By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is assistant professor of music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the author of Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera. In 2026-2027, she is the Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Two kinds of translation shape this evening’s program. The first is that of musical arrangement, in which a new creative voice reimagines an existing musical work—as violinist Nemanja Radulović has done for the two works bookending this program. Arrangements are capacious: they might complicate or simplify a piece, introduce a new stylistic approach, or bring in new performing forces. The philosopher Peter Szendy calls them a way to “listen to someone listening,” a surprisingly intimate window into how another person experiences music.
The second kind of translation entails movement across media. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade takes inspiration from the Middle Eastern folktales of One Thousand and One Nights, whereas Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata has inspired literary writing by authors from Leo Tolstoy to Rita Dove. (In turn, the twentieth-century composer Leos Janáček wrote a string quartet inspired by Tolstoy’s novella.) By contrast, Bach’s Chaconne—a work which has, over the centuries, prompted many musicians to inscribe their own listening in new arrangements—is presented here in its original form. These types of translation may seem dissimilar, but they both help us think about music as perpetually subject to revivifying influences—a fundamentally living art form that, with the support of human listening and human imagination, can generate more and more creativity in our world.
Ludwig von Beethoven, Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47 (“Kreutzer”) (1803) (arr. Radulović)
The violinist George Bridgetower took Europe by storm at the turn of the nineteenth century, delighting audiences from London to Paris to Vienna. Admiring listeners included Haydn, Thomas Jefferson, and none other than Ludwig van Beethoven, who was so moved that he dedicated his ninth violin sonata to Bridgetower. It was an odd dedication: “sonata mulattica.” Jokingly equating Bridgetower’s racial background as the son of a white Polish mother and an Afro-Caribbean father with the music’s character, Beethoven signaled his warmth toward the young violinist who would give the sonata’s premiere. That was not to last: at some point, the two men had a falling-out—perhaps over a woman—and Beethoven rededicated the sonata to the violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Partly as a result of this erasure, Bridgetower faded into historical obscurity. But more recently, he has inspired copious scholarly and artistic explorations; the poet Rita Dove, for instance, imaginatively humanizes this elusive man in her 2009 collection Sonata Mulattica.
The first notes of Beethoven’s sonata emerge sturdy yet unplaceable, like a city skyline on a foggy morning. The sky clears as the piano responds, but its steadying presence comes with a dramatic dip into a minor key before wandering toward a resolution. These dualities—the clear and the obscure, the sure and the suspended—pervade the entire atmosphere of the work. Expansive in scope, the first movement sees the violin leap from compact rhythmic gestures to quasi-improvisatory melodies. The piano is not so much an equal conversation partner here as the creator of a vast, harmonically adventurous canvas upon which the violin explores. In the second movement, the piano introduces an elaborate theme which is followed by a of series of variations. Ranging in tone from playfully mechanical to intricate and expressive, they are followed by a serene coda. A brash chord in the piano announces the third movement, a whirling tarantella-like dance whose relative straightforwardness offers a cathartic release from the emotional complexity of the two previous movements. Bridgetower, the work’s original dedicatee, premiered the just-completed sonata with Beethoven in the spring of 1803. In her poetry, Rita Dove imagines the moment as one of profound internal meditation for Bridgetower, who reflects on the strange circumstances that brought him to this moment, the bemused reactions of the audience, and his own deep wish that “this world could stop / for a moment / and see me….simply / be and be and be…”
J.S. Bach, Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004 (1718–1720)
Johannes Brahms once mused that Bach’s Chaconne encapsulated “a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings.” With no small amount of jealousy, he continued, “If I could picture myself writing, or even conceiving, such a piece, I am certain that the extreme excitement and emotional tension would have driven me mad.” At the time, Brahms was hard at work on an arrangement of Bach’s music for piano left hand alone; the resulting piece reflects his predilection for sophisticated restraint, his deep reverence for music of the past.
This evening’s program features the Chaconne not in Brahms’s arrangement—or in one of the many other arrangements that it has inspired—but rather as the composer originally wrote it. It is the final movement of the Partita No. 2 in D Minor, one of a set of six suites for violin that Bach titled, simply, “Sei Solo.” To one early commentator, writing in 1805, the suites represented “perhaps the greatest example in any art of the freedom and certainty with which a great master can move even when he is in chains.” Working with the limited materials of a single instrument, well-known dance forms, and a fairly conservative harmonic and rhythmic palette, Bach created music of astounding profundity. The preceding movements of the Partita include more straightforward dances: an allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. The chaconne, though technically a dance as well, here feels more like a dramatic monologue. Its austere opening theme follows the rhythm of a sarabande, with the second of three beats accented. In the piece’s first section, brief variations on this pattern proceed in D minor, one after the other, each made fascinating by rhythmic and melodic explorations. Then there is a sudden, astonishing shift: Bach takes us to the key of D major, which has never sounded more sacred or more serene. After this blissful second section, the Chaconne returns to D minor, and to the despairing character with which the piece began.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, Op. 35 (1888), arr. Aleksandar Sedlar
Scheherazade is not quite program music. It is inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, the famed collection of stories in which a sultan, who has turned to executing each of his wives after a single night, is beguiled by the storytelling of Scheherazade, whose tales entrance him night after night. Yet it is not a direct musical analogue to the folktales, in which the dramatic progression of the music mirrors the written narrative. Rather, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote, “the titles for the four individual sections…were intended only as hints to direct but slightly the individual listener…. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is an oriental narrative of some numerous fairy-tale wonders and not merely four pieces played one after the other and composed on themes common to all four movements.”
If Scheherazade is only loosely linked to program music, it is firmly ensconced within other nineteenth-century musical approaches: namely, those of exoticism and Orientalism, in which Western composers depict the East in exaggerated terms as mysterious, opulent, and fundamentally different from (and, implicitly, inferior to) their own culture. The murderous Sultan’s theme is aggressive and angry, presented in severe unison by the orchestra. Scheherazade, by contrast, is represented by the sweetly feminized sounds of a violin and harp, swirling with intricate ornamentation. Throughout the suite, we hear snippets of what the composer called “fairy-tale wonders”: stories associated with the ship of Sinbad the sailor, the tale of the Kalendar Prince, a raucous festival, and a shipwreck. The rather fuzzy relationship between these thematic inspirations and the music itself parallels the way in which Orientalist music only vaguely related to the real places it purported to depict. Yet the varied timbres, gloriously singable melodies, and sheer sonic beauty of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music make it easy to be swept away in the musical world he creates.
