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Rip Van Winkle Overture George Whitefield Chadwick
(1854-1931)

Chadwick’s Rip van Winkle Concert Overture was his first large scale orchestral work,
premiered at the Leipzig Gewandhaus zu Music concert hall under his direction on
June 20, 1879. After the music received excellent reviews in the German press, Boston’s
Handel and Haydn Society performed it twice in 1880. Chadwick also conducted
his 1929 revision of the score in NEC’s Jordan Hall. The work is dedicated to Joseph
Jefferson (1829-1905), an American actor who was known for his adaptations
and portrayal of Rip van Winkle on stage and screen for the last forty years of the
nineteenth century. Although Chadwick did not intend for his music to be a literal
retelling of Washington Irving’s 1819 tale (“It is in no sense programme music”), he
added a description for the revised publication of the score.
“The calm, peaceful introduction may be like the pleasant valley where Rip Van
Winkle lived. The first theme in the fast tempo may suggest the jolly good-for-
nothing which Rip really was. But he was fond of his little daughter, and so the
second theme is sweeter. And when he wandered off into the mountains the little
old men made him drink and play “Kegel” with them. Perhaps you hear the knocking
of the ninepins and the rolling of the distant thunder [depicting the bearded ghosts
of Dutch sailors imprisoned by Henry Hudson who are bowling in a cleft in the
rocks].
Then Rip goes to sleep and does not wake up for twenty years. There is a long
pause in the music to indicate the passage of time. Then Rip wakes up and goes
back to his home where he finds everything changed. All the rest of the overture
means the general rejoicing at Rip Van Winkle’s return.”
Washington Irving (1783-1859) invented the tale of Rip, an idle Dutch-American villager
in New York’s Catskills, as well as the story for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), as a
result of staying with a friend in Tarrytown, north of Manhattan. “Of all the scenery of
the Hudson,” Irving wrote, “the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my
boyish imagination.” Chadwick included most of Irving’s plan, minus Rip’s cantankerous
wife, his dog, Wolf, and the solemn ending (most of his friends have perished in the
Revolution). The “long pause” can be heard as humorous, since Rip has slept through
the entire American Revolution, and his beard has grown a foot (long). In the revised
version, the composer added a xylophone suggests sound of bowling pins falling.
Chadwick’s joyful ending depicts the verification of his tale [by the village’s oldest
resident, Peter Vanderdonck], a reunion with his daughter and son (now grown up), and
a new grandson (named after him).
Like Gershwin’s later American in Paris, this story has nostalgia for New York City at its
center: Irving had written the story in a single night in England after reminiscing with
his Dutch-American brother-in-law; the next morning he said he “felt like a man waking
from a long sleep.” Irving had been born during the same week that New York City

18 Plymouth Philharmonic O r ches tr a
18 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra