Program Notes - Beethoven & Schubert in Vienna (original) (raw)

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| | | | Phone: 800-314-2535 216-320-0012 Fax: 216-320-0129 E-mail: info@ApollosFire.org Program Note for: Beethoven & Schubert in Vienna BEETHOVEN Leonore Overture No.3 SCHUBERT Symphony No.8 in B minor (Unfinished) BEETHOVEN Symphony No.6 in F (Pastoral) The �solitary Romantic genius� is a compelling and fondly held image. It seems as fitting as it does tragic that Beethoven and Schubert could live in the same city for 30 years apparently without meeting or ever having a proper conversation. The two men inhabited different worlds. Beethoven was adopted by a circle of aristocratic patrons and had access to the resources necessary for large-scale concerts. Schubert could be found with his friends in the middle-class Biedermeier world of the musicale, a world that promoted his hundreds of songs, but offered little opportunity for orchestral music. (Schubert, statistically the more prolific symphonist, never heard a professional performance of any of his symphonies.) The two personalities were equally divergent: Beethoven inclined to brashness and possessing an intimidating reputation, Schubert plagued by modesty and diffidence. Schubert declared himself Beethoven�s �worshipper and admirer� but remained always too shy to approach him, even though the older composer held him high regard: �Truly, there is in Schubert a divine spark�he will cause a stir in the world.� If they met at all, it was at Beethoven�s deathbed. We do know that Schubert was a torch-bearer at Beethoven�s funeral on March29, 1827. That night he went to the �Castle of Eisenstadt� with his friends to drink and reminisce until one in the morning. There can be no doubt what was on his mind: Franz Grillparzer had just delivered a funeral oration that asked: �Who shall stand beside Beethoven?� To Schubert�s ears this was a challenge not a question. Beethoven wrote only one opera, but he wrote it three times over a period of a decade. Finally, in 1814, Fidelio took its present form. Schubert was 17 years old and, according to his friend Moritz von Schwind, he sold his school books in order to attend the premiere. Beethoven�s revisions left a legacy of four overtures: the three Leonore overtures and the final overture to Fidelio that stands with the opera today. (Ironically, this last overture wasn�t ready in time for the premiere � Schubert would have heard the overture to The Ruins of Athens instead.) Of the Leonore overtures, the third (from 1806) quickly became the most popular in the concert hall. Fidelio is an �escape� opera and its hero is Florestan, a political prisoner whose plight is summed up in his aria from the beginning of Act II: �In the springtime of life, happiness has deserted me. I dared to speak the truth boldly, and fetters are my reward.� The aria establishes the mood for the slow introduction of Leonore Overture No.3 and provides its main musical material. The overture then sets out, within a perfectly classical structure, to encapsulate the scenario of the opera, including a last-minute reprieve announced by dramatic trumpet calls. It may seem surprising that Beethoven would have discarded a supreme masterpiece such as this to write yet one more overture in 1814. There was a practical reason: the revised opera began in a different key; more importantly, the symphonic qualities that make Leonore No.3 so satisfying in the concert hall were less well-suited to Beethoven�s purpose in the theatre. Beethoven knew what he was about: ��though I am well aware of the value of my Fidelio,� he remarked to one of his friends, �I know just as well that the symphony is my real element.� Beethoven often referred to himself as a Tondichter (literally �sound poet�) rather than a Tonk�nstler (sound artist), which was the usual word for a musician. In doing so he revealed himself to be a musician of the Romantic age � a poet concerned with feelings, expression and abstract ideals, rather than an artist given to literal representation. Program music was hardly a new concept to Beethoven�s generation. Vivaldi�s Four Seasons concertos famously depicted nature and life in music. Haydn�s own Seasons and his oratorio The Creation continued the tradition. Battle symphonies and hunt overtures had perennial appeal. United by their attempts to imitate and portray nature and events, these works were concerned with what had become an 18th-century ideal: painting in tones. During the 19th century, program music took a different turn. This was an era when, as Carl Dahlhaus describes it, �experience was shaped by reading and when literature on a subject was scarcely less important than the subject itself.� (It is no accident that for the first time in history we encounter interpretative writing about music in the form of explanatory program notes.) Composers who sought to represent definable feelings or events in music were often criticized. That Beethoven saw himself as a poet rather than a painter in sound is confirmed by his comments about the Pastoral Symphony: �The whole work can be perceived without description � it is more an expression of feelings rather than tone-painting.� Elsewhere he says that �the hearers should be able to discover the situation for themselves.� Beethoven�s Pastoral Symphony emerged from an old musical tradition that includes the pastoral sinfonia in Handel�s Messiah, while obeying a Romantic and French Enlightenment call for a �return to nature.� Beethoven himself retreated frequently to the rural areas around Vienna to compose, and is once said to have preferred a tree to the company of men. His �Recollections of Country Life,� as the symphony was billed in the concert program, conveys above all this love of nature. The symphony is cast in five movements, the last three of which are played without pause. Beethoven�s arrival in the countryside is signalled by a suitably rustic drone from the violas and cellos, while the violins introduce the serene but lively first theme, the �awakening of joyful feelings.� The bucolic mood is maintained with uncharacteristically simple harmonies and textures, and themes evocative of peasant dances. The �Scene by the brook� contains a stroke of poetic genius � two solo muted cellos sustain a swaying figure for the murmuring of the stream � while towards the end Beethoven makes a whimsical concession to the more literal minded of his listeners, labelling in the score characteristically avian cadenzas for the nightingale (flute), quail (oboe), and cuckoo (clarinet). The third movement is the scherzo of the symphony, a �Merry gathering of country folk.� Again we glimpse Beethoven�s humor as he parodies the village band � not always in tune! But the scherzo is prevented from coming to a proper conclusion, the boisterous round dances are rudely interrupted by a thunderstorm, with cellos and double basses providing the first distant rumbles. The timpani enters for the first time, along with the piccolo and two trombones that Beethoven has held in reserve for this moment. Similarly he has kept the more interesting and complex harmonies for the storm, with its rain, lightning and �electric energies.� When the storm eventually subsides, the winds introduce the pastoral song of the final movement, the hymn of gratitude, a rainbow of promise conveyed by harmonious thirds and tranquil rhythms in a spacious rondo. The precise representational aspects of the symphony provide the most gratifying landmarks for listeners � the piping shepherds, the bird calls, a storm, country dances. Beethoven may not have wanted us to place too much store by his descriptive movement headings but they are a sure guide to this calm and expansive symphony. However, it is in the �expression of feelings� � the poetry � that the Pastoral Symphony finds its real strength and imagination: the infinite repetition of pattern in nature conveyed through rhythmic cells, its immensity through sustained pure harmonies. Beethoven�s Pastoral is a classical symphony in five movements; **Schubert�s Unfinished**represents just half a symphony. We have the complete music for the first two movements, and a sketch and one full page of a third, but no convincing sketch or score for the finale has ever been found. The surviving music dates from 1822; its poignant title from the 1890s.This symphony is Schubert�s incomplete masterpiece, perfect and loved in its imperfection, and with all the appeal of Romantic legend. For a time it was believed that Schubert died before he was able to complete the symphony, the work tragically cut short by fate. In the 1930s, musicologist Arnold Schering offered a programmatic justification for considering the two-movement symphony complete in itself, fancifully linking the musical journey with the events of an allegorical and semi-autobiographical tale, The Dream, that Schubert wrote down in the same year. Then there is the theory that Schubert did finish the symphony, but that the second half was lost � perhaps used for kindling, as happened with one of his operas. The most likely scenario is the least Romantic: Schubert simply reached a point in the symphony wherehe could not take the musical ideas any further, and so he abandoned the work to move on to other projects. The following year, he sent the two complete movements to the Styrian Musical Society in Graz as a �musical expression of my sincere gratitude� for a Diploma of Honor they had awarded him. This was not such a ridiculous gift: the classical practice of playing only parts of symphonies or splitting the movements to �bookend� a concert was still common. No doubt the Styrian Musical Society could have programmed the symphony as it stood � if it had ever reached them. Instead the symphony languished in a drawer of old papers belonging to Anselm H�ttenbrenner. Anselm was, in the words of his brother Josef, in possession of a �treasure�Schubert�s Symphony in B minor, which we place on a level with the great Symphony in C major�and with any of Beethoven�s.� Josef�s evaluation signals the tremendous strengths of the Unfinished Symphony. With this work Schubert was striving towards �a grand symphony�; a symphony that would stand beside Beethoven. Schubert did eventually complete his grand symphony, the Great C Major (No.9). Meanwhile, the Symphony in B minor was the work of a man searching for a solution to a puzzle: exploring innovations in melodic style and bold musical gestures, and developing long-range harmonic expression and astonishing modulations hitherto unknown. In his early symphonies Schubert learnt from Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. In the Unfinished Symphony he had no model � the vision of a �grand symphony� was Beethovenian in spirit, but Schubert�s realization of that vision was unprecedented. The Unfinished Symphony is not overtly grand in character, only in scope. Its opening is mysterious, quiet, and disorienting � it is unclear at first whether we are hearing a slow introduction or the real beginning of what is ostensibly a fast movement: Allegro moderato. But from the first appearance of the oboe and clarinet with the main theme, it is clear that breadth of ideas will win out over sheer momentum. Ironically, the true �main theme� is the second subject, introduced by the cellos. It really is the signature of the symphony, for it is itself unfinished: the cellos pass the theme to the violins, who in turn leave one of the most passionate melodies of all time hanging mid-phrase. The second movement is less anguished and troubled than the first � not least because of the move from B minor to a sunnier but unexpected E major � but it shares the first�s intensity and power. Indeed, it is possible that Schubert stopped work when he failed to conceive of a weighty finale that � following the lead of Beethoven � would be capable of balancing and resolving the tensions of the first two movements. For the premiere performance in 1865 there was a clumsy attempt to provide completion by appending the finale from Schubert�s Third. Since then, scholarly completions of the symphony have included realizations of the third-movement sketch and the not implausible substitution of one of the Entr�actes from Schubert�s Rosamunde music as a finale. But conductors, orchestras and music-lovers everywhere continue to find satisfaction in the originality and power of the first two movements alone. Composers since Schubert have weaned us from the need to hear a symphony end in the key in which it began, and familiarity with this beloved masterpiece means that we do not hear it as two movements short of a symphony. Instead, as Schubert scholar Brian Newbould puts it, we recognize it as �a pinnacle in the history of the symphony�a supreme poetic vision in sound�� �Who can stand beside Beethoven?� Perhaps no one, if we are to cling to Romantic notions of solitary genius. If not, we must surely look to the composer who requested that he be buried beside Beethoven: another �sound poet� � Franz Schubert. Yvonne Frindle �2004 PERFORMANCE HISTORIES Leonore Overture No.3 was first performed on March 29, 1806, in Vienna. Although discarded from the final version of Fidelio, the overture was published in 1810 as an independent concert work. Schubert�s Unfinished Symphony was not performed during his lifetime. Its premiere was conducted by Johann von Herbeck on December 17, 1865, in Vienna, 17 years after the composer�s death. The program concluded with Mendelssohn�s Italian Symphony. The Pastoral Symphony received its first performance in an all-Beethoven concert on December 22, 1808, in Vienna. The program included the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, the Choral Fantasia, the Piano Concerto in G, and selections from the Mass in C. | | | | � 2003 Apollo's Fire. All rights reserved. Problems or questions concerning this site contact: webmaster@apollosfire.org Site last updated 27 July, 2006 | | |