RHAPSODIE GOTHIQUE
for Viola and Piano

Date:
1987 [Manuscript dated: ‘December 13, 1987 (6:57a.m.)’]

Duration:
13'

Notes:

An original composition completed when Wingate was just 16, the dark and tempestuous Rhapsodie gothique for viola and piano is a paean to the late romantic idiom, and an exercise in virtuosic decadence for both instruments. Following a brief sojourn away from the cello in order to learn the viola, the adolescent composer had also recently read Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, and was in an indefatigably Gothic mood when work on the Rhapsodie began. But the piece’s impassioned main theme (heard initially in bars 15-30), is marked in the manuscript as ‘Thème Rachmaninovesque’, as this tenebrous viola melody together with its undulatory piano accompaniment seemed to summon the great Russian master in spirit, without using any material actually composed by Rachmaninov himself. Yet this guiding phantom nevertheless haunted the rest of the piece’s months-long composition process, yielding a cross between an imaginary soundtrack to a forested Gothic tableau and a shamelessly self-indulgent moto perpetuo piano étude with hapless viola obbligato. One pianist has described the piece’s character as being like ‘a windswept piano concerto where the orchestra consists of one lonely viola’.

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Ostensibly in C minor, the Rhapsodie opens with the viola’s seductive low C, but this is immediately revealed to be nothing but a leading tone to D-flat, thus setting in motion the endless phantasmagoria of tonal centers in the piece. After the introduction, the relentless waves of arpeggiated piano arabesques begin to drench the Rhapsodie in chromatic harmony, while the viola’s throaty tones hug the melodic shoreline. The second theme group (with three distinct but related forms) eventually causes the piece to reluctantly assume a convoluted rondo form, with sections often interrupted by restatements of the ambiguous opening material, or even by disquieting subito forte outbursts. In contrast to the ruthless busyness of the piano part, the viola is often made to suspend a single note for very long stretches of score while waiting for the piano to reveal the ultimate resolutory plan. But the viola has its share of fast passage work as well, sometimes even sharing accompaniment duties in virtuosic flourishes. The Rhapsodie eventually betrays a restlessness to end itself as it brings forth a series of false codas, but finally crashes to a close in a C-minor-infused denouement.

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Not intended to be passed off as an actual work from a bygone period (as was, for example, the faux-Baroque Albinoni’s Adagio for a time), but instead an exercise in style that turned out to be more than the sum of its autodidactic intentions, the Rhapsodie gothique gave the composer due cause for meditation on the question (and problem) of pastiche in musical composition, and on its possible and unapologetic use as a legitimate and unembarrassed means of artistic expression. Nevertheless, the piece was ultimately shelved away with the other juvenilia for decades until being rediscovered and subsequently engraved in 2023.​

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The work is dedicated to the beloved violist, pedagogue and scholar Marilyn C. Emmons (1929–1999), longtime professor of viola at Colorado State University – forever unsurpassed in kindness, generosity, optimism, intelligence, and rich depth of musicianship.​​