This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony and conductor Stuart Malina open the new season with a masterworks concert that includes a well-known favorite – the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto with pianist Di Wu – an almost unknown but delightfully tuneful jazz-classical cross-over hit from the 1930s by Morton Gould – his “American Symphonette No. 2” with its once very well-known “Pavanne” which many listeners might recognize even if they don't know the piece – and a grand symphony by a late-Romantic French master – Ernest Chausson's only symphony, in fact – which few people in the audience may have had many opportunities to hear live.
The Saturday night concert begins at 8:00; the Sunday afternoon concert, at 3:00. There's a pre-concert talk, as usual, an hour before each performance with a post-concert Q/A “Talk Back” session with Stuart and a guest or two (perhaps the soloist or a member of the orchestra).
Here is Di Wu playing Franz Liszt's transcription of Gounod's "Waltz from Faust," one of her performances at the Van Cliburn Competition in 2009.
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Several seasons ago, Stuart Malina mentioned, when faced with conducting a ubiquitous favorite like Beethoven's 5th again, a quote he'd heard from conductor Robert Shaw who said something to the effect that every time you perform a work like Beethoven's 5th there's always somebody who is hearing it for the first time – and somebody who is hearing it for the last time.
Tchaikovsky's 1st Piano Concerto is just such a work.
I'm sure there will be people in this weekend's concert audience who've never heard the whole piece before, live or otherwise – beyond its famous opening – and who knows who in the audience we may lose between then and the next time Tchaikovsky's concerto will be performed?
Our soloist for the first concert of the New Season is Di Wu who appeared here a few seasons ago to play another concert favorite, the Grieg Piano Concerto.
And since she was a finalist in the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition, founded by the great American pianist who won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 at the height of the Cold War and who was even treated to a ticker-tape parade in New York City when he returned – when was the last time a classical musician received a tribute like that? – it seems appropriate to include here a video of the complete concerto recorded from Cliburn's return to Moscow in 1962, again with Kiril Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic.
And yes, that is Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev smiling and applauding at the concert's conclusion. In 1958, when the judges had decided on Cliburn as the winner, they felt compelled to ask Krushchev if they could award the first prize of this competition – designed to demonstrate Soviet prowess in the arts the year after they'd launched Sputnik – to an American. Krushchev is reported to have asked “Is he the best? Then give him the prize!”
Incidentally, Cliburn performed two great Russian concertos during that competition. The other was Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto, a work you can hear when the HSO concludes the 2015-2016 season with Ann Schein in May.
While it's difficult for me to imagine a better performance than Cliburn's, for those of you who might prefer a more “modern” recording of the Tchaikovsky, here is a 2001 Van Cliburn Competition winner born in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, Stanislav Iudenich, with James Conlon conducting the Fort Worth Symphony. This performance is from the actual competition final round, not just a live concert performance (talk about pressure). That year, Iudenich shared the Gold with another Russian pianist, Olga Kern who, incidentally, played the Rachmaninoff 3rd in her concerto competition final.
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But what makes a popular hit like the Tchaikovsky 1st Piano Concerto?
Since it's called the 1st, clearly there must be at least a 2nd, and there's also a 3rd, but since these are little known and rarely heard, it's also clear Tchaikovsky did not have the same luck with the public with these two later works.
Here are some early reviews of one of Tchaikovsky's most beloved works, beginning with the world premiere, Hans von Bülow, the soloist, which took place, of all places, in Boston in October 1875.
“This elaborate work is, in general, as difficult for popular apprehension as the name of the composer... There are long stretches of what seems, on the first hearing at least, formless void, sprinkled only with tinklings of the piano and snatchy obbligatos from all the various wind and string instruments.” – Boston, Evening Transcript, October 25th, 1875.
“Tchaikovsky is unmistakably a disciple of the 'new school' and his work is strongly tinged with the wildness and quaintness of the music of the North. Taken as a whole, his Piano Concerto appeared chiefly as a novelty. It would not soon supplant the massive production of Beethoven, or even the fiery compositions of Liszt, Raff, and Rubinstein.” – Boston Journal, October 25th, 1875.
“This extremely difficult, strange, wild, ultra-modern Russian concerto is the composition of Peter Tchaikovsky... We had the wild Coassack fire and impetus without stint, extremely brilliant and exciting, but could we ever learn to love such music?” – Dwight's Journal of Music, published in November, 1875.
At it's first performance in Russia, a concert in St. Petersburg the following month, the critic of Novoye Vremya was more succinct. “Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.”
Tchaikovsky's said of that same Petersburg performance pianist Gustav Kross had reduced his concerto to “an atrocious cacophony.”
It should also be mentioned that, the Boston critics aside, the audience at that world premiere cheered the concerto enough that the finale had to be encored! George Whitefield Chadwick, a leading composer in Boston, wrote the performance was not well rehearsed and at one point, when the trombones came in early during a passage in the middle of the first movement, the soloist could clearly be heard singing out “the brass may go to hell.”
Anyway, just a few things to keep in mind when you hear a new piece for the first time...
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You can read more about the other works on the program in a subsequent post on this blog.
Over the summer, I was asked to read and review a new book by English author Sheila Seymour, a novel about Tchaikovsky called Sons of Janus. You can read that review, here.
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Tchaikovsky, Early 1875
Tchaikovsky's concerto, which he worked on between November, 1874, and February, 1875, was also not a hit with the composer's own former teacher, mentor and, at the time, boss.
Tchaikovsky, who had always wanted to be a musician though when he was growing up there were no music schools in Russia where he could study, had finally graduated from the recently formed St. Petersburg Conservatory founded by pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein who then sent his younger brother Nikolai (also a pianist and composer) off to Moscow to open a branch there along with Tchaikovsky who would teach theory and composition, though he was just out of school himself, totally inexperienced and not yet successful.
So far, he had composed a small number of works but the only ones that endure are the song “None but the Lonely Heart” (rarely heard today, but once another ubiquitous favorite); his 2nd Symphony (later to be eclipsed by the popularity – and comparative greatness – of his 4th, 5th and 6th Symphonies); the original version of his Romeo & Juliet though we know it by the 3rd version rewritten 11 years later; and the 1st String Quartet but only because its slow movement became popular as the Andante cantabile.
If you look at the published opus numbers, it would look like the ballet Swan Lake pre-dates the concerto, also, but he didn't begin composing it until after he had completed the concerto. Arguably one of the great ballets in the repertoire, it, too, by the way, was a complete failure at its premiere.
Nikolai Rubinstein
So here's a 34-year-old composer, just finished school (finally, after having finished a law degree and worked for a few years as a law clerk), who hands his teacher a big piano concerto. It was Christmas Eve and Tchaikovsky sat down and played through the first movement for Nikolai Rubinstein – nothing – and then he played through the remaining two movements – still nothing.
And then all hell broke loose.
“It turned out,” Tchaikovsky wrote years later to his friend and patron Nadezhda von Meck, “that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten. 'Here, for instance, this—now what's all that?' (he caricatured my music on the piano) 'And this? How can anyone…' etc., etc.”
He continued, “I was not only astounded but outraged by the whole scene. I am no longer a boy trying his hand at composition, and I no longer need lessons from anyone, especially when they are delivered so harshly and unfriendlily [sic]. I need and shall always need friendly criticism, but there was nothing resembling friendly criticism. It was indiscriminate, determined censure, delivered in such a way as to wound me to the quick. I left the room without a word and went upstairs. In my agitation and rage I could not say a thing. Presently R[ubinstein] enjoined me, and seeing how upset I was he asked me into one of the distant rooms. There he repeated that my concerto was impossible, pointed out many places where it would have to be completely revised, and said that if within a limited time I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honor of playing my thing at his concert. 'I shall not alter a single note,' I answered, 'I shall publish the work exactly as it is!' This I did.”
Hoping that Nikolai Rubinstein would premiere the work, instead (somehow) he convinced the German conductor and pianist, Hans von Bülow, a friend and champion of Brahms (who at the time had not completed his 1st Symphony), to take on the first performances even though he quickly dropped it from his repertoire.
But by the Moscow performance in November of that same year, Nikolai Rubinstein had changed his mind about the piece and, even though Tchaikovsky's own student Sergei Taneyev was the soloist, Rubinstein conducted the performance. Later, he would perform the work frequently as soloist, especially on his European tours.
Regardless of the composer's reaction to Rubinstein's suggestions – most of which were about the piano-writing or technical issues of “balance” between soloist and orchestra, as well as concern about the famous Introduction being in “the wrong key” and, beautiful as that theme is, never being heard from again – Tchaikovsky did make slight revisions on three subsequent occasions: in 1876, after a German pianist had given the London premiere; when the work was finally published in 1879, following advice from the Russian pianist Alexander Siloti, one of his own students (who later taught Rachmaninoff); and finally a few more simplifications and adjustments made in 1890, fifteen years after the premiere, the edition we usually hear today.
In the five years after showing his piano concerto to Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky then composed Swan Lake, the opera Eugene Onyegin, the “Rococo Variations” for cello and orchestra, the Violin Concerto, the 4th Symphony and The 1812 Overture.
This weekend, it's the last Masterworks Concert of the season – and it ends with one of the great symphonies of all times, Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5. Caroline Goulding who won an Avery Fischer Career Grant and a Young Concert Artists Award will be playing a 1720-ish Strad for Samuel Barber's largely lyrical Violin Concerto. And the concert opens with “Dances from Powder Her Face” by Thomas Adès, an English composer who's been all the rage for the last 20 years.
Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3:00 at the Forum in downtown Harrisburg. Truman Bullard offers the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance.
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Shostakovich's 5th Symphony is one of those works inspired by the idea of “Fate knocking at the door” or, to be more specific, the secret police knocking at the door. Because in Shostakovich's case, he'd run afoul of Stalin who'd walked out of a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1936 and whose reaction to the music was capsulized in the “review” Muddle Instead of Music.
This was not just a bad review. It not only banned his music from being performed (meaning no one would have the courage to commission any new pieces from him, either), it brought down on the composer's head the imminent threat of arrest and imprisonment. This was a time in Soviet history where artists (not just politically outspoken activists) could be accused of being “enemies of the people” as well as traitors to the ideals of Soviet art.
Shostakovich & his children
It sounds impossible for us to believe this – for more information, read my post, Shostakovich's 5th: The Incredible Story Behind the Music, here – but imagine waiting to hear someone knocking at your door in the middle of the night, having your bag packed in case they've come to haul you off to prison, not knowing whether you'd ever see your family again, and you have an idea what the atmosphere was like when Shostakovich began composing what became his Symphony No. 5.
Someone (presumably not the composer) called it “A Soviet Artists' Reply to Just Criticism” and it was generally considered to be Shostakovich's attempt at ingratiating himself back into favor with the government. In that sense, the music succeeded – it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. According to eye-witnesses, the ovation itself lasted over a half-hour.
The first movement is stark and dramatic, full of fits and starts, sudden changes and a good deal of uncertainty both haunting and haunted. The scherzo – no “joke” in the traditional sense – may be a brief tribute to Gustav Mahler whose symphonies Shostakovich greatly admired (the sweep of his first movements also reflect more the influence of Mahler than the traditional Western symphonic form). The third movement is a long lament spinning slowly through long lines, as lyrical as the scherzo was violent, interludes with the harp and celeste adding a sense of almost suspended animation.
The finale begins with a dark, pounding march that turns from “tending towards victory” but is always rushing off into an even darker celebration ever on the verge of hysteria. After a questioning middle section of (possibly) hypnotic reflection, the music slowly leads back to the march. But what is it about the ending when it finally gets there: triumph? Or resignation?
Here is a performance recorded with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic on tour in Japan in 1979.
Listen especially to the conclusion: check in about a minute or so for the build-up to 49:24 where the final march begins.
Here is another performance, this one with Yevgenny Mravinsky conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1983. Mravinsky conducted the world premiere in 1937 and had a long career with the work, a close collaborator with the composer. You probably don't have time to listen to both performances, but listen to the last few minutes at least of this one and compare it to the ending in Bernstein's performance. Notice the difference in Mravinsky's tempo at 43:50, especially the way the conducts with smaller gestures and occasional cautionary signals to the brass to keep it from getting too “over-the-top.”
And yet, it's the same piece! Bernstein's ending is certainly triumphant. But what is Mravinsky's? It's not the victory we in the West think of as being triumphant yet is this what the composer wanted?
Given the trouble Shostakovich found himself in with his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, imagine the problems Thomas Adès might face if he lived in a similar culture after his opera, Powder Her Face, was premiered in 1995...
In Shostakovich's opera, a young wife has an affair with a handsome farm-worker and together they kill her husband, hiding his body in the cellar. Once her husband has been declared “missing, presumed dead,” the widow now prepares to marry her lover until the body is discovered and the two are sent off to Siberia, the widow dying en route. If the pessimistic story is not un-Soviet enough (since art, in the official view, should be uplifting) the music itself was shocking – especially the imitations of their love-making in the lurid slides of the trombones.
Thomas Adès
While it's difficult to say or read anything about Powder Her Face that doesn't mention its most notorious moment – let's just mention the word, fellatio and move on – the music that appears in this orchestral “suite” the composer arranged from it catches more the decadent atmosphere of the life the main character leads with its infinite partying and her desperate attempts to find meaning in a presumably empty existence.
In the ad campaign for the 2003 New York City Opera production, she had been described as a “female Don Giovanni for the Monica Lewinski generation.”
As Alex Ross wrote about the opera, Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll, and center of a 1960s British sex scandal (she is invariably known as “The Dirty Duchess”)...
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“...becomes a half-comic, half-tragic figure, a nitwit outlaw. There were clear parallels with Alban Berg’s epic of degradation, Lulu [...] The libretto reads like a nasty farce, but it takes on emotional breadth when the music is added. With a few incredibly seductive stretches of thirties-era popular melody, Adès shows the giddy world that the Duchess lost, and when her bright harmony lurches down to a terrifying B-flat minor he exposes the male cruelty that quickened her fall. Adès's harmonic tricks have a powerful theatrical impact: there’s a repeated sense of a beautiful mirage shattering into cold, alienated fragments." [“Roll Over, Beethoven: Thomas Adès,” New Yorker Magazine, Oct 26, 1998]
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The “Dances” in this suite are really the Overture, a Waltz and music from the Finale arranged for full orchestra from the original score's pit orchestra of fifteen players.
But it's all “dance music,” opening with a tango (which Adès admits opens with the same notes as a tango by the great Argentinian singer Carlos Gardel, but he didn't know it and had no idea it was one of the most popular tunes in Argentina). Now, a tango is a very sensuous, impassioned and erotic dance to begin with, and this one is made even seamier if not smarmier than some you might see on “Dancing with the Stars” (or almost...).
The Waltz, rather than being an out-and-out waltz suggested by its association with Johann Strauss, is more of a jazzy cabaret waltz – or, to be more accurate, a parody of a jazzy cabaret waltz from one of the flashback scenes (this one, from her 1936 wedding). We think of a waltz as elegant but don't forget, when it was first introduced in post-Napoleonic Vienna, mothers were being warned not to let their daughters learn to dance the waltz...
In the end, the Duchess is forced to vacate her lavish home for a hotel room (where the opera takes place) and when she can no longer pay the bills, the manager (despite the Duchess' attempted seduction) evicts her: she suffers a mental breakdown. In the epilogue – in a moralistic way that might also bring to mind the conclusion of Mozart's Don Giovanni – her hotel room (and by extension, her whole world) is torn apart by her maid and an electrician. The music – keeping in mind Alex Ross' line about “shattering into cold, alienated fragments” – reflects not only the shattering of her life but also, eventually, her state of mind when she died, alone and penniless, in a London nursing home.
Despite all that moralizing and sensationalizing, the music is itself delightful, even sparkling, but a bit refracted like a disco ball gone bonkers.
Here's Christoph von Dohnányi with the Philharmonia Orchestra in a 2007 London Proms concert. At the end, the composer appears on stage for a bow:
By the way, if Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District almost landed Shostakovich in prison, BBC-4 aired the film version of Powder Her Face on TV, Christmas Day, 1999.
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In between the Adès which opens the program and the Shostakovich symphony which concludes the season is a very contrasting work, one of the most lyrical (at least for 2 of its 3 movements) and popular American concertos of the 20th Century, the Violin Concerto Samuel Barber composed in 1939 at the outset of World War II. In fact, Barber was working on it in Switzerland and was interrupted by the call for Americans to leave Europe as war approached. But it wasn't the war that nearly scuttled the piece – more of that in a moment.
Samuel Barber in 1938
Samuel Barber is a Pennsylvania composer, born in West Chester PA, growing up in a musical family that included the great opera singer, Louise Homer. He was a graduate of the Curtis Institute for Music in Philadelphia where he was, essentially, a triple-threat as a major in piano, composition and voice. Several of his most acclaimed works were written fairly early in his career – the Adagio for Strings written when he was 25, but also the “Overture to The School for Scandal” composed as a student at Curtis when he was 21.
He completed the Violin Concerto when he was 29 and wrote this program note for the premiere:
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“The first movement — allegro molto moderato — begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. This movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than concerto form. The second movement — andante sostenuto — is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetuum mobile, exploits the more brilliant and virtuosic character of the violin.”
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Here's Gil Shaham with David Robertson conducting the BBC Symphony in another Proms concert, this one in 2010:
It's that “Perpetual Motion” that has created what could be called the “controversy” behind this seemingly innocent piece. The story had been around for years: I'd first heard it when I read Nathan Broder's 1954 biography of Barber when I was high school in the '60s, plus it's in all the program notes I'd ever seen about it. I'd never read anything to the contrary. So it's a surprise to find out, after all these years, it's not true!
The story had it that when Barber was commissioned to compose a violin concerto for a wealthy patron's un-named ward, he submitted the first two movements when they were finished but they were deemed “too easy” – he was basically asked to write a more virtuosic finale, but the perpetuum mobile Barber sent him was viewed as too difficult to play. In response, the composer got a student at Curtis to sight read the movement which he did quite well, proving that, in fact, it could be done. The assumption was, then, that the violinist for whom it was composed wasn't... well... up to it.
It wasn't until the 1990s that word was going around the story was a myth yet still being included in program books for various recordings. Only when letters and other documents were released in 2010 – almost 30 years after Barber's death – did it turns out to prove quite a different story.
I quote, here, directly from the extensive Samuel Barber entry on Wikpedia which seems factual enough, rather than rewriting all the details in my own words:
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In 1939, Philadelphia industrialist Samuel Simeon Fels commissioned Barber to write a violin concerto for Fels' ward, Iso Briselli, [who graduated] from the Curtis Institute of Music the same year as Barber, 1934.[1] The Barber biographies written by Nathan Broder (1954) and Barbara B. Heyman (1992) discuss the genesis of the concerto during the period of the violin concerto's commission and subsequent year leading up to the first performance. Heyman interviewed Briselli and others familiar with the history in her publication. In late 2010, previously unpublished letters written by Fels, Barber, and Albert Meiff (Briselli's violin coach in that period) from the Samuel Simeon Fels Papers archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania became available to the public.[2]
Barber accepted his advance[3] and went to Switzerland to work on the concerto. Barber started working on the first two movements in Switzerland during the summer of 1939. He hoped to complete the concerto in the early fall to meet the October 1st deadline. His plans were interrupted, however, due to the impending war—all Americans were warned to leave Europe. In late August, he went to Paris and then took a ship to the USA, arriving in early September. After spending a short time with his family in West Chester, PA, he went to the Pocono Mountains to continue working on the concerto.
When he delivered the first two movements to Briselli in mid-October, Briselli received them with great enthusiasm. He believed they were beautiful and eagerly awaited the finale. He suggested to Barber that when writing the last movement, he might include more of the virtuosic side of the violin's capabilities.
However, in mid-November, things began to go awry. Briselli showed the two completed movements he was learning to his violin coach in New York City, Albert Meiff, who was immediately critical of the work from a violinistic standpoint. Briselli did not concur. Nevertheless, Meiff, who enjoyed the confidence of Fels, and believing he was protecting Briselli's interests, took it upon himself to write Fels a letter (November 13) stating why the violin part had to undergo a "surgical operation" by a "specialist" such as himself. He said "The technical embellishments are very far from the requirements of a modern violinist..." and if Briselli performed the work as written, it would severely hurt his reputation. Meiff said he was rewriting the violin part to make it more acceptable and that it was necessary that he, Briselli and Barber get together for a "special meeting" to discuss his changes.[4]
Ivo Briselli
Briselli was disappointed when he received the third movement from Barber in late November. He had expected a finale comparable in substance and quality to the first two movements, and felt it was too lightweight by comparison. He told Barber that it did not have a sense of belonging; it seemed musically unrelated to the first two movements, and he thought it was insufficient in compositional form or development to stand as the finale of a major work. It was important to Briselli that the commission be as substantial as the other major concertos in his repertoire that he was offering for prospective orchestra engagements.
Briselli asked Barber if he would rewrite the finale; he could premier it at a later date to give Barber more time if needed. He suggested possible ways in which the movement could be deepened or expanded; perhaps even changing its form altogether such as a sonata-rondo; that perhaps he might expand the third movement while possibly retaining the moto perpetuo as the middle section and giving it more clearly defined structural parameters. Briselli felt that only then would it be a complete, first-class concerto.
Despite Briselli's prodding, Barber was dismissive of his suggestions and declined to alter it. This was a big disappointment for Briselli who believed that with a substantial third movement, the work could stand as a great American violin concerto. Briselli decided to hold his ground regarding the finale and chose to forego the concerto's premier and relinquish his claim on it. On December 14, Barber wrote Fels that, as he probably already knew, Briselli had decided the piece was "not exactly what he wanted, and has given it back to me." Barber expressed concern about the disposition of the $500 advance that he had already spent and wanted to be sure that Fels understood his side of the story. Barber explains why he was late in delivering the commission: the war outbreak and the subsequent illness of his father. He says he landed back in the US on September 1 and immediately "went to the mountains to work." Barber said he was surprised to learn upon his return from Europe that "the first performance was already announced for January" without his being notified by Briselli or Eugene Ormandy. Also, Barber knew Briselli and Fels wanted the music by October 1 to give Briselli time to learn it—presumably for the upcoming January performances.[5]
At this juncture, the Barber and Briselli accounts differ somewhat; both are set forth here: Barber continues that he gave Briselli "the completed first two movements (about 15 minutes of music)" in "the middle of October" and "he seemed disappointed that they were not of virtuoso character--a bit too easy."[6] Briselli's account was that he liked them very much but suggested to Barber when writing the third movement, he might explore more of the virtuosic side of the violin's capabilities. Barber then says he asked Briselli "what type of brilliant technique best suited him; he told me he had no preference." Barber continues: "At that time, he did not apparently dislike the idea of a 'perpetual motion' for the last movement." Barber says that he "worked very hard" on the last movement, finishing it "in far from ideal circumstances" (his father's illness), and sent the violin part to Briselli about two months before the intended premier. Barber says that "It is difficult, but only lasts four minutes."[7] Barber never mentions Meiff's proposal that the three of them meet in regards to alterations of the violin part of the first two movements, or of Meiff's desire to "advise" Barber on the third movement while it was being written.
Barber then discloses to Fels that when he sent the finale to Briselli, "At the same time, I had a violinist from Curtis play it for me to see that it was practical and playable." Barber then wrote "My friends heard and liked it, so did I. But Iso did not." The three reasons he gave for Briselli's rejection were (1) "he could not safely learn it for January;" (2) "it was not violinistic;" and (3) "it did not suit musically the other two movements, it seemed to him rather inconsequential. He wished another movement written." Barber continues "But I could not destroy a movement in which I have complete confidence, out of artistic sincerity to myself. So we decided to abandon the project, with no hard feelings on either side." He said he was "sorry not to have given Iso what he had hoped for."[8] [Contemporaries confirmed that the two men did remain friends until Barber's death despite their disagreement on the concerto.]
Barber goes on to say that "While it was Iso's complete right not to accept a work he finds unsuitable," he feels he does deserve to be paid something considering that he had worked four months entirely on the concerto and "has done his best in submitting a work for which he makes absolutely no apology." He appeals to Fels' "understanding and generosity" that he be allowed to keep the $500 advance, which he believes is standard practice "when a commissioned work is not accepted by the commissioner."[9] Fels does say in his December 15 letter to Barber that the matter would most likely be settled "satisfactorily" for both parties. Meiff replies on December 26 with a lengthy two-page letter[10] outlining to Fels, "point by point," the many reasons why the piece is deficient—thus arming Fels with the information he needed to be able to speak intelligently to Barber. He explains: it "hasn't got enough backbone-- not strong, not majestic--does not contain enough dramatic moments, all of which make for a successful performance." He says it is not a piece for a great hall with a huge orchestra "...like placing a small basket of dainty flowers among tall cactus in a vast prairie;" he says it lacks an effective beginning and a typical violin technique. And specifically addressing the finale: "It was a dangerous thought from the very beginning, to make a perpetual motion movement ...without a breath of rest and without melodic parts...a risky tiresome ending...it was a wrong idea, and Mr. Barber should admit this." Meiff therefore felt it his duty "to advise Iso not to do it." On the positive side, he acknowledges that "...it has many beautiful parts" and that he has "personal admiration for the composer for himself personally and musically."
But there is never any evidence or assertion by Briselli or contention by Barber that Briselli found the third movement too difficult to play. As to the upcoming performance, in place of the Barber, Briselli substituted the Dvorak violin concerto. Barber's letter of December 14 to Fels identifies his intention with regard to the third movement: Barber set up a test of playability to assure himself what he was giving to Briselli was "practical and playable." Herbert Baumel was known to be an excellent sight reader, and he was asked to study the finale for a couple of hours, then to join him in pianist Josef Hofmann's studio. After reviewing the music, Baumel went to the studio to discover an audience of Barber (now teaching at Curtis), Gian Carlo Menotti, Mary Louise Curtis Bok (founder of the Curtis Institute), and a friend of Mrs. Bok. Baumel performed the concerto in the 1939–1940 season as soloist with the symphony orchestra of the Curtis Institute, conducted by Fritz Reiner. That performance brought the piece to the attention of Eugene Ormandy, who soon scheduled its official premiere in a pair of performances by Albert Spalding with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Academy of Music in February 1941. [The actual premiere was on February 7.] Those performances were followed on February 11, 1941, by a repeat performance in Carnegie Hall, and from that point, the piece rapidly entered the standard violin and orchestral repertoire. In fact, the Barber Violin Concerto has become one of the most frequently performed of all 20th-century concertos.
[1] http://www.curtis.edu/alumni/about-alumni/full-alumni-listing/view-by-last-name.html
[2] Historical Society of Pennsylvania letters and an in-depth portrayal of the violinist, Iso Briselli linked to this violin concerto, written and edited by conductor, Marc Mostovoy http://www.isobriselli.com.
[3] May 4, 1939 Letter from Fels to Barber
[4] November 13, 1939 Letter from Meiff to Fels
[5] May 4, 1939 Letter from Barber and reply by Fels
[6] December 14, 1939 Letter from Barber to Fels
[7] December 14, 1939 Letter from Barber to Fels
[8] December 14, 1939 Letter from Barber to Fels
[9] December 14, 1939 Letter from Barber to Fels
[10] December 26, 1939 Letter from Meiff to Fels
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I don't know why the myth of this concerto's last movement has persisted as long as it has, but I mention it only because it is so well known and probably remembered by many audience members and blog-readers. Still, the actual story is only one issue composers have to face when fulfilling a commission: what do you do if you write something for a performer who ends up not liking it or being unable or unwilling to play it?
So, in a way, here are three pieces of music who have unsavory stories connected to them: in the case of Adès' opera, it's the subject matter rather than the music's circumstances, but certainly with Barber's concerto and most of all with Shostakovich's symphony, circumstances regarding their creation that are far removed from the music we sit and enjoy and take too easily for granted. How often do we think about, even when listening to familiar pieces like these, what a composer put into the effort to bring something like this into the world?
This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony, conducted by Stuart Malina, presents Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, the Eroica, on its opening program of the new season. The concerts at the Forum are Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm with Truman Bullard's pre-concert talk an hour before each performance. You can read the previous posts in this series - about the program in general (complete video performances included); about Beethoven and Bonaparte the Hero; and about hearing the Eroica for the first time. And they can be read before or after (but not during) the performance.
While Bonaparte – that is, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte (born Buonaparte), not the Emperor Napoleon – was the impetus behind the Symphony in E-flat Major Beethoven began working on in 1802, I'm wondering if Haydn wasn't closer to the mark when he allegedly said, “He's placed himself at the center of his work. He gives us a glimpse into his soul. ...But it is quite, quite new – the artist as hero – quite new... Everything is different from today.” (– quoted as it was used in the BBC/Pro Arte film Eroica which was imbedded in the previous post.)
Haydn (from BBC's "Eroica")
The idea of the “artist as hero” is entirely antithetical to the “artist as craftsman” of the Classical Era of which Haydn is generally considered the ultimate example. Yet he had already begun pushing these boundaries, now that he had retired after nearly thirty years as a court composer for Prince Nicholas Esterházy and had few requirements to fulfill for his successor. He composed two immense oratorios – completing The Creation in 1798 and The Seasons in 1801 – and six monumental masses between 1796 and 1802, his last major works. And there is certainly something of the sublime far beyond the classical craftsman in these works.
Haydn teaching Beethoven
Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, a year after the death of Mozart – whose own music, especially in things like his D Minor Piano Concerto and the opera Don Giovanni challenged 18th Century Classical proprieties with an abundance of Romantic emotions – and studied with Haydn until he left once more for London in 1794. Though their relationship was never friendly – in fact, Haydn treated the young composer with some disdain if not jealousy and didn't seem to take these lessons seriously (Beethoven refused to list Haydn as his teacher on his first publications because he felt Haydn had taught him too little; another composer, examining Beethoven's counterpoint notebook, found several errors that Haydn had not bothered to correct) – Haydn was, after all, the most celebrated living composer in Europe at the time. One could point out many similarities in their works – the opening of “Winter” in Haydn's Seasons and the introduction to Beethoven's 4th Symphony, both in the same key, for instance – but then the “common language” of 18th Century classicism was so “common,” it is difficult to say how much of this is influence or coincidence much less imitation.
But there was something so startlingly new in the Eroica for 1803, it's impossible not to ask “where did that come from!?”
Yet if we examine the symphony in terms of its overall structure, it turns out not to be that different from the models that inspired Beethoven's first two symphonies between 1800 and 1802: instead of a slow introduction, typical with Haydn, Beethoven uses two peremptory chords to get out attention (no chance to settle comfortably into “listening mode,” here), but after that, the overall concepts are not unfamiliar – just incredibly expanded, especially in the middle section's development which is the hallmark of Sonata Form (in the 18th Century, this might be so brief as to be no more than a digression, but in Beethoven, it becomes the dramatic focus of the struggle between leaving the tonic key and its eventual return.
This first movement – full of excruciating dissonances and nearly as long as any of Haydn's earlier symphonies entirely – is followed, as expected, by a slow movement, but again one of immensely expanded proportions and intense drama – a funeral march, no less.
Haydn's third movements are often earthy and more dance-like than the standard courtly minuet of his earlier works, but Beethoven's takes this peasant-like energy to a new and often frenetic level, a return to life after the slow movement tragedy.
Haydn's finales were often light-hearted, full of tricks or jokes, but also capable of hiding intellectual details, but none of them were ever as long or as commanding as the Eroica's finale: here, a set of variations on what seems to be a simplistic, almost inane idea later turns out to be the bass of a theme introduced almost as an afterthought, but simple or not, it is full of “learnèd counterpoint” and out-and-out fugues, the culmination of the intellectual.
And it was the tradition in the 18th Century approach to variations that the next to the last one would be in a slow tempo (a way to inform the audience the end is near) which is exactly what Beethoven does here except, again, it is greatly expanded, almost into a slow movement of its own. It becomes an emotional climax if not of the whole piece, then at least the second half of the symphony (nothing could be more emotional that that funeral march's final disintegration). And how to end it? With an uproarious “happy ending,” a triumphal dance that, to a proper 18th Century classicist, would be vulgar in the extreme, pounding away at the final resolution to the home tonic – repetitive but also drunk with joy!
The skeleton of the classical symphony is still there but the surface of it – its scope and dimensions and what activates it as a work of art – are almost unrecognizable, certainly on first hearing. Yet it is not so revolutionary as we tend to think, embedded in the past as it is.
So it is interesting to read someone writing about the “sublime” in music:
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“In music, only that can be sublime which exceeds the conceptual powers of the imagination: which appears too large and significant, too foreign and strange, for the imagination to grasp it easily...”
“The feeling of sublimity in music is aroused when the imagination is elevated to the plane of the limitless, the immeasurable, the unconquerable. This happens when such emotions are aroused as... prevent the integration of one's impressions into a coherent whole.”
– Christian Friedrich Michaelis, “Some Remarks on the Sublime in Music” (Leipzig, 1805) quoted in James Webster's essay, The Creation, Haydn's Late Vocal Music and the Musical Sublime in the Bard Music Festival Series, Haydn and His World (Princeton, 1997)
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It is interesting to read this because it very much describes the music we associate with the huge emotional – indeed, “sensual” – leap into 19th Century romanticism which, as any music student has been told, essentially began with Beethoven's Eroica in 1803. Outside of a close circle of friends of Prince Joseph Maximilian Lobkowitz, no one else heard this symphony until April, 1805, when it was first performed at Vienna's Theater an der Wien.
And yet Michaelis published his “Remarks” in Leipzig in 1805: had he been in Vienna and heard Beethoven's startling new music? It's almost as if he were describing the Eroica's impact on its listeners:
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“Firstly, by uniformity so great that it almost excludes variety: by the constant repetition of the same note or chord... by long, majestic, weighty, or solemn notes, and hence by very slow movement; by long pauses holding up the progress of the melodic line, or which impede the shaping of a melody, thus underlining the lack of variety. Secondly, by too much diversity, as when innumerable impressions succeed one another too rapidly and the mind is too abruptly hurled into the thundering torrent of sounds, or when (as in many polyphonic compositions involving many voices) the themes are developed together in so complex a manner that the imagination cannot easily and calmly integrate the diverse ideas into a coherent whole without strain. Thus in music, the sublime can only be that which seems too vast and significant, too strange and wonderful, to be easily assimilated by it.”
– Michaelis, ibid
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The first idea certainly seems to pertain to Beethoven's epic Funeral March – even to that mysterious, unexpected D# interrupting the 1st Movement's opening cello melody, though not a “long pause,” which holds up the progress of the melodic line and expands it in such a way, there is this harmonic hiccup before the phrase cadences where it's expected to.
And the second idea – too much diversity – is another element of Beethoven's development sections, one thing after another thrown at you – melodic fragments, harmonic implications, striking dissonances and rhythmic irregularities – before you're back on any kind of solid (expected) ground.
Yet Michaelis is no doubt responding to elements of Haydn's oratorios – especially The Creation which already begins pushing beyond mere craftsmanship: the opening depiction of chaos was, to an 18th Century listener, sheer chaos, harmonically; the appearance of Light a stroke of brilliance that, though obvious to us (especially tame compared to today's special effects we witness daily in television, movies and video games) was thrilling to first-time listeners.
But it's all about expectations and how they're met: how did Beethoven get from being the Student beginning his studies with Haydn at 21 to the Master who wrote the Eroica at 32?
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Cherubini & Muse (by Ingres)
It is tempting to write about the influences on Beethoven' style we don't usually think about, especially composers of his time whom we no longer know. There was a whole school of French artists active in post-Revolutionary Paris who painted, sculpted and composed on an epic scale, composers like Cherubini, an Italian transplant who became the leading French composer and dominated the musical style of his generation. Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio, premiered in 1805, is based on a French "rescue" drama and heavily inspired by Cherubini.
But the musical style of Gossec, Gretry and Mehul was known to Beethoven whether or not he was aware of the paintings of David and Ingres. But this would take another sizable post of more interest to scholars than listeners, so let's leave that for now. It is, however, an area little written and less talked about in the Beethoven literature.
After producing six string quartets by 1800, his first symphony and a series of piano sonatas – including the very Romantic “Pathetique” in 1798 and the so-called “Moonlight” in 1801 (which could easily have been called the “Tempest” after its stormy finale) and the very next sonata, the placid “Pastoral” – Beethoven said to a friend, “I am only a little satisfied with my previous works. From today on I will take a new path.”
The next works he composed were the 2nd Symphony, the three violin sonatas of Op. 30 (dedicated to Tsar Alexander I), the “Eroica” Variations for solo piano which made use of a successful dance tune from his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus of the previous year (a view of Creation from the perspective of classical Greek mythology, by the way), and the three piano sonatas that includes the very unusual one actually known as the “Tempest” (from a chance remark he made about Shakespeare's play when asked what its opening movement meant without ever really explaining how it applies). And then he started working out some new ideas for another symphony.
But something else happened in Beethoven's life that year.
A far from heroic-looking Beethoven walking in the woods
He had begun experiencing symptoms that indicated something was wrong with his hearing and the idea of a concert pianist, indeed a composer, going deaf came at a time just as Beethoven's reputation was growing, that his new pieces were bringing in a good income. He was nearly 30 – what did it mean if he would soon go deaf and all this would come to a sudden halt?
In October, 1802, in the midst of the last movement of the 2nd Symphony, Beethoven wrote a heart-rending letter to his two brothers, intended to be opened after his death, which is known as “The Heiligenstadt Testament.” In places, it reads like a suicide note.
He had been troubled by the first symptoms around 1796, enough to worry about it. In a letter to a friend back home in 1801, he wrote “I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.”
When he wrote his 5th Symphony – which he started sketching probably while he was working on the Eroica and had completed the opening movements before he'd begun the 4th Symphony – he used that famous motive he described to his student Ferdinand Ries as “fate knocking at the door.” This gives rise to the idea the symphony is clearly about Man overcoming Fate and celebrating a great victory in the finale. It doesn't matter if that Man is actually the man Beethoven because the music itself transcends whatever inspired it, but certainly his own experiences dealing with what Fate has dealt him – in this case, his deafness – might have given him the dramatic inspiration whether he's writing an autobiographical piece or not.
Another fanciful image of Beethoven
And just as the Hero of the Eroica Symphony probably isn't a musical portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte – after all, how do you make sense of a hero who has a funeral in the second movement when the hero it is supposed to be dedicated to is very much alive? – is it any more possible the struggle in this music is the first stage of Beethoven coming to terms with his own deafness, becoming his own hero in grabbing Fate, two quick knocks at the door to start the symphony on its way?
Perhaps not. It's always dangerous to read anything into what Beethoven may have been thinking because he never told anyone what was specifically on his mind – even the reference to the “Tempest” is so vague, it hardly begins to answer the question.
But whether it is a musical portrait of Beethoven – or more likely his state of mind – or of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, is immaterial. You may hear great armies marching across battlefields in the first movement or hear in it a portrait not of Bonaparte but of Alexander the Great (as one writer insisted) but that may have nothing to do with what Beethoven was thinking about when he composed it.
What it comes down to is more like what Arturo Toscanini said: it is Allegro con brio, the tempo Beethoven gave to the first movement. It is about music and how it's put together: what you make of it is your own side of the equation.
The Harrisburg Symphony opens its new season in the newly renovated Forum in Harrisburg's capitol complex with two works by Beethoven - his 4th Piano Concerto (with Alon Goldstein as the soloist) and his 3rd Symphony, known simply as "The Eroica." You can read more about the concert here and other posts about the symphony here. (Check out some photos from the Forum's renovation process, here.) Concert times are Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm with Truman Bullard's pre-concert talk an hour before each program.
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Given the news today – pick your horror story: Ebola, ISIS, gun violence, political campaigns, what-have-you – it's sometimes difficult to imagine yourself living in some other era that could be any worse (your good-old-days or someone else's).
We often view Art as a means of escaping from our daily travails, a chance to forget about reality and lose ourselves in the glories of some past century.
But we often forget about the composer's reality at the time this music was being written and usually dismiss it as unnecessary to our enjoyment of it.
Granted, one can enjoy Beethoven's Eroica without knowing what was going on in his life or beyond hearing how it had once been dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte.
But if, after you've heard this composition – regarded as the first major work to unleash what became known as 19th Century Romantic Music – you wondered “where did that come from?”, then read on.
To open last season, Stuart Malina programmed Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring which is credited as being where 20th Century Music began. This season, he begins with Beethoven's Eroica which is usually given the credit for being the starting point for the 19th Century, dividing what's become standard classical music fare from the 18th Century's Baroque and Classical styles.
Heroic, indeed, whether it was inspired by Napoleon or not. It was longer than any symphony written before it and it was far more dramatic than anything Haydn had ever written. The demands on the listeners – not to mention the players – were unprecedented. What must it have been like to hear this for the first time in 1804, knowing only what listeners in Vienna knew? How can we, today, forget everything we've heard that's been written since then – written, mostly, in Beethoven's shadow?
Prince Lobkowitz
I'd recently discovered this 2003 BBC film – it lasts less than 90 minutes – which attempts to do just that: it takes place on the day Beethoven rehearsed his new symphony with an orchestra hired by his friend and patron, Prince Lobkowitz. Considering how Hollywood usually treats the arts – classical music, in particular – this is not a bad representation of the possibilities (at least no St. Bernards were harmed in the filming of this program). Many comments (whether they occurred that day or not) are factual or at least taken from historical documents. But it gives you a reasonable idea as far as “historical fiction” is concerned what could have happened.
What discrepancies exist are minor – the room it was filmed in may not be the music room of Lobkowitz's Vienna palace (see below) and the military gentleman, Count Dietrichstein, could not be the same Count Dietrichstein who exists in Beethoven's biography, a man five years the composer's junior who, aside from being artistically astute and a close friend, was also a composer himself.
Yes, Beethoven was in love with the young woman, Josephine von Deym, née Brunsvick (who arrives late with her older sister, Therese – both were piano students of Beethoven's and both have been considered candidates for the Immortal Belovéd who figures in Beethoven's life in 1812 - you can read more about the women in Beethoven's life in my blog post, here). Yes, she was recently widowed with four children (though one of them was only a few months old at the time, despite the scene where all four of them romp through the music room). Hopeful of marrying her, Beethoven was well aware of the laws which forbade her, an aristocrat, from marrying a “commoner” like Beethoven, despite his being a genius and being – well, Beethoven!
And yes, since the composer often styled himself in French, signing his name as Louis van Beethoven, his close friends are calling him Louis – not Louie...
Ferdinand Ries
Keep in mind Beethoven was 33 years old at this time – we tend to forget that he was only 56 when he died. His student, Ferdinand Ries (the son of Beethoven's first violin teacher back in Bonn), he who makes the hapless comment about the horn player coming in early, would have been 19, then. A month later, Ries made his debut as a concert pianist playing Beethoven's C Minor Piano Concerto (No. 3) with his own cadenza. Though he left Vienna in 1805, it is his account, written 34 years later, that supplies most of the information we have about this particular day along with several other anecdotes which give us such a wonderful view of the human who was The Master.
The biggest doubt about the film, of course, is the level of the performance. Ries remarks that the rehearsal was “terrible” and indeed here it begins that way. It is hard to imagine that, after a particularly bumpy start, this sight-reading session of such new and strange music should suddenly become a performance any ensemble today would be proud of – and kudos to the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique for supplying the musicians of the orchestra (except for one of the bass players and perhaps the second horn player) who are, in fact, led here by their actual concertmaster if, in the soundtrack, by John Eliot Gardiner. Still, it would be excruciating theater to subject modern audiences to what the actual rehearsal may have sounded like.
One of the things I like about this presentation is watching the faces of those people hearing this music for the first time – and not just hearing it but hearing music like it for the first time. There are those who are confused by it or perplexed by certain passages – especially the more dissonant ones – and those who are excited by it. For instance, Princess Caroline, Lobkowitz's wife, has an eagerness about her listening: clearly the music thrills her and she is up on the very latest of what is “new.”
There are those who clearly have no clue what is going on here, musically or otherwise, and can only compare it to what they know (“if this were by Haydn, it would be over by now,” someone – a footman? – says near the end of the first movement). There are those who have no clue what is going on, either, but are somehow aware whatever it is is something significant.
Count Dietrichstein, depicted here as an old fuss-budget clearly out of sorts over Beethoven's dedication to Bonaparte, is deeply affected by the slow movement, its funeral march: perhaps he is remembering friends he has lost on the battlefield? And the young woman – who is Josephine von Deym, the woman Beethoven is disappointed had not, at the beginning, arrived yet – is no doubt thinking about her late husband who'd died that January.
Prince Lobkowitz, historically described as “absent-minded,” is at times unsure what he is hearing, closing his eyes to better concentrate, perhaps, or is he nodding off, a bit? Suffering from gout? Perhaps.
Typical would be the discussion heard after the first movement – what each listener heard in the music, whether inspired by knowing it was a “Bonaparte Symphony” or simply in hearing great armies marching across history to do battle. Listeners have always heard music their own way, trying to create some story, perhaps, to hang on to, to explain what they're listening to when all the composer may have been thinking about was how to lead up to these particularly dissonant chords at the climax of the development section.
Haydn arrives at Beethoven's rehearsal
I don't know, frankly, if Haydn did show up at his student's rehearsal – and if he did, why not late, after all? – but I love the shot where Beethoven is standing in front of the orchestra (not as a conductor: conductors with batons didn't exist at the time!) and we see the old man Haydn entering behind him, like a ghost peering over his shoulder. Brilliant. Even more brilliant is the expression on Haydn's face as the camera moves in to focus on him, as Beethoven commits something his teacher (and many in those first audiences) would have viewed as a mistake – “why would he do that?”
What he says at the end is perhaps the most telling line in the entire film. Attributed to Haydn, I'm not sure (since I can't verify it anywhere other than having heard it so often) if it is factual or one of those mythological statements created by the well-meaning Anton Schindler years later, but it does sum up an attitude about Beethoven that transcends the usual misunderstanding between the Old Guard and the New.
“He's placed himself at the center of his work,” Haydn tells his hosts after the rehearsal has concluded. “He gives us a glimpse into his soul – I expect that's why it's so... noisy... but it is quite, quite new – the artist as hero – quite new... Everything is different from today.”
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To help imagine the mortal who could create such music, here is a video-montage of still photographs of a house in Döbling, now a section of Vienna. It is here that Beethoven lived when he composed most of his Third Symphony during the summer of 1803.
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(The soundtrack is part of the slow movement of the C Minor Violin Sonata, Op. 30/2 – here with Pinchas Zukerman and Daniel Barenboim – which was composed in the summer of 1802 when he was in Heiligenstadt, though I've never seen it referred to as the “Eroica Sonata” before. It's from the set I'd mentioned in a previous post as having been dedicated to the Russian tsar, Alexander I.)
The apartment Beethoven occupied that summer is accessible through a door off the courtyard just off the street. Presumably, he had a view of the fields and woods beyond though today, one can see only the house across the street.
The house itself – much less the grounds – is different from what it would have been during Beethoven's stay here, a house built in the 1790s on the main street of a quiet country suburb. The second floor was added in 1840 and the ornate lamp post is certainly later still. The house is currently a museum – apparently it was not open the day the poster of this video visited – and contains little actual material about Beethoven beyond some period furniture and informative displays, but you can find a little more about it and see a couple images from the inside at the official Vienna Museum website, here.
The Palace of Prince Lobkowitz (left), Vienna
The Palace of Prince Josef Maximilian Lobkowitz still stands in Vienna though the main family castle is in Prague. The Prince who was Beethoven's friend and patron (and, for a time, landlord) was the 7th prince of the family and lost much of the family fortune not only in supporting the arts in Vienna, maintaining his own orchestra, but in the political instability and economic downturns that affected Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.
The music room where this first “read-through” of the symphony took place is now called the “Eroicasaal” (or Eroica Concert Hall). In the photograph here, it is a scene of a lecture. It figures also in a scene from the PBS “Keeping Score” episode on the Eroica with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas walking through the space.
Though you would think the Viennese palace would be the spot for this, the family's collection of Beethoven memorabilia as well as numerous instruments and other manuscripts is housed at the castle in Prague. Here is a Viking Tours promotional video about the Lobkowicz's Palace. The Beethoven Collection begins c.3:20 into the clip:
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Beethoven also dedicated his 5th Symphony to both Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador who commissioned the three string quartets bearing his name (he also had household musicians which frequently played and premiered Beethoven's newest works). Among other works dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz are the Op. 18 String Quartets (first heard in 1800) as well as the “Harp” Quartet, Op. 74 (published in 1810), the Triple Concerto (written, however, for the Archduke Rudolph, the Austrian Emperor's youngest brother, who as both a piano and a composition student of Beethoven's and who was a frequent performer at the Lobkowitz's), and the song cycle, An die ferne Geliebter (“To the Distant Belovéd”) in 1816.
Lobkowitz, one of three aristocrats to guarantee Beethoven a pension to keep him in Vienna, was nearly ruined in the Depression of 1811 and was forced to renege on his contribution, much to Beethoven's displeasure. He wrote a small cantata for the Prince's birthday in 1816 to be sung to him by members of his family – he and the Princess had, by the way, twelve children – but the performance did not take place. The prince was “deathly ill” at the time and died a week later.
After Prince Joseph Maximilian's death, the family usually rented out the palace before selling the building in the mid-19th Century. It was for a while (with a bit of irony) the home of the French Embassy from 1869-1909: Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew ruled France as the first popularly elected President in 1848 who then staged a coup and overthrew his own government, naming himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1851 and ruled until 1870. From 1945-1980, it housed the French Institute of Vienna before becoming a government building which, since 1991, has been part of Vienna's Museum of Art and History, the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
As for Beethoven's pupil, Ferdinand Ries went on to become a well-known composer and pianist, if forgotten today beyond his association as Beethoven's Student. As Beethoven said of him, "He imitates me too much." As Grove's Dictionary put it, he caught the style and phrases but not the immortality of his master. For instance, the second symphony he composed - written in 1813, it was later published as No. 5 in D Minor - uses the famous Fate-Knocks-at-the-Door rhythm from Beethoven's 5th.
Opening of Ferdinand Ries' Symphony #5 (arr. as a Septet) 1813
(One should also point out, so did Gustav Mahler in his 5th Symphony...)
Ries spent a busy decade in London where he was also instrumental in helping secure a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society for what became Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Then he returned to Germany and became a respected composer and conductor in Frankfurt where he died in 1838 at the age of 53. He composed eight symphonies, eight piano concertos, three operas and two oratorios plus a large amount of chamber music and piano music, all of it forgotten today.
This weekend, Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony in an All-Beethoven program to open the new season featuring the 4th Piano Concerto with Alon Goldstein and the Symphony No. 3, the Eroica. The performances - in the newly refurbished Forum with new and wider seats, not to mention new rest rooms - are Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. Truman Bullard offers the pre-concert talk an hour before each concert.
Within the comparatively small world of Classical Music, given the greater aspects of the Music Business in general, there's a whole “Beethoven Industry” out there that has turned the opening notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony from the writer “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s vehicle of awe and terror [...] into a meaningless blur of disco beats, hip-hop samples, jingles, and ringtones.”
I'm quoting from Alex Ross' new column in the New Yorker magazine about the influence of Beethoven where he describes the final chapter of Matthew Guerrieri's book on the impact of Beethoven's most popular piece, a book called “The First Four Notes,” and I recommend both.
There are probably more books written about or inspired by Beethoven and his music than any other classical composer – no doubt the least of them being my own novel, The Lost Chord, a "classical music appreciation comedy-thriller" which you can read on the installment plan at my other blog –and in addition to Guerrieri's book, there's a new biography by Jan Swafford – appropriately entitled Beethoven: Anguish & Triumph – I can also highly recommend, as yet sight unseen, just on the basis of two earlier biographies, one of Johannes Brahms, the other of Charles Ives, that manage to make their subjects much more human than the typical, academic biographies that are generally available and generally of interest only to other typical academics.
I've just ordered mine and though it won't arrive before this weekend's concert – nor could I read much of its 1,100 pages in time, either – it is something I expect to enjoy in the coming months of what will no doubt be a dreary time of year for me.
And that's primarily because Beethoven is one of those composers who is a composer for all times and all seasons, not just the occasion of a concert.
Oh, I know there are more Beethoven Festivals and All-Beethoven concerts in the Classical Music World, but there are few composers who could reach more people (in whatever way one cares to “reach” people, these days) and few works that can be embraced by more listeners beyond those “classical music aficionados” that Beethoven's 5th and 9th Symphonies – or, for that matter, the 3rd, the one known as “The Eroica.”
The Heroic Symphony – it's one of those defining works that give us a glimpse of Beethoven the Creator, that epic genius, suffering and misunderstood, striding across the landscape of mortal mankind, the composer who went from being Haydn's student to become first a marble bust and then the God of Classical Music.
That mysterious journey from mere mortal to mythologized hero begins with the opening chords of his Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Op. 55 which, admittedly, doesn't sound as grand as calling it “The Eroica,” does it?
It is difficult to separate the man from the deity he became.
How does one “come to terms with” this music when music, generally speaking, was rarely something one needed to “come to terms with” before him?
As well-crafted as a Haydn Symphony may have been, it was always perfectly entertaining. The difference between what Haydn and Mozart composed, at least in the best of their works, and all those works by their contemporaries whom we no longer know or bother to remember is similar to what might be considered “art” and what we regard as “kitsch,” the idea of seeing Leonardo's Mona Lisa at the Louvre and the ubiquitously reproduced image that has come to mean “art” hanging on someone's living room wall.
We have become addicted to Beethoven. Generations have been trained to “fear” Beethoven. As Ross mentions in his article, he walked into Boston's Symphony Hall as a young would-be composer and saw the “name BEETHOVEN emblazoned on the proscenium arch [–] 'Don't bother,' it seemed to say.”
It's like those signs at amusement parks that were the bane of many a child's existence: “You must be this tall to ride.”
How different Brahms' life would've been – or at least his music – if Robert Schumann hadn't crowned him “Beethoven's Heir” when he was 20 years old. "You have no idea how the likes of me feels with the tramp of a giant like him behind you!" That's why it took him over 20 years to complete a first symphony – no pressure, right?
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About 3½ minutes into the PBS program Keeping Score's episode about Beethoven's Eroica, Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony's conductor, said how much of his life had been spent coming to terms with this piece while showing you an incredibly marked up score that leaves little uncircled, unhighlted, unquestioned.
Part of the problem is it's so often performed “ponderously, seriously, perhaps because it's called the 'Heroic'” and certainly because... well, after all, it's by Beethoven! But Tilson Thomas didn't think that way, studying the score: he found it at times “light, breezy, confident, frustrating, dangerous – even comic” and so we go from trying to depict Napoleon in the first movement to understanding a composer dealing with life and all the things that can affect one's life.
Of course, it's difficult to remove images of Napoleon – speaking of marble busts – from our minds, given the famous story of Beethoven dedicating his new symphony to Napoleon (originally, it was the “Bonaparte Symphony”) then tearing up the title page when he heard his hero had crowned himself Emperor, erasing the word “Bonaparte” so vigorously, there's a hole in the paper. Later, it became a work dedicated to the “memory of a hero.”
But was the music “about” Bonaparte, then “First Consul” of France following the revolution, or inspired by what he stood for, elements of freedom after years of tyranny under centuries of French kings? The fact he became Emperor a few weeks before Beethoven's new symphony was first played through is a historical detail: I'm talking about the writing process, when the symphony was being composed.
It's true that Beethoven viewed Bonaparte (to distinguish him from the Emperor Napoleon) as a hero bringing the ideals of the French Revolution to The People. The fact that Beethoven lived in Vienna, an imperial city, and depended on its aristocrats for their patronage, it seems counterintuitive that Beethoven should support what people considered the “anti-aristocratic” policies of the French. But politics – then as now – were more complex than that. Beethoven was most interested in what was good for Beethoven and the fact that Vienna was proving to be a dead end, financially, had him thinking about looking for a new place to live – perhaps Paris?
In 1798, he had briefly been befriended by the French Ambassador, Bernadotte – a general who would later become King of Sweden, by the way – and there's little doubt that at some point in their conversations, the ambassador might not have suggested the composer write a symphony “about Bonaparte.” That's at least what Beethoven's later secretary Schindler recalled, though much of what Schindler seemed to recall is always suspect.
But if Beethoven would go to Paris, how would he get Bonaparte's attention? How did an artist get anybody's “attention” except by dedicating a work to them? A copy of the score would be sent to the dedicatee with an appropriate letter and in return the artist hoped for some gift, some form of remuneration. The trick was being allowed to dedicate a piece to that person – seeing that name on the title page was like an endorsement and would influence people who would buy and/or perform his new work.
It was expedient, given the musical politics of the day, that a young composer like the recently arrived Beethoven dedicate his first piano sonatas to the Great Man with whom he studied, Franz Josef Haydn. The first violin sonatas were dedicated to another important composer in Vienna, in fact the most powerful composer in a very politically aware musical society – Antonio Salieri.
It also had very little to do with gratitude. Even when he dedicated a new symphony to his patrons Prince Lobkowitz or Prince Lichnowsky, the composer expected something in return usually in the form of a gift of money.
In 1803, Beethoven dedicated his Op. 30 Violin Sonatas to the Russian tsar, Alexander I, whom he'd just been introduced to by the Russian ambassador, Count Razumovsky (who would soon be asking for three new string quartets for his house musicians). Nobody calls these the “Alexander Sonatas.” Beethoven simply anticipated a gift in return – if not cash, perhaps a ring or a jeweled snuff box which the composer could then sell or pawn. It seems crass, but how, then, did a composer like Beethoven – essentially a free-lancer – expect to pay his bills?
I've never understood why people think the Eroica is “about” Napoleon. Those Op. 30 Violin Sonatas are certainly not “about” Tsar Alexander I nor are those three string quartets “about” their namesake, Count Razumovsky, though his being Russian instigated the use of some Russian melodies in the first two.
And wasn't that what Beethoven was doing with his third symphony – initially dedicating it to Bonaparte, the First Consul of France, hoping that, with a positive enough response, he might find it worth his while to move to Paris and perhaps receive patronage from France's ruler.
1st Consul Bonaparte, 1801
Certainly, it's of a grand scale, suitable for a musical depiction of the great revolutionary leader of the French. Remember the epic style of painting that was a hallmark of French style following the Revolution, especially the grandeur of Jacques-Louis David whose portrait of Bonaparte, then First Consul, crossing the Alps in 1801 (see right), edifies the hero on the level with Hannibal – not to forget the official portrait of Napoleon's coronation completed about two years after the fact, harking back to the grandeur that was Rome.
A “Revolutionary Piano Sonata” as had been suggested by the publisher Hoffmeister in 1798 wasn't going to cut it, nor, for that matter, would an ordinary Haydnesque symphony. No, it would have to be something on a scale unheard of in Vienna at the time, something immense – something, like the painting equating him with Hannibal (who, it was overlooked, lost the war when he invaded Italy with his elephants, by the way), something epic - something French: the musical equivalent of a painting by David!
People could hear the stature of the general in this dynamic and highly dramatic music, in the sheer scope of the piece, unlike any symphony written before – as people wrote after first hearing the piece, imagining great armies marching across battlefields and so on.
But was that what Beethoven was envisioning when he wrote this music? A heroic portrait in music of the great general, Napoleon Bonaparte?
According to the famous title page – which was not “ripped in two” upon hearing the news of Napoleon's crowning himself Emperor – the text reads
Sinfonia Grande
Intitolata Bonaparte (erased so roughly as to leave a hole in the paper)
[1]804 im August
de[l] Sigr.
Louis van Beethoven
Geschrieben
auf Bonaparte
The lines in Italian were written by a copyist (and the date, [1]804 August, added by another hand) and Beethoven's name Ludwig was styled, as he often did, in French as “Louis” – at other times he used “Luigi” instead.
But the German lines – “Written for Bonaparte” – were added in pencil by Beethoven himself and were not erased.
To make it more complicated, though, even before he had completed the score Beethoven indicated to his would-be publisher, through his student-secretary Ferdinand Ries, he had planned on dedicated the symphony to Bonaparte but this created a problem because Prince Lobkowitz offered to pay him a considerable fee for six-month's “exclusive usage” – ultimately, the symphony was performed privately several times at his palace before its official public premiere on April 7th, 1805 – and so he would give the dedication to Lobkowitz in honor of the fee but entitle the work “Bonaparte.”
By this time, Beethoven may have thought less of the idea of leaving Vienna for Paris. Even so, in August of 1804, three months after removing Bonaparte's name from the title page's second line, he wrote directly to his publisher describing what he was working on, including the Triple Concerto, some new piano sonatas and a new symphony.
“The title of the symphony is really Bonaparte.”
By the time the work was officially published, however, it was called “Sinfonia Eroica, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.”
Who Bonaparte had been in 1803 was different from the Napoleon who unleashed almost constant warfare on the rest of Europe for the next twelve years.
Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in December, 1804, and then attacked and occupied the city of Vienna in September, 1805, before defeating them and their Russian allies at the Battle of Austerlitz that December.
It would hardly do to be the composer of a work bearing the name of Austria's enemy...
Still, in the autumn of 1808, Beethoven received an invitation from Jerome Bonaparte, youngest brother of Napoleon and newly named the King of Westphalia, created out of various German states with Kassel as its capital. It was a job offer – to become the royal court composer with a hefty salary. Jerome was intent on creating a great cultural center in his capital – the Brothers Grimm were already the royal librarians.
It was unrealistic for Beethoven to accept the position, given his by now anti-Bonapartist views, but he let it be known he was considering it. As a result, the Austrian emperor's youngest brother, the Archduke Rudolph (a student of Beethoven's), along with Prince Lobkowitz and Prince Kinski, guaranteed Beethoven a pension if he would stay in Vienna. He did.
But perhaps there's more to the “Hero” in this symphony than the name Bonaparte implies?
There is an old quote from Haydn which, at the moment, I can't verify or find, and which might just as well be one of those mythological details associated with Beethoven and his teacher.
It is used in the 2003 BBC film “Eroica,” set on the day the new symphony was first heard in a rehearsal at Prince Lobkowitz's – I'll get to this in my next post – in which Haydn, arriving late in the midst of the scherzo, tells his hosts afterwards,
“He's placed himself at the center of his work – he gives us a glimpse into his soul – I expect that's why it's so... noisy... but it is quite, quite new – the artist as hero – quite new... Everything is different from today.”
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