters, Vladimir Stasov, who was prompted by his admiration of Tchaikovsky’s earlier Overture-Fantasy Romeo and Juliet.

Typically, Tchaikovsky’s first reaction — besides asking if he could omit the tempest itself — was whether he could name his work not The Tempest, nor even after the principal character, the magician Prospero, who conjures the storm, but after his daughter Miranda? The composer was evidently charmed by this guileless young woman, just as he would be by Tatiana in Eugene Onegin. It is Miranda who famously exclaims on seeing several men for the first time: “How beauteous mankind is!/O brave new world/That has such people in it!”

Tchaikovsky was dissuaded from this course, and in the end, in 11 inspired days, he composed a work framed by evocations of the sea. But Tchaikovsky’s main focus, as one would expect from a composer who excelled in opera, was on the characters of the play, most particularly Miranda and her beloved Ferdinand, and Prospero’s two servants, the spirit Ariel and the grotesque, bestial yet sensitive Caliban.

The sea plays an even more central role in Erich Korngold’s Suite from The Sea Hawk, prepared from music he composed for that film in 1940 (and later reconstructed in 2003 by Patrick Russ), and more especially in Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, drawn from his hit opera Peter Grimes, composed just five years later. Yet the main focus of Korngold’s music, as in the film, is perhaps not so much the sea as the swashbuckling hero played by Errol Flynn, Geoffrey Thorpe, roughly based on the real life exploits of the English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh — he who famously cast his cloak over a puddle for his Queen Elizabeth I, and defeated the Spanish Armada sent to invade England.

Still, Korngold invests a great deal of meaning in one particular romantic theme. This represents not merely love but a sense of hope and freedom, and perhaps the lure of the sea, where Thorpe feels most at home. You may sense this when Thorpe and his surviving men, having escaped an ambush in Panama, hack their way through the jungle and finally reach the sea, greeted by Korngold’s theme.

In Britten’s opera, based on an episode from the English poet George Crabbe’s collection The Borough, the sea takes as much emotional space as the title character, the fisherman Peter Grimes. The North Sea off the east English coast of Suffolk is vividly and quite specifically depicted, while at the same time — in a typically Romantic ploy — it is used to set the mood of each contrasting scene of the drama, almost as if it were an anthropomorphic character in its own right. In compiling his suite of interludes, however, Britten effectively presents them simply as vivid seascapes, ranging from the bracing yet melancholy strains of “Dawn,” through the bright glitter of “Sunday Morning” and gentle sea swell of “Moonlight,” to the final ferocious “Storm.”

So where does this leave Gustav Mahler and his songs, so often set in Austrian fields and woodlands very far from any sea? Indeed, though Mahler sailed across the Atlantic in 1908 to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera, and raised the New York Philharmonic into one of the foremost orchestras of the United States, he never depicted the sea in his music.

Yet Mahler provides a crucial link to the other three composers. He conducted several performances of Tchaikovsky, including the German premiere of Eugene Onegin, much admired by the composer, while his own music shows several signs of the Russian composer’s influence. He effectively mentored Korngold during the prodigy child composer’s early years in Vienna, steering him to his first composition teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky. And his music profoundly inspired Britten, whose string and brass writing in particular owes a deal to the Austrian composer.

Although widely feted as a conductor, Mahler famously bewailed his fate — with understandable exaggeration — as “thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia within Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world — always an intruder, never welcomed.” The fact he saw himself as an outsider gives him some common ground with Grimes and Prospero — perhaps even with Thorpe, who essentially lives “outside the law” as a privateer. And like all those other heroes, if in some cases only implicitly, Mahler himself had an empathy with nature. In Songs of a Wayfarer (1884-85), (baritone Konstantin Krimmel joins the CSO in this work), his hero, a barely disguised version of the composer himself, relishes the beauty of nature, most especially in the second song “Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld” (“I Went This Morning Over the Field”), even as he grieves over being forsaken by his beloved.