Rhapsody No.2 (Pastorale) for Piano

Nearly two decades, and several cataclysmic events in the composer’s life and in the history of his country, Iran, separate Farid Omran’s Two Rhapsodies for Piano, and yet there is a strong connection between them. Both pieces are homages to the music of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945), who was a pioneer in paving the way for folk and peasant music of Central Europe and the Near East to enter the Western canon.  According to Omran, “Iranian folk music is very rich and varied, and not too much work has been done on this inexhaustible source. Being faithful to tonal music myself, it was a good occasion for me to compose a piece that might give an idea to the listener about Iranian folk tunes.”  Both rhapsodies have themes that in their unadorned beauty and their rough-hewn, rustic simplicity sound as if they are directly quoted from Iranian folk music, and for the first main theme of the Second Rhapsody, that is indeed the case.  But most of the melodies in these two pieces are original, skilfully woven together with the folk material to form an organic whole, and therein lies Bartok’s key influence.  

Rhapsody No. 2 for piano was composed in 1989.  The folk tune in the centre of the rhapsody, its main theme, is called “Hey yar, hey yar,” which translates to “My love, my love.” It's a song from the Luristan province, a green but rugged land in western Iran, nestled in the heart of the Zagros mountains, and home to several nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, whose impassioned lifestyle and bravery in battle is legendary. 

The opening, with its sizzling minor seconds, creates an atmosphere of mystery that shrouds the scene like the morning fog in the mountains, out of which, like a figure stepping out of the mist, the theme makes its first appearance. Although abounding with rustic gaiety, the folk song in Omran's treatment acquires a certain edginess, and a sense of unease brought about by the syncopated rhythms and polyphonic writing. The lyrics to the song may provide us here with a clue to the origins of this unease: It's the song of a man who is coming to town to claim his bride. He is coming to take her away, and makes it understood that he won't take no for an answer. Just in case there is going to be trouble, he is not coming alone: 

Go shout it in the town, let the whole world know / I'm coming to take my love 

No one in my way dare say a word / I'm coming to take my love 

My love, my love, I'm coming to take my love / with a hundred and thirty riders, I'm coming...

I'm a warrior if need be, I'm coming... / With a dagger in one hand, a rifle in the other...

The undercurrent of danger and aggression which permeates this and many other songs from this region should not come as a surprise, since folk music is a mirror that faithfully reflects the lives of the people to whom it belongs, and danger and violence is a part of the nomad's life.

A second, contrasting theme is then introduced, which is not a known Persian folk song, but --and here the influence of Bartok is again apparent, it sounds as if it were. This is accomplished by the skilful use of a characteristically Persian tetrachord. A tetrachord is a collection of four consecutive notes, like a mini scale. The western major scale is made by stacking two identical tetrachords CDEF and GABC. A common tetrachord in Persian and other oriental music is CD-flat EF. In the traditional Persian music it's tetrachords, and not eight-note scales, that play the central role.

With the two themes given, we arrive at the development episode, and this is the other crucial insight of Bartok, namely that to integrate folk music fully into the classical music language, one has to extend to it the notion of development familiar to the sonata form.  This consists of breaking up the themes in the exposition and reducing them to small melodic or rhythmic figures that are then altered, repeated, and recombined in novel ways by the composer. This is precisely what happens to the main theme in the rhapsody. The repetitions raise the temperature by quite a bit before reaching a dynamic climax. The folk tune then returns in a two-part stretto, where two strands of the same melody make entrances that are out of phase with each other and form a musical braid. A moment of calm is then reached, and the piano leads us, via an introduction, to the second part of the piece, which in the words of the composer, is a Samaa', or dervish dance, the kind of dance still practiced in the monasteries belonging to various mystic sects all over Iran, where groups of men, and sometimes women, dance with increased abandon to the beat of Daf, a finger drum in the shape of a large tambourine, until they reach a trance-like state which for them is the union with God. Here Omran makes use of the so-called “Bulgarian” rhythm, where the eighth notes in a 4/4 measure are grouped as 3+3+2, made famous by Bartok, who composed six dances “in Bulgarian rhythm” as the climax to his monumental Mikrokosmos. At least one other great composer of Eastern origin, namely Khachaturian, makes frequent use of this particular rhythm in his works. Finally calm returns, and we find ourselves back in the Zagros mountains, shrouded in fog once more, but with the hero now in a trance, murmuring to himself the unforgettable rhythm of the Samaa'.

Shadi Tahvildar-Zadeh