Overture to Egmont, Opus 84
Ludwig van Beethoven
(b. Bonn, 1770; d. 1827, Vienna)

Composed in 1810.
Premiered on June 15, 1810 in Vienna.
Instrumentation: pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
Duration: 9 minutes.

     “The first casualty when war comes,” observed Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917, “is truth.” So when Napoleon invaded Vienna in May 1809, convinced that the Austrian Empire was the major stumbling-block to his domination of Europe, it is not surprising that censorship of literature, of the press, and of the theater were instituted immediately. The months until the French departed in October were bitter ones for the Viennese. The value of the national currency dwindled, food was in short supply, and freedoms were limited. Soon after the first of the year, with Napoleon’s forces gone, the director of the Hoftheater, Josef Härtel, arranged for the production of a series of revivals of the dramas of Schiller and Goethe, the great figures of the German stage. Appropriately, two plays that he chose dealt with the oppression of a noble people by a foreign tyrant, and of the eventual freedom the patriots won for themselves — Schiller’s William Tell and Goethe’s Egmont.

     Beethoven was commissioned to write the music for Goethe’s play. (Adalbert Gyrowetz was assigned William Tell. Rossini’s setting of the tale was still two decades in the future.) Egmont, based on an incident from 1567, depicts the subjugation of the Netherlands to the tyrannical Spanish rulers, the agony of the people, and their growing defiance and dreams of liberty, and ends with Count Egmont’s call for revolution and his vision in the moments before his execution of eventual victory. Beethoven approached his task with zeal, out of both his unmitigated respect for the author and his humanist’s belief in the freedom and dignity of man.

     The theme of political oppression overthrown in the name of freedom was also treated by Beethoven in his only opera, Fidelio, and the musical process employed there also served well for Egmont. The triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness, is portrayed through the overall structure of the work: major tonalities replace minor at the moment of victory; bright orchestral sonorities succeed somber, threatening ones; fanfares displace sinuous melodies. Devoid of overtly dramatic trappings, it is the same emotional road he travelled in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. The incidental music to Egmont mirrors the plight of the Dutch people and their determination to be free, finishing with a Siegessymphonie, a “Symphony of Victory.”

     The Overture compresses the action of the play into a single musical span. A stark unison begins the introduction. Twice, stern chords from the strings are answered by the lyrical plaints of the woodwinds. An uneasy hush comes over the last measures of this solemn opening. The main body of the Overture commences with an ominous melody in the cellos. A storm quickly gathers (note the timpani strokes), but clears to allow the appearance of the contrasting second theme, a quicker version of the material from the introduction. The threatening mood returns to carry the music through its developmental central section and into the recapitulation. The second theme is extended to include passages cloaked in the burnished sound of horns and winds. A falling, unison fourth followed by a silence marks the moment of Egmont’s death. Organ-like chords from the winds sustain the moment of suspense. Then, beginning almost imperceptibly but growing with an exhilarating rapidity, the stirring song of victory is proclaimed by the full orchestra. Tyranny is conquered. Right prevails.

Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Opus 90, “Italian”
Felix Mendelssohn
(b. Hamburg, 1809; d. Leipzig, 1847)

Composed 1831-1833; revised 1834-1837.
Premiered on May 13, 1833 in London, conducted by the composer.
Instrumentation: pairs of woodwinds, horns and trumpets, timpani and strings.
Duration: approximately 27 minutes.

     Felix Mendelssohn never learned how to take it easy. As a boy, he was awakened at 5:00 every morning to begin a full day of private tutelage, exercise, social instruction and family activities — the busy regimen he learned as a child shaped the rest of his brief life. Inactivity was anathema. Two months of bed rest occasioned by a leg injury in London in 1829 were more painful for the confinement they necessitated than for the medical condition. Throughout his days, Mendelssohn preferred travel to quiet life at home: he trooped across Europe, from Vienna to Wales, from Hamburg to Naples, and was welcomed and admired at every stop. Some of his journeys inspired music — the first of his ten trips to Great Britain, for example, which included a walking tour of Scotland (during which he enjoyed “a half-hour of inconsequential conversation” with Sir Walter Scott), gave rise to the “Scottish” Symphony and the Hebrides Overture.

     When he was 21, Mendelssohn embarked on an extensive grand tour of the Continent. He met Chopin and Liszt in Paris, painted the breathtaking vistas of Switzerland, marveled at the artistic riches (and grumbled about the inhospitable treatment by the coachmen and innkeepers) of Italy. “The land where the lemon trees blossom,” as his friend Goethe described sunny Italy, stirred him so deeply that he began a musical work there in 1831 based on his impressions of Rome, Naples and the other cities that he visited. The composition of this “Italian” Symphony, as he always called it, caused him much difficulty, however, and he had trouble bringing all of the movements to completion. “For the slow movement I have not yet found anything exactly right, and I think I must put it off for Naples,” he wrote from Rome to his sister Fanny. The spur to finish the work came in the form of a commission for a symphony from the Philharmonic Society of London which caused Mendelssohn to gather up his sketches and complete the task.

     The new Symphony was met with immediate acclaim at its premiere on May 13, 1833 in London, and was one of the series of British successes that helped enshrine Mendelssohn in the English pantheon of 19th-century musical genius as Queen Victoria’s favorite composer. Mendelssohn, however, was not completely satisfied with the original version of the Symphony, and he refused to allow its publication. He tinkered with it again several years later, paying special attention to the finale, but never felt the work to be perfected. It was only after his death that the score was published and became widely available. Despite Mendelssohn’s misgivings, the “Italian” Symphony has become one of the most enduring and popular pieces in the orchestral repertory, declared to be virtually perfect by the demanding British critic and scholar Sir Donald Tovey; it was a special favorite of that cantankerous curmudgeon and onetime music critic, George Bernard Shaw.

     Mendelssohn cast his “Italian” Symphony in the traditional four movements. The opening movement is a sparkling sonata-allegro with an elaborately contrapuntal development section. The Andante, in the style of a slow march, may have been inspired by a religious procession that Mendelssohn saw in the streets of Naples, but it also evokes the chorale prelude sung by the Two Armed Men in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The third movement, the gentlest of dances, is in the form of a minuet/scherzo whose central trio utilizes the burnished sonorities of bassoons and horns. The finale turns, surprisingly, to a tempestuous minor key for an exuberant and mercurial dance modeled on the whirling saltarello that Mendelssohn heard in Rome.

Concerto in D Major for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 77
Johannes Brahms
(b. Hamburg, 1833; d. Vienna, 1897)

Composed in 1878.
Premiered on New Year’s Day 1879 in Leipzig, conducted by the composer with
Joseph Joachim as soloist.
Instrumentation: woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings.
Duration: approximately 44 minutes.

     “The healthy and ruddy colors of his skin indicated a love of nature and a habit of being in the open air in all kinds of weather; his thick straight hair of brownish color came nearly down to his shoulders. His clothes and boots were not of exactly the latest pattern, nor did they fit particularly well, but his linen was spotless.... [There was a] kindliness in his eyes ... with now and then a roguish twinkle in them which corresponded to a quality in his nature which would perhaps be best described as good-natured sarcasm.” So wrote Sir George Henschel, the singer and conductor who became the first Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, of his friend Johannes Brahms at the time of the composition of his Violin Concerto. Brahms at 45 was coming into the full efflorescence of his talent and fame. The twenty-year gestation of the First Symphony had finally ended in 1876, and the Second Symphony came easily only a year later. He was occupied with many songs and important chamber works during the years of the mid-1870s, and the two greatest of his concertos, the B-flat for piano and the D major for violin, were both conceived in 1878. Both works were ignited by the delicious experience of his first trip to Italy in April of that year, though the Piano Concerto was soon laid aside when the Violin Concerto became his main focus during the following summer. After the Italian trip, he returned to the idyllic Austrian village of Pörtschach (site of the composition of the Second Symphony the previous year), where, he wrote to the critic Eduard Hanslick, “the air so bristles with melodies that one has to be careful not to tread on them.”

     The Violin Concerto was written at Pörtschach specifically for Brahms’ old friend and musical ally, Joseph Joachim. In August, when the sketches for the new work were almost completed, Brahms sent a draft of the solo part to Joachim for his advice on the technical aspects of the violin writing with the following note: “I wanted you to correct it — and I didn’t want you to have any excuse of any kind: either that the music is too good [to be changed] or that the whole score isn’t worth the trouble. But I shall be satisfied if you just write me a word or two, and perhaps write a word here and there in the music, like ‘difficult,’ ‘awkward,’ ‘impossible,’ etc.” Joachim took great pains in examining the score (his notated copy is still in the State Library in Berlin), and passed his advice on to Brahms who, rather obstinately, ignored most of it. Brahms, whose instrument was the piano rather than the violin, made a few changes in the musical aspects of the score, but left the sometimes ambiguous string notation largely untouched, a circumstance that has caused considerable interpretative difficulties for other violinists.

     Brahms originally envisioned the Violin Concerto as a four-movement work. He composed a scherzo and a slow movement for it, but decided to jettison them for reasons he did not reveal. “The middle movements have gone, and of course they were the best!” he wrote. He was probably being facetious about the quality of the discarded music because he continued, “But I have written a poor adagio for it instead,” referring to one of the most beautiful slow movements in the orchestral literature. The fate of the unused movements has never been exactly determined. The scherzo may have ended up as material for the Second Piano Concerto; the adagio may have been the basis of the present one in the Violin Concerto; or both movements may have been lost amid the aborted plans for a second violin concerto. (Brahms was rigidly systematic in destroying scores he did not want others to see.) His revisions proved effective, and after the Concerto was launched, he wrote to his publisher, Simrock, “It is well to be doubted whether I could write a better concerto.”

     The Concerto made its way slowly onto the world’s concert stages. Joachim programmed the work regularly as part of his tours, but others were reluctant to take on the imposing technical and musical challenges of the score. Hans von Bülow, a sensitive musician who should have known better, dubbed this “a concerto not for the violin, but against the violin.” There is no question about the difficulties of the score, especially those that its double-stops and wide skips impose on the left-hand technique of the soloist, but, with familiarity, the rigors of the work were not only conquered but relished by virtuosos. As with many of Brahms’ large works, audiences considered this one somewhat dry and pedantic at first, and even the composer’s staunch advocate, Eduard Hanslick, found little to praise in it. The integration of violinist and orchestra into a virtual “symphony with solo instrument” did not allow the empty pyrotechnics that listeners expected from a Romantic concerto, and the Violin Concerto took some getting used to. Get used to it listeners did, and today Brahms’ Violin Concerto is regarded as one of the two greatest works in the form ever written, matched only by that of Beethoven.

     Hubert Foss wrote of the style of the Violin Concerto, “Of all Brahms’ major works, this is the one which shows in the highest degree of perfection the reconciling of the two opposites of his creative mind — the lyrical and the constructive: Brahms the song writer and Brahms the symphonist.” Though the wealth of formal detail is an inexhaustible treasure which is best appreciated only after many hearings, the work’s sonorous beauty, opulent harmony and rich lyricism make an immediate appeal to the listener. The first movement is constructed on the lines of the Classical concerto form, with an extended orchestral introduction presenting much of the movement’s main thematic material before the entry of the soloist. The group of themes comprises several ideas that are knitted to each other by the rich contrapuntal flow of the texture. They are stately in rhythm and dignified in character, and allow for considerable elaboration when they are treated on their return by the soloist. The last theme, a dramatic strain in stern dotted rhythms, ushers in the soloist, who plays an extended passage as transition to the second exposition of the themes. This initial solo entry is unsettled and anxious in mood and serves to heighten the serene majesty of the main theme when it is sung by the violin upon its reappearance. A melody not heard in the orchestral introduction, limpid and almost a waltz, is given out by the soloist to serve as the second theme. The vigorous dotted-rhythm figure returns to close the exposition, with the development continuing the agitated aura of this closing theme. The recapitulation begins on a heroic wave of sound spread throughout the entire orchestra. After the return of the themes, the bridge to the coda is made by the soloist’s cadenza. (Curiously, Brahms did not write his own cadenza for this movement but allowed the soloist to devise one. Joachim provided a cadenza, as have more than a dozen others — including Kreisler, Heifetz, Busoni and Tovey — and it is his that is most often heard in performance.) With another traversal of the main theme and a series of dignified cadential figures, this grand movement comes to an end.

     The rapturous second movement is based on a theme that the composer Max Bruch said was derived from a Bohemian folk song. The melody, intoned by the oboe, is initially presented in the colorful sonorities of wind choir without strings. After the violin’s entry, the soloist is seldom confined to the exact notes of the theme, but rather weaves a rich embroidery around their melodic shape. The central section of the movement is cast in darker hues, and employs the full range of the violin in its sweet arpeggios. The opening melody returns in the plangent tones of the oboe accompanied by the continuing widely spaced chords of the violinist.

     The finale is an invigorating dance whose gypsy character pays tribute to the two Hungarian-born violinists who played such important roles in Brahms’ life: Eduard Reményi, who discovered the talented Brahms playing piano in the bars of Hamburg and first presented him to the European musical community; and Joseph Joachim. The movement is cast in rondo form, with a scintillating tune in double stops as the recurring theme. This movement, the only one in this Concerto given to overtly virtuosic display, forms a memorable capstone to one of the greatest concerted pieces of the 19th century. As John Horton wrote, “That Brahms should have ventured upon a Violin Concerto in D with the sound of Beethoven’s, as interpreted by Joachim, in his ears was in itself an act of faith and courage; that he should have produced one of such originality, sturdily independent of its mighty predecessor yet worthy to stand beside it, is one of the triumphs of Brahms’ genius.”<

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda