Machines & Myths

It is often said that Rossini’s William Tell Overture is the most famous overture in the repertoire, instantly recognizable to audiences around the world. Hector Berlioz, who wrote extensively about it, described the work as “a symphony in four very distinct parts, instead of the piece in two movements with which composers are ordinarily satisfied.” What gives this overture such lasting power?

Rossini composed it in 1829 as the introduction to his final opera, William Tell, premiered in Paris that year. Working under pressure, he drew on ideas from some of his earlier works, including Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra (Elizabeth, Queen of England). In fact, Rossini often recycled his own music—“Una voce poco fa,” the celebrated aria from The Barber of Seville, also has its roots in Elizabeth.

The overture unfolds in four contrasting sections, each vividly characterized:

• Dawn – Five solo cellos, supported by double basses, open with a tranquil evocation of daybreak over the Swiss Alps. A solo cello line passes between instruments, while distant timpani hint at turbulence ahead. Berlioz praised this passage as “a poetic opening” that captures “the calm of a profound solitude.”

• Storm – The serenity is suddenly broken as the full orchestra erupts with driving strings, winds, brass, and percussion. Rossini’s orchestral writing conjures lightning flashes and thunderclaps before the storm subsides into a single flute line.

• Ranz des vaches (Call to the Cows) – This pastoral interlude features the cor anglais in a gentle shepherd’s song, accompanied by flute figures above and the soft chiming of the triangle, evoking the bells of grazing cattle. Widely quoted in popular culture to suggest morning or daybreak, this melody serves as a leitmotif throughout the opera.

• Galop (March of the Swiss Soldiers) – The overture concludes with the famous galloping finale, depicting the Swiss people’s victorious uprising. Its driving rhythms have become synonymous with horse-riding scenes and heroic pursuits, immortalized as the theme of The Lone Ranger. Berlioz, while critical of its “outworn rhythm” and “abuse of the bass drum,” nevertheless admitted it was “treated with incontestable superiority” and performed with irresistible energy.

Beyond its operatic setting, the William Tell Overture has has enjoyed a remarkable life of its own. Franz Liszt transcribed it for piano in 1838 and performed it frequently in recital. More than a century later, Dmitri Shostakovich quoted its galop in his Symphony No. 15. And in popular culture, its themes have surfaced everywhere from Disney animations to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

Notes adapted from the Irish National Opera, and the LA Phil by Mathieu Roy.

Machines, Mannequins, and Monsters is a double concerto for piano and percussion, written for Edana Higham and Zac Pulak. The work unfolds in three continuous movements (attacca). Its title was inspired by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which explored how artists of the early 20th century responded to rapid technological change through images of machines, mannequins, and monsters—motifs that suggest both the real and the surreal, the hopeful and the ominous. You can visit the online exhibit here. 

The opening movement begins quietly, balancing low rumbles with shimmering metallic sounds. It gradually explores a spectrum of colours and gestures before building into a mechanical, clock-like section where fragments of melody overlap and collide.

The second movement functions as a cadenza for the soloists. Here, the sound world turns eerie and unsettling, as the percussionist is asked to create sounds and draw resonance from inside the piano itself.

The final movement bursts forth with speed, rhythm, and power. Its energy drives relentlessly forward until it finally dissipates, ending quietly yet unsettled.

In some ways, the Fifteenth is the most neo-classical of all Shostakovich’s symphonies. It is, at least in certain moments, his tribute to the world of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It is scored for a modest-sized orchestra and consists of four movements which follow, more precisely and yet more whimsically than any other of his symphonies, the ancient outlines: a gossamer and comical first movement, playing in an almost childlike way with the signposts of sonata form; a sombre slow movement; a dancing and elusive scherzo; and, after a mysterious introduction, a last movement miraculous in its fluidity and its unearthly sense of bright light playing on a surface beneath which lurk great depths of darkness.

The Fifteenth was undoubtedly intended as a summing-up, a survey by a sick and slowly dying man of a lifetime of musical experience. It also shows his vast knowledge of the medium and the history of the form. And it is packed with references to most of his own earlier symphonies, almost as though at this critical point he were looking back at himself, both as hero (the brilliant and fearless youngster who gave birth to the astonishing First Symphony, the heroic master of the Fourth and Fifth) and as anti-hero (the many disappointments, terrors and frustrations).

More surprisingly it contains, in a manner blatant and unnervingly provocative, a bizarre sequence of the most surprising quotations found anywhere in his output. In the first movement of the Fifteenth, without warning, the brass section of the orchestra lurches sideways into an absurd firemen’s-band version of Rossini’s ‘William Tell’ Overture. By contrast, the last movement opens with two extremely loaded quotations from an entirely unexpected source: Wagner. Nothing in Shostakovich’s earlier music had prepared listeners for this sudden interest in the Master of Bayreuth. The first reference is to the moment in ‘Die Walküre’ when Brünnhilde appears to the fleeing Siegmund. She has been sent to tell the unhappy warrior that he must die. This haunting chain of suspensions interrupted by menacing beatings of the kettle-drum is then folded by Shostakovich into a quite different Wagnerian quotation, the famous opening notes of ‘Tristan und Isolde’. And then, more bizarrely still, the ‘Tristan’ quotation itself blossoms into a garbled version of a beautiful song by Glinka, setting words by one of the greatest poets of early Russian romanticism, Yevgeny Baratynsky:

Do not tempt me needlessly

By returning to your former tenderness.

To a disillusioned man

All the old seductions are alien.

It is clear that Shostakovich intends every move he makes in this symphony to be loaded with specific significance.

Note by Gerard McBurney courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes